The Drying Rooms - Chapter Three

The Beast

Class photo 1964

In that hall she was Captain Hook. Why was she Captain Hook, when it could have been a boy? Maybe it was an enlightened thing. Part of the progressive co-educational boarding school thing. Like swimming naked. Or maybe it was just practical. There was only one girl’s part. And even now, she knows she wouldn’t have wanted to play Wendy.

Hear that! The doors of the hall have burst open. Turn your head. Quick. She’s making her entrance, brandishing the hook, her short legs charging full speed at the stage, roaring “Ahoy there!” at the chairs filled with proud parents – but not her parents; they were thousands of miles away in the heat of the sun.

She ran down that aisle with every muscle embodying the ferociousness of Hook and, just as she had rehearsed it, she aimed to land on that raised stage in one flamboyant Hook-like leap.  Only she didn’t. She failed. Her little legs scrabbled to mount the stage. Bum facing the audience. It’s all she can remember about her performance.  

Hilarious!

Sorry, I am ignoring you, my dear little friend. You are waiting so patiently, so trusting. Thank you for not laughing. I know you understand. It’s not because it isn’t funny. It is.

I see her.  Deliciously drunk and giggling in the anecdotal retelling of it - holding her audience round a dinner table. And something in me is revolted by her.

Come, we will leave the hall and go along the dark corridor that runs on the other side of the hall. A displeasing corridor – particularly bleak and institutional. The light from the windows darkened by a mess of brambles scratching at the glass. On our right at the end of the wall is the backdoor to the stage. Backstage nerves, peeking at the audience behind a curtain. She loved the insider access to the workings of make believe. The only certainty. The thing she knew she was going to do for the rest of her life. Only she didn’t.

Another corridor. Door after door. Classrooms. I can’t show you many of them because I can’t remember them. But here’s one I do remember. Let’s fling open the door! There it is, bathed in light. There’s a smiling man with a beard called Mr T and a chatter of children round low tables on which there are wooden rods of different colours and lengths, smooth and perfect for little fingers. I know now they are Cuisenaire rods. I looked it up. We were the experimental children. This stuff had only just started. It was supposed to be experiential and fun.

She has no memory of it being fun. Maths is still a misery for her. A weakness. A humiliation.

And at the age of nine, she wrote a poem about maths called The Beast - a national prize-winning poem, published. Mr T was the beast in the poem, but she remembers – she thinks she remembers – that Mr T was actually very nice about the poem.

(A few years later, when she was thirteen, she got out of her seat in another maths class and slapped the teacher, Mr G, across the face. She remembers it was because she repeatedly couldn’t understand the why of it, let alone the how. Mr G wasn’t nice about it. She is still appalled that she did such a thing, but she can’t remember the punishment. She can only remember shaking on a bench in the girls’ changing rooms.)

The Sixties classroom block windows look out on to the big play lawn. Ghosts of little children playing Kiss Chase. This is the lawn where they had the long whole-school photo taken, now rolled up in a cupboard with cracks across our faces.

OK. Here goes.

Hold my hand. Tight.

Quick.

Out of the maths classroom back into the corridor turn left past the backstage door to the big hall left again back past the main-entrance double glass doors ignore the ghost cars driven by ghost dads pulling up outside the headmaster’s house ignore the orchards don’t go outside don’t look at the orchards come on hurry please stop looking at the orchards or we’ll end up going down to the pet sheds and that’s another horror story come on run hold my hand tight run run run down the corridor that connects to the old building run run run into the ghost smells of boiled cabbage and disinfectant absorbed by wooden floorboards past the ajar door on the right is that the high-ceilinged classroom where we wrote our censored letters home keep going across the hall come on hurry

STOP!

Oh god. Do you see her? Do you see the little freckle faced girl in the bottle green tights? Standing in the hall outside the dining room? Looking up earnestly at the music master? Resolutely not looking down while the urine trickles down her right leg wetting her bottle green tights and forming a pool around her shoe, a dark and wet pool of piss on the polished wooden floorboards. Shh, it’s OK, little one. I’m over it now. It was a long time ago. Let’s keep going. You see that sweeping stair case on the left? It leads up to B-Block, the boys’ dorms.

She was in the boys’ dorms once. In Kind Matron’s cosy, colourful sitting room with boys in plaid dressing gowns eating biscuits and drinking glasses of milk while watching Bonanza on telly.  She was watching it too. She remembers big Hoss and handsome Little Joe. She watched it with her foot on Kind Matron’s lap, while Kind Matron gouged a verruca out of her sole; she didn’t mind the pain because it was so lovely to be in that cosy sitting room away from Cruel Matron’s cold eye. I know, I know, we must go there. G-Block. It’s nearly time.

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