The Drying Rooms - Chapter One

Arrival

The ‘Jungle Jim’

Let’s start at the driveway that leads up to the school. The gates.

Gates? No. I just see two blurred old stone pillars either side of the start of the drive. The drive was on a bend on the main road from Miseryfield. If you were driving from Miseryfield, it must have been a dangerous bend. Turning right into the drive must have been dangerous. Because it was a bend! A sharp bend. Definitely on a bend – wasn’t it? But which way did we turn?  Did we turn right or left into the school drive. I can feel both the turnings.

Come, little one. Trust me. Or is it me that trusts you? Whatever. I can’t do this without you. Take my hand. I had my eighth birthday here. October 8 1963. I have no memory of that birthday. But I do have a memory of birthdays. Not a memory, just wisps. We will get to the birthday room at some point. But not now. Now we are on the drive, moving past the lawn where we played, right below the girls’ dormitory block. Her dreaded face at the window when we looked up. Looking down on us. Watching. Her room was next to the first dorm I ever slept in.

I was going to start from the dorms because that is the place of misery still lodged in my fibrillating heart, but I can’t face it. Not yet. And the dorms are what this is all about, the main setting of Maudie. Yes, I promise you, it will be an adventure. The children will win. You can tell me what you want to happen. I trust you.

Come. You see that car? Parked on the bend leading into the drive. I’m in that car with another child. I can’t remember who the other child was, I can’t even see their hair, but it was someone I was happy to sit next to.

There is no anxiety around this memory. I see the field on the opposite side of the road, I smell the inside car smell. The enclosed steamed up capsule of it when we wound up the windows. And when we wound them down — the rush of air, the whoosh of passing cars in the rain. But I don’t see rain. It must have been a teacher’s car. Probably the maths teacher. The season is a blur. The colour is greyscale, the field is barely green — are there leaves on the trees?

We had a task. Undemanding but important. A task that had to be done. Straightforward, repetitive. There were two of us in the car. One in the front passenger seat. One behind the steering wheel. Would an adult have let us do that? On our own? Yes, probably. It was sixty years ago. Our job was to do a tally of the cars that went past – in each direction, I think. Yes, it must have been in each direction. What was it for?

She can’t remember. But she remembers the feeling. It was one of massive overwhelming boredom; they were on a rota and the shifts were long. Hours long it seemed. But it was delicious. It felt safe and free. It was a reprieve. And it was just out of bounds, just beyond the school gate, inches from the main road. The real world where real families lived.

A car drove past. Maudie and Buzz marked their tally sheets.

“25,” said Maudie.

“23,” said Buzz.

“You must have missed some.”

“I didn’t,” said Buzz. She was slumped in the passenger seat of Crackpot’s car with her clipboard on her knees. “This is so boring!”

But Maudie wasn’t bored. Maudie felt strangely relaxed. There was something about being just outside the school gates, something that made her feel free. But also kind of forever trapped. Free and trapped all at the same time.

Let’s continue up the drive.  I will hold your soft little hand more tightly now because we are entering the Homesick Lands.  I thought I would never feel that feeling again.

But she did feel it. Back in it rushed — years later when her brother died. Her brother! He died!  Alone in his room. He was the first brother to die.

On the right-hand side, foliage — maybe orchards — yes orchards, but scruffy, overgrown. Thickets and brambles and little gnarled apple trees. On the left-hand side, there is a large lawn. It is in cold shadow because of a line of tall dark trees. What kind of trees? She has no idea. But there is something foreboding and persistently evergreen about them.  Between them runs a zip wire. Do you see the zip wire? It’s so high, so long. Much higher and longer and more thrillingly dangerous than anything she has seen in the playgrounds of mothering and grandmothering. In the corner of the lawn, there is a jungle gym – or what she always thought was a Jungle Jim; boxy, no curves.

Can you see me, little one? On the Jungle Jim? I am hanging on the top rung. Next to my best friend.

The world upside down and giggling.

At the far end of the lawn, parallel to the drive on which we are now on — standing, staring — ran a building, a modern brick building, with lines of windows. What did we call that building? I’m going to call it G-Block, the girls’ dormitories.

The window of my dorm, one of my dorms over years of dorms, is next to the window of the matron’s sitting room. Cruel Matron. I told you about her. The one who cut our towels in half if they were too big, and – with the same scissors — cut our hair if it was too long. Clutch and chop. Actually, I have no idea if she used the same scissors. But I see those scissors, enlarged and filmic.

To the right, opposite the line of tall dark trees are raised banks of lawn in front of an old house. Not little bricks, more old red stone, or was it grey? The original school building, I guess. Rows of little windows looking out on to the lawn. B-Block, the boys’ dorms. If you were a little boy looking out of one of windows you would have looked straight at the zip wire, or you could have looked down, on to the washing line below your dorm and on some days you would have seen an ox-blood-red rubber sheet with my name on it in indelible ink — and from that you would have known that the chatty, freckle-faced little girl whose parents lived somewhere hot and abroad had a secret weakness.

And if you had been a nasty little boy that would have given you a reason to tease her, or even bully her.

Like the older girls did when Cruel Matron moved me into the dorm overlooking the kale field. But I can’t face going into that dorm now.

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