One Young Fool in Dorset (9 page)

The night nurse’s hand tightened on her torch. She
trembled as she turned on her heel and trained the beam on the
closed ward door, just as it burst open.

“
Aaaaaaagh!”
screamed a nurse as she ran into
the ward towards us. “Bats! BATS! The place is alive with
bats!”

The night nurse dropped her torch and jumped into my
bed, pulling the blanket over her head. The screaming nurse ran for
the door again, slamming it shut behind her.

I stood by my bed and looked up. Two or three bats
were flitting high up in the rafters. They didn’t scare me at
all.

A muffled voice emerged from the depths of my
bed.

“Have they gone?”

“The other nurse has gone,” I said. “But the bats
are still here. They are very high up. They won’t hurt you, you
know.”

The night nurse’s face peeped out from under my
bedclothes, her face as white as my sheets.

“You stay here,” she said at last. “I’m going to get
help.”

With as much dignity as she could muster with a
hospital blanket over her head, the nurse strode to the door and
let herself out. I was alone with the bats and a ward full of
sleeping children.

A caretaker came in next, armed with a big net. I
watched, fascinated, as he attempted to catch the bats. He failed,
but successfully shooed the little creatures out of the ward and
into the corridor. The night nurse returned, smoothing down her
apron and pushing escaped tendrils of hair back into her cap.

“Still not asleep?” she whispered. “Let me sort your
bed out for you.”

She replaced my blanket and I snuggled down, tired
now. None of the other children had wakened. I closed my eyes and
slept. My dreams were filled with bats and country dancing.

I learned later that a colony of bats had inhabited
the old hospital. They had been disturbed by the ongoing demolition
works, and some had entered the hospital, visiting several wards,
including ours. I hoped that they moved on without too much trauma
and found a safe new home.

It was also time for me to move on. I never saw Mrs
Pellow, Nigel Harding or Dorchester Preparatory School again. I
would now move on to Talbot Heath (TH), following in my big
sister’s footsteps. I only hoped that Enid Blyton had been telling
the truth about boarding school life.

* * *

School Report

Reading:
Victoria reads
well although shyness holds her back.

Writing:
Careless, although
she has a good command of words.

Written Composition:
Victoria enjoys this and has made progress.

Mathematics:
Has the
impression that this subject is too difficult for her.

What a pity Victoria wastes so much time
because she has ample ability. She has given up with mathematics
which is silly and pointless. She must do the Arithmetic and
English Progress Papers I have given her during the holidays.
Please ensure she does them daily, not in a rush just before the TH
term starts!

Joan Pellow (headteacher)

* * *

Before school term started, there was a lot to do.
Apart from the awful Progress Papers that I had to wrestle with
every day, there was packing. My father heaved a huge trunk into my
bedroom. There it remained, like a giant open coffin, slowly
filling up in readiness for the new term. TH had provided us with
an inventory, and every tiny thing on that list had to be checked
off, right down to colour of shoe polish. Astonishingly, the
particular brown required was called by a word that was soon to be
banned, a word that rhymes with ‘bigger’. We had no idea the word
was so insulting or controversial. Of course this particular shade
has been renamed now.

There were the summer and uniforms. In winter we
wore navy blue pinafore dresses with white blouses underneath. We
had to wear stockings and suspenders because tights hadn’t been
invented yet. The stockings were usually a disgusting shade called
‘American Tan’ and had to be 60-90 denier, making them virtually
bullet-proof. We also had to wear gloves and navy blue felt hats.
In summer, we wore gingham dresses and white socks with blazers and
straw boaters.

Then there was
mufti
, or non-uniform clothes.
We were allowed a couple of summer dresses, a pair of trousers, a
pair of shorts, and some tops.

Sports equipment, such as hockey sticks and tennis
racquets, needed to be packed. Black swimming costumes, and
culottes (short trousers that looked like skirts) were included. We
also needed bed sheets, towels, dressing gown, slippers and wash
stuff.

Then there were some puzzling items that needed
explaining, like the
6 pairs of white cotton linings
. And
3 pairs of navies with pocket
.

“
Ach,
” said my mother, already familiar with
this requirement because of my sister’s packing in previous years.
“Linings just means underpants. And navies are navy blue knickers
to go over the top.”

“What’s the pocket for?”

“I don’t know. A hanky maybe?”

Every pupil also needed to bring a sanitary belt and
two packs of Dr White’s sanitary towels. These were enormous pads
with loops either end, not like the neat, flat, self-adhesive pads
that are available nowadays.

“What are these?” asked my brother, waving one at
me.

He was preparing to go to boarding school too, and
Dr White’s were certainly not on his list of requirements.

“Oh, they’re in case you get a nosebleed,” I said.
“You hook those loops over your ears.”

He seemed satisfied with that, and left me to carry
on packing.

Every item had to be labelled with our name and
laundry number (mine was SY16) if it was to be sent to the laundry.
My mother never claimed to be a domestic goddess, and sewing on
those endless Cash’s name-tapes must have driven her crazy.

I was to be in St Mary’s, one of three houses set in
pine woodlands some distance from the school. St Mary’s was three
floors high and had long stone-floored corridors. The ground floor
was given over to the kitchen, dining room, Matron’s office,
prefects’ rooms and two common rooms: one for the seniors and the
other for juniors. Upstairs were the dormitories (or dorms),
bathrooms and the Housemistress’s suite.

St Mary’s
today

The dormitories already felt quite familiar to me as
I had previously visited them with my sister. There were eight high
metal beds, each with a metal locker beside it. No curtains, no
privacy, but it never occurred to me at that age that I needed
it.

On that first day, I was the last to arrive. The
dorm was buzzing with noise and chaotic with half-unpacked trunks.
Parents milled around, helping their daughters settle in. My father
was in the doorway, dragging my trunk inside. Overcome with
shyness, I looked around. Every bed seemed to be taken.

“
Ach
, I can’t see a spare bed,” said my
mother.

A girl with straight blonde hair looked up from the
locker she was filling. She and I stared at each other for a
moment. There was a naughty glint in her eye which I liked
immediately.

“This bed next to me is empty,” she said, and her
smile lit up her face.

I found myself smiling back at her, and in that
moment I knew I had a friend.

Soon, the parents had to leave but I scarcely
noticed mine go. Helen and I had finished our unpacking and were
sitting side by side on her bed, swinging our legs and chattering
about whatever eleven-year-olds chatter about.

Our dorm was on the first floor, and below it was
the junior common room. The common room was fitted out with
mismatching tables and chairs and some threadbare comfy chairs. We
had an old-fashioned record player with a needle that scratched our
records if we jogged it, but only a few records. The strains of
Homeward Bound
by Simon and Garfunkel even now immediately
transports me back to the common room. That and the taste of
butterscotch sweets, which were my tuck item of choice. After lunch
every day, Matron unlocked the tuck cupboard and we were permitted
just two of the sweets we had stashed.

I fitted into boarding school life fairly happily. I
didn’t see much of my sister as she was already in the upper school
and used a different common room. But I made friends quite easily,
especially after my housemates realised that my initial silence was
due to shyness. As soon as I felt comfortable, I was as lively as
the others. In fact, I was usually in more trouble than most,
except perhaps for my best friend Helen.

To exit the building, one had to walk along a
lengthy corridor, past the locker room where we kept our coats and
outside shoes, and out of the back door. It was just my luck that I
bumped into Matron just after I’d taken a shortcut.

“Victoria! Did I just see you jumping out of the
common room window?”

“Yes, Matron.”

“Good heavens! You know we can’t allow our gels to
jump out of windows! Whatever next?” Matron tried hard to sound
cultured, and girls were always ‘gels’.

“It’s not very high.”

“Nevertheless, I shall require you to write me two
hundred lines,
I must not jump out of the window
.”

My heart sank.

“Yes, Matron.”

“By chapel this evening.”

“Yes, Matron.”

As if our nightly visits to chapel weren’t bad
enough, now I had to waste time writing lines as well. I enlisted
the help of Helen and some other friends, and luckily Matron never
noticed the sudden changes of handwriting styles. This was common
practice, and I learned always to offer help with other people’s
lines, in readiness for when I was given my own to complete.

Matron was a formidable lady. She wore a white
starched uniform and white cap perched squarely on her red hair
which was rolled up into some sort of pleat. The white lace-up
shoes she wore were utterly silent, allowing her to prowl around
without a sound. Her footsteps may have been silent, but Matron’s
booming voice could be heard from the other side of the
building.

“Gels! Gels! You are not permitted into the dining
room except at meal times!”

With a rustle of uniform, she bore down on us.

“Gels! Out you go, unless you want to write some
lines for me?”

No, we didn’t. We exited swiftly.

Matron had her favourites, and I wasn’t one of them.
You knew if Matron liked you because on Sunday evenings, which were
hair-wash days, Matron let a small group of girls into her room to
dry their hair in front of the two-bar electric fire she had there.
I don’t think any of us had heard of hair dryers then, and we
certainly didn’t own one. Matron’s door would close and we’d hear
the sound of laughter as her favourites dried their hair and helped
themselves to Matron’s tin of Scottish shortbread.

Of course, anybody who courted trouble, as I and my
friend Helen did, would never get to dry her hair in Matron’s
room.

It was Matron who ran St Mary’s House, but it was
Mrs Driver who was officially in charge. Mrs Driver, the
Housemistress, was a mannish, secretive person who spent most of
her time in her suite of rooms on the top floor. She had grey hair
that she scraped back from her face and stuck down flat to her
skull with water, or perhaps Brylcreem. Half-moon glasses hung from
a chain around her neck, bouncing on her ample bosom as she
walked.

Mrs Driver owned a pop-eyed Chihuahua called Brandy.
Twice a day, Mrs Driver and Brandy would emerge from their rooms
and descend the stairs. Mrs Driver smelled the same as the Roman
Catholic priest from whom we bought our house in Wareham. Her eyes
were glazed over, and she looked at nobody, neither did she speak
as she walked down the steps.

On the other hand, Brandy, the Chihuahua, had
something important on his mind. As Mrs Driver continued down the
stairs, Brandy searched in vain for a mate. He charged into our
dorm, and finding no lady dog to cool his ardour, was forced
instead to make do with a slipper, or teddy, or pile of clothes on
the floor.

“Brandy!” called Mrs Driver from the bottom of the
stairs, and away he scampered to join his mistress.

“She should have called that bloody dog Randy,” I
once heard Matron mutter after Brandy had assaulted an unsuspecting
wastepaper basket in her office.

“Pardon, Matron?”

“Nothing. Helen, Victoria, haven’t you gels got
anything to do? Run along and do some schoolwork or something.”

Boarding school culture was fascinating. For a
start, there was a whole new language to learn. Luckily I didn’t
have a problem with that, as my big sister had already taught me
many of the words. For instance, a wastepaper basket was a
‘wagger’, and a petticoat was a ‘charlie’. If a girl’s petticoat
happened to show beneath the hemline of her skirt, one had to sidle
up to her and quietly hiss, “Charlie’s dead!” thus alerting her to
the petticoat calamity.