by Pet Jeffery
I stood with five uniformed schoolgirls outside a door bearing a plate with the inscription N Jones, Deputy Headmistress. We fidgeted nervously; none of us, I felt sure, knew exactly why we were here. My recollections of the Deputy Headmistress at the girls' grammar school I had attended were not reassuring. She had been the most savage member of staff, several times reducing me to tears with her sarcasm. According to rumour, she took a vicious delight in caning miscreants, such as girls caught in possession of cigarettes. Smoking had been regarded as an especially grave offence. I had not smoked whilst at grammar school, and never received such a punishment, but as I waited with those five girls, I wondered as to how long it would be before I was whacked for the first time.
It was ridiculous, I attempted to reassure myself. I was twenty-three years old, a graduate of both university and teachers' training college; I was not a schoolgirl. But no independent observer would have believed that. Part of my difficulty was that I've always looked very young for my age. My stature may be politely called petite, but a ruder person might refer to me as a titch. My voice is the only part of me that can accurately be described as high... high pitched, that is. It also matches my size: small and light; I sometimes wonder what possessed me to aim for a teaching career. Nor did my problems end there; I was possessed of a baby face, a face that could easily pass for that of a girl of less than half my years. I could not recall ever entering a pub, even wearing makeup and high heels, without a member of staff enquiring as to my age. In establishments where management was fearful that the licence might be revoked, my reply had invariably been met with incredulity and usually with expulsion from the premises.
When I mention high heels, I don't mean very high. My feet are in proportion to the rest of my body: tiny. Raising the heel of such a small foot very far above ground level seems beyond the art of even the most cunning shoemakers. I have only owned three or four pairs of shoes designed for an adult foot; children's footwear is both easier to find and less expensive. Money has always been an issue; too much of an issue for me to have ever attended a school such as the one in which I now found myself. To be honest, I've only ever owned three pairs of grownup shoes; the number is too small for me to have lost count, but three or four sounds so much better than three, and it's not an actual falsehood.
At that moment, the way in which I was dressed did not suggest my true age: far from it. I wore a childish grey pinafore dress and white school blouse partially covered by a burgundy coloured blazer bearing the school badge. The same badge appeared on the front of the burgundy velour hat that perched atop my long but plaited hair. About my neck was a tie striped in the school and house colours. My legs were adorned with white knee-length socks and my feet with shiny black Mary Jane style shoes. In other words, like my companions, I was clothed in unmistakable school uniform. To make matters worse, my uniform was clearly intended for a younger child than were those worn by four of the five genuine schoolgirls. Given my height and facial features, I was painfully aware that I looked as though I belonged in that young child's uniform.
A girl whom I guessed to be about twelve years old wore the same uniform as me, except that the skirt of her grey pinafore dress was several inches longer than mine. My length of exposed thigh suggested the clothing of a girl no older than twelve, and probably younger, rather than a young lady wearing a cool mini. The other three schoolgirls were probably aged between fourteen and sixteen. They wore grey pleated skirts in place of the pinafore dress. Their legs were encased in what might have been opaque tights or stockings, or just possibly dark coloured over the knee socks. Their shoes were flat lace-ups which, while not likely to be the choice of many adult women, looked more grownup than my childish footwear.
The date was one that I'm as unlikely to forget as I am my birthday. In fact, in a weird way, it turned out to be a form of rebirth, although not one that I welcomed. It was Saturday, 6th September 1969. People who were born in a later decade, or those who were privileged or who have forgotten the realities of the era, may think of the sixties as the swinging sixties. A few may recall the Woodstock Festival, which had featured as a television news item. But in reality, there was not a great deal of swinging for a respectable young woman in provincial England. And, with regard to my apprehensions that a schoolgirl might be whacked, it should be born in mind that corporal punishment was a fact of life in English state schools until 1986, and continued in private educational establishments until 1998. Canes were still swung, but ordinary provincial people most certainly didn't. Of course, the recipients of spanking and caning were mostly boys but, as the reputation of my former Deputy Headmistress indicated, girls were not necessarily exempt.
As I waited with five companions outside a Deputy Headmistress' office, all of us clad in school uniform, I grew increasingly nervous. A piece of reassurance returned to mind: something that confirmed this as a bizarre mistake, which would soon be rectified. I pulled my tie from the bib of my pinafore dress, and turned it over. There, as I recalled, was a Casher's name tape sewn to the striped fabric. It read: Leah Tompson. I was not Leah Tompson, schoolgirl; I was Lea Thompson, newly appointed teacher. Our names differed only in the placement of an 'h', but they were not the same. I could almost see how confusion might have arisen between two expected arrivals whose names were so similar, especially when the teacher looked so young. But surely the real Leah Tompson would arrive very soon, and the muddle would be sorted out. Thinking thus, I smiled at the spelling of the name tape.
I noticed that there was a second label sewn to the tie: a blue one with 2B embroidered in yellow. Was that the size? I'd worn a school tie years before but, apart from that, had small acquaintance with the things. If 2B was the size, the 2 might refer to the circumference of the wearer's neck, but what could the B signify? Perhaps it was the cup size, I thought, and giggled at the silly idea. The giggle died in my throat at the sound of an imperious voice.
"Girl! What are you about - fiddling with your tie? Tuck it in this instant!"
I looked up to see a large and evidently angry woman. Well, she certainly possessed broad shoulders, and towered over me; she wasn't quite as tall as the oldest of the waiting schoolgirls. Her bobbed grey hair placed her in middle age, but her skin showed no sign of wrinkling. She wore an ill-fitting tweed suit in which grey and brown predominated, together with a plain cream coloured blouse open at the neck. Her skirt hemline was at mid-calf level. Lower than the skirt, I could see a foot or so of thick and crumpled brown stockings - they couldn't possibly be tights, the very name of which bespeaks tightness. Her shoes were the reverse of glamorous; the word 'clodhoppers' sprang to mind. She was, I judged, physically strong; corporal punishment, even a smack, at her hands would surely hurt a great deal. I tucked my tie back into the bib of my pinafore dress.
"Sorry, Miss," I said automatically.
"You could sound more as though you mean it, girl."
"Sorry, Miss," I repeated, with more conviction.
"See that you are, girl, or you certainly will be."
I took the end of this short speech to mean that she would spank me if I didn't mend my ways: an eventuality I was anxious to avoid. I'd already been smacked that morning, and made to face the wall; I still smarted under such treatment. It was not that I smarted physically; to be honest, the smacks had been neither hard nor numerous. Rather, my dignity as an adult, as a teacher, smarted at the affront. I was twenty-three years old and not a person who may be smacked - yet I had been smacked, and threatened with a further, and presumably harsher, chastisement.
Unless the real Leah Tompson arrived, it was difficult to see how I was to escape from my predicament until at least the following day. I had no access to the school telephone and, even if I had, the most obvious person to call upon for help might consider my current situation a fine joke, if not retribution befitting my past offences. I mentally cursed my six or seven year old self for having heaped such trouble upon the head - or rather the bottom - of Auntie Sam.
Of course, I reassured myself, Mrs Liddell, the Headmistress, would return from her conference some time during the next few days. Surely she would recognise my face, and realise the mistake. Yes, I decided, my supposed status as a schoolgirl couldn't continue for much more than another twenty-four hours - or, at most, forty-eight. But those hours would be long, and quite possibly physically painful. I sighed deeply.
I have no memory of my father. According to my mother, he worked in military intelligence, survived the war but went missing in January or February of 1947. Mama wasn't always consistent as to the month.
My mother spoke with an accent and, when stressed, employed the grammar of another language. When I asked whether my father was still alive, her reply was, "Yes, of course he is. You must never think that he is coming dead." At her funeral, I overheard a neighbour refer to my mother as "the Polish lady". Perhaps she was Polish, although her grammatical slips suggested German to me. But a lot of the Poles who have lived in England since the nineteen-forties learnt German before they learnt English, so Mama's odd phrases may mean nothing. She would never speak of her life before I was born.
"Such terrible things," she said, when I asked. "One day you will know, perhaps, but for now you are so young." Whether or not she was Polish, Mama didn't seem to be a Catholic. In fact, she gave little sign of being religious: we attended a Christmas and an Easter service in the local Anglican church - and that was the extent of her Christian observance. I think that Mama lived on a pension of some kind. There was always food on the table, but we were never well off. When I went to university, I received a full grant; the local education committee did not expect Mama to contribute to my upkeep.
When I asked about my family tree, Mama replied, "Family tree! What family tree? It was chopped down by Herr Hitler and Comrade Stalin." The only other people related to me, of whom I'm aware, were Great Uncle Ronald, his wife Great Aunt Kate and their daughter Auntie Sam. Ronald's name was never shortened in my hearing, Katherine's and Samantha's always were. Kate and Sam sometimes visited us, or we them, but I saw a lot less of Ronald.
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