Too Marvellous for Words

by Julie Welch

  ‘Your mother’s written to me asking why you’ve dropped Chemistry. She wants you to keep taking it because she thinks you’ll need it when you go into the family firm.’

  Oh, of course. Now my sister was going to marry the fast businessman, whom my father flatly refused to employ, my mother had designated me in her dynastic fantasy as the one who would take over the business.

  That was the trouble with adults; they couldn’t just let you get on with it. They were always trying to make you into something you didn’t want to be, and either what you did want to be was something they didn’t approve of, or they told you it wasn’t possible because you were a girl, and girls just couldn’t do that. Because even if I’d wanted to take over the family firm, my father wouldn’t have let me in a million years, not even if I’d been all the most brilliant business brains in the world rolled into one, because I was a GIRL.

  And so my mother then blamed me because I wasn’t a boy, because if I’d been a boy all this wouldn’t have happened; bloody Jane wouldn’t have been made a director of the company and everything would be wonderful and skippety-doodah. Etc. etc.

  So it was all my fault, but as I would never be anything but a girl there was nothing much I could do about it. And never, never, would I go back to Chemmy and sit in that lab while Cawley squawked and threw test tubes. The woman was deranged.

  ‘I don’t want to go into the family firm. I’m going to be a writer.’

  ‘Hmph?’

  You could always tell when Jonah was really interested, rather than being about to deliver a ticking-off, because she would put her head on one side and look at you straight through her glasses, rather than glare at you over the top of them. ‘What are you going to write about?’

  Everything. Heroes and gangsters and glory. Horses. My friends. Having adventures. Everything about being alive. I want to make people laugh. And cry now and again. Writing’s everything to me. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, it’s what I’ve known I was going to be, it’s the only thing I’m really good at. I want to write the whole world.

  ‘Um . . . not sure yet,’ I mumbled.

  ‘I’ll write to your mother and explain that English is your strong subject and you need to be doing Languages,’ said Jonah firmly.

  So no more Chemmy for me because Jonah was on my side. She had protected me. Her word was the last word. Even my mother knew that. All was well with the world again.

  Except it wasn’t. In fact, it was about to end. October 1962 was the month of the Cuban missile crisis. The USA vs. the Soviet Union. JFK vs. Mr Khrushchev. It was something to do with the deployment of nuclear missiles. I didn’t really understand all that stuff. I just knew that I was I was about to be vaporised out of existence before I’d barely begun.

  We huddled in the commie with the prefect who’d come in to tell us to go to our baths. She sat down with us instead and discussed how long it would take for the fallout of a bomb dropped on Russia to reach Suffolk. That was even more frightening because she was a Big Girl and if Big Girls were taking it seriously we really were doomed. What would we do when the four-minute warning came? Ridley didn’t have a nuclear bunker. The only place we could think of was Dan Dan the Boilerman’s cellar. And what would Jonah do, hide under her desk?

  But of course all that cowering would be pointless because Felixstowe College would just go up in clouds of smoke and steam and dust like everywhere else. And if it didn’t, it would still be The End. Eventually. I had read Neville Shute’s On the Beach and remembered how the hero didn’t get blown to smithereens, or die of radiation sickness along with his friends and loved ones first time round. He got it and recovered. But he knew the sickness would come back, so he sat in his car, the solitary survivor, and took a kill pill. Perhaps Rayment would supply something similar to us at Sug when the time came.

  I didn’t want to die. Except for going to Heaven, there wasn’t much to recommend it. Even Heaven might turn out to be not all it was cracked up to be. What would we all do up there? Would it be lovely, like summer term, swimming in the sparkling sea and playing tennis and having midnight feasts all over the place? Or more like Sunday afternoons in winter when Pick of the Pops had finished and it was too wet and cold to go outside, and we had to sit around mending stuff and Erica would start picking on someone because she was bored, and then we would have to go to Evening Chapel for all eternity, with nothing to do to pass the time but count how many times Elly-J said ‘and’.

  And what if you were punished for past sins? I’d probably be dragged along to see Grandma and Grandpa Welch, like I’d had to when we were all alive, and I’d had to sit still and be quiet amidst the gloomy Victorian furniture (one room was filled entirely with glass cases of stuffed owls); Grandma with arthritic fingers at an angle of thirty-five degrees, so she couldn’t even knit any more, and Grandpa empty-eyed from glaucoma, and thus empty of everything in life that had amused him, like reading books and riding bicycles and walking on his hands. We had to see them every Wednesday, and one day my big sister told me to fake a sickie, and then we wouldn’t have to. So that’s what I did, and two days after that Grandma was found dead on the floor of her kitchen. It was a judgement. I might as well have clubbed her over the head myself.

  And I’d go there without having written any of the books I was going to write. Or having got married and had lots of children, which was my next ambition after being a writer. Would Jane be there with my parents, leaving me to play gooseberry till the end of time? And apparently animals weren’t admitted, so what would happen to Rebel? Would he be left out in the cold? And Chrissie would probably have to be billeted with her family, so I wouldn’t even have her. No one to get into absolute hysterics with, or save me a place on coach trips, or write stories and draw cartoons or imitate Bretch and Wrinch with; no one to put their arm round me if I cried. I would be so lonely. Forever.

  This could not go on. It was all getting very silly. Miss McNulty restored order. ‘There will be no World War Three,’ she said firmly, sitting angular and upright at her table at lunch the next day. She was a Catholic, so she would never lie. She was correct. There was no World War Three. That was that. We stopped thinking about our imminent extinction and moved on to the next drama: The Phantom Clothes Strewer of Ridley House. One of the great unsolved mysteries.

  ‘Someone’s been moving our clothes,’ Chrissie said to Juno and Wisty, as the four of us marched along to Riding in our hacking jackets and jodhpurs, my hard hat still with the little V torn out of it where I’d hit the ground falling off Prince all that time ago in Cornwall.

  It was a real November day. No sea, just a fog blanket. Blank windows all along the clifftop hotels. The stables were in a residential road, quite a walk from school. They must have been a coach yard at some point. It was a big paved yard scattered with straw and manure, with stables for seven or eight nags, most of which would have found their way into beef burgers these days. It exuded the usual horsey pong, which at that age you think is elixir. It was run by two men called Seelly and Blackie. Seelly was ancient and bow-legged and had probably been in the army, out in India. Blackie was a bit younger and had black hair going grey and a red face, but I was so man-starved he might have been Cary Grant.

  ‘Our Games things,’ I elucidated. ‘Dressing gowns. Blouses and ties. Bras even. When you wake up in the morning they’re all over the place. The Games pitches. On trees. In puddles on the cloakroom floor. And water poured on beds, too. It’s been going on for weeks. Bretch is going potty.’

  ‘Pottier,’ said Chrissie.

  ‘Perhaps you’ve got a poltergeist,’ said Wisty.

  ‘Oh – what?’

  ‘Actually,’ said Juno, ‘I remember hearing about this Tyndale who woke up in the morning to find somebody had shaved her eyebrows off.’

  ‘Golly,’ said Chrissie. ‘She must have been a very deep sleeper. I mean, wouldn’t you have woken up and noticed at the time?’

  ‘Well,’ said Juno, ‘there was a bi
t more to it than met the eye.’

  ‘Eyebrow,’ I said.

  ‘Shall I carry on?’ she said, in her best ‘I’m a Cranmer’ voice.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Everyone in her dorm was grilled. They all swore they hadn’t done it. Then she woke up to find that her shirt and cardigan had had the sleeves cut off. The dorm-mates were sent to Jonah. Still swore they hadn’t done it. Her parents came storming up to Felixstowe and threatened to bring in the police, and in the end the poor kid broke down and admitted it was her all along. Because she’d asked them again and again to take her away from this horrible place and they wouldn’t listen. Anyway, she got what she wanted. They took her home with them the same day.’

  When Chrissie and I got back from our ride, we told the others about Eyebrows Girl over our teatime toast and boiled eggs. Everyone made sympathetic noises and said, ‘No! Poor thing!’ and speculated who in Ridley could possibly be that miserable, but our thoughts soon switched to evening lessons – ‘Another Maths test! Bound to be ghastly!’ – and we got into our outdoor things and set off in the wind and rain to the school block.

  ‘At least we’ve got Drama,’ someone said, at which I remembered I was meant to bring in my wellingtons because we were rehearsing a skit called ‘Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud’, so I muttered that I’d catch everyone up and ran back down the path to Ridley.

  The cloakroom seemed strange and eerie because it was empty and I didn’t dare switch the light on because I wasn’t meant to be there. Wellies were kept in a big wooden box in the corner, and I had to be quick because Maths was first thing, so it was all a bit welly-nelly . . . I was chucking them on the floor in the frantic haste to find mine. It was no use. I’d have to have some light. And it was there, by the light switch, that the prefect found me.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  It was just like being accosted by a policeman. You automatically feel guilty even if you aren’t. I went bright red and tried to explain, but I could see she was looking over my shoulder at the scattered wellingtons and could almost hear the cogs in her brain whirring.

  After supper, I had to go and be grilled by Bretch. She was decent about it and I thought that was the end of the matter, but it was too late. In the febrile atmosphere, it only took one person in the wrong place at the wrong time to make everyone suspicious, and all of a sudden I was being looked at askance and sent to Coventry. How rotten people could be, Chrissie and I thought, because she’d told everyone it couldn’t be me, because she was with me practically all the time – except for that one dash to the cloakroom, of course – and anyway, I wasn’t remotely the sort of person who would creep around in the middle of the night hanging bras on trees.

  The perpetrator became more daring, or desperate; stuff was moved in broad daylight. Then it happened one weekend when I was away on exeat with my parents. My trial was over. Everyone knew it couldn’t have been me. But it had been horrid, absolutely horrid. Worse than all that stuff about World War Three, because I’d had a taste of how it felt to be unpopular. After a while the clothes stopped being moved, so I hope whoever was doing it had some help and care. We never did find out who it was.

  Chrissie had turned out to be a fabulous dancer. Delicate in her footwork. Controlled in her movement. Just naturally sexy and sinuous. The strange thing was that the minute the music stopped she was crashing into things all over the place, as if she suddenly wasn’t used to her body. Doors held a magnetic attraction for her, or perhaps it was the other way round, and she held the attraction for doors. She would only have to stand in one’s vicinity and it would fly open and bash her. She sported bruises on her shins, bumps on her forehead, even one week a black eye that gradually turned the shade of Mrs Kahn’s scrambled egg. And at the same time if any bug was going the rounds it would make straight for her, so when it wasn’t a stinking cold it was feeling sick. Naturally, when German measles struck, she was one of the first to succumb.

  More than half the school got it. Lucky pigs, no lessons for them. The San was already stuffed full, so dorms became isolation rooms and people lolled around all day and night, reading and listening to Radio Luxembourg and eating sweets, smug because they didn’t have to go to Games and wouldn’t have deaf babies when they grew up. Della won the jackpot. About a year before that, her mother had sent her to school with her big sister’s vest on, and it turned out she was allergic to wool, because the skin on her chest came out in a vest-shaped rash. So a year later, when she dutifully went to Rayment and told her she was down with measles, a rather harassed Rayment said, ‘No, dear, you’ve been wearing wool again, go away.’ Then Della went home on exeat that weekend and the doctor was called about her wool rash. ‘That’s no wool rash,’ he said, ‘You’ve got German measles.’ She was the luckiest pig of all. She had two weeks at home.

  I didn’t get it, not a single measle. What I did get was an awful letter about my mother.

  Not until I was well into adulthood did I consider how unhappy my mother must have been, feeling lonely and unwanted and blazingly jealous of Jane. She was angry. A

  Fury. It made her unkind. But who could she be unkind to? Not my father or Jane. So it had to be me. I was the youngest and smallest. The easiest target.

  She couldn’t stand me, it appeared. I watched other girls with their mothers – they would sit close, they talked about stuff, they shared a world. I was shouted at and criticised and called names. But my father would not come to my rescue. If I tried to stand up for myself, he would tell me to stop worrying my mother. He felt guilty. He was afraid of her temper, and he wanted a quiet life. I dreamed of him saying, ‘What do you mean by saying all these untrue things? She’s wonderful, she’s the finest, loveliest, most beautiful girl in the world.’ Or at least, ‘Leave her alone, she’s doing her best.’ Then I would have felt much better because I had an ally. But obviously I was not worth breaching the peace for.

  One afternoon Bretch, as usual, brought our letters into the commie when we came back from lunch and laid them out on the table by the door. There was one for me, with the postmark of my home town, but the writing on the envelope was unfamiliar. It was from a friend of my parents. She had noticed, she wrote, how my mother treated me, and asked if I would like her to intervene.

  Awful, awful! I was so used to being treated unkindly that I didn’t recognise kindness when it was being offered. What was this stupid woman doing, writing to me? Why shouldn’t my mother treat me the way she did? I deserved it. I was bad and disappointing and ugly and useless. I had completely let her down. And besides, what would happen if I took up this friend’s offer? My mother would be sure to find out. And there would be hell to pay.

  And I remembered how she’d been when I was much younger. Just lovely. Playful and warm. She smiled a lot, and especially at me. Now she glared. But I wanted to keep her on her pedestal, even if that meant I had to be the bad one. I could take it, if it would help. I got rid of the letter as if it was a dose of poison and made myself forget about it. So successfully did I blot it out that I only remembered what had happened three years ago, after she died.

  I wasn’t the only one with mother difficulties. Juno’s seemed even more troubled than mine. She drank, and had just fallen out of her car in Cranmer drive when arriving to take Juno out on exeat. So everyone knew. They had seen it. Those that hadn’t seen it were told about it.

  ‘My father’s a magistrate and he drives around completely plastered a lot of the time,’ I said, trying to be comforting, as we walked to Riding.

  Juno didn’t answer, and fatally I didn’t leave it at that but went wittering on in a light-hearted vein about all the hilarious things my father had done while blotto, such as raising his hat to a lamppost and saying, ‘Good evening, Madam,’ and mistaking Rebel for a cushion and plumping him up, and then there was the time the doorbell rang and I answered it and it was a taxi driver who said, ‘I believe this is your father,’ and he was standing there grinning and so pie-eyed he couldn’t even p
ut one leg in front of the other to walk over the threshold. I had to prop him against the wall, fetch a chair and push him into it to sleep it off right there in the hall. And suddenly Juno roared, ‘SHUUT UUUUUUP!’

  We walked on, neither of us saying a thing. What kind of insensitive ass was I? My daddy is convivial. He likes to make us all laugh. He’s never shamed me in public. And there’s Juno, with her raving alkie of a mother, and here’s her wound, and I’ve rubbed it red-raw. Ground, swallow me up.

  And then Juno gave my arm a little friendly pinch.

  ‘I say, my friend wrote and told me an absolutely killing story about her school yesterday.’

  ‘What? Tell me!’

  ‘Scandal. The Games mistress and the Games captain. Someone was sent up to the Games captain’s room to get some scoresheets. A suitcase on top of the wardrobe wasn’t closed properly – it burst open and all these letters fell out. Love letters from the Games mistress. So they read them.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Oh yes! And the music teacher and one of the girls were caught on top of the piano. My friend thinks they were just fiddling, but they both had to leave.’

  Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.

  18

  FILTHY BATES

  I was very keen to get back to school for spring term 1963 because in the Christmas holidays I’d had my first kiss and I wanted to let everyone know about it. It was at a dance at the house next door, where they had the ballroom, and at midnight we had the Fireman’s Waltz, in which you all trundled round and round, and then the music stopped, the lights went off and you had to kiss your partner.

  The boy was called Nigel, and he was probably the smallest, most unappealing and desperate person there apart from me. The kiss just went on and on. I’d honestly had more fun cleaning my teeth. He obviously thought the same because after about a minute of bumping our lips together and pressing and snuffling, he said, ‘Let’s stop now, shall we?’ And then we had to stand there in the dark listening to everyone else slurping and sighing and rustling each other’s clothes till the lights went back on. There was another boy there who I fancied much more, so, when I wrote about it in my diary that night, next to Nigel’s name I put a full stop that looked more like a comma and then the fanciable boy’s name, and then a dash and a ‘Wow!’, so if anyone peeked at my diary they might think I’d been kissed by both.