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.

The school day that went with a bang

If I’d wanted to announce my arrival at my new school any more spectacularly, I’d have had some difficulty.

There I was, nearly 17 and having flunked most of my ‘O’ levels. The exams were taken a couple of months before the family moved from just outside Manchester, which had been our home for eight years, to Lancaster, somewhat further north.

My father, clearly so pissed off with the lack of academic achievement that would allow him to boast about my prowess, mentioned this to our family doctor, who in turn suggested that my exam performance had quite probably been hindered by the impending move after the longest period of stability in my life to that point.

Fortunately, this argument seemed to placate my parents. And the school that I had been intended to enter in order to do my ‘A’ levels took me on anyway – on the proviso that I did my fifth year and my ‘O’ levels all over again.

So I started at LGGS. And somehow – although for the life of me I can’t imagine how – found myself getting attached quite quickly to a circle of girls from various years, all of whom were linked by varying degrees of the sort of eccentricity that teachers at my previous school had so nervously reported to my parents as present in me.

And then, for some reason or other, in my third week at the school, I accepted a dare.

You used to be able to buy little twists of paper that had some powder in them, which would make a very pleasing ‘bang’ when dropped forcefully.

One day, early in the morning, I took three of these things and, using Blu-tac, attached them underneath the pedals of the grand piano in the school hall. Then I let events unfold.

Miss Owen, our headmistress, cut an imposing figure. Tall and rather large, she had permed white hair, wore thick-rimmed spectacles, had a booming voice and absolutely no taste in clothes whatsoever. A familiar ensemble consisted of a dress in wide stripes of pink and purple, with a red cardigan on top. And always, always a string of double pearls. Her geometry lessons were generally considered to be ‘character building’. Fortunately – or perhaps not – I escaped ever having my character subject to such an exercise in construction.

Biggo had a loyal deputy called Mrs Rigby, who was tiny and ran around the school in ‘badger boots' (black footwear with a white stripe down the middle). Riggers (or ‘Rigour Mortis’ as she was also known), usually wore an academic gown, which floated out, Batman-like, as she stalked the corridors hunting for girls whose shoes had heels that were more than the prescribed height.

She had a ruler for that purpose, and when fashion created heels that were deceptively curved, she changed it for a flexible ruler. You didn’t get much past Riggers – who was also renowned for wearing hats to speech day that looked like upturned jelly moulds or unexploded nuclear bombs.

Then there was Mr McKee, the music teacher – and obligatory eccentric conductor of the school choir and orchestra. He and Biggo were arch enemies – although to be fair, pretty much every teacher in the school was an enemy of Biggo: if she achieved nothing else, she united the girls and staff against her. Noel was just rather more obviously so an enemy and everyone knew it.

One of the most dismally flunked of my ‘O’ levels had been in music, but at that point, it was the one course that I absolutely did not want to repeat, having been constantly vilified by my previous teacher for what I later realised were her failings: I’d barely been taught half the course – which Noel went on to do in his spare time, helping me catch up and get my qualification. But that's another story. However, Biggo – possibly thinking that Noel could do with a particularly reluctant student – insisted I retake music.

One of Noel’s particular ways of irritating our esteemed head was to be rather clever with his selection of music to be played as we exited the hall after morning assembly. On one occasion, for instance, he crept behind his curtain and set the record player to blast out the can-can from Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld.

Biggo’s expression was one of horror when her girls gave in to the irresistible urge to grab skirts and kick their legs into the air.

On the day of my dare, Noel was seated at his piano, waiting to play the hymn, as Biggo marched from her office, up the stairs and onto the stage.

“We will now sing,” she intoned, before a single ‘bang’ interrupted her.

She looked around, unable to work out what had happened. In the gallery, one teacher turned to another and said (rather optimistically, I thought): “Someone’s shot Miss Owen!”

Biggo waited and then tried again.

“We will now sing hymn number …”

BANG!!

We did manage to get through assembly. Just.

A few days later, as I was carrying a record player from a classroom to the storeroom for Noel, he turned on me.

“You put snaps on my piano,” he growled. One of those who had dared me had, it appeared, squealed under pressure.

“Yes,” I said simply. Which considerably appeased Noel, who sniffed and said, with a modicum of respect: “Well, at least you’ve got the guts to admit it,” before informing me that, after assembly the following day, I was to join him for a visit to Biggo. It seemed that in the absence of any other culprit, he was in Biggo’s firing line.

The next day, somewhat nervously, I waited silently outside her office for my interview. When the little traffic lights outside eventually turned to green, Noel opened the dark door, ushered me in and, with the words “here’s our explosives expert,” left.

The thing was, if I’d been nervous, that comment left me struggling not to guffaw. I stared at the floor desperately fighting the urge to giggle. Biggo took that for embarrassment – or downright shame.

“I assume that this is the sort of thing that went on in your previous school,” she boomed from behind her desk. Oh if only she’d known – I’d never done anything remotely like that in my life before.

“So I’ll put this on your school record and we shall leave it there.”

I fled gratefully, hoping that it would all die down, and thinking I’d got off really rather lightly.

But in the coming weeks, the story did the rounds of the city. Biggo was a legend – and any such event took on legendary status too. Eventually – inevitably – it found it’s way to my father, who related it over dinner one evening to the full family. And perhaps most surprisingly of all, it turned out that that was one of a very limited number of occasions on which he was actually proud of me.

Break the rules and cause a stir in the city and, apparently, you’re in favour. Perhaps it was one of the few times when I reminded him of how he’d like to see himself?

There are many more stories from my days at LGGS, which were really remarkably like one of those old school books for girls, penned by Angela Brazil or Enid Blyton. But for the time being, suffice it to say that Noel became a good friend, that those eccentric girls became The Rat Pack and that that was far from the last of my encounters with the legendary Biggo.