Not Like Mallory Towers

Chronology is impossible in a blog, as many people read it backwards, the most recently written piece first. So this one just may make more sense if you go all the way back to the first posting and read from there. Unless you follow it every day, which you can't in my case as I only write it sporadically. My intention is to write bits about my past, my family and my ancestors at random, as they occur to me. My year and a term at Hillgrove Boarding School has been occurring to me quite often lately. It seems a sort of watershed in my childhood.

That first afternoon, the day of the fire-practice, the headmaster was surprised and rather shocked when I turned up alone, on foot. All the other pupils were brought by their parents who all had cars. Some children are tearful at going away to school for the first time. When I arrived at Hillgrove that first afternoon in September clutching my little weekend case I felt relieved to have got there at all. During the summer holiday my mother had taken me there on the train and showed me the way from the railway station. Then, on the day before the first day of term when all the boarders were expected, she had put me on the train at Pwllheli fully expecting me to remember the way. But I didn't. I began to walk up the hill towards Upper Bangor and after what seemed like a lot of walking I wondered if I had forgotten to take some vital turn. Everything seemed unfamiliar. I stopped a kind-looking woman and asked her the way. She pointed it out to me and I thanked her. As I went on I heard her say in Welsh to her companion in shocked voice: 'Poor little thing, with her little case, going to boarding school all on her own.' Being very small for my age I looked more like a five than an eight year old, so she probably thought me much younger than I actually was.

After tea I was called to the Head's study because my mother was on the phone. But I had a telephone phobia dating back to an incident when I was four. Very few private houses had phones then. 'Do you want to have a word with your mother? She's phoned to check you've arrived safely.'

'No, thank you.'

The cadaverous Headmaster, whose bony head resembled a skull, raised his eyebrows, covering the mouthpiece with his hand. 'You don't want to speak to your mother, Anita? Nonsense, of course you do. Come along...' he held out the ugly, black, threatening mouthpiece towards me.

Not daring to disobey, I crept towards it, took the unfamiliar instrument in my hand and put it to my ear, imagining my mother standing in the red call-box in Station Square. I couldn't hear anything. Should I speak in English or Welsh? My mother had told me it was rude to speak Welsh in the presence of people who didn't understand it. But why should he be standing there listening to a private conversation? He was obviously determined to do so. I decided on English.

'Hello?'

'Is that you, Anita? Are you all right?'

'Yes, thank you.'

'You're very quiet.'

Long pause. She knew I hated telephones.

'Are you still there?'

'Yes.'

'What's it like there?'

Pause. 'It's all right.' I wanted to say, there aren't many children here. Fewer than in my class at Troedyrallt. Only that wasn't my class any more. And only two girls besides me. And both of them are much older than me. But I didn't think Mr. Chapman, the Headmaster, would like me to say that. It would seem a bit like accusing Hillgrove of not being a proper school. I was beginning to think it wasn't. On the one occasion my mother had been shown round the school she came back mentioning casually that all the children happened to be out on a trip that day.

Later that night, in the 'dorm', I took in my new surroundings by the moonlight flooding through the skimpily curtained window. It was nothing like my idea of a boarding school dormitory. My ideas, naturally, all came from fiction. Never before had I spent a night away from home on my own. At Mallory Towers and other school stories dormitories were large rooms with long rows of beds containing girls of the same age, as in a school classroom. Hillgrove, however, was a mixed school; not only a mixture of boys and girls but of day pupils, weekly and termly boarders. When I started there I was one of only three female boarders, in this room almost as small as my little single bedroom at home. On one side myself, in a single bed, while against the other wall bunk beds held the two big girls who had pushed me out of the window. Their names, I had now learned, were Valerie and Olwen. The former, tall, slim, red-haired, freckled and bored, spoke with a languid, upper-class drawl. The latter – she of the hammer fist - a plump, energetic, dark-haired farmer's daughter from Anglesey, spoke heavily accented English. I'd been given to understand from the start (though I really don't think this had been communicated to my mother – had she asked about language?) that speaking Welsh was taboo. An overture in this direction to Olwen earlier on had been met with a grin, followed by a frown and warning shake of the head. At my state school in Pwllheli, Troedyrallt, everyone spoke Welsh. In the infant school the teachers had never spoken anything but Welsh. They'd told us we were cleverer than English children because we could speak two languages, and encouraged us to feel proud of our country and heritage. But now I had to get used to speaking only English. And I had to get used to living with a lot of boys, because at the weekends I was going to be the only girl there, since Valerie and Olwen were weekly boarders.