I Digress

Before long Christine and I were doing everything together. We volunteered to be school librarians to stay indoors lunch times stamping books. We had smart green gold edged LIBRARIAN badges. I was happy enough with this bit of status and even happier not to get my hair messed up in a cold wind. There were two other Plymouth Brethren Librarians from our year. Ruth and Rebbecca had overall freckles, long coarse gingery single plaits down to their waists, and a very Old Testament way about them. They smelt of scorched lambswool. As law abiding Brethren they regarded us as sinners. They never said as much but we weren't that stupid. Ruth and Rebecca weren't in it for the books either. They'd volunteered so as to get away from the Heathens. After one Christmas holiday I remember us asking them what presents they'd got. "None," they said, "The Brethren don't believe in that sort of Christmas." Any attempt at real conversation between us pretty much stopped after this. We weren't giving up Christmas for anyone. Mine was pretty lean compared to Christine's but way up there in the lap of luxury compared to the celebrations of the dirgey Brethren girls

I was in the library with my horrible new brown shoes one day and moaned that the leather was rubbing me. Christine, ever the snob, said "they're not leather, they're plastic." I insisted they were leather, took one off to show her the lining but she insisted they were not. When she mocked me with the word 'leatherette' I was furious, and after a rising scale of 'no they are not, yes they are, no they're not' got so mad I tapped her on the head with the offending footwear and limped stompily off one shoe off and the other one on like Diddle Dumpling.