The Sun in the Morning (54 page)

Bargie left at the end of the next summer term. She shortened her skirts, shingled her lovely hair and went gaily off into the great world to become a Breaker of Hearts and a fully fledged grown-up. Doreen Hepper had already left; Beryl Beale went shortly afterwards, and I made a new friend: a day-girl called Helen Keelan who was another cousin of Cynthia's. Cynthia was not pleased by our friendship, but Helen turned out to be a real soul-mate. She was a giggler, and people who can giggle have always appealed to me. I don't mean the silly sort of giggling that is really sniggering, and only indulged in by empty-headed schoolgirls of the dimmest variety, but the spontaneous and semi-suppressed variety that rolls you up and makes you shed tears of mirth.

Together we wrote endless plays for our classmates to perform—the whole school, probably due to its Anglo-Indian affiliations, was nuts on amateur dramatics. Every form put on at least one play a year for the benefit and criticism of the other forms, and during my first term at The Lawn my lovely erstwhile chum of Simla days appeared as the heroine of a vaguely medieval drama with music, written and produced by the sixth form, in which the head-girl, Doreen Hepper, playing the hero, serenaded Bargie/Marjorie; the latter teetering dangerously on a step-ladder behind a flimsy canvas tower with her top half sticking out of a window cut in it. The song, a popular dance band tune of that year, was entitled ‘Memories', and though I can't remember ever hearing it since, the tune and the words still stick in my mind when much else of far more importance has been forgotten.

Of two other tunes that bring back vivid memories of The Lawn, one — ‘My Dear Soul' — used to be played on the seafront by the Town Band in the course of concerts that they gave for the tourists on summer evenings. It is, appropriately, a Somersetshire song, for Clevedon is in Somerset, and the words on the sheet music are written in dialect: ‘Zoul' for Soul and ‘Zumerzet' for Somerset. Played by a distant brass band on a warm, golden summer evening when the swallows are flying high, it is one of the most charmingly sentimental and evocative melodies one could wish to hear, and I used to hang out of my dormitory window to listen to it.

The other one is MacDowell's ‘To a Wild Rose', which I had to play as a piano solo at a school concert. A grisly ordeal, since I have never been in the least good on the piano: or any musical instrument for that matter, unlike Bets, who passed all her public pianoforte exams with flying colours.

But the songs that not only remind me of The Lawn but that I still cherish most are the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century melodies that John Gay adapted for
Polly
, the sequel to his smash-hit success,
The Beggar's Opera
.
^*

Both of these eighteenth-century operas were revived in the 1920s, and Bets and I were taken to see
Polly
, played on tour by a light opera company in the Pavilion Theatre at — I think — Rhyl, during a summer holiday spent in Wales. We had never seen or heard anything like it before and we both, having fallen instantly and madly in love with it, spent every penny of our combined pocket-money on the sheet music and the records, and on our return to The Lawn infected the entire school with our enthusiasm. We made a puppet stage out of a drawer from one of the dormitory chests of drawers, painted a whole set of scenery, drew the entire cast on cardboard (every member of it in at least a dozen different positions), coloured them and cut them out, fixed them on small blocks of wood, and with the aid of records and spoken dialogue, gave endless performances.

Because we saw
Polly
first, we always preferred it to the far more popular
Beggar's Opera
. We still do. One of the records, the best of course (it would be), got broken many years later. But the other two still survive: very scratchy but still greatly appreciated. And Bets still
has the original piano score bought with her pocket-money at a music shop in Clevedon.

The last of many songs that remind me of my schooldays is a hymn, the one that we, and probably all British schools in those days, sang at the beginning and at the end of every term: ‘Lord, receive us with Thy blessing, once again assembled here' for the first day of term, and ‘Lord, dismiss us with Thy blessing' for the last.

There is so much that I remember of those days, but since reminiscences of other people's schooldays come high on the list of ‘things we don't in the least want to hear about' I shall pass over the fire that started in the coal-hole in the basement and that the entire school enthusiastically helped to put out; the time that I won a bet by dressing up as a boy and sneaking out of the school and down to the seafront, where I bought half-a-dozen ice cream cones and returned safely with them as proof; and the triumphant success of
The Puddleton Pantomime
, written, produced and acted in by the Misses M. Kaye and H. Keelan (both of whom thought it was
hilariously
funny and laughed a good deal more over writing it than the audience did while watching it).

There are, however, two incidents that should be mentioned; the first because it was a sight that still stands in my memory as one of the most beautiful things I have seen in this beautiful world. I shall always be grateful to Dub-dub for having the imagination to send the entire school down to the seafront, to witness ‘The Cutty Sark', that most famous of all the old nineteenth-century tea clippers, moving slowly up the Bristol Channel with the tide and a light breeze. She was under full sail for the last time — or so we were told then — and it was a day of full summer. A hot, blue, almost windless afternoon without a cloud in the sky, but with a soft summer haze lying on the Channel so that one could not see the far shore. Sky and sea were as smooth and as palely coloured as a milk opal, and except for an occasional gull nothing moved; until slowly and softly that stately, white-winged wonder materialized out of the haze like some ghost from a slower and unbelievably lovely past.

The second memorable school experience is not something I saw, but an incident that deserves a mention if only because it illustrates how extraordinarily innocent we were in those far-off days.

I had achieved the dignity of a single bedroom (of which there were only two in the house apart from those occupied by the staff) and
Helen, who by then was no longer a day-girl but a boarder, occupied one of the five or six beds in the Explosion Room: a dormitory next door which got its name from the fact that Dub-dub had once accidentally kicked on the switch of the gas-fire one night as she left her sitting-room below, and that holy-of-holies filled with gas which blew up with a horrendous bang when a housemaid with a lighted candle entered it early next morning. The housemaid was blown back across the hall, through the big drawing-room beyond, and accompanied by a great deal of glass, catapulted through the windows and out into the garden; where she was retrieved from a rose bush, unhurt except for a few bruises and a scratch or two. She was the only casualty, apart from the damage to the house. And though the blast was reportedly heard in villages miles outside Clevedon, one member of the dormitory slept right through the whole thing, despite the fact that the blast blew a huge hole through the middle of the floor, leaving her bed poised on the edge of a yawning drop. Hence ‘the Explosion Room'. It was before my time.

Helen and I became inseparable. Together we fell madly in love with Pitt Chatham, the actor who played MacHeath in
Polly
and whom Helen had never even seen. We talked a lot about love. Both of us were set on falling in love as soon as we left school, and getting married and living happily ever after: in the meantime we cut out articles about and pictures of the fascinating Mr Chatham as MacHeath, which we stuck in a jointly owned photograph-album. Together we listened, enthralled, to his voice singing those charming songs in the dusty, candle-lit darkness of our secret hideaway — a small, disused cupboard which we named ‘Giggleswick', not in honour of the famous public school of that name, but because we laughed so much in it. Closeted in here we nibbled illicitly acquired pickled onions, plotted new plays and composed scurrilous limericks about the teaching staff, or read aloud to each other; a habit that eventually led to our downfall.

Helen would often sneak into my room after lights-out and squash into my single bed where we would either read with the aid of a torch or a purloined candle-end whatever book, poem or piece of homework happened to interest us at the time, or lie and discuss life in general, plot further plays or indulge in fits of giggling in the dark. Very often we would end by falling asleep, and she would whizz silently back to her bed in the Explosion Room in the small hours. Tacklow had given
me the inclusive edition, 1885 to 1918, of Rudyard Kipling's verses, and browsing through it one night just on the verge of sleep, we had read ‘The Explorer', which begins: ‘
There is no sense in going further
—
it's the edge of cultivation
…'. My bed was of the usual narrow, iron, for-boarding-schools-and-institutions type, and I, as the rightful owner, had the side against the wall while Helen had the outer one. She had a habit of talking in her sleep and an hour or so later I was awakened by her muttering something. Presently she turned over, and lying poised on the extreme edge of the bed said aloud and quite clearly: ‘Here's the edge of cultivation … What's the use of going further?', and fell out onto the floor…

I exploded into helpless giggles, and she woke in a state of high dudgeon and demanded to know what was so funny about falling out of bed and bruising yourself black and blue? It was some time before my unseemly mirth allowed me to explain, and when it did, she too went off into gales of laughter; in the middle of which the door suddenly opened and in stalked the matron.

Well, I can't say we didn't expect reprisals. Though not to that degree. We simply couldn't understand why she should be so unreasonably furious, and we put it down to the fact that we both kept exploding into giggles during the tirade that followed (we still thought it was funny). Matron didn't, and Helen was practically frog-marched back to her bed while I was locked into my room. First thing next morning, after I had washed and dressed under Matron's stony gaze, I was taken down to Miss Wiltshire's study where Dub-dub herself, every hair of her impressive moustache quivering with outrage, lit into me as though I had been a Victorian scullery-maid caught stealing the spoons.

You never heard such a hullabaloo! It ended with me being banished to Lawnside, the annexe-house next door where most of the form-mistresses and only a handful of senior pupils had rooms, and being put into a three-bed dormitory with Cynthia (who as Dub-dub knew very well had always been jealous of my friendship with her cousin Helen) and an older girl called Netta Something-or-other. Even that was not the end of it, for up to the day that I left school the teachers made every effort to keep Helen and me apart. We were not allowed to stand together, sit together, walk together in crocodile — or out of it — and an embargo was placed on Helen putting so much as a foot in Lawnside. Needless to say these tactics were unsuccessful and
we derived enormous entertainment from circumventing them; greatly assisted by the fact that we could still, when pressed, retreat into Giggleswick where no one could reach us, or even think of looking for us, since it was positioned above the stairs leading down to the basement and well above eye-level.

The cupboard itself was merely the enclosed angle between the base of the upper staircase that led up from the hall to the first floor, and I have no idea why that wedge-shaped bit of space should have been closed in to make a cupboard in the first place. Nor do I know why we didn't break our necks getting in and out of it, since the feat had to be accomplished by leaning out across the well of the staircase below, supporting oneself on the far wall with the palm of one hand while walking along a narrow wooden ledge not much more than three inches wide. However, we became so adept at this that we could whip in or out in a matter of seconds, and once inside, lock ourselves in with a bolt bought during holiday-time and firmly screwed onto the inside. This hideaway gave us as much pleasure as Bets and I had got out of our secret place on the top of Begum Kudsia's ruined gateway. In it we stored all manner of possessions including torches, candle-ends and matches, and (the school food being unbelievably dreadful) cheese, jars of pickles and tins of ginger biscuits: commodities that Helen, whose parents were still living in a house in Clevedon to which she returned at weekends, found it easy enough to buy in the town. Once, for a dare, we even spent an entire night in Giggleswick just to prove that we could do it. But that of course was before I was sentenced to banishment at Lawnside…

Looking back on that sentence in the light of a permissive age in which every child is expected to know everything there is to know about sex from the earliest possible age, I am astounded by the fact that neither Helen nor I had the
remotest
idea why such a fuss should have been made out of what was, to us, a fairly harmless escapade. We could see no reason why so much trouble was taken to keep us apart, or why Dub-dub and her minions should have blown their tops and behaved as if another world war had broken out in their midst. No sense of proportion! — that was the trouble with grown-ups.

Yes, I had heard about Sappho and her Isle of Lesbos. But the word ‘lesbian' meant nothing to me beyond that, and I had not given it another thought. Not even when I later got my hands on a copy of a
notorious, banned novel,
The Well of Loneliness
, which, since I missed the point completely, bored me stiff. I abandoned it half-way through and was not sufficiently interested to care what all the fuss had been about or why the Lord Chamberlain, or whoever, had bothered to ban it. Why
shouldn't
a woman prefer other women to men, or have a ‘pash' on a member of her own sex? All schoolgirls were apparently expected to have ‘pashes' for other girls: as witness all that tedious business of Y-Aying! Why, I myself had been pressurized by public opinion into Y-Aying Beryl Beale, and I did not believe for one moment that Dub-dub's jungle-drums would have failed to inform her of the existence of that particular custom in her school. Or that she would have been incapable of putting a stop to it had she disapproved!