Ten of the Best (6 page)

When I had finished the Principal gave me one of her long, disappointed stares. ‘It seems that you can’t be trusted,’ she said in a stony voice. ‘I’m very disappointed in you. Obviously you can’t go back to the dormitory. The other girls need their sleep, even if you don’t. You’ll have to sleep in the sanatorium, and you’ll stay there until we decide what to do with you.’

My heart sank. But at least I wasn’t being expelled. Yet.

That night I carried my clothes and belongings along to the sanatorium. I spent seven nights alone in the long dreary room where white sheets covered the empty beds, and a horrible smell lingered round the huge medicine cabinet. It was so bleak and white and dreadful my brain felt numb and I couldn’t even think of any stories.

At the end of the week something happened. A small girl called Mary-Jane Patterson, caught chicken-pox. She had to be isolated, so I was allowed to leave the sanatorium. I wasn’t to go back to my dormitory, however. This time I had to sleep in the linen room. It was a tiny room right at the back of the building. I’m sure it was haunted. Every night I would get a cold tingle down my spine and feel someone was in the room, watching me. Sleeping in that tiny room was worse than anything.

At last I was allowed back to the dormitory. I had learned my lesson, so they thought. And so I thought. But after a while the whispers started up again.

‘Tell us a nory, Jenny!’ ‘Go on!’ ‘Please!’ ‘I’ll give you my sweet ration!’ ‘You can have all my sequins!’ ‘Please tell us a nory!’

‘Better not,’ whispered my wise friend, Barbara. ‘This time you really will be expelled.’

But I couldn’t help myself. I got out all the bits and pieces I need for the best nory I would ever tell: combs, brushes, boxes, tins, sweet papers, rubber bands and a torch. This nory would be
son et lumiere
– sound and light. It began in the same way as the other nories, with the little old lady in her lonely old house, and it ended with her climbing up the chimney in order to escape the monster that had burst into her house; a monster with flashing eyes and a terrible growl.

The noise I made must have been considerable, but no one caught me. No one crept up, listened then flung open the door. This time I had got away with it. I could hardly believe it.

In the morning, after the bell had woken us up, Matron did her rounds, checking that we were awake and getting dressed. When she came to our dormitory she stood and stared at my face for what seemed like an age, and then she said, ‘You were talking after lights out, weren’t you?’

I could hardly confess. And yet did I dare to lie? How did she know? I became aware that the other girls were staring at me. Some looked scared, others surprised. Barbara looked slightly anxious.

‘Don’t bother to lie,’ said Matron with a nasty smile. ‘It’s written all over your face.’

What did she mean?

She marched me over to the mirror. I looked at my reflection. My face was covered in spots.

‘But…’ I said faintly. ‘They’re just spots – it doesn’t mean that I talked after lights out.’

‘Children who break the rules always get their comeuppance,’ said Polar Eyes. ‘Off to the sanatorium with you. You’ve got chicken pox.’

I should have guessed. Polar Eyes was a witch!

I spent a miserable three weeks in that awful, white, smelly room. Mary-Jane had recovered and moved out, so I was all alone. No one was allowed to visit me and I could only get my ‘fresh air’ while everyone else was in lessons. All contact was forbidden. Sometimes, Barbara would come round to the courtyard under my window and wave. But the area was out of bounds and she didn’t dare stay long enough for a chat.

When I was finally out of quarantine I was allowed back to the dormitory, and to all my friends. They had been starved of stories for so long they were desperate for a nory, ‘a really scary one,’ said Mary.

I was ready for them. I hadn’t been idle during those terrible weeks of confinement. ‘I’ve written a play,’ I said, and handed out sheets of paper. ‘If you all learn your parts we could do the play on the last night of term. It would be official, so we wouldn’t be breaking the rules.’

It worked. Nearly every night for the rest of the term, the girls in my dormitory burrowed down their beds with their torches and learned their lines. We got permission to do the play on the last night of term and it was a great success. Barbara had the leading role and I directed and did all the sound effects.

I can’t say I
never
told another nory, because that wouldn’t be true. But I waited until I was in a different dormitory. It was at the top of a very creaky staircase and this time I could hear Polar Eyes approaching long before she reached the door. I was always ready for her, with eyes tight shut and not a single sound effect in sight.

BERNARD ASHLEY was a headteacher for many years before becoming a full-time writer. His first novel
The Trouble With Donovan Croft
won the Children’s Rights Workshop Other Award. His novel
Dodgem
, which he serialised for television, won the Royal Television Society Award for best children’s programme. His novels for older children include
Tiger Without Teeth, Johnnie’s Blitz
and
Little Soldier
and for younger children
Dinner Ladies Don’t Count
and
King Rat
.

T
here was only one free place in the classroom. It was at the front, one half of a double desk, with its own lift-up lid but a shared hinged seat. If one of us stood up to answer a question – and in those days you had to stand up to speak to the teacher – the other had to stand as well.

‘Ashley, sit there.’

Ashley
! I’d never been Ashley’ in London. In London I was ‘Bernard,’ or ‘Bernard Ashley’ if I was up to mischief But never ‘Ashley’.

It was the first day of the new evacuation, and we were in Preston, Lancashire – my mother, my younger brother, Michael, and me – because she hadn’t let us go off to be evacuated with the school. In the first ‘blitz’ we’d gone to Hertfordshire but had come home when things quietened down. Now Mrs Gritton, a neighbour who was already evacuated to Preston, sent back addresses of others who would take people in. It was a paying business, seaside landlady money in a small Preston house not far from the abattoir.

Our father later said it was the worst eight minutes of his life, the incident that sent us away. He was a London fireman called out on the fire appliance to a ‘shout’ at the top end of Flaxton Road, where a big bomb had dropped. And this was where we lived, and where we were, home from school, at the time. But it wasn’t us who ‘caught a packet’, our family good fortune was someone else’s tragedy. When the fire engine turned the final corner Dad saw that we were OK, and they had to go further up Flaxton Road to the devastation; number 127 was still standing, and we were safe in our Anderson air raid shelter in the back garden. But that was it! Another ‘blitz’ had started, and we were packed off out of London on the first available train.

‘Ashley, sit there.’ The first morning in an alien school. From that moment in Preston I’ve known what it feels like to stand in front of a class of kids looking at someone as if they’ve come from Mars. I know something of what it must feel like to be Rwandan or Vietnamese or Somalian in Britain. But in my day evacuees were from London and Londoners were Cockneys, and Cockneys were nothing but thieving toe-rags. Shop doorways sometimes said it:
No evacuees
– the way shops today say
Only two school kids at once.
All of which amounted to a first, unpleasant impression – although I later made good friends and the stereotypes on both sides gave way to truth.

Anyway, I sat there – next to the prettiest girl I’d seen, after my London sweetheart Maureen Vickery. And it could have been the emotion of being wrenched away from my life so far, from my bike and my comic collection and my books and toys – and Maureen Vickery – but I fell immediately in love. Her name was Clare: blonde, serious, with a pretty nose, a beautiful mouth and teeth like a Hollywood film star. And aloof She dead set her shoulder against me and got on with her work.

It was a big class. Forties and fifties were common class sizes anyway, anywhere, but in wartime they were bigger still. Even the male teachers too old for ‘active’ service in the army, navy or air force were called up for other war service, which is why my father was a London fireman. Also, many young female teachers went into the ATS, the WRAF and the WRENs (female army, air force and navy personnel), so those teachers who were left had big classes which were often ruled by fear of the cane, the ruler and the slipper.

Miss Gibbs, my new Preston teacher, was strict like that. As well as my own home, what I suddenly missed about London was the gentle kindness of Mrs Nunn, my teacher in south London. Even she wasn’t above a knuckle rap with a ruler – you had to make a fist and take it – but it was never thin edge on, and she never sent anyone to the head for the sort of brutal caning he could dish out. If you were in Mrs Nunn’s class you were protected from the harsh world of school by someone rather like a ‘firm but fair’ grandmother.

Doh-ray-me-fah-soh-lah-te-doh.
That was singing in Preston. In London we sang
songs
–
Pedro the Fisherman
who was always whistling, and
The Lincolnshire Poacher
– tunes going with a cheerful, uplifting beat. But in Lancashire a ruler rapped the special blackboard on which the Tonic Sol-Fa was painted, and you had to hit the note the ruler commanded as Miss Gibbs jumped it up and down. She would suddenly point at you and command, ‘Fah!’ I didn’t know
Fah
from a fish supper – and a vocal shot in the dark always missed the musical mark and got a twist of disdain from her. This was
music
? To them it was, and the local kids had had years of hitting the right notes, which only showed how London brats had no proper education.

But the crucial examination for a new kid happens in the playground.

‘Where you from?’

‘What team?’

‘Good at ‘“Kingy”?’

‘Can you fight?’

‘Where’s your dad?’

‘You seen a bomb?’

I had seen a bomb, lots of them, or the effects they had – and saying so led to my first big mistake. A gang of boys told me about a bomb that had fallen in Preston town centre and cracked a paving slab – a small incendiary bomb, the sort dropped to start fires. And I scorned it.
‘Cracked the pavement?’
A boy who had seen a whole street devastated by a land mine, who had a camp on a bombed site, who’d seen the fires of the burning London docks changing the sky to Hell – I had to sneer at a cracked pavement.

And so they hated me. Which was a lesson to learn – more valuable than any of Miss Gibbs’, or even Mrs Nunn’s – never make someone else’s experience seem inferior.

The beautiful Clare wasn’t in on this – and since boys and girls did different things in school as well as in the playground, she wasn’t in on my punishment, either. Even in Elementary Schools the sexes were separated for certain lessons like Needlework and Woodwork. In Lancashire the correct uses of saw and chisel were taught, and you stood to attention on your side of the bench to receive instruction and then followed it a step at a time. Discipline was on the fierce side of strict with all those sharp tools around; it was military, frightening, a long way from having a chat while you worked thin wicker round thicker wicker in London, making baskets for Christmas presents.

The morning after the bomb sneer, the woodwork teacher, an older man too old to ‘serve’, had to suddenly leave the room – probably suffering from a weak bladder.

‘Tools… down! You, Coe, to the front.’

Colin Coe, one of the bomb-cracked pavement boys, went out to the front, cautiously because it could have been for anything. He might have planed when he should have rasped and a clip round the ear could be waiting for him.

‘Stand at the front, lad. You boys, you touch nothin’ an’ you say nothin’. While you, Coe,’ – he drew out the name on a long ‘oh’ sound – ‘you report t’me any boy who moves or speaks while I’m out.’

Coe looked round the room with an eager face. He surely would! The man went out and the class held a rigid parade ground stillness and silence. We stood to attention measuring our breaths in case they made our cheeks move. Nobody twitched a muscle – in London somebody would have done a modest blow-off It was the perfection of a silent tribute, because no joker dared voice his wonder about what the man had gone out for.
Two minutes an’ it’s number one, five minutes an’ he’s doing number two, ten minutes an’ he’s doing Miss Gibbs!
That would have been London – but this was Lancashire splendour, for those who admire the power of fear.

After a bit the man came back. We all looked at his flies, of course.

‘Coe…’ Long drawn out again. ‘Did any lad move or speak?’

‘Yes sir.’

It was a lie. We could have been our own toy soldiers lined up.

‘Who?’ The man’s old tortoise eyes flicked around the room.

‘Ashley, sir.’

Now a few muscles moved, small smiles at the benches. And Ashley’s inside turned over with a great squirt of fear.

‘Coom out, Ashley.’

‘I didn’t, sir,’ I started protesting as I walked out to the front.

‘So, ye’ve brought your London ways with you, have you, lad? Don’t they know down south the meaning of
meaning
?’

With a shake starting to come on me I watched him reach for his cane, a straight stick without the curved handle, which sat along an inside edge on his teacher’s bench. He picked it up and bent it, put a flex into it.

‘I never, sir, honest, I never said anything…’ My voice was on an upward curve through
soh
to top
doh.

‘When we say
don’t talk
in Lancashire we mean
don’t talk.
What do we mean?’

‘But I never—’

‘What do we mean?’
He brought the cane down on his bench with a crack like a firing squad.

‘Don’t talk, sir.’

‘Then you’ll have to learn that, Ashley. Up!’

He poked my right hand with the cane. I held it up, and out, the way boys did in London. I’d never had it before, but like every boy and girl in every school I knew the procedure.

Crack! The cane came down across my palm in a swift whistling strike. Yelp! It hurt like hell and the pain seared in like a poker burn. But I hadn’t flinched back from taking it and I didn’t snatch my hand away to comfort it between my legs. I kept it there for the next while my heart thudded scared blood. And, I don’t know, but he might have been impressed by that – because he dismissed me. No more. Just the one.

‘That’s a warning, Ashley, that we mean what we mean in this part of the world.’

My hand burned on through the day. But what brought the tears in the end – when I saw my brother Michael in the playground – was self pity and outrage at the attack on me.

But wouldn’t Clare be impressed? I’d had the cane, I was one of the bad boys. And a martyr – wouldn’t she feel sorry for me, the way girls in London sometimes wept for a boy who’d been punished? I hoped someone in the class might say what had happened in Woodwork, but they didn’t so I tried to keep my hand open on the desk so that she could see the weal. But she took no notice, and I had to get through the rest of the day just feeling abused – and thanking God we didn’t have a handwriting lesson because holding a pen gave me the shakes.

Even more than ever I wanted something to do with Clare. I can’t remember that I dreamt about her, but I know I thought about her a lot.. I did want some personal contact with my pretty desk partner, but she wanted none. In London, Kiss-Chase was a soft and sexy alternative to ‘Kingy’ but they didn’t seem to play it up here. So I was reduced to secondary contacts. Like, when we were sharing a hymn book, me holding one half of the book, Clare holding the other, instead of keeping it upright I would press it down flat and away from us. She didn’t want it at that angle and she’d bring it back up again from her side: a silent, hymn singing tussle. But I could feel her force, through the book. It was as pathetic as that! Or if I went up and down holding the bench seat, she had to do it, too.

My father kept in touch from London. He wrote a letter every week – and sent an instalment of a Robin Hood story printed in a paperback magazine, two columns of small print to the page, stapled with a paper cover.

They became important to me – contact with my father in London and stories that told of a hero exiled from his own home by a wicked oppressor, the Sheriff of Nottingham; who was just like me, driven from London by the evil Adolf Hitler. Stories do this. They give us comfort and strength from knowing that we’re not the only ones ever to have been in our situation. It’s reassurance and encouragement, because although not all fiction ends happily, it often holds hope.

As the weeks went by things got better at school – with the boys. Perhaps it was the caning, or my being good at ‘Kingy’, the playground game of the moment. This was a sort of ball ‘it’ and I was good at it; not so much at the throwing but at the dodging of the hard ball. I was often the last to be cornered with everyone else on the hunt. We had a rag or handkerchief wrapped round our right fists and we could defend ourselves – punch away the ball – with it; which was small, a tennis ball ‘core’ most often, just the perished black rubber inside. I got into the best ‘Kingy’ game and that carried a certain status.

Also, the kids on the estate where I lived all walked to school at the same time (no ‘school runs’ in cars then), so there were friends to be made, which happens once people are seen as people and not labelled by race, religion or some geographical divide. Lennie Bamber was a good mate. He lived across the road from me in a house that backed on to the railway line, where we’d sit on top of the sleepers that were his back fence and watch the trains go by; some of them hospital trains filled with wounded troops on stretchers.

Meanwhile in London my father was injured. It was nothing too serious, a wrenched knee where he’d slipped fighting an oil fire in the docks. But it meant that he couldn’t be an active fireman until the swelling went down and he could get full movement back into the leg. So he came to Preston on leave, with orders to report to the local hospital for physiotherapy. It didn’t stop him from taking us to a local fair and going on the Moon Ride, nor to Blackpool on a day trip and riding the Big Dipper, Dad sitting up at the front with his walking stick. His sick leave was a sort of wartime holiday for us, although school was still on and I was adapting to Lancashire teaching. The disappointment was that Clare didn’t seem to be getting any warmer towards me.

Sadly, all holidays come to an end. Soldiers on leave go back to their units, airmen and women to their airfields, and sailors to their ships. And, with Dad’s knee better, he had to go back to London to face the air raids again. Firemen, policemen, air raid wardens and civil defence, they all had to be out under the bombs while the others were in their shelters, and we knew the dangers of that. The death rate among fire fighters was horrendous – Churchill’s ‘heroes with blackened faces’. Next time for Dad it might not be a wrenched knee but a wall falling on him, or a floor collapsing, or being blown to flesh and bone by a direct hit.