Read Online The Following Girls by Louise Levene - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Louise Levene
Ads: Link
detention from Mostyn wouldn’t clock up a nasty little pink slip, so Dad needn’t find out. And the actual detention itself would be worse if the Drumlin had any say in the matter because the Drumlin always found filthy physical things for you to do like washing tennis balls or whitening goalie pads or chipping Juicy Fruit off the bottoms of chairs.
Baker tailed after the Snog Monster to her lair. The box pleat beneath the baggy arse of her skirt flapped from side to side as her veiny great legs scuttled along the corridors, like the back end of an elephant on a nature programme. On she trundled, past the Music Room where first years were wrecking ‘The Skye Boat Song’ (one of the treats being lined up for Founder’s Day) and past the Art Room whose masterpieces spilled out on to the noticeboards of the corridor outside. None of them was current, indeed most seemed to have been there since Baker and her father and Spam had come to that fateful open day when Dr O’Brien sold Dad on the idea of Fawcett and ‘the rosy path of golden possibilities’. Nearly all of the art was signed ‘Dora Hardcastle’ who was clearly nothing if not versatile: portraits, landscapes, the odd abstract and a stomach-turning still life of a Bakewell tart and what the Mandies had agreed could only have been a Scotch egg (Bunty’s favourite).
‘I blame Cezanne,’ sneered Queenie (whose mum dragged her round galleries every weekend while Daddy played golf).
‘I blame Mrs Chiffley,’ said Bunty. ‘I’d know those Domestic Science leftovers anywhere.’
‘Where is Bakewell?’
‘Bakewell’s a place ? I thought it was just a cooking instruction.’
Mrs Mostyn shared the Geography Room with a Miss Combe. Miss Combe had only graduated in 1970 and was keen to bring all that she had learned to the classroom. Out had gone capital cities, map-drawing, imports, exports. In had come pebble formation, ox bow lakes, meanders, town planning and ‘acid rain’. Miss Combe had her own cocoa bean, her own crumbs of bauxite and a special dinky apparatus to prove, after two weeks of drips, that rainwater would wear holes in limestone or similar – just in case the students thought she was making it all up, presumably. Far quicker simply to tell them, reflected Mrs Mostyn, or chalk it on the board, or give them a sheet about it.
Her keen young colleague, physical geographer to her unpainted fingertips, had mentioned with pride that the upper third in her last school could all parrot the chemical formula for sulphuric acid. Doubtless. But could any of them name three cities in West Germany? fretted the Snog Monster. Or say where pineapples came from? Or find Minsk? Mrs Mostyn liked her girls to have a good basic grounding in old-fashioned human geography – capital of Albania; neighbours of Switzerland; countries through which the Rhine flowed; uses of palm fibre, yam, that sort of thing – what Mrs Mostyn liked to think of as the useful sort of geography that enabled one to take an intelligent interest in people’s holiday stories, or overseas postings.
Mrs Mostyn’s pet detention was the never-ending business of updating the school’s stock of atlases. Half of these dated from 1944, the other half 1955, and the world was not what it was. Dr O’Brien had very generously offered to replace them all – Miss Combe was mad keen – but Mrs Mostyn, who begrudged spending school money every bit as fiercely as she begrudged spending her own, had resisted: unnecessary expense; nothing that a few duplicated cut-outs or an extra-fine nib couldn’t put right. Besides, new atlases would have meant New Geography and she was determined to hold out against this for as long as she possibly could. None of the scholastic publishers bothered with proper political maps any more, so it was by no means certain that the old copies would be replaced with anything suitable.
Miss Combe didn’t seem to care for maps at all, or map-reading. Such a skill, such
Baker tailed after the Snog Monster to her lair. The box pleat beneath the baggy arse of her skirt flapped from side to side as her veiny great legs scuttled along the corridors, like the back end of an elephant on a nature programme. On she trundled, past the Music Room where first years were wrecking ‘The Skye Boat Song’ (one of the treats being lined up for Founder’s Day) and past the Art Room whose masterpieces spilled out on to the noticeboards of the corridor outside. None of them was current, indeed most seemed to have been there since Baker and her father and Spam had come to that fateful open day when Dr O’Brien sold Dad on the idea of Fawcett and ‘the rosy path of golden possibilities’. Nearly all of the art was signed ‘Dora Hardcastle’ who was clearly nothing if not versatile: portraits, landscapes, the odd abstract and a stomach-turning still life of a Bakewell tart and what the Mandies had agreed could only have been a Scotch egg (Bunty’s favourite).
‘I blame Cezanne,’ sneered Queenie (whose mum dragged her round galleries every weekend while Daddy played golf).
‘I blame Mrs Chiffley,’ said Bunty. ‘I’d know those Domestic Science leftovers anywhere.’
‘Where is Bakewell?’
‘Bakewell’s a place ? I thought it was just a cooking instruction.’
Mrs Mostyn shared the Geography Room with a Miss Combe. Miss Combe had only graduated in 1970 and was keen to bring all that she had learned to the classroom. Out had gone capital cities, map-drawing, imports, exports. In had come pebble formation, ox bow lakes, meanders, town planning and ‘acid rain’. Miss Combe had her own cocoa bean, her own crumbs of bauxite and a special dinky apparatus to prove, after two weeks of drips, that rainwater would wear holes in limestone or similar – just in case the students thought she was making it all up, presumably. Far quicker simply to tell them, reflected Mrs Mostyn, or chalk it on the board, or give them a sheet about it.
Her keen young colleague, physical geographer to her unpainted fingertips, had mentioned with pride that the upper third in her last school could all parrot the chemical formula for sulphuric acid. Doubtless. But could any of them name three cities in West Germany? fretted the Snog Monster. Or say where pineapples came from? Or find Minsk? Mrs Mostyn liked her girls to have a good basic grounding in old-fashioned human geography – capital of Albania; neighbours of Switzerland; countries through which the Rhine flowed; uses of palm fibre, yam, that sort of thing – what Mrs Mostyn liked to think of as the useful sort of geography that enabled one to take an intelligent interest in people’s holiday stories, or overseas postings.
Mrs Mostyn’s pet detention was the never-ending business of updating the school’s stock of atlases. Half of these dated from 1944, the other half 1955, and the world was not what it was. Dr O’Brien had very generously offered to replace them all – Miss Combe was mad keen – but Mrs Mostyn, who begrudged spending school money every bit as fiercely as she begrudged spending her own, had resisted: unnecessary expense; nothing that a few duplicated cut-outs or an extra-fine nib couldn’t put right. Besides, new atlases would have meant New Geography and she was determined to hold out against this for as long as she possibly could. None of the scholastic publishers bothered with proper political maps any more, so it was by no means certain that the old copies would be replaced with anything suitable.
Miss Combe didn’t seem to care for maps at all, or map-reading. Such a skill, such
Similar Books
