That's Another Story: The Autobiography Read online

  ‘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.

  7

  ‘I Thought You’d Failed’ - Senior School

  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.

  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 w
as, 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 b
een 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.