The last year at school is eventful, but at least things
have a kind of pattern. Leaving school is the end of an era for everyone and
more so if one knows that one is going to leave everything behind and virtually
start a new life somewhere else. Not that I could have put that into words at
that time.
Looking back, I realize that Dada and Mama may have talked
about it to one another, but they had never discussed it with me and somehow we
didn’t even think about where I would be living in ‘the big smoke’.
For the last couple of years I have bridged the summer gap
by working at one of the stores in the High Street. The previous summer I
worked at Woolworth’s, which was fairly hellish and too much like hard work,
but this year I have promoted myself to Marks & Spencer, which is known for
its humanitarian attitude to employees and also pays better. Some of my
classmates are waitressing. That is even more lucrative, but I’m sure I don’t
want to look at food all day, apart from my right arm still being a bit weak
from the fracture suffered ten years previously, or so I tell myself. M & S
is ideal and I really enjoy the work, selling fashion accessories, kids’ stuff
and even fruit, in those days an innovation and an exceedingly popular one
judging from the streams of customers we ply with peaches, plums and pears all
day long. I make good profits for M & S, as I persuade people to buy more
than they want to and very often overcharge or short-change them. Most of them
are holiday-makers and don’t notice. I never notice until it is too late, and
it would be too embarrassing to run after them and tell them. No wonder, then,
that it isn’t long before I am given special appraisal by the store manager. I
expect he has noticed the rise in profits since I joined the task force.
Sure enough, he has a proposal. Would I like to join the
staff as a trainee manager? I must admit that I am flattered and a little
tempted, because the money is good and the prospects predictable in a company
that can safely be said to keep half the population bibbed and tuckered. In the
end I decide, not without some regret, to stick to my original plan! After
boring everyone for years with tales about going on the stage, I can’t very
well back out now. And anyway, I am not going to give Miss Owens the chance to
say she told me so.
The real reason I am working is to save up to go on a summer
music course, which I have had to pay for up front and to which I am therefore
committed. Actually, I didn’t really have to pay for it, but everyone else I
know goes to work to pay for extras, so I want to be able to say that I do
that, too. Mama, hell bent as she is on my getting a good education, thinks
it’s a good idea for me to attend a workshop where I will only be one of a
crowd. In point of fact, I think she wants me to realize that I could do
something more useful than sing for a living. Dada is just happy to see me
happy, a state I cannot truly admit to having experienced very often and
without feelings of guilt.
Summer music camps are invariably in places one should avoid
like the plague. This one entails a train journey up to London followed by a
lengthy one out into the wilds of Kent. It takes all day.
I had seldom dreamt of going to a boarding school, which
actually only ever seemed desirable when reading one of those library books
that extolled the virtues of an education run by nuns, aged spinsters and other
single-minded females, during which the whole gamut of misdeeds is run through,
including pillow-fights, midnight wine parties, sneaking off to the next
available pub, fraternizing with boys from the local high school and winning
the cup at the local gymkhana, which is what Lavender, the hero of my once favourite
series of boarding school sagas, managed on a horse with a limp after swimming
across the Thames in her school uniform.
Now, to my horror, at the camp I am going to find out what
it is like sleeping in a dorm with about 30 others, fighting for the scrambled
egg at breakfast, hunting down one’s toothbrush, comb, socks and any other
possessions which have been borrowed by a neighbour, not to mention lying awake
for hours listening to the various noises a roomful of sleepers make and hardly
managing to get a wink of sleep oneself, not least because the bed is
dreadfully narrow and abominably hard.
How am I going to survive the week at all, let alone sing?
On the first day we are sorted into voice categories and I
am sent to the altos, which is just as well because my throat is already sore
after a night spent fishing my skimpy bedding off the floor every time the icy
wind blowing across my back wakes me up to find myself uncovered and shivery.
We are going to sing ‘The Rio Grande’ and something else,
the title of which I have long since forgotten. We spend hours learning the
notes, which is incredibly boring for me and the others who can sight-read. I
suppose we must have taken breaks and maybe even done other things, but my only
recollection is of the endless rehearsals.
By Wednesday the performance is taking shape and the scratch
orchestra has arrived for the final rehearsals. The vocal soloists have also
arrived. This makes me quite angry because I am used to being the soloist
whenever I sing anywhere, but I’m now in the throes of a cold and my voice is
weakening by the hour, so it’s just as well I’m only in the second row of the
chorus with relatively little expected of me.
I suppose we got through the concert. On the day I am
feverish and quite ill and only common courtesy makes me line up with the
others rather than going back to bed, such as it is.
Is this what being a singer is all about? I resolve never
again a) to sleep in a draughty dorm, b) to sing in a scratch chorus and c) to
go to another summer camp.
Three weeks later, now fortunately recovered from what
turned out to be a thoroughly nasty bout of flu, I am once again on the train
travelling south, and this time it’s not just for fun.
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