The Quivering Tree (7 page)

Revolution
disappeared in a shower of chalk dust which, settling on Mrs Crail, found plenty to settle on. When at last, breaking an intolerable silence, I muttered haltingly – in Mrs Crail's presence I was seldom able to express myself in any other way – that all I had meant by
Revolution
was wheels turning round, not the guillotine or anything like that, she gave me twenty-five lines for impertinence.

Actually, obeying the instructions of the eponymous Mr Marriott, I hadn't meant anything. Not that it would have made any difference to have said so, the little episode being merely a continuation of the malign fate which from my first entry into the school had gone out of its way to foul up any relationship I might have had with its headmistress.

To quote another instance.

In St Gregory's Alley, a pedestrian way tumbling downhill from Goat Lane to St Benedict's, an undistinguished building advertised itself as the local headquarters of the ILP, initials whose meaning I had never thought to probe until, passing by one day, I noticed that, following some refurbishment of the premises, its facade was now emblazoned with the words, ‘INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY. FREE READING ROOM AND LIBRARY. OPEN TO ALL.'

Unable to resist such an invitation, I went inside, only to be disappointed. The library, so far as I could see, consisted of two bookcases filled with dejected-looking books with titles that for the most part I could make neither head nor tail of. The sole occupant of the room, an equally dejected-looking woman who sat at a card table with a box file on it, regarded me with such distrust that, if only to establish my standing as a member of the literate classes, I felt impelled to pull out a book at random and bring it over to her with my best smile, which for all the good it did me I might as well have saved for a more propititious occasion.

‘I'd like to borrow this one, please.'

Having printed my name, my address, and the name of my school on one of her cards, she let me have it eventually, reluctantly. It was clear from her manner that she did not expect any
cachet
to accrue to the ILP from its having secured my custom. The book clasped to my chest, I walked out of the building bang into Mrs Crail, who just happened (of course!) to be descending St Gregory's Alley at that fateful moment. The title of the book, which (of course!) just happened to be turned outward for anybody to read was:
Father Gapon: Martyr of the Russian Revolution
.

Mrs Crail took Dr Parfitt's letter from me, and opened it. Perusing the contents, her smile grew even jollier than usual.

‘There are seven weeks left of term,' she announced at the end, as if telling me something I didn't know. ‘How your doctor can predict the state of your health in seven weeks' time is beyond my imagining.' Handing the letter back as if divesting herself of something subtly unclean: ‘Tell Miss Reade you are excused games for the next three weeks.
Three
weeks. I hope I have made that clear?' I nodded dumbly. ‘Thereafter, failing a fresh letter, you will be required to join in all normal school activities, the same as everybody else.'

‘Don't let it worry you, dear,' comforted Miss Reade after the headmistress had sailed away, smiling. ‘Her bark is worse than her bite. She's all right, really.'

Across the arc of the years I still have to say that I don't think Mrs Crail was all right, really; and as between her bark and her bite there was nothing much to choose. You could catch rabies from either. It may be vanity which convinces me that she did not hate the sight of me the instant I first came within range of those smiling eyes. It was only after I had settled into the school and let down my guard that the rot set in. It was then that she made the shocking discovery that I was an enthusiast, a category of persons which, along with clever dicks, she seemed to regard as having been put on earth to try her, her especially. What she clearly aimed for in her school was a pleasing mediocrity on the part of all concerned, staff and pupils alike. No difficulties, no surprises. ‘You!' she would exclaim, jabbing a pudgy forefinger at the miscreant who had dared to be difficult or surprising, and smiling all over her face as she returned an essay marked with a big blue ‘R' (for ‘Repeat in the Detention Room after school'). ‘
You
are a clever dick. A little less cleverness next time,
if
you please!'

Mrs Crail taught English – her own tunnel-vision version of it, that is. Not the incomparable jewel-box of language, the treasure-house of literature my father and my brother Alfred had encouraged me to recognize it to be, but English as a pinched, sectarian cult devoted to the worship of an obscure deity called the Syllabus. According to its inflexible tenets, as promulgated by its high priestess, one did not inquire of a poem, ‘Is this good?' or, for that matter, ‘Is this bad?' but only ‘Is it in the Syllabus?' If the answer to the question was no, then, even if its beauty took you by the throat or its unique insights transformed your life, thumbs down. Cast it into that outer darkness reserved for quotations that would never be required in an examination paper.

As an enthusiast, I found myself – to my sorrow, for I would truly have preferred a quiet life to one poised forever on the brink of catastrophe – unable to keep my mouth shut. If only Mrs Crail had taught arithmetic, say, I could gladly have stayed mum from the beginning of the lesson to the end of it, and she could have marked me down as a model citizen. But how to stay silent when you had just that minute discovered ‘Christabel'?
Not in the Syllabus!
Or ‘The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám'?
Not in the Syllabus!
Or Oscar Wilde?
NOT IN THE SYLLABUS
!

There was a lot of window glass about in the Secondary School. Seen from the bottom of St Clement's Hill, the swell of the land lending importance, the two-storey main building looked fairly imposing, although its pomp and circumstance in fact housed nothing much but cloakrooms and office with, above, the labs positioned strategically where their bad smells could waft away on the breeze to the houses on the other side of the road, without distress to the sensitive nostrils of the budding young academics below. Out of sight behind this somewhat meretricious facade, the classrooms arranged around two quadrangles divided by the Assembly Hall were bungaloid and open-air, the brain-children of an architect who must either have hated little girls or could never in his own youth have attended a school constructed on such principles.

Admittedly, in summer the long narow rooms, tall windows taking up one long side, folding doors the other, had a lot going for them. Thistledown and the occasional butterfly drifted through: house-sparrows, surreptitiously encouraged by trails of crumbs, popped in and out to relieve the tedium apparently inseparable from getting an education. In winter, on the other hand (to say nothing of the other foot), the school raised the finest crop of chilblains in East Anglia, if not the entire British Isles. In the proclaimed cause of reducing the incidence of piles contracted by sitting on radiators with nothing between young bums and their sizzling convolutions except school bloomers, underfloor heating had been installed, the pipes unfortunately at a depth which, whilst they may have contributed to keeping the magma beneath the earth's crust pleasantly warm, on the surface had to be taken on trust, of which there was not a lot about.

Keep both feet firmly on the floor at all times
was the standing, not to say sitting, order,
and you'll be all right, glowing with health
. Certainly, the mercury dropping like lead, the ink thickening in the inkwells, our noses glowed as we strove unavailingly to discourage down-dropping mucus from its ambition to form a stalactite, and our chilblained toes grew itchy to the point where pain became an exquisite torture, almost enjoyable. ‘Are your feet firmly on the floor, girls?' sounded despairingly from mistresses themselves prowling to and fro like caged animals in the space between blackboard and desks in the interest of keeping their own circulation from calling it a day.

The school rule was that when the temperature, as registered on the thermometer attached to the frame of the folding doors, showed something sub-arctic – fifty degrees Fahrenheit is the number which intrudes itself on my recollection (though I may be mistaken: it could have been 273° Absolute) – windows were permitted to be shut, doors unfolded to form a fourth wall against the encroaching ice. As a result of this dispensation, in cold-getting-colder weather very little work got done, the mistresses' little promenades bringing them on transparently disguised ploys to check the thermometer, the pupuls' energies concentrated in a fierce communal act of willing the temperature down.

‘Don't breathe on it!' Maria Veronese, whose genes were tuned to a warmer clime, would plead when Miss Adams, our form-mistress, who was short-sighted, put her face close to the glass when taking a reading. ‘You'll warm it up!'

What busy bees we were once the crucial number was passed, running for the long hooked poles that slammed the windows shut, hauling the doors along their metal trackway like sailors in
HMS Pinafore
. The quadrangles were alive with activity. We could have murdered Alice Boulter, the form half-wit, for screaming out as if it were good news: ‘It's going up, Miss! The temperature's going up!'

Back at school in mid-summer, I could afford to be nostalgic about the joys of winter. Rightly or wrongly, and even though in my absence my desk in the front row had been given to Peggy Coates because she had begun to wear glasses whilst I was not there to defend it, I sensed a welcome in the place. About my schoolfellows, my erstwhile best friends, best enemies, I was less sure. I was after all, as I was humbly ready to acknowledge, guilty of three unforgivable crimes. I had been ill, I had been associated with a death, and now, as if those two were not enough, I was living with some of Them – the Them on the other side of the great divide which separates the teachers from the taught. Not one of the girls asked if I were feeling better, or said she was sorry about my father, but then I had never been so barmy as to have expected them to. Alice Boulter, the dope, wanted to know if Miss Locke wore pyjamas or a nightie in bed at night. Both, I answered: one on top of the other. This reply raised a titter and warmed the atmosphere a little, not much.

As it happened, my personal position in Form IIIa had always been on the equivocal side. Through no fault of my own, and no particular cleverness either, I had gone straight from the First to the Third Form, which meant that, separated from my contemporaries, the children with whom I had entered the school, I found myself among others who were a full year older and had already established their own pecking order.

French had been my downfall. I was the only girl in my year to come from a private school, and French – a subject at that time not taught at all in State primary schools – was one of the few things Eldon House had taught me – taught me by the medium of a genuine Frenchwoman, what was more, so that it not only was French, it actually sounded like it. Madame Bradley was married to an Englishman and powdered her face dead white like a Pierrot's, with black outlines round her eyes. She had worn gauzy, wide-brimmed hats in class as well as tight-fitting dresses that fastened all the way down her back from nape to hem with little buttons covered with matching fabric. It was a marvel to us how day after day she could sit on all those buttons and never once move a buttock. It had given us a high opinion of the French, a race which otherwise, I am practically sure, we would have regarded with suspicion and contempt. We felt privileged to have her for our teacher, an admiration which carried over into our work. Thanks to those buttons, we had felt she was somebody worth trying for.

When Miss Parsons, my French teacher at the Secondary School, found out how much French I knew, she set in motion a personal campaign for my advancement – one that, given Mrs Crail's prejudice against excellence of any kind, would have got nowhere if the object of her endeavour had been anybody but me. By then, however, the battle lines of my relationship with the headmistress had already been drawn up; and, aware of how much I hated the proposal – I never, in all my time at the school, learned the art of dissembling in that piggy presence – Mrs Crail smiled and smiled and said what a good idea.

Peggy Coates's glasses, instead of the usual metal, were framed in mock tortoiseshell, which made her look like Harold Lloyd. They were the latest thing and she was besotted with them, to say nothing of being as pleased as Punch to have my seat in the front row. Just the same, her glance of triumph slid off me uneasily as if, my father being dead, I too was putrescent, beyond the grave, which was odd because suddenly I had never found myself so confident, so aware of life, as I was at that particular moment. The realization came to me that it was a legacy from my father – all the life he no longer had need of.

Because a gift like that wasn't something to be frittered away on trifles, I went up to Peggy and said: ‘I don't see why you needed to take my desk.'

‘My eyes, dummy!'

‘Your eyes,' I pointed out – quite amiably, I like to think – ‘have got glasses on them, making them as good as new, if not better. If not, you'd better go back to your optician and complain. If you didn't have glasses I wouldn't say a word. But as you
have
–'

Leaving the girl appalled at my cheek I went up to Miss Adams and asked if I could please have my desk back. After all, Peggy Coates had glasses, whereas I had to make do with my two unaided eyes, such as they were. Our form-mistress, who was a gentle soul, looked flustered. She obviously had not viewed the matter in the light I indicated; but my calm sense of justice carried the day and Peggy Coates, near to tears and spilling her books and papers as she pushed angrily between the ranks of desks, was returned to the second row from the back whence she came.