1953 in My Father’s House XIX

Summer Term: Hamsters, Shakespeare & Swimming

Poor dear Jaggi died on the day I went back to Badminton, but before I got there. Fred, the groundsman, put him into a Kleenex box for me. And I went to the shed and saw his tiny little dead form in the box with a few leaves round him and cried and cried. To be honest, I didn’t love him quite as much as Mustard who had been my first, but I still loved him very much. His was the first death I’d had to contend with; my father’s mother had died when I’d been too young to form an attachment and both grandfathers were dead before I was born. Now I was heartbroken.

There had been so much rain, the soil was soft, so Belinda and I begged a spade off the same Fred and went to the Rough Patch and dug a hole at the bottom of the mound and lifted Jaggi and the leaves into it. I then worried that it wasn’t deep enough as I didn’t want other little creatures to nip at him right away when he was still only just dead. So we got him out, this was fiddly and Belinda didn’t want to but she helped me, and we dug again, taking turns until it was a nice deep hole which we filled over with earth. Then we sat by the buried hamster, or I did, for the rest of the afternoon till the supper bell.

I wondered and worried over death and where souls go to, even hamster souls. I cried in waves. I was really crying for everything I suppose, for Mummy being so far away and my siblings still being there with her. For leaving my father and No 55 where I felt comfortable now and having to return to this regimented life. For the loss of my freedom here. For things coming to an end, things you couldn’t have expected. I had had no warning that Jaggi had got worse and was going to die. For the idea that we would all die one day. Suddenly it was very real.

Jaggi was there and now he was gone. He was only a hamster, only my second-best hamster, but still I’d loved him and now I didn’t know what to do with that love. I had the idea that he should have at least a proper funeral, that it wasn’t enough to plonk him in the earth. You could say I wanted to draw it out because I wasn’t ready to give up on him. I decided to go inside and ask Miss Sanderson if she had the words of a funeral service I could borrow.

But on the way in I met Jennifer, one of the girls I’d given one of Mustard and Jaggi’s babies to, and she was crying and wiping her tears with her long single plait. She wasn’t one who would be crying because she’d left home, she was a happy-go-lucky sort of girl, mostly always cheerful. Perhaps she’d heard about Jaggi? Though her tears seemed too strenuous for that, too personal. What was it? ‘Jenny, what’s wrong, what’s happened to you?’

‘Matchstick has died,’ she told me.

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘He died in my arms, in the car as we drove back from Sherbourne, just now, just as we came into Bristol. And I loved him. I’d wanted a hamster for so long’ — and she cried and cried.

Needless to say, this set me off —‘Jaggi’s gone.’

‘I know.’

We looked at each other in terror. Why had they both died? I gave her the empty Kleenex box and we picked leaves together. There was a furore in the shed, everyone was rushing in, checking on their hamsters. The first night back was terribly unsettled, some children smuggled their hamsters into the dorm after lights out. But the prefects got wise to it and made us take them back. I saw Miss Sanderson the next morning. She arranged for me to see our Chaplain who, after quite a grilling, lent me a shortened version of a funeral service.

Jenny and I wrote a notice and pinned it to the board in the corridor, saying there would be a service for our hamsters after chapel next Sunday. Everyone was invited. By then two more hamsters were ill. It seemed there was a hamster flu spreading. The ill ones were removed from the shed and a hamster sanatorium was set up where the mowers were kept. It was hard to concentrate on lessons. Mustard seemed well so far, also Belinda’s Bur. But it was horrid to see some of the others get sick and not eat and get thinner and thinner.

I read parts of the Old Testament. I wanted it to be a proper service. I wanted long quotes that sounded sufficiently serious and dignified. Our hamsters deserved that.

By Sunday no more had died, but more were ill. We smuggled out food from our meals to give our hamsters special titbits to try to keep them healthy. We prayed, we made up spells and concoctions, we did everything we could think of. The sick ones just got thinner and thinner and we began to realise that if a hamster caught this flu – well, it would die in the end. It was terrible.

More or less the whole of the junior school poured into the Rough Patch, Belinda’s and my secret sanctuary, that next Sunday morning after church. It was a fine day for once. Not even a breeze. Still, I wore my coat because it looked sombre. Belinda and I and Jenny held hands to help give us strength. Jennifer talked about Matchstick, about everything she loved about him and then I did the same for Jaggi. And I suppose those with sick hamsters feared what was ahead and cried as loudly as us.

Then we had prayers and made a circle and picked wild flowers and grasses and threw them on the two little graves and I said prayers about them going into the earth and feeding the earth and the nearby bluebells and then becoming vapour and then rainbows in the sky, and at the same time they’d be scampering around free in the grasses in Heaven. I got a bit confused by then so I got out the funeral sheet and carried it through. My voice was really strong and I felt steady while I was saying those things. Then we knelt in the end and thought about our hamsters and wished them goodbye, and that was it, really.

Except it wasn’t. Because every few days another hamster got sick and every few days another of the sick ones died. And I was called on to preside over another funeral service. It seemed to have become my role. I was very dramatic, and we all cried; I cried every time afresh. But Miss Sanderson told me that our Chaplain wanted his funeral service book back, and after that there was a new notice on the board saying that all future services were to be banned and only one girl with a single friend could bury her hamster at a time.

We were down to three hamsters surviving. Bur, Mustard, and Longsocks who belonged to a rather dreary girl called Patience. We didn’t cage them any more in the shed, which had been scrubbed down and disinfected, but separately in different locations over the school. Even that didn’t save them. They died too in the end, every last hamster.

The Junior school was in mourning. Long faces everywhere, tears every night. Extra Ovaltine and chocolate rations were provided and even one or two matinee showings of musicals in an attempt to cheer us up. And then one girl asked her parents for a new hamster but Miss Sanderson put her foot down. She banned hamsters from the school. They were too much of a distraction and the cause of too much distress. And I don’t know for sure, but quite possibly another hamster hasn’t been allowed in Badminton Junior School to this day.

I missed mine till my heart felt it could bear no more pain, especially after Mustard died, but eventually you find you get used to it in the way we all do. You move on because you have to. But to this day I bear the mark I value where, when the train from Paddington stopped suddenly, a splinter of glass from Mustard’s cage cut into the ‘V’ between my thumb and forefinger.

Meanwhile my budding orator skills had caught the attention of the Elocution and Drama teacher whose name for the life of me I can’t now remember. I want to say Miss Eccles, but that’s not quite it. I remember her stylish clothes, though, and the spring in her step, like she was floating. She was one of the youngest teachers, pretty and engaged to be married – this an endless source of gossip.

Each class was to stage a play outdoors, and ours was a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Miss Eccles (I’ll call her) was going to direct ours, but as was the custom at Badminton, she’d have one of the pupils as her assistant/ sub director. Of course many of us longed for this role. I was amongst them, and overwhelmed when I was chosen. Miss Sanderson congratulated me when I bumped into her in the corridor, with a somewhat wry comment about hoping this would give me a chance to ‘use your dramatic talents more productively’.

What it did afford me was the opportunity to be close to the thinking of a director as a play evolved. I threw myself into it – energetic, full of ideas, (rather bossy, I understand,) and wholly committed. By the time of the performance I had memorised the entire play, a feat that seems to me unimaginable now.

I’m not sure how good the production was but of course we thought it was the best performance of A Midsummer’s Night Dream ever – though many of us had seen no other yet – just as I’d thought Marco’s Toad had been the best Toad. The only disappointment was that it rained on the night we were to perform, so we had to do it in the Assembly Hall instead – which wasn’t quite the same. Still, it had been engrossing to be involved in, which helped to distract me from the hamsters and furthered my love of Shakespeare. And, of course, of Miss Eccles.

Then at last, long-awaited, there was the swimming. Those preparing for Sports Day were able to swim every morning before breakfast which was wonderful as it got me out of the horrible early morning runs. I wasn’t much good at hockey, or even rounders, my eye/ball coordination being pretty rubbish. I had a reputation as one of the less sporty girls and was hoping to make up for this by excelling at swimming. Unfortunately, even here I had limited skills. I wasn’t a graceful diver, though could jump from great heights which didn’t do me much good. I could only swim breaststroke, no crawl because the breathing was a problem, no pretty butterfly stroke, nothing like that. Still, I was fast.

I won for our House Urquhart in the breaststroke category, and won again in the obstacle race. And was in the team for the relay race, in which we came in second by a hair’s breadth. Urquhart won in many categories that day and my achievements, if modest, enabled me to feel included in the general rejoicing at our triumphant post-event tea.

Lots of parents came. Mummy of course couldn’t and Daddy was tied up with business, though he sent me a good luck card for my races which I though sweet of him. And Belinda’s parents who had come, took me out with her the following day which was Sunday for a slap-up lunch in a hotel in Clifton where you looked down on all of Bristol below.

I wrote to Mummy and Daddy about the Sports Day and the outing with B’s parents. I enjoyed writing that letter; for once I had so much to say it went over onto a third page. I think I was making more effort too because I could feel the summer holidays very soon upon us. Before long, I would have been at Badminton for a whole six months. I’d be going up into the second year next term. I had friends now, I wasn’t an outcast or just tagging along with Belinda’s friends. I was still my slightly eccentric self, I didn’t even hope to be in the mainstream, or amongst the most popular, but I was making it on my own terms. I had a sort of role; it wasn’t too bad.

And ahead, so close now that I could stretch out my hand and almost touch it, was a week with Daddy and Marco in Brighton, a further week with Daddy travelling to the South of France. And then. And then, in a hotel in Nice we would all be together again: Mummy, John, Madeleine, Daddy and me.