I got chills...

No make up. No tights. No stockings. No short skirts. No trousers. No hair dye. No rocking rolling devil music. And, most certainly, no boys. Just tell the truth, shame the Devil, cross your legs and say no. Ah, those Carmelite nuns knew how to party though, simpering bashfully beneath their wimples when the jagged jaw of the parish priest came a calling. Rock on Sister, for you are indeed the bride of Christ Himself and the blessed one turns her eyes only heavenward as the fires of desire stoke the flames in your soul.

To a tall, flush-faced, be-plaited, be-ribboned, satchel-clutching ten year old Prossie* the finer aspects of the reign of Catholic fire and brimstone were as much a mystery as hieroglyphics. Pretty to look at, sometimes alarming in the telling, but as mortally unknowable as the activities with which unbaptised persons might occupy themselves whilst in God's eternal waiting room, Limbo being a concept that doesn't feature highly at a work-a-day down-town Methodist Sunday School. Oh, and the giddying heady heavenly scent of it. The incense, the holy smoke, the lithe writhing of the bright licking flames of the pure white candles in their jet black sconces. And the priest, listening hard to feverish whispering confession of sins in thought and deed, offering hoarse spoken words of absolution from behind delicate fretwork panels to juvenile knees.

I came unprovisioned, unprepared, into this Convent school world of saints and martyrs as my own adolescence was just beginning to bloom. 1979, Mrs Thatcher not long anointed as the bouffant haired latter-day Bismarck steering her iron-clad course into history. And I, on my first day, in brown felt hat, striped golden tie and coarse pleated skirt, stood wide eyed and craven in awe of the sheer power of it all. I was yet to learn the Hail Mary, mouthed nonsense words from half-closed lips, fiddled awkwardly with my tie at the moments in the chapel of genuflection and crossing. Make me an instrument of thy peace, Saint Augustine, and don't let Sister Philomena catch me doodling in the hymn book.

Five years on, I was an old hand. Could recite the prayers: English, French, Latin, knew the stations of the cross, ate fish on Fridays and passed unseen beneath the radar of my outsiderness. And then one day the priest must have called by unexpected, for the lunchtime corridors were deserted of sisters and their secular counterparts. Dun painted classrooms, playgrounds, tennis courts, quadrangles, we had the place to ourselves. The Devil he makes works for idle hands and our teenage hands itched with mischief. Some climbed upon the brown curtained stage, powered up the stereo, plucked from the ether a smuggled cassette tape and cranked up the volume. All that long lunchtime of bliss we tucked our skirts in our pants and danced and turned cartwheels to the Devil's very best tunes.

And so it was that the first time I heard the spine-tingling, hair-raising, pulse-throbbing, ear-addicting, blood-pumping sound of the (then banned) Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood was dancing with my knickers on show with a room full of 15 year old girls in the hallowed hall of a Convent school. Over and over and over again, the windows shivering with unholy volume until the room was a spinning, sweating, swaying sea of singing young women on the very tip of the brink of the precipice of adulthood moving only in the ways that ten thousand thousand years of instinct compelled.

Some people know exactly where they were and what they were doing the moment JFK was assassinated. On the moment of the first moon landing, I was still a babe in arms. But there are some very special moments plucked from a lifetime of memories that condense, coalesce and stand still as if time itself has halted. That afternoon in 1984 was one of them. Relax. Oh yeah.


I was reminded of this today when I went to visit Fram's blog (>>>Sort of San Franscico Fan Club>>>) and found he had posted Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd. I remember exactly where I was when I first heard that too: 2002, late September, driving across endless eternal beautiful red rocks in the Mid West USA. A lifetime of listening to music but some has the power to raise a tingle from nape to soul and stop the heart on vey first hearing. Another piece too like this, just the other day at the event of music and words. This time, Country Life by folk band Show of Hands, played and sung to perfection by Maria's husband Bob.

And if you're wondering, yes I did sing along. But not, this time, with my skirt tucked in my knickers.

* Prossie = Protestant

http://www.last.fm/music/Show+of+Hands/_/Country+Life

The dancing devils of '87

Being British, I ought to remember if the summer of 1987 was a good one weather-wise. But I don’t and it might have rained every single day for all I cared. Because I was 18, I’d just left school, the ink was still wet on my pink paper driving licence, I had the keys to my mother’s rusty old brown Renault 12, a pocket full of cash from working in a bar and the coolest cool black suede jacket this side of James Dean. Oh yeah, baby, coolest cool long hot summer of '87.

And if Bryan Adams didn’t think it was his duty to write a song about it too, then that was his loss. In any case, there was The Cure, Bauhaus, The Sisters of Mercy, The Cult, Depeche Mode, lyrical poets to a black hair-dyed man who sang directly to my adolescent soul, visions too of male perfection in anatomical leather trousers to speed my pulse and quicken my heart. I’d shaken the dust of childhood from my pointy-booted feet and made my pact with the dancing devil; there was no going back.

Days, weeks, months stretched ahead of me, open and rolling like the Arizona desert. At the far end, university beckoned, vague and shimmering like an oasis in a dreamscape, tantalising and unknown. But the keys to that kingdom were still some way off and I was in no hurry. One last summer of friendships closer than blood and stronger than steel, one last pause before the final ascent on the summit, one last summer of fun before the jaws of adulthood gobbled me up and made me pay my taxes.

Madeline was the only one from our friendship group not to be going on to higher education. She was perfectly able to do so, but had chosen instead to join the world of work. That four letter word was so abstract in its concept to us in those days that her choice seemed more exotic than if she’d run away with a moustachio'd lion tamer and was spending her days dressed in a spangly thong and hanging upside down on a trapeze whilst juggling penguins. If school was out for her too, then commuting was in, on the daily train from her little village up to the big bad city of London. More precisely, to the offices of the Metropolitan Police in Pimlico.

Where she was a few weeks later when we went, en masse, to meet her after work one afternoon. In those less paranoid times, we were perfectly able to stroll into her open plan high rise office without filling in twenty eight forms in triplicate. And so it was that we found her at her desk that day, dressed in her 1980s work gear and wearing proper grown up make up and bouffant hair, sitting typing in front of a tiny brown screen with square green writing on it. Her job – in fact that of the whole office – was dealing with unpaid parking tickets. Well, that’s what they were paid for anyway, but the office had a wonderful atmosphere and not just because of the smoke from the cigarettes that people could still enjoy at their desks. No, its cause was much more human and was sitting opposite Madeline in a dark shiny suit.

Of course, we all fell instantly in love with David. He was tall, handsome, funny, skinny as a thin stick and quite the most glamorous man that we’d ever encountered. He was 19, too, so sophisticated beyond our years. David soon became a regular part of our group, joining us for wild nights out where he soon proved to be by far the best dancer that we’d ever seen. For day trips down to Margate in his old maroon Morris Marina to make ourselves sick with fear on the roller coaster and to drink white cider on the yellow sand. To while away the wee small hours talking toffee in the cavernous canteen of the motorway service station over pots of stewed tea. To dance in the moonlight by the light of a bonfire on top of the ancient long barrow at Cauldron Stones. To shriek with terror as we crept through the thick dark woods to the old mausoleum in the grounds of Cobham Hall.

I never thought that summer would end. I don’t think any of us did really, not in our hearts. But time passes whether you wish it to or not, and it was with a deeply instinctive feeling that, when I said goodbye to my friends and drove off for university in my little yellow car, I knew nothing would ever be quite the same again. That coolest cool long hot summer had been magical, but the butterfly had flown away for good.

Or nearly. Twenty two years on, and I’m pleased to report that David is as charming and as funny and as delightful as he ever was. I spent Saturday evening with him, and his partner, and Liz, celebrating his 41st birthday over a wonderful meal in a restaurant in Gravesend. He’s the Vice Principal of a prestigious school in London now, a job that he loves, and I’d bet my shirt that he’s the most popular guy in the staffroom. I don’t really know what our 18 or 19 year old selves would make of us now if we met them down that long long time tunnel. But for all our middle aged clothes and shoes and glasses, we know that the dancing devils of '87 will always be with us in spirit.

Goodbye to all that

Some of the guidelines our parents issue us when we’re little don’t translate well to the adult world of work.

‘Don’t talk to strangers’, repeated sternly and mantra-like from the lips of our feverishly worried mother as she buttons up our straight-jacket itchy duffle coat and wipes our face with a damp and slightly smelly hankie as we prepare to embark on the perilous journey to the corner shop for a bag of penny chews, for example. It makes perfect sense in her adult-to-child paranoia transaction because it is logical and it will keep us safe from harm; our mother has forgotten that all adults look alike to our child’s eyes and that a stranger isn’t strange once he or she has smiled and said hello. Except for old Mr Smith of course who can’t smile any more because something happened after the war and whom we can’t help but find a little bit sinister in ways we don’t yet have the vocabulary for, but who isn’t in any event a proper stranger – although he certainly is strange – because he runs the corner shop with his portly wife who wears only stained beige cardigans…

Roll the time dice forward by a few decades or so and we might in fact find that we earn a good chunk of our monthly pay cheque precisely by our ability to talk to strangers and to talk strangers into things. Indeed, some of us might even earn our keep by talking to very strange strangers in close quarters and without the protective armoury of tightly-fitting winter outer wear or spit-cleansed faces.

“Respect your elders” is another one. It is perfectly right, proper, fitting and appropriate that our childhood should be passed in a slightly heightened state of free-floating anxiety lest we have accidentally omitted to call the lady whom we know to be Lillian by her given adult-to-child name of Mrs Jones. The terror that can be induced in us by inadvertently finding out the first name of one of our teachers at primary school and daring to say it out loud when we’re busting for the loo and can’t prise her attention away from the picture window is probably listed somewhere as a war crime under the Geneva Convention.

Respecting one’s elders does work in the adult world too as a general rule, with the exception on some occasions of the workplace where the elders in question are behaving with all the logic of a hormone-crazed baboon set loose from a winter of solitary confinement into a compound of fecund and spring-ready fellow primates.

One saying, though, that I think holds good for both child and adult is to do with the weather. Specifically the observation that “March roars in like a lion and leaves like a lamb”. Imminent climate catastrophe not withstanding, this phrase is as true now as it was when I was little and counting the days until my Easter eggs arrived and I could stop giving up whatever it was that I’d given up for Lent encouraged by the peer pressure of Sunday School. (Probably chocolate at a rough guess)

I no longer give up chocolate for Lent (or go to Sunday School for that matter; being 40 and all I think I’d stand out a bit). But March as a month sure is changeable. The beach this morning was pure balaclava weather, forcing me to keep my lips tightly sealed to stop the freezing wind from setting off all of my dental nerves like a miniature in-mouth firework display of synaptic activity. Yet by the time I reached the office building, the sun was shining, the grass glowing with growth and the sky full of cawing rooks carrying singular twigs to their nests high in the bare tree tops.

It was not Easter either, but it was the end of my own personal Lent; for today was the final time that I shall set foot in that office building. My last remaining colleague and I met with our director and the chairman of our charity and went up to the café to have a cup of tea and a doughnut. We talked, we laughed, we got sugar over our fingers and around our lips and at last the pretence of the previous few months was over and we said our goodbyes. We embraced, we pecked each other on the cheek in that slightly clumsy British way and we wished each other well as we departed in our four directions.

In keeping with the nature of the month that draws soon to a close, I took one last look around our old office and slipped away quietly into history like a lamb.

The art of bathing

I was born a water baby and remain one still, albeit a 40 year old version with more hair and wrinkles in different places.

One of my earliest memories is of clinging onto the green and cream polyester straps of my mother’s 1970s swimming costume, porpoise like and blinking on her back as she pushed through the water with a hearty breast stroke. I loved it when she’d launch us from the edge of the pool, bow wave rippling around us and sending the splashing wake crashing over me. At some point I graduated to fluorescent orange arm bands. That they pinched my upper arms and rubbed the sides of my little girl chest was a small exchange for buoyancy. I was captivated by my floating and thrilled when allowed to venture into the forbidden deep end. The mass of the body of water bore me up and I kicked my legs, exalting in their dangling freedom at what seemed like miles above the bottom of the pool.

My father bought me a tiny snorkel and mask when he started learning to scuba dive in the mid-70s. I’d watch them training in the diving pit at the open air swimming baths, peering through the chlorine and trailing my hands through the stream of bubbles as their compressed air rose to the surface in search of its own freedom. My mother sat at the kitchen table throughout the endlessly long hot summer of 1976, patiently and nimbly gluing together the pieces of his wet suit ordered in kit form. I sat on my chair reading the Beano and watched her work, nose full of the heady smell of viscous neoprene gum. When my father died two years later, my mother passed his kit onto the diving club so we didn’t have to see the pale blue aqua lung he left behind in the conservatory. It was, in any event, too big for a nine year old.

Swimming lessons at school followed, full of obsession with rubber verruca socks and communal showers and the sticky feeling of scratchy uniform on not-quite-properly-dry skin. My black nylon costume gaped at the legs when on the beige tiled pool side and my long hair would never quite fit into the swimming cap the way that it did for the neater girls. But in the water I was at one, in my element, whilst they fussed with their hair clips and clung to the side.

Swimming club came next, twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. I learnt how to breathe properly in front crawl, slowly perfecting the real time-and-motion that is uni-lateral or bi-lateral breathing in the heartbeat space created by your own wave rhythm. I bought a pair of black tinted goggles that made the water look like the Mediterranean does on postcards (minus the parasols) and my first Speedo costume with red white and blue stripes. My endurance grew with my body and at 13 I took on the local 10,000 metre record challenge. My mother threw me glucose sweets from the side as I ploughed up and down the lanes, abiding to the rules of not touching the sides to turn.

Around this time, a few of us started to be coached by Bill Ludgrove whose daughter had swum in the Olympics. I’d get off the school bus and run to my Gran’s house for tomato soup and crackers with cheese before returning to the pool. My already fair hair was bleached almost white by immersion in chlorine six days a week and the tips of my finger nails glowed. Bill was tough on us, made us swim a mile or more just for warm up, scold us for cruising or for resting. We became super fast and super strong, and we had a lot of fun. I was surprised, in spite of never having run before in my life or having any more exalted footwear than a pair of black plimsolls, that I came second in the cross country race at school.

My adolescence had been dawning for quite some time when I was asked if I wanted to learn how to be a lifeguard. It was a thrilling moment, a water baby’s rite of passage to the sophisticated world of rope coiling, chin towing and resuscitation techniques. I spent the three seasons from 1982 as a volunteer lifeguard on the beach at Sheerness, leaping onto my blue racing bicycle early on Saturday and Sunday mornings and peddling furiously down to the hut. We patrolled up and down the promenade, small groups of teenagers in the universal red and yellow uniform watching out for holidaymakers in trouble in the cold and dark sea. I rescued a boy once, grabbed his flailing arms where he’d been pushed in high spirits off the jetty and hauled him back up to the air.

My pale skin turned golden at being outside for all those months and had a constant salty sheen. Occasionally, the coast guards would come by for a cup of tea, drawing up on the promenade in their Land Rovers with the hugely powerful ribs towed behind. We lifeguards did a joint sea safety demonstration with them each summer. They’d scramble the bright yellow air-sea rescue helicopter for us, the pilot holding just above the water and whipping up the waves to hysteria with the down-draft from the rotors. Afterwards we’d sit on the steps outside the hut and eat burgers with fried onions and tomato sauce and listen to Relax on somebody’s radio.

But those long summer days couldn’t last and at 16 I started sixth form at a school some distance from home. Homework and records and friends and boys took the place of swimming club and I gradually drifted away like a renegade inflatable on an irresistible sea current. When my daughter was born a few years later I took her swimming at the Victoria baths in Portsmouth where I was a university student, enjoying our mother time in between lectures and nursery and library visits. The toddler would leap from the side into my arms, laughing and throwing her head back in delight as she crashed into the water.

I started learning to scuba dive about a year ago fired up with inspiration from the ‘try dives’ I’d had on my first visit to Egypt. Diving is as far removed from swimming as can be whilst still getting wet and my biggest challenge was learning how to slow down. Strapping on a pair of fins after all those years of pool training was like fixing an outboard motor to my legs and turning the throttle up to max. But diving is the art of slow personified and I try consciously to control my unconscious long-ago-learned speed. When it was time for my first open water dive in a lake last summer, my instructor was one of the founder members of the local diving club. I think he was quite lost for words when he realised that he’d also taken my father for his first open water dive more than three decades earlier.

I ran myself a bath this morning. It’s the first one I’ve had in nearly two months; I never felt quite at home enough during my stay back at the barn to do more than shower. I lay there in the perfectly hot water, eyes closed, just the tip of my nose poking up like a snorkel. The dog stuck his head over the side of the bath and snuffled up some bubbles that made him sneeze. I towelled off and readied myself for the day as the water glugged away down the plug hole. It was a very good feeling for a 40 year old water baby.

Wooden pants... and a tale of two dinners

It was a brainwave for David and Stephen to come up with the idea of a 'secret Santa' - also, come to think of it, a gold-star-worthy leap of lateral thinking to come up with concept of alternative Christmas. So combining the two in one delightful evening of food, drink and presents was always going to be a medal-winning performance.

And so the four of us - Liz, David, Stephen and me - gathered once again at their house to raise a toast and fill our boots at our alternative Christmas dinner. One month on from the C event proper meant that enough time and tide had passed under the bridge of any hastily-made virtuous new year resolutions to allow us a guilt-free evening of indulgence.

One of the 'rules' of the evening is that we each contribute one course to the meal. So we enjoyed a starter of chicken breast stuffed with Stilton and bacon; a main of delightful roast beef (with all the trimmings, naturally); and finished off with a choice of chocolate torte or blueberry cheesecake (or both) for pudding - accompanied by crackers and party hats and all washed down with champagne and lashings of thick double cream.

Stephen was my allocated person for secret Santa - anonymous gift to be to a value of a maximum of £5. So of course I made him a pair of wooden pants out of a piece of fire wood. I'm pretty sure that wasn't something that he already possessed...

***

A couple of weeks ago, I met up with my old school friend Sarah for the first time after twenty two years. Today, she had kindly invited me to her home for Sunday lunch, so I also met her husband (Simon) and son (Issac) for the first time. As well as their four cats, three chickens, two love birds, and, well not a partridge in a pear tree exactly, but two tanks full of fish.

Sarah had excavated some old school photos - those long, whole school affairs that took about half a day to take as I recall and mostly involved the younger ones getting told off repeatedly for fidgeting as the camera rotated slowly from one end to t'other. One of the photos was from 1985, just on the cusp of when Sarah and I were about to sit our O Levels and then to go on and leave the Convent for a 6th form elsewhere. Coming face-to-face with my 16 year old self was not something I'd anticipated today...

Another delicious roast (lamb today), followed by date and fig steamed pudding with custard and lots of fantastic cheese and biscuits. Wonderful. Although I remain puzzled how one can eat two such enormous (and delightful) meals barely more than 18 hours apart and still have room, let alone stand up afterwards. Good food, like sleep I've often thought, is something that can be enjoyed afresh on a daily basis with no hangover relating to what has gone before. Fantastic.

Now, where's my supper...?

Memory cheesecake

I’d wondered if I’d recognise Sarah.

The last time we’d seen each other was July 1987. I was all back-combed bleached hair pale-faced multi-earring-ed top-to-toe black-wearing Goth. Funky Town, Who’s That Girl, and Sinitta’s one-hit-wonder Toy Boy were riding high in the charts. The Pet Shop Boys were on the way back down from the top with It’s a Sin; we were just about to hear Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up for the very first time.

I’ve been on several blind dates* over the last few months and have certainly had a few butterflies on each occasion; that I was nervous going to meet an old school friend caught me by surprise. What would she look like? Would she be taller, shorter, fatter, thinner, speak differently from how I remembered? In the same way that rarely-visited relations seem genuinely taken aback that you’ve grown, I even couldn’t help but wonder if Sarah would still have her curly perm.

She didn’t, of course, and I recognised her at once as I walked into the pub. We embraced, ordered drinks, stared at each other, laughed at our ages, talked of partners, children, additions to and departures from our families, ordered food, shared tales of the tribulations of our own parents’ aging processes, of house moves, health, careers, current news, and reminisced about old friends seen or heard of or otherwise.

Memory’s a funny old thing – a sort of black box recorder where things are encoded and filed away according to, among other criteria, the significance to you of an event or a time or a place or a person. Sarah had the most astonishing recall of our school days. Details that I had completely forgotten – of friends, classmates, teachers, the old nuns who were still teaching at our school back then, of sports days and hockey teams, the playing field, the trees, the autumn conkers, the smell of polish, the pews in the chapel, and even where people sat in the 5th form. When she told me that she could name fifty individuals that had been in or left our form during the time we were at the Convent, I quite believed her.

Two forty year old women with twenty two years of life having passed by since they last met were always going to have lots to talk about. We ended our lunch with New York cheesecake and cream, more embraces and a date to meet up again in a couple of weeks.

Let those memories flow on and around the women we have become and help us create a new friendship in the here and now.



* But that’s a story for another day