The Wombwell Hall Cookery Class

My next door neighbour tells me that when she was a fourteen year old at school in Auckland they called it Home Science. At Wombwell Hall they called it Cookery and we only did it for two terms. I now see that it was taught by someone with the initials KH but I can remember nothing at all about her. My report (which I still have – yes, indeed I do!) says `Jean works quite well but needs to concentrate more on her work’ and she gave me a C. I can’t complain about that because I was awarded a C for most subjects. I had been quite looking forward to Cookery because my cousin Connie said that we got to make Scotch Eggs and Jam Tarts. It was the latter that attracted me most.

My Scotch Eggs were tidy and acceptable, at least that’s what Miss KH said at the time and I was certainly proud of them as I carried them home for tea. My mother was a decidedly dubious cook, happiest when she was churning out pots of stew or fried kidneys. She would never have ventured into something as complicated as a Scotch Egg so you can perhaps begin to understand my sense of achievement when I bore mine home wrapped in greaseproof paper. To be totally honest I don’t think I had actually come face to face with one before the quartet I created myself though I might have read about them. Anyhow they went down well at teatime in York Road though my mother insisted that my brother and I had slices of bread and the margarine she called butter with them.

After this success you can imagine how much I was looking forward to the conquering of Jam Tarts. They were something I was totally familiar with of course and my mother frequently tried her hand at making her own but her version was simply a baked pastry case which she filled with jam later when it had nicely cooled. This was because she was convinced that only a complete fool would think it rational to heat jam too much, and as for actually cooking it …. and at this point she shook her head sadly. It stood to reason she said that jam would burn like billy-ho and then what a mess you would have to clean up not to mention the waste of both jam and pastry. Consequently her tarts never tasted or looked quite right as you can probably imagine because jam cooked inside a pastry case has a completely different texture and taste to jam spread carefully over a baked pastry case. There was never any doubt that my brother and I much preferred the version made by the bakery in Northfleet High Street. However, my jam tarts were going to be the real thing, or as my cousin Harold would say – The Real McCoy, to be admired and perhaps even emulated. To ensure that I would be able to repeat this culinary success I was going to write down exactly how to make them in shorthand in case I forgot anything vital.

Miss KH explained the intricacies of the ovens – two girls to one appliance and the girl whose tarts went on the top shelf would need to check them carefully to avoid the danger of inadvertent burning. Slightly burned tarts were still edible of course but you could never be too careful she told us and the top shelf as we were most likely aware was a much hotter place than the bottom one. I wasn’t aware of course but once she explained this I became aware. I was to share an appliance with Pat Haslam who spoke a little bit posh and said Gosh and Golly a lot because she had previously attended a boarding school in Folkestone. This made her popular with some of the teachers and slightly alienated her from some of her classmates. Later she was to disappoint her parents by running off with a visiting GI and living with him for three glorious weeks in a room at The Cumberland Hotel. For this misdemeanor which in 1956 was considered serious, she would be sent to what was called an Approved School for over a year deemed to be somewhat beyond her parents’ control. My mother was always threatening to have me sent to such a place and I had visualized it as a kind of Borstal for girls but Pat, home for the holidays after her first term, said it was exactly the same as the boarding school in Folkestone that had cost her parents so much money and according to her father had clearly been a place with a bad influence since she had not Turned Out well. Her mother, on the other hand, blamed Wombwell Hall and girls like me that she had been forced to mix with.

This was all in the future of course. On the day of the Jam Tarts we shared a bench and prepared our pastry side by side, each of us ending up with a few pastry strips surplus to requirements. Miss KH enthusiastically suggested that we might like to decorate our tarts once the spoonfuls of strawberry jam had been distributed throughout the half dozen in each tray, with pastry crosses. Pat said she might do just that but I was firmly of the opinion that mine should be completely unadulterated and declined to follow her lead.

In Pat’s opinion I was foolish because it was a waste of the extra pastry and Miss KH nodded approvingly because she liked Pat and liked her ex boarding school accent even more. She said Pat was being very sensible. She wished all girls were as sensible. But I did not want to join the ranks of the sensible and in any case I was never going to get the accent right. I wanted the jam in my tarts to be unsullied by pastry extras so that my mother would clearly see that it was perfectly possible for jam to be cooked inside a pastry case. I put my tray on the bottom shelf of the oven and Pat said she didn’t mind using the top shelf in any case because it only meant her tarts would be cooked that much quicker. She thought hers looked Absolutely Topping with the addition of pastry off-cuts formed into crosses.

I’m not sure how it was that we came to forget to check on the top shelf tarts but we did and so when it came to removing the trays from the oven Pat’s were decidedly burnt, the jam bubbling away angrily and the pastry a very dark shade of brown. She very sensibly, her hands protected with oven gloves decorated with pink roses, grabbed those from the bottom shelf, maintaining they were definitely hers just as Miss KH tracked down the smell of burning and appeared before us. Our teacher gazed at me reproachfully reiterating her warnings concerning top shelf baking and telling me that unfortunately my tarts looked a little burnt and there was now nothing to be done about it. I protested that they were not in fact my tarts but she had already walked away and Pat was holding firmly onto the tray of unburnt tarts looking pristine and unsullied, exactly as jam tarts ought to look. The perfect ones were hers she maintained, packing them carefully into the cardboard carton provided by Miss KH.

I knew that pushing a tray of burnt tarts into Pat Haslam’s face and hair was absolutely the wrong thing to do, but I did it anyway whilst twenty other fourteen year olds and our cookery teacher looked on in horror. Somehow or other we both ended up on the floor of the classroom, Pat trying to defend herself and me screaming hysterically about pastry off cuts and bottom shelves of ovens. By the time Miss KH had heroically parted us we were both crying and I found I had chunks of Pat’s hair between my fingers together with a great deal of burnt strawberry jam.

The next morning found us both in Miss Fuller’s office where an explanation was demanded as to why girls on the very cusp of young adulthood were fighting on the floor of Room 5, one of them screaming like a fish wife. I just knew that one was me because girls whose vocabulary includes Gosh, Golly and Absolutely Topping definitely don’t scream obscenities learned from their grandmothers at others on account of ownership over jam tarts. Miss Fuller waited patiently, her pen tapping the desk in front of her. Eventually Pat said something about unfortunately making an honest mistake about which tarts were hers and Gosh she was dreadfully sorry. Miss Fuller’s shoulders straightened as she extended a commending nod in the direction of Pat Haslam, a pupil who had simply made an error and owned up to it like a splendid example of young British girlhood - a pupil any head teacher could only feel satisfied with.

She turned her attention to me and told me that my language had been completely unacceptable and my violence could not be tolerated. It had been no way to deal with what was clearly simply human error and I was to apologise to Pat immediately. I was also to apologise to Miss KH and furthermore I was to write an essay about better ways of resolving conflict. I told Pat I was sincerely sorry and went in search of Miss KH who looked nervous when she saw me approaching. I can’t remember if I actually wrote the essay or not.

A year or so later our gossiping group of ex-Wombwell Hall girls discussed the astonishing demise of Pat the boarding school girl as we shared a cramped corridor of the commuter train to Charing Cross, heading to our jobs in typing pools. We marveled at the audacity of her love affair with a tourist that had hurtled her out of the ranks of wage earner and unceremoniously flung her back to a school of the kind none of us would want to attend. And all the while I felt strangely triumphant and I wondered if Miss Fuller and Miss KH would ever get to know about it because a girl who was capable of lying about which Jam Tarts were actually hers was to my mind capable of almost anything.