by Mary Portas
In the summer just before I started secondary school, we got braver. Having had enough of kids’ games, we decided to investigate the yards of a cluster of factories on a small trading estate a few streets away from our houses. One in particular fascinated us. It produced fur for cuddly toys and we’d see bundles of the stuff being moved in and out of the factory, huge rolls of purple and orange nylon fur that was too much to resist.
Hoicking ourselves through an open window after everyone had finished their shift one summer’s evening, we rolled around in the off-cuts like pigs in swill. Later we would find an abandoned van on some waste-ground near the factories and customize it with bits that we scoured from the bins. The van soon became the Gang’s psychedelic headquarters.
The Gang had rules, and the most important was that everything had to be shared and shared alike: even Carina Cooper’s Chopper bike. How I longed for one. By now Joe had a white-and-red cow-horn bike with huge black wheels that he sometimes let me borrow. But Carina Cooper’s Chopper was something else. Bright orange, with a double seat and high handlebars, it was the bike that every child dreamed of having.
Huge, cumbersome and decidedly unreliable at high speeds, even the Chopper’s deficiencies didn’t dilute my love for it. Most of the toys we played with had their drawbacks. My hands were permanently covered with bruises because I was obsessed with Clackers. A loop of string with two hard plastic balls hanging at either end, I’d rotate the Clackers so violently that they’d either smash off each other or my hands. My knees were constantly covered with scabs as a consequence of shooting off the pogo stick at an awkward angle and there was no soft landing in playgrounds, just hard concrete that you smacked into when you fell off the climbing frame.
The risks of Carina Cooper’s Chopper seemed minimal, and the ultimate thrill was coasting from the top of Sandown Road to the bottom. Perching Lawrence on the seat behind me one sunny afternoon, I pushed off the Chopper and we started going downhill. Faster and faster we went, the road rushing underneath us as the bike got up speed. The quicker we went, the more the Chopper wobbled but I didn’t care. We were going at what felt like a million miles an hour.
Suddenly the end of the road loomed and I slammed on the brakes in panic. The heavy bike flipped straight over and the tarmac rushed towards me. Then everything went black. I was out cold and Lawrence, who’d luckily landed on top of me, desperately tried to revive me until I eventually woke up. As I was stumbling back up the road, Ula Cooper saw me and took me into their house where she gave me a cold flannel soaked in witch hazel. But even though I was seeing stars and suffering from a suspected concussion, I couldn’t wait to get back on the Chopper.
Blazers and boaters
It’s so cold when I walk downstairs that I can hardly feel my fingers. I rush into the living room towards the electric bar fire that’s fitted to the chimneybreast. Radio 4 is on in the kitchen and Eileen Fowler is talking in clipped tones as she instructs listeners through their morning exercises.
‘Bend and straaaaighten, bend and straaaaighten,’ she intones. ‘One, two, thray, four. Bend and straaaaighten. Down with a bounce, with a bounce come UP.’
I walk into the kitchen and see my mother making a half-hearted attempt to stretch her leg as she fills the teapot and sets it on the table. ‘Put your father’s coat out to warm it, will you, Mary?’ she says, as she butters slices of toast.
As fast as she adds them to a rack sitting on the table, Michael and Lawrence grab them.
‘Where are my football boots?’
‘Under the stairs.’
‘And my pencil case?’
‘In the living room where you left it.’
‘What’s in our sandwiches?’
‘Cheese or ham.’
‘Can I have jam?’
‘No. And don’t forget your basket for cookery, Mary. It’s sausage plait today, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, Mum.’
‘I’ve got all the ingredients ready.’
Dad walks in and sits down without a word. He picks up the glass of bicarbonate of soda mixed with water that Mum has left for him and drinks it in one go, then swallows a spoonful of Milk of Magnesia.
Gobbling my toast, I walk over to the radio and switch it to my favourite station. Tony Blackburn is chatting away and my heart skips a beat as ‘Get It On’ starts playing.
Mum walks out into the hall.
‘Joseph Newton!’ she calls. ‘If you’re not down here in two minutes then I’m coming up to get you.’
Joe and Michael are at St Michael’s Comp in Garston now, but while Michael is doing well, Joe isn’t. All he’s really interested in is drawing, and his art teacher says he’s very good. But Mum is too preoccupied by the fact that Joe’s been caught smoking to think of anything else.
‘Your brother could walk through a field of cigarettes and not touch one,’ Mum scolded him. ‘It’s those new friends of yours, isn’t it?’
Joe doesn’t say much. He’s grumpy a lot of the time and is either silently drawing at home or out with his friends. Mum’s worried about what he’s getting up to ever since he and Tommy Cooper secretly made some home brew and Joe was violently sick.
‘Sweet Jesus above in Heaven!’ Mum snapped, when she found out what he’d been doing. ‘Will you ever learn your lesson?’
But I know she worries that Joe never will.
Tish gets up from the table and slips her satchel over her shoulder. I stare at my immaculate sister: white shirt pristine, maroon striped tie straight as a die and black Clarks shoes shined. My new school uniform is a constant challenge for me. There are indoor shoes and outdoor shoes; a tie, blazer and boater; PE kit and hockey stick. Six months after starting at St Joan of Arc’s Grammar School, my socks continually slip down my skinny legs and my shirt mysteriously untucks itself; stains cling to my blazer and my boater is permanently halfway down my forehead.
Each day when I walk to the bus, I wonder if it will finally be my turn for one of the kids from Leggatts to nick it off my head and send it spinning down the pavement. Either that or one of the pupils from Durrants – girls with plucked eyebrows and feather-cut hair, boys with high-waisted peg trousers and a packet of ten Embassy – will get it on the bus. We try to get the 321 each morning because not so many of them get on it. But if the 385 pulls up and we have to board we’re at the mercy of anyone who wants to take a pop.
A hat has suddenly made me, Margaret McGuire, Shirley Breen, Geraldine Quinn and Lorraine Attard different. We all got into St Joan’s from Holy Rood and we’ve crossed a gulf from the Watford comp kids now that we get on the bus to a grammar in Rickmansworth.
‘Poshos,’ they say, as we walk past. ‘Snobs.’
But it’s not the kids with Watford accents that we’re different from. It’s many of the girls we go to school with now: girls with clipped vowels and English parents; girls who are not Catholic and live in places like Croxley Green, Great Missenden and Chorleywood. Girls with mothers who pick them up in Volvos or Rovers at the end of the day and fathers who work in advertising or company boardrooms. Girls with names like Mandy, Debbie, Linda and Carrie. Ever since starting at St Joan’s, I’ve longed to change my name to Cindy.
‘Wub the flour into the butter and add a dash of milk, gels,’ my new home economics teacher Mrs Owen says briskly, as she stands at the front of the class. ‘Now just a dash, gels. Just a dash. Wub, wub, wub.’
She’s almost as posh as Stella, and so are some of the girls at St Joan’s. Carrie Lowman lives in a huge house in Chorleywood, and Linda Barnes talks about having ‘supper’. My new classmates have guitar lessons, because they dream of being pop stars, and horses, because they want to join the Olympic team. When Sherry Lander moaned last week that we should be able to use a dishwasher instead of cleaning up ourselves after home economics, I thought she meant a servant instead of a home appliance. No one we know has a dishwasher. Although Carina Cooper’s mum has a chest freezer that I know Mum would kill for.
&nb
sp; I don’t yet really understand what all of this means. All I know is that I feel different from other kids for the first time in my life and have started bending the truth to cover it up. I talk about ‘my’ bedroom – not the box room I share with Tish. I mention my ‘wardrobe’ – not the curtain covering the space next to the chimneybreast. I say I shop in Miss Selfridge – not Watford market or second-hand shops. And apparently my father now drives a Jaguar.
Bryant & May’s matches 2
My feud with Mr Bunker reached its zenith when I almost set fire to Parkgate School. Michael and Joe were no longer interested in shimmying over the wall to play football with me so instead I got Lawrence to go. We were constantly together, my little brother always on my side and prepared to back me up.
‘What am I going to do?’ I’d wailed one day, as I stared at a cracked windowpane in the Front Room.
I’d shoved Lawrence during an argument and he had staggered back, knocking over the canary’s cage, which had fallen against the window.
‘Mum’ll kill me,’ I said breathlessly. ‘What’ll I tell her?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Lawrence said. ‘I’ll tell her I slipped.’
Mum never knew that he had lied for me. We were partners in crime, together day in, day out.
Growing up, the five of us would make a Guy Fawkes each year for Bonfire Night by stuffing Mum’s old clothes with tights, attaching it to a mask made out of egg boxes, then pushing it around the streets on the go-kart asking for pennies. On the night itself, we’d gather in the back garden and Dad would painstakingly light a box of Standard Fireworks. Until, that is, the year when a rocket shot into the box and everything went up at once. Then Mum decided the whole thing was literally money going up in smoke.
But by the time I was twelve, Michael, Tish and Joe had lost interest in making a guy so I decided that Lawrence and I should have our own private Bonfire Night. As loyal as ever, he diligently helped me to scour the local area for odd bits of wood that we heaved over the Parkgate wall as darkness fell.
‘This will be much better than the bonfire in Cassiobury Park!’ I reassured him, as I lit a match, forgetting that the underside of the steps we were sitting underneath was wooden.
Soon the steps began to smoke as the flames leaped out of control.
‘Mareeeeeee,’ Lawrence howled, as his eyes popped out of his head.
Bashing my coat against the fire, I soon realized there was nothing for it but to run and get Mr Bunker. After dousing the flames with a bucket of water, he dragged me home with a face as red as a beetroot.
‘It’s her again!’ he shrieked. ‘And this time I’m calling the police. Criminal it is. Criminal! Do you hear?’
My parents had stared at me in confusion, wondering what I’d been up to this time, until the local copper Mr Bradley turned up to explain.
‘The school is going to consider whether or not to press charges,’ he said, as he looked at me sternly.
My parents didn’t have the money to repair the steps. I thought of Holloway, of the women who screamed there, of Myra Hindley waiting to get me. In the end, I got away with a very severe scolding and being confined to my bedroom for what felt like weeks. Even when it came to Helen Windrath’s party, my mother wouldn’t budge and marched me around to her house to explain why I couldn’t attend.
‘I set fire to the Parkgate steps,’ I squeaked, as I looked at Mrs Windrath, who breathed a sigh of relief that the local would-be arsonist wasn’t going to play Pass the Parcel that day.
I should have learned my lesson. I should have realized that I was only going to come off worst when I misbehaved. But although it did cross my mind that maybe I should finally grow up a bit, I had not one but two people to feud with from my first day at St Joan’s: Beryl Stephenson and Mrs Duncan.
Beryl Stephenson was the art teacher. With a high forehead and frizzy grey hair, she looked like Art Garfunkel with a whiff of Isadora Duncan, given her artistic nature and penchant for flowing smock tops. The two of us were on a collision course because art had always been a source of fun and laughter at home with my parents but Miss Stephenson took it far more seriously.
Playing classical music during lessons as we silently painted, she also decided to recite ‘Tyger, tyger, burning bright …’ in hushed tones one day to get us in the mood to paint jungle animals. Standing behind me as I stood at my easel, she nervously cleared her throat and I dissolved into laughter. I was Miss Stephenson’s worst nightmare and I knew it.
‘It could be better,’ she told me, when I handed in a picture I’d done of a battered old pair of working man’s boots. ‘Can you try again, Mary?’
They were the kind of boots my grandfather could have worn on his farm in Ireland and I knew the picture was good. So instead of redoing the drawing, I simply handed it in again the next week.
‘This isn’t as good as your first attempt,’ Miss Stephenson told me, and I knew then and there that I would never be a favourite of Beryl’s.
Mrs Duncan, the school secretary, patrolled the corridors in Scholl sandals and a flowered dress that covered a bosom so ample it met her waist and was forever telling me off for running or laughing too loudly. She also quickly cottoned on to the fact that I’d worked out a way to get out of lessons soon after starting at St Joan’s.
There was a stream running through the school grounds that had a grotto at one end housing a statue of the Virgin Mary. Pupils were allowed to use a small green rowing boat moored there if they got in early enough before school and I loved that boat almost as much as the fact that if you fell into the river you were allowed to go and change into your PE kit. My outfit change often lasted almost a whole lesson and I mysteriously started falling into the river before double chemistry each week.
‘You again, Mary?’ Mrs Duncan would hiss, as I walked up the stairs covered with river weed.
‘Yes, Mrs Duncan.’
Between the two of them, there were eyes always watching me at St Joan’s and I rose to the challenge. When Beryl Stephenson asked us to get into pairs to do a painting, I partnered up with Moira McCann, one of Harry and Sheila’s daughters. I’d known Moira all my life and she was patient, kind and usually top of the class. She was also often prepared to take part in my naughtiness because she was my most loyal friend. Given that she was a perfect pupil, Moira was an ideal foil for my plan.
‘Let’s do a picture of a bigger lady,’ I said to her, as we stood at our easel, and soon a picture of a woman who looked almost identical to Mrs Duncan had appeared on the paper in front of us.
‘Let’s call it The Large Lady,’ I said, with a giggle.
Moira knew exactly what I was up to but was so kind that she would never have dreamed of telling Miss Stephenson – even if it meant getting into trouble herself. Our drawing was soon put up on a notice-board in the school corridor, and Mrs Duncan hit the roof.
‘You are so naughty, Mary,’ Moira giggled when the painting was taken down and we were told off.
‘Why don’t I buy you some Spaceships?’ I said, and linked my arm in hers.
Moira wasn’t there to caution me, though, when I walked into Mrs Duncan’s office one day and saw her familiar stretched Scholls lying on the floor. Putting them on a hockey stick, I started waving them out of the window. The more the girls below laughed, the more I waved the shoes. When they finally shot off the stick and landed on a flat roof, I thought I’d get away with it as the investigation into the missing sandals got under way. But in every school there’s a squealer who tells and I was discovered. From that day on, Mrs Duncan and Miss Stephenson were on the warpath.
I wasn’t rude. I didn’t steal. I didn’t bully. I respected most of the rules because I liked the structure of school. But I was a high-spirited child and could not resist defying Miss Stephenson and Mrs Duncan. When the chance came to make myself and other people laugh, I always took it. It was how I found my place and made friends in a world that seemed so different from the one I knew.
Parker pen
I stare at Sister St James. She is holding her fountain pen in her long tapered fingers. Her wimple is pristine white, her habit jet black, her eyes kindly as she looks at me. I can hardly believe that I am sitting talking to a nun about men’s parts.
Since starting at secondary school, I’ve discovered that convent girls are like catnip to flashers. There are men in raincoats everywhere. When Miss Gains is puffing on a fag somewhere far down the hockey pitch – only blowing her whistle from afar if things get too out of hand – there are men standing by the fence. When we’re haphazardly hitting tennis balls in our tiny games skirts and matching knickers, they appear in the distance and flick open their raincoats in front of girls hardly old enough to know what they’re looking at. It’s only because I’ve got brothers that I do.
A few days ago, I was sitting alone on the school bus because Tish had stayed late at school and everyone else had got off – our stop was nearly at the end of the route. Happily minding my own business, I glanced over at a man sitting across the aisle from me. With a slow smile, he lifted up the jacket on his lap and showed me what he’d obviously been waiting patiently to reveal since we’d left Rickmansworth.
My mother almost had a heart attack when I told her what had happened during an episode of Blue Peter. The lock came off the phone and she immediately called the school.
‘So can you tell me what the man looked like?’ Sister St James asks, as she looks at me.
She reminds me of the Mother Superior in The Sound of Music. Apparently there’s a policeman coming with a book full of pictures that I’m going to have to look through.
‘I didn’t see much of his face,’ I say, and dissolve into laughter.
Racing Pigeon magazine
The look on my mother’s face could curdle milk.
‘You’re going to keep those things in here!’ she cries at my father. ‘What will we do if someone wants to visit?’