The Drying Rooms - Chapter Two

"Mummy, I don't like it here."

A ‘Hillman something’

So we carry on up the drive, you and I. It goes up a rise and leads us to a mini- roundabout in front of the headmaster’s house. We are looking at another lawn. This one bare and bleak with the ghosts of children running on it. They are outside the modern classroom block, tacked on to the old school building, and the old school building somehow connects to the headmaster’s house. There are ghost cars pulling up now. Morris minors, Ford escorts, Hillman somethings. E-type Jaguars. They arrive, usually with one child in the back. Two if you’re lucky enough to have a sibling. They leave empty.

Parents, children, suitcases and trunks with names painted on them. There’s the kindly headmaster in a tweed jacket and his kindly wife, both of whom proved so ineffective. Brief respite, never rescue.

Smiles, handshakes, greetings; tearful clingings, prising screaming little fingers off grown-up coats; bare legs tearing across the lawn; overwrought excited shrieks of post-holiday reunions; children switching from one self to another in the brief chin-up-darling no-man’s-land border zone between the holidays and the eternity of twelve weeks of term. Don’t let go of my hand.

Entering the headmaster’s house was another border zone between the two worlds, different smells, different colours, a safe house between school and the real world, a safe world, the world where an almost real family lived, but getting into that house was rare, almost impossible. It wasn’t really an option. And if it was, was it worth it? The brief respites into the world out of bounds were longed for and savoured but the emotional price of re-entry was heavy.

There was a telephone in the headmaster’s house.

I was once allowed to use it to phone home. At the beginning. Maybe a few days into that first term. Maybe not. The telephone was big and black, sturdy. A metal dialling ring. Next to each hole was a number from 0 to 9 and three letters. Was it three letters? Yes. I researched it for Maudie. The photos of vintage retro phones landing a split-second gut-punch. In Maudie, her parents have a house in Pimlico, London.

In Maudie, the London number she dials is PIM 5479. Dialling is hard for her eight-year-old fingers.

It was the first time Maudie had ever dialled a number herself. Watched by the smiling headmaster’s wife, she inserted her finger into the hole and dragged the heavy dial the whole way round until it hit the stopping point.  The final number, 9, released the longest run of rapid clicks.

The smiling headmaster’s wife. It just made the stabbing homesickness worse. And in real life, who dialled the number? She can’t remember. Her mother and father must have been in London. She couldn’t possibly have been allowed to phone them in Khartoum.

I don’t know. I don’t know! Yes, I do know. They were still in London. Definitely in London. The memory is so strong.

Intact

but uncatchable

The big deal of making an expensive phone call.

The moment of desire meeting agony on hearing their oh-so-loved voices

The time-limited desperation of the conversation.

“Mummy, I don’t like it here. Please take me away.”

“Be brave darling.”

The burning gulp jammed in a throat

Then. Now.

How do you fuse the past with the present? Solder those parallel live wires?

The twisting jags inside

The desperation for a miracle

Make a miracle happen

Now, right now, make it happen

A miracle!

It was a recurring daydream

Make a miracle fly through the air towards the sun

Towards mum and dad on the airport runway

Waiting for her plane to take off

In the shimmering jet-fuel heat

A miracle!

Why don’t they stop the plane!

A miracle!

It didn’t happen; it hasn’t happened.

Maybe it’ll happen in Maudie. What do you think, little one? Maybe we can stop the plane in Maudie.

Let’s leave the headmaster’s house now and turn to our right and walk through the main doors into the school building. Not huge, hallowed doors – these are the glass doors of the modern Sixties block.

OK. We’re going in now! Don’t be nervous. I promise I won’t let go of your hand. We haven’t even got to the scary bits yet. Don’t worry, Cruel Matron doesn’t haunt these corridors. She must be waiting for us in G-Block, with her cold welcoming smile.

Opposite is a hall. Come, let’s push the door and go in. It’s the gym. Look. Up against the wall, can you see it? The wooden horse. The soft brushed leather on top is worn and shining from use. Years and years of hundreds, thousands of children. Run, leap, land, push off. Run, leap, land, push off … The little girl with short legs hated that wooden horse ….  something is spinning back to me.

That little girl. She did ballet in that hall! There was a bar running along the length of the wall. I am putting a mirror in there too, but I don’t think there was a mirror. I am going to let go of your hand for a minute and show you:

Her right hand is resting lightly on that bar; she places her heels together and sticks her toes out in a V, looking down at the pink tights, the treasured pink satin ballet shoes, the V of first position, keeping her back straight, looking ahead, a light, soft bend of her elbow, fingers relaxed and poised. Graceful. Floating. And then she bends her knees.

She is a swan. Elegant. Light and strong. But she is not a swan. Look.

What do you see? Standing by that bar the chubby little girl with short legs is trying very hard to do her very best.

Come, let’s leave her, poised and fixed. And alone.

Come with me to the other hall, the large assembly hall where we did eurythmics. That’s strange. Why didn’t we do eurythmics in the gym?  If I had paper and pencil now and tried to draw the images into a map, a floor plan, there would be so many areas where the pencil would hover and not know what to do, where to go. Was there a door here? A corridor there? Maybe we did eurythmics in both halls.

What was eurythmics? She doesn’t really know. She just knows she loved it, like an embarrassing secret. In the anecdotal retelling of it she has wholeheartedly joined in the giggly sneering at eurythmics; she has even imitated herself crouched on the floor pricking her way out of a bubble and becoming free. Free!

In Maudie, she has called the eurythmics teacher Myrtle Dipper. Myrtle Dipper is tall and floaty and carries a tambourine. Myrtle Dipper is soft and kind. She shakes her tambourine and twenty little boys and girls become Autumn leaves.

A vigorous shake of Miss Dipper’s tambourine stopped them all in their tracks.

“I want you all to look at Maudie for a second. See how she catches the breeze, just like a leaf.”

Maudie felt a rush of nerves, but within seconds her body was a leaf again, spinning and falling.

STOP!

What?  I have come to a stomach tightening, throat constricting stop.

The eurythmics lesson has gone!

For this was also the hall of assemblies and performances.

Performances. So many performances on that stage. She was Captain Hook. She was Humpty Dumpty. She danced. She sang. Years later, at the senior school, screaming and writhing, she was possessed in The Crucible.

She had the main part in Six Characters in Search of an Author.

She can’t watch. The dream never came true.

It still hurts.

I am backing out of the hall, leaving you there, my little blurred friend. I am leaving you there alone in that hall, sitting on a chair staring at the raised stage at the far end.

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