The eleven-plus became not, as intended, an efficient yet benign system of allocation, but one of often bitter competition. You either passed or failed the exam, and though there were a few transfers at thirteen to ‘correct’ earlier misallocations, these were indeed few. Nor were many technical schools built: by 1955 there were only 302 technical schools as compared to 3,550 secondary moderns and 1,180 grammar schools. Those that were opened often lacked the resources necessary to fulfil their mission. Few catered for girls or prepared them for appropriate apprenticeship opportunities such as in the retail trade, light engineering or hairdressing.
Research found that in the 1950s, the level playing field intended by the 1944 Act was in fact still unfairly tilted. As many as nine in every ten of the unskilled and semi-skilled working class were still deprived of a grammar school education. There was not only the academic competence needed on the part of the pupil to achieve a grammar school place; there was also the expense to the child’s parents of uniform (usually to be purchased at a named shop which enjoyed a monopoly), hockey sticks, mathematical instruments, school trips – all of which amounted to a serious bar for many children to taking up the places they had won.
Secondary moderns didn’t seem appropriately modern in equipping children for a fast-changing capitalist world, but rather became residual schools for those who didn’t pass muster to get into a grammar school. Their teaching was gendered: it was presumed that girls would find domestic science most useful in the job and marriage markets, and in any case, work would be but an interlude before marriage and babies. However, as the historian of girls’ education, Carol Dyhouse, points out, there was an unanticipated beneficiary of the Act: the fact that girls’ educational opportunities would in future be on a par with those of boys led to greater female aspirations and achievements, a situation that would seriously challenge local education authorities’ preponderance of provision for boys at grammar schools.
Grammar school pupils could sit the exams for the General Certificate of Education (GCE), which would permit entry into the sixth form, higher education and the professions. Meanwhile, the majority of pupils who attended secondary moderns left at fifteen before taking any public exams (indeed, initially such pupils were expressly prevented from taking GCEs). As late as 1961, seventy-three per cent of children left school at sixteen without having taken a public examination. In effect, at eleven years of age a child’s future trajectory was decided – largely, it has to be said, as a result of class.
All this educational upheaval, moreover, left the fee-paying independent (including public) schools out of the equation, despite concerns over whether, in the words of the historian R. H. Tawney, ‘the existence of a group of schools reserved for the children of the comparatively prosperous … is or is not, as the world is today, in the best interests of the nation. It cannot be justified by the venerable device of describing privileges as liberties.’ A number of Labour MPs (though not all) shared this view. Likewise, the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) was concerned that ‘the position of the Public Schools is anomalous in a modern democratic society’.
At George Street, we all sat the eleven-plus: Susan, Sandra and a few others passed on to the local co-ed grammar school, most of my classmates ‘failed’ and were destined for one of the local secondary mods. On the basis of my results I was offered an interview at the nearby direct grant school, Berkhamsted School for Girls, founded in 1888 by a local businessman. An enlightened advocate of education for girls, he succeeded in diverting funds for the purpose from Berkhamsted School, a much older foundation, the headmaster of which in the 1930s was the father of Graham Greene, a pupil there. Our most illustrious ‘old girl’ was the former Clementine Hozier who married Winston Churchill, and who, during my time as a pupil, graciously turned up to perform occasional ceremonies such as the opening of a new science block.
A direct grant independent school provided twenty-five per cent of its places free (since a grant was made by the local authority) to children who had spent at least two years in a primary school and had reached the required academic standard, while the ‘residuary places’ would be available for children whose parents were able to pay fees, providing the child reached the same required academic standard. Almost all were single-sex schools and slightly more were for girls. Academic standards were generally high and more pupils from direct grant schools went on to university than from either grammar or independent schools.
On the whole the ethos of direct grant schools was closer to public schools than grammar schools. Our headmistress, Miss Barbara Russell, had been deputy head of Roedean under the famed Dame Emmeline Tanner – and had imported many of the social if not always the academic standards from her former position. A trim, decisive, snobbish Scotswoman – with good legs and neat ankles, according to one pupil’s father – she was particularly concerned that none of her pupils should become ‘bobby-soxers’ and wrote an article in the local paper in effect advocating the infantilisation and desexualisation of teenage girls by keeping them away from pop music, jiving and fashionable clothes.
Berkhamsted took boarders from the age of six. There were real bricks-and-mortar houses for them and notional houses for day girls. Homework was called prep(aration), in case the thought of being at home in the evenings upset the boarders, and there was a hierarchy between those who boarded and day girls. This divide was even greater if you were a ‘scholar’, as we small band were known, a distinction to a degree perpetuated by the staff. Being a scholar was not a cause for praise; rather we appeared as somewhat unwelcome charity liggers. On one occasion I asked at the end of term to buy a copy of a book we had been studying – S. T. Bindoff’s Tudor England – since, unlike fee-paying pupils whose parents were billed for their books, scholars were loaned theirs. ‘But there is no need to, you are a scholarship pupil!’ the history mistress exclaimed in amazement. I was thus dismissed as an urchin with no use for, and no money for, books beyond the purely functional and transient.
I had harboured no particular ambition to go to any specific school, and felt I had made rather a hash (or bish) of the interview for Berkhamsted. Questioned as to what my hobbies were I replied: ‘Collecting postcards.’ But when I was asked what I did with them, I was nonplussed. Surely the accumulation was the hobby? What do philatelists do with the stamps they collect other than stick them in albums and swap them?
Nevertheless, aware that I clearly lacked some higher sense of purpose, I henceforth started to stick my postcards into scrapbooks with some sort of taxonomy. I pondered their exchange value. Would a view of Cliftonville seafront be a fair exchange for the donkeys on Blackpool beach? The prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux in sepia equate with the Eiffel Tower in colour? And where would I find a community of swappers? (No internet then.) Would a postcard in a newsagent’s window appear to have a subtext, drawing forth inappropriate responses? The distinguished art historian and one-time editor of Apollo magazine, Anna Somers Cocks, was once quoted as saying that only the unhappily married are collectors. To that category could surely be added the aimless and bored: that is, most children, a lot of the time.
I felt something akin to heart-plunging despair as I shut the door of the interview room and walked towards a window framing a horse-chestnut tree in full, effervescent bloom. A conviction that I would never see the school again weighed me down like a stone in the pit of my stomach. This was coupled with a freshly minted intense desire to do so, a certainty that I would find a wider horizon, a spiritual and intellectual home there and only there among its panelled corridors, its library with books reaching up to the ceiling, its small swimming pool. I was wrong on both counts. I was offered a place. But the frothy horse-chestnut extravagance had been a false portent. The school would be a dull disappointment to me; and much more so, I to it.
My mother was pleased at my academic success, though she feared, correctly, that it would make me a snob, and particularly a cultural and intellectual snob. The watercress gro
wer pressed a ten-shilling note into my hand, saying he realised he would not be able to speak to me now I was so elevated – his own daughter had passed to the grammar school.
There was a particular paradox about teachers at girls’ schools in the postwar years. All the teachers at Berkhamsted in the mid-1950s were women. All except one were unmarried – though a young French teacher who was observed boarding a London-bound Green Line bus after school every Friday announced her engagement and sported a half-circle diamond ring on her left hand, much to the excitement of her romantically minded pupils. Several of the staff were undoubtedly clever women with cultivated minds, who, had they been born a couple of decades later, would have taught in higher education, joined the upper ranks of the civil service, or succeeded in law, medicine, architecture, journalism or business. But career opportunities for girls were so limited when they were making their choices that teaching at a ‘good school’ must have seemed the most feasible option for many – an advance at least on becoming a governess, as would have been their lot in the nineteenth century. Compounding this was the invidious problem of surplus, or as the novelist George Gissing called them, ‘odd’ women – that is, those denied the opportunity of marriage by a variety of factors. Since the end of the nineteenth century, more baby girls had been born and/or survived than baby boys; colonial service, which sent many of the most eligible young men to the far corners of the empire, and the slaughter of the Great War had depleted the opportunities for marriage even further. And many of these women clearly resented it. They found their pupils unresponsive, giggling, unfocused – which many of us undoubtedly were.
Our nascent sexuality was also disturbing to the staff. It spoke of disobedience, uncontrollability, out-of-reachness. We wore bottle-green serge gymslips, or, when older, navy serge skirts, and blouses and green-and-pink striped ties in winter, and green-and-white gingham shirtwaister dresses in summer, with gabardine macs in winter. In summer we donned bottle-green blazers with the school motto ‘Festina Lente’ – ‘Hasten slowly’, or more colloquially ‘More haste less speed’, an adage (and an oxymoron) adopted from the Greek by the Roman Emperor, Augustus – emblazoned on the breast pocket.
Over our indoor clothes we were obliged to wear the strangest garment, a pinafore that looked like a maternity smock. When new, these were indigo blue and reached to the knee, but as denim does, they soon faded, and became more of a below the bust crop-top as their wearer grew. Such vintage items were much prized and decorated with biro graffiti, their owners ignoring requests to get a replacement for as long as possible; but as pubescent breasts swelled, the pinafores began to look even odder, like shelves waiting to be filled.
Naturally, as they grew older, some girls customised their uniforms, trying to inject a little style, even sexiness, into their drab, shapeless attire: ankle socks were rolled up to make them mid-calf (though not much could be done with heavy lisle stockings); winter velour and summer panama hats were pinched into more alluring shapes than the pudding basin original, dresses pulled tight with unauthorised belts or hitched into the waist elastic of (bottle-green) knickers to make them shorter; blazer collars turned up. All this was frowned on and punished with an order mark – as was poor deportment, or hair that touched the collar, an aberration that perplexingly frequently threw one of our English mistresses into a white-knuckled fury.
Some of the teachers were engaging. The woman who taught us Latin was a riot, enacting lines from Pliny by lying on the floor for dead, or leaping on desks to brandish a sword (in fact a ruler), mock-swooning over the lyrical poetry of Catullus. I liked history since it was taught with energy and was a far-ranging narrative that included intriguing characters – predominantly men such as Richard Coeur de Lion, William Gladstone, Wat Tyler, Aethelred the Unready, Elizabeth I and Joanna the Mad – among its cast of thousands. Geography in those days was physical rather than human, and we spent many lessons drawing round plastic outlines of Britain, Europe, India, Africa or Australia and filling in the oceans, the mountain ranges and the deserts, the rivers, mineral deposits and crops. My soul, and that of many others surely, was deadened by the teaching of music ‘appreciation’ by a moustache-bristling woman who tried to teach us sight-reading and read out abbreviated biographies of famous composers, while her toothy blonde companion (in life as well as in the classroom, we surmised) trilled away at the piano. Musical enterprise was not encouraged. When the vicar father of a classmate, who was a talented pianist, requested that his daughter be taught the organ, his plea was turned down on the grounds that her class work was not up to standard.
Discipline was harsh and unforgiving. Order marks were doled out by teachers or prefects (‘prees’) for talking when waiting in line for lunch, or for taking too long to change from outdoor shoes into indoor ones, for uniform transgressions, walking on the grass, losing an exercise book. The prees stood on staircases looking down and shouting harshly. There was a lot of shouting and I often wonder how those bully girls treated their own families later. Kindness and encouragement were not the order of the day. A metaphorical bucket of cold water always seemed at hand to crush spirits that might have soared. Girls were called buffoons, even morons, by staff, and we girls liberally used words like ‘retards’ or ‘spastics’ about each other and sneered at what would now be called an Essex accent. ‘You can’t be a speech therapist,’ a fellow scholar was told, ‘you don’t speak properly yourself.’
Discipline marks were for really bad behaviour: transgressions such as losing your lacrosse stick. We played lacrosse so we could have matches against smart schools like Wycombe Abbey, Cheltenham Ladies’ College or Sherborne, whereas the two local grammar schools played hockey. I was extremely bad at sport, and my memory of games was of being called ‘rabbit’ a lot, and only ever serving as a ‘ball boy’ in interhouse tennis matches. I quite liked lacrosse though, as, reputed to emanate from the North American prairies, the game had no boundaries and one could run cradling the ball in its leather net on a stick into the distance, far away from the crowd of keen types in their green Aertex shirts and serge divided skirts, feigning deaf to the games mistress’s insistent whistle.
Discipline marks were frequently doled out for answering back, or ‘insolence’, for questioning a punishment, or being late for assembly or wearing nail varnish or sneaking out of school or the boarding house to go into town. You had to report to your head of house to receive a punishment for a ‘dissie’, and on one occasion I was set to polish the brass furniture on the door of the prefects’ common room on the logic that doing this kneeling en plein air would humiliate me as fellow pupils wandered by. It didn’t really.
With little to focus my burgeoning sexual desire on, I tended to have the odd ‘crush’ (or ‘pash’) on a prefect or teacher, and indeed had what my friends called a ‘fan club’ myself – four girls, three called Jane, who followed me around at break times and after lunch. We rarely spoke.
As far as I know, the only girls who were expelled during my time were two pupils who climbed out of the dormitory window and made a buccaneer-like raid on the roof of one of the boys’ school houses, hoisting up a pillow case bearing an obscene word, and a couple of boarders who had reputedly been found in bed together in their dorm. For several days after the gossip broke, I was urged by the class sophisticate to stick my hand up in an English lesson to ask what a lesbian was, which she reckoned would be good sport for all, but since I wasn’t that daft I looked up the word in The Oxford English Dictionary instead.
Later it became de rigueur to select a boy from the boys’ school to fantasise about. I chose Eddie Kempling, who impressed me as he clattered up the stairs to the top deck of the bus in his OTC (Officers’ Training Corps) hobnailed boots and thick khaki uniform, his freckled face flushed with eager anticipation as he contemplated a day of combat on the playing fields – if not of Eton then at least of Berkhamsted. Again, we never spoke.
As we grew older, there were social evenings arranged largely for the bo
arders, but day girls were encouraged to go along too, and we stomped around the hall in mufti, circular felt skirts, or oatmeal-coloured pinafore dresses and turquoise or lime-green cotton polo necks, full tweed skirts topped by lemon Orlon cardigans, or tartan dresses with Peter Pan collars, to the music of Paul Anka’s ‘Diana’ (‘I’m so young and you’re so old,/ This, my darling, I’ve been told’) or Laurie London’s ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’, or the haunting melodies of Buddy Holly’s ‘Peggy Sue’ and ‘That’ll Be the Day’, but we stopped and sat down when someone put on the record of Cole Porter’s ‘Miss Otis Regrets (She’s Unable to Lunch Today)’.
Once a term (or was it year?) older pupils from the boys’ and girls’ schools met for a dance in the school hall. We girls had to submit the dresses we intended to wear for inspection a couple of weeks before the dance took place. On the evening of the dance, we sedately (or clumsily) negotiated the floor in waltzes and foxtrots, and sometimes the polka (I had only ever learned the male steps since there were no boys in school dance classes). We were scrutinised from behind the wooden pillars by members of staff to make sure that we did not dance with the same boy more than once. If we did, a heavy hand would be laid on our shoulder and we would be humiliatingly levered apart.
Joining the Dots Page 5
