‘Of course.’ She not only passed it but poured me half a glass, and I was as charmed as Mum would have been. ‘Where are you from?’ Her voice was not as grand as the Principal’s but it was unmistakably expensive, and I found myself imitating it as I told her Suffolk. I’d come to the conclusion that no one outside the county had ever heard of Breckham Market.
‘Suffolk? Oh, soopah – do you know the Hennikers?’
I said I didn’t.
‘Do you ride?’
At least I was on familiar ground there. ‘Oh yes!’ I said happily. ‘I’m always out and about on my bike.’
I heard Paula snort with laughter, and realized I’d said the wrong thing. The blonde, identifying me as an impostor, raised one quizzical eyebrow. ‘Soopah,’ she murmured, and turned back to her other neighbour.
‘What did I tell you?’ said Paula.
‘D’you mean your sister made friends with people like that?’
‘No chance, if you’re an outsider. But she copied them. Got rid of her Yorkshire accent and started being all airy and fanciful. I can’t stand that, pretending to be what you’re not and denying your origins. I think it’s con-temptible, don’t you? I mean, you are what you are. This is how I am and I’m not changing my ways to suit anybody. They can take me or leave me.’
I chased some apple crumble ruefully round my plate. Couldn’t seem to get the wretched stuff up with just a fork, which I knew was the correct solo implement. Paula shovelled hers in with a spoon, ignoring her fork, and didn’t care.
I couldn’t help admiring her for her independence. She’d think me completely con-temptible if she knew me, conforming like mad and forever worrying about the impression I was making. And the infuriating thing was that she was probably a lot more successful than I was. I could imagine her talking to the Principal, saying exactly what she thought in her uncompromising accent and probably being given full marks for character, while I got myself rejected as a creep.
At one point during dinner Paula’s ears had twitched as she heard a couple of unmistakable north-country voices from further down the table. As soon as we left the dining-room she went in search of them, and I was on my own.
There were plenty of magazines in the common room, some of them women’s glossies, and I flipped through them to pass the time before I could decently go to bed. This was another world all right. Impossibly expensive clothes, exotic foods, incomprehensibly enigmatic short stories; no knitting, no cut-out-and-ready-to-sew, no problem page anywhere. Mum wouldn’t have enjoyed the magazines, and to be truthful I didn’t much either.
One of the glossies specialized in articles on houses and the people who lived in them. The longest article was about a middle-aged professional couple who led a hectic life in London, and decided that they needed a small weekend place in the country where they could recharge their batteries. Exploring unspoiled Suffolk, they had discovered this dilapidated cottage – photograph of a house twice the size of ours and the Crackjaws’put together, and in much the same condition except that it was older and far more picturesque – and had converted it to a delightful country retreat. Photograph of her in a large comfortable kitchen warmed by an Aga, with decorative plates on a dresser, and a scrubbed pine table on which was arranged a bottle of wine, a trug of apples and what looked like a fancy foreign cheese. Photographs of him in the gardener-tended garden, and of both of them in the chintzy, beamed sitting-room; photograph of amusing rural bathroom, beamed and creeping with potted plants, but of course with a full complement of mod. cons.
It looked delightful. Soopah to live in the country. I curdled inside, socially envious. And then I remembered – I wasn’t just a country swede, I was a student for the night. It might be dark and cold and wet outside, but for once I wouldn’t have to put on my raincoat and wellies to paddle down to the lav at the bottom of the garden.
Come to that, I could have a bath. Not that I needed one, because I’d come clean, but I hadn’t ever bathed in a proper bathroom and so it offered a novel experience.
I went up two flights of stairs and explored my corridor. A room at the end was labelled BATH. One only. Was it, I wondered, for general use? Could I simply help myself, or was I supposed to ask permission? I had a feeling that this bathroom might be for the exclusive use of tutors, and that there would be a whole row of student bathrooms in another corridor. But there seemed to be no one else about and I decided to chance it.
I undressed, put on Mrs Vernon’s frilly housecoat, collected my skimpy towel and soap and took guilty possession of the bathroom. I wanted to be quick and quiet, but the pipes groaned and gurgled and the water splashed out so loudly that I nervously turned off the taps when there was still only a lukewarm puddle in the bottom of the bath. I sat in it apologetically and listened. No indignant protests from the corridor so I thought, ‘What the hell,’ and turned on the taps again. Delicious to feel the water inching hotly up my spine. I relaxed. I was really enjoying myself, for the first time since I’d arrived in Oxford.
And then I heard slip-slap feet coming up the corridor. The door handle turned and rattled. I stopped breathing. ‘Anyone there?’ said an irritated, superior voice almost certainly a tutor, come to claim her private bathroom. I splashed the water, not wanting to identify myself.
‘How long are you going to be?’ demanded the voice.
I scrambled to my feet, clutching the towel to me in case she was about to break down the door. ‘Just coming out,’ I croaked guiltily.
‘Fifty-seven,’ said the voice, and slip-slapped away.
I didn’t dare stay long enough to dry. I simply dragged the housecoat over my wet arms, grabbed my gear and shot out. The corridor was empty. The number of my room was fifty-one, so I hurried along looking for fifty-seven, intending to knock and call out, ‘The bath’s free,’ before scooting back to my room.
Then a girl came round the corner towards me, wearing nothing but a towelling robe so brief that Mum would have died of embarrassment if she’d seen it. I hardly knew where to look myself. I turned away to knock at the door of fifty-seven, and the girl said, ‘Well, come in,’ in an infuriatingly amused voice.
It was my blond dinner neighbour, blast her. She was about my height, but she managed to give the impression of being at least six inches above me. Her face seemed naked without the false eyelashes, but she obviously felt at no disadvantage and I was suddenly conscious that my fun housecoat must look to her exactly what it was, a serious jumble-sale bargain.
‘Was that you wanting the bath?’ I said crossly, knowing that she had no more right to it than I had.
She laughed, lightly. Ha ha. ‘That was you, was it?’
‘Yes. Well, I’m out now.’
‘So I see. What kept you?’
I thought she meant it. ‘I was as quick as I could be,’ I snapped. I turned and swept back to my room, clutching my housecoat so as not to trip over it. It was only when I reached safety that I realized she’d been laughing at my ridiculous haste. But at least she wouldn’t find it so amusing when she discovered that I’d forgotten to pull out the unfamiliar bathplug.
Chapter Fourteen
I’d gone to bed so early that I was down to breakfast as soon as the gong sounded. Just as I was finishing, Paula came in and sat beside me.
‘What are you doing this morning?’ I asked, hoping for company. My bus didn’t leave until two and I intended to spend the morning as a tourist, making the most of my first and probably last visit to Oxford.
Paula had no inhibitions about talking with her mouth full. ‘What do you think?’ She grinned, scrambled egg on her teeth. ‘First train back to Yorkshire!’
‘’Bye, then. Hope you don’t get a place here.’
‘Thanks. Look us up if ever you’re in Bratfut.’
It seemed as unlikely a place to visit as Bombay, so I didn’t ask for her address.
I packed my grip and walked out into the streets a free woman, determined to enjoy myself with or without company.
A whole day off from school, with the best part of a pound in my purse and four cigarettes left in the packet! It was just after nine o’clock, and not raining all that much. I bought a tourist map, and set off with the enthusiastic intention of seeing as many colleges as possible.
It was disappointing to find that the college grounds weren’t open to the public in the mornings, but at least that meant that I could see more of them from the outside. I walked and walked, up and down the streets and along the passages, gazing through gateways and gaping at gables and nearly dislocating my neck to look up at towers and spires. Oxford was splendour in stone, unbelievably handsome.
But three solid hours is a lot of time to spend sightseeing, particularly if you’re carrying a grip and it’s raining. There was so much time to fill that I made two stops for coffee and cigarettes, and by mid-day I was beginning to feel decidedly queasy.
I was also wet and fed up. My left boot was rubbing painfully against my foot, the same one that had recently been bashed by a hockey ball and kicked by Aunt Brenda. I wanted to sit down and have a rest, but I couldn’t face another cup of coffee so I decided to have an early dinner. Lunch, I mean. I’d hardly ever eaten out, so this was going to be another experience.
Coffee-bar food was too expensive, so I knew I couldn’t afford most of the other eating-places, even if I’d had the courage to go in on my own. There was always Woolworths, but that was the trouble, because it was bound to be exactly like the one in Yarchester. So I went into the back streets and found an inexpensive-looking café with a menu in the window offering fried eggs with chips, sausages with chips, or beef curry and rice.
I decided to be a devil and have the curry. Yet another experience. It promised an exotic change from Mum’s cooking, but I wasn’t sure about it when it arrived, a heap of coagulated rice topped with glistening chunks of mustard-coloured gristle. Still, I was committed to paying for it, so I ate as much as I could and washed it down with greasy coffee. My final cigarette tasted rank, and I stubbed it out half-finished.
When I left, with the steamy café filling with men in raincoats and women in headscarves, it was raining steadily. My poncho was far from waterproof, and I decided to shelter in Blackwell’s. I’d looked forward to browsing in a big bookshop, but when I got there I found that I couldn’t raise much enthusiasm for anything.
I was looking listlessly at a big volume of French Impressionist paintings when my forehead felt suddenly chill. I touched it and found that it was a good deal damper than the rain had made it. My hair was clinging stickily round my face and my knees seemed to have disconnected themselves from my feet. I didn’t feel very well at all. Closing the book, I made for the exit, putting my boots down carefully one after the other, and leaned in the doorway breathing cold rain. Better to stay in the fresh air, I decided. Couldn’t get much wetter, anyway.
I would soon have to set out for the bus station, but there was one more place I particularly wanted to see, New College. I turned left out of Blackwell’s, in the direction of New College Lane, but I hadn’t gone more than a few steps when nausea started to rise in my throat. I swallowed hard, hoping to keep it down by will-power, and walked on gingerly up the lane. A spasm of nausea caught up with me near the college gate, but I tried to keep my mind on medieval architecture. The walls and the tower were blurred and out of focus, though. The harder I stared, the more precariously built it all seemed. And now there was a griping pain in my insides, and it wasn’t just nausea I was worried about.
I knew I’d passed a public lavatory somewhere, not too far away if only I could find it. No use trying to hurry, or something desperate might happen. I retraced my wanderings with a slow fixed tread, alternately flushing and shivering as pain and nausea came and went, and I got there with just a whimper to spare.
When I emerged, feeling white in the face, one hand lugging my grip and the other clutching my middle, I had exactly seven minutes to get to the bus station. I don’t know how I made it but I did, half-running, half-tottering, with my grip banging against my boots and my feet hurting like hell, desperate to get back home. I’d had Oxford, in more ways than one.
By luck, I got a seat to myself on the bus. I took off my boots and wiggled my toes thankfully. London, here I come!
Mum was resentful when I didn’t get a place at Oxford, and Dad was terribly disappointed, but I snapped at her that it was nothing to do with not being posh enough, and explained to him that I’d rather go to London anyway. My only grievance was the waste of time. If Miss Dunlop hadn’t insisted on my staying the extra term I could have been in London already, having a go at living. But at least I could now leave school and start to earn some money.
I spent the week before Christmas helping as usual with the mail. A van delivered to outlying houses such as ours, but deliveries in the main part of the village were done by Mrs Howlett, the sub-postmaster’s wife, in her postwoman’s outfit. The Christmas mail was more than she could cope with single-handed, particularly as her husband needed her help in the office, which was the front room of their house next-door-but-one to Gran Thacker’s shop.
The deliveries took me about three hours in the early mornings and two in the afternoons, riding a heavy red post-office bike like Mrs Howlett’s. I needed the bike, with its large front carrier, to hold the parcels. There wasn’t much actual riding, it was all start and stop and staggering up people’s garden paths under the weight of my letter-crammed pouch. I found that my Christmas spirit evaporated rapidly while I was on the job, but with luck and Sunday working I could knock up five or six pounds.
And Gran Thacker was prepared to pay for a little help too, in the week before Christmas when customers went mad and bought enough food for the two-day holiday to last them a fortnight. Dad was run off his feet in the shop, so as soon as I’d finished my morning deliveries I rushed round there and got busy loading up the shelves and filling paraffin cans until it was time to go back to the post office again. We took sandwiches with us and Gran made a pot of tea, as she always did for Dad, and we spent our half-hour dinner break in the store-room with our feet well up, counting off the days until Christmas.
Christmas Day was much as usual, quiet if you didn’t count the almighty row the Crackjaws were making on the other side of the wall. I’d decorated the house with the paper chains I’d made when I was a kid, with a bit of holly balanced on top of Gran Bowden’s grandfather clock for luck. We didn’t have any use for mistletoe. Dad gave me a present of two pounds, and I gave him a lovely flowery tie which he put on straight away. It really suited him. Mum gave me the surprise sweater she’d been knitting every evening for the past month, and I gave her a pound box of Milk Tray. I don’t know what they gave each other, they didn’t mention it.
While Mum cooked the dinner, with me preparing the spuds and sprouts, Dad biked down to Gran’s, taking our presents: knitted tea-cosy from Mum, tin of tea from me, and a big tin of fancy biscuits from himself. We’d bought the wool and the tea and the biscuits from the shop, of course, so Gran got it both ways, the profit as well as the presents.
As usual, Dad biked back almost as unsteadily as Ziggy Crackjaw does from the White Horse, bringing Gran’s present to us. She reckons she doesn’t approve of alcohol, but she can’t bear to see anything going to waste so she makes it into wine: dandelions, peapods, elderberries, tea-leaves, potato peelings, anything she can lay her hands on. Gran Thacker could make wine out of old boots if she put her mind to it and used enough yeast. Because her wine’s home-made she’s convinced that it’s non-alcoholic, though she might know from Dad’s flushed face after one glass that it’s got a real kick to it.
This year’s present was potato wine; 1968, a good year for potatoes. It tasted earthy, but it went down well with our Christmas cockerel, specially fattened by Mum for the occasion. After we’d stuffed ourselves with bird and veg, followed by Christmas pud, we heated water in the biggest saucepan and washed up together, Mum washing, me drying and Dad putting away. Then we ate onc
e-a-year chocolate mints and watched the telly, and when the Queen came on to wish us a happy Christmas we drank her health, only Mum got hiccups in the middle of it and I had to sober her up with a cup of tea.
Somewhere about five o’clock, we had the traditional family row. While Dad and I were hard at work in the week before Christmas, Mum had gone mad making mince-pies and cakes. Quite apart from the fact that her baking is inedible, we were all too full to eat any tea. But when Dad and I tried to refuse, Mum shouted about our ingratitude after all the trouble she’d taken to please us, and so we ended up as usual eating a heavy tea just to pacify her, and suffering from martyrdom and indigestion for the rest of the evening.
On Boxing Day it snowed, and that night it froze, hard. Mrs Howlett, doing her post round solo again next day, slipped on someone’s steps and broke her leg.
I wouldn’t have wished it on her for the world, but as far as I was concerned it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. The moment I heard the news I rushed down to the post office to volunteer.
For the next three months I was the village postwoman, with an official armband and a big red bike to prove it. It wasn’t a full-time job and I didn’t qualify for the adult rate, but I had my eighteenth birthday that January and that upped my pay a bit. With overtime, because of the bad weather, I was taking home just over five pounds a week. Fantastic. I gave Mum three pounds, and saved the rest. No expenses; I’d gone off smoking ever since Oxford.
I certainly earned the money, though. It was a very bad winter, snow and ice until the end of March, and once or twice our lane was impassable until Mr Vernon unblocked it with his tractor and snowplough. Dad had to sleep at his mother’s during the worst of it, so that he’d be on the spot to open the shop at the proper time. He did offer to ask her if I could sleep there too, but I didn’t fancy living in such close proximity to Gran Thacker. I preferred to fight my way through the snow.
Cross My Heart and Hope to Die Page 15