It was a Wednesday night in October, and Rusty was sitting with her French teacher in one of the empty classrooms. She would really have enjoyed French if it hadn’t been for Mademoiselle, who was short and fat and reeked of stale cabbage-water and mildew. As Rusty was gazing at the thin moustache on her upper lip and the unwashed vest sticking out over her greasy suit, there was a knock at the door. It was a prefect from her House.
‘Excuse me, Mademoiselle,’ she began. ‘There’s a message from Miss Bembridge for Virginia Dickinson.’ She handed Mademoiselle a piece of paper.
She glanced at it and looked up. ‘You are to remain at the school for the weekend,’ she said. ‘Your mother is to visit a friend in Devon who is seriously ill.’
‘In Devon? Does she say who it is?’
Mademoiselle looked down again. ‘Oui. The Honourable Mrs Langley –’
‘Beatie,’ she whispered. ‘It’s Beatie and her ruddy indigestion.’
‘Insolence!’ shouted Mademoiselle, but Rusty hardly heard her.
The prefect left and Mademoiselle tapped her desk. ‘Attention, s’il vous plait. Rapportez-vous à la page vingt-trois, numéro huit.’
‘Numéro huit,’ repeated Rusty, dazed. She gazed down at her French reader. Mademoiselle tapped the desk again.
‘Dans un petit village de Normandie,’ Rusty began, ‘ily a
deux meuniers.’ She stopped. ‘Please, Mademoiselle, may I go to the John?’
‘Qu’est-ce que c’est, ce John?’
‘I mean,’ said Rusty, remembering the procedure and raising her hand, ‘please may I be excused?’
Mademoiselle gave a loud grunt and slammed the book shut.
‘ Très bien,’ she said. ‘But you will translate this exercise for me.’
lOui, Mademoiselle,’ whispered Rusty.
As soon as the French mistress had left the classroom, Rusty hurried out into the corridor, her head down. There was a large broom-closet at the end of the next passage. She moved swiftly towards it and flung open the door. Once safely inside, she stood in the darkness and leaned against the wall.
On Saturday morning, no one would have her in their group, so she had to go with the Juniors into town. She was put at the back and paired up with the other unpopular girl in her House, a small slight girl with a pasty complexion, from the Lower Fifth. Recognizing a fellow sufferer, Rusty gave her a friendly wink, but the girl turned miserably away.
Rusty spotted Rosalind and the other two girls at the front of the ‘crocodile’. They were paired with girls from their respective Houses. She waved to them. They waved shyly back. The ‘Bull’ marched up and down, checking to see that they all were wearing their outdoor shoes and stockings, their capes, gloves and hats. She paused at Rusty and glared at her L. L. Bean coat.
‘Virginia Dickinson, the sooner your mother obtains a proper uniform, the better.’
‘I have permission –’ she began.
‘If you answer me back, young lady, you will remain at school.’
As soon as her back was turned, Rusty shook her fist at her.
The girl next to her blushed. ‘Please don’t,’ she begged. ‘If you have to stay in, I won’t have a partner and she might not let me out either.’
‘O.K.,’ Rusty whispered.
They walked briskly down the school drive, through the gates and towards the bus-stop.
‘Say,’ said Rusty to the girl, ‘how come you aren’t winning the popularity contest either?’
‘I’m a Scholarship girl,’ she mumbled.
‘You mean you won a scholarship?’
She nodded.
Rusty gave a low whistle. ‘That means you must be pretty smart.’
The girl shrugged.
‘Come on. Don’t be so modest.’
‘I suppose I am a bit. I mean, I do well in exams.’
‘So the others are jealous, is that it?’
The girl looked astounded. ‘Jealous!’
‘No talking in the ranks!’ shouted Miss Bullivant over her shoulder.
In the distance they could see a bus approaching.
‘No,’ said the girl quietly. ‘They look down on me because my father doesn’t have to pay any fees. They call me “Charity Girl”.’
‘You’re kidding!’ whispered Rusty.
The bus slowed down and the girls in front stepped on to it. It wasn’t until they had reached the town that Rusty felt it was safe to talk to the girl again. Miss Bullivant was leading them towards a crossing. She stopped at the kerb, looked right and left, and then led them all firmly across the street.
‘Say,’ Rusty whispered out of the side of her mouth, ‘why don’t we be friends? At least we got something in common. Nobody likes us.’
The girl stared ahead. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry, but I just can’t. You see, if I make friends with you I’ll be even more unpopular. If I can just stick it out until the Upper Fifth, things will be different.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘This is my fourth year.’
Oh boy, thought Rusty.
They halted outside a newsagent’s and sweet shop.
‘You have ten minutes,’ said Miss Bullivant, ‘and remember, you are all to stay with your partners.’
‘Yes, Miss Bullivant,’ chorused the girls. ‘Thank you, Miss Bullivant.’
The full-time boarders had been given their week’s quota of money from their term’s allowance by Matron. Since Rusty went home at weekends, Matron had nothing to give her. Even so, Rusty would still have liked to wander in and out the shops.
What made the trip into town harder for Rusty to bear was that occasionally she saw girls from her own form walking freely about in fours; and some were sitting in a little Tudor teahouse with a plate of buns between them.
In spite of the quaintness of the town, everything looked grubby and run-down, as if the whole place needed a coat of paint; and Rusty still couldn’t get used to seeing so many windows without shutters. They seemed unfinished, somehow, like faces with no eyelids.
Bare-legged girls in faded coats and lace-up shoes, old ladies in trousers, and younger women with scarves tied in turban fashion stood outside the shops in long queues. Everyone looked so tired and worn down. There were no bright colours anywhere, only khaki and grey and a muddy sort of green. An old faded poster with We can take it on it was peeling off a wall. Beside it a new poster read: EXTRA EFFORT NOW MEANS BETTER LIVING SOONER. Rusty was just glancing down a street where there was a large pile of rubble, when she heard a boy yell out, ‘Hey, Yank, get a move on!’ She whirled around.
Across the street three uniformed boys were waiting for a fourth to catch up with them. Above knee-length grey shorts they wore scarlet blazers and caps with black stripes.
Rusty was aware that the crocodile of girls was moving away. If she didn’t take her chance now, it would be too late.
‘Hey, Yank!’ she yelled. The fourth boy, who was scowling, turned and looked across the road, puzzled. ‘Are you from the States?’ Rusty yelled.
He stood at the edge of the pavement and grinned. He had cropped brown hair and dark eyes. She guessed he was about thirteen or fourteen. He had a classical, regular sort of face. Nothing stuck out or looked squashed.
,’I was evacuated there,’ he said.
‘Me too. Where’d they send you?’
‘Vermont. Burlington.’
‘Oh boy, I don’t believe it! Say, do you know the Fitzgibbons?’
He shook his head. ‘Sorry, can’t say I do. Is that where you stayed?’
‘No, but my American grandparents live there. We call ‘em the Fitzes for short. Ever go ice-skating on the lake before it got snowed under?’
‘Millions of times.’
‘We coulda skated right past one another!’ she cried.
He smiled.
He doesn’t sound at all American, thought Rusty. I wonder why they called him Yank. ‘Ever make snow candy?’ she said.
‘Snow candy?’
‘Uh-huh. My grandparents taught me. You have to do it after a snowfall, so’s it’s clean or soft, I guess. Then you pour boiling-hot maple syrup on the snow, and shazzam! -snow candy!’
‘You know what I miss?’ he said. ‘Hot chocolate.’
‘Me too. And Coca-Cola.’
Rusty and the boy were totally unaware that the two groups of boys and girls had stopped walking and were staring, transfixed, as Rusty and the boy yelled across to each other.
The boy spoke of buying a nickel’s worth of hot cocoa on the lake, and of going to an old movie theatre, where the most beautiful stars and planets were lit up on the ceiling just like a planetarium, and during the movie you could just tip your head back every now and then and take a peek at them.
The drab grey town faded, and Rusty was suddenly back on the frozen lake in Vermont with Gramps and Uncle Bruno and Skeet.
But her journey was short-lived. Within minutes, she felt a hand grip her arm; it was the Bull. Below her steamed-up spectacles her thin lips were pressed into a single line. Outraged, she dragged Rusty away from the kerb.
‘How dare you!’ she spluttered. ‘How dare you!’
‘He was sent to Vermont,’ Rusty began. ‘Burlington, where my American grandparents –’
‘That will do,’ the Bull snapped. ‘Do you realize the disgrace you’ve brought on the school? Do you?’
‘What did I do?’
‘Go and stand next to your partner immediately!’
‘Yes, Miss Bullivant.’
As she approached the line of girls, Rusty caught sight of the look of horror on their faces. Her partner was staring down at the ground. Rusty noticed that she was blushing. ‘He was a sea-vacuee like me,’ she whispered.
‘Silence,’ said Miss Bullivant fiercely. ‘One more word out of you and I’ll see that you’re expelled, my girl. Benwood House doesn’t need your type.’
As the crocodile of girls trooped back in the direction of the bus-stop, the silence was electric. None of the girls dared even look at one another, let alone speak.
Rusty was completely bewildered. Didn’t they realize how lonely she’d been ever since she had come to this school? Didn’t they realize what it meant to meet someone who knew something about where she had come from? Whenever she had tried to talk about America, she was always stepped on. ‘Oh, America this, America that,’ they’d say. ‘Can’t you talk about anything else?’ But what? That’s all she’d known for the past five years. And then she’d hear them talking about the War, and that made her feel left out. Especially when Judith Poole said one night, ‘Of course, some people have never known what it was like to be really at war. Some people have never even heard one single bomb. Some people ran away to other countries.’ But Rusty hadn’t run away. She’d been sent to America, whether she had wanted to go or not, in just the same way as she’d been sent to this horrible school.
For the rest of the day and on Sunday she was put into an empty classroom to sit in disgrace and to eat her meals there alone. On Monday morning, a public announcement was made in assembly concerning her crime—talking to a boy – and she was given a discipline mark. As the others sat, Rusty was made to stand up in front of everyone to add to her humiliation.
Throughout the day she was greeted with open hostility, not only by the girls who felt that the honour of the school had been soiled, but especially by members of her own House. She had only to walk down a corridor or into a classroom, and immediately the girls would stop talking. At supper she found gravel and stones in her food, and when she slipped into bed, her sheets had been drenched in water.
The following morning she was summoned to the Head mistress’s study, to be told that she would have to remain at school the following weekend. Her mother was still in Devon. Beatie, she was informed, had died.