The Rat Pack – and in loving, joyous memory of Susan

When you hear of The Rat Pack, you possibly think of Hollywood and Vegas in the 1960s; of Sinatra, Deano and Sammy. But there was an earlier incarnation of the group, led by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

And it was that version that inspired a group of pupils at Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School to form their own Rat Pack in the autumn of 1979.

 

Bogart fan that I was, I’d just arrived at the school after my family had moved to the area from Manchester. This, however, was a very, very different sort of school – in many ways, like something out of an Enid Blyton or Angela Brazil schoolgirl novel, though for clarity, it was a state school in an area (like my previous one) that maintained the 11+.

 

The LGGS head was one Miss Owen – otherwise known with no particular affection as She Who Must Be Obeyed and Big-O. She was a substantial figure of a woman, often to be found clad in dresses of purple and pink, combined with an orange or red cardi and an obligatory pearl necklace, and was renowned for her character-building geometry lessons.

The cartoon version above, is by me and is not a joke. For clarity, that illustration also includes Mr Kenyon (physics) and Mr McKee (bowling), my music teacher. The latter was an absolute diamond, who I came to regard almost as a surrogate dad because of the way he seemed to genuinely understand me. And he was an absolutely superb teacher who essentially gave me a lifelong appreciation of classical music. 

 

She was aided in her rule by one Mrs Rigby (Riggers or Rigger-Mortis), a cadaverous figure who sped around the school in her badger boots (black with a white stripe down the centre), gown flaying behind her and a ruler always at hand to check that the heels of the girls’ shoes never surpassed the allotted inches. When heels got deviously curved, she got a deviously flexible ruler.

 

On speech days, she had a peculiar tendency of sporting headwear that looked either like an upturned jelly mould or an unexploded nuclear device.

 

In essence, it was Big-O and Riggers against the entire rest of the school community, uniting the rest of the staff and pupils in a quite extraordinary way.

 

Arriving at the start of the new school year in September 1979, I somehow fell speedily into the orbit of a group of girls from several years who could probably best be described as ‘eccentric’. Interested in chess, cricket and being cerebral, as I recall it, things came to a speedy head when I was dared to put caps – you remember those little twists of paper that exploded if you flicked them at the ground? – under the pedals of the grand piano in the school hall.

 

I took up the challenge – and Blu-Tacked a trio of them in place shortly before an assembly one morning.

 

With girls and staff crowded into the hall, music teacher Mr McKee sat down to play the hymn. Big-O strode onto the platform and intoned: “We shall now sing … 

 

BANG!

 

Shock ran around the hall. One teacher was overheard as saying (hopefully, I suspect): “Miss Owen’s been shot!”

 

Big-O looked around and tried again.

 

“Hymn number …”

 

BANG!!!

 

I was shopped of course, since while Mr McKee didn’t suspect me, his prime suspects knew whodunnit. Not that I have ever blamed them. I ’fessed up straight off, and got away with a mention on my record, as it was obviously a left over from my previous school; plus I’d also missed out on Miss Owen’s geometry lessons, so clearly lacked for character.

 

Though I cherish the memory of being shown into Big-O’s office by Mr McKee, with the words: “Here’s our explosives expert”. It was all I could do not to laugh out loud.

 

Lancaster is a very small city, but the story sped around it rapidly, just as did the regular extremes of Big-O and Riggers.

 

That was how my parents found out. My father, a clergyman, picked up the story and regaled it at dinner one evening. It turned out to be one of the rare moments in my life where I actually impressed him!

 

Yet thus was the Rat Pack born. I became Chief Rat – come on; how many people do you know who have tried to blow up a school piano in an assembly? – with my friends Susan as the Literary Rat and Fiona as the Deputy Chief Rat. I add mentions for Rachel, Eleanor and Dana who were rats without portfolio.

 

We spent the next two years, running up to her retirement, making Big-O’s life a misery – or at least complicating it with a campaign of rule-bending that never quite broke those rules, leaving her frustrated at being thwarted on various fronts.

 

A massive part of that was possible because Susan KNEW the rules. Nobody else in Christendom knew them as thoroughly as she did. They might have thought – a Big-O did – that they had the regs down pat, but Susan already had a lawyer’s eye for detail and a chink in the opposition’s armour.

 

Let me give you an example. Shortly after the piano incident, I was called into Big-O’s office for not having a school scarf. Given that we’d moved to Lancaster within days of the autumn term starting, none were available. The shops had sold out and they made hens’ teeth look everyday.

 

I tried with Miss Bell – who in her non-teaching time ran ‘Bell’s Boutique’ from the school basement, where she had vast stocks of second-hand school uniform, but to no avail.

 When you hear of The Rat Pack, you possibly think of Hollywood and Vegas in the 1960s; of Sinatra, Deano and Sammy. But there was an earlier incarnation of the group, led by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

 

And it was that version that inspired a group of pupils at Lancaster Girls’ Grammar School to form their own Rat Pack in the autumn of 1979.

 

Bogart fan that I was, I’d just arrived at the school after my family had moved to the area from Manchester. This, however, was a very, very different sort of school – in many ways, like something out of an Enid Blyton or Angela Brazil schoolgirl novel, though for clarity, it was a state school in an area (like my previous one) that maintained the 11+.

 

The LGGS head was one Miss Owen – otherwise known with no particular affection as She Who Must Be Obeyed and Big-O. She was a substantial figure of a woman, often to be found clad in dresses of purple and pink, combined with an orange or red cardi and an obligatory pearl necklace, and was renowned for her character-building geometry lessons.

 

She was aided in her rule by one Mrs Rigby (Riggers or Rigger-Mortis), a cadaverous figure who sped around the school in her badger boots (black with a white stripe down the centre), gown flaying behind her and a ruler always at hand to check that the heels of the girls’ shoes never surpassed the allotted inches. When heels got deviously curved, she got a deviously flexible ruler.

 

On speech days, she had a peculiar tendency of sporting headwear that looked either like an upturned jelly mould or an unexploded nuclear device.

 

In essence, it was Big-O and Riggers against the entire rest of the school community, uniting the rest of the staff and pupils in a quite extraordinary way.

 

Arriving at the start of the new school year in September 1979, I somehow fell speedily into the orbit of a group of girls from several years who could probably best be described as ‘eccentric’. Interested in chess, cricket and being cerebral, as I recall it, things came to a speedy head when I was dared to put caps – you remember those little twists of paper that exploded if you flicked them at the ground? – under the pedals of the grand piano in the school hall.

 

I took up the challenge – and Blu-Tacked a trio of them in place shortly before an assembly one morning.

 

With girls and staff crowded into the hall, music teacher Mr McKee sat down to play the hymn. Big-O strode onto the platform and intoned: “We shall now sing … 

 

BANG!

 

Shock ran around the hall. One teacher was overheard as saying (hopefully, I suspect): “Miss Owen’s been shot!”

 

Big-O looked around and tried again.

 

“Hymn number …”

 

BANG!!!

 

I was shopped of course, since while Mr McKee didn’t suspect me, his prime suspects knew whodunnit. Not that I have ever blamed them. I ’fessed up straight off, and got away with a mention on my record, as it was obviously a left over from my previous school; plus I’d also missed out on Miss Owen’s geometry lessons, so clearly lacked for character.

 

Though I cherish the memory of being shown into Big-O’s office by Mr McKee, with the words: “Here’s our explosives expert”. It was all I could do not to laugh out loud.

 

Lancaster is a very small city, but the story sped around it rapidly, just as did the regular extremes of Big-O and Riggers.

 

That was how my parents found out. My father, a clergyman, picked up the story and regaled it at dinner one evening. It turned out to be one of the rare moments in my life where I actually impressed him!

 

Yet thus was the Rat Pack born. I became Chief Rat – come on; how many people do you know who have tried to blow up a school piano in an assembly? – with my friends Susan as the Literary Rat and Fiona as the Deputy Chief Rat. I add mentions for Rachel, Eleanor and Dana who were rats without portfolio.

 

We spent the next two years, running up to her retirement, making Big-O’s life a misery – or at least complicating it with a campaign of rule-bending that never quite broke those rules, leaving her frustrated at being thwarted on various fronts.

 

A massive part of that was possible because Susan KNEW the rules. Nobody else in Christendom knew them as thoroughly as she did. They might have thought – a Big-O did – that they had the regs down pat, but Susan already had a lawyer’s eye for detail and a chink in the opposition’s armour.

 

Let me give you an example. Shortly after the piano incident, I was called into Big-O’s office for not having a school scarf. Given that we’d moved to Lancaster within days of the autumn term starting, none were available. The shops had sold out and they made hens’ teeth look everyday.

 

I tried with Miss Bell – who in her non-teaching time ran ‘Bell’s Boutique’ from the school basement, where she had vast stocks of second-hand school uniform, but to no avail.

 

It was Susan who came up with a plan. Remember that I said she was the detail one of us? She knew that the rules actually said that you had to have a school scarf … or a school beret.

 

I went to see Miss Bell again. She hadn’t thought of it, but was tickled pink and found me one – remember that I said that Big-O and Riggers unified the rest of the staff and the pupils?

 

My next appointment in Big-O’s office arrived one morning after an assembly. I had the beret with me, behind my back, as I entered her office.

 

“So … have you got a school scarf yet?” she intoned. “No,” I replied simply. You could see her inflating with pleasure.

 

“But I’ve got the alternative,” and produced the beret from behind my back, on a single finger.

 

There was nothing she could say – she had been done. I wore that beret in class for days – a glorious sign of victory.

 

The legacy continued. Susan was the first of us to leave for higher education – and while at Oxford, wrote a tome that the rest of us had been contributing to with ideas etc. It was called Murder on the Medium Wave, which managed to combine … well, murder, the England cricket team – which at the time included Botham, Gower and the Rat Pack’s beloved Mike Brearley – plus radio commentary of the sport and a (very) thinly disguised roster of our teachers and ourselves.

 

Forty-plus years on, I look back on those times with absolute relish. It was a barking, utterly unrepeatable experience. My Other Half had listened to the stories with a sense of tolerance, over some time, ultimately believing that there was a serious degree of exaggeration going on.

 

Yet when he joined me and Susan in an east London pub and the subject of LGGS inevitably came up, he was staggered to hear the same – and other – such stories, realising that no, I really hadn’t been making it up.

 

I consider myself very, very lucky to have shared that extraordinary experience with the rest of the rats – and not least, with Susan.

 

I’m posting this on an evening when I should have been in Manchester to say ‘farewell’ to Susan at a celebration of her life, after she died very suddenly a few weeks ago. With the extreme heat and all the don’t travel advice I cancelled my arrangements.

 

So I’m posting this now as an act of remembrance – and celebration.