The ‘picking teams’ ritual confirmed that dreadful possibility. My cherished hope that the leaders’ fingers might one day point at me first was never realised. Their keen eyes passed Christine and me over like dust among the diamonds until there was nobody else left. Although I liked netball and tennis, I loathed hockey, because we were always on the boundary, shivering while we waited for the ball to come our way and conscious of Nana, a dumpy little old lady in a hat, standing face pressed against the wire mesh, or sitting on a bench, a mother hen watching her chicks.
Occasionally I have wondered since whether our feeling of rejection was merely a symptom of mild paranoia, but when I meet women who were at Wychwood with us they put me right. ‘You were,’ they say, ‘very peculiar.’ And one asked me recently how I had learnt to speak properly? Did I see somebody? – meaning, I suppose, a psychiatrist, although perhaps a speech therapist would have been enough. She said, also, how sorry she had felt for me as I stood humiliated in an elocution lesson. ‘They asked you to try a tongue twister, which they must have known you couldn’t possibly manage. It was so cruel.’ Another experience edited out by my brain’s censor.
I suspect, however, that kind dark-haired Miss Woodward considered us to be a challenge. She raised our spirits by giving us the best parts when we read from Shakespeare in class and later, when we became less manageable, bribed us with chocolate to be quiet. Accustomed to women with outdoor complexions, I remember her as a fine-featured woman with dark shadows under dark eyes in a pale face, and elegant fingers slightly yellowed by nicotine. I see her now in a long dark skirt, sitting in a small, smoke-filled room, as she checked that we had cleaned our teeth and been to the loo. And we were first each night for this chore, because, having soon discovered that there was no hot bath water after half past eight, we opted to be the first to bed.
The other teachers are less clear in my memory, although Snodgrass and Pinhorn are names not easily forgotten. Formidable Miss Snodgrass, who later became headmistress, was a fine history teacher, although I felt a childish prejudice against the kirby grips that kept her hair so firmly behind her ears. Fair Miss Pinhorn, whose glasses seemed to match her skin, I resented because she insisted, in carpentry lessons, that we made easels for the use of fifth-and sixth-formers. Wanting to take home some elegant box I had made, I suspected our efforts were being exploited to save the school money.
For me the least successful and most unforgettable teacher was Mademoiselle – a Russian, I believe – whose great brown eyes sometimes brimmed with tears, as children played her up. Poor Mademoiselle, young and lost in the claustrophobic atmosphere of an English boarding school, found Christine and me impossible. And who could blame her, for, since we could hardly pronounce English, how could she be expected to teach us French? Years later when I was signing books at a Russian bazaar, Mademoiselle, now a tall, distinguished old lady with a stick, hobbled up. ‘You can’t be one of the twins,’ she exclaimed. ‘You must be Josephine.’ Her difficulty in accepting me as an author confirmed a childhood suspicion that she had considered Christine and me beyond recall (a view which first surfaced when she refused to give us extra French lessons after we had opted out of eurhythmics).
Perhaps the unrealistic dreams we brought to Wychwood, a liberal and enlightened school, contributed eventually to Christine’s and my bad behaviour. Imagining hunt balls, we wanted to learn ball-room dancing, but found ourselves instead attempting to sway gracefully in eurhythmics, or skipping, which we told Miss Lee we did not consider beneficial. We longed to learn more Scottish history, but found ourselves once again in the Stone Age, which had so fascinated Miss Fryer, while in geography we concentrated on the Colonies instead of Western Europe.
In the spring term Christine and I were put in different dormitories, but because we were still untidy and disorganised we were again, against normal practice, provided with housemothers. Mine was tall, flaxen-haired Noël Clifton, who lived on Dartmoor and rode. Feeling she was a kindred spirit I confided in her my hopes for success in a spring gymkhana. I won a first prize there – was it for best rider? I can’t remember – and eagerly sat beside her the next term, expecting her to ask how I had got on. But she didn’t, and family rules against swanking prevented me from telling her; so to my great disappointment, the girl I admired never knew that I was good at something.
Josephine, who always looked on the bright side, is certain Christine and I were not as miserable as we say, but Ann Mullins, whom Josephine sent to play horses with ‘the twins’, remembers us as unhappy. Ann, who became Ann Dally, a distinguished psychiatrist and medical historian, had already the knack of noticing behaviour and mood in others. ‘You were gloomy,’ she told me, ‘because of your speech problem, but Josephine was always smiling.’
During our first summer at Wychwood the teachers took a day off, leaving the senior girls in charge of lessons. Noël gave Christine a starred 1 for a picture of Jesus in the desert, a mark withdrawn by Miss Lyons the next day, because, she said, none of us was fit to draw Our Lord.
Each Sunday or Monday we three returned to school loaded with apples, a passport for Christine and me to a temporary popularity. We kept the apples hidden amongst our clothes to offer around when no teachers were about. But the dress box full of chocolate and grapes which Denis sent us in a typically spontaneous gesture, when he left Oxford after a year for the theatre, was a different matter.
Denis had won a Kitchener Scholarship to read History at Christ Church, an expensive college for a young man trying to live on a pound a week provided by Granny and a small parental allowance, which Cappy often only sent when dunned for it. Aunt Dorothea paid for a tailor to make Denis an overcoat, but he could hardly keep up with his polo-playing, sherry-drinking fellow undergraduates. Besides, his first love was for the theatre and, when he should have been reading history, he spent much of his time at the Playhouse. When he sent us the parcel he already had a job waiting for him as Stage Manager at the Bexhill Repertory Theatre, which was run by Matthew Forsythe, the producer of Cappy’s play It’s Folly to be Wise at the Kew Theatre in the ’twenties. Matthew Forsythe joined the Air Force in the war, but afterwards ran The Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow, where he immediately offered Denis another job. Later Forsythe became Director of the London Academy of Dramatic Art.
We ate the grapes straightaway and some of the chocolate. Then, before going home for the weekend, Josephine put the box under clothes in the bottom drawer of her chest of drawers, but someone discovered its hiding place and we returned to find it gone.
The only frightening experience at Wychwood was, for me, fire practice, when all the girls in my house assembled in an attic. A webbing band was put round our bodies under our arms, and in turn we were gradually let down the side of the house on a pulley with a teacher turning a small wheel. With little faith in our elders’ competence, I clutched at the wall’s creepers, scraping my knees and ashamed of my cowardice.
But if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Christine and I did at one time gain respect from our peers when, on Denis’s suggestion, we chose to recite in turn A.E. Housman’s poem, ‘Farewell to barn and stack and tree’, our voices rising as we reached those memorable lines:
And here’s a bloody hand to shake,
And oh, man, here’s goodbye;
We’ll sweat no more with scythe and rake,
My bloody hands and I.
‘I don’t think that’s a very nice poem,’ the teacher said, not liking the bloodys. But afterwards other children begged us to lend them our copy of The Shropshire Lad, and the next week recited the same poem, accompanied by their classmates’ giggles. Thereafter free choice ended and we were back to Walter de la Mare’s ‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller, Knocking at the moonlit door’, which we hated, and to Christina Rossetti.
In the summer term Josephine was put in the main house, Christine in St John’s and me in the Flat, where we slept only occasionally because of the polio epidemic, whi
ch Josephine has mentioned. When we did return to school we were, as usual, late for Assembly – a source of complaint from the teachers, to whom Cappy replied in a sharp, short letter saying that his wife’s health was more important than his children’s prayers.
Earlier in the year Mr Sworder had left with us Northwind, a blue roan gelding of 14 hands with a large dark head and black points, who became one of my special, most challenging favourites. After much schooling I rode him in a jumping class, judged by the notable Reading vet, G.P. Male. At the approach to each obstacle he half-reared and ran backwards, but in those days there were no time limits and somehow I got him round with only one or two refusals. I came out of the ring despondent, obeying the cardinal rule never to blame one’s mount for failure. Then, at the end of a long, hot day, I was astonished to be called back to receive the cup for the Best Rider in the Show – a quirky decision by Mr Male based entirely on my battle with Northwind, which suggested that the struggles with Jenny and Daisy had paid off and, for me, that some disasters turn into triumphs. When Mr Sworder eventually sold Northwind, he handed us ten shillings or a pound as usual for our work, which, of course, could in no way compensate for losing a pony whom I had felt was my own; but I think we had all learnt by then that life is punctuated with goodbyes.
Meanwhile, with so many lessons missed, Wychwood became for me almost unbearable, and secretly I decided to run away. Josephine’s initial attempts to make Christine and me feel at ease made my lack of friends all the more painful. Jean Chalk and Sally Foley had become distant. The apple season had not yet begun. And there was no one else remotely interested in us. During lessons I struggled in a fog of incomprehension.
‘If you don’t like something, don’t whine, change it,’ Mamma had advised on innumerable occasions. All right, then. I hated being a failure, so next term I would run away – with Christine if she wanted to come. I would disappear for a whole day and then, as evening fell, turn up at the house where Nana lived. She would contact Mamma and then perhaps everyone would understand how totally inadequate and fed-up I felt.
Then our parents told us that we were to leave school, because they could no longer afford the fees and we didn’t seem to be learning anything. I hugged this information to myself, thinking how amazed our unfriendly schoolmates would be when our names were read out at the end of term. But first there were plans for an end-of-term midnight feast. Mamma gave us fruit and ever-popular Lyons Individual Fruit Pies, and, tribal still, we agreed that all three of us would meet at the main house for the feast. The Flat had a balcony on the first floor, from which daring girls sometimes jumped down to the grass below when no teachers were around. Were doors locked at night or was it bravado which made me decide to jump from it too on the night of the feast? I don’t know what Christine’s plans were for leaving St John’s, but they, like mine, were pre-empted when we were both ordered to spend our last night in the main house sick beds, and we realised sadly that the teachers knew exactly what was going on and had decided to turn a partially blind eye. With deceit ruled out, the feast became a staid affair.
None of this mattered, of course, once we were back for good at The Grove, where half-disturbing, half-exciting talk of war was in the air, and we had our first very own pony, whom I have not mentioned, though we bought him on an autumn Saturday during our last term at Wychwood.
We came across Shandy (full name, Shandy Gaff) at Reading Market, where Mamma had left us on her way to shop in the town centre. He was one of scores of wild, recently-weaned foals from the New Forest, huddled miserably together in pens. Golden-coloured, yet more dun than chestnut, with a cream underbelly and a star which turned into a trickle running down to a pale muzzle, he seemed to me the most loveable foal in the world. Then, as we looked at him, he became the boldest, too, as he jumped over the bars of the pen and fell on his nose the other side. When a strong man picked him up and threw him back inside, our longing to buy him grew into an agony of hope, but we had no money on us and, very soon, we sadly watched him auctioned and sold to someone else. Then, too late, Mamma returned and drove us home.
Over lunch the vision of Shandy jumping the railings haunted us. Bought with several other suckers in one lot by a dealer, his fate seemed horribly uncertain. Was it possible he might be sold for dog meat? ‘It may not be too late,’ Mamma said. ‘If he’s still there his new owner might sell him on to us.’ And so, in a wild rush of hope, we decided to take the last of our money out of our post office accounts.
There was a dash to find our passbooks, an agonizing wait for the post office to reopen after the lunch break, and then at last Mamma drove us, with money in our pockets, swiftly down Gravel Hill, through Sonning Common, Emmer Green and Caversham, over the wide Thames to Reading. Would we be too late? We each had our own imaginary scenario.
With fast beating hearts we ran into the Market and – miraculously, we thought – the foals were still there, Shandy among them, his nose still bloody from his fall.
I don’t remember which of us asked the dealer whether he would resell Shandy, who was the smallest of the lot – only that after a tantalising pause, in which no doubt he worked out his profit, the dealer said, ‘All right, seventy-five shillings.’
Thrilled, we dug deep in our pockets, gave over the money. The sale was clinched and we probably shook hands, as was the custom in those days. Pleased with his sale, the dealer promised to drop Shandy off at The Grove soon after four.
So we achieved in one afternoon something other girls only dream of. And, in the dislocated weeks ahead, Wychwood could not compete with such an event. How indeed could we attend to Miss Lee’s often sensible homilies at Assembly or to dull lessons or much else when our minds were on home and the pony book lives we led there?
Christine
For years I could not hear the sound of a piano being played without recalling Highlands and the Miss Coopers. So it is with Wychwood, for the cry of owls on a winter night still reminds me of the owls in North Oxford which hooted so mournfully while I lay homesick trying to sleep. Beside my bed I kept a picture of Mama. And photographs of Dinah and Milkmaid in blue Woolworth frames.
Carola Oman had given Diana and me small cases in which to carry our toothbrushes and pyjamas backwards and forwards between home and school. They had our initials on them. Arriving on Monday mornings we would already be looking forward to returning home on Friday. Everyone tried very hard to make us happy; our housemothers were kind – we had them far longer than anyone else – our teachers were tolerant. There was no bullying of any kind and the school was known to prize individuality. It was not Wychwood’s fault that we were naughty, unhappy and quite incapable of fitting in. We did complain, particularly about tea which consisted of bread, butter, and jam one day, and bread, butter and slab cake the next, as we thought that we should have all of them every day. We also objected to one of the teachers insisting that we should say ‘pardon’ when we failed to hear something, instead of our usual ‘what?’ Mama wrote to Wychwood about both with words which were both scathing and elegant. Unfortunately she misunderstood our complaint about tea and objected to our being given Danish butter rather than English.
Josephine made lasting friends at Wychwood. Diana and I did not. People were kind to us because we were different and we knew why they were being kind. I constantly feared that I would be put on the same level as poor Winkle and Mary who were definitely odder than us.
Used to piles of blankets on our beds, the two plus eiderdown which we were allowed, was not enough for us on cold winter nights. So we went to bed earlier and earlier so that we could have baths while the water was still hot and our hot water bottles to comfort us through the freezing owl-hooting nights. In the mornings there were two bells, and one had to be up by the second. Before going to breakfast we were expected to strip our beds and open the windows. When we returned later the sheets often felt like ice.
Wiggy, my second housemother, wore a bra. It was the first time I had ever seen one. I w
ould lie in bed watching her dress, marvelling how long she took and then, when she had gone, I would drag my clothes on willy nilly, pull back my sheets, fling open the window and hurtle downstairs to breakfast.
In the winter we played hockey on a ground adjoining Oliver and Gurdens’ cake factory. Standing around, as a back without much to do I would grow cold, and with the smell of cakes cooking, got hungrier and hungrier. Fortunately Nana would be waiting by the way out to push chocolate into our eager hands as we passed by. Nobody said anything about this. Did they turn a blind eye? For all food and sweets were supposed to be handed in to one’s house-mistress or to matron. Perhaps because of this I always ate Nana’s gift immediately without offering so much as a crumb to anyone else.
But for me, like Diana, the worst part of being at Wychwood was feeling a misfit – which we were. In spite of Cappy having once played rugger with the Harlequins and in the doubles at Wimbledon, we were bad at games. We used long outdated words, had no social graces whatsoever, and we were farouche too; but, what I dreaded most of all, we were ‘peculiar’. As Diana has said, we were often absent, which hardly helped us to fit in. And it was not long before Mamma arranged for us to leave early every Friday to see our dentist Mr Robert Bruce in Reading who she said needed to check our braces. (Afraid that we might swallow them, she insisted we took them out while riding, and often we hung them on a damson tree in the paddock.) Our braces had to be made a little tighter every day. I always forgot this and much frantic tightening was done in the car on the way to Reading. Once, on a Saturday, we appeared in Mr Bruce’s surgery wearing MacGregor ties and he immediately asked how we were entitled to wear the tartan. Fortunately we were able to explain that the Wedderburns were related to the MacGregors and so we could wear their tartan ties, but not the kilt.
Fair Girls and Grey Horses Page 20
