by Julie Welch
On the other hand, mad teachers are so, so funny, and I’m afraid my Dark Side has prevailed. A weird kind of loyalty stops me from expounding on the slightly batty nervous mannerisms exhibited by several of our teachers, but I think it was Boris Johnson who, on the topic of cake, said he was in favour of having it and eating it. A quick straw poll among friends who attended similar schools in the same era as I did produced gems.
Miss Bang. Dandruff the size of sixpences. She chomped.
Miss Milner, a rather eccentric Latin teacher who wore purple clothes. She broke her leg roller-skating and slipped under the great high desk and everyone stood around watching her struggling to get out. It was a long time before anyone said, ‘We’d better help her.’
Miss Dawes. Her pupils spent a long time trying to destroy her. She had a breakdown in the class – screaming, ranting, raving, blubbing, carrying on.
Miss Bickersteth, known as Beak. More than a little odd, especially about sex. Every Sunday night she would read her girls Elizabeth Goudge and pass over a few pages: ‘I don’t think we’ll read that.’ Sex just didn’t exist. She had a dog, Misty, and she used to take it for a walk round the boundaries, hunting for sweet wrappers like truffles. If she found one, all the girls would be kept inside, while she’d tell them all about the walk. ‘Ooh, I saw two rabbits this morning, they were doing some silly things together.’
Mrs C had diabolical halitosis and, when demonstrating the sentence, ‘La gomme est dans la bouche,’ would take some poor girl’s rubber and put it in her mouth, then hand it back covered in foul-smelling saliva. She hated girls rocking in their chairs and would make them stand with hands on heads reciting French verbs.
A cookery teacher who lasted for about a month before the powers that be realised she was totally bonkers. They didn’t cook anything. Every class she gave, she had everyone scrubbing ovens, floors, walls, absolutely everything. The school only realised she was nuts when she had the girls sat out on the second-floor windowsills scrubbing the glass and bricks outside with bleach.
Mad Murgatroyd, a Head of Latin, who was one of those rather sad maiden ladies who wandered around talking to herself.
A French teacher, M’mselle B, who lived with the Geography teacher Miss D and who used to throw chalk or even the blackboard cleaner.
Also on the staff was a Maths teacher who had a first from Cambridge but couldn’t teach to save her life. She had appalling B.O. and was mercilessly tortured and teased. She never really recovered from the time the swimming pool was pouring smoke, as it was on fire (really), and she told the girls not to be ridiculous when they pointed this out and couldn’t they tell the difference between smoke and steam? She disappeared soon afterwards with a nervous breakdown.
Even so, in a competition for mad teachers, there could be only one winner. Cawley was a different class of bonkers. Seriously. Absolutely stark staring. We thought so, anyway. The Chemmy lab was in a separate building next to the Bilge lab, and though it looked harmless enough from the outside it should have had a warning whiff of sulphur emanating from it, because this was Cawley’s lair, her cave.
She kept that lab immaculate. Spotless benches, gas taps, Bunsen burners, sinks, fume cupboard, an enormous copy of the periodic table. Everything labelled, in the correct position, and laid out specifically. Racks of clean test tubes. Clean lab coats, white, hanging on the coat rack. Then she’d have some kind of brainstorm and lay waste to it, throwing test tubes and Bunsen burners all over the place, and send you scurrying out of the lab with equipment flying after you and crashing on the ground. Glass splinters everywhere.
It wouldn’t have been so bad had she confined herself to the lab, because then you could have easily avoided her, but she was ubiquitous. She prowled, holding her books close. Very determined, slightly hunched. Smart clothes, a groomed hairstyle – white hair, impeccably ‘done’. A frightening woman with cutting words and looks, poking her nose in, giving us the death stare. She caught us talking in cab at break once and made Cherry write down everyone’s names. Another time she was haunting our form room after French for some reason and wouldn’t let me get my wigging towel. What business was it of hers? As for being a Latimer, well.
The girls in this House have been told repeatedly that they must not have evening baths, unless they are down on the list, without special permission. The girl who took a bath without permission this evening will not be allowed to have any more evening baths this term.
What makes it all the more peculiar is that she doesn’t seem to have always been like that. Not quite as awful, anyway. Her first manifestation, when she arrived to teach towards the end of the war, was more Joyce Grenfell than Wicked Witch of the West. A little while ago, I met a charming Old Girl of that era, Penny Grossett, who remembers how the newly employed Cawley announced herself with a notice pinned up on the board: Who wants to go blackberrying?
Penny got on with her. Other girls were terrified but she was kind to Penny. Once, Penny came back from the San, still weepy, so Cawley sent her to bed and lent her a book, Her Good Grace by Elizabeth Goudge; Penny loved Goudge’s books after that. In Penny’s last term, when she was taking Oxbridge entrance, Cawley gave up her bedroom to her and bedded down in her sitting room. Though it must be added that when Penny thanked her, Cawley said gruffly, ‘Jonah told me to do it.’ Heaven forbid that anyone mistake her for someone nice.
It sounds as though she was reasonably normal back then, though. Normal for Felixstowe, anyway. I was riveted by a school photo that had been taken on Cranmer lawn in 1949, only a couple of years after the school had returned from its exile in Norfolk during the war. There, next to Miss Pipe, is a strikingly attractive young woman in a clingy jersey dress, her confident expression and pugnaciously squared jaw softened by thick, wavy, shoulder-length hair. This was someone who knew how to dress, even in Austerity Britain. Was that Cawley? Really?
Somewhere along the line, things must have gone a bit wonky. In those early years, she liked to play the piano. The girls would be in the dorm, lying in bed, and the Warsaw Concerto would start up. It was noisy but jolly good. Before the war, Cawley had been out there. She was obviously letting herself go. Speculation did the rounds. She had supposedly ‘lost her fiancé in the war’. We conjectured. Just how had she lost him? Had he been killed? Had she, you know, given herself to him, and the chap then scarpered?
But poor Latimers. People in different Houses didn’t know their luck. All the other House mistresses were tame in comparison. She was the most unsuitable woman you could possibly imagine to be in charge of between forty and fifty impressionable teenagers. Liz Bruce, a Latimer in Joanna’s year, emailed me from Australia.
‘Not a good choice for a House mistress. She really had everyone extremely anxious and nerve-ridden at all times. She was unpredictable – vicious at times and then delightful at others. One moment she would be putting her arm round you and the next she would be giving you a rather vicious pinch. She had some stomach problem. We were told part of her stomach had been removed and she couldn’t eat seeds. Hence we weren’t allowed to give her raspberries as a present. Not that I had any intention of giving the old bat a present anyway.
‘She also had her favourites – poor Georgie was one. She became House captain, which we all knew about from even the beginning of school. I don’t think Georgie revelled in her popularity with Cawley at all. Anyone who was vaguely intelligent was almost forced into doing Chemistry – out of the ten of us Latimers in Lower Six I would say more than half took it at A Level.’ Liz was one of them. And she hated Chemistry.
Also, Cawley was High Church. According to the tradition laid down by the school’s founders, the place was Low Church, so this must have been bloody-mindedness and a way of making herself conspicuous. In Chapel, the choir would look down from the choir stalls and wait during the Creed for ‘In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost’, which was the cue for Cawley and Maggie – who would never have done such a daring thing on her own, b
ut who was in Cawley’s thrall – to cross themselves. We’d never seen that before. And on one occasion Liz got called into her room and berated, as her parents had taken her on exeat to St Andrews, Felixstowe. ‘St Andrews is fundamentalist!’ screeched Cawley.
Another Latimer who responded to my round-robin appeal for informants was Sue Robinson, who was in the same year as Liz. Sue was a lovely looking and serious-minded girl who joined in Middle Five, when she was fourteen. Her parents were based in Aden, where her father was in Air Sea Rescue. A cherished only child who was used to her own room and her own space, she was now having to sleep on a squeaky bed with a concave mattress. She was very tearful at first, cried at the drop of a hat. Hugely unhappy. Somebody noticed she ate left-handed. She was made to sit in one place, wear a bib, and forced to eat right-handed. The humiliation was astonishing. All around, people laughing at the fact she was pebbledashing herself with food.
The only upside was that Cawley was so nasty it made everyone kind to each other. They all vowed they were never going to treat young people that way, ever, when they grew up. Or old people, either. She bullied Pipe horribly. Squawked at her. It got some girls crying, just listening to Cawley absolutely going for her matron. She was foul. And that poor woman would just look cowed and scuttle off to her room next to the Other Cupboard.
She lurked round corners. She snooped. Both women, she and Pipe, kept cats, black ones with white paws. Chut’n and Pickles were believed to join in the snooping, like witches’ familiars. Everything was peered into or under – cupboards, pillows, drawers, mattresses. She opened post, opened parcels, made random decisions about phone calls to girls from outside. Her room, to the right of the front door, was a homage to chintz. On a magnanimous day, she would invite people in and chat, but it was almost always chemists. These, her favourites, were allowed to take more calls than everyone else. They’d get the screech down the corridor as a summons. ‘Come ’ere!’ And then Cawley would sit there and listen in.
Why did she have to be like that? It wasn’t as if they ever did anything naughty. Well, hardly ever. She had a rota of girls who ran errands for her. Fagging, basically. Going to and fro with the tea tray, feeding the cats, having to get up early to make her breakfast. She was exacting. She had mustard with her sausages and it had to be freshly made from powder. One term the girls who were on breakfast duty mixed the mustard powder with spit instead of water. They also had to make Cawley’s birthday cake that year. One girl cut her toenails into the mix and then the others all spat in it in turn.
The rest of us felt very sorry for the Latimers. What a madhouse it all sounded. Thank heavens we didn’t have to live in it. But there was one thing none of us were able to escape – The Cawley Table.
12
SCHOOL DINNERS
One thing I must say before I start is that school dinners were never called that. In fact, dinner as such didn’t exist. We had breakfast, lunch, tea and supper. When we Ridleys reached Middle Five, we were joined by a very nice new girl, Gwen. Gwen had previously attended a state school where such distinctions did not hold, and on her very first day she made the mistake of asking Bretch, ‘What time’s dinner?’ which shocked Bretch so much her hair would have stood on end if it hadn’t been standing on end already. ‘You don’t say dinner, you say lunch,’ Bretch explained, after she had recovered from her swoon.
My first meal at school was supper, and jolly good fun it was too, because it was the first night of term and we were allowed to sit anywhere we wanted, and there was only one thing I had to secretly drop on the floor because it was so disgusting. But the next day was different. It was a Monday, and Monday was the day of table picking.
What happened at table picking was after morning lessons you would walk over to the dining room. At the door would be two prefects, one armed with a sheaf of cardboard squares, on which a letter and number had been inked, and the other to act as an enforcer. The enforcer was necessary because the letter denoted the member of staff at whose table you were to eat that week, and the number would tell you your placement, and what sort of week you were going to have, because every day you moved along a place until you sat next to the teacher at head of the table.
The M card wasn’t great. It meant you were on the table headed by Miss Maggie Macartney. But N, the next table along, was the dreaded one, The Table of Death, the ruination of your entire week, because N meant Cawley, and you had to make conversation with her. Because if you didn’t she would stand up when the meal was finished and address the whole dining room: ‘This girl on my right has not uttered a single word this lunchtime.’
One week Helen was on The Cawley Table and, when it was her turn to sit next to the mad old bag, she asked her, ‘Do you prepare all your lessons, Miss Cawley?’
‘What?’ Cawley screeched. ‘Miss Macartney, did you hear what this girl said?’
And Lindy was on The Cawley Table when her salad had a caterpillar in it, huge and green with a red stripe and still alive, trampolining across the lettuce. Lindy was doubly terrified. A caterpillar and Miss Cawley! She managed to get the caterpillar on to the table and then on to the floor, and then spent the rest of lunch holding her feet up. And the worst thing of all was if your cardboard square said N1 or N13, because that was the place either side of her, and you would have to talk to her twice, once at the start of the week and again at the end. Every Monday girls were running among their friends saying, ‘Please, please will you swap?’ And the cold, dead eyes of the enforcer prefect would alight on them, and make sure they submitted to their fate.
In 1963, Gill, the Walter Scott enthusiast, was halfway through her first term in Lower Five when the school was told that the Oxford Board of Examiners was thinking of bringing O Levels forward. Girls were going to have to decide their O Level subjects then and there, rather than at the end of the school year. It so happened that only a few days previously Gill had been sitting on the steps outside the Chemmy lab and Cawley, enraged at this act of trespass, hit her with the lab doors by throwing them open on to her back. So that clinched it for Gill: Chemmy to be dropped at the earliest opportunity. Then, the very next day, the Lower Fives were told they had to choose their O Level subjects early, and Gill nixed Chemmy, but she had to sit next to Cawley at lunch.
Cawley started the conversation straight after Jonah had finished saying Grace. ‘I’m going to get two scientists out of Ridley Middle Five.’
‘Yes, Miss Cawley.’
‘Don’t you want to know who they are?’
‘Yes, Miss Cawley.’
‘You and Rosemary.’
Cawley had no idea. Gill never spoke up. God no. Would you have done?
I used to pretend that school dinners were vile, Cawley or no Cawley, but I didn’t really mean it. Well, some of it was quite edible and, considering she was having to feed 300 people three meals a day, seven days a week, Mrs Kahn did us well. The prospectus called her ‘the nutritionist’, but she was much more involved that that. The school kitchens were large and had a hatch where the food would be passed on to trolleys, which would then be wheeled into the dining room. If you looked in you’d see bustling women and steam, and hear clatter, and Mrs Kahn would always be in the thick of it.
She was small and old, with dyed yellow hair and yellow, nicotined fingers. Very, very witchy, always with a fag in her mouth, and she muttered and limped, and had a twisted leg. Out at the back, next to the kitchens, were some store rooms and the room where she lived. There was a covered walkway, like half a courtyard, leading to these rooms, and then a gate to the drive. It was where the deliveries came and where the fire escape began. She was often seen pacing from her room to the kitchen and back, or to the stores, dressed in her white overalls, with a bunch of keys clanking at her side. The rumour was she had been the cook in a concentration camp. We would say the most terrible things about some of the bits and bobs we found in her stews and rissoles. One of her signature dishes was jugged hare, which always yielded an above average sup
ply of teeth and hairy stuff for comment
You were allowed to be ‘off’ three things, and these had to be in writing. A lot of people avoided the so-called scrambled egg, which was actually reconstituted out of powder and sat in a brick in a puddle. Or the fluorescent haddock, which was so dyed and overcooked it flopped on your plate like a single Marigold glove. Della was off liver, roes on toast (very tasty, in my opinion) and milk. But one day she was caught by surprise in the form of Eggs Florentine – a new departure for Mrs Kahn. It had been in the oven for hours. The spinach was black and the eggs were like jelly on top, with crispy bits. Everyone had to eat it because we weren’t off it, because we didn’t know Eggs Florentine was a thing. Della threw up afterwards. Probably out of sheer willpower.
But Mrs Kahn’s homemade sausages were delicious, and so were her puddings, especially the apple crumble and the steamed chocolate sponge with chocolate sauce. Sometimes we got chocolate sauce to pour over our ice cream, too, and that was just heaven. The liver would occasionally have pipes sticking out of it, but it came with lovely oniony gravy, and we had proper chips and real kippers, and sometimes roast chicken . . . if it was chicken. The pieces were awfully big. And chewy. We spotted Mrs Kahn once when we were out riding, and she was moving very purposefully, in her outsize orthopaedic shoes, along the clifftop, armed with a giant carrier bag. What was she doing out there? Was she clubbing seagulls?