That's Another Story: The Autobiography (11 page)

It was in the mid-eighties and I was up in Birmingham filming
The Making of Acorn Antiques
for the
Victoria Wood Christmas Special
. It so happened that I had been put up in a hotel just two or three miles from the school and one morning, finding myself with a couple of hours to spare, I decided to go and take a look. The school, as is so often the case, seemed to have shrunk, but was just as manicured and pristine as I remembered it. And there it was, the piece of lawn, the cause and the location of my and no doubt many others’ painful and humiliating public slapping. It was with joy in my heart therefore, and a pair of high-heeled boots on my feet, that I tramped up and down the full length of this lawn, several times, purposefully and with relish, digging my heels deep into the turf. I was hoping against hope that one of the Sisters would appear and tell me to get off the grass. Alas, no one came and I’m not sure how I would have reacted if one of them had come along and challenged my behaviour. In fantasyland I know exactly how I would have acted. I would have stood there, feet apart, hands on hips, and said: ‘Please, . . . make my day . . . Go on! Try and slap my legs.’

The nuns were of the classic penguin variety, wearing black, ankle-length habits with full skirts and waist-length, black veils that billowed out behind them like giant bat wings when they walked at speed. Under this, tightly wrapped about the head like a surgical dressing, was a starched, white wimple held in place by tiny white-headed pins, and covering their bosoms a stiff white scapular, upon which hung a big, black, wooden crucifix. Dangling from the waist, often accompanied by a bunch of keys, was a large set of dark, wooden, rosary beads that clacked and jingled when they moved, the sound of which served as an excellent warning that a nun was in the vicinity.

‘My name is Sister Cecilia.’

She had a big, pale, bespectacled face, covered in fine, downy hair, and she was the teacher in charge of the kindergarten. Almost immediately I noticed that there was a tension that hung in the air at this place, which was soon to be explained. For not only did the sisters dispense helpful gems like, ‘Don’t cross your legs, you never saw the Virgin Mary cross hers’ (I had never seen the Virgin Mary breathing in and out but it was fairly vital to the smooth running of a person’s day); or ‘Beware of chocolate . . . it’s a stimulant,’ and offer strictures that patent-leather shoes were not to be worn because they reflected your nether regions, they also administered painful and random slaps to the head, meted out for such misdemeanours as whispering in class. During my first couple of weeks an incident occurred that was to set the tone for my time at this school.

After much hype and many homilies as to how careful we were going to have to be, the kindergarten was delivered of a set of new desks. They were all there in place one morning when we arrived in the classroom. Their tubular, metal legs were still wrapped in brown paper, wound around them in strips. When the class was assembled, Sister Cecilia warned us sternly that under no circumstances were we to undo this wrapping: ‘Woe betide any girl found fiddling.’ Within a day or two one of the legs on my desk, the left-hand front one to be precise, was beginning to unravel! I can recall the shocked and sudden intakes of breath as my friends noticed the thin twist of paper coming away from and revealing the pale-blue metal leg beneath. Then as if in a bid for freedom, another leg revealed itself and then another; I looked on appalled and helpless, day after day, until finally all four, having popped their wrappings, were shedding them like snakeskin. Each time Sister Cecilia came near me I expected the customary stinging thwack to the side of my head but somehow I managed to escape it. Soon other people’s desk legs began to undo. One girl stayed away from school for a whole week, terrified of the consequences, but another brave soul decided to inform Sister of what was happening to her desk and to tell her that she, the child, had had nothing to do with it. She was dragged from her place and thrashed on the legs. I can see the two of them now, the girl with her cardigan half pulled off, careering into the front row of desks and knocking a tiny chair flying, then chasing one another around in a circle, the girl up on her tiptoes, her hips thrust forward, trying to get away, silent tears racing down her cheeks, and Sister Cecilia’s large, white hand in a blur of slapping, and the big, black cross, being swung and tossed violently about in mid-air, catching the girl on the face before crashing down again on to the starched white bosom. It was an event that none of us discussed. I wanted to tell my parents but I didn’t, projecting my own feelings of powerlessness on to them and feeling a need to somehow protect them from this.

Eventually, one Sunday night, unable to sleep, in a state of terror at the thought of going to school on the Monday and despair at my own childish impotence, I confessed to my parents in an explosion of gulping tears the awful tale of the mutinous desk legs. They stood dumbfounded and then, unable to calm me, my father went off to telephone the Mother Superior, my mother thinking the whole thing a bit of a storm in a teacup. I waited, in my pyjamas by the kitchen fire, sick to my stomach.

When he returned my father still looked dumbfounded; but he was also smiling.

‘There’s no problem,’ he said, his voice lifted in bemusement.

‘But what did she say? What did she say?’

‘She laughed . . . She said it doesn’t matter, Bab . . .’

It doesn’t matter! It was incredible to me that the fear and trepidation of the previous weeks could be solved by two smiling adults in a matter of minutes, over the phone; but it seems that it was, for when I went into school the next day, we were told to remove the wrapping from our desk legs. Thus was the desk-leg saga brought to a close.

However, I never went into that classroom, or, indeed, that school without fear of what was in store and there was plenty in store over the coming years, the elocution lessons my mother had spoken about with such reverence being one of my unhappiest experiences. These were to be taken by a lay teacher. In some ways I could cope with the inappropriate nature of the punishments handed out by the nuns because they were like a different species, holed up together in an alien bubble of a life. But I felt somehow let down by the lay teachers, of whom there were only a couple, when they displayed the same lack of compassion and understanding as the Sisters. None of the teaching staff seem to have any joy in them and to my young self they nearly all appeared angry and unhappy. The elocution teacher was no exception.

Our elocution classes were held in a prefabricated hut at the back of the school. The girl sitting next to me had ‘ELECTRIC CHAIR! ELECTRIC CHAIR! ELECTRIC CHAIR!’ emblazoned on the front of her elocution exercise book. My abiding memory is of standing at the front of the class reading from a book. Throughout the reading I had consistently pronounced words that had a long A, such as ‘daft’, in the same way as words with a short A, such as ‘cat’. This was the way I spoke then and how I speak today; it was the way we all pronounced such words at home, my mother being Irish and the rest of us having Black Country accents. I knew what was expected of me, but I simply couldn’t bring myself to say this long A.

After the reading the teacher wrote out on the blackboard a list of words that were supposed to be pronounced in this way and asked me to read them out. I didn’t get past the first one, which was ‘bath’. Something in me, even though I was frightened, still refused to say it the way she wanted and every time I said ‘bath’ with a short A she walloped my hand with a ruler. I can’t recall how long I stood there but there were several stinging slaps and I know that I never gave in. It felt like some kind of final frontier to my self-worth. I was defending who I was. If I gave her what she wanted, I would be confirming my mother’s fears - that we were not good enough - and I simply couldn’t do that.

This difficulty with Standard English, or Received Pronunciation as it was then called, followed me to drama school many years later and beyond. It was not that I refused to speak it for a role, but that it caused me a certain discomfort that I never disclosed. It slowly but gradually ceased to be a problem as I came, in later years, to be more accepting of myself and who I was. My mother, of course, was forever disappointed that I didn’t come home speaking like the doctors’ daughters of her imagination, and I was unable at the time to understand and therefore to express why I couldn’t.

I’m not going to list every punishment that took place at this school, but there is one more that remains strikingly distinct in my memory. I was in what would now be year five, making me eight or nine years old. Our teacher was Sister Ignatius, a towering figure - ‘Mum, she’s as tall as the door!’ - with a florid face and thick black, beetle brows. She had a huge, booming voice and a nasty temper. One day she had had reason to leave the classroom for a few minutes, leaving the form captain in charge. There was total silence as we got on with our work. Suddenly one of the girls said, ‘Isn’t it quiet without Sister?’ The minute Sister Ignatius returned, the form captain, a humourless swot of a girl for whom the term ‘teacher’s pet’ had probably been invented, saw fit to report this innocent remark. The nun then launched herself at the child who had had the audacity to speak in her absence, the first blow knocking her clean off her chair. She then set about beating her while the girl lay cowering on the floor, trying to protect herself. After a minute or so of flailing and thrashing, Sister Ignatius dragged the child to her feet and into a small room off the back of the classroom that was used as a furniture and stationery store. She slammed the door behind them and continued to beat her.

We sat frozen, in breath-held, mouth-dry silence. Not a look was exchanged between us as we listened to the sudden violent scrape of desk legs on the wooden floor and the raining down on to this poor girl of blow after blow. When the nun emerged, some minutes later, still purple faced and enraged, we were forbidden to speak to the girl. She was shut in the room for the rest of the day. We were told to send her to Coventry until instructed to do otherwise, and I still experience a sense of shame when I think of that girl standing alone at break times and dinnertimes in the days that followed, all of us fearful of what would happen should we dare to talk to her.

How on earth we learnt anything under this tyranny is beyond me. Long division? Forget it! Long multiplication? The same. If you didn’t get it the first time, for whatever reason, it was better, at least in my book, to copy someone else’s rather than suffer the humiliation that might result if you got it wrong. In year six under Sister Augustine’s slightly less terrifying tutelage, I would spend library hour, on a Friday afternoon, reading a book from cover to cover without taking in a single word of it. All of Arthur Ransome’s apparently wonderful novels simply passed in and out of my head in a blur of meaningless verbiage. It just felt as if the whole set-up was a club that I simply would never belong to, even down to reading a book for pleasure.

But something surprisingly healing did emerge from my time at this school and, even more surprisingly, it was during Sister Ignatius’s terrible reign. On the odd afternoon we would play the miming game whereby she would get us up individually, in front of the class, to do a mime and the other children would have to guess what it was. I can still recall the euphoria I felt on hearing that nun’s laughter the first time I stood out front and I can still see the classroom on that day, flooded with afternoon sun: how colourful and beautiful it suddenly looked. I also experienced a sense of power. I had, however briefly, quelled this woman’s anger and unhappiness and somehow made her safe.

‘You should go on the stage!’ she said in her big, cracked voice, still giggling. I knew then that in her laughter and in the laughing faces of my classmates lay my salvation and the building blocks for my self-esteem.

My mother’s ambition - or perhaps fantasy is more accurate - was for me to pass from the prep school up into the senior school, but I knew in my heart that there wasn’t a chance in hell and so did she. She had already been hauled in when I was in year three and told that there was every likelihood that she was wasting her hard-earned money, nine guineas a term. I simply wasn’t keeping up. I was separated off from the rest of the class with three or four other slow learners in order to try to bring me up to scratch and it wasn’t entirely working. Mum said virtually nothing as we walked to the bus stop afterwards but her disappointment was palpable in the tone of her voice and in the few words that she did say. ‘Oh, Julie . . . Oh dear . . . Tsk, tsk, tsk.’ I felt the same humiliation and helplessness as I had when I had wet the bed, in that I did not know what to do to put it right and to stop it happening again. However, I wasn’t thrown out, so my parents must have decided that it was best to keep me there and for me to soldier on and stay the course.