Fair Girls and Grey Horses

by Christine Pullein-Thompson

  My attempts at singing were also banned. Miss Cholmondley, who took choir practice at which the whole school tried out the assembly hymns for the week, took me aside and asked if I would mind not singing, as my efforts put the other children off. A little indignant, I decided to capitalize and later took her aside to point out that if I was not to sing there was no point in my being there. She agreed to excuse me and I then spent a few happy choir practices in sole possession of the communal swing. It was sited beside the Hut windows, so I was able to make triumphant faces at my friends as I swung. Eventually observed, I was told to go to my classroom and get on with my prep; this was acceptable as it meant less to take home at the weekend. My banishment from choir practice gave me more ammunition for my campaign to give up Musical Appreciation. Mamma was totally unmusical and always admitted that at the end of ten years of piano lessons she could only play ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’, but the Pullein-Thompsons were musical and she felt that there was no reason we should all have inherited the Cannan lack of ear. So as Musical Appreciation wasn’t an extra, I was forced to go on taking part for a whole year. As it was apparent that I couldn’t tell one note from another, I was given simple tasks – one clash of the cymbals, one tinkle of the triangle – but even then I would go into a dream and miss my cue.

  One of Wychwood’s more interesting and original ideas was their House of Commons. It met in the Hut once a week; the senior girls provided the officers and the front benches, while we junior backbenchers were supposed to scour the newspapers for topical matters to bring up at Question Time. I think we mainly concentrated on Question Time, but speeches were delivered and when you reached the Lower Remove you were required to make your maiden speech. I panicked, but Mamma was happy to write me a speech on the urbanization of rural England; I seem to remember poetic sentences about the pastoral heart of England being engulfed in a tide of creeping red brick. I read the speech nervously – I could only perform publicly on the back of a horse – and it was galling afterwards when everyone congratulated me on ‘your mother’s speech’. Later I became interested in Civics, which was suddenly introduced as a subject, and I think if I had stayed at school longer I might well have played a part in the House.

  At that time we were all more concerned with our own small world. Tony Craker, who had an older sister in the school and had been there longer than the rest of us, was usually our leader; but Ann Mullins, who joined us, was interestingly wicked and had been expelled, rumour suggested, from all her previous schools. Joan Aiken, who came a term later, was quiet with red hair and wore her tunic unfashionably long. We didn’t object to this for we had been taught at least to pay lip service to plain living and high thinking. Prepared to accept a degree of eccentricity, we scorned acquisitiveness. Two sisters from the Midlands who wore dresses with bows (instead of the skirts and sweaters most of us changed into for supper) and had their own radios, and were sent lavish, be-ribboned boxes of chocolates by their parents – they were the ones who were given a hard time.

  Joan Aiken was the only one among us to have divorced parents. Her father, the American poet Conrad Aiken, had left her mother who had married again. We were fascinated, and I remember her sitting on a table and the rest of us gathered round asking about the surnames and relationship of her various half – and step – siblings. My other memory of Joan is that when we drew horses I laboured long over the hideous angularities of hocks, fetlocks and pasterns, but she drew them with wings and lost the legs among the clouds.

  Encouraged to read newspapers, we came upon a guarded advertisement for disposable sanitary towels which offered a booklet, entitled Marjorie-May’s Twelfth Birthday, to help mothers explain menstruation to their daughters. Feeling wickedly subversive and hoping for revelations, we sent for it, but there was the usual disappointment. At the birthday party Marjorie-May’s slightly older cousin is much quieter than usual and later Mother explains that she has her first period and is now a woman. In saccharine language Marjorie-May looks forward to becoming a woman too. I took the booklet home for the delectation of Mamma and the twins. Mamma giggled over its awfulness and ‘Marjorie’ became an alternative euphemism to ‘the curse’.

  Despite the fecundity of The Grove, my racy reading and strong interest in veterinary matters, I seemed almost wilfully slow to grasp that sex was a human activity. I didn’t worry when, at a mutual examination of legs, mine – thin, and long in proportion to my body – were pronounced ‘not sexy’. A captive audience in the dormitory, I laughed heartily at Ann and Jean’s dirty stories – pretending to understand punch lines about husbands not being bicycle pumps. In fact I had left Wychwood by the time the long-known facts of life suddenly manifested themselves to me. It was by the pond at The Grove, where the ducks were engaged in their usual copulation, that I realized, and choosing the most dignified couple I knew, I told myself ‘Aunt May and Uncle Percival do that.’

  At Wychwood ‘Dares’ became fashionable for a time, and Ann was our most persistent and imaginative darer. At first I felt bound to accept these challenges, which ranged from standing on second-floor window ledges to telling some unfortunate mistress that she looked like a turkey cock; but it seemed that the more you took, the more were made. Gradually I realized that this was a form of tyranny and announced I would accept no more. Then I was tempted by dozens of easy ones, but I stood firm and eventually the craze died.

  Ruth Napier, who was in the form above me, was the daughter of Elizabeth Sprigge, and Ruth’s younger sister had written to tell Mamma that she much preferred the Jean books to her own mother’s Pony Tracks. We agreed with the critical judgement, but to admit it seemed an act of treachery which, as we were reared in the Scottish belief that blood is thicker than water, shook us to the core.

  In my third term Eleanor Dawson was a room-mate. She was a year older, but as her father trained racehorses, all the family rode and her brothers went to Eton, we had a lot in common. After sharing a room for a week or two, she was amazed to find that I hadn’t noticed she had only one eye. She took out her glass one at night and flopped a lock of hair over her face to hide the cavity. The accident had happened on her fourth birthday, as she opened a parcel with a pair of scissors. To me it became a Mamma-style awful warning; I still think of Eleanor as I take up scissors to attack a parcel, and remind myself to point them downwards.

  The summer I was ten I had been considered civilized enough to attend the Fourth of June celebrations at Eton and had much enjoyed an elegant lunch given by Denis’s housemaster, C.R.N. Routh. I remember the salmon – far more of a luxury then – and the huge homemade meringues, buff-coloured and far more delicious than the white objects one usually ate. After seeing round the school and eating a picnic dinner in the car park, we sat on the river bank to watch the Procession of Boats and then the lavish firework display. The dramatic set-pieces of Catherine wheels and waterfalls on the far bank were interspersed with rockets; I was thrilled with the ones that made multiple bursts, and joined in the audience participation when the whole crowd counted. The other memorable moment was Mamma fainting in the crush on the way to the car park and having to be supported to the car by Cappy and Denis.

  That summer at Wychwood, Eleanor was horrified to hear that I wasn’t going to the Fourth, particularly as it was Denis’s last half. She arranged with both sets of parents that her eldest brother Dickie, who was up at Oxford, should drive us to Eton after lunch and deliver us to our families.

  Clothes weren’t a problem because ever since the family dressmaker had retired, Mamma had decided that we must each have one good frock a year, and she bought them mail order from Harrods. We would help to choose the dress and then the twins would decide on one colour and I on another. Mamma did offer them different colours – they never wore matching sweaters or pyjamas – but for some reason their dresses were always identical. In linen hats that matched and tidy socks and shoes, we were considered equipped. We never had summer coats and Cappy loathed cardigans, so if the day
turned cold we had to freeze in silence. Any appeal to Mamma would be answered with one of her favourite quotes; ‘It is necessary to suffer to be beautiful.’

  Dickie Dawson appeared to be satisfied with our appearances but halfway to Windsor, after a further inspection in the driving mirror, he suggested that I removed the brace from my teeth. Obediently, for I was used to elder-brotherly advice, I wrapped it in a handkerchief and put it in my pocket.

  Denis was rowing in the traditional Procession of Boats, which then took place before the fireworks, as the light faded. The audience watched from the river bank and as the boats passed each member of every crew, dressed in white duck trousers, a striped shirt and a straw boater decorated with flowers, had to get to his feet and stand, holding his oar vertically in front of him. When Denis’s Arethusa drew level we were all in terror that one of the crew would lose his balance and capsize the boat, but they rose in turn until the whole crew stood erect and brilliantly illuminated by spotlights.

  On the whole Eton seemed to have very little influence on the twins and me. It had taught us to call sponge cakes sandwiched with jam and cream French Cream Jesuses. But I think the various strictures Denis tried to impose had as much to do with his growing sophistication as with his school. ‘You can’t go to the pony club, Miss Ferrand wears a hairnet,’ he would tell us; or ‘You can’t like china animals.’ But I think numbers gave us the strength to ignore him, for we accepted the hairnetted lady and continued to collect china animals, and Denis, always a generous brother, relented enough to give me a magnificent pair of china horse’s-head book-ends for my birthday. I think he must have been about seventeen when he announced that parents could not be called Mummy and Cappy, they had to be Mamma and Papa. While we were at Wychwood all our letters were written to Mummy, but as we became teenagers she changed to Mamma, quite happily. Cappy hated Papa – perhaps it was his unloved father’s name – but he finally accepted it when we were adult.

  In the autumn of 1937, when the twins joined me at Wychwood, I found many changes. Most of the old staff had disappeared. I heard that on learning the whole of the Shell form had failed school certificate, a furious Miss Lee had sacked the deputy principal, and many of the staff had resigned in sympathy. Even Matron had gone; in fact I think only Mademoiselle, Miss Baker and Miss Pinhorn remained. Miss Snodgrass the new deputy headmistress was an improvement, but some of the other staff were not. I remember one who wore cotton wool in her ears, answered no questions and obviously disliked us intensely.

  The twins were warmly welcomed and allotted the most popular seniors for their housemothers. I showed them round and introduced them to everyone, displaying them as an interesting rarity, for there were no other twins in the school. I also made use of them. When my over-energetic friends demanded that I joined them in jumping garden seats, I would say, ‘Take the twins,’ and make a swift retreat to the library.

  Though I was conscious that I had less energy than other children, it never occurred to me that there might be anything wrong. I used to feel very odd when I played tennis – I would play quite well in the first set and then lose my coordination completely in the second. In swimming races I would win the first heat and then disappoint my cheering friends by being quite unable to produce the same form in the finals. I would arrive at art lessons, which followed games, in a state of collapse, but I knew from experience that I always felt better after tea, with its liberal helpings of golden syrup. As I grew older and became more motivated, energetic exercise was an increasing problem. At least when riding the horse did most of the strenuous work; but mucking out stables before breakfast or a day’s hunting with only a sandwich at lunch-time would leave me feeling half dead. It didn’t occur to me to complain, or to consult a doctor, until I was adult and then I learnt that I was suffering from hypoglycaemia.

  During the ’thirties Cappy had realized that the changes wrought by the First World War and the Depression meant that many more public school boys had to earn their livings. Younger sons had traditionally entered the law, the church or the services, family banks and businesses took on their own, and the administration of the Empire had provided a living for those who could take exile. Cappy felt the new generation of young men needed career guidance and to be brought together with the new national and multinational firms that were coming into being. He persuaded the Headmasters’ Conference schools and Trueman and Knightley, one of the well-known education consultancies, to back him, and set up The Public Schools Employment Bureau with an office and an assistant in London. He then spent the term-time travelling round the schools interviewing and advising. We accused him of hurrying the poor unsuspecting boys into miserable careers in chartered accountancy, but he was convinced that this was the area of future growth. He admitted that he always advised against careers in the arts because he felt that writing, painting and music all offered such hard and uncertain lives that only those who went into them despite discouragement were likely to survive.

  With Cappy visiting schools, Denis at Christ Church and the three of us at Wychwood, Mamma was alone at home. She hated it, and if anyone sneezed on Monday morning she would persuade herself that we were all about to have colds and keep us at home for the rest of the week. Our parents’ disregard for the authority of school obviously had an effect on us and we were always in trouble for minor infringements, for which you were awarded an ‘N.D.’ or ‘not done’. The lack of name tapes on our clothes clocked up N.D.s by the dozen. The punishments were fines deducted from your pocket money, but as we had no pocket money they went unpaid. At the end of each term the unpaid fines were doubled, and a list on the notice-board named the offenders. As the P-T debt grew and grew, more law-abiding girls would gasp in horror at the huge sums we owed, but we knew that the school was helpless; our bank and post office accounts were out of their reach.

  In the summer of 1938 poliomyelitis, or infantile paralysis as it was then called, struck Oxford. It was a terrifying illness which left children and young adults crippled or suffering a living death in an iron lung. There was no immunization and no cure and I think people had only just become aware that swimming in polluted water contributed to the spread of the virus.

  Mamma removed us from school instantly and we spent a glorious summer at home. But when the outbreak was over we were returned in time for exams and it was deeply humiliating to find that one could no longer compete with one’s peers. Our parents, inconsequently, used our appallingly low marks as proof that we were learning nothing and that Wychwood was a waste of money. They decided we were to leave, they would find a governess and educate us at home; but meanwhile they had to give a term’s notice.

  Diana

  Looking back now to Wychwood I see myself an untidy girl struggling to be liked, in gaunt, red-brick houses with windows open to the damp cold of the Oxford air; I remember hockey on barren fields, chilblains and despair; I see a place where my half-understood dreams of being a normal schoolchild slowly fell apart like a bright jersey eaten by moths, until each day brought further confirmation of my failure both in lessons and relationships, and paranoia started to take root.

  When I arrived, with no special sheets or writing paper and the minimum items of uniform, my confidence had already been undermined by the entrance exam. Many questions in it had foxed me, although I now remember only one, which was about the significance of King Alfred. Of course I should have mentioned education and the navy, but we had never done King Alfred at Miss Fryer’s and all I could recall was a picture of him with a tray of burnt cakes in our illustrated nursery history book. So I answered, ‘King Alfred burnt the cakes,’ and, not realising the school was at a low ebb, I was surprised to be accepted.

  Tackling a new, unfamiliar curriculum, we struggled to understand lessons like people trying to find their way through deep country without the signposts and maps available to others. Worse still, we were, once again, ‘the twins’ rather than individuals; and potential friends had to take both of us or neither, for, hom
esick and lost, we stayed together like abandoned puppies. Outwardly cheerful, ill-written postcards sent by me from Wychwood showed how quickly I regressed. Yet the staff tried to make us feel at home and our form mistress, Miss Woodward, who I suspect admired Mamma’s books, tried to encourage us.

  The first term we shared a dormitory with our ‘house mother’, Joy, an amiable sixth-former appointed to show us the ropes and be available for questions. But, although there was no bullying and little cattiness, the place became for us the prison Mamma had anticipated. How could it be otherwise with almost every minute of the day organised and life punctuated by rules, which we rarely remembered? At home we hogged the nursery fire, here in the Banbury Road there seemed no permanent escape from the raw penetrating cold of an Oxford winter. While other girls wore tunics and white blouses Christine and I shivered even with games sweaters and blazers on top of that uniform, our faces marred by dental braces, mine on both top and bottom teeth. And while Josephine found warmth in the Library, Christine and I eventually sat in front of a coal stove in our class room which was adjacent to the Hut. Here, where no one else came in the evenings, we, too, could read in peace.

  Seeing Christine hunched and miserable was to see myself, except for those braces – she only had one at the top – which made me loth to smile. Inept but optimistic, we tried to make friends with two day girls in our class, tall Jean Chalk and the shorter Sally Foley. They had paired off and, conscious that people without friends were ‘wet blankets’, we tagged along after them. When spring came Mamma, anxious to encourage us, asked Jean and Sally over to tea. They rode Lassie and seemed to enjoy themselves. But the fact that they never asked us back fed my own suspicion that they came for the ride and to talk with the writer of A Pony for Jean, rather than because they wanted to be with us – a sad realisation, because I needed so much to be liked. With no friends, Christine and I feared we might one day be linked to the mentally disadvantaged Joy and Mary, whom Josephine has described. If you came in last for a meal the only vacant place would be next to one of these poor girls and secretly we thought this might one day be our scenario, too.