Kathy had always known that her father was clever. He had sometimes told her about his struggles in evening classes to catch up with other boys who had stayed in school a year or two longer, and she had always admired his tenacity and the quickness with which he had grasped subjects that were new to him. He was naturally good at mathematics but it was hard for him to get a white-collar job where he could work with his head rather than his hands. Managers were reluctant to employ someone who had left school at fourteen, but once the results of the examinations he took in evening classes were available he got his first job as a clerk at the sawmills, and from that position moved slowly but steadily up through the hierarchy until he was at the very top. In fact, by the time Kathy was in school, he was chief accountant at the sawmills and was justly proud of his ability to do the job.
Because of his own bad start, he had been determined that Kathy should have a good grounding in subjects additional to those taught at the Daisy Street School. But he had realised that any lessons he gave his daughter must be fun as well as instructive, and often their sessions would begin seriously and end in gales of laughter as Kathy, at his behest, tried to work out how long it would take twenty wasps to eat their way through a two-pound tin of golden syrup or how long it would take Mam to fill the wash boiler if she were only allowed to use a teacup, remembering that she had to take ten paces in each direction between the copper and the tap in the yard.
Kathy, who adored her father and thought him the best man in the world, now knew that fulfilling her parents’ expectations was her responsibility and acknowledged that if she could not do so she would be letting Mam and Dad down as well as herself. So she had approached her new school with a certain amount of caution though this had speedily proved to be unfounded. She had been taken to her classroom and provided with a roneo’d timetable and her class teacher, Miss Ellis, had told her that in this school it was the pupils who went from class to class, rather than the teachers, so that one did not remain in one’s classroom all day. This idea was a strange but pleasant one, and the fact that different teachers taught different subjects also meant that one was less likely to be picked upon. If a teacher disliked you, she only did so for forty-five minutes before one picked up one’s bag of books and moved on to a new classroom and, of course, a new teacher.
A good many of the girls in her class had been at the high school since they were four or five, but they were a friendly crowd, eager to get to know the two new scholarship girls, Kathy herself and Isobella Newton. When the teacher announced that it was dinner time, Kathy and Isobella were already sufficiently friendly to join the queue going into the dining room together, where Isobella admitted, in a breathy whisper, that she had been warned of awful consequences if she dropped food on her clothes. Kathy, who had received an identical warning, suggested that they should tuck their handkerchiefs into their collars or simply remove their tunics and go into the dining room in their blouse and knickers. This remark had the pair of them so helpless with giggles that they earned the wrath of a senior prefect. She warned them that though laughing was not forbidden it was frowned upon in the dining room, and added that conversation should be restricted to such remarks as ‘Please pass the salt’.
The morning’s lessons had suggested to Kathy that she was not going to find herself left behind by the rest of the class and the afternoon sessions confirmed it. Though neither she nor Isobella had had a chemistry lesson before, they were intrigued by the information they were given and by the short experiment which Miss Webster, the teacher, performed on the dais. This lesson was followed by a period in the gymnasium, where Kathy really shone, for she was already an expert at such things as shinning up ropes and walking along walls, having done so ever since she was big enough to join in street games. To be sure, here one climbed ropes as thick as one’s wrist and walked along a great wooden beam and not a crumbling brick wall, but the rest of her class clustered round her when they returned to the changing room, asking her, only half jokingly, if she had ever belonged to a circus. ‘No, but I have walked walls and climbed ropes all me life,’ Kathy had said truthfully. ‘I like boys’ games and anyway, in Daisy Street girls and fellers all muck in together.’
Someone sniffed disparagingly. It was a tall girl, with her hair braided into a long, fair plait, who had a habit of looking down her nose at people smaller than she. ‘I don’t see anything to be proud about just because a girl can behave like a monkey,’ she remarked, in a rather drawling voice. ‘But these scholarship girls are all alike, sharp as little monkeys but with no real intelligence.’
Several of the girls glanced at her with dislike and a round, fair, cuddly-looking girl, whose name Kathy already knew to be Ruby, said: ‘What a disgusting thing to say, Marcia. It’s stupid too, because when the end of term results come out I bet both Issie and Kathy will be placed higher than you. And you can’t walk the beam or climb ropes either,’ she ended triumphantly.
The taller girl shrugged. ‘If I wanted to be mistaken for a monkey, I might care about your opinion,’ she said nastily. ‘Come along, Cynthia, let’s cut along to Miss Grimes’s room so that we can choose our seats before the hoi polloi arrive.’
The two girls strolled off and the rest of the class straggled after them and no more was said, though Isobella whispered to Kathy that she rather feared Marcia had coined a nickname that might well stick. ‘Do you mind if they call you Monkey?’ she enquired anxiously. ‘But perhaps they won’t, because no one likes that Marcia much, do they?’
Kathy had replied loftily that she did not care what anyone called her but was relieved to find, when the girls congregated in the cloakroom at the end of the day, that she was still addressed as Kathy, even though the prefect insisted on ‘Katherine’ when she spoke to her.
The incident in the gymnasium was the one rather sour spot in a day which Kathy had otherwise thoroughly enjoyed. When relating her doings to Jane, she told her how unpleasant Marcia had been but ended, ‘Though no one called me Monkey, after all, so I needn’t have worried.’
‘But you said you didn’t care if they did,’ Jane reminded her. ‘An’ anyway, practically everyone down our street has got a nickname. They’ve been callin’ me Blondie for years!’
‘Ye-es, but Monkey sounds so rude somehow,’ Kathy said reflectively. ‘Monkeys swing through the trees in the jungle and steal things and they’re in zoos. I wouldn’t mind being called Brownie, because I’ve got brown hair, but that’s different.’
Jane admitted that it was and then said, half accusingly: ‘But you’ve gorra a new bezzie and now you’ve left Daisy Street I’ve got no one. Where does that girl Isobella live, anyroad? Is it near here? Only I know you’ve gorra have a pal in school and it can’t be me, but – but I’m still your bezzie outside school, aren’t I?’
‘Oh, Janey, of course you are,’ Kathy cried. ‘As for Isobella, I don’t know that she’ll ever be my best friend, even in school, but we’re both new and – and they keep telling you to get into pairs to go from class to class . . . as for knowing where she lives, I didn’t ask her and she didn’t ask me, but one thing I am sure of, we shan’t be meeting up outside school.’
‘Well, I dare say it’s mean of me, but I’m glad,’ Jane said contentedly, as they turned into Daisy Street. ‘You’ll want to go home right away, I expect, so you can tell your mam and dad everything. Can we meet up later, though?’
Kathy consulted the small wristwatch which had been her father’s present to her for winning the scholarship. ‘Mam works till six tonight and it’s only half past four,’ she said briskly. ‘So if you want to come round and give me a hand, I’ll get the tea going, like I do every night, so Mam can come in to a hot meal. Then I’ll have to fetch our Billy; he’s with Mrs Hughes in Pansy Street. I’ve gorra deal of homework to do, but I can whip through that after I’ve had me tea.’
‘I’ve been home already since we finish school before you, so I know you won’t find Billy with Mrs Hughes,’ Jane said. ‘She’s taken her Phil to the dentist so she brought Billy round to my mam. Mam’s had to go off to work, but your Billy’s safe enough. Tilly’s giving an eye to them, so they’re all playin’ in the kitchen, happy as pigs in muck. Do you want to go round straight away and fetch him? Only it’ll be easier for the pair of us to get tea at your place if you leave Billy where he is.’
Kathy agreed wholeheartedly with this since Billy had reached the age when saying no to everything was great fun and obeying a sister’s instructions, even when the sister was a great deal older, was not nearly as amusing as simply shaking his head and tightening his lips. Tilly, Jane’s eleven-year-old sister, was a sensible girl. She did her very best to help Jane to look after the younger ones and could be relied upon to see that a meal was prepared each evening provided that her parents had left her either money or ingredients. She and Jane were jointly in charge of the household whenever Mrs O’Brien was not available and, by and large, they managed extremely well, though Jane, being the older, had more authority.
Jane and Kathy turned into the back yard of the Kelling house in Daisy Street, as they had done so often in the past, and it was Jane who reached up to the lintel and pulled down the back door key on its length of string. She unlocked the door and the two girls entered, Kathy slinging her satchel down on the floor with a sigh of relief for it was simply bulging with books. She began to struggle into her mother’s calico apron, saying as she did so: ‘Mam’s left the food in the pantry. If you’ll just riddle the fire, I’ll fetch the stuff through. She’ll have left enough for you as well, Janey; going to come back later and have your tea with us?’
Jane often shared the Kellings’ evening meal. Kathy knew her mother felt guilty about being the parent of only two children, when Mr and Mrs O’Brien had eight, and did her best to ease their burden by feeding Jane three or four times a week. On this occasion, however, Jane shook her head. ‘Thanks ever so, queen, but not tonight. Mam’s gorra job cleanin’ in the Prince of Wales on Stanley Road, so Tilly and me is goin’ to make the grub for me dad and the kids.’ As she spoke, she was adding coal to the fire with the brass tongs, having already riddled it free of ash. She began to heave the ash pan out, then turned to her friend. ‘So once we’ve got your mam’s tea on the go, you might as well come round to number eleven and give a hand wi’ ours,’ she said hopefully, ‘before taking Billy home.’
Kathy sighed. She hardly ever went into the O’Briens’ house after school since it was like walking into bedlam after the quiet orderliness of her own home. There would be kids everywhere, the youngest two bare-bottomed as well as barefooted; there would be a mound of potatoes to prepare for the pan, accompanied usually by a scrawny cabbage and pock-marked carrots, which Kathy always suspected had been picked up by Mr O’Brien, who was a porter at the St John’s vegetable market, when the day’s trading was finished. Some families, she knew, actually scoured the big bins into which the remnants of the day’s produce were thrown, but people like that did not live in Daisy Street. Mr O’Brien earned a tiny wage and was glad of his wife’s contribution to their income, though this was somewhat haphazard. Mrs O’Brien often boasted that she could turn her hand to anything and this seemed to mean that she never stayed in one job for long. Kathy’s mother, who was fond of fat and friendly Mrs O’Brien, made excuses for her, but Kathy’s father had been heard to mutter more than once ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’ when Mrs O’Brien’s grasshopper boundings from job to job were drawn to his attention.
But the last thing Kathy wanted to do was to hurt Jane’s feelings. ‘All right. Once we’ve got our food on the go, I’ll come round and gi’ you a hand with yours,’ she said. ‘It’ll be a good hour before Mam and Dad are home and I’d sooner our Billy played with your little ones than came back and plagued me.’ She was rewarded by Jane’s beaming smile.
Mrs Kelling had left a pound of minced beef, three onions and half a dozen carrots, as well as a slab of Madeira cake, beside which stood a jug of milk and a packet of Bird’s custard powder. Kathy’s mouth watered as she began the preparations; minced beef stew followed by cake and custard was a great favourite of hers and she guessed that her mother had purchased these ingredients to make her first day at the new school a bit more special. However, quite a lot of work was involved in the creation of the dish. Kathy chopped carrots and onions with streaming eyes, fried them and the meat in a little dripping, added flour and water to thicken the gravy and then pulled the pan over the fire, keeping it to the edge of the flame so that it did not burn and stirring it with her mother’s long-handled wooden spoon from time to time. Meanwhile Jane scrubbed the potatoes and popped them into a second pot, and then the two of them laid the table. When this was done, they damped down the fire, pulled the pans to one side of the stove and set out for Jane’s house. Minced beef stew did not need long cooking; now it was on the go, it would need no more attention until the potatoes were pulled over the fire some twenty minutes before Mr and Mrs Kelling returned home.
Kathy shrugged off the calico apron and hung it on the hook on the back of the door. In the ordinary way, she knew she should have removed her uniform before beginning to work, but she guessed her parents would want to see her in it and anyway, since she was going round to Jane’s house, the O’Brien family too would be interested in her new clothes.
Jane, however, looked at her rather doubtfully as Kathy slipped her arms into her green blazer. ‘You don’t want to wear that round our place, queen,’ she observed. ‘Suppose young Freddy climbs on to your lap and then has a pee? And all our kids are filthy as pigs in a midden. Tell you what, bring your mam’s apron . . . but do leave that jacket thing behind.’