by Isla Blair
She got a First Class Honours Degree at Cambridge and she believed that teaching was not just a vocation, but a gift she had been given, something precious to share. She had a very firm belief that children should learn self-esteem by honouring themselves and others. She believed that education was a birthright all children deserved, and she would deliver it. She believed that you achieved if you endeavoured. That even if you failed, work could be its own reward, that confidence was encouraged by genuine praise, that kindness/gentleness was a strength, that a thirst for knowledge should be encouraged, that hope kept you buoyant, that every child had something special to give the world, that we were, all of us, unique.
She was a Christian Scientist and a Spiritualist. Our meals were carefully worked out; our diet was organic and a lot of it was raw. We had homemade wholemeal bread, raw salad of cabbage and carrots and currants and seeds and nuts and chopped up apple. I loved it. Pilchards were served once a week, but they were easy to palm off onto someone else. On the whole the food was good, not the sticky grey gloopiness of porridge and herrings and tripe.
I knew I’d like this school, where the girls termed my Scottish accent quaint, and liked my straight auburn hair and called me “film star”. I loved the nickname, even though I knew it wasn’t true. I’d always wanted to be a film star, I loved film stars, but I was starting to get plump and plain and a bit of a lump. My breasts were getting larger and were encased in “parachutes” and, at eleven, I had already had my periods for nearly a year. I was physically ahead of my age, but inside I was still such a little girl, still wilful, still defiant.
My secret was discovered on my second day at West Preston.
I couldn’t read. I’d been able to copy the shapes of letters, but I had no idea what they meant. No one in Scotland had taught me and my parents were not around to check. There were such long gaps between seeing them, two years would pass – a holiday filled with activities, swimming and running and cycling, then another two years of separation then another. And here I was, an adolescent girl, and I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that Peter Rabbit loved radishes in Mr McGregor’s garden if there weren’t pictures. I loved Jemima Puddleduck, but mostly for the drawings of foxgloves and the silly darling expression on her face. It had nothing to do with words. In “writing letters home” to India, Fiona colluded in my secret by writing out sentences which I copied. It would have been much easier to just read. But I didn’t know how, so I just pretended I did. I can’t think how the bluff persisted, or how I got away with it. I wish, of course, that I had been sussed earlier. I have tried to fathom what stopped me. Fear? Stubbornness? I think it was that I was always in trouble, standing in a corner with a rebelling heart, busy with behaving or not behaving, working out ways of answering back. We had never been praised at St Maray’s. Praise was perceived as leading to arrogance, to vanity. (The reason why we were not allowed mirrors.) And most of us need praise, or at least encouragement, like we need water or food – look at plants, a bit of plant food and a watering can and a good talking to and see how they grow.
Anyway there I was in Form 3b on my second day at West Preston with Miss Evans taking the class. The girls were copying out from a book, neatly and slowly, and girls were taking it in turns to read from the book. It was “Lorna Doone”. My heart pounded. What was I to do? For my turn would surely and inevitably come. Perhaps I could pretend to faint? My mouth went dry; I sweated as the adrenalin pumped through my veins. Juliet Palmer sat down – I tried to listen to the story. Lorna Doone, Carver Doone, Lorna, Carver, Carver Doone. It was my turn. I stood up. I told the story as I imagined it would turn out; I kept going, even though I felt the silence in the room become a force like a dam about to break. Inevitably, it did break. First giggles, then laughter, then sh-sh-shushing. Of course I stopped speaking because of the lump that had risen up in my throat, hard and shutting out air and tears did fall now. From my eyes and from my nose – fear, humiliation, relief I’d been discovered, but shame at the discovery, too. I was grown up, I was “Film Star” with swishy hair and I couldn’t read anything. I was on the edge of a huge and black hole – I was about to fall into it ... Miss Evans’ voice pulled me out.
“Isla, sit down. You are a brave girl and you must be a frightened girl, because you can’t read, can you? We will help you to read, won’t we girls. We will read with you in break and at playtime and you will enter a world where you will be transported.”
The class applauded. I cried again. Miss Evans said my life would change and of course it did. It didn’t take me long before “The cat sat on the mat” became Jane Austen, George Elliot, Dickens, and Shakespeare. Girls in their breaks vied to hear me read. I became someone to know, someone they’d “improved”, been kind to. In fact, they were kind and patient and utterly supportive.
It was not long before I was quite accomplished at Janet and John books, feeling a little humiliated that girls in my class who were reading Black Beauty and Jane Eyre were taking it in turns to help me pronounce things. S-C-H-OO-L, “You don’t pronounce the H and it’s not CH as in church; and you pronounce through and thought differently and there’s bough as in BOW, but the bow you wear in your hair is pronounced B-OH.” I would sometimes throw the book away in frustration that I couldn’t do it. As I stumbled and got things wrong sometimes the girls would laugh involuntarily and then say “Sorry.” They would get frustrated too. “Why can’t you SEE that that says BEAN and not BE-ANN,” and I would reply, “Well, last time it was I have BEEN to church – with two ‘E’s.” I can’t do this.”
Miss Evans would intervene, or Miss Williams or Miss Stromwall, and we’d have a “quiet time” in the small staff room when there was no-one else there. It didn’t hurt so much if I got things wrong in front of them. And they didn’t expect me to always get it right. What was easy for Wendy, Juliet or Sally was hard for me and my teachers recognised that. It was more than once that they said, “Has no-one taught you this, Isla? What about your times tables – do you know them?”
I learned to read and then – miraculously and quite suddenly – it all fell into place. I read all I could – Ethel M Dell as well as Dickens, Georgette Heyer and Anya Seton, in rotation with the Brontes and Evelyn Waugh. I read Agatha Christie and Lettice Leaf in The Girl newspaper. During prep (our homework, usually presided over by Miss Williams), I would have my exercise and text books open on my desk and Ryder Haggard on my lap (not literally of course). The frustration when I was discovered was not the 100 lines I had to write, “I must not read novels during prep,” but the fact of the book being confiscated for three weeks, by which time Amber in Forever Amber was forgotten in favour of Cathy in Wuthering Heights – not a bad substitute.
Soon I was reading out loud with the other girls and to my astonishment I became quite good at it. I didn’t drone as some of them did, I relished the words and I tried to make the passages live. Sometimes the girls would stop writing and just listen, and occasionally Miss Evans would let me read on, her head up from correcting our exercise books, and she’d listen too. It was my second experience of drawing in listeners, an audience, and it made me feel a tiny stirring of power; it took me back to that day on board ship when people clapped me for singing.
It wasn’t long before I was appearing in small parts in plays – “A Christmas Carol” and then a large one – Brutus in “Julius Caesar” (disappointed I wasn’t cast as Mark Antony). Brutus is a good man, no doubt of it, he comes forward and eloquently addresses the crowd – in prose. Then up steps Mark Antony, muttering that he’s not very good at public speaking and wins the crowd’s hearts by speaking in verse. Poetry beats pragmatism in rhetoric, certainly in drama and often in life.
At the end of my second term, each class was asked to choose a one act play and produce it themselves, covering all departments – director, actors, stage management, costume, lighting – and present it to the whole school at the end of term. Local people and patrons and governors of the school, parents and friends
were invited, too. Our play’s title was “The Bathroom Door”. I was given the main part, as my reading aloud had impressed our chosen director, Wendy Madley. The character was, unsurprisingly, called The Prima Donna. I did no work on it. I had the impression that it would all fall into place, come easily, as the reading had done once I had found the key. We rehearsed and I thought I would just pick up the lines. My colleagues got a bit anxious as the day of the performance grew nearer. But I was confident.
Of course, it was awful; I was awful. Being on stage where the words don’t come, sensing the stiff, embarrassed silence of the audience starting to cough and shuffle their feet, that feeling – being alone under the lights, marooned, utterly at sea, opening my mouth and no sound coming out – has become a recurring nightmare in my adult life. I was so conscious of letting down all my friends, betraying myself with my arrogance and utterly misplaced confidence. I was so ashamed – apologies could never be enough. I went to bed, but mortification kept me awake for most of the night.
After Assembly in the morning (where I tried not to see the gloating looks of “serves you right”, or worse, pity), Miss Boykett called me to her study. I prepared for the worst. But I was asked to sit down in the armchair and she sat on the other one, facing me.
“Well, Isla, what a big lesson you’ve learnt. That you had to learn it so publicly will be more painful, but it will guarantee that it will not be forgotten. You let us down last night, your colleagues of course, and you also disappointed and embarrassed the audience. Most of all, you let yourself down. You are not without talent, but talent needs hard work to help it blossom. Hard work will nourish it, polish it; nothing just happens by chance. Now go back to class and put this behind you. I won’t say forget it, for I know you won’t. But you will never, ever, not prepare for a part again.” Nor have I.
But I did go in for poetry competitions and bible reading at the Worthing Festival and to everyone’s astonishment, especially mine, I would very often win. We were competing against all the schools in the district, Convent of the Sacred Heart, Farlington School for Girls, Roedean and schools in Littlehampton, Rustington, East Preston and Ferring. I liked words. I liked the taste of them on my tongue, as well as the sound of them; words like relish and beleaguered, sonorous, gratifying, muffin and melancholy....If I was reading out loud as opposed to reciting by heart, I learnt that it was a good idea to keep my face out of the book as much as possible. I took my time and noticed that if I spoke in a clear voice, not too loudly, but distinctly, as if I was imparting a secret, people would lean forward to listen to me. Being told I was good at something made me want to try harder at everything else; confidence didn’t make me conceited, it made me believe that achievement was possible – I had a certificate to prove it: Isla Blair-Hill, 1st Prize in Bible Reading.
Most teenage girls go through a pretty horrible phase and I was no exception. I was rebellious, of course; I was defiant, I was passionate and proud and wilful. I was untidy, competitive and expected people to fall in with my ideas. I was bossy and found it hard to forgive hurt or betrayal. My reports home repeatedly said, “She lacks grounding.” And one of my reports read “Isla is a very good leader, but in the wrong direction.” I expected people to follow me and usually they did and I got them and me into trouble (not serious trouble, not boys or booze or even smoking – just being a bit silly).
But then Miss Boykett (nicknamed Bucket) played a master-stroke. Common, I’m told, in a lot of schools with an imaginative Head, she made me a Council Member. Council Members were like prefects. We were in charge of the other girls, to help them, persuade and counsel them; we did not punish, but occasionally we scolded – very occasionally. I was on the verge of turning into a bully and Miss Boykett showed me another way. I started to take an interest in the other girls, rather than just being preoccupied with myself. I helped some of the younger ones with homework, comforted them if they were homesick, hurt or rejected, or someone had been cutting or cruel to them; I would secretly help them to wash their hair. (We were only allowed to wash our hair every three weeks, unless we had a doctor’s certificate to wash it once a week. I prevailed upon my doctor to give me a certificate in the first term I was there. Now I wash my hair every day.) I would compose poems for Valentine’s Day on behalf of yearning girls for unavailable boys.
I began to really notice other people’s feelings and mind about them. My anger would flare if I saw injustice or cruelty and I would storm in to stop it. To this day, I find it difficult to watch plays or films where there is overt cruelty. I was sick, literally, as I watched “Midnight Express” in a cinema in Australia and never saw the end of the film. On the whole I became calmer, kinder, I hope a nicer person. I was probably a little prig. I found it oddly touching the way some of the little girls got crushes on me and the other councillors and asked if they could borrow a hanky or a letter to put under their pillows. Council members “ran the houses”. I was in the Red House, Arundel, and I was able to issue red stars for good behaviour and black stars for bad behaviour. I learned quite quickly that the red stars seemed more effective than the black variety. As one knows, a little bit of Baby-Bio makes plants grow, stamping on them crushes them. Obvious, really. And so it is with people. Most actors respond to directors who give them confidence, not those who taunt, humiliate and bully them. I am always surprised that some theatre directors don’t know this. Nothing is worse than being inhibited and made to feel foolish by the very person who should be helping you to spread your wings and fly. You need this help with every play, especially when the role is not an obvious piece of casting.
I would sometimes lead the prayers in Assembly, take reading and writing classes; yes, me, who only a few years earlier was struggling over the hieroglyphics myself. I would choreograph some of the younger girls in songs from the shows – “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” and “America” from “West Side Story”. No one was very good, but we had fun and laughed a lot and at some poignant moments we’d cry a little too, in a companionable way, and we’d dance together to the strains of “There’s a Summer Place”, and long to be dancing in the arms of boys with down on their top lips and who emanated the distant whiff of Eskamel (the ointment for acne), let alone in the muscular arms of Tab Hunter and Robert Wagner By this time in our lives we were desperate for any male company, even the butcher’s boy on his black bicycle and stripey apron had us all hanging out of the dormitory windows saying, “Oh! He’s gorgeous!” He wasn’t gorgeous at all. He was just a boy, but that was enough for us.
Fiona was at West Preston for only eighteen months. With so little grounding in her school work at St Maray’s it is remarkable how well she adapted to life in Sussex. She worked hard to make up for all the studies she had missed. It only became apparent how very poor the schooling at St Maray’s had been, when it was noticed by all the staff at West Preston. I was illiterate and we were neither of us very numerate; we both had a great deal of catching up to do, but with Fiona it was more pressing, as she had a deadline if she was to get any O levels at all. My breakthrough with reading was not referred to in my chats with Fiona; she was pleased, but there was no acknowledgement of my long-term inability; we just never mentioned it. Being so much happier at school, we made our own friends and were less dependent on each other for companionship.
In the summer term, Fiona got glandular fever and was shut away from us in wretched isolation. I would talk to her through a long glass window and watch her legs getting thinner, her face drawn and grey – woeful and dejected in her incarceration. She was sent home to recuperate with Aunt Ailsa, but of course becoming ill meant she was unable to take her O level exams and would have to come back for one more term in September to take them just before Christmas. Luckily she got the required passes enabling her to become the nurse she so longed to be and she entered the Middlesex Hospital as a student nurse aged nineteen. Miss Boykett and West Preston had changed both our lives and we became strong in the belief that we were cap
able of achieving whatever goals we set ourselves.
TWELVE
One Collar and Two Socks
The relief I felt that I no longer had to pretend to read when I couldn’t was so huge, I wondered why I had held this secret to myself for so long. With fifty years of hindsight, I still wonder why no-one at St. Maray’s picked up what Miss Evans at West Preston could hardly help but notice on my second day. And, in truth, my memory of actual lessons at St. Maray’s is so sketchy that it seems like a form of amnesia, for I can hardly remember anything about them. I remember NOT going to lessons, I remember “prep”, but what on earth did I do there? Now that I could read, it was as if everything had sharpened into focus. I imagined I even heard things with more clarity. It was as if I had been stumbling about wearing someone else’s glasses that were as thick as bottle tops, or that my eyes had been blurry and now, with spectacles or contact lenses, I could focus properly and blink away any shadows.
I liked the shape of words as well as the sound and I began to take pleasure in writing the letters out, carefully – between ruled lines at first and I made decisions about the shape of the letters that would inform my handwriting all my life; for example I write “r”s in a sort of Roman way, not in the up and down English way, I wanted the letters and the words to belong to me and not for them to be prescribed. I liked loops, which sometimes developed into rather self-conscious twirls; I enjoyed writing and learned to write in italic script with thick black ink and a selection of pens in varying sizes. It didn’t matter that it was often a mess; it was the fact I was doing it at all that made me excited and want to practise until I became reasonably proficient.
