1953 in My Father’s House IX

The Rough Patch & the Wild Patch

Dear Readers, for those of you who are new to my Memoir, and those who are returning to it after a gap, here is a brief overview of the story so far:

Aged ten and a half, in the first days of January 1953, I arrived in England from South Africa to live with a father I barely remembered, and go to an English boarding school. Leaving behind mother, siblings, pet dog, friends, our maid, Rachel, a balmy summer.

Everything about my father was surprising. He was a Labour town councillor for Brighton and the Managing Director and Chairman of one of Britain’s foremost Building Societies: one of the last of a breed of socialist entrepreneurs who lived life on a large scale. I was beginning to acclimatise to the idiosyncratic ways of his household – including sharing a room with Marco, a boy cousin I hadn’t known I had – when it was time for another departure. Read on –

Boarding school was a foreign country: the distance from Brighton seemed equal to the distance from Cape Town. As Margaret Atwood trenchantly portrays in her novel, Cat’s Eye, girls, as well as boys, can be cruel to one another in the playground.

As the main focus of this memoir is life with my father and cousin Marco at 55 Dyke Road Avenue, I intend to deal sparingly with school. This is not aiming to be yet another biography of the vicissitudes and (maybe?) triumphs of ‘my boarding school years’. But since my first experiences of boarding school were intertwined with my evolving relationship with my father, something needs to be said. And as I write, I find a reluctance to remember, of a different order from anything I’ve yet described – including my arrival in England that freezing day in January, which, to the girl being ushered into the corridor by the woman with her hair in a bun, already seemed a lifetime away.

I looked weird – my fuzzball hair did me no favours, I had a mild South African accent – in 1953, the accent of an outsider – I’d arrived in a ‘swanky’ car driven by a chauffeur, and, worst of all, my mind couldn’t operate. At the bang of the school’s front door closing, I found myself retreating into the dreamy and vague person my mother had been impatient with. I was slow to pick up the other girls’ names; slow to pick up the names of the houses we were separated into (mine was Urquhart- why not simply call us ‘yellow’ for godsake, since each house was identified by its colour: the Urquhart clan’s coat of arms was three boars’ heads on a yellow shield); slow to find my way around the buildings. Generally deemed slow, and derided as such. Oh, such a target for ridicule!

There were little notes passed around in class, over my head, or across me from one girl’s hand to another, notes about me, which made the recipient look my way and laugh. Then there was my crying, the just not being able to stop myself and that too became a focus for teasing, for being denounced. I would go into the lavs to cry privately. To discover that even there wasn’t safe. The divisions between the cubicles extended two thirds up towards the ceiling. And girls would stand on the lav seat in the neighbouring cubicles and poke their heads through, and jeer at me: cry baby! Nowhere to run.

On Sundays, an hour was set aside for letter-writing to our families. We sat in one of the schoolrooms, a teacher biding her time in the front. I wrote to Mummy: I miss you all. It’s very cold. The other girls tease me all the time. I am very unhappy. I want to leave. Please come and get me.

Each letter has to be taken up to the teacher to be read before being put in its envelope and sealed. The teacher calls me up to the front. She says, gently but firmly, ‘You wouldn’t want to worry your poor mother with a letter like this, would you? It would be very selfish to cause her to worry, so far away as she is in South Africa.’

Silence from me.

Then a little more sternly, and a little more coercively, ‘Now, of course you wouldn’t want to worry her, would you? Tell me?’

‘No,’ I agree, defeated, bewildered. Do I want to worry her?

‘Well then. Back you go to your desk like a good girl and write her something more cheerful. Just a few lines, if you can’t manage more…’

But there I am the following Sunday writing more or less the same. Except now I’m adding that the porridge we have to eat every morning makes me vomit.

There is a looming figure at the desk, a different gatekeeper this time. Who looks at me kindly, almost sadly, but has the same message:

‘You know better than to write a letter like this and cause your parents concern, don’t you, Joanna? Now start again, and tell them about some of the nice things that have happened this week.’

‘There aren’t any.’

She looks at me even more sadly, and kindly. ‘I’m sure you will be able to find some, if you think hard, Joanna.’ (And, checking her watch –) ‘We have ten minutes left. Just write a few lines, it needn’t be a long letter.’

And then this. Some sort of reversal takes place inside me. The ‘spirit’ my father has so recently appreciated becomes funnelled into a darker outlet. Anger at the unjustness, and revolt, turns me into a tear-away, an anarchist. I disregard rules, play pranks, perform acts of dare-devil eventually so extreme that the herd turn in astonishment. I even acquire a few followers. There I am, after a few weeks, earning the appellation of naughtiest girl in the junior school.

It started small, and gained momentum. First it was a matter of writing to my friends of the treehouse club in Cape Town (with Uncle Harold agreeing to post the letter for me when I was at his house for my first outing), asking them to send me a handful of the natural ‘stink bombs’ from a tree which grew in abundance close to our houses. When they did, with a speed I was grateful for, I hid these little brown pods close to where a teacher or matron might sit or stand. When the pods were crushed they emitted a strong sileage-like odour that would have anyone near gasping! The effect was so satisfying there were requests from my classmates to share my booty. Gradually the wave of teasing shifted towards the newer recipients of discomfort.

Next came the donuts. In desperation because the school food was so awful – and being cold and alienated I was perpetually hungry – I found myself remembering the midnight feasts in Enid Blyton’s books. On my second visit with Harold and Norma, I persuaded them to buy me two packets of donut rings to share with my dorm-mates. Innocently they obliged. When I re-entered the school a smudge or two of grease seeped through the paper bags so I put them under my pullover and coat. I went to the dorm and hid them under my underwear in the drawers next to my bed.

After lights out I whispered my plan. My dorm-mates were eager to eat the donuts then and there. But there were Prefects milling in the corridors, checking that us ‘first years’ were attempting to sleep and no beam of torchlight gave away a culprit guilty of after-lights-out reading. I urged we wait till midnight. We had no alarm. I would bang my head twelve times, I proposed, a trick I’d learned in Cape Town from my cousin Judy that had worked so far. That night it didn’t.

The next day, there was to be a check of all our chests, to make sure we kept them tidy or in case something untoward was hiding in them? I took out the three drawers and discovered a gap between the bottom drawer and bottom of the chest. I slid the donuts in there.

After that, perhaps the Prefects guessed something was up? Whenever I was awake, someone was patrolling outside our dorm. As the days went by, the donuts began to omit a stale smell. With the likelihood of being caught becoming increasingly a reality, there was nothing for it but for us all to stay awake the following night till there was no patrolling and then eat the donuts.

By then, they were far from delicious. So stale they were difficult to chew. The sugar could at least be licked. Nevertheless I urged everyone to swallow every mouthful, obliterate all clues. Still, the smell of donuts lingered in my drawers, whatever I did. And when the next inspection came, and the bottom drawer was pulled right out, a tell-tale stain met the eyes of the Prefect carrying out the inspection. Nothing for it but to own up, and at least claim I had eaten all the donuts myself and no one else had been involved. The aborted midnight feast did little to raise my popularity stakes, though my resolve to take sole blame might have maybe earned me a sneaking respect.

The worst punishment was eating those stale donuts. The lingering stale/rancid smell put me off donuts for years. The school’s punishments meted out – quotes on morality to be written out over and over, and help with kitchen chores and sweeping the floors after meals – were so benign that I got a taste for them, or stopped caring. Perhaps what I got a taste for was being subversive. I actually liked being in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, washing pans; from time to time being offered a sliver of carrot to munch, or some other discarded titbit. The place with its whiff of familiarity, domesticity, vaguely reminded me of being in the kitchen back in Cape Town, helping our Rachel.

After this, I took a larger step off the straight and narrow path of well-behaved girls who abide by the rules. Long before the present craze for it, and of course unaware of its asserted health and mental health benefits, I took a fancy to cold-water swimming.

There was a swimming-pool at Badminton, covered over in the winter but remaining filled; to be drained, cleaned and filled with fresh water during the Easter break in preparation for the swimming season. When I arrived at the school that time was far off. In January our exercise consisted of a pre-breakfast run in the dark, and whether it was the being pulled from sleep and running on an empty stomach without even a hot drink to fortify us, or the already mentioned lumpy porridge that awaited us on return, I was often sick – and almost always miserable in the mornings. Afternoon lacrosse was marginally better: only marginally. The cold up on Westbury-on-Trym was raw.

Why, then, make myself even colder? I’ve no idea. Some years ago, my, then, young Patterdale cross puppy was inadvertently pushed by a larger dog into the Lewes Pells’ Ponds in winter. The banks were high. I needed help to retrieve him. He was shivering, spraying the water out of his fur, looking most woebegone and aggrieved at what had happened. Then what did he do? To my astonishment he jumped right back in! I could only guess that he wanted to have the experience on his own terms.

I chose something even colder than those early morning runs, but under my own agency. I took to night swimming in the pool in winter. I think it was so unexpected that there were no precautions in place. I simply waited till everyone was asleep and the last light in the building was out. Then, using my torch, I tiptoed along our first-floor corridor, opened the door to the fire escape, climbed down it, laboriously pulled back the pool covers, and made myself dive in.

I was a good swimmer, thanks to the climate in South Africa and eight months a year of being in the sea. The water, needless to say, was freezing, the chill froze my breath, hurt my skin and had my heart thumping, but it was worth it. Oh, that adrenalin rush that people who do it nowadays wax lyrical about! Night after night the same. Word got around. Others in the dorm, disbelieving, started coming to the fire escape to watch. And even though they may have talked in whispers, with an audience my night dips weren’t going to remain under the radar for long.

I was sent back to the kitchen. Neither that nor further punishments had any effect. I was hauled up in front of the head matron, and eventually the head herself, Miss Sanderson. A notice went up on boards on two sides of the pool, Danger!! This pool must not be used unsupervised. But I persisted, refusing to be intimidated. Until one of the girls in my class one day told me the calamitous news – the pool had been drained.

I went on to engage in a whole list of misdemeanours that, dear readers, I am going to spare you the details of. There was a further recall to Miss Sanderson’s study. I remember, I think, her fine white hair, perhaps prematurely white, elegance and air of authority. She asked me,

‘What are we going to do with you?’

To which I had no answer.

She looked at me sadly, reflectively. Then she said that my father was an admirable man and that she had great respect for the work he was doing in Brighton. She said that I was to understand that this must be a difficult time for my parents, separated in two different countries as they were, and, rather than add to their burdens, didn’t I want to be a credit to them?

She didn’t seem to realise they were divorced. I wondered if they had intentionally given the impression they were still married: it was odd. Still I didn’t correct Miss Sanderson, who seemed quite taken with my father. And as to wanting to be a credit to them, Of course I did. But –

Other than the relatively gentle punishments I’ve mentioned, the way the pupils were kept in order was beautifully simple. We were divided into four houses and these houses competed against each other in games, work, artistic endeavour and, crucially through a system of stars won – gold for good behaviour and black for bad or sloppy behaviour. Each of us had a card sheet – a bit like at the races, but less fun. Individual stars were totted up on a weekly basis and the order of the four Houses read out in Assembly. Possibly there was an annual, or termly prize for the House with the most stars, I don’t remember;

You could be given up to a maximum of five stars, gold or black, on any one occasion. Most of my misdemeanours earned, naturally, five black stars, Poor Urquhart slipped to the bottom of the chart and there it stayed in the battle between the Houses. The idea behind this method of regulation being to get much of the policing done by the girls themselves. Urquhart girls were naturally furious about its place at the bottom of the four Houses every week. And all due to one girl with so many black stars that they literally ran off the edge of her record card.

The head girl of my House talked to me, the Urquhart girls in my class were detailed to talk to me but at a certain point their words fell on deaf ears. In so few weeks I’d turned into an anti-social being.

My father turned up at the school one weekday when we were in class, and I was called out. Miss Sanderson had most likely had some communication with him. I had intended to ask him not to bring Griff or the Bentley for his next visit, but hadn’t done so yet as I had no inkling that he was arriving. All I could think of when I saw that highly-polished car standing proud in the middle of the driveway with Griff at the wheel was that, if the other girls saw, it would start off another round of baiting me. I hardly had time to greet my father. I jumped into the back of the car and called to him, ‘Quick Daddy, jump in, oh do be quick, we have to get out of here.’ Non-plussed, my father got into the front passenger seat and gave the orders to Griff.

I don’t have strong memories of how the visit went, or what my father said to me, or even if he said anything much – though that seems unlikely. It was a grey day, and we drove over the Clifton Suspension Bridge I remember that, to a place by the sea with mud banks that looked as bleak in early February, as I felt inside. Possibly Weston-Super Mare? He and I went for a walk, but I don’t think he said much or I said anything. I think he bought me beans on toast in a hotel. He didn’t express anger, as I remember. I couldn’t finish all the beans even though my love for food was growing. When I pushed away my plate, I think he said something like, ‘I know you’re unhappy Jo, but you must stick it out. And it will get better, if you will only try’. I set my face. On the return journey he sat in the back and held my hand, but, when I didn’t say anything, he asked Griff to pass him the Times he hadn’t finished that morning.

He must have known quite a lot because I remember at one point he said, to try and make me laugh, ‘That was naughty of Uncle Harold to buy you those donuts, I believe you hoodwinked him properly there.’ He gave a bit of a laugh but it was a hollow laugh. And I wasn’t laughing or crying, or anything then. I was waiting, expecting some showdown, some insistence on his part that I stopped getting so many black stars and disgracing him. Another authority figure heavy on me.

All the way back I was waiting for the lecture, wondering when it would arrive. But as far as I remember, it didn’t. When he let me out of the car – at my insistence a street away from Badminton, out of sight of peering eyes at the windows – and walked me the last bit of the way to the school door, all he said was: ‘I hate to see you looking so peaky. But it is only two more weeks now till half-term. If there is anything I can do to make things better, tell me?’

So, I told him that some girls had a bit of tuck and it would be lovely if he could send me some sweets.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said.

Three things happened in the weeks left before half-term.

Urquhart expelled me, cast me out. Such a thing had apparently never happened before. Unable to coerce me to toe the line, the girls simply grew to a point beyond exasperation at being continually at the bottom of the league. They’d apparently talked it over with the Junior School Head, who explained to me that my House had arrived at a point where ‘there was, Joanna, no other way.’

The repercussions were severe indeed. Everything from eating to games, even to moving around the buildings was done by House. In the dining room each House ate together at a long table. Between two of these, a table for one was set up. And there I was, shamed, in everyone’s eye, a butt of both jokes and concern – I think the most soft-hearted of the girls found this punishment too dire; there were one or two sympathetic looks – and the occasional darts thrown over my head when the matrons weren’t looking. The general feeling, understandably, was that I had brought it on myself.

No counselling support attached to schools in 1953. I steeled myself. But meals were hateful, unbearable. My position was unattached, exiled in my own small island. One which – even despite evidence to the contrary most of the time ¬–¬ I have had to fight subsequently all my life. The very worst, the rock bottom as I remember it, was the occasions such as sports, where everyone congregated in their Houses and I simply had nowhere to stand, no-one to stand next to.

I cracked. I don’t know how many days it took. That we are not isolated creatures and that for most of us our yearning to be accepted by others, in one form or other to belong, is paramount, became devastatingly real to me. My will cracked, and with it, went something harder to define, to describe. All the research done after the Second World War on the effect of group pressure makes absolute sense to me.

I caved in. After, what? – a few days, a week or more? – that I can’t say. I caved in, promised no more misdemeanours and scrapes, I would tow the line. Urquhart reinstated me. The little table was removed from the dining-room. Before the half-term came, a sprinkling of gold stars were beginning to make their appearance on my card.

And meanwhile something else happened of import.

In my solitary wandering round the school I’d noticed a girl from my class slip into a shed, or sometimes slip out from the same shed. It must have been about the time of my reinstatement that I bumped into her just as she was leaving the shed and I stopped her and asked her what happened inside the shed. She said that I was to come with her, she’d show me. We went in together. It was a small building with a window in it and underneath the window was a wide shelf and on the shelf was a hamster cage with a hamster in it. My eyes must have grown wide because she laughed.

‘Whose is it?’

‘Mine,’ she told me.

‘You are allowed to have it here?’

‘Yes. My parents said I was unhappy about leaving it at home, and the school agreed. But they said I wasn’t to ‘make a big fuss about it’ so I keep it to myself, you know, unless someone asks. Like you did.’

‘Do you think I could have a hamster here?’

‘I don’t know. You could try. Do you have a hamster, then?

‘No.’

‘I had mine already, you see.’

We walked back to school together. I asked her to tell me when she was going to be with her hamster and I would like to go, too. She looked at me, seemed to consider, then nodded. She let me hold her hamster. I loved the feel of its little feet and beating heart in its soft fur.

Possibly it was my interest in her hamster, or whatever it was, something drew her to break ranks with the trio she had gone around with and become my friend. She was Belinda Burford. She had soft wide-set brown eyes, bouncy brown curls, a willowy figure and appealing smile. She was a popular girl and probably would have had many choices of friends. But by some luck, some magic, we just clicked. We were both dreamers.

And, equally of significance before the half-term break, was that one day after a visit to her hamster she said,

‘Come with me.’

‘Where to?’

‘Just come.’

I followed her over the well-kept lawns and along the gravel paths, then up a narrow grass path I hadn’t noticed at one side of the building and through an old gate swinging loose on its hinges. What was I looking at in the winter gloaming? A rough, neglected patch of land, with old apples trees and thorn bushes and a jumble of other bushes and trees, grass, mud, and a bit of a mound in the middle. I looked at her inquiringly.

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she said. I come here a lot. Don’t tell.’

I was nonplussed. ‘What do you come – to do?’

‘Just to be quiet, to be able to think my own thoughts.’

‘I’ve looked all over for the right place for my thoughts. I haven’t found anywhere right,’ I told her. ‘I don’t think I’ve thought any good thoughts since I’ve been here.’

‘You can share this,’ she offered, ‘if you want to?’

Belinda and the beginning of our life in the Rough Patch. But that will be for a further instalment.

The last thing that happened of significance was that, true to his word, my father did send me some sweets. But not just some sweets. He must have written (or perhaps got his office to write) to Cadbury, Roundtree’s and Fry’s and order from them not just a few sweets but whole boxes (samples?) of Mars bars, Milky Ways, chocolate peppermint bars, fruit and nut bars, humbugs, liquorice, butterscotch and toffees.

The next thing I knew I was requested to go to Matron’s office to explain these parcels that had arrived and she’d opened. These were far too many sweets for one girl, she reprimanded. And so cross was she by the cheek of the excess in the boxes in front of her that she confiscated the lot. And put them into the joint supply that we girls were meted out after lunch each day. I didn’t have a single extra sweet or chocolate from such largesse.

First the Bentley, now this new trouble. I was going to have to (gently) explain to my father when I saw him. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it like this at the time but I think I took in on some level, disappointingly, that it was going to have to be me who would have to protect him from his own excessiveness when it came to my school requests. And that I probably wouldn’t risk asking him for tuck again.