I started school with fair, curly hair. Two years later when I next saw our parents my hair was near-black and the dead straight it remained until my teens when the curl came back. ‘Darling! What’s happened to your golden curls?’ I didn’t know and, being shy with strangers, didn’t answer.
In those two years and again a year later Betty and I, and several other children with no English-based relatives able to have them, stayed at school during the holidays. Our situation was not exceptional in that time, or in the previous hundred or so years in Britain, and many boarding-schools catered accordingly.
In the holidays our Head kept on a skeleton domestic staff, often one mistress, and always stayed herself. We were well looked after, allowed to wear ‘holiday’ clothes and, as far as possible in any institution, to have a homely rather than Home atmosphere. We were allowed to play in areas forbidden in term: on the large pink-patterned rug on the polished front hall by the open door of the Head’s study; the wide back lawn cut and rolled to green velvet; or the massive rhododendron bushes backing the rose beds lining the lawn that made hide-and-seek territory and my private secret places. Beneath the bushes the ground was thick, soft and damp with old leaves, the giant purple and crimson flowers and dark green leaves shut out world and sky, but let the greenish light filter down like soft water alive with swimming insects. The insects never stung or frightened me, but if a ladybird plopped down she had instantly to be caught, carried out, placed on an external leaf and warned her house was on fire and children had flown. ‘Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home – quick! And don’t forget Ann’s under the frying-pan!’
We were taken for occasional ‘treats’ to the nearest seaside town and always to the same ultra-respectable tearoom where we ate the long iced buns we called White Mice and drank lemonade through straws. Teatime music was provided by a trio on a small platform backed by a multi-coloured paperbead curtain. The lady playing the piano, the lady playing the violin and the singing lady all had short bobbed hair, heavy fringes and rows of chunky glass beads round their thin necks. I liked the way they always seemed to play the same tunes, and I learnt the words of the songs before I could read and sang them tunelessly under the rhododendrons with the singing lady’s stresses, ‘What-TAIR befall I STILL recall that SUNlit mountain SIDE …’ ‘I want TO BE happy but I can’t be HAPPY till I make you HAPPY toooooo …’ Sometimes the singing lady played another violin and then, whatever the non-vocal number, the trio played as if their lives depended on their finishing it at record speed. The fringes bounded up and down, the chunky beads swirled from side to side, and at the end we children clapped enthusiastically and even the adult customers joined in, occasionally.
If one of us had a birthday we had a party amongst ourselves, wore party dresses and clung impatiently to the backs of chairs whilst Grace was said. ‘For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us – girls, please! A birthday party is no excuse for bad manners. No scraping of chairs, please. Now – for what we are about to receive …’
The one long table in use in the large dining-room was transformed with crackers, paper hats, bowls of lemon and orange jelly decorated with hundreds and thousands, the plates of banana sandwiches and white mice without which no treat was complete and the iced, candled birthday cake long-ordered from Suez, Singapore, Hong Kong, Madras. ‘Big breath, dearie, and all out in one blow. Have you remembered to wish?’ Then the chorus, ‘We wish, we wish, your wish comes true’, and had to be answered, ‘I wish, I wish, the same to you.’ (No singing of Happy Birthday as that custom had still to cross the Atlantic.)
At Christmas a tree was set in the dining-room’s great bay window. We helped with the decorations and piled round the tree’s foot the parental parcels ordered from England or heavy with foreign stamps, stout string and sealing wax. ‘Quiz – my Chinese stamps?’ ‘Ego!’ ‘Not fair – bags I – I said it first!’ ‘Didn’t—’ ‘Snubs to you, smartie – did, did, did!’ ‘Children, please! This is not a nice way for little girls to talk to each other!’ On Christmas Day we sang carols round the tree and some of the bigger children cried and those too young to remember Christmas with their parents could not understand why.
But I was never too young to feel or forget the bleak cloak of loneliness that settled over the shoulders on the last day of term when all that lingered in the classrooms were the empty desks, the smells of damp blackboard dusters, chalk and lead. Or to have permanently in memory the silent cluster of children looking out of a front classroom window at the other girls’ luggage being loaded into the station van and watching the empty drive after the van disappeared through the gates. Or those nights in the ‘babies’ dormitory, one of the smallest in the school and set across the corridor from the Head’s bedroom. The pines outside the windows cast flickering shadows over walls, empty white-quilted beds and dressing-table mirrors; shadows that elongated to clutching fingers or shaped unknown monsters that had to be evil, as they came by night. Echoing in from the dark Sussex countryside, the hoot of a solitary owl, scream of a hunted rabbit, or unnatural swish-swoosh of a bat, evoked a sweating terror to be sweated out with the head under the blankets, the only comfort a much-forbidden sucking thumb, until the glorious moment too early to place when my mind began telling me the stories that ever after at school provided an absolute refuge from the terrors of darkness and turned the night into my friend. Every holiday morning brought nearer the golden day when ‘the others’ came back and the holiday-stayers watched with grim smugness the new girls’ tears.
When I was five, for a few halcyon months our parents took Betty and me back to Suez and imported an English governess to teach us. In Suez was the home I had loved and forgotten until I clambered up the steps to the shaded verandah running round the house and saw our old head house-boy (we had eleven Egyptian ‘house-boys’) smiling and bowing in his spotless long white gown. I flung myself at him and slid instinctively into the fluent Arabic that had been my first spoken language. I never recall sprinkling my English with Arabic at school but the return to Suez produced total recall, to the profound disapproval of our new governess, Miss Y. ‘Nice little girls must not gossip with servants in their heathen tongue … no, no, no, child! Say “Please God make me a good little girl” not – whatever it was you said!’
‘Inshallah, Miss Y, and that means—’ (Roughly, as Allah wills it).
‘You mustn’t talk of Allah when saying your prayers to God —’
‘But Allah means God!’
‘That’s enough, child! Now then, into bed and once I’ve tucked in your mosquito netting all round – so – no undoing it or sucking the netting or you’ll get typhoid as well as malaria.’
‘Imshi!’ (Go away!)
‘And what, pray, does that word mean?’
‘“Sorry”,’ I lied to please her, and before she had left the bedroom I had convinced myself it was a more polite translation. She was an angular, ageless Englishwoman who wore shapeless cotton dresses and a disapproving expression. Mother’s elegant, spectacularly Spanish appearance and attitudes and insistence on personally supervising the daily boiling of all drinking water, the soaking of all fresh vegetables and fruit in Condés Fluid solution, and the boiling time of all cooked food by our cook and his army of assistant relatives, upset Miss Y’s notions of English suburban respectability, though it spared us all from typhoid, dysentery and even ‘gippy tummy’. She equally disapproved of the heat, the flies, the sun, the sand, the Arabs, Egyptians, Sudanese and Nubians, whom she referred to as ‘the natives’ in tones of doom that puzzled me, as I loved our kind, gentle-voiced household staff who had spoiled and indulged me from my cradle.
When out of doors all the British wore solar topees with rounded crowns and oblong brims; lined externally with white duck, internally with dark green. Dark green, thin muslin veils were suspended over our front topee brims and tied firmly round our necks by Miss Y before any outing. The veil tasted of dirt, sand and salt.
‘Stop eating your veil
again, child! I don’t know why you haven’t got typhoid …’
Inshallah.
The ETC had a cablehouse in the desert and often we were driven out to picnic in the narrow shadow of the low stone building. The hot desert air was laced with oil from the great refineries at Port Tufek, the pungency of the mis-named Sweet Water Canal, and an eternity of scorched sand. Miss Y sat bolt upright against the cablehouse wall, and surveyed with distaste the smooth, secretly shifting waves of the seemingly petrified white ocean. ‘Pity this desert has so much sand, children. Quite pleasant, if only there wasn’t all this messy sand.’
Other picnics within sight of the Suez Canal were magical – when we sprawled face down on the hot sand in the shade of a huge oil pipe the Canal became invisible and the ships gliding slowly up or down in single-file convoys glided on sand, silently as dreams.
One day when our parents were away until evening, despite warnings from our head house-boy that there was talk in the bazaar of a coming sandstorm, Miss Y insisted on taking us for our mid-morning walk along the fringe of the desert. Our head house-boy after further attempts to dissuade her retreated into inshallahs. ‘Lot of nonsense,’ said Miss Y striding out. ‘Lovely clear sky. A good walk’ll do us all good.’ We were away from the houses and shacks and probably not more than a few hundred yards into the desert when the sun suddenly became a red haze and a red-brown curtain unrolled from the sky and rushed towards us. Miss Y grabbed our hands, ‘Run, children, run! Back to the nearest house!’ But we had been long enough children of the desert to defy her, and pulled her down on the sand. ‘Flat on your face, Miss Y, hang onto your topee, jam the brim into the sand and keep your eyes and mouth shut – hang on to your topee or you won’t breathe!’ In seconds the sandstorm reached us and slashed with hot stinging whips bare arms and legs until we were buried. When the storm rolled on we dug ourselves out, and despite topees and veils our hair, faces, nostrils, mouths and bodies were caked with sand. Betty and I thought it all very funny, but Miss Y and our parents did not. A few weeks later Miss Y returned to England. Shortly after, a dog with suspected rabies blundered into our kitchen and bit Father when he caught it. Next morning he vanished to the Pasteur Institute in Cairo for treatment and not long after his return we sailed back to England and boarding-school.
I lost count of the times we sailed the Mediterranean in the 1920s in the old orange and black painted P & O liners with names echoing the British Raj – Kaisar-i-Hind, Rawalpindi and so many others. Homeward-bound, the British returning from India were easily identifiable as their faces were the deepest yellow and their skins, whatever the age, the most dried-up. The mid-morning beef tea and little square dry biscuits tasted nicer in the Bay of Biscay than in the Mediterranean, unless we sailed during the equinoxes. Then old Med. hands with strong stomachs would nod to each other as the fiddles came up round the tables in the dining-saloon, and the deck-chairs and occupants vanished from the open decks. ‘The Med.’s far worse than the Bay this time of the year. Typical of St Paul to sail at the equinox. Man was a born martyr.’
Being then a good sailor and already addicted to my lifelong habit of listening to strangers’ conversations, I glowed with smugness at knowing about St Paul and longed for our ship to be shipwrecked and give me a chance to strike water from any handy rock. But the liners pitched, rolled and creaked on through the gales. ‘So here you are again, dearie,’ said our Headmistress, ‘and quite lost your rosy cheeks. Never mind. Soon have them back.’
She was a small, stout, Oxford M.A., with an untidy grey bun skewered to the top of her head, with outsize hairpins which she shed as the leaves in autumn. Her stern manner could reduce parents and her staff to speechless jellies; but not her pupils, as she never used sarcasm on us, was genuinely fond of children and we knew it. Apart from the pupil-teacher, all her staff were graduates and, as herself, single women. But I never remember our Head making any pretence of preparing us for anything but marriage. She was an ardent upholder of the married state, the importance of good manners, good deportment, wool next to the skin, the Church of England, the Book of Common Prayer, the New – but not the Old – Testament, and Gregory Powders all round the junior dormitories on Saturday nights.
She only taught Scripture and often devoted half the period to social education. This did not include human biology. Throughout my school years the word ‘sex’ was only mentioned in language classes. But by eleven I knew how essential were good shoes and gloves. ‘Never forget, girls, one can always tell a lady by her gloves and shoes.’ And I knew the sight of my sitting with crossed legs would inevitably mean social ruin. ‘No nice girl ever crosses her legs when sitting, girls. Knees and feet together, if you please.’
‘But, please – it’s so uncomfortable—’
‘Dearie, no lady is ever concerned with her physical comfort on social occasions. Il faut souffrir pour être belle – you, child, translate! Quite right. Yes?’
‘Please, why is it so wrong to cross your legs?’
‘That is not a nice question, child! Nice girls do not ask such questions. Now, as I was saying – at first St Paul was most reluctant to allow the young John Mark …’
Probably no one born in Britain since 1939 can properly appreciate the effect of that throttling ‘nice’ on my generation of middle-class British women. Every adult responsible for our formative years interminably stressed the vital necessity of being nice: the alternative was to be fast. Not only social but economic ruin awaited fast girls, since British women in the 1930s (as the 1970s) were overwhelmingly, socially and economically dependent on their husbands. No nice boy would consort with a fast girl, and if the wretched creature survived to adulthood she became a loose woman. That no gentleman would marry a loose woman we knew as surely as we knew nice girls and nice boys grew up to be ladies and gentlemen. Our Head preferred ‘gentle-women’ to ‘ladies’, but allowed the latter as she liked to keep abreast with changing times. That there might somewhere be a world not wholly composed of ladies and gentlemen was never mentioned. We were told how to recognize a nice boy at sight: when shaking a nice girl’s gloved right hand a nice boy took off his own right glove first and looked briefly, politely ONLY at her nice face. This dictum caused considerable confusion in a dormitory of thirteen-year-olds, as then we had met boys on holiday, and observed their unaccountable preoccupation with our legs and newly bulging bosoms. As most of us had acne, we decided sadly but truthfully that our faces weren’t really very nice.
We talked of boys in giggling whispers in the dormitory or when changing shoes in the basement bootroom, but pregnancy and babies were such taboo words that I recall no occasion when either were mentioned. The word ‘intercourse’ conveyed nothing to me until my gynaecological lectures in 1942. The official and approved description for this dangerous ignorance was ‘girlish innocence’.
But as the onset of puberty and its concomitant upsurge of unmanageable emotions demanded an outlet, some girls had crushes on older girls or younger mistresses. These were officially discouraged, but as they rarely went beyond sighs, giggles, and saving chairs by the dining-room fire and hot cups of cocoa for the current beloved senior at mid-morning break (the juniors reached the dining-room first), the syndrome flourished pretty continuously amongst the elevens to thirteens. By fourteen, if not before, most of us on holidays had had our first dates with boys and, once the emotional interest was transferred to a young male, the need for a crush nearly always disappeared.
The other girls’ crushes worried me until I was nearly fourteen, as I could not understand them. Father had then retired, Betty had left school and was living with our parents in the small, semi-detached house in St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, which Father had bought on mortgage. In the holidays I had met boys and discovered I preferred them to girls. During the term I was quite happy to make do with an overworked set of fantasy figures I used in rota, as male leads in the particular heroic saga evolved to suit my particular mood. Whatever the setting and theme, every saga e
nded with a climatic holocaust from which either the boy rescued me or vice versa and we were both tremendously gallant.
At thirteen I was still desperately anxious to conform in all respects. As to be in fashion I had to have a crush, I decided to pretend one. First I had to find my crush. I looked the staff over in morning prayers. They stood in order of seniority against the wall a few feet from the music mistress at the piano, and, with the exception of the sturdy gym mistress in navy serge gym tunic and long brown woollen stockings, favoured limp hand-knitted jumpers and cardigans in muted shades of mud, sensible tweed skirts, lisle stockings and laced brogues. After close observation I decided I was not a good enough actress and did a second survey on the senior girls. Finally, without enthusiasm, I picked the hockey captain for two reasons; I wanted to get into the First Eleven and as she was tall and thin I could pretend she was a boy in disguise. I began working mentally on a new saga in the first verse of ‘Heavenly Father Send Thy Blessing On Thy Children Gathered Here’. Before we were marched out to Percy Grainger’s Country Gardens the hockey captain was a Middle European prince hiding out in a girls’ school to save his ailing father’s throne. His regal mother had so movingly begged him to flee that my form mistress interrupted her opening address to ask if I had a cold. ‘No? Then don’t sniffle, girl! It’s not nice.’
Our classroom was nearest the dining-room. At the break-bell, I charged ahead, uptilted a chair by the fire to mark it ‘bagged’, collected a hot mug of cocoa and when the seniors arrived presented both to the astonished hockey captain. I had then to queue for my own cooling cocoa and join the juniors masochistically shivering well away from the fire. Suddenly reality broke through, and for the first of countless subsequent occasions in life I decided that if others were prepared to put up with, or even enjoy, this situation, I was not. Anyway, I brooded, any prince fool enough to take refuge amongst giggling girls and wear navy gym slip, purple jersey, long black stockings, navy woollen bloomers with white cotton linings, Chilprufe vest, and stays – the hockey captain being too flat-chested for that daring innovation, a brassière, recently permitted to the more developed girls – was clearly a mother’s boy who deserved to lose his throne and would get no help from me when struck by fire and flood. The end-of-break bell ended my only crush and last conscious desire to conform in all respects.
No Time For Romance Page 3
