For Dolly, primary school was an escape. It felt safe and there were big brightly coloured posters up all around the room she sat in every day, saying A is for Apple (a big rosy-red apple to illustrate) and all the way through the alphabet to Z is for Zebra (a striped horse on this one). Even the teachers she hated weren’t too horrible. Mrs Lockhart took the kids for maths and clonked you on the head if she felt your work wasn’t up to scratch. Mr Vancy, who taught English, lobbed a rock-hard oblong blackboard duster at you if you chatted at the back of the class during lessons; and Dolly, who didn’t much care for education, was always chatting at the back of the class with her mates Vera and Lucy.
Dolly loved being a milk monitor and handing out the bottles from the crates to the younger kids, and having biscuits at break time, and the meals were okay, even if the cabbage was boiled to fuck and the custard was thin as cat piss.
She liked the priest, Father Potter, who came in every Friday and gave the kids a sermon in assembly. He played lovely classical music to them, saying in his super-posh voice that he wished them to learn a love of fine things, of beauty, and to go out into the world the better for it. She liked walking along the road in a crocodile-line of two-by-twos with all the other kids, one teacher at the front, another at the back, all the way to the church to sing hymns about praising the Lord.
She didn’t think she had much to praise Him for, not really, but she liked being in the church, she liked the stained-glass windows and the big angels with their luminous green and red feathered wings and the dumpy little cherubs with floaty hankies over their bits; it felt safe.
Then one day it was Lucy’s birthday and she and Vera were invited back to Lucy’s house for tea and cake. Lucy’s house was in between Dolly’s and the school; Dolly would call in there in the mornings, trailing her younger sister and her brothers behind her – eight-year-old Nigel, seven-year-old Sarah, little Dick and the youngest and frailest boy, Sandy, the poor bastard, who was always smothered in pungent Vick and goose grease over the winters to keep him from catching colds. Neither the Vick nor the goose grease seemed to prevent illness in Sandy, but Mum gave it a go when she was well enough to bother, which wasn’t often; so usually the task of greasing him up fell to Dolly.
Dolly and Vera and Lucy had a whale of a time at Lucy’s birthday tea, and Vera went home clutching a slice of sponge cake in a brown paper bag. A few minutes later, Dolly trailed out the door. Her brothers and sister had gone on home earlier, straight from school, and now the light was starting to fade as the sun set in the west, lighting the winter sky up like a huge apricot-coloured lamp.
