by Julie Welch
She unwrapped the Bournville, broke it into squares and shared them between us. ‘Anyway, the food was even more disgusting than ours. They shut the kitchen down once when the Department of Health swept in. Baked beans once a day, every day, burnt on top. Dead baby’s leg. Constipated bear – that was plate scrapings, which they formed into a sort of poo shape. Curried eggs consisted of curry powder and three sultanas, hard-boiled eggs floating in a sea of pus. And on Fridays they served fried potato and cabbage, which always made me sick, so I refused to eat it. Eventually the mother superior called me in and said, “You must eat it. You must learn to be like other girls.”
‘So the very next Friday I forced some down and was sick. By that time I’d started getting stomach pains, too, so I was sent to the Infirmary to be dosed with milk of magnesia and sent away again.’
Chrissie had made her empty sweet wrappers into a little mountain. Juno leant across and put the last of hers on top, like the fairy on the Christmas tree.
‘Over a few days the pains got worse,’ she said, ‘but they thought I was swinging the lead, so more milk of magnesia, more stomach pains, till with very bad grace the Infirmary admitted me. It was only because a young assistant to the nursing nun looked at me late on and heard me groaning and got so worried that she called the doctor, who said my appendix was about to burst. It was about to turn into peritonitis.’
‘Which is a medical emergency requiring immediate treatment, because if the infection spreads through the bloodstream to the major organs it can cause septic shock, leading to death,’ said Cherry knowledgeably. ‘Oh heavens!’ Suddenly she jumped up, and her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Did you hear a noise? Prefect! Danny, Chrissie – hide!’
So we got under the table and cowered while Cherry crept to the door and opened it and looked up and down the corridor. ‘No one there,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t from the corridor,’ giggled Juno, who was hanging out of the window. ‘You can come out now.’ She looked round. ‘It’s one of those water rats. Horrible great orangey things. They come up into the garden sometimes.’
So Chrissie and I crawled out from under the table and, of course, we were all in absolute fits, until Chrissie looked at her watch and said suddenly, ‘Goodness, we’d better scram. The lecture must be nearly finished.’ And we hurried back to Ridley in the dark, full of tuck and the feeling of having had a lovely time and liking Cherry and Juno so much.
No sooner had we sat down in the commie than everyone returned from the lecture, staggering with boredom and with stuff about the Magna Carta leaking out of their ears, and wanting to hear all about our visit to the San and whether Bobbie had finished being sick yet.
‘Did you see the ghost?’ asked Beth, giving me one of her more sadistic grins.
‘What?’
‘The San’s got a ghost.’
‘It’s meant to be the original owner’s disabled daughter,’ said Della. ‘She drowned in a sunken bath.’
‘That’s rubbish,’ I objected. ‘The San hasn’t got a sunken bath.’
‘Sunken baths can be removed. Ghosts can’t.’ Beth made whoo-hoo noises. ‘She had long red hair. Now she patrols the corridors in her long white nightgown, her stick going tippety-tap, tippety-tap, like Blind Pugh.’
‘People have heard her,’ said Della. ‘Tippety-tap, tippety-tap.’
Trust Cranmer to be haunted by a toff. But that settled it. Even if I were on death’s door, I was never going to be in the San.
9
FILTHY ROWS
Ailments too minor to qualify you for the San were dealt with at Sug, which was what we called Surgery. Sug opened for business just after the rising bell and was conducted in Ridley’s kitchen, where Rayment kept all her medical supplies in the fridge, next to the milk and butter. Her dispensary was not extensive. It consisted of liquid paraffin for constab, all-purpose goo for chilblains and gnat bites, cough linctus for stinking colds and Anadin for everything else. I rarely had ailments. I was a very healthy specimen. But I did, from time to time, need . . . you know. At Sug, the more brazen girls would ask for the Other Cupboard out loud, when even whispering to Rayment in private seemed to me too daunting for words.
Mortifyingly, my first frightful row was Other Cupboard-related. Cath had clocked me sneaking my one sanitary belt into the dressing table during Unpacking of Trunks, and helpfully informed me that if I had the curse I could be off gym and off Games. There was a relevant piece of squared paper on the noticeboard in the Covered Way. All you had to do was put a cross against your name. You didn’t have to say you couldn’t do Games because . . . you know. What a relief! But I had not taken Bretch into account.
Now, Bretch seemed as much part of Ridley’s fixtures and fittings as the bedsteads and washbasins, but hadn’t actually been its House mistress that long, so I think when I was given the two filthiest rows I have ever been given, she was still finding her way into her style somewhat. I was a learning opportunity. Always pleased to help.
Bretch’s predecessor, until 1957, was a lady called Miss Hoskin, or ‘Hossy’, as she was generally known. Hossy had been at Felixstowe since the beginning of time – before that, even, since she had been on the staff of the not-very-successful private school that begat Felixstowe College. Hossy taught Biology and was much loved. But then came the day of the huge drama, the morning that Jonah thumped into Chapel and made the sensational announcement that Hossy had died during the night. Everyone gasped with horror and sadness and then someone giggled, and the giggling spread from pew to pew while Jonah glared at them in majestic disapproval, though she never referred to this shocking breach afterwards, probably deciding it would just set everybody off in hysterics again.
At the time of Hossy’s death, Bretch was assistant House mistress of Ridley. She taught Pitman’s Shorthand & Bookkeeping, and was very good at it – although cross-eyed she could spot a ‘which’ instead of a ‘should’ stroke from the other side of the room. Current Events was another of her subjects. This was usually the first lesson after break, which meant everyone would bolt down their milk and breaktime bun, then rush to the library to thumb through the East Anglian Daily Times for some suitable talking point, such as the serial tractor arsonist in Norfolk. She ran the tuck shop, too. This had recently been set up in the garage belonging to Hooper, the Upper Sixth House. It was open on Saturday mornings, the day our pocket money was dished out. As well as sweets and crisps, the tuck shop sold stamps, pens, postcards, writing paper and envelopes. Bretch was also in charge of Careers Advice. For those not going to university, the options seemed to have boiled down to nursing or teaching, or to take a secretarial course. After all, she wasn’t doing too badly out of it, because now, on top of everything else, Jonah made her Ridley’s new House mistress.
She was an Old Girl, having gone through the school during wartime, leaving it briefly for a spell at secretarial college, then returning as a member of staff. That nickname, for instance: Bridget because her name’s Bridget and the fact she’s a wretch. Wouldn’t you have got rid of it the moment you left? Bretch hung on to it. She was sardonic about it, amused almost. The school was her life. She hadn’t had much experience of what it was like outside the walls. I mean, tall, stiff, fuzzy hair, bottle-thick glasses – no way was she ever going to get asked to dance. Though we obviously sniggered like mad about her supposed tendresse for Dan Dan The Boilerman. Dan Dan wore a flat cap and was short and old. He arrived at Ridley early every day in his three-wheeler van, parking it in front of the Covered Way before disappearing down the corner steps. What on earth did he do in there all day? We never saw him leave.
Bretch wasn’t unlikeable. In fact, she was the best of the House mistresses, and we were all jolly glad we were in Ridley, when the alternatives were Latimer’s witchy Cawley or Tyndale’s moody Maggie, or being in Cranmer where Jonah lived, overshadowing all like a giant meteorite. Cranmer did have a House mistress, but she was a pallid shape in comparison, a sop to convention who never s
tayed long. Every year came a new Mrs Thing whom no one remembered once she had scuttled off into the far yonder, except possibly for the one who wore flip-flops even in winter. And another because she was really big and her name was Mrs Bullock.
Yes, we liked Bretch, but naturally she was the enemy. She was famed for her eavesdropping. Her inadequate eyesight was compensated for by hearing that could pick up the love song of a bat, and she’d creep around and listen at doors. You’d get up to go to cab and – aaaagh! Bretch is outside! You could tell, even from a distance, when she was listening in – she would be standing very still, like a heron, on one leg. Fishing. If you were up to no good, the only warning that you were about to be rumbled was that her shoes creaked.
But in the year below ours were some of the naughtiest girls in the whole of Ridley. It was pranks, pranks, pranks all day and night where Annie and her chums were concerned: they followed up one midnight feast by sleeping in the baths; they shinned up the scaffolding that was the exoskeleton of the new music school that was going up behind the chapel; they stole Bretch’s glasses from her bedside table while she slept. And one term they were in the seven-dorm, which was a very nice suite on the southeast corner of the house, with five beds in the main part and two more down a little step and overlooking the orchard. It always caught the sun. One of these naughty girls was wizard at Science and she put her studies to good purpose by designing the ‘Bretch trap’. The girls made it out of two pieces of cardboard with silver paper on them and two wires, which they slid under the lino and threaded between the cracks in the floorboards, and on the end of each wire was a warning light that came on when Bretch was standing outside the door.
She lacked maternal instinct the way some people lack wisdom teeth, although there were attempts at being mumsily affectionate that didn’t quite work out. Once she walked into the dorm where an unclad Gill was trying to scrub mud off herself after Games, and exclaimed, ‘Gill, you are a dirty little girl!’ which probably came out of knee-jerk embarrassment (Oh gosh! Girl! Naked!) but didn’t go down well with a self-conscious thirteen-year-old. But she tried. Noticing that Marlee was always being left out of things, Bretch told Prue and Della they had to be friends with her. So they were a threesome sometimes, but Prue and Della didn’t like it very much.
Nothing cosy about her, of course. No woman friends. At least Cawley and Maggie had each other. Bretch’s chums were her prefects. At first I thought how sad that was. Thinking about it now, I’m not sure I’d reach the same conclusion. As mistress of Ridley, ‘the grandest house in the place’, she was in her element – top girl, leader of the pack – surrounded by the prefects who were her chosen subordinates. Together they made a very strong fighting unit, as I was soon to find out.
Our whole lives as juniors seemed like one big struggle against the prefects. We had a Head of House, a House Games captain, and two more girls who didn’t have specific job titles but were sort of Prefects Without Portfolio, so I guess were just there to bawl, ‘Will you stop making that disgusting noise!’ when you were laughing. Della’s big sister was in Lower Six. She was lovely, really nice, so of course she couldn’t possibly be made a prefect. You could tell who the prefects were even without those little red badges they were permitted to wear. They looked prefect-y. Their hair was properly done, their sausage curls stayed circular and springy, and the collars of their grey afternoon dresses were never hanging off. And they licked their lips when they spotted a junior.
Shoe-cleaning. Friday after supper. What a chore! Indoor shoes, outdoor shoes, Sunday shoes, hockey boots, gym shoes, jodhpur boots. And when you finished you had to take them to one of these harpies to be passed, and you could have the teensiest speck on a toecap, almost invisible to the human eye, and she’d say, ‘No! Take it back and do it again!’ What beastly girls they were.
Chrissie’s mouth turned down when she was trying desperately not to cry, because she was being told off so savagely. ‘And don’t sulk!’ they’d snap. ‘Stop sulking! Report to Bretch!’ So then she’d have to go to Bretch, who’d tell her off for sulking, and her mouth would turn down again because she was trying not to cry. She just couldn’t win.
The prospectus had misled us, you see. ‘Under the prefect system,’ it lied, ‘the elder girls acquire self-reliance and responsibility, and a spirit of service, gentle courtesy and loyalty is inculcated in all.’
Twaddle, especially the gentle courtesy bit. You only had to meet Deirdre, the complete rotter to whom I alluded briefly when I was talking about the Davy. Deirdre had specs, spots, pudgy cheeks and a gigantic bust that jiggled when she thundered down the flank in hockey. You had to flatten yourself against the wall when she passed, partly because she was a goddess on Mount Olympus but also because you might get a sideswipe from that awful bosom. But it wasn’t only Deirdre. They all seemed awfully grown-up and intimidating. They liked being in power, because they’d obviously been intimidated in previous years and were getting their own back. It was a case of ‘girl hands on misery to girl’.
A week into my first term, I was swinging up the Covered Way in my grey afternoon dress when Bretch, with her phalanx of prefects behind her, manifested in the corridor.
‘Why aren’t you at Games?’
I was speechless. One never, ever, mentioned one’s period. The nearest my mother could bring herself to refer to it was ‘a little visitor’.
‘I’m . . . off Games,’ I muttered.
‘Why?’
Bretch was a woman who had gone through school looking like a human lavatory brush. It had put steel into her core and now it was payback time.
‘I’ve . . . started.’ (You can take it from me this was said in the vocal equivalent of 6pt type.)
‘So? That’s no reason to put yourself off Games.’
‘But Cath told me if you were, if you, you know, if . . .’ I wanted to die.
‘Does Cath make the rules in this House?’
I’ve dropped Cath in it now. She may never speak to me again.
‘Come into the kitchen.’
The kitchen doubled as Bretch’s training quarters. It was where she coached her new batch of prefects in how to skewer juniors and make them cry. I trooped in there behind Bretch and her battalion, visibly vibrating with fear. Time has obliterated the memory of the row I got, but I do know I left shattered and sobbing.
The bigger row followed two weeks later. It was that damn guitar that started it. I took it from its resting place on top of the lockers and found the bridge had been detached and the strings hung loose. Someone had tampered with it, possibly to bring a halt to my renditions of ‘Michael Row the Boat Ashore’, which was the only thing I could play.
‘I expect it was an accident,’ Bretch said chillingly, probably because she couldn’t be bothered to play ‘hunt the guitar tamperer’ on top of everything else she had to do.
Injustice! Injustice!
‘Look! Look! Can’t you see it’s been deliberately done!’
‘Go and wait outside my room,’ she said, in a terrible voice.
‘Danny, you mustn’t be so rude,’ cried Erica, after Bretch had sailed out.
What a shock! I thought everyone would applaud me for standing up to the old bat. Now the fallout was reverberating from both ends of the house, with me sobbing in the junior commie and Bretch venting to her prefects in the Sixth Form commie: ‘She was SO rude!’
I trudged up the Covered Way and stood, knees going like castanets, outside Bretch’s sitting room. I could hear all the prefects squawking in empathic indignation next door. Deirdre was fabricating a story about me shouting at my pony during Riding.
The pony, Huntsman, was an obstinate brown gelding who never got out of a trot. His favourite activity was to stop halfway through a ride and luxuriate in a long, noisy pee. You’d just have to sit there, trying to look ladylike, while the clouds of steam rose around you. Apparently I had shouted at Huntsman, who was refusing to move.
‘Well, of course,’ Deirdre decl
ared complacently, ‘I just said, “Go on, Huntsman,” and he moved off immediately.’ More injustice! I never! She never! This did not happen!
Bretch eventually emerged from this coven of young witches. I followed her into her sitting room and stared at the carpet, which was the colour of custard creams.
‘P– p– please, Miss Cross, I’m sorry I was so rude.’ Then I sobbed and sobbed and agreed that it was an accident (it wasn’t! it wasn’t!) and Bretch parped on at me for about 500 years while I thought about raising the issue of the prefect who had lied about my shouting at the pony, but decided I preferred to stay alive. Look what happened when you told the truth. It was far more important to shut up and obey the rules.
10
WEIRD AND WONDERFUL RULES
There were so many rules. Life at Felixstowe College was regimented. I suspect this was deliberate, so you didn’t have time to think. Because if you thought about it you would have to wonder why the school had so many weird and wonderful rules, and that would use up time better spent doing all the things you had to do because life was regimented. Sukie said she’d lie in her Latimer bed, on her mattress with a dip in it that probably hadn’t been turned for year, just breathing. ‘No one’s going to tell me what to do till the bell goes in the morning.’ Phew.
Oh God, those rules. Number one was that you weren’t allowed to go to the college if you lived within ten miles of Ipswich. I’ve no idea why – perhaps there was deemed to be something especially plebeian about Ipswich. There was also a rule about what you could be called. Even if you hated your first name and had always been known by your middle name, it was your first name that had to be used. Jonah never bothered with given names at all. She just called us by our surnames. ‘Welch! What are you doing?’