So we all sang.
‘I love to go a-wandering
Along the mountain track,
And as I go, I love to sing,
My knapsack on my back.
Valdereeee, Valderaaaa,
Valderee, Valderaa-ha-ha-ha
My knapsack on my back!
We went a-wandering all the way back through the Kingston streets to school. Mothers were clustered anxiously in the playground. Mr Pearson was standing in the main entrance, arms folded. Miss Audric wasn’t cowed. She swept past them like the Pied Piper, leading her limping bunch of children back into school.
Perhaps it was just as well Miss Audric wasn’t a form teacher. She might well have abducted her class for a week at a time. Her children would have developed stout legs and stamina and known a great deal about Jesus and music and nature, but reading, writing and arithmetic wouldn’t have got a look in.
Our form teachers weren’t quite as eccentric as Miss Audric, but they were a very weird bunch all the same. The first year of the Juniors we had Mrs Dowling. She was a teacher of the old school – scraped-back bun, pleated skirt, flat lace-ups. She could be scathing at times. I wore a new dress with a flared skirt to school one day, and I couldn’t resist twirling round once or twice.
‘Thank you for showing us your knickers, Jacqueline,’ said Mrs Dowling, and of course everyone sniggered.
We had Mrs Symons in our second year and she was so much sweeter. She was Austrian and had a heavy accent, so we thought, ignorantly, that she was a bit ‘funny’. She tried very hard to make every child feel special. She liked my stories and gave me big ticks and the odd gold star, even though my pages were likely to be full of blots and smears. I had trouble with the school dipping pens. My ideas ran away with me and I couldn’t write quickly with those horrible scratchy pens because the ink spurted out and spattered the page. The inkwells encouraged the boys to play Beano-comic tricks. They’d dunk the tips of girls’ plaits in the inkwells and make inky blotting-paper pellets and fire them with their rulers.
When we were nearly at the end of term, Mrs Symons told us that Santa Claus would be coming soon. We were streetwise kids, eight going on nine. We looked at her, eyebrows raised.
‘Don’t you believe in Santa Claus?’ said Mrs Symons, pretending to be shocked. ‘You wait and see, my dears.’
On the last day Mrs Symons took the register and then told us she had to go on an errand, but a special visitor would be coming to look after us. She trotted off. Five minutes later a portly gentleman with a long white beard came striding into our classroom in wellington boots, wearing a scarlet robe edged with white cotton wool.
‘Hello, children! I’m Santa Claus!’ he said, with a pronounced Austrian accent.
Santa Claus was carrying a big sack. He had little wrapped presents for every single child in the class.
I loved dear Mrs Symons – but I loved my next form teacher even more.
* * *
I’ve written a book where a boy character likes playing chess in the playground. Which book is it – and what’s the boy’s name?
* * *
It’s Bad Girls – and the boy is Mandy’s friend Arthur King.
I sat next to Arthur King at lunchtime and then afterwards he tried to teach me how to play chess. It got ever so boring. I wanted to let my mind wander and think about Tanya meeting me from school and how we were going to be friends for ever and ever.
‘No, look, if you put your queen there I’ll be able to take it with my knight,’ said Arthur.
I couldn’t get worked up about it. The queen didn’t have long hair and a flowing dress, the knight didn’t have shining armour and a plume in his helmet. They were just twirly pieces of plastic with no personality whatsover.
Mandy gives Arthur rather a hard time at first. I’m glad she makes proper friends with him at the end of the book.
26
Mr Townsend
MR TOWNSEND TOOK us in the third year. I fell in love the very first day in his class. He stood in front of the blackboard and wrote his name – L. R. Townsend – in beautiful chalk copperplate. L. R. We found out soon enough that these initials stood for Leonard Reginald, dreadful old-codger names, but nothing could make Mr Townsend seem ridiculous. He wasn’t a particularly tall man, but he was fit and muscular, with tanned skin and dark-blond curly hair, practically film-star looks, a world away from the usual musty male teacher model.
He smiled at us all and sat on the edge of his desk.
‘Hello, everyone. I’m Mr Townsend. By the end of the day I hope I’ll know all your names.’
We all sat up straight at our desks and smiled back at him.
‘Isn’t he lovely?’ Marion whispered.
I sat next to her that year, though we didn’t really have much in common. Marion was a very blonde girl with a very pink face. She looked squeaky clean, as if she’d just had a good scrub in her bath. She was squeaky clean inside too. She went to church twice on Sundays, knew her Scripture off by heart and prayed to Jesus every night. Marion had a special smug holy expression when she said the word Jesus.
I knew even on that first day that Marion and I weren’t always going to see eye to eye, but at least we were united in our love for Mr Townsend. There wasn’t a single child who didn’t adore him. The boys loved him because he was sporty. He still played for a good rugby team and he loved cricket and tennis. He encouraged the athletic boys and coached them enthusiastically, but he didn’t shout at the weedy ones who ran knock-kneed and couldn’t catch. He was gently sympathetic – but he was no easy pushover. He never let anyone take advantage of his good nature. He never caned any child. He didn’t need to. The girls loved him because he was so kind and caring and artistic too. He shyly showed us his watercolour sketchbook. We all tried hard to copy his delicate landscapes with the school primary colour poster paints.
He taught us our lessons, fairly but firmly, but at play times he wasn’t just our teacher, he was our friend. He’d throw a ball about with the boys and ruffle their hair and pretend to bop them on the nose. He’d chat to the girls, treating us totally seriously. A little bunch of us would lean against him fondly. Marion once actually climbed on his knee. There was never anything odd or weird about Mr Townsend. We all knew adults who’d try to pat you or cuddle you too close. Mr Townsend was as kindly and gentle and safe as Santa Claus, though he didn’t have a silly beard or a habit of going ‘Ho ho ho!’
I tried harder in his lessons than I ever had before, simply because I wanted to be top of his class. I didn’t have much chance because I was totally useless at arithmetic. I could add and subtract and multiply and divide accurately enough (though I frequently had to work it out on my fingers), but I couldn’t do problems. You know the sort of thing: If it takes six men ten days to dig a hole 30 feet by 60 feet how long will it take eight men? I couldn’t concentrate on the logistics. I made up the six men in my head and wondered why they were digging this hole of such huge dimensions. Was it the foundations of a house? A swimming pool? A grave for an elephant? What time in the morning did they start digging? Did they have breaks for a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich? Why were the two extra men brought into play? Were they reserve builders, like reserve players in a football match? I’d be off in a daydream and all the other children would be on question three already.
Marion was good at arithmetic. It was her second-best subject (she shone at scripture). When we had an arithmetic test, I edged a little closer to her at our shared desk. She hunched over her page as she wrote down her sums, guarding her work with her hand, but as she turned the page, I could sometimes get a glimpse of her neat answers.
She saw me writing down an answer at the end of my untidy workings out and frowned. ‘You copied that off me!’ she whispered.
My mouth went dry. I suppose I had copied. Copycats were deeply despised.
‘No I didn’t,’ I said.
‘That’s a fib!’ said Marion.
‘No, I didn’t copy,
I didn’t,’ I lied.
I was getting scared Marion might tell Mr Townsend. I glanced at him anxiously.
Marion saw me looking. ‘I’m not a telltale,’ she said.
‘There’s nothing to tell because I didn’t copy, so there,’ I said.
‘I know you did,’ said Marion. She paused. ‘And Jesus knows too!’
I couldn’t help looking up to see if I could spot Jesus peering all the way down from Heaven, sucking his teeth and shaking his head at me. But at least Mr Townsend didn’t know, and I cared about him much more than I did about Marion’s Jesus.
I managed to pass muster in all the other lessons. I shone at English. I liked it best when we could make up stories, but I tried hard when we were told to write factual accounts too. Sometimes I blurred the distinction between the two. Mr Townsend set us the subject ‘My Day Out’.
I chewed the top of my pen, deliberating. Marion set to work, scribbling away with her fountain pen, writing about her day out in the country in Daddy’s Morris Minor. It was all right for her. We didn’t have a car so we didn’t have Days Out. We hardly ever went out as a family, Biddy, Harry and me. It wouldn’t work – Biddy would nag and bicker, Harry would snap and sulk, I’d pick my hangnails and start pretending.
Well, I could pretend a Day Out, couldn’t I? I got cracking with a sigh of relief. I decided we’d go for a Day Out in London. I didn’t invent a posh car for us. I wanted to be convincing. I took us by train from Kingston railway station. I embellished the journey with a few imaginary treats. I had a Girl comic and a packet of Spangles to suck while Mummy and Daddy chatted and laughed and looked out of the window.
I knew what to do with us when we got to Waterloo. We went over the bridge to the Strand. I was proud of my authentic details. I walked us up the Charing Cross Road to Foyles. I knew this was the biggest bookshop in London. I had several books at home with the distinctive green Foyles sticker inside. I described my book-browsing session in loving detail, fantasizing about the different books in the children’s section. I decided Mummy would buy me What Katy Did at School and Daddy would buy me Tennis Shoes by Noel Streatfeild.
Then we went to Hamleys, the big toyshop in Regent Street. I looked at the dolls with Mummy and the toy trains with Daddy, and they bought me a tiny teapot no bigger than my thumbnail for my doll’s house. Then we had lunch at Lyons Corner House, the only restaurant I knew in London.
I had another gnaw of my pen, deliberating over our afternoon. I decided we’d go to the zoo. I’d been there once when I was five to see baby Brumus, the polar bear, so this pretend time we went to see Brumus grown up, and the monkeys and the lions and the giraffes. I had a ride on a camel and an elephant. This wasn’t fantasy – children really could have special rides on the animals in those days. It had actually been very uncomfortable on that baby Brumus visit. I’d been placed between the camel’s humps and I was scared I might slip sideways. You sat on a special seat for the elephant ride, but I’d been strapped in with a lot of over-excited boys who kept poking me, and they all shrieked with laughter and said rude things when the elephant relieved itself.
I walked us all round the zoo, Biddy and Harry and I all licking Wall’s ice-cream wafers. Biddy wasn’t a woman who’d willingly walk to the end of the road in her tiny size-three heels, and she actively disliked most animals, so my imaginative powers were stretched to the limit.
I let us all have a sit down and another slap-up meal in Lyons. Our Day Out wasn’t over yet. I extended it into the evening. I decided to take us to the cinema to see a film called The Bad Seed.
Biddy and Harry had actually seen this film when it was on in Kingston. I’d longed to see it. I’d seen stills from the film in Picturegoer, a magazine I bought every now and then in case it had photos of Mandy. The Bad Seed starred another child film star, Patty McCormack. My heart still belonged to Mandy, but I did fall in love with Patty McCormack’s wonderful ash-blonde hair, styled in a fringe at the front and then two long beautiful plaits. She looked incredibly sweet and innocent and childish, with her neat hair and checked frock and little red tap shoes. It was a thrilling shock to read a paragraph about this new film and find that Patty played a child murderer.
I begged Biddy to take me to see the film but she said it wasn’t suitable. After she’d seen it herself I made her tell me all about this little girl Rhoda, who drowned a boy in her class because he beat her in a spelling test. He was in a pond and he struggled hard to haul himself out, but Rhoda took off her tap shoe and hammered his fingers so he had to let go. This appalled and impressed me. Ann was the only girl I knew who wore tap shoes, and she was a sweet kind girl and one of my friends – but I decided not to argue with her all the same.
I wrote about Biddy and Harry and me going to see The Bad Seed. I recounted the plot at length. I’d listened avidly to Biddy. Every now and then I embellished or invented, as always.
‘We all agreed it was the best film we’d ever seen. It was the end of a perfect day out,’ I wrote, finishing just as the bell went.
‘You’ve written heaps,’ said Marion, comparing her sparse page and a half with my six, seven, eight pages.
I shrugged modestly. I might be rubbish at maths, but I could certainly write.
I hoped Mr Townsend would like my composition. When Biddy asked me if I’d had a good day at school, I told her I’d written the longest composition ever.
‘What was the subject?’ Biddy asked, as she peeled the potatoes for our favourite treat supper, roast pork chops.
‘“My Day Out”,’ I said, starting to shell the peas for her. I loved doing this and helping myself to the tiny peas in the flat pods – but I always jumped if I found a maggot.
‘Mm,’ said Biddy absent-mindedly, slicing the potatoes and arranging them in the roasting tin. ‘So what did you write about? Did you tell about the time I got you all the Mandy photos in Wardour Street?’
‘No, I forgot. I did put about looking at the dolls in Hamleys though,’ I said.
‘Did you say I bought you those Old Cottage dolls?’
‘Well, no, you didn’t buy them with me on a day out – they were my Christmas present,’ I said.
Biddy raised her eyebrows at me and shoved the roasting tin in the oven. She started shelling peas too.
‘You could have juggled with the facts a little to make a good story,’ she said. ‘You love your dolls. And they cost a fortune.’
‘Yes, well, I put a lot else. I said you gave me lots of treats – and we all went to The Bad Seed in the evening,’ I said.
Biddy jumped as if she’d found a maggot as big as a snake. ‘You said I took you to The Bad Seed!’ she said.
‘You and me and Daddy,’ I said.
‘But we didn’t take you!’
‘Yes, I know, but I was juggling with the facts to make a good story,’ I said, echoing her exactly.
This was not a wise plan. She thought I was being deliberately cheeky and gave me a good shake.
‘How on earth could you put such a stupid thing? As if I’d ever take you to a film like that. Did you say what it was about?’
‘Yes, I told the whole story,’ I said, my head juddering. ‘All about Rhoda and the little boy and the tap shoes and how she killed him.’
‘You stupid idiot!’ said Biddy. ‘What sort of mother will he think me, taking you to a film like that! Have you handed this composition in?’
‘Yes, at the end of the lesson.’
‘Then he’s probably marking it right this minute,’ said Biddy. ‘Well, you must go and tell him first thing tomorrow morning that it was a pack of lies.’
‘I can’t do that!’ I said, starting to cry.
‘If you don’t tell him, I’ll come to the school and tell him myself,’ said Biddy, and I knew she meant it.
I spent a sleepless night worrying about it. Mr Townsend would be so hurt and shocked when he found out I was a liar. He’d never like me again. He’d be fondest of saintly Marion, who would never ever li
e.
I went to school early, feeling sick. I didn’t tell Cherry why I was so quiet. I didn’t try to play with Ann. I didn’t bicker with Marion. I didn’t giggle with any of the boys. I just stood in a corner, head bowed, fists clenched, as if I was already wearing a placard round my neck proclaiming me a LIAR.
Mr Townsend strode in cheerily, swinging his briefcase. He sat down at his desk, opened up his case and pulled out our green English notebooks.
My stomach lurched. I wondered if I ought to make a dash for the toilets. Mr Townsend looked up and saw me gulping like a goldfish.
‘Are you all right, Jacky?’ he said.
‘Yes. No. I don’t know,’ I mumbled. I took a deep breath. ‘Have you marked our English compositions yet, Mr Townsend?’
‘Yes, I have.’ He beckoned me closer. ‘I thought yours was particularly interesting, Jacky. Well done.’
Any other time I’d have spread my wings and flown round the classroom at such sweet praise. But now I felt I was falling. I was going down down down through the parquet flooring, through all the layers of earth we’d learned about in geography, until I tumbled into Hell itself, where I belonged.
‘I’ve got to tell you something awful, Mr Townsend,’ I whispered.
‘And what’s that?’ he said, his head on one side.
‘It wasn’t true, my Day Out,’ I said. ‘We didn’t go to London and we didn’t go to Foyles and Hamleys and Lyons Corner House and London Zoo.’
‘Didn’t you?’ said Mr Townsend.
‘It was all lies. And . . . and . . . and I definitely didn’t go to The Bad Seed. Mummy says she’d never take me to a film like that. I just made it all up.’
‘Very convincingly,’ said Mr Townsend.
He didn’t sound too shocked or horrified. He looked as if he was trying not to laugh!
‘So did you believe it all?’ I asked.
‘Well, not quite all of it,’ said Mr Townsend. ‘I rather think The Bad Seed is X-certificated. I don’t suppose they’d have let a nine-year-old go into the cinema.’