That's Another Story: The Autobiography (12 page)

As predicted I didn’t get in to the senior school, but this could hardly be called a disappointment, more a fortunate outcome, because it meant that if I passed the eleven-plus examination - and the alternative was unthinkable - I would go to Holly Lodge Grammar School for Girls in Smethwick, where there wasn’t a nun in sight, and my brothers were already going to Holly Lodge Grammar School for Boys. The two schools were separated by a joint driveway. As it was, I nearly didn’t get in there either. A letter came from the education authority, stating that I had in fact failed the exam. My chest tightens now as I recall my mother breaking the news as if she were announcing that I had been found guilty of some heinous crime and would be hanged by the neck until dead. I didn’t feel as if I had failed an exam; I felt as if I had failed my whole life and all I had to look forward to was years of shame at a secondary-modern school, to be followed by the second-class existence of someone who had failed their eleven-plus! I went around in a state of total dejection for days, wanting to hide away as I heard my mother, brave in her chagrin, broadcast the news of my failure to friends and family.

One kind friend of my mother’s, whose own daughter had failed some years previously, said, ‘Never mind, Julie, you have always got your church.’ Trying to take comfort in this, all I could think of were the middle-aged women who fussed around the parish priest at St Gregory’s, our parish church, which we all, my father apart, attended every Sunday. These women, who cleaned the vestry and took charge of the flowers in the church, were poor souls whom my mother referred to as ‘too holy’; unattractive spinsters who were always on their knees, making cow eyes at the priest, with no hope of marrying, and who wore sensible shoes and no make-up.

But then a week or so later, a letter came from Holly Lodge Grammar. It seemed I hadn’t failed at all; well, to be more exact, I was what the letter referred to as ‘borderline’ and it said that the school were willing to take me if I promised to work hard. I felt as a prisoner must do on death row after being given a reprieve; now I could say, ‘No, I have passed! They made a mistake! I’m going to Holly Lodge!’ When I went to visit the aforementioned friend of my mother’s to impart the good news, I was labouring under the innocent delusion that she would be pleased for me. She had had her back to me at the time, standing at the kitchen sink, but she spun around and with venom in her voice she almost shouted, ‘I thought you’d failed!’

Arriving at Holly Lodge was like getting into your own bed after weeks of sleeping on someone else’s hard floor. It was familiar and comfortable; people spoke as I did; they lived in houses like mine, in the same area; their brothers knew mine; older girls from the years above came up to me in the corridor and said, ‘Are you Kevin Walters’ sister? I grew inches taller with pride. In short I knew that this was where I belonged.

They also taught PE, which hitherto I had been deprived of, even teaching myself to swim just the year before at Thimblemill Baths in Smethwick. The saga of my learning to swim went on for a couple of years. When I was about eight, Mrs Carlton, a woman whom my mother worked with who lived only a few streets away, offered to teach me and so every Sunday morning throughout the summer at the painfully early time of six-thirty I would set off, my rolled-up towel under my arm, to meet her at the baths with her two sons, who both looked to me like Olympic swimmers and were both younger than me. Seven o’clock, when the pool opened, was an ideal time; the baths would be a perfect, untroubled oblong of clear, blue water just waiting to have its surface tension ruffled by the first time swimmer. It would be free of corn plasters, toenails and other unidentifiable debris as there were very few folk who had the inclination to turn up at that time of the morning to plough its widths and lengths. All very different from the people soup that formed later in the day.

Mrs Carlton would support me under my waist, encouraging me at every turn while I simulated breaststroke, and after a while she would let go. I was terrified of being underwater and it always ended in the same way with me flailing around in total panic, coming up coughing and spluttering, and my teacher saying, ‘Just do the stroke as you were doing when I was holding you,’ but I couldn’t. I felt that despite the huge, mumsy size of this woman, with acres of white, dimpled flesh flaring out from the edges of her costume and floating freely in the water, I could not trust that she would save me were I to get into trouble. And on top of this I had to suffer the humiliation of going home, Mrs Carlton disappointed because she had not achieved her goal, and everyone saying, ‘Well? Have you learnt? What’s the problem?’ Despite this woman’s kindly assurances that I was almost there and that I would do it before the summer was out, I knew that I wouldn’t. It wasn’t until two years later in the summer of 1960 that I finally learnt.

I had a dream; one night I dreamt that I could swim. I dreamt that I was in the shallow end at Thimblemill Baths and, standing about two feet away from the side, I jumped and held quickly on to the rail that ran along it. Then I simply repeated it, standing further and further away, until I realised that I was floating towards the side and that my feet were off the bottom. The very next morning as soon as I woke up, without stopping to eat or drink a thing, I raced down to the baths, clutching my ninepence to get in, with my blue nylon, still-ruched, bathing costume rolled up in a towel, and I did exactly what I had done in the dream. Then with an elation I had never felt before this and rarely since, I was swimming; within twenty minutes I was swimming widths and then lengths. It became a passion. I went every single day of that summer holiday, stinking constantly of chlorine, and there, amongst the throng of splashing girls and dive-bombing boys, and adults trying to swim sedately up and down in between them, I felt my first tickle of lust for a lovely-looking boy who popped up like a beach ball out of the water directly in front of me, said, ‘I think you’re luscious!’ and then disappeared again. I went straight to the changing rooms to look at myself, to see what he had seen, and then straight home to look up the word ‘luscious’.

Like my brothers before me, I loved sport and at Holly Lodge spent most dinner hours and time after school in the winter playing hockey, with Saturday mornings playing right wing or right half and eventually centre half for one or other of the school teams. Once or twice the PE mistress invited the local Sikh boys’ team to practise with us. They were gentle and friendly boys but their dark, long-limbed grace made us girls feel like a herd of carthorses; indeed, at the end of the practice, the sound of thudding boots on turf as we raced back across the pitch to the showers put me very much in mind of the Grand National. The Sikhs would practise shooting goals by placing a wooden school chair in the centre of the goalmouth and hitting balls from the halfway line straight between the chair legs with deadly accuracy. They put us to shame with their speed and skill.

At the end of the hockey season the first-eleven girls would play a match with the first-eleven boys’ football team from the boys’ school across the way. Every year I would watch from the sidelines and every year I would be more and more turned on by the spectacle of big, hunky, sixth-form boys bullying off with and tackling our first-eleven girls in sometimes quite ferocious tussles that looked as if, at any moment, in a parallel universe at least, they would fling their sticks aside and rip their clothes off. When it came to my turn to play them, in the lower sixth, I could barely run for the lust of it.

But for some, the highlight of the hockey season was the game we played against the staff. The thought of wrapping my stick across the shins of a certain teacher with stale, sulphurous breath, who had accused me of cheating when I hadn’t, was almost sublime, but when it came to it, I couldn’t do it, because she was a different person on the pitch, sweet, smiling and vulnerable. In fact, this was true of all of them, with the possible exception of a swaggering male teacher, who was deeply unpopular and who had the unsavoury reputation of slithering up to girls during lessons and placing his great hoof on the corner of their desk, thus thrusting his baggy, old crotch at them in a horribly intrusive and vaguely lewd way. So there was great pleasure and entertainment value in seeing him tackled and defeated by our heroic forwards, and excitement at the possibility of his actually being maimed by a flying stick or a rogue ball. He resembled a toad, with his jowly, pasty face speckled with warts and his unctuous, smarmy persona; his too-close-for-comfort tutoring had to be punished. So of course a huge, roaring cheer of enjoyment came from the crowd when he was helped, limping between two teachers, from the pitch, having been given a mighty thwack across the ankle by our towering centre half.

In the third year, a new sport was introduced by means of an exclusive club, which was to meet every Wednesday in the gym, after school. It was basketball and the teacher running it had hand-picked us mainly from the hockey team. After several weeks of learning the game and practising, we formed a team called the White Tornados and played games against other teams of a similar standard every week or so, but the main thing that kept our interest up was not so much the playing of basketball, but the witnessing of what we imagined to be an affair between this teacher and one of the older girls. They always seemed to be having animated and hushed conversations in the PE teacher’s office, out of which the girl would emerge either bubbly and ecstatic or red-faced and tearful, and the teacher looking slightly sheepish.

Then one day in the showers after practice, one of the girls blurted out, ‘I think they’m lezzers.’ And that was it; we watched them after that like hawks: the looks between them, clocking a certain tone of voice here, a little touch of fingertips on elbow there, checking to see the signs of snogging on their lips, but the evidence was never found to be conclusive. Sometimes they would be seen in close conversation outside the staffroom door, the girl looking up at the teacher with a swoon in her eyes, the teacher looking edgy and self-conscious. It was a soap opera that lasted a tantalising couple of years until we found out from several sources, after months of detective work, the devastating news that the whole thing was merely a disappointing infatuation on the part of the girl. Shortly afterwards half the team left. I stayed on with the team even after I left school, but eventually became disenchanted as my height became more and more of a disadvantage; everyone else towered above me and, tired of jumping for the ball only to be thwacked on the head by a pair of Amazonian bosoms, I stopped going.

During the summer terms I spent my free time preparing for the Smethwick inter-schools athletics championships, which were held every year at the Hadley Stadium in Smethwick. I was a sprinter and usually competed in the 200 metres and the relay, the winning of either, but especially the 200 metres, being almost a matter of life and death. To contemplate coming second or third was not an option, and the mere thought filled me with a sickening anxiety; indeed, I frequently threw up after a race, whatever the outcome of it. When I came third in the 200 metres, the first time I had ever run it, I hid in the toilets, vomiting and crying at the same time, which is actually quite difficult to achieve, and then waited, shivering and crouching on the floor of the cubicle, until everyone else had gone home. Facing them seemed an impossibility. It felt as if when I didn’t win, I didn’t know how to be, I didn’t exist. I was ashamed and went home in dread of telling my mother. She wasn’t an ‘Oh well, it’s the taking part that counts’ sort of person.

When while still at primary school, my brother Kevin came home and told her with pride that he had come third in a maths test, she shot back instantly with, ‘Who came first?’ and when he told her, she said, ‘Oh, he’s clever!’ reserving all her praise for some other child. Worse still, when my other brother Tommy got a first-class honours degree from Birmingham University, she just said, ‘Ah well, they’re turning them away from the Harwell nuclear plant with firsts.’ So when I stood in the scullery while my mum was making a batch of her legendary rock cakes - the cricket season was, after all, upon us - and I told her of the disaster that had occurred that afternoon, I was shocked at her gentle and unperturbed response. ‘Well, it’s all right, it doesn’t matter. Forget about it,’ she said without looking at me. I presumed that she must have sensed my distress and that in her eyes I didn’t need to be put right, as I was already having the correct reaction. I believe that, had I been pleased with the result, it would have been another story.

I never lost that race again and became Worcestershire 200-metres champion in 1966. As a result of this, an athletics scout from Smethwick Harriers came and took me under his wing, stating that I might have a modicum of talent. However, I had torn a muscle in my hip at these same county championships, whilst running the second leg of the 4 by 100 metres relay race, so instead of continuing with the sprinting, which would have damaged the muscle further, we embarked on a course of training that involved walking. This was not your normal walking, as used for getting around on an everyday sort of basis; no, this was a mode of walking that no mentally fit human being would employ to go anywhere for fear of attracting the wrong kind of attention. It involved a strong, pumping arm action, which was fair enough, but it also involved arching the back and making the arse stick out in a rather rude, baboon-like fashion. Then with legs straight, overextending the knee and always having to keep one foot on the ground at any one time, it resulted in a Max Wall type of somewhat vulgar mincing, at speed, with the hips and bottom swaying exaggeratedly from side to side.

This was competitive walking, and most athletics meetings had several walking races as part of the day’s events. You don’t see it so often today, but back then it was quite usual to see people waddling along at the side of the road, in training, much the same as joggers are a common sight now. I endured the humiliation of this by going training only either early in the morning or at dusk, and even then I couldn’t escape the smirks and sometimes outright laughter, occasionally accompanied by rude pointing, of people in the street, let alone the jeers and heckles often alluding to the possibility that I might have shat myself.