Small Island (8 page)

Miss Morgan was not an Englishwoman as the other teachers were, her country of origin was Wales – a corner in Britain famous for its coal, its capital city Cardiff, and for being where clouds tip excess rain before moving on to the pastures of England. While the five teachers seated themselves delicately upon the chairs provided on the stage, the principal paced stately to the piano and lowered her substantial backside on to the shaky stool. For a brief moment she paused as if in prayer – her hands splayed chord-shaped over the keys – before we new girls were ordered, by some imperceptible yet demanding movement of her eyebrow, to stand. She began to play, thumping out the chords to the hymn ‘Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise’. While thrashing and beating the instrument into a tune, her hair, which had sat as neat as if cast in resin, gradually began to give up one lock. The rogue hair shook looser with every note until the passion of her playing let it fall free over her forehead. ‘Most blessed, most glorious, the ancient of days’. With one mighty voice we new girls sang along, fired by the emotion of her performance and the vigorous quivering of the fallen lock. ‘Almighty, victorious, thy great name we praise’.

Michael was holding his closed hand out to me. This fully grown man with stubble hair piercing the skin of his chin was grinning on me as a schoolboy would. Opening his hand he revealed, resting in his palm, an ink-black scorpion, its tail erect and curled. I wanted to warn him of the danger of its murderous sting, but no words would come. I moved to strike the insect from his palm but my arm was being pulled away. Someone had my wrist clasped in their hand as tight as vine round a tree.

I had never had such a rude awakening. The cover on my bed was pulled back. I could not for a moment remember where I had laid my head to sleep. I was revealed half naked on the mattress – my nightdress rolled and twisted at my waist with the movement of my dreams. I was being pulled so hard I could do nothing but follow. My feet fumbled for solid floor as I tugged at my nightdress to hide my shame. And before I was entirely convinced I was no longer dreaming I found myself running for my life. My captor was before me still squeezing on to my wrist, she turning to look on me only to say, ‘Hurry nah.’ Other girls were running alongside us. The doors they hurtled through slammed behind them like gunshot. The slapping of our bare feet echoed on the stone floor of every long corridor we ran down, before we were funnelled to one single door where I was pushed and jostled through the hole by other girls, whose manner insisted they should get there before me. The room was so bright with sunlight that at first I could not see. But then I observed overhead shower pipes and felt wetness under my feet. My captor released my wrist now and in one deft movement pulled her nightdress over her head and stood before me as naked as Eve. She gestured for me to copy her but became exasperated, sighing and tutting as she watched me untying the buttons and bows that modesty had stitched at the neck of my nightclothes.

‘Come, hurry,’ the girl said, slapping my useless hands out of the way and fumbling at my buttons. She began to lift my nightdress but I held it tight, not wanting to be naked in front of so many strangers. She hit at my hands again. So I hit hers and for a second she stopped, startled, before hitting mine so hard I gave up the fight. And I stood, with all the other girls, exposed – clutching my elbows to me, trying to hide my breasts, between my legs, my backside, my unattractive knees. Then the water came on, pouring down on us in a rain of icy water. Every girl screamed. One deafening sound that drowned all others. Mouths open so wide I could see deep into pink throats, as girls with tendons that stood out on their necks like rope yelled with the force of beasts. And as I looked on my captor – naked, shivering, screaming, a glistening waterfall running down her black skin, past nipples that stood as erect as bullets – I detected a gleam of pure abandon on her face. So I closed my eyes, opened my mouth and let my lungs give forth the most savage ferocious cry my body had ever produced. The blessed relief of this noise cleansed like a silent prayer. I screamed until I became aware that the water was no longer flowing, the room was calm and I was gently being shaken by my captor, who was saying softly, ‘You can stop now.’

It was Celia Langley who pulled me from my bed that first morning. She believed it was the duty of a third-year pupil such as she to teach an untrained new girl (such as I) about the necessity of arriving early for the morning shower. The first out of the shower, dressed and smelling of sweet-scented soap would, on arriving for breakfast in the dining room, get a cup of chocolate that was still hot and drinkable. If you were second, third, or a deliberately dawdling fourth, then the chocolate would not only be cold but have a skin on it so thick it could be stitched into a hat. When Celia Langley took hold of my wrist that first morning – I the new girl in a bed next to hers – she placed me not only in the shower but firmly under her wing.

Celia came to my bed every evening after assembly, roll-call and prayers. Smelling of jasmine, she sat close beside me in the hour before the electric lights were extinguished. With everything Celia said, even if only telling me the time of day or commenting on the heat, she leaned with her lips close to my ear to whisper as if disclosing a hush-hush truth. These breathy tête-à-têtes were always accompanied by the gentle clatter of her knitting needles as she fashioned socks for men who, like Michael, were travelling to England to fight in the war. In those dusky evenings Celia, being a year older than I, coached me in what to expect from my lectures.

‘Geography will be taught by Miss Wilkinson,’ she told me. ‘She will try to tell you of glaciation or something of this nature. But if you are to mention, even if only in passing, the Pennine Hills – and only the Pennines will do this – her eyes will focus somewhere only she can see and instead of the geography lesson she will tell tales of her childhood in Yorkshire. While these tales are not particularly interesting they do allow you to look out the window on the trees.’

Celia whispered that Oliver Cromwell had a large ugly wart on his face when she found me struggling with a composition on this man’s accomplishments. Placing a delicate hand on my shoulder she informed me that Miss Newman who taught history held a theory that Mr Cromwell’s wart was a conspicuous sign that he had been sent by the devil to destroy the English monarchy. Mention this wart, Celia hushed, and Miss Newman, who believed coloured girls had a better understanding of these sorts of things, being less civilised and closer to nature, would write in my margins that I was astute. And all girls classified as astute were given the honour of entertaining everyone at evening assembly with a recitation.

I could not choose between Henry V’s speech before the battle of Agincourt or Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. Both allowed for rousing dramatic interpretation. The daffodils, however, Celia thought too simple – no girl at the college would be unable to recite that.

‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.’ It was Celia who instructed me to physically intimate the expressions referred to in the text – to stiffen the sinew and summon up the blood by raising my shoulders while holding my head aloft, so my chin could rise with the dignity of the oration, and to end with a genteel cry, but not too loud, for Harry, England and St George.

I was the talk of the college for several weeks. And when I thought my spirits could go no higher, my fairy cakes – with their yellow cream and spongy wings – were declared by the domestic-science teacher, Miss Plumtree, to be the best outside the tea-shops of southern England.

There were sixty pupils in the first class I had to teach. Sixty children fidgeting like vermin behind rows of wooden desks. Sixty nappy-headed, runny-nosed, foul-smelling ragamuffins. Sixty black faces. Some staring on me, gaping as idiots do. Some looking out of the window. Some talking as freely as if resting under a lemon tree.

I was used to children from good homes. In Mr and Mrs Ryder’s school wealthy, fair-skinned and high-class children sat ruly waiting for my instruction before lowering their heads to complete the task satisfactorily. In that school no child ever wiped their running nose across their sleeve before raising their hand high into the air and waving it around like semaphore. No child would chant, ‘Miss Roberts, Miss Roberts’, over and over until I could not recognise my own name. And no child ever subtracted five from ten and made the answer fifty-one.

Job himself would have wept genuine tears trying to get this rabble to face the board at once and Solomon would have scratched his head trying to understand what the wretched boy Percival Brown did with all the pencils. This light-skinned, green-eyed boy had looked the most trustworthy pupil for the task of handing one pencil to each member of the class. Half-way round the room he came to me saying the pencils had run out.

‘How they run out? I gave you sixty pencils,’ I queried him. ‘Did anyone get more than one pencil?’ I enquired of the class. Every one of those senseless children was suddenly attentive enough to shake their heads. ‘What you do with the pencils?’ I asked Percival Brown again. And this thieving boy just looked on me with a rascal’s eye and shrugged. I searched in his pockets, I went through his desk, while this class of seven-year-old ruffians peered at me and silently laughed.

And all through this mockery I was closely observed by Miss Cleghorn, who sat at the back of the class, her glasses on the tip of her nose, writing a report marked: ‘Progress and suitability of trainee teachers’. As every one of my classes ended – the herd of children stampeding to their play – she would approach me. Cocking her head to one side and looking to her notebook as if reading she would say, ‘Miss Roberts, you must try to maintain better discipline among your pupils.’ Or: ‘You are, I am afraid, Miss Roberts, letting these children get the better of you.’ Or: ‘You cannot expect a child to respect and obey a teacher who cannot maintain order within the classroom.’ While I, nodding impotently, mumbled that I would undertake to improve my performance.

I hungered to make those children regard me with as high an opinion as I had for the principal and tutors at my college. Those white women whose superiority encircled them like an aureole, could quieten any raucous gathering by just placing a finger to a lip. Their formal elocution, their eminent intelligence, their imperial demeanour demanded and received obedience from all who beheld them. As I prepared my lessons ready for the next day I resolved to summon every tissue of purpose within me to command that class to look on me with respect.

But in the morning their grubby little faces would file past me. Percival Brown grinning and picking at a scab on his elbow before handing me a browning star apple as a gift. Those sixty black children started the day by looking on me eagerly as we put our hands together ready to pray. But then as we lifted our heads after the devotion their fickle minds would start wandering again, roaming the classroom, drifting round the yard, their gazes fixed upon anywhere but me and the lesson I was about to give.

* * *

Celia waited to greet me after teaching practice one afternoon. Standing pretty by the gate of the school in a pale blue and yellow dress, her feet pressed together elegantly, she looked like a flower growing out of the dirt. I was so delighted to look on a familiar face at that school for scoundrels I had grown to despise that I refused to notice the trail of a tear, which ran through the dust on her cheek and collected in the cup of her Cupid’s bow. And she smiled brightly. I had no reason to think she was anything but cheerful as she said eagerly, ‘The men of the RAF are parading in the town. They will be leaving for England soon – we must wave them goodbye.’

It was on a weekend stroll, after I had been at the college for only a few weeks, that Celia and I had come across a place where, if we climbed to the first branches of a citrus tree, we could see over the barracks on the men who were being trained to go to war. At first all we heard were the bellowed commands that soared so loud into the air they were almost visible – by the left . . . quick march . . . attention . . . stand at ease. It was Celia’s notion to lift our skirts and scale the tree. She was hoping to discover, if only by a glimpse, how these instructions were enacted. Our view was from further away than the yelled commands had implied, yet we could clearly see a pattern of parading men manoeuvring as balletic as birds. And even at that distance it was apparent to us that those brave fighting men carried wooden broomsticks over their shoulders instead of guns.

After that, I decided to join in Celia’s war effort by starting to knit the only thing my talent would allow – long plain strips (which were always useful) – while Celia, tiring of socks, added hats to her repertoire. We tipped as much money as we safely could into the collecting tins that sat at the door to the dining hall. A picture, cut from the
Daily Gleaner
, of the fighter planes our money had helped to buy was pinned to the noticeboard. And every time Celia and I passed we pointed to the part – sometimes a wheel, sometimes a window – we decided our coins had purchased.

Marching in disciplined rows through the streets that afternoon, these men, dressed entirely in thick blue cloth, looked as uniform and steely as machinery. On their heads every one of them wore a strange triangular hat that was tipped at an impossible angle. I followed Celia as she nudged and poked her way through people come to stare. Women mostly, who pushed and jostled us back. Wives, mothers, sisters, aunts lining the street. Some were there just to see the spectacle, while others strained anxiously for a glimpse of a man they loved. But close to this fighting machine was merely composed of line after line of familiar strangers. Fresh young boys who had only just stopped larking in trees. Men with skin as coarse as tanned leather, whose hands were accustomed to breaking soil. Big-bellied men who would miss their plantain and bammy. Straight-backed men whose shoes would shine even through battle. It seemed all the dashing, daring and some of the daft of the island walked there before me.