Frankie and Stankie (27 page)

Dinah's family dentist is called Dr Goldman and his daughter is one of the tanned airhead glamour girls. Dr Goldman is always grumbling about his son who, by all accounts, is a bit of an airhead as well. He grumbles while he's injecting your gums with what feels like a large rusty nail grinding through bone and gristle, but Dinah's mum won't let the girls switch to young Dr Weiss, the junior partner, who gives injections that you can't even feel, just in case Dr Goldman gets offended. Dr Goldman is always so busy touching up his female assistants that he never finishes your fillings in one session. He does temporary fillings over and over and he tells you to keep on coming back.

The dentist has always loomed large for Dinah, who's got useless, hazard-prone teeth in spite of all the nutritious force feeding in childhood and the gollops of cod liver oil and malt from the big elliptical brown glass jar. Being premature and anaemic and substandard has meant that she's forever in there with Dr Goldman and his rusty-nail routine. Dr Goldman has even started to flirt with
her
, in a half-hearted sort of way, though she never gets a nice golden tan like his daughter. Dinah will lie in the sun for hours until her balance has gone all wonky and those swirly optical disturbances start invading the backs of her eyelids, yet she always stays lily-white. She doesn't know that her copious daily hay-fever drugs are sabotaging her efforts: antihistamine is the active ingredient in all the sun-block pills.

During assembly, Miss Maidment likes to find moral uplift in all the music that Miss Bardsey chooses for filing in and out. So,
whether it's ‘The Royal Fireworks' or ‘The Harmonious Blacksmith', she always says the same thing.

‘That
invigorating
piece of music,' she says, ‘serves to remind us of the energetic, yet
orderly
way in which we go about our tasks at GHS. School dismiss.'

Each morning there are two hymns which the girls sing from their little hardback copies of
The Public School Hymn Book
, compiled by the Headmasters' Conference and published in 1949 by Novello and Co. in Wardour Street, London Wl. From this address it has clearly made its way around the globe from Greenland's Icy Mountains to Afric's Coral Strand. At the front of the hymn book it says, ‘Verses marked with an asterisk may be omitted if it is desired to shorten a hymn', but at Dinah's school they nearly always sing all the verses. Dinah loves the hymns and she especially likes the names of some of the people who wrote them, like Nahum Tate and Percy Dearmer, which she reads as ‘Percy Dreamer'. She thinks it's exciting that some of them were written very long ago, by the Venerable Bede, or by the twelfth-century Bishop of Cluny. The hymns are her first introduction to the metaphysical poetry of George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, because the poetry lessons in class are always taken up with the ‘suitable narrative verse'.

I sprang to the stirrup and Joris and he.
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three.

Every time she reads this poem, Dinah wonders if she's got it right that ‘he', in line one, is ‘Dirck' in line two. The most memorable thing about the ‘suitable narrative verse' is that, thanks to the Caledonian factor, all the most fabulous and bone-curdling Scottish ballads have sneaked on to the syllabus, full to the brim with drownings, hangings, poisonings, infanticides and eye-pecking mutilations.

The girls go lisle-stockinged in winter and wear cotton ankle socks in summer, but the teachers have to wear nylon stockings all year round. Then there's the academic gown. Miss Maidment wears her gown every morning, but the rest of the staff wear theirs only on Speech Days and on special occasions. That's all except Mrs Keithley who doesn't have a gown because she's come from the non-graduate Afrikaans-language teachers-training college in
Bloemfontein. This is clearly why Mrs Keithley is always stuck up in the gallery on special occasions, with the job of looking after Dinah's class of junior girls. And once the girls have realised this, Mrs Keithley gets no peace.

‘Why aren't you on the stage, Mrs Keithley?' they say. ‘We think it's
not fair
'

Mrs Keithley tries a brave smile. ‘Because I'm up here in the gallery, looking after you, my girlies,' she says.

On Speech Day a visiting dignitary will come and he'll speak almost for ever. Then he'll have to hand out all the prizes and cups and shields. These always go to the same five girls, who already have their blazers decked out with gold grosgrain ribbon and rows of silver badges. Standard GHS blazers are plain navy with a green-and-white badge on the pocket – except for dumbo Marjorie's. Marjorie is in Dinah's class and one day her mum spots a brace of the high-achieving gold-braid girls on the bus, so she thinks to herself, Now that's a nice way to brighten up a blazer. When Marjorie comes to school next day with bunting all over her blazer, she gets sent straight home in disgrace to have it removed.

Dinah's dad once gets asked to present the prizes on Speech Day but he manages to wriggle out of it. He's only ever turned up once on Speech Day and he carries on about it afterwards as if it were a rerun of Dinah's Brownie Show Day. He's got a story he likes to tell about interminable speeches that he's heard from a colleague who's come from Yale. It's about a celebrity speaker who decides to take all the letters of the name Yale and expand, one by one, on a particular virtue that each of the letters represents. So after he's gone on and on about ‘Youth', ‘Ambition', ‘Learning' and ‘Education', he finally winds up by telling the assembled shining youth how fortunate they are to be at Yale. Then the chairman rises to give his thanks.

‘We are indeed fortunate to be at Yale,' he says. ‘Because we could have been at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.'

Occasionally, the girls are gathered in the hall to hear Distinguished Visiting Persons on the lecture circuit – people like Helen Keller and Sir Vivian Fuchs. Once there's a phoney ‘explorer' who is making everything up as he goes along. At the end of any particularly unlikely adventure, he stretches out his left arm and runs the palm of his right hand along it.

‘Now
that's
a long one,' he says. ‘You can believe that if you like.'

He tells the girls that he's got a mileometer strapped to his hip which he'll show them, if they come up and see him afterwards, and some of his stories begin to border on the risqué. In the background, Miss Maidment, slightly flapping the batwing sleeves of her academic gown, is trying to decide on a strategy of damage limitation – whether to keep on miming normality or whether to arrange for the explorer's premature ejection.

Then there's the Afrikaner intellectual who prematurely ejects himself. He's been a distinguished academic but he's fallen foul of the
Volk
and he's been hounded out of his job. There's only one place to be an Afrikaner at this time and that's inside the laager of religious-racist authoritarianism. Defy the thought police and you're out. Naturally, the professor's banishment has enhanced his reputation among the English community, because any chink in the monolith is always met with relish. So he's soon on the English lecture circuit. Nobody has foreseen that the poor old professor will have found his isolation sufficiently troubling to have led him into alcohol addiction, or towards a penchant for low life. His speech from the platform is thick and slurred and he has the yellowing vestiges of a black eye. Plus he keeps on looking sideways out of the window. Then he dismisses himself after only fifteen minutes.

‘Excuse me,' he says politely, ‘but I can't stay any longer. I've got Poppy waiting for me in a taxi.'

This is Dinah's best exit line, ever. Better than ‘Exit pursued by a bear'.

GHS is a state school, but it's one in the context of a state that spends three-quarters of its education budget on one-tenth of its children. White children. There's no entrance exam, so you go there because your parents choose it – which is what they do, on the whole, if they're middle class. If you don't go to GHS, then you go to Mitchell High School. ‘Going to Mitchell' is seen as slightly downmarket at this time, because it's what you do if you're going to leave school at sixteen and do shorthand and typing at the Tech. In this way, Dinah loses touch with half her junior-school class, including the two serious brain-boxes, Jennifer Wilson and Janet Camperdown. Those two most frequent recipients of the Al icecream Top Girl rosette are both of them ‘going to Mitchell'.

Throughout Dinah's first year at GHS, it's fairly clear that the
staff don't quite know what to do with them, so they're dealt with as if they were still in junior school. Normal procedure at GHS is for girls to be grouped in forms according to their Matric subjects, after which they move, on the hour, to the classrooms of their allotted subject teachers. But Dinah's year of under-age new-bugs is kept all day in one or other of the four new form-rooms under the eye of a class teacher who takes them for nearly everything. Dinah is separated from Angela who's in a different form, though they still come together in all the breaks. They are still each other's Best Friend, even though they can't perform their primary Best-Friend function of whispering and giggling together in the back row of every classroom. So they long for the second year when they can be reunited through judicious choice of Matric subjects.

‘You're still my Best Friend,' Dinah says.

‘You'll always be my Best Friend,' Angela says. ‘I've never had such a friend.'

Dinah is lucky in her form teacher because she gets Miss Barnes who's an Old World beauty with pearl earrings and Celia Johnson hair. Miss Barnes wears sprigged crêpe dresses with shoulder pads and she's got a charming retro look. Dinah can't remember anything much they do in class, except that at the end of every day Miss Barnes chooses a book and reads it aloud. She remembers this because one day the book is
Pride and Prejudice
and it's like nothing she's ever come across before. The language is like watching a flying kite. It's like being lifted off the ground. For Dinah – her dad's read-aloud Boys' Book sessions excepted – fiction has always been a matter of finding one's own easy-option page-turners unaided in the city library, which has meant a steady diet of Enid Blyton school stories and the
Bobbsey Twins
followed by
Sue Barton Staff Nurse
, and the mysteries of Nancy Drew. These have been punctuated by occasional accidental highs such as
Anne of Green Gables, Little Women
and
Ballet Shoes
. Then there's Anya Seton and Georgette Heyer. Just recently Dinah has discovered Lorna Hill, whose slightly wacky 1950s characters, with their highbrow musical and balletic ambitions, have supplanted the hearty, lacrosse-playing heroines of Enid Blyton's
Mallory Towers
.

Lorna Hill's combination of North Country pony-trekking, combined with the lure of the Sadler's Wells ballet school, has managed to echo Dinah's unfulfilled longings for riding and ballet
lessons. Plus Lorna Hill's books have boys: brainy, sexy boys for Dinah to fall in love with. The boys are sexy
because
they're brainy, not because they're smoochy. This is the bliss of them. They provide Dinah with a blueprint for the desirable male other which effectively renders ineligible most of the groping, real-life local boys. Lorna Hill provides the establishment brainy boys like hunky Northumbrian Guy who's going to be a vet. Then there are the anti-establishment brainy boys like orphaned, stroppy Sebastian, the threadbare musical genius and rightful heir to the Hall, who's one day going to be a famous conductor, because nearly everyone is going to be famous and special.

‘You only read those books because you're in love with Guy,' Lisa says one day at the supper table.

It doesn't cross Dinah's mind that Lisa can only be making this observation because she's been reading the books herself and she too has fallen for Guy. She feels the blush rising, neck to hairline, like cherry lemonade being poured into a glass.

‘You've gone all red,' Lisa says.

‘No I haven't,' Dinah says.

‘You
have
,' Lisa says. ‘Even your ears are bright red.'

Most of Dinah's ‘cultured' reading –
The Arabian Nights
and the Brothers Grimm, William Blake and the Shakespeare songs, Robert Louis Stevenson and John Bunyan, St Paul and the Psalms – it's all come to her in little bite-sized chunks, courtesy of her junior school Beacon Readers.

– in the time of the caliph Haroun al-Rashid, there lived in the city of Baghdad –

– now it happened that the king loved gold above all things –

– o Rose, thou art sick –

– come unto these yellow sands and then take hands –

– I should like to rise and go, where the golden apples grow –

– and from him came fire and smoke –

– though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels –

– for I have eaten ashes like bread and mingled my drink with weeping –

With school reading she's had to take in every word and do comprehension exercises on it afterwards. But with her own
easy-option reading for pleasure, she's often just skipped all the ‘description' and homed in on the dialogue. The dialogue is where all the characters are – and it's the characters who become your special friends.

‘For two pins I'd put you in my rucksack,' says Guy when he rescues fragile balletic Jane who is lost in a mountain mist in highly unsuitable shoes. Dinah likes to replay this scene over and over in her mind. She plays it with herself as Jane, yet at the same time she's longing to be the one who says ‘For two pins' out loud. It always sounds weird when she plays it out with her everyday speech – that's the trouble. She's tried for a while to change the way she speaks, just as she's recently tried telling people her name is Beatrice, but none of it will stick. She
has
managed to change her writing recently. She's given up on the looped cursive she's been taught in junior school and has mastered a spiky, non-looped italic that she's learned by herself from a book.