My mother's father's family

It's over a year since I wrote anything in my blog! At the beginning I said I'd be writing about my family, but I seem to have been writing more about my childhood than anything else. So it's about time I came up with some family history. And I'd be really glad if anyone has any info or comment on this.

I've mentioned my great grandfather, Robert Isaac Jones before. He's the one who relocated his joinery and cabinet-making business to the Strand in Station Square, Pwllheli just after it was built in 1907. His brother, Richard Albert, married a daughter of the Liverpool House family and was the father of the famous poet and archdruid Cynan, who was knighted by Prince Charles on his investiture at Caernarfon Castle in the 1960s. I have a photo of Cynan receiving Princess Elizabeth into the Gorsedd of the Druids in 1946, an occasion which apparently few people now remember. Otherwise no one would have made a fuss about our present Archbishop of Canterbury being a member of it! The Queen is the head of the Church of England after all, and if it's OK for her to be a member, it must be OK for him.

Robert Isaac's father was Robert Abraham Jones (born 1811), who later shortened his middle name to Braham. Some of his belongings are engraved with the initials RBJ. He was a well-known local character as he was the town clerk of Pwllheli for many years and there are several extant official documents in his handwriting, not to mention the diaries he kept for most of his life and his business day-books. Before becoming town clerk he was clerk to a local solicitor, but although well-educated his parents could not afford to send him to university and he never qualified as a solicitor. But for most of his working life he ran a little business from home (Penlon in Stryd Penlon) in his spare time, doing accounts, writing letters and simple legal documents such as wills for poor people for small payments of a few shillings and often pence. At that time everything official had to be done in English and a great many people on the Llyn Peninsula could not speak, read or write it. After retiring from the post of town clerk he continued this little business into old age.

His parents lived at the old manor house of Castellmarch near Abersoch and he was their fourth son. When I first discovered this I wondered why, as this manor had a large, prosperous estate at that time, my family always maintained his parents had very little money and could not send RBJ to university. So I did some research on this.

A temporary little brother

A (Very) Temporary Little Brother

When my granddaughter Rhiannon was five her parents told her all about her little brother, who was expected to arrive round about her sixth birthday. She thought about this for a while then asked, 'When my little brother comes, how long is he going to stay?'

Startled, her mother explained that little brothers were permanent fixtures in a family. But I, who was an only child, once had a sort of 'little brother' for two years only. Aged six, I was envious of school friends who announced to the teachers that a little brother or sister was expected at their house. The teachers would beam in delight and make a great fuss of them. I asked my mother if I could have one too but she said no. Nevertheless at school I told a fib and said that we would soon be having a new addition to the family. The teachers' reactions were quite different. They gasped in horror and asked was I really quite sure? Then they exchanged shocked glances and said no more. As my mother had been widowed nearly five years and was a teacher at Porthmadog Grammar School that would have been a terrible scandal! My mother found out and fortunately saw the funny side of my gaffe. She tried to explain why widows couldn't have any more children unless they remarried first, but I didn't understand and was very put out. I really, really wanted a little brother so much, I told her. Soon I began playing with an imaginary one, who had to have a place laid for him at the table at every meal.

Then my mother arranged for me to go and play with a neighbour's little boy, John Harris, who was two. John's mother told me that lately he'd begun to be afraid of being on his own after taking it into his head, following being told 'The Three Little Pigs' story, that there was a wolf hiding in their attic. But John called it 'Oof'. She left us playing quietly with alphabet bricks while she went to get on with something in the kitchen. The alphabet bricks were rather boring, so after a while I asked John to show me where the attic was. Then I crept up the attic stairs, crouched at the top and began making wolf noises: 'Wooo! Wooo!' John let forth an ear-splitting scream that brought his mother running in a panic to see what was up. John smiled at her very happily and said, 'Nita and me playing Oof in the attic!' For a long time that was his favourite game, with me howling and chasing him all round the house, while he screamed with a little more restraint than that first time.

Over the next two years we went on to play several other noisy games of imaginary adventures such as cowboys, pirates, lion-hunting, shipwrecks and so on. I decided what to play and John was happy to follow my lead. We always played in John's house, never in mine, as Mum and I lived with Great Aunt Kate, an old maid who didn't appreciate noisy games. From time to time my mother used to repay the Harris's hospitality by taking John and myself on a bus ride into the country for a picnic and outdoor play, as neither of us had a garden.

Then, soon after my eighth birthday, a great change came into my life. My mother became engaged to an Englishman from Liverpool called Owen Bailey, who persuaded her to send me to a boarding school out of the way. So came an end to my playing with John and all my friends in Pwllheli until the school holidays. I didn't like the boarding school at all. Having to speak English all the time, as Welsh was not allowed, and missing Mum, Auntie Kate and the cat, made me miserable. I longed to return to Troedyrallt School in Pwllheli with my friends. I yearned to go home at the end of each day like normal children, to the coal fire burning in the hearth and Auntie Kate's tasty suppers, instead of a stale crust in a cold refectory.

By the time the end of the Easter holiday approached, after I'd become reacquainted with all my old friends and favourite playtime haunts in Pwllheli, I secretly determined not to return to boarding school. Secretly, because I didn't want to upset my mother, who said boarding school would be a wonderful opportunity for me, something she had always wanted when she was my age. I understood. I'd read all her old Schoolgirls' Own Annuals and one or two of her Angela Brazils as well as the first of the new Mallory Towers series. I'm not quite sure how I worked out that just running away and leaving a letter would upset her less, but perhaps I only wanted to avoid confrontations. Books about unhappy children running away from home seemed to fit my case exactly.

I needed a companion for the journey, but none of my old school friends were willing to come. 'We have no reason to run away,' they said smugly. That was why I determined to take little John Harris with me, although he was only four at the time. He had recently been presented with a little baby brother (in whom I took no interest whatsoever) and had missed me during my absences, so was perhaps a little more amenable to my blandishments. One of my favourite books was a Welsh novel in which two boys stow away on a sailing ship to get a free trip to Liverpool, only to find her bound for the South Seas. I thought John and I could hide on one of the ships in Pwllheli harbour, get carried away to exotic climes and have all kinds of adventures in far-away countries where there were no boarding schools.

It was difficult to explain the idea of running away to John at first, since he was too young to have read such books, so I told him that we were going on our holidays alone, just the two of us. He was satisfied with this, and agreed to pack a little case. I had already brought my clothes in the weekend case which I normally took on my solitary train journey to school, John's mother thinking it was full of toys, books and painting materials as usual.

'Will we be away over Sunday?' asked John.

'Yes.' I thought it better not to suggest we were going away for good. 'Why?'

'Well, I have to pack my best coat then, to go to Sunday School, you know.' John took from the wardrobe his little pale blue tweed coat with the dark blue velvet Peter Pan collar, folded it neatly and put in the case. I sighed. John was not entering into the spirit of the thing. But taking him was better than going alone. Then he said:

'I think Mummy will worry about me. I think she'll cry.' I told him I'd write a letter explaining where we were going and leave it in his bedroom for his Mum. John was content with that. I wrote a brief note saying we were running away and never coming back and propped it on the dressing table. He couldn't read yet. Then, after making sure that John's mother was busy with baby Edward, we tip-toed downstairs, past the solicitors' office on the ground floor, and out we went with our little suitcases.

John was surprised when we walked past the bus station and the train station. He thought we were going to catch a bus or a train. I shook my head and led him towards the harbour. But I didn't tell him we were going to stow away on a boat, just in case he suffered from sea-sickness or was scared of water. The harbour held nothing but rowing boats. They were no good. By this time John was walking very slowly and reluctantly, even for a child of four. I decided it was too far to walk to the Marina where most of the big yachts and speed boats were moored, so we went on towards the beach. By the time we reached the promenade after his snail-like progress the sun was very low in the sky and John was complaining that his feet were hurting. So we sat on the sea wall for a while to rest. The beach was deserted, the sea devoid of any vessel, and none was drawn up on the beach. John said he was hungry. I jumped down onto the beach and returned with two round, flat stones with a piece of seaweed on each. Giving one to John, I pretended to eat from mine with relish. At that time imaginary food tasted better to me than most of what was on offer during those years of immediate post-war austerity. I began to describe to John the mouth-watering bacon, sausages, fried bread and egg we were eating. He usually went along with my make-believe quite happily, but now his bottom lip started to quiver.

'Nita – I want real food, you know. I'm really hungry.'

Before I could reply a long shadow loomed over us. A policeman. He asked our names and after hearing them read us the riot act about our parents being very upset and worried over our irresponsible behaviour. We had to go back home with the policeman, each of us holding one of his hands. And he held on very tightly too. John asked in a quavering voice if he was taking us to gaol. The policeman reassured him that he was taking us home. When we reached Station Square, where I lived above Bon Marché (recently closed down), and John above the solicitors (on the corner where the tourist office is today), the street lights were already on. A crowd of people stood in the middle of the road, several of them comforting John's mother, who stood weeping with baby Edward in a white shawl in her arms, his father's arm round her shoulders. Two more policemen stood by. Everyone clapped and cheered as the three of us appeared. The policeman holding us looked chuffed. I hung my head.

A woman standing next to John's mother took the baby from her so she could hold out her arms to John. He ran into them, sobbing. Only then did I realise that I'd done something very, very bad. Our policeman asked if my parents were in the crowd. I shook my head. He asked where I lived and I showed him our closed front door a few yards away. He looked surprised and, still holding my hand firmly, led me to the door and rang the bell. My Mum and Auntie Kate thanked him for bringing me home but said it really hadn't been necessary. They knew I'd come back when I was hungry because I often wandered off. John's parents were making a silly fuss over nothing, they said. But I knew they were wrong about that. I had to go back to boarding school of course, and John's parents forbade me to play with him ever again. I don't blame them!

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.

Starting School

During the war all available metal was melted down to make armaments. So - no biscuit tins, Mecchano sets or paint tins - I mean artist's paints, of course. Those were the only sort I was concerned with at age three and three quarters, when I started school. (Children who had lost a parent were allowed to begin early, despite the schools being very overcrowded.) Artistic talent ran in the family and my mother encouraged me to draw and paint from an early age. Paints were available only as loose little cuboids, bought by the half dozen and screwed into brown paper bags. My mother would wet one side of them and stick them round the rim of an old plate, which could then be used as a palette. And that was the cause of my blotting my copy-book on my very first day.

I loved school straight off - all these children to play and have fun with, run round the playground with at break, instead of just boring old Auntie Kate. And I made friends with a girl called Evelyn, even younger than me, whose mother had died when she was a baby, and who is still my best friend. But some things confused me. My mother had said I might be allowed to do some painting, so when the teacher, Miss Jones, a lady with a black moustache, put a little pile of brightly coloured cuboid shapes on the table in front of me I thought, 'Goody! Paints!' They were a lot bigger than the ones I was used to - all the better to paint great pictures with! But, though I waited, and waited, the teacher didn't bring me any paper, paint-brush or water. Each child had been given something different to play with, and nobody else had been given paints. There was a shoelace on our table, which didn't seem to belong to any of our activities. Tired of waiting, I wet my finger on my tongue and rubbed my fingertip on one of the paints to see what the colour looked like on my hand. Disappointingly, no colour came off. A roar from overhead:

'How dare you spit on my beads!' was accompanied by Miss Jones picking up my hand and giving it a sharp slap. Then she went away again. I stared at my table companions, mystified and rather upset. Beads? Square beads? What was I supposed to do with them?

'Thread them on this shoelace,' advised the oldest girl at the table.

'But they haven't got any holes in!'

'Oh, yes they have.' She turned one of them to show two holes on the narrow sides, where you wouldn't think of looking. Then she tied a knot at one end of the shoelace and expertly threaded three of the cuboid beads onto it. She had done this before! Following her lead, I quickly threaded all the remaining pieces of coloured wood and was rewarded with a 'Good girl, Anita! That's right,' as Miss Jones hurried past again. So I was back in favour. But I thought painting would have been a lot more fun. And I'd never seen anyone wear such a strange necklace as the one with big square beads on a shoelace.

Auntie Kate fetched me home for lunch then took me back. By this time it was raining so we couldn't go out to play. Every now and then Miss Jones would tell a child to go to the 'office'. Although she spoke in Welsh she said this word in English, instead of using the Welsh word 'swyddfa'. When she said this to me I went outside as the others had done and wondered where to go. I couldn't see anywhere that looked remotely like an office in our school yard. So I skipped around happily in the drizzle. Soon Miss Jones came out looking cross, grabbed my arm and took me in again, scolding me for running around in the rain. Then she asked an older girl to take me to the 'office', which turned out to be the outside toilet! We called it the 'lavatory' in our house, but I'd never heard anyone call it an 'office'.

Yes, we have no bananas...

Miss Griffiths, who taught us five year olds at Troedyrallt School in Pwllheli, burst into the classroom one morning in a great state of excitement.



'Guess what? A train full of bananas has come into Pwllheli this morning. Enough to give every single child in the town a banana each. And all your mothers have to take their ration books to the greengrocers' to prove how many children they've got so they can get a banana for all of you. All your mothers are queuing up right now and they'll be queuing all morning. Those of you who go home for lunch will find a banana waiting. But if you have school dinners you'll have to wait until you go home at the end of the day.'

We all gasped. Our eyes turned to the bowl of wax faux fruit adorning the window sill, where an improbably yellow banana jostled with two suspiciously florid apples. We all knew what bananas looked like, but none of us had ever tasted one.



I put my hand up. 'Please Miss Griffiths, my mother won't be in the queue. She's teaching at Porthmadog so I won't have a banana.'

'Nonsense!' she replied. 'Your Auntie Kate will be there in the queue.'

I wasn't convinced. My Great Aunt Kate had to queue up every morning for bread and meat. Standing for a long time time made her legs swell and she grumbled bitterly about this. I didn't think she'd be willing to queue all morning for one banana just for me. I'd be the only child in town never to know the taste of a banana.

But when I got home at midday there she was collapsed in the old wooden chair by the kitchen range, where the fire burned merrily, as always. Her worst leg, propped up on another chair, was twice its usual size. Smiling proudly, she nodded at the table laid for lunch. In its centre, on a plate, lay the BANANA in all its golden-yellow glory.

Forgetting to say thank you, I was going to grab it there and then. 'Wait!' said Lydia Kate sternly. 'That's your pudding. You have to eat your lunch first.' I have no recollection of the first course but I'm sure I wolfed it down pretty quickly, eyeing the coveted fruit all the while. At last came the supreme moment. About to bite into the exquisitely coloured flesh (yellow being my favourite colour), I was again foiled by Auntie Kate who said it must be peeled first. To my chagrin she stripped off the thick yellow cover like peeling a leather glove from a pale finger. I stared. The poor, denuded banana was white.

White as the inside of an apple, or mashed potato, boring things I ate every day. Also it had little black specks on the end. So I took a knife, sliced off the end and threw it in the fire. To my annoyance the newly revealed piece also had little black specks in. I cut off another thick slice and threw it away.

'What are you doing, you silly girl?'

'It's got black spots on!'

'Those are the seeds. They're supposed to be there. They're inside every banana and they go all the way through the middle.'

I didn't believe her. Not until I'd sliced off and discarded another 3 chunks despite her protests. Then, seized by an awful doubt, I cut a bit off the opposite end. Sure enough, there were the little black seeds in the centre.

'I would have eaten those bits you threw away,' she moaned. 'What a waste. What a wicked waste. You naughty, ungrateful girl!'

Subdued, I ate the remainder. A pleasant enough taste, but far, far short of the anticipated ambrosia. And when my mother came home that evening she was assailed by heart-rending wails about queuing up all morning for a banana only to have me throw away nearly half of it. My mother decreed that the next time I was allocated a banana I should give it to Auntie Kate. I nodded meekly. Bananas were over-rated anyway.

In my mother's shoes

Shoes

After my mother’s death we found a pair of her old shoes in the cellar; soft, chocolate-coloured suede lace-ups stretched wide and comfy as boats, great bumps hollowed out to accommodate her bunions, particularly the enormous one on the left foot where she had once, long ago in my childhood, dropped a sewing machine on her big toe joint. She hadn’t bothered with the doctor and it had presumably broken and healed crooked. Now I come to think about it, this little accident had been pre ’47 and as a war widow she would have been reluctant to incur a medical bill. It was the culmination of damage begun in her orphaned early teens when she squeezed her feet into dainty satin flapper shoes with pointed toes and Louis heels, shoes which resulted in hammer toes squashed into a point against the diagonal big toe.

Perhaps it was the advent of the NHS that resulted in an operation to her toes in an orthopaedic hospital in Liverpool when I was seven. It was too far to visit, and we relied on daily letters to keep in touch. I wrote up my little doings and she drew me a picture of herself in bed with her feet in traction, described her fellow-patients’ foibles and the strictness of the nurses. Half way through the three week absence my Great Aunt Kate who was caring for me and felt nervous about long train journeys decided to spend a chunk of her savings on a taxi all the way from Pwllheli to Liverpool, setting out at dawn in order to arrive for afternoon visiting. Four miles into the expedition (at Fourcrosses) the taxi broke down and took three hours to repair, while my initial excitement faded through impatience into boredom and finally despair. No journey since has ever seemed so long. We did eventually reach Liverpool, in the evening, long after visiting time was over. And as the sister sternly informed us, children were not allowed to visit at any time, let alone when they ought to be tucked up in bed. But my heartbroken wails combined with Auntie Kate’s indignant pleas and the taxi driver’s testimony resulted in rules being broken and we were allowed to see my mother for ten minutes, to bask in her smile and open arms, to be hugged and kissed before setting out on the long trek home.

And in the end it was all for nothing. My mother’s tendency to arthritis flared up although she was only in her twenties and attacked the traumatised joints, leaving her in worse pain than before. I hated going with her to buy shoes. She shunned the sensible, broad lace-ups and would spend hours going from shoe-shop to shoe-shop till she found a pair of smart cuban heeled court shoes she could manage to push her lumpy toes into, a sad, pretty Cinderella lumbered with the Ugly Sisters’ feet.

The arthritis must have been hereditary. When I was twelve, just after my periods began, the scaphoid bones on my feet swelled like golf balls and reddened painfully, making me cry off hockey at school and preventing my enjoying any exercise other than swimming or cycling. A fool of a consultant labelled them “congenital accessory scaphoids”, claiming the inflammation was due to their rubbing against too-tight shoes.
“They can’t be congenital,” my mother objected. “They’ve only just appeared. And she’s always been measured for Start-Rite shoes in the correct widths. She’s never worn anything else, except Clark’s sandals in summer.”
The swollen 'congenital' scaphoids kept me company all through my teens, whatever shoes I wore, until my first pregnancy, when they totally disappeared never to return. They didn’t prevent me, the moment I had some money of my own at sixteen, rocking and rolling in lime-green suede winkle pickers with four inch stiletto heels, though my mother begged me not to with tears in her eyes.
“I wish I’d had a mother to tell me not to wear silly shoes.”
But, like Hans Andersen’s Little Mermaid, whose exchange of her fish tail for a pair of exquisite legs and feet to try and capture her prince demanded the witch’s price of suffering agony with every step she took, I insisted on elevating my five feet one inch on stilettos despite the pain. I remember particularly a pair of black velvet winkle-pickers with stiletto heels and rhinestone buckles. As my bunions swelled and ached my shoes became gradually wider and lower down the years, until I finally gave up silly shoes entirely at age fifty-five. It was only then that I came to connect my stupidity with my horror, as a child, of being shown by a sailor uncle a pair of beautifully embroidered old Chinese slippers extending only three inches beyond the ankle and being told they were made for an adult lady with bound feet. The torture of her grandmother’s foot-binding was graphically described by Jung Chang in The Wild Swans, as well as the great pain of their gradual release to begin growing again after her marriage to a Manchu, who did not follow the binding tradition. Her account of the grandmother’s visit to her married daughter who lived over 300 miles away, a terrible journey by several means of primitive transport, involving many agonising miles on foot, only to be packed off home again by her new son-in-law after a stay of one week, had me in tears.
We Westerners have heard much about the infamous ‘lily walk’, the painful, tottering little steps of young women with bound feet, supposedly much admired by men in Old China. According to American psychologist Claude Steiner, destabilising clothes and footwear are part of a male plot to keep females weak and vulnerable: ‘Balance is a particularly valuable power source for women. Patriarchy discourages women from attaining a strong sense of physical balance. Women’s fashions designed to please men – tight clothes, miniskirts, high heels – interfere with physical stability.’
Yet it was apparently Chinese mothers-in-law who forbade their sons to marry girls with normal feet. And I cannot honestly say that any of the men in my life encouraged me to wear high heels and pointed toes. The opposite, in fact. In my experience men like to be accompanied by women who can stride out comfortably and keep up with their pace. I remember in Lincoln about 20 years ago going out in a group which included some German, French and Italian men. They were laughing at the local Debbies and Sharons because of their old fashioned high heels. I only ever came across one man who wanted me to wear high heels and I only went out with him once. So maybe I am simply not attracted to the kind of man who yearns for a bimbo.

A childhood experience

I couldn't believe my eyes. They were throwing children out of the third floor window! And I was next but one in the queue. Not a queue for bread or meat or bananas, but for being thrown out of a window.

I was eight years old, it was 1949 and my first evening at Hillgrove Preparatory Boarding School in Bangor. I'd never experienced anything like this before. With mounting horror I saw one little boy go to his fate meekly enough, pushed out by two burly teenage girl prefects. But the boy in front of me, about my own age and new here like me, screamed, 'No, no! I don't want to go!'

They fastened some sort of belt round him and tried to heave him out, but he clung to the sill, still screaming. One of the girls thumped his fingers, using her fists like hammers. With a cry of pain, out and down he went. Then it was my turn.

They pulled me up onto the sill. Through the window I could see all the other pupils congregating below, including those who'd been pushed out. They didn't look hurt. The headmaster, in black gown and mortar board, was barking orders through a megaphone.

'Come on, Anita. Buck up, child! Get a move on!' came roaring out of that thing in a posh English voice. I hated his drawing attention to me like that. All the faces below were staring up at me. The two big girls had put the straps round me and were shoving me over the sill. Terrified, I clung on like the previous boy, but was too shy to scream.

They prised my fingers off the sill, one by one. I had no option but to climb out. To my relief the straps round my chest held me firmly. I wasn't going to fall, after all. I hung over the abyss, my feet clamped on the wall.

'Walk down!' cried the girls. 'Walk down the wall!'

I'd never heard of abseiling. How could I walk down a sheer brick wall? I stayed where I was. Nobody could reach me here. Good. What was a fire practice, anyway? They'd never had one at my previous school. Now the Headmaster was bellowing through that megaphone again.

'Anita, just put one foot after the other and walk down slowly and steadily. Slowly and steadily. Come on now, we're all waiting. There are others waiting their turn.' Bet they're not in a hurry, I thought. I relaxed a little and the voices above and below me seemed to die down and go far away. I looked around, beginning to enjoy my high vantage point. The school grounds had tall trees, bushes, little paths that disappeared into promising wildernesses. This could be a good place to play, if they left me alone to explore.

I leaned back and began to walk down the wall. It was easy – I was just beginning to enjoy it when I reached the ground and someone took off my harness.

I turned to the Headmaster. 'Sir, can I have another go?'

He glared at me in disbelief while everyone laughed.

ends (500 words)