That's Another Story: The Autobiography Page 11

  This anxiety about clothes and my appearance reached a crescendo at around the age of fourteen or fifteen when one of the coolest girls in the class was taking a group of girls to see Thank Your Lucky Stars for her birthday and I was invited to go along. This was a weekly Saturday-night pop show, filmed for ITV on Sunday nights in front of a live audience in Birmingham’s Alpha studio. It boasted the first network television appearance of the Beatles and had made a star out of a local sixteen-year-old girl from the Black Country called Janice Nicholls who, when sitting on a panel to judge the latest releases, started a national catchphrase with, ‘I’ll give it foive,’ in her thick Wednesbury accent, meaning, I’ll give it five marks out of five.

  A couple of weeks before we were due to go, I began to get into a state about what I should wear. Nothing was good enough. I scoured shops with money I had begged from my father and nothing was right; but what was right? I had no idea. So, just as in the walking race, I concocted a plan. I would just be off school, ill, and therefore unable to go. So two days before the event, I took to my bed, claiming that I felt sick. Then at lunchtime I had some soup and proceeded to make myself vomit it up. When my mother returned from work and brought me up something to eat, I did the same thing.

  I continued to do this until the day after the girl’s birthday but by this time I really did feel poorly and the doctor was summoned. He said it was obviously a tummy bug and prescribed some kind of antibiotic. For two whole weeks I lay prostrate on the sitting-room sofa, every turn of my head making me retch, unable to keep anything down except for the odd mouthful of water, weakening by the day. I was astounded and secretly thrilled that I had the power to make all of this happen and I was lapping up my mother’s care and concern until the doctor returned for the third time and, worried that I had shown little if any improvement, started to talk of a possible hospitalisation.

  Now I really was scared. The next day with monumental effort I arose from my sick bed and for the first time in two weeks I looked in the mirror, something I was quite capable of spending hours doing and which I did on most days, fiddling with my hair, picking at my skin, daubing on eye make-up. But on this day, as I stood weakly swaying in front of the mirror that hung above the fireplace in the sitting room, I saw why their conversation had taken on its frightened tone and why they had spoken with urgency about a stay in hospital. It was the face of someone else. I moved in closer, unable to take in the transformation. My hair was flat with grease and matted for the want of a good wash and brush; my skin had gone sheet-white with a yellowish-green tinge at the edges; the hollows beneath my cheekbones were so deep that it almost looked as if I had a five o’clock shadow; my lips, shrivelled and cracked, had lost all definition and were virtually the same colour as my skin, and my eyes were enormous. This last effect I would quite liked to have kept. I stared into eyes that were strange yet familiar, like those of a relative, and I watched as big, shiny tears welled up and toppled over my bottom lashes, landing hot on to my bony chest. I touched the glass and whispered, ‘I’m so sorry.’

  And so began my recovery. When I finally returned to school, people gawped as I passed them in the corridor and didn’t want to tackle me at hockey practice lest, as one friend put it, I should ‘snap’. Although I had taken some pleasure in the attention I had received and my new-found power to make myself ill just whenever I wished, I was frightened by the fact that I could simply make myself believe I was sick and then become so, and by the subsequent way in which my body then took over. What if I couldn’t have come back? This thought crossed my mind and made me shudder on many an occasion during the weeks that followed.

  Throughout my entire time at Holly Lodge I felt younger than my peers. With the onset of puberty a lot of the girls in my class suddenly appeared a good few years older than me. Some looked as if they could be about thirty with a couple of kids, whilst others looked as if they were about nine. I was of the nine-year-old variety. A lot of them were sexually active and, if not, had a good working knowledge of how you went about things. I had no experience apart from a bit of kissing and fumbling. My sex education started when playing with my friends in Lightwoods Park aged about eight. One of them drew my attention to two dogs, one mounting the other, and said, ‘That’s what your mum and dad do.’ I took issue with this, thinking it to be a personal insult to my parents, stating that it couldn’t possibly be so because my mother was a Catholic. Even if it was true I didn’t really want this piece of information and did my best to rid my head of the image of my mother on all fours and my dad behind her, slavering and looking slightly hairy.

  Then once at secondary school, I laboured under the delusion, born of a rumour spread throughout my year, that if a girl had splayed feet, it meant that she had lost her virginity. This didn’t quite make sense when I looked at the girl a couple of years above, who was from a very religious family, wore very long skirts, sported two plaits down to her bottom and was nicknamed ‘Miss Smethwick 1918’, but I still believed it and it didn’t occur to me that my mother’s feet, for instance, pointed straight out in front and what about those unfortunate girls with pigeon toes? I supposed them to be the ones I had heard about, who experienced a great deal of pain on losing their virginity, which was evidently to do with the wrenching apart of their toes and the resultant strain on their ankles. I was also told by some informed soul that you could get pregnant by sitting in a married man’s bathwater, so I always gave the bath a good rinse if my father had been in before me.

  My mother never broached the subject of sex education until I was sixteen, when she asked without looking at me, in a little girl’s voice, ‘Do you know about periods, Julie?’

  ‘Well, I should hope so, Mum, I’ve been having them for two years.’

  She knew this of course but obviously had not known how to tackle the issue. My periods starting late didn’t help in the maturity stakes. The actual moment took place at age fourteen when I was staying with relatives of a friend and didn’t feel I could ask the elderly childless couple for assistance, so I ended up stealing a pillow case from the airing cupboard and shoving it between my legs. I went home on the bus in some discomfort and got off it walking like John Wayne. When I look back, it seems that there was also something engineered about my immaturity with my peers. If I played a childish role, I was no threat and therefore more lovable, and I felt safe in it, but despite setting myself apart in this way I managed to maintain a prominent position in the group, primarily by being good at sport but mainly by entertaining them and playing the jester.

  There was also insecurity around food. For the mid-morning break, which we referred to as ‘lunch’, people brought in sandwiches, crisps and fruit. I never did this. I spent the whole of the fifteen- or twenty-minute break begging titbits off the other girls. Seeing no shame in this, I went from one to the other.

  ‘Please, please, can I have a crisp? Can I have a sandwich? Oh, go on! Can I have another one?’

  They quite rightly got miffed: ‘For Christ’s sake, why don’t you bring your own?’

  It amazes me now how I put up with the humiliation involved, day after day, and it went on for two or three years. I had always blamed this odd behaviour firstly on the fact that my mother would never fund a daily packet of crisps and secondly on the fact that I felt I would be shown up in some way by whatever food I brought in. However, seeing as some girls brought in plain bread and butter, and others bread and dripping, I don’t think that this can really be the case. Rather than any kind of shame or embarrassment being the cause of my daily cadging, I think it had more to do with the fact that if I had nothing, nothing could be taken from me. As I was the younger sister of two brothers, anything, and especially sweets or snacks, was open season. Even now I feel enraged when anyone takes food off my plate.

  Although every school report said things like ‘Julia could do better; is not working to her full potential; does not concentrate’, as the years went by at Holly Lodge, my confidence grew and my schoolwork g
radually improved. I became good at French, English and Geography, and in the fifth year a select group of us went up into the second stream, 5L. I got four GCEs, English Literature, English Language, French and Geography, while failing everything else. In the case of History, where I did no revision at all, I achieved an unmarkable grade nine. I had sat in front of the exam paper, staring at it, unable to answer a single question, so, not wishing to sit there for an hour and a half conspicuously doing nothing, I wrote about a pair of new shoes I had bought the week before, a holiday in Weymouth from a few years back and what I expected to have for my tea.

  The GCEs were the peak of my academic achievement at Holly Lodge, for once I was in the sixth form things began to quickly slide. Many of my friends had left as in those days, particularly in working-class families, the imperative was to go out and get a job. My father never really expressed an opinion on this, just wanting me to be happy, but my mother, despite her penny-pinching fear of debt and poverty, always pushed the idea that education, particularly for the boys, was paramount. At the start of the new academic year various girls from different forms were now working alongside each other for the first time and so the whole dynamic changed and new friendships were formed. It was to be the setting for a very shameful episode.

  I had become friends with an entirely new group, which took me away from some of my old friends. This little clique was led by an exceedingly bright and charismatic girl who possessed a wicked sense of humour. Whilst somewhat scared of her, like the others in our little group I was both captivated and in awe of her. After a few weeks she started to take against a certain girl, making snide comments and funny asides about her, often followed by crude little cartoons of her victim, which highlighted her bodily imperfections in a most exact and comic way and sometimes ended up on the sixth-form notice-board. Although underneath I felt distinctly uncomfortable and guilty about being part of this bullying, I did nothing to discourage it; in fact, it was the opposite. I, along with the others, supported it with giggles and laughter, joining in with vicious gossip about the poor girl that made our leader hoot with delight and made us, in turn, glow with pride. We had done good! And whilst someone else was the scapegoat, she would not direct her acid wit towards us. It was too late anyway; we were already ensnared and had now become her devoted acolytes.

  But then it began to escalate; a chair leg was unscrewed in the school hall just before assembly, hoping that, when this poor girl sat on it, it would collapse in front of everyone. I sat a couple of rows back, holding my breath, hoping against hope that she would miss assembly, or choose a different chair, and praying that, if she were to sit in it, the chair would stay intact; it did. I breathed a huge sigh of relief but joined our leader in expressing disappointment.

  Then another horrid plan was hatched: this time to rub butter on the pedals of her bicycle and put pepper in her beret. I stood with the others, unable to bear the thought of it, yet heartily agreeing to it, feigning glee and excitement; wanting nothing to do with it, yet lacking the courage to walk away. This girl had been a good friend of mine and I felt heartsore at the undeserved grief that I knew we were causing her, watching over the weeks as her bubbly personality seemed to melt away and her rounded frame became skeletal, as if she were trying to disappear. When it came to carrying out the plan, fearful of being caught and wanting to distance myself as much as possible from the dastardly act, I said that I would keep watch from the library window upstairs. I didn’t; I just sat at a table staring blindly at some reference book or other, wishing I was somewhere else. I feel huge shame today at my cowardice and regret when I think of her sitting in the sixth-form classroom later that afternoon, her face burning from the pepper, her eyes smarting and bloodshot.

  A couple of evenings after this, I was at home, lying on the sofa in the sitting room, watching television, when someone knocked at the front door. On answering it I found our victim’s mother standing there. She looked small and pale with a headscarf tied tightly round her head. She asked whether she could come in. I was very scared, knowing of course why she had come and worried that my mother, who was only in the kitchen, might walk in at any moment. She made a little speech in a voice I thought was both angry and close to tears. She said that her daughter was desperately upset and didn’t deserve this treatment; it wasn’t fair and why were we doing it? I stood there dumbly, unable to answer any of her questions. When eventually she left, I showed her to the front door but just as she was about to walk off, she turned around and said, ‘She’s got a heart of gold.’ And I knew it was true. I went straight to my bedroom, flung myself on the bed and cried myself to sleep, waking the next morning still in my uniform. I told the others the next day that the girl’s mother had turned up at my door. They were shocked and said little, I suspect fearing that there could be repercussions of some sort, and the whole sorry episode drew to a close.

  The incident was duly filed away, in ‘the never to be looked at again’ file, at the back of my head, but like anything that isn’t aired it began to smell. Several years ago I could ignore it no longer and decided to write to the girl we had bullied. I wanted her to know my side of it and how I had felt, and I wanted to acknowledge my infantile cruelty, but more than anything, I suppose, I wanted forgiveness. I apologised for the pain she must have suffered and for my weakness and cowardice, at not sticking up for her or at least walking away. She, of course, was generous in her forgiveness and made light of it all. It is a tribute to her strength of character that she withstood the onslaught of our childish bitchery and I’m reminded of this every time I read of yet another child being kept off school or, worse still, committing suicide as a result of bullying.

  The work in the lower sixth was a lot more challenging than ever before and so, it seemed, was getting up in the morning. Generally, having overslept and missed the school bus, I would amble in, in the late morning or at dinnertime, until I got so far behind that I couldn’t make head nor tail of Geography A level, and Molière’s L’Avare might just as well have been written in Mandarin. Eventually at the end of the lower-sixth year, Mr Taylor, our deputy head, took me to one side and gave me a letter addressed to my parents. Mr Taylor - who unfortunately didn’t take us for A level and with whom a great number of girls, myself included, had been romantically infatuated - was a brilliantly inspired Geography teacher who got thirty hormonally challenged and totally uninterested girls through Geography GCE by the sheer force of his unique personality. You couldn’t help but remember his lessons; he was witty, funny and eccentric and often attracted the attention of a chattering girl by hitting her on the back of the head with a piece of chalk, thrown from some distance and with deadly accuracy. Today, of course, he would probably be up for assault.

  ‘Julia . . .’ Teachers always called me Julia. ‘We don’t want you to come back next year. You will never get your A levels now; it’s a complete waste of everyone’s time, as you are too far behind. You simply haven’t put in the work. And we don’t like your subversive influence.’

  I looked up into the intense blue eyes behind the horn-rimmed specs whilst scrabbling for the meaning of ‘subversive’. Did it refer to my truancy, which had got so bad that I was hardly ever there? Or could it have referred to the time when I had gone into an empty classroom, egged on by my friend, and thrown a metal tubular chair at a thin wooden partition, on the other side of which was our tightbunned and straight-faced form teacher who, in her terrible Edward Heath French accent, was in the process of teaching the upper sixth French group? It was reported that the resulting clatter had almost caused her to collapse with fright.

  I went home that afternoon, posted the letter to my parents, unread, into a dustbin outside a shop and told my mother that I had reached a momentous decision: I would take up nursing. There was no need for me to stay on at school; I would prefer to get a job for a year and save some money (the word ‘save’ was always a good one with my mother). Surprisingly, without any discussion, she agreed. I went straight upst
airs and looked up ‘subversive’.

  8

  The Little Nurse - Work

  My first full-time job was in an insurance office in Birmingham. Prior to this, aged about fifteen, I had been employed on a Saturday and during the school holidays at C&A Modes in the centre of Birmingham, where, along with my friend Chris, I worked backstage, as it were, unpacking the crates and parcels of blouses, dresses and skirts and other assorted items of clothing, then counting each one, after mentally tearing holes in its sartorial tattiness, logging it and hanging it up.

  We then found much more interesting employment at a sweet shop in Smethwick. It offered two advantages: there was no boss present, and every Wednesday night and all day Sunday we were left to our own devices. The shop sold every kind of sweet and, owing to the fact that there was no till roll and no real record of what was delivered and subsequently sold, we gorged ourselves freely on crisps, ice lollies, raspberry ripples, Bassett’s sherbet fountain (a personal favourite), fruit gums and Caramac chocolate ad nauseam, literally. We gave away packets of cigarettes to boys we fancied and spent hours on the telephone, playing daft tricks on members of the public, claiming that we were from a market research company and asking them lewd questions about their sex lives and body parts, or telling them we were from the telephone exchange and then asking them to make a high-pitched squeal down the phone, as a means of ‘testing the line, madam’. Needless to say, it was not a job that lasted long, once the rather absentee proprietor cottoned on to what was happening.