Читать книгу Fifth Formers at St. Clare's - Enid blyton - Страница 4

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It was the rule at St. Clare’s that as soon as any girl had been in the fifth form for two terms she should be allowed to have a small study of her own, which she shared with one other girl. These studies were tiny places, and the girls could, if they wished, furnish them themselves, though the school provided such things as a table, chairs and a carpet and shelves.

Most girls contented themselves with putting up a picture or so, and a clock. A few were more ambitious and got a carpet from home, and maybe even an armchair.

The girls themselves chose the companion with whom they wanted to share a study. This was not usually difficult, because by the time they reached the top forms the girls had all more or less made their own friends, and, when they were in the fourth form, had planned with whom they were going to share the study.

It was fun arranging about the studies. The pairs had to go to Matron and tell her they were going to share a study, and then Matron would allot one to them.

“Fancy you having a study!” she would say. “Dear me—it seems no time at all since you were in the first form and I nearly gave you a spanking for not reporting your sore throats to me!”

Pat and Isabel O’Sullivan were to share a study, of course. Mirabel and Gladys wanted to as well. Angela had asked Alison to share with her—both girls had the same dainty tastes.

“I bet there will be nothing but mirrors all the way round the walls of your study!” said Bobby to Alison. It was a standing joke that Alison always looked into any mirror she passed, or even in the glass of pictures, to see if her hair was all right.

Bobby and Janet were to share a study. Both were tomboys, with a love for practical jokes. What tricks would be hatched out, in their study!

One odd pair was Pam Boardman, the brainy one of the form, and Doris Edward, who was always near the bottom. For all her brilliance at mimicry and acting, Doris could not do ordinary lessons well, and admired Pam’s brains deeply. Pam had tried to help the bigger girl at times, and a warm friendship had sprung up between them, which made Doris suggest sharing a study. Pam had left St. Clare’s once, but had missed it so much that her parents had sent her back again some time later.

The lonely little Pam, who had never had a real friend, at once welcomed the idea of sharing a study with Doris. Doris made her laugh, she teased her and put on her big glasses and mimicked her. She was good for Pam.

“Whom is Carlotta going with?” wondered Pat. “Hilary, perhaps. They like one another very much.”

But no—Hilary, as head-girl of the form, had the honour of a study all to herself. So Carlotta could not share with her. She chose Claudine!

Matron was openly doubtful about this.

“You’ll have a mighty bad effect on each other,” she said. “You’re both as cheeky and don’t-carish as can be. What you’ll be like if you share a study, I can’t think. But mind—any broken furniture or reports of rowdiness, and you’ll go down to the common room of the fourth formers.”

“Oh, Matron—how can you think that we should be rowdy?” said Claudine, putting on her most innocent look. “I shall keep our study beautifully, so beautifully. Did I not in the holidays embroider two table-cloths, and three cushion-covers for our study?”

Anne-Marie and Felicity were to share a study, although Felicity had not been two terms in the fifth form, and Anne-Marie was new. Matron did not want them to be the only two without a study.

“Two geniuses together,” said Bobby, with a laugh. “They ought to use up the midnight oil all right, writing poems and tunes!”

No one had asked Pauline to share a study with them, and she had no friend to ask. She was not a girl that any one liked much, for she was envious, and had been very boastful till the others had found out that all her wonderful tales were made up. She had gone into her shell, and no one knew quite what the real Pauline was like.

“You had better share with Alma Pudden,” said Matron, ticking them off on the list. “You’re the only two left.”

“Oh,” said Pauline, dismally. She didn’t like Alma very much. Nobody did. She was so fat and unwieldy and bad-tempered. But there was no one else to share with, so that was that.

“Well—that’s the lot of you,” said Matron, shutting her book. “You all know the study-rules, don’t you? You can have your teas there by yourselves, if you don’t want to go to the dining-room. You can get in some one from the first or second form to do any little job you want done. You can do your prep. there in the evenings, and you can go up to bed when you want to, providing it is not after ten o’clock.”

The girls felt free and independent, having little rooms of their own. The studies were cosy corners, dens, bits of home—they could be arranged how the girls liked, and the tiny fire-places could burn cosy fires to sit by.

Angela, of course, furnished hers like a miniature palace. She bundled out every bit of the school furniture there, and got her mother to send her down things from her own bedroom. She went down to the town with Alison, and the two had a wonderful time choosing curtain material, cushion-covers and rugs.

They cost a lot of money. Alison hadn’t very much, but Angela had had magnificent tips from wealthy uncles and aunts in the holidays, and had saved them up for her study. She spent lavishly, and would let no one into their room till it was finished.

Then she and Alison gave a “house-warming” as they called it. They had ordered in cakes and sandwiches from the local baker, and bought lemonade and ginger-beer. The table was loaded with eatables, and a bright fire burnt in the grate, though the day was far too hot.

The girls crowded in curiously. They gasped at the polished furniture, beautiful mirrors and pictures, the two armchairs, and the lovely rugs. They fingered the silk curtains and looked at the brilliant chrysanthemums in the vases.

“Well!” said Bobby, “just wait till Matron sees all this! She’ll tell Miss Theobald you have too much money to spend, Angela!”

“I don’t see that it’s anything to do with Matron,” said Angela, stiffly. “Alison and I don’t consider there is enough beauty or comfort at St. Clare’s—not as much as we are used to at home, anyway—and now that we have a study of our own, we don’t see why we can’t fill it with our own ideas. Don’t you like it, Bobby?”

“Well—it’s a bit too showy for me,” said Bobby. “You know my simple tastes! But you certainly have made a marvellous job of it, Angela—and this tea is super!”

The other girls added what they wanted to their studies. Claudine put out her embroidered table-cloths and cushion-covers. Carlotta added a few things she had brought from Spain, one thing especially giving the little study colour and character—a deep red embroidered shawl from Seville.

The only people whose study was quite plain and without character was the one shared by Pauline and Alma. Neither of them had any taste or much money, and except for a blue vase contributed by Pauline and a tea-cosy as plump as Alma herself given by Alma, the little study was as bare as in the holidays.

Alma Pudden had a most unfortunate name. It would not have mattered a bit if she hadn’t been so like a suet pudding to look at, but she was. Her school tunic always looked like a sack tied round in the middle. Her eyes were almost hidden in her round, pasty face.

It was the fifth formers who nicknamed her Pudding, and she hated it, which was not to be wondered at. If she had laughed, and said “Yes, I am rather puddingy—but I shall thin out soon!” the others would probably have liked her, and called her Pudding more in affection than in derision. But Alma flew into one of her bad rages when she was teased.

She had queer tempers—not hot ones, quickly flaring up and down, like Carlotta’s or Janet’s—but cold, spiteful rages. Try as they would the others could not like anything about poor Alma.

Poor Pauline found sharing a study with Alma very dull indeed. Alma seldom had any intelligent remark to make, and though she pored over her prep. she rarely got good marks. She was selfish too, and always took the more comfortable chair, and helped herself to more cakes than Pauline.

Felicity and Anne-Marie found it rather trying to live together in the same study. Felicity thought there was nothing in the world but music, and she was always singing or trying out tunes on her violin, when Anne-Marie wanted to work or to write.

“Felicity! Must you play that awful, gloomy tune again?” Anne-Marie would say. “I’m trying to get the last verse of this poem right.”

“What poem? Is it the one you were doing last week?” Felicity would say. “Well, it’s a dreadful poem—all words and no meaning. You are no poet, Anne-Marie. Why should I stop my music in order that you should write third-rate poetry?”

Felicity did not mean to be rude or even hurtful. She was, as Bobby said, quite “batty” about her music. She was working for a stiff exam., the L.R.A.M. and was very young indeed to take it. Miss Theobald, the Head Mistress, did not want her to work for it, and had already told Felicity’s people that the girl must live an ordinary life, and take more interest in ordinary things.

“She is growing one-sided,” Miss Theobald explained to Felicity’s parents, who came to see her one day. “Sometimes I think she doesn’t live in this world at all! That is bad for a young girl. She is already far too old for the fourth form, and yet is not fit to do the work of the fifth. But I think I had better put her up into the fifth, where the girls there of her own age will wake her up a bit. I wish you would say that Felicity must put off working for this difficult music exam, for a year or two. She has plenty of time before her!”

But Felicity’s people were too proud of their brilliant daughter to put off any exam. It would be wonderful to have a girl who was the youngest to pass such an exam.!

“Put her up in the fifth form if you wish, Miss Theobald,” said Felicity’s father. “But don’t let her slacken in any way in her music studies. We have been told she is a genius, and a genius must be helped and encouraged in every way.”

“Of course,” said the Head Mistress, “but we must be sure that our ways of encouragement are the right ones, surely. I don’t like all this hard, musical work for so young a girl, when it means that other, quite necessary work has to be scamped.”

But it was no use talking like that to Felicity’s parents. Their girl was brilliant, and she must go on being even more brilliant! And so it was that Felicity was put up into the fifth form, to be with girls of her own age even though her work was far below the form’s standard—and yet had to work even harder at her music than before.

She did not like or dislike Anne-Marie. She was there and had to be put up with, but so long as she did not interfere too much with her music, Felicity did not really notice her study companion.

But Anne-Marie was jealous of Felicity and her undoubted genius. Anne-Marie was convinced that she too was a genius. Her people were sure she was, as well. They had her best poems framed, they recited them to visitors, who were too polite to say what they really thought, and tried to get publishers to print them.

It was most annoying that the girls at St. Clare’s didn’t seem to think anything of her loveliest poems. There was that one beginning:

Down the long lanes of the Future

My tear-bedimmed eyes are peering.

Only Angela and Alma had been impressed with it. Neither of them had enough brains to know a good poem from a bad one, and they could not see the would-be cleverness and insincerity of the long and ostentatious poem.

“What’s it mean?” said Carlotta. “I may be very stupid, but I don’t understand a word of it. Why are your eyes tear-bedimmed, Anne-Marie? Are you so afraid of your future? Well, I’m not surprised, if that’s the way you’re going to earn your living! You won’t get much money.”

“It’s tosh,” said Bobby. “You write something you really feel, Anne-Marie, and maybe you’ll get something good out of your mind. This is all pretence—just trying to be awfully grown-up when you’re not.”

So Anne-Marie was bitterly disappointed that her genius was not recognized, whilst every one apparently agreed that Felicity was gifted.

Still, on the whole, the study companions got on fairly well, some of them much better than others, of course. The twins rarely quarrelled, and had so much of the same tastes and likings that sharing a study was, for them, a thing of delight. Bobby and Janet too were very happy together, and so were Mirabel and Gladys.

It was queer at first to get used to sending for the younger ones to do odd jobs. But on the whole that was quite a good idea too. Many of the first formers, for instance, had been head-girls, or at least in the top forms of their prep. schools, and it did them good to be at the bottom of another school, having, at times, to rush off to do the bidding of the older girls. The twins remembered how they had hated it at first.

“We thought it was beneath our dignity to light someone’s fire, do you remember?” said Pat to Isabel, as she poked up the fire that a first former had just been in to light for her. “It was jolly good for us. We were so stuck up—thought such a lot of ourselves too! We got our corners rubbed off all right.”

“We get to know the younger ones too,” said Isabel. “They chatter away to us when they come to do their jobs. I’m getting to like some of the little first formers very much. One or two of them will be very good at games—they are awfully keen.”

“Angela sends for the young ones far too much, though,” said Pat, frowning. “She and Alison make them do too many jobs. They’ve got a bit of power, and they are using it badly.”

“Better get Hilary to tick them off,” said Isabel, yawning. “Golly, it’s five to ten. Come on, we’d better pack up and go to bed. Isn’t it fun to go when we like?”

“So long as it’s not after ten o’clock!” said Pat imitating Matron’s crisp voice. “Hurry—or it will be after ten!”