Too Marvellous for Words

by Julie Welch

  ‘I remember going to the GP with a sore throat and a cough and it was, “Take your bra off”,’ hoots someone else. ‘Touching up on the bazooka side of things. I had no idea that wasn’t on! A few months later, I saw in the paper he’d been had up.’

  ‘As our parents were in Kenya, we lived with our grandmother,’ says Joanna, ‘and when I was fourteen, Nana sat at the end of my bed and said she needed to talk to me about something. “This deed happens when you’re married and it isn’t very pleasant but it’s a duty that has to be done. The man’s private bit goes into your private bit and all you have to do is lie there and think of something else. And you don’t want to think about it at all.” I mean, I’d read about it in books and I thought it was meant to be quite nice.’

  ‘Felixstowe College being by the sea led to interesting sex lessons,’ says Gill. ‘Alexa and I weren’t the only people whose first experience of the real thing was coming across a couple on the beach directly in front of Cranmer one afternoon. God knows what we were doing going for a walk along the beach in Upper Four (it was my first term, I was twelve) but it was fascinating, and we watched for ages.’

  We look more closely at the photo, at an immaculately groomed, slightly crone-like figure with impeccably ‘done’ hair.

  ‘Oh my God, Cawley!’ someone exclaims. “The future for girls is Science! We MUST have more Science!” ’

  ‘Miss Pipe!’ one of the Latimers screeches. ‘This girl has a box of TWENTY-FOUR Tampax!’

  The sixth-form students giggle and look quizzical.

  ‘Cawley taught Chemistry and she was also the Latimer House mistress,’ we tell them. ‘She was terrifying and mad.’

  ‘She was obsessed with Tampax,’ explains Sukie. ‘Once, one of us came back from a long weekend with a large box of twenty-four. We were all having a go after Lights Out when we heard Miss Pipe, our matron, stomping along the corridor, so someone seized the evidence and threw it out of the window into the bushes. The next morning, the head gardener spotted us walking down to breakfast and said, “Them rhododendrons have grown some very funny blooms.” ’

  Another Latimer chips in. ‘Did you ever hear about that sixth-former who had to stay on an extra day at the end of summer term? Her parents were based abroad and that was the earliest she could get a flight out. Every house had to be cleared and cleaned out from top to bottom because Jonah rented them out to that Jewish summer school, so when the taxi arrived to take her to the station she had to leave behind a bag of used STs because there was nowhere to get rid of them. She was waiting for her train when suddenly Cawley flew at her and emptied the bag over her. On Felixstowe station platform.’

  ‘It must have been some ten years ago when I spotted her death notice in the Daily Telegraph,’ says Chrissie. ‘I was amazed to find out she was only just eighty. She seemed nearly that age when she taught us.’

  ‘Someone rang me up and said, “Are you going to the funeral?” ’ says Sukie. ‘I said, if I do it’ll only be to make sure she’s really dead.’

  Coffee is accompanied by a long session of whatever-happened-to . . .? Some there is news of: the one who came out; the one who may actually have been a spy, though of course she couldn’t talk about it; the mousey little thing who went blonde and became frightfully successful in business; the girl who became something big in hotels and ended up marrying her driver. Others have disappeared without trace. What of the one who went off to be an actress but ended up as some sort of mad stalker? The anorexic one who agreed to eat prawns, so everyone else wished they had anorexia too, in spite of the fact she’d started looking like a wire coat hanger? And she’d been such a gorgeous girl, too – all the juniors had pashes on her.

  ‘What’s a pash?’ asks one of the students, pausing with the cafetière.

  ‘It was a bit like the marriage market,’ says Lindy. ‘The pecking order of your form against the pecking order of theirs. You had to remember her birthday, and give her a piece of your birthday cake on yours. Mine was a prefect. We were in Lower Four and everyone organised it so I was left alone in the cloakroom with her. I had to kiss her, otherwise the two of us wouldn’t be properly pashed up.’

  A Tyndale pipes up. ‘The ultimate was to kiss them goodnight. I didn’t know whether to kiss mine on the mouth or the cheek.’

  And there are sad stories as well. There’s nothing more guaranteed to make you feel mortal than learning that people you remember so clearly as dear little Lower Fours or goddess-like Big Girls, so vividly, wonderfully alive, aren’t here anymore – viciously snuffed out by cancer or a car crash. (‘It wasn’t even her fault. Another vehicle slammed into the back of hers and sent her into eternity!’)

  But for me this is all drama and tragedy at one remove. It’s something else, not remotely sad, that sets off the emotion and makes my tears threaten to kick in, and that’s when we Skype Wisty in the States.

  Wisty was a Cranmer, so I didn’t see much of her in term time, but she lived near me in Essex, and she became my ‘holidays friend’. We spent whole days at each other’s house. On some memory card in my head are images of the two of us in jodhpurs and hard hats, posing on the lawn with my horse, Applejack; of being fifteen and wearing wool polo-necks and those ski-pants with the stirrup things at the ankles; playing Roy Orbison 45s on Wisty’s Dansette; of Saturday afternoons watching Grandstand on the television with my father. It was the only time in the week I got to spend with him. My mother would bring in a tray of tea and ham sandwiches. She was always happy to see Wisty. I think in some strange way she became a teenager herself, and sparky, adventurous Wisty was the teenager she would have liked to have been. My father, normally a distant, preoccupied figure, loved watching the wrestling on ITV (Giant Haystacks! Big Daddy! Mick McManus! Jackie ‘Mr TV’ Pallo!) and would get so carried away he would kneel in front of the set and bash his fist on the carpet, tomato-faced with laughter.

  Wisty had a really mischievous grin. The sight of her on the iPad screen, with her lovely big Turkish nose and still-luxuriant dark hair, is what sets off the emotion. ‘Wisty,’ I murmur, ‘it’s me.’ (Well, of course it’s me. This is Skype. She can see me. I’m a doddering fool.) We talk about her new grandchild, who is called Maja, after Wisty’s half-Turkish mother.

  ‘Your mum was a darling,’ I say.

  ‘I’m happy to have known both your dad and your mum,’ she says. ‘Spent some great weekends at your house.’

  ‘I loved your dad too,’ chimes in Chrissie. ‘He always made me laugh.’

  I clear my throat and hand her the iPad while suddenly needing to fetch something from my coat pocket in the hall. I love being reminded of my dad: the way he sent me the Daily Telegraph to read when he sensed I needed cheering up; how he could walk on his hands from breakwater to breakwater on summer holidays by the sea; the way he would bag my Beano to read after I’d finished with it. It was true; he did make us laugh. When you’re a teenager, you just think how odd and embarrassing your parents are – and, believe me, there was something very odd about my family – but now I think of how well they did, with the grand house, the business empire; what a go they made of it.

  And now it’s time to end the reunion. Travelling back to London on the train, I still feel a bit emotional. What awesome women. And I’m astonished at the bond I feel with them, though perhaps I shouldn’t be; we spent our formative years together, sharing the terror and hilarity. There’s a whole language out there, like ‘wapey’ for wastepaper basket, and ‘wigging’ for hair washing, that nobody in the world ever uses now, and we don’t either, but if we did we’d know exactly what each other meant. In some weird way they are my family more than my family was.

  On the spur of the moment I type Ridley House into Google, and a photo comes up on the property website Zoopla. It’s a different colour now, ice cream white. When I lived there the outside walls were coated in dismal grey pebbledash. But I’m still half-expecting to see Bretch waiting at the entrance, straight-backed and spind
ly in her trademark brown suit; the driveway full of cars at the beginning of term; an obstacle-course of suitcases and lax sticks in the hallway and, all along the corridors, girls bustling round the noticeboard to see which dorm everyone’s in, shouting about what they did in the hols and terrified they’ve forgotten to pack some vital piece of clothing. And my heart gives a strange jolt of excitement. I might have left boarding school but it never quite left me. A part of me still belongs there and wants to go back for the start of term.

  2

  THE PROSPECTUS

  The Felixstowe College prospectus was very smart indeed. It was bound in stiff, silvery-grey card with the school badge and motto on the cover, in red. A slip of cream paper fell out when you opened it. It wasn’t ordinary paper, but thick and almost satin smooth. In embossed, italic font it read: With the Head Mistress’ compliments. (I itched to change that to Head Mistress’s.) Below were contact details. Postal address: Felixstowe, Suffolk. That was all it needed for the postman to find it. The telephone number was Felixstowe 269.

  Inside were photos (‘Gymnasium Block’; ‘A Study Bedroom’; ‘The School Library’). An aerial view in black and white (‘Drawn by Leo Creak, 1949. Revised 1959.’) showed all the school buildings and the grounds, which seemed to extend for acres. It was the size of a village.

  There were tantalising details of all the extras girls had access to – four types of dance, swimming in the sea, riding lessons, ‘two fully-trained hairdressers’, badminton, fencing, lessons in public speaking and art history, ‘first-class concerts in the town’, drama, play-reading. You could learn Spanish and the harp, throw pots, order fresh fruit once a week, visit the tuck shop, have your deportment straightened and your flat feet corrected.

  The college boasted seventeen tennis courts (hard, clay and grass), a music school and a wonderful art and dance studio. Not to mention a chapel, a domestic science building, a pottery studio, hairdressing salon, purpose-built geography room and an enormous gymnasium. As well as lax and hockey pitches, there was access to a golf course and squash courts and stabling for our ponies. Every year there was the school gymkhana to look forward to, not to mention the trip to London to attend Wimbledon. Girls in the Upper Sixth could take driving lessons. It was the first girls’ school in the country to offer those. Beat that, Roedean. Nyah nyah, Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

  But where was Felixstowe exactly? I had visited a fair number of England’s seaside resorts. Sheringham and Cromer, for instance, where we’d gone on bucket-and-spade holidays when I was very young, catching shrimps in rock pools and getting the landlady of our boarding house to boil them up for my tea. Folkestone and Dover, where my father went on business trips – a long, long crawl in the Standard Vanguard through the Blackwall Tunnel, and the inevitable braking to a halt by a convenient grass verge in order for me to be sick outside rather than inside the car, but we’d also stop at a toy shop on the way so I could add to my collection of model horses. My father’s burgeoning business empire had taken us to Newcastle, from where my mother took me with my swimming costume and rubber ring to Whitley Bay and Tynemouth, with their gorgeous sweeping sands. We’d stayed in the Gower Peninsula for a holiday that passed into family folklore when a sweet shop caught fire and my father became a local hero, dashing into the burning building to save the jars of boiled sweets. Teignmouth in Devon, where the duty visit to two maiden aunts was quickly over and followed by diving off rafts and wild swimming in little rivers. And as we went up in the world, Cornwall was our destination – Bude and Widemouth Bay, and all the joy of surfing and riding ponies on cliff paths. So, for me, the seaside – the occasional roadside barf notwithstanding – meant sun and fun and family togetherness.

  Felixstowe, though, was territory unknown. Just a railway poster that said COME TO SUNNY FELIXSTOWE – but no one I knew seemed to. In fact, you could chart not just the steady upward rise of our family’s social status but also the decline of the British seaside resort simply through our holidays. By the start of the 1960s, the swanky thing was to go to the Costa Brava. That summer, the family next door, who were second-generation trade to our first-generation, and so slightly a cut above, announced they would be heading off there, too late for my mother to start booking flights. But it was our final summer holiday in Cornwall that resulted in the event that changed my destiny.

  It was the end of August 1960, and on the very last day of that holiday I fell off a small bay pony called Prince. Spectacularly, at the gallop, head first, while descending a bank. I remember remounting and telling Mr Coutts, the riding master (an old soldier with a pink face and white hair, topped by a brown hard hat, like a living strawberry and vanilla ice with caramel topping), not to breathe a word to my mother because she would only make a fuss. In fact, I told Mr Coutts this several times over, which should have made him aware I was not quite right in the head. I learned later that he was aware, but that Prince was the pony from which his own daughter had fallen and been killed, and he was so stricken by the prospect of history repeating itself that he couldn’t trust himself to speak about it without letting the side down.

  My sole subsequent memory of that day is of sitting in the back of our car being sick and complaining of a headache. I came round some time later to find myself in a cottage hospital in Launceston, with my terrified parents holding vigil in the dark, their holiday quite ruined. I was discharged after a week, and my parents kindly took me back to the riding school so I could give Prince a sugar lump. We drove home and then I just went back to school.

  At the time, school was the City of London School for Girls, and I was expected to do well because I had a corporation scholarship. My older sister had been Head Girl and mainstay of the hockey team, and the old trout of a headmistress obviously thought she was getting a genetic repeat. More fool her. There were a lot of clever girls in my year and they all did much better than me. They all worked diligently, noses in their books from first bell to last, while I did my homework standing on the tube in the morning rush hour.

  Over the next few months everything seemed to go haywire. I couldn’t sleep, my concentration was in pieces, I was sent out of lessons and was finishing near the bottom of the class. Plus, my parents weren’t getting on. Actually, things had been awkward, not quite right, since I was eight, but around this time, now I was twelve and perhaps more aware, they seemed particularly difficult and intense.

  Now, I suppose I have to let you in on our family secret, which was that I had what amounted to three parents, because my mother and father shared their lives with a redheaded divorcee called Jane. She was big, posh and Scottish. Braw, cultivated and, unlike the cloud of frazzled rattiness that was my mother, composed. I adored her, she got on with us all but, not to put too fine a point on it, my mother was usurped – and indeed I was usurped – by this giant wondrous cuckoo in our nest.

  Were she and my father having S.E.X.? Unimaginable. They were old. He had false teeth and she wore an all-in-one corset. But she was very definitely The One, and my father, the crafty thing, had sneaked her into the family structure by dint of making her a director of the business, along with my mother. At this point my father’s companies were based in the northeast, but the head office was not only in London, it was in our house. In the room next to my bedroom, with desks and telephones and typewriters and a monstrous duplicating machine called a Gestetner. And there the three of them sat all day, the women typing invoices, my father rustling papers and making decisions.

  She didn’t go home at the end of the working day. She stayed for supper. They hung out together, playing Scrabble, going out for Chinese meals, attending functions, because my father was something important in the local Conservative Party. She was just there. All the time.

  My mother and I had always been close. She was passionate and determined, but also a shy, proud woman who wouldn’t have dreamed of sharing her problems with an outsider. Her only female friend was Jane, and how could she have aired her suspicions to the very person who
was causing her anxiety? My sister was nearly ten years older than me and, having graduated from university, now had her own London flat that she shared with her fiancé, a rather fast young businessman of whom my parents disapproved. So there was no one to share the load. Just me.

  It was around then that I became not too keen on reality and developed a condition known in the family as ‘cloud nine’, immersing myself in a dreamworld of football heroes, great racehorses, fictional detectives, film and TV stars. In this I had been helped by the death of our old television, the faithful friend that had seen me through the Watch with Mother years to the 1960 Olympics. It had a pretend-walnut cabinet and tiny screen, and mysterious innards known only as ‘the condenser’. If the condenser went bust it filled your living room with a terrible smell. It was your TV’s death throes. Ours self-immolated in October 1960.

  A new television arrived. It stood on four metal legs and had speakers either side covered in shiny fabric with a small badge that said ECKO. The screen was four times as big as our old one. Why worry about what was going on in the head office? I had more interesting things to concentrate on. A much-enlarged David Broome riding Sunsalve at the Horse of the Year Show. Michael Landon as Little Joe in Bonanza, so clear I could make out his lovely long eyelashes. Lester Piggott on Grandstand, bum in the air. The captain of Tottenham Hotspur, Danny Blanchflower, no less a hero for advertising Weetabix: ‘Pass the hot milk, please’.

  When I wasn’t watching telly, I was reading. I read everything I could lay my hands on. The Daily Telegraph, front page to back, Micky Spillane crime thrillers, the entire Sherlock Holmes oeuvre, Mad magazine, Photoplay, The Register of Thoroughbred Stallions, my old Angela Brazil school stories (I had regressed that far), because the actual walls of our house seemed to thrum with misery and tension and, whenever I returned to the everyday world, it was to be railed at by my mother because my father preferred another woman and I was a hopeless failure who was going to be stripped of my scholarship. I loved my family with all my heart but, one spring afternoon, sitting on my bedroom floor with The Luckiest Girl in the School on my lap, I thought, Why not escape? Really escape, back into a world of jolly japes and midnight feasts, and I said the fateful words, ‘I think I would like to go to boarding school.’