by Pip Granger
‘Well, in my opinion, it’s been coming on for quite a while,’ Constable Jenkins told Mrs Hampton. ‘This one’ – he waggled Cathy as if she was a puppet – ‘has been bullying the other one for a long time now. I’d say this one’ – and he waggled me in his massive paw – ‘finally lost her rag.’ He put us both down in front of Mrs Hampton’s desk.
‘I see,’ Mrs Hampton said, looking at me again. ‘Well, thank you for your help, constable. I believe you can leave them to me now.’
‘Right you are, Mrs H. I just wanted you to know the extenuating circumstances.’
Mrs Hampton was hard but fair, I suppose. We both got a right old bollocking, Cathy for being a ‘vindictive bully’ who would surely ‘be better occupied using her energies trying to learn something useful’, while I was held responsible for ‘resorting to violence, no matter what the provocation’, when I should have ‘used the option of seeking the help of your teachers’. As if I would! I rolled my eyes at Cathy, who rolled hers back at me. Grown-ups, even teachers, couldn’t half be stupid, our eyes silently agreed.
We were sent on our way with a week of detention. The following week, Mrs Hampton, Cathy and I were kept together in one classroom while the other girls on detention were incarcerated elsewhere. Cathy and I were told to get on with our homework while Mrs Hampton did some marking.
It was peaceful in the warm classroom. All that could be heard was the wall clock ticking and our pens scratching as we laboured over our work. That week marked the end of the bullying. It was agreed between Cathy and me that the head-bashing incident would never be mentioned to my mother or, indeed, the headmistress. The whole incident, and the many months of bullying that led up to it, was kept between Constable Jenkins, Mrs Hampton, Cathy, her gang and me.
Not so very long after that, I changed schools, to one that was some distance away from Dagenham and which encouraged its pupils to think about taking a few GCEs. Everyone said it was because the psychologist had suggested that I needed the challenge of exams in order to pull my educational socks up, but looking back, I wonder if Mrs Hampton had had a quiet word somewhere, in order to get me away from that hell-hole of a school. I know she had a bit of a soft spot for me, because she told me so when I went to say goodbye to her on the day that I left.
‘Goodbye, my dear,’ she had said, her eyes twinkling at me. ‘I hope you do better at your new school. I know you are far more intelligent than you let on, so work hard and you could go a lot further than you ever dreamed you could.’
‘Are you sure?’ I asked dubiously. After all, I knew that the family brains had passed me by.
‘Oh yes.’ Mrs Hampton smiled. ‘I knew you had it in you when you took exception to the rule concerning long socks and stockings,’ she told me.
I blushed. The socks versus stockings incident had been my first act of rebellion at school, and I was still a little shocked at myself. Coloured long socks and stockings had become all the rage, and of course every girl in the school was soon sporting green, blue, red, yellow, maroon or purple legs. Yet, for some idiotic reason, Mrs Blackmore decided that she would allow long socks that stopped below the knee, but ban stockings that stopped a few inches above the knobblies. This meant that in cold, wet weather our knees would turn blue, and if you were a bit knock-kneed – which I was – they would chap so badly where they rubbed together that the skin would crack and bleed. However, if stockings were worn, there was no bare skin below the hem of our skirts. This kept our knees nice and toasty warm, and they also stopped the chapping. So I continued to wear stockings, despite the ban, and soon landed myself on the carpet in front of an angry Mrs Blackmore. Mrs Hampton had just happened to be present, to witness the scene.
‘I see you are wearing stockings. Are you unaware of the school rule that forbids the wearing of stockings?’ the headmistress asked, as she sat behind her desk looking stern.
‘No, miss,’ I whispered, shaken rigid to find myself in trouble. I usually managed to pass relatively unnoticed in the great scheme of things.
‘What on earth does “No, miss” mean? Are you aware of the rule or not?’ Mrs Blackmore asked testily.
‘I do know about it, miss.’
‘Then why, may I ask, are you flouting it?’
I didn’t know what to say, so I tried saying nothing, but Mrs Blackmore was not content with that.
‘I asked you a question, and I demand an answer. Why are you defying the school rule concerning stockings?’
‘Because it’s silly,’ I whispered.
Mrs Blackmore could not believe that she had heard me right, but Mrs Hampton, who was standing behind her, obviously had. I could tell by the way her mouth kept twitching. I was heartened by the apparent support of the deputy headmistress.
‘Did I hear you correctly, young lady? Did you just tell me that school rules were silly?’
‘No, Mrs Blackmore, that’s not what I said,’ I protested a little more boldly, reading Mrs Hampton’s twitching mouth as encouragement to stand my ground, which was probably not what she meant at all. ‘I said that the rule about the stockings was silly, not all of them. Some of them are very sensible, like the one about not climbing on the bike shed roof because it’s not safe.’
‘And why, pray, is the stocking rule “silly” in your expert opinion?’
I saw no reason for sarcasm and objected to being spoken to as if I was a raving half-wit – even if, on paper, I so obviously was. Nettled, I grew a lot bolder. ‘Because those few inches between stockings and socks means that our knees get cold and chapped, and chapped knees are really sore. Sometimes they even bleed.’
‘The fact remains that, despite your opinion on the matter, I have made a rule that I insist is kept by everyone. If I allow you to wear stockings, every girl in the school will want to wear them. Then where would we be?’
It was at that point that some devil in me decided to make its presence felt, and before I could clamp my gob shut I replied, ‘We’d all be in school, only with warm knees and no chapping. You don’t have bare knees, none of the teachers do, so why should we all suffer for some stupid rule that makes no sense at all?’ Judging by the way Mrs Blackmore’s mouth opened and closed like she was a landed guppy, she had no answer to hand. Meanwhile, Mrs Hampton had the whole of her bottom lip clamped between her pearlies, her eyes were twinkling brightly enough to light the Albert Hall and her shoulders were bobbing up and down with suppressed laughter.
In the end Mrs Blackmore found her voice. ‘How dare you speak to me like that? I am very angry with you and think it is best if you get out of my sight for the present, to allow me time to collect myself. I will deal with you later, when Mrs Hampton is not waiting to speak with me about more important matters.’ She pointed at the door. ‘OUT,’ she roared, ‘NOW!’
I didn’t need telling twice. Funnily enough, I never was recalled for punishment, and carried on wearing my nice, thick stockings. What’s more, many of the other girls followed suit. We never heard another word about the stocking rule either. Perhaps Mrs Hampton had pointed out that it was hard work enforcing rules that made no sense.
I was really looking forward to a fresh start at my new school as I said goodbye to the old one. The only bug in the butter as far as I was concerned was that I would miss the only friend I had managed to make in the two years I had spent there. Joyce had, in my opinion, been very brave to befriend me in the face of so much hostility from her schoolmates, but I needn’t have worried, we kept in touch. In fact, we are still good friends to this day. My husband always knows when I am speaking to Joyce on the phone because we giggle uncontrollably in much the same way as we did when we were girls together.
16
Raz and Rita
‘As you’re about to become a teenager, I’ve decided to throw you one last birthday party,’ my mother informed me one day a few weeks before the end of my final term at that awful school in Dagenham. She managed to make it sound as if she had thrown dozens of muffin worries in my
honour when, in fact, I’d had just the one, when I was a year old. I had no memory of that party, of course, and suspected it had been a bit of an excuse for yet another boozy do for her and Father and their friends, because by then my parents knew, or suspected strongly, that we were about to be evicted.
‘You can combine it with saying your goodbyes to all your friends at your old school.’ Mother’s smile as she announced this plan was so happy, I didn’t have the heart to tell her that if I invited all my friends from school she’d have to make just two fish paste sandwiches and one extra fairy cake.
I tried to look grateful. ‘I’d rather have a day on Rita,’ I suggested tentatively.
I had fallen in love with horsekind when I was much younger, but had only started riding when parental sobriety ensured that I received pocket money on a regular basis. I saved it up diligently in order to pay for my riding lessons. Rita was a huge pinto with a back as wide as a two-seater settee – almost – and rather fetching, shaggy white hoofs. Somewhere in her chequered ancestry there was a carthorse, no doubt about it. And like many a cart-horse before her, she had the easygoing temperament of a gentle giant – unlike her feisty stable mate, Sadie, who took delight in standing heavily on at least one of my feet while grabbing chunks of my clothing in her tombstone teeth.
Rita and Sadie, along with several other ponies, belonged to Raz, a proper Romany horse trader who had parked his colourful varda, or traditional horse-drawn caravan, on a disused airfield one day and had decided to stay. The airfield was left over from the war, and over time, he stocked it with ponies and made a makeshift stable block by converting one of the redundant hangars. Raz was a big man of about forty, I suppose. He had masses of dark, unkempt hair streaked with grey, and he always seemed to be in need of a shave. His tanned face was heavily lined, having spent the majority of its life out and about in all weathers. He was the first man I ever saw who wore an earring – just the one – but that was his only finery. His clothes were well worn, dark and suitable for hard, often dirty work. He wore a waistcoat in summer and winter alike, and the only touch of colour was the knotted scarf he wore instead of a collar and tie during the winter months. Back in the 1950s and ’60s, most men wore collars and ties, but Raz never did. I don’t suppose he’d ever even owned such things.
Raz rarely smiled, and was a man of very few words. He preferred the company of horses and dogs to people, and the few words that he did speak were mostly directed at them. This might explain why he had stopped travelling with his fellow Romanies and had settled down in relative isolation on the airfield. Some said that he drank, but I saw no evidence of it, and others said that he had been thrown out of the Romany fraternity for taking another man’s wife. If that particular rumour was true, then he had lost her somewhere along the way, because I saw no sign of her, either. I think he was just a solitary type with a tendency towards taciturn melancholy, who simply found animals less trouble than human beings. And on that subject, I was inclined to agree with him.
In return for mucking out stables, grooming ponies and hay-making in the long summer months, me and a few other girls and boys were allowed to exercise the ponies at a reduced rate, or sometimes for free, which helped me stretch my precious half-crown a week just a tad further. Looking back, I think Raz got a really good deal, frankly, but at the time it felt like an honour to be allowed to nuzzle a soft muzzle, inhale the whiff of warm horse and fondle all those sets of lovely lugs. I even loved the irascible Sadie – but not as much as the gentle Rita.
Every Saturday morning that was free from Father-visiting duty, I would cycle out to the airfield with a packed lunch and a bottle of pop in my saddlebag to commune with Rita and her pals. The ride to the airfield was always fraught, because it involved some very lonely country lanes. One of them was the haunt of a man who would leap out of the hedgerow into the narrow road, coat and flies wide open so that he could flash his pride and joy at me as I passed. There was no alternative route, unless I wanted to push my bike across ploughed fields, through thorny hedges and across muddy ditches – which I didn’t, largely because the farmers would not have liked it one little bit. Besides, that would have been the long way round, and I didn’t want to waste a second of my precious horse time.
That grubby old devil had learned my routine off pat, and lay in wait for me, week in and week out. A little thing like foul weather didn’t put him off his stroke. I would pedal like fury as I approached Flasher’s Lane, as I called it, so that he couldn’t grab hold of me as I flew by. I didn’t tell my mother about him, because she might have stopped me going to the airfield, but I always approached his particular stretch of hedgerow in fear and trepidation.
Finally, I told one of the older girls about him, and she, in turn, must have told Raz. The next week, the flasher leapt out of the hedge, filthy coat flapping and flies gaping as usual, but before either of us knew what was happening there was a furious bellow and Raz crashed through the hedge opposite, brandishing a riding crop.
‘You filthy buggerrrrr!’ he yelled as he bore down on my tormentor, crop raised high. He brought it down with a resounding thwack on the offending member, which promptly shrivelled to a shadow of its former self. ‘I’m telling your missus on you, Ernie, and all the fellas down the Hare and Hounds. And if I ever hear of you troubling any other young girl with your dirty ways, I’ll bloody well geld you once and for all.’
Ernie looked as if he was about to collapse with shock and pain, but Raz wasn’t finished with him. He hauled out and socked him so hard with his fist that Ernie landed on his back in the road, blood pouring from his nose. He began to whine and snivel for mercy, but Raz, a disgusted sneer on his face, pulled him to his feet and slapped him hard around the chops.
‘I’ll be taking you home now, Ernie, and we’ll explain to your missus all about what you’ve been up to. Happen she’ll castrate you herself and save me the trouble.’
Raz then turned to me, because, naturally, I’d stopped to watch. ‘Time you cut on along now. P’raps you’ll muck out Rita and give her a good groom and some exercise. I’ll be back later, as soon as I’ve finished with this here.’
He shoved Ernie with his huge right hand so that he stumbled forward a few paces, then he shoved him again. Raz gave me one of his rare smiles and an even rarer wink and continued to push his captive in front of him. I did as I was told. I never saw Ernie again. When I tried to thank Raz for his help, he said that we would not speak of it again – and we never did.
The other girls and boys who helped out at the airfield became my weekend friends, and for the first time ever, I felt that I belonged. Nobody sent me to Coventry, nobody beat me up and there were no nasty notes to worry about. How I loved the times I spent ankle deep in horse manure and the long hot days in summer that I spent pitchforking hay into the back of a horse-drawn cart, along with the rest of Raz’s willing helpers. Each time the cart was full, one of us would drive it back to the barn while the rest lolled in the heap of warm hay and stared up at the sky, listening to the slap of the reins on Rita’s ample back, the steady clip-clop of her hoofs on the concrete runway and the comforting creak of the ancient cart.
Back at the old hangar that served as a barn, we’d empty the cart, then sit in the shade to have a swig or two from our pop bottles while Rita had a long, very noisy slurp from the cast-iron bath that had been recycled as a water trough. This done, we’d all amble back to collect more hay. When lunchtime came around, we’d picnic on the grass. Then, full of pop, sandwiches, fruit and the odd sucky sweet or two, and drowsy from the sun, I’d lie back and listen to the gentle hum of the insects collecting nectar and pollen from the purple clover, yellow buttercups, blood-red poppies and mauvy-pink corn cockle, and the idle chatter of my friends.
Three of the older girls, Anne, Carol and Sue, were in their mid-teens and thus deeply fascinated with the male of the species. Personally, I couldn’t see what they saw in boys. Horses, dogs and cats were much more interesting, in my opinion.
They often squabbled about who was more gorgeous: Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard or Tommy Steele in the pop star category, and James Dean, Montgomery Clift or Marlon Brando in the film star section. They never did reach a definite conclusion.
While we younger girls yawned with boredom, the boys discussed the relative merits of various motorbikes. The Norton Dominator invariably came out top of their list, which begged the question as to why they bothered to discuss it at all. But they seemed to find the subject endlessly fascinating, and as one of the youngest of the group, and a girl at that, I knew better than to argue.
Anne and Carol both had a crush on one of the boys – Chester was his name – and when he wasn’t there, they ditched the Elvis versus Cliff argument and talked about him instead.
‘I wonder why he’s called Chester?’ Anne mused one day when the lad in question hadn’t yet arrived at the airfield.
‘It’s not what you might call a proper English name, is it? Sounds more of a Yank name to me; but he doesn’t sound like a Yank at all.’ Carol was right. His accent was mostly Essex boy, with a large dollop of East End thrown in for good measure.
I opened an eye and noticed the lad in question pedalling his bike up the runway even as they spoke. ‘There he is now,’ I warned them. ‘Why don’t you ask him?’
‘We can’t do that! He’ll know we’ve been talking about him!’ Anne sounded appalled at the idea. ‘Why don’t you ask him yourself if you’re so interested?’
‘I’m not really interested. I thought you two were!’ I was indignant at the mere suggestion that I’d worry my head about something as boring as boys.
‘Well, we are – sort of. Go on, ask him. I dare you,’Anne muttered hastily as Chester drew to a halt nearby, dropped his bike on the grass and whipped a greaseproof packet of sandwiches from his saddlebag, ready to join us for lunch.
‘Ask me what?’ Chester enquired as he plonked himself down among the daisies.
Anne nudged me hard in the ribs. ‘We were wondering,’ I said, ‘why you’re called Chester? None of us know any other Chesters,’ I said lamely. ‘It sounds American, but you don’t. You’re not American, are you?’