Chapter Six: Pickles
“Oh, fishcakes!” said Theresa. “Has anyone seen my hockey boots?”
Theresa was a redhead and a madcap, always losing something, so nobody took much notice. Only last week she had lost a ten-shilling note and made a tremendous fuss about it.
Beryl was in the common room, explaining fractions to Heidi.
“Just pretend you have a hundred stamps in your collection,” she said, “and you want to share them equally between two friends. You would give them fifty each. That is one half of the collection. And you write it like this: one over two. And if you add two halves together, you get one whole. You add the top numbers and keep the bottom number the same. Do you see?”
“They’re probably with my knitting bag,” said Muriel. “I know I left it here yesterday, and now it’s gone.”
Just then Marlene appeared in the doorway, carrying a large box. She had long, curly brown hair and was a swank.
“I say, who wants a piece of my cake?”
She put the box on the table and lifted the lid with a flourish. Inside was an enormous square cake, covered with chocolate cream and decorated with white icing around the top.
The girls crowded round to admire it. Marlene was an awful swank and a show-off, but she was also generous. Last week she had bought enough iced buns so that there was enough for half a one for everyone in the form.
“What a smashing cake!” said Theresa. “Is it your birthday?”
“No,” said Marlene, tossing her brown curls, “My cousin ordered it specially at the tea shop in town. Her father’s in the Foreign Office, you know, so she arranged for it to be delivered to the school.”
The girls were impressed. None of them had town privileges yet, and the only things they could buy for themselves were at the tuck shop on Wednesday after games and on Saturday afternoon.
Rita went to the kitchen to borrow a knife, and when she returned, Marlene began cutting the cake into halves and then quarters.
“Look, Heidi,” said Beryl. “Now the cake is divided into fractions. There are four quarters, and if we cut each four quarter into four, we shall have sixteen pieces. That means every one can have a piece.” Heidi was too busy admiring the cake to think about fractions.
The cake was so big that even as Marlene kept cutting and even when she put aside a quarter for herself for later, which was only fair, there was enough for everyone to have a good slice. Even Beryl forgot about fractions.
“We’d better eat it quickly,” said Rita. “We have history in ten minutes, and you know what a bate Miss Hornbeam gets into if we’re late.”
So they all tucked in.
“Thank you, Marlene. You’re a brick!” they cried.
They licked the last of the chocolate cream from their fingers, Marlene stowed the leftover quarter in the cupboard and they hurried off to history.
…..
“Sir Reginald Chunder, as he became after being knighted for his services to the Empire, took a great interest in girls’ education and in French art. He collected paintings. Do sit up, Marigold. You’ll turn into a hunchback if you slump like that.”
Miss Hornbeam was their housemistress and also taught history and deportment. She was very strict about posture. If the girls failed to sit up straight, she sometimes stopped the lesson and made them walk round the classroom with England in the Middle Ages balanced on their heads.
It was a large, heavy book with a thick spine, and balancing it was no easy matter. The twins, Milly and Molly, had discovered that it was easier if they placed the book with its spine at the front.
Today, however, Miss Hornbeam had interrupted her account of King Alfred and the burnt cakes to tell the class about Founders’ Day.
Beryl had heard that it involved making pickles and going round the village. She wondered why this should require a whole history lesson.
“Our school,” Miss Hornbeam began, “was founded by two very scholarly ladies, Miss Pike and Miss Gudgeon. They were devoted to the education of girls and believed that girls could be every bit as capable as boys when it came to their minds. Sit up straight, Theresa.”
Theresa pulled such a funny face that Beryl nearly laughed. Then she saw Miss Hornbeam narrow her eyes and thought better of it.
“Miss Pike and Miss Gudgeon began by teaching girls in Miss Pike’s house in Chiswick, near London. Their school soon became well known. A man called Reginald Chunder, had three daughters. After his wife died in a typhoid outbreak, he persuaded Miss Pike and Miss Gudgeon to take them as pupils even though he owned a pickle factory in Reading.
“When Sir Reginald died, he left them his country house that he had bought and expanded and put in sensible plumbing before the war, so that they could establish a proper school. And that, girls, is how St Nicola’s came to be founded and why we have these magnificent school precincts.”
After a few more details that seem to involve an army man who had been at Waterloo, someone who drowned in a pond, which is why it was always off-limits to girls, new electric wiring along with a wartime extension, and huts because of Americans, Miss Hornbeam paused and surveyed the class.
“Now, can anyone tell me how the school came by its name?”
Nobody answered. Perhaps nobody knew, or perhaps they preferred not to attract Miss Hornbeam’s attention.
Beryl was astonished to learn that the name came from a story about three boys who had been killed by an evil butcher and put into a pickle tub. St Nicholas had rescued them by bringing them back to life. The school crest therefore showed two barrels, though Beryl could not understand why there were two when there had been three boys.
“And how,” Miss Hornbeam continued, “did a gentleman who owned a pickle factory come to be knighted for his services to King and Country?”
Nobody ventured a guess.
“During the Boer War, which took place before the Great War, Mr Chunder, as he was then, arranged for the regiments sailing to South Africa to be supplied with his famous Chunder Chutney. When the British Expeditionary Force went to France in 1914, he made sure that the soldiers had pickled onions as well.
“As you know, girls, conditions in the trenches were dreadful. The trenches stretched from the Swiss border to the English Channel.” She pointed to a map on the wall and explained how there was mud, there were rats, and shells could fall at any hour. The Germans wore spiked helmets and were quite beastly in their determination to win, and girls knitted socks and went without sweets.
“But whatever else went wrong, Sir Reginald’s supplies kept arriving. At Christmas, the men received a tin of pickles. Later in the war, he introduced rhubarb and marrow jam, which the Tommies welcomed as a change from strawberry.”
Beryl thought of the poor men in the trenches, sitting in the mud and eating their Christmas pickles. She hoped they had something to eat with them. Pickles on their own did not sound very filling.
“Thanks to Sir Reginald’s enterprise and generosity,” Miss Hornbeam continued, “the soldiers had a little comfort in their difficult circumstances. After the war, he was knighted for his services to King and Country.”
Beryl thought this was a very good thing to have done, though she was not quite sure how eating pickles had helped to win the war.
“And that,” said Miss Hornbeam, looking almost pleased with herself, “is why we celebrate Founders’ Day every year at harvest time. We preserve the vegetables from our school garden in honour of Sir Reginald Chunder and remember our splendid founders, Miss Pike and Miss Gudgeon. Their portraits hang in the Dining Hall.”
She paused for a moment to let this sink in.
“Each form is assigned a particular kind of pickle or preserve. The vegetables are prepared and stored until Christmas, when the parents may purchase them to raise money for the School Fund. The girls also visit the poor people of the village, sing a carol and give them a jar as a Christmas present. It is a tradition of which we may all be proud.”
Beryl was still thinking about the soldiers and their pickles. She remembered Uncle Robert telling her about the time he had eaten spaghetti in Rome. She wondered whether the soldiers had ever had spaghetti.
“Sit up straight, Beryl!”
Beryl started. She had been daydreaming again. She sat up at once and looked Miss Hornbeam in the eye, remembering that the most important rule in history was to sit up straight.
It all sounded very exciting. Soon the whole school would smell of vinegar and spices.
When the pickle assignments were posted in the common room, the girls hurried to see what they had been given. They were delighted to discover that their form was to make piccalilli.
There was a list of everything they would need: Kilner jars, spice bags, mustard seeds, blocks of salt and malt vinegar. They would help harvest the cauliflowers, onions and carrots from the school garden, prepare the vegetables and follow all the stages of the recipe. When the piccalilli was ready, it would be stored in the kitchen cellar until Christmas.
“I hope we don’t have to peel all those onions,” said one of the girls.
“And I hope we’re allowed to taste it,” said another.
Beryl thought it would be interesting to see how vegetables could be changed into something quite different by putting them into vinegar and spices. She wondered whether the soldiers had eaten piccalilli and whether it had to do with Piccadilly Circus where she had been to see the lights last Christmas.
At supper that night, Beryl sat with her two dear chums, Marigold and Heidi. Afterwards, she would help Heidi with her with long division, and then the three of them would play Snakes and Ladders until bedtime.
As she passed by on the way to the prefects’ table, Top Girl – Veronica, stopped and spoke to Beryl. Everyone was astonished. Prefects did not usually trouble themselves with girls in the first form.
“It’s Beryl isn’t it?” she said, “Glad to see you have stopped snivelling. How are you getting on with that book of poems?”
Beryl was taken aback. She had almost forgotten the book. She had been so busy making friends and settling into school that she had hardly thought about it for days.
“I have a favourite poem,” she managed to say.
“Which one?”
Beryl told her.
“Sound choice,” said Veronica approvingly. “You must now return the book to me so I can study for my next exam. I hope you have taken very good care of it.”
Beryl was so happy. It was a wonderful thing to have two good friends, but it was even more marvellous to be noticed by one of the big girls.
After supper she hurried to the dormitory and opened the second drawer of her dresser, where she had hidden the book between her liberty bodice and her winter socks.
It wasn’t there.
She emptied the drawer and searched the others. She looked under the bed and behind the dressing table.
The book had vanished.
Beryl’s heart sank. How could she tell Top Girl that she had lost it? Veronica had trusted her with something precious, and now she had been careless enough to mislay it. Worse still, how would Veronica study for her next examination?
Beryl sat down on the edge of her bed. She would have to find that book.
Absolutely perfect tone and voice. You really transported me back!