6
‘Now you’re a proper schoolgirl!’ I felt my stomach tighten. I was standing in the kitchen, wearing a white blouse, with a navy, silver and yellow tie under a navy-blue gymslip that almost reached my ankles and which my mother was about to pin up and hem. It would have been the beginning of January 1955 and in a week or so I was about to start school at the kindergarten of a convent preparatory school in Birmingham. My years there, up until 1961, were amongst the unhappiest of my life. I had spent a carefree term in the nursery class at Abbey Road Juniors where my only memories are of seeing my name printed in big, black letters on a strip of card, and my taking in the shape the letters made, and of being put to bed in the afternoons for a nap. I am assuming it was carefree because the memories are so scant and the ones that remain are pleasant. Just before I left, the namecard came apart in the middle. What I find most significant about this is that I was not afraid of the consequences.
My mother had talked about my new school in hushed, reverential tones. ‘Oh, you’ll learn how to speak properly,’ whereupon she would launch into an awful attempt at a middle-class, English accent, thick with snobbery: ‘You’ll be mixing with doctors’ daughters and the like.’ I was uncomfortable with her talking in this way and even then saw it as some sort of betrayal. Clearly the way we spoke and the fact that I was a builder’s daughter meant that I was quite simply not good enough, so I started that school ashamed of who I was.
On the day my own daughter started school, she took a couple of cuddly toys with her and her teacher said, ‘Now, where would they like to sit?’ I couldn’t help but compare this to the reception I imagined I would have got on my first day if I had had the temerity to bring such a thing with me. I imagine it being slapped from my hands and being told in a loud and angry voice that this was a place for learning.
I have a very clear memory of that first day. I was to be taken to school by the older sister of one of Kevin’s best friends. Her name was Mary and she lived about three hundred yards from our house. Her mum, a small, dark, sharp-featured woman from Northern Ireland, my mother’s friend from St Gregory’s church, ran a clothing catalogue whereby people could order clothes and pay for them in weekly instalments. Every Monday night I was dispatched to pay our instalment, or the ‘club money’ as it was called. Her dad was usually there, ensconced in his armchair in front of the television. He was from Southern Ireland and was much older than his wife; where she appeared harder in both accent and attitude, he was soft and gently spoken. When I was very small he would take me on his knee and tell me stories of fairies and elves and enchanted horses, in a dark, dramatic voice that could make the hair on the back of my neck stand up, but he would always end in a burst of laughter and a rough, bristly cuddle.
I loved these Monday nights; I would be sat down in front of the television and given tea in a china cup and saucer, plus a piece of fruit cake, while I watched Bonanza, a Western series about an improbable family. I don’t remember their own children, of which there were three, being there very much; they were that much older than me and were most probably either off out having a life or in another room doing their homework. In fact I can remember feeling disappointed if any of the children were there because their mum and dad might have been distracted from their pampering of me. They were a couple whose emotional dynamic was similar to that of my parents, except that they seemed to have more time and were less stressed.
Mary was their middle child, about seven or eight years older than me, with an older sister and a younger brother, and she was a pupil at the senior school, next door to the prep. She was a pretty girl with long dark hair and a massive amount of good sense. The journey to school consisted in part of a fifteen-minute bus ride down towards the city centre. On that first morning I was just about to step down from the bus at the stop by the school when, with a sweep of her arm, Mary pushed me aside and leapt from the bus. Then with one foot still on the platform and the other on the kerb, and the palm of her hand pressed firmly into my chest to stop me getting off, she stood in the path of a speeding bicycle, thus preventing what might have been a rather nasty collision. Instead she struck a pose like Super-woman, straddling the space between bus and pavement, while the cyclist, with a long skid and a squeaking of brakes, ended up with the unseemly parking of his front wheel between her legs and his handlebars pressed hard up against her tightly belted, regulation, navy-blue, gabardine mac. I can still see his head and shoulders shoot forward with the force of stopping so suddenly, causing his Brylcreem-laden quiff to flop down, in what looked like slow motion, over his forehead. Mary then held the cyclist there, their faces just inches apart, while she waved me and several other passengers safely off the bus behind her. Words were exchanged between her and the young man but I cannot remember what they were, except that his were said with an angry scowl, culminating in ‘Fuck off!’ What I do know is that, without a doubt, she came off best.
After this act of bravery I was in complete awe of her. She was a heroine, a person in whose company I was not fit to be, and I rarely dared to speak a word to her on our subsequent journeys. On many an occasion, I even put up with her spitting on her handkerchief and then roughly cleaning my face with it, enduring the unpleasant smell of dried spit until I could get to a tap to wash it off, rather than hint that I might prefer her not to do it. So I was not a little relieved when at six years old I was allowed to travel to and from school by myself.
This went without a hitch until one afternoon in year six, my final year at the school. I was with my two best friends and the little sister of one of them. We had been waiting for the number 9 bus and, feeling a bit bored, we decided to play in the huge overgrown front garden of an enormous empty house that was next to the bus stop. All the houses along this stretch of road were massive and had been converted into either hotels or offices. After some time we heard a man’s voice shouting at us and coming towards us, through the bushes, from the direction of the house.
‘Oi! What do you think you’re doing?’
We decided to run for it and scampered out of the garden, a way down the road, into the front garden of another huge house and there we hid in the bushes. We crouched down, hoping the man had gone, but a few minutes later he reappeared. He was tall and thin, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a grubby-looking mac.
‘What do you think you were doing in that garden?’
I don’t know who said what, but I think we probably all spoke at once.
‘We were just playing.’
‘We’re really sorry.’
He told us to stand up and proceeded to put a clammy hand up each of our skirts in turn and to feel the tops of our thighs. Whilst doing this he asked us what school we went to, this simple question striking more fear into our hearts than the molestation that was taking place. Suddenly he said that he was going but that he would be back in a couple of minutes and then, jabbing his forefinger at us, he told us we were to stay put until he came back or else. We stood there for several minutes in silence, precious minutes during which we could easily have escaped, but we were doing as we were told out of total fear. I can still smell the damp earth and the rotting leaves around our feet, and I can recall wanting this man to be harmless and telling the others in a frightened whisper that I believed his touching us up was simply him working out our age!
‘What would the nuns say if they knew what you’d been up to?’ He was back again and strangely breathless.
‘Oh, please don’t report us! We won’t do it again.’
‘Well, you’d better come with me.’
And dutifully with hearts racing, we followed. He took us back the way we had come, past the disused house and garden where we had been playing and where several people were now waiting for the bus. We then went round the corner into a much quieter road. He took us a little way down it and then instructed us to stand against the wall and lift our dresses up. I can still see his face as he stared at us and my recollecting with horror that not only was I not wearing my school beret, a reportable offence, but that I was also not wearing my regulation navy-blue interlock-weave school knickers. Instead I had on a pair of shameful, pink nylon frilly ones that my mother had bought off the market. After several seconds of staring, he was clearly becoming agitated and took us back the way we had come, up the road and round the corner, where now there was quite a queue at the bus stop. On seeing these people, one of my friends, God bless her presence of mind, suddenly proclaimed, ‘Oh! I’ve got to go and get my bus now.’ And she ran off at top speed in the opposite direction.
This of course attracted the attention of the people in the queue. The man, then clearly panicking, said, ‘Yes . . . yes . . . off you go and don’t let me catch you playing in that garden again or I’ll smack yer bums.’ And with that he scuttled off.
We never used that bus stop again, preferring to walk a quarter of a mile to the next one; nor did we ever speak of the incident. I never told my parents. I didn’t want them to worry and I felt them to be powerless. The next day at school the girl who had run off didn’t turn up. I was in a complete haze of fear the whole morning until her bright little face appeared around the classroom door. She had been to the dentist. I have often wondered what would have happened if that bus stop had been deserted. The man was obviously looking for somewhere to take us and that empty old house would have been perfect if it weren’t for the people waiting for the bus outside it. I also think that if we hadn’t been so terrified of being reported to the school, we’d have been more inclined both to stand up for ourselves and to get away from this man, and that we might not have been so afraid to report him.
The school was situated in a middle-class residential road, full of large detached houses. It was a neat-looking, biscuit-coloured, brick building, consisting of two wings at the centre of which was the chapel. One wing was the school itself and the other was the nuns’ living quarters.
There was no playground as such; we would be sent out to play on the drive or sometimes, as a special treat, ‘down the field’. The field was a green area at the back of the school that stretched a couple of hundred yards down to the perimeter fence, the other side of which was the Edgbaston reservoir. It was not a playing field; there were the odd few trees scattered here and there, and the grass was patchy and rough. No sports were ever taught or played there, although I do seem to remember the odd beanbag being flung about. So weather permitting, at lunchtime and at mid-morning break we were sent out on to the drive to play. Alongside it was a strip of lawn, about the same width as the drive itself, running along underneath the classroom windows and bordered by a concrete kerb. Upon this grass we were forbidden to tread. Many a child, myself included, had been summarily thrashed about the legs for simply letting the back of a heel touch it. So when I visited the school almost thirty years later I was filled with devilment to find that piece of lawn still there.
It was in the mid-eighties and I was up in Birmingham filming The Making of Acorn Antiques for the Victoria Wood Christmas Special. It so happened that I had been put up in a hotel just two or three miles from the school and one morning, finding myself with a couple of hours to spare, I decided to go and take a look. The school, as is so often the case, seemed to have shrunk, but was just as manicured and pristine as I remembered it. And there it was, the piece of lawn, the cause and the location of my and no doubt many others’ painful and humiliating public slapping. It was with joy in my heart therefore, and a pair of high-heeled boots on my feet, that I tramped up and down the full length of this lawn, several times, purposefully and with relish, digging my heels deep into the turf. I was hoping against hope that one of the Sisters would appear and tell me to get off the grass. Alas, no one came and I’m not sure how I would have reacted if one of them had come along and challenged my behaviour. In fantasyland I know exactly how I would have acted. I would have stood there, feet apart, hands on hips, and said: ‘Please, . . . make my day . . . Go on! Try and slap my legs.’
The nuns were of the classic penguin variety, wearing black, ankle-length habits with full skirts and waist-length, black veils that billowed out behind them like giant bat wings when they walked at speed. Under this, tightly wrapped about the head like a surgical dressing, was a starched, white wimple held in place by tiny white-headed pins, and covering their bosoms a stiff white scapular, upon which hung a big, black, wooden crucifix. Dangling from the waist, often accompanied by a bunch of keys, was a large set of dark, wooden, rosary beads that clacked and jingled when they moved, the sound of which served as an excellent warning that a nun was in the vicinity.
‘My name is Sister Cecilia.’
She had a big, pale, bespectacled face, covered in fine, downy hair, and she was the teacher in charge of the kindergarten. Almost immediately I noticed that there was a tension that hung in the air at this place, which was soon to be explained. For not only did the sisters dispense helpful gems like, ‘Don’t cross your legs, you never saw the Virgin Mary cross hers’ (I had never seen the Virgin Mary breathing in and out but it was fairly vital to the smooth running of a person’s day); or ‘Beware of chocolate . . . it’s a stimulant,’ and offer strictures that patent-leather shoes were not to be worn because they reflected your nether regions, they also administered painful and random slaps to the head, meted out for such misdemeanours as whispering in class. During my first couple of weeks an incident occurred that was to set the tone for my time at this school.
After much hype and many homilies as to how careful we were going to have to be, the kindergarten was delivered of a set of new desks. They were all there in place one morning when we arrived in the classroom. Their tubular, metal legs were still wrapped in brown paper, wound around them in strips. When the class was assembled, Sister Cecilia warned us sternly that under no circumstances were we to undo this wrapping: ‘Woe betide any girl found fiddling.’ Within a day or two one of the legs on my desk, the left-hand front one to be precise, was beginning to unravel! I can recall the shocked and sudden intakes of breath as my friends noticed the thin twist of paper coming away from and revealing the pale-blue metal leg beneath. Then as if in a bid for freedom, another leg revealed itself and then another; I looked on appalled and helpless, day after day, until finally all four, having popped their wrappings, were shedding them like snakeskin. Each time Sister Cecilia came near me I expected the customary stinging thwack to the side of my head but somehow I managed to escape it. Soon other people’s desk legs began to undo. One girl stayed away from school for a whole week, terrified of the consequences, but another brave soul decided to inform Sister of what was happening to her desk and to tell her that she, the child, had had nothing to do with it. She was dragged from her place and thrashed on the legs. I can see the two of them now, the girl with her cardigan half pulled off, careering into the front row of desks and knocking a tiny chair flying, then chasing one another around in a circle, the girl up on her tiptoes, her hips thrust forward, trying to get away, silent tears racing down her cheeks, and Sister Cecilia’s large, white hand in a blur of slapping, and the big, black cross, being swung and tossed violently about in mid-air, catching the girl on the face before crashing down again on to the starched white bosom. It was an event that none of us discussed. I wanted to tell my parents but I didn’t, projecting my own feelings of powerlessness on to them and feeling a need to somehow protect them from this.
Eventually, one Sunday night, unable to sleep, in a state of terror at the thought of going to school on the Monday and despair at my own childish impotence, I confessed to my parents in an explosion of gulping tears the awful tale of the mutinous desk legs. They stood dumbfounded and then, unable to calm me, my father went off to telephone the Mother Superior, my mother thinking the whole thing a bit of a storm in a teacup. I waited, in my pyjamas by the kitchen fire, sick to my stomach.
When he returned my father still looked dumbfounded; but he was also smiling.
‘There’s no problem,’ he said, his voice lifted in bemusement.
‘But what did she say? What did she say?’
‘She laughed . . . She said it doesn’t matter, Bab . . .’
It doesn’t matter! It was incredible to me that the fear and trepidation of the previous weeks could be solved by two smiling adults in a matter of minutes, over the phone; but it seems that it was, for when I went into school the next day, we were told to remove the wrapping from our desk legs. Thus was the desk-leg saga brought to a close.
However, I never went into that classroom, or, indeed, that school without fear of what was in store and there was plenty in store over the coming years, the elocution lessons my mother had spoken about with such reverence being one of my unhappiest experiences. These were to be taken by a lay teacher. In some ways I could cope with the inappropriate nature of the punishments handed out by the nuns because they were like a different species, holed up together in an alien bubble of a life. But I felt somehow let down by the lay teachers, of whom there were only a couple, when they displayed the same lack of compassion and understanding as the Sisters. None of the teaching staff seem to have any joy in them and to my young self they nearly all appeared angry and unhappy. The elocution teacher was no exception.
Our elocution classes were held in a prefabricated hut at the back of the school. The girl sitting next to me had ‘ELECTRIC CHAIR! ELECTRIC CHAIR! ELECTRIC CHAIR!’ emblazoned on the front of her elocution exercise book. My abiding memory is of standing at the front of the class reading from a book. Throughout the reading I had consistently pronounced words that had a long A, such as ‘daft’, in the same way as words with a short A, such as ‘cat’. This was the way I spoke then and how I speak today; it was the way we all pronounced such words at home, my mother being Irish and the rest of us having Black Country accents. I knew what was expected of me, but I simply couldn’t bring myself to say this long A.
After the reading the teacher wrote out on the blackboard a list of words that were supposed to be pronounced in this way and asked me to read them out. I didn’t get past the first one, which was ‘bath’. Something in me, even though I was frightened, still refused to say it the way she wanted and every time I said ‘bath’ with a short A she walloped my hand with a ruler. I can’t recall how long I stood there but there were several stinging slaps and I know that I never gave in. It felt like some kind of final frontier to my self-worth. I was defending who I was. If I gave her what she wanted, I would be confirming my mother’s fears - that we were not good enough - and I simply couldn’t do that.
This difficulty with Standard English, or Received Pronunciation as it was then called, followed me to drama school many years later and beyond. It was not that I refused to speak it for a role, but that it caused me a certain discomfort that I never disclosed. It slowly but gradually ceased to be a problem as I came, in later years, to be more accepting of myself and who I was. My mother, of course, was forever disappointed that I didn’t come home speaking like the doctors’ daughters of her imagination, and I was unable at the time to understand and therefore to express why I couldn’t.
I’m not going to list every punishment that took place at this school, but there is one more that remains strikingly distinct in my memory. I was in what would now be year five, making me eight or nine years old. Our teacher was Sister Ignatius, a towering figure - ‘Mum, she’s as tall as the door!’ - with a florid face and thick black, beetle brows. She had a huge, booming voice and a nasty temper. One day she had had reason to leave the classroom for a few minutes, leaving the form captain in charge. There was total silence as we got on with our work. Suddenly one of the girls said, ‘Isn’t it quiet without Sister?’ The minute Sister Ignatius returned, the form captain, a humourless swot of a girl for whom the term ‘teacher’s pet’ had probably been invented, saw fit to report this innocent remark. The nun then launched herself at the child who had had the audacity to speak in her absence, the first blow knocking her clean off her chair. She then set about beating her while the girl lay cowering on the floor, trying to protect herself. After a minute or so of flailing and thrashing, Sister Ignatius dragged the child to her feet and into a small room off the back of the classroom that was used as a furniture and stationery store. She slammed the door behind them and continued to beat her.
We sat frozen, in breath-held, mouth-dry silence. Not a look was exchanged between us as we listened to the sudden violent scrape of desk legs on the wooden floor and the raining down on to this poor girl of blow after blow. When the nun emerged, some minutes later, still purple faced and enraged, we were forbidden to speak to the girl. She was shut in the room for the rest of the day. We were told to send her to Coventry until instructed to do otherwise, and I still experience a sense of shame when I think of that girl standing alone at break times and dinnertimes in the days that followed, all of us fearful of what would happen should we dare to talk to her.
How on earth we learnt anything under this tyranny is beyond me. Long division? Forget it! Long multiplication? The same. If you didn’t get it the first time, for whatever reason, it was better, at least in my book, to copy someone else’s rather than suffer the humiliation that might result if you got it wrong. In year six under Sister Augustine’s slightly less terrifying tutelage, I would spend library hour, on a Friday afternoon, reading a book from cover to cover without taking in a single word of it. All of Arthur Ransome’s apparently wonderful novels simply passed in and out of my head in a blur of meaningless verbiage. It just felt as if the whole set-up was a club that I simply would never belong to, even down to reading a book for pleasure.
But something surprisingly healing did emerge from my time at this school and, even more surprisingly, it was during Sister Ignatius’s terrible reign. On the odd afternoon we would play the miming game whereby she would get us up individually, in front of the class, to do a mime and the other children would have to guess what it was. I can still recall the euphoria I felt on hearing that nun’s laughter the first time I stood out front and I can still see the classroom on that day, flooded with afternoon sun: how colourful and beautiful it suddenly looked. I also experienced a sense of power. I had, however briefly, quelled this woman’s anger and unhappiness and somehow made her safe.
‘You should go on the stage!’ she said in her big, cracked voice, still giggling. I knew then that in her laughter and in the laughing faces of my classmates lay my salvation and the building blocks for my self-esteem.