The Flight of Gemma Hardy

by Margot Livesey

  The week after Miriam died we had exams every day. The following week Miss Bryant read out the results in assembly, enunciating the names of the girls who had failed with special clarity. I came fourth or fifth in every subject except scripture, where I came last. In arithmetic, I suspected, I had done better than fourth, but it was not part of Miss Bryant’s educational experiment for a working girl to be top of her class. As for the other working girls, they were always last, until the day when the results for French were read out and Findlayson had come fourth. Later, over the washing-up, Smith told me that Findlayson believed her father was a French sailor. When she was old enough, she planned to go to France and find him.

  That summer there were no regular pupils at the school and only eight working girls. I had been dreading the long, lonely days, but on the first morning of the holidays Miss Bryant announced that we would be picking raspberries for the farmer who owned the pigs. For three weeks Ross marched us along the drive, down the hill, and past the crossroads to the fields of canes. The farmer handed out stacks of punnets—several boys and girls from Denholm were also picking—and left us to get on with it. We were paid by weight, so he had no need to chivvy us.

  The leafy canes were much taller than me, taller even than Ross, and stepping between them I felt as if a lyre-bird might appear at any moment; for hours I picked in solitude save for the clouds of gnats. One afternoon I came upon Ross kissing a boy, her mouth gobbling up his. The next day I almost stumbled over Drummond and the same boy, lying on the ground. Hidden in the canes, I watched the boy rocking back and forth above her, grimacing. Below him Drummond, her red hair spread on the dark soil, kept her eyes tightly closed; once again I glimpsed her bra.

  At the end of the afternoon the farmer returned to weigh our fruit and note our pay for the day. Then the raspberries were tipped into a barrel of acid, which bleached them instantly. Later, at the jam factory, dye would restore the colour. On the day I saw Drummond with the boy, the farmer remarked on her picking. “Only seven pounds, lassie. Were you taking a nap?”

  She said nothing; the boy snickered. He had somehow managed to pick fifteen pounds. I saw Ross watching him, her lips parted over her chipped tooth. She and Drummond were good friends, but she too, I thought, would have been happy to lie down with him. I was glad there was something she wanted and couldn’t have.

  The week after Miriam’s death, she had tried, as we walked to the gym, to apologise. “I’m sorry about your pal,” she had said. “That was a shame.”

  “So why did you stop me seeing her when she was ill?” I demanded. “If I’d been able to take care of her maybe she wouldn’t have died.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “Miss Bryant comes down on me hard when things go wrong.”

  For her these unadorned sentences were the height of eloquence, but like Mr. Waugh’s insipid remarks in church—our dearly beloved pupil is at peace—and Miss Bryant’s prayers, they made me furious. “You’re a coward,” I had said. “All you want to do is bully other people.” Since then she had ignored me, except to give orders.

  On Friday afternoon the farmer brought his cash-box and we lined up to be paid; as usual I was last. “Not bad for a wee ’un,” he said, handing me two pound notes and two half-crowns.

  I clutched the notes in wonder. It was the first time I’d touched money, almost the first time I’d seen it since I left Yew House, and I’d forgotten how a bank-note was different from other kinds of paper, and the feeling of possibility that went with it. Then I remembered my circumstances. “Can you keep it for me?” I said.

  The farmer’s face twisted in bewilderment. “Would you not like to buy yourself some sweeties? Or one of those new comics? My daughter is always after the comics.”

  With a wary glance over my shoulder—the other girls were collecting their jackets and bags—I said I had no purse.

  “Och, I see,” he said, following my gaze. “The next rainy day, when I give you girls a lift to the school, I’ll bring what I owe you. You can be thinking of a safe place to keep your loot.”

  As we walked back up the hill, I braced myself for an attack, but the other girls were discussing a programme they’d heard on Matron’s wireless; gradually I forgot my fears. I was daydreaming about what to buy with my money—a skipping rope, a bag of gobstoppers—when Ross and Drummond appeared beside me. We were just inside the school gates. Silently they plunged their hands into my pockets and then ordered me to take off my shoes and socks.

  “I ate my pay,” I said as I sat by the side of the drive, pulling off first one empty sock and then the other. “The half-crowns were delicious. The farmer’s keeping my money. He thinks I’m too young to be trusted.”

  “Stupid moron,” said Ross, but she seemed to believe me. While Drummond went to join the other girls she sat down on the grass beside me. “It’s a pity you’re not older,” she went on. “I asked Miss Bryant if I could take my O-levels again next year. If I had someone to help me, like you and Goodall, I’m sure I could pass.”

  As I pulled on my shoes, I watched her fingers, pink with raspberry juice, pluck the petals of a daisy. Was she asking about love, I wondered, or something else? Gemma will help me. Gemma won’t. For a moment I longed to say I would. Even though I was only eleven, I could still drill her in subjects, teach her grammar and reading, help her get into the police. Then I remembered how she had stopped me, over and over, from going to Miriam. I tied my laces, jumped to my feet, and stalked off.

  On the next rainy day the farmer was as good as his word. As I climbed out of the Land Rover, he slipped me an envelope with my money. I had racked my brains as to a hiding place. The Elm Room was out of the question; so was my desk. An obscure volume in the library seemed like a good idea, but what if a teacher made a surprising choice? Finally, remembering the story of the third servant, I stole a polythene bag from the kitchen and, borrowing a trowel, dug a hole near a corner of the pigsty. By the end of the raspberry season, I had buried nearly nine pounds.

  In August I moved up to Miss Seftain’s class. I immediately liked two things about her: her excitement about Latin—she would pace the classroom, arms widespread as she described some neat construction—and her enthusiasm for space travel. She read us a poem she’d written in Latin about Laika, the mongrel stray who died travelling to the stars. A year later, when Strelka and Belka survived eighteen orbits and re-entry, we all wrote them letters. And when Yuri Gagarin made his famous orbit she led the entire school outside after supper to toast the night sky. Coincidentally her nickname was Birdy, after her crestlike hair and beaky nose, and at moments of passion it did seem as if she too might take flight.

  From my first day of conjugating amare—amo, amas, amat—I loved Latin. When I told her that I had been a friend of Miriam’s—sum amica Miriam—she persuaded Miss Bryant what a good advertisement for the school it would be if a working girl went to university: a triumph for her philanthropic experiment. Our tutorials became the high point of my week. We had been meeting for nearly two months when I confided what had happened with Mr. Donaldson.

  “Poor man,” said Miss Seftain. “Teachers are so vulnerable to rumours.”

  She wrote to various friends, asking if anyone knew his present whereabouts. No one did, but an Edinburgh friend revealed what had brought him to the village in the first place. He had been teaching at a famous boys’ school, and one night had taken two of his pupils to a pub and then on a joyride around Arthur’s Seat. It seemed unlikely that he was still teaching. “Although,” Miss Seftain added, “there are places, like Claypoole, that are off the radar.”

  But despite my tutorials I was still a working girl, and my days were still ruled by Ross. She made no more overtures. I saw her laughing with Findlayson, playing cards with Gilchrist, but her muddy brown eyes ignored me as she told me to wash a floor, or hurry up with the carrots. To my surprise I missed our odd moments of friendliness. Perhaps during the holidays, I thought, I could find a way to make amends. The
n one evening in early December I came into the Elm Room to discover her and Drummond packing. They were going to be chambermaids at a hotel in Kelso. When I went over to say goodbye Ross picked me up and swung me round. “Live up to your name, Hardy,” she said, and planted a smacking kiss on my cheek. The next day she and Drummond were gone. Gilchrist became head of the working girls, and I began to understand that Ross had been a skillful manager. She knew how to divide the tasks so that everyone pulled her weight. Now, even with Mrs. Bryant’s vigilance, the school grew dirtier; crises in the kitchen were more frequent. The next summer one of Cook’s sisters left and was not replaced.

  As for me, I was marking time in Form I. Miss Seftain kept me back for one year, and then a second. “You’re not Mozart, Hardy,” she said. “You need to be in a class with girls your own age. You’ll just be miserable if you try to go to university at fifteen, and I doubt you’d get a place.” Grateful for her protection, knowing I had no choice, I relinquished the superiority of always being the youngest in the class.

  By the time I at last moved up to Form II, there were only eight working girls, and the number of regular pupils was also dwindling. At assembly the library was no longer filled; one table in the dining-room stood empty; a year later another was only half full. The gym teacher left to get married, and Mrs. Bryant took over the gym classes. The following year Mrs. Harris left to nurse her mother, and Primary 6 and 7 were combined under Miss Grey.

  In Form IV, thanks to Miss Seftain, I sat eight O-level exams. The exams were set and marked by a national board, and I threw myself into preparation, knowing that, for once, I would not be judged as a working girl. The gym became an examination hall, and I loved the ritual of everyone filling pens and sharpening pencils, turning over the questions at the same moment, the teacher walking up and down between the rows of desks, calling out the time.

  In August Miss Seftain invited me to celebrate my seven As and one B (scripture). She lived in a flat in the converted stables, and I hoped, at last, to be invited inside, but she answered my knock by saying she’d be out in five minutes. I perched on the wall, watching a yellow snail nudge along. Whenever I offered it a piece of grass it drew in its horns, only to unfurl them again a few seconds later. Like Miss Seftain, I thought, it was being cautious. However much she wanted to help me, she was determined not to follow in Mr. Donaldson’s footsteps. She appeared, carrying a tea tray, and joined me on the wall.

  “Well done, Hardy,” she said, raising her cup to my lemonade. “I can see the headlines already: WORKING GIRL GOES TO UNIVERSITY.”

  We discussed the next set of exams, called Highers, which I would sit next year, and possible universities. I liked the idea of Edinburgh, but Miss Seftain urged me to consider Scotland’s newest university: Strathclyde. “You want to be in the vanguard, Hardy,” she said, “like Marcus Aurelius.”

  For all her talk of the vanguard, however, Miss Seftain too was slow to realise that Claypoole was changing. The regular girls now had a record player on which, after homework, they played catchy songs; on weekends, they wore pleated skirts and turtlenecks, or pinafore dresses. The Labour Party had been elected. Fewer parents worked abroad and more wanted their children to live at home. In the working girls’ bathroom there were enough basins to go round. As the days grew shorter and colder the school seemed larger and emptier. One January morning, only a week after the start of the new term, Miss Bryant looked out at us from the dais and asked us to sit down in our rows. With some scuffling, we knelt, or sat cross-legged, on the parquet floor.

  “As you must have noticed,” she said, “we are not as many as we used to be. Like a number of sister and brother schools, Claypoole has been losing pupils. There are several reasons for this, too complicated to go into, but the sad truth is that you cannot run a good school without a certain number of pupils because you cannot employ sufficient excellent teachers. A letter went out to your parents yesterday informing them that, due to circumstances beyond my control, Claypoole will close its doors at the end of this term. I have already spoken to several headmistresses who are eager to offer places to Claypoole girls.”

  A few girls had begun to cry; even a couple of teachers took out handkerchiefs. I gazed at the floor, trying to contain my jubilation. My life as a working girl was coming to an end. Not until lunchtime, when Cook asked what I would do in April, did I understand that within three months I would be homeless. When I said I’d no idea, her face puckered, as if the pastry she was rolling had stuck.

  “Can you not go back to your old home?” she said.

  “My aunt would sooner take in one of the pigs.”

  “Maybe”—she pressed down on the rolling pin—“you should ask Miss Bryant to find another school for you. You’re a bright little thing.”

  There was no point in saying that any other boarding school would involve fees. Instead I asked about her plans.

  “I’ll see if there’s an opening in Hawick. Sue”—she nodded towards the sister who still worked at Claypoole—“is getting married. Daft, I tell her, cooking for one ungrateful sod for free, as opposed to a hundred for good money.”

  I laughed, but for the rest of the day, while I studied and served supper and did the washing-up and got the dining-room ready for breakfast, I pondered Cook’s question. None of the other working girls faced my dilemma; two had homes, of a sort, to go to; the other five had already begun to talk with excitement about the jobs in hotels Miss Bryant would find for them. But I was still only five foot three (an inch taller than Yuri Gagarin, Miss Seftain reminded me); I had no money, save for what I had earned picking raspberries, and, as far as I knew, no marketable skills other than cooking and cleaning, both of which I disliked. I wanted to go to university, but how would I study for my Highers, now only a few months away, and where would I live?

  The day after Miss Bryant’s announcement two girls were late for class—judging by their eyes they’d been crying—and our form teacher said nothing. Later Smith didn’t show up to serve lunch; again no reprimand was forthcoming. Without a word, everyone understood that the rules were changing. Even the teachers started to be late for classes, and one or two skipped assembly.

  That Saturday, a cold, frosty day, I left my broom in a downstairs classroom and walked over the playing fields to knock again at Miss Seftain’s door. She answered, wearing a faded pink dressing-gown. “Oh, Hardy,” she said, stifling a yawn. “Were we meeting this morning?” It was the first time I had seen her without glasses, or lipstick, and she looked oddly younger.

  “No, but I need to talk to you.”

  “Give me five minutes—no, ten—and I’m all yours.”

  She closed the door in my face; some rules had not changed. Again I sat on the wall. This time I watched a thrush sampling the berries on a nearby holly-bush, spitting out some, eating others. My lack of a watch had turned me into a good judge of time. Just when I thought ten minutes has passed, Miss Seftain reappeared wearing, to my amazement, trousers. No teacher, to my knowledge, had ever worn them within the school grounds. She suggested we walk around the terraces. Mr. Milne still kept the lawns immaculate, but the flower-beds year by year had grown more rampant and now, in the dead of winter, were choked with stiff brown stalks. Only the snowdrops, with their tender white flowers, were in bloom. Miss Seftain nodded vaguely when I pointed them out. A tree was real when Ovid described it, not when it grew outside her window.

  “So talk to me,” she said, and I needed no further invitation to pour out my fears.

  When at last I stopped she said, “I’d like to help you, Hardy, but I’m in difficult waters myself. Claypoole has been my home for fifteen years, and finding a job in the middle of the school year is tricky at the best of times. It looks as if I’ll be moving in with my sister and her husband, neither of whom is thrilled at the prospect. I doubt many people will leap to employ a sixty-one-year-old classics teacher with an extremely poor record of university acceptances.”

  “You’re a super teac
her.”

  She produced her lipstick and, between applying it first to her upper lip, then her lower, said that she was a good teacher for girls like me but that she had little talent for stupid girls. “It’s like trying to plough very hard earth. I just can’t get the information into their brains.”

  Thinking of Cook’s sister, I suggested she might get married.

  “Married?” She threw back her head and laughed merrily. “Do you know who would marry me? Some man of eighty who had lost his wife and wanted a housekeeper. And do you know who a man my age would marry? Some woman of thirty-eight who was tired of working. Nearly fifty years after we got the vote that’s still the way the world works. If anyone’s going to get married it should be you.”

  “Me?” It was as if the frozen grass had turned suddenly red.

  She hummed a few bars of “Here Comes the Bride,” and then, seeing my face, laughed. “I’m teasing, Hardy. I hope you’ll fend off suitors until after university. So do you have any idea what you might do?”

  When I explained my utter lack of a plan, she asked if I liked children. “Child-care often comes with board and lodging.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I hate most of the girls here. I used to like my cousin Veronica before she became daft about fashion. Isn’t there something else I could do? I want to go to university.”

  “Someday,” said Miss Seftain. “Right now you need a job that will give you shelter, food, and clothing. If you don’t want to work in a hotel then, I think, looking after children is your best bet. A nice, honourable family,” she mused, “could be the making of you. Of course a horrible one could make your life misery.”

  “In which case I’d leave.” A jackdaw had joined us and was walking on the grass nearby, taking its own constitutional.