Dead Wood and Jasmine: Early Days at St Catherine’s
Flashback to Edwina's Schooldays

Her parents had done their best for her, at considerable sacrifice to themselves, which was a message often repeated and one she accepted without question. The years lost through the war and the move to Stansford - Betty insisted on living near her parents - meant her father had to start his career from the bottom again.

He’d been articled to a firm of accountants in London and going to night school to get his qualifications, but had volunteered as soon as war began. He was deeply resentful of those who stayed behind, including Uncle Walter, who was found to have a weak chest. People like himself had lost their best years fighting so that little children could grow up in peace, and had paid dearly for it, he said. He’d been forced to accept Betty’s older brothers’ charity in offering him work on the bookkeeping for the shop and garage to help get him started again.

Until Edwina was nine they shared a house with Betty’s older brother Stanley, his wife Patience and their son Tony, two years younger than Edwina. Half way up Vicarage Lane, on the edge of Manor Woods, it was a typical Victorian villa with a narrow, bay-windowed front, stretching back like a railway carriage with lots of compartments. Sharing the expenses and putting aside every penny – no holidays for them – they saved up to buy a plot of land to build on, in Parsonage Close, near the top of Vicarage Lane. Even so, they were determined Edwina should not be exposed to the council school most of her cousins were sent to. To get the best start in life you had to mix with the right sort of people and they were not to be found at Castle Street Girls.

There were only two private girls’ schools in Stansford and in spite of being staunch C of E her parents chose St Catherine’s Convent, where the fees were less and which was within walking distance across the fields. A gate further up Vicarage Lane on the opposite side led into King’s Meads. A path led across the meads, over the railway crossing, through another field where which you climbed a stile onto Monks’ Hill, where the Convent was. Her parents were pleased that she could stay there until she took her O Levels at 16. This they hoped would give her the chance to settle in, make and keep friends, the right sort of friends of course.

Edwin took her on her first day and formally handed her over to Sister Catherine Joan: ‘She’s in your hands now.’ This was terrifying, as were the nuns in their black garb and large wimples. The building seemed huge, with no end of narrow, dark corridors with cold stone floors and various staircases leading off the main hall; she was convinced she would get lost and never find her way out. Like the girl shut in the trunk she would be crying from some forgotten corner with no one to hear her. The floors were tiled, the ceilings high and she felt very small and insignificant indeed when Sister Mary Joan’s infant class filed into assembly to the front of the rows and rows of girls in identical navy blue pleated serge tunics over royal blue blouses.

Not all the teachers were nuns and some of them were nice; she had a crush on Miss O’Donoghue, the Maths teacher, that lasted years. The nuns she did not take to: there was something inhuman in the scrubbed faces with no make-up and no hair to give character. And some of them were spiteful, cruel even, like when Jennifer Johnson was ridiculed in front of the whole assembly because her tunic had become shiny with wear. She’d had to confess that she only had the one, whereas the uniform list stipulated two. Jennifer was a rather slow-witted girl, large-boned with gallumphing movements. She was used to being teased a lot, though usually she didn’t catch on and just smiled benignly, seeming flattered to have the attention. But the tirade from Mother Catherine Mary, culminating with
’ Tell your mother that in this school we expect decent standards’, had her big body shaking with sobs which grew more and more hysterical, till she was ordered out of the hall to stand in the corridor and ‘pull herself together’.

Edwina’s sense of mischief got her singled out for humiliation too, but thankfully only in front of her classmates. Miss Malone’s policy was to sit the brightest girls in the five desks at the back of the classroom; Edwina got good marks but wondered why she was not moved back. Then one day towards the end of the autumn Term Sister Catherine Peter came in and Miss Malone ordered Edwina to pack up her belongings. The Sister then took her to the next class up, where she later discovered she was the youngest by almost two years.

When she was eight they started learning Latin, chanting ego, me, mei or amo, amas, amat round and round the class. The following year Miss Ryan took the class to St Albans, to see the Roman remains at Verulamium. On the coach coming home, the children had started singing and Edwina took it into her head to sing a different song, loudly, so as to make herself heard above the main tune. Miss O’Ryan promptly forbade any singing at all. Next morning, Mother Catherine Mary came into the classroom to ask about the outing. Miss O’Ryan told her how the day had been spent and praised the girls’ behaviour, but said there was one girl who had behaved very badly and who had disgraced the school. She looked accusingly at Edwina. Heads turned and twenty pairs of eyes, plus the eagle glare of the mother superior, fixed themselves on her. Even the girls who had egged her on in the coach took on an air of smug disdain. Condemning her to writing out ‘blessed are the meek’ one hundred times and threatening to consider putting her back down a class, the nun swept out and Edwina sat trying desperately not to cry.

She did not succeed. Elizabeth Jenkins, from the row behind, prodded her in the back and when she turned and revealed her face wet with tears, scornfully whispered that she was a cry baby. Edwina felt they were all being horribly unfair, considering she was younger than all of them, but she was terrified Mother Catherine Mary might carry out her threat and send her back to the lower class, so she sat in rancorous silence waiting for the lesson to resume.

For a time she palled up with Jennifer Johnson and spent breaks sitting chatting under the cedar tree, whose enormous sagging branches were propped up with wooden posts used as home bases in games of tag. When her parents suggested she ask some friends for tea on her birthday, she would choose Jennifer and one or two others who were teachers’ pets and had posh accents, sensing that this was what would please them.

Then, in her fifth year at the Convent she made a new best friend, after an instance of cruelty that led her henceforth always to regard the nuns as the enemy.

Betty came one day to take her home for dinner. Occasionally she stayed to eat in the school dining room, but it was considered an unnecessary expense for every day. On this particular Wednesday Nana was not well and Betty had been to get her some medicine from the chemist’s. As a result she was late collecting Edwina, had no meal prepared and they eventually set out to return to school at about the time the bell would be signalling the end of the dinner hour. ‘I’d better give you a note for Miss Molloy,‘ Betty said and hastily wrote out a letter of apology.

As they hurried up the lane Bert Flack’s coal lorry went past then stopped. Bert’s son Fred wound down the window, leaned out and asked if they needed a lift. Betty hesitated; the Shepherds had known the Flacks since childhood but now considered themselves a cut above them in the social scale and Betty was not keen for her daughter to be seen arriving at the school in a coal lorry.

‘You look as if you’re in a hurry,’ Fred said, ‘The littl’un goes to the Catholic, don’t she? I got to go past Monks Lane.’
‘Oh please, Mum,’ Edwina begged. ‘Please can I?’ She looked up at the cab, which seemed miles above her, excited at the thought of actually getting inside it. Betty couldn’t come up with a reason to say no, so she said thank you, that would be most kind. Fred opened the door and she lifted Edwina on to the running board, from where Fred pulled her inside.

Edwina thought Fred was really nice, joking with her and saying she looked a proper little toff, whatever that was, but it sounded complimentary. Fred drew up just before the school gates and came round to lift her down. Feeling disappointed not to be in sight of her classroom, which meant nobody would see her arriving in the lorry, she thanked Fred and went up the steps to the main doot and into the cloakroom, where she sat down on the bench under her peg to take off her outdoor shoes.

‘You are late, child,’ a voice said. Sister Catherine Peter was sitting in the shadows at the end of the next row of benches. An older girl sat beside her, with her foot in the nun’s lap. There were bandages around the ankle. Sister lifted the leg off her lap and told the girl to go to her classroom. She struggled to rise on her good foot and hobbled off, throwing Edwina a sympathetic look as she passed. The nun strode towards Edwina.
‘I said, you are late.’
‘Yes Sister. Sorry, Sister.’
‘You have a note, of course.’
‘Yes, Sister.’
Edwina started to unbuckle the straps on her satchel but then realised that her mother had forgotten to give her the note when she got into the lorry.
‘Well?’
‘Mummy forgot to give it to me, Sister.’
‘We do not blame others for own mistakes, Miss. I expect you were dawdling along in a dream.’
‘No,’ Edwina protested, indignant at being unjustly accused. ‘We were really hurrying. Mummy had the note but we were so late and I had to come in a lorry and I got in and – we forgot the note.’
‘Will you stop arguing now.’
The nun’s temper flared and she grabbed the sleeves of her blazer and pulled it off. Edwina’s bottom lip began to tremble and this seemed to aggravate Sister Catherine Peter even more, for she tugged at the elastic under her chin, which held on the navy beaver hat with its royal blue band. Unfortunately she let go of the elastic before the hat was off and it sprang back right into the child’s eyes. The shock and pain were intense and tears spilled out of Edwina’s smarting eyes. Alarmed, Sister Catherine Peter’s reaction was to bluster on even more fiercely:
‘Stop that!’ she cried, ‘Or I’ll really give you something to cry about. Go and wash your face.’

When Edwina returned from the washroom, her sobs beginning to reach a hysterical level, Sister reached into the pocket of her copious skirt and handed her a barley sugar wrapped in cellophane.
‘Now be a good girl and go to your class.’

The girl with the injured ankle was waiting for her in the corridor that linked the cloakroom to the downstairs classrooms. Edwina had noticed her in Assembly and thought her amazingly beautiful. She had very pale blond hair, tied back with a royal blue ribbon, from which wispy tendrils escaped. She was 2 years above Edwina.
‘How you doing? What did the Peter cat do to you? I heard you shout out. Golly, your eyes look fearfully red.’
‘She pulled the elastic on my hat and let it go right into my eyes,’ Edwina sniffled.
‘Never mind. Scars of battle. She’s a miserable old crow’
Edwina was shocked at this forthright language and looked round nervously.
‘Don’t worry – she’s gone. I think you scared her a bit. Suppose she’d blinded you! What’s your name by the way? Mine’s Joanna, Jo to my friends.’ Edwina told her, and Joanna offered to walk her to her class, ‘though it’s like the blind cat and the lame fox, isn’t it’. Edwina nodded, not knowing what Joanna meant but sure it must be something very clever.

From then on, united in their dislike of the nuns, the two became avowed best friends, despite the 2 years’ difference in age. Jo amazed Betty by turning up at their house uninvited one Saturday morning, having cycled from the other side of town. She asked if Eddie could come out to play, then remembered Edwina had said that her mother didn’t like nicknames and hastily added; ‘I mean Edwina – can she please?’ Betty disapproved of such independence and grudgingly allowed them to play in Edwina’s bedroom or the garden, but not to go out in the lane.

‘You come to my house next time,’ Jo said at school on Monday. ‘My mater isn’t a bit strict.’
‘I don’t know if Mummy would let me,’ Edwina mused, knowing Betty thought her friend much too grown up for her.
‘Oh, I’ll get Ma to telephone her.’
‘We don’t have a telephone.’
‘Right-o. I’ll get her to write a letter and ask - ever so nicely,’ Jo insisted.
And sure enough, Edwina trotted home from school a couple of weeks later, with a letter purporting to come from Mrs Burrell, though in fact penned by Jo’s oldest sister.

The Burrells’ address was impressive, Alton House on Alton Avenue, a broad tree-lined private road with a dozen or so large houses set back in extensive grounds. Edwin drove her there on the Sunday afternoon and Betty came with them, full of recommendations as to her daughter’s behaviour. Leaving the car at the bottom of the drive, they all trooped up to the front door, but Joanna burst round the side of the house to forestall them.
‘Hello! I’m afraid my mother is a bit busy just now. Edwina can come with me. Thank you so much for bringing her.’

Somewhat disconcerted, the Nicholsons had no option but to return to the car and leave. The girls watched them drive off, then Jo abandoned her polite demeanour and urging ‘Come on, I want to show you my hidey hole’ led the way to the shrubbery at the back of the house.

Edwina’s parents were even more disconcerted when they came to collect her that evening and Mrs Burrell opened the door.

‘Yes?’ she enquired, looking at them as though she wondered what they were doing there. She was tall and thin, with greying hair swept up on top of her head, and had a rather vague, abstracted air. Luckily Jo and Edwina had followed her and she said with a faint smile, ‘Oh yes – the little Nicholson girl. Goodbye, dear.’

Betty was shocked when she gleaned from Edwina’s breathlessly enthusiastic account that the children had been left to their own devices all afternoon and had made themselves bread and jam for tea in the kitchen, while Mr and Mrs Burrell entertained their own friends. This had made Edwina feel grown-up and independent, but Betty reckoned this was not the way she would treat a child invited to her home. Nevertheless, Mrs Burrell’s accent, the house and evident wealth made an impression and no more objections were raised to the girls’ being friends.

Jane and Cecil Burrell fascinated Edwina: they spoke to their children as to fellow adults and Jo and her sisters seemed to do more or less as they pleased, so long as they took care not to disturb their parents’ activities. If Jane Burrell’s eyebrows lifted in mild surprise to see Edwina, Jo had only to say, ‘But, Ma, you said Eddie could come!’ and the response would be something like ‘Oh, did I , darling?’ followed by ‘Well, all right, but remember the Warmington Smythes are coming to dinner, won’t you.’

There was one occasion when Jo didn’t get her own way, though. She had persuaded her mother to give her a letter for Mrs Nicholson, suggesting Edwina stay the night at Alton House the coming Saturday. The girls were very excited and Jo had told her to bring ‘lots of money’ and they would have a midnight feast. Betty borrowed a small leather case from Auntie Cissy and packed clean nightie, vest and knickers and laid on top a little box of Turkish Delight as a thank you present for Mrs Burrell. As soon as Edwin deposited her at the front door, Jo took the case from her and led her upstairs to the room next her own, where she was to sleep. She put the case on the bed and opened it.
‘Jolly good – you got some sweets already’ she said, taking out the Turkish Delight. ‘I’ll hide them for the feast.’
‘Oh, but they were for your mother. Mummy said….,’ Edwina began, but Jo interrupted with,
‘Oh she won’t notice. Don’t know if she likes those anyway. Look, you’d better get unpacked, then come to my room – next one along. See you in a min.’

She went off clutching the sweets and Edwina stood looking round the room. She had never been to stay with anyone who wasn’t family and it was all so exciting. The room looked onto the lawn and shrubbery at the back of the house and was larger than any of the bedrooms at home. It also didn’t have matching pieces of furniture. The bed rested in a light wooden frame, with a small white table beside it, a lamp on one side and on the other a glass-fronted bookcase. A large, ornately carved wardrobe stood against the wall opposite the window. Under the window stood a chest in the same light wood as the bed, with a mirror on a stand on top of it and various china pots and bowls. In front of the chest was a stool covered in deep pink velvet and an armchair of the same material stood beside it. The carpet was flower-patterned in pale colours and the overall atmosphere was light and airy. Pale lacy curtains moved gently in the breeze from the open window and sunshine streamed in and dappled the white quilt on her bed, dotted with tiny pink and lemon roses.

Edwina walked round the room, peering at the pictures of unfamiliar cities and landscapes of lakes and mountains, and was about to open the bookcase when she heard Jo shouting at her to ‘get a move on’.

They walked down Alton Avenue together and along the main road to a little grocer’s shop, where Edwina gave Jo her pocket money and they chose chocolate biscuits, Walnut Whips, gobstoppers and liquorice pipes, with Trebor’s ha’penny chews to use up the last of the fund. Then they went back and lay on Jo’s bed talking till called for tea, or dinner, as this family called it. The dining room seemed huge, with portraits round the walls and Edwina was wondering who they all were when Mrs Burrell asked if she liked curry. Never having heard of it, but ashamed to say so, Edwina said she loved it and tried not to show her dislike when she tasted it.

Sadly for the girls, Mrs Burrell stopped them as they were going back upstairs after dinner and said to Jo,
‘I do hope you’re not planning one of your midnight feasts, Joanna. The whole house got disturbed last time and Mrs Holmes was most put out about the mess in your room. She had to take your bed apart to get rid of the crumbs!’

Seeing their guilty faces, or at any rate Edwina’s, she insisted they hand over their provisions and they went lamely to bed, Jo muttering furiously under her breath and Edwina mortified that she had incurred Mrs Burrell’s disapproval. Would she tell her mother? On reflection, she decided Mrs Burrell was far too absent-minded to think of such a thing, so Edwina was merely left with the guilt of knowing that Betty’s offering had been consigned to some forgotten corner, together with the hoard of sweets she had wasted her precious pocket money on.