The gradual deterioration of Dada's
health makes it necessary for him to move to a healthier climate, when he can
breathe less smog and more ozone.
Saying goodbye has
always been a dreadful experience because it is so often associated with Dada
being carried off to hospital in an ambulance and us not knowing if we will
ever have him back home again. Mama’s secrecy about Dada’s state of health
means constant speculation, and my own dread of hearing the worst makes it
impossible for me to ask any questions. Nobody seems to talk in our family,
unless it cannot be avoided, so I am growing up within walls of silence from
which there seem to be no escape.
Despite our new house only being a
few miles down the coast, it never occurs to me to try to keep in touch with
Hilary and my other class-mates. I haven’t even exchanged addresses with anyone.
It is as though I want to shield myself from the pain of separation by
forgetting that part of my life altogether. The only one I would still
recognize today is Hilary. My next meeting with her is to be about 15 years
later and very fleetingly under wildly differing circumstances.
But moving has its compensations,
too. We now live a short bus-ride away from the seaside resort we used to visit
on bank holidays when Dada was well enough to drive. It has a long sandy beach
and in summer a vaudeville company and other theatrical attractions entertain
the thousands of summer visitors who come year for year to enjoy the bracing
climate, which for most of them is their only chance to get away from the poky
industrial estates on which they spend the rest of their lives.
I very soon learn to
enjoy the amenities, frequenting the hot-dog stands with their piles of fried
onions and tubes of mustard. The bingo halls and souvenir shops rake in a fair
amount of my pocket-money during the first weeks after moving. The summer
season is drawing to an close. Life seems to be one long holiday until the
novelty wears off at the end of the autumn school break that has been
chosen for my school swap. Fortunately for me, my new grammar school is one of the best in the region.
Our new home town is a little more
select than the main holiday resort a few miles to the west. It has high
sand-dunes and fewer amusement arcades, and our house isn’t on the coast, but
nestles against the hills and is at the end of a long cul-de-sac. We don’t have
to mix with holiday-makers as there are no attractions to bring them near our
house, so we have all the advantages of living where the air is clean and
stimulating, without setting eyes on the visitors.
We live in the most beautiful house I
have ever lived in and I think I am happier there than anywhere else before. It
has a wonderful garden and the most gorgeous apple tree. It is October, and
when I sit on the garden swing and haul myself as high as possible, I can grab
at the crisp green fruit in passing. I can't believe that apples can taste so
good. I sit on that swing for hours biting into the apples and catching a
glimpse of the sea in the distance every time I reach the highest point of my
pendulum.
I have to get the bus to go to
school, so on the first day, in my smart new uniform with its dark blue skirt,
white shirt and royal blue blazer, I queue at the bus stop and make friends
with a girl who turns out to be in my class. Her name is Sally and she has
seven brothers and sisters, all younger than her. I resolve to become her
friend, but she tells me that she doesn’t have much time after school, because
she takes care of the little ones while her mother goes out to work. I don’t
know any working mothers, and the idea that Mama might go out of the house for
a few hours every day is completely strange to me. I don’t know whether to be
envious or sorry.
The school is newer, smarter and
bigger than my previous one. It has a beautiful library still housed in the
original Victorian building, and is run on the public school principle of
houses. I am put into the yellow house, and from then on practise a sort of
partisanship usually only to be found in the Houses of Parliament or at
boarding schools. All competitions, whether sport, music, art, or academic, are
registered according to these houses, and if you win a prize, it does credit
not only to you, but also to your house. This idea fires my imagination. Any
home-sickness is swept aside by new-found competitive zeal.
At the old school, my school work had
been sliding gradually into ignominy for the past year or so, mainly because I
had been avoiding as much homework as I can, and instead concentrated more on
my piano-playing, since I had been told that it will be useful when I am a
singer. It is a shock to my system when I realize that I will have to catch up
on a whole year's Latin, if I am to not to end up in academic oblivion.
I am assigned a dreary, brown-haired
old stick of a female who is to give me extra lessons every single day after
school in addition to the all the Latin lessons everyone is getting anyway,
until I catch up with the rest, who seem to me to be pretty fluent already. If
learning Latin is tedious, then learning extra Latin is devastating, especially
as she seems more interested in telling me about her bicycle tours round and
round Lake Windermere than Latin grammar.
The only other teacher on this level
of incompetence is the Geography master, a choleric old codger, obviously
marking time till his retirement, who makes us copy out page after page of our
text book at each lesson. His main preoccupation seems to be our hand-writing,
and I am not on good terms with him because I am left-handed, and according to
his code of ethics, left-handers have to be re-educated, if necessary through
thrashing. I resist his attempts to make a right-hander out of me, and I must
confess that I am learning everything I will ever need to know about sheep-farming
in Australia by writing out the text painstakingly and repeatedly until it is
flawless.
Remarkably, because I have never
lifted a finger to help at home (nor been asked to do so), I bask in the
generous praise of the domestic science teacher, a pert woman who wears
lipstick and scent to school and lets me sew skirts and blouses on her best sewing
machine instead of the usual red-and-white check apron which is the term task, but
which I understood to be my homework for the first week and brought back to the
second lesson ready to wear. My bread and butter pudding is judged the best in
the class. My first Christmas exams at the new school put me, to my utter
amazement, at the top of the class. Perhaps this isn't such a good school,
after all, if I can beat all the others to the post after only six weeks in
their system!
No comments:
Post a Comment