Brownie

I quite like my Brownie uniform: brown dress, brown beret and yellow cross-over tie. I go on my own now, since my sisters have both progressed up to Guides. Besides, I am now seven, and perfectly capable of making the fifteen minute walk by myself. I’m glad of it. I’m getting tired of my sisters’ practical jokes at my expense; the latest prank requires me to retrieve my beret from the garden of a house on the way to Brownies. It is named “Berry Bank”, so my sister flung my beret over the fence, insisting that’s where berets went: “Berry-beret, berry-beret–– ha! ha!” It is wearisome, and not at all funny, and I’m happy to be walking alone.

There is only one busy road to cross, by the pub: “Look right, look left, look right again, all clear? Quick march!” Having been a Brownie for a year or so, I’m starting to collect triangular proficiency badges: hostess, swimming, safety in the home, thrift. I’m an Elf, which means I have a little embroidered blue fellow doing his best to leap from a badge. The Brownie uniform has recently changed: pockets on the skirt of the dress rather than the chest. My mother has meticulously unpicked the pockets and sewn them on the skirt of my hand-me-down dress. However, the operation is not as successful as she had hoped, lines of stitches and lots of little holes are left behind.  

The church hall has a distinctive smell: part floor polish, part damp and mould.  In winter, the ageing radiators find it difficult to keep up, and it is generally dank and a little chilly. Brownie nights always start with a song and subs: “We’re Brownie Guides, we’re Brownie Guides, we’re here to lend a hand…” We line up to put our threepence worth of coins on the floor in the shape of a letter, skipping along to the song. Tonight I have a threepenny bit, which I place down carefully. Usually, Brownies is a routine mixture of games and songs, but tonight is a fancy dress party, a “Tramps’ Supper”. It is coming up to Bonfire Night, and to celebrate we are having a fancy dress party in which we all dress as tramps: scruffy clothes and scuffed boots, uncombed hair and grubby faces. I am looking forward to the baked potatoes and treacle toffee. 

We all line up, shuffling and giggling; Brown Owl and Snowy Owl are judges, walking up and down to choose the winner and runner-up. My mum has come up with a slightly different take on the tramp theme: she has sewn little patches of material from the rag-bag all over my uniform, just loosely so that they can be easily unpicked later. (And they are.) I am supposed to be a “Brownie Tramp” but that explanation doesn't seem to convince anyone, least of all me. I get blank looks and wrinkled brows. The girl who wins really does look like a tramp: grubby and disheveled, she has glasses and mousy hair, and wears a brown coat, like the grocer’s. In her pocket, she has an old tobacco tin containing several cigarette ends that make me feel a bit queasy. She shuffles about looking cold and hunched. I stand around feeling awkward and out of place, wishing that my mother had been less creative and that I had not gone along with her idea. I wish I looked like all the other little girls, wearing tattered clothes and having a little dirt rubbed in their cheeks. At the end of the evening everything is tidied away, and we join hands in a circle and sing our final song:

Oh Lord, our God

Thy children call

Grant us thy peace

And bless us all

Goodnight, Goodnight.

Afterwards, I wait outside for my dad to pick me up. He’s on time. I close the car door carefully and we drive home in silence. Back home, back in the bedroom I share with my sister, I screw my Brownie uniform into a tight ball before throwing it into the laundry basket. My sister watches, but she doesn’t ask, and I don’t tell.