'Oh no, really!'
'I insist!'
I dithered, nibbling my lip. I couldn't think clearly. Alarm bells were ringing in my head. Biddy had drummed it into me enough times: Never get into a car with a strange man! But he seemed such a nice kind strange man, and I was worried about hurting his feelings.
I tried to wriggle out of his suggestion tactfully.
'My mum isn't at home,' I said. 'So you won't be able to explain to her. I'll tell her when she gets home from work. I promise I'll explain it was all my fault.'
I went to pick up my satchel. I used the aching arm and nearly dropped it. I tried to hurry away, but the aching leg made me limp.
'You are hurt, I'm sure you are,' he said. 'Where does your mother work? I'm driving you there straight away, and then I'll drive you both to the hospital.'
I didn't have the strength for any more arguing. I let him help me into his car. Biddy's workplace, Prince Machines, was only five minutes' drive away. If he drove fast in the wrong direction, intent on abducting me, then I'd simply have to fling open the car door and hurl myself out. I'd survived one car accident, so hopefully I'd survive a second.
Yes, I know. I was mad. Don't anyone ever get in a car with a stranger under any circumstances whatsoever.
However, my stranger proved to be a perfect gentleman, parking the car in the driveway of Prince Machines, supporting me under the arm, carrying my satchel on his own back. Biddy looked out of the office window and saw us approaching.
She shot out of the office and came charging up to us. 'Jac? What's happened? Who's this? Are you all right?'
'This is my mum,' I said unnecessarily.
The stranger explained, anxiously asserting again that it really wasn't his fault.
Biddy didn't doubt him. 'You're so hopeless, Jac! Haven't I told you to look where you're going? You were daydreaming, weren't you? When will you learn?'
I hung my head while Biddy ranted.
'Still, thank goodness you're all right,' she said finally, giving me a quick hug.
'Well, I'm not quite sure she is all right,' said my rescuer. 'I think she was unconscious for a minute or two. She seems pretty shaken up. I'm very happy to drive you to hospital.'
'Oh, for goodness' sake, she's fine. There's no need whatsoever,' said Biddy. 'Who wants to hang around the hospital for hours?'
Biddy had once worked there delivering newspapers to patients and had a healthy contempt for the place. She always swore she'd never set foot in the hospital even if she was dying.
She had more authority than me and sent the stranger on his way. He was kind enough to pop back the following day with the biggest box of chocolates I'd ever seen in my life. I'd never been given so much as a half-pound of Cadbury's Milk Tray before. I lolled on my bed in my baby-doll pyjamas all weekend with my giant box beside me. I'd seen pictures of big-busted film starlets lounging on satin sheets eating chocolates. I pretended I was a film star too. I can't have looked very beguiling: I had one arm in a sling and one leg was black with bruises from my thigh down to my toes.
Biddy had had to drag me up to the dreaded hospital after all. My aching arm became so painful I couldn't pick anything up and my bad leg darkened dramatically. We spent endless hours waiting for someone to tell us that I'd sprained my arm badly and bruised my leg.
'As if that wasn't blooming obvious,' Biddy muttered.
At least it got me out of PE at school for the next couple of weeks, so I didn't have to change into the ghastly aertex shirt and green divided shorts.
I cared passionately about clothes, but most of the time I was stuck wearing my school uniform. The winter uniform wasn't too terrible: white shirts, green and yellow ties, plain grey skirts and grey V-necked sweaters. We had to wear hideous grey gabardine raincoats, and berets or bowler-type hats with green and yellow ribbon round the brim. Earnest girls wore the hats, cool girls wore berets.
We had to wear white or grey socks or pale stockings kept up with a suspender belt or a 'roll-on'. Oh dear, underwear was so not sexy in 1960! Those roll-ons were hilarious. They weren't as armour-plated as the pink corsets our grannies wore, but they were still pretty fearsome garments. You stepped into them and then yanked them up over your hips as best you could, wiggling and tugging and cursing. It was even more of a performance getting out of them at the end of the day. I'm sure that's why so many girls never went further than chastely kissing their boyfriends. You'd die rather than struggle out of your roll-on in front of anyone. They had two suspenders on either side to keep up your stockings. Nylons took a sizeable chunk of pocket money so we mostly wore old laddered ones to school. We stopped the ladders running with dabs of pink nail varnish, so everyone looked as if they had measles on their legs.
We had to wear clunky brown Clarks shoes – an outdoor and an indoor pair – though some of the older girls wore heels on the way home if they were meeting up with their boyfriends. They customized their uniforms too, hitching up their skirts and pulling them in at the waist with those ubiquitous elasticated belts. They unbuttoned the tops of their blouses and loosened their ties and folded their berets in half and attached them with kirby grips to the back of their bouffant hair. We were younger and meeker and nerdier in my year and mostly wore our uniform as the head teacher intended.
Everyone cordially hated the summer uniform: canary-yellow dresses in an unpleasant synthetic material. There is not a girl in existence who looks good in canary yellow. It makes pale girls look sallow and ill, and rosy-cheeked girls alarmingly scarlet. The dresses had ugly cap sleeves, like silly wings, unflattering to any kind of arm and embarrassing when you put up your hand in class.
Very few people had washing machines in those days. You did your main wash once a week, so by Friday our canaries were stained and dingy. We had to wear straw boaters going to and from school even if there was a heatwave. These were hard, uncomfortable hats that made your head itch. They could only be kept in place with elastic. Nasty boys would run past and tip our boaters so that the elastic snapped under our chins. Particularly nasty boys would snatch at our backs to twang our bra elastic too. I often wonder why I wanted a boyfriend!
I looked younger than my age in my school uniform, but I did my best to dress older outside school – sometimes for particular reasons!
Thursday 4 February
After school I went to the pictures with Sue and Cherry. I wore my red beret, black and white coat and black patent shoes and managed to get in for 16 as the picture was an 'A'.
I sound too twee for words. A beret? But at least it was a change from eau de nil. Green still figured prominently in my wardrobe though.
Saturday 12 March
In the afternoon I went shopping with Mummy and we bought me a pale green checked woolly shirtwaister for the Spring to go with my green shoes and handbag.
Just call this the lettuce look. However, I seemed to like it then. In May I wrote:
After dinner I got dressed in my new green shirtwaister, that I think suits me very well. Then, loaded down with records, I called for Sue and we went to Cherry's party. Everyone had brought lots of records, and did my feet ache after all that jiving! Carol wore her new black and white dress which looked nice.
My writing was certainly as limp as a lettuce in those days. Nice!
So I liked my green dress, but my favourite outfit was 'a cotton skirt patterned with violets and nice and full'. It's about the only one of those long-ago garments I wouldn't mind wearing now on a summer day.
Biddy was generous to me, buying me clothes out of her small wage packet.
Saturday 4 June
In the afternoon Mummy and I went to Richmond and after a long hunt we bought me a pair of cream flatties, very soft and comfortable. Then, back in Kingston, we went into C & A's and found a dress in the children's department that we both liked very much. The only trouble with it was that it had a button missing at the waist. Mummy made a fuss about it, but they didn't have another dress in stock or another button, so we bought it
minus the button as we liked it very much indeed. It is a lovely powder blue colour with a straight skirt and Mummy has transferred the bottom button to the waist so that it doesn't notice so much.
I sound like little Goody-Two-Shoes, trotting round with Mummy, being ever so grateful for my girly frock. It's reassuring to see that I revert to surly teenager the very next day.
Sunday 5 June
I AM A PIG. I was rude and irritable today and I just didn't care, and I spoilt Mummy's day at the coast. (Daddy wasn't very well-behaved either though!) I won't write any more about a very unfortunate day.
I wish I had. It would have been a lot more interesting than painstaking accounts of buttons missing on powder-blue dresses!
4
Chris
Sunday 3 January
Chris and Carol are my best friends, and there is also Sue who lives next door, and Cherry down the road. They all go to Coombe, my school.
I met my very special friend, Chris, on my first day at Coombe County Secondary School for Girls. I'd had another Christine as my special friend when I was at primary school but we'd sadly lost touch when we both left Latchmere. I think she moved away after her mum died.
I'd never set eyes on my new friend Chris before that first day at secondary school. I didn't know anyone at all. It's always a bit scary going to a brand-new school. Coombe was in New Malden, two or three miles from our flats in Kingston. I hadn't made it through my eleven plus to Tiffin Girls' School, but I'd been given a 'second chance' and managed to pass this time. I could now go to a new comprehensive school instead of a secondary modern.
Coombe was one of the first comprehensives, though it was divided firmly into two teaching streams – grammar and secondary modern. In an effort to make us girls mix in together, we were in forms for non-academic lessons like singing and PE, and in groups graded from one all the way to nine for lessons like maths and English. This system didn't make allowances for girls like me. I'd been put in group one, where I held my own in English and most of the arts subjects – but I definitely belonged in group nine for maths! Still, compiling that timetable must have been nightmare enough without trying to accommodate weird girls like me – very good in some subjects and an utter dunce in others.
I couldn't even get my head around the densely printed timetable, and the entire geography of the school was confusing. We weren't shown around beforehand or even given a map when we arrived the first day. We were somehow expected to sense our way around.
I managed to fetch up in the right form room, 1A. We stood around shyly, eyeing each other up and down. We were a totally mixed bunch. A few of the girls were very posh, from arty left-wing families who were determined to give their daughters a state education. Some of the girls were very tough, from families who didn't give their daughters' education a second thought. Most of us were somewhere in the middle, ordinary suburban girls fidgeting anxiously in our stiff new uniforms, wondering if we'd ever make friends.
'Good morning, Form One A! I'm Miss Crowford, your form teacher.'
'Good-morning-Miss-Crowford,' we mumbled.
She was small and dark and quite pretty, so we could have done a lot worse. I hoped she might teach English, but it turned out she was the gym teacher. I started to go off her immediately, though she was actually very kind and did her best to encourage me when I couldn't climb the ropes and thumped straight into rather than over the wooden horse.
Miss Crowford let us choose our own desks. I sat behind a smallish girl with long light-brown hair neatly tied in two plaits. We all had to say our names, going round the class. The girl with plaits said she was called Christine. I was predisposed to like girls called Christine so I started to take proper notice of her.
Miss Crowford was busy doing the Jolly-Teacher Talk about us being big girls now in this lovely new secondary school. She told us all about the school badge and the school motto and the school hymn while I inked a line of small girls in school uniform all round the border of my new and incomprehensible timetable.
Then a loud electronic bell rang, startling us. We were all used to the ordinary hand-bells rung at our primary schools.
'Right, girls, join your groups and go off to your next lesson,' said Miss Crowford. 'Don't dawdle! We only give you five minutes to get to the next classroom.'
I peered at my timetable in panic. It seemed to indicate that group one had art. I didn't have a clue where this would be. All the other girls were getting up purposefully and filing out of the room. In desperation I tapped Christine on the back.
'Excuse me, do you know the way to the art room?' I asked timidly.
Chris smiled at me. 'No, but I've got to go there too,' she said.
'Let's go and find it together,' I said.
It took us much longer than five minutes. It turned out that the art room wasn't even in the main school building, it was right at the end of the playground. By the time we got there I'd made a brand-new best friend.
Coombe had only been open for two years, so there weren't that many girls attending, just us new first years, then the second and third years. We barely filled half the hall when we filed into assembly. It was a beautiful hall, with a polished parquet floor. No girl was allowed to set foot on it in her outdoor shoes. We had to have hideous rubber-soled sandals so that we wouldn't scratch the shiny floorboards. We also had to have black plimsolls for PE. Some of the poorer girls tried to make do with plimsolls for their indoor shoes. Miss Haslett, the head teacher, immediately protested, calling the offending girls out to the front of the hall.
'They are plimsolls,' she said. 'You will wear proper indoor shoes tomorrow!'
I couldn't see what possible harm it would do letting these girls wear their plimsolls. Why were they being publicly humiliated in front of everyone? It wasn't their fault they didn't possess childish Clarks sandals. None of us earned any money. We couldn't buy our own footwear. It was a big struggle for a lot of families to find three pairs of shoes for each daughter – four pairs, because most girls wouldn't be seen dead in Clarks clodhoppers outside school.
However, the next day all the girls were wearing regulation sandals apart from one girl, Doreen, in my form. She was a tiny white-faced girl with bright red hair. She might have been small but she was so fierce we were all frightened of her. Doreen herself didn't seem frightened of anyone, not even Miss Haslett.
Doreen danced into school the next day, eyes bright, chin up. She didn't flinch when Miss Haslett called her up on the stage in front of everyone. None of Doreen's uniform technically passed muster. Her scrappy grey skirt was home-made and her V-neck jumper hand-knitted. She wore droopy white socks – and her black plimsolls.
Miss Haslett pointed at them in disgust, as if they were covered in dog's muck. 'You are still wearing plimsolls, Doreen! Tomorrow you will come to school wearing indoor shoes, do you hear me?'
Doreen couldn't help hearing her, she was bellowing in her face. But she didn't flinch.
We all wondered what would happen tomorrow. We knew Doreen didn't have any indoor shoes, and she didn't come from the sort of family where her mum could brandish a full purse and say, 'No problem, sweetheart, we'll trot down to Clarks shoeshop and buy you a pair.'
Doreen walked into school assembly the next morning in grubby blue bedroom slippers with holes in the toes. I'm certain this was all she had. She didn't look as if she was being deliberately defiant. There was a flush of pink across her pale face. She didn't want to show off the state of her slippers to all of us. Miss Haslett didn't understand. She flushed too.
'How dare you be so insolent as to wear your slippers in school!' she shrieked. 'Go and stand outside my study in disgrace.'
Doreen stood there all day long, shuffling from one slippered foot to the other. She didn't come into school the next day. The following Monday she wore regulation rubber-soled school sandals. They were old and scuffed and had obviously belonged to somebody else. Maybe someone gave them to her, or maybe her mum bought them for sixpenc
e at a jumble sale.
'At last you've seen sense, Doreen,' said Miss Haslett in assembly. 'I hope this has taught you all a lesson, girls.'
I hadn't seen sense. I'd seen crass stupidity and insensitivity on Miss Haslett's part. It taught me the lesson that some teachers were appallingly unfair, so caught up in petty rules and regulations that they lost all compassion and common sense.
A couple of years later I ended up standing in disgrace outside Miss Haslett's study door. She'd seen me walking to the bus stop without my school beret and – shock horror! – I was sucking a Sherbet Fountain. I'd committed not one but two criminal offences in her eyes: eating in school uniform and not wearing my silly hat.
Miss Haslett sent for me and started telling me off. 'Why were you eating that childish rubbish, Jacqueline?' she asked.
The obvious answer was that I was hungry, and I needed something to keep me going for the long walk home. (I'd stopped taking the bus after the dramatic accident.) However, I sensed Miss Haslett would consider an honest answer insolent, so I kept quiet.
'And why weren't you wearing your school beret?' she continued.
This was easier. 'I've lost it, Miss Haslett,' I said truthfully.
It had been there on my coat hook that morning. Someone had obviously snatched it for themselves when their own beret had gone missing.
'That's just like you, Jacqueline Aitken,' said Miss Haslett. 'Stand outside!'
I stood there. My legs started aching after a while so I leaned against the wall. I didn't feel cast down. I was utterly jubilant because I was missing a maths lesson. I gazed into space and started imagining inside my head, continuing a serial – a magic island story. Pupils squeaked past in their sandals every now and then, good girls trusted to take important messages to Miss Haslett. The odd teacher strode past too, several frowning at me to emphasize my disgrace. But then dear Mr Jeziewski, one of the art teachers, came sloping along in his suede shoes. He raised his eyebrows at me in mock horror, felt in his pocket, put two squares of chocolate on the window ledge beside me and winked before he went on his way.