My Secret Diary (3 page)

Everyone cordially hated the summer uniform:
canary-yellow dresses in an unpleasant synthetic
material. There is not a girl in existence who
looks good in canary yellow. It makes pale girls
look sallow and ill, and rosy-cheeked girls
alarmingly scarlet. The dresses had ugly cap
sleeves, like silly wings, unflattering to any kind
of arm and embarrassing when you put up your
hand in class.

Very few people had washing machines in those
days. You did your main wash once a week, so by
Friday our canaries were stained and dingy. We had
to wear straw boaters going to and from school
even if there was a heatwave. These were hard,
uncomfortable hats that made your head itch. They
could only be kept in place with elastic. Nasty boys
would run past and tip our boaters so that the
elastic snapped under our chins.
Particularly
nasty
boys would snatch at our backs to twang our
bra elastic too. I often wonder
why
I wanted
a boyfriend!

I looked younger than my age in my school
uniform, but I did my best to dress older outside
school – sometimes for particular reasons!

Thursday 4 February

After school I went to the pictures with Sue and
Cherry. I wore my red beret, black and white coat
and black patent shoes and managed to get in for
16 as the picture was an 'A'.

I sound too twee for words. A beret? But at least
it was a change from eau de nil. Green still figured
prominently in my wardrobe though.

Saturday 12 March

In the afternoon I went shopping with Mummy and
we bought me a pale green checked woolly
shirtwaister for the Spring to go with my green
shoes and handbag.

Just call this the lettuce look. However, I seemed
to like it then. In May I wrote:

After dinner I got dressed in my new green
shirtwaister, that I think suits me very well. Then,
loaded down with records, I called for Sue and we
went to Cherry's party. Everyone had brought lots
of records, and did my feet ache after all that jiving!
Carol wore her new black and white dress which
looked nice.

My writing was certainly as limp as a lettuce in
those days.
Nice!

So I liked my green dress, but my favourite outfit
was 'a cotton skirt patterned with violets and nice
and full'. It's about the only one of those long-ago
garments I wouldn't mind wearing now on a
summer day.

Biddy was generous to me, buying me clothes
out of her small wage packet.

Saturday 4 June

In the afternoon Mummy and I went to Richmond
and after a long hunt we bought me a pair
of cream flatties, very soft and comfortable.
Then, back in Kingston, we went into C & A's and
found a dress in the children's department
that we both liked very much. The only trouble
with it was that it had a button missing at the
waist. Mummy made a fuss about it, but they
didn't have another dress in stock or another
button, so we bought it minus the button as we
liked it very much indeed. It is a lovely powder
blue colour with a straight skirt and Mummy
has transferred the bottom button to the waist so
that it doesn't notice so much.

I sound like little Goody-Two-Shoes, trotting
round with Mummy, being ever so grateful for my
girly frock. It's reassuring to see that I revert to
surly teenager the very next day.

Sunday 5 June

I AM A PIG
.
I was rude and irritable today and I
just didn't care, and I spoilt Mummy's day at the
coast. (Daddy wasn't very well-behaved either
though!) I won't write any more about a very
unfortunate day.

I wish I had. It would have been a lot more
interesting than painstaking accounts of buttons
missing on powder-blue dresses!

Sunday 3 January

Chris and Carol are my best friends, and there is
also Sue who lives next door, and Cherry down the
road. They all go to Coombe, my school.

I met my very special friend, Chris, on my first
day at Coombe County Secondary School for Girls.
I'd had
another
Christine as my special friend when
I was at primary school but we'd sadly lost touch
when we both left Latchmere. I think she moved
away after her mum died.

I'd never set eyes on my new friend Chris
before that first day at secondary school. I
didn't know anyone at all. It's always a bit scary
going to a brand-new school. Coombe was in New
Malden, two or three miles from our flats in
Kingston. I hadn't made it through my eleven plus
to Tiffin Girls' School, but I'd been given a 'second
chance' and managed to pass this time. I could
now go to a new comprehensive school instead of
a secondary modern.

Coombe was one of the first comprehensives,
though it was divided firmly into two teaching
streams – grammar and secondary modern. In an
effort to make us girls mix in together, we were
in forms for non-academic lessons like singing
and PE, and in groups graded from one all
the way to nine for lessons like maths and
English. This system didn't make allowances for
girls like me. I'd been put in group one, where I
held my own in English and most of the arts
subjects – but I definitely belonged in group
nine for maths! Still, compiling that timetable
must have been nightmare enough without
trying to accommodate weird girls like me – very
good in some subjects and an utter dunce
in others.

I couldn't even get my head around the densely
printed timetable, and the entire geography of the
school was confusing. We weren't shown around
beforehand or even given a map when we arrived
the first day. We were somehow expected to
sense
our way around.

I managed to fetch up in the right form room,
1A. We stood around shyly, eyeing each other up
and down. We were a totally mixed bunch. A few
of the girls were very posh, from arty left-wing
families who were determined to give their
daughters a state education. Some of the girls were
very tough, from families who didn't give their
daughters' education a second thought. Most of us
were somewhere in the middle, ordinary suburban
girls fidgeting anxiously in our stiff new uniforms,
wondering if we'd ever make friends.

'Good morning, Form One A! I'm Miss Crowford,
your form teacher.'

'Good-morning-Miss-Crowford,' we mumbled.

She was small and dark and quite pretty, so we
could have done a lot worse. I hoped she might
teach English, but it turned out she was the gym
teacher. I started to go off her immediately, though
she was actually very kind and did her best to
encourage me when I couldn't climb the ropes and
thumped straight
into
rather than over the
wooden horse.

Miss Crowford let us choose our own desks. I
sat behind a smallish girl with long light-brown
hair neatly tied in two plaits. We all had to say our
names, going round the class. The girl with plaits
said she was called Christine. I was predisposed to
like
girls called Christine so I started to take proper
notice of her.

Miss Crowford was busy doing the Jolly-Teacher
Talk about us being big girls now in this lovely
new secondary school. She told us all about the
school badge and the school motto and the school
hymn while I inked a line of small girls in
school uniform all round the border of my new
and incomprehensible timetable.

Then a loud electronic bell rang, startling us.
We were all used to the ordinary hand-bells rung
at our primary schools.

'Right, girls, join your groups and go off to
your next lesson,' said Miss Crowford. 'Don't
dawdle! We only give you five minutes to get to the
next classroom.'

I peered at my timetable in panic. It seemed to
indicate that group one had art. I didn't have a
clue where this would be. All the other girls were
getting up purposefully and filing out of the room.
In desperation I tapped Christine on the back.

'Excuse me, do you know the way to the art
room?' I asked timidly.

Chris smiled at me. 'No, but I've got to go there
too,' she said.

'Let's go and find it together,' I said.

It took us much longer than five minutes. It
turned out that the art room wasn't even in the
main school building, it was right at the end of the
playground. By the time we got there I'd made a
brand-new best friend.

Coombe had only been open for two years, so
there weren't that many girls attending, just us
new first years, then the second and third years.
We barely filled half the hall when we filed into
assembly. It was a beautiful hall, with a polished
parquet floor. No girl was allowed to set foot on it
in her outdoor shoes. We had to have hideous rubber-soled
sandals so that we wouldn't scratch the shiny
floorboards. We also had to have black plimsolls for
PE. Some of the poorer girls tried to make do with
plimsolls for their indoor shoes. Miss Haslett, the
head teacher, immediately protested, calling the
offending girls out to the front of the hall.

'They are
plimsolls
,' she said. 'You will wear
proper indoor shoes tomorrow!'

I couldn't see what possible harm it would do
letting these girls wear their plimsolls. Why were
they being publicly humiliated in front of everyone?
It wasn't their fault they didn't possess childish
Clarks sandals. None of us earned any money. We
couldn't buy our own footwear. It was a big struggle
for a lot of families to find three pairs of shoes for
each daughter –
four
pairs, because most girls
wouldn't be seen dead in Clarks clodhoppers
outside school.

However, the next day all the girls were wearing
regulation sandals apart from one girl, Doreen, in
my form. She was a tiny white-faced girl with bright
red hair. She might have been small but she was
so fierce we were all frightened of her. Doreen
herself didn't seem frightened of anyone, not even
Miss Haslett.

Doreen danced into school the next day, eyes
bright, chin up. She didn't flinch when Miss Haslett
called her up on the stage in front of everyone.
None of Doreen's uniform technically passed
muster. Her scrappy grey skirt was home-made and
her V-neck jumper hand-knitted. She wore droopy
white socks – and her black plimsolls.

Miss Haslett pointed at them in disgust, as if
they were covered in dog's muck. 'You are still
wearing plimsolls, Doreen! Tomorrow you will
come to school wearing
indoor shoes
, do you
hear me?'

Doreen couldn't help hearing her, she was
bellowing in her face. But she didn't flinch.

We all wondered what would happen tomorrow.
We knew Doreen didn't
have
any indoor shoes, and
she didn't come from the sort of family where her
mum could brandish a full purse and say, 'No
problem, sweetheart, we'll trot down to Clarks
shoeshop and buy you a pair.'

Doreen walked into school assembly the next
morning in grubby blue bedroom slippers with
holes in the toes. I'm certain this was all she had.
She didn't look as if she was being deliberately
defiant. There was a flush of pink across her pale
face. She didn't want to show off the state of her
slippers to all of us. Miss Haslett didn't understand.
She flushed too.

'How
dare
you be so insolent as to wear your
slippers in school!' she shrieked. 'Go and stand
outside my study in disgrace.'

Doreen stood there all day long, shuffling from
one slippered foot to the other. She didn't come
into school the next day. The following Monday she
wore regulation rubber-soled school sandals. They
were old and scuffed and had obviously belonged
to somebody else. Maybe someone gave them to
her, or maybe her mum bought them for sixpence
at a jumble sale.

'At last you've seen sense, Doreen,' said Miss
Haslett in assembly. 'I hope this has taught you all
a lesson, girls.'

I
hadn't seen sense. I'd seen crass stupidity
and insensitivity on Miss Haslett's part. It
taught me the lesson that some teachers were
appallingly unfair, so caught up in petty rules and
regulations that they lost all compassion and
common sense.

A couple of years later
I
ended up standing in
disgrace outside Miss Haslett's study door. She'd
seen me walking to the bus stop without my school
beret and – shock horror! – I was sucking a Sherbet
Fountain. I'd committed not one but two criminal
offences in her eyes: eating in school uniform and
not wearing my silly hat.

Miss Haslett sent for me and started telling me
off. 'Why were you eating that childish rubbish,
Jacqueline?' she asked.

The obvious answer was that I was hungry,
and I needed something to keep me going for the
long walk home. (I'd stopped taking the bus after
the dramatic accident.) However, I sensed Miss
Haslett would consider an honest answer insolent,
so I kept quiet.

'And
why
weren't you wearing your school
beret?' she continued.

This was easier. 'I've lost it, Miss Haslett,' I
said truthfully.

It had been there on my coat hook that morning.
Someone had obviously snatched it for themselves
when their own beret had gone missing.

'That's just like you, Jacqueline Aitken,' said
Miss Haslett. 'Stand outside!'

I stood there. My legs started aching after
a while so I leaned against the wall. I didn't feel
cast down. I was utterly jubilant because I was
missing a maths lesson. I gazed into space and
started imagining inside my head, continuing
a serial – a magic island story. Pupils squeaked
past in their sandals every now and then, good
girls trusted to take important messages to Miss
Haslett. The odd teacher strode past too, several
frowning at me to emphasize my disgrace. But then
dear Mr Jeziewski, one of the art teachers, came
sloping along in his suede shoes. He raised
his eyebrows at me in mock horror, felt in his
pocket, put two squares of chocolate on the window
ledge beside me and winked before he went on
his way.

I smiled at Mr Jeziewski and savoured my
chocolate. I couldn't resist writing a similar scene
in my book
Love Lessons
, in which my main girl,
Prue, falls passionately in love with her art teacher,
Mr Raxbury. I promise I
didn't
fall for Mr
Jeziewski, who was very much a family man and
rather plain, with straight floppy hair and baggy
cords – but he was certainly my favourite teacher
when I was at Coombe.

Having Chris for a friend was an enormous help
in settling into secondary school life. She wasn't
quite as hopeless as me at PE, but pretty nearly,
so we puffed along the sports track together and
lurked at the very edge of the playing field,
pretending to be deep fielders.

We managed to sit next to each other in maths
lessons so they were almost enjoyable. We didn't
learn
anything, though our teacher, Miss
Rashbrook, was very sweet and gentle and did her
best to explain – over and over again. I could have
put poor Miss Rashbrook on a loop and played her
explanation twenty-four hours a day, it would have
made no difference whatsoever.

Chris and I pushed our desks close and tried to
do our working out together – but mostly we
chatted. We daydreamed about the future. We
decided we'd stay friends for ever. We even wanted
to live next door to each other after we got married.
We could see the row of neat suburban houses
outside the window and picked out two that were
ours. (I had private dreams of a more Bohemian
adult life, living romantically in a London garret
with an artist – but wondered if I could do that at
the weekends and settle down in suburbia Monday
to Friday.)

We don't live next door to each other now but
we
did
stay great friends all through school and
went on to technical college together. We used to
go dancing and I was there the evening Chris met
her future husband, Bruce. I was there at Chris's
wedding; I was there – in floods of tears – at Bruce's
funeral. We've always written and phoned and
remembered each other's birthdays. We've been on
several hilarious holidays, giggling together as if
we were still schoolgirls.

Chris lived in New Malden so she went
home for dinner, and at the end of school she
walked one way, I walked the other, but the rest of
the time we were inseparable. Chris soon asked me
home to tea and this became a regular habit.

I
loved
going to Chris's house. She had a
storybook family. Her dad, Fred Keeping, was a
plumber, a jolly little man who called me Buttercup.
He had a budgie that perched on his shoulder and
got fed titbits at meal times. Chris's mum, Hetty,
was a good cook: she made Victoria sponges and
jam tarts and old-fashioned latticed apple pies. We
always had a healthy first course of salad, with
home-grown tomatoes and cucumber and a little
bit of cheese and crisps. I had to fight not to be
greedy at the Keepings. I could have gone on
helping myself to extra treats for hours. Chris's
sister, Jan, was several years older and very clever
but she chatted to me as if she was my friend too.
We were all passionate about colouring. Chris and
Jan shared a magnificent sharpened set of Derwent
coloured pencils in seventy-two shades.

After Mrs Keeping had cleared the tea things
and taken the embroidered tablecloth off the green
chenille day cloth, we three girls sat up at the table
and coloured contentedly. We all had historical-costume
colouring books. Jan had the Elizabethans
and coloured in every jewel and gem on Queen
Elizabeth's attire exquisitely. Then she settled
down to all her schoolwork while Chris and I went
up stairs. We were supposed to be doing
our
homework up in Chris's bedroom, but we muddled
through it as quickly as possible.