Too Marvellous for Words Read online

  To Jonah and Bretch,

  in affectionate memory

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  The Story of Felixstowe College

  1 The Young Ladies of Felixstowe College

  2 The Prospectus

  3 The Smorgasbord

  4 The School Train

  5 First Night in the Dorm

  6 Inshallah

  7 The Sex Maniac

  8 A Midnight Feast

  9 Filthy Rows

  10 Weird and Wonderful Rules

  11 Mad Teachers

  12 School Dinners

  13 Lessons

  14 Moral Worth

  15 Jonah

  16 Come to Sunny Felixstowe

  17 The Phantom Clothes Strewer

  18 Filthy Bates

  19 Captain of the Seconds

  20 Citizen Kittens

  21 The Teenage Genius

  22 Sex and Kirbigrips and Rock ’n’ Roll

  23 Help

  24 The Bicycle Thieves

  25 The Last Hurrah

  26 The Great Fire

  27 Valete

  28 Old Girls

  29 News of Old Girls

  School Hymn

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  When I tell people I went to boarding school, they always ask two questions. Was it just like Malory Towers? And did you have midnight feasts?

  As it happens, I can answer both these questions and more, loads more, because I remember so clearly everything that happened to me at Felixstowe College in the early 1960s, when the world was quite different from how it is now. When school was a place of weird and wonderful rules and happenings that seemed perfectly normal at the time: when the headmistress and the Head of Science raced each other on public roads in their sports cars; when fire practice involved abseiling down the walls; when having meringues for your birthday tea instead of plain cake was branded ‘disgraceful’.

  This is a story not just about me but about some of the girls who were there with me, who have equally vivid memories of a life of dorms, bizarre slang, frumpy uniform, mad teachers, pranks, pashes and no boys whatsoever.

  Felixstowe College was a beautiful school set by the sea on England’s east coast. Four main boarding houses were centred round a nineteenth-century school block, its focal point a library with a fairytale glass roof. Felixstowe is now one of Europe’s largest container ports but, when the college was founded in 1929, it was a wealthy seaside resort developed in Edwardian times as a British rival to Nice and Biarritz. Mrs Wallis Simpson made it her base while waiting to marry the Prince of Wales.

  The school was based in the Old Town, where retired colonels and rich widows lived – the kind of characters who get murdered in Agatha Christie whodunits. Along the seafront and clifftops were vast luxury hotels, as well as the privately owned villas and mansions that, by the time I joined the school, had been taken over by the college. While the world beyond its borders was exploding into a starburst of music, fashion and sexual freedom, we played local lacrosse derbies against St Felix School, Southwold, attended compulsory classical music concerts and wore thick, Nora Batty-type stockings. We were taught how to hold a plate and glass, and an umbrella. Each week there was a set period for Public Speaking – because one day we would be the women who gave votes of thanks at church fêtes and, if we met someone important, we’d know what to do. And then, in 1965, huge excitement percolated through the entire school when Radio Caroline was moored offshore. Hurrah! That really started to drag us out of the Victorian age. (You may have noticed I’ve written ‘Hurrah!’. One of the weird and wonderful rules was that ‘Hooray!’ was banned, because it was common.)

  In this extraordinary world of jolly japes with your chums, terrifying prefects, twice-a-day Chapel and ‘House spirit’, we were taught by spinsters, made intense, passionate friendships, learned how to curtsey to the Queen, and were forbidden by ‘Jonah’, our formidable headmistress, from wearing satchels on our backs because that was what day school girls did. Jonah was absolutely adamant that we should never be mistaken for day school girls. We were better than that – we wore boaters, not berets, and cloaks instead of coats. Your boater was made of stiff grey straw, with a flat, shallow crown – and completely useless as a hat. You might as well have stuck a pile of LPs on your head. If you tried wearing it at a fetching angle, a House mistress would yank it straight.

  Over the years we were there we played pranks on teachers, held midnight feasts, had pillow fights, won trophies for our Houses and swotted for exams – just like the characters in Enid Blyton’s fictional boarding school, Malory Towers. But then there were the goings-on that Enid Blyton didn’t write about: the rather dodgy love-ins in the nine-dorm; the Drambuie kept in shampoo bottles; the smoking on the fire escape; the History and English teachers who lived together – were they or weren’t they? And ooh, the scandals. The girl who disappeared abruptly in mid-term (whisper: she was pregnant). The other girl who was actually caught at it with . . . was it a painter and decorator? An under-gardener? Anyway, they were doing the deed in the chapel garden. Round the back, in a nice secluded garden with a pond.

  ‘It was definitely a gardener,’ says my friend Della, ‘and he wasn’t even very attractive.’

  So already you can see that this account of life at Felixstowe College is far more weird and wonderful than any boarding school fiction, but it’s also much more realistic and full of emotional ups and downs. Girls ran away or discovered sex; parents died or split up. There was homesickness, anorexia and a mysterious outbreak of stealing. Had they happened today, the things one or two staff members did to us would result in suspension, pending an enquiry.

  In a way, too, we lived in privileged deprivation. As another friend, Juno, puts it, ‘If I ever went to prison, I’d probably find it quite comfortable.’ We slept on hard, lumpy mattresses in crowded dormitories where ice formed on the windows – on the inside. We were fed on a diet of institutional food that included powdered egg left over from the Second World War, burnt curry, stew with teeth in it and cauliflower cheese with a big grey caterpillar slumped across the top (probably the most nutritious part of the meal). There was a complete lack of privacy, and we were told what to do from ten to seven every morning to Lights Out at night, which was at seven thirty for juniors and as daringly late as a quarter to nine for the Lower Sixth. Can you imagine, in summer, when the sky was still light and the birds still singing? No wonder some of us got into such creative mischief.

  Some of my friends thoroughly enjoyed their schooldays. Often they were the ones who had been given a choice as to whether or not they went, or who could rationalise why their parents had sent them away to be educated. Others found the all-chums-together happy times promised by the Malory Towers books weren’t quite so fun-packed and appealing in real life, and one hated it so much that even now she calls it ‘that place’, and gets very angry talking about it.

  ‘For years afterwards,’ says Rona, ‘the smell of fish would give me a sinking feeling, conjuring up the freezing platform of Liverpool Street station on to which the trains from the east coast would unload their cargo of fish. And from which the next train would depart with its cargo of apparently jolly, grey-clad girls, fighting back tears at leaving their parents and dreading the sight of those iron bedsteads and horsehair mattresses lined up in the dormitories, waiting to offer us the cold comfort of our first night back at school. And the dreaded awakening the following morning to the clanging of the bell and the start of yet another endless term of Spartan grey living, biting east coast winds and grey skies, foggy, soggy Games pitches, enforced sport, jam and marge for tea, grey uniforms, grey knickers
, grey lisle stockings, grey cardigans, grey coats and cloaks, grey hats and gloves, grey Sundays . . . and the beginning of yet another chart of grey days to be crossed off one by one.’

  But most of the young ladies of my generation, including me, look back with affection on our years at Felixstowe College. How else would I have had the chance to climb out of the dorm window in the dead of night, learn how to pick locks or taste our head cook Mrs Kahn’s chocolate sponge with chocolate sauce, her signature dish, the best pudding in the world? And though I have always taken pains to repudiate any suggestion that the place left its stamp on me, I have realised that in one way at least I will always be a boarding school girl. One of my personality traits that people have commented on is my enthusiasm, my gusto, what my mother would call ‘vim and vigour’. Jolly hockey sticks!

  As children in the days before the self-revelation of social media, we just took everybody at face value, and what these women have told me about their lives inside and outside school has been fresh and surprising to me in spite of the fact that we lived so closely together. I’m amazed at the private dilemmas or struggles some were going through. I’ve been enchanted by their recollections, and also deeply impressed by how these wonderful women have turned out. Most of us agree that the really satisfying thing was how we made lifelong friendships.

  In the words of my friend Gill: ‘I think it’s a testament to the fact that even if we did go through unhappy times we all supported each other, and our friendships helped us through those times. We can all meet again (some for the first time in more than forty years) and still know each other and care about each other; still be able to sit down and talk endlessly, not only about school but about life since. We really did know each other well.’

  So this is a group biography and a social history, told through my own personal recollections and those of my friends. I hope it will appeal to all women, of every age, who read boarding school stories when she was a child and dreamed of going there, or who is just curious about what life was like for girls back then, or was actually a boarding school girl herself, with her lax stick and House tie, hiding biscuits under floorboards for midnight feasts, sneaking out of bounds to smoke, having unrequited crushes on an attractive Games captain, shutting herself in the bathroom to swot the night before O Levels, becoming heartbroken because her best friend has dumped her for someone else, or even spending an entire weekend unable to stop laughing because it was all so ridiculous. (It’s true. One whole weekend.)

  Over the next few chapters you’ll meet some of the people who are going to share their stories. Some names have been changed, in a few cases because friends have wanted to preserve their anonymity, but in others because of the annoying tendency of middle-class parents to name their daughters from a very small shortlist. For every unique Shirley, Beryl and Susan-Mary, there was a cornucopia of Sarahs, a job lot of Annes and a positive glut of Elizabeths (the Queen has a lot to answer for). All my Ridley House year group are pseudonymous, one reason being that I have been unable to track everyone down but need to include their part in the tale of our goings-on. Another reason is that, as teenage girls, we were sometimes horrible to each other. So some aliases are useful if you’re providing the full lowdown on boarding school life as it was truly lived, but on the other hand you don’t want the world to know. I’d change my name if I could, but there you are. But these are real women telling their stories and every single thing I’ve written about here really happened.

  THE STORY OF FELIXSTOWE COLLEGE

  Thanks to Facebook, the now-defunct Friends Reunited and the round-robin email, tracking down the girls with whom I shared school life took only a surprisingly easy amount of detective work. As well as describing, though, how we grew from terrified juniors to sixth-form goddesses I wanted also to write something of our school itself, its origins and milestones and significant figures, not to mention how it came to its end. This was more problematic. I didn’t know where to start, who to ask, who knew.

  Then, one night in the Groucho Club with my husband, during a get-together with two friends over from Los Angeles, I mentioned that I was writing a book about girls’ boarding schools.

  ‘Oh,’ said Linda, ‘you must get in touch with my sister-in-law. She went to Abbots Bromley and her daughters were boarding school girls too.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Oh, it was all a bit traumatic; it closed while they were there. Somewhere called Felixstowe College.’

  Can you imagine the odds against that happening? But if you think that’s serendipitous, what about this? I had already been lent an almost complete set of school magazines, among them a pamphlet detailing the period between 1980 and 1989. Writing it was the retirement job of my old House mistress, Bretch. There is a nice photo of her on the front cover. She hadn’t changed. The specs were still bottle-thick, the smile a little sardonic. Her hair, though grey, was still frizzy, still sticking straight up in the air like that of a cartoon figure whom the artist wants to show surprised. ‘WHAT do you think you’re doing?’ she seems to be saying, as she did back then. ‘Settle down now!’

  Anyway, that, more or less, was What Happened Next sorted out. What seemed impossible, though, was finding out about the school’s origins. With the whole place gone, its records destroyed, and staff and pupils who could have told me about the early years long dead, it was going to be like putting together a jigsaw puzzle from which many of the pieces had gone missing. Then, one day, thanks to one of those round-robin emails, I heard from Sue Robinson, who had been two years below me and was Head Girl in 1967.

  It was the year Elizabeth Manners had taken over as headmistress. Within two years, Maude, as she was nicknamed, had published The Vulnerable Generation, an eloquent and prescient bit of tub-thumping about the over-sexualisation and increasingly pressurised life of girls. In its day it created a media sensation and polarised opinion. By the time Miss Manners retired, in 1979, the college had developed a strong academic reputation (famously, she had declined to offer the young Lady Diana Spencer a place, having found her academically wanting); it had its greatest ever number of pupils, and was sending an unprecedented number of leavers to Oxbridge and what are now known as the Russell Group universities. It was also clear that the experience of being Maude’s Head Girl had been one of the most positive in Sue’s life, at a time when events at home had been distressing.

  Then I had a brainwave. I remembered that, in 2007, Miss Manners had appeared on a BBC Radio 4 programme called The Little Red Book. Aged ninety-one, she had given a spirited performance. At one stage, when asked for her thoughts on masturbation, her comment was, ‘I wouldn’t know, I never tried it.’

  She had been famous in her time. There would surely have been obituaries if she had died; she must still be around. ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could meet her again?’ I said to Sue.

  Through a BBC contact I found out that Miss Manners still lived in Felixstowe, and Sue and I visited her in her small flat overlooking the sea. It was almost the same view as the one she had looked out on from the study she occupied as headmistress, and great age had failed to diminish her. I thought she was worthy of her own tarot card: Force To Be Reckoned With. Sue provided lunch and I brought the wine.

  I told Miss Manners of my difficulty tracing documentary evidence of the school’s history. She directed me to her bookshelves, and at last I had in my hands not just a copy of The Vulnerable Generation, but a booklet bound in the college colours of grey and red. The Story of Felixstowe College 1929–1979, a complete history, had been published to coincide with its half-centenary in 1979. No author is given, but the assumption is that it is the work of Miss MacKerness, Head of English during the era of Miss Manners.

  Crucially, from the point of view of this book, Miss Manners allowed me to take it home with me. I would not otherwise have been able to write from such a detailed and accurate viewpoint. I have it in front of me now and I can only say that it is Too Marvellous For Words.

  1


  THE YOUNG LADIES OF FELIXSTOWE COLLEGE

  June 2014. A crowd of well-coiffed grandmas bearing contributions to lunch is gathering on the front doorstep of a large barn conversion in Hampshire. Most wear smart-comfy, on a spectrum from jeans to tweeds; there are high-end runabouts parked in the gravelled drive; iPads and iPhones are being flourished.

  The weather is British summer at its best – warm, sunny and dry; perfect conditions, we all agree, for an Old Girls’ Reunion. Traditionally, this would have taken place over a weekend in the college grounds, with a School vs. Old Girls tennis tournament and a thanksgiving service in the chapel on Sunday – the full works, with prefects parading House banners and the pews awash with hats. Juniors would give up their beds so former Girls could sleep in dorms again. We would bed down on the common room floor, which was only a bit harder than our mattresses, and creep out for a midnight feast.

  Now, however, we don’t have a school to meet at any more. Felixstowe College closed in 1994, a casualty of the financial downturn and the trend away from single-sex boarding education. It was just one of the many schools you might describe as ‘a Malory Towers sort of place’, that shut down from the 1970s onwards, one by one, like light bulbs switching off.

  A twentieth anniversary of your school closing? Let’s party! A throwaway remark on Facebook has turned into reality. Old Girls have travelled here from all points of the compass and Juno, a Cranmer (I’ll explain about that later), has lent her house for the occasion. I’m actually nervous, because although I’m riven with curiosity about how everyone has turned out, I have mixed feelings about my schooldays, when I was one of the rebels and it all ended rather scandalously. And even though I went off to make my name as a journalist on a national newspaper, and should sail in looking fashionable and groomed and confidently metropolitan, I feel a bit black-sheepish, if truth be told.

  It ought to be a poignant gathering but, in the huge, open-plan reception area, the decibel level is already rising. To one side is a spacious, elegantly converted annexe in which we can see feverish activity: teenage girls are putting the finishing touches to a long table laid with a white damask cloth and festooned with displays of beautifully arranged flowers. Juno, tall, model-slim and smiling, tells me they are A Level students at the school where her daughter works.