The Drying Rooms - Chapter Twenty Five

The Headmaster's Letter

… a neurochemical bomb, discovered amongst a mass of letters and documents

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Audio version of Chapter Twenty Five

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In the previous chapter, Maudie speaks out and gets the rescue I have always longed for.

She is heard.

Her parents see the light.

They come to take her home. For ever.

I have discovered proof that I too spoke out. Eventually. Or maybe it wasn’t eventually. It’s only the process of writing this memoir that has caused me to wonder why only one of my letters home survives.

I’ll never know what it was I told my parents that caused my father — neither a mollycoddler nor a complainer — to write a letter to the headmaster in November 1966, a month after I had turned eleven. All I have is the headmaster’s reply, a neurochemical bomb, discovered amongst a mass of letters and documents that have ended up with me after the deaths of both parents.

18^th November, 1966

Dear Mr. Parsons,

Thank you for your letter of 11^th November. I am very sorry that you should have been worried by Emma’s letter.

As far as Jose is concerned I do indeed realise that he can be a little fresh with the girls and I am trying to make sure he has no contact with them whatsoever. I am also trying to get it over to the girls that they must in no way encourage him by arch looks etc! Domestics are hard to get and I don’t want to sack him.

As far as the more serious question of Mrs X is concerned, I am afraid we are up against the very difficult problem of personality. If I remonstrate with her it is likely to make Emma’s position more difficult. I can now state in confidence to you that Mrs X will not be here after July, but I would ask you to keep this entirely to yourself for everybody’s sake. Please don’t let either parents or children know this as yet. Meanwhile, I have spoken to Emma and will continue to try and give her a basic education in diplomacy!

Yours sincerely

I liked that headmaster. He was fun. He joined in games of British Bulldog on the lawn under G-Block; he let us loose on the thrilling high zip-wire; he very occasionally appeared on G-Block and had us giggling and shrieking by throwing us on our beds, and, presumably, he believed in and implemented the progressive, more holistic education that the school prided itself on. Nevertheless, his letter exemplifies the prevailing culture of the time: collusion and blame the children.

I have no memory of Jose and being told not to ‘encourage’ him. But, just as I surmised in Chapter Thirteen, from reading between the lines of an earlier letter to my father, the headmaster and I appear to have had something in common: we were both frightened of Cruel Matron.

For me, every word of the headmaster’s letter hangs heavy. Every sentence is a cover for what lies underneath.

Mrs X will not be here after July

I will never know if Cruel Matron jumped or was pushed, or simply retired, as is evidenced by another ‘find’ in the unsorted mass of old letters and documents: a school governor’s report with the following entry:

Headmaster’s report on the school Year 1966-67

Parents of [the junior school] were glad to present a cheque to Mrs X as a mark of their appreciation for the care she had given to the girls as Matron over the past 10 years.

I don’t want to believe Cruel Matron retired. Not just because I can’t bear the thought that there was no final reckoning, but because I now know (thanks to serialising this memoir) there were also complaints about her from other girls’ parents.

Apart from the ending in Maudie of my parents coming to take me home, I no longer need the satisfaction of a final reckoning for Cruel Matron.

I had initially planned a Hollywood ending for Cruel Matron in Maudie. Glorious, satisfying, retribution. But I can’t do it. Even in Maudie. Why not? Because Cruel Matron is both too serious and not serious enough; she has diminished.

Cruel Matron. I know you. I don’t know you. You’ve been there all my life. You haven’t been there all my life.

I have finally written myself free of you. I’m not left with avengement. Just sadness. I am sad for me and all the other girls who suffered because of you. The residue of you that remains in my limbic system would have been so different had you been kind.

My father sent the letter to the headmaster containing his ‘worries’ about Cruel Matron in November. She finally left in July, so I and the other girls still had to endure more than seven months of Cruel Matron before she left.

When we returned to school in the Autumn of 1967, Cruel Matron had been replaced by the music teacher’s wife, who was kind. We had one year to go before moving up to the senior school. I can remember things from that year. Happy memories. Helped by discovering the only extant letter from me to my parents, written in that last year just before I turned twelve. A letter full of chatty news, including a reference to Mr T (the maths teacher who features in Chapter Three) about whom I wrote the national prize-winning poem The Beast when I was nine.

Below is an extract from the start of a long letter I wrote to my parents after Cruel Matron had gone.

There is only the odd spelling mistake but virtually no punctuation. As a teacher, required to drill punctuation into today’s children, I was immediately struck by this. I was nearly 12!

But as a writer — who now loves the creative tool that is punctuation — given the choice between the exuberant flow of this letter and one page of perfect punctuation with constipated sentences, bolted on fronted adverbials and streams of unnecessary adjectives demonstrating knowledge of commas, I would go for this 12-page letter written ‘for real purposes’ any day — despite the favoured connective being ‘anyway’.

5^th October 1967

Dear Mummy and Daddy,

I am so sorry I have not written to you but last weekend we went hiking it was super fun the first day we went about 12 miles and it was lovely we had Mr T and a new games teacher call Rosemary she is very nice well anyway we started off at 10 o clock on Saturday morning all gay and fresh. naturally after a bit I got left behind eating blackberries when we got to a disused railway bridge I took a photo of evryone sitting on a wall. We then plouged on until we came to an A3 where we had lunch we must have looked a sight all sitting along the pavement stuffing lunch luckily there was a pub nearby so that Mr T had a pint of beer while we had cokes etc then we went on and I fell into a stream and so did Rosemary we then were chased by a herd of cows that was frightening Mat managed to trip over and when she looked up she found cows on either side of her. Then came the worst thing we came to a ten foot drop with boggy water underneath. There were three thin logs badly tyed together lying over it We had to get across and when it came to my turn a boy had come back across to get my ruksac and my deodorant fell in. [the letter then describes arriving at a youth hostel and spending the night] … I played ping pong practically all evening and some people played a kiss chase game & Mat & I crept out with our cameras and took a flash of them. anyway I had to do the washing up and it was all a mixture of Bacon rind and peas in the water.

One thing I remember very clearly about that year when I turned twelve is that I immediately stopped wetting the bed.

I don’t hate Cruel Matron. I feel sorry for her. I think she was unhappy. (Didn’t she have a husband who died in the war?)

What I hate is the system that allowed her to happen.

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