Cat's eye

I can see your underpants.

Or else:

Me no know, me no care,

Me no wear no underwear.

This is said by boys, while making faces like monkeys.

There’s a lot of speculation about underwear, especially the underwear of the teachers; but only that of the female teachers. Male underwear is of no importance. There aren’t very many male teachers anyway, and the few that do exist are elderly; there are no young men, because the war has eaten them. The teachers are mostly women over a certain age, women who aren’t married. Married women don’t have jobs; we know this from our own mothers. There’s something strange and laughable about older, unmarried women.

At recess, Cordelia doles out underwear: lavender frills for Miss Pigeon, who’s fat and saccharine; plaid for Miss Stuart, lace-edged to go with her hankies; red satin long johns for Miss Hatchett, who’s over sixty and wears garnet brooches. We don’t believe any of this underwear actually exists, but thinking about it is a nasty joy.

My own teacher is Miss Lumley. It’s said that every morning before the bell rings, even in late spring when it’s warm, she goes to the back of the classroom and takes off her bloomers, which are rumored to be of heavy navy-blue wool and to smell of mothballs and of other, less definable things. This isn’t repeated as speculation or as part of the underwear invention, but as fact. Several girls claim they’ve seen Miss Lumley putting her bloomers on again when they’ve had to stay in after school, and several others say they’ve seen them hanging in the cloakroom. The aura of Miss Lumley’s dark, mysterious, repulsive bloomers clings around her and colors the air in which she moves. It makes her more terrifying; but she is terrifying in any case.

My teacher of the year before was kindly but so unmemorable that Cordelia doesn’t even mention her in the underwear game. She had a face like a dinner roll and blancmange-colored skin, and ruled by wheedling. Miss Lumley rules by fear. She’s short, and oblong in shape, so that her iron-gray cardigan falls straight from shoulder to hip with no pause in between for a waist. She always wears this cardigan, and a succession of dark skirts, which can’t possibly be the same one. She has steel-rimmed glasses, behind which her eyes are hard to see, and black shoes with Cuban heels, and a tiny lipless smile. She does not send children to the principal for the strap, but does it herself, in front of the class, holding the hand out flat, bringing the black rubber strap down in sharp quick efficient strokes, her face white and quivering, while we watch, wincing, our eyes filling with involuntary tears. Some girls snivel audibly while she does this, even though she isn’t doing it to them, but this isn’t wise: Miss Lumley hates sniveling, and is likely to say, “I’ll give you something to cry about.” We learn to sit up straight, eyes front, faces blank, both feet on the floor, listening to the whack of rubber on cringing flesh. Mostly it’s boys who get the strap. They are thought to need it more. Also they fidget, especially during sewing. We are supposed to sew pot holders, for our mothers. The boys cannot seem to do this right; their stitches are large and clumsy, and they stick one another with the needles. Miss Lumley stalks the aisles, whacking their knuckles with a ruler.

The schoolroom is high-ceilinged, yellowy-brown, with blackboards at the front and along one side and tall many-paned windows above the radiators on the other side. Over the door to the cloakroom, so that you feel you’re being watched from behind, there’s a large photograph of the King and Queen, the King with medals, the Queen in a white ballgown and diamond tiara. High wooden desks that sit two, with slanted tops and holes for inkwells, are arranged in rows. It’s like all the other schoolrooms at Queen Mary, but it seems darker, possibly because there’s less decoration. Our old teacher brought paper doilies to school in her many efforts at appeasement, and her windows were always crawling with paper vegetation. But although Miss Lumley observes the seasons in this way too, the plants we bring forth under her glittering steel-rimmed eyes are smaller, shriveled-looking, so that there are never enough of them to cover the bare spaces of wall and glass. Also, if your fall foliage leaf or your pumpkin is not symmetrical, Miss Lumley won’t put it up. She has standards.

Things are more British than they were last year. We learn to draw the Union Jack, using a ruler and memorizing the various crosses, for St. George of England, St. Patrick of Ireland, St. Andrew of, Scotland, St. David of Wales. Our own flag is red and has a Union Jack in one corner, although there’s no saint for Canada. We learn to name all the pink parts of the map.