The Drying Rooms - Chapter Twenty Three
Evidence
Audio version of Chapter Twenty Three
Extract from Maudie:
The dorm was waking up. Maudie could feel the cold edge of last night’s large damp patch against her thigh.
A floorboard creaked in the corridor. It was Axe. Maudie knew she was there, holding the bell and looking at her watch. Any second now ...
Maudie bit the edge of the sheet. She bit down hard until all her focus was jammed into her teeth and jaw. If she blubbed now, there would be hell to pay.
The door opened. Axe’s voice and the clanging bell crashed into the silence of the room.
“Good morning, girls! Washrooms in five minutes! No dawdling.”
Maudie shut her eyes tight.
She heard the others getting out of bed.
“Come on, Maudie. Wake up!”
It was Buzz.
Maudie bit the inside of her cheeks to stop herself from crying.
“Are you OK?” Buzz’s voice again.
“Yes. You go. Coming in a minute,” Maudie managed to get out.
As soon as they were gone, Maudie got out of bed and pulled off the sheets and blanket. There was very little time. Axe could be back any moment. With all her strength she lifted the mattress and stuffed the nightie and the damp sheet between the mattress and the metal bed springs. With any luck they would be dry enough by tonight. Then she made her bed as fast as she could - but was careful to do hospital corners, like Axe had taught them. She couldn’t fail bed inspection. Not again. If she had to wash her sheets in front of the other girls again, she’d die. But tomorrow it would all change.
Tomorrow was Sunday and Kay the new girl’s important judge father was coming to take her out to tea. Kay was going to give him the film from Maudie’s camera. Once he had developed it, everything would change.
Planning and executing Cruel Matron’s downfall never happened, but waking up in a wet bed and dealing with the evidence before Cruel Matron could find it did happen. In this Maudie extract it’s very coherent. But could I swear to the detail in court? Of course not.
There are so many wisps and amorphous fragments of bed wetting memories, many of them recurring, repetitive flashes, like bright shards of immutable truth. It happened! It definitely happened! And it was recently corroborated by my best friend at the time.
We met for lunch and recognised each other instantly even though we hadn’t seen or heard from each other for sixty years.
She remembers me coming into her bed on some of those bed-wetting nights (I don’t remember this, but it immediately connected me to being held in the arms of another child, which I describe in Chapter Six when we tried to mother each other when we were homesick).
My then best friend also remembers coming into the washrooms one night and finding me trying to wash the stain out of my sheets in one of the little basins (Chapter Six again: And in the empty echoes of the night, she stood again at those basins, using a wooden nailbrush to scrub around the ring of urine.)
Oh, the relief of the corroboration! But my friend has no memory of Cruel Matron’s punishment of making me wash my sheets in front of the other girls. That happened! (Didn’t it?) Yes. Yes? Yes! But would the evidence stand up in The Memory Court?
In the novel, Maudie and her plucky friends carry out an elaborate plan to expose Axe and bring her to justice. ‘Justice’ is a word much used by Kay, the new girl; her ‘important judge father’ has told her about brave people bringing about justice because they tell the truth at great risk to themselves. So Kay’s father is the adult they choose to help them facilitate their plan.
The plan is to collect photographic evidence of Axe’s cruelty and excessive punishments. Maudie is the only one who owns a camera.
(I owned a camera. My parents gave me a Brownie camera for my eighth birthday, my first birthday at boarding school.)
The plan is high risk and requires tremendous bravery for all involved— but particularly for Maudie as she is the one who is actually taking the photographs. The first photo Maudie takes is of Kay’s hair, which Axe has just chopped to shoulder length.
Just like Cruel Matron, Axe hates long hair, unless it is growing from the head of a girl who was one of her ‘pets’. (Cruel Matron had ‘pets’. I was one when I first arrived because I reminded her of her labrador puppies). Maudie also takes a photo of Kay’s ‘before and after’ towel. In the novel, the girls know that as soon as Kay’s lovely, long hair is cut, her towel (huge, soft and luxuriant) would be the next for the chop. Cruel Matron hated such towels. She cut them in half. (Not mine — my mother also happened to be an advocate of short towels.)
Then, in Maudie, over a series of nights, Maudie, with her friends acting as spies, lookouts, and decoys, takes photos of all the other evidence they can find to back their case, starting with the mirror outside Axe’s door, placed there to catch any girl trying to creep past. (Cruel Matron had such a mirror.)
There is a sequence of photographs of girls ‘sitting out’ (for the crimes of talking after lights out, or creeping past Axe’s door to go to the loo) and they are matched to photos of Buzz’s watch, showing the start and end time. Surely their parents would be outraged to see a start time of 8pm and an end time of 2am? I have no memory of knowing the actual time, but I do remember battling sleep and the discomfort of a cold floor numbing my bum through my nightie or pyjamas while ‘sitting out’ for hours in various locations: the windowless tuck cupboard room; the stone stairs; the corridor by the mesh swing doors; the wooden floor outside Cruel Matron’s door.
At least there was a bench to sit on in The Drying Rooms and it must have been warm down there, but the Drying Rooms, at the bottom of the building, down the cold stone stairs, was the scariest place of all. Dark, clanking and solitary. The Drying Rooms always felt like being forgotten, that somehow you had ceased to exist and nobody knew where you were. This is true to an extent. I think I was forgotten in the Drying Rooms, never collected. But in the Memory Court, I couldn’t swear to it.
But a dear and still close friend has a strong memory of being forgotten in The Drying Rooms. Left there all night. And her memory is tied up with the smell of curdled milk, from one of the standard issue pint glass bottles that had been shoved under a bench. It's hardly surprising that she remembers the milk. Milk made her vomit. An intolerance which Cruel Matron put to the test when my friend was eight.
My friend’s mother had just dropped her on her first day at school and informed Cruel Matron that her daughter doesn’t drink milk. As soon as my friend’s mother was gone, Cruel Matron poured a glass of milk and told my friend to drink it. And that wasn’t all. There was more cruelty to come. The full memory is recounted in my friend’s words in Chapter One of Alex Renton’s book about abuse at boarding schools, Stiff Upper Lip.
A familiar image floats in as I search for the words to describe the presence of the Drying Rooms in my psyche. It is a TV ad from years ago that left an imprint. It shows a man dressed only in a thin hospital gown in a wind-howling wasteland. We see his bare legs and feet attempting to walk on cracking ice. And then a Macmillan cancer nurse appears. She touches his arm. She has a gentle, competent voice. Help has arrived. It may be a difficult journey, but he is no longer alone.
Rescue. It never happened. But in Maudie it happens and it happens gloriously.
Again, using the fictional Maudie is such an effective way to tell the story of the horrifying details of Cruel Matron’s sadistic treatment of you and the other children.
This is powerful and gut wrenching because so much DID happen to me. I FEEL the wordless knowledge of my memory. And I thank you for helping to expunge it.