Things to Make and Mend (2 page)

St Hilary’s, the school Sally attended in the Seventies, had a peculiar preoccupation with
the gentle arts.
Arts for girls.
Cooking
and needlework. Quiches spilled out from the ovens,
haberdashery
from the cupboards. St Hilary’s itself was hidden behind skeins of conspiratorial rhododendron bushes. Several grey, unalluring Portakabins adorned the grounds, plonked down beside the high-windowed classrooms. There was the Arts Block and the Science Block. There was a ‘playground’ where the girls slouched and whispered. There was a netball pitch, a hockey pitch and an outdoor long-jump, to which girls were sent out in midwinter in tiny shorts, their thighs mottled with cold. Sally will never forget the desolate wail of a sports-whistle across
mud-whorled
playing fields, or the pointless thud of hockey ball against stick.

She hated needlework then. Every Thursday morning, from ten to eleven thirty, the girls were supposed to sit in the Arts Block (classroom H) to improve their skills with needle and thread. And most Thursday mornings they did: they sat there, dutifully sewing. But they all destested it. Why bother making a
‘young woman’s skirt / jupe pour une jeune femme’
when you could go to Miss Selfridge and buy one? Their teacher’s name was Miss Button, as if she had been destined all her life to do this: to instruct teenage girls on the importance of neat
fastenings.
She was as unyielding as a newly-sewn button, too. She appeared at school, taut and disconcerting, the term Sally began her fourth year. Sally and her best friend Rowena Cresswell had been sitting in a Chemistry lesson at the time, trying to analyse
the properties of carbon dioxide (
Method: First we removed the oxygen from the gas jar by holding it underwater. Then we placed the gas jar over the
…). They had turned their safety-goggled gaze to the window to observe a young woman dressed in shades of brown and tan, disembarking from a Spider car. She looked very neat. She glanced up, registered Sally and Rowena and then looked away.

The girls discovered, after Miss Button’s arrival, that
Needlework
was not a peaceful occupation, not a pleasant hobby with which to while away the afternoons. Miss Button possessed a ruthlessness that was alarming.

‘Karen Worthing, do you honestly believe this hemming is adequate?’

‘Rowena Cresswell, you have pinned the pattern on upside down.’

‘Sally Tuttle, this is a part of the trouser leg, it is
not
the pocket.’

She possessed something called a ‘Kwik-unpick’: a cruel-
looking
metal instrument with two prongs, one sharp and one blunt. It was very efficient at dismantling bad sewing. Miss Button loved her Kwik-unpick and was always very quick to use it.

When her mood was light she would sometimes issue
photocopied
sheets of ‘traditional sewing songs’ that she wanted the class to sing. This constituted the ‘fun’ part of the class. They
would,
she informed them, have fun.

‘Today,’ Sally recalls her saying one autumn afternoon as she returned magnificently to her desk, ‘we are going to sing “Wee Weaver”.’

And Sally and Rowena Cresswell had sat up straighter and looked at their photocopied sheets. 

Confined.
Sally knew exactly how that person had felt.

‘Wee Weaver?’ she mumbled to Rowena Cresswell.

‘Bosom?’ Rowena mumbled back, and they both began to snigger. Sally placed a Black Jack in her mouth and offered one to Rowena. Black Jacks were good at stifling sniggers; it was not a good idea to undermine Miss Button’s appreciation of
Needlework.
Because Needlework was extremely important. The term Miss Button arrived, she had arranged for the class to go on a French exchange
specifically
to stay in a village close to Bayeux and its tapestry. Sally can’t remember the name of the village now, but it had had dozens of road signs pointing the way to Bayeux, a café called
La Bataille
and a small gift shop that sold mini-tapestry gift-sets. It had been very rural apart from that, with old cars
rattling
down white dust-tracks, fields full of sunflowers, dead chickens hanging from their ankles in the market. At school the girls had sat with their penfriends and marvelled at the relaxed maturity of the class. Where were the serried ranks of desks? Where were the uniforms? They still, however, had to sing
traditional
songs, just as they did in Needlework classes back in
England.
And their French Literature teacher still issued photocopied sheets. 

‘I dunneven know what “ma mie” means,’ Sally remembers whispering to Rowena.

‘I presume it means “mon amie”,’ Rowena hissed back, ‘I
presume
it’s one of those thingummies.’

‘What – a corruption?’

‘Yeah. Is that the word? A corruption. Or a declension or something.’

Rowena and Sally had both gone to look at the famous tapestry of course; they had both located poor Harold with the arrow in his eye and all the fallen soldiers in their chain mail. They had admired the satin-stitch and the intricacy of it all. Rowena had got
l’autobus
to Bayeux with Miss Button and a motley
assortment
of girls. Sally had been taken there in a car by her exchange family,
la famille Duval,
who had been genuinely keen for her to appreciate their region’s celebrated artwork. They were a very cultured family, Sally recalls, although she picked up all kinds of swear words from her elegant penfriend. She learned to speak with a freedom she never acquired at school. French words tumbled out of her mouth.
Les idiomes, les colloquialisms, les bons mots.

‘You speak French absolutely,’ said Madame Duval, holding Sally’s face between her warm palms and squashing her cheeks slightly, as if she was still a small child. She smiled. ‘You have an ear.’

Sally loved that family, that fortnight, that trip. That was when she thought she would go on to study French at university. Ha ha ha.

Rowena had had a less successful ‘placing’, she recalls, with a policeman’s family on the outskirts of the village. Her penfriend Laurence was surly and uninterested – she would not even go to look at the tapestry with the other girls; there was a deranged Alsatian called Bertrand, and they ate undercooked steak all the time. They never went out in the evenings.
En famille,
they stayed in and watched football in their small, overheated
salle à manger.
Eventually, Rowena came out in a rash – a stress-induced 
rash which itched and bled and turned out, when she had it diagnosed back in England, to be impetigo.

‘What a bloody nightmare,’ she used to joke sometimes, when they reminisced about it.

Oddly, on their final day in France, Rowena’s ‘family’ had taken her on a sudden excursion to Rouen Cathedral and
proceeded
to shower her with gifts: boxes full of chocolates, a pair of fashionable shorts, a broderie anglaise tablecloth for her mother. ‘Pour notre petite écolière anglaise,’ Madame had written on the tag. ‘Guilt gifts,’ Rowena said, marvelling at that unexpected sight of the cathedral, and the possession of a hand-embroidered
nappe pour table.
She had shown the
nappe
to Miss Button on the ferry back to Folkestone. Miss Button had fingered the cloth. ‘Sad,’ she said, ‘how banal modern embroidery can be.’

She was never an intellectual girl, Sally. More of a
plodder.
Quite common too. Quite working-class. Within three years of arriving at St Hilary's she had given up the following subjects: Latin, Social Studies, History, Geography, Art, German, Physics.

She persisted with Needlework.

Most girls, including Rowena, were studying eight subjects for their O-levels. Some were doing as many as ten. Francesca Ball, a kind of prodigy, was studying eleven O-levels and two AO-levels. But Sally Tuttle was studying five, one of which was Needlework. Needlework, said with a sneer. Neeeeedlewuuurk!

On Thursdays, Sally and Rowena were together all day.
Conspiratorially
they endured:

Thursdays were bad. But they were lightened by each other's presence. They were Sally'n'Rowena, Rowena'n'Sally: a natural phenomenon, like twin rocks in the sea. If one of them was
spotted
alone at school, people would be surprised. ‘Where's Sally?' they would ask. ‘Where's Rowena? Is she ill?'

In every class, they shared a desk. Rowena was left-handed
and so their writing hands clashed. It did not occur to them to sit the other way around until this was suggested one day by Miss Button.

‘Sit on Rowena's right, Sally, for pity's sake,' she said, ‘and you won't keep bashing into each other.'

Rowena and Sally looked at each other, giggled, got up, swapped seats and sat down again.

‘Wonder of wonders,' said Miss Button.

After that, the only time Rowena intruded on Sally's writing space was when, head almost in her arms at the end of a lesson, she would twirl her hair around the fingers of her right hand.

Be careful always to follow the correct size-lines.

Do not attempt to begin tacking until all the tailor's tacks are in place.

NEVER cut into a notch.

‘Look at Miss Button,' Sally whispered to Rowena that autumn afternoon, the afternoon of the ‘Wee Weaver'. Because Miss Button had started to sing, launching herself into the lyrics with a handful of girls sitting in the front row. How many more traditional songs were there?, Sally wondered. The week before it had been ‘Wind the Bobbin Up' and the week before that, ‘Greensleeves' (…
Thy smock of silk, both fair and white, with gold embroidered gorgeously;/ Thy petticoat of sendal white,/ And these I bought thee gladly
…)

‘Look at her go,' Rowena whispered.

Miss Button was singing boisterously, a smile on her face, amber jewellery sparkling at her neck.

‘Why was the weaver confined to his loom?' Sally wrote in her rough-book, sliding it across to Rowena.

Rowena considered, silently.

‘Maybe he wove his beard into it,' she wrote, pushing the book back to Sally.

Some of their classmates were singing the words quite enthusiastically now – the voices of Christine Pringle and Susan Temple, dismissed long ago as the class goody-goodies, could be heard quite clearly above the drone. And Sally felt a
little
sad not to be joining in. She would have sung – she secretly enjoyed singing – but with Rowena she had appearances to keep up. So after a moment she stopped, sighed and started to doodle in her rough-book. A biroed heart, its circumference gone over and over in blue so that it left an impression over several more pages.

(‘
She's loved by all young men and that does grieve me
,' warbled Christine and Susan …)

An emphatic blue heart, through which she drew an arrow.

They were in the middle of the second verse –

– when there was a sudden rap on the door, then the jack-in-the-box appearance of St Hilary's deputy headmistress: a large,
exasperated
person. She walked, fast but solemn, across the room towards Miss Button. The two women stood close, teacherish, and whispered. Then Miss Button nodded her head, raised her hand and shushed the singing girls.

‘Sally Tuttle. Miss Gordon would like a word with you outside please.'

Sally felt her face become pale. She glanced at Rowena and Rowena glanced back.
They know. Someone has told them.

And she was on her feet, the faces of her classmates looming up at her like lilies in a swamp.

‘You OK? Shall I come with you?' Rowena whispered. This was not about embroidery. Rowena was the only person who knew what this was about.

Sally looked away.

‘Wish me luck,' she croaked, and she felt Rowena touch her sleeve as she brushed past to the end of the row of chairs and across to Miss Gordon.

‘OK. Drama over. Let us resume,' she heard Miss Button instruct the class. ‘Where Willie and Mary spent many the happy hour …' she pronounced, clapping her hands together. The
warbling
resumed.

The green-upholstered Resource Area was meant for the
sixth-formers
to sit in during breaks, but nobody ever did. It was always as deserted as the
Marie Celeste,
all the sixth-formers
preferring
a broken-down brick wall behind the Assembly Hall.

Sally walked behind Miss Gordon. She looked down at her feet: at her oversized shoes moving her on, one step after another. She thought of Mary, Queen of Scots climbing the scaffold.

‘We'll sit here,' Miss Gordon proclaimed, swinging her
substantial
weight into one of the little chairs. She looked at Sally. ‘You've gone very pale,' she said, noticing finally. ‘This is nothing to get alarmed about, Sally. You look quite … unwell.'

‘Do I?'

‘Yes,' said Miss Gordon. She frowned, paused, drew in her breath and then pulled an envelope out of her pocket. Sally was reminded of the conjuring tricks she had seen once, years before, at a children's party.

‘It's just a phone message from your father,' Miss Gordon said.

Sally's heart thumped on.

‘The secretary kindly made a note of what he said and said she would pass it on. So here I am,' said Miss Gordon, ‘passing it on. Aren't I the lucky one?'

‘Right.' 

Sally took the note from the amused Miss Gordon. It had been sealed in the envelope, but someone,
someone,
had unsealed it.

‘OK?' Miss Gordon said, the small smile struggling not to appear on her face.

Miss Gordon had, Sally felt, always thought that she was slightly ridiculous – not really worth the generous bursary bestowed upon her – and here was the proof.
A father who sends messages about dental appointments! And what does the father do? The father is a postman!
Most of the girls who went to Sally's school had parents with proper jobs. Solicitors. Doctors.
Dentists.
Accountants, like Rowena Cresswell's dad. Diplomats: there was even a diplomat! Miss Gordon looked at Sally, her eyes small and twinkling and mud-coloured behind her glasses. She had a large, upholstered bosom behind a stiff grey jacket. Sally was aware of the pulse inside her head, of her heartbeat, of her ten fingers clutched into cold fists in her lap.

It was not her father who had phoned to leave that message. That message was a ruse. And now she had nowhere to place her fear of discovery. She felt as if she might be sick.

‘Not earth-shattering then?' Miss Gordon asked.

‘No.'

Miss Gordon composed herself and continued. ‘You still look terribly guilty about something, though, Sally Tuttle. Any dark secrets we should know about?'

‘No. None at all.'

‘That's all right, then,' said Miss Gordon.