Learning to Swim

by Clare Chambers

  ‘Did you bring a letter from your parents this time?’ I asked, already nervous at the possibility of witnessing another clash between Frances and Dr Peel.

  ‘No, Mum had left before I got up,’ she said, then seeing my dismayed expression added, ‘Don’t worry. I got Rad to do one – he’s got Mum’s signature off to a T.’

  Dear Beatrice

  I started at my new school today. I didn’t think I’d be nervous but I was. I’m in 1T – Mrs Twigg’s class. She’s all right, but she’s got this funny way of shutting her eyes when she’s talking and not opening them again for ages. I don’t think she’ll be much trouble. The history teacher, Dr Peel, is rather fierce. She made me sit next to this girl called Abigail – wait for it – ONIONS, who is a bit stuck up but quite nice. She’s got long hair, a crooked tooth, a pointy sort of nose and really neat writing. She said I could borrow her books to catch up all the work I’ve missed which is a good thing because after history we had French, and I didn’t know what was going on! When I got home Mum was working late and Dad was out I don’t know where, so I did a bit more unpacking till Rad came home then I made us a fried egg sandwich for tea and we played chess till Mum got back. I lost sixteen–nil. She’d brought in a Chinese takeaway so we ate that too.

  Frances was a serious diarist. She would even bring her ‘journal’ – a large maroon leather volume – to school and every so often would ostentatiously produce it from her bag and start writing, one arm protectively shielding the page. Then she would make a great show of locking it and stashing the key in her purse-belt. It was unnerving to be in the middle of a conversation with her, only to have it terminated as she dived for her diary and scribbled down a few words. It made you rather inclined to watch what you said. After a couple of weeks and much wheedling on my part she allowed me a glimpse of the above entry and my curiosity was justly rewarded.

  ‘Oh!’ I gasped as I read her appraisal of me, blushing to the tip of my pointy nose. ‘Why did you let me read that bit?’

  ‘What?’ She looked over my shoulder. ‘Oh, did I say you were stuck up? Well, it doesn’t matter. I wrote that two whole weeks ago. I don’t think that now.’

  When Karen’s glands had once more returned to their regular dimensions and she reappeared at school I was forced to reconsider my loyalties. Of course I ought to have told Frances that Karen would be wanting her seat back – there were unspoken rules about territorial disputes of this sort. But it was Frances I wanted as a friend, and so a compromise presented itself. We would take it in turns, the three of us, to sit in a pair, so that none of us would feel left out for long. Frances accepted this arrangement, as she accepted all life’s inessentials, with complete equanimity. Karen was dubious at first, feeling that she had been outmanoeuvred behind her back, but when she saw in what esteem Frances was held by the rest of the class for her sheer oddness she relented. This caused me even greater anxiety as I began to worry that they might discover a common interest which would exclude me, and I tried to engineer my periods of exile at the single desk so that they coincided with a lesson with one of the stricter teachers who demanded absolute silence, so that I knew no confidences were being exchanged.

  Three girls can’t be friends for long: the pairing instinct is too strong. And so it proved with us. Although nothing was said, perhaps even thought by the other two, gradually, inexorably Karen began to be squeezed out, and this unspoken allegiance in an unwilled but still genuine unkindness only served to bring Frances and me closer together. For me, who had never had a sister or a proper friend before, it was like a miracle.

  How can I express the strength of her appeal to my eleven-year-old self? Maybe it was that in a strange way she reminded me of my old enemy, Sandra Skeet, but without the malice. They both had confidence and the ability to command loyalty, yet in Frances’ case those same qualities were deployed unselfishly. Perhaps it was her lack of timidity that I liked. Almost nothing embarrassed her, whereas I would blush merely in response to passing someone in the corridor. Or perhaps it was just that she was more interesting than me: she was always regaling me with new stories about her family, throwing in names and references without any explanation as if I already knew them all intimately, which after a few weeks I felt I did.

  ‘Last night Lawrence was supposed to be coming round to supper –’

  ‘Who’s Lawrence?’

  ‘One of Mum’s old boyfriends – but he was late and the lamb was getting more and more burnt, and then Fish and Chips started their banging–’

  ‘Fish and Chips?’

  ‘Our next-door neighbours. They’re not really called that, but Dad’s always bitching about them and the walls are quite thin so we have to say Fish and Chips in case they’re listening.’ Apparently Fish and Chips, a mother and son, were keen home improvers and the sound of drilling and hammering would issue from their side of the party wall at unneighbourly hours.

  ‘Last night the noise was so bad we gave up and went out to a restaurant and didn’t get back till twelve – that’s why I’m so tired. Anyway, Growth was pleased because he got the lamb.’

  ‘Who’s Growth?’

  ‘Our dog – his real name’s Buster but he’s got this big lump on his side and Rad started calling him Growth and it sort of stuck. We’ve adopted him because Bill and Daphne couldn’t look after him properly.’

  ‘Who are Bill and Daphne?’

  Events in the Radley household often conspired against Frances getting a decent night’s sleep. She frequently came to school yawning and bleary-eyed. Friends of her mother would arrive without warning and need to be put up for the night, and Frances would have to surrender her bed and sleep on the sitting-room couch. This would entail waiting up until the early hours for the guests, who were invariably conversationalists of some stamina, to make a move upstairs. As far as I could gather from these and other stories her parents seemed to spend almost no time together. Her mother’s hours at the market research bureau were very long, and the job often involved playing host to panels of volunteers testing and discussing new products. At our house women assembled on Wednesdays to discuss Robert Browning; at the Radleys’ it was more likely to be gravy browning, but their gatherings sounded livelier, somehow. Her father worked nights – at what, exactly, I wasn’t sure; Frances was evasive about the details. During the week she and Rad existed on a diet of school dinners and in the evenings fried egg sandwiches, and another staple, ‘the Greasy Dog’ – a sausage and a rasher of bacon rolled up in a slice of bread and fried in butter, on the strength of which Frances was slightly on the plump side, though extremely fit. She was easily the fastest runner in the class and could hit a rounders ball right out of the school grounds into the back gardens beyond. Unlike me she was a confident swimmer, and while I loitered in the shallow end, kicking around on a polystyrene float with the other defectives, she practised the front crawl in the Olympic pool.

  ‘You’re a brilliant swimmer,’ I said, enviously, as we peeled off our white rubber hats which made us look like so many boiled eggs bobbing in the water.

  ‘I’m not as good as Rad. He once rescued a girl from drowning in Cornwall when her canoe capsized. He had to drag her in to shore and give her the kiss of life – which was doubly amazing because he hates girls.’

  When we picked teams for netball she was always first to be chosen. If she was captain she would pick me first out of loyalty, even though my natural place in the ranking was well down. I returned this kindness by allowing her to copy my homework on the frequent occasions when she failed to do it. Academic discipline was beyond her: she could only understand subjects where an element of the personal prevailed. For this reason she was rather good at English where her gifts for autobiography and embellishment were effortlessly deployed.

  My parents were delighted that in spite of their fears I had turned out to be capable of making and hanging on to a friend and that at last there was some prospect of my being normally happy at school. They urged me to invite
Frances to tea so that they could meet her. I hesitated. Keen as I was to establish a further bond of friendship between us I was cautious about bringing her home. Whether I was worried that my parents and I would be exposed as the drones of convention that we doubtless were, or whether it was fear that Frances’ rather free way of addressing adults might offend a stickler for manners like my mother, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t examine my feelings too closely in case they revealed something about myself that I didn’t want to know. Besides, an invitation to The Close, as far as I was concerned, was only a means to that most pressing of ends: a return visit to the home of the Radleys, where I would at last meet the characters whose habits and exploits I had come to know, and where something interesting would surely happen to me.

  9

  At the end of that first Christmas term the upper school mounted a production of The Mikado, in which leading roles were taken by sixth form and staff and a few lesser parts filtered down to the younger pupils. It was rare for anyone below the third year to be considered, but Frances, as well as having a clear soprano voice, had the sort of black-haired, pale-skinned looks which could be made suitably oriental without further stretching the resources of the wig department, and she was duly dragooned into the chorus. As one of the few cellists in the school I auditioned successfully for the orchestra and found myself playing – or at least miming, until I had memorised the trickier reaches of the score – alongside much older girls, girls who wore tights and eyeliner and high-heeled shoes, and who seemed marvellously unafraid of the teachers.

  This, we were given to understand by Mrs Twigg, was an honour and a privilege far in excess of our deserts and, rather than distracting us from our work, ought to spur us on to greater endeavour. These remarks were directed principally at Frances, whose initial interest in the production had been awakened by the discovery that final rehearsals were to take place during lessons. Frances was also, it emerged, in competition with Rad who, as well as being a boy genius, chess Grand Master and champion swimmer, was also a distinguished actor. I had no ambition to be up on stage, but was happiest in the twilit obscurity of the orchestra pit; participating but out of sight. The older girls, when they saw how timid I was, and how grateful for their attention, looked after me, fussed over me and made fun of my blushing. The girl whose music I shared, a prefect and therefore an object of some awe, turned a deaf ear when I strayed into unwritten keys, indicated where we were in the score when it was clear I was adrift, and smiled encouragement when, on familiar territory at last, I set to with any conviction.

  Although I was content simply to be in the presence of Art, an additional incentive offered itself to the older girls in the form of a detachment of half a dozen boys from the local independent school drafted in to take the key male roles. Competition for their favours was fierce, and come rehearsal time a better turned-out collection of townswomen of Titipu it would have been hard to find. In the hot-house atmosphere backstage romances blossomed and died in a matter of days. Ko-Ko, the best looking of the boys, seemed to be working his way through the entire cast. There was always one puffy-eyed girl being comforted by friends in the changing rooms, or glowering from the wings at Ko-Ko and his latest conquest.

  I had two reasons for looking forward to the performance – which was to run for three nights in the last week of term; the pleasure of being involved in something so far beyond my individual abilities, and the fact that Frances’ family would be coming to the opening night. At last I would get a glimpse of the legendary Radleys.

  On the morning of the dress rehearsal I awoke with a sore throat and a shivery, dizzy feeling which was unmistakably the beginning of something nasty. Refusing to acknowledge these symptoms I put on an extra vest and staggered down to breakfast. Mother looked at me suspiciously as I sat at the table stirring my uneaten cornflakes, my teeth chattering.

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’ she asked, laying the back of her hand against my burning forehead. That settled it. ‘You’ve got a fever!’ she exclaimed, clattering around the medicine cupboard for the thermometer which a few minutes later confirmed her diagnosis. ‘Up to bed!’

  ‘I can’t – it’s the dress rehearsal today,’ I said urgently, my hot face getting hotter. ‘I can’t miss that or I won’t know what’s going on tomorrow in the real thing.’

  ‘If you don’t get up to bed now you won’t be well enough to be in the real thing,’ mother said sharply. ‘Go on and I’ll bring you a hot water-bottle.’ Water-bottles and ice-packs: there was no illness which could not be treated with the application of extreme temperature. I started to cry.

  ‘Come on, treasure,’ said father gently. ‘If you spend today in bed you might be better by tomorrow morning.’

  ‘And if you go in today,’ mother threw down her trump card, ‘you’ll probably pass on your sore throat to one of the soloists, and then you’ll be popular!’

  If prayer could heal I would surely have been cured by lunchtime. I lay sweating under my sheets applying all my concentration to getting better. Mother had urged me to try and sleep, so I clenched my eyes shut and willed myself to drop off. When that failed I stared straight ahead hoping boredom would see me off. After a while the patterns on the wallpaper started to disintegrate and re-form themselves into recognisable shapes. How could I not have noticed until now the smiling face of Jesus looking down on me from above the bookcase? Or that curious snarling dog?

  At lunchtime mother brought me some chicken soup and toast on a tray. She ate hers sitting on the floor beside my bed, and then when she had washed up she read me the first chapter of Jane Eyre, and we played rummy. Mother was always much more sympathetic to my maladies if they happened to fall on her day off. By evening time my temperature had gone up by a degree or so and I was starting to ache. My head felt as though it was filled with sand, one minute I was hot and dry as if cooking from within, the next cold and clammy. The water-bottle was alternately tossed out of bed and retrieved as this pattern repeated itself throughout the night. When morning came I was so weak, so wretched, so steam-rollered by flu that I had resigned myself to missing not only the show but Christmas itself. I was too ill to care.

  While my fellow performers were being made up with five and nine and black eyeliner, I was being sponged down with lukewarm water; while they were deferring to the Lord High Executioner I was raving deliriously that there was a seahorse in the bottom of my bed. The third day brought a slight improvement: I now had the energy to mope and grizzle and shuffle around the house in my dressing gown and slippers feeling mightily sorry for myself.

  Mother continued to ply me with easily digestible food, weak drinks and hot water-bottles or cold flannels. She often came to sit with me when I was awake: we were fairly galloping through Jane Eyre.

  One afternoon, the day of the final performance and the last day of the Christmas term, I was sitting in bed trying to cheer myself up by making paper chains to decorate the sitting room. It had dawned on me that I wouldn’t be seeing Frances, or anyone from school, until the new term – until 1978! – and that I had missed the opportunity to send or receive any cards. As I licked and stuck the last link in the chain and tried to disentangle the rustling coils on my bed without crushing the paper, mother called up the stairs, ‘You’ve got a visitor’, the door opened and in walked Frances herself.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, pleased at having taken me by surprise. ‘I thought I’d better drop in on the way home – not that it is on the way – and see how you are. This room’s tidy. Where do you keep all your stuff?’

  ‘What stuff?’ I had a wardrobe, a desk, a bookcase and my bunk-beds. On mother’s advice I was occupying the bottom layer in case I threw myself out in a fit of delirium. I shuffled the paper chains on to the floor so she could sit down.

  ‘Oh, you know, bits and pieces.’ She plonked her school bag on my feet and produced from the turmoil within it a small parcel wrapped in red tissue paper and fastened with a strip of Elastoplast. ‘Happy Christmas,’ she s
aid, handing it over.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, delighted, careful not to probe the packaging in case I guessed what it was. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t got you anything, but I haven’t been out.’ I laid the parcel gently at my side.

  ‘Well, aren’t you going to open it?’ demanded Frances, disappointed.

  ‘I can’t open it before Christmas,’ I said, as if this prohibition had the full force of the law behind it.

  ‘Oh, all right. It’s nothing much anyway.’

  ‘It’s really kind of you.’

  ‘No, it was only cheap. It cost 10p.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what it is.’

  ‘I’m not going to. They were two for 20p so I got one for Mum as well.’

  ‘Well, don’t give me any clues. I’ll go and put it under the tree now.’ But there was no gagging her.

  ‘Don’t put it near a radiator or anything or it’ll melt.’

  ‘Oh Frances, you’ve given it away now.’

  ‘No I haven’t.’

  ‘You’ve said it’ll melt – it’s pretty obvious that it’s chocolate.’

  ‘No it’s not. Actually …’

  ‘Well, don’t tell me.’

  ‘… it’s a candle.’

  ‘Oh Frances!’

  This exchange was interrupted by mother bringing in two cups of tea and some home-made biscuits – tooth-cracking peanut brittle and ever so slightly salty shortbread. Frances cleared the plate. ‘Oh great,’ she said. ‘We never get anything like this at home.’ Through a mouthful of crushed nut and toffee shards she brought me up to date with the progress of The Mikado.

  ‘The first night was really good, although the audience was a bit dead, and so the next day everyone who hadn’t been in it was wishing they had. And then last night there was a bit of a hoohah because Yum Yum forgot one of her lines and was just standing there waiting for a prompt which never came because the prompter was chatting up Ko-Ko in the wings. The audience was starting to fidget so finally Pitti Sing sort of hissed the line at her and Yum Yum said “What?” and the audience fell about. So now none of the other upper sixth girls are talking to the prompter – she’s a bit of a leper anyway because she’s just lower sixth – I don’t think they care about her making Yum Yum look a berk, they’re just jealous because Ko-Ko fancies her.’