O Caledonia

The excitement and pride of being a real schoolgirl with a real uniform had rapidly given way to bewilderment, and bewilderment to a numb desolation. She did not know how to talk to the other girls. At Auchnasaugh the boys had taken great pleasure in words, rehearsing new discoveries, competing to find the most resonant, succinct, or bizarre. They had also, she realised now, been interested in so many things, applying themselves with the same unquestioning absorption to making balsa wood aeroplanes, building dams, composing sonnets, developing photographs, stalking Janet. The girls were interested in clothes and their families and games. A few were interested in boys. When Janet used words which had delighted or amused her they fell silent and stared and moved away muttering to each other. First they thought she was showing off; then they thought she was mad. She became silent, lost in dreams at meal times, so that on the few occasions when anyone did speak to her she did not hear them. They put pepper in her tea to see if she would notice, and for a while she didn’t. They hid her hockey boots so that she would be late for the game, a cardinal sin. Janet assumed that she had lost them; she lost things all the time. She hid in the back of the music practice room and read all afternoon. The housemistress summoned an emergency meeting of all girls before supper. “Someone, who is in this room, cut the game today. There can be no excuse for letting sides down. In this school and in this life we work together, no matter how small our contribution. This is the first rule of social behaviour, and you are here at St. Uncumba’s to learn it. All for one, one for all. If you think you know the identity of this girl I trust you will make your feelings clear to her. I shall say only this.

Be ashamed.” Janet was sent to Coventry. For three days no girl spoke to her, no one answered when she tried to find her way to classrooms or games pitches; she was late for everything. It became clear to her that she would have to pretend to like hockey and she would have to try to talk in simple language, if she could think of anything at all to say. Also she needed someone to plait her hair. Nanny had always done this; Janet was hopeless at it; it unwound in maddening wisps and frizzy scrolls, as fast as she twisted it back. By surrendering her weekly chocolate bar, the sole pleasure of a Sunday, she obtained a helper. Hilary Dibdin was not friendly. Apart from a curt “Hallo, Janet” on the first day, she ignored her. Janet overheard her telling a group of girls that if they thought Janet was peculiar they should see the rest of her family. “And the place they live in. Enormous and freezing cold. They’ve hardly any carpets and they let the animals climb all over everything and lick the butter. In the garden — well, you could hardly call it a garden, it’s all overgrown and wild — there are a whole lot of really poisonous plants. My poor brother got stung by them and he was in hospital for weeks.

There’s a disgusting bald cat too, who goes around being sick everywhere.” Janet fled to her icy cubicle and sat clutching her photograph of the dogs on the back drive, looking around at her, smiling in the sunlight under the great trees. Soon a monitor came and dispatched her to the study room to get on with Knitting for Charity. Every moment of the day was timetabled. At night she lay in her cold white bed listening to the bitter sea wind; the lights were still on and for twenty minutes you could read a book of your own choice. Next term she would bring back a torch. But now she was too forlorn even to read; the print was a long grey wet blur, like her life. At the far end of the dormitory the bath taps were running. Someone was singing:

Seven lonely days make one lonely week

Seven lonely nights I cried, cried for you.Oh, my darling, I’m crying, boo-hoo hoo hoo…

She was drowned in desolation.