Hello gang! A different sort of newsletter from me this week because I am trying to get all these books finished and ready to sell! This is an edited extract from a piece I wrote during Karen McLeod’s excellent creative writing course. If you like this sort of thing, let me know. I have more like it.
PS. Also, can we I just take a moment to go, ‘Yipee!’ about the election and the football and the fact that I woke up just in time to see Liz Truss lose her seat.
When people ask me what primary school I went to, I assume they are social engineers trying to garner answers to my security questions. No one asks you what primary school you went to; that would be a weird thing to ask. But if someone were to ask me, I would tell them I went to a home for girls set in the 1800s. That is the only possible explanation for it. It was the sort of place that might feature in a quaint, outdated children’s book. Something like Tom’s Midnight Garden, a story about a child who goes back in time and plays with a girl from the past. Presumably, in order to get to my school, my parents waited until midnight and, as the clock struck thirteen, sent me off up the drive, at which point I entered the dreams of an old lady who used to attend a school in Victorian England and now has a recurring nightmare about it.
The whole set up was like something from the days when young ladies in large houses were educated by governesses. Two elderly spinsters acted as joint Headmistresses. Mrs Childe was posh and sporty – the sort of woman who barks orders at dogs. She was never without a massive anorak, which she would snuggle into as she took us out in a force-nine gale to play netball in our tiny games uniform. Mrs Bailey was posh and twinsetted. The sort that pours tea and nurtures fondly held prejudices. She taught us to pronounce “suit” and “tissue” like early BBC continuity announcers. See-yute. Tiss-you. When I started school I had an estuary accent like the rest of my family; by the time I left I said, “whoopsie” when I made a mistake, and genuinely said, “ya” without any irony.
The headmistresses had been given their roles by the founder of the school, Mrs Rene Howden, a woman who had – as far as I can make out – taken a fancy to running a school, and so had converted her gaff into an educational establishment. Rene’s influence continued beyond the grave. She was mentioned often, her cross-stitched scatter cushions furnished the settle in the entry hall (along with a beautiful Paddington Bear that we weren’t allowed to touch), and her favourite poem – the Desiderata – was framed on the wall.
“Go placidly amidst the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence”.
A good motto for any decent female: hush now, dear.
The poem wasn’t the only thing, we also had Rene’s chosen school creed. We recited it every day before the Lord’s Prayer, chanting in our creepy, piping child voices like something from a horror movie.
This is our school.
Let peace grow here.
Let the room be full of contentment...
Peace and contentment. More calls for ladies to be calm and quiet. When we reached the part where tempo shifted, we would become more energetic, switching from a monotone to a passionate entreaty:
Let us remember,
so many hands can build a house,
so many hearts can make a school.
As a child, I understood this to mean that the teachers might, at any time, get us to build another school. So many little hands, all of them building away, making a new school. Like ants.
But, despite our impressive headmistresses, the real power lay among the boarding staff. Most of them carried the title of “Nanny” (with some opting for a first name and others a surname – Nanny Alison vs Nanny White). From there, things suddenly went medical. Sister Miller was in charge of day-to-day pastoral care, with Matron visiting a few times a week. To this day I couldn’t tell you who Matron was or what she was supposed to be doing. But she was lovely; friendly and kind. Sister, meanwhile, was less “kindly carer” and more “authoritarian overlord”. Scottish, dour and utterly terrifying, she ruled with a rod of iron. Woe betide anyone who got on the wrong side of Sister. She would stick you with her gimlet eye and flay the flesh off your skin with her acid tongue, her jowls wobbling as she shrivelled another liver with her vinegar.
I loved her.
She never patronised, she didn’t play favourites, and that gimlet eye had naughty glint. Every punishment she meted out felt fair, and once it was done, it was done. She harboured no grudges. She once warmly congratulated me for not spreading my conjunctivitis to the other eye, saying I deserved a “Marathon bar or something” for being so self-controlled. The Marathon bar never materialised, busy women like her don’t have time to pop to Budgens to get a small child a Snickers, but all these years later, I can still summon up the warm glow of her praise and bask in it.
Her descent from power was a confusing one, certainly in my child brain. I’m not sure if she officially retired. When Nanny Alison took over (without adopting the title of Sister), it felt more like a coup. I don’t remember giving Sister a big send off. I don’t remember any big speeches or flowers. She was one of only two staff at the school I liked. Surely, her tearful leaving speech would have left an imprint in my memory? But from my point of view, one day she was there, and the next it was a Nanny Alison state.
Nanny Alison was young and so much softer and friendlier than Sister. She was the Miss Honey to Sister’s Miss Trunchball. She smiled and giggled. She was sweet with the children.
I absolutely loathed her.
As one of the younger, less senior Nannies, her rise to power was like something out of Stalin’s playbook (from my lowly perspective). And her rule was similarly sinister. She spoke to us like we were children, patronising and babyish, she openly favoured some children and treated the rest like irritants.
There was a sense of living under a totalitarian state. Where Sister had been stern but hands off – spending most of her time upstairs in her office – Nanny Alison was always around ever corner, always sitting in state in the dining room (which was also the hall). Every Sunday we gathered there to polish our shoes and write a letter home. When she took over, she began a policy of reading these missives – presumably to check for cries for help – before we put them in the envelopes. We had to stand there while she scanned them. Sometimes she would comment loudly on the contents so that every child could hear.
There was something insidious about the way she seemed so sweet but acted so poisonously. It was confusing. I never remember her actively punishing me, but somehow she rattled my self-worth. She was a honey trap run by killer bees. Years later, Dolores Umbridge’s sickly sweet iron rule over Hogwarts would give me the same feeling.
Nanny White was another false friend. Seemingly kindly and sweet, but actually a mean old battle-axe with a snappy daschund. Early in my time at the school, I thought it would be funny to remove a chair someone was about to sit on, like they do in slapstick comedies. The child fell onto her bottom and cried. I felt awful and realised my mistake immediately. Having already been very thoroughly told off by the teacher, the story escalated into a school-wide drama, and the next day I was summoned to the Kindergarten room where Nanny White shamed me in front of the entire class of preschoolers, told me I could have paralysed the my fellow pupil, and made me apologise again (but not to the victim, to her). I was six. I would like to take this opportunity to tell Nanny White that she is a massive bell end.
The main school was in an old Tudor country manor house with, rumour had it, a priest hole behind the recessed picture above the fireplace in the hall. Towards the end of my time there, Health and Safety inspectors took one look at the huge ladder that ran from the top of the house through hatches in the floors to the bottom, and threatened to close the place down.
To prevent closure, all our creaking metal beds were manhandled down the narrow staircases from the attic and placed into classrooms. We spent a whole term sleeping in the first floor rooms. My room was in the library (happy days). Lessons were crammed into other various nooks and crannies on the ground floor. Of course, to us those tiny attic staircases were perfect – child-sized and mysterious, winding up into our dorm rooms where we were free to die horribly in any fire that chose to ravage the ancient pile. This was a romantic place, a delicious place. Full of mystery and squeaking floorboards.
We were convinced there were ghosts at every turn. We spent our lives hunting for the tunnel that – rumour had it – took you to the church across the road (which had once been part of the estate). Was it through the priest hole picture? Under the main staircase where the cleaners kept the mops? Through the banks of the main garden where the white rabbits lived? We never found the tunnel, but we often used to turn the handle below the fireplace picture and listen to the creaks and groans behind the panelling, as though the picture would open up if only some spoilsport adult hadn’t sealed it in place.
Recently, looking up the history of the building, I discovered the whole thing was built in 1876 as a big fake and so the likelihood of their being a priest hole behind the picture above the fireplace was slim and the tunnel was a sad sad lie. I now realise the handle we used to turn was probably an old servant bell and the mechanism we could hear moving was just the pull-cords that ran behind the panelling. This made me very sad and I would like to protect young me from ever discovering this terrible news.
The students weren’t allowed to use the main staircase. We had to go up the servants’ stairs round the back of the house. Every school trip we went on, we wrote a letter of thanks to each teacher who had taken us. When a teacher passed in the corridor, we bowed our heads and did a curtsey.
I was punished a lot at the school, with shame being the preferred method. Once, the prefects were merely asked to name children they thought were cheeky or disrespectful and my name was on the list. We were summoned to the teachers and told we would be punished for our unspecified crimes. We sat crossed legged in the school corridor where everyone would pass by and ask us to explain why we were there. They let us read our books, thought, which wasn’t any kind of punishment to me, a child who would rather read a book than do nearly anything else at all. The next time I was punished (for playing an awesome game of ‘It’ in the dark after hours in a classroom crawling around under the desks), they realised their error and instead made us learn the 23rd Psalm (the version from Come And Praise). Especially appealing for me was the middle verse, which went,
“Yea, though I walk in death’s dark vale, yet will I fear no ill, For Thou art with me, and Thy rod, And staff me comfort still.”
It made me feel like Dallben the wizard was accompanying me through Annuvin, the land of death, to face off with the evil sorcerer Arawn. (I hadn’t read Lord of the Rings yet, but I’m sure you can make sense of all that by just transposing the names yourself).
Before I make it all sound quite quirky and fun, I should be clear that I absolutely hated this school. I felt bullied and alone. I wet the bed regularly and had to hide it because the nannies only provided us with enough underwear for each day and I felt certain they would not only have told me off but would have made a thing of it in front of the other students. My lumpen mattress had a dip in it from what seemed like a century of children’s buttocks. Eventually I plucked up the courage to mention it and was given a replacement that was just as bad, but had the buttock groove in a different place. When I wet the bed, I had to sleep right off the edge of the mattress, praying it would be dry enough by morning that no one would notice.
It was made very clear to me that I wasn’t good enough to play with certain children. One day I came in and my best friend had moved seats to sit next to a daughter of the Swiss ruling classes because her mother told her to. This genuinely broke my heart and I felt the sting of it well into secondary school. It’s truly mad how long it took me to get over that heartbreak, but I suppose I had no grown-up to talk to about it. I arrived at school already traumatised from abuse and thinking about how alone I was makes me feel a pang in my heart for that little child. After Sister left the pastoral care lacked any kind of tenderness or affection, aside from a few notable exceptions. I had one teacher who really liked me – but she arrived much later and wasn’t around after classes finished. The rest made me feel inadequate, common and unwanted. I had pierced ears and dark skin (much darker than it is now thanks to hard SPF use) and a mother who had to work to pay the fees.
And yet, my closest friend (the one who saved me from total friendlessness towards the end of school), remembers the place with extreme fondness. She will read this (because I’m going to send it to her) and I’m sure she will have a very different story to tell. Reminiscing with her has certainly made me question my perceptions over the years. That said, she stayed for an extra year, our favourite teacher became headmistress and things changed a lot. I think that probably saved her more than she realises.
Whatever, I was a sad, lonely and probably more traumatised than I realised child. Maybe I would have been unhappy anywhere, but I don’t think anyone can deny it was a weird school. Just imagine us, doing our fire drills, slowly climbing backwards down a wooden ladder into the classroom below, prancing round our maypole like little pagans, being given deportment marks for how nicely we carried ourselves, being made to eat every last bit of mince and sweetcorn on our plates, spending every Friday gathered in the drawing room to watch Nanny White’s favourite TV shows, being punished simply for looking at a prefect the wrong way, desperately seeking a secret haunted tunnel to escape through.
This sounds so, so awful for you, but I'm not going to lie, I would read an entire book about this school, because it's fascinating. I had no idea schools like this existed outside of Enid Blyton stories!
Wow, Katie. I'm sorry you went through that, but you write about it so wonderfully. I was obsessed with boarding school fiction when I was little - I was so desperate to be sent to one that I circled adverts for them in magazines and left the pages open for my parents to see. As soon as I got a bit older I realised they weren't the utopian places I thought!
This line is perfection: "The sort that pours tea and nurtures fondly held prejudices."
I hope this story makes it to something longer - I'd buy it and read it avidly.