Look Back in Hunger Page 6

  The rudimentary sex lesson we had at this point was somewhat traumatic too. We were informed of the very basic mechanics of menstruation, which was made to sound like some ancient medieval torture and unsettled me enormously. I went home that day and remarked to my mum that I was so thankful we only had to go through it once. My mum informed me that I’d obviously misunderstood and was looking at a lifetime of it. I didn’t get over this piece of earth-shattering information for months. Subsequently, I have been accused by the more upmarket tabloids of only ever talking about periods, in my quasi-feminist, man-hating way, and I would just like to point out (for any tabloid journalists reading this, which is unlikely) that out of probably nearly twenty hours of stand-up material there is roughly ten minutes of material on periods, which hardly qualifies as ‘talking about it all the time’. So there!

  Not long after that, the school contacted my parents and said they wanted me to go up into the third year from the first year as I wasn’t being challenged enough. I had really enjoyed myself at the school up to that point. I didn’t find the work particularly easy or feel different from my peers. I always looked forward to going to school and I would have been quite happy to stay there for the rest of the allotted time, despite the violin incident. But this was a social minefield. My old peers would hate and resent me, as would my new peers. My parents caved in. I think they were aware of how difficult it would be for me to be in a class with kids two years older—the potential for bullying and the sense of alienation generally—and although they were very unenthusiastic about me spending four hours a day on a bus, it was the lesser of two evils.

  They decided to send me to Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Girls after all. At the time I wasn’t that keen to go because I was happy where I was. I didn’t have any feelings one way or another about the grammar-school system. I think the fact that it was an all-girls’ school was in some ways more of a challenge, as I had been used to being at a mixed school. Although boys weren’t my favourite things when I was twelve, I think in hindsight it was important for them to be around, as growing up with boys and spending all your schooldays with them gives you a more natural perspective on them and makes them seem less like alien creatures. They become alien creatures when you’re a bit older.

  So, on my first day, I found myself waiting at the bus stop at 6.45 a.m., freezing cold, in the regulation navy-and-yellow uniform (yum) with a ridiculous felt hat. We were transported to Tunbridge Wells by an ancient, wheezing double-decker bus which stopped at about a hundred villages on the way. After a few weeks I had got into the routine—our hats stayed off until we reached the outer environs of the town, at which point we suspected a teacher/border guard lurked, furnished with binoculars, to pick off those naughty girls who didn’t have their hats on. Some years later, fags were added to the mix, as the bravest of us sat at the back and puffed inexpertly on a No. 6, coughing and giggling in equal measure.

  Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Girls was pretty much as you might imagine. Many hundreds of educated young ladies from a variety of backgrounds, all marshalled and directed by a group of mainly single women in their forties and fifties, some of whom were extraordinarily sweet and others storm troopers in tweed.

  Our one well-known alumna was Virginia Wade, a famous tennis player who somehow got it together to win Wimbledon at one point. I would say she is a pretty typical ex-Tunbridge Wells girl. If you ever see her on telly, and she pops up from time to time to give her views on tennis, you will note that she is sweetly unfashionable and unerringly polite, in some ways a bit like a Victorian throwback. This, I think, is what the headmistress hoped we’d all turn out like.

  Our headmistress was visually unthreatening, looking as she did like a twin-set-and-pearls type, but she had a rod of steel running through her and this was evident whenever there was any punishment to be meted out. I was a good girl, so it was unusual for me to see much of her, but she left fear in her wake, and a hushed respect coupled with terror would descend on everyone in the corridor should we spot her heading towards us.

  I went back to the school recently for a speech day. It was a surreal experience. The new headmistress belonged to the twenty-first century, having as she did a normal hairstyle and normal clothes. We all sang the school song, which I had completely forgotten and have immediately suppressed, so I couldn’t even tell you one line from it, but it was full of worthy sentiments, almost like a hymn, with nothing about smoking on the bus or pissing about during Latin in it.

  The headmistress introduced me by saying something like: ‘There are girls who are hugely academically gifted who apply themselves to their work, and there are others who mostly fly by the seat of their pants. Please welcome Jo Brand!’ This didn’t really chime with my memory of the place, as I did very well in my O-levels and didn’t really get into trouble until I went to school in Hastings.

  Among all the tweed and pudding-bowl haircuts, there was one cuckoo in the nest—our science teacher. She was a blonde siren, voluptuous and bursting out of her lab coat, and her appearance was the sort that promised untold delights to pervy middle-aged men. I thought sex lessons with her would be a hoot, but unfortunately she just did the ‘insert the penis’ mantra like all other science teachers and I was hugely disappointed.

  My French teacher was like an elderly stick insect. She wore the most amazing bloomers I had ever seen in my life. They looked like they had been plucked from a Dickens novel, worn by someone like Betsey Trotwood, and they extended down to almost below her knees. How did we know? Because she would sit at the desk with her legs wide open and in between chanting, ‘Je vais àla boulangerie’ and ‘Où est la gare?’ and suchlike, many of us would deliberately drop pencils or rubbers on the floor so we could have a quick gander.

  Bullying was not something, thankfully, that I experienced at this school, from other girls at least. If it was going on, I was blissfully unaware of it and pretty quickly I fell in with a group of warm, friendly girls who became close friends.

  I liked sport generally. I didn’t really have an athletic build, being slightly short, but I wasn’t fat at that point and I could shift my arse when I had to. I liked netball particularly because it was a real team game in which you depended on others and I played wing attack which meant I got the opportunity to score fairly often. A sport I wasn’t so keen on was hockey. Once you’ve been hit round the ankles a few times by some hulking great brute of a girl, it kind of loses its appeal. So at some point during my hockey career, I chose to be a goalkeeper. This was because you were togged up with loads of protection, like shin pads, you were the only player allowed to kick the ball as well as hit it with your stick and there were long periods of inactivity when you leaned against the goalpost. I would have had a fag if I could. I always remember hockey being played on muddy fields on cold, wet days, whereas it always seemed to be sunny when we were playing netball. False memory syndrome again, I suppose.

  Some months after I arrived at Tunbridge Wells and having been allotted a place in the school netball team, I found our team playing against my old school which contained some girls who had been my friends. I’m ashamed to say that they seemed to me to have become country bumpkins, compared to the sophisticated Tunbridge Wells girls I was now spending my time with. It was a painful lesson to learn and it sent me the certain message that I had moved on from my old school and was now a grammar-school girl, much as I felt in my heart that this shouldn’t be the case. All the awkward promises to stay in touch had melted away after a couple of months and it was as if we had never been close. So if any of those girls from Homewood are reading this, I apologise if I came across as a nobhead and I fully confess I was being one.

  My best friend Paula came from a resolutely working-class Catholic background and had seven siblings and the most gloriously chaotic household you could imagine. After a while, as I was finding the journey a bit of a struggle, it was arranged that I would stay at Paula’s one or two nights a week and together we would stay a
t my Auntie Margie’s one night a week. Auntie Margie was the mother of the baby, Elizabeth, that my brothers and I had dropped in a pond when we were younger, although she remained blissfully ignorant about the details at that point.

  At Paula’s, we slept three in a bed, the telly was on all the time, the noise level was at eleven most of the time and I absolutely loved it. Coming from a home in which my parents still tightly controlled our viewing habits, it was like being released into Wonderland a couple of nights a week.

  School life quickly settled into the well-worn routine so beloved of children all over the world. I enjoyed school a lot, got on with everybody pretty well, behaved myself and did my work. I wouldn’t say I was the star of the class, but I hovered in the top ten most of the time.

  My favourite lesson was Latin, for some weird reason. I loved Caesar’s The Gallic Wars and was really attracted to all these soldiers ‘mounting the ramparts’ and ‘sending dispatches to Cicero’. There was something comforting about repeating endless declensions of nouns, or was it verbs? Can’t remember but I loved it. What made all the difference was having the sweetest, most self-effacing teacher ever. The poor woman had been saddled with the name of Miss Polmounter, not a name you’d really want to go into teaching with. But because she was such a sweetie, we didn’t use it against her because we were all so fond of her. Nothing much very exciting ever happened in Latin lessons apart from once, just after I’d had a BCG inoculation and the top of my arm had become a big, infected lump, tempting my friend Julia to give it a slightly too hard punch. My arm gently exploded, spewing pus all over my shirt, giving us something to talk about for weeks afterwards and leaving me with a very attractive scar that looks like a love bite.

  Speaking of which, boys were starting to enter the frame round about the age of twelve or thirteen, although Tunbridge Wells Grammar School for Girls was the sort of school where teenage pregnancies were not so much frowned upon as met with histrionics, complete with screaming and tearing out of hair.

  I remember my first kiss very well indeed. I think you’ll find most girls do. It was at a party, and I suspect I was probably about twelve. I had hooked up with this slightly spotty young man whose name now escapes me. I didn’t really fancy him very much but had decided that my first kiss was something to get over and done with, a bit like your first smear. He seemed as good a candidate as any. He was a bit of a shit dancer, but who isn’t at that age? I think someone had smuggled some extremely weak beer in, so we all thought we were pissed out of our heads. And as the ‘slowies’ kicked off, I realised the moment was nigh. The face belonging to the boy in question loomed towards me and I shut my eyes and hoped for the best. To say it wasn’t nice is underplaying the sheer horror of it all. A wet, slimy tongue pushed its way into my mouth and moved in a very unimaginative circular direction for what seemed like a thousand years. I was too surprised to respond in any constructive way apart from managing a quick poke in and out of my tongue now and again. Mercifully, it finally stopped and I pulled away feeling a mixture of revulsion at the practicalities of it and ecstasy at a developmental barrier finally hurdled. I think at that point, poor guy, I made my excuses, backed towards the door and headed off into the night, not wanting to repeat the experience until I was about seventy. Thankfully, I’ve met much better kissers since then but I could well understand how a crap first kiss could send you sprinting to a convent.

  One thing I had mixed feelings about at school was athletics. I was in most of the teams—hockey, netball, tennis—but one thing I couldn’t stand was athletics. I wasn’t really built like an athlete, being less than willowy and a bit short. I’m not at all sure the sports teacher, a curious mixture of manly and horribly enthusiastic, was very keen on me. During an athletics session in the summer, she divided us all into fours to run the 400 metres and for some reason bunged me in with the three fastest runners in the school. I kept up with them for about the first seven metres and then they began to pull away, and as I saw their backs disappearing into the distance and became aware of the amused glances of the rest of the class, I realised I was going to get a right drubbing. By the time they had finished, I was only a third of the way round and was forced to slog on alone, the last 200 metres almost matching the humiliation of the violin debacle at my previous school.

  It’s hard to work out when you’re a kid why certain teachers instantly don’t like you. In psychotherapy this is known as ‘negative transference’ and, put at its simplest, it involves an instinctive hostile reaction to someone you’ve just met that you cannot explain, even if they seem like a perfectly nice person.

  Although the games mistress wasn’t my greatest fan, this was more of a problem with another teacher I had, who singled me out for some nasty treatment and indulged in what I believed was mild bullying. This, of course, was disguised under the cover of my supposed shortcomings, including the assertion that I had a speech impediment and therefore would never be able to pass any spoken exams. My ‘speech impediment’ amounted to a very slight hiss when I pronounced the letter ‘s’, and no one else had ever noted or commented on it.

  I certainly wasn’t aware of it, and neither were any of my family. I always thought teachers were supposed to help prevent bullying, not be the bullies themselves. Still, I suppose it was a good lesson: that occasionally in life—or for some poor sods more frequently than that—people will take an instant dislike to you and make your life a misery for no reason. Initially I kept quiet about the handful of instances when this teacher singled me out and made me look like a fool, because I was embarrassed about it and thought it was my fault. We all want to be liked and, I suppose, we all assume that if we are nice and polite to people there is no reason for them to go on the offensive. But things got steadily worse. This teacher would show me up in front of the class and try to make the other girls laugh at me.

  These frequent, humiliating allusions to my general crapness were accompanied by a fair amount of sarcasm and it got to the stage where I was reluctant to be in this teacher’s class, or indeed go to school at all.

  So, I eventually mentioned this to my mum, who I suppose was shocked to find out that in what she had assumed was a middle-class environment populated by sensible teachers, this horrible person had it in for her little girl. And my mum cannot abide bullying of any sort; it makes her angrier than anything else. She is someone who, when she is angry, does revenge big time and will not put up with any kind of injustice. So …

  My mother, with all guns blazing, headed up to the school to ‘sort it out’, and if there’s one thing my mum is good at it’s giving someone a general sort-out. It seemed that almost instantly the problem melted away and I had no more grief at all. If only I could keep my mum in a cupboard and get her to sort out all the negative things in my life.

  Other highlights and lowlights of life at school were as follows:

  ● A friend of mine managing to insert a tampon during our geography O-level exam. I won’t tell you her name—I’m sure you’ll understand why. What was particularly impressive about this incident was the fact that it was during an exam, when teachers watch you like a hawk for fear of any cheating going on. Our teachers would not only sit at the front with a beady eye on all of us, from time to time they would stroll up and down the aisles of the big school hall, leaning over us and doing big, long, hard stares at our work. So all power to her for managing what would have involved a fair bit of shuffling around. It was the talk of our little group of friends for ages afterwards.

  ● Winning a prize in the fifth year and being permitted to choose a book. I asked for an anthology of Bob Dylan lyrics and had to wrestle with the headmistress who thought it was a highly inappropriate book for a grammar-school girl to be reading. A friend of mine who allowed the school to choose her book for her ended up with a volume on polishing pebbles, guaranteed to make you lose consciousness at the first page. In retrospect, I made a wise decision.

  ● Finding ever new and resourceful ways of getting o
ut of having a communal shower every week. Even though I wasn’t overweight, the idea filled me with absolute horror. Having been forced into the shower once, I vowed that I would never go in there again. I never did.

  This meant that I had to come up with a truly impressive list of excuses and these included:

  1. ’I’ve got my period.’

  This excuse was a good one, because obviously in a class of thirty or so girls, the teachers did not have a chart of everyone’s menstrual cycles, so you could get away with at least two periods a month.

  2. ‘I’ve got a cold.’

  This was a dodgy one, because the more gung-ho teachers would say something like ‘Well, having a shower will be good for you.’ So I had to make sure I only used this if a weedy, sympathetic teacher was on shower duty.

  3. Once, when I’d exhausted numbers 1 and 2, I just started to cry for no reason and pretended I had problems at home. This worked a treat, but could only be used once in case they got suspicious and contacted my parents.

  ● A girl in our class turning up for school one day looking as if she had been tarred and feathered. Her little brother had cut off all her gorgeous, long, white-blond hair while she was asleep and although it had distressed the poor girl enormously, it was hard not to laugh.

  ● Piano lessons with my piano teacher, Miss Funnell (yes, that was her name), who took a somewhat hard-line approach ‘to scales and would threaten to whack me on the hand with the thin edge of a ruler if I bolloxed them up. This did not encourage me to get them right, however.