A meeting was called by the Women in Charge mid-way through my first year in sixth form. It was the kind of large important meeting that we were all told about a week in advance and that meant that we all, the entire lower sixth, had to gather in our library-adjacent common room to be addressed as a collective.
The contents then, logically, concerned us all.
The Women in Charge had called in back-up for the occasion and sat against the wall along with her were Mrs Grey (The Gray-ster) and Miss Kermit (Kermy!) Kind and witty, respectively, and not above idle gossip, collectively, The Grey-ster and Kermy were lower-sixth favourites. They had a difficult line to walk however between their natural goodness and the terrible demands of duty. They were for the most part good to us though, like friendly prison guards who gave you extra cigarettes when the warden wasn't looking, or rather like friendly prison guards who let you come in and weep all over their office and abuse the warden terribly, when the warden wasn't looking.
Now the warden was looking they sat ashen faced and uncomfortable, staring at their shoes.
Once we were all settled the Women in Charge waddled her way up to what she must have imagined was her soap-box and tilting forward on the balls of her small feet, trilled at us "Laddddiiies."
"Sorry to keep you after school (general inward grumbling) but there are two things that have come to my attention and that really need to be dealt with straight away. The first is that someone has bought a stick in to the common room, (the eyes of about 10 good friends shifted towards me, and mine shifted towards Sticky, my proposed sixth form mascot who rested forlornly in a corner.) It needs to be removed immediately. The second is that there is still some very inappropriate dressing going on. We have been over this before ladies, sixth formers need to look respectable! I don't want to see any more clevage (eyes probably shifted in various directions here,) any more corsetry (100 pairs of eyes, back to me) or any more, any more...abundancies of lace, (ah, that was everyone, everyone's eyes, even The Grey-ster and Kermy had allowed themselves a quick glance up from their shoes towards my corseted-in-tits-out-lace-swaddled self.) Correct it ladies! ("lady" chimed in everyone mentally "correct it, lady.")" The Women in Charge stepped heavily down from her imaginary soap-box and exited with as much gravitas as she could command.
It would have been annoying if it wasn't so hilarious, The Women in Charge could have just sidled up to me as I walked to a class and said "Anna, stick - out! Stop dressing like a Victorian whore! Comprende?" but a meeting for the entire year? With extra staff members present to really hammer it home? I resolved to purposefully drag my feet on both issues until they could learn to be less childish about the whole thing.
I wasn't given much oppertunity to drag though. When I came in the next day I found that Sticky was not resting in his usual corner.
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| Sticky. The God of our legend. |
Having decided that sixth form was really grim and dreadful, that we had prefered GCSEs, and that all changes being made managerially and acedemically were for the worst, some friends and I had decided to buoy up spirits by appionting a stick we had found in the grounds as Sixth-form mascot. We felt it correctly reflected our disillusionment with the current state of affairs...
"Who is your mascot? Is it a horse like on the school badge?"
"God no, it's that old stick, over there."
The brilliant thing was that, in spite of his unassuming appearance, Sticky was working, a girl with access to the art block supplies had offered to paint him pink and blue and varnish him. We were going to carry him to important events, hold him aloft like a beacon of excellence as the head girls were announced, dress him up appropriately for Christmas. He had brought us all closer and, frankly, rekindled our collective hopes and dreams.
And now he was gone. His favourite corner, empty.
I burst in to The Grey-ster and Kermy's office.
"What have you done, you monsters! Where is Sticky?"
"What? Who?"
"Sticky - The Sixth Form Stick! Don't act like you don't know, we had a bloody meeting about him yesterday!"
"The old stick in the corner of the common room? The Women in Charge made us throw it out back outside where it belonged."
"He! He - and he belonged in our hearts!" - I would have said but didn't.
I turned and exited disappointed with both of them.
When an extensive search of the area below the windows of the common room and a more general sweep of the grounds yielded no Sticky, it became apparent that their "outside where he belongs" business was a crock. It was like telling a child that their cat had gone to live on a farm.
For a long time I expected The Women in Charge to send me woodchippings through the post. Bargaining with me until I was dressed appropriately and Sticky was returned to his rightful place, though maimed and a shadow of his former self.
It never happened. Much more sinisterly he was just quietly and mysteriously disposed of. A-level history had taught us that you don't ask questions when this sort of thing happens, so we didn't ask them then. We made our peace with never seeing him again and our collective heightened spirits disappeared along with him.
A few months latter having, presumably, matured slightly, The Woman in Charge tried a different tack in regard to my dress-sense. Appearing at my side one lunch time as I sat innocuously reading Pope in the library.
"Ah Anna."
I put Pope down.
"Now let me just say at the outset, I do...like what you are wearing."
"We both know you don't" I should have said but didn't.
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| What I was and wasn't wearing |
"but I mean really, Anna, come on!...it's just too avant garde. It's not necessary! No dresses from now on, stick to jumpers and t-shirts. Please! There will be complaints! I can't have things like dress offending anyone."
She nodded smartly and bustled away.
I nodded back and picked up Pope again. This was ridiculous. Avant garde? As in ahead of it's time? Challenging? I could understand the application of the term if I had come in skin-tight disco-ball lycra. I could understand if I had come wearing a burka that completely obscured my face but that had a panel cut out of it that meant that it also entirely exposed my bare breasts, that she could reasonably worry that my manner of dress might offend.
But I was wearing an empire-line cream dress, and a tailored black jacket. I'd even gradually eased the corsets out of my clothing cycle. Nothing was out, nothing was pinched in, nothing was overtly offensive. I was sat reading Pope in an empty library. I wasn't avante garde. If anything I was extremely retro.
And besides even if I had been a little daring in my sartorial choices it wasn't like everyone wasn't fully aware of why. Unlike the numerous other people in the year who were lounging around with skirts cut up to here and tops cut down to there for no good reason, I was trying to quickly and effectively seduce my english teacher. Everyone knew it. It had become part of the hive mind of Fort Pitt. All members of staff knew it. The years sevens in my form knew it before they had met him or me, as if it was a piece of information passed to them in their introductory assemblies
"Here at Fort Pitt we try to uphold excellence at all times. You will eventually grow used to our mixture of dictatorialism and incompetence. You can eat lunch in your form rooms if your form tutor allows you. There is an avante garde looking girl in sixth form trying to bed a member of staff." and so on.
The refusal of the Women in Charge to publicly recognise my well know agenda as well as the terrible fate of Sticky as ordained by her, meant that I churlishly retained my mode of dress until the day I left, as much for the sake of defiance as for seduction. My spirit outlasted hers. After nine more months of corsetry, ruffles and cream lace she stopped mentioning it, stopped contriving horrible little tete-a-tetes in libraries, stopped calling meetings to address it in front of the student body.
The last time she ever mentioned it was about a year later when she called me into her office to brief me for my Cambridge interview, just a subtle little dig to let me know that she hadn't laid the issue to rest yet...
"And for goodness sake Anna, if you want to be taken seriously, just watch what you wear."
"...What the fuck have you done with my stick?"
I should have said but didn't.
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