The Following Girls Page 4

  The assembly hall was already nearly full as Baker and Bunty took the seats that Queenie and Stott had run ahead to save for them, only they had to budge up and let Baker sit at the other end of the foursome, as far away from Bunty as she could get. There were still two empty rows in front of them, thanks to an extended lecture being given by Mrs Rathbone to her half of the Lower Fourth on the importance of punctuality in later life.

  That was one of the Rathbone’s running gags, that codswallop about ‘preparation for later life’, the idea that this artificial planet they’d created, with its nutty rewards and punishments, with its poxy little pecking orders and traditions was some sort of model village version of the world beyond its chain-link fencing. The idea that once you let yourself yield to the joys of Mildred Fawcett, let her into your life like Jesus in gown and kick-pleated tweeds, you could be re-made as a separate species, femina Fawcettiana, merely by being banged up in the same institution for seven years. Did Holloway make the same boast?

  Mildred Fawcett had begun in 1900 as a far smaller school, but had grown steadily from the original thirty pioneers. After the war, when more and more girls were demanding to stay on for their Higher Certificate, the trustees had decided that the old junior and senior schools should be split into three sections, but to this day not one of the staff had tumbled to the fact that every boys’ school in the district knew their precious sixth form as ‘Fawcett Upper’.

  The assembly hall was lined with oak panels – Dr O’Brien’s ‘Wall of Glory’ – prefects, captains of games, the odd scholarship. Nothing later than 1952, mind you (when the space ran out). Were they even real, these Sidebottoms, Trubshaws and Pratts? They made them up, surely? Or had they just bought a job-lot of sign writer’s samples? Scrote? That was just being silly.

  Lower Four R were finally clacking across the parquet, a blur of blues. All those different materials – serge, Courtelle, botany wool, nylon, flannel, not to mention the many, many different vintages (and wash temperatures) – meant that there were a dozen shades of Fawcett blue: matchbox; spaghetti wrapper; salt bag; Rothman packet. Not forgetting knicker – and bruise.

  The miniskirt, still all the rage when Baker started in ’70, had resulted in a diktat that all hemlines should be one inch from the floor when you knelt down but it was a tricky bugger to enforce: ‘On your knees, Upper Threes!’ – not really how the goons saw themselves. Fashion had now swung the other way which made a sizeable fraction of the second year very groovy indeed as their entire kit was several sizes too big – ‘Mummy says I’ll grow into it’. Mummy bloody well hoped not, actually, but it lasted longer and Mummy secretly preferred the shapeless silhouette and had an inbuilt horror of seeing her daughter’s perfect young shape in anything too obviously form-fitting. Mummy pined for the days of bust-binding and the Liberty bodice and was ready to thank heaven fasting for the six-month craze for thick black tights and granny boots.

  One sure-fire way to wind everyone up was to wear everything much too small. Queenie, a veteran of the prep department (alias Fawcett Under), was still skinny enough to fit into her original blazer, a saucy little bum-freezer in faded blue flannel which she had grown into and out of since her mother first bought it when she was seven. The goons, who spent more time and energy belly-aching about hemlines and hairstyles than they did on Macbeth or matrices or petty larceny, were horribly torn about this. Making do and mending had stained their thinking like beetroot on a powdered egg omelette, but it drove them all good and mad just the same.

  The alternative strategy was to get everything in the largest possible size: growing into things was never an exact science, after all, and large was very very large indeed – it had to be. Every form had one – a walrus in blue serge wearing sizes you normally expected to see being pulled out proudly by slimmers of the year in mumsy magazines at the dentist. Glands, they usually said, or big bones. How big? There was a skeleton in the Biology lab and it was hard to picture it inside Rosemary McReadie. That neat, bleached pelvis would be lost underneath those forty-six-inch hips (‘death helped me shed twelve stone’).

  Brian and the lads preferred to wear everything on the small side: skirts on the short side, shoes on the high side, purse-belts pulled unlunchably tight, in hopes that wolves would whistle at them. But nothing too rebellious, nothing detention-worthy and all very much as per The List which was pinned inside the special glazed noticeboard on the wall of the entrance lobby along with the names of governors and where to muster should the whole putrid place go up in flames. The List told you where to buy it, how many to get, which styles were acceptable, but it was quite an old list because it still had ‘gymslips’ as an option.

  The only shop in England authorised to sell the uniquely terrible outfit worn by the girls of Mildred Fawcett didn’t find there was much call for gymslips and finally stopped stocking them in 1969 (stopped stocking stockings too), but they were still on the blessed List and the local Oxfam shop had them: only 20p; irresistible; one step closer to the St Trinian ideal.

  Baker’s stepmother hadn’t minded the gymslips – pleasantly traditional; safely girlish; undeniably practical – and she said as much in her reply to Mrs Mostyn’s letter which had heavily hinted that a skirt be bought.

  It had been two years now since anyone had worn a hat but, like gymslips, they still featured on The List: felt in winter; straw in summer; which was fine if Daddy drove you in but an incitement to riot on the top of a local bus and the School Council vote against had been unanimous. Mildred Fawcett MBE, would be turning in her grave.

  The current head (Desiree Mary O’Brien MA Oxon, PhD Lon) generally excused herself Tuesday assemblies. The excuses varied but whatever it was – important calls, pressing matters, other business (a cigarette by the open study window) – appeared to involve a great deal of strong tea and shortcake biscuits. Proceedings were directed instead by the dreaded Mostyn, Snog Monster and all round graffiti-magnet. This morning the deputy head was a vision in violet Crimplene beneath a crumpled nylon wig.

  ‘Looks zackly like Ted Heath in drag.’

  Baker and Stottie had begun a silent game, safe in the knowledge that Miss Gleet would never dare pull them up for it. ‘Talking in assembly’ was a recognised crime but ‘playing Scissors Stone Paper’ definitely wasn’t. Braver souls than Miss Gleet had been known to go for ‘mucking about’ but it still looked pretty bloody feeble spelled out on the printed pink detention form.

  They carried on with the game. Baker could see the slightly alarmed look on the mistress’s face as, count after count, their two hands made identical shapes – until it dawned on the silly cow that the three shapes were coming round in order: stone, paper, scissors, stone . . .

  Baker altered her strategy: scissors, scissors, scissors, scissors, to leave her mind free to wonder what the hell Bunty was playing at, while Stottie alternated stone and paper and the Mostyn got stuck into one of her god-awful readings.

  Dr O’Brien usually liked to rustle up her morality tales from scratch, using raw ingredients from the Daily Telegraph. Not the juicy bits – like the story about the jilted lover who posted baby rats through the letterbox while her rival was away on the Norfolk Broads for three weeks. Nothing fruity. Just common-or-garden tales of polio victims playing the oboe.

  Mrs Mostyn preferred the ready-made musings to be found in Gladsome Minds, a slim green volume packed with convenience food for schoolgirl thought, homely homilies that could be relied upon to bridge the gap between Non Nobis Domine and the netball results. There was a moral – there always was – to Mrs Mostyn’s dismal stories: pride being skin deep or beauty going before a fall. Some rubbish.

  The first hymn was ‘I Vow to Thee’, omitting the slightly belligerent second verse. Mrs Mostyn still missed the bone-buzzing hum of the organ (out of commission since Founder’s Day 1969). Even with the pedal down the baby grand was simply no match for copper-bottomed hymns like ‘Jerusalem’ or ‘Those in Peril’.

  The Mostyn’
s next task was to announce that a first year called Mary Field had been chosen to represent Surrey in a chess competition and as a result the staff room had voted to award her a blue enamel badge with ‘School’ printed on it. Surprised applause in the first year ranks. Young Miss Field hadn’t breathed a word about her chess habit, fearing (rightly) that it wouldn’t play well with the Upper Third. But a ‘School’ badge? Nice one.

  Mrs Mostyn handed the prize over with her left hand while crushing the girl’s metacarpals with her right. Blue was the first rung of merit badging. Green came next, then red, then yellow, then, finally, white – but no one ever got white, just as no one was ever given full marks for an English essay (always something to strive for). The entire school badge collection lived in a roll of green baize in a tambour-fronted cupboard in the school secretary’s office, along with a whole card of virgin badges in various shades marked simply ‘Leader’, a stillborn brainchild of the head before last that had been voted down by the staff room. Rather a pity, thought Mrs Mostyn.

  The founding headmistress had originally intended there to be only one white merit badge to be awarded in truly exceptional circumstances to the Fawcettian par excellence. There were in fact two, left over from 1949, a vintage year when the legendary Mallinson twins had been joint head of school, taking it in turns to welcome visitors with confident, painstakingly-elocuted votes of thanks. At least, Mrs Mostyn paused in her happy daydream, one assumed they were taking it in turns . . . they were identical, after all. Identical in most respects, at least (only one of them got into Cambridge). One never knew, twins did lark about so . . . Mrs Mostyn had yearned for a twin: the fun one could have had.

  Yellow merit badges were slightly easier to come by but there were still only four of them in circulation at any one time like Orders of Merit or Companions of Honour or Garters. Someone had to leave the school or die or elope with their orthodontist (in the infamous 1962 case) for a Yellow to become available.

  Mary Field’s chess gong would normally have been it for school news. There had been a happy time when the names of those in detention were read out to shocked silence, a real black cap moment: ‘The following girls . . .’ but Dr O’Brien’s arrival had put an end to the practice on the grounds that the additional humiliation was ‘unnecessary and inhumane’ (or so she put it at the policy meeting). But she too had probably seen the smirks and heard the admiring giggles as the same naughty names were recited week after week, heroines of the wrong sort of school story.

  O’Brien’s unwillingness to draw attention to the undesirable element meant that Mrs Mostyn wasn’t able to give her next announcement the weight it deserved, but the assembled girls sensed at once that something significant had occurred. Eliza Warner was to be head of Nightingale House with immediate effect. There was a puzzled burst of applause as the captain badge was handed over and Eliza (who had been sitting in the second row of prefects) now took the empty seat alonside the Head in the first. The seat where Alison Hutchinson usually sat.

  ‘What happened there?’ whispered Baker.

  Stottie shrugged her shoulders. A hushed hum filled the hall as the girls puzzled over the substitution.

  ‘Silence! Well done, Eliza. I’m sure that you’ (the tiniest telltale emphasis) ‘will be a fine example to the younger girls. So important.’

  Mrs Mostyn preferred not to read out the sports news herself: always a lowering change of tone after Gladsome Minds, she felt, and in any case it was good public speaking practice for the sixth form. Today’s results had been delegated to the school’s games captain and Julia Smith, now seventeen and darling of the Lower Sixth, was standing alongside the Mostyn, waiting to divulge. She would have scored quite high on the Bryony Scale, noted Baker: tall and slim with that wavy auburn hair and perfect white teeth – but ‘dress’ would have let her down. Ever since her triumph in the tennis tournament she seemed to be forever playing or refereeing or coaching or cheering on some game or other, tricked out in a sort of mongrel kit. This morning it was a divided skirt, leotard and hockey boots finished off with her grandmother’s old Fawcett cricket sweater, a hangover from the pioneering 1920s when all sports were fair game and the domestic science kitchen was a carpentry workshop.

  ‘She wants a cravat with that,’ hissed Stottie as she sized up the ensemble, ‘or spats.’

  Over the sweater Julia wore a fashionably junior-sized blazer, heavy with its six-year crop of enamel: tennis (natch), deportment, netball, a yellow ‘School’ badge and all four personal survival medals which proved that she could, if required, retrieve bricks from deep water or make a rudimentary float from a pair of Winceyette pyjamas – so likely. As the orderly queue for lifeboats formed on the promenade deck to the sound of ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ and the steady scrape of deckchairs being rearranged, there Julia would be in the icy North Atlantic, personally surviving on a balloon of stripy brushed cotton.

  The lower school inter-house netball semi-finals had been won by Fry and Stanhope (Curie and Nightingale being rubbish at team games). The head girl, in pride of place at Mrs Mostyn’s right, tried her best not to cheer too keenly because the head girl was also head of Fry House. This development had been unforeseen and did not, technically, contravene the Fawcett Code but it had smelled a lot like pluralism to Queenie: ‘Or do I mean nepotism?’ she asked when the double promotion was announced. ‘One of those. Greedy, either way. Head girl and house captain? She’ll be invading Poland next.’

  Fry and Stanhope. Who the hell was Stanhope, anyway? Baker had once put a motion to the School Council suggesting an update of the house names. Her cousin’s school had houses named after the conquerors of Everest said Baker, face suspiciously straight. Mrs Mostyn, who had been the presiding member of staff at the meeting, pointed out that Mildred Fawcett, who christened the original houses in 1900, wanted specifically to celebrate (Mrs Mostyn could no more split an infinitive than dangle a participle) specifically to celebrate feminine achievement. Fair enough, conceded Baker, but could they not celebrate something a bit more up-to-date: like four great women composers, say, or artists? Mrs Mostyn had looked at the girl very sharply. What a ghastly little smart-aleck she was. Was she being facetious? Surely not, but Baker’s proposal had kept her awake that night just the same. She managed the four artists eventually (just do-able if one allowed sculpture and included Kate Greenaway and Beatrix Potter) but composers? Not possible.

  Julia still held the floor. The previous afternoon’s league match had been against St Ursula’s who had made mincemeat of the home side. Julia Smith might have finessed the odd tennis trophy but Mildred Fawcett had never really been an especially sporty school. The small suburban site had only space for three courts, hockey was a twenty-minute hike away and the results were invariably ‘disappointing’. Julia certainly looked disappointed. Stephanie Stott and the Under 13s had ‘done their best’ but they had been trounced 14–1 by the superior fire power of the local convent. The fourth form sat on its hands and there was even some booing from the fifth (like Guernseys in a far-off field) but there wasn’t a peep of complaint from the goons: a blind eye; a deaf ear. The girls needed an outlet and it might, God knows, put a bit of heat under the Under 13s. Very Unschool, of course, not to clap, but no more than the eleven little slackers deserved. You could tell Julia thought so, as she grinned approvingly at the front row of the gallery.

  ‘But the good news,’ Julia raised her slightly husky voice, immediately stilling the outbreak of chatter, ‘is that Penny Drummond of Lower 5P has been picked to join the Surrey Under 16 ladies fencing team.’

  Frabjous abandon in the ranks, even though Penny Drummond’s skill with a foil owed bugger all to Mildred Fawcett and a very great deal to her long-suffering father’s willingness to spend his weekends driving to tournaments in draughty sports halls in places like Leicester and Ashton-under-Lyne.

  On and on it went. Out of the corner of her eye Baker could see Bunty stroking purposefully at the ladder on her knee, coaxing it
down her calf. Bunty’s legs were nine out of ten (always something to strive for).

  ‘Very well done, Penny. Everybody,’ smirked Julia ‘didn’t she do well? Hip-hip?’

  ‘Ra-a-a-y!’

  ‘You can do better than that!’ Like some tosser in a pantomime. ‘Still can’t hear you!’

  Baker looked along the cheering row: schoolgirl complexions livid with spots, crooked teeth reined in by the sinister glint of their braces, crooked hair held in check by clips and slides and loops of elastic. A chemist’s shop aroma of (permitted) cough sweets and Victory Vs and Fisherman’s Friends. The proles in the very front row were wetting their little selves: shouting louder to please Julia. Young Steve Stott’s face was almost bruising with strain.

  ‘Hip-hip?’

  ‘R-a-a-a-a-ay!’

  And Julia was smiling now – her mouth was, anyway. Baker watched the older girl scanning the rows of screaming blue murder, then suddenly Baker caught her eye and Julia seemed to pause mid-grin and one sleek auburn eyebrow arched higher than the other. The practised move made her look smugger than ever. Baker pictured pinning the pale, pretty Julia to the garage dartboard, taking aim again and again and again, arrows sprouting from all over her stupid face. Treble twenty would be right between those unsmiling blue eyes.

  Mrs Mostyn was also watching Julia from behind her upswept spectacles while pretending to straighten the skinny ribbon bookmark in her hymnbook, marvelling at the girl’s unteachable gift for bending a crowd to her will. Look at them all: had them in the palm of her hand, eating out of it.

  When the storm had passed, the Mostyn rose effortfully to her feet. She closed her eyes and there was the hint of a chant in her lah-di-dah tones as she gave her godless recitation of a prayer selected from her other book, a brown one: leader snot; witch art; usual stuff. And Baker watched as Brian and the chaps made signs of crosses over their navy V-necks. They weren’t Catholic or anything – wouldn’t be in the hall if they were. Catholics bothered God in their own mysterious way Tuesdays and Thursdays in the first floor music room. Jews Mondays and Fridays. Jews. Were there hymns for Jews? wondered Baker. And if not, why not? There were all-purpose hymns surely? They weren’t all stood up, stood up for Jesus. And the God was supposed to be the same. Were angels kosher? The Old Testament had angels. Baker turned to ask Bunty but then remembered that she wasn’t speaking to her.