by Julie Welch
Which is where I was happy to leave it for now. I didn’t want to go on a date or anything, not that he’d asked. I could just picture it. Sort of. We’d have to kiss each other for ages again, wouldn’t we? Then there would be a whole evening to get through in which we’d have to talk. It would be like sitting next to someone at lunch who you didn’t have anything in common with because she wasn’t in your form. All I wanted was to get back to school with my new First Kiss Brownie Badge of Womanhood, where I could savour my triumph from a long way away, and moan with the others about the exams they always made us take the very first week of term.
Why did they make us take them the minute we got back? Did they want to spoil Christmas and New Year by making us revise and worry and stay up late peering at our books? We wouldn’t have put it past the old bags. We staggered out of the classrooms, grimacing and putting our hands to our cheeks. ‘Maths was ghastly!’ ‘Geography was foul!’ ‘I’m bound to have failed!’ ‘I couldn’t do a scrap! I had to waffle madly!’
Meanwhile, snow was falling, snow on snow. Snow on sodding snow, as Christina Gabriel Rosetti nearly said in ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’. The Big Freeze was how it was described in the papers. All of Britain was paralysed. January recorded the lowest temperatures of the twentieth century and February was hardly any better. Anything less like spring you could not imagine. The sea was solid ice from Dunkirk to Herne Bay and someone drove a car along the Thames at Oxford. On our first Sunday back, piling into the cloakroom to put on our Harris Tweed coats for Morning Chapel, someone exclaimed, ‘Oh, what’s happening? Has cab overflowed? I’m paddling!’
Erica ran to fetch Bretch, and along she sailed to survey the rising tide in the cloakroom, rolling her lips together thoughtfully before hurrying off to commune with Dan Dan the Boilerman in his Dan-cave. It turned out a pipe had burst and flooded the floor. What fun!
Dan was kept busy. A few days later, another pipe burst in the Lower Six dorm and drips came off the lights and ceiling in our commie. Then water started pouring down the walls and through the gap under the door into the corridor. We had to move back into the junior commie for tea, then moved operations into Ridley’s little library at the far corner of the house.
You couldn’t see out of any windows, as they were curtained by snow and ice. In the classroom we might as well have been back in the eighteenth century half the time because we had to work by candlelight. The electricity went on and off, and on and off, like the lights at Piccadilly Circus. We had one Bilge lesson illuminated by Bunsen burners. The northeast wind howled. Chrissie was commie captain that term, and one of her duties was to fetch Bretch’s supper from Cranmer. It must have been stone cold when it got to Ridley, if it hadn’t been blown off the plate on the way.
We were let back into our own commie at the end of January. It was still snowing. Lower Six got into a huge row because Bretch was eavesdropping outside their dorm door and overheard them saying she looked like a cab brush. She did! Just like one! It went all round House and soon the whole school heard about it. Round and round the dining room went the news. ‘You’ve never heard anything so killing in your entire life . . . Balloon and Jo said Bretch looks like a cab brush!’ We were in absolute fits.
That weekend we had a snowball fight after Chapel. A prefect sent us to Bretch who, after giving us a filthy row, said we could have another after lunch provided we wore macs and boots. It was absolutely sweet of her. We built a snowman and gave it a cab brush for a head.
No games, of course. The pitches had vanished. They lay somewhere under a giant white frozen marshmallow. We said hurrah too soon. Coulo made us practise lax stick work in the gym instead and gave very long lectures about tactics on a blackboard. Or we had to go for cross-country runs alongside the clifftops and beside the beach, the wind blowing, minus ten degrees, in our divided skirts. Though if you timed it right you could be a tail-ender, hide behind a beach hut and rejoin on the way back.
There was no let-up. Everywhere stayed white and snowing. When it wasn’t snow, it was hail. I developed chilblains on my feet. Giant chilblains, as big and pink as carnations. All Rayment could think of was to cover them in her all-purpose goo. Who was the Middle Five sexpot now? Not me. I minced around, feet squelching in my shoes, itching and scratching. They were hot and painful, and I was very bad-tempered. But then we all were, stuck in the commie together for hours on end, Marlee blubbing in a corner because she wanted a friend to tell things to and she hated everybody because they were always foul to her, and Marion getting on everyone’s wick because she kept going on about her hair being greasy. Greasy? She should try having my feet.
Marion stuck her nose in the air. ‘You don’t know your onions,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘She means you’re weird,’ said Beth.
‘And you’ve always been weird and you always will be weird,’ said Marion. ‘Your whole family’s weird.’
I was going to smack her face but my hand hit my glasses on the way up and they flew across the floor and broke. I picked them up and put them back on crooked, which Beth apparently found the most hilarious thing that had ever happened in the entire history of the universe, so I slapped her horrid yok-yokking face instead of Marion’s.
‘Danny, don’t be silly.’ Chrissie grabbed my hand. ‘Calm down.’
I stopped to think about it. No. I didn’t want to calm down. ‘You all get on my wick! Waaa-haa-haaaa!’
I ran out of the commie in floods. Then Beth ran out in floods. Cath and Chrissie followed me to the dorm and made soothing noises while Prue and Della went off to cheer Beth up, and eventually we all went back to the commie and got on with what we’d been doing.
But that wasn’t the end of the sturm und drang. By no means. It was nothing compared to what happened next. Erica and Bobbie broke up.
The break-up between Erica and Bobbie was awful. A term-defining drama. Erica dumped Bobbie to go round with Lindy. They had a huge, hysterical scene in the dorm. At least, Bobbie was hysterical, then took to her bed. She pulled the covers over her head like a turtle and sobbed for five whole hours. It was horrible, like a divorce. Every night she cried and cried till the covers shook, while Erica, in the next bed to her, tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. During the day Bobbie wore a vampiric look, with a ghastly pallor and her lovely soot-black hair all lank and her eyes red-rimmed, and she’d be waiting in Ridley drive for a couple to ask her to walk with them over to breakfast while Lindy and Erica strolled off into the distance. The dreadful thing was that although I was very sad for her an even stronger feeling was that I was glad it wasn’t me.
‘Oh, but Lindy, how can you go around with Erica, she’s so bossy!’ I wailed.
‘If you can’t beat them, join them,’ said Lindy calmly.
19
THE CAPTAIN OF THE SECONDS
The freeze of early 1963 hung on and on till February was nearly over. One day, though, came the sound of melted snow rushing down gutters, and dripping off branches, and car tyres sloshing along a wet Maybush Lane, and gradually the playing fields were visible again. House Games would go ahead.
House matches were staged every term. They had meaning. Blood would be shed, elbows deployed, sticks whirled. One Ridley got a lax ball in the eye, which nearly destroyed her sight. One year our Games captain staggered off the pitch able to waggle her nose between her fingers. Shots ricocheted from goalie’s pad to foreheads. There was always someone being carted away to have stitches. But House matches carried on being held, because it gave opportunities to people who otherwise wouldn’t experience the thrill of playing in a team. It was democratic. Everyone should have the chance to be miserable on the Games pitches.
But I wouldn’t have been miserable. Secretly I craved to be good at Games. But I wasn’t, not really. I ran around enthusiastically. I did not, unlike some of the others, hide in the wardrobe or under the bed. No names, no pack drill but, unlike one of my form-mates, I didn’t get out of them by sticking a
finger up a nostril and shoving it around till I got a nosebleed. But my legs were short, I ate too much and my glasses misted up when I was hot.
If you were good at Games, you could escape to another place for a few hours. You could meet another school and they’d all complain about how awful their school was. One of my friends boarded at a convent, one the day the hockey team had an away match against an approved school. My friend and her teammates were shown around and it was lovely. Sprung mattresses, single rooms, pretty curtains. Then the delinquent girls arrived for the return fixture. They were astonished. ‘You mean,’ they gasped, ‘your parents actually pay to send you here?’
But I never got picked for anything. And then the list went up on the Ridley noticeboard for House Games and my name was on the team sheet. C for Centre: ME! I was captain. Captain of Ridley lacrosse seconds. I’d never been captain of anything.
My sporting debut was on a dank, blustery day. The touchlines were barely visible. On one side was what seemed like all of Ridley, out in force, the dull grey of macs and tunics and stockings livened up by our House colours of cornflower blue. Teddy bears had been press-ganged into supporting, dressed in tiny knitted blue jerseys and scarves; bunches were tied with blue ribbon; someone was wearing her (blue) dressing gown over her outdoor clothes. Even Bretch had swapped her brown winter suit for a navy Dannimac and blue umbrella.
I was on fire. The northeast wind blasted up the legs of my divided skirt as I sprinted behind the Cranmer goal, specs misted with effort, knees caked in mud and stained with grass, despite the fact that rain had been falling since face-off and that in between quarters I’d been trying to rinse them clean with the sleeve of my sweater. The detour took me on to the path by the fence that marked the end of our playing fields, where a steady stream of melted slush flowed towards the road and slopped over the top of my boots on to my lovely blue Ridley socks, although as those were already sodden anyway this hardly mattered.
We had been hanging on to a one-goal lead, and then Cranmer equalised. Heads went down. I was the captain. I had to galvanise my team. I was Danny Blanchflower in that famous sixth-round FA Cup tie against Sunderland, in the double-winning season of 1960–61: ‘Now keep your heads and let’s get going after a goal. We don’t want that business down in our goalmouth again.’ Well, I raised a clenched fist, anyway. ‘Come on, Ridley!’ I shouted.
Back on the pitch, I hurtled towards the crease with the Cranmer left defence, an enormous Upper Five with rollicking bosoms, hacking at my stick. This was it. This was my moment. This was when I performed the trick that regularly made Coulo flap her tracksuit top and twitch. I switched hands. It looked odd and ridiculous but it always worked. I was now cradling on the other side. My opponent couldn’t reach my stick in time. The cry went up. Shooooot! And whump – my shot bounced into the net off the goalie’s padded legs.
I had scored a goal. I had scored for Ridley. Two-one, two-one, two-one, two-one. And then the final whistle went. Ridley had won the Lacrosse 2nds Cup.
My last duty as captain was to raise my lax stick. ‘Three cheers for Cranmer! Hip-hip–’
‘Hurrah!’
‘Hip-hip–’
‘Hurrah!’
‘Hip-hip–’
‘Hurrah!’
Back at House, I swaggered nonchalantly into the kitchen to fetch a glass of water. Bretch was already there with the phalanx of prefects. ‘Some have glory thrust upon them,’ she purred. It was the only time Bretch was ever pleased with me. Three cheers for me! Hip hip hurrah! Etc.
It wasn’t the restoration of Games that stopped us quarrelling, though. It was boys. Not visible boys. That wasn’t allowed. It was virtual boys, in the form of letters. Getting a letter from a boy was the next level up in the Brownie Badges of Womanhood. You would go hot and cold all over because he’d signed his name with an x, and even more so each time the number of xxs per letter increased, not to mention when he sent one with a whole paragraph of just xxs, and when he moved on from Dear to Darling and then Dearest.
Sodding Erica was the first to get one. With a Harrow crest on the envelope. No xxs but signed ‘Luv by the gallon’. She wrote back, ostentatiously. ‘Can anyone think of any synonyms for sex and seduce?’ she drawled, pen in hand. ‘I don’t want to repeat myself.’ What bosh. They’d probably just sat out a slow foxtrot in a dim corner and fiddled around a bit.
But there was no getting away from it. She had entered another world and soon Lindy followed her with someone called Geoffrey. Geoffrey! What kind of Adonis calls himself Geoffrey? And then all the other girls who had older brothers started receiving letters with crests on the back, because these brothers had sex-starved schoolmates looking for girls to write to. Beth with her mattress-stuffing hairdo got a letter. Meanwhile, the Latimers were busily corresponding with a lot of Adrianos and Lorenzos and Benitos, after Sukie’s friend Sian has gone on holiday to Italy and come back with a list of willing correspondents. How did they manage to smuggle them past Cawley? Easy. Sukie did Squash as an Extra. The courts were in the basement of the headquarters of Fison’s Fertilisers, which had once been the Hamilton Hotel. It was near the seafront and about a mile away from Latimer. Sukie would post their letters to them on the walk down there. Hers was Roberto, who said he loved her.
And Cherry. Even Cherry was writing to a boy. Even though she still had no bosoms, let alone the curse. Her mother had sent her a bra, though she didn’t need one. She wore it but the pouches stayed empty. And one evening at supper we had macaroni cheese, and Juno got up from her place and walked over to Cherry’s table bearing a side plate on which was placed one piece of macaroni. Cherry’s eyes opened very wide and then they both screamed the place down with laughter. Practically.
‘I borrowed Juno’s vanity mirror,’ Cherry explained later. ‘To look down there to see if there was any obstruction. There was a huge bit of skin like a piece of macaroni over IT! I am definitely not normal.’
And then everyone else was writing to boys and she was so desperate to get a letter from one too that she got one as a penfriend. ‘But we can never meet,’ she said.
‘Oh, Cherry. Why not?’
‘Because he thinks I’m a boy. I advertised in the Eagle, you see. I call myself Charles. It was just so I could say I’ve had letters from a boy. But you can see why meeting might be difficult.’
I had to act quickly. I was being left behind. Soon I would be a wallflower. Why hadn’t I tied Nigel to a chair and threatened to make him kiss me again unless he exchanged addresses with me? In desperation I went down the penfriend route like Cherry. But I would not masquerade as a boy. The whole point was to find someone I could meet, so the Eagle was out of the question. Instead I placed an advertisement in the ‘penfriends wanted’ column in Riding magazine.
You had to say whether you wanted to write to a boy or a girl, and specify what region or country you would like your penfriend to live in. I made the mistake of leaving my advert in Riding out for all to see. ‘Boy anywhere,’ Cath read out, and then for days and days she and Beth kept calling me ‘lovelorn Danny’ and dissolving into giggles until I wanted to start smacking faces again. But I didn’t in the end because one afternoon, when Bretch brought the letters in after lunch, there was an airmail envelope, redirected from home. It was from someone called Gunther, who enclosed a photo of himself in the outback. He was wearing some kind of Australian hat. Oh dear. I have to say, this Gunther chap was not what I had in mind at all. Could we make a go of it? When I’d stipulated ‘boy anywhere’, I’d meant somewhere like Colchester, or Esher, or even Solihull at a pinch. Somewhere that was accessible enough for me to pretend we had met at a dance. And anyway, Gunther was awfully beardy for someone purporting to be fifteen.
It so happened that soon after I received this missive it was time for our year to be given Miss Beynon’s reproduction lesson, such as it was. Miss Beynon was scarlet in the face all the way through, very noticeable because of her carrot-head hair and its associated white,
freckled complexion. Her reproduction lesson involved the drawing of blinds in the Bilge lab, and a white screen on which was projected a diagram of two stick people. They seemed to be lying on a table. Was that it? Then there was a picture of a willy. It was pointing straight down. How did the man do what Miss Beynon said he did if it pointed straight down? Would he and the woman have to form some sort of T-square? I was none the wiser. But I certainly wasn’t going to form T-squares with Gunther. Into the wapey he went.
20
CITIZEN KITTENS
As it happened, shortly after Miss Beynon’s reproduction lesson, a sequel took place while Wisty and I were taking Rebel for a walk in Epping Forest.
What with Chrissie living far away in Guernsey, Wisty was the friend I saw most of in the holidays. We mixed hardly at all at school because she was a Cranmer, but we both did Riding and got chatting on those long walks from school to the stables, which was how we discovered we lived only eighteen miles apart – well within the reach of our mothers’ cars – and almost from the start we spent a lot of time together outside term-time. There were other people from school who lived quite near me, but Wisty was the one I liked best. She had a gleam in her eyes; she was mischievous. Like Beth, but cheerful.
Wisty probably wasn’t going to be Miss World – her nose was rather aquiline – but you could tell she would end up tall and dashing and would look good in big hats and high-heeled boots. She had creamy skin and thick, raisin-coloured hair, which tangled into ropes that flopped over her forehead. The colouring came from her mother, who was half-Turkish. Often when someone had a foreign name it was quite embarrassing because it sounded horrid, like Bogwash or Splotzel, but Wisty’s mother was Maja, pronounced Maya, and Wisty had that as her second name. Her first name was really Elizabeth, which one of her brothers (there were two: Roly, who was two years older than her, and Greg, who was two years older than Roly) couldn’t pronounce as a kid. So he said ‘Wizabeth’. Which turned into Wisty.