The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  All in all, it had seemed like quite a daring thing to do, as well as a nice moment of conspiracy between them. Sandra neatly clipped off the price tags from the, to be honest, still horrible components of the school uniform, and removed them from the cheap plastic shop hangers, putting them carefully instead on the aligned wooden hangers, all looking in the same direction in the wardrobe. She had no qualms about facing down any games mistress. After all, her mother’s was the more mature attitude. So, it was a bit of a shock when, two days later, her mother went off with Francis to buy his uniform, and they returned not only with the List A stuff, but also with a scrupulously accurate account of the horrible List B demands of sportswear. Maybe he’d already grown out of his old stuff, the weirdo beanpole, but it still looked like a not-very-graceful inconsistency on her mother’s part.

  It took Sandra a while to see that her mother’s first duty, as she saw it, wasn’t to the uniform of the two schools, but to the different things that her children needed from her just then. Sandra needed conspiracy and support against an authority that would always be bone-headed and ludicrous, whether in London or Sheffield. Francis, on the other hand, with his shyness and self-consciousness, would be worried, even frightened, by the suggestion that he needn’t bother with the petty rules and prescriptions of an authority not yet known in any detail. For him, the reassurance, the sense that his mother was always on his side, would come more convincingly from her serious-minded attempt to kit him out with absolute correctness. All the same, Sandra didn’t believe that her mother really gave a toss for the whole paraphernalia of sport. The naughtiness she’d revealed to her was, objectively, much less of an act than whatever serious attitude she’d adopted in the shopping expedition for Francis, and after that they’d not taken a taxi home. Apart from anything else, it was much more mature, not taking games seriously.

  That comfort had more or less disappeared by the time it came to Wednesday afternoon. The cloakroom was dank and smelly in a fungal way, the dark varnish on the benches shabbily peeling off like dry skin, lit only by a thick-frosted window high up in the wall, six inches deep, running the length of the changing room. It was almost underground. She was last in, and had difficulty finding a peg, finally pushing aside the over-ambitious claims of one of the sneering girls, and getting pushed in return. It was netball, apparently, and she changed into her old outfit, consciously ignoring the giggles and scandalized murmurs around her. The door was half opened and a rough voice, neither man’s nor woman’s, called in, “Hurry up, girls, line up quickly.” It sounded like Miss Whitaker’s voice, the hairy-armed games mistress at Tiffin. Perhaps they all came from the same suppliers, like the uniforms, purple, black, or snot-green. Sandra finished changing into her crumpled games outfit, now becoming a bit tight, and followed the others out into the little lobby. She joined the end of the line, noticing the daunting uniformity of the others, and waited.

  In a moment, the games mistress came back in; she was short and broadly built, her chest without a bosom, but stout like a guardsman’s in her red tracksuit. The white stripes down the side of her track-suit trousers curved outwards like jodhpurs, outlining things massive and firm. She came straight up to Sandra. “That’s not the correct wear,” she said. “And who are you?” Sandra explained that she was new and—

  “I can see you’re new,” the woman said. “Never seen anyone so new-looking in my life. And what in heaven’s name are you doing in that unholy get-up?” That, Sandra thought a little unfair; it was what they wore for games lessons at Tiffin, which after all was no more stupid a school than this one, but she told the woman her name and explained about it being a new kit, fairly new, and then, despising herself under the woman’s lobster-like glare, suggested that they would get the right-coloured kit before long. All of this was against the fascinated inspection and ugly giggling of the three girls she’d tried to make friends with. They, slightly surprisingly, were straight out of the box as far as their kit was concerned, conforming to the inch with requirements.

  “I don’t care about any of that,” the woman said. “If you’re in my class, you turn up in the right kit, or not at all, or rather,” she went on, perhaps having seen some opportunistic glint at the prospect of licensed skiving in Sandra’s eye, “I’ll send you out on the pitch with whatever ends and odds on I can find in the box in my office. Is that clear? I want you in the right kit this time next week or I’ll want to know the reason why. Today you get off lightly. Now. What position do you play?”

  Sandra had thought all this fury, either fake or, more absurdly, real, both risible and genuinely frightening, but that request she absolutely wouldn’t lower herself to give an answer to. In the past, she had been put into positions in netball, could probably even remember the names of some, but out of a sense of her own dignity, she wouldn’t give an impression to the class, now finely gripped by this confrontation, that she could honestly be bothered to remember any of that crap. She lowered her eyes disdainfully, shrugged.

  “Hello! Hello!” the woman shouted. “We’ve got a right one here. I asked you a question and I expect an answer.”

  “I don’t know the answer,” Sandra said, now losing her temper a little. “You give me a piece of information, and then perhaps I can learn something I didn’t know. I thought that was the point of school.”

  “The point of school is whatever I say it is,” the woman said, but that could hardly be true, objectively speaking, and it must have sounded a little limp as a retort even to her, as she then abruptly appointed two captains and ordered them to start picking their teams. Sandra was last to be picked—“That new girl, then”—and it was with a sort of exultation she realized that however long she was at the school, however many games of stupid netball and stupid hockey were organized for her benefit, she’d now always be last to be picked, correct kit or not.

  The game of netball was the usual nightmare of legs gone pink and chubby in the chilly wind. The air ached with the predatory chirp of the whistle, and it was usually directed at her. She was holding the ball in the wrong way—how? It was round, wasn’t it?—or she’d thrown it to the wrong people, or the right people somehow in the wrong way. There were already people in the class who had apparently concluded they weren’t going to like her, and if, outside the netball court, they could best pursue their dislike by ignoring her, here they could apparently make the most of it by paying her every attention. With each new piece of notice paid came, too, an almost gleeful reprimand from the cuboid games mistress, and even the most normally delinquent of the class, the ones who could usually rely on the woman’s exasperated fury, could today deflect that fury by making the new girl fail, make her the focus of beadily expressed rage. They threw the ball at her, hard and often. The side of her head pained, her pink thighs, her hands sore with the abrupt slap of the thrown plastic ball, and with nothing to show for it except the games mistress’s reprimands and a few sour looks. She wouldn’t have wanted sporting triumphs, but she might have settled for the cachet of deliberate, contemptuous crapness. She couldn’t fool herself: it had just looked like ineptitude.

  “We’re going to have to try hard to knock you into shape,” the games mistress said to her nauseatingly, when it was all over, beefily falling into step with Sandra as she drooped after the others back towards the school buildings. “And if you’re in one of my physics sets, I hope I’m going to see a bit more effort there, too.”

  “Physics?” Sandra said, confused by the reference—there didn’t seem to be much to link physics and physical education.

  “Yes, physics,” the woman said, insultingly raising and showing her voice. “That’s what I mostly teach.”

  Inside, gripped with the horrible suggestion, Sandra was just about to start changing when another whistle blew, still harsher inside the concrete room. “Everyone must take a shower. Is that clear?” the woman called. “And I’m going to sit here and watch to make sure everyone does.”

  “She’s a right old lesbian
, that Neve,” the girl next to Sandra muttered, surprisingly at Sandra and meant in a kindly way; she hadn’t expected anything like generous commiseration, or taking sides against the awful Neve, as she was called. But that surprising and comforting fact couldn’t do much at the moment, because Sandra had no towel to dry herself with. She hadn’t thought through the implications of that entry on the timetable, sports, periods 6–8.

  “You don’t have a towel?” Neve said, voice raised, her hands in a what-now position on her hips. The class paused in its undressing, paid attention. “Why ever not?”

  “I didn’t think—” Sandra said.

  “You thought you’d get back into your uniform without showering? How absolutely disgusting.”

  Sandra wondered what Neve was short for—Neville, perhaps. “The thing is,” Sandra said patiently, “it’s the end of the day. I can shower when I get home.”

  “You’ll shower now if I say so,” Neve said, “and manage as best you can. I expect someone will lend you a towel.” That seemed unlikely, and Sandra undressed and walked with the others through the bleak hissing tiled chamber as swiftly as she could.

  Around her—she could hardly not see, or hope that she wasn’t observed in her turn—was the indignity of twenty girls’ bodies, some skinny and boylike, others plain and lumpy with puberty, their square blocky breasts and massive thighs about an exuberant fury of scribbled pubic hair, like a tangled mop-head, and then, here and there, girls who simply looked like women, who had stepped effortlessly from one sort of grace to another, their transformation so recent, making no demands of them, a transformation like that of the heroine of an old book for children stepping across a brook to find herself a queen in one move. Sandra would have classed herself with this last group, despite her spots, and knew quite well that she had not changed much through these processes, that puberty for her was a matter of mild adjustment and not unequal spurt and explosion.

  “Here, use this,” Neve said roughly, handing her a fairly disgusting greyish towel, the texture of coarse sand. “I found it in a corner of my office. You can use that this week. Don’t forget next.” Sandra would have liked to drop it contemptuously on the floor, but she was wet; she dabbed at herself, and then dropped it disdainfully in a puddle.

  “Well, that seems stupid,” her father said that evening.

  “She was really cross,” Sandra said. “She was yelling at me because I didn’t have the right-coloured shirt or something.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought it made an ounce of difference in the long run whether you wore a green shirt or an orange shirt or a sky-blue-pink one to run round a field in,” her father said.

  “I don’t care what I wear,” Sandra said, “for playing hockey in. I wouldn’t care if I played it in my bra and knickers.”

  “I bet you would,” Francis said earnestly. “I bet you a million pounds you would.”

  She brushed him aside like a moth. It was nice to have someone slightly retarded, even if only in the evening, to practise on.

  “It’s stupid, and they ought to realize it’s stupid,” Sandra said. “I’ve a good mind to go on wearing what I was wearing today.”

  “Don’t do that, love,” her mother said, cutting through the principle of the thing in an infuriating way. “We’ll buy you the proper wear at the weekend, if this woman insists on you having it. I don’t want people shouting at you, even if it’s for a nonsensical reason.”

  “The thing is,” her father said, “the world’s full of people who make up their own rules and then try and get you to stick to them as though they were important. You know, when I left school, my first job I worked in a bank in the City, a small private bank, and it was starting at the bottom, but it was a good job with prospects. At least, your grandma said so. Your uncle Henry, his friend Eric, he worked near there and he put in a word for me. But you see, in this bank, they had a rule that when you were in your own office, or the office you shared with three other clerks I should say, you could take your jacket off when you were working and even roll your sleeves up—I suppose to keep the ink off your sleeves because in those days you didn’t change your shirt every day, you just changed your collar and went on, because your shirts, they all had detachable collars. Gaw, we must all have ponged the place out, but you just—”

  “Yes, I bet you did,” Alice said, because Bernie’s stories, rarely embarked upon, had a habit of running into a sand of memory about cuffs and collars, ration books and next-door’s air-raid shelter, the one with a pack of rabbits living in it, the point of the story sinking in his wonderment at the passing of small properties. It came back, wherever he started from, almost always to detachable collars. They all looked forward to the appearance of the collars.

  “Yes,” Bernie said. “I’ll say we did. Well, the rule was that if you were in the office, you could sit without a jacket. But if you left the office for any reason, even if you were just going to the office next door to see George or Joe or whoever it might be, then—” deep breath “—you had to put on your jacket, roll your cuffs down, straighten your tie. It was just a rule, a completely stupid rule, but they made you obey it like it was a rule against, I don’t know, stealing money or something.”

  “It’s just like that,” Sandra said, “with this woman Neve. She thinks that’s the most serious thing in the world, matching shirts with everyone else.”

  “And what they want,” Alice broke in, speaking with an urgency that made them look at her in surprise, “is for you to start believing those rules, not just obeying them, but really believing it matters.”

  “But the thing was,” Bernie went on, “the funny thing was, I worked there for two years and then I thought to myself, Sod this for a game of soldiers. Because I’d done my job as well as anyone could, but I was still doing the same job for the same pay that I was when I went in, and they’d started saying, ‘If you carry on we’ll have to think about giving you more responsibility,’ as if to say to your face, ‘You mug.’ Coming the old acid but never doing anything about it. And meanwhile, all the time, there were people who’d come in after me, who were the chairman’s wife’s nephew, or who went to the right school and had the right voice, or who played cricket in the same village team as a member of the board of governors, and they were being promoted, given responsibility, all right, and they weren’t much cop, most of them. Some of them went off without a word every Friday lunchtime, going off shooting, they said, for a Friday-to-Monday, as they called it, and it was Friday to Monday, they’d be back Monday lunchtime in their tweeds with some dead wildlife hanging from their wrist. I can hear them now—‘Ah, Sellers, have a brace of partridge, my good fellow,’ and dropping these dead birds, all their feathers and mud and shit all over them, on my desk.”

  “I can just see your mother’s face,” Alice said, “if you turned up with two dead partridges—a brace, that’s two, isn’t it?—and asked her to start plucking them for your Monday-night tea.”

  “That’s right,” Bernie said. “She’d have had a conniption fit at the idea of eating something you’d got from a field, she’d have said, ‘We might have had to live like that in the war, but I don’t see the necessity for it now.’ But you see, they’d got a rule against walking between offices without your jacket on, but they didn’t have one against promoting someone because you knew their dad, or because you were having an affair with their mum, or because you were their dad. They weren’t bothered about that.”

  “What your dad means—” Alice said.

  “What I mean is,” Bernie said excitedly, “is it’s stupid, it’s a stupid rule you’ve come across and it’s a stupid person that’s enforcing it, but it’s not going to be the last time you come across one. Sometimes you need to obey the stupid rule, but I tell you, gel, you don’t start believing it and you don’t start inflicting it on anyone else. You want your own rules, the important ones.”

  “Don’t you have stupid rules at the Electric?” Sandra said.

  “Ha,” Berni
e said. “Of course we do. But I’m in charge of them, more or less.”

  “All the same,” Alice said, “we’ll go and get you a proper Flint-coloured games kit at the weekend.”

  “At the Friday-to-Monday,” Francis said dreamily. “It sounds—”

  “It sounds ridiculous,” Alice said firmly. “Really, it can’t be very nice to be shouted at for something so trivial, and I dare say it’s not very pleasant for the woman herself to have to shout at people. I shouldn’t like it at all.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Sandra said. “But you ought to see her. She loves it.”

  “Poor woman,” Alice said. “And I expect she’s probably a lesbian, too, poor woman.”

  “Mother!” Sandra said.

  “Well, I expect she is, isn’t she?” Alice said, over Bernie’s chortling.

  “She does look a bit like one,” Sandra said.

  “Well, there you are,” Alice said.

  All that was quite consoling, but what Sandra couldn’t understand was the way the class pretty well lined up against her with the games teacher’s attitude. It seemed unlikely, so blown-up and froglike a figure commanding popular support.

  Sandra hadn’t mentioned the towel question in front of her parents and, especially, brother, partly because it was embarrassing but mostly because she didn’t think it was that important. She’d take a towel next week, and it would be a big one, to wrap herself in. She wasn’t about to flash her pubes in Neve’s lascivious direction again.

  But, weirdly enough, it was the towel that had inspired all the interest the next day. When Sandra came into the classroom the next morning, minutes before registration, two of the three girls she’d tried to befriend were at their places, and around them a gaggle of boys in their black blazers, sitting on the tables, some hanging on like perching crows. The look on the girls’ faces was of gleeful mock-concern, their voices hushed with pretend worry. But the boys—some of whom, surely, weren’t even in Sandra’s class—were alive with excitement, hooting mutedly, and when one girl said something, perhaps just “That’s her,” on Sandra’s entrance, they all turned round, almost awestruck, before beginning to laugh in a crude, directed style. Some even stared at Sandra as they laughed. She tried hard to be mature and objective as the suddenly horrible word “towel” floated over.