Learning to Swim

by Clare Chambers

I had been sent to the medical room to lie down after feeling dizzy during P.E. It was one of mother’s days at work (she was a doctor’s receptionist, part time) and the school secretary was having some difficulty contacting her, so I was left to languish on the sick bed, authentic ex-hospital issue with an adjustable backrest and abrasive grey blankets. The medical room was in the same corridor as the headmistress’s study. From my vantage point I could observe through the half-open door the passage to and fro of various miscreants, and hear the sighing and fidgeting coming from the vicinity of the wooden chair on which offenders, like prisoners on death row, were obliged to await their punishment. The first visitor to pass the doorway was Peter Apps, the school layabout, a recidivist in his final year who was caned on a regular basis. The door creaked open to admit him and clicked shut, and then there was a minute or two of silence before he was ejected and slouched back up the corridor rubbing his bottom.

  The next to pass into my field of vision were Ruth Pike and her mother. Their conference with the headmistress lasted at least a quarter of an hour and ended in the corridor with much handshaking between the two women, apologies on one side and thank-yous on the other. Five minutes later I heard a familiar footstep on the tiles; I would have recognised the slip-slop of Sandra’s sandals anywhere. She sat on the chair outside the head’s office holding on to the seat with both hands and swinging her legs from the knee. After some time she was admitted, and for all my concentration I couldn’t catch so much as a syllable of what went on inside. She certainly hadn’t been awarded the school prize, as when she did emerge her pale face was whiter than ever, apart from her eyes which were pink and puffy with crying.

  Just before lunch the school secretary poked her head around the door. ‘I’m afraid we still can’t get hold of your mother, Abigail. Is there a neighbour we could call, or are you feeling better?’

  I was no longer feeling ill by this time, and besides the blanket was becoming almost unbearably itchy, so I decided to rejoin the class. The midday bell was ringing as I made my way back to the form room to retrieve my sandwiches, swimming upstairs against the tide of bodies that surged down to the dinner hall. Classrooms were out of bounds during breaks. The only exception to this rule was the monitor who was allowed to stay behind at the end of the lesson to clean the blackboard and tidy the chairs. This duty, which was much coveted, happened this week to have fallen to Ruth Pike, who would happily spend the entire lunch hour rearranging the furniture, lining up the scissors and pens in their racks and wiping every speck of chalk dust from the board rather than face the savagery of the playground.

  As I reached the top of the stairs I could hear a commotion coming from the classroom. Through the panel of glass in the closed door I could see Ruth Pike lying on the floor, surrounded by a pack of girls whose job it was to restrain her. Sitting astride Ruth’s stomach was Sandra Skeet who was in the process of slapping her about the head, face and arms with the blackboard rubber, which sent up clouds of filthy dust with every blow. Ruth’s dark hair was grey with the powder, and her raw skin was cracked and smothered. She was making a strange choking noise.

  ‘Stop it!’ I shouted – my voice emerging as a squeak – as I threw the door open, and was brought up abruptly, as Sandra glanced over her shoulder at me and then carried on oblivious. For a second I stood there, helplessly, as if I had done my bit and there was really nothing more I could do, and then from nowhere I felt a tremendous anger rise up in me like boiling milk, and before I could stop myself I had marched over to the scissor rack and seized a pair. If they hadn’t been round-ended safety scissors I would surely have drawn blood, but as it was I grabbed one of Sandra’s spindly blonde plaits and chopped it off about two inches from her scalp. It wasn’t a clean cut either, but Sandra was so stunned by my assault that she only realised what was happening after the first snip, by which time I had a firm grip on the hair and her writhing and screaming were to no avail whatever. I was still standing over her, pigtail in hand, when Mrs Strevens erupted through the door, scattering conspirators, while Ruth lay twitching and gasping on the floor, a little puddle spreading beneath her skirt.

  I never saw either Sandra or Ruth again. Sandra didn’t come back to school after that incident – a pity, as I was looking forward to seeing how she would disguise her lopsided haircut – and gossip swiftly confirmed that she had been expelled. Ruth was taken off in an ambulance: a combination of terror and the lungfuls of chalk dust she had inhaled had brought on an asthma attack. Despite the headmistress’s assurances that the chief culprit had been permanently excluded from the school Mrs Pike decided that Ruth would be better off taking her chances elsewhere. I was severely reprimanded for the amputation of the pigtail, which in the commotion of the moment I had been left holding and had finally stowed at the bottom of my desk, where it lay coiled like an anaemic viper. I was saved from expulsion by my previously unblemished record and the fact that I was acting in defence of Ruth. My parents felt obliged to make a show of disapproval of my behaviour to satisfy the head, but although my mother was concerned at this previously unsuspected streak of aggression in my character, their principal feeling was one of relief.

  ‘After all, she only cut off one pigtail,’ my father offered in mitigation.

  5

  My part in the deliverance of the class from the tyranny of Sandra had unexpected consequences. Her former attendants, floundering without their leader, began to transfer their allegiance to me. Not because they liked me or felt guilty about past unkindnesses, but because they were now frightened of me. It was as if the class was waiting to see what I would do next. This situation seemed to me hardly more appealing than the one it had replaced. The thing I had hated most about being bullied was the visibility; now I was more conspicuous than ever. ‘That’s the girl who cut off the other girl’s hair’ ran the whisper around the school walls wherever my shadow fell.

  It was fortunate for me that something else soon arose to occupy my time or I might have abandoned myself to the role of School Bully Elect.

  ‘Do we want Abigail to learn a musical instrument?’ father said one evening over tea, reading from the school newsletter. ‘Do you want to learn a musical instrument, Abigail?’

  ‘Yes, we most certainly do,’ said mother. ‘How much does it cost?’

  ‘It’s free. We just have to tick this box. Are you sure you want to, Abigail?’ father persisted, his propelling pencil hovering above the paper. ‘It means lots of practice.’

  ‘Of course she does. I’ve always said she was musical,’ said mother, as if the fact was already proven. ‘Choose something like a flute that’s nice and quiet and easy to carry.’

  ‘A cello?’ There was a hint of concern at the edge of mother’s voice.

  ‘That was all they had left,’ I said. ‘Cellos and Tubas.’

  ‘Well, thank heavens for small mercies,’ said mother, eyeing the canvas-clad beast at my side.

  ‘Mrs Allen’s class is right next to the music cupboard and they went first and took all the flutes and violins and by the time it came to our turn there was only big stuff left.’ Strange to think my career should have turned on such an accident. ‘We can do other instruments if we want, but we’ve got to buy our own. I’d rather learn the flute.’

  ‘The cello will be fine,’ said mother firmly, and she put on Jacqueline du Pré playing Elgar (quietly) in the background while we sliced runner beans, just so I would know what I was aiming at.

  How I hated that cello – dragging it to school like a corpse each week; hauling it on and off buses, blushing and apologising as I left a trail of skinned ankles and bruised shins in my wake; walking with a list to one side to keep it from scraping along the ground, my free arm stuck out as a counterweight. Physically we were such an odd couple – me: small, fair and skinny as a flute, and the cello: huge, dark and broad-hipped. It was by no means a new model either, but well used and slightly chewed around the waist so that I got splinters in my legs and had to have a spec
ial dispensation to wear trousers to my lesson, a further indignity. Nevertheless I resolved to bear this burden, did my practice for twenty minutes each day as instructed by the teacher, Mrs Ede, and subjected my parents to recitals of scales and demonstrations of my pizzicato technique which they endured with fortitude. After two months the little white tapes which had marked the elementary positions on the fingerboard were removed, leaving faint traces of glue which I used as a guide for weeks to come. Although I moaned and whined about doing my practice, and put it off until just before bedtime so that the shadow of it darkened the whole day, once I had actually begun to play I found I was enjoying myself and was unaware of the time. In my end-of-term report Mrs Ede praised my ‘natural ear’ – the first complimentary remark ever made about my ears – and I began to take the whole enterprise more seriously. By this stage more than half of those children who had elected to learn instruments in the first place had proved uninterested or incapable and had thrown in the towel: the music room was once again plentifully stocked with flutes. But, encouraged by Mrs Ede’s cheering words, I remained loyal to The Monster, as it became known at home. I even began to treat it with more respect, wiping the resin from the strings with a saffron-coloured duster, polishing the wood with Pledge until I could see my own frowning face in its shiny back.

  After two terms of sawing away dutifully at scales and arpeggios and three easy pieces I passed Grade One with distinction and my vocation announced itself. As a reward and a spur to further endeavour, my parents offered to buy me a Big Present. I chose bunk-beds, and slept in the top like a princess in a tower, with the cello, my surrogate sister, on the bunk below in a nest of cuddly toys.

  6

  ‘She walks in beauty like the night

  Of cloudless crimes … chimes … it’s no use,’ said Mrs Gardiner, ‘I can’t see a thing without my specs. You’ll have to read, Monica.’

  Wednesday night was poetry night. My mother had once belonged to the local choral society which met once a week to rehearse an unchallenging repertoire of popular works for performance in the parish church to an audience composed of friends and relatives of the choir. The advent of a new, young conductor who wanted to introduce an element of modernity into the programme – adventurous pieces full of percussion and discords and unnerving silences – had caused rumblings of dissension within the ranks. He had finally overreached himself with the intimation that certain of the second sopranos were having trouble with the top notes – were not in fact sopranos at all, and might like to switch voices. My mother and half a dozen other women, already aggrieved at a recent hike in the annual subscription, resigned in a body. They were suspicious of modern music, resentful of being talked down to by someone just out of college, and they were damned if they were going to sing first alto: give up the tune after all those years, no thank you.

  To fill in the chasm that this act of insurrection had left in their cultural lives, my mother and the other rebel sopranos decided to turn their attention to another branch of the arts. In pursuit of poetry, as of music, they preferred to hunt in a pack, and every Wednesday evening would see them gathered in whosever living room the hospitality rota decreed, sherry in hand, thrilling to the forthcoming chase.

  One of the women, Mrs Davis, who worked as a librarian and had once had a poem of her own published in the Lady, acted as chairwoman. Her job was to introduce the poems to be read with a few words about the life of the poet, the historical background and the movement to which he belonged. Poets, I gathered, did not come singly but in waves.

  My father, who was rather fond of poetry, would retreat to his study with his pipe the moment the first arrivals crunched down the gravel drive. I was allowed to sit in or not as I chose, provided I was quiet. I usually joined in, as I always liked to be included in anything that was going on, and besides there were better biscuits to be had on a Wednesday night.

  On this particular evening, though, I left at half-time because my granny, mother’s mother, who was staying with us, was starting to fidget with boredom. She was not keen on poetry, having been forced to learn reams of the stuff at school – Gray’s ‘Elegy’ and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ – and was anyway rather deaf, so kept missing bits and tutting which made the readers nervous. Another source of discomfort was the lack of heat in the living room; Granny’s house in Bognor Regis was centrally heated to a ferocious degree, and she found my mother’s aversion to warmth impossible to understand. To be fair to my parents, they had not left her to freeze, but had furnished her room with a three-bar electric heater which made a twanging noise and smelled of scorching dust, and it was to her room that we retreated with tea and biscuits for a game of cards.

  ‘I’m not a great one for poetry,’ Granny said as she shuffled the pack. We were sitting either side of her bedside table; I was perched on the bed, she was in the armchair. ‘I’ve always preferred novels, myself. Have you read much Thackeray?’

  ‘No,’ I said. I was nine years old.

  ‘Well, you should. I’d read all of Thackeray by the time I was your age. Used to read all night under the bedclothes by torchlight at school. Caned for it regularly. Ruined my eyes of course. The reading, I mean, not the caning. Wouldn’t you like to go to boarding school?’

  People often remarked how dissimilar my mother and granny were – an observation intended to flatter my mother. There was some truth in it: my mother tended to disapprove of things silently; my grandmother vocally. Granny had acquired at an early age the air of a woman thwarted. As a young girl her ambition to study law had been obstructed by parents reluctant to sponsor the education of a mere female. Instead, she had watched them squander their money on putting her three less intelligent brothers through public school and university where to a man they failed to distinguish themselves. She had however absorbed some of the lessons of her schooldays – she would rather starve than use the wrong knife and fork, for example – and could at least claim that thanks to Thackeray and Co. her nights had been spent profitably. Her marriage to an older man from the village was not happy. My grandmother was not suited to marriage, and my grandfather was not suited to my grandmother. Domesticity did not come naturally to her. She had some modern notion that motherhood was not necessarily women’s work, and if you had been bathed by her as an infant in two inches of cold water with wedges of hot ash from her cigarette dropping on to your bare skin you tended to agree. Determined that her own daughter should not be similarly penalised, she budgeted and saved and went without to send her to a good school. But she had reckoned without the vagaries of human nature. What my mother enjoyed by way of material advantages she completely lacked in ambition, wanting nothing more than a quiet family life and a little job to bring in some pin money.

  I did love my grandmother, as children often do, but I was frightened of her too. She was a fine storyteller, and could be relied upon to take my side in any dispute – just as a way of evening things out and prolonging the argument. But her outspokenness and lack of tact were legendary. ‘What’s that appalling noise?’ she once demanded, and when told that it was the sound of me practising the cello, laughed and said, ‘Good Lord, I thought a cat had got stuck up the chimney.’

  Visits to her house in Bognor were an ordeal, too, as we would be obliged to go down to the beach for the afternoon, a pilgrimage which inevitably exposed me to public scrutiny and embarrassment. While other families seemed to get by with a few towels, our luggage had to include an ice-box, hamper, towels, spare towels, deck-chairs and wind-breaks from which father was required to build a bedouin-style encampment. While normal people undressed, Granny would add more and more layers – coat, scarf, rugs – and sit grimly facing out to sea as if it was all a test of character.

  ‘No, not there, Stephen, there. Not too close to those people. They’ve got a wireless.’ Her voice would echo across stretches of sand like a drill-sergeant’s across a parade ground. Mother and father instead of hiring a beach hut used to get changed, with much hoppi
ng about, inside a home-made orange towelling tent with a drawstring neck which was worn like an oversized poncho. Designed with self-effacement in mind, it rendered the wearer visible for miles. As a mere child I was expected to be exempt from finer feelings like modesty and to manage with just a towel. The last time we had been to the beach together I had wriggled out of my knickers and vest and half-way into a one-piece swimsuit under cover of a small towel which I was holding up with my teeth, when granny, provoked beyond all endurance by this display of prudery, snapped, ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, what does she need that for? It’s not as if she’s got any bosoms!’ and snatched the towel away to expose the truth of this to the whole beach.

  On this particular evening, while the ladies downstairs were laying Byron out on the slab, we were playing Beggar Your Neighbour, which my mother always called Beat Your Neighbour, because, she said, beggar was a swear word, or very nearly. Granny was a formidable opponent; there was no question of her letting me win, and after two hands she suggested we play for money. ‘We usually play for matches,’ I said, but she dismissed this with a wave of her hanky.

  ‘Go and ask your father for some change, then we can play properly.’

  ‘Come in,’ came father’s voice from the study in response to my timid knock. I peeped round the door – I didn’t often venture further than this into his sanctuary. My role was usually one of summoner, calling him to lunch or supper. Occasionally, of course, I crept inside while he was out, but the carpet was so covered in papers, schoolbooks, marking, piles of typewritten pages, notes on this, translations of that, that it was almost impossible to cross the room without disturbing something. It always looked like the scene of a recent break-in.

  ‘Can I have some change? Granny wants to play cards for money.’