A Tiger's Wedding

by Isla Blair

  There were wood and coal-burning stoves in the classrooms, but no heating in the bedrooms; our little tumblers of water by our beds would be frozen solid when the dark dawns summoned us from slumber. Liberty bodices were novel and strange – thick woollen over-vests with rubber buttons down the front and even my slight 6 year old frame was bulked by them. Woollen socks to the knee held up with bits of elastic, Viyella woollen blue blouse, gym slip of maroon, and a maroon and blue striped tie, this was the uniform and was worn every day. We had underpants and over-pants (sort of big bloomers), but the cold fastened you in its hard grasp that no amount of clothes could slacken – overcoats indoors, scarves, gloves, jumpers, nothing kept the cold out – rather they seemed to seal it in.

  After a breakfast of usually porridge, we would go upstairs and we “little ones” had to sit on rows of humiliating potties until we had performed. Embarrassment joined humiliation and a growing bubble of fury. Why did we have to do this? We had to dress in bed, have our baths in the dark, but this most private and personal thing, defecating, we were expected to do in public – with the big girls rushing by, others cleaning teeth and joining the dreaded queues for Virol or Cod Liver Oil. It was not long before I became totally constipated. To begin with, I didn’t want to perform like this in public – but then I couldn’t.

  So the daily spoonful of Virol (a rather thick and petrolly looking malt) usually had a spoonful of syrup of figs with it. Eventually I was allowed into the big girls’ loo, but wasn’t allowed to lock the door. The only thing to stop anybody walking in was a slightly peevish “Somebody’s in” as I sat there with my knickers round my ankles. That got a good score on the humiliation board, but it was a hundred-fold better than “Potty Row”.

  Virol was supposed to be full of vitamins and things that would make little girls big girls. It made me gag. I don’t know if our diet was balanced or not, but I remember the things I didn’t like. In India there were mangoes and pineapples, papaya and gooseberries, lychees and passion fruit and delicious cinnamon sticks to chew on; there were cashew nuts and oranges, sugary pistachio-puddings. Here, in Scotland, there was “White Pudding” – sticky sausages made of oats, I think – and even more disgusting, “Black Pudding”, which was a sort of white pudding soaked in blood – well, that’s how Janet Glendenning described it – and I had trouble swallowing a mouthful. Herring, or some hateful fish full of bones, dipped in more oats. Sardines squashed up on bread, horrid smelly fish with their eyes still in, and mashed turnips – orange in colour with a taste of rained-on hay and something that had been buried in the earth for a long time. The mash had horrid spiky bits in it that felt like wooden splinters; the girls called them toenails. That was a thought to put me off too. But worst, oh worst by a long way, worse even than liver with veins in it and blood coming out, was TRIPE. Oh tripe, tripe, tripe. Just the smell of the tripe at Friday lunch times would cause a silence in the dining hall followed by repressed moans, the odd gulp and smothered sobs. Tripe is the most – yes, almost certainly – the most loathsome of things that people put in their mouths.

  Tripe is not possible. Its odour is unbelched belches and it looks blubbery and porous, with wavy bits like flapping seaweed, only white; a sort of white, grey-green – like a giant’s tongue that has been cut up and stored in a dark cellar for 100 years. It is everything that is uneatable – I’d rather eat a fox.

  The onion sauce the tripe sat in was floury and tasted of nothing at all, not even onions. It was sort of viscous, like jelly fish – Irene Lamb said it was like afterbirth. It sort of lay there, glutinously surrounding this lining of some bovine beast’s stomach. And we were expected to eat this. The notion of eating it grew more monstrous, the more I looked at it on the plate. I looked, and looked. I could not swallow at all.

  One of the rules was “Everything on your plate must be eaten – everything. If you do not like something hold your breath and swallow it, for eat it you will. If, by the end of the meal you have not eaten it, you will sit there until you do. You will forego your next meal until you have eaten this one.” But tripe was not possible. One of the reasons I never learnt to sew is because sewing class followed tripe on Fridays and I missed the class. I’d be sitting in the dining room, usually alone, with tears blinked back by pride and defiance. I became something of a cause celebre. “Isla’s not here, Miss, she’s in the dining room; it’s Friday.” It wasn’t a celebrity I liked.

  The powers that be (headmistress, form mistress, matron) decided that lessons must be learned; an example had to be set. Not only would class be missed, but I would have the same meal (tripe) served at each meal – supper, breakfast and so on – To be fair, 24 hours or so later, as soon as I did stretch my fork towards this repulsive thing, with hunger beating the battle over defiance, they removed the plate and gave me what the other girls were eating. It was a strange breaking of the spirit, like people used to do with horses sometimes in India – I hated watching it; so did Daddy. “That’s not the way,” he’d say.

  I was utterly bewildered by the punishments. Very often I hadn’t known what it was I’d done wrong. In India, when I was naughty I would be summoned to the drawing room where Mummy would look sad and Daddy would speak to me in his quiet voice – telling me of his disappointment in me and explaining exactly what I had done and how it was unacceptable. I was never struck or shouted at, but asked to go to my room to think about things – and I’d creep away, defiance evaporating, replaced by the lump in the throat that made it hard to speak or swallow. For I usually did know what was wrong, what was rude, what was unkind, boastful, cruel, or silly. And thinking about it in my bedroom would bring the punishment – shame. I was always forgiven.

  But now my hands would be hit for being over-eager with the wrong answer, for being late; I stood in the corner for longer than I attended classes for answering back, for giving a wrong look, for pulling someone’s hair or talking after lights out. Although I found this surprising – these little thwacks didn’t bother me; my hands stung for a bit (longer if there were chilblains), but this didn’t last long – the really horrible punishments were the ones that went on and on.

  We were all sent to school with wooden “tuck boxes”, little trunks that held fruit and biscuits and chocolates, cake and Turkish Delight and favourite treats. At tea time we were allowed one piece of fruit and one chocolate biscuit or cake with our tea. Our parents had arranged for tuck parcels to be sent from Stewarts in Blairgowrie (the shop had been owned by our great grandfather). Oh, the excitement when they arrived! We had one each. “Isla Blair-Hill, parcel for you. Fiona Blair-Hill, parcel for you.” The tearing of paper revealed shortbread and chocolate and fudge and all sorts of delicious things.

  Some misdemeanour on my part led to the elongated punishment of all my tuck being shared out daily amongst the other girls until the end of term – and I would get nothing. It was wounding and seemed unfair that Peffy Shanks should get my Wagon Wheel and Janice McClure my Blue Riband wafer. This punishment just seemed spiteful.

  Being sent to bed in the middle of the day was another punishment – without food, without a book, without any work – would often, through boredom, lead to further bad behaviour. I remember once catching sight of the collection of glass animals owned by the senior girl in our dormitory. She was several years older than us and it was her duty to keep us in check. Gwen Kelly was her name and her glass animals were kept – dusted, loved by her – on the mantelpiece of the dormitory. They were her pride, her treasures and I became enchanted by them on this boring bedtime punishment day. Little green seahorses with yellow eyes, a black and white penguin with a baby by its side. Stripey tigers, white sheep with rough coats and black faces, horses with blonde swishy tails – I got up to look closer. We were all forbidden to touch these precious little pieces of art. But I found myself reaching for the seahorse and – oh horror! The cuff of my pyjama jacket caught the horse’s tail and it smashed to the floor, taking with it a grey mother rabbit and her three ba
bies. I was mortified. I scurried back to bed with thumping heart, awaiting the discovery of my disobedience and misplaced curiosity.

  It didn’t take long. Gwen was in anguished tears as I explained how a huge gust of wind had entered the dormitory and swept the animals off the mantelpiece. I watched as everyone’s accusing eyes took in the unruffled beds and curtains, dolls in their places on smoothed counterpanes. I felt ashamed and stricken and genuinely upset for Gwen, but I can’t remember the punishment that followed. I doubtless thought that I deserved it.

  Fiona was always being sent to bed. She missed birthday parties, Halloween parties, all sorts of happy occasions – she almost took herself to bed before the pronounced punishment as soon as she had done something that was a bit out of order. She often misbehaved, but her behaviour was not disruptive or malicious; she was just naughty sometimes. For example, tying Mrs Cock’s gown to her chair (Fiona said Mrs Cock’s name was rude and she and Janet Gordon giggled about it), or arranging midnight feasts and getting caught. She was as naughty as any of the other girls; she even led the odd uprising.

  The midnight feast – a phenomenon discussed with relish in girls’ novels like “What Katy Did at School”, was never really enjoyed much by any of us who took part in them, but you’d rather die than admit such a thing. Well, imagine it. Being woken at 1.00 a.m. by a sleepy girl in charge of the alarm clock and forcing your feet into slippers, yourself into your woolly dressing gown, having pulled yourself from the (at last!) warmth of your bed. Crouching in torch light and pulling from underneath the loose floor board curled up pieces of bread and jam saved from tea, Penguin biscuits and Wagon Wheels, jelly babies and sherbet lemons; all of them coated in a sprinkling of dust and bits of fluff, despite their brown paper bag wrapping; an abundant hoard for any mouse or rat that lurked or scurried – or whatever mice and rats do.

  And so you would sit, shivering with cold in the unheated dormitory, pretending enjoyment with sleepy “ummmms” and ”yummmms” until it was time to pack up the debris and deposit it under the easily lifted floorboard and go back to bed, only to find that sleep had fled and you were awake and ready for the day, but had to lie in the dark in your now-cold bed, shaped like a canoe, the mattress having such a dip in the middle, and you’d feel a bit sick with bits of jelly baby in your teeth while thinking longingly of the lime trees and the sunshine and the canna lilies and mother’s lily of the valley perfume and Daddy’s pipe and slow smile.

  “Going to Coventry” was the worst punishment of all. You were sent to a room, where your meals were brought up to you, your schoolwork and so on, but no-one was allowed to speak to you – staff or pupils. It was only for twenty-four hours, but they were the loneliest twenty-four hours imaginable, and frightening; you felt as if you were living at the bottom of a dark well, with light and life, laughter and chatter seen and heard, but out of reach. You would beg not to be sent to Coventry.

  I came out of the “Coventry Room” blinking, as if I had been in the dark for a long time. The room, in fact, was quite light, with a long window that reached nearly to the ground, but it was so narrow that you couldn’t really see out of it. I was blinking a lot: so much so that people mentioned it, Alexandra Kelly and Pamela Murdoch. “What’s the matter with your eyes, Isla? You keep blinking.”

  Matron Howisman noticed I was blinking as I had my Virol in the morning. “We’ll have to cut your fringe, Missy. That’s the problem, your fringe is too long.” But she didn’t say “Missy” like Ayah said it, as if it was my name and I was her “Missy Baba”– she said it as if I had done something wrong and blinking was something that was bad and I would get sent to Coventry again. I so did not want to be sent to Coventry again.

  I was told that I had to go to the Infirmary at tea time; Matron was there with a pair of scissors. I’d seen her use these to cut up pillowcases into squares for dusters. “Sit down, Missy,” she breathed with a wheezing sound – and I don’t think she could remember my name, so she just said “Missy” in that frightening way, as if she were going to punish me. She put a towel around my neck, sat me on a stool and told me to close my eyes. I felt the scissors slide over the scar on my forehead that was sensitive if anyone touched it and I heard a slow “clip, clip” and it was over. The towel was pulled off and wiped across my face.

  “You can go now.” So I went. I saw myself later in the darkened window of the dancing room before they closed the shutters and my fringe had become a frill on my forehead about an inch long. I hate short, heavy fringes; why have a fringe at all? Actually why did I have a fringe? Mummy and Ayah said it framed my face, as they clipped it slowly with little snip, snips and showed me myself in a little hand mirror and so I didn’t mind it. It felt nice, but I hated this. I felt like a sheep when they cut off its wool, or a plucked chicken. I felt reduced and that I was no longer a Saluki and Mummy would not like my slippery inch of hair and she would say “It’s a shame.”

  I went on blinking.

  I forgot about my fringe, because I never saw it again, there were no mirrors, of course, and I soon stopped touching it, but I went on blinking and blinking and annoyed everyone, but I didn’t know I was doing it, so it was hard to stop. This lasted some months.

  It was soon to be Halloween and we all had to have costumes. I had been in “Coventry” when it was decided what we were to be – so all the best parts had gone, the witches, ghosts, vampires and black cats, the bats and wrapped up Egyptian mummies. I was to be an apple blossom fairy. What on earth had a spring-time apple blossom fairy to do with darkness and spooks and hook-nosed, warty, scary people? “That’s all the crepe paper that’s left, pink and green, so Miss Rae says you can cut it out and be an apple blossom fairy with petals. You have to make a skirt,” Janet Glendenning said.

  I had no idea how to make a skirt from cut out crepe paper petals. Miss Rae drew petal shaped pieces on the pink and green crepe paper. They were long and looked like the lozenges that Ayah sucked when she had a cold, but bigger of course. It was enough to make a sort of crepe paper petal-y skirt. She said I was to cut round the drawn in lines – but I couldn’t. The scissors were blunt at the ends and the blades didn’t seem to meet, so when I tried to cut the paper it just skewed off and made a bend in the crepe. I got tearful with frustration and Miss Rae had to cut it out for me. I had to glue the top bits together so that it could be wrapped over a piece of elastic that would go round my waist to make my apple blossom fairy skirt. The glue got everywhere, globs of it fell onto the bit of the petals that were supposed to look nice, and it got on my hands so that there were marks on the crinkly crepe with stretchy tendrils of glue all over it. It looked horrible. I felt humiliated and ashamed that I was so hopeless and I knew I’d look awful as an apple blossom fairy, when everyone else had long black dresses and pokey-up hats as witches and wizards, and Pamela Murdoch (a day girl) had got her father to make a skeleton suit; she was all in black apart from white painted on bones that bent and moved as she walked.

  I was trying to stick my petals together, when Fiona came into our form room during “recreation time”.

  “Isla, Isla come, come now. Come quickly.”

  “What is it?”

  She led me by the hand up to the dormitory at the top of the school. “Come here. Look out of the window, over there to the left, do you see? A tiger’s wedding.” It was a rainbow arching over the brown coloured moor and above it, another rainbow, just as bright and stretching right up, right over and right down to the ground where it disappeared.

  “Do you remember what Mummy said? Her bit of the rainbow, can you say the colours?”

  “Red, orange, yellow, blue, green, indigo, violet.”

  “Yes, blue, green, indigo, violet – do you see the last colour, her colour? Do you remember she said if we saw a rainbow, the last colour was her colour, her name, Violet. If we saw that, we were to know she was there with us, that she was thinking of us.”

  I looked at the wonder above me and the last colour that w
as vibrant and then bleached into the sky – Violet. Mummy. Her colour.

  I inhaled deeply, as if to invoke the colour from the rainbow into me to pull my mother into my lungs.

  The rainbow faded, Miss Rae called me back to my petals and Fiona sat beside me to glue them into place. She made me my apple blossom skirt.

  During my first few days at school, an incident occurred that has stayed with me; the shame of it never goes away.

  I sucked my thumb. I was six years old and Matron thought it was time the habit was broken. I’ve no doubt she was right, but it was a comfort that no one had named “bad” before. So all us thumb-suckers were singled out and we had to have little lint bags put over our hands at night and our hands tied behind our backs – so that we couldn’t reach them. It was hard to sleep, thumb-less and uncomfortable. I wanted to go to the loo in the night, but wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone in my dormitory and I couldn’t pull my pyjama bottoms down. Perhaps I didn’t really want to go? I could hold on until morning? And it was very dark and very cold. I went back to bed where I dreamt I was weeing and woke up and – horrors – found that I had. I was not a bed-wetter. I had never done it before and there was an explanation for it. But no one asked me. Matron’s lips puckered into a prune of disapproval. She took me to the bathroom, removed my pyjamas and washed me down, all without a word. My bed had been stripped when I returned to the dormitory and it was time for breakfast. Fiona, in the bigger girls’ dormitory, had heard what had happened. She told me not to worry as I hadn’t done it before and I wouldn’t do it again. She stopped the tears before they came by telling me it would all be alright and giving me her bear, Wampus, to hold.