She it was who split up the chopping board to light the fire, the
first morning after her arrival, because she couldn’t find a bundle
of firewood anywhere. On being referred to the stack of dry kindling
wood in the coal shed—she had never heard of lighting fires with trees
before; never thought, indeed, to live with a family that expected you
to do such things!
* * * * *
On one occasion, when I was in one of the largest and poorest of the
London Elementary Schools, where the children looked as pitifully
sordid and poverty-stricken as I have ever seen them, I asked a few
questions of one small girl in the front row of a class. Her outside
dress consisted of an old dilapidated waistcoat worn over a dingy
flannelette nightgown, while a ragged piece of serge fastened around
the waist with a safety-pin did duty for a skirt. But she was only one
among a classful of rags and tatters.
“What is your name?” I asked, by way of starting conversation.
“Victorine,” the forlorn-looking little thing replied.
“And what is your lesson about?” I then inquired.
“Therdelfykorrickul,” she informed me.
Seeing the bewildered look on my face, the head mistress, who was
showing me round, said, “Enunciate your words more carefully,
Victorine, and speak slowly.”
Victorine understood what “speak slowly” meant, and so she said very
deliberately, “The—Delphic—Horricul.”
“So you are learning about the Delphic Oracle. And what are you going
to do when you grow up?” was my next query.
“I’m going to work in the laundry like muvver!”
We went into another classroom; here more ragged unwashed clothes
greeted me on every hand. I had no need to ask the subject of the
lesson, for the girls were facing a blackboard on which was written
“The Characteristics of Shelley’s Poetry.”
After I had seen more tatters in a third room, where a lesson was being
given on “Infinitive Verbs,” I said to the head mistress, “If I had
this school, do you know what I should do? I should take a class at a
time, and give out needles and cotton, and tell them to do the best
they could to sew up the rags in their dresses and their pinafores.
I would not mind if they did not put on patches even to a thread in
the regulation way, so long as they made some attempt to run together
those rents and slits and yawning gaps. I would let the other lessons
go till this was done. And I would not let a girl take her place in a
class in the morning till she had mended as well as she could any rents
she had worn to school.”
The head mistress shook her head. “That would not be practical; you
see, it isn’t in the Syllabus.”
I don’t pretend to understand the inwardness of syllabuses, but I
couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t an opening here for a new one.
While so much unpractical stuff is taught to the poorer classes in
elementary schools, is it any wonder that the children know so little
of the things appertaining to daily life?
Eileen didn’t exactly suffer from rags. She was as neat and patched and
wholesome as her clean, sensible grandmother could make her; but she
was forlorn-looking to the last degree. One of the first things I tried
to do was to get her to take a little pride in her personal appearance.
And it was wonderful how she responded. With her hair released from the
uncompromising, tight screw that had been kept in place by three big
iron-looking hair-pins, and done higher up, and more loosely over the
forehead, and a pretty collar and blue bow for her Sunday blouse, she
looked a different being.
“Poor little thing, she has never had a soul take any interest in how
she looks,” Ursula remarked to me. “And even though we’re not allowed
to cast our bread upon the waters, nowadays, they haven’t said anything
officially about ribbons.” And so we searched our drawers for suitable
finery that might bring a little colour into Eileen’s hitherto drab
outlook. Virginia followed suit, remarking that she liked to scatter
little seeds of kindness by the wayside, since you never know what may
result.
True! She didn’t!
Meanwhile, Eileen gloated over the odds and ends, fixing weird and
crazy-looking bows to her black sailor hat, draping her shoulders with
bits of lace to see if they would make a collar, and standing in front
of the kitchen glass trying the effect of pinks and purples under her
chin.
For a time, the questions ceased.