by Elisa Lodato
‘Helen’s not eleven yet.’
‘No. The eleven-plus is the name of the test the children sit. It determines whether they’re bright, er, clever enough to go to grammar school. To a selective school. Mrs Saunders, we have one of the finest grammar schools right here in Kingston. If Helen passes, you could send her to one of the best schools in the country.’ Helen’s mother finally understood that Ms Rogers was barking up the wrong tree.
‘Miss … um …’
‘Rogers. But please, call me Liz.’
‘Miss Rogers. Look around you. I don’t have that kind of money. I’m glad you think Helen’s clever, but I can’t afford to send her to private school.’
‘No, no. Mrs Saunders, grammar school is still state education. There would be no fees to pay. She just has to pass the test, and I’m confident that, with some tutoring, she’d stand a very good chance.’
‘Tutoring?’
‘Yes,’ Ms Rogers gulped and continued, ‘one-to-one tutoring. I’m here because I’d like to tutor Helen myself. For free,’ she added quickly.
‘Why would you do that?’
‘Because she’s clever. And because I’d hate to see a girl like Helen miss out on opportunities because of …’ she looked over at Helen’s older brother, still staring at the blank television screen ‘… circumstances beyond her control.’
Helen’s mother agreed to the arrangement. Ms Rogers began tutoring Helen in her classroom after school every Monday. Helen’s sharp, darting intellect quickly settled into the required framework. She was spiky in her selection, quick to digest the logic and move on. And as the months passed, she began to grow confident and optimistic. She knew that my mother – over in Surbiton – was being prepared by my grandmother for the same test. After five years of almost constant companionship, Helen needed my mother as much as my mother needed her. She worked hard for Ms Rogers, not because she saw an opportunity to improve her lot in life but simply because she couldn’t foresee a life without my mother by her side.
For my grandmother, the eleven-plus was her longed-for means of separating my mother from Helen. A place at grammar school was the only way, short of moving to a new area, to ensure the two friends were finally pushed in divergent directions. It was an inadvertent slip by my mother that finally alerted her to Ms Rogers’s tutoring intervention. My mother wanted to know how she would travel to and from her new school.
‘By bus. The number 65 takes you straight there,’ my grandmother answered, matter-of-factly.
‘Will it go past the Cambridge Estate?’
‘No.’ My grandmother paused. ‘Why would you ask that?’
‘Because I want to go with Helen.’
‘Darling, Helen won’t be going to your school.’
‘Yes, she will. She’s very clever. Ms Rogers said so.’
‘Ms Rogers? Your teacher from Reception? What does she have to do with all this?’
‘She’s tutoring Helen. To pass the eleven-plus. She wants her to go to my school.’
My grandmother’s lungs burned. She stared at her daughter and realised, with searing frustration, that she’d waited too long to try and get her away. The route she had taken, tutoring my mother for grammar school, was obvious to others and they were catching up. So my grandmother did what any self-respecting middle-class mother would do in such circumstances. She bemoaned the injustice of Ms Rogers’s partiality to Helen to the other parents, eventually taking her complaint to Ms Rogers’s classroom one afternoon after school. She sat my mother down in a corner of the room and approached Ms Rogers, who was quietly marking, at her desk. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you. Might I have a word?’
Ms Rogers, who had already looked up when they walked in, took off her glasses and narrowed her eyes to see better. ‘Yes, of course. You’re Katharine Lambton’s mother, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, Jean Lambton. Do you mind if I sit down?’
Ms Rogers simply smiled her assent at the nearest chair and waited.
‘I understand you’re tutoring Helen Saunders for the eleven-plus. Is that correct?’ Ms Rogers put her glasses back on and stopped smiling.
‘That’s right.’
‘Ms Rogers, I haven’t come here to cause trouble, but it strikes me that personally tutoring one child out of a school of many demonstrates a preference that some might regard as … unprofessional?’
Ms Rogers swallowed hard and stood up. ‘I don’t see what this has to do with you. My dealings with another pupil are none of your business.’ And then, ‘I’m sorry to be so blunt.’
‘Don’t be. I admire your honesty. And your good intentions. Does the headmaster know what you’re doing?’
‘Yes,’ she lied.
‘Very well. I’ll raise my concerns with him, in that case.’
The headmaster, Mr Evans, duly discussed the issue with Ms Rogers. He also went on to share the view, that tutoring pupils for the eleven-plus was not a practice to be encouraged in school, with all the teachers in a staff announcement the following Monday morning. Ms Rogers took him at his word and inwardly shrugged at the risk. She found the time and space to continue tutoring Helen by moving the sessions to her own flat, in the early evening. On the day of the eleven-plus, she called in sick to school, arranged to meet Helen at a bus stop near her estate and drove her the short distance into Kingston. Both Helen and my mother found themselves sitting in the large, contained hall. Two rows and many desks apart, they fingered the regulation-issue pencil and paper and waited for the clock, heavy with its own importance, to signal the beginning of the exam. The silence was suddenly stabbed by the leads of hundreds of sharpened pencils. The paper was a passport to another life: a life in this hall. With legs crossed. Waiting for the next instruction. My mother had a view of Helen’s head bent down in concentrated submission. She picked up her own pencil and answered her way into more time with Helen.
Three weeks later, Helen’s mother received a message from another world. On paper embossed with the school crest, she read her daughter’s name and the words that confirmed she was to have a new life. Helen had not only passed the eleven-plus, she had scored in the top ten per cent of applicants. Helen’s success vindicated Ms Rogers’s intervention and soured my grandmother’s dealings with her daughter’s primary school thereafter. But none of that mattered to Helen and my mother. All they looked to was the following September.
My grandmother, counselled by my grandfather, accepted defeat. She knew my grandfather was not prepared to move away. But Helen’s admission to the grammar school achieved two things: it gave my mother greater confidence and optimism about going to secondary school in general, so much so that her crippling shyness began to recede and she started speaking more in public. And of course, the fact that Helen had joined the ranks of other middle-class girls. She could now expect to go to university and even attract a suitable husband.
Suitable, that is, by my grandmother’s standards. So while my grandmother did not exactly approve of the friendship, she certainly softened to the idea of it.
My mother made no effort with the other girls in her class. And they met her inattention with their own disregard. But Helen was different. Everybody liked her. She was funny, uncompromising and contemptuous of what she called the ‘beige’ teachers. The ones who were too afraid to teach in a comprehensive school. Their history teacher was a diminutive, round woman called Miss McCabe. She was from the Outer Hebrides and spoke in gentle, self-effacing tones. She dreaded teaching my mother’s class because of Helen.
One cold afternoon in November 1973, during a lesson on Henry VIII, Miss McCabe asked the class what happened to Anne Boleyn. Everybody waited for Helen to clarify matters, and with only one girl willing to answer, Miss McCabe had no alternative but to admit her interlocutor. Helen stood up.
‘Helen.’
‘Sorry, miss – I’m just not quite sure what you mean. What happened to Anne Boleyn is a very general question. Too general, some might say.’
The class
giggled. My mother, sitting a few rows behind, crossed her legs uncomfortably. She didn’t want Helen to get into trouble. If she got in trouble, my mother would spend break time on her own in the playground.
‘How should I rephrase the question, Helen?’ Two spots of red had appeared in Miss McCabe’s cheeks. They were like little cherries on a Bakewell tart.
‘I’m not the teacher here, but it strikes me that you’re asking if Anne Boleyn was executed, divorced or died naturally.’
‘Yes. And?’
‘Wouldn’t it be better to ask, “What was Anne Boleyn’s fate as the king’s wife and why is this significant?”’
‘Sit down, Helen. I don’t need a lecture on how to do my job from you, thank you very much.’
‘But since you ask, he only went and chopped her bloomin’ ’ead off!’ And, hitching her skirt up, she began dancing on the spot in the manner of a naughty cockney, singing: ‘I’m ’Enery the Eighth, I am,/’Enery the Eighth I am, I am!’ The class erupted in laughter and began clapping in time as she gurned her way through the rest of the verse. The sight was enough to topple my mother’s anxiety and she too collapsed into the chorus of hilarity.
My mother remained by Helen’s side until the last possible moment of every day. They got the bus home together, but because she was forbidden to visit Helen’s flat, they either got off the bus in Kingston and walked around the town centre or travelled on to Surbiton together, where Helen and my mother would sit up in her room or out in the garden if it was warm enough.
The first time they ever kissed was in her bedroom. It was at the end of January, about a week after my mother’s thirteenth birthday. My grandparents had bought her a record player and Roberta Flack’s ‘Killing Me Softly’ on seven-inch vinyl. Helen and my mother lay down on her bed and luxuriated in the freedom of filling a room with music. My mother looked at Helen, who lay with her eyes closed, concentrating on the lyrics. Without opening her eyes, she said, ‘Do you think flushed with fever means she’s turned on?’
My mother hadn’t listened to the words that closely. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Kiss me. I’ll tell you if it flushes me with fever.’
‘Why would I do that?’ my mother asked.
‘Because it might feel nice. And I’ll be able to tell you if you’ve done it right.’
‘Sounds a bit dirty.’
Helen opened her eyes and sat up. ‘I’m not asking you to wipe my arse. Or even your own, for that matter. Don’t you want to just try something out? With me?’ As she said the last two words, she looked at my mother’s lips. They were full and small, like a little rosebud. Helen knew they’d be soft. She leant in and pressed her own thin lips against my mother’s mouth.
My mother pulled back, almost imperceptibly, but like a child that detects sugar in a morsel of food they thought to reject, she came back. The first contact had already begun stimulating the sensory neurons within her lips. As her brain flooded with dopamine and the blood flowed to the vermilion border, my mother kissed. And allowed herself to be kissed.
Helen licked my mother’s top lip in gentle invitation to open, but she wouldn’t. She’d already gone further than she ever thought possible.
There was no obvious awkwardness the next morning at school, but my mother was even more subdued than usual. She kept stealing glances at Helen and then swiftly returning to her books, her face burning at the memory. Sitting on their usual bench at lunchtime, Helen asked her what was wrong.
‘Nothing.’
‘Is it because of yesterday? At your house?’
My mother flushed red.
‘Kath, it was a kiss. That’s all.’
‘But the tongue thing …’ Her voice trailed off.
‘What about it? It’s called Frenching. Everybody does it.’
‘Do you?’
‘Do I what?’
‘Do you do it? To other people.’
‘No,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve never done it before.’
‘Never done what?’ Two girls from their form group, Karen and Emily, interrupted the quiet conversation. Karen was digging at the corner of a crisp packet, determined to mine the final greasy fragments with her fingernails.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Helen said dismissively. ‘I’ll catch up with you in Science.’
But Karen was sucking her foraging finger thoughtfully. Emily stood beside her, bored and impatient for something to happen. Neither girl understood Helen’s fascination with my mother.
‘What have you never done before?’ she repeated, balling up her crisp packet and throwing it at my mother’s head.
Helen jumped up, her anger and menace immediate. ‘Say sorry right now.’
‘Sorry,’ Karen smiled as Helen faced her. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt your girlfriend.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said she’s your girlfriend. I bet that’s what they were talking about, Em,’ she said, turning to bored Emily. And then in a mocking, high-pitched whine: ‘Please can I finger you, Kath? I’ve never done it before.’
Helen met Karen’s smile, staring at her steadily. ‘That’s right. It is my first time. But I think I’m going to start big. Forget fingers, I’m going with a fist. And the first place I fist will be your face.’
‘Oh, fuck off, you pair of lesbians.’ Karen’s plait whipped round as she turned to stalk back to the school building. Emily followed, slow and spiritless.
My mother stood up, her face red and hot, and shouted at Karen’s retreating back. ‘She’s not my girlfriend!’
‘Shut up, Kath,’ said Helen.
‘I just want her to know—’
‘Well, I don’t care who knows.’
‘She might tell my mum.’
‘Tell your mum what?’
‘About the Frenching.’
‘They didn’t hear any of that. Anyway, so what if they did? I couldn’t give a shit what Karen or Jean or anyone else thinks.’ She reached for my mother’s hand, but my mother pulled it away.
‘Not here,’ she said, looking around.
‘Where, then?’
‘At my house,’ my mother said, looking at Helen’s hands with fear and excitement. ‘We could listen to “Killing Me Softly” again.’
And that’s how the title of Roberta Flack’s hit song became a euphemism for uncovering something exquisite. The greatest revelation for both of them was that the capacity to experience pleasure was contained within their own bodies. That it had been there all along, and just as they could decide when to set the seven-inch single spinning, they could choose to press their lips together and release something pure and simple. And as yet undiluted.
In the Easter holidays of that same year, Helen’s mother took her and her two brothers down to Poole to visit her sister and brother-in-law. During their stay it became clear her mother was in the process of organising a permanent move. They spent several hours in the civic centre, registering for various services, while John went with his uncle to meet people who might be interested in hiring him as a labourer. When Helen asked what was going on, her mother told her she was simply ‘looking into things’, but as they walked round the perimeter fence of a comprehensive school near her aunt’s house, she knew the looking was with a view to joining.
Over the May bank holiday, Helen and her family made another visit to Poole. This time they were shown round a flat on a housing estate a couple of miles from her aunt. She became anxious.
‘We’re moving here, aren’t we?’
‘It’s for the best. John can work, and I’ll be closer to Auntie Debs.’
‘But what about school?’
‘You’ll go to school here.’
‘But my school. I want to stay at my school.’
‘What difference does it make? You’re a clever girl – you’ll be fine wherever you go.’
‘And Kath?’
‘Kath? Your little friend? Oh, she’ll be all right. I wouldn’t worry about her.’
But the though
t of my mother did worry Helen. She foresaw her impending isolation and loneliness and dreaded it on my mother’s behalf. She felt responsible for her, understanding as she did that my mother only felt strong when she had somebody to stand behind. And that person had to be Helen. Their private communion had made the attachment stronger, deeper in a way that neither girl could articulate.
Helen delayed telling my mother. She hoped the move would not come to pass; that John would do something to irritate his uncle or her mother would fall out with Auntie Debs, but at the beginning of July, Helen’s mother gave Kingston Council notice of her intention to leave and began packing boxes.
On the last day of the school year, Helen asked my mother if she could come over after school. She said she had something to tell her. My grandmother had let them in and then disappeared to another part of the house. Though it was only a few roads away from our own, my grandparents’ house was much bigger; they lived on a crescent consisting of just nine houses, all with a large garden at the back. It was a warm day and my mother, responding to Helen’s request for a drink, poured them both a glass of lemonade. Helen opened the back door and they walked down to the end of the garden, to a little shrubbery my grandmother had cultivated. It was secluded and shaded. They were both in their summer uniforms, light cotton gingham dresses that buttoned up the front. They crossed their legs and sat down on the cool earth, their white ankle socks and scuffed black shoes turned down on their sides. Helen had been picking her fingers; the skin around her cuticles was pink and exposed.
‘So what is it, then?’ my mother asked.
‘We’re moving away. To Poole.’
‘What’s Poole?’
‘My aunt lives down there. And my uncle’s got John a job.’
‘But what about school?’
‘My mum says I can go to the local one.’
‘You can’t go.’
Helen looked down at her ankles. She was trying not to cry. ‘It’s not up to me. My mum thinks it’s a much nicer place to live. And she’s sick of John sitting around the flat all day.’
‘No,’ my mother began to cry, ‘you can’t leave me. Come and live with me.’