by Julie Welch
How glamorous he had been. How young. All over the Western world, streets would be half-empty and subdued. But we had a trip to Colchester Natural History Museum and Zoo arranged and life had to carry on.
The streets of Colchester were rather unsatisfactory, as plenty of people were about doing their weekend shopping as though nothing had happened. How could they be so insensitive? I kept trying to think about President Kennedy but it was hard to be solemn on an empty stomach, and earthly considerations like dying to go to cab had to be taken into account. After the talk on natural history, we went to the zoo and had lunch there. It was bangers and mash, and we played ‘Please Please Me’ and ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ on the jukebox, and started bopping. Marion affected to be furious. ‘You haven’t any respect for the dead,’ she intoned.
After supper, we were allowed to watch a tribute to Kennedy on TV, which stunned us into silence for a while. But difficult decisions had to be made. Should we cancel the midnight feast we had planned in the dorm for that night? Everything was stored in a cardboard box inside the wardrobe. We had a packet of Dad’s Cookies, sardines, hard-boiled eggs, crisps, wafer biscuits, a big bar of Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut, tins of cling peaches and Nestlé’s Milk, and some dates, which came in a small but heavy half-brick, wrapped in cellophane with a yellow palm tree printed on it. We decided to go ahead with it. We didn’t think JFK would have minded. It was all so awful but we were alive and so were John, Paul, George and Ringo.
Strangely enough, the term JFK was assassinated was also the term of bed-hopping. It started with an approach: ‘We were wondering if you’d lie on top of us so we could find out what it’s like to have a man on top of us.’
We were in the nine-dorm that term, the one that ran the length of the Covered Way, bridging the oldest part of Ridley and the pre-war extension. The dorm had a hospital look, with the beds set out in a line. That night we waited a while after Lights Out, and then beds were left for other beds. It didn’t feel sexy at all, but I was pleased with myself that I’d accomplished it. None of us spoke of it afterwards, and it wasn’t until fifty years or more had gone by that I mentioned it to Cherry. ‘Oh, we did that lying on top of each other thing,’ she said. ‘Immie, Hilly, Juno and me, when we were in the four-dorm. I had no sexual feeling at all! Do you think someone talked to someone or were we all doing it at the same time? Morphic resonance, as Rupert Sheldrake would say.’
We worked out that the timing was almost identical, within a week or so of the Kennedy assassination, so the question had to be whether the death was some sort of catalyst. But perhaps that was just a coincidence because, not long after, Annie told me about her year’s ‘rather dodgy love-ins’.
‘It was only that one year,’ she said. ‘Strangely, it was also confirmation year. In the dorm, we all did Bible-reading fellowship. All competing to see who was the purest. Then we would probably have a midnight feast. The seven-dorm was where we’d have our trysts. Between four and six of us – it varied. We’d spend hours enacting whatever we thought might occur between a couple in bed. There must have been couplings going on all over the place.’
They were confirmed in 1964, a full four months after the assassination. So I don’t think John F. Kennedy can have been instrumental.
In the real world, skirt lengths were on the rise. We hitched up our tunics by folding the tops over our girdles, though Maggie or Cawley would yank them down by the hem. There were rebellions against wigged hair. We were aiming for the Cathy McGowan look. Ready Steady Go! went out on ITV on Friday nights with the line, ‘The weekend starts here!’ and everyone apart from swots and wets crowded round their House TV to watch, fantasising for half an hour that that weekend wasn’t going to consist of Prep, Games, Chapel and a lecture on the Architecture and Grounds of Stowe School. The theme tune was Manfred Mann’s ‘5-4-3-2-1’, the opening bars of which were ‘Five . . . Four . . . Three . . . Two . . . One!’ followed by a harmonica riff by their lead singer, Paul Jones. What a dish he was. As were Allan Clarke of the Hollies and Mike Smith of the Dave Clark Five (boomp, boomp, glad all over).
Lucky Cathy McGowan, who had weekly access to these gods. She was Ready Steady Go!’s presenter: a gorgeous, lanky 21-year-old with long, straight black hair and a fringe that reached past her eyebrows. Long hair and fringes sprouted all over the school. Jonah went to war, because hair meant sex. Memos were pinned to House noticeboards:
I am increasingly depressed about hairstyles in the School generally, and while taking parents round yesterday I saw many girls trying to revise with their hair hanging all over their faces. I realise this is more obvious when girls are working than it is when they are walking about, but please could you have a hair inspection before examinations begin and insist that girls wear Kirbigrips or tie back their hair?
R. M. Jones
The alternative to Jonah’s Kirbigrips was to wear your hair in bunches. We had to line up for hair inspections in Cranmer’s front hall at the start of every term. One poor girl had an Alice band. Jonah called her out in front of the whole school. ‘Turn round. Turn in front of everyone. Do not wear that thing ever again.’ As though it was a thong or tassels on her nipples.
The Hair Inspection of Autumn Term 1963 took place in Cranmer front hall after lunch, since all girls and their House mistresses and the two alpha matrons, Poulson and Pipe, were already in situ. We had to file past them. They fired off catty comments and divided us into categories. There was the OK group, who were free to go. The Some Hope brigade was sent to one end of the hall. Chrissie and I were Beyond Hope. We had to go to the other end of the hall, where Bretch made us part our fringes in the middle and anchored them with Kirbigrips. Not only did I have Kirbigrips, I had to have bunches, too. Rubber bands were provided. They stuck out like Mickey Mouse ears. It was not the look I was after. I wanted Cilla Black meathooks, those long wings of hair that curved around her chin as she sung ‘Love of the Loved’ on Thank Your Lucky Stars.
But Cilla’s hair obviously did what was expected of it. Mine was maverick. It wasn’t curly, but nor was it straight. It just went the way it wanted to go, whatever I tried. My fringe would always go wavy and stick up at the ends, even though I wetted it and anchored it to my forehead at night with Sellotape. And a fat lot of good those beauty lectures were doing me. I was so broad in the beam, so wobble-thighed, so speccy. If I left my glasses off I had to screw up my eyes and, even then, anything more than ten feet away was a blur. In the Christmas hols I went to a dance held by Della, where Cath’s brother danced with me once and then not again, and no other boy did either. I sat upstairs in the loo for hours and hours.
Juno recommended the Mazola diet. One tablespoonful of corn oil a day. ‘It really works,’ she said.
‘How would you know? You’ve always been a broomstick.’
But this was a new, cool Juno. Still a tall, fair-haired broomstick, but no longer a gawky, stoopy one. She’d stopped not quite knowing what to do with her legs. She still had a drunken mother to cope with, but now she also had an older woman in her life. This was someone called Jean, whom she had met at her stepbrother’s wedding reception at the Hurlingham Club in Fulham and who had taken a liking to her. Jean had trained at Lucie Clayton and was twenty-three. She wore Mary Quant – skinny-rib sweaters and geometric patterns – and had a fur-collared winter coat in Red Fox, which Vogue had pronounced that season’s colour. Her shoes were from Bally and Charles Jourdain – those black loafers with the gold chain across the instep. She didn’t have a diet, she had a régime. She went to the Establishment Club and let Juno read her copy of Private Eye. Jean and her boyfriend turned up at Felixstowe in an Austin Healey Sprite and they drove up and down the seafront with Juno sitting on the ledge at the back, and no one even noticed, because you could get away with anything in Cranmer. Well, almost; you still couldn’t use the main staircase. But I was heartily sick of Jean already because it was the adult world, and someone had opened a door for lucky Juno to let her in.
/> But at least I had John, Paul, George and Ringo. A gang of us went to see them on their Christmas tour in January 1964. The Astoria in Finsbury Park was a huge, grimy palace that stuck out on the corner of Seven Sisters Road and it was filled with more girls than I’d ever seen in one place; more even than at the finals of the Schools Hockey Tournament at Wembley; enough to fill thirty chapels. It was a girl Hajj. They just flocked. I saw girls there whom I’d met on school trips, and girls I knew from other schools. We heard ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, ‘All My Loving’, ‘This Boy’, ‘I Wanna Be Your Maaa-aan’. ‘She Loves You’, ‘Till There Was You’, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, ‘Money’ and ‘Twist and Shout’. Actually, we didn’t hear much because of the screaming. I didn’t see much either. I’d left off my glasses (I couldn’t let John or Paul see me in specs) and squinted like mad. I couldn’t scream. Why could they all scream while I couldn’t? Perhaps I saw some sort of Jonah hologram out of the corner of my eye, wearing her poker face. Or heard some inner prefect: ‘Will you stop making that disgusting noise!’ But it was marvellous, marvellous, and so far, far away from Chapel.
My parents let me hold a party at the end of the Christmas hols. We didn’t have a ballroom like next door, but men from my father’s works cleared all the furniture out of the dining room and there was enough room to stick a group in the window bay. They were called Formula Four. I’d seen their advert in the local paper. They weren’t the Beatles but they were a proper group with drums and amps and they had the hair, at least. My parents footed the bill.
I wore a sleeveless satin dress in dark turquoise, tactfully given a drop waist by my mother’s dressmaker. ‘You look attractive,’ said Della, sounding surprised. She was going to stay the night. So was Chrissie, who had flown over from Guernsey. My father had driven up to Victoria to meet her. Why did I never think at the time of all the effort my parents put in? My mother made up bed after bed in the spare rooms because Gwen was going to stay the night too, and so were the First Proper Boyfriend and his mate (‘Both dishes!’ commented Chrissie), and then, there she was, making tea and crumpets while we sat in the living room watching the wrestling on TV. And then more tea when Prue and Bobbie and Wisty rolled up.
Thank heavens. I’d been feeling nervous all day, because however many parties I held I always worried that no one would come. And then the doorbell just kept ringing. Boy after boy, girl after girl. One minute we were standing in a little circle, smoking and drinking punch, which had also been made by my mother, and then we were standing in an ever-larger circle and then the dancing started and we were off. So were the lights. From time to time my father would open the door and switch them on, and as soon as he left they went off again. And the racket the band made. Till one o’clock in the morning. What a trial it must have been for my parents.
Who had to be on duty the following day, too, because clearing up had to be done (I lifted not a finger) and people had to be driven to stations or dropped off back at their homes – so many of us in my mother’s car that Della had to sit on my lap. And it just went on, the whole of the rest of the week. Chrissie was staying with me till term began. We were driven to cinemas, and collected from cinemas. We had meals made for us while we sat in my bedroom and played records. We monopolised the television, because the Beatles were on Sunday Night at the London Palladium. My mother drove around repatriating things borrowed for the party.
One morning, on behalf of the family firm, she had to go to the West End headquarters of a company that specialised in an item of technology called an Epivisor, and of course she was thrilled to have the responsibility of judging its suitability and to be acknowledged as a company director. If there had been more of that, I’m sure she would have been much happier. She took us with her and, after she had concluded the business meeting, we went to Harrods where she treated us to a smorgasbord. On we went after that to Bond Street, so we could gawp at the shops. And in the days that followed she drove us to Wisty’s, so we could read magazines in Wisty’s bedroom and go shopping in the local high street, and boy spotting. She bought us pub lunches. She drove the two of us back to Felixstowe. I took it all for granted. I never once thanked her. What a spoilt pig.
23
HELP
In spite of my defects I had by now stockpiled four boyfriends, including an American bishop’s son who lived in Belgravia and somebody I got off with on an educational trip to France in the Easter hols of 1964. What an experience that was. He had the hugest tongue you could possibly imagine, and the flappiest and the wettest. Flob, flob, flob. It was like snogging a rubber glove. Still, now I’d done French kissing and that was what counted. But perhaps Chrissie and I should have been more covert about our boy spotting. My mother had festered malevolently about the goings-on at the party in the Christmas hols. It wasn’t until summer term that I discovered she had struck out behind our backs.
Apart from our first term, when we had no say in the matter, Chrissie and I were always in the same dorm and our beds were always next to each other’s. But now my mother had put a spanner in the works. When we arrived at Ridley, Chrissie came dashing up to me. ‘Danny, we’ve been put in separate dorms!’
We looked pleadingly at Bretch, who was in her defensive stance, one long arm straight across her midriff like a tiller. ‘I was asked to,’ she said stiffly.
‘Julia, I want you to know I had nothing to do with this,’ said my mother in a very stilted voice. What a liar. It turned out she had written to Jonah, complaining that while Chrissie stayed with us during the holidays she had been ‘making eyes at the coalman’, and asking for us to be separated.
Such a horrid day. In floods, both of us. Plenty of shoulders were offered to cry on. We begged Bretch to change us back, and she said she would as soon as she could, as it had made us unhappy. So there was that to cling on to. But not much else. Chrissie was hauled into Jonah’s study to be told she was uncouth and uncivilised. Rotten for her. So unfair. I was left trying to cope with the knowledge that my mother had written that poisonous, ludicrous letter. She had given no hint to me of what was afoot. I had been stabbed in the back. By my own mother. I felt responsible for her behaviour. I was so ashamed.
I had a lot of growing up to do before I had any insight into what she had done. She was an unhappy woman, and when you’re unhappy and see happy people you can really want to lash out. I think she felt threatened and left out by the closeness Chrissie and I shared. She was also at a time in life when a woman, frankly, may not be quite sane, and having to deal with two exuberant teenage girls and their burgeoning sexuality must have been dreadfully hard.
But how were we going to get through this? We had O Levels coming up. O Levels were going to be a miserable time anyway. Life would be no fun at all. Swot, swot, swot, day after day. Summer passing unnoticed. The girls splashing about in the sea weren’t going to be us. It was all about revising to the very last minute, propped up against the bolted door of cab at two in the morning. And now no Chrissie. Perhaps no Chrissie forever more. She was so unhappy she asked to leave.
Jonah and Bretch were both on her back. The venom was directed at her, not me, and all because of my mother. You’re unruly, you’re sulky, young ladies don’t behave like that, you’re this, that and the other (insert pejorative of choice), bark, bark, bark. It got to the stage of her parents giving notice. In the end she only stayed on because she wouldn’t have been able to do A Level Spanish at a school in Guernsey. But her parents stood up to Jonah. If she stays, you’re not to be nasty to her anymore, was the gist of the message. It seemed to work. The verbal horse-whippings stopped, anyway.
I just felt more and more depressed. I was going to have to forget all this had happened, the way I forgot that awful letter in Middle Five. It was the only thing to do. She was my mother. But I covered the front of my summer dress in biro, as if I wanted to scribble myself out. No one noticed.
Annie was miserable, too. I didn’t know, as she wasn’t in my form. And anyway, she’d
always looked so happy, the classic naughty schoolgirl. She had been happy, for the first half of school. The second half was awful. She was young for her year – still ten when she was sent away. And then everybody except her started growing up, and all the pranks and the midnight feasts got left behind, and one day, when she was in Middle Five, playing jacks in the commie, the cool girl in her year said, ‘I’m not surprised you’re no good at it, with big hands like yours.’ What fourteen-year-old girl wants big hands? And then came the solution. She and another girl were outside hitting tennis balls against the commie wall. The other girl announced she was on a diet. That’s what I’ll do, thought Annie. I’ll join her on a diet.
She started getting a bit thin. And a bit more thin. Upper Five was a really rotten year. She was in the Tower with a girl who bullied her. The bully was the girl with the mostest. She had a big sister, she was good at sport, in all the teams, she’d had a boyfriend in Middle Five. It was a verbal drip drip drip. Waking her up at night. Annie got even thinner. Anorexic maybe, though it wasn’t really known about in those days. She was just so miserable. She was going to have to do Languages for A Levels instead of Geography. She didn’t find Miss Wrinch’s lessons boring like the rest of us. She loved them. But she was going to have to take Languages, because her mother wanted her to go into the Civil Service, and in those days you didn’t have much say. Oh, this is how it’s got to be, she thought. Not eating was a cry for help. Oh, please won’t someone notice me? No one did.
Sukie wasn’t eating, either. She’d arrived when we were in Middle Five and was put in Latimer, poor thing. She’d lived in Kenya, where her dad was a solicitor, and had been at a boarding school in Nairobi. Dancing was her passion. She went into Nairobi on the back of a truck every Saturday, to ballet lessons with a woman called Madame Zerkovich. Madame Z was small and dark with a big stick that she used to hit you with if you didn’t get your legs right. ‘Open!’ ‘Hands!’ Sukie loved it. But her mother was petrified her school was going to become multiracial, because they had one African and one Indian there, so her aunt on her father’s side – she was her godmother as well – very kindly said she’d be her guardian in England if they wanted to send Sukie to school over there.