by Julie Welch
But really, everything we got up to was just harmless naughtiness, and Bretch and Jonah had seen it all before, and in between all the japes and pranks we behaved very well and tried hard to ‘give back to our House’, which was one of Bretch’s favourite expressions. Really bad deeds were done by Big Girls, for whom the punishment was being ‘asked to leave’. Quite early on in the term, one girl was caught behind the shed with the gardener’s boy and was quarantined in the San, waiting for her parents to come and take her away.
‘She’s the one with a very large bosom and a terrible gap between her teeth,’ said a Latimer, who seemed in the know. ‘At tea she has jam and it comes through the gap.’
‘She’s a nymphomaniac,’ Marion said knowledgeably.
I knew a nymphomaniac was a bad thing for a woman to be, and that it seemed to involve her doing it all the time, willy-nilly, with any Tom, Dick and old Harry, so somehow, although I was shocked in a thrilled sort of way, it wasn’t surprising. The kind of person who ate that jam would not be fastidious.
8
A MIDNIGHT FEAST
‘I don’t know why food tastes so much nicer in the middle of the night than in the daytime, but it does!’
ENID BLYTON, The Twins at St Clare’s
We knew it was going to happen. There had been an undercurrent of excitement in the junior commie for nearly a fortnight. Towards the middle of October we had been gifted the opportunity for a midnight feast. An Old Girls’ Sherry Night in London was going to lure Bretch from Ridley overnight, leaving us in the care of our matron, the kind-hearted, indulgent Miss Rayment. As the weather was still mild, and the autumn fogs not yet begun, the Ghost Walk was our chosen venue, leaving the Lower and Upper Fours to argue it out over who bagged the junior commie and who had theirs in the big downstairs bathroom.
Just because Bretch and her supersonic hearing would be absent, and we could slip outside without difficulty, it didn’t mean we could dispense with proper military-style planning. That was part of the excitement. We moved food from our lockers, under cover of our cloaks, to the hiding place in the bushes. We’d been collecting it and stashing it away for a week. Della and Prue stole some bread from the kitchen, hiding it in their grey bags. We bought sweets and crisps from the tuck shop and solicited contributions from home. We had a Battenburg cake, ginger biscuits and bourbons, Wagon Wheels, Potato Puffs and lashings of orangeade. Prue’s mother had contributed a tin of mandarin oranges, smuggled in via a parcel and wrapped in a pair of replacement pyjamas. My mother sent a box of Twiglets, some Dairylea cheese triangles and a packet of frankfurters. Erica’s mother provided her noted homemade game pie. She would.
It had to start at midnight, on the dot. In the four-dorm we kept each other awake and, at ten to midnight, we crept downstairs in our pyjamas, dressing gowns and slippers and stole through the Middle Five commie to the cloakroom to fetch our cloaks. Then we met up with the others in the Covered Way and waited on tiptoe by the door for the clocks of Felixstowe to strike midnight.
We were all out at a sprint and across the drive to the front garden before the last ‘bong’ had sounded. The Ghost Walk was below and to the left was a little hollow behind the wall separating Ridley from the outside world. Its trees provided good cover from both Bretch’s sitting room and the Lower Six commie. Along the patio we crept, down the wide stone steps, over the lawn. It was a clear night, with plenty of stars, and daisies sparkled and buttercups glowed in the moonlight. We stopped once or twice to make sure no one was left behind and that someone had brought the can opener and jug of water. Then we picked our way over the rockery and were able to disappear into the dip below the screen of tamarisks, where we retrieved the food from its hiding place in the bushes and took up our allotted places in a circle under the trees.
Erica, the boss, occupied the alpha position with Bobbie and Lindy either side of her like maids-in-waiting, and Marion was next to Lindy. Marion and Lindy might have been going round together, but Lindy really preferred Erica. They’d all been together since they were eleven years old and their friendships periodically formed into different patterns, like a shaken-up kaleidoscope. Bobbie, being kind, made room for Marlee, the left-out girl. The little married couples were Della and Prue, Beth and Cath, and Chrissie and me. As it was the first proper midnight feast Chrissie and I had attended, we let the others take the lead in serving the food.
Della and Prue cut the cake with a penknife that was part of a rather exciting multipurpose device belonging to Beth, who was given it by her older brothers when they upgraded to real Swiss Army knives. It came with a retractable can-opener, and they passed it to Beth to deal with the mandarin oranges. She divided them up, two per girl, and dropped them in our outstretched palms. The game pie was delicious, as well as grown-up, though should it have had all that runny stuff in the middle? I was the only one who seemed to know what the frankfurters were. They also looked as if they should have been stored in a fridge rather than in the back of my locker for a week. Never mind. Nobody else wanted one so I ate the whole pack myself. Scrummy!
Conditions were perfect. The Ghost Walk was dry-ish and the air had an autumnal nip but still smelt fresh and flowery. The sea, invisible behind the wall, made a faint sound like a brush on a snare drum. We drank out of the glasses we kept our toothbrushes in, so there was a hint of Colgate along with the orange squash. We talked in whispers, occasionally glancing back at Ridley, a ghost house in the moonlight, checking that no light came on in the six-dorm, where the some of the Lower Six were billeted. They surely wouldn’t have been such rotters as to split on us, but you never knew.
I’d been living for this moment since I’d arrived at the school; since before that. I’d once had a French pen-friend to stay when I was ten, and I made her get up in the night to eat dried macaroni from a paper bag and drink milk diluted with water. That night in the Ghost Walk we were all schoolgirls everywhere, past, present and future, real and imagined. We were Darrell and her chums at Malory Towers; we were the O’Sullivan twins at St Clare’s; we were the girls in their night rails consuming confits and sugarplums in a rose-strewn bower at the bottom of an eighteenth-century seminary garden. We were the real-life girls who had gone before us at Felixstowe: the Upper Sixth in their last ever night at school, celebrating with vodka, along with crisps and homemade cheese straws and sausages on cocktail sticks and four tins of cling peaches. We were Tyndales easing up a floorboard in their commie, hopping out the window and running across the lawn to the rose garden to eat Wagon Wheels in the moonlight while Maggie in her room overlooking the back lawn turned a blind eye. We were the poor Latimers who could only dream of midnight feasts because a real one would have had Cawley and their matron, Miss Pipe, at them. We were Cranmers whose middies featured tins of Roka biscuits and pâté de foie gras because one of them had a London dentist by whom she had special dispensation to be treated in term time, so every time she had a toothache the Cranmers said, ‘Yippee!’ because she would come back having dropped into Fortnum’s. We were the Cranmer Middle Fives of 1953, creeping down to the kitchen in the middle of the night and picking the lock with a couple of Kirbigrips and plunging their hands into a big bowl of golden fruit – ooh, apricots! – but they were raw eggs waiting for breakfast.
Just utter bliss.
Around one o’clock we brought things to an end, not wanting to be seen falling asleep in class the next day. Crumbs had to be swept up and sweet wrappers pocketed prior to being discreetly buried at the bottom of a wapey, Beth first of all finishing up the flakes of Potato Puff left at the bottom of the bag with a wetted fingertip.
Our heads popped up above the dip. We scanned our surroundings. All appeared safe. One by one we scuttled back across the lawn but, just as we were turning the corner, a light went on in the kitchen. Everyone stood stock still, as though we were strung together on a washing line. Who was in there? Had someone woken up in the night feeling ill? Oh no, if Rayment had to be fetched to ring up Sister and get wh
oever it was admitted to the San, we were going to be stuck out there for ages!
No one make a sound.
Bobbie started to make little herch-herch noises in the back of her throat, trying to stifle a cough. This was potentially a disaster. Her cough was famed far and wide. It carried like a sea lion’s bark. She grabbed the hem of her dressing gown, scrunched it up and stuffed it over her mouth.
The kitchen light went off. We waited, counting to ten, then ran, bent double under the window, back to the commie, in via the Covered Way, creep creep creep, to our dorms. We thought we’d never get to sleep after all that excitement, but we did.
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness . . .
I don’t know if Edward Fitzgerald was inspired to write the Rubaiyat by Ridley gardens. If not, he jolly well should have been.
The next day Bobbie was sick three times in three hours, the last time just before lunch in one of the Cranmer cloakroom cabs, so Cath held her hair back from her forehead while it was all going on and then Erica took her up to the San. Some of the others felt a bit queasy too. Erica tried to blame it on the week-old frankfurters but, given the choice of admitting I was a greedy pig and being guilty of poisoning most of the form, I opted unhesitatingly for the former and confessed to eating the whole lot. So it must have been the runny gravy in the game pie, and Erica was awfully upset because she had swanked endlessly about that game pie, i.e., that it was a Closely Guarded Recipe handed down from great-grandmother to grandmother to mother etc. etc., so it was what I think Miss Williams, our English teacher, would have called ‘hubris followed by nemesis’.
After supper, Bretch gave Chrissie and I the duty of taking Bobbie a change of pyjamas, her letters and my radio (as hers had conked out), which meant a trip to the San instead of going to a lecture in the library on ‘The Pageant Commemorating the Signing of the Magna Carta’ (what a shame!).
Cranmer was enormous – a Victorian mansion on a clifftop. You could see it from miles out to sea, as it dominated the skyline. It had been built in rip-roaring mock-Tudor style to house Felix Thorneley Cobbold, barrister, diplomat, brewer, banker, farmer, Liberal MP and public benefactor. It replaced a property owned by another family member, John Cobbold, whose son, John Chevalier Cobbold, the Member of Parliament for Harwich, had lived there.
The Cobbolds, along with the Tollemaches (another old family on the Suffolk superstratum), were behind the Tolly Cobbold brewery, a dynasty so important that they had not just a road on the seafront but a whole promontory named after them: Cobbold’s Point. Cranmer was just called The Lodge in the old days, although anything less lodge-like it would be hard to think of. It was a fat, stuffed, stupendous house, flamboyant with mock-Elizabethan bells and whistles that made the facade look like a giant pincushion.
In the 1960s, two Cobbolds (wonderful Old Etonians known as Mr John and Mr Patrick) were the force behind Ipswich Town Football Club. They employed Alf Ramsey, who went on to manage the England team that won the 1966 World Cup.
It was special, the best and biggest, the holy of holies, because, when the school started, Cranmer was it – the entire school. Obviously Jonah lived there. She had her own room and sitting room, known as the Headmistress’s Suite, although not an en-suite so, if you were a Cranmer, you’d sometimes catch her striding towards the bathroom with her kiss curls in butterfly clips.
Cranmer girls were also special, the elite, the Chosen Ones. Jonah wasn’t really interested in the girls at interview. It was their parents who mattered, and she would cherry-pick the best prospects – titles, anyone related to titles, daughters of MPs and the upper ranks of clergy. Trade was fine if it was a blue chip company and Daddy could be tickled up to give money to the school. So if you were a Ridley or a Tyndale or a Latimer you’d failed to pass muster before you even started, and when you went in there you already felt a social inferior. For me it was like being back home all over again, with the house next door and their ballroom and tennis court.
The hall was a huge space, with dark wood panelling on the walls and a large polished table. It was open for two storeys, boasting a wide staircase with a beautiful blue carpet and carved banisters. All out of bounds, apart from when we had hair inspections and when we were training to be debutantes by gliding down the stairs. So Chrissie and I just poked our heads round the door to see what it was like, and then up we climbed to the San via the back stairs by the kitchen.
It was on the top floor and, along with the dining room and Jonah’s study, one of the only places that we non-Cranmers were permitted to set foot in. It was completely unlike the rest of the school – all white paint and hush. There were two single rooms, a general ward with six beds in it, an enormous room that contained a bath and all manner of mysterious equipment, and a big consulting room with a desk and chairs and a map of Latvia on the wall, because that was Sister Berg’s homeland. Sister had come to us from St Monica’s, Clacton, and was a bishop’s daughter; her family had had to flee in the face of the Russian advance during the Second World War. Sister would point to a spot on the map, showing us where she had lived. She was tall, with long brown hair that she tucked under her cap – an attractive woman who was maternal enough to teach us how to do butterfly kisses, but who was also rather forbidding.
Bobbie had a room to herself, with a proper hospital bed and two whole pillows, and was already looking more cheerful and much less green. Luckily, owing perhaps to some premonition, two aunts, a granny and a godmother had all written and posted long epistles to her before the midnight feast and ingestion of the Game Pie of Doom had taken place, so she had heaps of letters to read. Chrissie had brought her pack of cards, and the three of us played Racing Demon and Spit, with the cards spread out on the bedclothes till Sister came in and shooed us out.
On our way along the scuff-walled and lino-floored corridor (Cranmer was only grand where visitors might see it), we heard, ‘Psst,’ and there were Juno and Cherry peeping round from behind a dorm door. They were both in their grey afternoon dresses, Cherry’s very neat and clean and Juno’s with an ink blob on one cuff and the white collar hanging on by a couple of buttons. They beckoned us inside.
‘We didn’t want to go to the lecture, so we hid in the wardrobe,’ said Juno.
‘You won’t tell, will you?’ said Cherry anxiously.
‘Poor thing, she’s a terribly obedient child,’ said Juno. ‘I regularly lead her astray.’
Their dorm was absolutely huge, with six beds on each side, making twelve in all, and a dressing table at the foot of each. The dressing tables faced each other and the mirrors made reflection after reflection after reflection.
‘You can climb along the top of the dressing tables and crash-land on the mattress,’ said Cherry, sitting on the edge of her bed and bouncing up and down.
I looked at her photos and exclaimed admiringly at one of a huge Georgian house. ‘Oh, we don’t own it,’ said Cherry. ‘It’s the rectory. Impossible to keep warm. Brrrr! My father’s a canon. We haven’t a bean, but clergy are allowed here on the cheap.’
Another photo was of a boy in a wheelchair, his limbs and head twisted awkwardly. I tried to look as though I hadn’t seen it, but Cherry said, ‘That’s my brother. He’s a spastic.’
So of course I then blushed bright pink, because it was one of those things you weren’t supposed to mention, like cancer.
‘He’s a good brother,’ Cherry said stoutly, and I was about to ask more about him, to show I wasn’t sweeping it all under the carpet, when the door burst open and there stood a lantern-jawed prefect.
‘What are you doing in here? Why aren’t you at the lecture?’
‘We’ve been visiting someone in the San,’ Cherry said quickly. Innocent face.
The prefect glared at Chrissie and me. ‘Well, you two get out and go back to House, and Cherry and Juno, stop hanging around your dorm and go to your common roo
m.’
‘Why aren’t you at the lecture?’ I should have said, I thought, as we clattered down the stairs (according to Miss Williams this was something called esprit de l’escalier, and meant a witty retort that came to mind after the opportunity to make it had passed).
Then we did something daring, which was to run from one side of Cranmer’s grand entrance hall to the other, where the cloakrooms were, and then something even more daring, where Chrissie and I were concerned, because instead of going straight back to House we went to Cherry and Juno’s commie, which was at the far end of the house next to the cloakroom. It was huge but looked a bit of a dark and friendless place, to be truthful, because it was wood-panelled and looked out on the overgrown part of Cranmer gardens, which were clogged with trees and bushes. But Cherry and Juno fetched their tuck boxes from their lockers, and brought out a bag of Murray Mints, some Ginger Nuts, a bar of Cadbury’s Bournville, a bottle of orange squash and some plastic cups, so immediately everything seemed full of light and warmth, just because they were there and we were us and we were going to have a merry old time.
‘Won’t be a sec.’ Juno darted into the cloakroom to fill the cups at the washbasins. ‘We used to drink squash all the time at my last school,’ she said, coming back with the cups balanced precariously in the crooks of her elbows. ‘Then, halfway through one term, came this notice: “We’d like to announce the water is now suitable for drinking”.’
‘Tell her how your last school tried to kill you,’ said Cherry.
Golly!
‘It was a convent,’ said Juno, carefully setting down the cups, then taking a seat at the end of the table so she could stretch out her long legs. ‘Ghastly place, an old house with lots of creaky staircases, on the point of falling down. A lot of the teachers were burnt-out nuns from the tropics, and when I left the only things I could do were Latin and Needlework. The dorms were all named after saints and were all in a long line, with fire escape hatches between them, so you could sneak in and out. We used to have amazing inter-dorm fights. Missiles of tissues soaked in toothpaste and shampoo, and sometimes wee. I was jolly good with a catapult. I could get my bomb right across from Perpetua to Bernadette.’