Old Girls Go Off the Rails (Old Ducks’ Club)
Chapter 1
Oh, happy days. No more horrible dark-green uniform, stupid pudding-bowl hat and definitely no more suffering at the hands of teachers who had probably never been as young, carefree and happy as I was that day.
It was late June and all that stretched ahead for me was the summer.
I was free from revision, blistering-hot classrooms, homework and the all-encompassing fear that had tormented my dreams for months – that I would not remember enough English, History or French to successfully answer the questions in my A level exams.
By then it was too late to worry. The results wouldn’t be through until August and if I got the right grades I had a place waiting for me at university in Cambridge, so there was nothing else to think about then except how to fill the eight or nine weeks until I found out my fate.
I anticipated late mornings, lazy afternoons at the local swimming pool, hanging out with my best friends Harriet and Anna.
The expectation was marvellous and at the same time, after all the weeks and months of restriction and worry, the prospect of such freedom was a bit sudden and unexpected.
Like a pressure cooker valve being released.
The girls with whom I had spent the last seven years, some of them for longer, were finally scattering, like a handful of dropped ball bearings.
Some had summer jobs lined up; a few were going on a last family holiday.
Quite a lot of them had vague ideas, like me, of lazing about doing nothing in particular.
But out of the blue, Harriet and Anna had suddenly chosen a different option and they were the envy of everyone including me because they were going Interrailing for a month with Harriet’s cousins Tom and Paul.
For the princely sum of ￡32, they could spend a month hopping on and off trains and seeing as much of Europe as they could. And oh, how I wanted to go too.
The prospect of seeing Paris, Spain maybe Switzerland or Austria with just a backpack and a passport and some travellers cheques tucked into a safely zipped money belt was irresistible.
It sounded so exciting; the idea of such liberation was intoxicating.
But even when they insisted that I must go with them and my heart leapt at the prospect, I knew deep down it would be impossible, and I was right.
My father said, ‘No, Lizzie.’ Very firmly and several times. And no amount of begging, sulking, reasoning or door slamming would change his mind. He said he had been abroad after the war and didn’t think much of it.
He said I was too young; Anna would probably go off with the first boy to catch her attention (quite possible) and leave me stranded, Harriet didn’t have the sense of a doorstop (well, she was a bit excitable) and Tom and Paul might be charming and intelligent but they would be no help if anything went wrong.
‘But what could go wrong?’ I had wailed.
‘Lots of things, Lizzie, now let’s hear no more about it,’ he’d said with a dark look, and he had shaken his newspaper at me to show the discussion was over.
Instead, to my everlasting despair, he had arranged for me to work all summer in a windowless back office at his branch of Bowens Bank, where I was called Miss Stevens.
I was to do filing and answering the telephone and a hundred dull things.
He wasn’t the sort of parent to be defied and back then teenagers were a lot more biddable than they are now.
The anguished cry of ‘Anna’s mother is letting her go’ was met with the predictable response of ‘I don’t care what Anna’s mother is doing’, and that was that.
Bowens Bank was taken over a few years later by one of the big four and refitted with snazzy red counters and glass security panels, but when I walked back in there one morning a few years later, the room where I had worked that summer still smelled of bad coffee and dust and my despair.
* * *
I went to the local train station with my friends that Sunday morning, to wave them off on their adventure, and I didn’t think I had ever felt so jealous before or since.
Dressed in the universal teen uniform of jeans, a denim jacket (double denim was okay back then) and cheesecloth shirts, the four of them were excited to the point of hysteria.
Anna’s crazy curls had been tamed into a plait that managed to look sensible and sexy at the same time, and Harriet was wearing a funny little bucket hat with a smiley face logo on the front.
Tom and Paul were sitting on a bench, long legs stretched out in front of them, almost crackling with the supressed energy that young men have at eighteen.
They all had new smart blue passports with lots of empty pages waiting for official stamps and scribbles.
They had impressive backpacks with many zips and pockets; money belts filled with exotic-looking francs to spend when they reached Paris and travellers cheques to take to the bank when they needed more cash.
I was so near and yet so far. I almost wept with envy, imagining them strolling along elegant boulevards, sitting at impossibly chic cafés sipping café crème, or perhaps eating glossy croissants.
I wasn’t sure what they might do if they ever got to Belgium or Switzerland, but I guessed it would be making a lot of wonderful memories that involved divine chocolate and breath-taking scenery. And I wasn’t going with them.
It seemed so wrong; we had been friends for years.
We had gone all the way through secondary school together.
We did everything together. We’d been in the school swimming team when I was the captain and able to tell them what to do for once.
We had stood in the school choir side by side, we’d taken part in concerts and plays, even been in the same guide troop for a while until Anna was asked to leave and so Harriet and I left too, as some sort of protest. Surely we were inseparable?
That day it was raining. I had borrowed my mother’s umbrella which was decorated with parrots, and I remember stamping back home from the station in a proper fury, almost crying with disappointment.
My job at the bank would start the following day and I could imagine all too well what it would be like.
Some colourless people shuffling paperwork and wandering about with folders who would only defer to me because I was the manager’s daughter, but I bet secretly they would be looking at me with contempt that I couldn’t find anything better to do with my holiday.
As I reached my front door I could hear my mother laughing at something on the radio in the kitchen and it made me even crosser.
She was of course busy with the traditional Sunday lunch my father insisted on every week, and even the wonderful smell of roast beef and Yorkshire puddings permeating the hallway failed to cheer me up.
As I stood in the doorway taking off my dripping raincoat, I made an impassioned, silent promise to myself. One day I would go too; one day I would be the one getting onto a train in Worcester and getting off in Paris. I knew now of course it wasn’t that simple but back then I thought it was.
I didn’t know it then as I sat torturing myself, imagining what my friends were doing as I stabbed resentfully at the carrots, the roast potatoes and the cauliflower, but it would be forty-six years until that promise to myself came true.