7
My mother’s ambition - or perhaps fantasy is more accurate - was for me to pass from the prep school up into the senior school, but I knew in my heart that there wasn’t a chance in hell and so did she. She had already been hauled in when I was in year three and told that there was every likelihood that she was wasting her hard-earned money, nine guineas a term. I simply wasn’t keeping up. I was separated off from the rest of the class with three or four other slow learners in order to try to bring me up to scratch and it wasn’t entirely working. Mum said virtually nothing as we walked to the bus stop afterwards but her disappointment was palpable in the tone of her voice and in the few words that she did say. ‘Oh, Julie . . . Oh dear . . . Tsk, tsk, tsk.’ I felt the same humiliation and helplessness as I had when I had wet the bed, in that I did not know what to do to put it right and to stop it happening again. However, I wasn’t thrown out, so my parents must have decided that it was best to keep me there and for me to soldier on and stay the course.
As predicted I didn’t get in to the senior school, but this could hardly be called a disappointment, more a fortunate outcome, because it meant that if I passed the eleven-plus examination - and the alternative was unthinkable - I would go to Holly Lodge Grammar School for Girls in Smethwick, where there wasn’t a nun in sight, and my brothers were already going to Holly Lodge Grammar School for Boys. The two schools were separated by a joint driveway. As it was, I nearly didn’t get in there either. A letter came from the education authority, stating that I had in fact failed the exam. My chest tightens now as I recall my mother breaking the news as if she were announcing that I had been found guilty of some heinous crime and would be hanged by the neck until dead. I didn’t feel as if I had failed an exam; I felt as if I had failed my whole life and all I had to look forward to was years of shame at a secondary-modern school, to be followed by the second-class existence of someone who had failed their eleven-plus! I went around in a state of total dejection for days, wanting to hide away as I heard my mother, brave in her chagrin, broadcast the news of my failure to friends and family.
One kind friend of my mother’s, whose own daughter had failed some years previously, said, ‘Never mind, Julie, you have always got your church.’ Trying to take comfort in this, all I could think of were the middle-aged women who fussed around the parish priest at St Gregory’s, our parish church, which we all, my father apart, attended every Sunday. These women, who cleaned the vestry and took charge of the flowers in the church, were poor souls whom my mother referred to as ‘too holy’; unattractive spinsters who were always on their knees, making cow eyes at the priest, with no hope of marrying, and who wore sensible shoes and no make-up.
But then a week or so later, a letter came from Holly Lodge Grammar. It seemed I hadn’t failed at all; well, to be more exact, I was what the letter referred to as ‘borderline’ and it said that the school were willing to take me if I promised to work hard. I felt as a prisoner must do on death row after being given a reprieve; now I could say, ‘No, I have passed! They made a mistake! I’m going to Holly Lodge!’ When I went to visit the aforementioned friend of my mother’s to impart the good news, I was labouring under the innocent delusion that she would be pleased for me. She had had her back to me at the time, standing at the kitchen sink, but she spun around and with venom in her voice she almost shouted, ‘I thought you’d failed!’
Arriving at Holly Lodge was like getting into your own bed after weeks of sleeping on someone else’s hard floor. It was familiar and comfortable; people spoke as I did; they lived in houses like mine, in the same area; their brothers knew mine; older girls from the years above came up to me in the corridor and said, ‘Are you Kevin Walters’ sister? I grew inches taller with pride. In short I knew that this was where I belonged.
They also taught PE, which hitherto I had been deprived of, even teaching myself to swim just the year before at Thimblemill Baths in Smethwick. The saga of my learning to swim went on for a couple of years. When I was about eight, Mrs Carlton, a woman whom my mother worked with who lived only a few streets away, offered to teach me and so every Sunday morning throughout the summer at the painfully early time of six-thirty I would set off, my rolled-up towel under my arm, to meet her at the baths with her two sons, who both looked to me like Olympic swimmers and were both younger than me. Seven o’clock, when the pool opened, was an ideal time; the baths would be a perfect, untroubled oblong of clear, blue water just waiting to have its surface tension ruffled by the first time swimmer. It would be free of corn plasters, toenails and other unidentifiable debris as there were very few folk who had the inclination to turn up at that time of the morning to plough its widths and lengths. All very different from the people soup that formed later in the day.
Mrs Carlton would support me under my waist, encouraging me at every turn while I simulated breaststroke, and after a while she would let go. I was terrified of being underwater and it always ended in the same way with me flailing around in total panic, coming up coughing and spluttering, and my teacher saying, ‘Just do the stroke as you were doing when I was holding you,’ but I couldn’t. I felt that despite the huge, mumsy size of this woman, with acres of white, dimpled flesh flaring out from the edges of her costume and floating freely in the water, I could not trust that she would save me were I to get into trouble. And on top of this I had to suffer the humiliation of going home, Mrs Carlton disappointed because she had not achieved her goal, and everyone saying, ‘Well? Have you learnt? What’s the problem?’ Despite this woman’s kindly assurances that I was almost there and that I would do it before the summer was out, I knew that I wouldn’t. It wasn’t until two years later in the summer of 1960 that I finally learnt.
I had a dream; one night I dreamt that I could swim. I dreamt that I was in the shallow end at Thimblemill Baths and, standing about two feet away from the side, I jumped and held quickly on to the rail that ran along it. Then I simply repeated it, standing further and further away, until I realised that I was floating towards the side and that my feet were off the bottom. The very next morning as soon as I woke up, without stopping to eat or drink a thing, I raced down to the baths, clutching my ninepence to get in, with my blue nylon, still-ruched, bathing costume rolled up in a towel, and I did exactly what I had done in the dream. Then with an elation I had never felt before this and rarely since, I was swimming; within twenty minutes I was swimming widths and then lengths. It became a passion. I went every single day of that summer holiday, stinking constantly of chlorine, and there, amongst the throng of splashing girls and dive-bombing boys, and adults trying to swim sedately up and down in between them, I felt my first tickle of lust for a lovely-looking boy who popped up like a beach ball out of the water directly in front of me, said, ‘I think you’re luscious!’ and then disappeared again. I went straight to the changing rooms to look at myself, to see what he had seen, and then straight home to look up the word ‘luscious’.
Like my brothers before me, I loved sport and at Holly Lodge spent most dinner hours and time after school in the winter playing hockey, with Saturday mornings playing right wing or right half and eventually centre half for one or other of the school teams. Once or twice the PE mistress invited the local Sikh boys’ team to practise with us. They were gentle and friendly boys but their dark, long-limbed grace made us girls feel like a herd of carthorses; indeed, at the end of the practice, the sound of thudding boots on turf as we raced back across the pitch to the showers put me very much in mind of the Grand National. The Sikhs would practise shooting goals by placing a wooden school chair in the centre of the goalmouth and hitting balls from the halfway line straight between the chair legs with deadly accuracy. They put us to shame with their speed and skill.
At the end of the hockey season the first-eleven girls would play a match with the first-eleven boys’ football team from the boys’ school across the way. Every year I would watch from the sidelines and every year I would be more and more turned on by the spectacle of big, hunky, sixth-form boys bullying off with and tackling our first-eleven girls in sometimes quite ferocious tussles that looked as if, at any moment, in a parallel universe at least, they would fling their sticks aside and rip their clothes off. When it came to my turn to play them, in the lower sixth, I could barely run for the lust of it.
But for some, the highlight of the hockey season was the game we played against the staff. The thought of wrapping my stick across the shins of a certain teacher with stale, sulphurous breath, who had accused me of cheating when I hadn’t, was almost sublime, but when it came to it, I couldn’t do it, because she was a different person on the pitch, sweet, smiling and vulnerable. In fact, this was true of all of them, with the possible exception of a swaggering male teacher, who was deeply unpopular and who had the unsavoury reputation of slithering up to girls during lessons and placing his great hoof on the corner of their desk, thus thrusting his baggy, old crotch at them in a horribly intrusive and vaguely lewd way. So there was great pleasure and entertainment value in seeing him tackled and defeated by our heroic forwards, and excitement at the possibility of his actually being maimed by a flying stick or a rogue ball. He resembled a toad, with his jowly, pasty face speckled with warts and his unctuous, smarmy persona; his too-close-for-comfort tutoring had to be punished. So of course a huge, roaring cheer of enjoyment came from the crowd when he was helped, limping between two teachers, from the pitch, having been given a mighty thwack across the ankle by our towering centre half.
In the third year, a new sport was introduced by means of an exclusive club, which was to meet every Wednesday in the gym, after school. It was basketball and the teacher running it had hand-picked us mainly from the hockey team. After several weeks of learning the game and practising, we formed a team called the White Tornados and played games against other teams of a similar standard every week or so, but the main thing that kept our interest up was not so much the playing of basketball, but the witnessing of what we imagined to be an affair between this teacher and one of the older girls. They always seemed to be having animated and hushed conversations in the PE teacher’s office, out of which the girl would emerge either bubbly and ecstatic or red-faced and tearful, and the teacher looking slightly sheepish.
Then one day in the showers after practice, one of the girls blurted out, ‘I think they’m lezzers.’ And that was it; we watched them after that like hawks: the looks between them, clocking a certain tone of voice here, a little touch of fingertips on elbow there, checking to see the signs of snogging on their lips, but the evidence was never found to be conclusive. Sometimes they would be seen in close conversation outside the staffroom door, the girl looking up at the teacher with a swoon in her eyes, the teacher looking edgy and self-conscious. It was a soap opera that lasted a tantalising couple of years until we found out from several sources, after months of detective work, the devastating news that the whole thing was merely a disappointing infatuation on the part of the girl. Shortly afterwards half the team left. I stayed on with the team even after I left school, but eventually became disenchanted as my height became more and more of a disadvantage; everyone else towered above me and, tired of jumping for the ball only to be thwacked on the head by a pair of Amazonian bosoms, I stopped going.
During the summer terms I spent my free time preparing for the Smethwick inter-schools athletics championships, which were held every year at the Hadley Stadium in Smethwick. I was a sprinter and usually competed in the 200 metres and the relay, the winning of either, but especially the 200 metres, being almost a matter of life and death. To contemplate coming second or third was not an option, and the mere thought filled me with a sickening anxiety; indeed, I frequently threw up after a race, whatever the outcome of it. When I came third in the 200 metres, the first time I had ever run it, I hid in the toilets, vomiting and crying at the same time, which is actually quite difficult to achieve, and then waited, shivering and crouching on the floor of the cubicle, until everyone else had gone home. Facing them seemed an impossibility. It felt as if when I didn’t win, I didn’t know how to be, I didn’t exist. I was ashamed and went home in dread of telling my mother. She wasn’t an ‘Oh well, it’s the taking part that counts’ sort of person.
When while still at primary school, my brother Kevin came home and told her with pride that he had come third in a maths test, she shot back instantly with, ‘Who came first?’ and when he told her, she said, ‘Oh, he’s clever!’ reserving all her praise for some other child. Worse still, when my other brother Tommy got a first-class honours degree from Birmingham University, she just said, ‘Ah well, they’re turning them away from the Harwell nuclear plant with firsts.’ So when I stood in the scullery while my mum was making a batch of her legendary rock cakes - the cricket season was, after all, upon us - and I told her of the disaster that had occurred that afternoon, I was shocked at her gentle and unperturbed response. ‘Well, it’s all right, it doesn’t matter. Forget about it,’ she said without looking at me. I presumed that she must have sensed my distress and that in her eyes I didn’t need to be put right, as I was already having the correct reaction. I believe that, had I been pleased with the result, it would have been another story.
I never lost that race again and became Worcestershire 200-metres champion in 1966. As a result of this, an athletics scout from Smethwick Harriers came and took me under his wing, stating that I might have a modicum of talent. However, I had torn a muscle in my hip at these same county championships, whilst running the second leg of the 4 by 100 metres relay race, so instead of continuing with the sprinting, which would have damaged the muscle further, we embarked on a course of training that involved walking. This was not your normal walking, as used for getting around on an everyday sort of basis; no, this was a mode of walking that no mentally fit human being would employ to go anywhere for fear of attracting the wrong kind of attention. It involved a strong, pumping arm action, which was fair enough, but it also involved arching the back and making the arse stick out in a rather rude, baboon-like fashion. Then with legs straight, overextending the knee and always having to keep one foot on the ground at any one time, it resulted in a Max Wall type of somewhat vulgar mincing, at speed, with the hips and bottom swaying exaggeratedly from side to side.
This was competitive walking, and most athletics meetings had several walking races as part of the day’s events. You don’t see it so often today, but back then it was quite usual to see people waddling along at the side of the road, in training, much the same as joggers are a common sight now. I endured the humiliation of this by going training only either early in the morning or at dusk, and even then I couldn’t escape the smirks and sometimes outright laughter, occasionally accompanied by rude pointing, of people in the street, let alone the jeers and heckles often alluding to the possibility that I might have shat myself.
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.
This anxiety about clothes and my appearance reached a crescendo at around the age of fourteen or fifteen when one of the coolest girls in the class was taking a group of girls to see Thank Your Lucky Stars for her birthday and I was invited to go along. This was a weekly Saturday-night pop show, filmed for ITV on Sunday nights in front of a live audience in Birmingham’s Alpha studio. It boasted the first network television appearance of the Beatles and had made a star out of a local sixteen-year-old girl from the Black Country called Janice Nicholls who, when sitting on a panel to judge the latest releases, started a national catchphrase with, ‘I’ll give it foive,’ in her thick Wednesbury accent, meaning, I’ll give it five marks out of five.
A couple of weeks before we were due to go, I began to get into a state about what I should wear. Nothing was good enough. I scoured shops with money I had begged from my father and nothing was right; but what was right? I had no idea. So, just as in the walking race, I concocted a plan. I would just be off school, ill, and therefore unable to go. So two days before the event, I took to my bed, claiming that I felt sick. Then at lunchtime I had some soup and proceeded to make myself vomit it up. When my mother returned from work and brought me up something to eat, I did the same thing.
I continued to do this until the day after the girl’s birthday but by this time I really did feel poorly and the doctor was summoned. He said it was obviously a tummy bug and prescribed some kind of antibiotic. For two whole weeks I lay prostrate on the sitting-room sofa, every turn of my head making me retch, unable to keep anything down except for the odd mouthful of water, weakening by the day. I was astounded and secretly thrilled that I had the power to make all of this happen and I was lapping up my mother’s care and concern until the doctor returned for the third time and, worried that I had shown little if any improvement, started to talk of a possible hospitalisation.
Now I really was scared. The next day with monumental effort I arose from my sick bed and for the first time in two weeks I looked in the mirror, something I was quite capable of spending hours doing and which I did on most days, fiddling with my hair, picking at my skin, daubing on eye make-up. But on this day, as I stood weakly swaying in front of the mirror that hung above the fireplace in the sitting room, I saw why their conversation had taken on its frightened tone and why they had spoken with urgency about a stay in hospital. It was the face of someone else. I moved in closer, unable to take in the transformation. My hair was flat with grease and matted for the want of a good wash and brush; my skin had gone sheet-white with a yellowish-green tinge at the edges; the hollows beneath my cheekbones were so deep that it almost looked as if I had a five o’clock shadow; my lips, shrivelled and cracked, had lost all definition and were virtually the same colour as my skin, and my eyes were enormous. This last effect I would quite liked to have kept. I stared into eyes that were strange yet familiar, like those of a relative, and I watched as big, shiny tears welled up and toppled over my bottom lashes, landing hot on to my bony chest. I touched the glass and whispered, ‘I’m so sorry.’
And so began my recovery. When I finally returned to school, people gawped as I passed them in the corridor and didn’t want to tackle me at hockey practice lest, as one friend put it, I should ‘snap’. Although I had taken some pleasure in the attention I had received and my new-found power to make myself ill just whenever I wished, I was frightened by the fact that I could simply make myself believe I was sick and then become so, and by the subsequent way in which my body then took over. What if I couldn’t have come back? This thought crossed my mind and made me shudder on many an occasion during the weeks that followed.
Throughout my entire time at Holly Lodge I felt younger than my peers. With the onset of puberty a lot of the girls in my class suddenly appeared a good few years older than me. Some looked as if they could be about thirty with a couple of kids, whilst others looked as if they were about nine. I was of the nine-year-old variety. A lot of them were sexually active and, if not, had a good working knowledge of how you went about things. I had no experience apart from a bit of kissing and fumbling. My sex education started when playing with my friends in Lightwoods Park aged about eight. One of them drew my attention to two dogs, one mounting the other, and said, ‘That’s what your mum and dad do.’ I took issue with this, thinking it to be a personal insult to my parents, stating that it couldn’t possibly be so because my mother was a Catholic. Even if it was true I didn’t really want this piece of information and did my best to rid my head of the image of my mother on all fours and my dad behind her, slavering and looking slightly hairy.
Then once at secondary school, I laboured under the delusion, born of a rumour spread throughout my year, that if a girl had splayed feet, it meant that she had lost her virginity. This didn’t quite make sense when I looked at the girl a couple of years above, who was from a very religious family, wore very long skirts, sported two plaits down to her bottom and was nicknamed ‘Miss Smethwick 1918’, but I still believed it and it didn’t occur to me that my mother’s feet, for instance, pointed straight out in front and what about those unfortunate girls with pigeon toes? I supposed them to be the ones I had heard about, who experienced a great deal of pain on losing their virginity, which was evidently to do with the wrenching apart of their toes and the resultant strain on their ankles. I was also told by some informed soul that you could get pregnant by sitting in a married man’s bathwater, so I always gave the bath a good rinse if my father had been in before me.
My mother never broached the subject of sex education until I was sixteen, when she asked without looking at me, in a little girl’s voice, ‘Do you know about periods, Julie?’
‘Well, I should hope so, Mum, I’ve been having them for two years.’
She knew this of course but obviously had not known how to tackle the issue. My periods starting late didn’t help in the maturity stakes. The actual moment took place at age fourteen when I was staying with relatives of a friend and didn’t feel I could ask the elderly childless couple for assistance, so I ended up stealing a pillow case from the airing cupboard and shoving it between my legs. I went home on the bus in some discomfort and got off it walking like John Wayne. When I look back, it seems that there was also something engineered about my immaturity with my peers. If I played a childish role, I was no threat and therefore more lovable, and I felt safe in it, but despite setting myself apart in this way I managed to maintain a prominent position in the group, primarily by being good at sport but mainly by entertaining them and playing the jester.
There was also insecurity around food. For the mid-morning break, which we referred to as ‘lunch’, people brought in sandwiches, crisps and fruit. I never did this. I spent the whole of the fifteen- or twenty-minute break begging titbits off the other girls. Seeing no shame in this, I went from one to the other.
‘Please, please, can I have a crisp? Can I have a sandwich? Oh, go on! Can I have another one?’
They quite rightly got miffed: ‘For Christ’s sake, why don’t you bring your own?’
It amazes me now how I put up with the humiliation involved, day after day, and it went on for two or three years. I had always blamed this odd behaviour firstly on the fact that my mother would never fund a daily packet of crisps and secondly on the fact that I felt I would be shown up in some way by whatever food I brought in. However, seeing as some girls brought in plain bread and butter, and others bread and dripping, I don’t think that this can really be the case. Rather than any kind of shame or embarrassment being the cause of my daily cadging, I think it had more to do with the fact that if I had nothing, nothing could be taken from me. As I was the younger sister of two brothers, anything, and especially sweets or snacks, was open season. Even now I feel enraged when anyone takes food off my plate.
Although every school report said things like ‘Julia could do better; is not working to her full potential; does not concentrate’, as the years went by at Holly Lodge, my confidence grew and my schoolwork gradually improved. I became good at French, English and Geography, and in the fifth year a select group of us went up into the second stream, 5L. I got four GCEs, English Literature, English Language, French and Geography, while failing everything else. In the case of History, where I did no revision at all, I achieved an unmarkable grade nine. I had sat in front of the exam paper, staring at it, unable to answer a single question, so, not wishing to sit there for an hour and a half conspicuously doing nothing, I wrote about a pair of new shoes I had bought the week before, a holiday in Weymouth from a few years back and what I expected to have for my tea.
The GCEs were the peak of my academic achievement at Holly Lodge, for once I was in the sixth form things began to quickly slide. Many of my friends had left as in those days, particularly in working-class families, the imperative was to go out and get a job. My father never really expressed an opinion on this, just wanting me to be happy, but my mother, despite her penny-pinching fear of debt and poverty, always pushed the idea that education, particularly for the boys, was paramount. At the start of the new academic year various girls from different forms were now working alongside each other for the first time and so the whole dynamic changed and new friendships were formed. It was to be the setting for a very shameful episode.
I had become friends with an entirely new group, which took me away from some of my old friends. This little clique was led by an exceedingly bright and charismatic girl who possessed a wicked sense of humour. Whilst somewhat scared of her, like the others in our little group I was both captivated and in awe of her. After a few weeks she started to take against a certain girl, making snide comments and funny asides about her, often followed by crude little cartoons of her victim, which highlighted her bodily imperfections in a most exact and comic way and sometimes ended up on the sixth-form notice-board. Although underneath I felt distinctly uncomfortable and guilty about being part of this bullying, I did nothing to discourage it; in fact, it was the opposite. I, along with the others, supported it with giggles and laughter, joining in with vicious gossip about the poor girl that made our leader hoot with delight and made us, in turn, glow with pride. We had done good! And whilst someone else was the scapegoat, she would not direct her acid wit towards us. It was too late anyway; we were already ensnared and had now become her devoted acolytes.
But then it began to escalate; a chair leg was unscrewed in the school hall just before assembly, hoping that, when this poor girl sat on it, it would collapse in front of everyone. I sat a couple of rows back, holding my breath, hoping against hope that she would miss assembly, or choose a different chair, and praying that, if she were to sit in it, the chair would stay intact; it did. I breathed a huge sigh of relief but joined our leader in expressing disappointment.
Then another horrid plan was hatched: this time to rub butter on the pedals of her bicycle and put pepper in her beret. I stood with the others, unable to bear the thought of it, yet heartily agreeing to it, feigning glee and excitement; wanting nothing to do with it, yet lacking the courage to walk away. This girl had been a good friend of mine and I felt heartsore at the undeserved grief that I knew we were causing her, watching over the weeks as her bubbly personality seemed to melt away and her rounded frame became skeletal, as if she were trying to disappear. When it came to carrying out the plan, fearful of being caught and wanting to distance myself as much as possible from the dastardly act, I said that I would keep watch from the library window upstairs. I didn’t; I just sat at a table staring blindly at some reference book or other, wishing I was somewhere else. I feel huge shame today at my cowardice and regret when I think of her sitting in the sixth-form classroom later that afternoon, her face burning from the pepper, her eyes smarting and bloodshot.
A couple of evenings after this, I was at home, lying on the sofa in the sitting room, watching television, when someone knocked at the front door. On answering it I found our victim’s mother standing there. She looked small and pale with a headscarf tied tightly round her head. She asked whether she could come in. I was very scared, knowing of course why she had come and worried that my mother, who was only in the kitchen, might walk in at any moment. She made a little speech in a voice I thought was both angry and close to tears. She said that her daughter was desperately upset and didn’t deserve this treatment; it wasn’t fair and why were we doing it? I stood there dumbly, unable to answer any of her questions. When eventually she left, I showed her to the front door but just as she was about to walk off, she turned around and said, ‘She’s got a heart of gold.’ And I knew it was true. I went straight to my bedroom, flung myself on the bed and cried myself to sleep, waking the next morning still in my uniform. I told the others the next day that the girl’s mother had turned up at my door. They were shocked and said little, I suspect fearing that there could be repercussions of some sort, and the whole sorry episode drew to a close.
The incident was duly filed away, in ‘the never to be looked at again’ file, at the back of my head, but like anything that isn’t aired it began to smell. Several years ago I could ignore it no longer and decided to write to the girl we had bullied. I wanted her to know my side of it and how I had felt, and I wanted to acknowledge my infantile cruelty, but more than anything, I suppose, I wanted forgiveness. I apologised for the pain she must have suffered and for my weakness and cowardice, at not sticking up for her or at least walking away. She, of course, was generous in her forgiveness and made light of it all. It is a tribute to her strength of character that she withstood the onslaught of our childish bitchery and I’m reminded of this every time I read of yet another child being kept off school or, worse still, committing suicide as a result of bullying.
The work in the lower sixth was a lot more challenging than ever before and so, it seemed, was getting up in the morning. Generally, having overslept and missed the school bus, I would amble in, in the late morning or at dinnertime, until I got so far behind that I couldn’t make head nor tail of Geography A level, and Molière’s L’Avare might just as well have been written in Mandarin. Eventually at the end of the lower-sixth year, Mr Taylor, our deputy head, took me to one side and gave me a letter addressed to my parents. Mr Taylor - who unfortunately didn’t take us for A level and with whom a great number of girls, myself included, had been romantically infatuated - was a brilliantly inspired Geography teacher who got thirty hormonally challenged and totally uninterested girls through Geography GCE by the sheer force of his unique personality. You couldn’t help but remember his lessons; he was witty, funny and eccentric and often attracted the attention of a chattering girl by hitting her on the back of the head with a piece of chalk, thrown from some distance and with deadly accuracy. Today, of course, he would probably be up for assault.
‘Julia . . .’ Teachers always called me Julia. ‘We don’t want you to come back next year. You will never get your A levels now; it’s a complete waste of everyone’s time, as you are too far behind. You simply haven’t put in the work. And we don’t like your subversive influence.’
I looked up into the intense blue eyes behind the horn-rimmed specs whilst scrabbling for the meaning of ‘subversive’. Did it refer to my truancy, which had got so bad that I was hardly ever there? Or could it have referred to the time when I had gone into an empty classroom, egged on by my friend, and thrown a metal tubular chair at a thin wooden partition, on the other side of which was our tightbunned and straight-faced form teacher who, in her terrible Edward Heath French accent, was in the process of teaching the upper sixth French group? It was reported that the resulting clatter had almost caused her to collapse with fright.
I went home that afternoon, posted the letter to my parents, unread, into a dustbin outside a shop and told my mother that I had reached a momentous decision: I would take up nursing. There was no need for me to stay on at school; I would prefer to get a job for a year and save some money (the word ‘save’ was always a good one with my mother). Surprisingly, without any discussion, she agreed. I went straight upstairs and looked up ‘subversive’.