too smart by half, young Janet,’ Betty said, but she smiled back at her daughter and hoped the journey wouldn’t be too jerky, for she was feeling incredibly nauseous.
She knew she wouldn’t be able to keep her pregnancy a secret much longer. Only the previous evening she’d seen Bert looking at her quizzically as she undressed. She’d tell them this weekend, she decided. After all, Janet would be over the first hurdle, and it would give them something else to think about besides her results.
‘We’re here, Mom,’ Janet said suddenly. ‘This is it.’
The exam room was meant to be intimidating, with its rows and rows of single desks, and Janet was glad Miss Wentworth had warned her that it would be like that. She had to walk nearly up to the end row, because her name came late in the alphabet. She stared at the other children and they stared back, and Janet knew they were as frightened as she was.
Just before she went into the room, Betty had pressed a package into her hand.
‘A lucky shamrock,’ she said. ‘Gran had it specially sent from Ireland to bring you luck today.’
Janet wondered if she’d be allowed to have her lucky shamrock on the table with her, and then she saw that most of the children had something: a teddy, a small horseshoe, a rabbit’s foot. Her shamrock sat at the side of the desk in its little box, and reminded Janet that her grandparents were rooting for her too.
She didn’t find the papers that hard. Miss Wentworth had done her work well. She’d obtained old English, maths and intelligence papers and they’d worked through them at her house. Now Janet finished those in front of her with ease. Then she looked at all the other children and was assailed by doubts. She’d made a complete mess of the tests! She must have or she wouldn’t have finished in the time allotted. English was the only paper she needed more time for, and that was only because she overran on the essay.
As Janet suffered inside the examination room, Betty suffered outside it. At one point she felt she had to get out of the soulless corridor in which all the parents were waiting and had gone to look around the city shops. She seldom had a chance to visit Birmingham centre now with the demands of her family. She soon realised she wasn’t taking anything in and was constantly looking at her watch, willing it to be time to collect her daughter. Eventually, she forced herself to drink a cup of coffee, but it was a struggle, for her stomach was churning more than ever.
It’s not the end of the world if she doesn’t pass, she told herself. It’s only an examination, and she’s only a child. They shouldn’t be under such pressure. But she knew that for Janet it would be the end of the world, and she sent a silent prayer up to the God she still believed in and asked His help for her daughter.
On the way home on the bus, because she felt peculiarly drained and was a bag of nerves because of the strain of it all, Janet didn’t speak much and answered questions as briefly as possible. What Betty wanted to say was ‘How did it go?’ but she looked at Janet’s white, drawn face as she came out of the examination room and didn’t dare. She told Bert she thought it had gone badly, and everyone kept off the subject so that Janet would not be upset.
Janet thought it odd that no one mentioned the exam. It was just as if she’d not sat it at all. They don’t think I’ve passed, she thought, and her own confidence began to ebb away. She went to Miss Wentworth’s on Sunday afternoons now, as well as on Saturday afternoons and Wednesday evenings. Sometimes she wondered why she bothered, or why Miss Wentworth still wanted to coach her.
When the Christmas cards began arriving, Janet was in a fever of anxiety. When at last the long, thin brown envelope dropped on to the mat, she picked it up with trembling fingers and handed it to Betty.
‘I can’t open it,’ she said.
Betty took the envelope and tore it open. ‘Oh my God!’ she cried, her eyes bright with unshed tears of disbelief. ‘You’ve passed, lass, you’ve bloody well passed.’
Bert took his family out for a meal to celebrate, and after that began to talk at work about his clever lass who’d soon be going to grammar school. In vain did Janet tell him that this was just the first step, and that she had another exam to pass. In Bert’s opinion, the result of the second exam was a foregone conclusion.
Many of the men at the factory expressed doubts as to the value of educating a girl. ‘Boy or girl,’ Bert told them, ‘makes no difference. If they have the brains, they should have the opportunity, I say.’
‘It’s as if he was never against it in the first place,’ Janet told Miss Wentworth, ‘and he’s so proud of me, it’s embarrassing.’
Miss Wentworth smiled. ‘Your mother won him over then. She was determined she would.’
‘I’ll say.’
It was a Wednesday evening towards the end of January, and Janet’s last lesson before the final exam the following Saturday. It was bitterly cold and the roads were thick with ice. They’d finished work and were having a cup of cocoa and buttered crumpets before Janet set off home. Janet, who was sitting on the rug before the fire, stretched out her legs contentedly and said suddenly:
‘I shall miss coming here.’
‘I should miss it too,’ said Claire Wentworth, ‘if you stopped. But why would you?’
‘What would be the point?’ Janet said. ‘I mean, the exam’s on Saturday.’
‘That just proves you have the intelligence to get into grammar school,’ said Claire. ‘My next job is to make you able to cope with it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, my dear girl, that we will then embark on a course of improvement,’ Claire said. ‘We will visit the art gallery in Birmingham and learn a little of the lives of the artists; the natural history and science museums, where we will learn many interesting facts. We will take some of the classics from the library and read and discuss them. I will explain a couple of Shakespeare’s plays to you so that you will understand more when you go to grammar school, and we will examine the rudiments of Latin.’
‘Why Latin?’
‘Because you may need it,’ Miss Wentworth said. ‘It is the basis of language, for one thing, and you need it to get into many universities.’
‘You think I’ll go to university?’ Janet asked incredulously.
‘Janet, you’re not eleven years old yet. Who knows what you’ll achieve, or where you’ll end up? We must cover all the options. And when you go to grammar school, I want you to go on equal terms, not as a scholarship girl to be pitied.’
Years later, Janet would realise how wise Claire Wentworth had been. Now, she was just thankful that her visits to her teacher’s small terraced house in Erdington weren’t coming to an abrupt halt.
The second part of the eleven-plus had to be taken at Whytecliff School, because that was Janet’s first choice. As the school was in Sutton Coldfield, outside Birmingham’s boundaries, Janet and Betty had to go on the Midland Red bus, not on one of Birmingham’s yellow and blue ones. Janet had never been on one before, nor had she ever been into the small town of Sutton Coldfield itself. The bus took them along Eachelhurst Road and down the side of Pype Hayes Park, lined with prefabs, a legacy from the war. It was just past the park’s perimeter and over the Birmingham border. This was the furthest Janet had ever been from her home. She looked out at the large detached houses, set well back from the road, with long front gardens and drives that disappeared behind privet hedges. ‘Think of the cost of all the coal you’d need to heat one of those places,’ Betty whispered, seeing Janet’s concentrated gaze.
‘I think if you were that rich you wouldn’t have to worry about the price of coal,’ Janet whispered back. She wondered if any girls from the houses they were passing would be sitting the second part of the exam with her that day, but there were no girls of Janet’s age at the bus stops; in fact, more often than not, nobody was at the bus stops and the