Dancing the Charleston Read online

  One girl touched hers, probably just straightening them, but she received a loud telling off: ‘No one is to turn their papers over until I blow my whistle!’

  ‘I wish you all good luck, girls,’ said Miss Eliot.

  She nodded, the other lady blew her whistle, and we were off. I turned the first paper over. ARITHMETIC TEST.

  The first few questions weren’t too terrible – simple adding up and taking away, the sort of sums I’d done when I was six. My hand stopped shaking. Maybe this was all you had to do to get into the high school. We did much harder sums with Miss Nelson. I felt suddenly superior.

  Then I turned the page, and my heart started beating a little faster. Multiplication and long division were harder, and I knew I was prone to make silly mistakes. Still, I carried on steadily, checking my workings. The next page was fractions and decimals, much trickier. And then problems. Terrible complex problems. My head ached just reading the questions. I couldn’t answer a single one.

  I flicked through the rest. Some of the questions had odd pictures of triangles and rectangles. Others had sums that didn’t even make sense, with letters of the alphabet mixed in with plus and minus and equals signs.

  The girl behind me was sniffing again. It took all my willpower not to burst into tears myself. It was no use just sitting staring at these new sums. Instead I wrote at the bottom of the page, in my neatest handwriting:

  I wrote it at the bottom of all of them, even the page of problems, which was a downright lie. Still, they might just blame my teacher instead of me. I put the arithmetic test to one side and opened the English test.

  I expected a list of titles and a lot of blank paper, but there were several other tasks to complete first. Some were quite interesting, like puzzles, where you had to fill in the missing word. I rather liked doing them. But the next page brought me up short, because we had to underline and identify all the adjectives, nouns and adverbs in a set of ten sentences. Miss Nelson occasionally droned on about grammar, but I’d never listened properly because it was so boring. I knew I didn’t have much hope of getting any of them right, so I wrote my terribly sorry excuse, and turned the page.

  This still wasn’t the composition. It looked like a poem. I cheered up a little. Miss Nelson was fond of poetry and often chalked a poem on the blackboard for us to learn by heart. I nearly always learned it first, much to Maggie’s annoyance, and recited it with great expression. I had particularly loved proclaiming My Mother, even though it made the boys giggle. I once set myself the task of learning the whole of Hiawatha, but I got sick of it halfway through.

  This poem wasn’t that sort of story poem though. It was a description of a bank of wild flowers where some lady called Titania was sleeping. There were questions afterwards. How many types of flower were on this bank? That seemed easy enough. I dithered over eglantine, because I’d never heard of it. I thought it might be some kind of tree and wouldn’t count it as a flower. They asked what we thought her dreams were about. Dances were mentioned, and I wanted to impress with my contemporary knowledge, so I suggested she might have been dancing the Charleston. Then we had to describe Titania, though we didn’t have much to go on. I thought she might look like Desiree. I couldn’t work out why she was lying down outdoors instead of sleeping in her bed, so I suggested she was eccentric. Then, at long last, I got to the essay titles – but there wasn’t a choice. There was just one title, and it wasn’t My Home, even though I shut my eyes and opened them again several times, trying to will the right words onto the page. The title didn’t change. The Market Place.

  I didn’t want to write about a market place! I wasn’t remotely interested in markets. I couldn’t give a boring Maggie-type list: there’s a stall of red apples, a stall of yellow pears, a stall of green cabbages … I wanted to make my composition interesting.

  Then I remembered Aunty’s birth certificate. Ivy Enid Watson, stallholder. What was she like, this unknown grandmother? What did it feel like to be her?

  ‘Time’s up, girls! Put your pens and pencils down!’

  I couldn’t believe it! I was just getting into my stride. I’d only written three paragraphs, and yet I knew that my composition was my best hope of passing this wretched examination. I tried scribbling another sentence or two to explain my story, but clipboard lady shrieked at me.

  ‘You, girl! Don’t you have ears? Put that pencil down this minute or I shall tear up your papers!’

  I flung my pencil down so quickly that the lead broke. We sat in silence while she went up and down, collecting our tests. She sniffed at me when she took mine.

  At last everyone’s papers were in neat piles on the front desk. Miss Eliot came back into the room. ‘There now, girls. You can relax!’

  There was a little hiss of whispers, even a giggle or two. I peered round and saw that the crying girl was actually dry-eyed and smiling.

  ‘It wasn’t such an ordeal, was it?’ Miss Eliot said, and they all shook their heads. I shook mine too, because I didn’t want them to see how I’d struggled. ‘It will be nearly the end of term before we’ve processed your papers and discussed your merits. Then we will write to your parents. You can run and find them now. Well done!’

  She smiled at us, and most of the girls smiled back. Several even chorused, ‘Thank you.’ The crying girl actually skipped off down the corridor. ‘Mummy, Mummy, it wasn’t too bad at all!’ she called when she reached the playground. ‘I think I’ve passed!’

  Several other girls were calling out too. They sounded eager and excited.

  Mr Benjamin was waiting, splendid in his stylish suit. ‘Hello, Mona. Do you think you’ve passed?’

  ‘I – I’m not sure,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I’m sure you have, my dear. Shall we go and have lunch to celebrate? I’m sure The Crown can rustle up something decent – or we can drive back and have lunch at the manor, how about that? Perhaps that would be better – your aunt will be on tenterhooks.’

  I nodded. For once I wasn’t at all hungry. I was going over all the questions in my head, and starting to get really worried. I remembered the sums I hadn’t even attempted. If the clipboard lady was marking them, she’d never accept my terribly sorry excuses in a million years. I could only get half marks for arithmetic. Not even that. And perhaps the easy sums at the beginning barely counted. There was no getting away from it.

  ‘I think I might have failed my arithmetic paper,’ I confided to Mr Benjamin in a tiny voice, not wanting the chauffeur to hear.

  ‘Never mind! I’m sure it won’t matter in the least. My goodness, who cares about silly old sums!’ he said. ‘It’s the English paper that’s the important one. It was your composition that impressed your school inspector.’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t have time to write much,’ I said. My voice was starting to wobble.

  Mr Benjamin reached out and held my hand, sensing my panic. ‘You’re not expected to write pages and pages, not in an exam,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t even manage one page,’ I said. ‘There was all this other stuff – grammar things – and I’ve never been able to do them.’

  ‘Oh, I totally agree. I found grammar incredibly tedious when I was at school,’ said Mr Benjamin. ‘Don’t worry about it, Mona.’

  But I was worrying, though I was pretty certain I’d got all the word puzzles right. And the poem questions.

  ‘Eglantine is a tree, isn’t it, Mr Benjamin?’ I asked.

  ‘Hmm. I rather think it’s another word for honeysuckle, and that’s a flower,’ he said. ‘I have honeysuckle and jasmine climbing up the walls of my rose bower. They all smell heavenly, especially at night.’

  ‘Who’s Titania?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s the Queen of the Fairies,’ said Mr Benjamin. ‘She’s in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. Oh, I’ve just had the most tremendous idea! I think I will organize a performance of the Dream in my rose bower! It would be so beautiful! Would you like a part, Mona? You could be one of t