The Following Girls (6 page)

Yellow merit badges were slightly easier to come by but there were still only four of them in circulation at any one time like Orders of Merit or Companions of Honour or Garters. Someone had to leave the school or die or elope with their orthodontist (in the infamous 1962 case) for a Yellow to become available.

Mary Field’s chess gong would normally have been it for school news. There had been a happy time when the names of those in detention were read out to shocked silence, a real black cap moment: ‘The following girls . . .’ but Dr O’Brien’s arrival had put an end to the practice on the grounds that the additional humiliation was ‘unnecessary and inhumane’ (or so she put it at the policy meeting). But she too had probably seen the smirks and heard the admiring giggles as the same naughty names were recited week after week, heroines of the wrong sort of school story.

O’Brien’s unwillingness to draw attention to the undesirable element meant that Mrs Mostyn wasn’t able to give her next announcement the weight it deserved, but the assembled girls sensed at once that something significant had occurred. Eliza Warner was to be head of Nightingale House with immediate effect. There was a puzzled burst of applause as the captain badge was handed over and Eliza (who had been sitting in the second row of prefects) now took the empty seat alonside the Head in the first. The seat where Alison Hutchinson usually sat.

‘What happened there?’ whispered Baker.

Stottie shrugged her shoulders. A hushed hum filled the hall as the girls puzzled over the substitution.

‘
Silence
! Well done, Eliza. I’m sure that
you
’ (the tiniest telltale emphasis) ‘will be a fine example to the younger girls. So important.’

Mrs Mostyn preferred not to read out the sports news herself: always a lowering change of tone after
Gladsome Minds
, she felt, and in any case it was good public speaking practice for the sixth form. Today’s results had been delegated to the school’s games captain and Julia Smith, now seventeen and darling of the Lower Sixth, was standing alongside the Mostyn, waiting to divulge. She would have scored quite high on the Bryony Scale, noted Baker: tall and slim with that wavy auburn hair and perfect white teeth – but ‘dress’ would have let her down. Ever since her triumph in the tennis tournament she seemed to be forever playing or refereeing or coaching or cheering on some game or other, tricked out in a sort of mongrel kit. This morning it was a divided skirt, leotard and hockey boots finished off with her grandmother’s old Fawcett cricket sweater, a hangover from the pioneering 1920s when all sports were fair game and the domestic science kitchen was a carpentry workshop.

‘She wants a cravat with that,’ hissed Stottie as she sized up the ensemble, ‘or spats.’

Over the sweater Julia wore a fashionably junior-sized blazer, heavy with its six-year crop of enamel: tennis (natch), deportment, netball, a yellow ‘School’ badge and
all four
personal survival medals which proved that she could, if required, retrieve bricks from deep water or make a rudimentary float from a pair of Winceyette pyjamas – so likely. As the orderly queue for lifeboats formed on the promenade deck to the sound of ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ and the steady scrape of deckchairs being rearranged, there Julia would be in the icy North Atlantic, personally surviving on a balloon of stripy brushed cotton.

The lower school inter-house netball semi-finals had been won by Fry and Stanhope (Curie and Nightingale being rubbish at team games). The head girl, in pride of place at Mrs Mostyn’s right, tried her best not to cheer too keenly because the head girl was also head of Fry House. This development had been unforeseen and did not, technically, contravene the Fawcett Code but it had smelled a lot like pluralism to Queenie: ‘Or do I mean nepotism?’ she asked when the double promotion was announced. ‘One of those.
Greedy
, either way. Head girl
and
house captain? She’ll be invading Poland next.’

Fry and Stanhope. Who the hell was Stanhope, anyway? Baker had once put a motion to the School Council suggesting an update of the house names. Her cousin’s school had houses named after the conquerors of Everest said Baker, face suspiciously straight. Mrs Mostyn, who had been the presiding member of staff at the meeting, pointed out that Mildred Fawcett, who christened the original houses in 1900, wanted specifically to celebrate (Mrs Mostyn could no more split an infinitive than dangle a participle)
specifically
to celebrate
feminine
achievement. Fair enough, conceded Baker, but could they not celebrate something a bit more up-to-date: like four great women composers, say, or artists? Mrs Mostyn had looked at the girl very sharply. What a ghastly little smart-aleck she was. Was she being facetious? Surely not, but Baker’s proposal had kept her awake that night just the same. She managed the four artists eventually (just do-able if one allowed sculpture and included Kate Greenaway and Beatrix Potter) but
composers
? Not possible.

Julia still held the floor. The previous afternoon’s league match had been against St Ursula’s who had made mincemeat of the home side. Julia Smith might have finessed the odd tennis trophy but Mildred Fawcett had never really been an especially sporty school. The small suburban site had only space for three courts, hockey was a twenty-minute hike away and the results were invariably ‘disappointing’. Julia certainly looked disappointed. Stephanie Stott and the Under 13s had ‘done their best’ but they had been trounced 14–1 by the superior fire power of the local convent. The fourth form sat on its hands and there was even some booing from the fifth (like Guernseys in a far-off field) but there wasn’t a peep of complaint from the goons: a blind eye; a deaf ear. The girls needed an outlet and it might, God knows, put a bit of heat under the Under 13s. Very
Unschool
, of course, not to clap, but no more than the eleven little slackers deserved. You could tell Julia thought so, as she grinned approvingly at the front row of the gallery.

‘But the good news,’ Julia raised her slightly husky voice, immediately stilling the outbreak of chatter, ‘is that Penny Drummond of Lower 5P has been picked to join the Surrey Under 16 ladies fencing team.’

Frabjous abandon in the ranks, even though Penny Drummond’s skill with a foil owed bugger all to Mildred Fawcett and a very great deal to her long-suffering father’s willingness to spend his weekends driving to tournaments in draughty sports halls in places like Leicester and Ashton-under-Lyne.

On and on it went. Out of the corner of her eye Baker could see Bunty stroking purposefully at the ladder on her knee, coaxing it down her calf. Bunty’s legs were nine out of ten (always something to strive for).

‘Very well done, Penny. Everybody,’ smirked Julia ‘didn’t she do well? Hip-hip?’

‘Ra-a-a-y!’

‘You can do better than that!’ Like some tosser in a pantomime. ‘Still can’t hear you!’

Baker looked along the cheering row: schoolgirl complexions livid with spots, crooked teeth reined in by the sinister glint of their braces, crooked hair held in check by clips and slides and loops of elastic. A chemist’s shop aroma of (permitted) cough sweets and Victory Vs and Fisherman’s Friends. The proles in the very front row were wetting their little selves: shouting louder to please Julia. Young Steve Stott’s face was almost bruising with strain.

‘Hip-hip?’

‘R-a-a-a-a-ay!’

And Julia was smiling now – her mouth was, anyway. Baker watched the older girl scanning the rows of screaming blue murder, then suddenly Baker caught her eye and Julia seemed to pause mid-grin and one sleek auburn eyebrow arched higher than the other. The practised move made her look smugger than ever. Baker pictured pinning the pale, pretty Julia to the garage dartboard, taking aim again and again and again, arrows sprouting from all over her stupid face. Treble twenty would be right between those unsmiling blue eyes.

Mrs Mostyn was also watching Julia from behind her upswept spectacles while pretending to straighten the skinny ribbon bookmark in her hymnbook, marvelling at the girl’s unteachable gift for bending a crowd to her will. Look at them all: had them in the palm of her hand,
eating
out of it.

When the storm had passed, the Mostyn rose effortfully to her feet. She closed her eyes and there was the hint of a chant in her lah-di-dah tones as she gave her godless recitation of a prayer selected from her other book, a brown one: leader snot; witch art; usual stuff. And Baker watched as Brian and the chaps made signs of crosses over their navy V-necks. They weren’t Catholic or anything – wouldn’t be in the hall if they were. Catholics bothered God in their own mysterious way Tuesdays and Thursdays in the first floor music room. Jews Mondays and Fridays. Jews. Were there hymns for Jews? wondered Baker. And if not, why not? There were all-purpose hymns surely? They weren’t
all
stood up, stood up for Jesus. And the God was supposed to be the same. Were angels kosher? The Old Testament had angels. Baker turned to ask Bunty but then remembered that she wasn’t speaking to her.

There was a special board for house notices outside the assembly hall and Eliza Warner’s name was already in place on the list.

‘What happened to whatshername?’

‘Stole an eye shadow from Woolworths or something, so my little friend Bryony tells me,’ murmured Queenie. ‘Suspended for the remainder of the term pending a governors’ meeting, so Eliza gets promoted.’

‘Which reminds me,’ said Baker, ‘I found a use for that bogus badge.’

Baker had been to a church jumble sale a few weekends earlier and while rootling in a box of dead men’s buttons had unearthed a whole blazer’s worth of random school badges, King’s Manor by the look of them (nowhere else offered lacrosse). Baker was wearing ‘Lacrosse’ herself but the treasured white ‘School’ badge deserved a better home and where better than the head girl’s lapel?

‘It’s still there. She’s got so many she hasn’t even noticed. Left her blazer on a bench yesterday and I seized my moment: there was just space under “Hockey”.’

Chapter 4

The rest of the form had charged out of the hall towards the rain-glazed exercise yard but Baker dawdled in the lobby, putting off the horror that was Tuesday morning games. Games. Games used to mean quoits and hoops and bean bags covered in brightly coloured burlap. Fun and games,
proper
games and Sports Day. Baker cuddled the memory. A whole field alive with chatty six-year-olds in vests (summer ones) and navy knickers, running up and down holding spoons with eggs in them. One mad, marvellous year lovely, clever Miss Gatsby who was new and wore flick-ups and lovely green glass beads and who always gave the winner a big, soft freesia-scented hug had combined the dressing-up and three-legged races so that the finishing line of small girls in outsize tea gowns and vast picture hats looked like a drunken vicarage garden party.

Races over, it would be time to wriggle back into a dozen different red ginghams in a hundred different dress patterns and tidy all the different hairstyles: braids and bunches and tails – low ponytails, high ponytails,
side
ponytails – and those of the little coloured twins whose heads were ploughed and scattered with fuzzy-felted fields, a plaited scarecrow on duty in the centre of each square.

Ribbons re-tied, buttons buttoned and they would all flock round the trestle tables spread with beakers of fluorescent orange squash and paper plates of unfamiliar biscuits (the kind that said on the top how nice they were). And pretty doll’s sandwiches – pink and white, yellow and white – the sliced bread so plump and soft that tiny fingers left dimples in the bright white dough, penny-sized munches missing from the discarded crusts.

Even netball was a game in those days but it was mortal combat now – especially the way Bryony and her lot played it. It wasn’t a
sport
either, was it? Not really. You never saw netball on the telly, grown-ups didn’t play it, there weren’t clubs for it like golf or tennis. Nobody ever went on a netballing holiday – except possibly Miss Drumlin. Miss Drumlin was painfully keen on sport of all kinds and played lacrosse for Middlesex. At least the Mandies very much
wanted
it to be Middlesex (may actually have been Surrey but where was the fun in that?)

On a normal Tuesday, Miss Drumlin would pick her pets to be the four team leaders who would then pick
their
pets plus the straightest shooter and the tallest girl in the class – not necessarily in that order – before finally divvying up the lumpy, butter-fingered leftovers who’d have to take whatever position remained (wing defence was usually the last to go). But not everyone could play. Give or take a flu outbreak, there should (in theory) be four girls left over from a class of thirty-two: a Mandy-shaped foursome who could loiter on the sidelines and pretend to practise passing.

But first came PT. Ugly, jumpy, stretchy movements led by the ugly, jumpy, stretchy Miss Drumlin. The Drumlin had been delayed that morning by a prole with a nosebleed. There was no Fawcett matron. Instead the role was shared by Miss Drumlin and a scary ex-hockey international called Mrs Bremner who haunted the touchlines in a judo suit or (if wet) re-sorted the lost property cupboard armed with a gaily-striped Thermos traditionally believed to contain a fortifying blend of Horlicks and cherry brandy. Neither mistress had any patience whatever with any sort of ailment, be it headache, sore throat, growing pains or, in one nasty but mercifully not life-threatening case, scarlet fever (‘Don’t
fuss
, Melanie! It’s just a heat rash!’). And Mrs Bremner gave painful periods very short shrift and kept elaborate note of the menstrual cycle of all regular sufferers. Cry off too often and she would consult her precious chart – ‘
Again
? So soon?’ – and threaten letters home and internal examinations by the school doctor until the pain subsided and the poor hockeyphobe agreed that yes, do you know, yes, perhaps the aspirin had done the trick after all.