I’m not sure for how long the “secret guard” business carried on. When Ruth and I discussed it while I was caring for her down in Dover, she claimed it had been just a matter of two or three weeks—but that was almost certainly wrong. She was probably embarrassed about it and so the whole thing had shrunk in her memory. My guess is that it went on for about nine months, a year even, around when we were seven, going on eight.
I was never sure if Ruth had actually invented the secret guard herself, but there was no doubt she was the leader. There were between six and ten of us, the figure changing whenever Ruth allowed in a new member or expelled someone. We believed Miss Geraldine was the best guardian in Hailsham, and we worked on presents to give her—a large sheet with pressed flowers glued over it comes to mind. But our main reason for existing, of course, was to protect her.
By the time I joined the guard, Ruth and the others had already known for ages about the plot to kidnap Miss Geraldine. We were never quite sure who was behind it. We sometimes suspected certain of the Senior boys, sometimes boys in our own year. There was a guardian we didn’t like much—a Miss Eileen—who we thought for a while might be the brains behind it. We didn’t know when the abduction would take place, but one thing we felt convinced about was that the woods would come into it.
The woods were at the top of the hill that rose behind Hailsham House. All we could see really was a dark fringe of trees, but I certainly wasn’t the only one of my age to feel their presence day and night. When it got bad, it was like they cast a shadow over the whole of Hailsham; all you had to do was turn your head or move towards a window and there they’d be, looming in the distance. Safest was the front of the main house, because you couldn’t see them from any of the windows. Even so, you never really got away from them.
There were all kinds of horrible stories about the woods. Once, not so long before we all got to Hailsham, a boy had had a big row with his friends and run off beyond the Hailsham boundaries. His body had been found two days later, up in those woods, tied to a tree with the hands and feet chopped off. Another rumour had it that a girl’s ghost wandered through those trees. She’d been a Hailsham student until one day she’d climbed over a fence just to see what it was like outside. This was a long time before us, when the guardians were much stricter, cruel even, and when she tried to get back in, she wasn’t allowed. She kept hanging around outside the fences, pleading to be let back in, but no one let her.
Eventually, she’d gone off somewhere out there, something had happened and she’d died. But her ghost was always wandering about the woods, gazing over Hailsham, pining to be let back in.
The guardians always insisted these stories were nonsense. But then the older students would tell us that was exactly what the guardians had told them when they were younger, and that we’d be told the ghastly truth soon enough, just as they were.
The woods played on our imaginations the most after dark, in our dorms as we were trying to fall asleep. You almost thought then you could hear the wind rustling the branches, and talking about it seemed to only make things worse. I remember one night, when we were furious with Marge K.—she’d done something really embarrassing to us during the day—we chose to punish her by hauling her out of bed, holding her face against the window pane and ordering her to look up at the woods. At first she kept her eyes screwed shut, but we twisted her arms and forced open her eyelids until she saw the distant outline against the moonlit sky, and that was enough to ensure for her a sobbing night of terror.
I’m not saying we necessarily went around the whole time at that age worrying about the woods. I for one could go weeks hardly thinking about them, and there were even days when a defiant surge of courage would make me think: “How could we believe rubbish like that?” But then all it took would be one little thing—someone retelling one of those stories, a scary passage in a book, even just a chance remark reminding you of the woods—and that would mean another period of being under that shadow. It was hardly surprising then that we assumed the woods would be central in the plot to abduct Miss Geraldine.
When it came down to it, though, I don’t recall our taking many practical steps towards defending Miss Geraldine; our activities always revolved around gathering more and more evidence concerning the plot itself. For some reason, we were satisfied this would keep any immediate danger at bay.
Most of our “evidence” came from witnessing the conspirators at work. One morning, for instance, we watched from a second-floor classroom Miss Eileen and Mr. Roger talking to Miss Geraldine down in the courtyard. After a while Miss Geraldine said goodbye and went off towards the Orangery, but we kept on watching, and saw Miss Eileen and Mr. Roger put their heads closer together to confer furtively, their gazes fixed on Miss Geraldine’s receding figure.
“Mr. Roger,” Ruth sighed on that occasion, shaking her head. “Who’d have guessed he was in it too?”
In this way we built up a list of people we knew to be in on the plot— guardians and students whom we declared our sworn enemies. And yet, all the time, I think we must have had an idea of how precarious the foundations of our fantasy were, because we always avoided any confrontation. We could decide, after intense discussions, that a particular student was a plotter, but then we’d always find a reason not to challenge him just yet—to wait until “we had in all the evidence.” Similarly, we always agreed Miss Geraldine herself shouldn’t hear a word of what we’d found out, since she’d get alarmed to no good purpose.
It would be too easy to claim it was just Ruth who kept the secret guard going long after we’d naturally outgrown it. Sure enough, the guard was important to her. She’d known about the plot for much longer than the rest of us, and this gave her enormous authority; by hinting that the real evidence came from a time before people like me had joined—that there were things she’d yet to reveal even to us—she could justify almost any decision she made on behalf of the group. If she decided someone should be expelled, for example, and she sensed opposition, she’d just allude darkly to stuff she knew “from before.” There’s no question Ruth was keen to keep the whole thing going. But the truth was, those of us who’d grown close to her, we each played our part in preserving the fantasy and
making it last for as long as possible. What happened after that row over the chess illustrates pretty well the point I’m making.
I’d assumed Ruth was something of a chess expert and that she’d be able to teach me the game. This wasn’t so crazy: we’d pass older students bent over chess sets, in window seats or on the grassy slopes, and Ruth would often pause to study a game. And as we walked off again, she’d tell me about some move she’d spotted that neither player had seen. “Amazingly dim,” she’d murmur, shaking her head. This had all helped get me fascinated, and I was soon longing to become engrossed myself in those ornate pieces. So when I’d found a chess set at a Sale and decided to buy it—despite it costing an awful lot of tokens—I was counting on Ruth’s help.
For the next several days, though, she sighed whenever I brought the subject up, or pretended she had something else really urgent to do. When I finally cornered her one rainy afternoon, and we set out the board in the billiards room, she proceeded to show me a game that was a vague variant on draughts. The distinguishing feature of chess, according to her, was that each piece moved in an L-shape—I suppose she’d got this from watching the knight—rather than in the leap-frogging way of draughts. I didn’t believe this, and I was really disappointed, but I made sure to say nothing and went along with her for a while. We spent several minutes knocking each other’s pieces off the board, always sliding the attacking piece in an “L.” This continued until the time I tried to take her and she claimed it wouldn’t count because I’d slid my piece up to hers in too straight a line.
At this, I stood up, packed up the set and walked off. I never said out loud that she didn’t know how to play—disappointed as I was, I knew not to go that far—but my storming off was, I suppose, statement enough for her.
It was maybe a day later, I came into Room 20 at the top of the house, where Mr. George had his poetry class. I don’t remember if it was before or after the class, or how full the room was. I remember having books in my hands, and that as I moved towards where Ruth and the others were talking, there was a strong patch of sun across the desk-lids they were sitting on.
I could see from the way they had their heads together they were discussing secret guard stuff, and although, as I say, the row with Ruth had been only the day before, for some reason I went up to them without a second thought. It was only when I was virtually right up to them— maybe there was a look exchanged between them—that it suddenly hit me what was about to happen. It was like the split second before you step into a puddle, you realise it’s there, but there’s nothing you can do about it. I felt the hurt even before they went silent and stared at me, even before Ruth said: “Oh, Kathy, how are you? If you don’t mind, we’ve got something to discuss just now. We’ll be finished in just a minute. Sorry.”
She’d hardly finished her sentence before I’d turned and was on my way out, angry more at myself for having walked into it than at Ruth and the others. I was upset, no doubt about it, though I don’t know if I actually cried. And for the next few days, whenever I saw the secret guard conferring in a corner or as they walked across a field, I’d feel a flush rising to my cheeks.
Then about two days after this snub in Room 20, I was coming down the stairs of the main house when I found Moira B. just behind me. We started talking—about nothing special—and wandered out of the house together. It must have been the lunch break because as we stepped into the courtyard there were about twenty students loitering around chatting in little groups. My eyes went immediately to the far side of the courtyard, where Ruth and three of the secret guard were standing together, their backs to us, gazing intently towards the South Playing Field. I was trying to see what it was they were so interested in, when I became aware of Moira beside me also watching them. And then it occurred to me that only a month before she too had been a member of the secret guard, and had been expelled. For the next few seconds I felt something like acute embarrassment that the two of us should now be standing side by side, linked by our recent humiliations, actually staring
our rejection in the face, as it were. Maybe Moira was experiencing something similar; anyway, she was the one who broke the silence, saying:
“It’s so stupid, this whole secret guard thing. How can they still believe in something like that? It’s like they’re still in the Infants.”
Even today, I’m puzzled by the sheer force of the emotion that overtook me when I heard Moira say this. I turned to her, completely furious:
“What do you know about it? You just don’t know anything, because you’ve been out of it for ages now! If you knew everything we’d found out, you wouldn’t dare say anything so daft!”
“Don’t talk rubbish.” Moira was never one to back down easily. “It’s just another of Ruth’s made-up things, that’s all.”
“Then how come I’ve personally heard them talking about it? Talking about how they’re going to take Miss Geraldine to the woods in the milk van? How come I heard them planning it myself, nothing to do with Ruth or anyone else?”
Moira looked at me, unsure now. “You heard it yourself? How? Where?”
“I heard them talking, clear as anything, heard every word, they didn’t know I was there. Down by the pond, they didn’t know I could hear. So that just shows how much you know!”
I pushed past her and as I made my way across the crowded courtyard, I glanced back to the figures of Ruth and the others, still gazing out towards the South Playing Field, unaware of what had just happened between me and Moira. And I noticed I didn’t feel angry at all with them any more; just hugely irritated with Moira.
Even now, if I’m driving on a long grey road and my thoughts have nowhere special to go, I might find myself turning all of this over. Why was I so hostile to Moira B. that day when she was, really, a natural ally? What it was, I suppose, is that Moira was suggesting she and I cross some line together, and I wasn’t prepared for that yet. I think I sensed how beyond that line, there was something harder and darker and I didn’t want that. Not for me, not for any of us.
But at other times, I think that’s wrong—that it was just to do with me and Ruth, and the sort of loyalty she inspired in me in those days. And maybe that’s why, even though I really wanted to on several occasions, I never brought it up—about what had happened that day with Moira—the whole time I was caring for Ruth down at the centre in Dover.
All of this about Miss Geraldine reminds me of something that happened about three years later, long after the secret guard idea had faded away.
We were in Room 5 on the ground floor at the back of the house, waiting for a class to start. Room 5 was the smallest room, and especially on a winter morning like that one, when the big radiators came on and steamed up the windows, it would get really stuffy. Maybe I’m exaggerating it, but my memory is that for a whole class to fit into that room, students literally had to pile on top of each other.
That morning Ruth had got a chair behind a desk, and I was sitting up on its lid, with two or three others of our group perched or leaning in nearby. In fact, I think it was when I was squeezing up to let someone else in beside me that I first noticed the pencil case.
I can see the thing now like it’s here in front of me. It was shiny, like a polished shoe; a deep tan colour with circled red dots drifting all over it. The zip across the top edge had a furry pom-pom to pull it. I’d almost sat on the pencil case when I’d shifted and Ruth quickly moved it out of my way. But I’d seen it, as she’d intended me to, and I said:
“Oh! Where did you get that? Was it in the Sale?”
It was noisy in the room, but the girls nearby had heard, so there were soon four or five of us staring admiringly at the pencil case. Ruth said nothing for a few seconds while she checked carefully the faces around her. Finally she said very deliberately:
“Let’s just agree. Let’s agree I got it in the Sale.” Then she gave us all a knowing smile.
This might sound a pretty innocuous sort of response, but actually it was like she’d suddenly got up and hit me, and for the next few moments I felt hot and chilly at the same time. I knew exactly what she’d meant by her answer and smile: she was claiming the pencil case was a gift from Miss Geraldine.
There could be no mistake about this because it had been building up for weeks. There was a certain smile, a certain voice Ruth would use— sometimes accompanied by a finger to the lips or a hand raised stage- whisper style—whenever she wanted to hint about some little mark of favour Miss Geraldine had shown her: Miss Geraldine had allowed Ruth to play a music tape in the billiards room before four o’clock on a weekday; Miss Geraldine had ordered silence on a fields walk, but when Ruth had drawn up beside her, she’d started to talk to her, then let the rest of the group talk. It was always stuff like that, and never explicitly claimed, just implied by her smile and “let’s say no more” expression.
Of course, officially, guardians weren’t supposed to show favouritism, but there were little displays of affection all the time within certain parameters; and most of what Ruth suggested fell easily within them. Still, I hated it when Ruth hinted in this way. I was never sure, of course, if she was telling the truth, but since she wasn’t actually “telling” it, only hinting, it was never possible to challenge her. So each time it happened, I’d have to let it go, biting my lip and hoping the moment would pass quickly.
Sometimes I’d see from the way a conversation was moving that one of these moments was coming, and I’d brace myself. Even then, it would always hit me with some force, so that for several minutes I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything going on around me. But on that winter morning in Room 5, it had come at me straight out of the blue. Even after I’d seen the pencil case, the idea of a guardian giving a present like that was so beyond the bounds, I hadn’t seen it coming at all. So once Ruth had said what she’d said, I wasn’t able, in my usual way, to let the emotional flurry just pass. I just stared at her, making no attempt to disguise my anger. Ruth, perhaps seeing danger, said to me quickly in a stage whisper: “Not a word!” and smiled again. But I couldn’t return the
smile and went on glaring at her. Then luckily the guardian arrived and the class started.
I was never the sort of kid who brooded over things for hours on end. I’ve got that way a bit these days, but that’s the work I do and the long hours of quiet when I’m driving across these empty fields. I wasn’t like, say, Laura, who for all her clowning around could worry for days, weeks even, about some little thing someone said to her. But after that morning in Room 5, I did go around in a bit of a trance. I’d drift off in the middle of conversations; whole lessons went by with me not knowing what was going on. I was determined Ruth shouldn’t get away with it this time, but for a long while I wasn’t doing anything constructive about it; just playing fantastic scenes in my head where I’d expose her and force her to admit she’d made it up. I even had one hazy fantasy where Miss Geraldine herself heard about it and gave Ruth a complete dressing- down in front of everyone.
After days of this I started to think more solidly. If the pencil case hadn’t come from Miss Geraldine, where had it come from? She might have got it from another student, but that was unlikely. If it had belonged to anyone else first, even someone years above us, a gorgeous item like that wouldn’t have gone unnoticed. Ruth would never risk a story like hers knowing the pencil case had already knocked around Hailsham. Almost certainly she’d found it at a Sale. Here, too, Ruth ran the risk of others having seen it before she’d bought it. But if—as sometimes happened, though it wasn’t really allowed—she’d heard about the pencil case coming in and reserved it with one of the monitors before the Sale opened, she could then be reasonably confident hardly anyone had seen it.
Unfortunately for Ruth, though, there were registers kept of everything bought at the Sales, along with a record of who’d done the buying. While these registers weren’t easily obtainable—the monitors took them back to Miss Emily’s office after each Sale—they weren’t top secret either. If I hung around a monitor at the next Sale, it wouldn’t be difficult to browse through the pages.
So I had the outlines of a plan, and I think I went on refining it for several days before it occurred to me it wasn’t actually necessary to carry
out all the steps. Provided I was right about the pencil case coming from a Sale, all I had to do was bluff.
That was how Ruth and I came to have our conversation under the eaves. There was fog and drizzle that day. The two of us were walking from the dorm huts perhaps towards the pavilion, I’m not sure. Anyway, as we were crossing the courtyard, the rain suddenly got heavier and since we were in no hurry, we tucked ourselves in under the eaves of the main house, a little to one side of the front entrance.
We sheltered there for a while, and every so often a student would come running out of the fog and in through the doors of the house, but the rain didn’t ease. And the longer we continued to stand there, the more tense I grew because I could see this was the opportunity I’d been waiting for.
Ruth too, I’m sure, sensed something was coming up. In the end, I decided to come straight out with it.
“At the Sale last Tuesday,” I said. “I was just looking through the book. You know, the register thing.”
“Why were you looking at the register?” Ruth asked quickly. “Why were you doing something like that?”
“Oh, no reason. Christopher C. was one of the monitors, so I was just talking to him. He’s the best Senior boy, definitely. And I was just turning over the pages of the register, just for something to do.”
Ruth’s mind, I could tell, had raced on, and she now knew exactly what this was about. But she said calmly: “Boring sort of thing to look at.”
“No, it was quite interesting really. You can see all the things people have bought.”
I’d said this staring out at the rain. Then I glanced at Ruth and got a real shock. I don’t know what I’d expected; for all my fantasies of the past month, I’d never really considered what it would be like in a real situation like the one unfolding at that moment. Now I saw how upset Ruth was; how for once she was at a complete loss for words, and had turned away on the verge of tears. And suddenly my behaviour seemed to me utterly baffling. All this effort, all this planning, just to upset my dearest friend. So what if she’d fibbed a little about her pencil case?
Didn’t we all dream from time to time about one guardian or other bending the rules and doing something special for us? A spontaneous hug, a secret letter, a gift? All Ruth had done was to take one of these harmless daydreams a step further; she hadn’t even mentioned Miss Geraldine by name.
I now felt awful, and I was confused. But as we stood there together staring at the fog and rain, I could think of no way now to repair the damage I’d done. I think I said something pathetic like: “It’s all right, I didn’t see anything much,” which hung stupidly in the air. Then after a few further seconds of silence, Ruth walked off into the rain.
