Neither of the cars was working on my first day at Mary Hall’s School. Louise offered to drive me to school and Mummy, with Poppy in tow, came too. We sat in a row on the front seat of Louise’s pea-green camper van. Mummy and Louise chattered and laughed, Poppy slept, and I clenched my teeth and gazed out of the window, trying to plot an escape from the camper van at an invisible distance from the school.
I had never had a school uniform before, nor indeed a whole outfit of new clothes. Daddy took me to Norwich armed with a pale-green list of school requirements and we bought them all. On the school outfitting floor of Blond’s department store we hailed a matronly woman. She had frizzy grey hair and a badge with ‘Madge Wilkins’ written on it. Madge had never met anyone like my father.
‘My dear lady.’ He leaned on the counter and pushed his dark glasses on to his forehead. ‘Would you be kind enough to render us assistance in dressing my daughter as befits a pupil of Mary Hall’s School?’ He lowered his glasses again and lit a cigarette. Madge patted her hair and overlooked the cigarette. She led us to a rail of drab green clothes. Daddy removed his glasses for a closer look. ‘Remarkable,’ he drawled. ‘Do you think they deliberately dress these poor children like lesbian aunts, or is it done through ignorance?’
Madge bridled. ‘Mary Hall’s is the most expensive uniform on our racks,’ she reproved.
‘Dear God,’ said Daddy, ‘let’s get this damn thing over, then.’
Madge reached into shelves and boxes and brought out cream shirts, fawn jerseys, socks, and bile-green heaps of skirt and blazer. Daddy became bored before we got to ties and gym knickers and left me, speechless and bewildered, by the pile of my acquisitions.
‘I don’t really like that,’ I said. Madge was holding up a jersey the colour and texture of thick porridge. ‘Do I have to have it?’
Madge clucked like a broody hen as she consulted the list. She pulled out a thin, tawny cardigan. It reminded me of Ginger, Brodie’s cat, and I nodded. ‘That one is fine. I can wear it under my jacket when I go riding.’
But there was no alternative to the foul skirt, a triangle of crackling synthetic fabric. Madge insisted on one several sizes too big. Its folds reached half-way down my calves and hung there, inelegant and stiff, like mildewed cardboard. ‘It’s a polyester mix,’ enthused Madge, ‘so Mum can just pop it in the washing machine and run a cool iron over it.’
I thought of Mummy’s iron, its once shiny surface blackened and ploughed where Daddy had used it to press masking tape on to his torn jeans. ‘We haven’t got a washing machine.’
Madge gasped. Her face registered the tragic pity she would have displayed if I had told her I had no mother.
Daddy returned. ‘Dear lady’ – he leaned on the pile of uniform in front of Madge – ‘could she not have one of those black dresses that the divine Goldie wears on Top of the Pops? Are you with me? The dress is, I think, made from a black plastic bag.’
‘She’s not called Goldie,’ I hissed at him. ‘She’s called Blondie.’
Madge knew who he meant. ‘My sons love her,’ she beamed, showing white, even dentures between her frosted lips. ‘You might find those frocks on the fashion floor, but I’m not sure that we stock them.’
Daddy nodded sagely. ‘Ah so,’ he said.
We took the clothes to the cash desk and they were priced. I was mortified when the total was rung up. ‘Daddy, we can’t afford sixty pounds,’ I whispered, ‘we’ll be bankrupt.’
‘My love, I will be the judge of that. But it does seem a shame that your uniform should be so uniform. Let us go and buy a pen.’
We bought a beautiful silver pen and an atlas. We didn’t buy the regulation green Bible because Daddy leafed through it. ‘This is rubbish. You will read the King James Bible, if – which I doubt – you read the Bible at all.’
I was worried. ‘But Daddy, what will I do in scripture lessons?’
‘You will not attend them,’ he said firmly. ‘You are a Catholic and you have no need of scripture lessons.’
Daddy never went to church, and when I asked him if I was going to be confirmed, he said, ‘There is no reason for you to confirm your faith, just as there is no reason for you to confess to it.’