Goodness, Grace and Me

by Julie Houston

  I remember being so shy I could hardly eat. I couldn’t quite work out how to balance my plate as well as the cup of weak, fragrant tea that my dad, if he’d been there, would have referred to as ‘gnat’s piss’. Even Grace was subdued, on her best behaviour, and I think that was Mary Goodners’ intention. It may have been the eighties, the workers no longer doffed their flat caps to ‘the missus’, and the servants had been whittled down to one ‘daily’, but she was sure as hell not going to let us forget her status as mill owner’s wife.

  On the journey home, I was the last to be dropped off by Amanda’s father. It had been an unusually warm September that year, and quite a number of the local kids were still out, swooping around the estate on bikes, unconsciously imitating the gathering swallows that within weeks would be gone. Any credibility I might still have had about being one of them, despite my ascent to the Grammar School, was finally and irrevocably squashed at the sight of Frank Goodners’ Rolls-Royce drawing up in front of our garden that evening. I walked the gauntlet of a score of eyes, flagrant or hidden behind net curtains, and I felt myself to be different.

  My adoration of Amanda continued throughout that year. I would try to catch a glimpse of her in assembly as she sat with the other sixth-formers in their hallowed positions behind the teachers. A smile bestowed as we moved from one lesson to the next along the corridor would fill me with a glow far superior to that resulting from the porridge forced upon me by my mother at breakfast now that the winter mornings were here.

  Eighteen months later and Amanda was half way through her final year at school and head girl. Grace and I were fourteen-year-old rebels at the mercy of our hormones as was anyone brave enough or daft enough to cross us. My poor mother, who, having given birth to me relatively late in life, had her own hormones to contend with, came second only to those in authority at school. Being grammar school girls, and knowing that any defiance towards staff would end ultimately in expulsion, our militancy was of the cowardly variety, as we vented our adolescent insolence on the foot soldiers that policed the corridors and cloakrooms rather than the generals in charge of the battle.

  Amanda, once our darling, took her responsibilities very seriously indeed and had, to us, now crossed over to the side of authority. Grace, always passionately loyal to those she loved, felt particularly let down by what she regarded as Amanda’s traitorous change of allegiance, and renamed her ‘Little Miss Goodness’. She then went out of her way to goad Amanda into confrontation. She would wear her beret pinned to the back of her head so that, when Amanda demanded to know why she wasn’t wearing it, Grace was able to turn in mock surprise and assure her that indeed she was. Lip gloss, mascara, chewing gum and, eventually, cigarettes were all confiscated, but it was the incident in the games shed that tolled the death knell on our former adoration.

  Being in the dusty shed at lunchtime, instead of braving the north wind that regularly blew off the Pennine hills and swept across the playground, was an offence in itself, but with its racks of hockey sticks and ancient shin pads and its profuse atmosphere of sweat, dust and linseed oil, the shed was a haven in which Grace, myself and our gang of four others would regularly find refuge.

  This particular lunchtime we were huddled into a corner, our duffle coats a barrier against the draughts that threatened to permeate our bones, engrossed in a game of ‘Consequences’.

  At the very moment that Grace opened the multi-folded scrap of paper, the shed door opened to reveal Amanda with a posse of senior prefects. My eyes met Amanda’s cool, measured stare as, simultaneously, my warning toe failed to marry with any part of Grace’s anatomy.

  ‘Right, listen to this,’ Grace guffawed as she quickly scanned the paper before standing to read. ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Mr Hardcastle met Amanda Goodners down by the canal. He said: ‘I know what you want darlin’!’ She said: ‘It’s a blow job for you, Randy Pants!’ And the consequence was: A flock of little piglets.’

  ‘A flock of piglets? Pigs don’t come in flocks do they?’ continued Grace. ‘I bet you wrote that, Hattie!’ Even at fourteen she would argue the toss over details that she felt weren’t quite right.

  ‘We didn’t quite catch all that, Grace.’ Amanda’s voice was pure steel. ‘Please read it again. I’m particularly riveted by my response to Mr Hardcastle.’

  Grace turned, her face ashen, the scrap of incriminating paper a tight ball in her sweaty hand.

  ‘Oh come on, Grace. I’ve never known you lost for words before. I’d very much like to hear again what I apparently said to our school caretaker.’

  Grace remained rooted to the spot while the rest of us dealt with the situation in our own particular way. Sarah Armitage was blinking madly, the whole of her facial features convulsed in a bizarre Saint Vitus Dance, while Clare Hargreaves was staring intently at a spot on the floor a few inches from her feet. My fingernails were gouging a valley into the palm of each hand as I held them imprisoned in my coat pockets.

  Grace seemed to shake herself, sighing slightly before opening the crumpled paper. With her eyes fixed on the paper, the slight tremor of her hand the only indication that she was about to seal her fate, Grace spoke the words that would condemn the six of us as profane, grubby-minded miscreants.

  Almost twenty-five years on the ructions that were caused by this little lunchtime incident hardly seem credible, but the fall out was far reaching. We were hauled in front of Miss Seddon, the ageing despot whose demise as head teacher would come about only with the extinguishing of the town’s Grammar Schools a few years later, and made to hand over the incriminating piece of crumpled paper. Not only had our smutty little game insulted and degraded our head girl and school caretaker (who unfortunately happened to be a snooker-playing friend of my dad down at the British Legion), we had also shown a flagrant disregard for school rules by being found in a place that was strictly out of bounds. This was the icing on the cake for Amanda as far as our behaviour was concerned. As we stood, condemned, in the dock of Miss Seddon’s study, Amanda unburdened herself with a litany of our misdemeanours over the previous six months, and sentence was passed.

  We were excluded from the premises for a week and given a warning, both verbally and via the letter that was posted home, as to our future conduct in school.

  ‘Oh and just one more thing, Grace.’ Amanda’s voice was triumphant as she caught up with us on the way back to the classroom to collect our things. ‘Keep your grubby little adolescent mitts off Jonathon Farrell. Get back to the nursery where you belong and stay there until you’re old enough to play with the big boys.’

  Ah, so that’s what this was all about. I’d warned Grace she was crackers to flirt with Amanda’s gorgeous boyfriend, but she would take no heed and, to be fair, he had come on to her, even snogged her once against the wall of Studio 89 coffee bar in town. The dangerous thrill of a two-minute encounter with the enemy’s boyfriend must have been immense.

  ‘But what exactly had you written?’ my mum had asked, perplexed as to how such a game, resurrected each Christmas by Granny Morgan after the Queen’s Speech, could possibly have led to such disgrace.

  Giving the honest answer, ‘our head girl was fellating Dad’s snooker partner down by the canal’, was never on the cards, not least because I doubted my mum knew what a blow job was. Mind you, I was fairly much in the dark myself as to the intricacies involved in the whole ghastly sounding procedure, believing it to be largely a product of Sarah Armitage’s overactive imagination. I spent the week banished to my room, ashamed to meet my mum’s hurt eyes, and avoiding my Dad’s all-knowing ones. Diana thought my fall from grace was a hoot, constantly expanding on the fact that she, and my brother John, might only have got as far as the local comp, but they’d never brought such disgrace to the family.

  The whole tawdry incident might have been forgotten, or passed into the annals of school history to be resurrected as ‘Do you remember …?’ over a glass of wine on a girls’ night out, had Amanda not moved i
n on my brother, John and, in his words, ‘ruined my life for ever.’

  Chapter 8

  Two things happened during the week that followed Nick’s declaration he was quitting his job. Firstly, Wells Trading, the company just outside Midhope that had employed Nick since the demise of The Pennine Clothing Company, decided that if he was handing in his notice and leaving them, he could jolly well go right now without further ado. By that Monday evening Nick had been ordered to clear his desk, been escorted from the premises by security – presumably to prevent his taking anything that might assist in a new venture – and was now officially out of work.

  While I cringed at the thought of him being escorted off site like a criminal in full view of all the other rubber-necking employees, Nick was more than delighted that he’d not actually had to work his month’s notice.

  He spent the next few days in cahoots with David Henderson, and by Thursday he’d left on the first of his fact-finding trips to Milan.

  The second thing to happen was that changelings came in the middle of the night, spirited away Kit, and left one of their own in his place: that’s the only explanation for Kit’s rapid descent into teenage hell. He looked remarkably the same, apart from hair that seemed to have grown several inches overnight, and a school uniform, bought only a month ago for the new term, that now appeared to have shrunk in the wash. With a week to go until his fourteenth birthday, he’d metamorphosed into a monosyllabic, grunting adolescent.

  The signs had been there, I suppose, but with my full attention given over to Nick and his madness, I’d chosen to ignore them. I felt bereft. Not only had Nick deserted me for David Henderson and Italy, Kit seemed intent on getting on with new ventures that certainly didn’t include his mother, but certainly did include the opposite sex. He was suddenly spending an inordinate amount of time in his room playing music that sounded alien to my (eighties- music-loving) ears, and communicating relentlessly with all and sundry on Facebook.

  I had little experience of this. Liberty, at fifteen, was too disdainful of spots, greasy hair and puppy fat to have ever embraced the adolescent stereotype that her brother appeared to have taken on with remarkable speed and gusto. To be fair, his hair, the same dirty-blonde as Nick’s, was washed too often in the shower (hogged morning and night) to be anything other than floppily clean and shiny and, while I’d noticed that several of his friends seemed to have outgrown their faces, leaving their noses and lips at odds with the rest of their features, Kit had managed to keep everything in proportion.

  Grace, who’d come with India and me to watch Kit play rugby for the school team on the Saturday morning following Nick’s departure for Italy, commented as such as twenty-two or so fourteen-year-old boys fought for the ball on the frost-hardened playing field.

  ‘Why is it that these privately educated boys have long, flowing locks, while the kids we teach all seem to have number one buzz cuts?’

  I pondered this. ‘Maybe it’s just that the boys who leave us at eleven start to let their grow hair when they get to High School? I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, they all look so much more attractive than the fourteen-year-old boys we came across when we were their age. Don’t you remember how the boys from the Boys’ Grammar School all had suppurating blackheads and cheese-and-onion breath? The boys here are demi-gods compared to the ones in our day.’

  ‘Probably something to do with the tan they all still have from exotic holidays with Mummy and Daddy,’ I laughed. ‘Does wonders for spots. And I bet half these boys go to their mothers’ hair salons and get highlights for their hair. Having a gorgeous, well-groomed teenage son is as much a designer accessory as the latest Chloe handbag,’ I added as I turned to make sure India was still in hailing distance. Over by the touchline stood a gaggle of teenage girls, their shiny GHD straightened hair and incredibly skinny jeans tucked into flat, fleecy boots lending them a uniformity they’d probably spent hours trying to achieve. Nothing worse than being out of place amongst your teenage peers.

  ‘I hate to tell you this but I think your son is one of the main attractions on the pitch,’ Grace commented idly as she turned her attention to the girls on the touchline.

  ‘What makes you think that?’ I asked, squinting to get a better look.

  ‘‘Go, Kit!’ on their home-made banner is a bit of a giveaway,’ she laughed.

  ‘These girls are so forward,’ I exclaimed. ‘Kit’s constantly on his mobile, receiving texts from them. I’ve threatened him with no birthday money if he brings the damned thing to the dinner table once more. It’s very disconcerting when we’re enjoying a nice shepherd’s pie and there’s a relentless bleeping and buzzing coming from his groin.’

  ‘His groin?’ Grace laughed, the first I’d heard from her for what seemed a long while.

  ‘He keeps the phone in his trouser pocket hoping we won’t notice the constant activity going on down there. One girl rang at ten-thirty on the landline the other evening when Kit was in the shower. I told the little hussy he was fast asleep in bed.’

  Grace laughed again. ‘I bet he loved you for that.’

  I handed Grace a beaker of coffee from the flask I’d brought with me, and she curled her leather-clad hands around its heat while stamping her feet in order to bring back some warmth. We did seem to be having a very early cold snap. If it carried on like this I wouldn’t be able to do much to my new garden. My dad had been up to dig around and straighten out my plot a little during the week, but the ground was very hard and progress had been slow.

  The insurance people were due to pay a visit to assess damage and loss after our fire and I’d already had a lovely evening poring over gardening catalogues in order to choose a new potting shed and replacements for the garden tools that had gone up in smoke. I reckoned that if we were going to have a new shed, we might as well have a proper job – one in which I could actually potter. Maybe even have a comfy chair down there so I could escape and read my book in peace.

  ‘Dan’s not coming back, you know,’ Grace suddenly said as she continued to watch the scrum in the middle of which Kit appeared to be coming off rather badly.

  ‘Have you seen him?’ I asked as I refilled her coffee mug.

  ‘He actually took me out for dinner last night. We were very civilised and we talked about what we both wanted.’

  ‘And? What is it that he wants?’

  ‘A stress-free life away from me, I reckon. Says he loves me, but can’t live with me at the moment. Says I don’t realise how much he’s suffered with not being able to become a father. I suppose I never really looked at it that way. Anyway, he’s going to carry on living at the corporate flat for the moment.’ Grace paused before adding, ‘And just for the record he’s going to carry on seeing Camilla.’

  ‘Oh, wonderful,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, Grace, but I think he’s being an absolute shit. He wants his mistress and his wife and he’s making out that you’re the baddy in all this. He’s basically saying that you’ve become neurotic and that you’ve driven him into the arms of another woman. And just to even it all up a little more you’re supposed to feel sorry for him because you’ve not been able to produce a baby. If he were that bothered he’d be here with you, holding your hand and trying to work out what to do next. Oh, and by the way, ‘he still loves you!’ Typical male – blaming anybody but himself for having an itch in his boxers!’

  Grace opened her mouth to defend Dan, but then saw my face, thought better of it and sighed, ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re right.’

  The whistle to signal the end of the match sounded from the far end of the pitch and Kit and his team trooped off towards the changing rooms. Having spent much of the game talking to Grace, I wasn’t quite sure who’d actually won, but from the way Kit’s team walked with their heads down, I assumed they hadn’t.

  In the car on the way home Kit, who with a nod and a grunt had confirmed his team’s defeat, turned to me and said, ‘I’ve been invited to a party tonight. Can I go?’

  ‘I don
’t see why not. Whose is it, where is it and who’s going?’ I replied.

  ‘Some girl’s over near Blackbrough.’

  ‘Blackbrough? Oh, Kit, that’s miles away.’ This was the trouble with your kids going to school with children from all over the county – you spent your weekends doing nothing but ferrying, like an unpaid taxi driver, from one end of it to the other.

  ‘What time does it start and what time do you need picking up? Remember there’s only me doing the taxi driving this weekend with Dad still in Italy.’

  ‘Well, it starts about six o’clock and finishes at twelve.’

  ‘Midnight? But it’s an hour’s journey there and an hour back. I really don’t fancy doing that at that time of night. And what am I supposed to do with India?’

  ‘I actually meant twelve o’clock tomorrow.’

  ‘What, stay there all night? No way, Buster. You’re thirteen years old for heaven’s sake.’

  Kit tutted and rolled his eyes. ‘Fourteen next week, Mum. Everyone’s going.’

  ‘And what sort of parents allow their thirteen-year-old daughter to have an all-night party? With boys?’ And alcohol, drugs and sex, I added, silently, for good measure.

  ‘I suppose you think there’s going to be alcohol, drugs and sex there,’ Kit tutted again.

  ‘No, I wasn’t thinking that, Kit.’ I lied. ‘Who is this girl, and if you’ve been invited where’s the invitation? And where do you all propose sleeping?’

  ‘She’s called Tara, no one gives invitations anymore and her mum and dad will be there. And I suppose we’ll sleep wherever we can.’

  ‘No way,’ I repeated, more firmly this time. ‘You are far too young to be gadding about and sleeping out all night. Do you know I was eighteen before I went to an all-night party and even then I had to tell your Granny Keturah I was staying at a friend’s house for the night because I knew there was no way she would have let me go.