Highdean School

Love letters straight from the heart,
Keep us so near while apart.

Edward Heyman & Victor Young

All us Gordon House girls grabbed a carriage to ourselves as soon as the special train the school had booked for us turned up - late - at Crècy. We glared out of the windows at anyone who tried to get into our special compartments and by the time the train finally left the station we were well and truly catching up with each other's holiday adventures. It helped the journey pass more quickly. The school bus was waiting under the awning at Tilling station and we all piled into it for the short ride to school.

We were expected to write home as soon as we arrived at Highdean. Why we had to write, why we couldn't just send an anbarogram, I couldn't make out. Oh well:

Dear Daddy,

Just a quick note to let you know I got here in one piece. The train was horrible. I'm so glad you were able to get me a reserved compartment all to myself. When I got to Paddington I had a terrible time finding a cab and when I did at last it was so expensive! Thirty bob! Miss Alton had to lend me the money when I got to Crècy.

I'll write again next Sunday as usual.

Love,

Sunny

I sealed up Daddy's letter, addressed it to "Rt Hon Sir Ronald Moon MP, KC" and put it to one side.

'I hope you're proud of yourself,' said Alfie, sitting on the desk preening himself.

'It would have cost thirty bob, if we'd gone by taxi. That's what Tanya said. That's what she had to pay.'

'But we didn't pay that.'

'We would have, if we'd taken a cab. Instead, we used our initiative and we deserve a reward for it. Thirty bob sounds about right to me.'

'We didn't take a cab. Your initiative nearly got us killed!'

Is your daemon a pain in the neck too?

'Found any fleas yet, daemon?' Alfie scowled while I took out another sheet of writing paper:

Dear Aunt Sybil,

Thank you so much for looking after me during the holidays and for packing my trunk for me. I have arrived at school safely and am looking forward to getting really stuck in to my studies.

Love,

Sonya

I put Aunt Sybil's letter next to Daddy's. Things had come to a pretty pass when I had to write bread and butter letters to my own relatives, living in my own home. Oh well, job done. I sighed and dipped my pen in the inkwell. Now for the letter I really wanted to write. I relaxed and sat back in my chair:

Darling Gerry,

Well, here I am, back in good old Highdean in good old Tilling. The jolly old Pit. In one way it's horrible, it being school and all, but in another it's quite nice. For a start, I've got a study of my own at last. My very own room! I've put your picture on the mantelpiece, next to the watercolour you did of the house. There - that's a little bit of home for me, even though I'm stuck in the Pit.

Home is a pain without you there, Gerry. Aunt Sybil is still as stuck-up as ever. She orders me about all the time. I think she's trying to turn me into a lady. Daddy is nice. He's the same old Dad he always was. Busy, not at home all that much, staying up in Town all week, sitting on Committees and making speeches in the House. You know what the speeches are about, of course. I wish I was like you, fighting in the war instead of sitting here in the Pit. I want to do something - something that matters.

I know I must sound like a little kid to you, complaining like this. I imagine you're standing on the bridge of your ship in an icy gale doing real serious brave things while I'm learning stuff like Roman, Computation, Personal Theology (it's Advanced Personal Theology now I'm in the Sixth) and Domestic Administration (that's Cookery. I suppose you've got a Ship's Cook to look after you and all your men. Yo-ho-ho and all that). I thought it was going to be cushy in the Sixth, not being a Junior any more, but instead there're lots of new Duties I have to do. Something to do with Privilege bearing Responsibility in its Wake or some rubbish.

I met a friend of yours in London - Mabel Patterson. She says she met you at the Hunt Ball a year or two ago. Do you remember her? She's got curly red hair and she drives like a lunatic. (She's an ambulance driver now). I think she likes you. Perhaps you and she could meet up next time you get some leave. She's awfully nice, even though she scared me half to death with her weaving and bobbing.

Oh Gerry, we miss you so much, Alfie and me. How I wish this horrid war was over so we could all start living together again, just like it was when Mummy was still alive. Just you and me and Mummy and Daddy. No vile old Aunts hanging around spoiling things for everyone. No nasty Red Boxes for Daddy.

Don't pay any attention to me. I'm just a kid.

I'll write again soon. Love you forever,

Sunny

I sighed again, only more deeply than before, and put Gerry's letter down next to the other two. The last rays of the setting sun were tinting the walls of my little room a deep orange-red. I'd get some of my drawings and poems up on the walls soon and then the place wouldn't look so strange, so not mine. 'Come on,' said Alfie. 'It's tea-time. 'They'll be ringing the bell soon.'

'Very well,' I said in my best Aunt Sybil voice. 'Let us attend to our Duties.'

Our Duties. Yes. It seemed that the first Duty I had to perform was to coax the contents of E Study out of Gordon House and off to the Dining Hall. E Study, I should say, wasn't a private study like mine; it was a common room where the fourth-formers - disgusting little beasts, all of them - were kept until they were senior enough to get a place of their own.

I got up and, with Alfie trotting behind me, stomped out into the corridor and down to the common room. The scruffy little horrors who lived there were either sitting at the tables looking glum or rampaging around and shrieking at the tops of their foul voices. Their daemons were chirping and mewing and squeaking like feeding time at the zoo. I couldn't stand it, the noise.

'Shut up you brats!' I bellowed, and whacked the nearest tabletop hard with the flat of my hand. 'Teatime in two minutes. Put your things away in your lockers and line up by the door. Erica, sort that lot out, would you? Rachel, you put those books away. And listen!' I banged the table again. 'Any trouble and you're for it. Especially you, Charmaine. I've got my eye on you, so watch out! Do you want me to send for the Head of House? She'll sort you out.' There was an instant hush. You didn't want to get into trouble with Her, if you could possibly help it.

Promptly at six o'clock the bell rang and I shepherded my flock out of the door, past the tennis courts and the tuck shop and in through the oak doors of the Junior Dining Room. I got them all standing in more or less the right places and hissed at them to stop their idiotic chattering.

'You're enjoying all this,' said Alfie from his place on my left shoulder as we waited for the Head Girl to say Grace.

'No, I'm not.'

'Yes, you are.'

'Shut up, daemon.'

"The first objective of each and every member of the staff of Highdean School is to bring out the very best in every girl who is placed in our care."

So says the school prospectus. They had a real job on their hands when it came to bringing out the very best in me. I hadn't known I was such a rotten bully.

* * * *

The post was still running well, despite the War, so it was only two or three days later that I found an envelope waiting for me in my pigeon-hole by the front door of Gordon House. I recognised the handwriting straight away. There was no time to read it now - chapel - so I waited until later when the first lesson had got under way. It was Commercial Geography and Miss Froyle was well and truly going on the subject of Afric economics. She was droning on about diamond mines and flax exports and paying no attention to any of us, so I took out the envelope and carefully sliced it open with a nail file. There were two letters inside:

Dearest Sunny,

I'm so glad to hear that you got to Highdean without any problems. That is, apart from the appalling overcharging by the taxi-driver who took you from Paddington to Crècy. Thirty shillings fare! That's an absolute disgrace and I'm thinking of raising the matter in the House. I think, and the Party is behind me in this, that this kind of war profiteering has gone on for quite long enough. However, I know that politics doesn't interest you very much, does it, so I won't go on about it! I've enclosed a P.O. for two pounds to cover your extra expenses. Do remember to pay Miss Alton back and thank her from me for helping you out in a tight spot.

All my love,

Daddy

Dear Daddy. He was always so matter-of-fact in his letters. Hardly himself. Still, he'd come through with the money, and that was what was most important to me right now. Now for the other letter:

Dear Sonya,

It was with some relief that I read your letter. I trust that you mean it when you say that you will devote yourself whole-heartedly to your studies. Education, education, education! It is so important these days.

Love,

Aunt Sybil

I was fondly imagining what special torments I could devise for Aunt Sybil when my reverie was disturbed, not by Alfie who was usually pretty good at keeping a look-out for me, but by Miss Froyle.

'Moon!' A stick of chalk whistled past my head and smacked against the wall behind. 'The chief export of the Gold Coast is?'

I paused for effect. Then, in the sweetest voice I could manage I replied,' Bovine manure, Miss Froyle?'

* * * *

That half-term seemed to last for ever. It wasn't that I was bored - I was - or that there was lots of work to do - there was - or that I was collecting Demerit Marks faster than I ever had before, despite being in the Sixth. Nor was it the Duties I had to perform. They weren't so bad - mostly ordering the Juniors around. The Head of House had taken me aside for a walk by the greenhouses and given me a lecture about Establishing My Authority, just as if she was a grown-up. Poor thing! She was only two years older than me, but she acted as if she were middle-aged. She'd even had her hair cut short; not in a bob, which was a popular patriotic style, but in tight curls close to her scalp. She looked forty years old in her dowdy cardigan, droopy skirt and baggy-kneed stockings. Even her fox-daemon Paralinus looked elderly, with his white-haired snout and weary eyes.

Yes; I wore the same sludge-brown school uniform as her, but somehow it didn't look so bad on me. I'd let my hair grow so long that its dark curls were straightening out of their own accord. I liked to sit on the grass bank by the side of the Memorial Hall and let Alfie comb it out with his claws.

No, it was none of those things; not Duties, not Demerits, not itchy lisle stockings. What was depressing me so much was the sheer bloody pointlessness of it all.

* * * *

There were still two weeks to go until half-term. It was the end of another less-than-exciting day and I was lying in bed. Because I was a Senior I now had a cubicle to myself at one end of the dormitory. That was the good part. In return I was expected to make sure that the third-formers in the other beds behaved themselves. They didn't. Giggles from the far end, and the occasional sharp intake of breath, together with the flickering light of an oil-lamp told me that the urchins had got hold of what the Headmistress called "inappropriate literature", probably stolen from their parents' private libraries or Gordon House's unofficial stock of wrinkled and thumb-marked Yellow Books. Which one? I took a guess. Judging by the pitch of the voices, and the depth of the silences between the outbursts of laughter it was most likely that they were reading The Travails of a Private Lady or, just possibly, La Conte d'Y; always supposing the little thickies could read Frankish, that is.

I'd had an idea for a story myself. No, not that kind of story. It had come to me while I was on the train. I had seen a woman - her clothes made her look like a housewife out on a shopping trip - who had got a piece of grit in her eye. A man was helping her remove it. Perhaps he was a doctor. How would it be, I thought, if they met again, in town, and fell in love, even though both of them were married to other people? They have to meet somewhere away from home and they'd always be afraid of bumping into people they knew. It'd be sure to end badly.

Oh wait! Suppose that instead of having an affair in the town where they lived, they both travelled a lot by train. He could be a brush salesmen - an aristocrat fallen on hard times - and she could be, oh, I didn't know, a supply teacher or something. They'd never know when, at some junction or remote country station, they might not bump into one another. Their meetings would be rare, and random, and oh, so sweet! I flicked on the light, took out my notepad from the side of my bed, and started to write:

The weather was sunny and bright with a soft south-westerly wind. The clock was standing at a quarter to three when Alex Lyons; tall, debonair, but with an air of lost wealth about him, stepped out onto the platform of Wulfrun station. He carefully lit a casual cigarillo and stood under a yellow lamp-standard, looking about him warily. Would she be there - his Lara? It had been ages - nearly three weeks - since they had last met, at a pretty little halt in Staffordshire and consummated their physical passion in the waiting-room, unbeknownst to the station master and porter sitting in their little cubby-holes just the other side of the paper-thin wall that was covered in big posters for Devon and the Kernow Riviera. Would this be the very day they would meet again? Would she be as lovely as the first day he had seen her, dabbing at her eyes under just this very same old clock? He heaved a deep, heartfelt, sigh, and his gorgeous otter-daemon Dorothy sighed deeply with him…

I wrote for hours, while the kids crept back to their beds and fell asleep, one by one.

* * * *

Only one week to go until half-term! And suddenly I didn't want to go home any more. A bombshell had landed and its explosion had left me in pieces. I sat in the window of my study with tears in my eyes and wrote a letter to my far, far-away brother:

Darling Gerry,

I don't know if I can stand it much longer. Look at this letter Dad's sent me. Look! I've copied out the bit that matters:

Now, Sunny, I've come to the part of this letter that I'm not looking forward to writing. You must know how I've been feeling about Gerry going to sea while I've been sitting comfortably in the House, or at home. You know that I was a sailor myself, back in the old days. All the time this dreadful War has been dragging on I've felt torn apart. Half of me wants to go back to sea and command a ship again. The other half knows that he can serve his country perfectly well here in Blighty, by making sure that the King's Government make wise decisions. So far, the second half has always won.

Did you know that I've asked the P.M. several times if I can leave the Front Bench and join up, and that he's always refused to accept my resignation? Well, now there's no choice in the matter. They have decided to recall the Naval Reserve; and that means that everyone who's served in the Navy in the last fifteen years has to rejoin. I know that I could dodge this if I wanted to. They'd find some way to get me out of it, I'm sure, but I don't want to get out of it. Do you understand? For Gerry's sake, and the country's, I'm going to go back to my old ship. I owe it to everyone, especially myself.

I'm sorry, Sunny. I know that you were looking forward to us being together at half-term and that isn't going to happen now. Please try to get on with Aunt Sybil, both for my sake and for your mother's. This is a demanding time for us all, and we must try to make the best of things.

I shall be in Pompey by the time you read this, taking command of my ship. Wish me luck!

Oh Gerry, I knew it! I knew it! It was the way he always kept that photogram of HMS Undaunted on his desk next to Mummy's picture, the way he looked at you when you left the house in your new lieutenant's uniform. I could tell what he wanted to do. I knew how much he hated being an MP and a Government Minister. Now he's gone, and I'm going to lose him too, the same way I lost you.

I feel absolutely foul. I feel desperate. I want to kill myself.

'Don't say that,' said Alfie, nuzzling my cheek with his nose. It was late afternoon in my study, with an hour to go until teatime. I was sitting at my desk, looking out of the window. Bright September had turned to rainy October. The leaves were turning and falling fast, laying crackling carpets of brown debris along the pathways and avenues of the school grounds. The aging of the year, someone had written. Aging and dying. 'Please, please don't talk about dying,' Alfie said. His eyes were every bit as moist as mine.

I couldn't face a whole week at home alone with Aunt Sybil. I had to do something about it or I would burst.

* * * *

'Ceely!' We were standing outside the Music School.

'Sunny! So you are talking to me. I thought you'd given up talking to people.'

'I'm sorry, Ceely, I know I've been a terrible bore all term. Hiding in my study, and all.'

'You certainly have. Here, can you hold this for me for a mo?' Cecilia passed me her satchel. It was heavy - packed full of textbooks and exercise books, just as mine was. I staggered under the combined weight of her satchel and mine. Cecilia reached into her blazer pocket and took out a bar of chocolatl. She broke it down the middle and offered me half.

Good sort, Cecilia. She'd do nicely for what I had in mind.

'Ceely, do you think you could do me the most enormous favour?' I talked, Cecilia listened and her eyes grew wide, first with shock and then with amusement.

'Gosh, Sunny! What a tremendous jape!'

* * * *

Dear Aunt Sybil,

Just a short note to let you know that Cecilia Armitage - do you remember her, she came to stay last summer - has asked me if I'd like to go to Cambria with her for the half-term next week. Her people have a grouse moor up there and it sounds such fun that I've already said yes. We'll go up there by train and motor-car. I can borrow C's spare Barbour and leggings, she says, and they'll show me how to use a real shotgun! Her father is General Armitage, by the way. We know the Armitages, don't we?

I'll write to you when I get there. It'll be ripping fun, and such an adventure!

Lots of love,

Sonya

Right. Now we were set. Now we could get away at last.