‘What made you want to teach biology?’ Diana asked one evening, shyly curious.
‘Oh, it was the place. Gower. Not a lot to do there -nearest cinema was miles away - except read books, or go for walks. Lots of wild life, though. Just sort of happened.’
Gower was still Gower, in all its beauty: self-contained, teeming with life under hummocks of gorse and in rock pools. I was wild, too - cantering off on my own, hiding in cliffs that overhung the sea above Worm’s Head or Oxwich Point. I knew they were high and dangerous. My mother would have beaten me if she’d known the risks I took. Often I scraped myself against the jagged edges of rocks, or fell and grazed my knees until they bled.
‘Worse things happen at sea,’ my mother would say as she swabbed the cuts with Dettol, and she’d stump off, leaving my father to comfort me. He would pull me on to his lap and I could smell the sweat of his clothes and the Brylcreem on his hair, and he’d whisper, ‘Worse things happen at sea,’ and laugh into my ear.
I took longer and longer walks. To justify them I would say as I left the house that I was studying the plants and shore-life. I sketched and wrote down the Latin names of what I drew. So the beautiful pink and violet shell was Gari fervensis, the big pink scallops were Chlamys opercularis, and very occasionally I’d come across the rayed artemis, Dosinia exoleta, a round shell with markings that looked like ancient writing - Sumerian, I thought later. I learned the names of all the crabs, from the fierce, attacking fiddler crab, Portunus puber, to the timid shore crab, Cracinus maenas.
‘Other children collected stamps or cigarette cards; I collected the natural history of Gower, drew it and labelled it. I became more knowledgeable than anyone, even my father, and that, I suppose, is why I am a biologist. Or at any rate, a biology teacher.’
Diana Monk had no idea that Sylvia cherished powerful fantasies about Hermione. It did not occur to her that she had the right to be jealous. She barely acknowledged her own emotions, let alone Sylvia’s. As for the girls, it wouldn’t have entered their heads that a member of staff might trespass into their zone; and, indeed, what Sylvia Parry felt for Hermione was not an adolescent ‘pash’. Although they sometimes shocked and excited one another with smutty conversations after lights, most girls were entirely ignorant about their own sexuality. By the time they reached the Lower Fourth some had started the curse, but they couldn’t have explained accurately what its function was, even though they giggled in class when the English teacher read out, The curse is come upon me! Cried the Lady of Shalott.’ They kissed each other good night, but these kisses were still the smothering hugs of children and not yet the explorations of precocious young women.
Occasionally a ‘pash’ between a pretty junior and a receptive senior might lead to a secret meeting in the long grass at the end of the games field. They would usually just talk, unfamiliar with the vocabulary of desire, hardly knowing why they wanted to be alone, until by accident they brushed against each other’s little breasts and discovered how nice it felt. But the prelude was so long and the subterfuge so elaborate that most ‘pashes’ were over before reaching even this innocent stage. In any case, ‘pashes’ were discouraged, and once a term Mrs Birmingham would talk vaguely in Prayers about being pure in mind and body and (the relevance was obscure) about the undesirability of friendships between girls from different forms. Then the school would sing ‘Love Divine, All Loves Excelling’.
Very rarely was there a scandal. Letters hidden under pillows during term or sent by post in the holidays would be intercepted, diaries read; there would be a brief episode of melodrama, and all contact would be forbidden. For a while the girls concerned would whisper and cry in the dormitory at night, but it never lasted long. Sometimes a girl would develop a passion for one of the teachers, but this was ridiculed. Teachers were in the enemy camp, although Miss Valentine was an exception. Her face glowed with such cheerfulness, her voice was always so lilting and good-tempered, that she was generally agreed to be ‘an absolute darling’.
The Lower Fourth breathed heavily over its prep.
‘I saw you sucking up to Miss Valentine. Yuk! How could you? Practically slobbering all over her. It’s only because she gives you good marks…’
‘It’s got nothing to do with you, so MYOB. If you weren’t so jolly lazy, Fiona Cathcart, you might get decent marks too.’
‘I haven’t got a pash on her, so I don’t write it all out twice and do beautiful darling little maps with lovely green and blue outlines, that’s why.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Madeleine and made a face, scrunching up her nose and mouth and poking her head forward.
‘Anyway, some people are trying to work, in case you hadn’t noticed. Which, ‘cos I’ve looked everywhere and I still can’t find my rotten pen, is hard enough, without your sarky comments.’
Constance looked as though she were working, but she was not writing her English essay (’My Best Friend’), which had been easy and had only taken her ten minutes, even though the best friend she described was imaginary. Now she was writing a letter. She knew it was hopeless and she was only putting herself in the wrong and sounding ungrateful. She knew her mother would tell her to make more of an effort to join in and find a friend. So she added, ‘I do try and join in. But I’m no good at jacks and nobody ever tries to catch me in Kick the Can. Oh, well, there goes the supper bell so I’ll have to stop now. Masses of best love, Constance.’
I’m going to run away and that’ll show them, she thought. She made a song of it: I’ll run away, far, far away, and come again another day - no, that was silly - she’d never come back. Not ever.
Sheila stared at her supper, an iridescent orange triangle of smoked haddock lying in a tepid puddle of milky liquid. She ate the bits of potato that weren’t dyed yellow and put her knife and fork together.
Charmie was talking across her to Mick and Madeleine: ‘… so then this girl, she’s an orphan you see - I think that’s it - yes, and she’s fallen on hard times and she has to go and be a typist because she hasn’t got any money and she’s so ashamed she changes her name. That’s so no-one will know it’s her. But the boss’s son - he’s a lord really, only his father’s making him start at the bottom - well, he keeps noticing her ‘cos she’s so pretty and sad and everything, and …’
The other two listened bright-eyed, eating mechanically.
That’s not how you told it to me, Charmie,’ interrupted Sheila. ‘You said it was her who was the duke’s daughter, only…’
‘Oh, shut up, who cares anyway, it’s my story. You didn’t see the film. Quick, take my fish, I don’t want it.’
I don’t want it either, thought Sheila, crumbling the shiny yellow flakes on her plate. She turned them over so that the black skin was on top.
‘Pass your plates along, everybody!’ commanded Hermione, the senior at the head of the table.
‘Whose is this? Who hasn’t eaten their fish?’
‘Please, Hermione, Sheila hates fish. Do let her off,’ said Charmian.
‘Sheila Dunsford-Smith, is this your plate?’
‘Yes, Hermione.’
‘Well, sit here and eat it or you won’t have any pudding.’
Torn between the desire to obey Hermione, thus earning her fleeting approval, and her disgust at the sight of the mangled fish, Sheila answered, ‘But I don’t want pudding.’
‘That’s got nothing to do with it. You know the rules. You can ask for a small portion, but you must eat what’s on your plate.’
Conscious of having been scrupulously fair, Hermione turned back to her neighbour.
Long after the others had scattered for the last forty minutes of their day, Sheila sat over her congealing plateful. At last she was released by Diana Monk, who glanced into the dining-room and was moved to pity by her slumped shoulders and trapped expression. Five minutes later, enclosed within the warm red brick walls of the kitchen garden, Sheila knelt by their plot, turning the earth with a fork as listlessly as she had picked at t
he fish.
‘Sheil! Sheeeeei-la!’ she heard, and saw Charmie up by Pets, beckoning to her urgently. ‘Quick! Only ten minutes left and Mick’s just started counting. Here.’ As Sheila joined her she smiled radiantly and said, ‘Gosh, you were super to get me out of that stinky fish!’ Together they raced off to crouch behind the garden shed, arms round each other’s shoulders, panting and flushed under the rose-pink evening sky.
The last rays of the sun soaked into the plump rectangular cushions on the bay-window-seat. The Head and her Deputy sat in their usual armchairs over a pot of weak coffee, the wireless tuned to the Third Programme.
‘You were right about Sylvia Parry,’ said the Head. ‘There is something threatening there. No wonder she frightens the girls. That little one - third-former, Katherine —’
‘Wilson?’
‘Yes, little Katherine Wilson, she’d been sent out to stand in the corridor yesterday. I happened to come across her. She was petrified. Shaking like a leaf. She isn’t yet ten. I can’t employ a woman who terrorizes small children. Why is she doing it? Frightening little girls … is the woman right in the head?’
‘She’s responsible for more order marks than any other member of staff,’ said Miss Roberts. ‘And she and the unfortunate Diana Monk are up to something.’
‘Well, perhaps. You could be right, though personally I doubt it. In any case one couldn’t dismiss her for that. They’d both deny it.’
‘But one’s never very happy about it,’ said Miss Roberts vehemently.
The Deputy Head’s unmarried state resulted from the fact that no man had ever asked her. She liked men well enough. She thought lesbianism was unnatural and wicked, and would have preferred to dismiss staff whom she suspected of such leanings, but unfortunately the law was not on her side.
The Head continued to brood.
‘She’s never administered corporal punishment, as far as I know…’
‘Henrietta, she doesn’t need to. She frightens them to death as it is.’
‘What am I supposed to do, Peggy? I can’t possibly replace her at this stage of term - not with O and A levels just coming up. I’ve tried to talk to her. She denies having any personal problems.’
‘Diana Monk doesn’t look capable of making trouble,’ said Peggy, and smiled wryly. ‘She’d never stand up to her. No, I think it’s a matter of temperament. Parry’s one of those people with more than their fair share of anger. She could fly off the handle at the slightest thing. Did you give her a formal warning?’
‘Not this time. I hinted that she could do with a weekend off, but she turned it down.’
‘Let’s hope we don’t get any parents complaining. That could be tiresome.’
‘Keep an eye on her for me, won’t you, Peggy?’ The rain-pattering sound of applause swelled from the wireless. ‘Now then, shall we listen to the news?’
Half an hour later, after the usual depressing reports from the Korean war (it couldn’t - could it? - affect her boy in Hong Kong), Henrietta Birmingham sat looking out across the darkened lawns to the trees silhouetted against the slate-blue sky. Too late for the sunset, too pale for moonrise; only the evening star hung above the earth. She used to watch it as a girl from her bed in Scotland. She had had a bedroom to herself by the time she was twelve, but when the boys were away at the Front she preferred to sleep in the old nursery, with its memories of the time when they’d all been children together under the benevolent eye of Nanny, rather than stay in a grown-up room empty of ghosts. How hard it is being a girl, she used to think when her brothers’ stilted letters arrived. They told her nothing, hardly more than their dutiful letters home from Eton, but she read between the lines and imagined the thrill, the rivalry, the dramatic challenge of doing your best -not just in a cricket match, but for your country. She had envied them at first.
Jamie had kept his promise to write, but what was she to make of the cryptic lines which expressed no pride and delight? He was just being modest. He must be doing marvellous things. She longed for something broader and greater than her own limited horizons, for the chance to escape, to be brave and glorious, for something beyond the narrow confines of girlhood. But the world, her parents, Nanny, her brothers, even Jamie - they all thought her yearnings foolish. They told her that one day, when a good man asked her to marry him, everything would fall into its proper place and she would find her destiny.
Every evening she prayed for them, alone in their nursery with its alphabet frieze round the walls, toys tidily ranged in the toy cupboard, watching her through the glass doors, books in order on the shelves (she would take them out sometimes, wistfully - Jock of the Bushveld, The Crimson Aeroplane). Praying was all she could do, and so she prayed for hours: first for Jamie, that she might see him again, then for the other two, that they might not be wounded or … or called to God just yet. She prayed for all British soldiers and airmen, and for the Canadians and Australians, and the brave Indian regiments whom she had seen marching at the King’s coronation; she prayed as well for all German officers and soldiers and all poor prisoners wherever they might be; and most earnestly she prayed to God to make the generals end this wicked war. Finally, opening her eyes to the high, cold, hardhearted moon, she prayed for their happiness. Not for her own. She knew she wasn’t good enough to deserve that and in any case she didn’t know what would make her happy.
The next year her eldest brother, Alistair, died, and a month or two later Jamie was wounded on the Somme. But God answered her prayers. Jamie came back. Back, it is true, with one leg missing, a mockery of her fleet-footed young companion. When they sent him home to convalesce, she was the one who sat beside his bed all night, while the nurse or Nanny dozed next door; she was the one who listened while he moaned and twitched in his sleep. She heard his panic-stricken roars and cries, and started when he jerked bolt upright out of his dreams to clutch the stump of his knee and groan at the pain in his missing leg.
‘Tell me, Jamie. Never mind how disagreeable, don’t spare me. Tell it all to me, and maybe that will take away the nightmares.’
At first he would scowl at her.
‘You’re a girl. Don’t be stupid. Get the nurse. Tell her I need morphine. Get her for me, Henrietta.’
After a while, though, the blackened, charred desolation in his mind began to find its way into words. Her old nightmare took on shape and detail. ‘It was like roasted chestnuts on the nursery fire - when they’re all burnt and black, the flesh in the middle oozing and sweet. The noise was like hell. I hear it in my head.’ The sounds he made were a parody of her brothers, as boys, playing soldiers: ‘Boom, bang, thump, whistle, wheee, boom-boom,’ but then, ‘scream, yell, moan, gasp.’ They’d never mimicked the noises of pain, just keeled over and died obediently. After the bang-bangs you were dead, for a moment or two anyway.
‘You’ve never seen… you can’t possibly imagine our faces,’ Jamie told her. ‘People making ghastly grins and jokes. Bad form to show you were afraid. Ever heard the word rictus? It’s in between grinning and dying. The men’s faces grinding over their skulls, and sometimes just skulls. Like this - look at me, Henrietta. Look at me. Yes, they did that, too: eyes screwed up against the light. And then a smile, fine old boy, don’t you worry about me. Don’t you ever dare think war is fine and noble, Henrietta. Don’t tell Mother I said so.’
She would force the nurse to let her help when the dressing on his stump was changed, force herself to confront unblinkingly the crazed red flesh that had been his leg, the seeping yellow and black lines where the wound was healing slowly, to cradle the hot, ugly stump while cool fresh gauze was wound around it, so that it looked cared-for and hygienic, hidden from fastidious eyes.
Soon he would call her at night and spew up the jagged fragments of his nightmares. ‘The horses, Henrietta - have I told you how the horses stank? How the rats would crawl out from inside their bellies, after gnawing out their livers. The liver is the best bit, and the old rats knew it. We had rats in the trenches, to
o, and we used to stick bits of cheese on the end of the bayonet and when they came and nibbled the cheese we’d pull the trigger. Oh, we had our laughs. Do you know the colour that rotting horse turns? A sort of slimy bluey-green.’
She never covered her eyes or ears; she accepted whatever he had to tell her and still looked steadily back at him as though uncontaminated by his horrors. Their parents never knew. Her mother was relieved that Hetta’s awkward desire to nurse was stilled by having Jamie to care for.
During the day she would wander exhausted over the summer hills, falling asleep with her face on her arm, waking up to find the scratchy heather embedded in her stockings and hair as the birds sang high up in the clear sky. She would plunge her arms into the ice-cold water of a lochan until her flesh vibrated from the chill, and then shake the freezing drops into the bright air. It was not a time when she could pray. She was angry with God for allowing such things. Nature became her church, the trees its pillars, the hills its altar. The sunsets were its stained-glass windows and the stars its candles. Submerging herself in the changeless calm of her surroundings, she would fall into a healing trance and go home to another night with Jamie.
A friend from school, a comrade of his called Roly, who had come through the same horrors, had been wounded but survived with all four limbs intact, came to pay him a visit. Only his mind was shattered. He watched the tall girl with grey-blue eyes and long, shining hair and wondered why the corners of her mouth trembled and why she narrowed her eyes when she looked at him. When he wanted to talk to Jamie alone she would not leave, saying, ‘I have heard it all. Nothing you can say will shock me.’ After a nod from Jamie he took her at her word, and she heard the familiar stories from another man’s mouth. But when he began to talk about the two French girls they had rogered and she realized what that meant, she was shocked; she understood that there was even more frightfulness in this war than Jamie had told her, of a kind that she hadn’t imagined, that could affect girls like herself; and that she too would have been corrupted and changed, as Jamie had been.
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