The Colour of a Street Light

They always gave us our new names on Sunday evenings.

I don’t know how it was where you were. I’ve heard that some centres rotate names every fortnight, or even every month, but Harigale House was always very vigorous about it. I remember working it out when I was in Class 7, when we were all being taught how to multiply big numbers using written method. 52 weeks in a year, and I’d spent four years, three months at the house so far. 220 names.

People looked forwards to Sundays. There’d always be a lot of guessing and hoping about what kind of names people would get. The girls would bet against one another with paper clips and sweet wrappers, swearing that their next name would be of German origin or begin with the letter B, and there was always a real hissing commotion if someone got it right. I don’t know if there was anything like that in your centre, but the girls in mine took it all deadly seriously - one even risked trying to break into the Mistress’ office on a Saturday evening to find next week’s registers, just so she could be sure to win everything in the betting pool. I’m not sure whether she managed it. Probably not.

We got our new names on little plastic cards with safety pins on the back, so we could tack them onto the breast pockets of our dresses. They had to be on the left side, and we could only take them off when we bathed. I expect it was that way at your house, too.

When I was very young, one of the girls in my handwriting class used to note down all of her weekly names in the back of her exercise book, underlining the ones she liked best and embellishing them with little blotted stars. The seating rotation never had us sit next to one another, and for the most part she never took any notice of me, but there was one week where it was different.

I was called Florence at the time, and she was Edith – a name that, everybody knew, made her suck her teeth and scowl. She was seated two rows in front of me, but she kept craning round to shoot little glances my way, her eyes all beady and furrowed. There was a moment where she stopped me in the corridor only to turn around and flounce off again. I couldn’t make sense of it.

Then, at the end of the week, my name card disappeared.

I never figured out that it was her, but I didn’t have to. After I went wailing and sobbing to the nearest matron, they sent every girl in the house back to her dorm and started tearing through nightstands and rifling through the pockets of every dress and blazer in the place. It didn’t take half an hour before they found my name tag, stuffed down the side of Edith’s bedframe.

“I wanted to be Florence again,” was all she told the matrons.

The name she’d been given eight weeks before. The name she’d adorned with stars and spirals in the back of her exercise book.

They sent her away after that.