Rosie Page 7

  ‘Whatever next!’ said Nan.

  Did we ever see actual snakes? I think we did, but I can’t be certain. It always frightened me, in my early life, when I recognised something I thought I knew seeming to undergo troubling alteration so as to resemble something else: a dress standing up on the floor, like a headless person; tears that turned to blood on my pillow; flamingos used as croquet mallets in Alice in Wonderland; slimy weeds moving like living reptiles.

  And yet you could say that my childhood was defined by the huge, life-changing alteration that I longed to bring about. I didn’t want Jane to be my mother; I wanted Nan to be my mother.

  I used to fantasise that there would be some colossal Moment of Revelation (over elevenses in the nursery, perhaps – the setting for the utterance of so much shock news) when Vera Sturt would be revealed as my true parent and Jane would be sent away – back to do her shopping in Liberty’s, with its glass cabinet in a thousand pieces on the floor; back into the darkness of the nightclubs where she loved to dance.

  But it never happened.

  Carolyn Slaughter was right to designate Nan as my angel, as the person who saved my sanity – and probably that of my only child, my daughter Eleanor, who, thanks to the love I’d been given by Nan, was able to become the recipient of the mother-love in me and in turn show deep and unwavering affection towards her own two children.

  Angels in the Bible appear and disappear in flaming glory, in blinding light. They announce the most breathtaking events. But Nan was never able to appear as a winged messenger, telling me what I wanted to hear. She was just an ordinary woman, a little lonely, a little disappointed by life, a person who loved flowers and knitting and funicular trains and classic serials on the radio. She’d also loved Peter Taylor, her first charge, and, by some miracle, she discovered in her heart a willingness to love Jo and me.

  The English Room

  Crofton Grange School was housed in a large mansion near the small village of Braughing (pronounced Braffing), in Hertfordshire. The facade of the building was grand, with ‘Tudor remnants’ still showing here and there among its heavy restoration, which dated from the 1830s. Neither the Tudors nor the Victorians had been able to heat the house properly, and the builders who had converted it into a school in the 1940s had made only half-hearted attempts to warm up a few of the ground-floor rooms with heavy iron radiators. My most afflicting memory of Crofton Grange is of the eternal cold we all endured.

  There was a ‘school ghost’, who went by the Dickensian name of Miss Mellish, a woman who had reputedly been murdered on the grand Tudor staircase. I suppose she was the ultimate Tudor remnant, and we all longed to terrify ourselves by catching sight of her. My friend Elsa Buckley has always claimed that she did see Miss Mellish, that the ghost ‘came floating up the stairs, in purple’. Of course, it had to be purple, a colour perfectly aligned with the vivid imaginations of teenage girls, and I don’t remember Elsa being frightened, just rather privileged to have been the one to see Miss M.

  Around the front of the house was a ha-ha, designed to keep animals from straying onto the lawns, but there were no animals any more; the ha-ha was there now, it seemed, only to keep us in. Beyond the ha-ha was a park, leading on one side to some beautiful beechwoods, known as the Mentley Woods, where we were allowed to walk at weekends. We were not free, even in the woods; we were prisoners of the school. Trespass beyond the gates and you were expelled. Yet there was an illusion of freedom, for what this park became was a vast green amphitheatre for conversation.

  Walking there in our ‘outdoor shoes’, away from the gaze of the teachers and the prefects, in little huddles of two or three, we dissected our teenage hearts. Our favourite places to perch were the fallen trees that were strewn across the park like wrecked ships. Sucking on grasses in the summer, or eating raw elderberries to try to assuage our perpetual hunger, we exchanged anxieties and dreams.

  What did upper-middle-class girls – in such a place, in rural England in the 1950s – actually talk about? Did we have anything interesting to say to each other? We were polite, innocent children, who knew hardly anything about the world. The word ‘politics’ had almost no meaning for us. And the nearest we got to rebellion was to play Tommy Steele’s ‘Singing the Blues’ on the school gramophone. We lived in a pre-Elvis world.

  Later, after that voice from some measureless cavern of desire had touched us, we’d talk about boys we’d met in the holidays, from whom we constantly hoped for cards and letters. But in my first years at Crofton Grange, what we talked about most was our exile – from our homes, from ‘proper’ food, from warmth, from our distracted parents (or, in my case, from Nan) and from a past that appeared suddenly nurturing and benign. This shared exile confected a bond between us and, on the whole, made us kind to each other.

  There was some bullying in the school. I remember that we sometimes gave the (very few) fat girls a miserable time. A girl with an irritating adenoidal voice was parodied and shunned – all the more cruelly because her parents were Christian Scientists, who refused all medical intervention for their daughter. We occasionally settled quarrels by bashing each other with lacrosse sticks or stealing each other’s sweets, but mainly we wanted to make friends and discover ways to make bearable what, at its core, was an unbearable situation for us all.

  We were never made to suffer physical beatings. The worst punishments at Crofton Grange all involved missing some longed-for treat: the Saturday-night play put on by each class in turn, the Hallowe’en supper, the Guy Fawkes Night firework display. But for the generation of boys sent away to school in the 1950s in Britain, now men in their sixties and seventies, corporal punishment was a hideous part of day-to-day life. This descended down the generations, with small boys who had been caned for minor rule infringements growing up to become prefects who in their turn had beating rights.

  How did the lads survive, in the face of this constant terror? First-hand accounts given to me by friends and relations of this age group all recall feelings of perpetual dread, lasting years. But in A. A. Milne’s 1939 autobiography, It’s Too Late Now, he wrote: ‘I was happy at school [Westminster, where he, too, was beaten] only because I had to be at school and must therefore get what happiness I could out of it.’ So I suppose this was what all the boys had to do – get what happiness they could – and I think, after the first bad bout of homesickness, most of us at Crofton Grange made some similar sort of resolution.

  Yet for the first couple of years, we never stopped longing for time to pass, to release us back into our families – or what remained of them. At the start of every term, we drew what we called a ‘term worm’ at the back of our prep books. The worm was divided up into segments – one for each day – and the days were coloured in the moment they’d passed. Sometimes, down the length of the worm, there lurked some anticipated happiness – a parents’ day celebration, a half-term weekend – and I remember that I coloured these in before I got to them, partly to make them stand out, but also knowing already that – such is the teasing nature of time – they would be over almost before they had begun.

  Our Crofton day started at five past seven, when the matron and the two under-matrons woke us by sticking thermometers into our mouths. These thermometers were housed in little glass tumblers of TCP, and the smell of this medication can still make me gag. Round the dormitories the matrons marched, dressed in white overalls and little starched head-dresses, the tiaras of the school-medics’ world. They stuck the thermometers under our tongues, hurried on to another dorm, then marched back in, snatching the thermometers out again, reading them with practised, laser eyes and passing on to the next bed.

  There were almost one hundred girl at Crofton Grange and about thirty thermometers, so each thermometer went from TCP to mouth and back again three times every morning. More than the dread of the TCP, I used to fear the taste of another girl’s mouth, stale from sleep, tainted by last night’s supper of macaroni cheese – or worse, by some vomiting that had occurr
ed during the night.

  Now and again, I tried to cheat the thermometer reading by heating it on my body. In my first year, I’d lost the art of falling asleep at bed-time – that sweet descent which had seemed so easy when I shared a room with Nan – so I began most days feeling tired, sometimes so deeply exhausted that I longed to succumb to illness and be sent to the san, which was heated with a gas fire and where you were allowed to listen to Housewives’ Choice on an old Roberts wireless.

  The deception with the thermometer seldom worked, because there wasn’t enough time for the temperature to rise before the tiara brigade returned. So my bedding would be pulled back and I’d stagger around in search of underpants, vest and socks, often feeling almost insane from lack of sleep. Children’s bodies need a lot of deep rest and mine was often so starved of it that I had bouts of hallucination.

  We had exactly half an hour to wash and dress – in yesterday’s underwear, in the day-before-yesterday’s underwear, in three- or four-day old underwear – because nothing was laundered more than once a week. Hair-washing – done in a basin – was a rationed activity and there were no showers, only ancient baths of stained enamel, with a line marking the permitted height of the water, to which we had access twice a week. I think we all stank like polecats.

  After tugging on our grimy clothes, we lined up and went down the back stairs to the hall, where we waited for the headmistress, Mrs Baines, the head girl and the prefects to descend the main staircase (up which Miss Mellish’s ghost had once floated for Elsa) and to take their places in the dining room before we filed in for breakfast.

  The kitchen staff at Crofton Grange were Italian. They did their best, I guess, with cheap ingredients and, until 1956, post-war rationing, but hunger gnawed at us all, right through our school years. Ninety-nine per cent of us were stick thin. We were expected to play lacrosse or tennis every afternoon on a very low-calorie diet. Supper was sometimes nothing more than bread and cheese and water. Tea was bread and jam. If some girls put on flesh, it was no doubt because of this bread-choked diet.

  The best meal was breakfast, for which the Italians often made a delicious kind of hash out of bacon and onion that we called bacon pudding, and sometimes there were sausages – one each – served with Italian tinned tomatoes. If your parents had agreed to pay extra, you were allowed an orange at breakfast, but Jane had told me and Jo that she was ‘paying quite enough, thank you very much’, so we never got the oranges, and it’s interesting to observe that I still think of an orange as some kind of precious fruit. To start my day, as I often do now, with freshly squeezed orange juice still strikes me as a secret luxury.

  The bacon pudding was washed down with weak coffee, drunk out of mottled green plastic cups. When it was your turn to sit at Mrs Baines’s table, she would encourage you to ‘make a lifelong habit of avoiding sugar in coffee’. No doubt she wanted to save on rations and on catering funds, but we all took her seriously and tried to please her because she was the headmistress, and so lingering and effective was this command, I have never been able to bear the taste of sugared coffee, down the whole pathway of my life since that time.

  After breakfast, we began lessons. The classrooms were designated not by class, but by subject. The history room was the only one with a heater, put in there, we supposed, because the history teacher, Miss Vermidge, was best friends with Mrs Baines. The Latin room and the art room were housed in wooden huts. Our favourite room, despite the cold, was the English room.

  In winter, for most lessons, I wore blue-and-pink fingerless gloves, knitted by Nan, thus saving myself from the chilblains from which many girls suffered. How we were able to concentrate in these freezing little spaces, I can’t quite recall. A deep longing for spring, for the sight of a daisy pushing up on the slopes of the ha-ha, was acute in all of us all through the winter term.

  The teachers’ bedrooms were warmed by gas fires, but how did they survive the glacial classrooms? A defining image of Crofton Grange, for me, was the sight of our English teacher, Miss Ida Robinson – whom I came to know and admire, with something akin to love – reciting the poems of Keats wearing a ratty fur coat, from which she was seldom parted. She tucks the collar of the coat round her thin neck as she begins:

  Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun,

  Conspiring with him how to load and bless

  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run …

  In my second year, Miss Robinson asked me to paint an ‘illustrated’ version of ‘To Autumn’ to go up on the English room wall. On stiff, expensive white paper, I made a complex border for the poem, featuring hazel twigs, poppies, standing sheaves, ‘mossed cottage trees’, bees, gnats, robins and swallows. When this was done, the moment to copy in the poem arrived.

  I selected a calligraphy pen and black ink. I was proud of how good my handwriting could be, when I paid attention. (My father had exquisite writing, and I suppose I tried to copy this.)

  Then I spoilt the whole thing with a spelling mistake in the first line. I can’t read or hear this poem without remembering the terrible blunder, which couldn’t be rectified: ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitulness’. I felt covered with shame.

  Yet my love of Keats’s work wasn’t affected by this. When ill in bed recently, I spent two solid days reading the 2001 Folio edition of The Complete Poems and loved every moment of them. Simon Brett’s engravings for this collection are also very fine, leading you seductively forward from one poem to the next.

  Of all the teachers at Crofton Grange, Miss Robinson was the only true intellectual. Her background was her ‘beloved Oxford’. She was a close friend of the Poet Laureate, John Masefield. She had been engaged to a fellow student at Oxford, who had died in the war before they could be married – or so went the narrative we told each other about her. But was this true? I can’t say for sure. I think we may just have wanted to believe that a woman as passionate about literature as Ida Robinson had had some physical passion in her youth. We already understood that for many women of her generation, love had passed them by altogether. Apart from Mrs Baines, who was a widow, none of the teachers at Crofton Grange had ever been married.

  We called Miss Robinson ‘Robbie’, when out of her hearing. Robbie’s deep feeling for Shakespeare’s language, which she understood as well as ‘the cat sat on the mat’, untangled the words and found the rhythms for us so effortlessly that we were quickly led to precocious epiphanies of understanding.

  I remember that we began Romeo and Juliet in my first term, when I was just eleven. I’ve never forgotten my encounter with this play. Over the many productions of Romeo and Juliet that I’ve seen throughout my life, it’s still Robbie’s voice that I sometimes hear, reciting while gazing out of the English room window at the snow falling on the park. This speech is spoken by Romeo at dawn, after the secretly married lovers have spent the night together and can’t endure the idea that morning will part them:

  Let me be ta’en, let me be put to death;

  I am content, so thou wilt have it so.

  I’ll say yon grey is not the morning’s eye,

  ’Tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia’s brow;

  Nor that is not the lark, whose notes do beat

  The vaulty heaven so high above our heads:

  I have more care to stay than will to go:

  Come death and welcome! Juliet wills it so.

  ‘Now unpack it for me,’ says Robbie. ‘What is “yon grey”? ‘What does “reflex” mean here? Who is Cynthia?’ And I suppose, at the beginning, we looked completely blank and Robbie would have had to answer all her own questions. But here’s the thing with Shakespeare’s language, if it’s well taught: understanding becomes fertile, begets other small moments of revelation, and these lead on and on and multiply until what at first seemed as perplexing as a maths equation ends by unfurling before your eyes an exquisite solution.

  Robbie had a thin, sorrowful face – as
if, somewhere in her life, she’d seen human agonies she couldn’t forget. And some of the time, she was severe with us, slapping down the heavy dictionary on our desks when we got a word wrong and turning her back on us – shoulders hunched with fury inside the fur coat – till we’d looked it up and got it right. But when we did well, when we could tell her that Cynthia was not only the moon (with its ‘pale reflex’ or reflection), but also another name for the goddess Diana, from Mount Cynthus, where she was born, Robbie’s face would be transfigured by an extraordinary smile, revealing protruding, untutored teeth.

  Robbie was the greatest fount of consolation at Crofton Grange. Not only did she manage to make Shakespeare thrilling for us and give us our first sip of Keats’s melancholy, but by doing this – by treating us as ‘clever’ children – she cemented friendships within our small group. Probably she behaved just the same with other classes (Jo had great respect for her, too), but we chose to believe that she favoured us, Form 2A, and we set aside our homesickness in our efforts to please her.

  Jane McKenzie, Elsa Buckley, Julie Phillpotts, Heather Gray, Jane Stern, Marilyn Gillespie, Clare Wainwright, Alison Fairfax-Lucy, Elizabeth Blackadder, Gillian Shepherd, Dallas Hill, Elizabeth Beddington, Deborah Walker and Rosie Thomson … we thought of ourselves as Robbie’s crew. We didn’t mind our forced shackling to the Oxford English Dictionary. When we’d found the word she’d asked for, we competed to dash for the blackboard to obey her command: ‘Write it down! Write it down!’ And for prep (not ‘homework’, for our homes were far off), she began early asking us to make up stories. ‘The imagination,’ she told us, ‘allows the human mind to escape from the mundane. People with no imagination lead dull lives.’

  As a counterbalance to Romeo and Juliet and Keats’s odes, we were reading John Masefield: The Midnight Folk and Lost Endeavour. The stories I wrote for Robbie at this time were heavily influenced by the adventures of Masefield’s characters, mainly boys, who cross dangerous seas – those seas to which Masefield lost his heart as a young midshipman in the navy – in search of treasure and who find magic potions to make them invisible. The idea of escape from the limits of their world is at the heart of these books, and escape was much on my mind. I longed to disappear and reappear, not beside Masefield’s ‘lonely sea and the sky’, but on the banks of the canal where the water snakes and the slithery weeds lived in terrifying confusion at the end of the Meadows garden, to find Nan at my side.