The Flight of Gemma Hardy

by Margot Livesey

  The train was already at the platform and while Mr. Carruthers carried my suitcase to the guard’s van, she stared down at me. Against her blue coat her golden hair shone; dark crumbs of make-up dotted the creases around her eyes. Perhaps Veronica had lectured her too about her eyelashes.

  “Well, Gemma, we’ve reached the parting of the ways. You’re an ugly child—my poor sister-in-law was a plain Jane—but I hope you’ll study hard at Claypoole and be a credit to me. You must—”

  “I’ll always try to be a credit to my uncle,” I broke in, “but you’ve treated me like a leper. If I win every prize in the school it won’t be because of you.”

  Without waiting for an answer, I turned and marched towards the train. Behind me I heard Mr. Carruthers cry, “The ungrateful brat,” and his footsteps in pursuit. Then came my aunt’s voice and two sets of steps walking away.

  I chose the first empty compartment I came to. As soon as the train pulled out of the station, I knelt on the bristly seat, switched on the little lights on either side of the mirror, and studied my reflection. With my hair pulled into braids, my face had a naked, startled look. My eyelashes were pale, Veronica was right, but my eyes were the same shade of grey as the feathers of the geese that flew over the fort, and my nose was small and straight. I might be plain but I did not think I was ugly. I would make friends at the school. I would try not to show off, or be a copycat. I would learn French and hockey and take piano lessons. I sat down in a corner seat and, lulled by the sight of the wintry fields and the sound of the wheels—one way, second class, one way, second class—fell asleep.

  I woke to the wheels making a different sound and the dull red struts of the Forth Rail Bridge flashing by. In one of his sermons my uncle had compared living a good life to the endless task of painting the bridge. As soon as the painters got all the way across, he explained, they had to begin again. Far below I glimpsed the choppy waters of the Firth of Forth flowing into the North Sea.

  In Edinburgh the guard carried my suitcase to a platform at the far end of the station and installed me on a bench. My train to Hawick left in an hour. “You’re a wee lassie,” he remarked, “to be travelling alone.”

  “I have my book and I have my lunch.” I held up each in turn, smiling, but the guard’s ruddy face did not smile back.

  “My youngest daughter can give you three inches,” he said, “and I wouldn’t let her loiter about the station. Stay here and don’t speak to anyone not in uniform.”

  My aunt’s briskness and a sense of adventure had carried me through the last few hours. Now I was alone on the windy platform, and the thought came to me that no one within fifty miles knew my name, or my whereabouts. I too could disappear, blown away like the dry leaves I saw skimming down the tracks. Perhaps other people had had the same feeling. The bench was covered with initials. Among several hearts I made out the command FLY AWAY. If I had had my penknife to hand, rather than rolled into a pair of socks in my suitcase, I would have carved YES below. I stamped my feet for warmth and even that sound disappeared into the emptiness.

  But in a few hours everything would be different. And for now I opened the paper bag to discover my favourite egg and cress sandwiches, a bottle of Ribena, an apple, and two chocolate biscuits. I put these last in my pocket for later, and set to work on the sandwiches. I was dropping the crusts into the bag when I saw a note.

  Dear Gemma,

  The best of luck at your new school. Be good!

  I hope our paths cross again one day.

  Kind regards,

  Audrey Marsden

  Reading the words—she had printed them as if I couldn’t read cursive—I was doubly glad I had not gone to her the night before. She had been kind to me when no one else had, but a small part of me counted her a coward. I tore the note into pieces, stepped to the edge of the platform, and released them into the wind.

  I was eating the apple in neat bites when a train steamed up to the platform and, with one last exuberant shriek, came to a halt. No one in uniform was nearby, so I asked a tall man in a smart green coat if this was the train to Hawick. “Indeed it is,” he said. Claiming a mysterious slipped disc, he commandeered a boy of about Will’s age to carry my suitcase. Once we were settled in a compartment and the train was under way, the three of us exchanged destinations. The man was going to Carlisle. The boy was going only one stop. He had come into the city to apply for a job at a fishmonger’s but they had said he didn’t have enough experience.

  “That’s ridiculous,” said the man. “A lad your age, they should train you.”

  I regarded the boy with new interest. In profile his upper lip jutted over his lower, like the trout my uncle had occasionally caught. I asked if he liked fishing.

  “Not really,” he said. “Too much hanging around, but I like cleaning my dad’s fish. Everything’s very organised—bones, guts.” He wriggled his fingers. “Do you like fish?”

  “Yes.” Over the years I had grown accustomed to my landlocked life but suddenly I longed for the sea. Why hadn’t I asked Dr. Shearer or Mr. Donaldson if there was a school on the coast? Then the man asked where I was going and I explained about Claypoole.

  “Isn’t this the middle of term?” he said, his voice lifting in surprise.

  “They’re short-handed, and I did well on the exams.” My boasting made it sound as if I would be helping in the classroom, not the kitchen, but kindly he did not press me. He said he’d left school at fourteen and always wanted to travel; so far the only place he’d gone was Africa during the war. “I’m always suggesting to the wife that we go to Madagascar or New Zealand.”

  “Would you like to go to Iceland?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Bit chilly for me.”

  “I wouldn’t mind it,” volunteered the boy. “I like the idea of dogs and sledges.”

  “I think that’s Lapland,” I said, “though they do have lots of snow.”

  After the boy got off, the man remarked, like the guard, that I was young to be travelling alone. “Couldn’t your mum come with you?”

  Living in the village, I had seldom had to deal with such questions. Now I said cheerfully that my parents were dead and I was an orphan. The man’s eyes widened, and he began to stammer out apologies. Quickly I reassured him that this had happened a long time ago. For the rest of the journey we played I-spy and I could see him pretending not to know the answers. We stopped at a town called Galashiels. Twenty minutes later we pulled into Hawick. Cautiously the man lowered my suitcase onto the platform and wished me luck. I waved as the train pulled away but he did not wave back.

  When the train was out of sight I left my case and made my way to the front of the station. A maroon van was waiting. As I approached, a door opened. “You must be Hardy,” said the man who climbed out. “I’m Mr. Milne.”

  “Gemma Hardy,” I corrected, studying this first ambassador of the school. Mr. Milne was only a few inches taller than me and, with his large head of grey hair and his round belly, he resembled nothing so much as a garden gnome. His dungarees had many intriguing pockets and were very clean.

  “Is this all you have?” he said when he saw my case. “Some girls bring everything but the kitchen sink.”

  Like my aunt, he made me sit in the back; unlike her, he talked to me. The town of Hawick, he said, was famous for its woolen mills. His wife worked at one that produced lovely cardigans; they cost a pretty penny. Then he told me how to get to the school and, thinking I would need to reverse this journey someday, I paid close attention. First we drove five miles to the village of Denholm. There we crossed the river Teviot and drove two more miles to the village of Minto. Claypoole had been the ancestral home of Lord and Lady Minto until both their sons died in the war, the older in North Africa, the younger on an Atlantic convoy. They had sold the estate in 1946 and moved to Edinburgh. The school was owned by Miss Bryant, the headmistress—Mr. Milne’s voice underlined the name—and her sister-in-law, Mrs. Bryant, who’d been widowed a few years
ago. “I’ve never known a woman,” he said, “who can make a shilling go further.”

  When I left Yew House that morning there had been snow on the stony hills and frost whitening the fields. Here the hills were green and softly rounded, and the fields were surrounded by hedges rather than stone walls. Even the sheep were larger and cleaner. In Denholm crocuses and snowdrops bloomed in the gardens of the whitewashed cottages. On the far side of the Teviot a line of willows led to a crossroads; we turned right up a hill. Almost at the top we swerved into a driveway, past a little gingerbread house. “That’s where we live,” said Mr. Milne. “In the lodge.”

  The house that came into view around the next bend rewarded all my daydreaming. Claypoole was built of a pleasing light grey granite. The two wings of the school stood at right angles to each other and were linked by a curving balustrade supported by elegant pillars. Row after row of windows shone. Mr. Milne parked beside a flight of steps. These led down to the back door, which, he explained, I would normally use. Today, however, we would enter by the front door. He rang the bell and led me into a large oak-panelled hall. Several armchairs were grouped around the fireplace, and at the far end a beautiful, red-carpeted staircase spiralled up to a glass dome. How grand everything looked, and how comfortable. A girl, dressed in a green tunic and brown knee socks, appeared. I stared at her wonderingly while Mr. Milne asked her to tell Miss Bryant that the new working girl was here.

  She hurried away through the nearest door and he pointed out the picture over the fireplace; it showed the house as it had been in 1900. “You can still see the remains of the carriage house,” he was saying when something made me turn. A tall, grey-haired woman wearing a beautiful navy suit was descending the spiral stairs. Miss Bryant, I was to discover, liked to make an entrance. I glimpsed a high, bony forehead, an elegant nose, and scarlet lips, the upper unusually thin, the lower unusually full. Later I heard one girl claim that she was fifty; another that she was barely thirty. Both seemed plausible.

  “Thank you, Mr. Milne,” she said. “The suitcase goes to the Elm Room.”

  Without a backward glance he disappeared. “So you are Hardy,” Miss Bryant continued. Her accent, like her age, was elusive, neither Scottish nor English but some blending of the two. “Your aunt has warned me that you are prone to lying and daydreaming. At Claypoole you will find that, between your lessons and your other duties, there is no time for either. You understand that you are here as a working pupil?”

  “My aunt should have not said that.”

  “Stop glaring at me, and address me as Miss Bryant. Let me ask again: Do you understand that you are a working pupil?”

  “Yes, Miss Bryant. But my aunt—”

  “It is up to you to prove her wrong and to prove us right in offering you a place. Your work does not begin to pay for your board, let alone tuition. Ross will show you what to do. You’ll start in Primary Seven on Monday.”

  I was about to blurt out my pleasure—I must have done exceptionally well in the exams to be moved up two years—when a tall, red-cheeked girl with a chest even more formidable than Louise’s stepped into the hall.

  “Ross, this is the new girl, Hardy. She will take over Montrose’s duties.”

  Ross studied me, her glance shifting rapidly from my leather shoes to my pigtails. “Montrose minded the fires,” she said. “This one won’t be able to carry the scuttles.”

  I stood up straight and said I was strong for my age.

  Ross smiled, not pleasantly; her two front teeth were longer than the others and one was chipped. Miss Bryant’s expression did not change. “Arrange things as you see fit,” she told Ross. “Be sure she works hard.”

  She departed with the same clip of heels and swish of skirts that had accompanied my aunt’s entrances and exits. A moment later the chandelier and the wall sconces went out, leaving us in gloom. Ross seized my arm. “Got any grub?”

  Before I could answer she plunged her free hand into my pockets, first left, then right, and triumphantly retrieved the chocolate biscuits. “My favourites. Come on. Let’s dump your coat and you can start in the kitchen. I hope you’re not a whiner.”

  “I don’t whine,” I said, trying to pull free. “Please let go of my arm.”

  She only tightened her grip.

  Soon I would discover that the main building of the school, like Gaul, had three regions. The hall where I had entered was in the grand part, which contained the dining-room, the library, several classrooms, and the rooms where the Bryants and the senior teachers lived. On the lower level was a warren of kitchens, cloakrooms, and, facing the garden, more classrooms. At the top of the house were the dormitories. But on that first day it was all confusion. Ross dragged me down a dark staircase and along a corridor to a room that smelled of shoes. She threw my coat on a peg, and dragged me along another corridor to the kitchen. Three broad-shouldered women—sisters, I later learned—and several girls were at work. Ross brought me before the largest of the women, who was standing at the stove, face flushed, bosom heaving, as she stirred a gigantic pot.

  “Cook, here’s the new girl. What should she do?”

  “Potatoes,” said Cook, without ceasing to stir.

  In the scullery Ross handed me a grubby apron, tipped a mound of potatoes into the sink, and fetched two huge saucepans. Single-handed, I was to peel the potatoes for 120 people. I wrapped myself in the apron and set to work as Mrs. Marsden had taught me, washing each potato in the icy water, peeling it thinly (the vitamins were right below the skin), and carefully taking out the eyes. However many I peeled, the mound grew no smaller.

  “Cripes,” said Ross, “you’re a slow-coach. These need to be on the stove by five sharp.” She pointed to the clock over the door—it was already four-thirty—picked up a knife, and began to peel potatoes in a slap-dash fashion.

  “What happened to Montrose?” I asked.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  I tried another line of questioning. “Are you an orphan too?”

  Ross hooted with laughter. “Shut up and peel the frickin’ potatoes.”

  Claypoole had been built to be occupied by a few lords and ladies waited on by an army of servants. Now the proportions were reversed; a dozen working girls struggled to take care of more than a hundred regular pupils, and the teachers. Happily the laundry was sent out, but we were entirely responsible for the housework and we helped to prepare and serve meals. All the food had to be transported by lift up one floor to the dining-room, where portraits of men and women in evening dress gazed down benignly on girls in ugly uniforms, eating ten to a table. I was not among them. My job was to carry out plates of food as fast as I could. At first I felt shy in my role as waitress—Ross had set me to serve the younger girls—but they ignored me except when I accidentally slammed down a plate. At last everyone was served, and Cook handed me my portion of mince, potatoes, and turnip. I sank onto a milk crate too exhausted to eat. Only my limp pigtails testified that my breakfast with Veronica had taken place hours, not weeks, ago.

  “Get a move on,” said Ross. “We clear the tables in five minutes.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “You’ll get nothing else till breakfast and that’s just bread and jam.”

  When I still didn’t move she seized my plate and devoured the contents. I watched wonderingly. Whatever my tribulations at Yew House, meals had been a constant. Not so at Claypoole. Working girls got the last of everything. By the end of three days I had learned to eat at top speed. Someone was always hovering, ready to snatch whatever I left. Often I saw Ross and the other girls scooping food from the dirty plates the way I had done at Yew House for the dogs. But that evening all I wanted was to lie down and figure out how I had ended up here.

  Before bed, however, came another Herculean task: the washing-up. A stout girl named Smith and I were assigned to the cutlery. “Hurry up,” she kept saying, and ignored my requests for a clean tea towel. Only when every plate and every knife and fork had
been washed and dried and the tables laid for breakfast did Ross lead me to the Elm Room. The other dormitories—Beech, Poplar, Pine, Willow, Holly, Maple, Oak, Birch, Fir, and Lime—were filled by age, but the working girls were housed together, although I was ten and Ross nearly seventeen. She led me up three flights of stairs, first the dark one we had come down, then a broader, more elegant flight to the floor where the regular pupils slept, then a narrower and steeper one. The Elm Room was just wide enough to accommodate two rows of beds beneath its sloping ceilings. By the light of a single bulb several girls were playing cards.

  “Here’s the new girl,” said Ross.

  “I’m Gemma.” Despite my weariness, I longed to make a good impression.

  A couple of the girls grunted and one—she had olive skin and sharp features—approached. “So this is what they got instead of Montrose. A little rat.”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” said Ross. “I doubt she’ll last the year.”

  The girl gave my left pigtail a fierce tug and drifted back to the card-players.

  Ross steered me to the bed by the door, the noisiest and draughtiest in the room. My school uniform was already lying there: a dark green tunic several sizes too large, a light green shirt clearly too small, a brown belt, and brown knee socks. Veronica would have gnashed her teeth at the sight of such ugly garments. The colours reflected the school crest: a brown acorn and a green oak leaf. The motto, predictably, was that small things lead to large ones.

  While I unpacked into the small chest of drawers at the foot of my bed, Ross explained that Sunday was the easiest day of the week for working pupils. Serving breakfast was followed by church, followed by lunch, followed by cleaning the classrooms. Supper was an hour earlier so that we had a free hour before bed. I laid out my pyjamas and dressing-gown. Ross fingered the latter, a cast-off of Louise’s made of nice, thick flannel. “Watch out for Findlayson,” she said. “She’ll have this off you in the bat of a pig’s eye.”