by Sandy Taylor
I passed the eleven-plus. I knew I would, because I’m dead clever. I know how long it takes five men to fill a bath if it takes two men twenty minutes. Not that I care how bloody long it took them.
Dottie is worried that we won’t be best friends any more. Fat chance!!!
Tatty bye
Mary Pickles (genius)
Aged 11.
Chapter Six
‘Nothing is going to change,’ said Mary.
‘Yes it will,’ I said. ‘We won’t go to school on the same bus and I will have to sit next to someone I don’t know and I won’t have a best friend anymore.’
‘We’ll always be best friends, you dope.’
I could feel my eyes filling with tears and I didn’t want to cry, because I was really proud that Mary had passed the exam and I didn’t want her to feel guilty about going to the grammar school. ‘Everything will change,’ I whispered.
‘No it won’t,’ said Mary. ‘I’m not going.’
‘What?’
‘I’m not going.’
‘But you have to go, you passed the exam.’
‘It’s not law, you know. There isn’t some law that says, all ye who pass the eleven-plus must, on pain of death or worse, go to the bloody grammar school.’
I started to giggle: ‘You’re really not going?’
‘I’m really not going.’
‘But why?’
‘Because I don’t want to. It’s not part of my life’s plan to spend the next hundred years going to school and being told what to do and when to do it. Going to grammar school won’t make the slightest bit of difference to me being an artist. In fact it might make it harder because there’ll be more homework.’
This was a lot of information for me to take in all at once.
‘You’ve got a life’s plan?’ I asked.
‘Everyone should have one, otherwise you will end up making loads of mistakes.’
‘Does that mean I need one?’
‘No, you’re part of mine. I’ll make sure you’re okay.’
‘Don’t your mum and dad mind you not going to the grammar school?’
‘Not really. They know that I’m going to be an artist, and once I make my mind up about something, I don’t usually change it.’
Mary never failed to amaze me. I could just imagine me saying to my mum, ‘Oh, by the way, I passed the eleven-plus, but I’ve decided not to go to the grammar school, is that okay with you, Mum?’
‘I think Mum was a bit miffed,’ said Mary, ‘because she would have liked to have shown off to Lady Muck who lives down the road.’
‘Lady Muck?’
‘Yeah, you know, the one with the mock-Tudor front door.’
‘And the funny husband?’
‘That’s the one. Well, according to her, her daughter Penelope is the most miraculous thing since the virgin birth, and she‘s always going on about how clever she is and how pretty she is, blah, blah, blah. Anyway she failed the exam, so my mum would have liked to have bragged about me.’
‘Well she can still brag about you can’t she, because you passed?’
‘Lady Muck wouldn’t believe it if I wasn’t prancing round in the poncy uniform.’
‘You do make me laugh, Mary Pickles.’
‘I’m so glad, Dottie Perks.’
I remember the day Mary told me that she had fallen in love for the first time. It was on my eleventh birthday. My Aunty Brenda had bought me a Bunty annual. I had the Bunty comic delivered to my house every Tuesday and as soon as I heard it fall through the letter box, I ran downstairs before anyone else could pick it up. ‘As if,’ said my sister Rita, ‘anyone else would want it.’
I showed it to Mary when I got to the bus stop and she burst out laughing.
‘What?’ I said, staring at her.
‘I can’t believe you’re still reading that stuff.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s kids’ stuff, Dottie,’ she said, screwing up her nose as if she had a bad smell under it.
‘But I like it.’
‘Well it’s time you stopped liking it.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve grown up, Dottie.’
‘What, in two weeks?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I‘m talking about two weeks ago when you borrowed my Bunty comic.’
She decided to ignore that and went on talking.
‘So what’s in it that you like so much?’
‘I like “The Four Marys” and…’
‘“The Four Marys”?’ she screamed.
‘And “The Dancing Life of Moira Kent”.’
‘“The Dancing Life of Moira Kent”!’
I was pretty confused now. ‘Why are you repeating everything I’m saying?’
‘Because I can’t believe you’re saying it.’
‘Well, if you don’t think I should be reading Bunty, what should I be reading?’
‘Romance,’ said Mary, smiling.
‘Romance!’ I said. ‘Why would I want to read about romance?’ My sister Rita was fifteen and there was enough romance floating around our house without me joining in.
‘Because I’ve fallen in love.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘You’ve fallen in love and I’ve got to stop reading Bunty?’
‘It’s time you grew up. I’ve grown up, and so should you.’
‘But I haven’t fallen in love, Mary, and I don’t want to, well not till I’ve read my new Bunty annual anyway.’
‘Okay,’ said Mary ‘You can finish the book.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, grinning.
Just then the bus came round the corner, Mary and I ran up the stairs and plonked ourselves down at the front.
‘Who have you fallen in love with then?’ I asked, stuffing the offending book into my satchel before Mary suggested that I throw it out of the window.
‘Elton Briggs,’ she said. ‘Who else would I be in love with?’
‘Elton’s not the only boy in the class, is he?’ I said.
‘But he’s the best looking,’ she said, ‘and the most popular.’
Up until that point, I had never known Mary to care much about looks or popularity, it was one of the things I really liked about her, but now she had fallen in love with Elton Briggs, who although popular, wasn’t always a very nice boy.
I suppose Elton was quite good-looking and the other boys seemed to look up to him. He was taller than most of them and he was good at things like running and football. They used to hang around him, just like the girls hung round Mary.
I had always felt a bit sorry for Elton, because his dad died when he was only nine years old. He had been called out of the classroom and then he was off school for a while. There were a lot of rumours going round. People kept asking Ralph, but when they did, Ralph sloped off with his hands in his pockets and wouldn’t say anything. After a couple of days our teacher told us what had happened and asked us to be kind to Elton when he came back but not to crowd him with questions. Louise Morgan, who always seemed to have something wrong with her, went hysterical and had to be taken to the sick room.
When Elton did come back, we all tried to be extra especially kind to him, except Dominic Roberts who didn’t know the meaning of the word. But Elton acted as though nothing had happened. I for one wasn’t convinced, and neither was Mary, because sometimes he just stared out of the window when he should have been writing or paying attention, and Mrs Roberts our teacher never told him off. Maybe it was that vulnerable side that Mary saw, too, and not the big act that he always put on.
‘I really, really love him, Dottie,’ said Mary that day on the bus. ‘One day I am going to marry him and we are going to travel round the world and have a fabulous life together.’
I didn’t really know much about love, but it kind of made sense to me that you would probably fall in love with someone because they were nice to you and shared their sweets with you and things like that, but Elton wasn�
�t that nice to Mary. He wasn’t that nice to me either, but I wasn’t the one who’d fallen in love with him so it didn’t matter.
After Mary fell in love with Elton everything changed. We stopped playing exciting games and all we did was follow Elton and Ralph around the playground. Sometimes Elton paid attention to Mary and they would walk around holding hands or he’d chase her round the field; at those times Ralph Bennett and I were sort of thrown together, which was pretty embarrassing to begin with, but over time we got more comfortable with each other and we would sit on the school field talking. I learned that he’d known Elton all his life. They were born in the same hospital only days apart and the two mums had kept in touch, so they had sort of grown up together. Neither of them had brothers or sisters. Ralph was a tall, awkward-looking boy and whatever time of day it was, he looked as if he’d just fallen out of bed.
‘Do you think Elton really likes Mary?’ I asked him one day when we were sitting on the field.
‘I dunno,’ he said.
‘But does he talk about Mary?’
‘All Elton talks about is football and music. Perhaps if Mary had a number on her back he might take more notice of her.’
‘You can be quite funny sometimes, Ralph Bennett.’
Ralph went bright red.
‘It’s not true love, then?’ I said.
Ralph laughed. ‘They’re a bit young for that, don’t you think?’
I thought so too, but Mary was smitten.
Sometimes Elton would completely ignore Mary and walk around the field holding Valerie Colahan’s hand, or lean against the climbing frame, laughing out loud at something Beverly Johnson said, and you just knew it was all an act, because Beverly Johnson couldn’t be funny if her life depended on it, added to the fact that she had the sense of humour of a gnat, and all this was done in sight of Mary.
At those times, Mary would sit with me and Ralph, looking sad and upset, and to make it worse, Ralph would then stop talking and I wouldn’t know how to make things better for either of them. One day when the three of us were sitting together in silence, Mary suddenly said: ‘You know what you ought to ask your mother to get you for Christmas, Ralph Bennett?’
‘What?’ said Ralph, looking startled.
‘A tongue,’ said Mary.
I thought that was a mean thing to say and I knew Mary wasn’t a mean person. She was just feeling bad. Suddenly a football hit Ralph on the back of his head, a crowd of kids started laughing and one of them shouted, ‘Ahh, did I hurt your little ginger bonce?’
Suddenly, Elton came racing across the field. He ran up to the boy and pushed him to the ground. ‘What did you say to him?’ he snarled.
The boy looked terrified. ‘Nothing, Elton,’ he said.
The other boys had backed away.
‘I asked you what you said.’ He was glaring down at the frightened boy.
‘I just asked him if he was okay.’
Elton looked at us. ‘What did he say?’
‘Something about his ginger bonce,’ said Mary.
‘Leave it,’ said Ralph, ‘I’m okay.’
Elton pulled the boy up off the ground. ‘Don’t you ever say anything like that to my friend again, do you hear me?’
‘I won’t, Elton,’ said the boy.
‘Now beat it.’
The boy didn’t move.
‘What?’ said Elton.
‘Can I have my ball back?’
‘What do you think?’ said Elton, smirking.
‘But I only just got it for my birthday, my dad’ll kill me.’ The boy looked as if he was about to cry.
Elton kicked the ball hard across the field.
‘Thanks, Elton,’ said the boy, looking relieved, and ran off after the ball.
‘Are you all right, mate?’ said Elton, sitting down next to Ralph.
Ralph was rubbing his head. ‘I’ll live,’ he said.
‘I’ve had more fights over your flippin’ hair than I’ve had hot dinners,’ said Elton and we all fell about laughing.
That same year someone put a Valentine’s card in my desk. It had a big heart on the front surrounded by little cupids holding garlands of flowers and inside was a little poem and whoever had sent it had written: ‘From your secret sweetheart.’ All the girls had been really impressed when I found it. At first, I thought it was someone playing a mean trick on me, and Mary, who hadn’t received a card at all that year, said it was probably someone’s idea of a bad joke. I wasn’t the sort of girl who got Valentine’s cards, so I pretended I didn’t care about the card at all. I stuffed it in my satchel and never had it on display. I still had it in my special memory box under my bed though. I had always hoped that it had come from Ralph.
Perhaps that was the day that I first fell in love, a little.
Chapter Seven
Brighton, 1963
It was the day after Mary and I met Ralph and Elton in the record shop. I woke with a fizzy feeling in my stomach. It took me a moment to remember what it was and when I did, I rolled over and hugged my pillow with joy. Ralph Bennett had asked me out. He had asked me! Dottie Perks! Out on a date! It was going to be the start of something wonderful, I knew it was. I had never felt so happy, so excited; life had never seemed so full of possibilities and potential.
Ralph and I had been friends all through school. At the beginning we had been thrown together because he was Elton’s best friend and I was Mary’s. Soon, though, we became friends in our own right, because we wanted to be. Ralph was not a noisy, show-off boy, but one of the quieter ones, and everyone liked him, even the teachers. He always sat at the back of the class and he never said very much, but he was always smiling, always friendly. I’d seen him once or twice since we left school, but either I’d been with my mum or he’d been with someone else and so we’d never said more than ‘hello’ to one another. He and Elton lived in a different part of town and our paths didn’t cross much.
Mary and I had been out with a few boys since leaving school. Well, Mary had been out with a few boys, I’d been stuck with their friends. Memories of spotty faces, cheese-and-onion breath and clammy hands still made me shudder. I wasn’t that interested in boys. The only boy I had ever felt comfortable with was Ralph and now he was in my life again and suddenly everything seemed rather wonderful, actually.
As I was enjoying this strange and delicious feeling of anticipation, something cold and wet slapped me on the face.
‘Ow!’
I sat up and removed the object. It was a flannel. My older sister Rita was standing on her side of the bedroom wrapped in a towel and smiling at me.
‘What are you looking so pleased about?’ she asked. ‘You look like the cat that’s had the cream!’
‘Nothing,’ I said. I threw the flannel back at her and turned over.
‘Yes it is something!’ Rita persisted, pulling at my covers. ‘You were sighing in your sleep. You were smooching up to your pillow! It’s a boy, isn’t it? You’ve met someone, haven’t you? You fancy someone! What’s wrong with him? Is he desperate? Is he blind?’
‘Oh go away!’ I said. ‘Go away forever, Rita.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll be out of here soon,’ Rita trilled. ‘Just as soon as I’m married! And while we’re on the subject, don’t forget Aunty Brenda’s coming over later to decide on the bridesmaids’ dresses.’
I had forgotten. I groaned and burrowed back down the bed.
That summer, Rita’s wedding was all anyone seemed to talk about at our house. It was kind of exciting and I wasn’t exactly jealous, but it was hard being Rita’s younger, less attractive sister. And also it was hard because sometimes, just once in a while, it would have been nice if Rita and I could have gone shopping together or gone to the cinema, or even just walked down to the seafront for an ice cream, things we used to do together, just the two of us. I never talked to Rita like I talked to Mary, but she had always been there for me. Now it felt like I didn’t have a sister any more.
Rita and I
were good friends when we were younger, but since she had ‘blossomed’, things had started to go a bit wrong. One day she was just ‘Rita’ and the next she was ‘Rita the beauty’. People were always saying she could have been a film star and Rita loved that. I couldn’t see it myself. She still looked exactly the same to me. We’d shared a bedroom ever since I was two, and I knew she looked pretty rotten first thing in the morning. She didn’t look too great last thing at night either. She was named after Rita Hayworth and these days she acted like she expected everyone to treat her like a film star too.
I suppose Rita couldn’t help being beautiful, but she always made me look worse by comparison. The most annoying aspect of this was that whatever she ate she still looked like a stick insect, whereas I only had to pass a doughnut and great blobs of fat would hurl themselves at my thighs. When I was eleven, I overheard Aunty Brenda telling Mum that she was feeding me too much starch and that I was getting very round-looking and my mum saying: ‘Rubbish, it’s just puppy fat, in a couple of years it will all drop off.’ I told Mary and she thought that was really funny and wondered whether it would suddenly fall off me in the middle of a maths lesson, or during assembly, or whether I’d just gradually lose bits of it all over the place. Mary was great like that. She always saw the funny side of things and then you ended up seeing it as well. In the end we were both rolling around in fits of laughter, thinking of all the funny places where the fat could drop off.
Now Rita was engaged to be married to a chap called Nigel who worked in insurance. Mum was delighted because she said that with him having a proper job like that, Rita would be set up for life. Nigel had long arms. His shirtsleeves didn’t quite reach to the end of them and his wrists were very bony. He tried to sell life insurance to Dad, who said if he wasn’t around to get the benefit of the money then he wasn’t interested. Nigel said it would give him peace of mind knowing that his loved ones could give him a proper send-off when he departed this world. Dad said he’d be quite happy in a cardboard box which shouldn’t cost very much, and anyway he thought insurance was a big con and the only people who made any money out of it were the likes of Nigel. I tended to agree with him, but I did feel a tiny bit sorry for Nigel, who went all crestfallen and started scratching the back of his ear. Mum squeezed Nigel’s arm and told Dad not to show his ignorance and to apologise. Dad said he had a right to say what he liked in his own home. Mum said if he felt like that she wouldn’t bother with a cardboard box when he popped his clogs, she’d put him out with the rubbish. Dad just snorted and Nigel’s ears went very red and you could tell he didn’t know what to do with his face.
