100a Sally Arnold

July 1972

‘You know Sally Arnold, don’t you?’ said Keith Mowbray, a fellow apprentice at Collingwood, the dockyard training centre on Khyber Road.

Sitting at a work bench, I looked up from my work. ‘No’

‘Yeah, you do. You pushed her down some stairs.’

Suddenly I felt uneasy. A year or so older than me, Keith was one of several long haired, leather jacketed youths at Collingwood and I feared this was a prelude to something nasty. When I told him, truthfully, that I’d never heard of Sally Arnold, he leaned back against the short wooden partition that divided my section from the next, and told me something that had my head spinning.

Sally Arnold was Keith’s girlfriend. Whilst waiting for Keith at the gate the previous afternoon, she’d spotted me. Alarmingly, she’d then identified me to Keith as the boy who pushed her down some steps when we were kids. ‘She’s still got the scar to prove it,’ said Keith. ‘And she’s never forgotten it was you that did it.’

The accusation gnawed at me for the rest of the day and all the way home. Sally Arnold, Sally Arnold, Sally Arnold… I knew loads of people in Twydall and many more besides by sight or name, but that name meant nothing to me. A girl with a scar? Where, on her face? A pretty blonde came to mind, a girl that occasionally caught the same bus to Twydall as me, at the depot, in my Upbury Manor days. A Napier girl possibly, perhaps a bit younger than me. She might have had a small mark on her face but a scar?

A breakthrough came that evening when, after hours of soul searching, I recalled an incident at the infants that occurred after the class had been dismissed for playtime. A young boy on a sunlit staircase, I was a straggler at the back. After taking eight, possibly nine steps down to a small landing, a sharp right and right again put me on a second flight of steps to the ground floor.

Spring/Summer 1962.

I was surprised when Miss Thorpe sent me from the classroom to see Miss Winter the headmistress. Though I wasn’t too familiar with the school’s main entrance, I knew Miss Winter’s office was up there somewhere and I strolled up the main corridor, untroubled. I liked Miss Winter, a nice lady with a big smiling face.

Some adults were waiting when I reached the carpeted reception area, Miss Winter amongst them, only she wasn’t smiling. The moment she saw me, she flew at me.

Before I knew it I was in her grip and dancing on my tiptoes. ‘You wicked boy!’ she raged, as the first of many slaps stung the back of my bare legs.

‘You bad, bad boy!’

Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap!

The grown ups looked on in sombre silence as I yelped and sobbed from an attack that was as shocking as it was brutal. Miss Winter was still fuming when she let me go. I must have done something really, really bad but whatever it was, I did not know; nor would I, until I was seventeen.

Other than me, the only people on that staircase at that time were two girls, possibly in summer frocks and cardigans, a little way ahead. We were halfway down those steps when suddenly and without warning, a fourth person charged down the staircase and barged me in the back, sending me crashing into the girls. The culprit, a fair haired boy, didn’t break stride as he bolted down the stairs and shot through the exit door to the playground. Momentarily shaken, I composed myself and went on my way, paying little attention the girls, who ended up on their hands and knees in the hallway. Could one of those girls have been Sally Arnold?

Slowly but surely, things started dropping into place; at the speed the incident happened the girls probably didn’t see the other kid but they must have seen me.  Even if they didn’t know my name, they’d have known me as the new kid; everyone knows the new kid. And if Sally’s injury was damaging enough to leave her scarred, then it explained the severity of the hiding I got from Miss Winter. It also gave a possible reason as to why my teacher paid a highly unusual visit to see my mother. I’d wondered about that too.

Though I recounted the sorry tale to Keith, there was no feedback. Within days we’d been assigned to the dockyard, where we got swallowed up among thousands of workers. I never saw Keith again and though I entertained a hope that I might get a chance to talk to Sally in person one day, the possibility ended for good when I returned home to Lancashire in 1975. Frustratingly, that’s where this story ends. Sally, wherever you are, I hope you’re well and good.