Another Day, Another School

On returning from Salzburg in the summer of 1959, my sister, Stella, and I spent some time at Mrs. Harris’s boarding house then started at the new school, Charters Towers, that my mother had selected for us.  Our arrival at Bexhill-on-Sea was somewhat less portentous than our arrival in Malvern.  It was a sunny day and the school was housed in relatively modern buildings rather than in an old monastery.   It was made up of four large brick and wood houses connected to each other by breezeways. The head mistress, Miss McGarry looked chic in her tailored dress and fashionable shoes, as she greeted students at the school.  These visuals made me feel more optimistic than I had felt upon arriving at St. James's, hopeful that we were embarking on a less dispiriting future. 

Appearances aside, the protocols at Charters Towers were not very different than those at St. James’s.  We had a strict daily schedule, starting with a 7:00 o’clock bell that rousted us from bed, followed by breakfast and assembly, which consisted of prayers and announcements, followed by classes until lunch.  Afternoons held more classes until tea at 4:00 ending with homework in our classrooms. In the evenings we had a little free time, and then bed and lights out, and silence until the wake-up bell. 

On Saturday nights, we girls would congregate in the assembly hall to play records and dance with each other to rock and roll and pop music.  Sunday mornings, most of the girls went to church, but the non-Christians conducted their own services in classrooms.  I was relieved not to have to battle for this privilege, as I had done at St. James’s.  Sometimes on Sunday evenings, there would be a movie, generally something quite childish—I remember seeing Bambi.  The girls ranged in age from about 10 to 18, so the films usually catered to the youngest among us. 

At times we would also get guest speakers, and once we had a vicar sermonizing on morality.  He started out by saying that morality wasn’t something that some proper ladies had thought up over Sunday tea.  I don’t think I paid much attention after that, or even knew the meaning of morality.  From his speech, all I deduced was that morality equaled abstaining from anything heterosexual.   I was surprised that the lecture quite upset some of the girls. Oddly this is the only lecture I recall of all those we sat through on Sunday evenings because it actually frightened some of my classmates.  In an all girls’ school, I wasn’t sure what the vicar thought we were going to do.  We may have been boy-crazy, but access was scarce and we couldn’t act out on our impulses, even if we wanted to.  There was a boys’ school across the street from us, but we never mingled. Once in a while when we had a fire drill and were scrambling down the ladders outside our dormitory windows, the boys would gather at their windows and watch us from across the street.   The only breach in “morality” that I knew of involved an American girl, whose parents were in Saudi Arabia and had sent her to Charters Towers for lack of local schools. There was a young man who worked in the kitchen, a pimply, sweaty kid.  She flirted with him, causing him to be fired and herself to be expelled.  It all seemed so high-strung.

The staff were mostly female, and again, mostly single, more worn and anxious “war surplus” women. They seemed to be unattached to anyone in the outside world, and I have very little idea of what their private lives were like or why they ended up in these boarding schools. They had such an air of desperate endurance about them.  Our English teacher had served in some capacity in North Africa during World War II and had met some writers, including Thornton Wilder.  I don’t know why I remember this and I can’t remember if she met him in North Africa or somewhere else.  (Oddly, when I was working on my Master’s degree, I worked as a teaching assistant to a professor who was writing a biography of Thornton Wilder.) Miss Lloyd intrigued me with what seemed to have been a Bohemian life before she became a school mistress, and also because she talked about herself, something that was not encouraged.  She was extremely tense and if we wanted to distract her, we would crack our knuckles, a sound that really agitated her. 

A World War I Memorial in Budapest with the same sentiment

I credit Miss Lloyd with my love of literature.  She introduced us to poetry in a way that engaged me.  We read mostly war poetry by those young English poets who either died in World War I or came out of it bitter and broken, poets like Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke, and Siegfried Sassoon.  As an impressionable teenager I felt I was experiencing the futility and savagery of war.  I thought I understood the irony of a phrase like “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” Miss Lloyd had lived through the carnage of World War I and had witnessed World War II.  Perhaps she conveyed to us the sense of horror but also of the camaraderie of living so intensely.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est

The assistant to the head mistress also taught English.  She proclaimed that a non-English speaker could never write well in English; she must not have been familiar with Joseph Conrad.  She was a wiry woman with a lot of nervous energy, and she mostly followed the head mistress around and did her bidding.  Miss McGarry’s mother also worked at the school, teaching remedial English to us non-natives, whether we needed the tutelage or not.  Madame, as we called her, rarely admitted that Garry (our not-so-secret name for Miss McGarry) was her daughter, but once in a while she would slip and say something personal about the two of them. Garry herself was rumored to have lost her fiancé in World War II, but I don’t know how these rumors originated, since the private lives of the staff were not generally discussed with students.  I suppose there was so much secrecy about teachers’ private lives as a way for staff to be segregated from students and keep discipline.

The only male teacher at the school had been a prisoner of war in a German camp, and that is how he had learned the language.  He taught us a German song about best comrades going to war together (Ich hat ein Camarade, Eine besser findst du nicht…) and a folk song about a mermaid on the Rhein.  He usually sat on top of an empty student desk to instruct us, and if we were inattentive, he’d hurl a piece of chalk at us.  He always wore a carnation in his lapel, a touch that endeared him to one of the matrons in charge of our dorms.  The rumor was that he had a paralyzed wife that he took care of, another attribute that endeared him to Matron. 

Garry ruled the school through terror, in my memory.  If she asked us to see her after assembly or called us into her office, we went in fear, and it seemed I was often a target.  I don’t think I was a rebel, but I remember her looking down at me sternly in the hall one day and telling me “I will not be defied.”  I didn’t know what I had done, or for that matter what “defied” meant. I just remember feeling constantly wary for the duration of my time at the school.  I was in detention for my penmanship, the punishment for which was to forgo part of the Saturday night dance so I could practice English penmanship in which letters are written straight up and down rather than my American style which slanted right. There were other infractions for which I was sent into the school courtyard to weed, a punishment that was bewildering, since I didn’t know a weed from a desirable plant.  Another time, the punishment was to sew a bag, with Garry in the room regaling us with stories of her school days and how her teachers resented her for making them teach geography when she was the only one taking her General Certificate of Education (GCE, a national exam for graduation from school) in the subject.  This confidence was puzzling to me, because as I said, the staff’s private lives were not discussed.   In this instance, she was both punishing us and also making us feel special by sharing something about herself.  Her punishments always seemed arbitrary, and I never really knew when I had transgressed. 

On the positive side, I made lifelong friends at Charters Towers, and my dearest friend, Vivian, and I were close until she died of cancer. I am still in touch with Jill, who now lives in Toronto and came to my son’s wedding in Colorado and with Sandra, who lives in England, and we meet when we can. I saw Sandra recently in Sussex where she now lives. Sandra was from Scotland, and she invited me to stay with her in Alloway, very near where Robert Burns had lived. Her family was unceasingly kind to me.  When my family and I were in New Zealand, we met up with another old friend, Fiona, who now lives there, and she and her husband showed us around Auckland.   So despite the mixed memories from that time, I am grateful for the friends. The alumni of Charters Towers have annual reunions to which Garry went until her death at age 101.  Clearly, many of us forged lifelong friendships at the school, and there is a Charterians Facebook page where the “old girls” stay in touch.

The girls at Charters Towers were mostly from well-to-do middle class families, without the status of the girls from St. James’s, so there was no talk of gymkhanas and regattas.  The only elective I recall, was ballroom dancing which was taught us by Miss Sylvester and her husband, who seemed to have no name of his own.  Miss Sylvester was the sister of Victor Sylvester, who was the Guy Lombardo of Britain, a big band leader of some fame.  Miss Sylvester and her husband would come down to Bexhill by train every couple of weeks and lead us around the assembly hall in waltzes and foxtrots. They even taught us the Charleston.  They were rather gaunt, grey and grim looking, and smelled of cigarettes and perfume.  For these lessons, we wore our “own clothes”, the term we used for anything that wasn’t our uniforms, and wore silver “slippers” which were actually clunky silver sandals. Miss Sylvester also wore silver slippers, and her husband wore a suit and tie. 

The handful of us girls who took ballroom dancing worked towards getting medals in certain types of dance.  These medals were awarded once you passed national dance exams, and I have a bronze and silver medal in ballroom dancing and a bronze medal in Latin dancing, which meant that in addition to the waltz and foxtrot, I could cha-cha, tango and passe doble.  The medals denoted a level of difficulty, bronze being the most basic level, not placement in some competition like the Olympics.  It always struck me as a ridiculous achievement, and I don’t know how I ended up taking these classes, but I suspect it was to escape the routine of school.  In later years when I worked in engineering companies where the engineers took themselves very seriously, I was tempted to frame my certificates and hang them in my office as a joke, as the engineers did their diplomas.

Stella stayed at Charters Towers only about a year and a half, after which she pleaded to leave.  She wanted to go to art school in Paris, but at this point, my parents were reluctant to indulge her and returned her home.  My mother came to England and arranged for Stella to go back to Iran, and then she and I went to Paris.  I don’t know why Stella wasn’t allowed to go to Paris with us, but I suppose my parents didn’t want to reward her for failing to stick it out.  I was somewhat relieved that my parents allowed her to leave school.  I felt the burden of her unhappiness and felt helpless to do anything about it, feeling that I was barely sustaining myself.

I stayed at Charters Towers until 1962 and took my GCEs in five subjects. I failed art, but passed the other subjects.  At this point, I too had had my fill of boarding school, so without conferring with my parents, I applied to colleges in the U.S.  Vivian was going to college in New York so I applied to schools in New York too, without the vaguest idea of which school I wanted to attend or, for that matter, what college was.  All I wanted was to get away from boarding school and England, and since, at the age of 16, I didn’t seem to be fit for much besides school, college seemed like a reasonable option.

I was accepted at Adelphi University in Long Island, and asked for my parents’ support to go there.  When I told Garry where I was going, her comment was that someone should inform Adelphi that it should be pronounced with a short final “i”, as in Delphi. I guess that was her way of telling me I was embarking on a shoddy education—what could I be taught by a college that didn’t know how to pronounce its own name.  A year later, I returned to Charters Towers to visit friends, and had to meet with Garry in her parlor before I could reunite with them.  She admired my shoes and told me I was intelligent, as though we were old friends.