The Sales were a complete contrast to the hushed atmosphere of the Exchanges. They were held in the Dining Hall, and were crowded and noisy. In fact the pushing and shouting was all part of the fun, and they stayed for the most part pretty good-humoured. Except, as I say, every now and then, things would get out of hand, with students grabbing and tugging, sometimes fighting. Then the monitors would threaten to close the whole thing down, and we’d all of us have to face a talking to from Miss Emily at assembly the next morning.
Our day at Hailsham always began with an assembly, which was usually pretty brief – a few announcements, maybe a poem read out by a student. Miss Emily didn’t often say much; she’d just sit very straight on the stage, nodding at whatever was being said, occasionally turning a frosty eye towards any whispering in the crowd. But on a morning after a rowdy Sale, everything was different. She’d order us to sit down on the floor – we usually stood at assemblies – and there’d be no announcements or performances, just Miss Emily talking to us for twenty, thirty minutes, sometimes even longer. She’d rarely raise her voice, but there was something steely about her on these occasions and none of us, not even the Senior 5s, dared make a sound.
There was a real sense of feeling bad that we had, in some collective way, let down Miss Emily, but try as we might, we couldn’t really follow these lectures. It was partly her language. ‘Unworthy of privilege’ and ‘misuse of opportunity’: these were two regular phrases Ruth and I came up with when we were reminiscing in her room at the centre in Dover. Her general drift was clear enough: we were all very special, being Hailsham students, and so it was all the more disappointing when we behaved badly. Beyond that though, things became a fog. Sometimes she’d be going on very intensely then come to a sudden stop with something like: ‘What is it? What is it? What can it be that thwarts us?’ Then she’d stand there, eyes closed, a frown on her face like she was trying to puzzle out the answer. And although we felt bewildered and awkward, we’d sit there willing her on to make whatever discovery was needed in her head. She might then resume with a gentle sigh – a signal that we were going to be forgiven – or just as easily explode out of her silence with: ‘But I will not be coerced! Oh no! And neither will Hailsham!’
When we were remembering these long speeches, Ruth remarked how odd it was they should have been so unfathomable, since Miss Emily, in a classroom, could be as clear as anything. When I mentioned how I’d sometimes seen the head wandering around Hailsham in a dream, talking to herself, Ruth took offence, saying:
‘She was never like that! How could Hailsham have been the way it was if the person in charge had been potty? Miss Emily had an intellect you could slice logs with.’
I didn’t argue. Certainly, Miss Emily could be uncannily sharp. If, say, you were somewhere you shouldn’t be in the main house or the grounds, and you heard a guardian coming, you could often hide somewhere. Hailsham was full of hiding places, indoors and out: cupboards, nooks, bushes, hedges. But if you saw Miss Emily coming, your heart sank because she’d always know you were there hiding. It was like she had some extra sense. You could go into a cupboard, close the door tight and not move a muscle, you just knew Miss Emily’s footsteps would stop outside and her voice would say: ‘All right. Out you come.’
That was what had happened to Sylvie C. once on the second-floor landing, and on that occasion Miss Emily had gone into one of her rages. She never shouted like, say, Miss Lucy did when she got mad at you, but if anything Miss Emily getting angry was scarier. Her eyes narrowed and she’d whisper furiously to herself, like she was discussing with an invisible colleague what punishment was awful enough for you. The way she did it meant half of you was dying to hear and the other half completely not wanting to. But usually with Miss Emily nothing too awful would come out of it. She hardly ever put you in detention, made you do chores or withdrew privileges. All the same, you felt dreadful, just knowing you’d fallen in her estimation, and you wanted to do something straight away to redeem yourself.
But the thing was, there was no predicting with Miss Emily. Sylvie may have got a full portion that time, but when Laura got caught running through the rhubarb patch, Miss Emily just snapped: ‘Shouldn’t be here, girl. Off you go,’ and walked on.
And then there was the time I thought I was in hot water with her. The little footpath that went all round the back of the main house was a real favourite of mine. It followed all the nooks, all the extensions; you had to squeeze past shrubs, you went under two ivy-covered arches and through a rusted gate. And all the time you could peer in through the windows, one after the other. I suppose part of the reason I liked the path so much was because I was never sure if it was out of bounds. Certainly, when classes were going on, you weren’t supposed to walk past. But at the weekends or in the evenings – that was never clear. Most students avoided it anyway, and maybe the feeling of getting away from everyone else was another part of the appeal.
In any case, I was doing this little walk one sunny evening. I think I was in Senior 3. As usual I was glancing into the empty rooms as I went past, and then suddenly I was looking into a classroom with Miss Emily in it. She was alone, pacing slowly, talking under her breath, pointing and directing remarks to an invisible audience in the room. I assumed she was rehearsing a lesson or maybe one of her assembly talks, and I was about to hurry past before she spotted me, but just then she turned and looked straight at me. I froze, thinking I was for it, but then noticed she was carrying on as before, except now she was mouthing her address at me. Then, natural as you like, she turned away to fix her gaze on some other imaginary student in another part of the room. I crept away along the path, and for the next day or so kept dreading what Miss Emily would say when she saw me. But she never mentioned it at all.
But that’s not really what I want to talk about just now. What I want to do now is get a few things down about Ruth, about how we met and became friends, about our early days together. Because more and more these days, I’ll be driving past fields on a long afternoon, or maybe drinking my coffee in front of a huge window in a motorway service station, and I’ll catch myself thinking about her again.
She wasn’t someone I was friends with from the start. I can remember, at five or six, doing things with Hannah and with Laura, but not with Ruth. I only have the one vague memory of Ruth from that early part of our lives.
I’m playing in a sandpit. There are a number of others in the sand with me, it’s too crowded and we’re getting irritated with each other. We’re in the open, under a warm sun, so it’s probably the sandpit in the Infants’ play area, just possibly it’s the sand at the end of the long jump in the North Playing Field. Anyway it’s hot and I’m feeling thirsty and I’m not pleased there are so many of us in the sandpit. Then Ruth is standing there, not in the sand with the rest of us, but a few feet away. She’s very angry with two of the girls somewhere behind me, about something that must have happened before, and she’s standing there glaring at them. My guess is that I knew Ruth only very slightly at that point. But she must already have made some impression on me, because I remember carrying on busily with whatever I was doing in the sand, absolutely dreading the idea of her turning her gaze on me. I didn’t say a word, but I was desperate for her to realise I wasn’t with the girls behind me, and had had no part in whatever it was that had made her cross.
And that’s all I remember of Ruth from that early time. We were the same year so we must have run into each other enough, but aside from the sandpit incident, I don’t remember having anything to do with her until the Juniors a couple of years later, when we were seven, going on eight.
The South Playing Field was the one used most by the Juniors and it was there, in the corner by the poplars, that Ruth came up to me one lunchtime, looked me up and down, then asked:
‘Do you want to ride my horse?’
I was in the midst of playing with two or three others at that point, but it was clear Ruth was addressing only me. This absolutely delighted me
, but I made a show of weighing her up before giving a reply.
‘Well, what’s your horse’s name?’
Ruth came a step closer. ‘My best horse,’ she said, ‘is Thunder. I can’t let you ride on him. He’s much too dangerous. But you can ride Bramble, as long as you don’t use your crop on him. Or if you like, you could have any of the others.’ She reeled off several more names I don’t now remember. Then she asked: ‘Have you got any horses of your own?’
I looked at her and thought carefully before replying: ‘No. I don’t have any horses.’
‘Not even one?’
‘No.’
‘All right. You can ride Bramble, and if you like him, you can have him to keep. But you’re not to use your crop on him. And you’ve got to come now.’
My friends had, in any case, turned away and were carrying on with what they’d been doing. So I gave a shrug and went off with Ruth.
The field was filled with playing children, some a lot bigger than us, but Ruth led the way through them very purposefully, always a pace or two in front. When we were almost at the wire mesh boundary with the garden, she turned and said:
‘Okay, we’ll ride them here. You take Bramble.’
I accepted the invisible rein she was holding out, and then we were off, riding up and down the fence, sometimes cantering, sometimes at a gallop. I’d been correct in my decision to tell Ruth I didn’t have any horses of my own, because after a while with Bramble, she let me try her various other horses one by one, shouting all sorts of instructions about how to handle each animal’s foibles.
‘I told you! You’ve got to really lean back on Daffodil! Much more than that! She doesn’t like it unless you’re right back!’
I must have done well enough, because eventually she let me have a go on Thunder, her favourite. I don’t know how long we spent with her horses that day: it felt a substantial time, and I think we both lost ourselves completely in our game. But then suddenly, for no reason I could see, Ruth brought it all to an end, claiming I was deliberately tiring out her horses, and that I’d have to put each of them back in its stable. She pointed to a section of the fence, and I began leading the horses to it, while Ruth seemed to get crosser and crosser with me, saying I was doing everything wrong. Then she asked:
‘Do you like Miss Geraldine?’
It might have been the first time I’d actually thought about whether I liked a guardian. In the end I said: ‘Of course I like her.’
‘But do you really like her? Like she’s special? Like she’s your favourite?’
‘Yes, I do. She’s my favourite.’
Ruth went on looking at me for a long time. Then finally she said: ‘All right. In that case, I’ll let you be one of her secret guards.’
We started to walk back towards the main house then and I waited for her to explain what she meant, but she didn’t. I found out though over the next several days.
CHAPTER FIVE
I’m not sure for how long the ‘secret guard’ business carried on. When Ruth and I discussed it while I was caring for her down in Dover, she claimed it had been just a matter of two or three weeks – but that was almost certainly wrong. She was probably embarrassed about it and so the whole thing had shrunk in her memory. My guess is that it went on for about nine months, a year even, around when we were seven, going on eight.
I was never sure if Ruth had actually invented the secret guard herself, but there was no doubt she was the leader. There were between six and ten of us, the figure changing whenever Ruth allowed in a new member or expelled someone. We believed Miss Geraldine was the best guardian in Hailsham, and we worked on presents to give her – a large sheet with pressed flowers glued over it comes to mind. But our main reason for existing, of course, was to protect her.
By the time I joined the guard, Ruth and the others had already known for ages about the plot to kidnap Miss Geraldine. We were never quite sure who was behind it. We sometimes suspected certain of the Senior boys, sometimes boys in our own year. There was a guardian we didn’t like much – a Miss Eileen – who we thought for a while might be the brains behind it. We didn’t know when the abduction would take place, but one thing we felt convinced about was that the woods would come into it.
The woods were at the top of the hill that rose behind Hailsham House. All we could see really was a dark fringe of trees, but I certainly wasn’t the only one of my age to feel their presence day and night. When it got bad, it was like they cast a shadow over the whole of Hailsham; all you had to do was turn your head or move towards a window and there they’d be, looming in the distance. Safest was the front of the main house, because you couldn’t see them from any of the windows. Even so, you never really got away from them.
There were all kinds of horrible stories about the woods. Once, not so long before we all got to Hailsham, a boy had had a big row with his friends and run off beyond the Hailsham boundaries. His body had been found two days later, up in those woods, tied to a tree with the hands and feet chopped off. Another rumour had it that a girl’s ghost wandered through those trees. She’d been a Hailsham student until one day she’d climbed over a fence just to see what it was like outside. This was a long time before us, when the guardians were much stricter, cruel even, and when she tried to get back in, she wasn’t allowed. She kept hanging around outside the fences, pleading to be let back in, but no one let her. Eventually, she’d gone off somewhere out there, something had happened and she’d died. But her ghost was always wandering about the woods, gazing over Hailsham, pining to be let back in.
The guardians always insisted these stories were nonsense. But then the older students would tell us that was exactly what the guardians had told them when they were younger, and that we’d be told the ghastly truth soon enough, just as they were.
The woods played on our imaginations the most after dark, in our dorms as we were trying to fall asleep. You almost thought then you could hear the wind rustling the branches, and talking about it seemed to only make things worse. I remember one night, when we were furious with Marge K. – she’d done something really embarrassing to us during the day – we chose to punish her by hauling her out of bed, holding her face against the window pane and ordering her to look up at the woods. At first she kept her eyes screwed shut, but we twisted her arms and forced open her eyelids until she saw the distant outline against the moonlit sky, and that was enough to ensure for her a sobbing night of terror.
I’m not saying we necessarily went around the whole time at that age worrying about the woods. I for one could go weeks hardly thinking about them, and there were even days when a defiant surge of courage would make me think: ‘How could we believe rubbish like that?’ But then all it took would be one little thing – someone retelling one of those stories, a scary passage in a book, even just a chance remark reminding you of the woods – and that would mean another period of being under that shadow. It was hardly surprising then that we assumed the woods would be central in the plot to abduct Miss Geraldine.
When it came down to it, though, I don’t recall our taking many practical steps towards defending Miss Geraldine; our activities always revolved around gathering more and more evidence concerning the plot itself. For some reason, we were satisfied this would keep any immediate danger at bay.
Most of our ‘evidence’ came from witnessing the conspirators at work. One morning, for instance, we watched from a second-floor classroom Miss Eileen and Mr Roger talking to Miss Geraldine down in the courtyard. After a while Miss Geraldine said goodbye and went off towards the Orangery, but we kept on watching, and saw Miss Eileen and Mr Roger put their heads closer together to confer furtively, their gazes fixed on Miss Geraldine’s receding figure.
‘Mr Roger,’ Ruth sighed on that occasion, shaking her head. ‘Who’d have guessed he was in it too?’
In this way we built up a list of people we knew to be in on the plot – guardians and students whom we declared our sworn enemies. And yet, all the time, I th
ink we must have had an idea of how precarious the foundations of our fantasy were, because we always avoided any confrontation. We could decide, after intense discussions, that a particular student was a plotter, but then we’d always find a reason not to challenge him just yet – to wait until ‘we had in all the evidence’. Similarly, we always agreed Miss Geraldine herself shouldn’t hear a word of what we’d found out, since she’d get alarmed to no good purpose.
It would be too easy to claim it was just Ruth who kept the secret guard going long after we’d naturally outgrown it. Sure enough, the guard was important to her. She’d known about the plot for much longer than the rest of us, and this gave her enormous authority; by hinting that the real evidence came from a time before people like me had joined – that there were things she’d yet to reveal even to us – she could justify almost any decision she made on behalf of the group. If she decided someone should be expelled, for example, and she sensed opposition, she’d just allude darkly to stuff she knew ‘from before’. There’s no question Ruth was keen to keep the whole thing going. But the truth was, those of us who’d grown close to her, we each played our part in preserving the fantasy and making it last for as long as possible. What happened after that row over the chess illustrates pretty well the point I’m making.
I’d assumed Ruth was something of a chess expert and that she’d be able to teach me the game. This wasn’t so crazy: we’d pass older students bent over chess sets, in window seats or on the grassy slopes, and Ruth would often pause to study a game. And as we walked off again, she’d tell me about some move she’d spotted that neither player had seen. ‘Amazingly dim,’ she’d murmur, shaking her head. This had all helped get me fascinated, and I was soon longing to become engrossed myself in those ornate pieces. So when I’d found a chess set at a Sale and decided to buy it – despite it costing an awful lot of tokens – I was counting on Ruth’s help.