The teachers were nearly all nuns and were all characters. There was Sister Borromeo, who taught us history, a long lean ascetic lady, who, whenever she wrote on the blackboard, put a sideways cross over one of the words. This puzzled me for a long time and one day I summoned up the courage to ask her why she did it. ‘To remind me that all my work is done for God,’ she replied. I never worked out whether that was profound, or profoundly dotty.
Sister Borromeo was a nervous lady and it was due to her that I transferred my fear of bombing raids to a fear of lightning. I remember one particular history lesson, which was disturbed by ferocious claps of thunder. I had been told that thunderstorms were not dangerous and was quite prepared to shrug them off, until I noticed that after every clap of thunder Sister Borromeo would anxiously cross herself and whisper, ‘I thought I saw lightning.’
At the convent I was among the group apart, known as the ‘Non-Catholics’. We were excluded from interesting-looking occasions, when incense was burned and rosaries were said. From time to time, a very important-looking figure came to visit the school. He wore a long, purple gown and all the way down it at the front, in a sort of semi-circle over his large protuberant stomach, were tiny little round purple buttons, covered with the fabric of his robe. I used to stare at him, trying to count his buttons, but he never stayed still long enough for me to get all the way from top to bottom. I never knew who he was, though he was clearly some dignitary in the Roman Catholic hierarchy and we all had to call him ‘Monsignor’. The Catholic girls were allowed to kiss his ring, but we were supposed just to curtsy to him.
But even as a non-Catholic, I did learn to recite the Hail Mary, which was said in chorus several times a day. Or at least I thought I did. No-one ever taught it so I just picked it up, but for years I thought it went, ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you, blessed art thou swimming and blessed is the fruit of thy, whom Jesus.’ It was only when I thought about this, much, much later, that I realised that could not have been right.
I was never quite sure how to take the nuns. I had never met any before. We all called them ‘Sister’ and some of the Catholic girls bobbed to them as though they were royalty. But I couldn’t help noticing how oddly they behaved. Sister Dominic was a scatty and very untidy nun whose habit was always dirty and torn, with the tears held together with huge tacking stitches. But she had a heart of gold. She used to bring in to class, as prizes for mental arithmetic tests, pieces of cake of dubious origin, which emerged from the folds of her none-too-clean habit and which certainly should have had a health warning attached. We gobbled them up, both because we were greedy and because we didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Sister Dominic claimed to be lame and was allowed to travel from the convent to the school and back in a wheelchair, a journey of about 200 yards over a rough, stony track. Presumably her sister nuns pushed her to school, but we girls vied for the privilege of pushing her back.
Three or four of us would seize the handle of the wheelchair and run as fast as we could, bashing the poor lady and her wheelchair over the stones in what must have been a bone-breaking journey. She seemed to enjoy it though, and when, as regularly happened, a wheel flew off the chair, she would leap out, take off her shoe, and using it as a hammer, bash the wheel back on. It was this sprightly readiness to leap out which made us all wonder just how lame she really was.
Sister Cecilia was quite a different cup of tea. She terrified me. She was an exceptionally neat nun; her habit was always clean and beautifully pressed but her character matched her appearance and she was extremely severe. She taught art, and her lessons should have been pleasant occasions, but I was not very artistic and she was very sarcastic. My fear of art came to a head one Christmas when she decided we would all make crackers. I was unable to grasp that you had to get the crepe paper one way round and not the other. I kept getting it wrong and when all the other children had a box of lovely crackers to show for their pains, I had just a few sticky, mangled messes because I had had to keep taking mine to bits. I stayed awake many nights worrying about those crackers, and to this day the sight of a certain kind of shiny string, which is still sold at Christmas, the kind we had been given to tie up those crackers, gives me the shudders.
In spite of Sister Cecilia, this was a happy period for me as a child, once the bombing had stopped. Life was no great effort. I was one of the brighter children at the school and had plenty of friends. We went on Saturday mornings to the children’s picture show at the Roxy cinema, where some weeks Flash Gordon and his gang got into the most nerve-racking adventures, and sometimes, for the girls, we had Carmen Miranda and her fantastic fruit-covered hats. We marvelled at the cinema organ, which came up out of the floor changing from livid pink to vivid green as the mood of the music altered. My uncle played the piano for the silent films in Redcar, so he told us all about mood music and the difficulty of keeping the music in time with the pictures. We sometimes went down to the sea at Walney Island, though it was a dangerous place in those late wartime days, as much of the beach was mined and enclosed with barbed wire and there were frightening notices, saying ‘Danger of Death’.
At the weekends the whole family went walking in the Lake District, practically deserted and quite unlike the crowded tourist area it later became. We stayed for holidays at the Crown Hotel in Coniston, and watched the Victorian steamboat, ‘The Lady of the Lake’, rotting away quietly on Coniston Water and much to my satisfaction I climbed Coniston Old Man on my tenth birthday.
However in 1947, when I was twelve, my father took a post in the Drawing Office at
Stanton Ironworks in Ilkeston, on the border of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, and very sadly on my part, we left the Lakes and the sea and the north of England and my little convent school for the Midlands.
2
The nuns at that convent school must have been better at teaching than I have allowed. At the age of twelve, without too much difficulty, I was accepted at Nottingham Girls’ High School, one of the Girls’ Public Day School Trust group of schools and then the best girls’ day school in the area. At the beginning, this was the only thing that worked out well about the move to the Midlands. There was no place for my brother, then fifteen, at Nottingham High School, the much older and rather grander boys’ school, neighbour of the girls’ school in Arboretum Street. He had to go to Ilkeston Grammar School, which was considerably less academically distinguished. As he was very clever, much more so than I, that was a disappointment to my mother, though eventually he did very well there.
We found ourselves living in a house which belonged to Stanton Ironworks, a small Edwardian semi in Longfield Lane, on top of a hill just outside Ilkeston, which overlooked the valley in which the Ironworks lay. The view was the best thing about it; you couldn’t quite see the works from the house, but when the wind was in a certain direction, you could smell the sulphurous odour of the coke ovens, or ‘Duckhams’ as they were called, after the manufacturer, Messrs Woodall-Duckhams. ‘Duckhams is strong today,’ people would remark, in the same way as you might say ‘Turned out wet again,’ in other parts of the country. The house itself was gloomy and old-fashioned. I remember coming home from school on my first day and finding my mother close to tears after a day spent scrubbing the red-tiled floor of the kitchen. She had made no headway at all, because it was damp. As well as the damp tiled floor, that room had a black iron stove in the fireplace, with little baking ovens, and in the scullery there was a low stone sink with an open drain beneath it. It was the authentic version of what the kitchen designers try to reproduce nowadays, and it was extremely uncomfortable. The milkman brought the milk in a can, and poured it out into a jug, which we had to have ready for him. There was no refrigerator. To my mother, who had lost her new suburban house in London, with all the family capital tied up in it, to the controlled tenant, it was all deeply unsatisfactory. But there was no chance whatsoever in the circumstances of their buying anything else, so she had to put up with it.