More Than Just Coincidence

by Julie Wassmer

  We handed our list to the assistant, who led us to various rails and stacked shelves, selecting bottle-green gymslips and skirts, green-and-red-striped ties, gingham summer dresses, starched white shirts and sports gear suitable for hockey and something called lacrosse. I stepped out of changing cubicles looking, and feeling, uncomfortable in stiff-collared blouses. My mother checked the price of each item. It was all shockingly expensive. Stunned by the mounting subtotal, she started to panic, insisting on large sizes I could grow into, until the sales assistant reminded her as tactfully as she could that since the bursary paid for a full six years there was no need to economise. I heaved a sigh of relief. I had no intention of starting a new school swamped in voluminous skirts when the mini was all the rage.

  We stepped out into sunshine, laden with bags. The Kardomah coffee house was only a few bus stops along the road and my mum couldn’t resist dropping in so the Saturday waitresses could see where we had been. ‘Julie’s grammar school uniform,’ she said proudly, raising a Gamage’s bag.

  There was more to be done when we got the uniform home. Every item had to have its own name tag. My mother considered the instruction ruefully, then went out to the market and bought iron-on labels. Life was too short for a working woman to sew.

  Seven years before, the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, had told us all we ‘had never had it so good’, but in the East End, at least, we were only just beginning to agree with him. By 1964, ‘Live now, pay later’ was the slogan of the day. No one seemed to fear hirepurchase agreements any more and labour-saving goods were at the top of every shopping list. My mother now flicked through catalogues to make her purchases. Tupperware was the latest thing, and she invested in lunchboxes and drinks containers that I could take with me to school. At long last we got our first fridge, powered by gas, and the milk came in from its saucepan of cold water on the window ledge. While I experimented with fruit-cordial ice cubes my mum, who had never been much of a one for shopping or cooking and had at last been emancipated by a threestar ice compartment, embraced the new frozen-food options with enthusiasm. Out went the old staples of corned beef, spam and tinned ravioli and in came exotic convenience meals like fish fingers and crinkle-cut chips.

  The flat itself, though, was deteriorating further. The roof had sprung more leaks, a paisley patch of damp was spreading out across the bedroom ceiling and there was even more subsidence in the living room. Uncle Will had brought home a cute mongrel puppy he christened Judy and in the summer holidays I escaped most days to walk her in Victoria Park and teach her tricks. Or I would go to the local Odeon for an hour or so to be whisked off to considerably more glamorous locations a galaxy away from Mile End: Istanbul in the to-catch-a-thief caper Topkapi, or the beautiful American mansion, with its stables and horses, to which handsome Sean Connery brings ice-cool Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s Marnie.

  At home I shut myself off from whatever was going on around me and worked on my Olivetti typewriter, which my mother had bought me for my birthday six months earlier. It came with a smart grey case containing a neat pouch where I could store pens, paper and envelopes. I loved every task associated with it, no matter how small—changing the ribbon, feeding in the paper, snapping down the bar to keep it in place—just like those men who are never happier than when they are tinkering with their cars. When I was ready I would position my hands above the keys like a concert pianist before allowing my two forefingers to dance across them, impressing on the paper poems and stories set in places I had only ever read about or seen at the cinema: Mediterranean islands like Rhodes, home to the Colossus, and beautiful Capri, where the emperor Tiberius had thrown his enemies off a high cliff.

  By the autumn the Macmillan government, still reeling from the Profumo affair, was listing as badly as 25 Lefevre Road. My father was now confident that a Labour prime minister would soon be in power and the class barriers would come crashing down.

  The seeds of such a revolution had already been sown. In what seemed like a strange reversal of the natural order, Terence Stamp, Michael Caine, the Beatles and Peter Sellers, working-class heroes all, were mixing with the likes of Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. London in the 1960s has been described as the place where our modern world began and we were seeing the emergence of a new meritocracy, where talent mattered more than who your parents were. One of its first stars was the photographer David Bailey, born in Leytonstone, while the East End’s own Vidal Sassoon, who had given the fashion supremo Mary Quant her iconic bob cut, was famous all over the world.

  Throughout the summer a pristine satchel has been sitting permanently by the door, filled with blank notebooks: the unwritten story of my career at the Central Foundation School for Girls. On 14 September 1964 I put on my new uniform, slip the strap of the satchel across my shoulder and set off for the bus stop.

  The stiff white blouse puffs up out of the loose waistband of my skirt as I raise my arm to hail the number 8. Unsure how I should wear my beret, I’ve tried it several ways: at jaunty French angles, like a workman’s cap and, lastly, drawn down at the back like a snood. I catch sight of my reflection in the bus window as I jump on board. The beret looks like a flat, green dinner plate perched on my head. Climbing the stairs to the upper deck, I spot an empty seat but before I can reach it I am pounced upon by a swarm of older girls, all wearing the same bottle-green uniform as mine.

  Panicked, I fall to the floor and a scuffle breaks out. I’m kicking and struggling but someone grabs my beret and when I eventually manage to break free it is tossed back at me. I see that its stalk is missing.

  ‘You’ve been bobbled!’ they scream, clattering down the stairs, cackling.

  A third of the pupils at my new school are Jewish, most of whom live in Stepney and Whitechapel. Many are from families that fled Poland and Germany in the late 1930s and 1940s and have relatives who survived concentration camps. They have dark hair and strange names like Bobravitch and Baruch. The only two ‘foreigners’ I have ever known before are Mrs LeWars and a boy called Remo Randolfi whose family run a café and ice-cream parlour in Roman Road. Now I am about to become ‘foreign’ myself, albeit only for half an hour, when I am wrongly seated on the kosher lunch table, perhaps because I, too, am dark-haired and have an odd surname.

  Years later I would discover that my roots are a mixture of French Jewish and Irish Catholic, but on my first day at senior school, I was happy to be whatever they wanted me to be.

  The CFS had stood in Spital Square since 1890, but dated back to a much earlier era. It had been endowed as a free charity school for boys and girls in 1726, but had very probably existed as a parochial charity school since 1702. The Edwardian red-brick building was bordered on one side by Spitalfields fruit market, where I had to pick my way through squashed, sometimes rotten fruit to reach the gates. Often I would come across hard-up East Enders or refugees sorting through it to rescue the more edible specimens. On the other side was Bishopsgate, gateway to the City, its banks and its money, and a couple of miles further on, the West End.

  This location, at the midway point between East End and West End, seemed an apt metaphor for how I would come to see myself in my grammar school years: suspended in a no-man’s-land between a past I was being educated out of and a future still beyond my reach.

  At primary school I had benefited from a progressive approach that treated education as a springboard to social mobility and mirrored the changing times. Walking through the door of the CFS, by contrast, was like stepping into the past. The grammar school (motto: Spe Labore Fide—by hope, by work, by faith) clung resolutely to its traditions and its illustrious history. Instead of drama there was elocution, long afternoons spent trying to recite Keats’ odes without giving yourself away with the merest suggestion of a flattened Cockney vowel. Latin mistresses led us through the tedious declension of nouns. The only hint of the Swinging Sixties was the occasional polka-dot mini-skirt a brave young supply teacher might dare to wear. Our headmistress, the jealous guardia
n of the school’s antiquated standards and customs, was apparently unaware of any smashing down of class barriers. Her pride and joy was the board that hung outside her office displaying, in gold lettering, the names of all the girls who had gone on to Oxbridge. Katharine Whitehorn’s later description of tradition as ‘habit in a party frock’ would have found no resonance here.

  In truth the school was already an anachronism by the time I entered its hallowed portals. The expansion of the comprehensive system, where state schools did not select their pupils on the basis of academic achievement, was already underway and the election of a Labour government the very next month escalated the demise of the grammar school in all but a handful of areas of the country. The Central Foundation School was duly obliged to go comprehensive and in 1975 would relocate to new premises in Bow.

  In my first year I worked hard and came top of the class in nearly all subjects. Subsequent years were a different matter, however, as it became increasingly evident that I’d been hot-housed by my trendy primary school and then dumped in an institutional backwater. It was Goodbye Mr Chips minus the charismatic teacher. The school refused to acknowledge that I was finding certain subjects difficult: in their eyes, I was simply not trying hard enough. I had been put into the top stream to work towards O-Level maths, for example, but when the lessons became more advanced and I began to lag behind they refused to allow me to drop down into the CSE stream. If they had done so, I might have coped better. It would also have given me the opportunity to study other subjects for which I showed more flair and interest, such as music. It was as though the school was determined I should not be permitted to benefit from my lack of effort, even though the reason behind it was a lack of aptitude.

  My dad still bragged at the Bridge House about his clever kid but the only subjects in which I maintained good grades were English, foreign languages and history. In other lessons I acted the clown, entertaining my classmates with my updated repertoire of impressions, which now included Cilla Black and Sandie Shaw. My school reports showed how badly I was trailing in maths and sciences and my father was frustrated. I had lost interest in school but he made excuses for me, knowing it was difficult for me to concentrate on homework without a room of my own.

  Concerns about my academic performance took a back seat when Uncle Johnny became ill. He had suffered health problems ever since the war, during which he’d served in the Royal Army Medical Corps, attached to The West African Frontier Force. He had been injured during the D-Day landings and my mother often spoke of how he had arrived home in a pitiful condition, stricken by dysentery. Now when we visited Riverside Mansions there were no afternoons spent singing in the Jolly Sailor. My cousins and I were told to keep quiet: their father had terminal cancer. Uncle Johnny struggled up and down the stairs, yellow with jaundice, his face contorted by pain. At the end of the war his unit had also helped to liberate Belsen; now, in the last days of his life, he looked like one of its victims. When he finally died, my mother collapsed.

  Shortly after the cremation, she went off one evening to the Bridge House with my father. She returned drunk, in distress and arguing with him. My dad told her to pull herself together and accept that Uncle Johnny was gone but she continued to rail at him. Swaying in the tiny kitchenette, she stumbled, fell under the table and lay there crying out in pain like a wounded animal. I had never seen anyone so bereft and tried to help her to her feet but it was impossible. Although she was slightly built she was a dead weight, heavy with sorrow and alcohol. I looked to my father but, still smarting from their row, and possibly trying to allay my anxiety, he seemed uncharacteristically cold and distant. ‘Just leave her where she is,’ he ordered. I hesitated, unsure of what to do.

  As he walked through to the living room, my mother suddenly gathered her strength and chose a target for her rage and grief. ‘I wish it had been you instead of him!’ she screamed.

  I didn’t need to see my father’s face to know what a terrible thing she had just said. She knew it too. Still slumped under the table, she began to wail. My loyalties were torn. I was a kid. What was I to do? I stood up and made a decision. I did what my father had told me to do. I left my mother on the kitchen floor to cry herself to sleep. In the morning she got ready and went off to work without uttering a word about what had happened the night before.

  That incident was shocking, not least because it was never mentioned. If I had always been aware of my mother’s fragility, now I had seen her behaving more like a child than a parent. Worse, my father, her steadfast protector, had turned his back on her that night, and I had abandoned her, too. Perhaps I had realised that I couldn’t be her mother, and she couldn’t absolutely be mine. If I had always instinctively avoided rocking the boat at home, from that moment on I made a conscious effort to ensure she was never upset.

  I had come to understand something significant: in general grown-ups might be able to sweep away problems and fears, but in my family it was probably best to keep unpalatable truths, and your feelings, to yourself.

  Chapter Four

  Rebel Without a Cause

  On a summer’s afternoon I am sitting in a French lesson singing, along with my classmates, a French song about a shepherdess.

  Il était une bergère

  et ron ron ron petit patapon

  Il était une bergère

  qui gardait ses moutons, ron ron

  qui gardait ses moutons.

  Unable to concentrate in the heat, and because of a dragging pain low in my belly, I keep forgetting the words. I feel wretched, uncomfortable and out of sorts, and beads of sweat are breaking out on my forehead. At last the bell rings and as I get to my feet I know instantly that something isn’t right. I make for the toilets.

  I have just started my first period. Emerging from the cubicle to wash my hands and splash my face with water, I glance up at my reflection in the mirror. I still look the same, even though I am now supposed to be a ‘woman’.

  Later, at home, I stole two sanitary towels from the drawer where I knew my mother hid them. No slender, adhesive-backed pads in endless shapes and sizes for the 1960s woman: just bulky towels with loops at each end that had to be attached to a special belt. And I didn’t have a belt. When my mum came home from work I felt unable to tell her what had happened. I couldn’t help feeling I had done something wrong. Perhaps I had. I was growing up.

  When I was nine my mother had taken me to our family doctor, concerned about the swellings beneath my nipples. I had taken off my T-shirt while Dr Teverson gently felt my tiny breasts, his eyes decorously closed behind his heavy horn-rimmed spectacles. My mother looked on anxiously. Finally the doctor gave his verdict: puberty, pure and simple. My mother protested. At nine years old? How could a child so young display the seeds of womanhood when she herself had been flat-chested until she gave birth to me? Dr Teverson tried to reassure her—girls developed earlier these days, he said—but if my mother was reassured, she wasn’t convinced, and she had never once broached the subject of menstruation with me. I had to find out about that at school.

  In some ways I was relieved we hadn’t talked about it since that appointment at the doctor’s surgery had instilled a sense of unease, if not guilt, about the way my body had begun to change. Other girls of twelve had flat chests but still proudly wore ‘teen bras’. I envied them as I ran around hockey fields and netball pitches with only a tight vest to restrain my bouncing bosom. My mother seemed to have a blind spot as far as my physical development was concerned. How on earth was I to tell her about my period?

  It was two days before I eventually plucked up the courage to blurt it out. She seemed scared by the news. She was also shocked, confessing that her own periods hadn’t started until she was eighteen. Why was everything happening to me so soon? I had no answer, but at least by the next day I had my own sanitary protection—and my own ‘teen bra’.

  Within a year or so, a lot of the girls at my school had acquired boyfriends and those of them who hadn’t gained r
espect before had it now. Interest in my clowning around had waned, and with it my popularity. I was out of fashion in more ways than one, with my hedge of dark, frizzy hair that required not so much trimming as topiary. It wasn’t a good look when everybody aspired to long, straight hair that swung in long, glossy curtains, like Twiggy’s. I spent hours every day trying to iron my hair until I found some heated tongs that did the trick. But they burned my neck and other schoolgirls accused me of having love bites. Wishing that were true, I never put them right.

  Half woman, half child, I was full of contradictions. I didn’t seem to fit in anywhere any more. Going to grammar school had driven a wedge between me and my primary school friends and now it was driving a wedge between me and my parents as well. I was beginning to feel too East End for school and too West End for home. I’d always enjoyed a good debate with my father, who had a great respect for Parliament and was a staunch believer in people standing up for what was right. But as I got into my history studies, I found I was overtaking him in terms of the ammunition I was able to bring to some of these arguments. He admired Henry VIII for rebelling against the Pope, for example, and I picked holes in his reasoning by pointing out that Henry only rebelled against the Catholic faith when he wanted a new wife to produce an heir. He was chuffed that I was learning, but often what I was being taught conflicted with his own views.

  My insecurity manifested itself in rebellion, principally against CFS and its suffocating restrictions. My partner in crime was June, a classmate who lived in a council house near me and who was trying to cope with a troubled home life. Her mother had recently left home and she felt abandoned. Riding the bus together to and from school, we recognised each other as kindred spirits. We shared a lack of respect for authority and an ability to lose ourselves in stories and our own imaginations. We swapped favourite books. I gave her The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s gripping account of the exodus of dirt-poor farmers from the dust bowl of Oklahoma to the ‘promised land’ of California, and June introduced me to the realm of fantastic creatures in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, in which she sought solace.