That's Another Story: The Autobiography (13 page)

There is only so much a sixteen-year-old can take and it all came to an abrupt end some weeks later when, at an athletics meeting, I was to enter a walking event for the first time, possibly a two- or three-mile race. I set off at a cracking pace, leaving the others way behind almost immediately. When I was nearly at the point of lapping them for the first time, after only a lap and a half and thinking, these people are hopeless, I started to tire, and gradually throughout the subsequent laps they began to overtake me, slowly but surely, one by one. I couldn’t possibly keep up the pace I had started out with. When the last one passed me, I felt my face blush with shame and the old panic begin to balloon in my chest. I had no choice: I simply couldn’t be the last person over that finishing line, and in this instance not only would I be the last person to finish, but I would also be the last by at least a lap.

So in panic mode and beginning to feel nauseous, I concocted a plan and, minutes later, I started to stagger and wobbled off the track on to the grass. After reeling around for a few seconds, I collapsed and lay there, doubled up, clutching my stomach and groaning. I waited. First there were shouts and then the thud of feet on turf as a couple of St John Ambulance men came running towards me. I was about to ‘bravely attempt’ to get up on to my feet when a stretcher was thrown to the ground, right in my eyeline. The day was going to end well after all! This was more than I could have hoped for, being carried off on a stretcher by two burly ambulance men, every pair of eyes in the stadium upon me, the centre of a drama, of my very own making; the young girl who all but had the race in the bag, only to have it snatched from her grasp by a mystery illness. The girl who had soldiered on, in agonising pain, until she could take no more: she is nothing less than a heroine!

Then Bernard, the coach, arrived, rudely interrupting the kindly paramedics, one of whom was holding my hand and telling me I was going to be fine.

‘No, it’s all right, fellas, you won’t be needing that.’

Sure he wasn’t talking about the stretcher!

‘She’s just run out of breath. I told you, didn’t I, to pace yourself? What were you playing at?’

‘My stomach . . . I can’t get up!’

‘Don’t be so silly, of course you can. It’s just a bit of stitch.’

And with that he sent my knights in shining armour away. I watched them amble off, the glorious stretcher swaying empty between them.

‘Come on! On your feet. You’ll get cold down there.’

I wanted to rise up and lamp him one on the chin. Then others started to arrive and gawp, gathering around me in a little, curious circle.

‘Is she all right?’

‘Yes! Course she is! She just went off like shit off a shovel and then found she’d got no puff! I wouldn’t mind but I’ve been training her for weeks.’

Oh, the humiliation! Now, I was no longer the tragic heroine, but the idiot who had whizzed off at a ridiculous speed, got a stitch and had to stop; it was almost worth telling them the truth! Of course I never did, but Bernard knew, and I knew that he knew, and he knew that I knew that he knew. I never went back.

I was to start my time at Holly Lodge, or ‘The Lodge’ as we called it, in Form 3C. This was the bottom class of four streams and it was here that I made my friends, some of whom I am still in touch with today. On the first day we filed into our new classroom, which was in a semi-basement that half looked out on to the playing field at that side of the school, and our teacher, a tall, grim-faced young woman who wore Edna Everage glasses, taught History and seemed to be in a permanent state of resentment, took the register. After each name was called the appropriate girl replied by shouting out, ‘Here!’ When my turn came, just as I was about to answer, I felt a slight prick in my left buttock and my ‘Here’ popped out in a little falsetto yelp, causing the teacher to pause momentarily with a baleful look over the top of her glasses. I turned to see what was going on, to be met with a huge smile from the girl behind. She had stuck her regulation geometry set compasses point into my bum cheek. Her smile was quickly wiped away by the sound of her own name being called out like a threat but we had bonded in that moment. Not that I want you to think, dear reader, that the piercing of one of my body parts with a sharp implement is mandatory for the forming of any friendships on my part, but this girl had huge charisma and attracted around her a little clique of which I was very proud to be a member.

It was at her twelfth birthday party, during a game of Postman’s Knock, that I had my first kiss from a boy who lived across the road from her. I would see him every time I went to her house and had taken to going there on the way home from school. He was a couple of years older, with cornflower-blue eyes, and was made more attractive by the fact that his father was in prison for robbing gas meters. It was exciting knowing what my mother’s reaction would be if she were to discover this liaison, which, needless to say, in due course she did. My brother Kevin spotted me with him one day when he had walked me home and that was it; not only did he tell the boy to clear off, but he then got my mother involved, telling her that I was mixing with a rough lad from a certain part of Smethwick. Much as my mother was fond of my friend, I was duly forbidden to ‘go hanging about there’. It was an area she referred to as the ‘bottom end of Smethwick’. I tried to reason with her, explaining that there was no ‘bottom end’, it was all ‘bottom’, but she wouldn’t have it and so I continued to go in secret.

I felt instantly at ease with the girls in my class and was able to let go of most of the self-consciousness that I had suffered at the prep with regard to the way I spoke, where I lived (I never invited anyone home, during the time I was there), what my parents did for a living, where we went on holiday (the summer before my last year at the prep, we went to Margate, another bone-numbingly long journey, and, whilst there, made a day trip to Calais). When I went back to the prep school after the summer holidays, girls were discussing their two or three weeks in Italy, Scotland and Cornwall. So when I was asked where we had been, I said, heart racing, that we had toured the south coast, well, we had visited Folkestone, as well as Margate, and been to France. Inevitably one of these girls, who had spent the previous summer in Provence, then asked where in France had we gone. I was at a loss, not having been anywhere else, and so had to admit it was Calais.

‘What, the port? You don’t mean where you get off the ferry?’

‘Erm . . .’ Someone behind me let out a little squeak of laughter. ‘Yes.’

‘What? You got off the ferry and didn’t go any further?’

I tried to laugh it off. ‘Yes.’

‘But Calais is horrible. People race off the ferry to get out of it.’

‘Well . . .’

I was paralysed by my dissembling and stood there, my face boiling, my heart now deafening in my ears. The little group dispersed, suddenly distracted by the clanging of the bell for lessons to begin. As I went to my desk and lifted its lid, the girl at the next desk said, ‘I went on a day trip to Calais once. I loved it.’ I wanted to cry.

While I was there I was always ashamed of virtually anything that might give a clue to my background, right down to the material that my school uniform was made of, my mother always going for the cheaper option. My panama hat, which we were required to wear at the prep during the summer term, was unlike anyone else’s, theirs being neat, pale and pork-pie shaped, and mine being large, yellowish and battered-looking with a misshapen, unruly brim, the sort of thing that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a scarecrow or on Guy Fawkes, on top of the bonfire. It caused endless embarrassment, not least when I walked up our street upon arriving home from school, running the gauntlet of the neighbourhood kids, all giggling and making country yokel noises, and Dermot sitting smirking on his wall. I didn’t have the courage to remove it until at least year three, fearing that somehow the nuns would find out. And all this owing to the fact that Mum had found a bargain in a closing-down sale at a shop in town.

But at Holly Lodge, I slowly began to discover a pride, both in my family and in my home. I recognised my peers and found my place amongst them pretty quickly. I was the cheeky clown, calling out in class with comments to make the other girls, and sometimes the teachers, laugh. I would impersonate the headmistress, my grandmother, or a nutty woman who lived up the road, various pop stars and singers: anything to get those laughs. I recognised a power in it; it enabled me to be seen. It was inclusive; it both put things in perspective and cut them down to size. It stopped the world from being overwhelming and it was a lethal weapon.

The school had a drama society, but because of my daily performances in class I had little use for it. Also I wasn’t generally keen on the girls who belonged to it, thinking them uppity and cliquey. Only once did I appear in one of the school’s yearly drama productions, put on in conjunction with the boys’ school, and that was as Moth in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in my first year. I found it thrilling: not only the opportunity to perform, but also a chance to go and rehearse in the out-of-bounds boys’ school, where it was to be performed and where I proceeded to fall head over heels in love with the sixth-form boy playing Lysander, a stocky youth with thick, curly blond hair and very pink cheeks. It was an infatuation from afar as he seemed like a man and I felt like a child, and I doubt that he had any inkling of it. I conducted myself in rehearsals much the same as I did in lessons: playing the fool, making everyone laugh and constantly interrupting the male teacher, whom I also had a bit of a crush on.

Finally, one day, this teacher dragged me in gorgeous masterly fashion to one side and said, ‘Do you know why I cast you as Moth?’

‘No,’ I said, looking up flirtatiously.

‘Oh, then let me tell you; it’s because like a moth you are a bloody nuisance!’

The thrill I felt, standing backstage on that first night, listening to the excited chatter of an expectant audience, my face plastered in Leichner’s greasepaint, dressed in my costume of lilac muslin wings that were attached by elastic to my thumbs, and a tunic, made from pink and lilac muslin and satin by my mum on the old Singer sewing machine, is basically the same stomach-churning, mouth-drying, heart-banging thrill that I feel nowadays waiting in the wings to go on, on a first night. And wherever it may be, that warm dark space at the back of a flat (a piece of scenery), smelling of wood, scenery paint and dust baked by stage lights, half lit by the spill from the stage, filled with whispered apprehension and expectancy, will always remind me of that night long ago, on the creaking, cramped side-stage of the school hall at Holly Lodge boys’. However, I never went for any more parts, preferring the instant fix I got from calling out and clowning in class.

Despite its rather genteel-sounding name, Holly Lodge Grammar was by no means a school for young ladies. In fact, Smethwick Hall, the secondary modern, where I would have gone had my ‘borderline’ pass not been looked upon kindly, was considered by some to be a better school, where the behaviour of the pupils, in particular, and the standard of the work in many instances was superior. It was said that there were several parents each year who, even though their girls had passed the eleven-plus, had elected to send them to Smethwick Hall, thinking that they would most likely mix with a nicer class of girl and fare better generally. This was apparently not true of Holly Lodge boys’ school, which seemed to enjoy a higher reputation.

Although we had a uniform - school beret, navy-blue mac, blazer and skirt (gymslip in the first year), white blouse, navy-blue and gold tie, and black, flat, sensible shoes, accompanied by a satchel or briefcase - when I arrived that first day, bright and stiff in my new clothes, I found that the uniforms of many of the older girls, especially those in the lower streams higher up the school, were distorted out of all recognition. Berets, if worn at all, were folded in half and pinned on to the very back of the head with a couple of hairgrips. Hair would then be backcombed and lacquered up and over the top, often to gravity-defying heights, so that the thing was barely visible, while it was kept in place by hairspray that had more in common with glue than anything used today. Ties were discarded or left loosely hanging around the mid-bosom region; blouse collars were worn up with the tips turned down; skirts, which were meant to be mid-knee in length, were rolled over at the waist and hoicked, St Trinian-like, up to mid-thigh and, until tights came in, often revealing stocking tops and suspenders. Satchels, long abandoned, were replaced by ‘gondola’ baskets, shaped like boats, which were meant to be used only for domestic science. In the first two or three years I was there, shoes, not exactly fitting the sensible label, tended to be flat but with pointed toes and steel caps on the heels, so that the noise as girls walked along the stone corridors, in large numbers, from lesson to lesson, dragging their feet, was like something out of heavy industry, and any slipping or skidding, as happened frequently, would cause sparks to fly.

Out of school, en masse, some of these girls could be quite an alarming sight, trailing along Smethwick High Street on the way home, striking sparks, arms linked, four abreast, making passers-by jump into the road to get out of their way. Discipline varied hugely from class to class. Certain teachers hadn’t got the power of personality required to get our attention and their classes were nothing short of mayhem, with everyone talking at the top of their voices, wandering around willy-nilly, completely ignoring the teacher’s pleas to sit down and be quiet. On one occasion we barricaded the door with desks so that the teacher couldn’t get in; on another we barricaded ourselves in a corner behind piled-up desks so that the teacher could barely see us. I can remember a teacher giving up and leaving in tears on more than one occasion.

My insecurity, although greatly reduced after leaving my junior school, still manifested itself at odd times in odd ways. For instance, I would never customise my uniform; in fact, my uniform made me feel safe, and I never looked forward to non-uniform days, always feeling awkward and embarrassed in whatever I wore, either the clothes feeling too childish for me or me feeling too childish for the clothes. Doing something different with your blazer or your skirt meant putting your head above the parapet; it meant you were open to comment, open to judgement. I never felt good enough about myself to do that. Choosing to personalise your uniform was a sign of wanting to be grown up and part of me just didn’t want that; I wanted to be little and cute and funny, and to be loved for it. ‘Love the baba . . . love the baby.’ Even graduating from socks to tights was a cause for anxiety. So I put it off and put it off, becoming the last in my year to do it, first wearing thick ones that were more childish-looking lest anyone should say: who do you think you are? Because I didn’t know.