Rock Me Gently (4 page)

‘There’s no uniform for you yet. You’ll have to wear your own clothes for a few days,’ she said tightly.

I had begun to wonder how I was ever going to tell the nuns apart. In their black habits, cool coifs and whitewashed faces, they all looked exactly alike to me. But staring at Sister Mary, I thought:
I certainly shan’t forget her.
Robust with a face shaped like a clenched fist, and a tiny lipless mouth permanently scrunched as if she were about to spit, she eyed the ranks of girls like a cross but efficient policewoman with a truncheon.

Under her stern gaze, my courage left me. She made my scalp tingle with her strangeness. I felt badgered, confused and yearned for Mum.

She sent Frances to search out a hat for me.

‘We can’t have you entering church bare-headed,’ she said, glowering at me.

Frances returned with an ill-fitting knitted beret that sat clumsily on my head, but Sister Mary said I would just have to keep my head still to stop it slipping off.

Suddenly the nun’s stick hit the floor with a loud crack.

‘All ready? Heads up, mouths shut, eyes forward,’ she said.

‘Don’t gallop at the front. Nor crawl at the back.’

The file of girls trudged towards the convent chapel, which stood at the opposite end of the corridor from the children’s quarters. Situated a floor above the old people’s area, it was shared by the whole community.

As we climbed the polished wooden staircase to the church, I whispered to Frances, ‘Who’s Benny Dixon?’

Her dark eyes sparked with laughter. ‘Benediction is the name of a church service we go to every day at four o’clock, not the name of a
man.
Didn’t you know?’

We passed a cold black marble bowl built into the wall and the girls dipped a furtive hand in the low tide of water and crossed themselves before entering the church. This was the first time I’d ever been inside a church. There was a high ceiling, with lights shaped like dancing ladies hanging down on chains. The altar stood on a dais covered with a white lace cloth and surmounted by a golden crucifix. The room was ablaze with candles and loaded with summer flowers. At the back of the church several pairs of children’s eyes peered over a balcony, the sun glowing through three small red stained-glass windows behind them like burning rubies.

Statues hung on either side of the altar. One was a man draped in flowing white robes with his heart showing, his head tilted sideways like a puppy. The other showed a man with cascades of curls falling across his face, sitting down, arms bent as if cradling a small animal, with two children leaning on his knees; underneath, in an ornate Bible-script, it said ‘Suffer Little Children’.

As each girl entered the church she paused, curtsied swiftly and made the sign of the cross. I tried to copy them, bobbing up and down and signing myself in a similar manner, but my feet got tangled together somehow, and I fell on my bottom. I scurried after Frances and sat down, cheeks blazing. In the silence I found that my heart was beating violently.

Someone began to speak and I jumped guiltily. I listened, but could not follow what was being said. The speaker appeared to be a priest in front of the altar. A murmur of voices suddenly surrounded me: a dialogue had begun between the priest and the congregation.

Then the piano music started and everyone stood up. I watched what Frances did - stood when she stood, knelt when she knelt. During the hymns she offered me her thumb blackened prayer book, indicating with her finger which song we were singing, but all I could do was shrug. I didn’t know any of the tunes. The songs and prayers were all gobbledegook to me, because they were written in a foreign language.

I sat down and then realised that the others were kneeling. I felt myself becoming red with alarm as I hastily dropped to my knees on the wooden bench, hiding my cheeks in my hands. It was all so strange, and I hoped desperately that no one had noticed my ignorance. But in spite of her jutting coif, which hid her profile, I would soon learn that Sister Mary saw everything.

The priest stood up and walked out. All over. I slumped in relief as we began to troop out, passing as we did another statue at the back: a woman in blue with a cracked face that frowned beneath her veil. She stretched out her blue arms stiffly towards an injured man at her feet. Below it, on an unfurling scroll, it read: ‘The Greatest Of These Is Charity’.

In the refectory, sixty girls stood from end to end along three narrow tables, waiting for the signal for grace. I absent-mindedly sat down on the wooden bench, and then popped up again, mortified by a nudge from the horrified Frances. ‘You have to wait!’ she hissed.

A tall girl at the centre muttered: ‘...
per Christum Dominum
nostrum.’
A loud ‘Amen’ rumbled from everyone.

I sniffed the air and screwed up my nose. The room had the sickly smell of sour milk.

The children drew out the benches with a noise like the roar of a train and sat down. I remembered how the train had roared like that on my journey to Bexhill with Mum.

A few voices rang out in the refectory but were instantly hushed. At last came the signal to talk, and babble broke out.

I sat in gloomy bewilderment, looking around the long room with its white-tiled walls. Dozens of flies buzzed everywhere. Tea, which the children called ‘collation’, consisted of two pieces of grey bread that appeared to be curling at the edges, some rancid dripping, and black brackish tea, poured from enormous steaming metal urns into tin mugs. It smelt and tasted like rotten flower-water.

‘Give your bread a good bang on the table first to get rid of any ants,’ said Frances.

I looked up and down the long table and noticed everyone tapping their bread. I suddenly didn’t feel hungry.

Frances began scraping away with her knife at a lump of bread, scooping bits out of it.

‘If you eat the mouldy bits, you’ll get the gripes, so just scrape it off.’ Without looking up she said, ‘If you don’t eat yours, I will. But you’ve got to learn to eat things you don’t like. And you can’t begin too quickly.’

She motioned to the short, stubby girl with thick coarse hair who sat opposite us, grimly tapping her bread. The girl’s left hand looked tight and sore. A dark purple bruise clouded the back of it. She was about fourteen or fifteen years old.

‘That’s Ruth Norton,’ whispered Frances. ‘One Friday she refused to eat some fish, saying it looked like it had never been alive and she’d just as soon eat carbolic soap. So every day for a week Sister Mary put the same fish back in front of her saying, “Fish is good for brains, which you’re badly in need of, and if that plate isn’t empty by the end of today, you’ll have it back tomorrow.” Each day Ruth tried to eat it, but she kept dropping it out of her mouth on to the plate, saying it was too salty. Finally she made herself swallow it and then she spewed it up. Sister Mary forced her to eat her fishy sick.’

I gaped at Frances, who sat matter-of-factly eating her bread and dripping, apparently not overly disturbed by the story. She was casually warning me of a danger, that was all.

‘Anyway, if you don’t eat, you get a black mark against your name,’ she said.

I tried to nibble at a bit of bread. It tasted like old cardboard.

‘What does a black mark against my name mean?’

Frances shrugged. ‘You’ll find out on Sunday.’

Obviously bored with this conversation, she turned her attention to the other girls, diving into their chatter with a laugh. The whole table was ignoring me, their voices and eyes skating over me as though my chair were empty. I laboriously chewed away at the hard piece of grease-spread bread feeling sullen and trapped as I listened to their puzzling chatter.

I had read about boarding schools in Enid Blyton books. Now here I was, actually sitting at a table with the residents of what I had imagined to be a dazzling world. Tears pricked at my eyes. I put my bread down. I couldn’t eat any more of it, no matter what they did to me.

‘Use a smaller brush on it, that’ll work,’ Frances was saying.

‘Ruth, did you finish polishing the floor of the corridor to the nuns’ quarters?’

Ruth’s chocolate-button eyes were worried and defiant, but she winked.

‘Sure. Just tied the rags to my shoes and skated extra hard.

Couple of figure eights and it was done.’

Everyone burst out laughing. I stared down at my plate. They all talked as if they had known each other for ever. I didn’t know how to act. If I tried to be funny, they’d call me a show off; if I didn’t, I’d be boring. I longed for the day to be over and to be in bed. I realised dimly that their conversation centred on housework. Frances was saying something about a lavatory floor.

‘Sister Mary says she wants to be able to eat her dinner off it by the time I’ve finished,’ she laughed, ‘so the only way to get the muck off is to scrape it with a knife.’

She turned to a hollow-cheeked girl sitting next to me. Her eyes looked like she’d been raised on fish food: bloodless and watery. There was no colour in her face except at the tip of her nose, which was moistly pink. She had the saddest face I had ever seen, and I had passed a few in the convent that day. Her thick, fair hair looked like it had been cut with pinking shears despite the clips used to tame it.

‘Janet,’ said Frances, ‘can I borrow your penknife tomorrow?’

Janet had rolled up her shirtsleeve and was scratching a pink-scaled sore on the elbow of her papery arm. It looked raw and slimy.

‘Course you can,’ she said, with a smile that lit up her colourless eyes. ‘As long as you don’t get caught and have it confiscated.’

‘Ta ever so,’ said Frances.

I would have given anything to be able to slip in a remark to show I understood what they were discussing. But though I was good at guessing, I couldn’t begin to fathom it. So I listened, wide-eyed. Whenever I caught Frances’s eye, she looked away. Then she noticed my breathless attention, and took pity on me.

‘You’ll be told tomorrow what job you’ll be doing.’

Without thinking, I blurted out, ‘Do you mean the sort of jobs that housemaids do? Don’t the nuns employ cleaners?’

Silence. Everyone looked at me as if I had landed from another planet. Frances raised her arched eyebrows, in warning. I bit my lip, searching her eyes for a clue. Then I felt someone kick my leg under the table.

‘Are you kidding?’ hissed Ruth in a sandpaper voice that should’ve belonged to an old man. ‘Anyone with a ha’p’orth of sense knows that we’re the dogs bodies that do all the dirty work here. I bet you’ve never scrubbed a floor in your life, missy prissy.’

My eyes stung. ‘I
have.’
But my voice didn’t sound very convincing.

‘I believe you, thousands wouldn’t.’ She leaned across the table and made sniffing noises in my direction. ‘Cor! Get a whiff of her!’

Ruth had a flat, dimpled face and almost comically round dark eyes. A scattering of freckles dusted her nose. ‘Tell us, do you know what Jeyes’ Fluid is?’

I answered, ‘No.’

Ruth turned to the other girls and said, ‘Oh, I say, she must come from a dead mucky home.’

All the girls stopped eating and looked at me, laughing. I blushed under their eyes. I tried to laugh with them. But I could not because my lips were all shivery. Should I have said yes to the question?

Frances sighed wearily. ‘Don’t get at her, Ruth. It’s not her fault if she doesn’t know about the work routine yet.’

‘The sooner she gets used to it the better, then.’ Ruth took a swig of the bitter black tea from her tin mug and, puckering her bronzed tea-bathed lips, said, ‘Yuk! This stuff is strong enough for a mouse to trot on.’

‘The milk must be cheesy again,’ said Janet.

I tried to think of something to say that wouldn’t upset Ruth.

Everything in my head was jumbled and arguing. I wondered if it was worth telling them that the children never had to do chores in my London school.

I took another slow bite of bread and dripping. It stuck in my throat. Ruth sat cleaning her teeth with a crust, which she finally gummed into mush and swallowed. Leftover crusts, turned brown by the tea into which they had been dunked, lay scattered on the table. Ruth picked them up and crammed them into her tunic pocket.

A bell rang for grace. Ruth, while stiffly crossing herself, stuck her tongue out at me, then mouthed the words ‘What you staring at?’ I looked away, feeling as though she had punched me, or pinned a sign to my dress:
This person is to be despised! She
doesn’t know what Jeyes’s Fluid is!

Section by section, the girls filed out of the refectory, the junior girls last. I asked Frances in a low voice why Ruth didn’t like me.

Frances sighed again, looking irritated at my incompetence.

‘Don’t worry, take it with a pinch of salt. She can’t stand anyone here, especially the nuns.’

‘Why can’t she stand the nuns?’

‘She has to work in the kitchen most days instead of being in school.’

I was horrified. ‘Why?’

‘Because she’s left-handed.’

‘You’re joking!’

Frances’s dark eyebrows arched in surprise. She looked around to see if anyone was coming. ‘No, I’m not. Sister Mary used to whack her every day in class. She said she was doing the devil’s work. Ruth tried using her right hand, but she was no good at it. She’s not thick, you know, but she’s much older than the rest of us in our class. She’s put in with us because the nuns make her work in the kitchen and laundry so much that she gets behind with her lessons. Sister Mary hates her. Sometimes it’s really funny, because she’ll be writing something on the blackboard with her back to us, and she’ll say, “Norton, I know you’re up to something over there. Don’t let me catch you.” She forgets that Ruth’s not in the classroom. She’s slogging away in the kitchen.’

I bent my head forward to hear better as Frances continued. ‘Ruth has a bad chest, you know. She had TB a few years ago. Yet nearly every day she has to go down on her knees like an old washerwoman and scrub every inch of the kitchen floor with carbolic soap. There’s a nun at her heels most days, telling her that work is a virtue that will make her a useful member of society. Well, something like that. But if Ruth stops for a second, they hit her on the legs with a cane. But she never cries. Once she had to get out on the window ledge and clean the windows. Another time she had to wash the walls and kill the bugs and flies by squashing them. She’s as happy as a skylark most days, but sometimes it gets her down, like today. That’s all.’