Eighty Not Out (4 page)

4

Strathearn School under Miss Miskelly

I
entered the transition class at Strathearn grammar school, the entrance to which was on the back road from Belmont to Parliament Buildings. A regular bus for civil servants, which I took on days when the weather was too bad to cycle, passed my school and the entrance gates to Campbell College, a boys' preparatory and public school, often referred to as an establishment for the cream of Northern Ireland society – ‘rich and thick', according to Samuel Beckett who taught there in the late twenties. Strangely enough I do not associate entry to the new school with any particular trauma. The transitional, co-educational class led to Forms 1 and 2, above which the school was for girls only. Miss Miskelly, the headmistress, was a formidable woman built on the same pouter-pigeon lines as San's sister. Small in stature, and firmly corseted, she favoured dresses with a lacy corsage, worn with high-heeled beige kid shoes. She presided over morning assembly, the roll call, and the singing of two hymns, before we went to our respective classrooms. She and my mother had a guarded relationship about which I can only conjecture: I suspect my mother had been forced to reveal her straitened circumstances, and negotiated the fees. Her own record at Richmond Lodge School, which had an excellent reputation, will have been used to some effect. The assembly hall also served as a gymnasium under the direction of a gym mistress, who also took us for rounders, tennis and hockey. Not truly sadistic, she nevertheless had unrealistic aspirations, and could not accept that not every spine was flexible enough to bend backwards till the head touched the floor. The vaulting horse was my greatest enemy, particularly when the pummels were removed and we were told to attack it short end on and somersault off the far end: to this day orthopaedic surgeons mutter about old injuries I suffered during
PE
. Among us were a few naturally gifted gymnasts, flexible, courageous and never breathless; they were in their element demonstrating skipping and floor exercises at the end-of-term display. The rest of us just muddled through, hoping not to attract attention. Mary, a country girl large for her age, had won a scholarship to the school: when the rest of us stripped to vests and knickers, it was revealed that she was wearing a boned corset. On being told that she could not possibly do exercises wearing such a garment, she became stubborn, pleading: ‘Me mammy says I'm not to take it off.' The matter was referred to the headmistress, and Me Mammy won: Mary was excused gymnastic lessons.

Almost instantly I formed a crush on a wiry little boy called Cecil Heron, the son of a schools inspector; this was not noticed by anyone, least of all the object of my passion, and after my first term we never met again. The other boys were two studious sons of a local doctor, and the son of a well-known landscape artist, rough, loud, grubby and untidy, who constantly tested the teacher's patience. He was not a bully, but I was afraid of him. Among the girls there was a tyrant who imitated my speech, stole some crayons, and, having identified a number of vulnerable spots, teased me ruthlessly. I never developed any effective defences. She was big, verging on fat, with fuzzy fair hair and, I now see, of limited intelligence.

The class included several girls three years older than me. One, daughter of a colonel, would today be called ‘an army brat'. She came from India where she had been educated by governesses; though bright, she had a lot of catching up to do. Another, also bright, was struggling with left-handedness and probably dyslexia. Then Celia, who was to become one of my best friends, was bone idle, but fancied a career in theatre and took elocution lessons – an expensive extra. Annie, a scrawny girl with a prominent nose, was the adored only child of elderly parents who lived near the school. San was quick to point out her oddities: ‘That's a quare freak you've picked up.' Poor Annie developed anorexia; sometimes, after we had been playing, her parents would ask me to join them at the evening meal. These were protracted affairs, punctuated by parental exhortations of ‘Will you not take a little bit more, wee sweetheart?' I, who did not need any urging, was acutely embarrassed. Annie often fled the table and disappeared upstairs, probably to be sick. I went with Celia, now a burgeoning young woman of thirteen, to visit her in a mental hospital, where, weighing just over five stone, she was being force-fed. She used to stroke her lower abdomen, from which the hip bones stuck out like a starving animal's, and say: ‘Look how fat I'm getting.'

Not long before my tenth birthday, Conrad, now almost blind as a result of the distemper he had developed the previous year, escaped from the garden and walked straight into the path of a bus. The driver, who was very upset, had come carrying the corpse, to explain that he had not been able to brake in time. I was at school, and my mother, after burying Conrad in our Pets' Cemetery, beside defunct tortoises, budgies and goldfish, came by car to collect me and break the news. Grieving as much as I, she arranged a trip to Dublin in an effort to take my mind off the loss. The Austin Seven had been replaced by a Morris Eight: I thought the design beautiful, in particular the red jewel in a silver mount on the door of the boot. I was bursting with pride as we drove in FZ 5440, what was then regarded a long distance, to Dublin. My mother had booked a room at the Ivanhoe Hotel in Harcourt Street; the next time I stayed there was on honeymoon, just after Christmas in 1950.

This was my first visit to that beautiful city; quite ignorant of architectural epochs, it struck me as much superior to Belfast. There is a photograph of me standing at the top of Nelson's Pillar in O'Connell Street, sadly to be blown up in March 1966, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. We visited the crypt of St Michan's Church, where the guide encouraged me to touch the crusty belly-flap of one of the mummified corpses. Why on earth did my mother think this a suitable place to take a grieving child? Then we visited the zoo. I have hated zoos since my first visit to the sunless Zoological Gardens under Cave Hill in Belfast, but did not have the guts to say so. All the grown-ups assumed that children liked both zoos and circuses. I had my fill of the latter too after being terrified by a clown at Duffy's travelling circus near Killyleagh, County Down. I did not like the elephant, either – much too close for comfort. Nor did I like the spectacle of lions and tigers performing tricks in response to the prods and cracking whip of the ringmaster. Six white horses, ridden by a plump woman in a red spangled suit, were nice, and the sea lions were
OK
, apparently enjoying themselves. I was not sure about the chimpanzees, feeling then, as now, that our relationship is uncomfortably close. My mother must have retained pleasant memories from visiting the zoo in the early twenties; her albums from those years contain pictures of big cats behind bars and an adult elephant. I know that, like white hunters who turn to conservation, she would ultimately have changed her views on the incarceration of wildlife. As a final ‘treat' I was given a ride on a bristly, warmly smelly baby elephant. But when I was taken to follow and witness the end of a stag hunt, I finally voiced my disgust as the terrified animal jumped the sea wall near Groomsport, and launched itself in the direction of the Copeland Islands.

Race meetings at Downpatrick, on the other hand, were thrilling: the jockeys' multicoloured satin blouses, the jostling crowd, and the fact that both my mother and aunt coyly placed miniscule bets on some of the horses. We had a seat-stick, too, but I was not tall enough to use it properly. The atmosphere was far removed from anything I had ever experienced. If it rained, we retired to the car, which steamed up, to eat sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs.

We were a household of animal lovers and pets of all kinds found a home with us. The shelf under the north-facing kitchen window was devoted to an aquarium of coldwater fish deemed too delicate for the pond; multicoloured fantails and Othello, a black specimen with protuberant eyes, lived in harmony with a burgeoning snail population. A mature
Dytiscus marginalis
beetle, its larval form, and several snail species inhabited a tangle of weed in an old battery container; the beetle was a deliberate internee, but the larva had come with weed taken from a pond near Manns Corner. The beetle used its formidable pincers, with slow deliberation, to ingest large worms until only a pallid, pasta-like string remained before it fell to the foul bottom; only then was a new sacrifice offered. It was my job to dig for worms and select the daintier specimens for the newts who lived in a designer vivarium in the living room. My mother had modelled something on the lines of a miniature stage set for
King Kong
, complete with cave where the newts slept; wriggling bait was offered at the mouth of the cave, held by a pair of long-handled tweezers. The inhabitants – sexes unknown – numbered four – Napoleon, almost black, Josephine, yellow, and two nameless, light brown; they were fussy eaters, but my mother told me not to be so squeamish and chop worms, rejected as being too large, into bite-sized pieces with her pearl-handled penknife. A display tank with overhead lighting, containing small goldfish and shubunkins took pride of place in the sitting room, next to the wireless, on a shelf above the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. Any fish suspected of having a fungal infection, or with a depressed dorsal fin, was given a bath of potassium permanganate, then subjected to running water treatment in a milk can in the kitchen sink: sickly fish seldom survived. My mother's ventures into the world of pisciculture came to an end after she installed a heated tank with an aerated oxygen supply to house a pair of angel fish and several neon tetras: there were power cuts with inevitable results, the only survivors being the snails and weed.

On many Sundays my mother did not emerge from her room fully dressed until after eleven, so when Conrad was alive, I rose early to let him out into the soft light, before the sun burned the dewdrops off the spiders' webs. I would inspect the pond that my mother had built unaided: it was circular concrete, with vertical sides, and had no sloping points for easy access by amphibians. It was over-stocked with several conventional goldfish, four spotty shubunkins, a pair of golden orfe, and a catfish. The orfe grew quite large and sometimes jumped out to flap helplessly on the stone surround, to be put back if lucky. Two freshwater mussels burrowed in the bottom sludge, and there was a healthy snail population. I would do a head count of fish, and try to calculate how much my favourite – a large orange carp called Augustus – had grown. Carefully selected waterweeds grew in abundance, and a water lily produced several white flowers each summer. I would check the blackbird's nest, and the dense column of snails I hoped Mr Boyd, who helped my mother with the garden, would not discover. He did, and they ended their days a brown foamy mess overflowing a seldom-emptied stone jar next to the water butt. One day I found a black cat sitting where the blackbird's nest had been.

When Conrad and I went back indoors, I would grub around the kitchen for the rudiments of breakfast, and return to bed with a bowl of raisins and nuts for another reading session. I was in love with Bulldog Drummond, and detested Phyllis when she came on the scene. Lord Peter Wimsey was also the object of some affection, although I felt inferior to the formidable Harriet. I ploughed my way through almost all of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and the more popular Dickens novels.
Three Men in a Boat, The Diary of a Nobody, Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes
, and Belloc's
Cautionary Tales for Children
were favourites. Later I fell, as did Jane, for the glowering Mr Rochester, and Jo's Professor Baer. My bizarre choice of first husband, Rudolf Beer, may well have been coloured in some weird Freudian way by
Little Women
. H.G. Wells I found difficult. Some of the historical romances by Sir Philip Lindsay, favoured by my mother, gave clues about the lustful aspects of romantic love. Words such as ‘libidinous', ‘lascivious' and ‘carnal' had to be looked up in the dictionary, and there were references to ‘pert erect nipples'. I do not recall any bulges in groins, but despite their historic accuracy, there was a Mills & Boon element. Unfortunately his books were often returned to the library before I had finished my sneaky dips into them. The stories of E. Nesbit, the
Just William
series,
Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Huckleberry Finn
were all devoured, although I fear not retained in detail. Bad habits were formed during those years, and speed reading probably achieved at the cost of limited retention.

Listening to the
BBC
was universal, so I became familiar with much classical music, as the wireless was on almost continuously at home. Despite our near breadline existence, we had a recent model in a walnut cabinet with an art deco fretwork sunburst design on the front. Although dubbed tone-deaf, I soon had favourite pieces of music: Grieg's
Peer Gynt
suite, Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, Bizet's
Carmen
, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Ravel, Sibelius, Dvo
ř
ák, Mendelssohn. My mother, while an accomplished pianist, did not like Bach: it was therefore many years before I discovered the delights of the Brandenburg Concertos or heard a harpsichord recital. She loved Gilbert & Sullivan, and was familiar with all the scores, but music was not essential to her, and she played infrequently. I, on the other hand, used to spend hours trying to work out the notes and get both hands together, but pleas for lessons were dismissed as a waste of money. Most of my contemporaries said I was lucky as they hated having to practise. I listened regularly to
Children's Hour
with Uncle Mac, never missing an episode of
Toytown
with Larry the Lamb, Mr Growser and Dennis the Dachshund. San's taste ran to Gracie Fields, George Formby, Harry Hemsley the ventriloquist, with his puppet Horace, Paul Robeson and Count John McCormack, but the Irish folk songs she adored were seldom broadcast in unionist Ulster. Albert Sandler and his Palm Court Orchestra was another favourite, as was Henry Hall. She sang ‘Old Faithful, We'll Roam the Range Together', ‘Tiptoe through the Tulips', and ‘There's a Hole in the Bucket, dear Liza', as well as painful interpretations of tunes made popular by Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald.