by Julie Welch
‘Can I just sit in the car for a bit to see what it’s like?’ begged Della.
So she sat on Jay’s lap and Roy Ripping gunned the engine and, with a puff of exhaust, the MG shot off down Ridley drive, straight across Maybush Lane and through Cranmer’s gates, and turned in a mad circle and shot back out again all in one go, with Della screaming and laughing at the same time, and hanging on to the window handle for dear life, and then she staggered out with legs like jellyfish and tottered towards us absolutely lit up with fun and joy, while Roy Ripping and Jay roared off, leaving nothing but a little patch of oil on the gravel and a dull, still silence.
At which Bretch emerged from the caretaker’s house at the end of the drive.
‘She’s been spying on us from the kitchen window!’ hissed Beth.
We all tore inside and along the corridors but we could hear her behind us, so we belted into the dorm. Beth, Marion and Chrissie shot into the wardrobe, and the rest of us were diving under the beds when Bretch stormed in.
‘Come on out, wherever you are.’
Sheepishly we emerged, one by one, feeling like burst balloons, and after that we had to stand in a line in the commie and be given a row.
‘You’re behind all the trouble in the house,’ murmured Chrissie, sotto voce.
‘You’re behind all the trouble in the house!’ raved Bretch. ‘Julia Welch, it’s no laughing matter!’
Of course, when someone says, ‘It’s no laughing matter,’ when you have to be solemn and full of remorse, that makes you want to laugh even more, and Chrissie and I stared at Bretch’s feet to try and steady ourselves, but they only made us want to laugh even more. But now Bretch was saying sweetly to Della, ‘And what did you do after I went out?’ when obviously the old bag knew jolly well, but she made Della confess all the same, so that was Della in floods, which left her completely washed out for the rest of the day.
Even though Erica got us singing ‘One Petty Woman in a Tree’ to the tune of ‘Five Rosy Apples on a Tree’ we were very subdued. This place was quite obviously in the charge of tyrants and madwomen. We were Middle Five now. Why should we submit to such pathetic indignities?
Jonah was right. I was famished for attention. Life was so frustrating and banal I began to imagine myself the subject of a TV documentary, ‘The Teenage Genius’, although I would only get as far as the trailer every time. My picture would appear on screen while a disembodied voice intoned: ‘Danny. Mercurial. Enigmatic.’ Then everything would vaporise and I would be back in the cloakroom whitening my plimsolls or lining up with the rest of the class in the gym for Drama, which that term was of crucial importance, as we had to perform something on Speech Day. Jonah was aiming high as usual, and this year we were going to have a money-spinning fête, combined with short drama performances enacted by every form in the school.
Our Drama teacher was known as Mops. She was modern in her approach, although old and small and wrinkled herself, with beady eyes and blackened, seaweedy hair. Her lessons took place in the gym and, as her clothes were strangers to the laundry, the entire place was filled within seconds with a terrible smell of stale sweat. Poo! Couldn’t another member of staff have told her? They were probably too busy fleeing from her presence in the staff room, holding their noses. Mops’s idea was that we should do something called ‘The Breath of Life’, which Beth immediately christened ‘The Bad Breath of Life’. It was to feature scenes and poems portraying the emotions, and at the first rehearsal Mops tried to get us to play love scenes. To Erica’s horror, Mops wanted her to kiss Cherry. Cherry didn’t mind but Erica was very upset at doing something so embarrassingly lezzy. The more uncomfortable she was, the more Mops insisted. And she would have to do it again and again in rehearsal, poor thing, and we couldn’t stand the idea of Erica upset and uncomfortable every Friday morning in Drama, so we decided to think up an alternative. It had to be something that would appeal to Mops’s modern predilections and, as we were all very keen on Beyond the Fringe and That Was The Week That Was, we came up with the idea of a revue, and set to work thinking up skits and composing topical verses.
As a nod to culture, the Cranmers were going to perform some scenes from Shakespeare, in modern dress, and Cherry and Juno had started their own pop group and would do one of their own songs. The Tyndales had a lovely dance and mime routine about a fortune-teller. Marion and Beth were doing a comic double act. Marion would wear her tunic in a gormless sort of way, and the costume cupboard up in the clock tower had yielded an ancient black shawl which, with a certain amount of adjustment, became McNulty’s flapping gown. Armed with a ruler (McNulty had a tendency to rap people over the knuckles if they were wool-gathering) Beth became our Maths teacher: ‘I say, I say, why can’t penguins fly?’
‘Oh – um – did Miss Beynon tell us in Bilge? Perhaps I missed that lesson. Is it because they don’t have wings?’
‘No, you eejit,’ at which Beth would rap Marion’s knuckles. ‘Because they’re chocolate biscuits!’
Bobbie, who was a brilliant mimic, was going to do some of her impressions of TV and radio personalities, including her famous one of Max Robertson commentating on the racing at Snetterton. Snetterton was a funny name in itself, especially the way Bobbie said it. Della, who was still smarting about the spoilt visit from Jay and Roy Ripping, wanted to sit on a high stool and sing ‘All Alone Am I’, but we persuaded her that it might put a bit of a damper on things and instead I wrote her a skit on the BBC children’s programme Watch with Mother. For the Latimers I composed a song and dance routine involving lax sticks and purple grease-painted thighs called ‘Cradling’, to the tune of Bud Flanagan’s ‘Strolling’. I had also written a humorous poem, ‘Come To Sunny Felixstowe’, with which we were going to close the show. In fact I contributed a lot of the sketches and, although I was too absorbed in our production for the Teenage Genius fantasies to resurface, I did think my mother would be proud to see it performed at Speech Day. Perhaps it would soothe the blow of my abandoning Chemmy if she could see my success as a writer.
There was a large L-shaped classroom at one side of the library and, because the gym was being used by the Wycliffes rehearsing ‘Hansel and Gretel’, most of our preparations took place in there. It was actually much better because it had lots of windows, which we would fling open when Mops’s smell became overpowering. We were obliged, of course, to seek Jonah’s approval for our revue, so Mops arranged a private viewing for her, and we cleared the desks to make space and found a stout chair, to which Mops escorted her. And so our revue began.
It was not a success. The Watch with Mother skit didn’t seem so funny after all. Bobbie got halfway through her routine and then just dried at the terror of it all. Masses of ghastly things happened during the Tyndales’ dance routine, i.e. they slipped, the record jumped and a bookcase nearly gave way. And Jonah just sat there, an industrial-sized basilisk. There was not even a twitch of a facial feature when Beth told the penguin joke, which had everyone in fits. She was inanimate. Had she died? I stared at her bosom to see if it was rising and falling, and it was. Jonah had not died, but we had. By now I was just longing for the whole ghastly thing to end, which was signalled by the rest of the cast creeping out, leaving me alone on our makeshift stage, almost face-to-face with Jonah as I delivered the last verse of our closing number:
So if you want to see a concert,
Or need a place to go,
You’ll always get a welcome
At Sunny Felixstowe.
At which, as arranged, there came a tremendous banging on the classroom door and the entire cast shouted, ‘Let us in! We’re soaked!’
Jonah rose and, with a grunted, ‘Thank you,’ left the classroom. We had to wait for our next Drama lesson for the verdict when, with much hand-wringing, Mops broke the news that we would not be performing our revue at Speech Day because it made fun of Felixstowe. So much for the Teenage Genius. It had simply not occurred to me that last year’s sopping ‘Hiawatha Wedding Feast’
would be a sensitive subject with Jonah.
So now we were back to ‘The Breath of Life’, and in the meantime all the other forms had bagged the interesting things to organise at the fête, and we were left with the produce stall. But actually, that turned out to be good fun. After having nothing to do for the last few weeks of term, we spent the whole evening before the fête making toffee apples (scrumptious), icing cakes and filling flans, and in the morning we buttered sandwiches for the teas to be held in Ridley gardens and arranged our display of bottled fruit, fresh farm butter and twenty-two different kinds of jam.
And the fête really was awfully jolly, with the stalls decorated with brightly coloured streamers and striped sunshades and laden to overflowing with goods aplenty. Younger brothers and sisters were having a go on the pony rides, while fathers showed off their bowling at the coconut shy, and the bottle stall sold hundreds of tickets, and everyone looked so gay and happy in their red blazers and summer dresses. And throughout it all the sun was shining fit to burst, so the poem about the rain would have been flopped completely anyway. Nobody would have got the point of it and I would have looked awfully silly. It would have been a disappointing end to my dreams of literary stardom. But I would be a writer. People would take some notice. One day. One day.
22
SEX AND KIRBIGRIPS AND ROCK ’N’ ROLL
Summer hols, 1963. My sister and her fast businessman got married. They were off to start a new life in Australia, which plunged my mother into gloom, as the original plan was for the happy couple to buy a house within motoring distance of ours. She had dreamed of frequent visits and being a mother-in-law of the most useful possible variety and, when the time came, a granny available for childcare duties, which she would have loved. And she would have been terribly good at it, too, because with small children she was in her element. Instead her older daughter, her favourite, was going to be the other side of the world.
We went to Heathrow to see them off.
‘It’s such a long way,’ my mother said dolefully.
‘You can put my pony fund towards the fare and go to see them,’ I said gruffly. I had forty-eight pounds saved, enough roughly for a leg and a half. Perhaps the tail, too. My mother affected not to hear, because to have her unlovely, unpleasing younger daughter offering all her worldly goods to help her get to Australia would have forced her to rethink her view of herself as a tragic victim.
Thank heavens, though, I was able to get away from it all. I was off to Guernsey to stay with Chrissie. The sun shone, we sailed across the turquoise sea to Sark, and I was able to forget everything except swimming, sunbathing, shopping and eyeing up boys. What a lovely mum Chrissie had. Warm and happy, and she made me feel so welcome. Why couldn’t mine be like that? Why did my home life have to be such an attritional muddle?
But perhaps, when I got home, things would be better? No such luck. There was a right old ding-dong going on in head office. My father had bought both my mother and Jane new cars. While trying to park in our drive, my mother had driven her Vauxhall Victor into the back of Jane’s Wolseley Hornet. Stepped on the accelerator instead of the brake. According to Freud, there are no mistakes. All is intentional. My mother had rammed Jane’s backside.
‘Hello, I’m back.’
‘Jane and your father are carrying on!’ shouted my mother. ‘You stick up for me!’
Why should I? I thought. You never stick up for me. And anyway, I didn’t want to be put into a position where I had to champion one parent against the other. I was looking forward to seeing my own bedroom again and reacquainting myself with my model horses and back issues of Horse & Hound, and I dragged my suitcase into my bedroom. My mother followed me in.
‘You needn’t unpack.’
I was to be got rid of again. The last thing she wanted around was this fat, awkward gooseberry. I was to go to Brittany for two weeks with another friend and her family.
‘Your mother is imagining things,’ my father bleated. ‘I don’t know why she keeps going on like this. We could have such a happy home.’
Adults. Huh. Why were they so incompetent at managing their lives? I hoped my parents would get divorced and that my father and Jane would get married and I could live with them. Then, I thought gloomily, my father would never let that happen. I’d be stuck with my mother.
My father obviously felt very guilty about all this carry-on, because I was bought a horse. My love, my friend, my thoroughbred Welsh cob cross. He was bay with a white blaze down his nose shaped like a diamond, and an aristocratically dished head, and a little feathering of hair around his heels, which came from the plebeian Welsh cobby side of his family. I called him Applejack, since a new song had just been released called ‘Tell Me When’ by a band called the Applejacks. What made the name additionally attractive was that I found ‘applejack’ a very romantic word, like ‘moon’ and ‘gillyflower’. It was also a kind of cider, and I liked drinking cider. Drinking was grown up, and cider tasted much nicer than horrid, tart gin.
Applejack was not my only new possession. I also had a boyfriend. Shortly after the binning of Gunther, I’d had a letter from another boy. This one sounded nice. He lived in London and we exchanged letters all through summer term. He sent me a photo. Was it really him? It was. I met him at the end of the hols. Tall and blond. A bit of a hunk, actually. As far as I could tell, because I wasn’t wearing my glasses. We sat in my bedroom and played singles on my Dansette. ‘That’s the type we want,’ said my father, after he’d gone, and my mother said he was ‘manly’. Life was looking up.
So, back to school for autumn term 1963, with Applejack travelling to Felixstowe in a horse box to the riding stables where he was to be kept at livery. My new boyfriend, handsome and nice though he was, came rather a poor fifth in my pantheon of passions that term. Applejack was first. My parents arrived within three weeks to take me out on exeat and I abandoned them all afternoon to plait his mane, polish his hooves, untangle his tail and bring a shine to his lovely bay rump. Second was John Lennon. I had settled on him as my favourite Beatle rather than Paul. I felt he had a superior mind. Third was Blackie the riding instructor, on whom I’d suddenly developed such a violent crush that he started bringing his wife to the stables as a safeguard whenever it was my afternoon for Riding.
In fourth place was Jesus Christ. Our year had been confirmed en masse at Easter, which had been terribly exciting, like getting married. Rellies and godparents sent us little cards – ‘Congratulations on your Confirmation’. We treasured our crucifixes, showing them to each other, each thinking ours was the nicest and most holy.
The confirmation ceremony had taken place at a church in town because the college chapel was too small to fit in all the fond parents. Veiled, in our tussores, we queued in the aisle, stepped up and knelt – two at a time to speed the process up a bit. When the Bishop’s hand descended on my newly wigged hair I waited for the hoped-for bolt of heavenly goodness to shoot through me, but nothing happened. He might as well have been patting a Labrador. Disappointing. Still, we could now go to Communion. Going to Communion meant you were grown up. So did being an Upper Five. We could also at last attend the make-up and etiquette lectures in the library.
Ladies from Lucie Clayton, all hats and cashmere, with perfectly shaped eyebrows and lipstick-free teeth, and smelling of Joy and Madame Rochas, gave us hints on grooming and posture, the use of good cosmetics and personal hygiene. We had a lecture on dress materials from a Mr Weblin of Harrods. He described briefly the manufacture of various fabrics while we studied samples, and then gave hints on buying our own material. Another Harrods person produced a tweed suit, and showed us some of the accessories that could be worn with it. A Balenciaga original! The winner of the Golf Cup, a lithe blonde, got to model it. I sat there and dreamed it was me. But nothing like that would ever happen to me. She looked gorgeous. She always did. I would gaze at her when she played lax. She was a winged Mercury, flying towards goal, natty in her white Aertex and grey divided
skirt, with her neat bust and trim ankles, and her short, feathery hair. Almost gamine. Perhaps just a hint of a moustache, which was probably part of the attraction. I could never be like her. My short legs would never get any longer and, however hard I tried not to, I still ate too much. And then there were the glasses. Would I never be attractive? I began to think I was from a different species.
Friday 22 November 1963. Dreadful news. Someone had tried to assassinate John F. Kennedy. We heard as we came back from a form hockey game. Upper Five A vs. Upper Five B. The As won. Chrissie played right half for the first time and did jolly well. As we were slinging our hockey sticks into the container in the cloakroom, someone came belting in.
‘Have you heard? President Kennedy’s been shot!’
‘Oh, don’t be so silly!’
It was only when we got to supper, and everyone there was talking about it, that we realised it was true. He had been taken to hospital, apparently. Gravely wounded, but we thought they were trying to save him. I imagined America’s finest surgeons at his bedside, repairing the damage, putting the president of the free world back together again. He would slowly get better. I had no idea his brains had been shot through and Jackie, in her sugared-almond-coloured suit, had crawled across the car to fetch a piece of his skull that had gone flying. Picking things up off floors and returning them to their proper place was instinctive behaviour in a wife and mother. He was already dead when they reached the hospital. I went to bed still thinking he was alive and then, in the morning, we were told the truth.