Too Marvellous for Words by Julie Welch

Author:Julie Welch [Welch, Julie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

15

JONAH

Jonah used to slide down the banisters at Cranmer. Well, that story could easily be apocryphal but I’ve heard it from so many sources, and it’s such a delightful image, that where’s the harm in putting it out there?

Jonah – Miss Ruth M. Jones – was born in 1906, and grew up on a farm in Llandindrod Wells, where she helped with the calving. She went to the local grammar school and from there to the University of Wales, where she gained a first-class mathematics degree. It was an era when hardly any girls went to university, let alone did degrees in Maths. She’d also had her arm up a cow’s bottom, so you can see she was unfazed by life’s challenges. She was special, a legend, a complete one-off. Any girl at Felixstowe whose surname was Jones had to become double-barrelled, i.e. Something-Jones, because there was only one Jones at Felixstowe College.

The first time I clapped eyes on her was at an Open Day in 1961, the summer before I joined the college. We prospective pupils were given tea in the giant L-shaped classroom to the side of the library, and I can see her now, surveying us with her back to the windows, lit by a shaft of June sunlight. The head at my previous school had been a forbidding old trout known as Coalhole. Coalhole had a deep, well-modulated voice, all the better to rumble, ‘Julia, I am accustomed to people being alert in my lessons,’ in her Scripture class. Jonah, in contrast, looked sort of ho-ho jolly. That may have been a trick of the light.

She had very fine, greying fair hair styled in a sort of pudding bowl ’do, but with a kiss curl held in place by a surprisingly girlish slide. She had always been on the roly-poly side and, by the time I joined the school in 1961, she was absolutely monumental, but I swear she possessed a superpower. She could teleport herself. One minute I’d have my head over my exercise book, writing a scurrilous satire about various staff members, complete with cartoons, and the next the offending object would be tucked between her arm and considerable bosom and I’d have days of that sudden-sinking-of-the-stomach, sweat-trickling-down-my-armpits wait for my name to appear on The Jonah List.

I’ve told you what her study in Cranmer was like, with that oriel window. It offered the most breathtaking, panoramic view of the sea. Huge container ships would inch past, so close you wanted to wave at the people inside, but as I was usually in there to be given a row that would have just meant more trouble.

Jonah joined the school in 1931, to teach Maths; it was her third teaching post. By this time, in need of extra accommodation for junior girls, the school had bought Maybush House, up the road from Cranmer. The house came with an exciting backstory; it was said to have been an inn at one point, and the haunt of smugglers.

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