Owning Up: The Trilogy (20 page)

Situated as it was in a network of streets whose names evoked the world of medieval chivalry in the works of Sir Walter Scott, Camelot paid homage to an even earlier legend. Although there were only about thirty pupils we were divided into houses – Percival, Tristram, Lancelot and Galahad – each with its coloured badge sewn on the pocket of our blazers. To begin with you were put into the kindergarten under the supervision of a very pretty girl called Kitty Coope. She was the daughter of a Church of England canon, one of those .ecclesiastics sufficiently elevated for Gangie to drop his name into the conversation whenever a suitable opportunity presented itself.

I had been told that ‘Kindergarten’ meant ‘Children’s Garden’. I found it confusing that the whole school was called a ‘Kindergarten’, and yet we were in a class which was called ‘the kindergarten’, a children’s garden within a children’s garden. I was equally puzzled as to why Camelot was called a kindergarten at all. It was a house, its garden a scruffy little patch of grass with a few straggly laurel bushes.

Although everyone went home for lunch, when you were still in the kindergarten you didn’t come back in the afternoon. The only refreshment provided by the school was a choice of hot milk or water at the mid-morning break. The milk always had a nasty skin on it and the water was served in thick mugs which somehow, although I was perfectly fond of water, made it taste brackish. You had to have one or the other and Miss Edwards made sure you drank it all up. I still can’t abide water in a cup or mug.

Life in the kindergarten class was very pleasant. You crayoned in pictures in a colouring book (it was long before the days of free expression), moulded plasticine, played with a sand-pit, watched tadpoles turn into frogs in their season (what happened to the mature frogs? Were they released into one of the lakes in Sefton Park?), and did raffia work. Tom, who was very amused by anything I had to tell him about Camelot, was extremely sarcastic about the little raffia purses or place-mats that I brought proudly home. ‘Miss Coope is very good at raffia,’ he’d say with some accuracy, for I was very clumsy with my hands and needed a lot of ‘help’. The fact that it was true made his teasing no more bearable and I would protest with increasing vehemence that I’d done it all by myself. Maud naturally and ostentatiously used the nasty little purses and set the tatty place-mats until she felt I’d forgotten about them.

Once I’d left the kindergarten, however, I began to feel less at ease. I discovered you were meant to learn, not just what interested you – I had no objection to that – but things which didn’t, like adding up and dividing, French, geography and reading, The latter I finally mastered (in memory practically overnight) and I quite enjoyed history – we used a little book entirely composed of myths: Alfred and the cakes, King Canute, the Princes in the Tower – but for the rest I refused to pay any attention at all. This both worried and puzzled Miss Yates and the staff. I was clearly quite bright, in some respects almost precocious, so why couldn’t or wouldn’t I learn anything? Miss Yates gave me several stiff talkings-to, but although I promised to try they had no effect at all. Severe and witty Miss Gibbons tried sarcasm; broad-beamed Miss Edwards scorn; pretty Miss Dobson persuasion, but I continued to acquire very little knowledge from these conscientious ladies.

I could, on the other hand, memorise poetry easily and recite it with dramatic if rather hammy facility. The day of the school concert at the end of each term was my apotheosis, the moment when the ugly duckling turned temporarily into a swan. Miss Yates very much dominated these occasions: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’, a breathless and nervous child would announce. Then it would continue, ‘Shall I compare thee…’ only to be interrupted by Miss Yates. ‘Who’s it by, dear?’ ‘William Shakespeare,’ the by now thoroughly rattled child would concede before beginning again, all memory and concentration shattered.

One term, encouraged by Miss Gibbons, who had a streak of mischief behind her severe horn-rimmed glasses, I recited
Albert and the Lion,
the humorous monologue I had learnt by heart from a gramophone record and which, with my talent for mimicry, I could deliver fairly convincingly in the strong Lancashire accent of Stanley Holloway’s original. All the mistresses, with the exception of Miss Yates, were delighted by this deviation from ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ or ‘I once had a sweet little doll, dears’, and my contemporaries, too, enjoyed the rather bloodthirsty and callous couplets. Miss Yates, although clearly unhappy, didn’t interrupt, but when I’d finished she clapped her hands for attention and told the school that although George had been clever ‘in his way’, she would be most displeased if she heard any child trying to imitate the accent. Having an accent at Camelot – not ‘speaking properly’ – was certainly on the level of being detected eating sweets on a tram.

The Christmas play was a far more ambitious project than the end of term concert. We played it twice; a ‘dress rehearsal’ in front of our nannies and an ‘opening night’ the following afternoon for parents and relations. The play, which was always a fairy story, was written by one of the staff and the costumes were ingeniously constructed by Miss Coope from coloured crepe paper and safety pins. One year I was a jester in blue and yellow motley and genuinely thought that at the ‘dress rehearsal’ I had given a pretty impressive performance. I was therefore all the more hurt and shocked when Miss Yates stopped me in the corridor next morning and hoped I’d do better in front of the parents. Did I give a bad performance or did Miss Yates feel that I needed deflating? Perhaps both.

Miss Yates was also responsible for one of the few serious tickings-off I ever received from my mother. I’d fallen down a flight of stairs at Camelot and, probably because there was no carpet, had hurt myself quite badly. Children seem to fall downstairs frequently; I’d done it many times before but always without injury. In a panic-stricken way I’d even quite enjoyed it: the world suddenly fragmented, gravity set at odds, bits of stair, banister, skirting-board, wall and ceiling jumbled up together at speed. This time however it was not at all pleasurable and, with a bruised knee and a bump on the head, I was so shaken that I’d been sent home early. Maud, full of concern and sympathy, had asked me if I’d cried. ‘Oh, no,’ I told her airily, ‘not a bit.’ ‘Brave little man!’ she said. ‘Brave little soldier!’

A couple of nights later, coming down into the lounge after tea, looking forward to the American Colonel spitting into the fire or another chapter from
The Jungle Book,
I was confronted by a mother I didn’t recognise, cold and grim. ‘I met Miss Yates in Lark Lane,’ she said, ‘and we talked about you falling down the stairs. I said, “Wasn’t George brave not to cry?” and she told me you’d quite naturally howled and screamed. You must never tell lies, George! There’ll be no reading tonight. You must go to bed now!’ I was frightfully upset, but at the same time couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. No doubt I’d cried after my fall, but by the time I denied it later I’d convinced myself I hadn’t. I could ‘see’ myself hurt certainly, but courageously dry-eyed, making light of my injuries. I was not only upset by Maud’s reproaches, I was also put out. Of course she came upstairs later and ‘made it all right’ but I’m still puzzled by what got into her. With her need to be liked at all times, especially by her children, her moral reproach, while perfectly justified, was completely out of character.

Jester and stairs apart, I wasn’t at all unhappy at Camelot. I’d enjoyed quite a lot of it – joining the Wolf Cubs for example and prancing round the carved wolf’s head in the assembly room chanting ‘We’ll dib dib dib. We’ll dob dob dob.’ During Wolf Cubs we had to call Miss Dobson ‘Akela’ and, although I could see little resemblance between her and the Father Wolf in the Mowgli stories, I’d liked the connection between life at school and the magic world in the dark red book with Kipling’s mysterious swastika on the cover.

Bill overlapped me at Camelot by several terms, and it was irritating that he should be so much quicker than I was at learning things. Although three years younger, he was reading before I could and did well at everything else too. By the time I left I’d learnt one useful if dangerous lesson; that if you could make people laugh you could get away with almost anything. Miss Gibbons, for instance, was frequently exasperated with my lack of concentration, but I seemed able to amuse even her, and she was seldom cross for very long. Only Miss Yates was impervious to jokes. When I left at the age of seven she told me seriously and rather sadly that she was sure I could do better if I tried, that archetypal reproach of a teacher confronted by a bright but idle child.

10

At Camelot I developed the ability to separate areas of life one from the other, a trick for which I was to be increasingly grateful. As soon as I was home or during the holidays Camelot ceased to exist except as a source of anecdotes to amuse Tom. However, even at home things were less happy, because the nursery had become a torture-chamber. Firm but kind Bella, although she was to return later, had gone and her place was taken by a handsome fiend, a sister of the Leathers’ nanny, called Hilda Cadwallader.

Hilda was a savage and chilly disciplinarian particularly at mealtimes, implementing her rigid injunctions with the aid of a thin green garden cane which she flicked with great accuracy under the table to catch me, and more rarely Bill, across the calves or thighs. Her principal obsession was that if we took anything at tea we must put it on our plate before transferring it to our mouths. As forgetting to do so was to court instant and painful retribution I soon, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, learnt this lesson and to this day on taking a sandwich or a biscuit automatically, however rapidly, touch my plate with it. ‘Eating everything up’ was another of Hilda’s strict rules, a common one I know. My mother, who much to our relief would sometimes join us for lunch or tea in the nursery, would wait until Hilda had left the room to get the pudding and then rapidly gobble up whatever we didn’t want off our plates. This I found, while welcome, very confusing. Was Maud on our side and if so why didn’t she tell Hilda we needn’t finish things we didn’t like? Did she know of the existence of the thin green cane? We probably hadn’t told her about it; children just don’t. But if she did know, why didn’t she forbid its use? I now realise that the reason was Maud’s terror of a confrontation with someone of strong character and Hilda was certainly that. Andrée, still in her high-chair, was spared the rod but not a certain amount of force feeding and a slap on the leg if she persistently threw her spoon and pusher on the floor.

Our walks, too, became less interesting because on many afternoons, ignoring Sefton or even Prince’s Park, Hilda would head down Aigburth Road to meet her sister, the Leathers’ nanny, and spend the afternoon chatting and looking in the shops. This was very boring for Bill, my cousin Gillian and me (Andrée was still in her pram, John already at school all day) but at least it reduced Hilda’s attention and left us free to scamper ahead or hide round corners. Once I stole an egg from a mound displayed on the sloping marble slab of a fishmonger’s in Aigburth Vale. I don’t know why I did it and was instantly so frightened that I threw it into a bush in someone’s front garden. My crime preyed on me to such an extent that several months later I imagined I overheard the woman in the fishmonger’s say to a customer as we passed: ‘A bad little boy pinched an egg from this shop when I wasn’t looking and I’ve told the police.’

I don’t know how long Hilda was with us; certainly long enough for Andrée to be talking and sitting up at the table. But eventually she left, a day of celebration for me, and her place was taken by her other sister, May. This Was, on the face of it, good news. May had been house parlour-maid before her elevation to the nursery and seemed to be a cheerful girl with a plain, friendly face and big glasses. My optimism turned out to be displaced however. Somehow the flight of stairs from kitchen to nursery transformed May into a tyrant like her sister. The gardening cane remained in use, the rules as strictly enforced. She didn’t stay too long, however, and her place was taken by a sweet-natured girl called Minnie Shearer and eventually by the return of Bella, but by that time I was beyond the jurisdiction of nannies anyway.

The kitchen, both before and after May’s metamorphosis, remained a refuge and a place of comfort. Following May’s promotion Edna, Auntie Min’s successor as cook, was joined by a very jolly girl called Ethel. In Liverpool every year there was a fancy dress dance at St George’s Hall called ‘The Servants’ Ball’. Such a concept, such a name for such a concept, appears absolutely grotesque now but it didn’t then. The Servants’ Ball was a very popular function and comparatively valuable prizes were offered for the best costumes in several categories: single, couples, most comic, most artistic, etc. Edna and Ethel won the couple’s prize two years running: one year as Laurel and Hardy (Edna was big and plump, Ethel small and thin) and the next year as ‘The Bisto Kids’. I hadn’t seen Laurel and Hardy on the screen then – I hadn’t been allowed to go to the pictures – but I knew what they looked like from
Film Fun,
my favourite comic.

My comfort during the regime of the Cadwallader sisters, and indeed at all times of stress, was a small bear I’d had ever since I could remember. Its name was ‘Little Ted’ and over the years it had gradually lost arms, legs and eyes until hardly any of the original remained. It was repaired by my mother, no great hand with the needle, and as it also shed all its fur, it was eventually quite a repulsive object. Nevertheless Little Ted was a powerful fetish, so much so that I even took him to Stowe and later on into the navy where he was eventually lost, creating in me considerable, although suppressed, anxiety. How did I avoid teasing by school boys and seamen for having a Teddy bear? By pretending, like Sebastian Flyte, that it was a bit of camp, although in fact it was nothing of the kind but an important psychological prop. Little Ted was far more of a help in adversity than God or his son, ‘Gentlejesusmeek-andmild’. I said my prayers because I was told to, but I gabbled through them at a fair lick especially on the cold linoleum of winter. My real solace lay on the pillow, its button eyes hanging on threads, its limbs and old woollen glove fingers lumpily stuffed with cotton wool, one ear gone, its body held together by a pair of grubby but remedial pyjamas knitted by the Griff.