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Fic: Play Up and Play the Game (Charley)
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classicdw_fic entry, xposting here because one of my New Year's Resolutions is to be better about having my fic all in one place.
Title: Play Up And Play The Game
Author: Doyle
Character/s: Charley, Margaret Pollard
Pairing: none
Rating: G
Prompt: Prompt was for an audio companion before they met the Doctor.
Recipient:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
castrovalva9
Word count: 1815
Disclaimer: Doctor Who belongs to the BBC, the Pollards belong to Big Finish.
Author's notes: It’d be remiss to write a 1920s boarding school story without tipping my hat to Angela Brazil.
Summary: Very few people understand 12-year-old Charley Pollard, her older sister least of all.
“You can sit there.” Margaret pointed at a desk in the middle of the classroom, and frowned when her sister plumped for a window seat instead. In any other junior girl that would have been rank cheekiness and deserving of a ticking-off, but she struggled with this sort of thing when it came to Charley. Little sisters could wreak their revenge in the summer holidays; in any case, Charley was eminently unsquashable. Even at eighteen years old, Margaret knew that if she were to be hauled up before the headmistress, unthinkable an event as that was, she would in be pieces before she could knock on the door. Her sister, six years younger, had faced down the dragon in her lair four times in three terms and never seemed the least shaken by the experience. A small part of Margaret admired that.
“Have you brought paper and pencils? You’ll have to run and get them if Miss Whitby hasn’t left any.”
Charley lifted the lid of her desk and produced the implements with a condescending flourish. “That’s why I wanted this seat. I have done this before, Peggy.”
The worst thing she could do, she knew, was rise to the childhood name. “I know you’ve done this before,” she said, Head Girl sternness in her voice, sister or no sister. “You must have been kept in more times than everyone else in your form put together. Honestly, Charlotte, anyone would think you get in trouble deliberately.”
“Oh, that’s just silly,” she said, sounding so wounded that only the stone-hearted, or a member of her family, or the headmistress, would have doubted her for an instant. “It’s rotten luck being stuck indoors while everyone’s out there in the stands, cheering on the First Eleven.” She looked out of the window as a handful of fat raindrops spattered against the glass. “In here, copying out poetry, while you’re all having a marvellous time in the rain and the freezing mud…”
“Just get on with it,” Margaret said sourly, annoyed by that contented little smile Charley was trying to hide. The most important match of the year – the one she’d been gearing her team towards all season – and Charley not only didn’t care, she was actually pleased to be in detention instead. There were times when Margaret didn’t think they could be related at all.
She had been starting the fifth form and, to her own mind, quite grown-up when Charley had joined the school – not Head Girl yet, but already Captain of Games, and confident that her sister just needed a term at the school to buck her ideas up. She’d settle down and use the sharp mind she obviously possessed for prep and exams, not made-up games and elaborate fantasies; she’d get onto the first form lacrosse and hockey teams, the necessary first step to one day inheriting her sister’s captaincy; she’d make friends, nice girls her own age, who’d invite her to their houses in the holidays and, in time, provide access to their eligible older brothers.
Nothing had happened as she’d expected. Charley was popular in her form, as generous, naughty girls tended to be in the junior school, but her only particular friend was a girl called Patricia, whom Charley had singled out as her best friend because, she said, she wasn’t frightened of spiders and was good at climbing trees and had lived in Ceylon. Patricia had no eligible brothers. She was an only child, a state Margaret sometimes looked upon with a secret, guilty envy.
The mistresses hadn’t warmed to Charley as much as her peers. Her end of term reports were their mother’s self-professed comedic highlights of the year. Visiting her in the San after she’d fallen through the potting shed roof – she never had come up with a convincing reason for why she’d thought the groundskeeper might be a German spy – Margaret had overheard Matron suggest darkly that the girl might be some satanic agent sent in judgement on them. Family loyalty notwithstanding, she could see her point.
Most inexplicably of all, Charley wasn’t interested in games. Not playing them, not watching them, when even the very worst duffers could pass a happy Saturday afternoon in any weather shouting themselves hoarse on the stands. It was unheard of. It was downright unEnglish. Margaret felt she only really came alive when she had a hockey stick in her hand, but Charley had refused to put her name down for anything, even the summer tennis friendlies. “Of course you won’t be much good to begin with,” Margaret had told her, “but you’ll get better if you work hard at it – you could come out with me before breakfast, I’ll help.”
And it wasn’t as though she’d expected Charley to fall over herself with gratitude – though any of the other first-formers would, if offered personal coaching by the Head of Games – but her sister had given her such a look, as if Margaret couldn’t help herself and was more to be pitied than mocked. Bewildered, hurt, she had never raised the subject again.
“You’ll be late for your match,” Charley observed, finishing off her first page and moving to the next with a sigh that said that all human suffering couldn’t compare to the tedium of copying Tennyson. “It’s quite safe to leave. I’m not going to run off the moment your back’s turned.”
“I don’t have to get changed until half past,” Margaret said, sitting at the next desk; at least three feet away, but close enough for Charley to sigh to herself again, as if she was being penned in by sisters on all sides. It was rare seeing her like this, bent over a school-book and quiet, and Margaret wondered what would happen next year, when she had left school and Sissy had joined it, whether being the older sister instead of the younger would make a difference to Charley. “Charley,” she said.
“If I ever meet Alfred Lord Tennyson I’m going to tell him that in a hundred years time the only really famous poets are ones who write limericks. He does go on.”
“Charley, I was wondering whether you ever thought about the future. Because you’re about that age when you should be thinking about these things – whether you want to go to university, or if you’ll want Mother to arrange your coming out…”
“I’m going to be an explorer,” Charley said, the answer she’d been giving since she was three and had worked out that the spinning ball in their father’s study was the world, and that she lived on it. “I’m going to go everywhere – India and Africa and the Far East and the Americas and heaps of other places. I want to see Mount Everest and jungles and the Pyramids…”
“I wish you’d be sensible,” Margaret broke in, earning herself the glare she’d known was coming.
“I shall dedicate the first edition of my travel memoirs to you,” Charley said grandly, setting her pencil to paper as if she intended to start writing them at once. “’To my sister Peggy…”
“Margaret!”
“’Who is always sensible, and very good at hockey.’”
“You needn’t sneer at me,” she said, stung, terrified that tears were going to come into her eyes. This was exactly why she didn’t talk to Charley much, because she’d worked so hard at making herself Margaret, someone who was good at lessons and games and liked by the other girls and the mistresses, someone known as solid, level-headed, reliable, and her sister could casually slice through all that to awkward, shy Peggy, who had never done much of note and probably never would. Margaret would have kept her temper and gone to change; it was Peggy who lashed out. “It’s all stories, anyway,” she said. “You’re never going to go anywhere – perhaps Venice for your honeymoon, or a cruise when you’re sixty, the ordinary things, but not these grand adventures you keep planning because eventually you’ll have to grow up, Charlotte!”
Her sister stared at her, wide-eyed and lost for words, possibly for the first time in her life.
“Well. I mustn’t be late,” Margaret said, almost in her normal voice, though she could feel the colour flushing her cheeks. “You’re to stay here until you’ve finished – I’m sure you know better than I do how much you’re supposed to write.”
“All right, Margaret,” she said, gingerly picking her up her pencil. “And once I’m finished, if the match hasn’t finished, I should… come down to the pitch?”
Head Girls didn’t slam doors, but she closed it very pointedly.
**
“If you were planning on roaming the grounds you should have told one of the servants to bring an umbrella for you.”
Margaret looked up at her mother, peering at her from underneath a huge, black umbrella that was indeed being held aloft by one of the footmen. He stared straight ahead, quite as though he wasn’t getting soaked through. It had started raining during the service, she knew, because she’d let the noise drown out the bishop’s eulogy; inadequate words spoken over an empty coffin.
Lady Louisa gestured at the footman, who brought a handkerchief from his pocket, mopped the water from the bench, and held the umbrella at a suitable height for her to sit beside her daughter.
“Sissy’s still carrying on,” she said, by which Margaret understood that her youngest sister – her only sister, now – was crying again.
“She’s just sad, Mother.”
“Yes, well.” Her mother drew herself up, hands folded properly on her knees, and Margaret thought how much older she looked. “It’s a sad time,” she said.
“I suppose Sissy will have to go back to school next week. I could drive her down, if she’d like.”
“Yes. If it’s convenient.”
It would have been announced at assembly, if things hadn’t changed since her schoolgirl days. Every so often there had been hushed announcements of girls’ mothers, fathers, brothers dying – and Charley was an old girl, that would only add to the awful glamour of the thing. She could almost hear them whispering in corners. I remember her, of course, I was in first form when she was in fifth… always getting into trouble… stowed away aboard an airship, she used to say she was going to travel the world…
“Charley came down to see me play hockey once,” Margaret said, wrapping her arms around herself as if against the cold.
“Doesn’t sound like Charley’s idea of fun.”
“It was in sixth form,” she said. “One of the last matches I played. She’d been in detention, but she saw the last ten minutes. She must have run all the way from the school.”
Her mother asked, distantly, “And did you win?”
The rain trickled down her neck and face and she wondered if she was ever going to cry. “I can’t remember,” she said. “It wasn’t really important.”
classicdw_fic entry, xposting here because one of my New Year's Resolutions is to be better about having my fic all in one place.Title: Play Up And Play The Game
Author: Doyle
Character/s: Charley, Margaret Pollard
Pairing: none
Rating: G
Prompt: Prompt was for an audio companion before they met the Doctor.
Recipient:
castrovalva9Word count: 1815
Disclaimer: Doctor Who belongs to the BBC, the Pollards belong to Big Finish.
Author's notes: It’d be remiss to write a 1920s boarding school story without tipping my hat to Angela Brazil.
Summary: Very few people understand 12-year-old Charley Pollard, her older sister least of all.
“You can sit there.” Margaret pointed at a desk in the middle of the classroom, and frowned when her sister plumped for a window seat instead. In any other junior girl that would have been rank cheekiness and deserving of a ticking-off, but she struggled with this sort of thing when it came to Charley. Little sisters could wreak their revenge in the summer holidays; in any case, Charley was eminently unsquashable. Even at eighteen years old, Margaret knew that if she were to be hauled up before the headmistress, unthinkable an event as that was, she would in be pieces before she could knock on the door. Her sister, six years younger, had faced down the dragon in her lair four times in three terms and never seemed the least shaken by the experience. A small part of Margaret admired that.
“Have you brought paper and pencils? You’ll have to run and get them if Miss Whitby hasn’t left any.”
Charley lifted the lid of her desk and produced the implements with a condescending flourish. “That’s why I wanted this seat. I have done this before, Peggy.”
The worst thing she could do, she knew, was rise to the childhood name. “I know you’ve done this before,” she said, Head Girl sternness in her voice, sister or no sister. “You must have been kept in more times than everyone else in your form put together. Honestly, Charlotte, anyone would think you get in trouble deliberately.”
“Oh, that’s just silly,” she said, sounding so wounded that only the stone-hearted, or a member of her family, or the headmistress, would have doubted her for an instant. “It’s rotten luck being stuck indoors while everyone’s out there in the stands, cheering on the First Eleven.” She looked out of the window as a handful of fat raindrops spattered against the glass. “In here, copying out poetry, while you’re all having a marvellous time in the rain and the freezing mud…”
“Just get on with it,” Margaret said sourly, annoyed by that contented little smile Charley was trying to hide. The most important match of the year – the one she’d been gearing her team towards all season – and Charley not only didn’t care, she was actually pleased to be in detention instead. There were times when Margaret didn’t think they could be related at all.
She had been starting the fifth form and, to her own mind, quite grown-up when Charley had joined the school – not Head Girl yet, but already Captain of Games, and confident that her sister just needed a term at the school to buck her ideas up. She’d settle down and use the sharp mind she obviously possessed for prep and exams, not made-up games and elaborate fantasies; she’d get onto the first form lacrosse and hockey teams, the necessary first step to one day inheriting her sister’s captaincy; she’d make friends, nice girls her own age, who’d invite her to their houses in the holidays and, in time, provide access to their eligible older brothers.
Nothing had happened as she’d expected. Charley was popular in her form, as generous, naughty girls tended to be in the junior school, but her only particular friend was a girl called Patricia, whom Charley had singled out as her best friend because, she said, she wasn’t frightened of spiders and was good at climbing trees and had lived in Ceylon. Patricia had no eligible brothers. She was an only child, a state Margaret sometimes looked upon with a secret, guilty envy.
The mistresses hadn’t warmed to Charley as much as her peers. Her end of term reports were their mother’s self-professed comedic highlights of the year. Visiting her in the San after she’d fallen through the potting shed roof – she never had come up with a convincing reason for why she’d thought the groundskeeper might be a German spy – Margaret had overheard Matron suggest darkly that the girl might be some satanic agent sent in judgement on them. Family loyalty notwithstanding, she could see her point.
Most inexplicably of all, Charley wasn’t interested in games. Not playing them, not watching them, when even the very worst duffers could pass a happy Saturday afternoon in any weather shouting themselves hoarse on the stands. It was unheard of. It was downright unEnglish. Margaret felt she only really came alive when she had a hockey stick in her hand, but Charley had refused to put her name down for anything, even the summer tennis friendlies. “Of course you won’t be much good to begin with,” Margaret had told her, “but you’ll get better if you work hard at it – you could come out with me before breakfast, I’ll help.”
And it wasn’t as though she’d expected Charley to fall over herself with gratitude – though any of the other first-formers would, if offered personal coaching by the Head of Games – but her sister had given her such a look, as if Margaret couldn’t help herself and was more to be pitied than mocked. Bewildered, hurt, she had never raised the subject again.
“You’ll be late for your match,” Charley observed, finishing off her first page and moving to the next with a sigh that said that all human suffering couldn’t compare to the tedium of copying Tennyson. “It’s quite safe to leave. I’m not going to run off the moment your back’s turned.”
“I don’t have to get changed until half past,” Margaret said, sitting at the next desk; at least three feet away, but close enough for Charley to sigh to herself again, as if she was being penned in by sisters on all sides. It was rare seeing her like this, bent over a school-book and quiet, and Margaret wondered what would happen next year, when she had left school and Sissy had joined it, whether being the older sister instead of the younger would make a difference to Charley. “Charley,” she said.
“If I ever meet Alfred Lord Tennyson I’m going to tell him that in a hundred years time the only really famous poets are ones who write limericks. He does go on.”
“Charley, I was wondering whether you ever thought about the future. Because you’re about that age when you should be thinking about these things – whether you want to go to university, or if you’ll want Mother to arrange your coming out…”
“I’m going to be an explorer,” Charley said, the answer she’d been giving since she was three and had worked out that the spinning ball in their father’s study was the world, and that she lived on it. “I’m going to go everywhere – India and Africa and the Far East and the Americas and heaps of other places. I want to see Mount Everest and jungles and the Pyramids…”
“I wish you’d be sensible,” Margaret broke in, earning herself the glare she’d known was coming.
“I shall dedicate the first edition of my travel memoirs to you,” Charley said grandly, setting her pencil to paper as if she intended to start writing them at once. “’To my sister Peggy…”
“Margaret!”
“’Who is always sensible, and very good at hockey.’”
“You needn’t sneer at me,” she said, stung, terrified that tears were going to come into her eyes. This was exactly why she didn’t talk to Charley much, because she’d worked so hard at making herself Margaret, someone who was good at lessons and games and liked by the other girls and the mistresses, someone known as solid, level-headed, reliable, and her sister could casually slice through all that to awkward, shy Peggy, who had never done much of note and probably never would. Margaret would have kept her temper and gone to change; it was Peggy who lashed out. “It’s all stories, anyway,” she said. “You’re never going to go anywhere – perhaps Venice for your honeymoon, or a cruise when you’re sixty, the ordinary things, but not these grand adventures you keep planning because eventually you’ll have to grow up, Charlotte!”
Her sister stared at her, wide-eyed and lost for words, possibly for the first time in her life.
“Well. I mustn’t be late,” Margaret said, almost in her normal voice, though she could feel the colour flushing her cheeks. “You’re to stay here until you’ve finished – I’m sure you know better than I do how much you’re supposed to write.”
“All right, Margaret,” she said, gingerly picking her up her pencil. “And once I’m finished, if the match hasn’t finished, I should… come down to the pitch?”
Head Girls didn’t slam doors, but she closed it very pointedly.
**
“If you were planning on roaming the grounds you should have told one of the servants to bring an umbrella for you.”
Margaret looked up at her mother, peering at her from underneath a huge, black umbrella that was indeed being held aloft by one of the footmen. He stared straight ahead, quite as though he wasn’t getting soaked through. It had started raining during the service, she knew, because she’d let the noise drown out the bishop’s eulogy; inadequate words spoken over an empty coffin.
Lady Louisa gestured at the footman, who brought a handkerchief from his pocket, mopped the water from the bench, and held the umbrella at a suitable height for her to sit beside her daughter.
“Sissy’s still carrying on,” she said, by which Margaret understood that her youngest sister – her only sister, now – was crying again.
“She’s just sad, Mother.”
“Yes, well.” Her mother drew herself up, hands folded properly on her knees, and Margaret thought how much older she looked. “It’s a sad time,” she said.
“I suppose Sissy will have to go back to school next week. I could drive her down, if she’d like.”
“Yes. If it’s convenient.”
It would have been announced at assembly, if things hadn’t changed since her schoolgirl days. Every so often there had been hushed announcements of girls’ mothers, fathers, brothers dying – and Charley was an old girl, that would only add to the awful glamour of the thing. She could almost hear them whispering in corners. I remember her, of course, I was in first form when she was in fifth… always getting into trouble… stowed away aboard an airship, she used to say she was going to travel the world…
“Charley came down to see me play hockey once,” Margaret said, wrapping her arms around herself as if against the cold.
“Doesn’t sound like Charley’s idea of fun.”
“It was in sixth form,” she said. “One of the last matches I played. She’d been in detention, but she saw the last ten minutes. She must have run all the way from the school.”
Her mother asked, distantly, “And did you win?”
The rain trickled down her neck and face and she wondered if she was ever going to cry. “I can’t remember,” she said. “It wasn’t really important.”