Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  She didn’t in any case read much – the parish magazine, my grandmother’s The People’s Friend, the Bible and that was about it. She thought magazines a shocking waste of money, full of silly pictures and articles, entirely frivolous. My love of virtually any magazine annoyed her. In the house of various neighbours I read Woman and Woman’s Own and loved them, loved the sheer brightness of them however false the contents, and I bought the Girls’ Crystal and later Eagle, and Girl, for myself. I read every word, however sentimental or trite (not that I recognized the stories in these publications were either), caring only that what was offered was a view of life quite different from the one I was seeing. I loved the fashion pages and would pine for the cheap or special offers – a red taffeta skirt was what I most wanted at ten. It looked so shimmeringly beautiful on the Woman’s Own model. I’d lie on my stomach on the living-room floor for hours going through stacks of old magazines I’d been given, reading the same stuff over and over.

  It exasperated my mother. ‘I thought you had more sense,’ she’d say, and when I started buying my own magazines there was no holding her scorn – ‘All that money!’ she’d exclaim over the sixpence I’d spent, ‘And for what? Just rubbish.’ My only defence was to declare I liked rubbish, which she dismissed, rightly, as an inadequate answer. I couldn’t articulate what I got from trashy magazines, why the arrival of a new copy of one of them cheered me up. They didn’t cheer my mother up. Life might be mundane, it might be grim, but no silly magazine was going to make any difference to her. But then no kind of reading did, she couldn’t get from reading what I could. I could even read my brother’s comics, though in fact she never objected to my love of The Hotspur, The Wizard, The Rover and Cannonball. It was always those women’s magazines she saved her contempt for – it was almost as though they were a vice to which she saw I was addicted, as though she thought I was betraying, in my love for them, a weakness which it was her duty to combat – that way, the way of popular magazines, lay perdition.

  Equally suspect was my passion for the photographs of film stars. She couldn’t see the point of the glossy publicity photographs for which I sent away – they held no romance for her at all. I’d gloat over yet another signed copy of Hedy Lamarr’s hand-out picture and she’d shake her head in disbelief and disgust. I had a scrapbook and pasted the photographs into it and then turned the pages slowly, hypnotized by the huge eyes and long eyelashes and luscious lips and shining hair of my favourites. But my mother, with her unyielding respect for absolute truth, knew these images were fraudulent and didn’t want me to be hoodwinked. Nor did she want me to have stupid ideas. I might think that I, too, could become a film star and my head was already full of such dangerous, outlandish notions – I was always thinking I could be what she was absolutely certain I could never be. Once, she opened a demand for more money from a company peddling these pictures. I’d sent for a new Margaret Lockwood photograph and, when it did not come, announced I was going to write and complain. That was when my mother told me she’d opened a letter asking for two extra shillings before it could be sent, and so she’d torn it up. I was furious and said I’d have sent the extra money and I would do so now. ‘Then you’re a fool,’ she said. ‘You’re letting yourself be taken advantage of. That photo isn’t worth it. I was only saving you from yourself.’ That had me screaming – the last thing I wanted was to be saved from myself. I wanted to be myself and myself yearned for those alluring, glossy photographs. I sent the extra money but my postal order was returned. The offer had closed.

  I often spent my pocket money equally ridiculously but my mother didn’t always disapprove. If I gorged myself on ice-cream sundaes that was apparently all right. But what she really liked was for me to choose to spend my money on others, to be virtuous with it, to put it into the collection box at church, or into the missionary box she had at home. Sometimes I did. But though I liked the feeling of goodness this gave me, and even more my mother’s approval, the trouble was that this feeling was so short-lived. In the money would go, my weekly two shillings, and almost before the collection plate had passed to the end of the row I was resenting its disappearance. I simply couldn’t bear to think of having no money now for another seven days. It was preferable to try to be magnanimous but get something out of it. A perfect opportunity presented itself when an unpopular teacher, Miss Parker, retired. Nobody gave her a present. I told my mother how sorry I felt for poor Miss Parker, the only teacher ever to leave without being presented with flowers or some token of appreciation. Then I had the brilliantly noble idea of buying Miss Parker a present myself and taking it to where I knew she lived. My mother was thrilled – this was the daughter she’d always hoped she’d reared. I duly saved my weekly two shillings pocket money for four weeks, and then I went to Woolworths and bought a picture. It was in a gilt frame, six inches by eight, so quite respectably large to me, a print of a meadow with a little girl picking poppies in it. I thought she looked rather like me and was pleased at the similarity.

  I wrapped it up in tissue paper and off I went, already anticipating Miss Parker’s tearful gratitude and practising my own modest reception of it. But visiting teachers in their homes was not something anyone ever did and as I neared Miss Parker’s house on the banks of the Caldew I remembered why she had been so unpopular: she was terrifying. She’d been a great caner, using not a cane but a solid wooden implement, thick at one end, narrow at the other, a sort of pointer for using on the blackboard. I was nervous by the time I rang her bell and even more so as I heard her coming to her door. She hardly opened it. Only a crack, but sufficient to see her bad-tempered expression, the glare behind her thick spectacles. ‘Yes?’ she said sharply. ‘What do you want, bothering me?’ I thrust the wrapped picture at the gap in the doorway, but it wouldn’t go through. I swallowed and whispered. ‘It’s a present. I wanted to give you a present.’ ‘What?’ she shouted, making no move to open the door wider. ‘Speak up, for heaven’s sake.’ I tried again. ‘It’s a present, for retiring. I wanted to give you a present because you didn’t get one. It wasn’t fair.’ The rage on her face finally got through to me and I dropped the picture on her doorstep and ran, only slowing down when I was round the corner. Then I stopped and cried.

  It had all gone so wrong, my wonderful gesture, and I didn’t understand why. What had I done? What had I said that was so wrong? Why was Miss Parker so angry? My mother consoled me and said some people saw the worst in everything and I was not to be upset because God had seen and heard and knew how kind I’d tried to be. Didn’t I remember the bit in the Bible about turning the other cheek? Well, this wasn’t exactly the same, but it almost was. I must, in effect, turn the other cheek. She was proud of me. It had been a useful lesson in humility, she said. In fact, though I was only dimly aware of it, it was nothing of the kind. It was a lesson, rather, in what happens when you’re so in love with your own virtue you fail to see you’re patronizing and self-righteous.

  X

  Soon after Miss Parker left, I went into the Merit class. The Merit was the same examination my mother had sat at eleven, but it now controlled entry to the once-exclusive fee-paying Grammar and High Schools as well as to the two schools, the Margaret Sewell and the Creighton, created from the old Higher Grade. Carlisle, in short, had by the late 1940s a tripartite secondary education system. The top percentage of those who passed the crucially important Merit went either to the Grammar School, if a boy, or to the High School, if a girl, then the next in order went to the other two schools. Those who failed were doomed to go to secondary moderns which were much worse than secondary and modern not at all. So the Merit was a big event in our lives. Its significance was clearly understood. It settled our future, it pigeon-holed us, at eleven, as clever, quite clever or stupid.

  My brother Gordon had failed the Merit in 1943 and since he was not stupid I’d always known there must be something wrong somewhere. My mother was distraught and blamed the weeks off school Gordon had been obliged to have because
of illness. He’d had scarlet fever the months before he sat the Merit; he was in the fever hospital for weeks (so was Pauline, but I never caught it. I never caught anything). My mother knew the Merit was largely an intelligence test but she also knew Gordon had missed all kinds of practice tests and that, since he lacked confidence at the best of times, this was a handicap. There was still a year to go before the vital 1944 Education Act, usually known as the Butler Education Act after Rab Butler who was Minister for Education at the time. It opened the way for any child, however poor, to gain entry to the previously fee-paying grammar schools, since ability was now to be the only criterion. Universities and colleges would also be within their reach since means-tested grants would be available, as well as state scholarships, to cover all expenses. My grandfather had offered to pay for Gordon to go to the Grammar School but he refused to be paid for. He was upset and he was proud – if he hadn’t passed to go, he didn’t want to. Arthur thought he was right, Lily that he was wrong. Arthur was no advert for not going to the Grammar School. What job would Gordon get, a product of Ashley Street Boys? A poor job, his highest aspiration an apprenticeship in some trade, and my mother knew he was worth more than that. He was quiet, like her, and shy, like her, but he was also perfectly intelligent and hardworking and well worth educating. She felt that when he got over the poor health, which had dogged him all his childhood, he would make up for lost time and flourish, he’d be a late developer (and he was). It was maddening that I was clever and was the one never ill. I, as a girl, didn’t need to be clever. It would do me no good just as it had done her no good. I would only marry and have children and share her own fate, whatever I said.

  So there was not the same anxiety over the Merit when it came to my turn to take it – except in my own mind. The thought of failing the Merit made me want to die, as exaggerated a reaction to the thought of it as that. I had to go to the Carlisle and County High School for Girls (I loved its full title). Nothing else would do, certainly not the Margaret Sewell School. My mother’s and her family’s attitudes to the High School in her day were not mine. I didn’t believe for one moment that the High School was above me, or too good for me, or not for the likes of me, and if that meant I was getting above myself, too bad, I was desperate to exceed my supposed reach. But it was to my advantage in every way that the situation in 1949 was dramatically different educationally from how it had been in 1913. The High School was no longer fee-paying. Entry was free and through the passing of the Merit only. Books did not have to be paid for and, though there was still a uniform, there were grants for those too poor to afford the expenditure. The very mention of the word ‘grant’ produced shudders of horror at home – grants were charity, and never ever would we be recipients of that – but not in me.

  I took to haunting Lismore Place where the High School stood, aloof behind its fences. I’d walk along the road and if no one was about put my eye to a crack in the wooden paling and ogle the impressive building, a large country house in appearance, with grass tennis courts in front. Every time I passed a girl in the High School uniform I’d feel such acute pangs of envy – oh to be able to wear that navy gym-slip, that blazer with its rose-and-castle crest, that grey felt hat! Garbed like that I’d be straight into one of those utterly unreal but passionately desirable school stories I read so many of. I’d no longer be living in the middle of a dreary council estate having a dreary life. Then suddenly, for the first time in my young life, I became ill. The Merit was in March, and in January I contracted jaundice and was off school for six weeks. My mother was worried but I was frantic – ‘Will I be better for the Merit?’ I sobbed, lying there so weak and tired I couldn’t even read for a while. She went down to the school and asked for the practice tests, something she hadn’t known to do for Gordon, and when I was a little better I did them and she took them back to the school where the headmistress assured her there was nothing to worry about. I was absolutely certain to pass for the High School, it was impossible for me to fail.

  But I didn’t think it impossibile. Ashley Street didn’t send many girls to the High School. Its catchment area was poor, unlike that of Stanwix School up above the Eden. They sent girls by the dozen to the High School, whereas Ashley Street only managed one or two a year. The Merit was on 2 March. I didn’t return to school until 28 February, still shaky on my feet. I kept a diary that year, a little red Letts Girl Guide diary, and all it seems to record are dates and feelings to do with this wretched examination. The results of the Merit were due on 15 June. They were posted, as everyone knew, on the fourteenth to the homes of the children who’d sat it. For days before I betray in my diary the most agonizing tension, describing my nightmares, the waking up and screaming in the middle of torrents of running blood (the same nightmare I always had). It wasn’t connected at all to the Merit or the High School, but when my mother woke me and calmed me she always said, ‘I wish this Merit was over. This is ridiculous.’ She tried to tell me it was not the end of the world if I failed. There was no pressure to succeed coming from her or anyone else. But she didn’t understand, only my diary understood – ‘It will be the end of the world’, followed by a line of exclamation marks.

  What a fuss for a ten-year-old to make (I wasn’t eleven until May). No results came on 15 June. The word went round that the schools had them, and Ashley Street’s were bad. I woke on the sixteenth feeling so sick and dizzy, as though the jaundice had returned. I couldn’t eat a thing or utter a word. I got ready for school, with a struggle, and then stood at the window watching for the postman. My mother said nothing – I looked so pitiful and it was a new emotion to feel pity, she later said, for her always aggressive elder daughter. I saw the postman on the other side of the road. He walked up the path and put something through the Gillespies’ door. Moments later Mrs Gillespie flung open her window and shouted to no one in particular, waving the envelope violently, ‘He’s passed! Colin’s passed for the Grammar School!’ I was by then on my own doorstep, anxious to take my envelope myself from the postman. He was almost level with our gate. He was level with it. He was past it… past it. My mother’s hands were on my shaking shoulders. ‘Just go to school,’ she whispered, ‘it can’t be helped.’ Walking stiffly, heart thudding, tears barely held back, a tragic little figure no doubt, I began to cross the side road to the bus stop. A milk float just missed me – ‘Look where you’re going!’ the milkman shouted. I wasn’t going anywhere, alas. I would be staying at Ashley Street. I heard my mother shout, but I thought she was just telling me to be more careful too, and kept on walking, one-two, one-two. Then she caught up with me, breathless, and shoved a brown envelope into my hand – ‘It was a mistake,’ she panted, ‘the postman came back. You’ve passed for the High School.’

  My happiness was overwhelming – I was ecstatic, such joy, such relief. It was miraculous. ‘I cannot write down how HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY I feel’ the diary was told. Suddenly I was sweetness and light at home, my spirits unquenchable, my optimism all-embracing. ‘Getting above herself already,’ my father muttered ominously, but my mother told him to let the child have her moment. She had to go down to the High School to see the headmistress, to be given instructions about rules and uniform. She came back apprehensive. ‘It’s such a big building,’ she told me when I plagued her for information. ‘There’s a huge hall, you’ll be lost in it.’ I knew I would not. ‘The headmistress is called Miss Wilson. She wears a black gown. You’ll have to do homework, you’ll have to have all this uniform. Look, I don’t know how we’ll manage.’ I looked at the list, savoured each item, adoring the very words, the very ordinary words – leather satchel, gym shoes, tie, V-necked pullover, navy raincoat-with-hood, obtainable at the school outfitters, Jespers.

  My mother came to life. ‘No,’ she said firmly, ‘it will have to be the Co-op. I can’t pay Jespers’ prices.’ I pleaded and pleaded but she was annoyed and told me not to be absurd, a gym-slip was a gym-slip wherever it was purchased, and Jespers were notorious for charging twice
what every other shop did. Even going to the Co-op would be ruinously expensive and I had to understand that. What I understood, and so did my mother really with her love of clothes, her sense of style, was that a gym-slip from the Co-op was never going to look like one from Jespers. Luckily, my grandparents were so proud of my amazing feat that they gave my mother the money for the uniform. ‘Get her the best,’ my grandfather growled. It was the first time I had ever liked him: the best could only mean Jespers.

  My mother still insisted on the Co-op for some basic items – she would not spend 4s. 6d. on a pair of white socks when the Co-op had identical ones for 1s. 11d. Since my clothes snobbery didn’t extend to socks I graciously conceded the point. It was enough that the gym-slip and blazer were bought at Jespers. My mother enjoyed going there as much as I did – she was haughty and dignified and her voice changed; she used her church voice to ask for ‘the larger size, please’ and to say ‘a little longer, I think’. The room in which the school uniforms were kept had a carpet on the floor and rows of solid wooden shelves and the assistants were very superior. They wore tape measures round their necks and called my mother ‘modom’. She was more than equal to the challenge of matching their hauteur. When we’d finished this exclusive shopping we went and had our tea in Binn’s café as a special treat. ‘I just hope you like this High School when you get there,’ my mother said, ‘after the carry-on you’ve made.’