by Sonia Tilson
“I know. But it still hurts to remember those years. And then for her to give us that scenario! I was so lonely indeed!” He snorted and got up. “I’ve got to go to the loo. And I can see my old pal, Ian Martin, over there. I’ll just have a little chat with him before I come back. Pip-Pip!”
It was true, she thought, that childhood hurts could remain with you in all their intensity. So much for Time the Great Healer. Sipping her dry white wine, Gillian relived her arrival as a boarder at Deer Park School for Girls.
W
“I’ll say again, Gillian, you’re a very lucky girl to have got into such a good school!” Her mother turned around in the passenger seat as they drove across the border from Wales into England.
“I don’t see why.” Gillian twisted her fingers together in her lap. “My Eleven-plus marks were better than most, and so’s your money I suppose. If anyone’s lucky it’s you,” she burst out, reckless with anger and misery, “because you won’t have to bother with us now, hardly at all. You managed to be without me and Tommy during the whole of the war,” and her mind skittered back to that first year of evacuation until, wrenching her attention back to the current abandonment, she stated, “And now it’s boarding school for the two of us!”
“For shame, Gillian!” Her mother turned back to face the front. “At eleven years old you should be able to understand that we’re doing this for your own good. Deer Park has an excellent reputation, and you’ll meet some very nice girls there.”
Gillian twisted her fingers in her hair and drove an imaginary hatpin into the back of her mother’s head.
In the gleaming black Rover bought to celebrate the end of the war, they drove under the thirteenth-century arched gate and up the main street of the town, her father stopping in the town square to admire the bronze statue of a man holding up a biplane. Up on the hill overlooking the town stood the imposing stone building that was Deer Park School, brownish-pink stone against the hard blue September sky.
The car nosed through the gates and up the drive to the wide parking space in front of the school. Her mother, splendid in a blue silk suit, got out, holding on to her wide-brimmed hat and gaping at the grandeur of it all. Beside her, Gillian stared up at the mullioned façade and the white clouds scudding over it, until the building seemed to be falling on top of her. Averting her eyes to the terraced lawns, flanked by cedars of Lebanon, copper beeches, and horse-chestnut trees, in front of the school, she became aware of other girls in the driveway, screaming with joy at seeing each other again, or taking tearful farewells of their parents.
“Doctor and Mrs. Davies?” A large woman, her hair swept into white wings on each side of her head, swanned up. “I am the Headmistress, Miss Campbell. So pleased to see you!” She turned to Gillian with a smile, “And this must be Gillian. Welcome to Deer Park, Gillian. I hope you’ll be very happy here.”
There was nothing wrong with that, Gillian supposed, but her spirits sank even lower at hearing the headmistress’s accent, the same as Mrs. Macpherson’s. She pretended to study the view, while her parents, after the required farewell kisses and exhortations to work hard and be a good girl, got into the car and drove off.
Standing stiff and tall, she thought of the Jolly Miller of Dee in the song they used to sing at school in Tregwyr: “I care for nobody, no, not I./ And nobody cares for me!” Clenching her teeth, she blinked at the free, racing clouds.
Miss Campbell beckoned to an older girl in a crisp, light-blue linen dress, and told her to take Gillian into the school and show her to her dormitory.
After running an eye over Gillian’s ashen frizz of hair, crumpled blouse and skirt, and skinny legs, the girl led her off. “What’s your name?” she asked in a plummy English accent, officiously consulting a list as they went up the wide stone steps and through the crested entrance.
“Gillian Davies. What’s yours?”
“Camilla Worthington. I’m a senior prefect in my last year at school.”
Sunk in misery, Gillian put her nose in the air. “Well, bully for you!”
Camilla Worthington raised her eyebrows and tossed back her golden hair. “You’d better learn some manners, Gillian Davies, if you know what’s good for you!”
She shimmered along in front of Gillian, up two flights of stone stairs and down a long corridor, leaving her with an abrupt “This is it” in front of a door.
There were five narrow beds in the room, each with a chest of drawers and a small wooden chair beside it. Her trunk had been placed at the bottom of the bed nearest the door. The other girls had already set up home: knick-knacks and family photographs were assembled on chests of drawers, soppy toy animals lay on the pillows, and cozy dressing gowns hung behind the door. She had not thought of bringing any such homely touches, apart from the torch Tommy had given her in case she wanted to run away, but she did have the new blue woolen dressing gown her grandmother had made her.
Tommy had cried when he gave her the torch, and they had promised to write to each other, holding on to the thought of the Christmas holidays. He was going the next day to a prep school even further away from home than Deer Park, where, like her, he knew nobody.
She put the torch at the back of a drawer and hung up the dressing gown on one of the two remaining hooks, taking some comfort from how well it stood up against the others.
Another going-away present had been from Mrs. Farrell. Gillian had gone to see Vanna one last time to see if they could make up their quarrel, but Vanna had taken herself off upstairs, slamming a door. Mrs. Farrell had shaken her head sadly. She was thinner than ever, and beginning to look quite old, although she was only the same age as Gillian’s mother.
“I’ve missed you, Gillian,” she said. “I miss our talks.” She turned to one of the bookcases. “I want you to have these.” She handed Gillian two books: Everyman volumes of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.
“These are wonderful!” Gillian opened the top one, seeing the comforting Everyman promise. “But won’t Vanna want them?”
“No. Those are for you.” Mrs. Farrell kissed her goodbye.
Gillian quickly finished unpacking her trunk. Her mother had bought her some nice clothes, she thought as she put them away, guiltily remembering how she had refused to go on the shopping expeditions her mother had said would be such fun, and how rudely she had rejected her mother’s choices of “sweetly pretty” frocks. Sometimes she thought her mother had got her mixed up with some other girl, like Gladys for instance, who would have loved those bright, flowery dresses.
Propped on her elbows on the bed, she opened Jane Eyre. After inhaling the old book smell and flipping through for illustrations, she settled down to read. Deer Park and her parents’ departure faded to nothing as she turned page after page, racked with pity and indignation for poor little orphaned Jane, and aghast at the terrors of the red-room.
The door opened with a bang against the head of her bed, jolting her back into her strange new world. Camilla Worthington appeared in the doorway, with what was obviously another new girl cowering behind her.
“You still here?” She looked at Gillian coldly. “You should be in the assembly hall. Miss Campbell expects all the new girls to wait for her there.”
“How was I supposed to know that?”
“Once again, Gillian Davies, that’s no way to speak to a prefect. What’s more, you’re not allowed to lie on your bed in the daytime.”
The other girl, a dark, sallow little thing in a straight navy dress with white collar and cuffs, began to cry.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Camilla Worthington turned on her heel and banged the door shut on them.
The girl threw herself face-down, sobbing, on the last unclaimed bed, clutching the bedspread in her fists. “Oh, Mummy, Mummy! Why did you leave me?”
Reluctantly abandoning Jane in the red-room, Gillian sat up and studied this real-life girl. “What’
s your name?”
“Fiona.” The girl looked up for a moment, blotched and red-eyed.
“Come on, Fiona, buck up. Let’s go and find the assembly hall.”
“I don’t want to.” She was face-down, sobbing again. “I want my Mummy!”
Gillian thought that rather childish. The last time she had cried for her mummy, she had been six years old, and a fat lot of use that had been.
“But you’ll see her at half-term, won’t you?” she said.
The girl wept even harder. “I won’t see her for a whole year. She’s going back again to India tomorrow on the boat. Now I’m all alone.” She buried her face in the pillow, hiccupping with sobs, “Oh, Mummy, come back! Don’t leave me!”
“What about your father?”
She looked up at Gillian, her eyes brimming. “He died.” The tears rolled down. “Last Christmas. There’s only me and Mummy now,” she sobbed. “I want to go home!”
Well that was tough, Gillian thought, but she would just have to get on with it, like the rest of them. “Look here, Fiona.” She stood up and straightened her skirt. “I really think we’d better go to the assembly hall. The headmistress probably wants to tell us all the rules. Maybe take attendance. You’d better come, or you might get into trouble.”
Blowing her nose and catching her breath in little sobs, Fiona followed like a new-hatched chick as Gillian went down to look for the hall.
Miss Campbell looked down from the podium at the new girls gathered before her. She welcomed them all and spoke in a generally encouraging sort of way before going on to explain not only the rules, but also the reasons for the rules. She followed that with a description of the boarders’ daily and weekly schedules.
With Fiona sniffling beside her, Gillian listened carefully, her head sinking lower and lower. When the headmistress came to the weekend routine, Gillian realized the problem: there was no spare time. Not anywhere. Not in the day, not in the week, not even at the weekend. There would be no time in which to read Jane Eyre. As long as she could read, she had told herself, she could get through anything, but evidently it was not going to be so easy.
When she tuned back into the talk, she heard Miss Campbell explaining the significance of the school motto: Servate Honorem, ‘Preserve your Honour’. Apparently it meant that all of them should, and could, live their lives so that they need never, ever, feel ashamed of themselves in any way. Gillian glanced furtively around at all the open faces staring up innocently at the headmistress. She looked down at the laces coming undone in her stiff new black shoes, a hard ache in her stomach.
“Stone walls do not a prison make,” her grandmother would say, quoting as usual, “Nor iron bars, a cage.” Gillian had not seen any iron bars during her first week, apart from the entrance gates, but there were plenty of stone walls, and as far as she was concerned, they jolly well did a prison make. Sitting down at one of the long tables to chunks of tube-filled liver with lumpy mashed potatoes and soggy cabbage, or stinky boiled cod with wallpaper-paste sauce and grey leather-
skinned broad beans, she thought longingly of her grandmother’s clever ways with rations and homegrown vegetables.
As she had foreseen, the lack of privacy and spare time was even harder to bear. The only spot of time the boarders had to themselves, between the end of ‘prep’, the time to be spent on homework, and bedtime, provided nothing else had been organized, had to be spent in the din of the Junior Common Room, with its sagging sofas and odours of sweat and digestive biscuits and ink. This was the time for the hazing of new girls, the other girls discussing them as if they were not in the room.
On her third day there, Gillian surfaced from Jane Eyre at the sound of her name.
“She’s never got her nose out of that stupid book.” Pamela Bingham, a chunky Upper Fourth girl, was exclaiming. “And did you ever see such hair? Like Harpo Marx! Touch of the old tar brush, if you ask me!” This raised snickers, and a remark about gooseberry eyes. “And those legs! Like broomsticks! But it’s her parents I feel sorry for. I mean, wouldn’t it be absolutely the pits to have a drippy daughter like that! But I expect the Welsh aren’t so fussy.”
Gillian looked up to see a semicircle of fourth-formers
staring at her, shaking their heads.
She stood up. “I’m sure my parents would prefer it to having a greasy-haired, pimply-faced daughter, with legs like tree trunks, who can only read things like,” she picked a dog-eared book off the table, “Mad-cap Moll of the Lower Fourth.” She dropped the book, brushing her fingers together, and left the room.
Life was more tolerable in the dormitory. The other girls: Anita, with her blonde curls and dimples, sturdy, athletic Diana, her short black hair cut in a dead-straight line above her equally straight eyebrows, and lanky, round-shouldered Chris, the obsessive piano player, her hair dangling in thin brown plaits, all seemed to know each other and get on well, leaving the two new girls alone; Gillian to read, and Fiona to cry. Chris and Anita arranged each other’s hair, and Diana talked non-stop about games. All three of them discussed the teachers and prefects, at which times Gillian gathered they did not like Camilla Worthington any more than she did. They politely tried to include her in their conversation a few times, but finding they were no competition for Jane Eyre they soon gave up the effort.
During her first two weeks at school, Gillian hid in the library during break, tried unsuccessfully to persuade Matron she was sick, and even managed, with a little help from Anita, to conceal herself inside the vaulting horse in the gym in order to be left alone with her book, but nothing worked. Finally she decided she would have to read in bed, after lights out, using Tommy’s torch.
Bed was the one place in all this whirling commotion where she felt safe in her own space, and where she did not have to do anything, or answer to anyone.
That night, snuggled into the coarse sheets, heavy blankets pulled over her head to conceal the torchlight and shut out the sound of Fiona’s sobbing, she was riveted by the approaching death of Helen, Jane’s saintly friend, at terrible Lowood School.
“Are you going somewhere, Helen? Are you going home?” Jane was asking.
Gillian turned the page, her heart beating fast in grief and dread.
“Yes; to my long home—my last home.”
Gillian felt the shock of bedclothes being pulled away. Back for a moment at Maenordy, she put her arms around her head, waiting for the slaps.
“No reading after lights out, Gillian. You need your sleep.” Matron spoke softly so as not to wake the others. “I’m sorry, but I’m confiscating these.” After a few quiet words with Fiona, she slipped away with the book and the torch.
Covering her head, Gillian began to weep quietly, not for her home, or her parents, or even for Tommy, but for her lost world: for Jane, for Helen, and for all the poor, unwanted girls at Lowood School.
“Are you crying for your mummy?” a voice whispered by her ear.
“I am not crying for my mummy! I’m crying for my book. Matron took it away.”
“How can you cry for a book? It’s just a story. It isn’t real. Don’t cry!”
After sending Fiona back to bed, Gillian stared into the darkness, thinking about what she had just said. Truly it was strange that Lowood seemed so real to her; more real than Deer Park. And how was it, she wondered, that she understood so well what people in books were feeling? She knew as if they were her own, Jane’s loneliness and anger, Pip’s shame and sense of inferiority in Great Expectations, the longing of the Forsaken Merman for his mortal wife in the poem they had read that day in English class, and the yearning, too, of the merman’s wife after she had returned home, for the little mermaiden she had left behind. She had never been in any of their situations, and yet she knew their inmost feelings. Why was that?
The next morning, when they were up and dressed, and the other girls had gone chattering off, Gillian
saw that Fiona’s thin face, behind its curtain of stringy dark hair, was the colour of green olives, with purple shadows under her eyes. Her tie was crooked and her tunic on back-to-front. She drooped on her bed, sniffing and fiddling with her sash. To keep her out of trouble, Gillian persuaded her to come down to breakfast even though she knew she wouldn’t eat anything. She never did.
Later that morning, Miss Lamb, the English teacher, elegant in a chignon and a long black cloak, read aloud from a poem called “Pippa Passes.”
God’s in his heaven.
All’s right with the world!
she concluded with an airy wave of her hand, followed by a thud from the back of the class as Fiona fell off her chair in a dead faint.
At bedtime Gillian went to the sick bay.
“Ah, Gillian, the reading girl,” Matron looked up from her logbook. “I want to talk to you, dear. That poor little thing from your dormitory is breaking her heart. She’s not sleeping, and she won’t eat a thing. She’s just pining away for her mother.”
“Yes I know. Can I have my book back, please, Matron?”
Matron looked at her for a long moment over her glasses, sighed, and shook her head. “You may. I’m keeping the torch, though.” She handed the book to Gillian who stuffed it down the front of her box-pleated tunic, tying the sash tightly.
A few nights later, just before lights out, Gillian looked up in a daze from Jane Eyre, her eyes resting on Fiona’s empty bed. She wondered for a moment what was happening to her tearful little roommate, until the mystery of the demonic laugh through the keyhole of Jane’s bedroom door reclaimed her attention and she sank back into her book for the last precious minutes of reading time.
The next day she was summoned after classes to the sick bay. Matron was all starched up as usual in her white uniform, but she did not have her cheerful “How-are-we-today?” face on.