Bad Blood (19 page)

The high school liked girls with rounded characters, loyal, outgoing, serviceable girls who made the best of themselves. Even the communal fantasies were well groomed. Quite a lot of girls back then dreamed of becoming air hostesses. Being an air hostess hadn't yet been revealed as waitressing-in-the-sky, but was somehow connected with team spirit, patriotism and the WAAF officers who mourned the pilot-heroes as they pushed mimic planes about in headquarters bunkers in war films. In peacetime there was more chance of marrying a pilot; or a first-class passenger might at any moment intuit from the way you poured his coffee that you had the sterling spirit and the poise to play his helpmeet on solid ground somewhere in Surrey.

Meanwhile, Whitchurch was a self-satisfied little Shropshire market town that took its character from retailing and auctioneering and accounting. The cattle market was on Fridays and half-day closing (religiously observed) was on Wednesdays. Whitchurch had missed out long ago on the great local events of the early Industrial Revolution that had created Ironbridge, although there was Smith's Foundry still and Joyce's Clock Factory (the wartime voice of Nazism on the radio, Lord HawHaw, a.k.a. William Joyce, was a cousin), and a stagnant wharf
where a disused branch of the Shropshire Union Canal came to a quiet end. This cul-de-sac stood conveniently for the town's position.

It was rumoured that once upon a time Whitchurch was nearly picked instead of Crewe as the site for the great railway junction of the region, but some visionary reluctance on the part of the town fathers had saved it for rural commerce. The present station was sleepy, just one of the stops between Shrewsbury and Crewe, although it did have a doomed line that ran due west into Wales to Aberystwyth and another to Chester, and a coal depot. Otherwise, there was a cheese factory and a new Silhouette corsetry factory where bold women in curlers made the armoured (padded, circular-stitched, rubberised, boned) bras and girdles that would mould all those rounded characters.

The town's own fat navel was a three-way road junction slap in its middle called the Bull Ring, the original site of the cattle market. High Street, Green End and Bridgewater Street crowded with shops – ironmongers, grocers, outfitters, stationers, drapers, seed merchants – met there in a knot. But perhaps the most distinctive feature of Whitchurch (which had a total population of about fifteen thousand) was the number of pubs, more than thirty of them, ranging from ‘hotels' like the Queen Vic, where the prosperous farmers lunched while their cattle and hogs went under the hammer, to spit-and-sawdust snugs like the Back Street Vaults, or Grandpa's old haunt the Fox and Goose, where the lower orders lurked. Whitchurch was a hard-drinking place every day, not just on market days, a tight little town was its reputation, in more senses than one.

Sundays were particularly busy, since Wales was dry on Sundays. Then the same blue bus that I caught to school turned into a drinkers' shuttle ferrying thirsty Maelorites over the
border into England, where on the Whitchurch town boundary stood the huge Highgate pub, tiled like a public convenience, proudly boasting on its sign – depending which direction you approached from – that it was ‘The First/Last Public House in England'. Not that everyone drank there; they distributed themselves around the town until the witching hour of 10.30, when they converged on the bus once more. Going home, they'd snore their way past another sign of lacy ironwork with only one side to it, and no electric light, that said
Croeso i Gymru, Welcome to Wales
.

On Monday mornings the bus smelled of Wem Ales and Woodbines: selaW ot emocleW. None of us spoke Welsh, but we had broader Shropshire accents than Whitchurch people, marking us out. Then there were our own social strata: the bus served three schools, the secondary modern (mixed), the boys' grammar school and the girls' high school, and it had an elaborate unspoken seating plan.

The back seats were reserved for big girls of fourteen and fifteen who went to the secondary modern, but only just. They had perms, boyfriends and jobs lined up, and they wore their school uniforms in a sketchy, customised way, with extra bits and bits missing, and nylons whose ladders they fixed showily with nail varnish. They had a lot to talk about and laugh over in private. They painted their nails on the way home and picked off the varnish the next morning, although sometimes they passed around a bottle of remover that smelled headily of pear-drops. They didn't have homework, but kept changes of clothes in the shopping bags they used for satchels; school was for them a last concession to other people's picture of childhood, for in the country girls were grown up at fifteen.

The secondary modern boys were younger for their age and scuffled about in the middle seats, playing at being wild, priding
themselves on the filthiness of their ties and wearing spare cigarettes behind their ears. Although they sometimes looked up girls' skirts and told dirty jokes, they were second-class passengers, the bus was girl territory, the real tearaways among the boys didn't stoop to catch the bus, but biked to school on the days when they weren't truanting.

And the grammar school boys and high school girls, a conspicuous and shifty minority, distributed themselves around the front seats as they boarded. Grammar school boys stood out sacrificially in bright purple blazers and caps. At least the high school's navy blue matched the majority – although only at a distance, there was no getting around the stigma. The very first time I caught the bus I committed the terrible solecism of sitting next to a big girl who was saving a seat for her friend in the next-to-back row. She very soon – with a kind of matronly contempt – let me know my mistake. Those first few months I ended up more often than not next to a real pariah, Gilbert, a pale and soft-spoken grammar school boy whose mother had once complained to the bus driver when a rude boy stole his cap. In any case, sitting next to someone of the opposite sex meant you were nobody.

In theory we who'd passed the eleven-plus were supposed to despise the secondary modern kids for being common and thick. In practice we envied them for knowing how to be outsiders and as we grew older we aped their style: caps and berets balled up in pockets, greased and lacquered quiffs of hair, secret lockets and chains with rings on them under their shirts. When rock and roll and rebels without a cause hit Whitchurch they were ready with the right look and so were we. In time my old Hanmer school enemy Gail and I would even form our own girl gang and inherit the back seat. But for now being bused just felt very lonely. In my oversized
gabardine raincoat (with hood), over the top of my cardboard-stiff blazer, over the top of my oversized gymslip, with my new beret and badge and my imitation-leather satchel weighed down that first morning with my shoe bag and plimsoles and indoor sandals, all marked with my name in indelible ink as instructed, I was like an evacuee or a displaced person. The bus picked me up every day from The Arowry corner at 8.15 and dropped me off again at 4.30, and in between it was just me and all sorts of Latin.

The days went by dreamily, for I was high on sleeplessness and often feverish from sinus infections that made my cheekbones buzz and my eyes droop. The words, maps, lists and diagrams in my textbooks were to me classic ciphers, empty and O-shaped – obedient, open, waiting to be filled with meaning. I'd get light-headed over the simple, blissful fact of alphabetical abstraction; the thought that the smudgy marks I made shared the same powers as the ones printed in books was a continuous miracle. Numbers were harder, they were more tied to things, but once we got on to algebra I felt safer. This was the letter of the law: suddenly I was doing a right thing. I'd always been a speed-reader, and now that reading was regarded as work I was industrious to a fault and used up my third-form miscellanies in no time.

Extra tasks were a godsend. I especially relished one in particular, making a geography scrapbook, sticking in pictures divided by country and colony. Applying scissors and glue to the vicarage collection of
National Geographic
s gave me an excuse for annexing more of the ledger end of the table at home; it also suited my own mental geography, which was all cut-up and collage, a mimic empire of signs. I imagined my memory as a series of rooms full of old coins, stuffed snakes and dried, flat flowers. I learned verse by heart with ease and
hung it on the walls like tapestry samplers. With a small extra effort I could store in imaginary cupboards and call up before my mind's eye whole pages of biology textbook, or French irregular verbs. But Latin set texts themselves were my best trophies. ‘
Gallia est omnis divisa in tre partes
 . . .' Caesar's
Gallic Wars
exuded the most detached and conquering confidence. All books were like pop-up books to me back then and Caesar especially. His were words you could marshal like armies of lead soldiers.

But I lacked the courage to put up my hand in class to volunteer answers and, when forced to read out loud, I slurred the words and scrambled red-faced for the end of whatever folksy and supposedly musical lines from a play or poem we were ‘elocuting'. ‘Up the airy mountain, / Down the rushy glen . . .' I longed to put the noisy nonsense out of its misery and dissect it in private. I didn't know how to pronounce half the words I played with on paper, of course, and was too humiliated to take in what they were supposed to sound like when helpful teachers corrected me. Saying anything in French was out of the question, self-consciousness stopped my mouth. ‘
Je m'appelle
 . . .' My name wouldn't go into French and I always mumbled it anyway, so that people thought I was called Laura.

In class, the only progress I'd made since Hanmer school was in stoicism: I learned to swallow my tears. Nonetheless, thanks to written exams I came top in nearly everything at the end of the first term. This gave me great pleasure, for surely it meant that my private currency had value in the world outside. I hugged myself. My triumph was tinged with vengeance, too. That'll show them, I thought. I meant the other girls and the teachers who'd suspected me of having someone else who did my homework. But mainly I meant my parents
and particularly my father. He'd taken me aside the day before I started at the high school and told me that I should not expect people there to find me clever, as they had at Hanmer. He just wanted me to have a sense of proportion, to get things into perspective, to take a balanced view, to be realistic. That'll show him, I thought, carrying home my end-of-term report: it's not like telling the time or riding a bike after all. It's Latin
and he doesn't understand it
.

He had to take comfort from the abysmal marks I got for physical education and especially gym, which
was
the bike-riding fiasco over again, pretty exactly. I could play leapfrog and climb trees. I could even ‘vault' a five-barred gate if I started from the third bar up (I was too short otherwise): then, one hand on the top, the other on the second bar down on the other side and over you go! But faced with a vaulting horse I was abashed, I faltered and ran out of conviction long before I landed on the so-called springboard and collided in slow motion with its hard leather flank. On the wall bars I suffered from vertigo. I couldn't climb ropes at all, my arms became quite strengthless and I shook with my fake and useless efforts. No amount of encouragement did any good and very soon the gym mistress came to regard me with real distaste.

My wretchedness made me unteachable, I had no spontaneity, no openness, I couldn't be helped. For her I was an unhealthy child in the moral sense, a natural malingerer. She'd haul me over the horse with gritted teeth, she didn't like to touch me, you could tell. But then she was the one – since she was responsible for our deportment and ‘hygiene' – who had to send my parents notes about the lice in my long, untidy hair (which I still wore in pigtails) and the one who had to try to teach me to walk without slouching when I went up on speech day to collect my prizes, crossing the stage first as the youngest
and (as she said) giving such a bad impression at the very outset. I was the sort of girl who let the side down given half a chance. Nonetheless she soldiered on and refused to leave me out of her lessons, even when I persuaded my mother to give me notes saying I had a headache. I wasn't surprised she wasn't convinced, for I thought I was cheating. But perhaps my blocked sinuses did have something to do with how bad I was at gym, perhaps after all I did lack balance? At the time, both the gym mistress and I took my passive resistance personally, as a trait of my character. And it was true that I could stand on my hands when no one was looking.

I couldn't sing a note even if no one was listening, though – and my tone-deafness was a great disappointment to the music mistress, who had taught my mother twenty years before. Several of the older spinster teachers remembered my mother for her prettiness, her acting ability and the sweetness of her singing voice, so I wasn't for them quite the forward peasant the younger ones took me for. Although it was obvious I didn't take after her, at least I had a mother with some accomplishments. But in music lessons I'd doodle in my jotter and Miss Macdonald would send me out for fidgeting, more in sadness than in anger: why couldn't I sit still and listen? If I'd been able to explain myself I'd have said that music, being unintelligible, scrambled my thoughts like static, so I had to shut it out. When we sang in assembly I'd use my Hanmer church choir trick and mouth the words silently. Most of the hymns I knew already and some I loved for their association with vicarage dark corners: ‘Immortal, invisible / God only wise' always cheered me up,
that
was a style of mystery I felt at home with.

For speech days the high school had a school song of its own, dating from its 1920s heyday, a kind of hymn to hockey, with a rousing chorus – ‘There's many a school in Britain / And
schools across the sea / Where girls may be as happy / As clever and as free . . .' No one quite knew whether to be proud of the song or not, since it sounded very dated by the 1950s and not even Miss Macdonald's prize pupils could manage the setting with grace. It got higher and higher until it ended on a drawn-out squeaky crescendo: ‘. . . just the
schoo-oo-ool
for me!' The music had been written by a friend of the then headmistress, herself a Somerville graduate. He was called Montague Phillips, composed ‘light operas' and must have had some very light 1920s sopranos in mind for the high point of the chorus. The verses in between called for less vocal gymnastics, so you could concentrate on the words (‘by Miss S. Bostock'), which are wonderfully redolent of the ethos that shaped such schools: