Opposite the Cross Keys (5 page)

And when I bumped into Mrs Saunders out with Vera and Amy, I almost did.

Eldon House, you have to understand, was one of the poshest schools in the city, if not
the
poshest. It didn't take just anybody; though how Miss Boothby and Miss Chandos, the joint Principals, decided who was and who wasn't just anybody I couldn't, and can't say. They took boarders as well as day girls, and two of the girls were Honourables.

I had yet to prove myself worthy of such exalted company.

It was one of those seminal moments which, if they do not exactly alter the course of one's life, alter the world in which one breathes and moves. In that moment I – an ‘I' sprung that instant into being, like Minerva from the brow of Jove – saw the Fenners for the first time for what they were: a pair of grotesques who, with their preposterous clothes, their wild, anarchic humour and their brazen disregard of convention, could have nothing to do with a little lady in an Eldon House uniform.

To put it another way, without dressing it up in highfalutin' excuses: I was suddenly ashamed of them.

‘Hello.'

‘Hello.'

The girls and I greeted each other decorously. I had already taken the precaution of moving a little distance away from my companions. I shook hands with the mother, who looked a little disconcerted at the stickiness of my glove, and did the little bob which was the first, if not the only thing Eldon House ever taught me. As I curtsied, I sent up a desperate prayer that the Saunders' hadn't noticed who I was with.

I reckoned without Mrs Fenner.

Surging forward, she thrust the chamber pot, greenery and all, into my protesting arms.

‘Your turn now, gal Sylvie!' she boomed. ‘Blamed if I'm goin' to carry a jerry about all arternoon jest in case
you
get caught short!'

To this day a haze of misery descends between me and the reality of that moment and the next few hours – at least, it seemed like hours, if not the remorseless reaches of eternity – during which I was made to carry the chamber pot the length and breadth of the Market Place. Sometimes, reliving it, I almost succeed in convincing myself that the misery consisted in my horrified, if belated, awareness that, silly little snob that I was, I had antagonized the two people who meant more to me than anyone else in the world, and not in the fact that there were several other Eldon House girls and their mothers who saw me, to say nothing of Miss Whistler, who taught English and Needlework, and who had to put on her pince-nez before she could believe her eyes.

Though her expression abated not a whit of her customary sunny humour, Mrs Fenner was pitiless. If any passer-by missed the significance of my burden, she did not hesitate to enlighten them. Through it all, Maud pressed her lips together the way she did when she was annoyed, but, apart from an occasional sniff which made her wart wobble, made no other comment until we passed by Mr Marcantonio's ice-cream cart, where she turned aside without a word and bought a cornet. Not a boat, so it couldn't be for me.

When she had paid for it, she rounded on me abruptly.

‘I reckon people ashamed to be seen out with people won't be wanting to come out on the Market Place with people any more.'

My response, the inevitable one, was to burst into noisy crying, to which she listened for a while with the air of someone trying to put a name to a familiar tune. Then, as if the performance had begun to bore her, she handed the ice-cream to Mrs Fenner to hold and brought out a man-size handkerchief in whose folds she nipped my nose painfully between her thumb and forefinger.

‘Blow. Again.'

When I had complied, she polished the reddened organ as if it were the knocker on our front door, returned the handkerchief to her pocket, and, relieving me of the chamber pot – which I had not dared to drop in the midst of my keening, though the thought had flashed through my mind – handed it back to her mother.

‘Here, ma. She'll fill it up for you if she goes on much longer. I reckon she's learned her lesson.'

‘What lesson's that, then?' Mrs Fenner inquired innocently. ‘Iggerant ole cow like me can't hope to teach anything to the likes of her.'

‘All right, ma. Put a sock in it.' Repossessing herself of the ice-cream which it seemed, wonder of wonders, was intended for me after all – though a cornet, not a boat, a subtle distinction Maud knew would not be lost on me – she snapped, ‘For heaven's sake, take those gloves off! That school o' yours 'll probably put you in solitary for a week for it – but there! Give us all a rest!'

I licked the ice-cream and felt better, though it was one of the mysteries of life how the same ice-cream could taste altogether different according to whether it came in a cornet or a boat. Mr Marcantonio, who, being Italian, was very emotional, leaned over the edge of his little cart and murmured, ‘
Coraggio
, little one!' which nearly set me off again. I was in no mood for
bel canto
.

‘No need to put
your
spoke in, thank you very much!' Maud said ill-humouredly, at which Mr Marcantonio's dark little monkey face with its twirled moustaches screwed up as if he were about to burst into tears himself. Maud would probably have been kinder to him if she hadn't known that he had seven children at home and another on the way inside his fat little Italian wife.

My mother happened to be in the kitchen when we got back home. She looked with concern at my reddened nostrils and eyelids.

‘Oh dear!' she said. ‘I hope Sylvia isn't coming down with one of her colds.'

‘Wouldn't be surprised,' was Maud's answer. ‘She
would
take off those new gloves of hers, no matter what.'

I was seven and a half, I calculate, when I first set foot in Salham St Awdry. That is to say, I had seen the village many times before then because Cromer was my mother's favourite choice for our Sunday outings to the sea, and St Awdry's was on the main Cromer road.

We never got out, though: just that my mother would invariably say, as we drove through, ‘This is where Maud comes from,' and I would peer about in all directions, wondering which was the Fenners' house, and hoping vainly for a sight of Mrs Fenner.

My brother Alfred did the driving on these occasions – indeed, upon every occasion: the thought that my father might himself learn to drive had never occurred to him. He and my brother had come to an arrangement which suited us all very well. In return for acting as family chauffeur on Sundays, Alfred had the use of the car for the rest of the week, when he and his friends, on summer evenings, would cram into it with their ukeleles and drive away singing and laughing, just when it was time for me to go to bed.

The weekday Morris, decorated with pretty girls with red lips and long cigarette-holders, and young men in plus-fours or Oxford bags, was quite a different car from the Sunday one, which was sedate and very blowy because my father was a believer in fresh air as a cure for almost everything, and it had to be hailing, snowing or pouring cats and dogs before he would agree to having the windscreens put up, or the hood.

As the windscreens – made of a kind of celluloid with a border of black belting – were kept under the back seat when not in use, a call upon their services meant that rear passengers had to disembark whilst the back seat was moved aside and the screens retrieved. Each one had two fingers of metal protruding from its base which had to be slotted into the holes prepared for their reception in the thickness of each door or, in the case of the rearmost screens, in the top of the coachwork. This operation always took time because, for some reason we did not understand but accepted without question, all six windscreens were slightly different: only one fitted any one door. We were always meaning to mark them in some unmistakable way, but somehow never got round to it.

What with one thing and another, then, we were usually wet through before we had got the windscreens in place; the interior of the car likewise, since the screens had to be positioned before the hood could go over. When at last the latter was ready to be raised, my father and my brother, with many an ‘Over to you' and ‘Over to
you!
' exchanged on a rising note of exasperation, would finally get the heavy fabric unconcertina-ed, and bedded down in the sockets provided at either side of the front windscreen.

By the time we had succeeded in making all shipshape and Bristol fashion, quite often the sun had come out again. Quite often, too, having proceeded to our destination seated on wet upholstery in wet clothes, we – to my father's sorrowful but ill-concealed satisfaction – arrived back home sniffing and sneezing. What else could we expect, he demanded, if we insisted on huddling together like pigs in a sty, breathing in each other's carbon dioxide instead of the good fresh air, excluded on the inadequate ground that it was, for the moment, a little on the damp side? None of this would have happened if only we had kept the hood down.

The day I first set foot in Salham St Awdry, however, was a glorious day in June. The picnic basket was strapped to the luggage rack. My bucket and spade were in the back of the car, together with towels and bathing costume and sand shoes, and my brother's tennis racquet. To my disgust, he had a date to play tennis with some of his Cromer friends – which meant that a rather boring day loomed ahead of me. My parents were really too elderly to enjoy building sandcastles or making sand pies. Although occasionally, just for the devil of it, I had both of them down on their knees digging and tunnelling, I was usually merciful and allowed them to sit peacefully in their hired deckchairs, immersed in the Sunday papers. To be truthful, I wasn't much of a castle and sand pie person myself, and, as we prepared for our departure, the prospect of the day stretched ahead, infinitely expendable.

It was Maud's own doing, not any uppishness on the part of my parents, that we never offered her a lift to St Awdry's when we happened to be going that way ourselves. She could not, she asserted, get off with an easy mind if she didn't tidy up after we had left and before she took her way down to the bus station in Recorder Road. She was sure no one wished to come home to a pigsty.

This used to puzzle me, since the house patently wasn't a pigsty, until, years later, I came to the conclusion that her last-minute scuttling around, smoothing bedspreads, folding pyjamas, replacing the breakfast cloth on the dining table with the embroidered runner which was its usual dress between meals, was the equivalent of her adamant refusal to let me out of the house wearing a liberty bodice with a button missing.

‘I'll be late for school!' I would wail. ‘You can sew it on tonight. Nobody will know the difference.'

‘And suppose you have an accident, Miss Clever, and they cart you off in an ambulance to the Norfolk and Norwich? What are
they
going to think then, eh?'

‘I could always say it came off in the accident.'

‘Liars go to hell,' was the reply, delivered in a tone which indicated Maud was half-inclined to leave me to my just deserts. But it was no good. The other half invariably won, and I would have to wait for the button to be sewn on before I was free to go.

And so, I think, it was with the house on Sundays. Suppose it caught fire whilst we were away, what would the firemen think when they saw the mess we'd left the place in? I believe that if she had anticipated a burglary, her chief worry would have been that the silver could have done with a polishing.

On that never-to-be-forgotten day, my brother, by the happiest chance, had trouble getting the car to start. When the so-called self-starter failed to bring the engine to life, he was forced to bring out from that repository under the back seat a large implement with a kick like a mule which, upon being thrust through a hole at the base of the radiator, hopefully engaged with the engine when the handle was turned. By the time he discovered that the root of the trouble lay in his having forgotten to switch on the petrol supply, he needed a fresh shirt and flannels and Maud had had ample time to leave the house in a condition she had no cause to be ashamed of, whatever disaster might befall in our absence.

Accordingly, my mother offered her a lift, which she accepted with moderate enthusiasm, her scepticism about my brother's driving ability, I believe, tempered only by the eclat of being seen arriving in her native village
en voiture
.

I sat between her and my mother on the back seat, Maud in her navy costume, on her knees the leather handbag my mother had given her on her last birthday. She wore her blue straw hat with the off-duty insignia pinned to it.

As we got under way and into that turbulence which invariably filled the rear of the car at speeds in excess of twelve miles per hour, the cherries and those other strange fruit plopped against each other like castanets. Myself, bareheaded, sat happily enjoying the wind rushing through my hair: my mother, a seasoned traveller who had not thought to warn a beginner of the hazards of motoring al fresco, had tied a scarf over her hat and under her chin.

‘What the hell's that noise?' called out my brother, out of sorts after his earlier argument with the car.

‘It's only Maud's cherries,' I answered for her.

‘Tell her to shut them up, then. They're driving me batty.'

Maud, hanging on to her hat with both hands as the wind schemed to send it skimming over the hedgerows, went red in the face. ‘Tin't me making this here wind! Turn it off an' they'll stop!'

Obviously, her worst fears about my brother as chauffeur were being borne out. Alfred slowed down enough to reduce the hurricane to a mere gale, but Maud was unappeased. When he came into St Awdry's he brought the Morris to a halt outside the Cross Keys, and asked winningly – he was a sweet-natured young man and, I am sure, regretted his momentary lapse – ‘Opposite the Cross Keys – that's right, isn't it?'

Maud, unforgiving, replied sarcastically, ‘That's on'y to have the postman on. Opposite the Swan, actually.'