Jacky Daydream Read online

  ‘How dare you come into my classroom ten minutes late!’ he thundered. ‘What have you been doing, you idle lazy gossipy girls?’

  I clenched my fists. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ve been doing!’ I shouted back. ‘Christine’s been crying and I’ve been trying to comfort her. You know her mum’s very ill. You know what Christine has to do. How dare you call her lazy and idle!’

  The class sat statue-still, mouths open. They stared at me. Nobody ever ever ever answered Mr Branson back. I’d obviously gone mental. They stared at Mr Branson, waiting for him to go to the cupboard and get out his cane. I waited too, trembling.

  Mr Branson’s face was purple. He stood still, making little snorty noises with his nose. A long blue vein throbbed on his forehead. Then he took a deep breath.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said.

  I sat. Christine sat. Mr Branson took a new piece of chalk and continued writing on the board.

  That was it! He carried on teaching and then left the classroom at the end of the lesson. I breathed out properly, almost collapsing. I couldn’t believe it. I’d shouted at Mr Branson and survived! Perhaps he’d actually felt ashamed, realizing just how hard it was for Christine. But he didn’t do anything to make it easier for her.

  We didn’t either. I was allowed to invite Christine for tea one Friday when her older sister was back at home. Christine and I shut ourselves in my bedroom and I showed her all my dolls, even my special secret paper girls. We got out all my art things and made ourselves cardboard badges with a C entwined with a J design, carefully coloured in Derwent crayon. We pinned our badges on solemnly with safety pins. We fingered all the beads in my shell box, holding the crystals to the light and marvelling at the rainbows. We lay on our tummies and drew portraits of each other.

  Then we took a sheet of drawing paper and folded it up into squares to make a ‘fortune-teller’. We sat cross-legged, deciding each other’s fortune. We were so absorbed in our play we didn’t want to stop for tea, so Biddy, with unusual tact, brought our meal in to us. We picnicked on banana sandwiches and cream buns and chocolate fingers and Tizer and then lolled against each other, flicking through old Girl comics.

  Christine’s father came to collect her very late, past my usual bed time. The adults chatted uncomfortably for a minute or so. The fathers exchanged pleasantries about work. Biddy said something about Christine’s nice manners. Christine’s mother wasn’t even mentioned.

  She died the day before we took our eleven plus. Christine came to school red-eyed but resolute. She sat the exam along with all of us – and passed.

  * * *

  Which character in my books has a mum who has cancer?

  * * *

  It’s Lola Rose in the book of the same name.

  Mum’s fever went down, but she had to stay in hospital a while. Then she was well enough to come home, though she still had to go for her treatment. First the chemotherapy, weeks of it.

  All Mum’s beautiful long blonde hair started falling out after the second treatment. It was so scary at first. Kendall and I were cuddled up with her in bed in the morning and when she sat up great long locks of her hair stayed on her pillow.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Mum gasped. She put her hands to her head, feeling the bald patches. ‘This is just like being in a bloody horror movie!’

  I wanted to write truthfully about Victoria and her illness. She calls herself Lady Luck – and I do so hope she will be lucky and get completely better. She means so much to Lola Rose and her little brother Kendall. Still, they also have Auntie Barbara to look after them. I love Auntie Barbara. I wish I had one!

  31

  Our Gang

  CHRISTINE AND I were best friends – but we were also part of a gang. There were our two boyfriends, David and Alan. They were best friends too. David was a freckle-faced, rather solemn boy with brown hair and clothes that my mother would call ‘nobby’. David’s mum had him wearing checked shirts and khaki shorts and baseball boots, clothes we’d consider cool now but were a little odd in the 1950s. Alan wore ordinary grey boy clothes. His sleeves were always rolled up, his collar open, his socks falling down, his sandals scuffed. He had straight fair hair, the sort that has to be smarmed down with water to stop it sticking straight up. He had a cheeky grin and a happy-go-lucky character.

  David was my boyfriend; Alan was Christine’s. It was all very convenient – though secretly I preferred Alan to David. One play time Christine talked a little wistfully about David.

  ‘Do you really like him then?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, yes. As much as Alan. In fact more. But don’t worry, Jacky, I know he’s your boyfriend. I’d never ever try to take him off you.’

  ‘Mm. Christine . . . the thing is, I like Alan. More than David. I wish we could swap.’

  ‘Well . . . can’t we?’

  We tried to think of a tactful way of putting it to the boys. We didn’t want to hurt their feelings. We didn’t want them to go off in a huff and take up with two other girls.

  ‘We can’t tell them,’ I said.

  ‘Yes we can,’ said Christine.

  She was bossier than me and very determined. She caught my hand and pulled me over to the corner of the playground, where Alan and David were swapping cigarette cards with some other boys.

  ‘Hey, Alan and David, Jacky and I want to talk to you,’ she said.

  They sighed and came over, shuffling their footballers and cricketers into separate packs.

  Christine put her arms round their shoulders. ‘We like you both very much, but Jacky was just wondering . . .’

  ‘Christine!’

  ‘OK, OK, we were wondering, how do you fancy swapping over for a bit? So you can be my boyfriend, David, and Alan, you can be Jacky’s boyfriend.’

  We waited, while David looked at Alan and Alan looked at David.

  ‘Yep. That’s fine,’ said Alan.

  ‘Fine with me too,’ said David.

  Then they went off to bargain for more cigarette cards and Christine and I went off to swap beads, all of us happy.

  They weren’t proper boyfriends, of course. We didn’t go out with each other. I didn’t go round to play at David’s or Alan’s and I wouldn’t have dreamed of inviting them for one of Biddy’s cream-bun teas. Our romances were very low key. We sometimes took turns giving each other ‘a film-star kiss’, but it was really just a quick peck. We wrote love letters to each other in class, but they were brief to the point of terseness, though for years I treasured a crumpled piece of paper saying, ‘Dear Jacky, I love you from Alan.’ I was far closer to Christine, to Ann, to Cherry – and to another new friend Eileen.

  She wasn’t a new girl but she seemed new in Mr Branson’s class. She’d been away from school for a couple of months in Mr Townsend’s class with a badly broken leg. I remembered her as a curly-haired pixie-faced girl, maybe a little babyish for her age. She came into Mr Branson’s class transformed. She’d grown several inches. Not just upwards. She had a chest!

  She was the first girl in our class to wear a real bra. The boys teased her as soon as they found out and twanged her bra at the back, but Eileen managed to slap them away and keep them in their place. She looked so much older than everyone that she had sudden authority. She swished around the playground in her full patterned skirts, her small waist cinched in with an elasticated belt. She had an air of mystery about her, as if she knew all sorts of secrets. Well, she did. She sat in a corner with Christine and me and told us what it was like to have a period. We knew some of this Facts of Life stuff already, but it was interesting to have Eileen telling us practical details.

  We must have been a satisfying audience, Christine and I, with our short haircuts and little white socks and Clarks sandals. Eileen elaborated, telling us things that seemed utterly unlikely – and yet maybe people really did this or that? She also told us about some sort of boyfriend she’d met in the summer holidays, Mr Honey. I hope he was complete fantasy.

  Eileen had a real boyfriend at scho