by Julie Welch
Anyway, Bretch now had a boudoir of her own, if you could call it such, because it can’t have been more than seven feet square. It was on the ground floor and must have been a butler’s pantry or a housekeeper’s sitting room back in the day – tiny and terrifically dark, because the window was high up, it was little more than a donjon. I’m amazed she could lie on her bed full-length. Her feet must have stuck out through the door, surely.
Between that, the posh staircase we weren’t allowed to use, and an embarrassing area called the Other Cupboard, where the packs of STs were stored, was one of Ridley’s four bathrooms. It was the biggest I’d ever seen, with high windows and exposed pipes and three baths lined up in a row, with cubicle curtains for preservation of modesty, not that you’d bother about that much once you’d been there a few weeks and got used to flashing everything in front of all comers. It was actually a friendly place, because if you were assigned to it on the bath rota you could lie there in the warm water chatting to your chums. But on Sunday mornings you would find it locked, and the following ditty would be ringing out around the house to the tune of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’:
Land of soap and water,
Bretch is having a bath,
Matron’s looking through the keyhole,
Having a jolly good laugh.
Next, the other side of the corridor. That faced the sea and featured one of the most popular dorms in the house. Known as the downstairs six-dorm, its windows opened on to the patio, thus offering exciting possibilities for nocturnal escape. The windows still had their original shutters, with little planks behind them that you could ease out to hide the sweets you bought at the tuck shop for midnight feasts.
A few steps further along took you into Here Be Dragons Corner, where Bretch’s sitting room and the Lower Six commie (warning: may contain prefects) were situated. A sharp right turn would take you to, on the left, the kitchen and the downstairs five-dorm. Midnight feasts went indoors for the winter, like tennis tournaments and athletics championships, and this five-dorm was Ridley’s top venue, its Wembley, its Centre Court, as it offered easy access to butter, bread and anything left over from Bretch’s supper.
Between dorm and kitchen were stairs to more dorms. But if you kept going you would reach the Covered Way, the other commies, the cloakroom and another set of stairs, which led up to more dorms. The biggest in the place, the nine-dorm, was above the Covered Way and was so long it could be accessed by the staircases at either end. It was the dorm that was the most fun to be in because you could push the beds together in a line and somersault all the way along them.
I think this would be an opportune moment to tell you more about the girls I spent those formative years with, because I will be mentioning them a lot in the pages to come and it will be a help if you can tell one from the other: which ones were good sorts and which were wets; who was difficult to get along with; who went round with whom etc. etc.
Erica was our leader. She was physically perfect – a hooked nose excepted – with long legs, a pert bosom and a cocktail party laugh. How terrifyingly grown-up she was. I’d wake up in the morning thinking, Oh, please let Erica approve of me today, please let it be someone else’s turn to be childish and silly.
She was going round with Bobbie, who had soft brown eyes and hair the colour of black coffee, and was funny and easygoing where Erica wasn’t, but they do say opposites attract, of course.
The next most dominant character in our group was Beth. You’d have expected someone called that to be all doomed and sickly, like her namesake in Little Women, but not this Beth. Our Beth was the binary opposite. She had frizzy, sticky-out hair that never went the way she wanted and a tough face that was completely transformed by a lovely wicked smile. She was brainy and sarky – her jokes were the filthiest, her laugh the dirtiest, her pranks the most inventive, her put-downs the most quelling. Squish-squash-squish. Beth did not approve of show-offs, sneaks, rotters or wets. She made sure you knew when you were out of line. She didn’t say much; hardly a word sometimes. Just smiled her evil smile. But you would know you had transgressed and, although I liked her, I found her a little bit frightening.
You might already have formed a good idea of Cath. She was the practical, helpful one, a good person to have around the place. She and Beth made a formidable couple so, after one or two unsuccessful attempts to boss them about at the start of every term, Erica mostly left them alone.
Della was easily the prettiest, though ‘pretty’ is rather a wet word, which Della The Blonde was not, as she was grave, somehow, as well as sexy. She wore her fair hair in one long plait down her back. Snake hair. When she had something important to say, she would signal it by giving a little sniff.
Prue, who Della went round with, was quiet and studious. The sort who you thought was a goody-goody because she just went calmly about her business, but if Beth had some sort of prank going she was always one of the first to volunteer. She never got into any trouble because, when it came to being lined up in the commie for the inquisition, Bretch would always say, ‘Well, it can’t possibly have been Prue!’
Lindy was what mothers in those days would have called a thoroughly nice girl, though with a deep-down core of steel. Jonah adored her.
Lindy went round with Marion, whose hair was a lovely mass of dark blonde curls and whose bust was the best in our year but, perhaps because she wasn’t very happy at boarding school, always seemed to have some ailment or other. Each ailment was always of the kind grown-ups suffered. She had ‘nerves’. Or her ‘gall bladder’. Even housemaid’s knee, once. It was never anything age-appropriate like mumps or verrucas.
Marlee wasn’t really Marlee, of course – Jonah would never have accepted anyone with a name like that – her real name was Marilyn, which Erica, who was in charge of nicknames, thought was too like Marion, so it had been conflated with her surname.
She was small and inoffensive, the left-out girl, just one of those unfortunate people who seem to slip through the cracks. Poor thing, she just couldn’t find a best friend. She never got the opening gambit right and didn’t quite understand jokes, a sort of minor dislocation between her and the universe, summed up in the way she often did up the buttons of her mac in the wrong holes. I wasn’t as kind to her as I should have been, perhaps because I was the left-out girl at home and saw something of myself in her plight.
Lastly Chrissie – my ally and co-conspirator, my fellow poet, the best girl in the world, my friend from the very first. Wasn’t I lucky?
I will now tell you about the Davy. The Davy’s full name was the Abseil Davy Descender Automatic Fire Escape. I searched online for this contraption not long ago and was amazed to discover that you could still buy one, because I thought it would have gone the way of trolley buses and gramophones, but when I checked again, it was listed as discontinued. Your Davy was fitted next to the dorm window and consisted of two harnesses operated by a pulley arrangement. While you abseiled to the ground in one harness, a second empty harness passed you on its way up. You had to push yourself away from the wall with one hand so you didn’t get skinned by Ridley’s pebbledash, while your other hand tried to keep your skirt from riding up around your waist. It was great fun, although it took forever. I never thought everyone would make it out in the event of a real fire.
In my first year there was one prefect, Deirdre, who was an absolute rotter (and you’ll find out why later). She was fat and I hoped her enormous bosom would be too big to fit into the harness and she would perish in the flames like Joanna at the end of The Girls of Slender Means.
And finally the cloakroom. You could only get to this by going through the Middle Five commie, and it was the site of strange happenings that took place in the first week of my first term, when the whole of Ridley seemed to have turned into a weird kind of dating agency.
The pashes were getting sorted out. Chrissie and I sat ignored in the junior commie after supper, pretending to read, listening to the whispers and the noises off. The
activity seemed to be based on the conveyor belt principle. The blushing suitor of Lower Four, having declared herself to her Chosen One among the lax sticks and hockey boots by planting a tremulous kiss on her cheek, would clatter up the stairs to the waiting huddle of giggling dorm-mates. Della, being the prettiest in our year, had two Lower Fours fighting over her. Erica was annoyed because only one wanted to have a pash on her.
Curiously it was officially condoned. I suppose they thought it’d stop anything worse. You wrote to them in the holidays and let them carry your books. They’d cry in the corridor to make you give them some attention, because you were meant to be kind. And you had to kiss them goodnight, like Mummy. They’d cry if you didn’t. They’d follow you down to school from a distance, like stalkers. I had no idea such a thing existed, and it all seemed absolutely ghastly, but it was obviously something that had to be done if you wanted to fit in, so I put myself on the market. All the attractive girls, the form captains and hockey heroines, were snapped up straight away but my dance card stayed unmarked till a rather quaint Lower Four started up an elliptical conversation by the lockers. But I lost my courage.
‘Oh, you mustn’t. Please don’t,’ I breathed.
We then simultaneously fled in opposite directions. The next thing I knew was that she had gone for a Middle Five called Lobster. We never spoke of it.
After pash night, the cloakroom reverted to its regular function, and Ridley returned to its normal calm, which involved everyone sitting in our commie playing card games and jacks, trying to find Radio Luxembourg and sewing and knitting misshapen objects to be sold at that term’s Christmas Fair. This was going to be held at the Pier Pavilion, at the more louche end of town. The object of the exercise was to raise money for Jonah’s Appeal Fund for a new, bigger chapel and a swimming pool.
‘Nothing exciting ever seems to happen,’ said Lindy, gloomily wielding her crochet hook.
7
THE SEX MANIAC
No sooner had Lindy complained about the lack of exciting events than a sex maniac started roaming the school grounds. Apparently. ‘It’s not true,’ said Lindy, and the rest of us dithered between taking Lindy’s word for it and being absolutely terrified. We pressed our noses to the junior commie windows, searching for any action. What did a sex maniac look like? Marion let out a huge scream and cupped her cheeks in her hands because she saw a face, but it turned out to be Bobbie’s, reflected in a pane.
The Cranmers were blasé about it, as they often passed the time after Lights by watching people having sex under blankets on the beach from the dorm window. Every House was on lockdown – Bretch and Miss Rayment, the matron, striding through the Ridley undergrowth; Poulson, the Tyndale matron, sprinting all over the house closing curtains, sliding bolts and pressing her back to the kitchen door. My bed was closest to the window and I stayed awake almost one whole night because I thought the sex maniac would climb up the drainpipe and get after me. The excitement lasted a couple of days and then everyone forgot about it because:
1) We had hockey House matches and Ridley 2nds beat Cranmer 2nds 10–0.
2) We were allowed to watch Juke Box Jury back at House instead of Saturday’s film show in the gym because the projector had broken. Normally the prefects put a stop to that kind of thing. We were only allowed to watch Danger Man because they all fancied Patrick McGoohan and the TV was in our commie, so they couldn’t very well turf us out.
3) Bretch gave us a row about the butter fight.
House Tea was the best part of the day. You’d eat it in your commie, ravenous and in high spirits after Games, with the radio on and all your friends around you. It was cosy and jolly except if you were in Cranmer, where they had to go to the cavernous dining room and help themselves from the table nearest the kitchen. Very, very depressing. On the other hand, Cranmer had all the nice things, so this was natural justice balancing the scales a bit.
Tea consisted of bread and butter, or margarine if you’d eaten all the butter. There was also a bowl of runny dark-red jam, like blood with pips in. The same stuff was served up at mealtimes, when we had semolina or tapioca. I couldn’t believe anyone would want to spoil their food with it. You’d have to have no taste at all, just a sort of gollup-up-everything greed. I never saw any of us at Ridley put it on our bread, but there it was at tea, day after day, unwanted. It must have been years old.
The bread was delivered daily by a local bakery, Millars. It was against the rules to eat that which had arrived that day; only the day-old stuff was allowed. The excuse was that fresh bread caused indigestion, although really it was because when fresh it was so delicious that we’d scoff the lot and they’d have to order extra. But the deliveryman left the bread stacked in crates on the kitchen table and, if you were commie captain and had to help get the tea things, it was your solemn duty to swap the loaves so your table had the warm, soft ones baked only that morning.
So anyway, the butter fight. Lower Five vs. Upper Four. It was Sunday afternoon, when tea was accompanied by Pick of the Pops. This was greatly looked forward to, as it was one of the few pop music shows you could get on the BBC Light Programme, and the only one we could listen to from start to finish. Saturday meant Saturday Club, but that began at ten in the morning, when we were over at the school block in the middle of Prep. Prep ended at 11.30 a.m., and if you ran very fast you could catch the last ten minutes, but that wasn’t very satisfactory. Then there was Easy Beat, which went out at 10.30 a.m. on Sundays, so unless we had Evening rather than Morning Chapel we would miss half of it. Two Way Family Favourites, created to link families at home in Britain with members of the armed forces serving overseas, followed immediately after that, but was much more square, playing the kind of music your parents liked.
I think I was probably a late developer when it came to pop, because I had only just started to enjoy songs such as John Leyton’s ‘Johnny Remember Me’ and Billy Fury’s ‘Halfway to Paradise’. It was the era of the changeover from Bill Haley and the Comets, Alma Cogan, Lonnie Donegan and skiffle, and during my last year at the City of London I was regarded as quite square myself because I didn’t like Helen Shapiro, who was only a little older than us when she made the charts with ‘Don’t Treat Me Like A Child’, but already had that beehive hairdo and wore heels.
Cliff Richard had had a hit with a song called ‘Dynamite’, which contained the line, ‘Let me feel your bosom when I hold you tight’, which I listened to again and again to make sure, because I couldn’t believe my ears. But by the time I did get interested in pop songs, and the boys who sang them, Cliff had cleaned up his image and now had the look of a young man who lived with his mother, who made him wear a vest. I much preferred that huge, snarling lump of testosterone, Elvis, and it was Elvis vs. Cliff that the butter fight was all about. I expect what triggered it off was that Elvis was ridin’ high with ‘Wild in the Country’, while Cliff hadn’t had a hit since ‘I Love You’, and there was a passionate debate about which was better. It escalated to the extent where people began throwing things, and the uproar brought Bretch into the commie.
What DID we think we were doing? What WAS this, the Wild West?
I adopted a saintly pose. I hadn’t chucked any butter. I’d maybe flicked a bit of bread at Marion but really only a large sort of crumb and it missed, and bread was not the issue. But Erica, Beth and an Upper Four did flick some butter, and the Upper Four’s missile got stuck on the TV screen, so a filthy row from Bretch ensued. They had to go to bed straight after supper. The rest of us had to clean up the mess because otherwise Rose and Burton would take one look at it and threaten to leave, as usual.
Rose and Burton were the cleaners. Rose was little and cherry-cheeked. She wore a flowered pinny, spoke with a lovely Suffolk burr, and shuffled around like Mrs Tiggywinkle. Burton had glasses and dyed, bright-orange hair, and looked like Ronnie Barker in drag. They did all the horrid jobs, like cab cleaning and emptying the ST bins, while doubling as maids – they brought in our tea things
, did the washing up, scrubbed floors. They were the House characters. ‘The whole thing,’ said Lindy, ‘is to NOT upset Burton and Rose, WHATEVER HAPPENS, because they’ll never get anyone else.’
Rows, rows, more rows. One about not closing the dorm window properly (we didn’t take much notice). One about baths when it was Erica, Beth and Marion’s turn on the rota to have their baths in the afternoon, all at once, in the big ground floor bathroom. One overflowed a little and Bretch went on the warpath and blamed it on Beth, who nobly took the rap, although Erica was the offender. She had to run round the Games pitches twice after Games, so she soaked Erica in revenge. Erica then hid Beth’s pyjamas, so Beth got in a bate.
‘ANOTHER row, worse luck,’ commented Lindy.
All these offences were followed by a tariff of punishments. The mildest, for talking after Lights Out, was being sent down to stand in the Covered Way in our dressing gowns, where we would stand giggling and watching the hands of the clock move until the statutory twenty minutes was up. At Ridley there was absolutely no way we would not talk after Lights, or not start talking again after we’d been told to be quiet. It was a matter of pride. Even if you wanted to go to sleep. So, of course, we would be punished again, this time by having to get up twenty minutes early and report to the place of correction, otherwise known as the Lower Six commie.
Bretch would be waiting for us in there with a carrier bag, from which she would fish out lots of knotted and tangled-up string, which we had to tease out and wind into neat balls. If that didn’t do the trick, and we were caught talking after Lights again too soon after the second offence, we would have to put on our cloaks over our night things and walk over to Cranmer, to line up in front of Jonah in her study. Jonah would mutter ‘Stupid’, and send us back again, and on your House mistress’s report at the end of term something would be written along the lines of ‘Julia must learn to be more responsible’.