Too Marvellous for Words

by Julie Welch

  Meanwhile, Rosie trained as a nurse at Westminster Hospital. She qualified in 1978 and took up a post there as Staff Nurse on a Cardio-Thoracic ward before joining Ashley at the Royal Sussex County in Brighton where she worked in A & E. ‘When Ashley was accepted as a doctor by a hospital in New Zealand he proposed to me so I would be able to work there with him for a year. We married three weeks later and flew to Auckland.’

  They returned to England and their first son was born the following year, in 1982, and their second son in 1984, by which time Mummy had come round to the idea that Ashley wasn’t such a bad catch after all.

  Liz Bruce

  As a Latimer, with Cawley as her House mistress, Liz was more or less forced to do Science A Levels. Her grades were good enough to win her offers from Nottingham, Sheffield and Leicester: ‘I still remember going for my interviews and feeling very alone sitting in various London stations on my way up north for interviews, wearing a mini-skirt and freezing.’ After all that, her family moved to Australia and she ended up at Sydney University instead, doing Chemistry. Which she never actually used because she hated Chemistry.

  ‘I never had a feel for it. In fact, I feel very strongly that Cawley had a very negative influence. We were never encouraged to study the things we actually liked.’

  After university she married and had a daughter and a son. ‘I’ve lived in Canberra for decades and am very happy. I ended up running a plastic surgeon’s practice, which was terrific.’ And nothing to do with Chemistry.

  Sue Robinson

  Practically the last thing Jonah said to Sue was, ‘Elizabeth [Manners] has chosen you to be Head Girl. How ridiculous is that?’

  It was the end of summer term 1967, and Miss Manners was due to take over that September. Lower Six had been a mixed year for Sue. Her father’s latest armed services posting had meant a move from Aden to Northern Ireland, and it was around that time that her mother, to whom she was very close, began a series of surgeries for breast cancer. For the first time, school became something of a haven. ‘Friends. Fun. I could get away from the anguish.’

  Manners expected quite a lot from her prefects. She wanted them to be a real presence in the school. ‘More approachable. Less of the spy; more guiding, helping, supporting younger pupils. Be kind to them. So she was trying to eradicate bullying. But I think that had an impact on us from an academic point of view. We weren’t in lessons, and it was our final year.’

  Sue was studying for A Levels in Chemistry, Physics and Double Maths and, along with her responsibilities as Head Girl, there was plenty at home to be worried about. Christmas was horrid. Her mother was in hospital for most of it. In the Easter holidays, she found out her father was having an affair. The neighbours in Ireland told her.

  ‘I absolutely went for him. I was furious. Not that he was having an affair, but that it was public knowledge and that my mother knew. And that he couldn’t cope with her being mutilated. Plastic boobs and whopping great steroid doses. He expected his wife and daughter to be good-looking. Represent what was best. I wasn’t sorry for him, which perhaps I should have been.’

  She had been offered a place at Birmingham to do nuclear physics. ‘Three Cs. I screwed them up. Cs for Maths and Chemistry, D for Physics and E for Further Maths. I did really well in General Studies but that was no good to anyone, was it?’

  She did re-sits at Cambridge Tech., where she changed her mind about Birmingham and applied to Homerton to read Maths, Cert Ed. and the Cambridge Tripos part, B. Ed. She had also embarked on her first serious relationship and, in the middle of it all, got pregnant.

  ‘My mum was in a hospice. My dad did the never-darken-my-door-again thing, and refused to fill in the grant form. I was accepted by Homerton then, through very kind people there, and got a place at an unmarried mothers’ home.

  ‘Mum died in July 1969. She never made it to her forty-fifth birthday. Three months after she died, my father married someone three months older than me and I never saw him again.’

  Sue’s son was born in her first term at Homerton. She was allowed off sport and PE because her tutor reckoned labour was enough.

  OUR TEACHERS

  Jonah

  At the end of the summer term of 1967, Jonah left the stage. Her parting gift from the school was a model of a whale, with a miniature Jonah inside. Her retirement home was a bungalow outside Swansea, overlooking Caswell Bay: ‘Pronounced “casual”, as in your shoes,’ said Jonah. Here she flung herself into working for the Red Cross and at the Women’s Institute’s Denman College. Her big treat was having a television in her bedroom. She liked to wake up to find David Frost at the end of her bed.

  Jonah died in January 1985. Her death notice in that year’s school magazine says that it was ‘peacefully in hospital after a very short illness’, although it’s hard to think of Jonah doing anything peacefully.

  Bretch

  Bretch retired in 1989, the last of ‘our’ teachers to go. It was very hard for her to leave Ridley, her home for almost all her adult life, and she only moved out the day before Judy James and her family arrived.

  Maggie

  Maggie carried on as Tyndale House mistress and teaching until December 1979. Many of ‘her’ girls invited her to their weddings and visited her in her bungalow in nearby Kirton after she retired.

  Cawley

  The last time I saw Cawley was in the Christmas vacation after my first term at Bristol. Chrissie had stayed on into Third Year Six and, mini-skirted, I went back to Felixstowe accompanied by boyfriend du jour to see her. As I chatted to Chrissie outside Hooper, a familiar squawk was to be heard. ‘Julia Welch, what do you think you look like? I can almost see your bottom!’ Cawley had obviously shot out of Latimer to see what was going on.

  Cawley died in 2002. Her funeral was at St John’s in Old Felixstowe. High Church, of course. Penny Stevenson, who Cawley was kind to in 1949, went, but she was more or less the only one. A lot of people who might have been there, her favourites, didn’t turn up.

  Coulo

  When I began researching this book, it appeared that all the women who had taught me had died. Frustrating. Then a chance conversation with a former school friend on Facebook revealed that Coulo, our former Games mistress, was still around, living at a great age in a residential care home. Not just that, but she loved to receive letters and phone calls. I wrote, explaining what the book was about, and asking if an interview would be possible. Two evenings later, my phone rang. It was her. We chatted, it was lovely, her voice was no different. I half expected her to say, ‘Shoo-ooot!’ We left it that we would speak again on the phone when I had got to further grips with the book. A few weeks later, it was too late.

  Another door opened. Unlike our other teachers, Coulo was a mother. I emailed her son, Richard, who kindly offered to give me an account of his mother’s life. He also sent some wonderful photos, including one of her as a beautiful, sophisticated young woman. I have had to compress, and leave out a lot, of Richard’s account. It really deserves a whole book in itself, as packed with drama, loss, heartbreak and success against the odds as any Penny Vincenzi novel.

  She was born Diana Meller in Leighton Buzzard on 14 October 1916, in the middle of the First World War. Her father, Bob, went to Harrow, and then Trinity College, Cambridge, before qualifying as a doctor and serving in the navy; her mother, Florence, trained at Bart’s and nursed the Turks during the Bulgarian Turkish war of 1912–13. Her parents met in Khartoum, and she had two younger siblings, Jo and Billy. After the war, the family moved to Hampshire and then, when Diana was ten, to Felixstowe, where she continued to live for forty years.

  In 1929, Di, Jo and Billy were playing in a sandpit belonging to a nearby construction site when the sides collapsed and they were buried. Diana managed to dig herself out, and then her sister Jo, but Billy died. He was eight years old. His name was never mentioned in the family again. Richard thinks Billy’s death may have had a lasting effect on his mother, as she was always reluctant t
o talk about people who had died.

  Diana was nineteen when she went to Bedford College to train as a PE teacher. In the holidays she would go skiing in Bavaria, and on one of those expeditions she met Richard’s father, also named Richard. He was an alumnus of Jesus College, Cambridge, a keen rower and captain of the boat club, and went on to qualify as an architect. At the outbreak of war, he volunteered for the navy. That August, Diana and Richard were married. In November 1941 he set sail from Malta on HMS Neptune, along with two other cruisers and an escort of four destroyers, to try and sink a convoy of merchant ships carrying forty-five Panzer tanks and other much-needed supplies from Italy to Rommel’s army, in North Africa. As they approached Tripoli, the Neptune, which was leading the squadron, sailed at full speed into a minefield and was severely damaged. After hitting a further mine later in the night, it sank. Richard was among the 766 of the crew of 767 who died. Seventeen days later, on 6 January 1942, Diana delivered her son. With baby Richard, she returned to live with her family in Felixstowe and went back to work, by which means she was able to put Richard through school. And that is how she came to be our Games mistress.

  Me

  As for me, I took a degree in Philosophy from Bristol University then joined the Observer sports department. I was the first female ever to report football in a national newspaper. Everyone said it was a brave thing to do but, quite honestly, if you’ve spent five years with Jonah, Cawley, Bretch and Maggie nothing is ever going to terrify you again. Since then I have written books and scripted films and television plays, and have achieved my other ambition, which was to get married and have lots of children. Like Sukie, I can say I have had a lovely life.

  And what became of my parents and braw Jane? They simply went round as a threesome well into old age. Jane was the first to go, and my father and mother both missed her very much. My father died a few weeks before his eighty-ninth birthday, and all my mother’s courage and determination came to the fore as she rebuilt her life as a widow. In her final decade she moved to Scotland to live near my older sister. Well into her nineties, she would return by plane to visit me in London, full of beans at the excitement of the journey. I was very proud of her. My nephew, Matt, was something of an honorary son to her and they loved each other dearly. He was with her when she died at the great age of ninety-nine and a half. Her last words were to her two great-granddaughters. They were, ‘What did you do at school today?’

  THE SCHOOL HYMN

  Dr Savill, Chaplain, 1989

  Tune: Doncaster, S. Wesley

  ‘Ne Manus Offendat’ – Cranmer

  Let not your hand offend

  But rather let it serve

  The cause that has no earthy end

  Bring love and truth and birth.

  ‘Honour before honours’ – Ridley

  A glorious goal ensures

  The way is glorious too;

  Honour alone our place secures

  To your own self be true.

  ‘Vincit omnia veritas’ – Latimer

  So hear the joyful sounds

  ‘Truth conquers in all things’

  For eager hearts and open minds

  With them can take wings

  ‘Utmost to the highest’ – Tyndale

  For hearts and minds and wills

  Must fully face the tests

  Demanding all those perfect skills

  The highest aim expects

  ‘Fide Constantia’ – School

  Endurance, faith and love

  Rich qualities of life

  Will help the spirit from above

  To harmonise all strife.

  Old Girls/all

  From age to age passed on

  These virtues shall not fade

  Truth, honour, faithfulness and love

  Of these the school is made.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank all my friends for giving such generous help with my research and for telling me so many wonderful tales about life at Felixstowe College. Although some names have been changed and situations ‘re-described’ to protect the privacy of those involved and to help the story rattle along, this is a faithful account of our experiences and I have never had so much fun writing a book before. Friends from other boarding schools also beguiled me with anecdotes, and I’m grateful to Lindsey Bailey, Peggy Bailey, Penny Perris, Sally Louis, Linda Mallory, Sue Lloyd, Gillian Bull, Caroline Elliott, Jenny Sinclair, Carla McKay, Annie Caulfield and Jill Drewett, all of whom succeeded in keeping me in fits. Thanks also go to Robert Kirby and Ariella Feiner of United Agents, who helped me believe this was a story worth telling, to Kerri Sharp, my editor at Simon & Schuster, for her passionate championship of the book, to Margaret Angus and Jane Claydon for their fascinating background information about boarding schools and lacrosse in particular, and to my husband, Ron, and sons, who for the last two years have performed the essential duty of cheering me on.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Julie Welch was Fleet Street’s first female football reporter and is well known for her screenplay about her childhood following Spurs in the 1960s, which was turned into a TV film, Those Glory Glory Days, by David Puttnam. She is also the bestelling author of numerous titles including The Ghost of White Hart Lane (with Rob White), the story of Spurs legend John White.

  By the same author

  Those Glory, Glory Days

  (screenplay)

  The Biography of Tottenham Hotspur

  The Ghost of White Hart Lane

  (with Rob White)

  Out On Your Feet

  26.2: Running the London Marathon

  First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2017

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 2017 by Julie Welch

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Julie Welch to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

  1st Floor

  222 Gray’s Inn Road

  London WC1X 8HB

  www.simonandschuster.co.uk

  www.simonandschuster.com.au

  www.simonandschuster.co.in

  Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney

  Simon & Schuster India, New Delhi

  The author and publishers have made all reasonable efforts to contact copyright-holders for permission, and apologise for any omissions or errors in the form of credits given. Corrections may be made to future printings.

  Excerpts from Enid Blyton’s The Twins at St Clare’s, used as epigraphs, reproduced by kind permission of Hachette Children’s Group.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4711-5478-2

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-5480-5

  Typeset in Bembo by M Rules

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd are committed to sourcing paper that is made from wood grown in sustainable forests and support the Forest Stewardship Council, the leading international forest certification organisation. Our books displaying the FSC logo are printed on FSC certified paper.