poured into a large zinc tub, and we sat in it together to work up a lather with rough lumps of carbolic soap and wash ourselves thoroughly under Matron’s watchful eye. It was the last time at The Dean that I shared a bath with just one other person. Weekly bath night, it turned out, consisted of four to a bath, always in the same six inches of scummy water. So this was luxury.
The boys’ dormitory occupied the first floor of the east wing. Rows of beds along facing walls of a long room. Tall arched windows stood at each end, and shorter rectangular windows lined the outside wall. In later days it was filled with spring sunshine, warm and bright, but today it breathed gloom and depression. Peter and I were given beds side by side at the far end of the dorm. I had noticed, as we passed among them, that all the neatly made-up beds had small canvas sacks placed at the end of them, and when we reached ours I saw two empty sacks draped over our solitary case. There were no bedside cabinets, drawers or cupboards. We were, I soon found out, discouraged from accumulating personal belongings. And connections to the past were frowned upon.
Mr Anderson came in behind us. ‘You can empty your case and place your belongings in the sacks provided,’ he said. ‘They will remain at all times at the foot of your beds. Understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Everything in the case had been systematically folded by somebody. I carefully separated my clothes from Peter’s, and filled both our sacks. He sat for a while on the edge of his bed flicking through the only thing that remained of our father. A collection he had begun before the war of cigarette packets. Like a stamp album. Except that in place of the stamps, he had cut out the fronts of dozens of different cigarette packets and pasted them into the pages. Some of them had exotic names like Joystick or Passing Cloud or Juleps . All with colourful graphic illustrations, heads of young men and women seen puffing ecstatically at the tobacco-filled tubes that would later kill them.
Peter never tired of looking at them. I suppose the album was mine, really. But I was happy to let him have it. I never asked him, but it was as if those cigarette packets gave him a direct connection in some way to our father.
I felt a much stronger connection with our mother. And the ring she had given me was the symbolic memento of her that I guarded with my life. Not even Peter knew I had it. He couldn’t be trusted with a secret. He was just as likely to open his mouth and blab to anyone. So I kept it hidden in a rolled-up pair of socks. It was just the sort of thing, I suspected, that would be confiscated or stolen.
The dining hall was on the ground floor, and that’s when we met most of the other kids for the first time, after they got back from school. There were probably fifty or more of us at that time. Boys in the east wing, girls in the west. Of course we were a curiosity. Naïve newcomers. The others were blasé, experienced Dean kids. We were wet behind the ears, and worst of all, Catholics. I don’t know how, but they all seemed to know that, and it separated us from the crowd. Nobody wanted to talk to us. Except for Catherine.
She was a real tomboy back then. Brown hair cut short, a white blouse beneath a dark-green pullover, a pleated grey skirt above grey socks gathered around her ankles, and heavy black shoes. I suppose I must have been about fifteen at that time, and she would have been a year or so younger than me, but I recall noticing that she already had sizeable breasts stretching her blouse. Though there really was nothing feminine about her. She liked to swear, and had the cheekiest grin I ever saw, and never took lip off anyone, even the bigger boys.
We were supposed to wear ties for going to school, but I noticed that first night that she had already discarded hers, and at the open neck of her blouse I saw a small Saint Christopher medallion hanging on a silver
The boys’ dormitory occupied the first floor of the east wing. Rows of beds along facing walls of a long room. Tall arched windows stood at each end, and shorter rectangular windows lined the outside wall. In later days it was filled with spring sunshine, warm and bright, but today it breathed gloom and depression. Peter and I were given beds side by side at the far end of the dorm. I had noticed, as we passed among them, that all the neatly made-up beds had small canvas sacks placed at the end of them, and when we reached ours I saw two empty sacks draped over our solitary case. There were no bedside cabinets, drawers or cupboards. We were, I soon found out, discouraged from accumulating personal belongings. And connections to the past were frowned upon.
Mr Anderson came in behind us. ‘You can empty your case and place your belongings in the sacks provided,’ he said. ‘They will remain at all times at the foot of your beds. Understood?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Everything in the case had been systematically folded by somebody. I carefully separated my clothes from Peter’s, and filled both our sacks. He sat for a while on the edge of his bed flicking through the only thing that remained of our father. A collection he had begun before the war of cigarette packets. Like a stamp album. Except that in place of the stamps, he had cut out the fronts of dozens of different cigarette packets and pasted them into the pages. Some of them had exotic names like Joystick or Passing Cloud or Juleps . All with colourful graphic illustrations, heads of young men and women seen puffing ecstatically at the tobacco-filled tubes that would later kill them.
Peter never tired of looking at them. I suppose the album was mine, really. But I was happy to let him have it. I never asked him, but it was as if those cigarette packets gave him a direct connection in some way to our father.
I felt a much stronger connection with our mother. And the ring she had given me was the symbolic memento of her that I guarded with my life. Not even Peter knew I had it. He couldn’t be trusted with a secret. He was just as likely to open his mouth and blab to anyone. So I kept it hidden in a rolled-up pair of socks. It was just the sort of thing, I suspected, that would be confiscated or stolen.
The dining hall was on the ground floor, and that’s when we met most of the other kids for the first time, after they got back from school. There were probably fifty or more of us at that time. Boys in the east wing, girls in the west. Of course we were a curiosity. Naïve newcomers. The others were blasé, experienced Dean kids. We were wet behind the ears, and worst of all, Catholics. I don’t know how, but they all seemed to know that, and it separated us from the crowd. Nobody wanted to talk to us. Except for Catherine.
She was a real tomboy back then. Brown hair cut short, a white blouse beneath a dark-green pullover, a pleated grey skirt above grey socks gathered around her ankles, and heavy black shoes. I suppose I must have been about fifteen at that time, and she would have been a year or so younger than me, but I recall noticing that she already had sizeable breasts stretching her blouse. Though there really was nothing feminine about her. She liked to swear, and had the cheekiest grin I ever saw, and never took lip off anyone, even the bigger boys.
We were supposed to wear ties for going to school, but I noticed that first night that she had already discarded hers, and at the open neck of her blouse I saw a small Saint Christopher medallion hanging on a silver
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