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Authors: Ruth Skrine
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in therethat, when a friend’s hair caught light from a candle, I was able to smother it before the flames had done more than frizzle the ends.
Little of what I was taught in school remains in my mind. Just once, I felt a stab of recognition. I was driving across the plains of Alberta. Nodding donkeys dotted the yellow, autumnal landscape, exact replicas of the picture on page twenty-three in my geography book. The isolated excrescences stood as evidence of the oil wells below.
During the Christmas holidays, in the last year before I left school, I went to my first dance, held at Corsham Court. I wore a floor-length blue dress lent by the wife of a local doctor, with my long hair pinned up with kirby grips into curls all over my head. It should have been the most romantic occasion but turned into something of a nightmare. Biz and I were good friends with Richard Awdry and his younger brother Philip. That night Richard was, in my view, the most handsome boy in the room. He was also literate and amusing – but he spent the whole evening dancing with a pretty brunette. I sat behind a pillar discussing the dissection of dogfish with another schoolboy, both of us feeling too plain and nervous to dance: and if I had taken to the floor my hair might have come down. A picture from the local paper shows the guests crowded on a staircase, and there is Richard with his brunette and I a few rows behind, looking anxious.
Before the war such parties, even in much smaller private houses, had been common. My parents had given one in Green Gables. They rolled the carpet back in the nursery, sprinkled powdered chalk on the floorboards and put 78 rpm records on the gramophone. I must have been eight or nine at the time and was allowed to join in with Arthur provided we promised to go to bed promptly at 9 o’clock. The last dance, Sir Roger Decoverley, was moved forward so we could take part before we were banished. I was both proud and furious when I overheard someone say, ‘The little dears, so good of them to go to bed without making a fuss.’
* * *
Back at school after my visit to Corsham Court, my three sixth-form subjects had been dictated by my mother’s decision that I should be a doctor: biology, physics and chemistry. The only one that held the slightest interest for me was biology. We had a good teacher who was married and marginally more interested in the way living things, including human beings, worked. I learned physics by rote, messed up the practical chemistry exam and did not reach the required standard for the place in the second year of the medical course that I had been offered at Bristol University. Luckily they had forgotten to state in their letter that my exemption from the first MB was dependent on my grades. My father created a fuss and they were forced to accept me into the first year. I am ashamed that I only managed to get into university because of an administrative fault.
Before I took up that place I negotiated two important milestones. In two hours during the summer I became an adult. . . or so it felt to me. At that time women with long hair wore it up, the plaits wound into bangs over the ears or round their heads. Only children wore them hanging down. This rigid distinction allowed no opportunity to oscillate between being a child and a grown up. When I insisted that I wanted my plaits cut off my mother eventually agreed, but only if I went to her special hairdresser in London, where he was to put a perm in the remaining hair. I sat in the chair with my mother standing by my side as we watched the long strands fall to the floor. In the mirror, she looked devastated. The man applied lotions and papers and curlers and a disgusting chemical smell filled the room. Once it was washed off and my hair had been dried I watched the head in the mirror turning from side to side, unable to accept that it belonged to me. With no experience of brushing short hair, let alone helping it into any sort of style, it
Little of what I was taught in school remains in my mind. Just once, I felt a stab of recognition. I was driving across the plains of Alberta. Nodding donkeys dotted the yellow, autumnal landscape, exact replicas of the picture on page twenty-three in my geography book. The isolated excrescences stood as evidence of the oil wells below.
During the Christmas holidays, in the last year before I left school, I went to my first dance, held at Corsham Court. I wore a floor-length blue dress lent by the wife of a local doctor, with my long hair pinned up with kirby grips into curls all over my head. It should have been the most romantic occasion but turned into something of a nightmare. Biz and I were good friends with Richard Awdry and his younger brother Philip. That night Richard was, in my view, the most handsome boy in the room. He was also literate and amusing – but he spent the whole evening dancing with a pretty brunette. I sat behind a pillar discussing the dissection of dogfish with another schoolboy, both of us feeling too plain and nervous to dance: and if I had taken to the floor my hair might have come down. A picture from the local paper shows the guests crowded on a staircase, and there is Richard with his brunette and I a few rows behind, looking anxious.
Before the war such parties, even in much smaller private houses, had been common. My parents had given one in Green Gables. They rolled the carpet back in the nursery, sprinkled powdered chalk on the floorboards and put 78 rpm records on the gramophone. I must have been eight or nine at the time and was allowed to join in with Arthur provided we promised to go to bed promptly at 9 o’clock. The last dance, Sir Roger Decoverley, was moved forward so we could take part before we were banished. I was both proud and furious when I overheard someone say, ‘The little dears, so good of them to go to bed without making a fuss.’
* * *
Back at school after my visit to Corsham Court, my three sixth-form subjects had been dictated by my mother’s decision that I should be a doctor: biology, physics and chemistry. The only one that held the slightest interest for me was biology. We had a good teacher who was married and marginally more interested in the way living things, including human beings, worked. I learned physics by rote, messed up the practical chemistry exam and did not reach the required standard for the place in the second year of the medical course that I had been offered at Bristol University. Luckily they had forgotten to state in their letter that my exemption from the first MB was dependent on my grades. My father created a fuss and they were forced to accept me into the first year. I am ashamed that I only managed to get into university because of an administrative fault.
Before I took up that place I negotiated two important milestones. In two hours during the summer I became an adult. . . or so it felt to me. At that time women with long hair wore it up, the plaits wound into bangs over the ears or round their heads. Only children wore them hanging down. This rigid distinction allowed no opportunity to oscillate between being a child and a grown up. When I insisted that I wanted my plaits cut off my mother eventually agreed, but only if I went to her special hairdresser in London, where he was to put a perm in the remaining hair. I sat in the chair with my mother standing by my side as we watched the long strands fall to the floor. In the mirror, she looked devastated. The man applied lotions and papers and curlers and a disgusting chemical smell filled the room. Once it was washed off and my hair had been dried I watched the head in the mirror turning from side to side, unable to accept that it belonged to me. With no experience of brushing short hair, let alone helping it into any sort of style, it
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