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11 July 1955
It’s after 11 PM but I can’t sleep and my head and heart are so full I can hardly stand it. No, I can’t stand it. I’m writing this in the hope of making sense of it. Though it may be I’m just talking to myself.
This morning was Gerald’s humiliation exercise number one: the Institute. He marched me there, hand on my arm like a ward in chancery, and handed me over to the Head as though I were a new pupil. Rather than leave me alone to discuss this, he then stood by while Mrs Fielding discussed timetables and subjects as though I’m ten years old. Timetables! For me! And what an utterly wretched timetable it is.
Starting next week, for two months I am to present myself at 7:30 in the morning. Daily!! Students are expected to cook breakfast—not only for ourselves, but for the staff as well. We must all sit down at 8:30 and eat what we have produced. Imagine it! Gladys Williams up at dawn, frying bacon for a pack of “teachers” in hairnets.
And the clothes—oh, the clothes. Not a pretty or smart uniform at all. I’m required to wear plain cotton overalls, a stiff apron, my hair tied back and under a net. Servant’s garb, though no one called it that. I shall look like the scullery maid in a touring play, only without the curtain call at the end.
Most of the girls are 16 or 17 at the most, just out of the local school, local shop-girls’ daughters and factory apprentices, blinking at me as if I’d blundered into the wrong doorway. If they knew I was five-and-twenty I think they’d simply die of laughing.
Worst of all was what the Head herself said. She took pains to tell me most of the girls at the Institute are under eighteen. That they were taking me only as a “special exception.” That I was to be careful not to “corrupt” them with “fast ways” that will only get them in to trouble. No make-up. No cigarettes. No “inappropriate topics.” She looked straight at me when she said it, as if I were some cabaret singer smuggled in through the back door rather than a young lady from a “good” family. Clearly, that’s Gerald’s point.
I smiled and nodded while the Head explained, but inside I burned. Gerald, of course, called it “wholesome discipline” and a “needed adjustment.” He spoke as if he were sending me to the seaside.
And then, as if that weren’t enough, came humiliation number two: tomorrow we go to Saint Clare. Gerald informed me over lunch when we returned from the Institute, scarcely lifting his eyes from his paper. We are going together. I commented that there were less than two weeks left before the Summer holidays, that Clarissa would come home then, that there was no reason for us to go.
He said nothing. I wasn’t even sure he heard me. I then said there is no reason why I need to go. “We are leaving at nine, sharp, and will be spending the night at Bryn Derwen.”
Great. So this trip is also to be a stop at his constituency. How lucky for me that I get to come.
That was all he said. I excused myself and left the table. Before dinner I said I didn’t feel well and would be in my room. Nothing was sent up for me, making it clear that Mrs. Fielding isn’t happy with me, or at least too busy to care that I haven’t eaten today. Fine. I don’t have an appetite anyway.
Poor Clarissa! She knows nothing about what’s coming. Gerald has forbidden me to write before the end of the term and didn’t tell me we were going until it was too late anyway, so I cannot even warn her. Tomorrow she will see Gerald and me walk in and know why we’re there.
I want to scream, to stamp, to tear this page, this book in two. Instead, I write my anger, because there is nowhere else for it to go.
Apparently 25 is still old enough to be spanked by circumstance and scolded like a schoolgirl as far as my dear brother-in-law is concerned.