My Animals (and Other Family)

by Phyllida Barstow

  When the prefects had everyone seated to their satisfaction – tiddlers in front, Sixth Form at the back – and shushed us to silence, Brag and the staff would stalk on to the dais, bid us good morning, and call out the name of any girl whose birthday it was. Up you would stand, shuffle along the row and approach the dais, to be presented with a tissue-wrapped, ribbontied book, a card, and a white box containing a very decent birthday cake with your name iced on it, big enough for the whole form to have a slice. Nor did the special treatment stop there. You were also allowed to choose the day’s hymn, and to go up the town that afternoon with your special friend to buy sweets.

  I turned twelve just a few days after term started and, knowing myself the veriest squit in the school hierarchy, felt too shy to mention my birthday, so was astonished when Brag called out my name. I couldn’t think how she knew. Invited to choose the hymn, I hastily opted for the all-time Barstow family favourite, Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer, and got a much less agreeable jolt when Miss Parke, at the piano, struck up the wrong tune. I was unaware that any tune other than Cwm Rhondda even existed. Nor did the other girls seem to know the words. Hot with embarrassment, I listened to them stumble and mouth through all three verses and decided there and then to choose something really hackneyed next year.

  A few brisk prayers came next on the agenda, followed by the daily two-minute Newsflash, presented by each girl in the school in turn and, I seem to remember, in alphabetical order. This was our single regular brush with current events and window on the outside world, and had to be recited from memory, which some girls found easier than others. After listening, roughbook in hand, to three consecutive BBC bulletins on Nanny P’s wireless – at 6pm the previous night, then 7am and 8am, you scribbled a précis of three or four stories that made the headlines, memorised it as best you could and, with heart thumping fit to choke you, marched up to the front of the hall and gabbled it out to the assembled throng.

  A succinct account, clearly delivered, might well be rewarded with a star from the dais, rather like being knighted on the battlefield. I remember being thus honoured when I memorised a story about the exiled king of Nepal, sonorously repeating his full title Maharajadirajah Tribuvana Bir Bikram Shah, which made everyone laugh; but the great thing was that no matter how badly you did your Newsflash, no-one ever scoffed since they knew full well their turn was in the pipeline this term or next, and the relief when the ordeal was over made one quite light-headed.

  Then Miss Parke would crash into the opening chords of some stirring march – Wagner’s Meistersingers was reserved for Speech Day and Prize-giving at the Winter Gardens – and out we would file, row by row, to begin the day’s work.

  Gwendolyn Parke was Brag’s special friend, and in the holidays they shared a cottage somewhere up in the Malvern Hills, whose location they kept deliberately vague. She was a concert-standard pianist, and took only the most musical girls as pupils, while the rest of us shared a series of run-of-the-mill music teachers who never, poor ladies, managed to get me beyond a Pass at Grade 2 with a thumping finger-stumbling rendition of Gathering Peascods after which, to everyone’s relief, Mummy agreed that I had no talent for the piano and let me give it up.

  Miss Parke’s star pupil was a very pretty and gifted girl one form up from me. She was called Diana – known as Tiddly because she was tiny – had fair bubbly curls clustering all over her head and was living proof of the power of ante-natal suggestion. Her mother told mine that although she and her husband were completely unmusical, she had so longed for a daughter who could play the piano that she had spent her entire pregnancy listening to Mozart, morning noon and night and, lo and behold, when Tiddly was born, she was soon revealed as a musical prodigy.

  She had no inhibitions about performing, and was often put on parade to show prospective parents the quality of Lawnside’s music, her fingers fairly flying over the keys of the grand piano on which Elgar himself had once played in Brag’s drawing-room while the ‘Cook’s Tour’ – as such visitors were known – balanced tea-cups on their knees and murmured appreciation. Sometimes she even deputised for Miss Parke at Prayers, an honour none of the other music teachers were granted.

  Choral singing was another art-form dear to Brag’s heart. As a child she had known not only Elgar but several of the friends represented in his Enigma Variations, and Sir Ivor Atkins, one of the last survivors of that circle, still came weekly to teach Lawnside’s Special Singers, as the choir was known. (He was pretty old and doddery by then and I am sorry to say that irreverent schoolgirls that we were, we mocked his stiff gait and shushing Churchillian speech, and referred to him as ‘Saliva Napkin’).

  It was a very different matter when his place was taken by the brilliant young organist at Worcester Cathedral, David Willcocks. Not only young and brilliant, either, but also handsome, friendly, full of jokes and charm. There was a concerted gasp from a hundred-odd adolescent female throats when he strolled into the Hall in Brag’s wake, sat down at the Piano-Which-Elgar-Played (which the school handymen had trundled across the road from Brag’s drawing-room in his honour), whizzed up and down the keyboard a few times in sheer exuberance, then started putting us through a series of musical exercises before launching into the setting of the Magnificat which we had learnt with Sir Ivor the previous term.

  How we sang! How we tried to catch his eye and pitch our voices ever louder in the hope of making an impression! More work was done in a single lesson than poor Sir Ivor had managed to get through in a whole term, and there was a spate of applications to join the Special Singers and get the chance of singing lessons at even closer quarters.

  Pretty soon he began coaching us to take part in the Cheltenham Festival of Music, which involved a lot of intensive practice, lesson-missing and hair-washing in order to do the school credit. With our blue summer dresses starched so stiff they could practically stand by themselves, we were bussed into Cheltenham to perform in the Regency Town Hall, and after a fearful battle with Westonbirt and St Mary’s, Ascot, scraped second place in the Schoolgirl Choir class with two set-pieces chosen by the judging panel, followed by Handel’s aria O Had I Jubal’s Lyre, full of long, fast, showy runs that left us gasping for breath.

  Brag was delighted, and rewarded the whole choir with the unheard-of double treat of a shopping trip up the town on Saturday afternoon, plus permission to sit in the chancel of Malvern Abbey for Matins on Sunday. The latter was usually a privilege accorded to those who accumulated more than six stars in a single week, but it was a bit of a poisoned chalice as far as I was concerned, because under the eyes of the whole congregation as well as the Abbey’s regular choir it was impossible to read the paperback thriller I had concealed between the hollowed-out covers of a Prayer Book.

  I had – and still have – a problem with long sermons. It seems so unfair to subject people who have come to church (thereby making a large hole in their precious Sunday) to a long harangue about their supposed faults and wickedness without giving them the chance to speak up and refute the charges. I never found it easy to accept criticism with good grace – a recurrent theme in my Behaviour reports – being inclined to sulk or answer back, but those were personal, recognisable faults and, however unwelcome, I would know in my heart the criticism was justified. The priest in the pulpit, on the contrary, couldn’t possibly know whether or not his congregation deserved his strictures, and I would sit in the pew either grinding my teeth and mentally refuting his argument, or staring around at the memorial tablets trying to see how many words I could make out of a single name.

  The Rev. Ronald B. Lunt, though a learned and kind man as we later discovered during his Confirmation Classes, was extremely verbose and never said a thing once if he could say it three times. I longed to slam my prayer book shut the moment he went over the statutory eleven minutes and say, ‘Amen!’ very loudly, as Sir Roger de Coverley used to.

  In Lent he stretched services almost beyond endurance, and we tried every trick in the book to mak
e ourselves come over faint, so that we could be taken home early by a prefect and made to lie down for an hour. Stuffing the soles of your shoes with blotting-paper was said to be infallible, but never worked for me; while holding my breath while the second-hand of my watch made a complete circuit merely brought on a fit of coughing.

  However there was one panacea for boredom in church that never failed me, for it was only when we were wearing our smart overcoats that I had the chance to locate and secretly crinkle the crisp white £5 note which Mummy had slipped between the right-hand pocket flap and its lining, and stitched in place. ‘Mad-money,’ she called it, meaning that if I ever felt mad (in the American sense, i.e. angry) enough to want to bolt home from school, I should have the wherewithal to buy a train ticket to Hereford and a taxi back to the Fforest.

  It was a great comfort to know it was there, and when the coat passed on to Olivia and then Miranda they, too, were told where to find it in case of emergency. Only at the last minute before the trusty garment was handed over to Lawnside’s Second-Hand Uniform cupboard when Miranda grew out of it did she remember to take the note from its hidingplace and put it to more conventional use.

  Another big name in Brag’s pantheon was that of Sir Barry Jackson, who had founded the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. He had been part of the charmed circle which included Elgar and Bernard Shaw, and had often stayed at Lawnside, besides playing a large part in establishing the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon. Several times a year we were given the opportunity to go by bus to this huge, strangely barrack-like building, to picnic on the river-bank and attend a matinee by the Royal Shakespeare Company, where so many famous actors began their careers. Then, as now, producers loved to shock, and some of the scenes got pretty steamy. I remember seeing Brag lean sideways to look anxiously along the row of innocent, ignorant schoolgirls as Antony and Cleopatra rolled about semi-naked on a large sofa, breathing out in hoarse, lascivious gasps the lines which we had plodded through in wooden monotones in English Lit.

  There was always a rush to bag the back seat of the bus for the long drive back to school, but for me the combination of exhaust and exhaustion was a sure trigger for motion sickness. Quite suddenly I would feel hot all over, then icy cold and, before I could ask the teacher in charge to stop the bus, would project the remains of several meals over my unlucky seat-mates.

  We were allowed three exeats or home visits per term, and since my parents lived too far away to make this feasible on still-rationed petrol, from time to time other girls would kindly ask me to go with them, and meet their ponies and dogs and brothers and sisters, and feast on Sunday roasts and delicious rich cakes which made the return journey something of an ordeal. Twice I disgraced myself by throwing up over the beautiful leather upholstery of Mr Pugh’s treasured Bristol sports car and frankly it is something of a miracle that after the first episode I was invited a second time.

  There wasn’t much for visiting parents to do in Malvern on a Sunday, and since they were both happy and busy at home Mummy and Daddy were reluctant to waste such a major part of the weekend hanging around the over-heated Mount Pleasant Hotel making stilted conversation with their schoolgirl daughters, for by this time Olivia had joined me at Lawnside, though the three-year age gap meant we saw very little of one another. But the occasion of my Confirmation was a three-line whip they could not escape. A calf-length white dress was obligatory but difficult to find in Wales, and the one Mummy eventually bought was a twee little number in floppy crepe, horribly expensive, and impossible to wear in any other circumstances. I felt a fool in it, and the moment the confirmation service was over, thankfully changed into the comfortable red wool dress I wore as ‘mufti,’ after tea, whereupon family spirits revived as we all cast piety aside and dashed off to the cinema to catch the first sitting of The Dam-Busters.

  Verse-speaking exams were mandatory all the way up the school. Though I had no difficulty in memorising the poems set by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, when it came to delivering them to stony-faced examiners my harsh, rather nasal tones and plummy accent never impressed them enough to award me the coveted Distinction that my best friend Jane achieved in every grade. With her dark, dramatic looks and beautiful speaking voice she was, for me, a source of constant admiration bordering on envy, and though I knew very well I could never rival her effortless stage presence, where she led I usually tried to follow.

  On one occasion, this was to the Cheltenham Literary Festival. A new Drama teacher asked for volunteers to compete in the class for Shakespeare duologues, and Jane and I and a stage-struck, curly-headed form-mate called Sue were duly entered in the schools’ section of the Spring festival and set to learning our lines. Mrs Barraclough listened to us reading, then directed us to suitable short scenes. Jane chose Cleopatra’s dream of Antony; Sue opted for Juliet immured in the tomb, and I rather unimaginatively followed suit with another scene from Romeo and Juliet, this time between Juliet and her Nurse – a poor choice since I entirely lacked the mercurial grace necessary to play Juliet, and was not helped by the lines which, like most of Shakespeare’s comic passages, were woefully unfunny.

  Mrs Barraclough toiled like the trouper she was to bring us up to standard. She had pasty, rubbery features and twinkling slits of eyes. Though heftily built, she concealed her corpulence in flowing dark dresses swathed with shawls, and could move about the stage with surprisingly speed and agility. She had, we learned, once danced in the corps de ballet. When she turned to drama coaching, her most famous pupil had been the comedienne Diana Dors, whom she had transformed from a mousy teenager into the world famous pneumatic Blonde Bombshell, Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe.

  The competition was held in a hall which seemed to me enormous, with rows and rows of empty chairs broken only by the three-strong panel of judges at centre front, with the couple of dozen schoolgirl competitors crowded humbly at the back.

  We were called to the stage in alphabetical order, and being a B, I wasn’t given long to develop stage-fright. Nor was I particularly worried, having known myself outclassed from the moment the first budding Beatrice embarked on her scene, and I gave my usual undistinguished performance, lumbering ridiculously from side to side speaking to empty air as I played the alternate parts, and getting only one laugh – unfortunately unscripted – when I plumped on to the chair which was my sole prop and all but missed it. (This gaffe was rewarded with the comment: The candidate must learn to sit down with more grace and control, which my parents found much funnier than I did.)

  Back in my seat, glad it was over, I enjoyed watching the other contestants. Some were impressive, but when Jane took the stage it was plain to us all that she was in another league. She drifted a couple of steps towards the footlights, gazed into infinity, and as she began in her low, musical voice, ‘I dreamed there was an emperor, Antony…’ the row of judges gave a little purr of content and relaxed in their seats, recognising a star.

  She won by a distance, to her own apparent bemusement. Never before or since have I heard that speech delivered with more drama, dignity and pathos but Jane had no ambition for a stage career and it was Sue who later took to the boards.

  As we inched our way up the school, Priscilla, whose powerful brain was beginning to flex its muscles, Jane, the good all-rounder, and I rotated top marks in whichever form we happened to be. I was usually second or third, seldom achieving first place, partly because of my Achilles heel in maths, and partly because I hated to be seen to try hard at anything. This was unfortunately part of the Lawnside ethos of the time. It was OK to win through natural brilliance but very infra dig to do it by making an effort – an attitude that led to endless complications, denials, and studying by torchlight under the bedclothes.

  Our passage through the Fifth Form was scarred in traditional fashion with scandals and naughtiness, punishments and recriminations. Everything we did seemed to get us into trouble, whether it was walking on the hills and getting back late, sitting on radiat
ors (guaranteed to give us piles), breaking things, losing things, forgetting things – there was no good in us. My ‘attitude’ was constantly criticised but I couldn’t see what was wrong with it. Nor did I understand why Brag flew into a truly terrifying rage when two girls – yes, Leesa was one of them – were found in the same bed.

  The whole house was summoned from the dormitories to sit on the stairs and listen to a lengthy harangue about their wicked behaviour and why it must never, ever happen again, but Brag didn’t actually tell us why not and unless you happened to have heard of lesbians, The Well of Loneliness and related matters (which none of us had) the whole tirade was thoroughly puzzling.

  Worrying, too, since it meant it would now be more dangerous than ever to creep into bed with Sally, who slept next door to me, to listen to Saturday Night Theatre on her tiny wireless, turned very low. This was a weekly treat I much enjoyed and increased my annoyance with Brag for making such a fuss about nothing.

  Easter happened to be unusually early that year, and feeling ourselves hard done by because of spending it at school, we melted a lot of chocolate bars on the single form-room radiator, meaning to pour the resulting mess into the shells of our breakfast boiled eggs. Unfortunately several slipped between the radiator and the wall and began to drip slowly on to the floor.

  We wiped up the spreading pool as best we could, but the chocolate burned on to the radiator bars was impossible to get at. The cleaner complained to our house mistress, a spiky, chain-smoking ex-policewoman called Mrs Moore, and she in turn sent us for a bollocking in Brag’s study, an over-heated den dominated by a huge picture of St Sebastian looking like an agonised pin-cushion with arrows protruding from every limb, and full of small tables loaded with knick-knacks. You could hardly move without knocking something over, which did nothing to increase our confidence and was, I think, a deliberate weapon employed by Brag to keep pupils in their place.