24. Gainsborough

All our dorms are named after authors, poets, painters and composers. I know that now. This term I am in Gainsborough. I am sharing with Emma, Caz and SJ. It’s fun. I like just being the four of us. I like it much better than being in Barrie. We chat after lights out and the dorm is far away from Havard’s study and Matron's office so we rarely get caught.

In the mornings we only have 30 minutes to get out of bed, wash, dress, make our beds and get down to breakfast. So I have devised a time-saving trick. Rather than having to make my bed every day, which takes forever, with hospital corners and all that, I sleep on my fully made bed, on top of the counterpane, covered with my duvet. I slip into the duvet cover, between the duvet and the cover, it’s a bit like a sleeping bag. In the mornings I roll up the duvet and shove it under the bed right at the back, out of sight and in seconds I’ve straightened the cover. Hey presto! Bed making simplified. Until I get caught.

I’m very excited because Emma has said we can go to her house for a weekend very soon. She lives on a large farm near Oxford. We are spellbound as she tells us what it’s going to be like. There are beautiful rooms for us to sleep in and we will have delicious food of course but best of all are the boys. Emma knows four boys, one for each of us. She describes them in detail, they are perfectly suited to our different temperaments and interests. One, like Caz, is into horses and ponies. One loves music, another is sporty and the fourth, the boy for her, well I suppose he’s just right for her. She doesn’t say much about him. For weeks we spend hours planning our weekend away, talking about what we will do and where we will go.

It’s sad really. We all know it’s a fantasy. We work out pretty quickly that Emma is making it all up but we don’t have the heart to say and I think part of it is we don’t want to shatter the dream. We so need something exciting and fun to think about and talk about. We love lying on our beds dreaming of this perfect time we will spend together, with these perfect boys. We ask all sorts of questions: How old are they? What are their names? What do they look like? What schools do they go to? Emma has all the answers. She knows everything about these boys. And they sound perfect. They can’t wait to meet us. The date for the weekend keeps being put off and eventually, it’s clear that it’s never going to happen. Caz gets annoyed.

“She’s lying, we can’t let her get away with it,” she says.

I know she’s right but I don’t mind. “So what?” I say. “Let’s not be horrible. She probably knows we know. Let’s not make a fuss about it. She just wanted to impress us, to be part of something, and we all enjoyed it really”. I’m pleading with her because I want to keep the peace. I hate it when people argue. I am disappointed, even slightly puzzled that Emma could keep up the lying for so long, but I do know that it was all a game, one that we were all playing, whether we wanted to admit it or not. And I understand about the dreaming, I understand very well.

So we just stop talking about it and Emma stops too. We all pretend it was never a thing. And we go back to life at Oakdene... boring school for girls.

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Going from being in Barrie which I shared with seven other girls to Gainsborough which I shared with just three was very comforting. I am so much better in small groups. I always have been. I find large groups of people intimidating. I think starting off at Oakdene in a dorm with so many girls, just off another dorm (Kennedy) which I think had twelve girls in it, was just so daunting. Our little group of four was much less stressful. And even though the decor and the furnishings were pretty much the same as Barrie, it felt less institutional. A little more like a bedroom than a dormitory. I am fond of cosiness. I like to make a nest, to have a space that’s mine.

Emma and I have remained best of friends to this day. We all had to find our own ways to survive being at boarding school. For Emma this was part of her survival strategy at the time. It makes perefct sense. I am grateful today, as I was then, that she gave us a whole term of dreaming. It brought the four of us together, it gave us a shared project that inspired our immaginations and warmed our hearts for a little while. Just what we needed.

Go to the next story: 25. The Cullimores