The Drying Rooms - Chapter Nine

The Striplight

The Four Marys, Bunty Annual 1965

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Listen to the audio version of Chapter Nine here

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In her second year at the school when she turned nine, she was put in the dorm overlooking the kale field with five girls from the class above hers. The sixth bed needed filling, and she, considered to be a precocious child, well able to handle being with older girls, was chosen by Cruel Matron to fill it. This was delivered to her by Cruel Matron as something she could rise to, almost an honour. But was she singled out for this challenge because Cruel Matron believed in her—still had a soft spot for her little puppy-like pet?—or had she already become Cruel Matron’s adversary, who needed taking down a peg or two? In which case, it was a success.

In that dorm, her bed was next to the door, squashed into a dingy, sunless corner.

Under her bed was her suitcase. Every bed had a suitcase under it. It was in our suitcases that we kept our few personal possessions: the immersive escapes into other realities: Narnia, Black Beauty and Ballet Shoes – the comics that we swapped and often read together. She can remember savouring the latest escapades of Bunty’s Four Marys. Now those four Marys seem like a dull, prim relic of a bygone age. Not so Narnia. Narnia is still inside her. Aslan on the stone table, looking like her father with his glasses off, still stirs a yearning for something longed for but unreachable. 

Hers was a small blue suitcase with a soft top. In addition to books and comics, there were treasured pieces of home in that suitcase: her real baby crocodile handbag, folded in the middle of its flattened-out body, with a popper connecting its head to its tail; her baby cheetah skin rug; the little cloth pouch holding her set of Jacks.

And her dark blue leather writing case. She loved that writing case — with its slot to hold a pad of Basildon Bond paper on one side, a pouch for envelopes on the other and a leather pen loop in the middle for her fountain pen. She loved admiring her own italic writing when she practised her autograph, skilfully employing the italic pen nib for calligraphic thick and thin strokes.

She can remember sitting up in bed with that writing case propped on her knees, and she can sort of remember the Sunday morning censored letter writing classroom. But this is more like a scene in a film, a scene in someone else’s memory. A memory that doesn’t quite belong to her. The censor (Cruel Matron? The Headmaster?) sitting behind a table at the top of the class, or patrolling between the rows of desks, the scritch-scratch of laborious fountain pens, sideways glances of bent heads, whispers, the eyes of the censor looking up …

I’m so homesick

                      I hate it here

                                           please please (underlined three times) take me away.

Not allowed.  

Or maybe just coerced into not writing. Don’t upset your parents. Tell your mummy about the bonfire party yesterday. Tell them you performed in assembly; they’ll love that.

She’s pretty sure this weekly routine of expurgated news happened (resulting in a sweet child’s letter with sufficient curated cheerfulness) but she can’t put her hand on her heart in a witness box and say whether she did or did not tell her parents about the reality of what was going on in G-Block.

That’s just it. Reality. She may not remember the content of her letters, but there is a known thing, cast-iron inside her, not so much a memory, as an ongoing acceptance. This was just reality. She’s pretty sure she never told her parents the whole truth and nothing but the truth because it never occurred to her to do so. She told them she was homesick – she must have told them that. But homesickness was an accepted part of the deal. And the instant cure for homesickness was being home. The feeling vanished as soon as the school gates were behind her.

And presumably it was normal to seek out a toilet cubicle for private crying in the day; presumably it was normal to bite your pillow when you cried in the night.

She knew waking up wet, creeping down to the washrooms to scrub out the piss stain, being made to wash her sheets in front of the other girls wasn’t normal because it only seemed to happen to her. But it was just the way it was and she had to endure it. She didn’t know there was an alternative.

Or – and here’s a thought – was it also because she learnt early on that sneaking on Cruel Matron was unconscionable, that telling her parents was far too risky?  it would make her life worse.

Although she cherished her bed in that dorm for being in the corner, it was also a position that held menace:  if the door was flung open, or opened inch by inch, all she could see from her pillow was the side of the door, not the person standing in the doorway. And that person could be Cruel Matron slowly opening the door in her silent shoes or, more likely, flinging it open after lights-out and catching them at it.

Catching them at what? The whole dorm bursting into laughter at the sudden eruption of a fart in the dark? A girl in mid-creep across the floorboards to soothe the sobs of homesickness coming from another bed? Or – the most common sin – just talking quietly.

This is what she remembers. In scraps. The scraps are now taking her away from the dorm with the older girls and back to the previous dorm, the dorm with her own age group – back to the time, she thinks, when she stopped being Cruel Matron’s pet.

In that dorm, she was in another corner bed, by the window. She remembers the sudden switch from hushed chatting and teddy-cuddling to gut-rush fear.

“Who’s talking?”

Cruel Matron’s icy voice.

Held-breath silence.

No confession.

“I said, who’s talking?”

No confession.

Loyalty.

“Out. All of you.”

Lining up under the striplight in the corridor.

The coldness of it.

The waiting.

The shivering.

Six girls saying nothing.

All the other dorms listening with held breath.

Collect up these scraps. Chuck them up in the air. They land in a different order, but they are the same images— with other scraps in the mix.

Lining up under the striplight in the corridor.

Cruel Matron moving up and down the line.

The clutch-and-chop of hair cutting.

In a row. In turns.

Those with hair below their shoulders.

Clutch. Chop. Done. Next.

Clutch. Chop. Done. Next.

Clutch. Chop. Done.

The coldness of it.

The waiting.

And towels.

Holding our towels for inspection.

A large, luxuriant towel cut in half.

A miserable little girl helplessly watching her mother’s choice being scorned.

In that bright striplight corridor.

All towels that weren’t regulation size were cut in half.

That is her memory. Like a fact.

Not her towels. Hers were already small enough. This is an ongoing family joke about her mother. Not her meanness, but her slightly snobby take on the kind of people who bought large, luxuriant towels. So her towels were already small — pale yellow and white striped. Just wide enough to cover from chest to top of thighs. Long enough to pull round but not cover completely — exposing a draughty gap down the side of her body. And, after the regulation cold showers and baths, freezing wet shoulders, arms and legs.

Now, in her grandmothering, she feels vicarious warmth every time she wraps a huge towel round a shivering little body.

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