Page 57 - Through a glass brightly

Went up loft in Tudor House but it’s very bare and not much good.’ That’s my entire record of one day's grammar school education!
There seems to be a fund raising (for animals) element in this club as I am treasurer and at some point we decide to keep mice up there. We also start exploring other places and on 27th we are caught in the boiler room by Mr Anderson (caretaker?) who ‘didn't mind’. A lot of people do seem to have been very tolerant of our antics. However, things are about to come to a head: on 3rd December I record that “The others (Pat, Pat, Sue and Cary) were caught by Miss Manning in the loft. They were sent to Miss Balaam who 'didn’t mind' and she sent for me this morning.’ Is this the Hall loft episode? I think it must be. My memory is that I was at a piano lesson and therefore not present. I imagine Pat and Cary may remember how Miss Balaam ‘didn’t mind’!
What I don’t know if I ever admitted at the time is that after school on 2nd, the same day that the four were caught up the loft, Miss Balaam sent for me and asked me all kinds of questions about the club - I don’t record what. I had completely forgotten this but my mother, typically, had phoned her up the day before and told her about it. That would only have been about the stable loft and club as cellars didn’t really feature and the hall loft was a new idea, but I would have been terrified of Miss Balaam and spilled any beans she asked for. So I who had naively related to me mother our innocent happy trips up the stable loft, raising money in aid of animals, may have inadvertently been the cause of extra vigilance - who knows as it can only have been an accident that Miss Manning happened to see the loft explorers. I had not yet learned to keep secrets from my mother, but even when I did she always seemed to find out and caused trouble for me. As when a group of us - Maggy Peart you were involved I think - went and bought Moravia’s Woman of Rome from the second-hand shop somewhere near the school. I didn’t even know what it was about but was happy to get involved and never had it in my house nor did I tell my mother, but she must have had spies in the area as she found out and rang the school about that. The parent from hell in many ways though she meant well, don’t we all, but it’s no excuse.
Going back to the mice and Miss Balaam... My memory - though my diary doesn’t record it - is that she said we could do odd jobs to raise money and that we could keep the mice in the biology lab. I haven’t even mentioned keeping the mice in the loft but I’m sure we did - perhaps not for very long? Miss B, wise as she was, didn’t rant and rave but tried to channel our energies, but of course it took all the excitement out of it. We did keep the mice in the lab and they reproduced as mice do and we sold the babies to the pet shop and raised money that way. We go carol singing - I don’t say where - and raise £1 1s for the club and meet at Pat Ross’s in the holidays and make plans for an ambitious summer fair where we make things and sell them - I don’t think this ever happened. We go on meeting in the loft - I can only assume that was allowed - but with increasing changes of members as one after another resigns and storms off - first Pat Ross, then Sue Baker - and the two Maggies, Youngs and Westley, join. On 4th March Cary and I clean out the mice after school in the lab. When we come to put them back, having counted 2 adults and 8 babies we can only find 7. After a long hunt we decide it must have run down a hole and go home on the bus. I go into the kitchen and strip off my gaberdine saying - we lost a mouse! - and out drops the mouse onto the floor and runs away into a corner... My mother, to her credit, does not scream and jump onto a chair and we catch it and put it in a box and I carry it back to school the next day in the box, none the worse for its experience travelling in which part of my clothing I have no idea!
And the club just seems to peter out. In June we are still selling babies - mice that is - we hadn’t sunk that low - but we finally sell the whole lot to the pet shop and in September on the first day of Lower Fifth we officially, as I put it, disband the club. We seem now to turn our attention
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