CHAPTER ELEVEN: School Friends

Not long ago, I watched a television programme in which a historian was describing life in the fifties. Although she was a young woman, she spoke with such authority that she gave the impression that she, herself, had lived through those years.
‘The fifties,’ she said, ‘were drab, dreary years.’
This is untrue. I daresay, to a young person of today, the post-war period would have seemed drab and dreary by comparison. My generation, however, was not brought up to equate happiness with material possessions and although we had less, we were happier because, quite simply, we were never bored. We had learned to entertain ourselves by using our imagination. Our pleasures were simple. I looked forward every week to buying my favourite comics, School Friend and Girl and I spent many hours in Falmouth Library happily choosing books to borrow. Because our lives weren’t dominated by television, our hobbies occupied much of our spare time. As well as my drawing and painting I did a good deal of sewing, rattling away on my mother’s treadle-operated machine; I also had a miniature, hand-operated sewing machine, picked up at an auction sale, which was so old that it could only do chain stitch. My parents had also acquired a piano at one of the auctions they regularly attended in order to buy the furniture needed to fill our big house; it was a very antiquated piano, painfully out of tune and with one or two broken strings, but to me it was a source of endless pleasure. I wanted to have piano lessons but my mother said it would be too much on top of all my school work. What she really meant was that piano lessons were too expensive. Also at an auction, my mother had won a bid for a knitting machine. She had intended to use it herself but couldn’t fathom how to do so and so she gave it to me. I quickly discovered how it worked and found I could make my own jumpers in no time at all. It was only a very basic, single-bed machine but I could obtain all sorts of patterns and fairisle effects using the odds and ends from my mother’s hand-knitting yarns.
As far as entertainment was concerned in the fifties, the cinema played an important part. In Falmouth, we had two cinemas - the Grand and the Odeon and an evening at the pictures was something you could really look forward to. You certainly had your money’s worth. The show would begin with the ‘B’ movie, followed by Pathe News, advertisements and trailers. Usherettes would walk around in the interval with trays of ice-cream and, to me, a visit to the cinema without a choc-ice was unthinkable. You had to lick it slowly so that it would last well into the start of the main feature. As a small child, I had loved Laurel and Hardy but now that I was older I much preferred Norman Wisdom; no-one else could make me laugh as much. I saw all the famous films deemed suitable for children such as Lassie Come Home , Genevieve and all the well-known musicals; I used to drive my sister mad with my incessant, early morning renderings of songs from Oklahoma and Carousel. My school also organised visits to the cinema to see fiims which were considered educational, such as Scott of the Antarctic and A Night to Remember which was the first film about the sinking of the Titanic. There was an actual survivor of the Titanic disaster living in Falmouth and she was invited by our school to see the film. Afterwards, she climbed on to the stage at the Odeon to say a few words and be thanked by the manager; she was an elderly lady and she seemed rather overwhelmed by all the attention.
Sophisticated modern children are so accustomed to realistic special effects that they can watch, without turning a hair, films which would have scared me to death. Once, I saw a film called The Green Slime. It was about an alien, fungal growth which grew at an alarming rate and smothered everything with which it came into contact. It was abysmally bad. Even so, it frightened me so much that I couldn’t sleep that night and I had to get up in the small hours to make an inspection of the house and reassure myself that we weren’t about to be overwhelmed by rampant fungi.
My friend Jenny and I established a profitable enterprise by selling hand-painted portraits of famous film stars which we copied from magazines. These celebrities were the heartthrobs of the day because there were as yet no rock stars or boy bands. As girls, our role models, generally speaking, were Pat Smythe ( if you were horsey ) or Margot Fonteyn ( if you were mad on ballet, as I was ). If I’d been asked to name my own favourite film star, I loved animals so much that would have said, without hesitation, Lassie. How that film had made me weep!
Once, my mother took me to see the very latest in cinema-going experience, a 3D film. When we bought our tickets we were given special spectacles to wear while watching the film. The frames were made of cardboard and I fiddled with mine so much that they almost fell to bits and kept slipping off. The film was silly and I was not impressed by the 3D effects. I’m not surprised that it turned out to be a very short-lived craze.

In Britain, by the mid-fifties, there was a mood of optimism which was infectious. Even in Cornwall, which had always lagged behind the rest of the country, you were aware that things were changing and that people were looking to the future.You sensed that something exciting was just around the corner, waiting to happen. As grammar school students, we were regarded as the élite; a great deal had been invested in our education and we were expected to repay our country by pursuing worthwhile careers. During the war, circumstances gave women the chance to prove their worth and although sexual equality was still many years ahead, attitudes were changing and our teachers encouraged us to take advantage of the fact that, at last, the door of opportunity was open to us. At school, each year was divided into two groups: in the ‘A’ stream you did chemistry or physics and were expected to go on to university, while in the ‘B’ stream you did biology because these were the girls most likely to go into the nursing profession. I was glad I didn’t have to do biology because I’d seen the girls dissecting fish, frogs and other creatures and I considered this to be horribly cruel.
There were two other first-year girls from the High School living nearby and, most mornings, we would arrange to meet so that we could walk together to school. I became good friends with one of the girls, Jean: she was very mature for her age and was beautifully spoken, with no trace of a Cornish accent. She had elegance, charm and poise and these qualities had been rewarded with one of the school’s coveted deportment badges. Good posture was considered important and you were reprimanded if you slouched. If you were fortunate enough to be awarded a deportment badge you were expected to set an example to the other girls and maintain it at all times. The worst thing that could happen to you was to be stripped of your badge in morning assembly before the entire school; it was worse than a clergyman being publicly defrocked. Jean suffered this fate some time after receiving hers and although I felt it was unfair that she should have to be subjected to such humiliation, I was unable to quell a certain satisfaction because I thought she was inclined to be conceited at times and needed being brought down a peg or two. I was wary of inviting her to our house because I suspected that my mother was jealous of her. She made spiteful remarks about Jean’s looks and said that the airs she gave herself were unjustified. Once, we went to see a performance of Snow White given by a drama group to which Jean belonged and in which she played the leading part. I thought she was very good but my mother said she was wishy-washy. Later that week, the performance was reviewed in our local paper, the Falmouth Packet, and the reporter declared that Jean had ‘lent a winsome grace to the exacting role of Snow White.’ This did not please my mother.
Jean’s older sister, Winifred, was the editor of the womens’ page of the Daily Telegraph and once used her as a model for an article on hairstyes for young girls. Although Jean’s hair was shoulder length, the article descibed it as waistlength and my mother could not refrain from sarcastic comment.
‘Waistlength hair!’ she said to Jean, sneeringly, the next time she saw her. ‘Your sister’;s kidding you, isn’t she?’
I had another friend, Wendy, who invited me to her house for tea and to meet her parents. I was so nervous that when Wendy’s father held his hand out for me to shake, I proffered my left instead of my right. He made a joke of it but I was ashamed and embarrassed. Later, they invited my mother and me to Wendy’s confirmation. It took place on a cold, wet winter’s afternoon and I found myself pressed up against a scalding hot radiator. I steamed away and my bare legs scorched as the service went on and on; I thought I would die of boredom. But my mother was impressed.
‘Why don’t you get confirmed?’ she said.
I froze with horror at the very idea. All those precious hours wasted in church, all that praying. Not likely! It would be like the Salvation Army all over again, only worse. I was worried that she might insist but, luckily, she became preoccupied with some pressing matter and the subject wasn’t mentioned again.
During games lessons when the other girls would be either outdoors playing hockey or netball or in the gym hall doing P.T., Jenny and I would spend the time chatting happily; it was an arrangement which suited us well until a new, very keen, games mistress turned up and decided that we would both benefit from some form of exercise. We were affronted; we considered that we had an inalienable right to these free periods. But she made us sit back-to -back and pass a large ball over our heads to each other. We soon got bored with that and when she wasn’t looking we returned to our old ways.
Jenny lived in Penryn, just outside Falmouth, and I was so pleased when she invited me to spend the weekend with her. I quickly warmed to her parents who, after the eccentricities of my own, seemed so reassuringly normal. What a terrible time it must have been for them when their daughter contracted polio! But fate, I was learning, was indiscriminate and those who were the least deserving sometimes suffered the most. Jenny had an older sister, Diane, also a pupil at our school and one of those girls of whom we, as lowly first-formers, were very much in awe. She was blonde and slender and had a host of attentive admirers.
We had such fun at Jenny’s house. We thought we’d be terribly daring and have a midnight feast; we stole cheese from the fridge and a tin of pineapple chunks, cut them up into little squares and threaded them on to cocktail sticks. We had a bottle of Corona and some chocolate and, in the middle of the night, got up, somewhat sleepily, to consume our illicit picnic.
My friend Penny also invited me to tea in order to meet her parents. Again, I was nervous but at least I remembered to shake hands with my right hand this time. After the meal, I needed to go to the bathroom but was far too shy to ask. My need grew more and more urgent so I made my excuses as soon as I could and set off home. Penny’s house was quite a distance from mine and there were no convenient hedges en route behind which I could seek relief. I felt that my bladder was bursting but at long last I reached our house. I flung the front door open, raced upstairs, threw myself down on to the lavatory seat and then............... nothing! I simply couldn’t go.
Penny and I shared a passion for animals. Once, we discovered an injured mouse and she was so upset by its plight that she burst into tears. She wasn’t allowed to have pets at home so I think she enjoyed coming to my house and playing with our animals; we had always had dogs and cats because my father, too, was fond of animals. I had been given a pair of white mice and my father designed and made a beautiful wooden house with a sliding glass door for them. I’d been told that both the mice were female but one morning when I was cleaning their cage I discovered a nest in which were concealed several bald, pink baby mice. No sooner had the babies grown up than more appeared; very soon, they too began to have young. I was able to find homes for some of them but that still left me with a great many mice. The cage was far too small to house so many so my father bought me a shop display cabinet at an auction sale and I converted it into a mouse city. Our cat used to spend many hours sitting motionless in front of the display case staring with rapt attention, eyes as round as saucers. Even after I had eventually managed to re-house all my mice and the display cabinet had been taken outside into the back yard, the cat would still sit for hours staring at it intently.
I had another friend, also in my class at school, called Gillian. She was a quiet, sensible girl with a gentle nature and I never heard her make an unkind remark about anyone. She was always beautifully dressed and I envied her lovely clothes. Her mother made a good many of them and it spurred me on to be more adventurous with my own dressmaking projects. I had become very conscious of the fact that many of my clothes were second-hand, bought by my mother from ‘that posh woman up the road.’ My friend, Jean, crushed me by saying that she couldn’t bear the thought of wearing anything that had been worn by someone else. When I told my mother this, she retorted:
‘Well, she wears wool, doesn’t she? Doesn’t she realise it’s been worn by sheep?’
In the winter of 1957 my sister and I became victims of the Asian flu virus which medical experts feared would become the deadliest epidemic of the twentieth century. I awoke one morning with a sore throat which was so painful that I was unable to swallow. I had the idea that if I made myself some lemon juice in hot water it would relieve the discomfort but when I slid out of bed and put my feet on the floor a wave of nausea and dizziness overcame me and I fell back on to the bed. Jean had the same symptoms and we were so ill that we lay in bed for days, hardly moving. The doctor was called and we were so weak that we barely had the strength to protest when our mother forced the vile-tasting medicine he had prescribed into our mouths. The virus left us feeling very frail and it took several weeks for us to recover fully. Many girls at my school were affected and our studies had to be suspended until the worst was over.
We were very excited when our class was told one day that we were going on a school outing and that we would not have to wear our uniforms. Immediately, all the girls began discussing what they would wear and I was very relieved that my mother had recently bought me a new dress which I liked a lot and would not feel ashamed of wearing for the occasion. It was a red, tartan pinafore dress incorporating a little white blouse with a black velvet bow around the neck. If only I had a new hairstyle to go with it! I pleaded with my mother but she still insisted I was too young. Some of the girls asked if they’d be allowed to wear trousers and were told that they could provided they examined their rear ends in the mirror beforehand. In those days, it was considered offensive to be seen in trousers if you had a large bottom.
I sat next to my friend, Jean, on the coach and whereas the rest of us were behaving like silly little girls in our excitement, she was dignified and restrained. In fact, the only time I had ever seen Jean display any emotion at all was when her dog was bitten on the neck by an adder while we were out walking one day. In only a few moments, a large swelling appeared under his throat, giving him the appearance of a pelican. Poor Jean was panic-stricken. I had never seen her cry before.
‘He’s not going to die, is he?’ she sobbed.
In the event, the dog was fine. He was able to walk back to Falmouth and be attended to by the vet, Mr. Smythe. We weren’t aware at the time that Mr. Smythe was, in fact, an expert on canine treatment and was highly regarded in his profession; years later I discovered that he had written a number of extremely interesting books pertaining to his remarkable career which had begun so long ago that he had to do his rounds on horseback when he first started practicing.
We had been learning about the extraction of coal gas in chemistry and so our outing was going to include a visit to the gasworks at Truro. This turned out to be rather terrifying since it involved scaling metal stairs to great heights. I clung on to the rails for dear life and tried not to look down. Afterwards, we were to visit a knitwear factory at Newquay and then we were going to have a picnic on the beach. As far as I was concerned, the visit to the knitwear factory was the highlight of the day. How different were those huge, industrial knitting machines from my little single-bed one at home! They allowed us to help ourselves from a big box of offcuts of knitted fabric and I wanted to take armfuls. I had to be content with just a few pieces which I thought I’d be able to join together and make into a rather original bag. in the coach on the return journey, I dropped off to sleep; it had been a lovely day.

My friends and I were in the habit of rambling for miles and there could not have been a single part of Falmouth and the surrounding countryside that we hadn’t explored. One day, a group of us were scrambling down a wooded bank below Pendennis Castle when a boy of about seventeen or so jumped out from behind a tree and brandished a revolver at us. It is highly unlikely that the gun was real but we weren’t to know that and we were extremely frightened.
‘What are you doing here?’ demanded the youth. ‘You have no right to play here!’
His manner was so authoritative that we quaked in our shoes. He waved the gun at us and motioned towards the bank down which we’d just scrambled.
‘Get back up there!’
We clambered up the slope as fast as our legs would carry us and when we reached the top we ran to the safety of the castle entrance. We were breathless and speechless but relieved that we hadn’t come to any harm. We wondered who the boy was and if we should report the incident. Perhaps, though, we really had been trespassing and if we told anyone we might get into trouble. We were in a quandry. We were making our way back down the hill when I glanced behind me and saw, on the edge of the high wall of the castle moat, the same boy lying flat on his stomach, his gun aimed at some point in the distance, apparently pretending to be a soldier. So, then, he was not a person of authority, just a pathetic weirdo with a toy gun. Nevertheless, it had been a strange, disturbing happening and we were all very quiet on our way home.
One of our favourite haunts was the Stack, a clifftop, gorse-covered area with a network of underground tunnels which were once arsenic mines, overlooking Swanpool beach. It was a lonely place and so popular with courting couples that on fine days there was hardly a secluded spot unoccupied. It did not take us long to realise that the occasional, rather creepy, lone men we nearly always encountered there were actually part of an organised gang of peeping-toms who communicated with each other by means of whistled signals. We were too young to understand how anyone could find pleasure in spying on couples; it seemed to us a very strange, pointless pastime and it amused us greatly to mimic their whistles and by doing so cause annoyance and confusion.
I told Jenny about our escapades at the Stack and the courting couples and she thought it would be hilarious to make cardboard silhouettes of a man and a woman embracing each other which we could then put against my bedroom window on the following Friday evening when the Brownies passed by on their way home from their weekly meeting. With the curtains open and the light on, she said, it would look just like the real thing and they’d be shocked and startled. How daring it sounded! So, from a large piece of cardboard obtained from Fred’s Stores around the corner, I drew and cut out what I thought was a very realistic, life-sized representation of a couple kissing and when Jenny came to my house on the appointed evening we placed it against the window and I went out into the street which ran alongside the side of the house to see the effect. I was highly satisfied with my handiwork and when I reported back to Jenny that the Brownies were sure to be fooled, we could hardly wait for them to appear and to watch their reaction. We hid ourselves behind the curtains, laughing so much that the tears ran down our faces. The Brownies did indeed look up at the window but I think it was the sound of our uncontrollable laughter and not my artistic efforts which attracted their attention. How innocent we were!
Although we did not appreciate it at the time, we were very privileged to be able to grow up in a lovely place like Falmouth. Our summer holidays, spent mainly on ther beach, were idyllic. Although Gyllingvase was our favourite beach, changing in and out of our swimming things was something of a problem because you were obliged to use a changing hut, for which you had to pay. This meant that there was a lot of surreptitious fumbling about under towels and sometimes we’d be spotted by a beach vigilante who would tell us off. One afternoon I was running down to the sea with some friends when the younger brother of one of them accidently knocked his foot against mine. It was only the slightest contact yet it was sufficient to snap my little toe and I suddenly found I couldn’t walk. There was a St. John’s Ambulance hut on the beach so some of my friends went to off to try to seek assistance. The woman in charge said she wasn’t allowed to leave her hut and that I’d have to go to her. Since I was some distance away, at the other end of the beach, and unable to walk, this was an impossibility; what a ridiculous arrangement! It meant that if, for example, you were going to have a heart attack or an epileptic fit or even felt a bit faint, you would have to ensure that you were taken short in the vicinity of the St. John’s Ambulance hut. I’m afraid that, because of my experience of being refused help, even to this day I regard that organisation with something of contempt.
Since there was to be no assistance and I could do no more than hop about on one leg, one of my friends volunteered to walk back to my house to inform my mother. Eventually, she arrived at the beach, none too pleased, and because she had no money for a taxi, had no alternative but to call an ambulance. I had always been told by the doctors that my condition would improve when I reached puberty and began producing oestrogen, the female hormone which is beneficial to bones. However, this broken toe turned out to be the first of many fractures of the bones of my feet and it was not until I was in my twenties that my condition began to improve. At Falmouth hospital a doctor examined my toe and told my mother that because it was definitely not broken, there was no need for an X-ray. My mother explained that I had a rare, hereditary condition but, like so many inexperienced young doctors, he’d never heard of it and insisted that I needed no treatment. My mother lost her temper and a furious argument ensued. In the end, we had no alternative but to go home, my mother supporting me as I hopped on my good leg. The next day, she called our family doctor who immediately contacted the hospital. They summoned me back, X-rayed my toe and a declared that it was, indeed, broken.
‘We’re a bit concerned,’ said the doctor to my mother, ‘that Margaret might have a tendency to brittle bones.’
‘Has she now! she exclaimed, when she had recovered the power of speech.

My friend Penny and I were involved in a drama on the beach one cold, grey, winter’s afternoon. It was not Gyllingvase this time but the long, narrow, so called Castle Beach, below the Falmouth Hotel. We were so engrossed in our conversation that we took no notice of a high-pitched, wailing cry which sounded really no different from one of the many gulls wheeling overhead. The cries became more desperate and we realised that the sound was human: we turned to see, in the distance, a woman bending over another figure lying on the shingle. We ran towards them and found that they were two elderly ladies. The one who had collapsed was unconscious and there was a trickle of brown fluid running out of her mouth. I was so deeply shocked that I had no idea what to do; Penny, however, collected her wits and said that she would run back up the beach and across the road to the Falmouth Hotel to ask them to call an ambulance. Meanwhile, I remained with the women, staring down with horror at the unconscious figure and with no idea what to say to her extremely distressed companion. The ambulance arrived quickly and we stayed until the patient had been taken away on a stretcher. I sensed, instinctively, that the woman was dying; I knew about death because I’d always had pets but this was the first time I’d had any first-hand experience of human mortality and I was so deeply disturbed that it preyed on my mind afterwards for a very long time.
I was still passionately interested in astonomy and shortly after my thirteenth birthday the Space Age began with the launching of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1. Following this momentous event, a Falmouth travel agency put a big notice in its window advertising the very first bookings for a trip to the moon which prompted Penny and me to dare each other to go in to make our reservations. However, we were so overcome with giggles that neither of us could speak. At last, when we were finally able to compose ourselves, I blurted out that we’d come to book our places as passengers on the lunar expedition which they were advertising in the window. The manager told us that we’d have to come back later, probably in a few years. I don’t know how he managed to keep such a straight face.
At school, we were encouraged to have foreign penfriends and there were approved organisations which helped you to find suitable ones. Mine was American and she was called Elizabeth Grass; I thought it was a very curious surname but my mother said Americans often had strange names. The correspondence didn’t last very long because it seemed to me that we had very little in common and it was difficult to know what to write about. She appeared to be obsessed with Communists - something I thought very strange in someone so young - and in every letter she referred to ‘them’ ( being the Russians ) and ‘us’ ( the Americans ). I was rather put out by this attitude because, due to my love of ballet, I had a great admiration for Russian culture. In the end, I simply stopped writing to her and instead sent a letter to the Russian Embassy in London asking if an English-speaking penfriend of my age could be found. I was gratified to receive a very prompt reply in which they told me:
‘We hope very soon that you will be hearing from your Russian friends.’
But I never did.
There were some important changes taking place at school, the most significant being that we were soon to be having a new headmistress. Whether or not it was anything to do with the scandal of Mr. Herbert no-one seemed to know: Mrs. Robertson simply announced that she would be leaving at the end of term. The school organized a farewell concert for her and when the choir sang her favourite piece, she wept unashamedly. We were sorry that she was leaving because, although she always maintained discipline, she was not so strict with us that she inspired fear and she took pains to encourage us to regard our school as our second home.
When, at the beginning of the following term, we saw our new headmistress for the first time, it was difficult to conceal our surprise. To say her appearance was unusual would have been an understatement; indeed, I imagine the majority of us had never seen anyone like her in our lives. Although she wore women’s clothes, these did not conceal the fact that her form was very angular and mannish; she wore spectacles and her silvery grey hair was cropped very short, like a man’s, serving to emphasise the prominence of her nose and her strong features. Miss Jacob inspired in us an immediate respect and we soon became accustomed to her unconventional looks. Her subjects, about which she was passionate, were Greek and Latin; she even had a little dog called Quillo which, she told us, was a Greek name. I was so anxious to please Miss Jacob that I applied myself to my Latin studies with a renewed determination and spent almost the entirety of a weekend designing a cover for my Latin exercise book. It earned me a housepoint or two and Penny was so impressed that she decided to do the same. Whether it was because she was not very good at drawing or whether she really intended her Roman figures to be dressed in erotic underwear instead of togas, I can’t say. I remember thinking, when I saw her hand in her exercise book, that she must have gone quite mad and I cringed with embarrassment on her behalf when Miss Jacob reprimanded her.
As the end of that term approached and we revised for our exams, I had a strong premonition that one of the questions we would be asked in the Latin exam would be to write down the Latin names of as many animals that we could think of. I already knew the names of several because of my interest in astronomy - Leo the lion, Cygnus the swan, and so on - and I set about memorising as many more as I was able. When the day of the exam arrived and I saw the paper on the desk in front of me, I knew instinctively that my hunch had been right and, sure enough, when we were given the signal to begin, I turned the paper and there it was!
‘Write the names, in Latin, of as many animals as you can.’
I tackled all the questions with confidence and filled a whole sheet with the Latin names of just about every creature on the planet. Miss Jacob was impressed and my exam result was excellent.
As well as a new headmistress, we also had a new music master; he was Welsh and his name was Mr. Duggan. Whereas I had found our lessons under the tuition of Mr. Herbert very boring, Mr. Duggan’s enthusiasm for the subject could not fail to inspire. He introduced us to composers of whom I’d never heard: Vaughan Williams, Delius, Elgar and many others. He opened the door to a world of music I had never known existed and I found myself looking forward to our weekly lessons as I had never done before. My first year at the High School had gone very well but the second was turning out to be even better.

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