32 Bording-school, Orlando and genteel poverty

No, not me. I never went to boarding school. I’m sure I would have hated the close proximity of all those other females.

However, One of my new friends is an ex boarding school girl named Janet Bidston-Clarke with an ‘e’ who joined the school round about the same time as me. Janet has the most la-di-da speaking voice I have ever heard. She seems altogether more mature than all the rest of us. She has quit a boarding school for reasons I never discovered to live with a really old great aunt (she calls her 'Auntie' almost crushing the word to make it rhyme with jaunty) called Anita Orlando, which I am told is Italian. 

Miss Orlando lives in a long road lined on one side with semi-detached late Victorian houses, which look quite small from the front, having just a front door and one bay window, but stretch back for miles, so that the centre of them is usually very dark and creepy. Lots of those houses have been converted into Bed & Breakfasts. If they had been in London they would have been sold for a king’s ransome and converted into posh flats.

I am fascinated by Janet, because she manages to cultivate a sense of mystery concerning herself and her past. She tells you little bits, but never enough to satisfy you. Janet plays the piano, sings, talks French and wears nylons. At boarding school she has had a really good time, almost like in 'Lavender wins the day', which was my very favourite boarding school book until I lost sight of it, and I don't really understand why she has come to such an ordinary grammar school in an ordinary sea-side resort like ours, with slot-machines and a permanent fair-ground. I did dream of boarding schools at the time, not knowing what sorts of places they really were. I suppose I thought I would have enjoyed the sensation of coming home for the hols and having everyone making a fuss of you.

Janet drops hints about a mysterious father who roams about Europe and writes her postcards with love and kisses on them, and a working mother who apparently lives in Torquay, which is down at the posh end of England. Fancy living so far away from your mother even when you aren't at boarding school.

But Janet doesn't seem to be sad. She loves Miss Orlando and Miss Orlando's Anna, an old parlour maid who lives with Miss Orlando and Janet and looks after their every need.

One day, after choir practice, Janet pulls me aside.

'My Aunt wants to meet you,' she whispers. 'Can you come to afternoon tea?'

This is the chance I've been waiting for to satisfy my curiosity about Janet's operatic relation and the unusual domestic arrangements.

Up to now, I've only been inside the Orlando house once, and then only as far as the front room, which is dark and shabby, with pompous oil paintings in ornate frames that could be undiscovered masterpieces by Rembrandt or other Dutch Masters, when I called for Janet one day to attend a school choir practice in the run up to the Christmas carol service.

Mama would say the house had seen better times, and I would have written my name in the dust on the furniture if I had had to wait much longer. Whatever Anna did, it certainly didn't include dusting. I didn’t set eyes on her that day.

Now, at long last, I will be able to explore the rest of the house and even get to know the perpetrator of the gob-stopping spam doorsteps without ketchup that Janet always eats for lunch. I'm not even quite sure what an old parlour maid looks like.

Fancy anyone having a servant in a place like our town.

The mystery surrounding Janet is so far beyond my previous experiences that it doesn't really matter where we go from here.

Next day, straight after school, instead of catching the bus home, I walk with Janet to Miss Orlando's for tea.

Almost before Janet has hammered on the big front door with the horrible tarnished gargoyle knocker (Anna doesn't go in for polishing, either), it is quietly slid back to reveal a shrunken, colourless figure all in black with a kind of afternoon apron hanging loosely down from her waist, and a sort of cap without a back to it, like the ones waitresses in cake shops wear. Her hair is grey, sparse, bobbed, and scraped back behind the elastic band holding the cap together, and she has hardly any teeth. Is she representative of the profession of parlour maid?

“Ah, Miss Janet. You're back,” she lisps humbly, like a scurrilous Dickens character, through her unbeautiful dental stumps, almost curtseying as she does so. “And this is your little friend?”

I stammer a hello. I'm not little at all. In fact I'm much taller than Janet and starting to look quite mature, and I'm allowed to wear stockings instead of socks on a Sunday, though Mama doesn't allow me thin nylons yet.

All of a sudden I feel like a grand lady. I can recall the kind of respectfulness that was awarded to me and Aunt Jane when she was mayoress and I wonder what is expected of me now.

“This is Anna, our guardian angel,” Janet is explaining in a voice you normally only hear at amateur dramatics.

Fancy saying that about this old woman, though she's not that far away from the angels, when I think about it. I wonder in passing if she had an unborn twin and I ask myself what stroke of fate has brought her into this house.

“Auntie rescued Anna from an orphanage that was bombed out in the war,” Janet is saying, as though she has read my thoughts, while Anna nods her head several times in abject gratitude.

So that's it. Rescued and then faithful to the end of her days. Well, at least she has a roof over her head. Orphans don't have that many choices even now, let alone all those years ago, assuming Janet meant the First World War and not the second.

Rapid mental arithmetic tells me that Miss Orlando must be Janet’s great aunt. Why didn’t I think of that before? Now I can’t very well ask her about it.

Anna finishes nodding and wipes a tear off her cheek. What depths of emotion and tragedy has she experienced? She turns to go back into the house. Dragging her shabby shoes over the worn wooden floor, she makes her way to the bottom of the staircase, which curves up the right-hand wall of the house. We leave the front room behind on our left. The hall is lit by gaslight that flickers and hisses. The house is cold and damp, since no sunlight could penetrate as far as the inner part of the house even if the windows were less crusted with dust. The staircase is carpeted in threadbare Axminster that must once have had a flowery pattern on it but is now almost see-through. The wooden stair-boards creek like in a Hitchcock film. I don't suppose anyone can get up and down those stairs without being heard.

Anna stops at the bottom of the stairs and stretches out a sinewy arm rather gloriously like Boadicea in her chariot.

“Miss Orlando will see you now,” she croaks, the stumpy smile again spreading across the wizened features. “I'll bring the tray up right away, Miss Janet,” she adds, and this time the curtsey is not just a figment of my imagination. Then she hobbles to the back of the house, and I start to ask myself if I have landed on a film set, so weird and crazy is the whole set-up.

But Janet is cheerful and obviously thinks everything is normal, for she bounds up the stairs two at a time shouting: “Jauntie Auntie. We're here!”

That must be here nickname for Miss Orlando and does rather tie in with my view of the posh pronunciation. I wonder how jaunty one can be in old age. She must be at least 70 or 80. I follow Janet rather more sedately up the groaning stairs, peering over the banisters as I go, straining my eyes in the dim amber light to see if I can make out anything in the darkness at the other end of the corridor below, into which Anna has disappeared as if down a coalmine.

At the top of the stairs is a landing. The house is actually on at least three floors, but I assume that it is on this first floor (or is it the bel étage?) that Miss Orlando actually spends her daytime hours. So downstairs must be the servants quarters apart for the front room, which is presumably used as a waiting room. The lighting on this upper landing is much better. A bronze and glass candelabra with real candles has spread its wings and is shedding rather flattering soft light. Opposite the top of the stairs is the main room, the music room, Janet calls it. That must be above the front waiting-room because it has the same kind of bay window and I can see the tree across the road even from where I am standing now. Then there is a corridor going to the back of the house, presumably exactly above the one leading to the Black Hole of Calcutta. There's another flight of stairs up, this time only bare boards, and a bathroom, which Janet points out to me for obvious reasons. The porcelain there is old-fashioned; the loo has a chain to pull instead of a modern flushing device; the soap is green and smells of garden. The bathroom does not invite you to stay longer than you have to.

We go into the music room. It is surprisingly comfortably furnished with dark old pieces, Indian rugs on the wooden floor, and dozens of portraits of splendid looking and grandly dressed people tucked in among the vast wall-paper flowers. Against one wall there is an ancient upright piano and in front of it there is a duet stool almost like the one I have at home.

I wonder if Janet would like to play duets with me.

Piles of sheet music and vocal scores take up most of the available surfaces and in one corner of the room there is a very old gramophone with a handle to wind it up.

This room is also lit by candles in a hanging bronze and glass candelabra that tinkles whenever there is any movement or when I crash into it with the top of my head. I am much taller than the residents here.

But there is no sign of Miss Orlando.

“I'll go and see where she is,” says Janet. “Why don't you try the piano?”

“Oh, may I? Won't it make too much noise?”

“Nonsense,” says Janet. “Auntie loves music.”

She goes out of the room in search of Auntie and I am left to my own devices.

I slink past some of the portraits. Are they family heirlooms? I can't see any other evidence of past riches, though the pictures could be valuable, of course. There are so many poor people with aristocratic family trees in Britain that doesn't even matter whether you have money or not. It's the connections that count.

Now I'm starting to understand what Mama means by having a heritage and why she didn't let me go tap dancing at the local dance hall with the girls from Albert Street when I was small. It was one thing going to school with them, where you were supervised, and quite another sallying out to spend your free time doing something nobody with any class would dream of doing, according to Mama.

But I did so want to tap dance.

All Miss Orlando’s sheet music is classical and the opera scores include all the Puccini and Verdi operas and a whole lot of obscure Italian and French stuff. Miss Orlando used to be a professional singer, of course. While I am thumbing through the repertoire, Janet comes back with Miss Orlando. Or rather, Janet comes into the room and announces the imminent arrival of 'Auntie'.

Miss Orlando is a nice, tiny old lady.

I'm not expecting a nice old lady. In fact, I don't know what I'm expecting after the vision of poor Anna, with her scuffed up shoes and gnarled fingers and gaping gums.

In complete contrast to her 'servant', Miss Orlando is dressed in shiny, well-worn velvet of various hues. Her skirts are long. She is wearing several layers of clothing. Nothing matches, either in colour or style, and some of it looks as if it has come from a theatrical costumier's, but the effect is nevertheless harmonious. She is wearing a long pearl necklace and carrying a flat embroidered bag with a white lace hankie hanging down over the side. Her hair is very grey and set in parallel waves, and she has little sparkling slides to hold back it out of her face. Janet isn't much bigger than her. Maybe Miss Orlando has shrunk. But she is nevertheless a lady with dignity and self-assurance and it is now I who feels the urge to curtsey.

Miss Orlando goes over to the fire-place and jerks energetically at a long heavy cord with a tassel on the end of it.

Hardly has she walked back across the room and taken her place at the small round table in the bay, unrolled her starched linen napkin and spread it over her knees, gesturing graciously to us to do likewise, than we hear the creaking of the wooden stair treads as Anna approaches arduously from below, bearing the tea things.

“Ah, there you are, Anna,” says Miss Orlando in a regal, Queen Mother type of voice.

“The tea, Miss,” Anna replies humbly as she arranges cups, saucers, spoons, milk, sugar, teapot and a plate of small, dry, elderly biscuits in front of us. Her fingers tremble as she performs these duties. Miss Orlando appears not to notice.

“Thank you, Anna,” she says with incredible formality.

“Will there be anything else?” Anna asks wearily, rubbing her chafed, bluish hands together and looking distinctly chilled.

“No, thank you,” replies Miss Orlando. “Anyway, Janet can get it if there is.”

“Thank you,” says Anna gratefully, and backs awkwardly out of the room as if she were leaving the throne room at Buckingham Palace.

 “Anna used to be a very beautiful ballet dancer before she wore out her feet and her teeth,” says Miss Orlando. “You can't get servants like that these days.”

I'm quite sure you can't, I'm thinking. Why isn't she pensioned off? She's as old as the hills. And she could have easily got herself some dentures on the National Health.

“I expect you're wondering why she's still working for me,” Miss Orlando queries.

I blush. She has read my thoughts. I hope she isn't going to make a habit of it.

“Well,” I stammer. “It's just that she's very old to be working.”

“Don't worry about it,” says Miss Orlando. “She's devoted to me and she would not want to leave me.”

Janet jumps up and goes to the window.

“She's gone to do the shopping now, Auntie,” she announces.

“I hope she doesn't forget the spam,” Miss Orlando says, helping herself to sugar.

“We used to have mortadella in Italy,' she goes on, rolling the ‘r’ with relish, “but you can't get anything like that here.”

Miss Orlando sighs as she stirs her over-sweetened tea. I have been counting the lumps. I think she has put eight into the small china cup.

“What's mortadella?” I whisper to Janet.

“Italian spam,” she hisses back.

Suddenly I get the feeling that time stands still in this house. The only source of heating is an ugly gas fire hissing ineffectually in the discoloured grate. The interior decoration is ancient and there isn't even electric light. I ask myself if there's any running water, and decide I'd better make do with one cup of tea, just in case there isn't. A vision of aged Anna carting rusty tin buckets of water in from a pump in the back yard slides into my consciousness and I begin to ask myself what other sacrifices Anna has made so that I might sit here and drink afternoon tea like this.

“And you play the piano, Faith?” Miss Orlando asks suddenly.

I am chewing on one of the dry old biscuits and don't have enough saliva to swallow it. Mama says that swilling food down with liquid is unladylike, but I'm forced to do this, because not speaking when you're spoken to is impolite.

“Yes,” I finally bring out in a scratchy voice that quite startles me.

“And how long have you been playing the piano?” Miss Orlando continues in slow, structured tones.

“I can't remember,” I reply truthfully.

“Silly,” Janet chips in. 'Auntie means how long have you been having lessons.”

“Oh...ummm....about eight years, on and off.”

“Then you must be very good,” Miss Orlando concludes.

“Well...” I am modest about my piano playing. “I broke my elbow when I was seven and sometimes I have problems with the sinews.”

“Your right elbow?”

“Yes.”

“Like what's her name in the Mikado,” Miss Orlando says in a giggly sort of voice.

I can't laugh, because I don't know what she's talking about.

“And now you'd like to learn to sing opera,” Miss Orlando is saying.

I'd what? How did she get that idea?

Janet smiles at me, nodding and encouraging me to nod, too.

“Well, I have thought about it,” I admit.

I'll get you, Janet Bidston-Clarke with an ‘e’, I'm thinking. Of course, I'd told her my dream about the opera and she had told me about her aunt being a singer, but I hadn't actually connected the two until this moment.

“Katisha”, Miss Orlando remembers out of the blue, leaving me as puzzled as ever about this opus. “That’s the name...... So how long have you been singing?” Miss Orlando asks me, helping herself to some more sugar lumps and tea.

“Since I was little,” I reply.

“Well, that is most interesting.”

Miss Orlando gets up and goes to the piano.

“Would you like to sing something now?”

I'm on the point of saying no when Janet catches my eye. Go on, she seems to be saying. This is your chance. Do it. She's a singer. Perhaps she can give you some tips.

“I don't know any opera,” I say, looking around at the piles of vocal scores, “unless you mean Mimi.”

“Well, a thirteen year old who sings Mimi is something quite out of the ordinary. Let me see if I can find the music.”

Miss Orlando reaches out to the nearest pile.

“Ah, here we are. Which bit would you like to sing?”

I take the score from her. I turn over its yellowing pages but don't recognise anything on them.

“I think this is the wrong opera,” I venture to say.

“Nonsense. There's only one Mimi and only one La Bohème,” Miss Orlando insists.

“La Bohème?” I am genuinely puzzled. “I mean Siegfried's Mimi.”

Miss Orlando suddenly hoots with trained operatic laughter.

“Ta! Ta! Ta! Ti! Ti! Ti!” she declares in a surprisingly high voice.

When she has calmed down a bit she looks at me pityingly.

“You poor girl,” she starts off. “Where did you get the idea that Mimi sings in a Wagner opera?”

“Well, Mama's got a pile of piano transcriptions of the operas, and some of the singing bits have the words in and there's a super bit for Mimi in the Siegfried book.”

Miss Orlando nods sympathetically.

“If you take a closer look at this score,” she says gently, “you will see that my Mimi is spelt with two ‘I’s. But the Mimi in your book is spelt M-I-M-E.”

Of course it is, now I think about it. I used to think it meant mime as in pantomime, which is just about the opposite of singing, before I asked my Uncle Horace. He told me it must be Italian and you could say it like 'me me'. But he obviously hadn’t told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth and now here I was, making a fool of myself in front of this cultured lady.

“Well, I didn't sing any Wagner in Italy,” Miss Orlando regrets, “so I haven't got the music. But you can bring yours and we'll look at it together.”

She doesn't tell me then that Mime is a dwarf and is always sung by a tenor. I expect she doesn't want to embarrass me any further.

I'm quite disappointed that I can't think of anything else to sing except hymns. And I don't really like singing them because I think they are boring compared with Wagner. But Miss Orlando suddenly decides she will teach me anyway.

I'm very surprised because I haven't even asked her yet. I don't know what to say. So I don't say anything.

The tea-party is quite suddenly over. Miss Orlando tells me to come back at 11 o'clock the following Saturday. Then she closes the lid of the piano and leaves the room.

Janet immediately starts gathering up the tea-things and I help her to take them downstairs. Maybe I'll get a peek at the back of the house now.

Although it's only about six o'clock, it's very dark in the long gas-lit corridor downstairs. I don't think Janet notices what a bad state the place is in. She certainly doesn't seem to mind my seeing it. Anna is probably still out, I am thinking, when I hear a door open and suddenly she is standing right next to me. I think she has stepped out of the broom cupboard.

“Was the tea all right, Miss Janet?”

“Yes, perfect thank you, Anna. And the biscuits were delicious.”

Janet gushes rather a lot at school, too. I don't feel able to rave about the biscuits.

“Would you like to see the rehearsal room before you go?” Janet asks me, and in so doing seems to be deliberately putting a time-limit on my visit. That's all right by me. I still have to get the bus home and will have to do my homework whatever time I get there.

“Well... yes,” I reply. So I won’t get to see the kitchen, after all.

“We'll have to go outside and round the back. You can get there through here, but Anna doesn't like anyone going through her kitchen. And anyway, when the ladies' choir comes, there are too many of them.”

I follow Janet out of the front door, round the side of the house, past about three very narrow, high windows along the otherwise blank house wall and into the back yard. From there we go through a French patio door into a surprisingly light room with about three rows of kitchen chairs and another upright piano.

“This is where Auntie rehearses with her ladies' choir,” Janet explains proudly.

“It's very nice,” I find myself saying. “How many ladies sing in the choir?”

“About 20, I think, though it could be more.”

“Do you sing in it, too?”

“Yes, of course. I couldn't let Auntie down. Would you like to join?”

“I'll have to ask first,” I reply, thankful that this is probably true.

Things are moving just a shade too fast for me.

Later, back home, I'm subjected to twenty questions by my curious parents. I explain in great detail what the house looks like, as much about Miss Orlando as I know myself, and a whole lot about poor Anna that is enhanced by my fertile imagination.

“Well, I think that Anita Orlando's probably as poor as a church mouse,” Mama decides. “Fancy not even having electricity. I wonder how they get their clothes clean?”

I happened to know that Janet washes her own clothes because one day we had a discussion at school about domestic chores. I remember being astonished that she had to do all her own washing and tidying and even some of the shopping.

“But this servant woman...”

Mama is persevering with the questioning, though I'd rather get on with my homework now.

”... Did you say she's been with Miss Orlando all her life?”

“Well, sort of,” I answer.

“I'd just like to know when Miss Orlando was in Italy,” Mama perseveres. “Somehow there are flaws in her story. Does she speak with a foreign accent?”

“I don't think so,” I shrug. Come to think of it, her painstaking diction could be foreign, I suppose. But then, how did she come to be related to Janet?

At some point in the conversation I break the news that Janet is trying to get me to have singing lessons with her aunt.

Surprisingly, my parents think this is a good idea, especially Dada. As far as the choir is concerned, they are prepared to leave that decision to me. So I decide to give it a try at some time in the future. I'll have to wait until after Saturday, anyway. Maybe Miss Orlando might not want me in her choir when she's heard me sing!

Over my homework, I ponder on today's events. Mama is suspicious of Miss Orlando, because she's suspicious of everyone. But apart from Miss Orlando's life-style, which is genteel poverty, I can think of nothing particularly negative about her. She obviously lives by her wits. I'm sure she only has the fees from her teaching, though Janet hasn't yet told me what it costs to belong to the choir. Dada has volunteered to come with me to my first singing lesson, to get the financial side sorted out.

So now there's nothing for it but to wait for Saturday to arrive.