‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Mr Townsend, are you cross with me for telling lies?’
‘I don’t think you were really lying, Jacky. You were just making things up. There’s a big difference. You’ve got a very vivid imagination.’
I took the deepest breath in all the world. ‘Do you think I might be able to write stories one day?’ I asked.
‘I’m sure you will,’ said Mr Townsend solemnly.
I wanted to throw my arms round his neck and kiss him.
A week or so later Mr Townsend suggested we all might like to start a special project for English.
‘I’m going to give each of you your own notebook,’ he said.
He patted a pile of brand-new green exercise books. School stationery was in short supply. We were taught to fill in every single line in our exercise books, even using up the fuzzy backing to the covers. We had to keep dipping our scratchy school pens far down into a thick gravy of congealed ink before we were allowed to top up our inkwells. Now we were being given a whole new notebook each. It was a sign that Mr Townsend was taking this special project seriously.
‘What is our project going to be on, Mr Townsend?’ Julian asked eagerly.
He was the class swot, a highly intelligent, sweet, tufty-haired boy who waved his arm all the time in the-classroom, asking endless questions and knowing all the answers.
‘I think I will let you all choose individual projects, Julian,’ said Mr Townsend. ‘I want you to write about whatever interests you most. Maybe a special sport, a hobby, a period of history, a type of animal, a favourite country – whatever you like.’
‘Could I possibly do astronomy, sir?’ said Julian.
A few children groaned. Other teachers would have groaned too and mocked Julian’s pedantic politeness, but not Mr Townsend.
‘I think that would be an excellent choice,’ he said.
The rest of 3A had less esoteric choices.
‘Bags I do football!’
‘No, I’m doing football.’
‘Me too.’
‘Can I do rugby?’
‘Can I write about my dog?’
‘I want to write about France – we’ve been there for our holidays.’
‘I want to write about birds. I’ve spotted heaps in my I-Spy book.’
‘Can I write about Gilbert and Sullivan?’ asked Cherry.
‘You what?’
‘Who are they?’
‘Are they your boyfriends?’
‘They wrote operettas. Mum and Dad sing in them and they’re ever so funny,’ said Cherry.
There were sniggers.
‘Funny ha ha, or funny peculiar?’ said Jock, screwing his finger into the side of his head to indicate loopiness.
‘No, no, they are funny,’ said Mr Townsend. ‘I’ve sung in The Pirates of Penzance, Cherry.’
This instantly gave Gilbert and Sullivan a total seal of approval.
‘Please may I write about ballet?’ Ann asked.
‘I wonder if I could write about Jesus?’ Marion asked. ‘What are you going to write about, Jacky?’
‘Maybe . . . maybe I could write a story?’ I said.
‘No, it’s a project. You can’t write an ordinary old story,’ said Marion.
‘Yes I can,’ I said. ‘Well, I don’t just want to write a story.’
I went up to Mr Townsend’s desk, not wanting to shout it out in front of all the others.
‘Please could I write a novel for my project, Mr Townsend?’ I said.
He hadn’t mocked Julian or Cherry. He didn’t mock me either.
‘I think that’s a brilliant idea, Jacky,’ he said.
I danced back to my seat and nodded my head at Marion. ‘Did you hear that? Mr Townsend said it was an excellent idea,’ I said.
‘He’s just being kind,’ said Marion. ‘Anyway, you can’t write a whole novel.’
‘Yes I can,’ I said.
I couldn’t, of course. I wrote twenty-one sides, and that included a Contents page, but it was divided into seven chapters and it seemed like a whole novel to me.
I decided to write about a large family. I very much wanted to be a member of a large family. It was too intense when it was just Biddy and Harry and me. I decided this was going to be about a poor family with problems. I was irritated by the smug, safe, middle-class world of most of my children’s books. The fathers were doctors and vicars, the mothers baked cakes and arranged flowers, the children went to posh schools and rode on ponies and had picnics and played jolly games.
I only knew one book about poor people, and that was The Family from One End Street. The family were called the Ruggles. I wanted to use a similar semi-comic name. I liked listening to a comedy series on the radio called Meet the Huggetts. I decided to call my family the Maggots. I called my first chapter ‘Meet the Maggots’. My dad was called Alf and was a bus driver. I drew him with a pipe and a moustache to make it clear he was a man. I wasn’t very good at drawing males.
My mum was called Daisy. She didn’t go out to work, she just (!) looked after her seven children. She had a bun and worry lines across her forehead. She was particularly worried about her eldest, fifteen-year-old Marilyn, as she was ‘dead keen on boys. And boys were dead keen on her too.’ She was a pretty blonde. I drew her with ornate earrings. Pierced ears were considered ‘fast’ on young girls in the 1950s. I wanted Marilyn to be very fast.
Then there was Marlene. She was twelve and brainy. She’d passed her scholarship to the grammar school (as I was expected to do next year). I wrote: ‘Her interest is books. You can’t drag her out of them.’ Poor Marlene wasn’t a beauty like her sister. She had a mousy ponytail and had to wear National Health glasses. I’d just started to wear glasses myself. Biddy was enormously proud of the fact that she’d paid for special fancy glasses with upswept frames. She wasn’t having her daughter wearing little round pink National Health specs, thank you very much.
The third sister was called Mandy. She was ten and had big brown eyes and dark plaits and was desperate to be an actress. No prizes for guessing who I based her on!
Then I branched out and invented nine-year-old boy twins. There were boy twins in The Family from One End Street so I was obviously copying. I called my twins Marmaduke and Montague. Daisy had obvious aspirations for her first sons. Then she went on to have Melvyn, a shy, sensitive little boy who was mercilessly teased by five-year-old Marigold, the baby of the family. She was a fiesty little girl with abundant blonde curls and a misleading angelic expression.
I gave each child their own chapter, inventing little domestic scenarios, still shamelessly copying when I ran out of original ideas. Marilyn decided to dye her hair to please her boyfriend Sid and ended up with bright green locks – something very similar happened to Anne of Green Gables. The twins discovered stolen treasure as if they were reserve members of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five.
‘The Maggots’ was not a particularly startling or stylish story, sadly – but I can nowadays claim, jokingly, that I wrote my first novel at the age of nine.
* * *
Who wrote a story about ‘Night-time’ at school and tried very hard – but her teacher said that it was very rambling, and she had a warped imagination?
* * *
It was Tracy Beaker in the second book about her, The Dare Game.
Last week we had to write a story about ‘Night-time’ and I thought it an unusually cool subject so I wrote eight and a half pages about this girl out late at night and it’s seriously spooky and then this crazy guy jumps out at her and almost murders her but she escapes by jumping in the river and then she swims right into this bloated corpse and then when she staggers onto the bank there’s this strange flickering light coming from the nearby graveyard and it’s an evil occult sect wanting to sacrifice an innocent young girl and she’s just what they’re looking for . . .
Tracy thinks she’s written a masterpiece but her teacher, Mrs Bagley, isn’t particularly appreciative. She tells Tracy she has a ver
y warped imagination. I’m sure my Mr Townsend would have encouraged Tracy! It’s tough that she has Mrs Vomit Bagley for her teacher. They are never going to see eye to eye.
27
Mr Branson
MR BRANSON TOOK the top Juniors. We nicknamed him Brandy Balls. We weren’t being particularly rude. Brandy Balls were reddish aniseed sweets, very popular in the 1950s. Even so, no child ever called Mr Branson Brandy Balls to his face. We didn’t even call him Mr Branson. He was Sir, and we stood up when he came into the room, we stood up when he spoke to us, we stood up when we needed to speak to him, we stood up and stayed standing up, hands on head, if we’d been disobedient.
He wasn’t a dear gentle friend to us like Mr Townsend. He was a teacher. I can’t remember him caning any of the boys but we were all frequently terrified of him. He had a habit of whacking you across the knuckles with a ruler if he felt you needed to get a move on with your writing. If you settled into a little daydream, he’d aim his sharpened chalk at you with surprising accuracy, so that it really stung. If you were ever unwise enough to yawn, you had to run round the playground five times to get some oxygen into your lungs. He urged you to go ‘Faster! Faster!’ until your lungs weren’t just freshly oxygenated, they were in danger of total collapse.
We might not have called him nicknames to his face but he had plenty for us, mostly unpleasant. I managed to be Top Girl some of the time, in spite of my lamentable maths, so I think he quite liked me. In fond moods he’d call me Jacky Daydream, almost a term of endearment for Mr Branson. He could also be cruel though. He frequently called me Four Eyes, a nickname I hated, as I was very self-conscious about wearing my new glasses. He also called me Sly Boots because when he stood over me in class, I was so intimidated I didn’t dare look up at him.
‘You’re sly, Jacky, that’s what it is. I can’t stand people who won’t look me in the eye.’
I did my best to meet his fierce bloodshot gaze, my eyelids twitching behind my awful fancy glasses.
I got off easily. He was particularly hateful to the slow and the stuttering, proclaiming them morons and imitating their stammer. He was worst of all to Julian, the most intelligent boy in the class – no, the whole school, including the teachers. Mr Townsend had encouraged Julian to ask questions. Mr Branson sighed heavily whenever Julian waved his hand. He’d imitate Julian’s voice and encourage the rest of us to laugh at him. He’d call Julian Brainy Bonce or the Professor or His Lordship. Julian continued valiantly waving his hand in class no matter how many times Mr Branson belittled him.
He was unspeakably unkind – and yet he was a brilliant teacher, particularly in English. He was very keen on extending our vocabulary. He’d hand out tattered orange textbooks every week in a special vocabulary lesson. There would be twenty questions and we had to guess the twenty esoteric, extraordinary words on the blackboard in his neat teacher’s writing. Then came the best part of the lesson. He’d make up a story incorporating all twenty words, always a bizarre, funny fantasy story that had us laughing our heads off – and effortlessly remembering the definition of every single word.
Mr Branson encouraged us to tell stories too. He asked what we’d been reading and got us to recount the plot. He often picked me to say what I was currently reading, though he pooh-poohed my girly choices. One day I told him I’d been reading The Prince and the Pauper. He looked surprised, even impressed. This definitely wasn’t a girly book. It was a long, hard, difficult book by Mark Twain. I hadn’t actually read the book. I’d read a comic-strip version, a Children’s Illustrated Classic, luridly coloured and simplified. Still, it gave me a grasp of the story, so I started telling it at great length, embellishing as I went. The bell for play time went long before I was done.
‘We’ll have the rest after play time,’ said Mr Branson.
So after the break I went and stood in front of the class again.
‘The Prince and the Pauper – part two!’ I said.
They all laughed, but seemed keen for me to continue.
The best lesson of all was the last lesson on Friday afternoons. Mr Branson would read aloud to us. He scorned Namby-Pamby Blyton and all her contemporaries. Mr Branson read us boys’ tales of derring-do, late-Victorian adventure stories. I usually hated that sort of story, but Mr Branson was so brilliant at reading aloud that the boys in the book ran through our classroom, seizing our hands and whirling us away with them. We climbed mountains, we jumped across ice floes, we swung on creepers through the jungle. When the bell went for the end of afternoon lessons, our heads jerked with the shock of shooting back to the stuffy classroom. We all groaned because it was going-home time!
Mr Branson had high expectations of us. He prepared us with regimental precision for our eleven plus exam. There were two non-fee-paying grammar schools in Kingston – Tiffins Boys and Tiffins Girls – but the catchment area was huge and it was very difficult to pass highly enough to get a place. Mr Branson took pride in the fact that he prodded a handful of his class through the exam. If we failed, we were personally insulting him and his teaching ability. It made taking the eleven plus even more scary.
It loomed over us the moment we started in our top year. SATs tests are like little pimples compared with the huge boil of the 1950s eleven plus. None of us came from the sort of homes where private education was a possibility. The eleven plus was our one chance to get to a grammar school and stay on to do all the right exams and go into one of the professions. If you failed the eleven plus, you went to a secondary modern school and left at fifteen and started work straight away. You worked and therefore you stayed working class. Biddy and Harry and I hovered precariously between working class and lower middle class. Harry was a civil servant, we said ‘lav’ instead of ‘toilet’, we never dropped our aitches or said ‘ain’t’. I knew I had to live up to our aspirations.
Biddy didn’t promise an incredible present if I passed the eleven plus. Most of my girlfriends had been promised a Pink Witch bike if they passed.
‘I think that’s just putting pressure on the poor kids,’ Biddy said. ‘I’d never do that to you, Jac. You just do your best, dear.’
She knew I’d try hard whether I was bribed or not. And I didn’t want a Pink Witch bike. I couldn’t ride any bike, pink or not.
* * *
Very few of the characters in my books ride bikes. I can only think of one girl. Who is it, and which book does she appear in?
* * *
It’s Treasure in my book Secrets.
There was a girl cycling round and round too, doing fantastic wheelie tricks on a BMX. She looked every bit as tough as the boys, her hair tousled, a big red scar on her forehead, her face pale and pinched. She was so skinny in her tight jeans and tiny matted fleece. I stared at her enviously.
She saw me staring. She stuck her tongue out at me.
I waggled mine back at her.
Then she grinned. I grinned. It was just as if we knew each other.
I wanted to write about the friendship between two very different girls. Poor Treasure is going through a very tough time – but India isn’t any happier, even though she lives in a big posh house and has any number of wonderful things. India is passionate about The Diary of Anne Frank. I read it when I was about India’s age and thought it the most amazing, moving book too. I used to have a photo of Anne Frank on my bedside table.
28
The Eleven Plus
I HAD A filthy cold the day I took my eleven plus. One of those head-filled-with-fog colds, when you can’t breathe, you can’t hear, you can’t taste, you certainly can’t think. I was boiling hot and yet I kept shivering, especially when I was sitting there at my desk, ready to open the exam booklet. I knew I wouldn’t have a hope in hell with the arithmetic part. I felt as if those eight mythical men were digging a hole in my head, shoving their spades up my nostrils, tunnelling under my eyes, shovelling in my ears.
I knew copying was out of the question. I wouldn’t just risk the wrath and sorrow of Marion an
d her best friend, Jesus. We’d all been told very sternly indeed that anyone caught copying would be drummed out of the exam, the school, the town of Kingston, England, the World, the entire Universe – left to flounder in Space, with every passing alien pointing their three green fingers and hissing, ‘Cheat!’
‘Open your paper and begin!’ said Mr Branson. ‘And read the questions properly.’
I read the questions. I re-read the questions. I read them till my eyes blurred. Pens were scratching all around me. I’d never felt so frightened in my life. I didn’t know the answer to a single problem. I could do the simple adding up and taking away at the beginning. Well, I thought I could. When I picked up my pen at last and tried to write in my first few answers, the figures started wriggling around on the page, doing little whirring dances, and wouldn’t keep still long enough for me to count them up. I couldn’t calculate in my bunged-up head. I had to use my ten fingers, like an infant. I felt like an infant. I badly wanted to suck my thumb and rub my hankie over my sore nose, but if Mr Branson saw me sucking my thumb, he’d surely snip it off with his scissors like the long-legged Scissor Man in Struwwelpeter. I did try to have a quick nuzzle into my hankie, but it was soggy and disgusting with constant nose-blowing, no use at all.
I could manage the English, just about, but the intelligence test was almost as impenetrable as the arithmetic. The word games were fine, but the number sequences were meaningless and I couldn’t cope with any questions starting: A is to B as C is to? Indeed! What did they mean? What did any of it mean?
I struggled on, snuffling and sighing, until at long last Mr Branson announced, ‘Time’s up! Put your pens down.’
My pen was slippy with sweat. I blew my nose over and over again while everyone babbled around me.