by Julie Welch
Much to my surprise our parents chummed up too, so the ferrying between each other’s houses was often linked with pub lunches or drinkies, and they even made up foursomes for dinner dances, although, as Wisty’s parents were sane and socially competent, I was baffled as to what they could see in mine.
I liked her so much! Not as much as Chrissie, and in a different way, because with Chrissie it was all about writing things and having private jokes and general propping each other up, whereas with Wisty it was doing things. At first that was mainly horsey stuff. We visited each other’s riding school. Whole days of mucking out and grooming, with a picnic lunch of Marmite and lettuce sandwiches and Penguins, sitting on top of a pile of hay bales. Heaven. We watched the racing on Grandstand on Saturdays, and my father put on sixpenny bets for us. Her parents took us to the Royal International Horse Show at White City, and my parents took us to the Royal Tournament at Earls Court. We went up to London on the tube together to skate at Queen’s ice rink in Bayswater.
I loved staying over at Wisty’s house. They were like one of those dream families you read about, where everyone’s always joshing each other and, while not sick-makingly huggy, there was a lot of arm round the shoulders and ruffling of hair. Wisty was allowed to be rude to her mother. One day she said, ‘So what?’ when her mother pointed out they couldn’t have a tennis court in the garden because it would take up too much room and there wouldn’t be any lawn left over for anything else. So what. I was aghast. I would never have got away with ‘so what?’. Surely her mother would have the screaming abdabs? I waited anxiously for the storm. But Mummy just laughed. And her father sort of mock-cuffed the back of her neck and said, ‘That’ll be enough of that, young lady.’
Where were the dramatics? They weren’t even cross. For all I know it might have been a front; they might have been masters of dissimulation and, when no one was there, brandished knives at each other, and kept a mad Turkish grandmother chained in the cellar and fed through a grille. You couldn’t ever truly know what was going on in someone else’s family. But I didn’t really think any of those things. They were just lovely. Normal. With luck, contact with them might instil some regularity in mine.
They had an old fat Labrador, called Sheba, who was so broad from shoulder to shoulder you could rest your plate on her. She pottered, like a slowly moving coffee table. The hall was cluttered with tennis rackets and rugby boots and climbing gear because they were sporty and intrepid, and in the garden was a rickety greenhouse where Roly showed me a tortoise egg. It was on bedding made of gravel and straw, and a kind of cloudy white colour, as though he’d captured a miniature moon as it flew through the universe. But could it really be what he said it was? Did mother tortoise sit on the egg to hatch it? Surely she would crush it to pieces. Roly must be having me on. Not that I minded. I was alone with a boy, a real boy. Maybe he would suddenly take my hand. Then I thought, despondently, that he wouldn’t be interested in me in that way. Not while I was wearing tartan trousers and a pale-blue hand-knit.
So, the sequel to Miss Beynon’s lesson happened one weekend in the Easter hols of being fourteen, when Wisty was staying with me. Our house overlooked Epping Forest. You just crossed the road and there it was. It started with a long walkway of tussocky grass called The Glade, as wide as a dual carriageway, that unfurled for a couple of hundred yards before tracks led off to the left and right, the left-hand one being an extension of the green dual carriageway, the right-hand track leading to several exciting ponds where you could fish for tiddlers and collect tadpoles. The forest could be a spooky place, even in daylight, but the rustlings and cracking of twigs was more likely to be owls or lovers than escaped murderers, and what wonderful opportunities there were for a terrier of Rebel’s inquisitive nature. He would bound off and that would be the last you saw of him. In the end you’d start to worry you’d never see him again, and you’d wander around calling his name for ages.
This time was like every other. Wisty and I were looking for him when we heard a noise in the bushes, so we followed it up and there stood a man with his coat undone, holding a sort of light-purple cylinder in one hand.
We couldn’t believe our eyes. Surely not! We backed off and marched smartly away, as if we’d seen nothing, and just at that moment Rebel appeared, so we put him back on his lead. As soon as we got to the bottom of The Glade, we turned the corner and ran as fast as we could to the road, where it met the sandy track and the forest-keeper’s house.
‘It was one, wasn’t it?’ said Wisty, when she’d got her breath back.
‘I can’t think of anything else it could have been.’
‘Are you going to say anything?’
‘Oh God, no!’ I gasped. ‘Are you?’
‘What? And have everyone kick up a frightful stink? You’re joking!’
We looked at each other. ‘I hope they aren’t all like that,’ said Wisty, and then we got into absolute fits about it because it had given us such a shock, but all the same it had looked so funny. But worse might have happened and, by unspoken consent, we stopped taking Rebel for walks in the forest for a while.
In any case, fourteen was a kind of crossover age where we still liked doing some of the things we’d done at thirteen but discovered there was more to life than horsey stuff and swimming and skating. Now we both had Dansettes.
Mine was a hand-me-down from my sister, beige with two knobs at the front for volume and changing the speed of the turntable from 45 to 33 rpm, and a carrying strap. It did up like a little overnight case. Wisty’s was even better. She’d got it for Christmas and it had an automatic record changer, which meant we could put a pile of 45s on the rod in the middle of the turntable and, with a bit of whirring and clicking, it would work its way all through the stack. So I would take my 45s to her house and we would sit on the floor playing ‘Please Please Me’ and ‘From Me to You’, and Billy Fury’s ‘Like I’ve Never Been Gone’, and the Four Seasons’ ‘Walk Like a Man’, and ‘Foot Tapper’ by the Shadows. Over and over again.
While all this was going on, we invented a club called the Federal Union of Citizen Kittens. Club membership didn’t involve anything; it was just an acknowledgement of our sophistication. I was getting quite daring in my writing. I had started a short story in which a character said ‘sod’. And ‘bugger’. But I’d never have said them out loud, let alone the F-word. At fourteen? In 1963? You just didn’t, even if you knew what it meant. And I wasn’t sure that I did.
Now that Epping Forest was off-limits, Wisty and I did a lot of wandering around Loughton High Street. This was a timeline of my childhood: the china shop, which sold the Beswick model horses I still collected; the church hall at the side of St Mary’s, where I’d gone to Brownies (I was Sixer of the Gnomes, the only public office I was ever to hold); a café beside a triangular green where, when I was very young, my mother would take me for dainty afternoon teas featuring bone china and a tiered dish of Kunzle cakes. These were much nicer to look at than to eat. Once you prised off the decorations and peeled back the outer casing of chocolate you were left with a mound of sickly mock cream on a damp biscuit base. But why on earth would Wisty and I want to set foot in there? Our hangout was the Gaytime coffee bar, with its Formica tables, jukebox and its name spelt out in squiggly blue and red neon. They served coffee in Pyrex cups, which was very go-ahead for Loughton. My mother thought the Gaytime was the haunt of boys who rode motorbikes and girls with dyed hair, so we never let on we went there.
Our other new haunt was the record shop, which had LP covers stuck at angles on the wall behind the counter, an island in the middle where you could flip through LPs, and listening booths. I had been dying for ages to try a listening booth, but the prospect filled me with something like stage fright. Everyone in the shop except me was a proper teenager. The girls wore teenager clothes, while I was still in those tartan trousers and hand-knit woollies, because I let my mother choose my clothes, and I now understood they were all wrong and I needed nylons and
flatties and a turtleneck top and a skirt that showed my knees. But now I had Wisty for moral support, and was able to ask to listen to ‘Out of the Shadows’ with reasonable confidence.
There was always the cinema, too. The Century, where the girl next door and I had been allowed to watch U films on our own, had closed down, and now we had to go to South Woodford, which meant dragging my mother out in her car or taking a stop-start journey by bus. But when you’re fourteen going by bus with your friend is an adventure, and it would drop us off in George Lane, over the road from the Plaza or right outside the Majestic on the main road.
The Majestic was cavernous, with red plush seats and an upper circle. Great things had obviously been planned for it when it was built before the war but, with the coming of television, audiences had declined and, in the foyer, mysterious signs announced ‘Banqueting Suite’ and ‘Ballroom’, although there didn’t seem to be either now. At the end of every performance the national anthem was played, so during the closing credits there would be the sound of seats going up and people nipping out and, if they were too slow, they would be caught by the first strains and have to stand stock still in the aisle.
The Majestic was where we saw our first James Bond film, Dr No. I was particularly excited by this because Wisty said that we’d be meeting Roly there. ‘He likes you,’ said Wisty. Perhaps he did, a bit. He did show me his tortoise egg, after all. But when we got to the Majestic I was terribly disappointed because he was with another girl. Why hadn’t Wisty told me? But it seemed she hadn’t realised either. The girlfriend had hair with a fringe and flick-ups and a short-sleeved turtleneck top and a skirt that showed some of her thighs. Which were long and shapely. She and I were separated by a year and, at a rough guess, one and a half stone.
Roly introduced me. I was dismissed with a glance. She turned and said something to Roly and laughed. I didn’t think she was very nice. They lit cigarettes when the lights went down and, after a while, I could hear rustling and huffing. So I attended very closely to what was happening on the screen. If I was going to be a proper writer I would obviously have to put S.E.X. into my books, and I tried to reconcile the man with the purple pipe and what Sean Connery was doing with Ursula Andress, which seemed to be terribly effortless and smoooooth. It was much worse than not knowing what to do in the listening booth. Really, I hadn’t a clue. It was like starting at a new school, or being plunged into a new world. I wished I knew someone who could tell me how to go about it.
After Dr No, it was almost time to go back to school for summer term 1963, so I didn’t see Wisty again until I got to Liverpool Street to board the boat train. Of course, we smiled and waved, but she got into a Cranmer compartment and I tugged my suitcase a little further along until I found Chrissie and the other Ridleys. Soon we were all jabbering and shrieking about what we’d done and where we’d been and I barely gave Wisty another thought. She was a Cranmer and I was a Ridley, and in term-time the twain shall hardly ever meet.
21
THE TEENAGE GENIUS
School seemed dull and regimented after the Easter hols. Instead of the cinema and the coffee bar and record shop, it was House meetings, locker inspections and a deadly lecture on schools in India, which the prefects made us go to, only just stopping short of driving us there at the end of a stick like cattle on market day.
‘Life is drear and boarding school a drudge,’ sighed Chrissie, as we toiled our way through tests in virtually every subject. I revised for Bilge in cab during break but it didn’t sink in. Latin was all right, but Geog. was absolutely foul, and we were all bound to have failed. As for English Lit., I couldn’t do a scrap of it, so waffled madly.
English Lit. was one of my least favourite lessons. We were doing Pride and Prejudice and had to submit to dear old Miss Evans, scratching herself and doing the crossword and droning on about Jane Austen’s sense of irony while the tantalising thwack-thwack of ball on racket on the tennis courts went on right outside the windows. What a lot of snobs and prigs they were in Pride and Prejudice! Compared to Meryton, Felixstowe College was a hotbed of reds and anarchists. And frankly I would have chosen Wickham over stuffy old Darcy any day. At least he had a bit of go in him.
But why couldn’t we study books that were relevant to Life As it Was Lived Now instead of ones by people who hadn’t been alive for centuries? For light relief, I was busy working on The Sandwich Stories, a series of illustrated comic novellas with plots and characters that included not just some of my friends but also Bretch, Elvis and the Shadows. These were passed round to everyone else for their comments and suggestions, and we had our heads together over them in the library when suddenly there was a whoosh of air and a dark mass blotted out the light from the firmament.
How did Jonah manage to move so fast and so silently? Was she on castors? I went to move my hand over the drawing of Bretch scaling a rope ladder to the tower dorm for the purposes of eavesdropping. Too late.
‘What are you doing?’
‘W-working, Miss Jones.’
Jonah snatched up The Sandwich Stories and gave them a quick glance. Accompanied by a ‘Mnph,’ they left the library tucked under her arm.
What a disaster. Now I had to wait for my name to appear on The Jonah List. Out of what was obviously sheer sadism, two weeks were allowed to pass before the summons appeared on the green slip of paper outside the Bilge lab.
Back in Jonah’s study again, with the Queen looking at me reproachfully from above the mantelshelf and my Sandwich Stories in Jonah’s hand, folded back at the drawing of Bretch scaling the rope ladder.
‘Why bring Miss Cross into it?’
In my dreams I would have said, ‘Oh, come off it, you know very well. It’s because she’s got fuzzy-wuzzy hair and bottle-bottom specs and ski-sized feet and she’s a perfect gift to satirise.’ But I realised this question was what Miss Williams had told us was rhetorical, so I just looked at my feet as usual and mumbled, ‘I don’t know, Miss Jones.’
‘You could be a likeable child if you weren’t always trying to call attention to yourself.’
‘Yes, Miss Jones. Sorry, Miss Jones.’
‘Actually, Jonah was jolly decent, considering,’ I said to Chrissie later that day, as we rushed to Chapel together for a last-minute practise of the lesson she had to read in Vespers that night. She was very nervous about it, and wanted to make sure the Bible was open on the right page. It was a good thing she did because the bookmark was in Joshua.
‘It’s a bad omen,’ she said gloomily on the way out. ‘I’m bound to pronounce Ephesus wrong.’ At which we ran straight into Maggie, who gave us her choicest ‘what-are-you-doing-in-the-Lord’s-house?’ face. ‘Shouldn’t you be at your clarinet lesson?’ she demanded of me.
Oh heavens! I had completely forgotten that it had been changed from its usual time.
‘Go and see Miss Cornford,’ she snapped.
I trudged away to have my ear chewed off by Cornford, and thence to apologise to Mr Hailes, so I was late for Vespers and got a filthy glare from Jonah as I had to squeeze past rows of people to find a place while they carried on singing ‘The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended’, thus calling attention to myself again.
At least I didn’t miss Chrissie’s lesson. Her hand was shaking so much she had to hold on to the rail in front of the lectern but she didn’t make any awful bishes, thank goodness, and afterwards everyone, even the Ridley prefects, all crowded round to tell her, ‘Well read!’
But the rapprochement with the prefects was short-lived. Not long after this, she forgot to collect Bretch’s supper from Mrs Kahn, and only remembered halfway through Vespers. She slipped out and dashed over to Cranmer, where she met two of them triumphantly bearing the tray back to Ridley. Why not just pass the tray on to Chrissie? But no, they had to be foul to her. She had lost all rights to the tray. It was their tray now. And she was rude and bad and the most useless commie captain ever known to Ridley. How could they be so horrid to her? She was the politest, most de
cent girl in the world. Worth ten of those trainee battle-axes. What a ghastly term this was turning out to be. The prefects picked on us, the teachers gave us extra prep and Bretch wouldn’t allow us to do anything. Could we go and dance in the studio? No. Could we go and play tennis? No. We made a bit of a stand and started hitting up against an outside wall, but unfortunately Gwen sent a ball through a window, so all our rackets were conflabbed, and while the batey bag was at it she had Lindy’s and Beth’s radios off them as well because they were playing them in the garden. So that was us down to two radios and we hadn’t even got to the third week of term. And now it was Della’s turn to be in trouble.
It was Saturday afternoon and we were playing skipping games on the hard standing outside the commie when there came a most tremendous roar and a screech of tyres. Who could it be? We abandoned our skipping ropes and dashed round to the front of House. What an amazing sight! An old MG Midget was parked in Ridley drive, and there was Della’s big sister Jay, with her fair hair whipped by the breeze and her sunglasses perched on top of her head, and beside her at the wheel not a boy but a young man. I didn’t catch his name because I was so taken by his trousers – which hadn’t any turn-ups but were tapered at the ends, and were done up with a zip rather than buttons – but it was something suitable like Roy Ripping. Roy Ripping brought out a box of cigarettes then patted his pockets. ‘Got any matches?’ Chrissie and I beetled off to the kitchen and stole some, which he immediately pocketed (and we never saw them again). Anyway, it seemed that Roy Ripping and Jay wanted to take Della out to tea, but just at that moment Bretch emerged from the Covered Way and prepared to mount her bicycle, so Della belted up to her to ask permission. The answer was no, of course, and away Bretch cycled down the drive.