Frankie and Stankie Read Online Free PDF

dress over a white blouse, and grass-green bouffant knickers to match, with a pocket on the knickers for her hanky. Every morning all the girls have to lay an ironed hanky on their desk before assembly and put their hands on the hanky to display clean fingernails. The dress and the knickers are made of regulation fabric called Tobralco, and Lisa has to wear white ankle socks with her black Knockabouts. She also has to have a leather satchel with two shoulder straps and a panama hat with a badge.
    Angel-face isn’t lucky with her reception-class teacher. On her first day she is herded into the assembly hall with seventy-five other new girls, all dressed in grass-green, and they are made to wait and wait. Eventually a pretty, smiley young teacher with auburn hair like Maureen O’Hara and a bias-cut skirt and cork-heeled sling-backs comes in and calls out lots of names. The lucky little girls line up one by one in front of her and are borne away to a classroom, while Lisa’s half wait and wait some more. Lisa is caught short and piddles discreetly on to the lino, standing up. Some of it runs down her legs and into her socks, but most of it makes a puddle on the floor, from which she walks away. Eventually an old battleaxe comes in, with pale, watery eyes and with her hair done in sausages under one of those hair-nets made of human hair. She’s called Miss MacLean. She gets the children to line up two by two, before tapping at Lisa’s puddle with a billiard cue.
    â€˜And who is responsible for this?’ she says, but Lisa doesn’t own up.
    Miss MacLean is a witch, and she victimises Lisa, who writes with her left hand and smudges a lot. When they graduate to dipping pens with G nibs, bad girls fill the inkwells with blotting paper so that, when you dip your pen in the inkwell, you get a midnight-blue jellyfish on the end of it. The jellyfish are used for ink fights.
    One day a girl called Tilly Boston lobs a jellyfish which splatters on the wall, but Miss MacLean blames Lisa and demands that sheask Mother for a picture in a frame to cover the blots. This is timed with the arrival of a batch of lithographs sent to Dinah’s mum by her one-time boyfriend at the Berlin art school where she herself was a student a long time ago. But the girls’ mother is determined that Miss MacLean is not getting one of those. So she cuts out a photograph of Swiss mountains from
Life
magazine and puts it in a frame. Miss MacLean is pleased with the picture and hangs it over the jellyfish mark on the classroom wall.
    The only other picture is of King George VI, because Durban is terribly royalist. Everybody knows that the English are best and Lisa learns to sing ‘Rose of England thou shalt fade not here’ and ‘There’ll always be an England down every country lane’. She also learns a hymn about not letting her sword sleep in her hand until she’s built Jerusalem on England’s green and pleasant land. Dinah is already longing to be English, although she hasn’t even started school yet. Tilly Boston is huge and scary because she’s much older than everyone else in the class. She’s been kept down two years running because she can’t pass the Class One end-of-year exams.
    Lisa, having learnt to write her letters, writes lots of letters at home. Then she teaches Dinah, and every afternoon they busy themselves writing letters to their mother. The letters are always the same, because Lisa has misunderstood the purpose of letters. She says that, after you’ve written the address and the date at the top right-hand corner, in a neat slope, and after you’ve written the salutation, what you do is you copy out sentences from the Beacon Readers. When you’ve copied out as much as you want to, you write, ‘From your loving friend’ and you put your name at the bottom. Then you draw pictures in the margins. After that, you make an envelope out of a sheet of paper