None of the grown-ups took these little melodramas seriously. Childhood, after all, is an innocent, unclouded time. Children are like tumbling puppies or singing birds. Even the most loving and sensitive parents, grannies or teachers assume that adolescent emotions are undeveloped and fleeting. How could they be serious, funny little monkeys? It was a tiresome phase and of course they all exaggerated wildly, but thank goodness it didn’t last. Adults have forgotten the agony of growing up, when feelings are vast and incomprehensible, primitive and turbulent. Sheila and Constance suffered stoically and in silence, while Charmian vented her anger and pain on her best friend.
Every day was divided into meals and lessons and Rest; letters and parcels; sport and play; Prayers and mufti; hobbies, pets, bath-time, hair-washing and bed. Each segment of time was signalled by the heavy clanging of the bell.
Every week a different prefect had the job of bell-ringing. She had to walk - the school rules said girls must walk, never run, not even in case of fire - from her form-room or dormitory down to the cupboard in the Covered Way (which the squits, for this reason, innocently called the Cupboard Way) where the bell was kept. She would grasp its smooth wooden handle with both hands and hurl the sound in all directions, deafened by its great double thunderbolts. Its clangour would reach the form-rooms, the lavatories and changing-rooms, where girls were dreaming or conspiring; it would reverberate high up on the top floor and across the lawns, commanding people to return from the swimming-pool and tennis courts. Everyone obeyed, for without the bell’s regular, impersonal ringing, the school would have collapsed into chaos. Everyone could chant the school timetable: Nine-oh, nine-forty, ten-twenty, they’d mutter (now comes Break), eleven-twenty-five, twelve-five.
* * *
After the bell for the end of the last period before lunch, Sylvia Parry arrived in the staff-room and searched impatiently in her drawer for a cigarette. The Lower Fifth, revising biology for their imminent O levels, were whipping themselves into melodrama. Many of them were stupid or lazy, with every reason to panic about their chances, and she had lost her temper.
‘For Pete’s sake, Marjorie Hilton!’ she had snapped at one vacant-faced, pony-loving girl who had been gazing out of the window. (She was dreaming of riding bareback, hair streaming in the wind, towards some ill-defined but glorious encounter.) ‘If you can’t understand osmosis by now we might as well all give up. I’d like to take hold of that stupid brain of yours and wring it out to see what, if anything, you have retained from your years of expensive education.’
Shocked out of her fantasy, Marjorie stared at the raging figure beside the blackboard. A hand went up.
‘Well, what is it now, Wendy?’
‘Please, Miss Parry, shall I show Marjorie my notes and explain them to her?’
‘Well, of course, if you feel you may succeed where I have manifestly failed, I shall be happy to hand my job over to you. Meanwhile I suggest we leave Marjorie to wallow in her own stupidity and get on with the next block of revision.’
She knew she’d been unfair to them both but for God’s sake … As she took out a Craven A, Ginny Valentine said, ‘I wouldn’t if I were, you, Sylvia. There’s a note in your pigeon-hole. Looks like a summons from on high.’
Sylvia tore open the pretentious crested envelope. It bore the school emblem, a three-masted sailing ship, and below it the motto Fortiter, fideliter, feliciter, bravely, faithfully, happily - Mrs Birmingham’s dream for her school. The note inside said, ‘Would you be good enough to come and see me before lunch? HB’
Sylvia took an urgent drag before stubbing out her precious cigarette and slamming the door.
‘Come in,’ called Mrs Birmingham with a rising inflection. ‘Ah, Miss Parry. Thank you. Do sit down. A sherry?’
The Headmistress’s study was a serious room, lined with bookshelves and the school group photographs for the last seven years. There were also prints of Dürer’s hare and his praying hands, which economically conveyed to parents and other visitors an interest in religion, biology and art. Very few failed to recognize the prints, and only the most confident could refrain from murmuring ‘Ah, Dürer, of course…’
Mrs Birmingham’s desk stood in front of tall windows. Light gilded her papers, the wooden IN and OUT trays, and a rectangular blotter with leather corners. Behind the desk stood a substantial chair that had once been her father’s, more like a throne than a chair, while facing it was a much smaller chair with a high, hard back. Sylvia, motioned to the small chair, sat down with only the sherry glass to differentiate her from any girl called in for a ticking-off. Miss Roberts’s desk in the other corner of the room was tactfully empty.
‘I thought it time we had a chat about how things are going this term,’ the Head began neutrally. She waited, her concentration fixed and her face unsmiling.
‘I’ve just come from the Lower Fifth,’ Sylvia said. ‘They seem to be up to scratch with their revision. One or two failures to be expected, of course, but that’s unavoidable.’
‘Is it? I thought if we knew a girl was bound to fail we didn’t enter her for the examination. It’s bad for confidence, and bad for the school’s record.’
‘Well, they’re not certain to fail. I’m being realistic. Pessimistic even.’
‘Have you offered extra coaching? I would have to consult their parents, naturally, but few parents decline.’
Extra coaching, dear God. And when was she supposed to find the time for that, with over a hundred books to mark every week?
‘Well, let’s leave that aside for the present,’ Mrs Birmingham said. ‘I asked to see you because certain disturbing rumours have reached me, not for the first time, about your demeanour in class. Your handling of the girls. I thought it would be helpful to hear in your own words if there is any cause for concern. Anything I ought to know about.’
‘There’s been another outbreak of stealing, mainly in the Lower Fourth. Fountain-pens disappearing, the usual sort of thing.’
‘I was referring to your own conduct, Miss Parry, rather than to that of the girls.’
‘Girls can be very excitable. They can be - how shall I put it? - melodramatic.’
There was no answering smile.
‘I was under the impression that it was you who are excitable, Miss Parry. That you frequently lose your temper. That some of the girls are afraid of you.’
‘No bad thing,’ said Sylvia, attempting another conspiratorial smile.
‘On the contrary,’ said the Head coldly, ‘it is a very bad thing …’
Does she imagine I don’t know what a very bad thing it is? Does she think I was born this caustic, dangerous spinster?
One freezing Gower winter, Mother caught pneumonia. Small wonder, the times she stood out in the cold hanging sheets on the line as they snapped back into her face, or trudging along, head down against the wind, to and from chapel or the grocer. She continued stumbling through her duties, hacking and wheezing, and I don’t remember that my father or I took much notice. Now, as then, I cannot feel guilty about her. Finally one day we came back from school together, me bundled up on the front of his bicycle, feeling his strong body pedalling rhythmically against me, and she wasn’t there. He went upstairs and found her lying on their bed, frightened by her collapse, the loss of control. The doctor came and took her off in his own car to the hospital at Swansea. He said she was very ill.
Then we were on our own. We divided up the chores and kept the place spick and span. Mother would have been proud of us. We didn’t need the neighbours, though I heard them behind my back saying I was a brave girl and the parson’s wife would bring round a cake or a pan of soup, still hot from her own stove. We drank cups of tea together, my father and I, just the two of us, while I listened to Children’s Hour, and for supper we ate the parson’s soup, or bread and meat paste, tinned sardines and hard-boiled eggs — things that didn’t need cooking. I’d clear away the table while he marked exercise books and prepared lessons. I never asked for his
help with my school work. He was busy, and besides, I could do it easily.
When it was my bedtime he’d tap his watch and go up to draw the curtains and run my bath. I undressed and he folded my clothes in a tidy pile on the chair in my bedroom. I’d sit in the bath - this wasn’t every night, of course, only about twice a week - and he would soap the flannel and wash me, making swirls of lather across my skin like the patterns on the matted coats of the white Gower ponies. Then I’d step out of the bath into the towel, and he’d close his arms and hug me inside it, rubbing my back and legs.
‘Are they done?’ he’d say. ‘No, I don’t think they’re quite done.’
I liked it, and giggled as he dropped the nightdress over my head.
One night when she’d been away about a week, maybe ten days, he read a story, as usual, cuddled me and kissed me good night and after he’d gone downstairs I got out of bed quietly, so as not to hurt his feelings, because he’d forgotten my prayers. I knelt down beside the bed and folded my hands and leant my forehead on them. I shut my eyes and said, ‘God bless Dada and God bless Mummy and make her better, and make me a good girl…’ Even though I’d been so quiet I heard his step on the landing. I opened my eyes and saw the wedge of light widening as he came through the door.
‘What are you doing, Sylvy? Naughty Dada, did we forget your prayers?’
I don’t know why I felt guilty. I scrambled to my feet and was climbing hastily into bed.
‘Well, we’d better have another good night kiss, then.’ He walked back to the door and closed it, so the room was dark, a line of light from the landing showing up the texture of the lino. He was still in his schoolmaster’s suit, only he’d taken the jacket off and was wearing an old Fair Isle knitted waistcoat. The waistcoat crossed the room towards me, stretched across his chest. I wasn’t in bed; I was still sitting on the edge with my legs dangling down.
‘Haven’t I been a good girl?’
‘Oh, yes, a good girl, such a very good girl. Quickly now, into bed, quickly, under the sheets.’
I stared very hard at the drawn threads along the hem of my calico sheet, at the neat little squares they made, like the edge of a stamp, and I looked at the fat, faded roses on my bedroom wallpaper, because you know how it is, after a while a dark room seems to become quite light. That’s because your eyes adjust.
Walking down to the beach one day by myself, through the tall sea-grass, slippery to the hand like chives, I overheard two boys as they passed me, whipped by the wind.
That’s just love innit?’ the big boy said to his pal.
‘Oooh-er …’ said the other, smaller boy, screwing up his nose and stamping on something in the sand.
‘Did you killed it?’ the first boy asked.
I walked along the beach looking down at my feet where brownish, visceral ropes of seaweed coiled, glistening wetly on the sand. They felt squelchy if you trod on them, like something dead and putrefying, like the sheep I sometimes found in ditches, all slimy inside and covered with flies and maggots.
I still have the photograph taken of us that summer: all the village children lined up in forms outside the school. The teachers are in the middle of the group, my dada in the very middle. Some of the more daring boys have pulled a face, but most of us, conscious of the click that would freeze us for ever, are still and serious. If you made a face and the wind changed, you’d stay like that, and it was the same with the camera. My eyes are just two dark triangles - the sun is overhead and it blanks out my expression. I look like my father: the same thickset body and broad face, the same swarthy Celtic colouring. I was Dada’s girl all right. My mother, who had come back from hospital pale and dry, moving slower than before, was cross when she saw the photograph.
‘What were you glaring like that for? Like a real black dog was sitting on your shoulder.’
I didn’t answer.
Sylvia returned from that long-ago time and place to find the Head still speaking, as though mere seconds had passed.
‘… Girls need discipline, yes. But even more than discipline, they need kindness. I assume you entered the teaching profession because you felt, if not a vocation…’ Miss Parry smiled in acknowledgement of the irony ‘… at least a sympathy for girls; some understanding of their problems.’ Mrs Birmingham leant back, her eyes tender and reminiscent, and continued, ‘Until they’re ten or thereabouts, twelve if they’re fortunate, little girls are privileged beings. Those years are the nearest we ever come, perhaps, to the Garden of Eden.’
‘I grew up in Gower,’ said Sylvia, seeing she had to say something.
‘Land of our fathers, land of the free,’ quoted the Head obscurely. Then, getting back to the point, ‘But adolescence, on the other hand, is not always an easy time. How are we to teach them, other than by precept and example? Being seen to lose your temper is not an example you would wish to set, surely?’
In the silence that followed, Sylvia felt her gorge rise and the dark mottling began on her neck. Mrs Birmingham noticed too, and waited.
‘May I know who has complained?’
‘No, you may not. You may deny the truth of it, however, if it is untrue. Do you?’
‘I may… occasionally, under pressure… speak a little harshly, perhaps. I will try to moderate my reproofs,’ said Sylvia formally.
‘If there is anything you need to talk over, I am always here. I am concerned about the stealing, of course. For the time being I prefer to investigate that privately. As to yourself: perhaps there are personal problems? Could you take the first Parents’ Weekend off?’
‘I have no personal problems, thank you, Headmistress. I shall not require the weekend off,’ said Sylvia Parry.
‘Very well. And now, there’s the lunch bell. Thank you.’
One-all, thought Sylvia, as she stood up to leave. I have been warned. But she hadn’t heard about the stealing. I’ve got to watch my step all the same. Self-righteous cow.
She strode into the dining-room and stood rigidly at the head of her table as one of the seniors gabbled, ‘Benedictus benedicat per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.’ From the shelter of closed eyes and bent heads, Diana Monk looked anxiously across at her. Chairs and benches scraped the floor as the school sat down to lunch.
Girls were popular either because they conformed, naturally and without trying, to the prevailing idea of what was normal, or because they deviated from it in some remarkable way. Hermione Mailing-Smith was a perfect example of normality, never harbouring a single original thought, but she also deviated because of her fragile beauty. A cloud of adoration, like a solar flare, surrounded Hermione on her elaborately modest path through the day. She epitomized sixteen-year-old loveliness, legs tapering elegantly as a pair of scissors from the neat, flat ovals of her buttocks, her body curving and budding as though it moved underwater, while the fine, pale hair looped on top of her head flowed like the air itself. She had wide eyes, wide nostrils and small, pretty ears. One in a thousand girls conforms to this universal image of young girlhood. It was Hermione’s accidental good fortune to be that one.
Because Hermione looked so exquisite, so sweetly vulnerable, it was impossible not to feel that her character - her soul - must be heavenly too. The tributes beauty accepts make it easy to be generous. Hermione had always taken this attention for granted, making little distinction between the worship she received from her parents, other people’s brothers, certain teachers, or her own contemporaries. At sixteen, however, she was becoming aware that the stares of men were more disturbing than those of the juniors. She was curious about the effect of her dazzling looks, the power she might wield, and impatient to put it to the test. She rather liked the idea of being cruel and seeing some young man languishing and fading away for hopeless love of her.
At school she was called ‘Hermy-One’, the joke failing to conceal that she was the unique, the one and only Hermione. She was not clever, but most members of staff made allowances; she was not tidy, but someone else would always gathe
r up her discarded clothes or papers, grateful for the brief intimacy this permitted. Her personal mannerisms were mimicked throughout the school — the way she unpicked the pleats of her heavy tweed skirt so that instead of kicking lumpishly around her calves it swung coquettishly from her hips; her way of writing capital letters with a loop and a flourish. She ran like a deer, springing across the games field to a background roar of ‘Oh, come on, Hermy-One! Oh, yes! Yes! She’s done it!’ More girls had ‘pashes’ on Hermione than on any other senior.
In most cases a ‘pash’ was a safe outlet for adolescent emotion and practice for sexual encounters to come. Charmian and Sheila were united in their mutual worship of Hermione. Others worshipped her in secret, deriving a bitter thrill from denying it.
‘She’s not that pretty,’ they would say, crossing their fingers.
The desire her beauty aroused was not always passive, for Sylvia Parry was in thrall to Hermione. The taut blue veins at the back of Hermione’s knees, the concave upward arch below her chin, the triangular breasts that tipped her Aertex shirt into twin points as she moved; these recurring glimpses tormented Sylvia. She would enter the Lower Fifth’s form-room clotted with expectation, telling herself that Hermione was just an ordinary, silly girl, vain and shallow like most sixteen-year-olds, only to be ravished by the rediscovery that she was as flawless as in memory. In class the girl seldom asked a question and, if addressed, would smile abstractedly.
‘I don’t know, Miss Parry. Shall I look it up?’ Someone would thrust a book under her nose, open at the appropriate page.
‘Oh, yes,’ she would say. ‘Here it is. Do you want me to read it out?’
‘You’re supposed to know, Hermione,’ Sylvia would admonish, grateful for the excuse to pronounce her name and look directly into her face, gulping down its details as greedily as a pelican, to be regurgitated later for the nourishment of her ravenous heart.
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