The Drying Rooms - Chapter Thirteen
Evidence
Audio version of Chapter Thirteen
The first draft of this chapter, written over a year ago, was called The Punishment and this is how it started:
The punishment for the dare that will always be an agony of regret and loss was issued by the Headmaster the next day. A few days before the most exciting weekend ever — the upcoming Parents Weekend. I was going to see my parents for the first time in what felt like forever. They were over in England. I had been beside myself with excitement. Counting down the days, the hours. We did that a lot. Made charts and crossed off the days, the hours, the minutes. Usually towards the end of term.
The punishment for the dare was not being allowed to see my parents.
So that was that.
My parents were in England. And I wasn’t allowed to see them.
An eternity of weeks stretched ahead before I would board a plane and see them again.
The headmaster delivered the killer blow. But do you know what, little one? It was her. I know it was. It was her who made him do it.
So now, let’s go back to the previous chapter, to the end of Chapter Twelve
We got caught. That’s the point. The snap of a switch. Light flooding the girls’ washrooms. Cruel Matron in the doorway.
Ending Chapter Twelve with this ‘knowing’ we were caught in the girls’ washrooms is slightly disingenuous.
I am coming up to the surface in this chapter to explain why.
Since writing the first draft of Chapter Twelve, also over a year ago, I have come across memory gold-dust: corroborating evidence.
Despite this, apart from the last line locating The Dare in the girls’ washrooms, I chose to keep only my flawed memory as the source material for Chapter Twelve.
I now know for sure the washrooms were definitely involved. In Chapter Twelve, I sensed the washrooms were somehow integral to the memory of the dare, but I couldn’t fully feel myself in them. I can now — since coming across the evidence.
Even ‘coming across’ may not be quite true because the likelihood is that I ‘re-came’ across the corroborating evidence: two letters, one to my father from the Headmaster and one to my mother from Cruel Matron. These letters to my parents will have been in my possession ever since they died, many years before writing The Drying Rooms. I must have read them! Maybe the memory was constructed and given some coherence through a combination of both sixty-year-old experiential fragments and the ‘forgotten’ information in those letters.
Anyway, the point is, I wrote The Dare chapter well BEFORE being aware of any corroborating evidence.
The (re)discovery of the letters gave me an air-punching moment of Yes! It did happen like that. It did!
It was in the middle of the night ✔️
It did involve boys ✔️
The washrooms were a key location ✔️
The punishment was as I have always remembered ✔️
First, the letter from the Headmaster, a man I liked. He was often on zipwire duty and sometimes he appeared on G-Block and played a game of picking us up in our nighties and pyjamas and throwing us on to our beds, like a jolly uncle. Recently, I told a friend about this game and her immediate wide-eyed, faintly amused but shocked response told me she thought it was weird and inappropriate. I have never had that thought – until now. Actually, I still don’t have that thought. I am fighting against it. I just remember it as fun – and the fact that he was on G-Block at all made it feel somehow safer.
June 28th 1965
Dear Mr and Mrs Parsons,
I am afraid Emma was caught last night, at 3 a.m., with a party of boys in the girls bathrooms. Although this may be considered as a fairly innocent “dare”, I had made it quite clear to the school earlier in the term that for a number of reasons we cannot tolerate girls going to the Boy’s Wing, or vice versa, at night …
I am afraid I must ask you not to take out Emma over the next weekend. She will have to stay at school to do various jobs for matron …
I am afraid this sounds very harsh on somebody of Emma’s age, especially in view of the fact that you have just come home …
Three times: I am afraid … I am afraid … I am afraid … Is there a hint of regret here? Of reluctance to issue the punishment? Of ‘I am slightly fearful of your reaction because actually I think it is too harsh’?
Was he? Was he afraid? I think so. Or are my aging neurotransmitters just blundering about on warped pathways?
I don’t remember the ‘jobs for matron’ punishment, but I was always convinced that she was behind the main punishment of not seeing my parents.
And here it comes. Proof of that too.
The letter from Cruel Matron to my mother (written on June 30th 1965, two days after the Headmaster’s letter to my father. It includes these lines:
I shouldn’t think too much about the escapade with the boys. I think Emma only joined in because it was big to do so.
Anyway Emma is all smiles now, to know she is going to see you another weekend. I told [the Headmaster] I thought that would be better, as all must share the same correction this weekend.
So it was her! She suggested it. I knew it!
Was I ‘all smiles’? Maybe. Doubtless my nine-year-old boarding-school-self kicked in and coped. I have no memory of ‘another weekend’. My memory has always told me that not seeing them that particular allocated Parents Weekend was a small death.
But there’s something else in that letter to my mother. The main thrust of the letter appears to be a response to a concern my mother must have raised about another child bullying or upsetting me in some way. I don’t know what it was. I can’t believe it was the ‘deeply naughty game’ as described in Chapter Ten — I would never have told my mother about that. But whatever it was, I am astonished that my mother wrote to Cruel Matron about it. She was not that kind of mother.
Or so I have always thought.
But Cruel Matron’s letter has chilled me for another reason, another memory corroboration. It’s the word developed.
Develop. Developing. Developed. Cruel Matron’s love of these words floated in to my memory of her checking our breasts in Chapter Five.
Cruel matron’s letter of 30th June 1965 starts:
Dear Mrs Parsons,
I am so sorry I missed your telephone call on Sunday. Especially as you were worried about Emma.
I think I have been able to help and that she won’t be troubled again. I wish Emma had told me, but they will never ‘give each other away’. Anyway I have talked to X [the other child], who did this to another girl this term. She is starting to develop and feels very important I think!
She may even find Emma uppish! To be frank!
No comment.
I'm rendered a bit speechless - so sad. But what astonishing memories and letters... x
Bloody hell Enma.