CHAPTER TEN: High School Girl

If I‘d had any concerns about looking ridiculous in my new school uniform on my first day at the High School they vanished as soon as I saw that all the other new girls were as swamped by theirs as I was by mine. Our skirts came down to our ankles and the sleeves of our blazers flapped emptily about our knees. I was conscious of the stiff collar of my new white shirt and hoped, as it was a very warm day, that I wouldn’t sweat and make dirty marks on it. I knew, of course, all the girls from Clare Terrace but there were quite a few unfamiliar faces. One of the teachers approached me and asked if I wouldn’t mind giving another new girl a helping hand; I turned and saw a girl with the friendliest smile and the most open, good-natured expression I had ever seen. Next to her smile, the other most noticeable thing about this remarkable girl was her hair: it was arranged in two, thick, auburn plaits which blazed in the sunlight streaming down from the high sash windows of the school hall. She asked me my name and told me hers was Jenny. She was so nice, so engaging, that it would have been an impossibility not to like her immediately. For a moment, I couldn’t understand why she could possibly need assistance from me; then I saw that she was wearing heavy leg irons and carrying a metal walking-stick. Obviously, she was a victim of that cruel illness, the one which all parents feared more than any other, polio. Jenny explained that, although she could manage by herself with the aid of two sticks, it was easier for her to get about if she could put her hand on the shoulder of someone of a similar height, for balance, and use just the one stick. Naturally, I was only too pleased to volunteer my shoulder and, from that day, we were friends.
After assembly on that first day, we spent most of the morning sorting out timetables, electing monitors and form prefects ( prefects were invariably chosen from those girls who excelled at sport and were therefore the most popular), acquainting ourselves with the school’s rules and deciding to which of the four ‘houses’, named after famous Cornish families - Arundel, Killigrew, Grenville and Basset - each of us was going to belong. I was to be in the Arundel house. We would be awarded house points for good work and, at the end of the year, these would be totted up and the house with the most points would be the winner. After we had dealt with these matters we were asked to write an essay about the career we hoped to pursue when our education was finished and I, like the majority of the girls, wrote with lamentable lack of imagination that I wanted to be a vet.
I scrutinised my timetable with curiousity and pondered each new subject I would be studying: French: a foreign language. Would it be difficult? Latin: another language which was sure to be difficult; would I cope? Chemistry: I looked forward to that as I had always been interested in science. Classical stories: that sounded intriguing. What, exactly, were they? I longed to ask but was afraid to do so for fear of appearing ignorant. At my previous schools we had done arithmetic but here, at the High School, it was called mathematics, which made it sound far more formidable. Also, according to this timetable, there seemed to be an unconscionable amount of school hours devoted to this most hated of subjects. Still, there was art, at which I had always been able to excel, and domestic science, which was probably very easy. Divinity: that was simply R.E. with a fancy name and bound to be boring: anything to do with religion always was. Music: that sounded more interesting. History: boring. Geography: even more boring. English literature: I loved reading so I would be good at that. English language: apart from art, this was my best subject and so I felt confident as far as that was concerned. At the High school, games and sports were an important part of the curriculum but, because of my brittle bones, I had always been forbidden to take part in any kind of physical education. When I saw how hideously unflattering were the grey shorts the girls wore for games I was not sorry.
My mother and my sister were waiting for me outside the school gates at the end of my first day at the High School. I was interrogated without mercy.
‘What was it like? What did you do today?’
‘Nothing much. Timetables and things.’
‘But you must have done something else apart from timetables.’
‘We just did boring stuff.’
‘But what sort of stuff?’
‘Just talking about things - oh, and we had to write an essay.’
‘An essay? What was the subject? What did you write about?’
‘What I’m going to be when I leave school.’
‘What did you say?’
‘That I wanted to be a vet.’
‘But that’s not very original. Girls always say they want to be vets. Couldn’t you have come up with something better than that?’
‘But I do want to be a vet.’

I was awarded several house points for our first French homework. We had to draw a house - open at the front like a dolls’ house - with all the rooms and the furniture inside them identified by their names in French. I spent at least two hours, happily absorbed, drawing mine. By coincidence, our French teacher, Miss Richards, shared the house next door to us in Clare Terrace with Mrs. Andrews, the art mistress. Miss Richards spoke French with a broad Cornish accent and would have long conversations with the French onion man who was a familiar sight in Falmouth, cycling around with long strings of onions dangling from his bike. He even wore a striped jersey and a black beret, like a caricature of a Frenchman. I was getting on well with French and Latin and seemed to have an aptitude for languages.
Maths was a different story. I struggled. Algebra was entirely new to me, as was geometry, and it seemed to me that these subjects had been devised by some spiteful mind with the sole intention of tormenting those, such as I, who possessed no natural propensity. Miss May, the teacher, was an extremely kind, patient, dedicated woman and had she been otherwise - like Miss Jellis at Clare Terrace, for instance, - I would have simply given up.
English literature was more of a challenge than I had anticipated. We had to learn long passages from the Shakespeare play we were studying - A Midsummer Night’s Dream - as well as poems; we read classics such as Pride and Prejudice and, as an example of a modern novel, John Buchan’s Thirty-nine Steps, which I enjoyed. Later that year, the older girls gave a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which all the fairies were played by puppets made by the girls. Mrs. Andrews, the art teacher, knew how to make real marionettes, operated by strings, and I looked forward to that time when I would be learning how to make them, too. As first-formers, we were learning how to do calligraphy, using round-hand pens and black Indian ink, something which has proved to be a most useful skill in my adult life.
As a subject, chemistry was turning out to be as absorbing as I had anticipated it would, and I looked forward to our lessons immensely. There was an after-school chemistry club of which I was an eager member. In it, we did all kinds of exciting experiments and, most thrilling of all, learnt how to make chemical gardens by dropping various crystalline substances into jam jars filled with agar solution. To me, watching them grow, like corals, was pure magic and, with my pocket money from Auntie Frances, I bought tins of agar solution from Boots and pestered all the chemists in Falmouth for crystals so that I could make my own ‘gardens’ at home. Later, we studied the different forms of sulphur and in the consequent test we were given I obtained top marks with one hundred per cent.
Although I loved chemistry, my favourite lesson of all was classical stories and I looked forward all week to that period on Friday afternoons. Our text book was Robert Grave’s The Greek Myths; he was a highly regarded modern author and poet and I never imagined that one day, many years later, I would live in the same part of Spain as he had and actually meet his descendants. It is a great pity that this subject is no longer part of the school curriculum because no other can inspire and stimulate the imagination as much as the stories of the great heroes - Theseus, Perseus, Jason and all the others - and their adventures. After we had listened to a story, we would write our own account of it and illustrate it with drawings. I used to get so carried away, so immersed in re-living the adventure through my drawings, that when the bell sounded for the end of the lesson, I could hardly bear to return to the real world.
I found domestic science lessons very tedious. Because I did a lot of sewing at home I was by now quite accomplished and therefore regarded our sewing project as something of an insult. From a length of white cotton fabric we had to construct a cookery apron incorporating French seams, pleats and tucks. The project dragged on for weeks and by the time the aprons were finished, they were grubby and ink-stained. As well as sewing, I had also learned how to cook at home, a chore which my mother was only too glad to relinquish to me. We were taught how to make pastry, cakes and Victoria sponges - something I already knew - and how to decorate plain biscuits with icing sugar and little silver balls, an exercise which I considered to be of no use at all.
As I had expected, our geography and history lessons bored me and I did not do well in those subjects. Miss Bates, our history teacher, wore a very dark shade of lipstick which accentuated her protruding teeth and I applied greater attention to the study of these than I did to the lessons. Several years later, when we were sixth-formers, she took us for ‘general studies’ classes in which we would discuss various issues concerning the world into which we would soon be venturing. Miss Bates told us many things which would today be considered as either grossly politically incorrect or downright erroneous. As an example of one of her more outrageous declarations, mixed marriages, she told us, were a very bad thing because the children resulting from these unions invariably inherited the worst traits of each race.
Although I enjoyed our music lessons and became a member of the school choir, I did not like Mr. Herbert, the music master. Even though he joked and laughed a lot and had a very genial manner, I felt, from the beginning, an instinctive aversion. There was something about his demeanour- his way of speaking, his gestures, his poses - which I found disturbing. One day, in the corridor, he waylaid me and, placing a hand on each of my shoulders, he bent down and stared intently into my eyes.
‘Extraordinary!’ he said. ‘The whites of your eyes are quite blue. So beautiful!’
It is true that the whites of my eyes are noticeably blue: it is an indicator symptom of my brittle bone condition and people often remark on it. I stiffened with alarm from the pressure of Mr. Herbert’s hands on my shoulders and averted my eyes from his intense gaze. A deep blush coloured my face. Perturbed, I had no idea how to deal with this situation and was greatly relieved when a crowd of girls came running down the corridor and he had to release me in order to let them pass. After this incident, I kept well out of his way. He was a popular member of staff and I dared not mention it to anybody, not even to my friends: they, too, seemed to like Mr. Herbert. Then, one day, he simply vanished from the scene. Nothing was said of his sudden disappearance and none of the other girls in my class appeared to know anything about it. It was all very strange.
No-one could fail to sense that there was an atmosphere in our school. It was unnaturally quiet. The staff wore serious expressions and when they weren’t teaching, shut themselves into the staffroom. The headmistress seemed unduly preoccupied and the older girls gathered into groups and whispered among themselves in the corridors and in the playground. It was evident that something momentous had occurred which was far too shocking to be made known to first-formers. I overheard a conversation between my mother and Auntie Frances when we were visiting one day.
‘ And you should have seen him when he came out of the church with some of the other teachers after the carol service,’ said Auntie, ‘he was flirting like anything and they were loving it. He had one on each arm and they were giggling so much you’d have thought they were young girls.’
So, then, they were talking about Mr. Herbert. We didn’t have any other male teachers. Could it be that whatever had happened at school had something to do with the disappearance of our music master? I strained my ears to hear more of the conversation but Auntie kept recounting the same incident. In the end, I decided to confront my mother and ask her if she knew what had happened to Mr. Herbert. All she would tell me was that he had ‘got himself into a bit of trouble.’ I wondered what the bit of trouble was.
One Sunday, some time later, I saw my mother cut an article out of the News of the World
and, somewhat furtively, put it into a drawer. I waited for a suitable opportunity, then sneaked into the room and removed the article from where she had hidden it between some papers. Scanning the column, I discovered to my amazement that it was a detailed report of a court case involving our own Mr. Herbert. Apparently, he had been carrying on an affair with a fifteen-year-old pupil at the High School who was now expecting a baby. Extracts from the girl’s diary were read out in court.
‘Had S.I. in the back of the car.’
It was explained to the court that ‘S.I.’ was an abbreviation of ‘sexual intercourse’. What, I wondered, was sexual intercourse? I was dying to know what, exactly, was the nature of our music master’s crime but, as ever when anything concerning such matters cropped up, I was thwarted by my own ignorance. Mr. Herbert told the court that he was in love with the girl and wanted to marry her as soon as she was sixteen. I marvelled at his vanity; as if anyone would want to marry such a revolting old man! Despite his intentions to stand by the girl, he was given a prison sentence. I re-read the article so that I could memorize it and put it back where I had found it. Fancy such a thing happening at our school! It was quite incredible.
I quizzed my closest friends about the matter but they were as ignorant as I was. None of us knew who the girl in question was and, anyway, she had long since left the school. We discussed pregnancy and childbirth, about which we were totally unenlightened, and wondered what it would be like to have a baby.
‘They say it’s the worst pain you can possibly suffer when the baby comes out.’
‘Well, how does the baby come out, then?’
‘Out of your belly button, of course. Everyone knows that .’
‘But how does the baby get there in the first place?’
‘ First you have to get married and then the husband has to do something to the wife.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘But Mr. Herbert and that girl weren’t married, so how can she be having a baby?’
There was no answer to that. Our knowledge of the facts of life was miserably inadequate.


There was great excitement when we were informed that we were going to see a performance of Romeo and Juliet to be given by the pupils of Truro School. The excitement was due not so much to the anticipation of seeing a live performance of a Shakespeare play but to the fact that Truro School was a boys’ school and we in the first form were at an age when we were becoming curious about the opposite sex. When I was younger, I used to regard boys with contempt and was manifestly of the opinion that they were, without exception, immature and stupid. When I was a pupil at Clare Terrace, a certain boy used to cycle past our house almost every day and, when he saw me, would stare at me with a blatancy I considered most impertinent. One day, walking home from the High School, he caught my eye and I was startled to find myself admiring the striking contrast between the blackness of his thick lashes and the piercing blue of his eyes. Nature had crept up on me and, in a heart-fluttering moment, had caught me out when I least expected it. What a cunning trick!
We giggled self-consciously as we made our way into the theatre hall of Truro School on the afternoon of the performance. We had never seen so many boys! The older ones ignored us with pointed aloofness but the younger ones eyed us surreptitiously. I found myself wishing I had a more flattering, less childish hairstyle and attempted to hitch up the hem of my skirt by folding the waistband over several times. Truro School’s interpretation of Romeo and Juliet was such that the world’s most famous and tragic love story was turned - unintentionally - into a comedy of such hilarity that we could barely contain ourselves. In our entire lives we had never seen anything so side-splitting as the sight of all those boys dressed up as girls. We were hugely entertained and, at the final curtain-call, showed our appreciation by clapping a little too enthusiastically.
That evening, I asked my mother if I could have my hair cut and styled. She regarded me quizzically and told me I would have to wait until I was a little older. A few days later, I was sitting at our big mahogany dining table, quietly doing my homework, when she came into the room, shutting the door behind her. This was significant because whenever my mother entered a room and, with deliberation, shut the door behind her it meant that she had an accusation to make or something of extreme unpleasantness to say. I looked up, alarmed, wondering what it was that I had done.
‘You probably know all about what I’ve got to say,’ she announced. ‘I expect you talk about it with the other girls, don’t you?
I looked at her, blankly. Slowly, it dawned on me that what she was trying to say was causing her great embarrassment and I reddened, self-consciously. She saw the flush and interpreted it as an affirmation of what she had just asked.
‘You know all about it, then? The other? ‘
And with that, she turned and went out of the room. What, I wondered, was the other? ‘ her obvious embarrassment made it clear that it was a subject connected with down there. That meant it was to do with something shameful, something unmentionable. What could it possibly be?
Fortunately, enlightenment came in the form of a talk, given by two visiting professionals, at school. Our parents had received notification that we were to be given an informative lecture entitled ‘Sex Education’ so that those who did not want their daughters to attend could request their absence. There were, indeed, two or three girls from the first form who were absent; the rest of the school filed quietly into the assembly hall where the teachers were already seated and the atmosphere seemed to bristle with embarrassment as we settled ourselves on the floor below the platform where the two female professionals were waiting to begin. We listened, agog, as the women took turns to explain to us the workings of the female reproductive system and the mysteries surrounding conception and childbirth. To a young girl who was as ignorant of such matters as I was, it was all quite shocking. When they had completed their lecture, the women asked us if we had any questions we would like them to answer. There was, of course, a host of things that we were dying to know but not a single girl had the courage to put up her hand. Then, to our astonishment, one of the older girls raised her arm.
‘If a girl has intercourse just the once,’ she asked, ‘can she still get pregnant?’
There was an almost audible gasp from the rest of her classmates. They looked at each other, knowingly, and as we filed out of the hall I heard one of them say:
‘She must have done it then! What if she’s going to have a baby?’
‘Well,’ replied another, unkindly, ‘it’ll serve her right. I’d never let a boy go all the way with me.’
One of the girls from the first form whispered:
‘Did they mean that those monthly period things happen every month?’
I could not bring myself to discuss, even with my closest friends, any of the matters about which we had just been informed. My mother had instilled in me a profound sense of aversion and distaste for anything to do with down there. Yet, there were so many questions I wanted to ask, so much reassurance I needed. With this scant knowledge of what was happening to our developing bodies, most of the girls in my class began our periods when we were about thirteen. Sanitary protection was primitive in those times. We were obliged to wear around our waists elastic belts with a suspender at the back and another at the front on to which were looped sanitary towels. These were so thick, chafing and so uncomfortable that you found yourself walking about with a legs apart, John Wayne, cowboy gait. To complete the discomfort, we sometimes had to wear ‘sani-knicks’ which were, in reality, giant, plastic bloomers. We had not been warned about the stomach cramps. There were miserable mornings when I would set off for school, practically doubled over with pain, my mother’s scolding voice still ringing in my ears. As for the very basic information we had been given regarding the mechanics of sex, such had been the emphasis on the importance of marriage as the only foundation for a sexual relationship, I decided that it was something I wouldn’t have to concern myself about for a very long time.
But all these events were yet to come and, meanwhile, my happy first term at the High School ended with Christmas plays, concerts and carols. Miss Richards had taught us a French carol and while some of us sang the words, the rest of us carried out the actions. In was chosen to be a sheep - a mouton - and for my costume I wore an old, rather smelly, sheepskin rug. My cue was ‘Entrez petits moutons!’ and at this I scuttled across the floor on my hands and knees, to the very great mirth of the audience. I was such a success with my interpretation of a sheep that, from that day, I was labelled with the nickname ‘mouton.’
I was looking forward to Christmas because my grandfather, Auntie Lal, Uncle Albie and Stephanie were coming to stay with us and that meant we could all have a good time because, with company in the house, my mother wouldn’t be able to start a row. I’d helped with the making and the icing of the Christmas cake and the Christmas pudding and took charge of the stuffing of the turkey because, for some reason, she always worked herself up into a state bordering on panic as far as this routine task was concerned. Jean and I made paper chains from coloured, gummed strips and picked holly and ivy. Christmas trees were expensive and therefore not so common as they are nowadays and my mother dismissed the artificial ones you could buy from Woolworth’s as tastelss tat.
Whenever I saw my cousin Stephanie I was envious of the fact that she always seemed so much more grown-up and mature than I was. I hated my short, bobbed hairstyle and wished mine was long, blonde and curly, like hers. Jean and I had to wear the fairisle sweaters our mother had knitted for us for Christmas and I thought I looked shapeless and lumpen in mine whereas Stephanie looked sleek and elegant in her bought sweater. Nevertheless, That Christmas was the best ever. My father was allowed to go to the pub with his brother and his father before the turkey was dished up. Normally, my mother resented his going out to enjoy himself but this time she was outnumbered and couldn’t object. After lunch, we went for a walk around the Castle Drive and my grandfather said, as he always did whenever he came to stay with us:
‘If you lived in London, you’d pay five pounds just to look at this view.’
My sister and I were fond of our grandfather but our mother had always spoken of him with disparagement. Until the death of our grandmother, after which he had moved to Brixham, the couple had lived in Walthamstow, in a place called Pick Hill. According to my mother’s description of Pick Hill, it was the most squalid slum imaginable, scarcely fit for human habitation. Whenever there was a row, she would nearly always bring up the subject of Pick Hill.
‘Your father’s dirty!’ she would yell. ‘No wonder, living in a filthy hole like Pick Hill. What’s more, your mother was a thief! I’ve seen her steal tomatoes and hide them down her drawers. Why do you think I’d never eat anything she offered me when I went round to your house?’
But there were no rows that Christmas. In fact, it had been so pleasant that everyone agreed it would be nice to do the same thing the following year. The prospect delighted Stephanie and me; next Christmas, however, was a long way off.

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