Too Marvellous for Words

by Julie Welch

  My father had dropped us at the front of the station while he went off to park the car, so while we waited for him to reappear I was allowed to go to the forecourt shop for some goodies to eat and drink on the journey. The shop was long and narrow, and what was going on behind the windows was obscured by magazines pegged on wires and strung across the glass. I bought some Penguins, a Tiffin and a tube of Spangles, then stopped by a machine to get my name printed on a narrow strip of aluminium. It wasn’t something I’d ever have a use for, but feeling the raised imprint of the letters was very satisfactory.

  My parental party was a threesome. My mother had roped in my father because it was a big event. I was going off to boarding school, the first in our family to be sent away. This gave him a reason to invite Jane along too. I rejoined them reluctantly. What must it look like to all those other girls and their families waiting on the platform? Could they sense this bizarre set-up in which I more or less had three parents? I wondered if I could pretend she was an auntie, but she wasn’t auntie-like in any respect. At my last school my family hadn’t seemed in any way peculiar. The mother and father of one friend were each having affairs (they were Hampstead people, both psychotherapists, so it was out there for all to know). Another of my mates lived in a commune. Artists. Hampstead, too. They did that sort of thing there. But now, as I stood on that platform, I thought, If you had a conventional family, if you had a father who went to work ever y day and a mother who ran the house, the sort you read about in Ladybird books and Malory Towers, then everything would be OK. As it was, from the outside, I imagined we must have looked as weird as weird can be.

  ‘Ridley! Any more Ridleys? Over here!’ The speaker was a shapely girl with a helmet of blonde hair. She was so confident and in control that I thought she must be a prefect, though when I gravitated thankfully towards her little group it transpired she was in the same form as me.

  ‘Are you Ridley? Lower Five? Are you sure?’ She gave my guitar a dubious look. ‘I say, I don’t know if you’ll be allowed to keep that.’

  The guitar was cheap and flimsy, a birthday present. From time to time I would strum it inexpertly. I wasn’t ever going to be Julian Bream and I’d only brought it with me to seem interesting. The thought flashed across my mind that the best thing would be to run back to my parents with it and ask them to take it home again, but when I looked around the station concourse they’d already gone, probably to have a Chinese meal followed by a threesome at Scrabble, and they were probably secretly relieved to have me off their hands, which was lowering.

  So I just gave a weak smile and a shrug and, anyway, Bossy Helmet Girl was now performing the introductions. Her name was Erica, this one was Beth, that one was Marion, and there were Bobbie and Marlee, and Cath and Lindy would be getting on further up the line. Names, names, names. They were all nice and smiling but then they started gabbling away to each other again, so I went and stood beside another girl also standing on her own, looking solemn behind her spectacles. ‘Hello. Are you on your own too?’

  She told me her name was Chrissie and she’d come all the way from Guernsey.

  ‘I didn’t want to look babyish, so I told Mummy not to wait,’ she said. ‘But then when I got here everyone had their mothers with them.’

  She seemed as forlorn as I felt, so I offered her one of my Penguins, because I do find that when you are a bit down there is nothing better than having someone to look after, and we soon cheered up, sharing our crisps and biscuits and talking about things that interested us.

  At last the train was ready for us to board, so then came all the kerfuffle of finding a compartment and putting our suitcases on racks. I wedged the guitar under my case, which probably did it no good but at least it wouldn’t fall on someone’s head. Erica bagged the window seats for herself and Bobbie and, forgetting I was there, beckoned Chrissie to sit next to her, but Chrissie and I were already plonked down next to each other, by the door. The others filled the spaces in between, but we could see over them to the clutter of houses as the train chugged through suburbia. Then the landscape changed, becoming brown with woods and green with fields. They were Essex fields, impenetrable with maize, or empty but for one discoloured piece of abandoned machinery, or neat and trimmed with a few enticing show jumps set up in them, and a horse or two.

  Chrissie and I played a game of ‘spot the horse’, and then another of coming up with the silliest words and names we could think of.

  ‘Gusset.’

  ‘Lumbago.’

  ‘Isle of Wight.’

  ‘Dirndl skirt.’

  By the time we got to ‘peewit,’ we collapsed in hysterics and got into one of those states when you think you might die because you’re laughing too much to breathe, and it went on and on till Erica said imperiously, ‘I’m glad you two have got such a wonderful friendship,’ so we shut up.

  At Colchester, the door of our compartment slid open to admit a girl with her hair worn in a thick brown plait. She had high, wide cheekbones, clear blue eyes with long lashes, and an interestingly sultry mouth. ‘Back to school, worse luck,’ she commented, heaving her suitcase on to the rack. ‘Anyway, jolly good fun. Hello,’ she said to Chrissie. ‘You must be the new girl. I’m Lindy.’ Then she turned to me. ‘Who are YOU?’

  I told her.

  ‘Oh, you must have got Clare’s place. She’s gone to Australia. She was jolly nice.’

  My heart sank. That must be like having a brother or sister who died before you were born. Someone you were never going to be able to live up to because they were now saints beyond reproach. After Colchester we had one more stop, at Manningtree, where we were joined by someone called Cath, who greeted Chrissie and me in a brusquely friendly way. She had freckles and vivid blue eyes and the most gorgeous coppery hair.

  After Manningtree the landscape began to change. Goodbye to my Essex world of mudflats, hawthorn hedges, copses, ditches and dumpy medieval churches in the middle of nowhere. We were now in Suffolk. Instead of little clapboard houses were stud farms and gallops and rolling pastures, punctuated by villages of cottages with walls of dark, rich pink. Then busy roads and houses and factories began to appear. Ipswich. All change! We skittered along the platform and up and down steps, pushing and crowding on to a different sort of train, just two carriages with seats either side of an aisle. More girls got on. We made a Ridley corner, and Chrissie and I found seats next to each other again. Then, just before the train moved off, two girls came bursting into our carriage.

  ‘I say, do you mind two Cranmer interlopers?

  This question was posed by a small girl with a playful smile and woolly fair curls sticking out from under her hat. The girl with her was gawky, with a tall person’s stoop, a beaky nose and blonde hair in a boyish crest. There were cries of ‘Cherry!’ and ‘Juno!’ and we all squeezed up to make room.

  ‘Did you have a good hols?’

  ‘Oh, well, the bust exercises were a complete failure,’ sighed Cherry. ‘I still haven’t got any bosoms.’

  She and Juno plonked themselves down opposite us and then started bobbing up and down and twisting to say hello to Erica and Bobbie and Cath and Marion behind, and then they were all off, talking about tennis tournaments and weddings and gymkhanas, so Chrissie got out a book to read and moved it towards me so I could read it too, which made me feel a bit sick because the print jumped all over the page with the bumping of the train. But after another half-hour or so the countryside became roads and lampposts and bungalows, the train slowed and then halted at a station built of golden-yellow brick. Felixstowe Town. We were there.

  5

  FIRST NIGHT IN THE DORM

  Felixstowe College was not built for a school and so it has premises which combine the comforts of a home with the needs of a school. No two Houses and, in fact, no two dormitories in the whole school are alike.

  The Felixstowe College Prospectus

  As we spilled from the train we could hear loud revving and smell exhaust fumes, and ther
e in the forecourt was a coach waiting to drop us all off at our various houses.

  ‘Come on!’ shouted mother hen Erica, pushing us through the chaotic throng of girls humping their suitcases into the boot and bagging seats. I couldn’t find anywhere to sit, but Lindy ordered two small girls to budge up at the back, so we squashed in and off we went.

  It wasn’t what I was expecting. I still had a picture of Malory Towers in my head – a neat school, just one big building. But here we were, going all over town, and the coach journey took ages. First we went along the high road until we came to a halt outside a huge Edwardian house with creeper at the edges like a pair of mutton chop whiskers.

  The two small girls jumped up and hurried off the coach.

  Juno sat beside me. ‘Poor little mites,’ she said in a sepulchral voice. ‘Back into the valley of the shadow of death.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That’s Latimer. They’ve got Cawley for a House mistress. She’s quite, quite mad. There was this girl in Latimer who had two long plaits. One day she did something that incurred Cawley’s wrath, and Cawley lashed out at her, then grabbed a plait and pulled as hard as she could. She almost scalped the poor girl – blood was flowing. Imagine six years with her!’

  By this time the coach had moved on all of a hundred feet or so and stopped at another house, which looked almost the same as the other one but bigger. It had a driveway that went in and out round a lovely central treescape. Juno said it was Tyndale. ‘There’s a path at the back between the two houses, but it might as well be the Berlin Wall. No one’s ever allowed to cross it into the other house. Ever. Maggie’s the House mistress there. Miss Macartney. She’s Cawley’s chum. Not awful like Cawley but she had some sort of weird love life that went wrong, so she has her moods, let’s put it that way.’

  One more question. ‘Why is it Cawley? Why not Miss Cawley?’

  ‘Oh, just the way it is. If they don’t have a nickname then behind their backs you just call them by their surname.’

  ‘Except for Bretch,’ said Cath quickly, squeezing in on the other side of us.

  ‘Who’s Bretch?’

  ‘Our House mistress in Ridley. Her name’s Miss Cross.’

  ‘Why Bretch, then?

  ‘It was her nickname when she was at school here herself, because her name was Bridget and she was a wretch. My father came to see me once and didn’t realise, so he said, “Good afternoon, Miss Bretch.” Do warn your parents.’

  By now we were turning into a road called Maybush Lane, and I saw playing fields and tennis courts, and then came a beautiful, very ancient wall, the kind that encloses country estates. Some of its bricks were cracked, a bit crumbly, some dark pinkish-red, some silvery grey, and where it met the ground a few tendrils sprouted and trailed, so it was almost alive. What was behind it? Was all this ours too? Set into the wall was a pair of huge doors, and above them was a tower with a clock set in its centre that hung high above the whole building like a moon with hands.

  A little further down the road the coach made its final stop. On either side, at the end of drives, were two houses, and between them I could see a promenade and a thin slice of sand and the sea and, in the muzzy late afternoon light, boats slid across the horizon.

  ‘Good luck! Have fun!’ said Juno, and she and Cherry fetched their cases and hurried off in a chattering crowd through two tall gateposts towards the very grand house on the left. ‘Come on, this way,’ said Cath, shepherding me towards the house on the other side. This was not quite as big, but its toes were almost in the sea, and I could see lawns all around it and an orchard full of knobbly apple trees behind. Cars were backed up in the drive, along with mothers in hats and pinstriped fathers, boot lids creaking open and being banged shut. Carried forward on the tide of girls, I lugged my suitcase and guitar across a big courtyard to a funny, greenhouse-like walkway, which Cath said was called the Covered Way. Inside, a shrieking crush had formed around a huge noticeboard: people trying to find which dorm they were in, hailing their friends, asking if their trunks had arrived yet, clattering up staircases.

  ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?’ said a well-modulated voice behind me. I turned round and there stood the most peculiar-looking woman I had ever seen. I couldn’t tell who she was addressing, because each eye went in a different direction, but a pale, bony finger pointed at my guitar.

  ‘I told her it wouldn’t be allowed,’ said Erica.

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Bretch. ‘Cath will put it in your common room for now.’

  ‘Wait here, and then I’ll take us up to the dorm,’ said Cath, who had very kindly taken charge of me.

  Each dorm had a number, though no one seemed to refer to them that way, but called them ‘the nine-dorm’ or ‘the five-dorm opposite the kitchen’, and so on. ‘We’re in the upstairs four-dorm with Erica and Bobbie,’ said Cath.

  It was at the side of the house, overlooking a big lawn and a long path that wound its way along a high wall in a shroud of trees and bushes. ‘It’s called the Ghost Walk,’ said Cath. I turned from the window and studied the interior: four beds with bedsteads of black scuffed metal, a plain wooden chair beside each bed; four dressing tables, a wardrobe and two washbasins. Everything a bit jammed together.

  The beds were already made up with one rough, thin blanket provided by the school, and the eiderdown, sheets and pillowcases that had been sent on before we arrived, so you couldn’t choose which bed you were in. Sheet changing was once a week, when the top sheet was moved to the bottom and the new one put on top. ‘You can give someone an apple pie bed,’ said Cath. ‘All part of the fun.’

  My sheets and pillowcases had a pretty floral border, while everybody else’s were white – so I clung on to this bit of individuality. My bed was beside the two washbasins, and Cath’s was next to mine. Bobbie and Erica had the beds opposite. I put my flannelette pyjamas under the pillow and my slippers under the bed, and a torch and contraband Micky Spillane paperback, Kiss Me Deadly, under the mattress, then hung up my dressing gown with everyone else’s. You were allowed to display three photos on your dressing table. Mine were of 1) my wire-haired fox terrier, Rebel 2) Mummy and Daddy on the patio of a Spanish villa, enjoying one of those married couple breakfasts where both parties stare silently into space, and 3) a rather wonky view of the back of our house.

  Cath helped me unpack my suitcase and told me where everything went.

  ‘Um, where’s the lav?’

  ‘You don’t call it the lav,’ she said. ‘It’s cab.’ Cab boasted an old-fashioned, high-up cistern with a chain flush, hard toilet paper, and brown bags hanging from the door on strings for used STs. Beside the pedestal, in a pot, was a brush with spiky bristles and a long wooden handle. I studied the facilities thoughtfully, then followed Cath downstairs to our commie.

  The junior commie was on the southeast corner of the house and had French doors and two sets of windows, so it was airy and light. A tiny TV was perched on a high shelf. The room contained four tables, one for Lower Four, one (bigger) for Upper Four, and the biggest for Lower Five. A further small table stood in the middle.

  ‘That’s for our tea things,’ explained Cath, ‘and Bretch comes in and puts our letter on it for us to open after lunch. You have to write to your parents every Sunday and Wednesday, by the way.’

  ‘Twice a week! I’ll never find enough to say!’

  ‘Use big writing,’ Cath advised, guiding me towards the lockers. These occupied all of one wall. Each was about a foot square and covered with a flimsy piece of curtain. I put my radio in there. It was a portable, although it wasn’t very, being the size of a large biscuit tin, but it had a strap across the top for carrying. On the front was a dial that said Light Programme and Home Service, and a knob with a pointer that you twiddled towards the dial, and another knob that you used to turn it on and off, which was also the volume control. For a couple of hours every evening, a lot of fine twiddling could bring you Radio Luxembourg, the only source of po
p music, and even that finished before bedtime with someone called Howard Bachelor, Keynsham – K.E.Y.N.S.H.A.M., who was advertising his football pools system. After that it was religious programmes.

  What else needed to go in my locker? My Marmite, purse, well-equipped sewing case, copies of Horse & Hound, Pony and Riding and my photos of Danny Blanchflower and Lester Piggott. Lester Piggott was winning the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe on a fine dapple-grey mare called Petite Etoile, and Danny Blanchflower, captain of the Tottenham Hotspur Double-winning side of 1960–61, was holding the FA Cup aloft. I finally found a place for my precious brown cardboard file containing the novel I was currently working on, The Horse From Hell, along with several never-finished ones belonging to my crime thriller phase. These featured heroes with names like Corder Burns, because they sounded like Sexton Blake and Sherlock Holmes. I’d usually write a couple of chapters of those, then run out of steam because I was more interested in creating the character than any sort of plot. The same went for my westerns phase, which consisted mainly of pages and pages of descriptions of horses and sunsets.

  The other Ridleys in my year were standing in a little group in front of the Lower Five table. We inspected each other. Along with Erica, Bobbie, Marion, Lindy, Chrissie, Marlee, Beth and Cath, were two small, quiet girls, one fair, one dark. Della and Prue.

  ‘You’ll have to have a nickname,’ Erica said to me. ‘We’ve already got two Julias in our form.’

  I said that at my last school I’d been known as Danny, and then of course I had to explain that it was in honour of Danny Blanchflower, and I showed them the two photos I had brought with me, the one of Danny and then the one of Lester Piggott.