Beastly swots, jolly japes and very big knickers
Ah, the memories . . . the bright green practice fields; the thwacks of balls against tennis rackets and shouts of: ‘Well played!’; the hammer horror boarding house glowering down from the hill beyond; around the back of the cricket pavilion, the whiff of Woodbine cigarettes mingling with patchouli (doubly transgressive) from those naughty but oh-so-impressive girls in the Upper Fifth . . .
the sound of the gong; bumping into your friends as you clatter downstairs to the dining hall for tea; the crash diet forgotten as pappy white toast beckons to be spread with a paste of margarine and sugar. Later, on a thursday, top Of the Pops on the telly and the older girls pretending to be Pan’s People up on the stage with the heavy blue curtains pulled back . . .
then there’s prep, conjugating Latin verbs under our breath or trying not to giggle as we read Sir Walter Scott’s the heart Of Midlothian with ‘puir Jeanie Deans’ and her ‘ wee tittie’ [sister].
Into the dorms with their 13 spartan cubicles for Lights Out: flimsy candlewick counterpanes the colour of curdled tapioca on hard beds, the ghost stories we told in earlier years replaced by swooning speculation in a game of Who Would You Rather? (Mick or Keith? Paul or John?)
And in the morning, the crocodile of girls walking two-bytwo from the boarding house to school in our greengage wool suits, looking out for the local loiterer Dirty Berty, with his blue specs which meant (so we believed) he could see through our shirts to our chaste white cotton Berlei starter bras.
the title of Julie Welch’s book sums up precisely my response to the tales inside. Reading it was to be transported back to my days at boarding school.
Unlike her Felixstowe College, which dropped ‘ladies’ from its name, mine ( Cheltenham Ladies’) retained it and still does. But apart from my school’s stubborn punctiliousness and an age gap between us of seven or so years, much of what she recollects is instantly recognisable to me.
If the past is another country, boarding school is that with knobs on — particularly in Julie’s day. It has its own language understood only by its citizens — ‘ wapies’ for wastepaper baskets, ‘wigging’ for hairwashing (strictly once a fortnight, eugh) and ‘pashes’ (like a mild form of fagging). there are rules, rules and rules, the strange and arcane among the sensible. there are bonkers amounts of very specific uniform — two sorts of gloves, stupid hats, white underpants known as ‘big whiteys’ worn with huge green overpants.
My undomesticated mother managed to bleach mine a tiedye effect, which was mortifying because we wore them for Pe. I can still recall the shame of all eyes on my patchy derriere as we lined up to vault the gym horse.
Welch brings to life her circle of friends: erica, the poised but bossy leader with perfect hair; Della, Beth, Lindy and absolute bestie Chrissie, some of whom appear at the start of the book at an old school reunion.
the midnight feasts, the pranks, the fantastic figure of the headmistress Miss Jones, or ‘Jonah’, the eavesdropping housemistress known as Bretch — this is all summoned with brio and a tone that veers from the knowing with pithy put-downs (a hapless cleaner is described as looking like Ronnie Barker in drag) to one of untrammelled, almost innocent gaiety.
there are Bunterisms and Blytonisms galore: ‘ lashings’ of orangeade, girls and teachers getting into ‘ bates’, ‘swots’ and ‘wets’, absolute rotters and beastly girls as well as spiffing ones.
Some are sent to Felixstowe because their fathers are posted abroad, others are dispatched because of family tradition or, frankly, because it’s too much of a bother for parents to deal with them at home.
It was the unusual intensities of her home life, coupled with reading enid Blyton’s Malory towers, that prompted Welch to implore her parents to send her to boarding school.
According to her, there were three people in her parents’ marriage — the third being Jane, a redheaded divorcee, ‘big, posh and Scottish’, who worked with her father and didn’t go home at the end of the day: ‘She was just there. All the time.’
Welch’s aspirational mother took out her anguish on her younger daughter: ‘It made her unkind. But who could she be unkind to? Not my father or Jane. So it had to be me. I was the youngest and the smallest. the easiest target. She couldn’t stand me, it appeared.’
At school, the independentminded, bright, pony-mad Welch was bound to get into trouble and there were inevitably tears before bedtime.
throughout her school days she wrote stories — the horse From hell being an early, unfinished novel; the Sandwich Stories, a series of illustrated novellas that featured her school friends as well as elvis, the Shadows and, oh dear, since Jonah found and confiscated it, her housemistress, Bretch.
DURINg
her third year at Bristol University, Welch won a national award for a piece about student life (sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — and abortion) which was published in a newspaper colour supplement.
She was on her way, later becoming Fleet Street’s first female football reporter and writing a screenplay about her childhood love of Spurs in the Sixties, which was turned into a tV film, those glory, glory Days, by David Puttnam.
there is something engagingly vintage about this book, describing a vanishing and, in Felixstowe College’s case, a vanished world. Welch’s alma mater closed down in 1994, unable to survive in a changed world. What a super girl she was, as a younger Welch herself might have said.
I think if she had been a contemporary at my ladies’ college, we might well have been pals. Or certainly have gone in for a wizard prank or two.