by Katie King
Nobody had to wear uniform these days if they didn’t have it, although many schools encouraged the wearing of uniforms if possible. The relaxing of the rules was a government edict designed to help the poorer families, and because there were rumours clothes would be rationed at some point in the next year, in the eyes of many clothes just for school felt an extravagance too far. But as a lot of children had been evacuated in their previous school uniforms, Connie wasn’t surprised that the boys were all wearing neatly ironed white cotton shirts, and grey short-legged trousers. And she knew that Mabel had organised for donations of clothing to help many of the most disadvantaged children in the parish.
The children all going to ‘big school’ had been treated with a lot less excitement by the grown-ups at Tall Trees than when the evacuees had had to join their new primary school a year earlier, when the getting-ready-for-school on the first day had felt a real production the whole household was involved in.
In comparison, earlier this morning Mabel, Roger and Peggy had waved them off and had shouted repeated ‘good luck’s as they made their way down the road, and Mabel had packed their lunches for them. But that was about all the fuss that was made.
‘I suppose it’s because they think that if we’re old enough to be here, we’re old enough to sort ourselves out,’ Connie had replied when Jessie said as much. He knew what Connie meant, and he thought there was some truth in it. But it felt a big step to him, all the same.
After everyone except Angela rubbed the top of their shoe on the back calf of the opposite leg to dust away any motes before swapping legs, Tommy had been told that his collar was standing up on one side, and Larry that his shoelaces were coming undone and he should tie the bows with a double knot, they decided everything was as it should be. They didn’t want to let Roger and Mabel, or Peggy down. At least not on their very first day.
Tommy had been pushing Angela’s wheelchair, but now she looked up at him in a way that let him know she wanted to wheel herself the last bit, and so with only a little reluctance – as he wanted to show any new pupils whom he and Angela were about to meet that she was spoken for – Tommy stepped back and stood beside Larry.
All the other Tall Trees children understood, but nobody wanted to draw attention to Angela and Tommy’s silent dialogue.
As one, they all looked up and down the road, and they could see there were other children heading towards the school too, some looking very nervous.
The Tall Trees lot were proud they didn’t seem as scaredy-cat as these others, although privately each had a little pit of apprehension churning away in their stomachs now they were so close to entering the school grounds for the first time.
Well, all of them except for Connie, but then that was to be expected with her. Nothing seemed to bother her overmuch.
Jessie realised it helped a little in their stiff-upper-lip stakes that just before they’d left Tall Trees Peggy had doled out gobstoppers to each of them in individual twists of brown paper bag for the children to suck ‘on the way home’, with a casual aside as she made sure that each child had one that if it all felt a bit much during the day, then they could touch the gobstopper in their pockets to remember they were all clever and that the school was very lucky indeed that they were going to be its pupils for the foreseeable future, and that they were all very loved by herself and Roger and Mabel.
It was such a treat to have sweets as they were hardly ever available anymore (or if they were, Mabel and Peggy rarely saw to it that the children had them). And Peggy had been very insistent that the children weren’t to eat the gobstoppers until they headed back to Tall Trees at the end of the school day, and so the children had already made a pact that they would all pop the sweets into their mouths at the same time once the bell had rung for going home time.
Still, it all felt like something of a new beginning.
Jessie sneaked a look at Connie. Her head was high, and her shoulders back. Jessie envied his sister’s bright eyes and the determined set of her mouth, and he felt a little feeble in comparison. He sighed; it had been ever thus, he supposed.
Over the previous few days, the children had agreed that the new school was a signal for a new, more grown-up phase of their lives.
And so, with reluctance, they decided it was time to mothball the TT Muskets (short, naturally, for the Tall Tree Musketeers). Although it had been fun to come up with japes over the summer designed to irritate the Hull boys under the aegis of being in a gang, all of this felt a bit babyish now that they were about to spend time with children older than themselves, although Jessie couldn’t help but wonder if the Hull boys would say goodbye to their equivalent gang with the same ease that the Tall Trees children had.
Then Jessie had an even more sobering thought. He’d tried very hard not to think about them for a while, but after seeing the Hull boy near the dairy Jessie knew they were coming back into his life. And although these lads were older than the Tall Trees lot, they had clearly been in a gang in the summer. Presumably they didn’t see their rivalry with the TT Muskets as something babyish to be put away. What if those rowdy lads were planning some truly awful things that were still in store for Jessie and his friends? What was just as concerning was that the Hull boys attended the school that the Tall Trees children were standing in front of. It hardly bore thinking about.
Jessie heard himself swallow with apprehension. He hoped the others hadn’t caught this.
As the children made their way through their new school’s gates, Connie decided that the imposing stone buildings stood tribute to the fact that in all sorts of ways it was bolder and bigger – much bigger, in fact – than what they were used to. Clearly, this establishment was going to offer them a very different experience than what they had known up until then.
This school felt decidedly grown-up. It even had some tarmacked tennis courts; the droopy cast to the nets suggested the games resources were in some disrepair, although there was what Connie thought might be a netball court marked out alongside. Connie had never played tennis before, or indeed netball, but she rather fancied herself swinging a racket or shooting a ball at the netball hoop.
‘Have you noticed what’s over there, Aiden?’ she said, nodding her head in the direction of the courts. ‘What are our chances of being able to play on those, do you think?’
‘Lordy, I suppose it will depend on whether there’s a games master who can coach tennis,’ he said.
‘Or games mistress,’ Connie said pointedly, and Aiden had the grace to look as if he had been caught out and that he knew he shouldn’t have jumped to such an assumption.
Connie let him stew for a second or two, and then she added, ‘Looks interesting though. And at least we’ll have left the days of country dancing behind with all the rubbishy gypsy and daisy chain palaver. Don’t you think it looks much too grand here for something so, um, er …’
‘Parochial,’ Aiden finished for her as he knew Connie was still talking about the country dancing, and he and Connie laughed. Neither had ever enjoyed this activity, which their previous teacher at primary school had been much too fond of.
In fact those country dance lessons had nearly always degenerated into something of a melee when, during a progression, the boys would try to roughhouse the girls, and swing them around incredibly fast in the hope that they might fall over, at which point, inevitably, Connie would have to give the boys back as good as she could.
The resulting bumps and grazes had indeed got so out of hand the previous term that after Tommy came home with a spectacular swelling on his brow, Roger had had to go in to have a ‘little word’ with the teacher, much to Tommy’s chagrin.
After Roger’s visit, the teacher threatened the class sternly that unless everybody was gentlemanly and lady-like (she looked piercingly at Connie as she said ‘lady-like’) to each other at all times when dancing, then she’d have no option but to insist the girls danced with girls, and – horror! – the boys with boys.
This was
taken to heart by all concerned and there hadn’t been a single unbidden bruise or scraped knee after that. It hadn’t made any of the children enjoy country dancing the more though.
Once they’d crossed the open space inside the gates and were near to the school buildings, the children were immediately shepherded through the entrance by an older pupil wearing a ‘prefect’ pin, and down a wide passage towards a large hall.
They peeped into classrooms aligning the walkway through their open doors as they made their way to the hall, and it was clear that the school’s buildings were designed to be daunting, with tremendously high ceilings in each classroom, and huge windows that faced both to the outside and to the internal school corridors and that had sills so lofty that pupils sitting at their desks couldn’t look out and distract themselves by watching what was going on elsewhere.
The corridors were echoey, and the wooden bricks in the parquet flooring had been laid in an intricate herringbone design and had slight dips in them occasionally from having so many pupils and teachers walk on them.
At the front of each classroom was the teacher’s desk on a low dais, and beside this a big blackboard propped on three wooden legs.
The school was much, much grander than the primary school in Bermondsey that Jessie and Connie had attended with Larry and Angela – and Peggy had worked as a school teacher, a profession she knew she would have to give up once Holly was born – and Jessie felt awed by its grandeur and size. However, it still shared the whiff of boiled cabbage their primary school had always had too, and so although it did feel strange, it also was slightly familiar as well.
This school was unusual though, as it was loosely modelled on a grammar school, although without perhaps quite the emphasis on a grammar school’s academic achievement, having instead a bias towards technical skills such as wood- and metalwork.
Its youngest pupils were eleven years old and the eldest eighteen, although few stayed on that late, with the poorer children leaving at fourteen as their families needed the extra wage they could provide; nearly everyone else left at either fifteen or sixteen.
This latest intake of first-formers, as Connie and her pals were, had been requested to attend a day before the other years returned in order to register and learn their way about. This took a very long time indeed, the twins agreed.
It was livelier in the afternoon, as the head of year, a Latin master called Mr Sprout (no one dared giggle when his name was announced), told everyone that now the pupils were to be allocated their classes, called forms, the allocation based on each pupil’s previous year’s schooling.
Once they knew which class they were in, the pupils would then go to their tutor room where they would meet their tutor.
As names were read out, there was a lot of twisting and turning as everyone tried to get a glimpse of who else they were going to be taught with.
‘Aiden, just look at the size of each form, each one is going to be huge!’ hissed Jessie in an awed voice as he and Aiden waited to see where they would be sent.
Quickly Aiden totted up the numbers in all the various groups, and of those still to be called, and then he whispered out of the corner of his mouth in Jessie’s direction, ‘Looks like there’s goin’ t’ be no more than forty in each class. That’s good. My brother Kelvin said we might ’ave as many as fifty per teacher, but I don’t think that’ll be rightly so fer us.’
Jessie gulped. Ordinarily he enjoyed, quietly, being an active member of a class as learning was, generally, fun as far as he was concerned. But he didn’t much fancy the idea of putting his hand up to answer a question if there were going to be forty-nine people watching him, especially if he were then to slip up when giving an answer. This, coupled with the unspoken threat of the Hull boys, made him feel very circumspect.
Connie’s name was the first of the Tall Trees entourage to be called. To her horror, she was sent to the line for the lowest stream, 1E.
Immediately Aiden and Jessie were told that they should line up with the others in the top class, 1A, which they felt bad about as the timing seemed to rub Connie’s nose in it; they knew she would hate her 1E status being in such immediate contrast to their own academic proficiency.
It wasn’t long before Tommy and Angela were sent to the line for 1D, and then, after a long pause, so was Larry. 1D was the lower middling group, although Angela was informed almost immediately that because of her wheelchair she wouldn’t be able to attend any classes on the upper levels of the school because of the stairs. This meant that at these times the teachers would set her work and she would have to go to the library to study for a period quietly on her own. Angela shook her head sadly at this as she obviously didn’t want to spend what might be a large proportion of her lessons by herself.
Jessie looked anxiously over to Connie again to see how she was taking the news that she was in the lowest stream, now she had had several minutes to get used to it.
He found her staring back at him intently with over-bright eyes, and this made Jessie wonder if perhaps she might be teetering on the edge of tears, or whether they might be tears of temper as Connie often had a very short fuse.
Jessie knew his twin wouldn’t appreciate being so publicly shown up for having problems in the classroom. He’d always tried very hard never to draw attention to this, which wasn’t easy as, being twins, they were often compared to one another, and of course Jessie had the advantage that he found schoolwork came very naturally. He’d always felt intensely uncomfortable if anybody asked Connie why she wasn’t more like her brother in this respect. And if it all got a bit too much and his sister should succumb in public to a teary moment, Jessie knew that Connie would feel it to be a terrible loss of face. It was all terribly concerning and actually, the more he thought about it, the more Jessie couldn’t remember the last time he had seen Connie cry, whether it be in public or not. He really hoped that today wasn’t the time she broke her resolve never to sob.
As the children were sent away to meet their form tutors in their new classrooms, Jessie risked slipping briefly across the room to Connie’s side, where he said in what he hoped was as reassuring a way as possible, ‘They’ll have just made a silly mistake, Con, you wait and see. You’ll be back with the rest of us in no time. No time at all, you mark my words.’
Connie didn’t say anything although she blinked several times, and then she muttered in the smallest and softest voice that Jessie had ever heard her use, a voice that clutched at something to do with them being inextricably linked as twins, ‘I don’t think they have made a mistake, Jess. I’m sure of it. They’ve seen me for the stupid nitwit that I am.’
‘Well, you get first ride on Milburn then,’ said Jessie. He felt put on the spot and this was the best he could come up with. Connie’s sceptical gaze made him add, ‘When Milburn’s got his shoes on once more and we can ride him again, of course. And if you’re a nitwit, then I’m a, er, a nincompoop.’
Connie didn’t respond with even the tiniest smile.
Even Aiden, normally so good at saying the right thing at the most apposite time and being Connie’s special buddy at Tall Trees, seemed at a complete loss of how to deal with the situation now that he had crept close too. Eventually he told her in a very low voice, ‘You know, don’t you, Connie, that if I could change places with you, I would?’
Connie flashed the pair of them a fleeting but distinctly wobbly smile, and then she said with a dimpling of her chin and a downward tilt of her moth, ‘At least I won’t have to do Latin in my dunderheads group. I don’t think me and Latin are made to be best friends …’
And with that she trotted away to catch up with the rest of 1E as its last stragglers made their way to their classroom.
Jessie felt very strange as the sight of Connie’s straight and resolutely proud back was swallowed up by her new classmates.
He knew he passed at being taken for a bright boy, and so Jessie wasn’t particularly impressed at being chosen for the top stream as to his mind a
ll this showed was an ability to regurgitate what teachers had said.
In day-to-day life, Jessie had always found Connie to be braver than him, and much smarter too when it came to playing memory games (or indeed any sort of games, especially ones that involved lots of racing around and practical problem-solving), or counting cards for matchsticks (which Ted always told her she wasn’t to do, especially if she were ever playing cards in public, as this aptitude wasn’t going to win her any favours as some would take umbrage to her counting skills), or a nail-biting round of truth or dare, or indeed in any sort of problem-solving that required quick wits rather than bookish learning, and Jessie deemed it very odd that others didn’t see her similarly. In his opinion Connie was as sharp as a whip, although he was at a loss how to demonstrate this to anyone who didn’t know Connie well.
But the more he thought about it now, the more Jessie realised that he simply couldn’t understand why it was that Connie found her school lessons so difficult. He knew it wasn’t a case of her messing around and that she could achieve higher marks if she just put her mind to it.
The fact of it was though that Connie had never impressed any of her teachers, while he had been praised to the nines unnecessarily. And this just wasn’t fair to either of them.
As he took his seat in his new form room, Jessie felt like a minnow in a fast-flowing river that was threatening to send him tumbling out to sea, and he certainly wished he had a bit more of Connie’s bluff and bluster about him.
There were a lot of strange faces here, many of which didn’t look friendly in the slightest as the pupils banged the wooden tops of their desks closed after they’d put their possessions inside.
Right then, in Jessie’s eyes, bluff and bluster certainly seemed the best qualities for helping one get on in the world. He hoped nobody had seen him jump nervously when the first desk lid had been dropped with a bang.
