My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  However much I had dreaded facing the same sort of conditions, I must admit that, compared to the exciting shenanigans at Slapton School, Lawnside seemed decidedly tame as, without so much as a pillow fight, Mary Jane and I watched Matron turn out the light and went quietly to sleep.

  Next day, however, I was glad we had been given the chance to find our feet before the other boarders swarmed into their houses and the school echoed with voices and laughter. Just as you should always put a strange pony into the field to settle down before letting the home team join it, so Brag’s strategy of summoning new girls a day early ensured that we knew at least some of our classmates and were not overwhelmed by the sheer, boisterous energy of the returning habituées, many of whom had come up from the Junior School.

  I remember feeling quite dazed when I first walked into the big dining-room with its high ceiling and long tables covered in oilcloth, and found it absolutely crammed with girls – more girls in a single room than I had ever seen in my life – all clattering and chattering and shouting across the tables, and if there hadn’t been kind Mary Jane waving from the seat she had bagged me next to her, I would have been tempted to turn tail.

  Since it was only tea, and a pretty boring tea at that, consisting mostly of fish paste sandwiches supplemented by bread and marge, because the weekly butter and sugar-rations had not yet been doled out, everyone sat where they pleased, and I was soon mesmerised by the party at the table next to ours, where one girl was effortlessly dominating the conversation while all the others craned to hear what she was saying. She was clearly a well-known wag, since her stories were punctuated with bursts of laughter and shouts of, ‘Go on, what happened next?’

  ‘They’re Fifth Form,’ said Mary Jane, following my gaze. We had learnt enough by now to know that the whole of Remove separated us lowly Upper Fourths from these glamorous beings in the Fifth, fourteen- to fifteen-year-olds and traditionally the wildest, naughtiest girls in the school, having outgrown their youthful respect for authority without yet acquiring the gravitas of the School Certificates, who would themselves mature in the fullness of time into the demi-goddesses of the Sixth Form.

  Certainly the Fifth Form table was having a wonderful time, and making more noise than the whole of the rest of the school, but I had eyes for no-one but the principal raconteuse. She wasn’t beautiful, far from it, having a pale, freckled, wedge-shaped face and untidy sandy hair, and was square-built rather than fat, so that her neck seemed to vanish into her shoulders, but so powerful a magnetism radiated from her that I could feel myself blushing as I darted covert glances across the table.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I murmured.

  ‘Which?’

  ‘The one talking.’

  ‘I think she’s called Leesa.’

  It seemed the most alluring name I had ever heard. I finished my tea in a daze, half fearful that she might notice me, half longing for it, and wholly baffled by the effect she had on me.

  Leesa would have been astonished if she had ever known of my instantaneous enslavement. She was, as it turned out, a very down-to-earth girl, neither particularly clever nor athletic; in fact apart from a certain artistic talent she was entirely average in every way, and why I should have fallen for her at first sight remains a mystery. She was my secret idol, but I would have walked over hot coals rather than let anyone else know. Lots of girls flaunted their ‘pashes,’ which I thought silly, even vulgar, and I went to great lengths to conceal my feelings for Leesa.

  For breakfast and tea you sat where you pleased, but there was a weekly draw for places for the more formal meals of lunch and supper. It was a sensible way of mixing seniors and juniors, and meant that Brag – who sat with us, but ate different food – talked to a whole range of more or less tongue-tied neighbours in the course of a term. You were supposed to kick off three different topics in the course of a meal, which was a good preparation for dealing with dinner-table bores in later life, and actually she was easy enough to talk to unless her mind was elsewhere. This would become apparent if she started glancing from side to side, her mouth twitching as if trying to reorganise her dentures, then suddenly rapped on her glass. An apprehensive silence would fall because there was no way of telling whether we were about to be blasted for bad table manners (this happened frequently); praised for special effort (rarely) or simply informed of arrangements for the following day. She had a quirky sense of humour and twice I remember her telling us to scream as loudly as we could for the next two minutes.

  A long queue would form outside the dining room before lunch on Monday, and one after another we would draw our lunch and supper places from a waste-paper basket full of numbered slips. The odds against sitting next to a particular person were quite long, but during my first term the worst happened and I found myself next to Leesa at lunch for a whole week. Was she, I wonder, puzzled because I turned scarlet and stammered when she spoke to me? Did she think I was either very stupid or very dull?

  Over the next two years as we rose up the school in our separate forms, I gradually learned to maintain at least a semblance of composure in her presence, but it was never easy, nor could I understand why she had this peculiar effect on me which no-one else seemed to feel. It certainly wasn’t love in any sense I recognised. If anything, I was ashamed of my reaction to her presence – how I was always aware exactly where she was in a room, and the strange way her name jumped out of team-lists as I ran my eye down them.

  After taking School Certificate she left and I never saw her again, but when I heard that she had died, unmarried, in her thirties, just as her artistic career was taking off, I felt a powerful pang of loss despite the fact that I had never really known her at all.

  Although I missed Taffy and Scot, and sometimes thoughtlessly stretched a hand behind me hoping to make contact with that sharp, loyal nose, boarding school was much more fun than I had expected. Apart from the gaping hole of maths, my various governesses had taught me enough to hold my own in the Upper Fourth, and it was actually a pleasure to have a bit of competition, with fortnightly grades and class placements, and stars awarded for good work.

  There were also, inevitably, stripes for bad behaviour, and you had to read out the reason for these to the assembled school at Prayers, and often face a public rocket from Brag. Rudeness, answering back, untidiness and resentment of criticism were my principal failings, and received more or less run of the mill opprobrium, but any hint of cheating or deceit would send Brag ballistic. She would rage at the culprit with really frightening fluency and often reduce her to tears.

  I was never on the receiving end of such a tirade and rather enjoyed her volatility. You never quite knew which way she would jump. She had favourites and bugbears, and if you were one of the latter it was all but impossible to change her opinion, which she expressed so loudly and publicly that some girls – some parents too, particularly fathers – admitted to being scared of her.

  However, she had a compensating sense of fun. When Brag gave the school a party, which she did every term, she really went to town. In the Spring, St Valentine’s Day was celebrated with hearts and flowers and love-bird decorations, plus competitions for love-poems, Valentine cards, and imitation bird-calls. Most people blew on their thumbs to produce owl-like hoots, but a more enterprising approach was taken a particularly plain stout girl called Susie, who brought the house down by seizing her own pendulous jowls and flapping them as she quacked to produce a most realistic imitation of a duck.

  On Midsummer Eve we were taken in big buses to the foot of Midsummer Hill, and regaled with a splendid picnic on the summit. On a tree-lined bank above a little dell, we feasted on sausage rolls, cheese triangles, fruit cake and apples washed down with fizzy lemonade, and then sprawled on the grass to watch short original plays put on by each form in turn, with the Worcestershire plain slowly darkening below us until the sun finally set in the west and the magical evening ended with a wild race downhill to the buses.

  Best of all the parties w
as Hallowe’en, which was held in the big hall of the Malvern Winter Gardens, decorated with cut-outs of black cats, skeletons, cauldrons, ghosts and googlies galore.

  Dressed in a black cloak and pointed hat, with her long grey locks streaming down her back, Brag would supervise the lighting of candles in jam jars in the Lawnside drive before the whole school set off up the hill in crocodile, with prefects swathed in white sheets running up and down the line making spooky shrieks and trying to blow out the candles.

  A couple of weeks earlier, a van-load of large turnips and swedes would have been delivered to the Art Room, and every odd moment since we would have spent carving them into fantastical masks and monsters. These would now have been numbered and arranged on long tables, and it was a great thrill to come in from the wild, dark night to the hall lit with lanterns and candles, and find a card next to your cherished creation showing that it had found favour with the judges.

  Paper bags full of party food were handed out by Sixth Formers dressed as witches, and we formed a circle round the hall, each with her jam jar and candle planted before her, and ate watching first the teachers, then the sixth form compete at apple-bobbing in the middle of the room, cheering as the highly competitive English mistress plunged her whole head with its coronet of plaits into the water-tub and emerged, spluttering and gasping, with a Cox’s Orange Pippin gripped in her teeth.

  Then it was our turn with the apple-bobbing, form by form, after which we moved on to the even more taxing feat of eating a currant bun threaded on a string while kneeling with hands behind our backs. There were rowdy games and fortune-telling organised by the prefects, and finally prize-giving before the head girl made a graceful little speech thanking Brag for the party, and we went out two by two into the lamplit streets.

  In the bleak post-war years when so many foodstuffs were still rationed, I was always amazed by the lavish scale of these parties, and the care and thought put into planning them. I am sure Brag enjoyed them as much as we did, though she was particularly strict and acerbic in the days that followed them – probably tired out.

  Lawnside was not a brainy school. Only one girl from my form made it to Oxford, and one to Trinity College, Dublin: the rest took a single A-Level in their Sixth Form year and then left at the end of the summer term with no plans for further education beyond finishing school in London, Paris or Rome. In fact in some respects the school motto: Knowledge is no more a fountain sealed was a bit of a joke, since although the humanities were well taught, science remained a closed book. Either Brag couldn’t recruit a suitable teacher or she considered physics, chemistry, botany, biology and all but the most basic mathematical subjects of little use to girls. During the four years I spent there, my form toyed with nothing more in the scientific line than the alimentary canal of the rabbit. We had just begun teeing ourselves up for exciting revelations about its reproductive arrangements when the so-called Science Mistress married and left. She was never replaced.

  There was a rapid turnover of geography teachers, too, and several other staff were hardly up to the job of controlling teenagers. We used to mock Miss Twiss for her tortured Northern Irish vowels, pretending we couldn’t understand her, and also played up shamefully when an ineffective old lady with a quavering voice tried to maintain order during Needlework.

  ‘Keep the room still!’ she would beg as the noise-level rose, and in response we would run to hold on to the door and walls as if in the throes of an earthquake. She was too downtrodden to carry out her threat of complaining to Brag, but we would have been given a merciless tongue-lashing if she had.

  Mademoiselle Courcou, aka Mammy, was one long-serving mistress who never had the least difficulty in commanding respect. She was a big, lumbering flat-footed woman who wore a mannish tweed overcoat indoors and out. Her complexion was so pale it might have been dusted with flour, but her eyes were quick-moving, shrewd and cynical. She had heard every excuse known to the schoolgirl mind for handing prep in late, and knew exactly how to deal with it.

  Her lessons were as rigidly structured as the Liturgy and she was a great believer in learning by rote. We would leap up as she huffed and puffed into the classroom and dumped her heavy hold-all by her desk.

  ‘Bonjour, mes enfants, asseyez-vous.’

  ‘Je m’assieds. Je suis assise,’ was the correct response and woe betide anyone who varied it.

  Every lesson included verbs, dictée, vocabulary, reading French aloud, and ended with the whole class chanting the poem she had chosen for that term, until we could have recited it in our sleep. The result was that when we faced up to School Certificate Oral French, as well as a few minutes of stilted question-and-answer conversation, we could offer the examiners a choice of at least a dozen short poems with absolutely no fear of forgetting a line, so deeply were they embedded in our memories.

  For my first two years at Lawnside, Mammy seemed to me a ferocious tyrant, then as I accepted her rules, she gradually morphed into a teacher whose lessons I enjoyed, and finally a friend whose determination to get me through French A-level was if anything greater than my own. She seemed ancient as the hills to a Fourth-former, but younger and livelier – even prepared to let us argue with her – when we were in the Sixth Form.

  There were hints of some mysterious sorrow that had blighted her life, forcing her into the slavery of teaching cloth-eared English teenagers how to murder the French language. On her birthday she was given (as we all were) the opportunity to chose the hymn for Prayers, and since the Tsarist anthem God the All-Terrible was her invariable selection, we speculated that this tragedy was connected with the Russian Revolution. Her family exiled? A lover who died? I shall never know.

  Yet if Lawnside was decidedly short on intellectual rigour, it was nevertheless an intensely civilised school. I never saw or heard of any girl being bullied, and when seniors had occasion to talk to juniors, they did so in a friendly, reasonable way – there was nothing like the open enmity between age-groups that lent such spice to Teddy Lester’s Schooldays.

  We didn’t exactly shine at games, either. Being in the middle of a town, we had no playing-fields near at hand, and had to walk, slouch, run (depending on your state of keenness) a good mile and a half to some roughish pasture behind the Technical College, where there was a rudimentary pavilion and hockey pitch. I was a slow runner, and not a natural team-player. Once I had the ball I tried to hang on to it, deaf to the Captain’s shouts of, ‘Pass, you nitwit! Pass!’ Being left-handed I was comfortable playing left half, a position from which one took part in most of the game without the heroics of bullying or shooting goals. Hockey sticks were longer and heavier in those days, and we wore studded leather boots which could make mincemeat of an opponent’s unguarded shins, but as Mummy remarked philosophically it was better to have battered legs than missing front teeth, like so many lacrosse players.

  In summer we had the use of four tennis courts belonging to the Manor Park Hotel, but again the school’s approach was somewhat lackadaisical. The coach concentrated on girls who showed promise, and left the rest to play pat-ball with minimal instruction. Since we had no special sports clothes – hockey was played in shirts and tunics, gym in shirts and brown knickers, and tennis in the same dresses we wore for class – by Friday the smell of adolescent sweat could be pretty punishing.

  Still more uncomfortable were the arrangements for swimming. Across the road from Lawnside Gables, the Sixth Form house, were the municipal swimming baths, open-air, unheated, grubby and unappetising, the changing-cubicles dank and smelly, with slimy slatted floors. Between 7.15 and 8.30am, before the pool was opened to the public, any girl who could not produce a convincing excuse was obliged to swim for quarter of an hour, three times a week.

  A more grisly start to a summer morning would be hard to imagine. Roused from your warm bed, you staggered downstairs and, under the gaze of Nurse Painter, aka Nanny P, who looked a dear old softie with pale blue eyes and fluffy grey hair but was actually a good deal tougher than
old boots, were forced to choke down a slice of bread and marge which had been cut the night before and was curling at the edges, very difficult to swallow. It was an article of faith with Nanny P that a girl who swam without eating would sink like a stone, and she refused to let anyone past the door until she had finished chewing.

  Across the garden, perhaps with a minor diversion to snatch a few ripe gooseberries off a bush, across the road, and in through the creaky door to where the chilly heavily-chlorinated rectangle of water awaited the first brave soul’s honeypot jump. It was far too cold to linger on the concrete surround. The only hope was to immense oneself quickly and swim up and down as fast as possible until released by the merciful order to come out.

  My bathing dress was a dark-green wool one-piece, on the close-fitting side and difficult to stretch far enough to get the straps over my shoulders. It was an even worse struggle to get out of it in the dank, dark changing-room without tramping on discarded and no doubt verruca-infested bits of band-aid.

  I had never swum in a heated pool – up till now total immersion had been either in the Wye, the tooth-chattering sea at Borth, or a neighbour’s green and slimy pool at Much Hadham – so I already looked on bathing as an ordeal rather than a pleasure, and found conditions at Lawnside much as I expected. For girls who had learned to swim in sunnier climes, though, the municipal baths at daybreak were a horrid shock. Jenny and Gill, identical twins who had grown up in India, knocked spots off everyone else with their aquatic skills and always won the Diving Cup, but even they looked pinched and grey by the end of the Swimming Sports and when, after an outbreak of polio at Eton, Brag told us that she was with great reluctance cancelling swimming for the rest of the term, I for one sent up a silent cheer.

  This announcement, like others of its kind, was made during ‘Prayers,’ as the morning assembly was called, though so much school business had to be crammed into the twenty-odd minutes between breakfast and our first lessons of the day that unless a girl was sick unto death or a major calamity had befallen the nation, precious little actual praying took place in the big hall at Lawnside Grove, the only space large enough to seat both senior school and The Lodge, as the junior house was known.