Too Marvellous for Words

by Julie Welch

Nobody liked the spam fritters, and you had to be very greedy to eat them. Karen was very greedy. She was Ridley’s assistant matron, though not for long. She was young. She had long, tangled dark hair, and wore hairy black jerseys and baggy cotton skirts. Where did she spring from? How could the school have employed someone as exciting as her? Matrons weren’t like that. They were either kind, motherly types, like our Miss Rayment, or gorgons like Miss Poulson of Tyndale.

  Poulson was squat and squinty, humpbacked and stoopy, and she smelt of Algipan. Her cure for everything was a double Anadin. She went round all the dorms at night, making sure the curtains were closed, because if girls were prancing around people could see. She used to shout at them from the other end of the corridor. She popped up in the bathroom once when Joanna was in the bath. ‘I don’t believe it! It’s you again! It’s not your turn to be in the bath!’ and tried to haul Joanna out. And she wouldn’t let anybody go to cab after Lights Out. She would wait in the corridor, in darkness, to catch you out. It got so bad that the greatest dare was to go in the washbasin. One night, Joanna’s sister Rosie bravely tiptoed into the corridor, at which came a scary, nasal voice: ‘Who’s that? What are you doing?’ So embarrassing. Now the whole House knew that Rosie was going to cab.

  But here in Ridley we suddenly had this amazing Karen creature who, instead of taking Lights, would sit on the ends of our beds, telling us about her boyfriend Derek and the Ban the Bomb marches she went on, and how she was an atheist, and what French kissing was, and how she sometimes went around with no knickers on. I thought she was brilliant, the most exciting thing ever to happen in Ridley. But Karen was greedy because she was eating for two and, one night, spam fritters were on the menu at supper and she ate the lot and then rushed out into Cranmer gardens and threw up over the tamarisks, so that was Karen sacked.

  Even more thrilling than Karen barfing over the tamarisks was the day Rosie found The Body On The Beach. Rosie was very self-effacing. She once nearly choked on a sausage skin at lunch and nobody noticed because she was such a quiet little thing. Rosie had arrived for breakfast early and, as no one else was around, she decided to walk in Cranmer garden. She looked at the beach and there it was. A woman who had drowned herself, it transpired. Rosie never got any credit for spotting the woman. As soon as she saw her she ran back into Cranmer and told another girl, and the other girl hogged all the limelight.

  13

  LESSONS

  I discovered the school part of school wasn’t too bad – most of the time, anyway. There was, however, one 35-minute spell of gibbering fear every week, which was Chemmy with Cawley, and Scripture could be nerve-wracking if Maggie was in one of her moods. But I liked being able to walk to class without having to spend an hour on the tube first, and we must have all made a splendid picture, hurrying from breakfast to Morning Prayers and then our classrooms, hugging the sides of our zip-free cloaks together against the northeast wind, like people in a costume drama.

  The school day was different to what I’d been used to as a Day Girl. In the morning were six lessons, four before break and two after, and then we went to Cranmer for lunch. Then, instead of more lessons, we had Games. One’s brains did yawn and go phew by the afternoon, so this was not as ghastly as it sounds. Ru-uuun! Shoooo-oot! Blow those cobwebs away! Fortified by the rites of House Tea, we would return to the intellectual fray for four more lessons, and then round things off by belting out a hymn at Vespers.

  And however dreary the morning lessons were, there were always the breaktime buns to look forward to. They were staggering. They came from Millars, the local bakery that supplied our bread, and we would have a different kind each day, laid out on three shallow trays in the playground next to the little bottles of milk with the tops already punctured and speared with straws.

  Monday was a jammy doughnut. It was all soft and sugary on the outside, and then you bit into the lovely pale-yellow springy interior and burst it so the jam splattered all over your chin. Tuesday was a currant bun, which may sound dull in comparison, but the currant-to-bun ratio was spectacularly generous. Wednesday brought forth a Danish pastry, though that was my least favourite, as the lemon curd in the centre looked like phlegm. Thursday’s was an elongated iced bun. A sticky willy. No further elucidation necessary. Friday saw a repeat of the jammy doughnut. There was always someone on a diet, so if you hung around the playground long enough you could have two.

  As for lessons themselves, my desk in Lower Five A was in the third row and Chrissie bagged the one next to mine, so I had someone to pass notes to when things flagged. We were in note-passing range of Della and Beth, too. Plus you could usually rely on Beth for a few pranks. At one stage we had a supply teacher who wore her hair done up. We had to take our exercise books to her desk for marking, and Beth took a magnet and made all her hairpins fall out. And by the time our year started doing Physics, the school had appointed some poor little wet-behind-the-ears 22-year-old youth, and all the girls ran rings round him, even Cherry who was normally so well-behaved. He always wore red socks, so we would hold our noses when he came in: ‘Poo!’ He resigned after a term. What fun!

  And we put chalk on Miss Evans’s chair, so she would get it on the back of her gown. Miss Evans took us for English Literature and was a dreadfully boring teacher but kind, like a granny. She had a great head of fluffy white hair, and you could see the tops of her woolly stockings when she sat down. She gave us stuff to read while she did the Daily Mail crossword or surreptitiously knitted. We were meant to be doing Pride and Prejudice but you could read anything. You could even walk out of the classroom and go and talk in cab. She never noticed. She looked very old, even older than Cawley, who was Methuselah, but neither of them was as ancient as nice Miss Wrinch, who taught Geography. Miss Wrinch was so serenely old that I thought she had been granted eternal life.

  Wrinch had one unfortunate nervous mannerism – after finishing a sentence she would draw back her lips and suck air between her teeth. Shluuuurp. She was lean and virginal, wore her hair in wings, walked on tippy-toe and said Him-ah-layas instead of Hima-lay-as. We had to go to the Geography room for her lessons. It was a special building tacked on one side of the gym. The Story of Felixstowe College rhapsodised about its ‘delightful view over the lawns to the sea’. The room was light and airy and contained a massive black globe, which you could write on with chalk. This was a gift from ‘Jonah’s Jews’ – a summer school from North London that rented the college buildings. At the end of summer term we had to clean out every dressing table and locker, every scrap of our day-to-day detritus, everything that made us who we were, because ‘the Jews’ were coming. One summer they held a beach party and chopped up some of our furniture to make a fire. They gave us the globe as reparation.

  Wrinch was tall, and so was her desk. Perched on a high stool, she tootled on about volcanoes and how they worked, and meandering rivers, and populations in valleys, and where crops were grown. And fjords. She loved going on about the fjords. She started with the fjords and never got off the fjords, it sometimes seemed, and you whiled away the time staring at her scraggy neck and the stick-like body under her gown. Oh dear, she was such a kind, safe teacher, doling out glucose tablets to everyone before exams. She never shouted or threw chalk, and she certainly never put rubbers in her mouth. But so boring. I’d have to write down everything she said otherwise I’d forget it straightaway. Nothing stuck. Not one single f jord. When it came to exams, I had to memorise entire essays in cab overnight beforehand. ‘Wales is a very mountainous country, with some peaks over up to 3,000ft high.’ A few days after one exam, I was on The Wrinch Table at lunch and boasted about my feat of memory. ‘Yes,’ she said drily, ‘it rather read that way.’

  I was fascinated by her Christian name, Lois, which should have belonged to a jazz singer, not someone who was a living history of our school. I hesitate to say ‘BJ’ because those initials stand for something altogether rather rude these days, but Miss Wrinch had been there BJ – Before Jonah. Sh
e had been a day pupil when it wasn’t even yet Felixstowe College, but an obscure private school called Uplands.

  Uplands had occupied a site called Bulls Cliff, 200 yards from the sea, and Lois Wrinch was there to witness the drama when Bulls Cliff went up in flames in the summer hols of 1927, and the speedy reopening on new premises, Cranmer. She was living at the time on the High Road, near Tyndale and Latimer, in a house designed by her father, and Wrinch père was the architect who transformed Cranmer’s stable block into our beautiful library. She was there in the autumn term of 1928, on the morning of the Great Announcement, when (I quote The Story of Felixstowe College), ‘ . . . the Head Mistress gave the pupils the exciting news that, as from January 1929, Uplands School would be no more for it was to become Felixstowe Ladies’ College, a Public School for Girls’.

  I’ve been able to find only one school photo from the time when it was Uplands. Lois Wrinch is standing in the back row – an attractive girl, tall, chin up, with long, wavy brown hair, good bones and a slightly stubborn set to the mouth. This was Wrinch as a teenager, not scraggy and wrinkled as we knew her, but tingling with hormones, worrying about spots and bras and periods, trying on clothes, swotting for exams, getting letters from boys (there must have been some, she was so lovely), making plans about university. Off she went to King’s College, London, where she was a star and won prizes for the best female Science student. When the Second World War broke out, she joined the WRENS and became something mysterious in the Met Office. Lois the weather girl, gesturing at cloud formations and storms over the White Cliffs of Dover and Normandy Beach. Anyway, after the war she came back to Felixstowe and that’s where she stayed.

  So, as I’ve said, Miss Wrinch practically had heritage status by the time she taught us. She was knocking on a bit, all that girly lusciousness long gone, and it turned out she wasn’t very well. One lunchtime she was doling out rice pudding at the head of The Wrinch Table, and she fainted into it. Was it a prank? Had someone put knockout drops in the rice pudding? But no, this was real.

  The very decent Tyndale Head of House, who was passing by, put an end to the paralysis that had descended on the dining room by lifting Wrinch’s head out of the green enamel tray, and tenderly wiping clean her face and straggly hair. Awful for her. A shock for us, too. She was also real; not a Geography machine. Teachers were human. I should really not be horrible to them.

  Miss Wrinch wasn’t the only nice teacher. French and Spanish were taught by a poised, very attractive woman, Miss Sanford, who treated us like people and won our hearts with a risqué joke: ‘Madrid is nine months vierno (winter) and three months infierno (hell).’ You’d remember your seasons in Spanish easily after that, wouldn’t you? Sanford was half-Spanish herself, with black hair and flashing eyes, and she rolled her Rs. When, later, we were studying Lorca as one of our set books for A Level, and the word ‘castrated’ cropped up, Della, all butter-wouldn’t-melt, stuck up her hand and said, ‘Please, what does castrated mean?’

  ‘Strrrripped of his manhood,’ replied Sanford cheerfully.

  Della knew perfectly well what castrated meant, having been brought up on a farm where there was a lot of castrating.

  Sanford lived in the town, keeping house for her widowed father. Big bust, slim hips, a bit of a Barbie doll. Wonderful. Not the slightest bit mad, even though she’d obviously had a stricken love, because why else would she be single? A soldier who died, perhaps. Or she wasn’t allowed to marry him because she was a Catholic and he was of another religious persuasion. Actually, it turned out she had a lover in Spain and used to pop over to be with him in the school holidays. No wonder she was so sane and cheerful.

  Sanford’s main chum in the school was Miss McNulty, one of the Maths teachers. She was nice, too, if fierce. Sanford and McNulty went to the same Catholic church and the same hairdresser. Both wore their jackdaw-black hair in the same wavy bob, McNulty’s the more wild and vigorous, especially when she was annoyed. You couldn’t get away with a thing in her lessons. She would threaten to push you into a peat bog. She was one of the school stalwarts, a fiery Irishwoman, tall and angular, with a strong accent and a real Irish face, like a beaky female version of Father Ted. Wore just the most awful clothes, of course. But she liked young people and would talk about where she grew up, where she learned. A bit before the end of the lesson she would disappear to get a book from the library, to talk about Pythagoras, but really to have a cigarette followed by a strong mint. She was magnificent.

  Bilge (that’s Biology) was taught by young, freckle-faced Miss Beynon, who was one of the few teachers who had a modern bust, i.e. she wore a pointy bra, not a boulder-upholder, under her crisp flowered blouse, along with a light floral perfume that we thought was probably Coty’s L’Aimant. Miss Beynon was engaged, which was most likely why she was fun and not a bit neurotic. She let me keep the dead shrew I found on the Games pitches and, while it awaited dissection by me, kindly allowed it to be stored in formalin next to The Foetus. We were very proud of our Foetus. When we played home matches against visiting schools, we would have to amuse them after tea and once it was a Catholic school, so they were taken to see it. They left horrified.

  Everybody should have at least one memorable teacher who encourages your enthusiasm for what you want to do later on and, in my case, it was Miss Laycock, who taught Elocution. She seemed different from the other staff. Tall, humorous, affectionate, long-legged and, to look at, a cross between the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard and the principle boy in panto. I think she might have trained for the stage – she had a deep, deep voice that came from somewhere located between her bosoms. Perhaps she had ended up with us because the work in rep had dried up now she had reached a certain age. But I had the impression she had lived a life and she was someone who could be talked to about everything. I was not going to be able to act, because on stage I froze, knowing everyone was looking at me, but she gave me confidence in my reading voice, brought out my love of dialogue and the rhythms of sentences, and encouraged me to say what I wanted to say. Far more than ploughing through set books with Miss Evans and Miss Williams in English, this was real learning for someone who wanted to be a writer.

  As for the difficult teachers, it was just school, wasn’t it? The kind and nice outweighed the mad and nasty, and that was the important thing. So lesson time wasn’t bad, and most days there was something to look forward to – French, Art, Gym, Bilge, Elo, Current Events. The only day of dread was Thursday, not just because that was Chemmy morning. It was also the day of The Jonah List.

  14

  MORAL WORTH

  ‘Attendance at one of the Chapel services is an inspiration and a touch of refreshing grace in so wonderful a company of future womanhood and potential mothers of a new England.’

  From a Suffolk Fair magazine article on Felixstowe College

  Miss Beynon’s Bilge lab might have been a happy place, but the wall outside was sometimes not, because on it was a noticeboard, and on Thursday at breaktime a little knot of girls would be crowded round, anxiously checking the green slip of paper that had just been pinned up.

  Jonah had a beautiful study. It was on the top floor of Cranmer – large, high-ceilinged, and with an oriel window that looked out over the sea. There were comfortable chairs for parents to sit in, and a drinks cabinet to give them drinks from, and Persian rugs for them to admire. Over the mantelshelf, behind an enormous desk, hung Annigoni’s portrait of the Queen. And at the enormous desk sat enormous Jonah. Jonah was just a nickname, of course, a matey version of Miss Jones that she’d been known as since time immemorial. Mentally I associated it with Jonah and the Whale, and whale-wise she certainly had the build.

  The wait outside, sitting on a bench, was petrifying; miles worse than having to wait at the dentist. But I couldn’t think of anything I’d done wrong. The work was easy-peasy and I had sailed to the top of the class. That was it! She was going to tell me how clever I was. I stood smiling at her complacently.

  �
�People are saying you’re conceited,’ she barked.

  Wham! It was like being punched on the nose. So this must be what that prospectus meant by the close personal attention of the headmistress. I didn’t like it one bit. I went red and looked down at my feet, the alternative being Jonah’s eyes fixed beadily on me over the top of her glasses. Oh vanity, thy name is JULIA WELCH (R).

  But what people were saying I was conceited? Jonah hadn’t seen me in action, so how did she know? Which teachers had given me the raspberry? Was this Bretch’s revenge for the guitar? Had I been self-important in Geography, pompous in History, smug in English? Had I been altogether too pleased with myself in Scripture or a show-off in Latin? Much too full of myself in Maths? Probably. I was so awfully pleased to have my brains back, you see, having made such a hash of things at my previous school.

  ‘W-w-well, I don’t think I’m conceited,’ I muttered, because right at that moment I wasn’t at all, I was a balloon someone had stamped on. Absolutely crestfallen. Oh dear. I began to realise that this school was not just about midnight feasts and learning how to play lax. I was going to have all my moral failings pointed out, too. I was a girl, so I’d have to develop dreary virtues like modesty, and being useful, and darning.

  Boom, boom, boom. Jonah was rattling on at the speed of sound. Mainly I nodded. She wasn’t really cross now she’d got her point over, which was that people wouldn’t like me if I was conceited. How did she know I so badly wanted to be liked? Was she some kind of mage?

  With a final, ‘Yes, Miss Jones,’ I staggered out of the door and took a rather wobbly walk back to House because my knees were still knocking. This was obviously how life was going to be from now on. Would I have to pray? Claim that I earnestly repented and was heartily sorry for my misdoings, and that the remembrance of them was grievous unto me and the burden of them was intolerable? Wouldn’t God be able to tell I was lying? I didn’t find my misdoings intolerable at all. If I was going to pray for anything, it was that I wouldn’t get any more filthy rows as long as I lived. Though as God had still not come through with the horses in seven colours that I’d asked for, I didn’t hold out much hope that He’d be all that bothered.