Easy As Getting A Good Report.
by Angharad (could do better)
part: 399.

Breakfast was late, it took us a little while to clear up the feathers from one of the pillows, which had haemorrhaged all over the place. Stella, giggling scooped up as many of the curled feathers and duck down as she could, shoving her collection into a plastic bag, whilst I chased down the others with the vacuum cleaner.

“We used to have pillow fights in the dorms when I was at school,” said Stella, “only once did we have a pillow burst, and the whole dorm was put on detention for a week.”

“Serves you right,” I said, emptying the vacuum cleaner into a bin bag. “I think maybe I need to get some new pillows. These could be getting a bit ripe.”

“Are you giving them a ticking off?” asked Stella.

“What? What are you on about?”

“Ticking, pillows.”

“Stella it’s clocks that tick, pillows don’t say much at all, in my experience.”

“Pillows do tick.”

“Don’t be daft. How can they tick…oh, bugger. You pig, you got me again.” She had pointed to the fabric the pillow was in, a pillow tick. Grrrr!

I said that breakfast was late, it could well have been that lunch was early. We ate brunch, as our cousins across the pond call it. It proved to be heavier than a normal breakfast but possibly not as much as typical lunch could be. Either way we had some bacon sarnies, with grilled tomatoes and mushrooms. They were delicious, especially washed down with copious amounts of tea.

“Right, lets go and get these new pillows.”

“Stella, I am so full, I can hardly move.”

“Typical of today’s youth, gratuitous self indulgence and idleness.”

“Gee thanks, remind me to contact you if I need a reference.”

“Yes, ‘Could do better, except in dormouse juggling,’ that would be a good one.”

“I’ve probably had worse, especially at school.”

“Oh I had some crackers from school, ‘Lady Cameron, would do well to pay more attention to the laws of the land with a view to maintaining them, not transgressing them.’

“Oh, I don’t think I can beat that, but my sports master possibly second guessed me. ‘As a rugby player, Watts may find it useful to join the netball team.’ My dad was furious, when he confronted the games master, the bloke said , he meant it with regard to a sense of timing and balance, which he thought netball would encourage.”

“Did they ever let you find out?”

“No, sadly. My friends thought it was hilarious. Whenever we played rugger or soccer, they suggested I should play, ‘goal defender’.”

“Oh, that good eh?”

“Yep. Hence the cycling, I was useless at that too.”

“That makes me feel a whole lot better.”

“Why?”

“Well if you were useless, and have got better, then there is hope for me too.”

“Yeah, I asked to do cycling instead of soccer.”

“And?”

“I was accused of trying to skive off, besides my dad wouldn’t buy me the sort of bike I wanted until it was too late.”

“Pity.”

“He played football and rugby for his school, but was twice my size and weight. He was built like a bull, I was like a gazelle, one with poor hand eye coordination.”

“What about tennis?”

“We did a bit of it, I wasn’t very good, but at least the ball was softer than it was in cricket.”

“Oh, I played ladies cricket, great fun.”

“Maybe I’d have enjoyed that more than I did the men’s variety. I couldn’t bat for toffee and my bowling was mediocre, although I wasn’t a bad slip fielder. However, not good enough to get in the team, so Daddy was not impressed with me.”

“So what else do you recall from your school reports? I had, ‘Stella would be a good listener if ever she stopped talking.’”

“Nothing new there then,” I said, dodging her swipe. “I had, Watts has a rare talent, he is the only person in this school who can plane scalloped wood with a box plane.’”

“Explain, ex-plain–ha ha,” she laughed at her own joke. No seriously, I don’t get that.”

“A box plane is designed to strip the wood in straight lines. I could give it a regular undulating surface instead of flat. As a woodworker, I made a good rugby player.”

“That bad, eh?”

“Oh yeah, but the one I got for metal work, well, “Charles has a wonderful action with the hammer on the anvil, unfortunately, he has yet to make contact with the metal he’s supposed to be drawing.”

“Drawing?”

“Yeah, the object is to heat the iron and work it with a hammer to draw it out. I never actually managed to hit it.”

“Did you need glasses or something?”

“No my sight was fine, I did hit it once or twice, but it was such a heavy hammer, I couldn’t lift it properly, so his remark was doubly sarcastic.”

“Oh, you were a real girly then?”

“I wanted to be, I used to watch the girls going into their school and dream what it would be like to be there.”

“Much the same as the boys I should think, boring and a waste of time. I mean, why did they teach us to type? None of us were likely to be secretaries unless it was as a way of marrying our bosses. What parent in their right mind paid several thousand pounds a year to have their daughters learn to type?”

“I wish they’d taught me to, I’d have found that rather useful, more so than trying to make paint scrapers or letter openers.”

“Didn’t you have to do some sewing as well as woodwork?”

“Yeah, I was actually quite good at that, although I managed to lose my demo piece so it wouldn’t show in my report.”

“Maybe your mother would have been more sympathetic to you if you had let them mark it.”

“I doubt it. We had to do a bit of homework and she saw me, she laughed at me, though she did correct what I was doing wrong.”

“Sometimes people have to take these things on board at their own pace?”

“Someday never.” I felt my sadness rise again. I had never managed to talk to my mother rationally about my feelings. I liked to hope that if she’d lived things might have been different, but I wasn’t holding my breath.

“We’ll never know now, so you might as well feel positive as negative about it.”

“If wishes were horses then beggars would ride, that’s what my mum used to say.”

“My Gran used to say, ‘If ifs and ans were pots and pans, there’d be no need for tinkers.”

“What’s a tinker?”

“According to my Gran, they were like gypsies who repaired pots and pans and dealt in scrap metal. You know, itinerants moving around the place, in the days when pots and pans obviously weren’t made of stainless steel and were too valuable to discard.”

“Gosh, I never thought of that, I wonder how they repaired them?”

“Soldered, I suppose. Couldn’t really see them having facilities for welding.”

“Welding?” I was amazed, “Can you weld saucepans, then?”

“Not stainless ones, the old cast iron ones possibly, but they could solder them. Haven’t you ever tried it?”

“A bit, but only in the garage when I was a kid and trying to repair a brake mounting. It didn’t work, too soft.”

“I made some jewellery while I was at school, you see, Millfield did teach me something, as well as breaking and entering.”

“What?”

“Yeah, getting in after lights out, or getting out again.”

“Thankfully, I was at home not sent away to a concentration camp. Having said that, Daddy was pretty strict, so you might have had more freedom.”

“Probably, I didn’t let the school stop me doing anything, and I even let them teach me the odd thing.”

“Yeah, I suppose I must have allowed that to happen too, or enough to have Sussex accept me and then give me a degree.”

“London, did the same for me, only in nursing. They liked Simon so much they gave him a master’s.”

“What, an old master’s?”

“Oh yeah, I like it. I’ll have to tell him that. Hey, you’ve got one too, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, from Portsmouth. Sometimes, I think I miss the place.”

“Come back with me tomorrow then.”

“No, I have commitments here, and besides, I’m not ready to see Tom just yet and maybe he feels the same?”

“One way to find out.”

“Come on, let’s go buy my new pillows,” I said changing the subject.