Leave That Sort of Thing to the Frumps, I Say

The young ladies who boarded at St Winifred’s Grammar School for Girls were expected to chip in with various chores. On the final Friday evening of the month, a rota would be posted to the notice board outside the dayroom. This rota outlined who would be responsible for each of the different tasks which needed doing around the building. It was an elderly building and on the verge of falling into disrepair so the rota included not only the usual domestic chores -toilet-cleaning, dish washing, floor scrubbing etc- but also a handful of more niche jobs such as pinning the sagging curtains back up and ensuring the ever growing gaps between the windows and their frames were stuffed with newspaper so the worst of the draughts could not sneak in.

No girl was exempt from the schedule though the house mistresses, Miss Evans and Miss Baker, tended to turn a bit of a blind eye. So long as everything was accomplished, they did not care who accomplished it. Over the years a kind of system had developed. The system seemed to pass by osmosis from one set of girls down to the next. If you didn’t fancy doing chores, you could pay another girl to take your place on the rota. Sometimes pocket money was exchanged. Sometimes the transaction was in kind: an English composition carefully forged in payment for a week avoiding dishes duty, or the lend of a hairband when a girl did not fancy mopping the floors. On other occasions girls exchanged treats from home. By the fifth or sixth week of term, everyone was starving for home-baking. It was not unknown for a girl to volunteer quite willingly, to clean the second floor toilet block, for nothing more than a jam Swiss roll.

Everyone knew about the system. It was not a hierarchical system. That is to say, the scholarship girls were just as likely to offload their duties as the girls who arrived at St Winnifred’s with monogrammed luggage and expensive takes on the standard school shoes. The system existed to provide a buffer for those girls who needed a little breathing room, who every so often could not face scrubbing or cleaning on top of revision or an imminent essay deadline.

The system could not have anticipated Emily DeLargy, who arrived halfway through the second term with two trunks full of elegant dresses and her own bed linen in a separate case. Emily DeLargy was not like the other St Winifred’s girls. She looked ten years older than her fifteen years. She wore her hair in a grown-up style and flounced around with manicured nails. She laughed when she saw her name on the chore rota; laughed like someone had cracked a joke. “I don’t scrub floors,” she said. “leave that sort of thing to the frumps, I say.” To prove a point, she held up her pale white hands with their red lacquered nails and tucked a golden ringlet behind her ears. She turned on her shiny patent heels and glided away.

Emily DeLargy would not buy into the system either. “Why should I pay someone else to clean for me?” she said. “I’m not the sort of person who cleans. That much should be obvious.” As soon as Emily DeLargy voiced this opinion, other girls began to agree. They were also not the sort of people who cleaned. They began refusing to follow the rota. They would not scrub or polish themselves and they wouldn’t use the system to barter their chores. In a fit of pent up frustration, they ripped the rota off the noticeboard and burned it in the dayroom grate. Chaos descended upon St Winifred’s. Nothing was cleaned. Nothing was scrubbed. The pile of dirty dishes sat two foot high in the kitchen sink. The curtains sagged and eventually fell down. The windows let in every draught.

The girls went hungry. The girls grew cold. The girls were not as clean as they had been, for the bathrooms were all filthy and unusable. The girls sat around the dayroom listlessly, too tired and fed up to contemplate books. It did not feel much like progress but Emily DeLargy assured them they were now liberated from domestic drudgery and Emily DeLargy surely knew what she was talking about. Emily DeLargy was not a frump.

Inspired by a line from Agatha Christie’s 1975 novel, Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case