I won’t be a carer any more come the end of the year, and though I’ve got a lot out of it, I have to admit I’ll welcome the chance to rest—to stop and think and remember. I’m sure it’s at least partly to do with that, to do with preparing for the change of pace, that I’ve been getting this urge to order all these old memories. What I really wanted, I suppose, was to get straight all the things that happened between me and Tommy and Ruth after we grew up and left Hailsham. But I realise now just how much of what occurred later came out of our time at Hailsham, and that’s why I want first to go over these earlier memories quite carefully. Take all this curiosity about Madame, for instance. At one level, it was just us kids larking about. But at another, as you’ll see, it was the start of a process that kept growing and growing over the years until it came to dominate our lives.
After that day, mention of Madame became, while not taboo exactly, pretty rare among us. And this was something that soon spread beyond our little group to just about all the students in our year. We were, I’d say, as curious as ever about her, but we all sensed that to probe any further—about what she did with our work, whether there really was a gallery—would get us into territory we weren’t ready for yet.
The topic of the Gallery, though, still cropped up every once in a while, so that when a few years later Tommy started telling me beside the pond about his odd talk with Miss Lucy, I found something tugging away at my memory. It was only afterwards, when I’d left him sitting on his rock and was hurrying towards the fields to catch up with my friends, that it came back to me.
It was something Miss Lucy had once said to us during a class. I’d remembered it because it had puzzled me at the time, and also because it was one of the few occasions when the Gallery had been mentioned so deliberately in front of a guardian.
We’d been in the middle of what we later came to call the “tokens controversy.” Tommy and I discussed the tokens controversy a few years
ago, and we couldn’t at first agree when it had happened. I said we’d been ten at the time; he thought it was later, but in the end came round to agreeing with me. I’m pretty sure I got it right: we were in Junior 4—a while after that incident with Madame, but still three years before our talk by the pond.
The tokens controversy was, I suppose, all part of our getting more acquisitive as we grew older. For years—I think I’ve said already—we’d thought that having work chosen for the billiards room, never mind taken away by Madame, was a huge triumph. But by the time we were ten, we’d grown more ambivalent about it. The Exchanges, with their system of tokens as currency, had given us a keen eye for pricing up anything we produced. We’d become preoccupied with T-shirts, with decorating around our beds, with personalising our desks. And of course, we had our “collections” to think of.
I don’t know if you had “collections” where you were. When you come across old students from Hailsham, you always find them, sooner or later, getting nostalgic about their collections. At the time, of course, we took it all for granted. You each had a wooden chest with your name on it, which you kept under your bed and filled with your possessions—the stuff you acquired from the Sales or the Exchanges. I can remember one or two students not bothering much with their collections, but most of us took enormous care, bringing things out to display, putting other things away carefully.
The point is, by the time we were ten, this whole notion that it was a great honour to have something taken by Madame collided with a feeling that we were losing our most marketable stuff. This all came to a head in the tokens controversy.
It began with a number of students, mainly boys, muttering that we should get tokens to compensate when Madame took something away. A lot of students agreed with this, but others were outraged by the idea.
Arguments went on between us for some time, and then one day Roy J.
—who was a year above us, and had had a number of things taken by Madame—decided to go and see Miss Emily about it.
Miss Emily, our head guardian, was older than the others. She wasn’t especially tall, but something about the way she carried herself, always very straight with her head right up, made you think she was. She wore
her silvery hair tied back, but strands were always coming loose and floating around her. They would have driven me mad, but Miss Emily always ignored them, like they were beneath her contempt. By the evening, she was a pretty strange sight, with bits of loose hair everywhere which she wouldn’t bother to push away off her face when she talked to you in her quiet, deliberate voice. We were all pretty scared of her and didn’t think of her in the way we did the other guardians. But we considered her to be fair and respected her decisions; and even in the Juniors, we probably recognised that it was her presence, intimidating though it was, that made us all feel so safe at Hailsham.
It took some nerve to go and see her without being summoned; to go with the sort of demands Roy was making seemed suicidal. But Roy didn’t get the terrible telling-off we were expecting, and in the days that followed, there were reports of guardians talking—even arguing—about the tokens question. In the end, it was announced that we would get tokens, but not many because it was a “most distinguished honour” to have work selected by Madame. This didn’t really go down well with either camp, and the arguments rumbled on.
It was against this background that Polly T. asked Miss Lucy her question that morning. We were in the library, sitting around the big oak table. I remember there was a log burning in the fireplace, and that we were doing a play-reading. At some point, a line in the play had led to Laura making some wisecrack about the tokens business, and we’d all laughed, Miss Lucy included. Then Miss Lucy had said that since everyone at Hailsham was talking about little else, we should forget the play-reading and spend the rest of the lesson exchanging our views about the tokens. And that’s what we were doing when Polly asked, completely out of the blue: “Miss, why does Madame take our things anyway?”
We all went silent. Miss Lucy didn’t often get cross, but when she did, you certainly knew about it, and we thought for a second Polly was for it. But then we saw Miss Lucy wasn’t angry, just deep in thought. I remember feeling furious at Polly for so stupidly breaking the unwritten rule, but at the same time, being terribly excited about what answer Miss Lucy might give. And clearly I wasn’t the only one with these mixed emotions: virtually everybody shot daggers at Polly, before turning eagerly to Miss Lucy—which was, I suppose, pretty unfair on poor Polly. After what seemed a very long while, Miss Lucy said:
“All I can tell you today is that it’s for a good reason. A very important reason. But if I tried to explain it to you now, I don’t think you’d understand. One day, I hope, it’ll be explained to you.”
We didn’t press her. The atmosphere around the table had become one of deep embarrassment, and curious as we were to hear more, we wanted most for the talk to get away from this dodgy territory. The next moment, then, we were all relieved to be arguing again—a bit artificially perhaps
—about the tokens. But Miss Lucy’s words had puzzled me and I kept thinking about them on and off for the next few days. That’s why that afternoon by the pond, when Tommy was telling me about his talk with Miss Lucy, about how she’d said to him we weren’t being “taught enough” about some things, the memory of that time in the library— along with maybe one or two other little episodes like that—started tugging at my mind.
While we’re on the subject of the tokens, I want just to say a bit about our Sales, which I’ve mentioned a few times already. The Sales were important to us because that was how we got hold of things from outside. Tommy’s polo shirt, for instance, came from a Sale. That’s where we got our clothes, our toys, the special things that hadn’t been made by another student.
Once every month, a big white van would come down that long road and you’d feel the excitement all through the house and grounds. By the time it pulled up in the courtyard there’d be a crowd waiting—mainly Juniors, because once you were past twelve or thirteen it wasn’t the thing to be getting so obviously excited. But the truth was we all were.
Looking back now, it’s funny to think we got so worked up, because usually the Sales were a big disappointment. There’d be nothing remotely special and we’d spend our tokens just renewing stuff that was wearing out or broken with more of the same. But the point was, I suppose, we’d all of us in the past found something at a Sale, something
that had become special: a jacket, a watch, a pair of craft scissors never used but kept proudly next to a bed. We’d all found something like that at one time, and so however much we tried to pretend otherwise, we couldn’t ever shake off the old feelings of hope and excitement.
Actually there was some point in hanging about the van as it was being unloaded. What you did—if you were one of these Juniors—was to follow back and forth from the storeroom the two men in overalls carrying the big cardboard boxes, asking them what was inside. “A lot of goodies, sweetheart,” was the usual reply. Then if you kept asking: “But is it a bumper crop?” they’d sooner or later smile and say: “Oh, I’d say so, sweetheart. A real bumper crop,” bringing a thrilled cheer.
The boxes were often open at the top, so you’d catch glimpses of all kinds of things, and sometimes, though they weren’t really supposed to, the men would let you move a few items about for a better look. And that was why, by the time of the actual Sale a week or so later, all sorts of rumours would be going around, maybe about a particular track suit or a music cassette, and if there was trouble, it was almost always because a few students had set their hearts on the same item.
The Sales were a complete contrast to the hushed atmosphere of the Exchanges. They were held in the Dining Hall, and were crowded and noisy. In fact the pushing and shouting was all part of the fun, and they stayed for the most part pretty good-humoured. Except, as I say, every now and then, things would get out of hand, with students grabbing and tugging, sometimes fighting. Then the monitors would threaten to close the whole thing down, and we’d all of us have to face a talking to from Miss Emily at assembly the next morning.
Our day at Hailsham always began with an assembly, which was usually pretty brief—a few announcements, maybe a poem read out by a student. Miss Emily didn’t often say much; she’d just sit very straight on the stage, nodding at whatever was being said, occasionally turning a frosty eye towards any whispering in the crowd. But on a morning after a rowdy Sale, everything was different. She’d order us to sit down on the floor—we usually stood at assemblies—and there’d be no announcements or performances, just Miss Emily talking to us for twenty, thirty minutes, sometimes even longer. She’d rarely raise her
voice, but there was something steely about her on these occasions and none of us, not even the Senior 5s, dared make a sound.
There was a real sense of feeling bad that we had, in some collective way, let down Miss Emily, but try as we might, we couldn’t really follow these lectures. It was partly her language. “Unworthy of privilege” and “misuse of opportunity”: these were two regular phrases Ruth and I came up with when we were reminiscing in her room at the centre in Dover.
Her general drift was clear enough: we were all very special, being Hailsham students, and so it was all the more disappointing when we behaved badly. Beyond that though, things became a fog. Sometimes she’d be going on very intensely then come to a sudden stop with something like: “What is it? What is it? What can it be that thwarts us?” Then she’d stand there, eyes closed, a frown on her face like she was trying to puzzle out the answer. And although we felt bewildered and awkward, we’d sit there willing her on to make whatever discovery was needed in her head. She might then resume with a gentle sigh—a signal that we were going to be forgiven—or just as easily explode out of her silence with: “But I will not be coerced! Oh no! And neither will Hailsham!”
When we were remembering these long speeches, Ruth remarked how odd it was they should have been so unfathomable, since Miss Emily, in a classroom, could be as clear as anything. When I mentioned how I’d sometimes seen the head wandering around Hailsham in a dream, talking to herself, Ruth took offence, saying:
“She was never like that! How could Hailsham have been the way it was if the person in charge had been potty? Miss Emily had an intellect you could slice logs with.”
I didn’t argue. Certainly, Miss Emily could be uncannily sharp. If, say, you were somewhere you shouldn’t be in the main house or the grounds, and you heard a guardian coming, you could often hide somewhere.
Hailsham was full of hiding places, indoors and out: cupboards, nooks, bushes, hedges. But if you saw Miss Emily coming, your heart sank because she’d always know you were there hiding. It was like she had some extra sense. You could go into a cupboard, close the door tight and not move a muscle, you just knew Miss Emily’s footsteps would stop outside and her voice would say: “All right. Out you come.”
That was what had happened to Sylvie C. once on the second-floor landing, and on that occasion Miss Emily had gone into one of her rages. She never shouted like, say, Miss Lucy did when she got mad at you, but if anything Miss Emily getting angry was scarier. Her eyes narrowed and she’d whisper furiously to herself, like she was discussing with an invisible colleague what punishment was awful enough for you. The way she did it meant half of you was dying to hear and the other half completely not wanting to. But usually with Miss Emily nothing too awful would come out of it. She hardly ever put you in detention, made you do chores or withdrew privileges. All the same, you felt dreadful, just knowing you’d fallen in her estimation, and you wanted to do something straight away to redeem yourself.
But the thing was, there was no predicting with Miss Emily. Sylvie may have got a full portion that time, but when Laura got caught running through the rhubarb patch, Miss Emily just snapped: “Shouldn’t be here, girl. Off you go,” and walked on.
And then there was the time I thought I was in hot water with her. The little footpath that went all round the back of the main house was a real favourite of mine. It followed all the nooks, all the extensions; you had to squeeze past shrubs, you went under two ivy-covered arches and through a rusted gate. And all the time you could peer in through the windows, one after the other. I suppose part of the reason I liked the path so much was because I was never sure if it was out of bounds. Certainly, when classes were going on, you weren’t supposed to walk past. But at the weekends or in the evenings—that was never clear. Most students avoided it anyway, and maybe the feeling of getting away from everyone else was another part of the appeal.
In any case, I was doing this little walk one sunny evening. I think I was in Senior 3. As usual I was glancing into the empty rooms as I went past, and then suddenly I was looking into a classroom with Miss Emily in it. She was alone, pacing slowly, talking under her breath, pointing and directing remarks to an invisible audience in the room. I assumed she was rehearsing a lesson or maybe one of her assembly talks, and I was about to hurry past before she spotted me, but just then she turned and looked straight at me. I froze, thinking I was for it, but then noticed she was carrying on as before, except now she was mouthing her address at me. Then, natural as you like, she turned away to fix her gaze on some
other imaginary student in another part of the room. I crept away along the path, and for the next day or so kept dreading what Miss Emily would say when she saw me. But she never mentioned it at all.
But that’s not really what I want to talk about just now. What I want to do now is get a few things down about Ruth, about how we met and became friends, about our early days together. Because more and more these days, I’ll be driving past fields on a long afternoon, or maybe drinking my coffee in front of a huge window in a motorway service station, and I’ll catch myself thinking about her again.
She wasn’t someone I was friends with from the start. I can remember, at five or six, doing things with Hannah and with Laura, but not with Ruth. I only have the one vague memory of Ruth from that early part of our lives.
I’m playing in a sandpit. There are a number of others in the sand with me, it’s too crowded and we’re getting irritated with each other. We’re in the open, under a warm sun, so it’s probably the sandpit in the Infants’ play area, just possibly it’s the sand at the end of the long jump in the North Playing Field. Anyway it’s hot and I’m feeling thirsty and I’m not pleased there are so many of us in the sandpit. Then Ruth is standing there, not in the sand with the rest of us, but a few feet away. She’s very angry with two of the girls somewhere behind me, about something that must have happened before, and she’s standing there glaring at them. My guess is that I knew Ruth only very slightly at that point. But she must already have made some impression on me, because I remember carrying on busily with whatever I was doing in the sand, absolutely dreading the idea of her turning her gaze on me. I didn’t say a word, but I was desperate for her to realise I wasn’t with the girls behind me, and had had no part in whatever it was that had made her cross.
And that’s all I remember of Ruth from that early time. We were the same year so we must have run into each other enough, but aside from
the sandpit incident, I don’t remember having anything to do with her until the Juniors a couple of years later, when we were seven, going on eight.
The South Playing Field was the one used most by the Juniors and it was there, in the corner by the poplars, that Ruth came up to me one lunchtime, looked me up and down, then asked:
“Do you want to ride my horse?”
I was in the midst of playing with two or three others at that point, but it was clear Ruth was addressing only me. This absolutely delighted me, but I made a show of weighing her up before giving a reply.
“Well, what’s your horse’s name?”
Ruth came a step closer. “My best horse,” she said, “is Thunder. I can’t let you ride on him. He’s much too dangerous. But you can ride Bramble, as long as you don’t use your crop on him. Or if you like, you could have any of the others.” She reeled off several more names I don’t now remember. Then she asked: “Have you got any horses of your own?”
I looked at her and thought carefully before replying: “No. I don’t have any horses.”
“Not even one?” “No.”
“All right. You can ride Bramble, and if you like him, you can have him to keep. But you’re not to use your crop on him. And you’ve got to come now.”
My friends had, in any case, turned away and were carrying on with what they’d been doing. So I gave a shrug and went off with Ruth.
The field was filled with playing children, some a lot bigger than us, but Ruth led the way through them very purposefully, always a pace or two in front. When we were almost at the wire mesh boundary with the garden, she turned and said:
“Okay, we’ll ride them here. You take Bramble.”
I accepted the invisible rein she was holding out, and then we were off, riding up and down the fence, sometimes cantering, sometimes at a gallop. I’d been correct in my decision to tell Ruth I didn’t have any horses of my own, because after a while with Bramble, she let me try her various other horses one by one, shouting all sorts of instructions about how to handle each animal’s foibles.
“I told you! You’ve got to really lean back on Daffodil! Much more than that! She doesn’t like it unless you’re right back!”
I must have done well enough, because eventually she let me have a go on Thunder, her favourite. I don’t know how long we spent with her horses that day: it felt a substantial time, and I think we both lost ourselves completely in our game. But then suddenly, for no reason I could see, Ruth brought it all to an end, claiming I was deliberately tiring out her horses, and that I’d have to put each of them back in its stable.
She pointed to a section of the fence, and I began leading the horses to it, while Ruth seemed to get crosser and crosser with me, saying I was doing everything wrong. Then she asked:
“Do you like Miss Geraldine?”
It might have been the first time I’d actually thought about whether I liked a guardian. In the end I said: “Of course I like her.”
“But do you really like her? Like she’s special? Like she’s your favourite?”
“Yes, I do. She’s my favourite.”
Ruth went on looking at me for a long time. Then finally she said: “All right. In that case, I’ll let you be one of her secret guards.”
We started to walk back towards the main house then and I waited for her to explain what she meant, but she didn’t. I found out though over the next several days.
