Cross My Heart and Hope to Die (10 page)

I gave Miss Dunlop an edited version of what I'd thought of the examination papers. I really didn't believe I'd done well enough for the college to want to interview me.

‘If they do, you should soon hear from them,' she said. ‘But keep working while you're waiting. And don't forget, Jennet:
more sleep
.'

She showed me her teeth, which meant that she'd finished with me. I said, ‘Thank you, Miss Dunlop,' and went out. The buzzer had already gone for break, and I was eager to get at the apple that Mum had pushed into my satchel before I left home.

Caroline came over as soon as I appeared in the sixth-form common room. She was an enviably pretty girl with a good figure and shoulder-length straight fair hair.

‘How did it go with Miss Dunlop?' she asked.

‘Much as usual. She said she was tempted to call my essay meretricious.'

‘Is that good?'

‘Not the way she said it. Got a dictionary?'

Caroline looked it up while I munched my apple. ‘What else did Miss D. go on about?' she asked. She was due for the next session with the headmistress.

‘“More sleep, Jennet,”' I mimicked.

She considered me critically. ‘You do look as though you could do with it.'

‘Well, you know how it is.'

She gave a sexy sigh in agreement.

We'd never been close friends, but because we were taking the same subjects we spent most of our time in school together. Caroline's father was production manager at one of the factories on the Breckham Market industrial estate, and they lived in a large detached house near the golf-course, and they had two cars, one of which she was learning to drive.

Caroline had always had boy-friends. That was something else we didn't have in common. But I wasn't going to let on that I'd never had one, so when she talked about hers I half-invented one of my own. It was no use trying to pretend that it was Mark Easton, because she knew him. But she'd never been anywhere near Byland, and as Andy Crackjaw had grown into a not-bad-looking man I'd found myself describing him.

Andrew, I'd told her, was a neighbouring farmer's son: six feet tall with rather dramatic dark eyebrows that almost met across the top of his nose, tremendously romantic on account of having European blood in his ancestry, unswervingly faithful, unflaggingly ardent, but so gentlemanly that he was always prepared to take ‘No'for an answer. Andrew was the answer to a maiden's prayer, and Caroline was so impressed by my steady relationship with him that she sometimes came to me for advice.

She looked carefully round the common room, leaned towards me and began to whisper. Her hair fell over her nose and a strand of it fluttered about with every breath.

‘Richard asked me if I would, last night.'

I was still brooding over my meretricious essay. ‘Would what?'

‘You
know
.'

‘Oh.' I realized what she was talking about. ‘Did you?'

‘No, of course I didn't. Not like that, in the back of his car. But I'm seriously thinking about it. Should I?'

I knew the answer to that one because I read it in Mum's
Woman's Weekly
. ‘He won't respect you if you do.'

‘That's what my mother always says. But Richard's so
persistent
. Besides, it's such a temptation –'

‘Don't I know it!' I said.

We sighed together.

I longed to have a real boy-friend, and anyone would do, temporarily, just so that I could chuck my imaginary one. I'd built up a complex of implications, half-truths and downright lies during my time at the grammar school, and I was sick of the whole business. It was such a drag trying to keep it all up.

Once I got to university, I intended to abandon the entire edifice. I'd have achieved something then, and I'd be able to start my life afresh. I'd be my own person, and it wouldn't matter if everybody knew what a primitive way of life we'd led at home.

It sounds horribly snobbish, I know, but I was ashamed that we lived in a damp poky little farm cottage miles from anywhere, with no bathroom and an outside pump and a bucket lavatory at the end of the garden, and that my mother worked in the fields and my Dad was a shop assistant. I wasn't ashamed
of
them, I was ashamed
for
them.

No, that's not honest either, because the only time Mum came to school for an Open Day, wearing a terrible straw hat with cherries on and saying all the wrong things in a stupid mincing voice, I was so ashamed of her that I could gladly have strangled her. But I know she couldn't help it, she'd never had a chance to mix with different people and see how they lived. I was getting the chance, and making the most of it; no point in having an education if you stay exactly the same as you were when you started.

It didn't take long, when I first went to grammar school, to see that the girls were divided into those who came from ordinary homes like mine, and those who were different. The different ones fascinated me. They were so much more confident, so enviably relaxed, and they made me feel inferior. I knew that I was awkward and anxious, and I wanted to acquire some of their confidence, so from my first week at the school I watched and listened and copied.

There was so much to find out, beginning with how to use a flush lavatory without being afraid that the chain would break if you pulled it too hard. At school dinners I learned not to hold my knife like a pen, and to put my knife and fork neatly together on my plate when I'd finished. And I worked on my Suffolk accent, shortening the broad vowels that would otherwise give me away as a country girl.

I didn't tell too many lies about my background. No need. I said that our house was right out in the country, and if anyone chose to imagine that it was large, attractive and permanently covered in roses, that was up to her. If the subject of our fathers'jobs came up, I said that mine worked in the family business. When school trips abroad were planned I wouldn't admit that we couldn't afford them, but said I had so much fun with Andrew-the-boy-next-door that I preferred to stay at home.

Fortunately I lived too far away to invite any friends to tea, and the only girls from the village at grammar school were either several years older or several years younger than me, so I got away with it. By the time I was fifteen I was accepted as one of the middle-class girls, the confident ones who had a future.

It's only subsequently that I've wondered whether any of the other girls were in fact keeping up the same pretence as I was. When you know you're a liar, and feel guilty about it, you imagine that everyone else is always telling the truth.

The only person at school I did confess to was Sally Buckle. She was my best friend for four years. She lived in the town and I went to her house several times. Her Dad worked on the railway and they lived in a small terraced house near the station, and the first time she invited me home, because I'd missed my usual bus, we surprised her mother out in the back yard, shabbily dressed and with her hair in rollers, unpegging some corsets from the washing line.

I don't know which of us was most embarrassed. Their kitchen was in a terrible muddle, just like ours on wash day, and Mrs Buckle couldn't have been more apologetic if Sally had brought Miss Dunlop to visit her. Poor Sally was squirming on her mother's behalf, and I didn't know what to say until it occurred to me to tell the truth.

‘My Mum would be green with envy if she could see your kitchen, Mrs Buckle – inside tap and hot water and everything. We have to fetch our water in buckets and heat it up in the copper on washdays. You are lucky.'

She relaxed immediately. Obviously she'd been fooled by my carefully polished accent and thought that Sally had brought home somebody from a posh family, and you could see how chuffed she was at the thought that we were ordinary people and not as comfortably housed as they were. After that, we got on very well together and I had a standing invitation to go there whenever I missed my bus.

Sally was the best friend I've ever had. We spent all our time at school together, and during the Easter and summer holidays we'd cycle to meet each other for a sandwich and apple picnic at least once a week. But then the railway junction at Breckham Market was reduced to an ordinary main-line station and Sally's Dad was made redundant, so they had to move to Ipswich. We wrote to each other every week at first, but it's difficult to keep up the same sort of friendship just by writing and our letters tailed off. I missed her tremendously, though. Still do.

Another person who knew, or guessed, about the act I was putting on was Mrs Bloomfield, the deputy headmistress. She arrived at the school at the beginning of my last term, ready to take over as headmistress when Miss Dunlop retired at the end of the school year.

We'd got so used to Miss Dunlop and the rest of the middle-aged teaching staff that when word went round that the new deputy head was a widow we expected someone solemn and grey-haired. Mrs Bloomfield, when she arrived, was a revelation: about thirty-five, we estimated, tall and very slim with ashblond hair which she wore swept up into a knot, and fabulously dressed. We were all dazzled by her sophistication, and her widowhood gave her an added glamour because it was rumoured that her husband had been killed flying with the Royal Air Force.

Mrs Bloomfield taught English, and Caroline and I had weekly tutorials with her that term. She made a point of treating us as students, not schoolchildren, which I suppose is why she lent me the book of uncensored poems. She was cool, detached and amused, and I really looked forward to those tutorials, partly because she made English literature so fascinating, but chiefly because I hoped that some of her confidence and poise would rub off on me. Well, no harm in hoping.

At our second tutorial, Caroline was a few minutes late and Mrs Bloomfield had suddenly said to me, ‘I believe you come from Byland. I was born in Suffolk too. My father was a farm worker, we lived at Ashthorpe.'

I had been astonished. I probably sat there gaping, unable to believe that anyone so stunning could have emerged from a background similar to mine. ‘I'd never have known, from your accent,' I'd blurted out, and she had laughed. ‘I worked at it,' she said. ‘Did you have to work at yours?'

But then Caroline turned up, and that had put an end to the conversation. I was always hoping for an opportunity to continue it, though, and I had one to look forward to on that particular day.

It was my turn to be one of the dinner-duty prefects. At least, it would have been my turn in ten days'time but I knew that Mrs Bloomfield was going to be on staff duty so I'd fiddled the rota. It was a spread-out school so there wasn't really much chance of seeing her as we patrolled round, but it was worth a try.

The first job, after school dinner – fish pie with mashed potato topping, followed by lemon sponge pudding – was to make sure all the girls went outside. Fresh Air and Exercise was one of Miss Dunlop's manias. In winter all the layabouts tried to hole up indoors, but since we'd done exactly the same thing when we were their age, we knew where to look. I took the old building and Sandra Pell took the new wing and we flushed the kids out.

‘Must we, Janet? I've got a terrible cough.'

I knew her, young Wendy Barnes from the Lower Fourth, a cheeky little monkey. She was making heartrending coughing noises, but spoiled them by laughing.

‘Go on with you,' I said. ‘Get some nice fresh air and exercise, it'll do you good.'

‘But it's terribly cold. I'll die of exposure.' Her friends had already run off (‘And don't run in the corridors,' I'd called after them, too late) and she was lingering for the sake of it.

‘Only if you stand still. Go on, I want to get outside myself.'

‘Are you going to play hockey?'

‘Certainly not, at my age. Out you go.'

She grumbled and dragged her feet but I refused to encourage her any further.

‘See you outside, Janet?'

‘Not if I see you first. And don't run in the corridors.'

I put on my raincoat for warmth and started the outside patrol, keeping an eye on what was going on. There was hockey practice on the sports field. I'd been in the second eleven for four years, which must have been a school record because usually you either made the first team or were dropped to third. But I was too useful to be relegated – all that running home from school for fear of Andy Crackjaw, and then biking up and down the lane, must have strengthened my leg muscles. I was an accurate hitter, and I'd found that haring about the hockey pitch swiping at a ball was a good way of getting grievances out of my system. I packed it in as soon as compulsory games stopped in the sixth form, but I still sometimes joined in a practice. I watched the players wistfully, feeling rather old.

Sue Larter, the second-eleven captain, saw me and trotted over in her tracksuit, looking madly healthy.

‘Like a bash, Janet?'

‘I'm on duty.'

‘It's the only time you come out here these days. All that sitting about in the common room doesn't do you any good, you're not nearly as fit as you used to be.'

‘Ah well, I've got other interests …'

‘So I've heard. But are they as good for you?'

Sue was a clown, always bouncing about full of cheerfulness and fresh air. But her offer of a hockey stick was tempting. I looked round. There seemed to be no crises that demanded my immediate attention so I slipped off my raincoat, borrowed the stick and waded in.

A fast ball skimmed past and I ran, trapped it, dribbled round an opponent and whammed it across the centre. Lovely stuff. I felt fourteen again, easy and irresponsible. I was just glancing round to see who was in what position when the wretched ball, slammed straight back at me by some hetty young idiot, cracked me hard on the side of the foot. I howled, and hopped, and said a word that I knew I knew but had never before been sufficiently provoked to use.