Grammar School Girl
Saint David’s Mansions, a four-storey apartment block in Sydenham, southeast London, became our new home. Grandiose in name only, it backed onto a large grassy wasteland where debris from demolished buildings was scattered. Through a child’s eyes, this was an enchanting place abounding in splintered planks, wrecked furniture, and smashed staircases. On this hill, it is said, the queen of the ancient Britons, Queen Boadicea, made her last valiant stand against the Romans, around A.D. 60. The dump provided a fantastic playground where Vivien and I spent hours racing up and down the slopes on imaginary horses, or finding secret hiding-places under stones to conceal coded messages. In the springtime, the rugged terrain bloomed with clumps of daisies, straggling wild roses, and cornflowers. I used to lie in the long grass and watch the scudding clouds sweep over London while memorizing my favourite poems, or play out scenarios from my fertile imagination: one day I was Cathy of Wuthering Heights, the next a captive Indian princess from a cowboy western.
Vivien and I collected an assortment of large garden snails and wrote numbers on their backs with coloured markers. These decorated creatures were released into the garden, where we amused ourselves keeping log books to track their meanderings through the privet bushes. To this day I harbour a maudlin concern for garden snails, picking them off the sidewalks and depositing them in the grass. Occasionally we staged snail races on the low concrete roof of an abandoned air-raid shelter. What patience we must have possessed! Damien pestered his big sisters until we gave him his own pet snail, which he painted red, named Poke, and housed in a marmalade jar beside his bed. How easily we children were entertained as we immersed ourselves in our new surroundings, scarcely looking back at the life we had abruptly abandoned in Canada.
The carefree summer came to an end in September when I was taken to the imposing ivy-covered Sydenham County Girls School. Because of our time in Canada, I had missed the critical entrance exam to grammar school; however, the headmistress improvised a test consisting of a few arithmetic problems and an essay on the theme “I Was a Stowaway,” which, having had firsthand experience aboard two ocean liners, jump-started my imagination; I wrote non-stop for an hour. The headmistress must have been sufficiently impressed by my creative ramblings, as I was summoned to her office for an interview. Confidently, I rattled off stories about our stay in Toronto. She cut me short, looked at me severely, and instructed me in impeccable Queen’s English to simply answer “Yes, mistress” or “No, mistress.” My “undisciplined” years in Canada had left me with some deplorable habits! At one point I made the mistake of replying “Okay, mistress” to her questions. “My dear, a young lady must never use that dreadful American word,” she reprimanded, frowning over her horn-rimmed spectacles.
I was trundled off to buy the compulsory school uniform: tunic, blouse, navy blue bloomers, gabardine coat, and a hat with an embroidered crest. The school motto was “Aim High,” a dictum I proudly sported on my blazer. All this uniform business made me feel like I already belonged to that privileged mob of English grammar-school girls.
To my parents’ satisfaction, the headmistress placed me in class 1A, with the brightest kids. Swinging my new leather satchel, I tried to blend in to the ponytailed throng. Once classes began, I was grateful for my mother’s years of extra coaching in mathematics and English. The sheer size of the school of two thousand girls made me apprehensive for the first few days. My new classmates thought my “American accent” most peculiar — that same accent that Canadians had found so “English” — but they did their best to make me feel at home, clapping enthusiastically after my presentation on Canada in geography class. The elderly English mistress used to invite me to walk with her during the morning recess so that she could talk about poetry — Wordsworth, Browning, and Tennyson. This exposure to the magic of words and rhyme inspired many poems, including a parody of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, which recounted the story of Hiawatha’s visit to Sydenham County Girls School and to my delight was selected for the annual yearbook. For the first time in my life, I loved going to school in spite of having come from the relaxed educational system of Canada. Within the more rigid discipline of the British system, however, even my innocent cartwheels on the school lawn got me into trouble for showing my knickers. Luckily, I excelled in most subjects, receiving weekly “gold distinctions” in the headmistress’s office. “Thank you, mistress,” I piped up proudly in my best schoolgirl English.
Each morning, dressed in a blue uniform and felt hat, I jumped on the red double-decker bus and clambered to the top for the half-hour ride to school. At lunchtime, the plump cockney cooks allowed me to venture into their steamy kitchen for my ration of cheese as, thanks to my parents, I had been brought up without eating meat. The “sweets” of pink blancmange and spotted dick seemed a scrumptious change from my mother’s healthy dinners of brown rice and vegetables. On Fridays we were marched single file to the local swimming baths and forced into the frigid chlorinated water, which stung our eyes and turned us into shivering lumps of gooseflesh. Class 1A used to return with stringy, dripping-wet hair and chattering teeth in the chilly days of the London winter. Apart from swimming, the other class I was not too fond of was music. Scales and music theory seemed a bore, but in the school assemblies I happily belted out such rousing hymns as “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
Creating things with my hands gave me great satisfaction. After mounting some pressed wildflowers from the dump on strips of cardboard covered with cellophane, I glued on pink ribbons and persuaded Vivien to accompany me door to door to offer my bookmarks to the people on our street. As pleased as Punch, we sold the handicrafts for a shilling each. Next I struck upon the idea of doing odd jobs on Saturday afternoons. As a child I never had reservations about knocking on the doors of total strangers; it never occurred to me that it could be dangerous for an eleven-year-old girl and her nine-year-old sister to walk unescorted into unfamiliar homes. The Londoners seemed so hospitable and friendly. The world and her people were all to be trusted. We shopped at the greengrocers for one elderly lady, swept a man’s stone yard, returned an empty gas tank for a granny in a wheelchair, and received a few shillings for our labours. Each Saturday we skipped off to perform odd jobs, telling our parents that we were meeting school friends.
Having a secret from our parents felt naughtily delicious. Our hard-earned pennies were spent on treats from the local sweet shop, where jars of tantalizing confectionary made our mouths water: powdered-sherbert cones with licorice-stick suckers, milk drops, Jelly Babies, dolly mixture, and Black Jacks.
My father slipped and broke his leg while playing football with his students, a bunch of rough, tough emotionally disturbed adolescent boys, and was hospitalized for six weeks. Each day my devoted mother bused across London to visit him, leaving us to our own devices. They began to realize that England offered few options for my father’s career, and that many friends seemed trapped in economic ruts. In contrast, they remembered the open-ended challenges and opportunities in Canada. A position of art teacher in the Etobicoke school system was available, so after only one year they decided to board ship once again and return to their adopted land. I am sure it was with many regrets and considerable emotional turmoil that they waved sad goodbyes to their relatives and friends for the second time.
For Vivien and me, the move was simply another episode in our wandering lifestyle. We accepted their decision without question. Although it meant leaving our favourite schools, we sensed their disillusionment with life in the “old country” and were prepared once again to sail across the Atlantic. For the third time, my parents stuffed our wooden trunks with dolls, teddy bears, books, and canvases, and boarded another Greek liner, the SS Arcadia, to carry us three thousand miles to a country that now felt familiar.