“Under the bram bush,” the two girls sang in the playground. They faced each other, clapping their hands in unison, Celia Burkett mirroring her new friend. “Under the bram bush, under the sea boom boom boom, true love for you, my darling, true love for me, when we get married, we’ll raise a family, so under the bram bush, under the sea, sexy.” When they said the word ‘sexy’, as well as lifting their eyebrows, they raised their skirts high up with exaggerated gestures, flashing their navy knickers.

Celia’s pleated skirt was in a popular sort of green tartan, setting off the lime green of her headband which did its best to restrain the flyaway bob. Her friend’s was a pleated grey school skirt, though uniform was optional at Lewis Lane primary school.  The playground was full of girls’ games until the doors to the dinner hall flew open and the first of the boys swooped out of Second Sitting, stuffed with spotted dick.

They blasted out in formation like the Red Arrows from the nearby RAF base at Kemble, which always caused the children to stop their play and gaze upwards. They knew all the planes; sometimes a VC10, or the king of them all, Concorde (or Concorrrrde as was said in these parts), breaking the sound barrier as it left RAF Fairford. But, today, eyes were cast about the playground, sensing a different sort of shattering. 

It was the two Janes. Celia thought the Janes would nudge up like cows behind her, as was their habit, but today it was the turn of another child, a boy with a blazer round his shoulders. They trailed him, giggling and chanting in broad Gloucestershire:

Ole Farmer Buck he brought him a duck,

 An’ he cut off her feet coz her walked in the muck. 

An’ when her wouldn’t go for to roost like a crow,

Why did he go and act thicky way?

Coz he were a fool an’ a gurt big fool.

Coz he were a fool us all do say.

The boy ignored them and the two Janes recited it again, only instead of ‘cut off her feet’ they substituted it with ‘cut off his arms’. Celia hadn’t noticed the boy before, he was not in her class.  When he turned round she saw he had a crew cut, sort of gold, the colour of dolls’ hair. One of the Janes snapped her bubblegum –the stout Jane with the wavy hair and insolent stare. “Hey, your mamma took something that shrivelled up your arms,” she said to the boy, strands of pink splattered about her mouth. Celia looked the boy over, she hadn’t noticed. She’d thought his arm was broken or in a sling, but there were little hands like paddles up at shoulder level, peeping out from the black depths of his blazer.  “She took something when you were a baby in her tummy,” continued the stout Jane, “and that’s why you can’t swing from them monkey bars.”

Celia saw the boy’s ears go pink as the blotting paper on the desks in the classroom, the rest of his face following suit. His face was shaking, like when you hold your breath too long or before you have a fit. Like that girl in her sister’s geography class who had suddenly fallen off her chair and started wriggling around all over the floor and all the furniture had to be moved out of the way until the wriggling subsided, so Abby had said. It was frightening, Abby said; and now fit prevention was uppermost in Celia’s mind.  That and the knowledge of how it felt to be on the receiving end of the two Janes’ antics. Like the way they imitated her short Lancashire ‘A’s when she said ‘bath’ and ‘past’, and so she stomped over to the other Jane, Jane Gillespie, with the strawberry blonde plait. “Leave him! Leave him alone!”

It was probably the bravest thing she’d ever done in the playground, but instead of thanking her, the boy screwed up his nose and blew her a big raspberry, louder than a fart. The two Janes laughed. The boy laughed. The dinner lady wandered by, too late as always, holding the hand of one of the first years. 

Celia felt a little tricked, her eyes smarting with humiliation as she retreated to her new friend, Vicky Hawthorne. She smelt faintly of her father’s dental clinic, the whiff of pink mouthwash lingering in her topknot. “Take no notice,” said Vicky, against the giggles and whispers.

As they passed from the main playground into the privacy of the girls’ playground, where boys weren’t allowed, Celia said: “But why, Vicky?”

“Because you’re the new girl.”

“No, not me. That boy.”

“Because he’s a Thalidomide, Celia. You’ve heard of that, haven’t you? It’s that drug expecting mothers took that did things to their babies.”

“But why didn’t he say anything to them?”

“Flipping heck, Celia. He couldn’t duff them up, could he? If they were boys he might have kicked them like a donkey or got one of his big brothers to do them in.”

Vicky looked down into the sparkle of her black patent-leather shoes with the bars across. “They’re always teasing, the Janes.  They tease you, Celia, because you’re the new girl, but wait till next year when they’ll be new girls too. We’ll all be new girls when we go to secondary school.”