SCHOOL DAYS
If the child is father of the man, so also is he, or rather is she, the
mother of the woman.—ARCHDEACON BUNTING.
The same change in our family fortunes which made it necessary for us to
give up the old home at Barstoke made it necessary also for my parents
to send me to school. It was only long afterwards that I realized what
bitter heart-burnings this decision caused them, or what anxious
discussions preceded it. To understand their reluctance, you have to
remember that at the time of which I write no privilege of the governing
classes was more tenaciously preserved than their exemption from
education. The same instinct of struggle which bade the poor keep away
from the workhouse bade the rich keep their children from school. My
father in particular had often declared that no child of his should
undergo the degradation of being taught so long as he could break stones
to avoid it. But our case was really desperate; to keep me at home was
almost beyond his means, quite apart from the grant of £200 which, on
condition that I kept all my terms, would be paid to me annually for my
attendance. My mother protested, indeed, that at fifteen I was far too
young to be away from home; but in those days the objection did not
carry the weight it would carry nowadays: you would still see poor
little mites of ten or eleven being packed off to some place of
education, with the knowledge that for eight long weeks they would never
see their dolls and their toy horses again. Those were stern days, but I
sometimes think the discipline was good for our character.
How vividly, especially in childhood, the tragedies we undergo inwardly
print on our minds the recollection of the scenes in which we
experienced them! I must often have travelled by train before, yet this
was the first railway journey of my life which has left me any
recollection of it. It took me but two hours to reach the heart of
Berkshire (for this was in the days when the railway was still used for
quick travel, and the private companies, often in competition with one
another, used to run trains at what we should consider breakneck speed),
but those two hours seemed to me like a Purgatory. And yet, in a calmer
mood, the scenery at which I peered out through the carriage windows
would have seemed beautiful enough. As soon as you passed Maidenhead you
were in the country; the leaves were just beginning to turn with the
autumn along the comfortable, purposeless banks of the full-fed Thames;
to give place, once Twyford was reached, to the burning regiments of
dahlias and early chrysanthemums that fringed Sutton’s seed-grounds.
Only as we slowed down through the smoky suburbs of Didcot did we
slacken speed; and then on again into the Downs, with the spell-stricken
glamour of their mysterious repose. At Challow I crept out, a woe-begone
little figure, on to the platform, and faced the huge effort of daring
which I needed to intercept a porter and ask him to take my luggage
out—a necessary expense, for of course we used to take our own linen
about with us, and our heavy trunks had to be committed to the care of
the guard. The porter was a less formidable character than my fears had
painted him, and when I had paid up my two shillings wished me “Good
afternoon” with the old-world courtesy of the time.
Miss Montrose’s school, for which I was bound, proved to he a pleasant
old Georgian building, standing in a park of its own at the foot of the
Downs. It was difficult to imagine, even then, that this huge barrack of
a place, which had contained some forty rooms even before its
enlargement, had ever been utilized for the needs, and staffed by the
servants, of a single family! It was now some three times its original
size: and yet a school of a hundred girls found it cramped and
uncomfortable enough. I was horrified to find, on my arrival, that I
should have to share a maid with five other girls, and that my bedroom
would be the only sanctum in which I could find privacy. Miss Montrose
herself, a prehistoric old lady who still affected the knitted jumper
and the bobbed hair of fifteen years earlier, greeted me with a slightly
_de haut en bas_ manner—the legacy, I suppose, of the old days of
school-mistressing. She was a fine character, and a few years earlier,
though then nearly sixty years of age, had gone up to Oxford and taken
her degree in book-keeping and dairy-work. It is no small testimony to
her strength of character that she was able to manage a school of a
hundred girls with only fifteen assistant mistresses to help her. Most
of these I found to be pleasant, civil-spoken sort of women, many of
whom had embraced school-mistressing as a vocation, although they might
have gone far in one of the learned professions.
I always distrust people who say they look back to their school days as
the happiest time of their lives: either they must have been
unimaginative women from the first, or retrospect has mellowed for them
the sour realities of memory. For myself, during the earlier part of my
time at any rate, I was profoundly unhappy. Looking back, I think it was
chiefly the irritating restraints which were put upon our liberty that
annoyed me. No girl, for instance, might go up to London more than twice
a term (unless, of course, she was visiting her parents). No girl might
enter the public house in the village. No girl might keep a
motor-bicycle—and so on. The science of education was then in its
infancy, and school authorities did not realize that, in thus fettering
the liberties of their young patronesses, they were unfitting them for
positions of responsibility later on, and causing the gravest
inhibitions in their subconsciousnesses. These regulations were enforced
by a system of punishments which would, nowadays, be condemned as
brutalizing. In proportion to the magnitude of the offence, the offender
used to receive a quarter of an hour’s, or half an hour’s, or an hour’s
“talking to” by Miss Montrose herself. She would make you sit down in a
comfortable chair while she sat opposite you on a stiff one, and so
would lecture you, by the clock, unmercifully. She would point out that
the mistresses, who gave their services in the cause of education for
nothing or next to nothing, ought to be treated with admiration and
respect; that you yourself, since you were taking pay from the country
to learn as much as you could, ought to obey the rules of the
institution which made this possible for you. If it was a case of
insolence towards one of the teachers, she would dwell especially on the
“caddishness” (she was of the old school, and did not mince her words)
of bullying one’s social inferiors. If the worst came to the worst, she
would threaten to report on you as having reached Standard Eight, which
would mean that you would have to leave the school as having finished
your education. I never knew one of my school-fellows get through one of
these interviews without scalding tears. It was not, I believe, till the
fifties that anything was done to curb the severity of such punishments.
The lessons themselves, managed on the old high-and-dry lines, were not
calculated to arouse any enthusiasm in young minds. Oh, the drudgery of
those hours of geography, when we spent our time constructing hills,
valleys, and table-lands out of clay in the garden, or made models of
the railway systems across the lawn: when, perched on separate islands
in the bathing-pool, we had to launch mechanical boats to one another,
freighted with the principal exports of the various countries—it is no
wonder that, with these methods, the science took little hold on our
imaginations! It might win the assent of the brain, but it could find no
lodgment in our hearts. Oh, the dreary mornings we spent in weaving
baskets, or making artificial flowers, or calculating our winnings at
_petits chevaux_ with the mathematical mistress! The truth is, perhaps,
that I was too young for these things, and was all the time having to
conform to the standard of a class intellectually in advance of my own
attainments. My most grateful memories are of the mistress who, four
times a week, drew French out of us: and that, I am afraid, not because
she attracted us, but because it was an understood thing that in those
periods it was safe to “rag” as much as you liked. The lowest French
class was taken by a master, the only man employed on the staff, and him
we spared in deference to his sex; but Mademoiselle Amboise was fair
game for us, and I am afraid the poor woman must have suffered acutely
“Ah, Mademoiselle, que je m’ennuie!” we would say to her from time to
time, and the poor soul would rush to your side to comfort you. She
would carefully teach us the chorus of a song, and then, when she had
sung through a verse of eight lines in her beautiful voice, we would
either have forgotten the words of the refrain, or intentionally murder
the tune of it, and the whole process had to be begun again. Or she
would deliver the whole of the opening soliloquy in some old-world play
of Rostand’s, and then look round for the new characters to come in,
only to find that we had all played truant and run off into the country,
leaving one girl in the seats of the little theatre (Mademoiselle was
very short-sighted) to do the applause all by herself! I remember one
girl affecting to have lost her memory, so as to be unable to speak a
word of French, and our delight when Mademoiselle Amboise, breaking the
strict rule against talking English in French class, burst out, “Ah,
Miss ——, you are little pig!”
But there are more grateful memories, too, of those all-too-rare
half-holiday afternoons (Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, as far as I
remember) when we would make off to the old haystack and smoke there, as
I suppose schoolgirls always have and always will, and talk of what we
would do when we were women: or take car into Didcot for a good
“blow-out” and an evening at the pictures: or the rainy days, when one
“class-room” would invade another, and leave behind it a confused
wreckage of Greek statues, glass cases, and electric light globes. There
were the football matches too: it is hard for me, now, to believe that I
was once a promising half-back! We played the old “Association” game, of
course: as yet very few girls’ schools had taken up Rugby. I suppose I
have never experienced, in a long life, such a protracted thrill of
excitement as when I played, in my third year, in the great match
against Radley, and the fortunes of the game hung in the balance for a
full half-hour. Summer has less poignant athletic memories for me, I
suppose because we still played cricket for the most part, and could do
little to improve our game at tennis with only five covered courts.
When I was going through my dear mother’s things after her death in ’59
I came across a whole bundle of my old school letters in one of her
desks. It was pathetic to see how carefully she had treasured them,
arranged them, tied them up in ribbon of different colours according to
the year they were written in. The old, blue-black ink we used then has
stood the test of time far better than most modern documents will. There
is little about the letters that is of general interest; they are just
an expression of the aims and interests, the hopes and the solicitudes,
of girlhood just turning to womanhood; hopes how buoyantly eager!
Solicitudes how lightly borne! I print one of them here, written towards
the end of my first year at school, in the hope that, if nothing else
about it arrests attention, the prim, stately language of
fifteen-years-old in those days will call for a smile or for a blush,
which you will, from the precocious, slangy young misses of to-day.
BISTON HALL,
CHALLOW.
_June 18, 1931._
DEAR OLD MUM,
_Hope you didn’t think I was dead, not hearing from me all these
three weeks: fact is, I’ve been abso-jolly-lutely full programme
just lately with these theatricals coming on. They are going to be
some effort, I can tell you. All the chaps say the scene where I
come in drunk is like nothing on earth. But I shan’t spoil it for
you beforehand; you are coming down, aren’t you? Don’t bring Dad if
you think the old thing will be shocked; he is so mid-Edwardian
about some things. We beat the London Hospital nurses by nearly an
innings last Saturday: they were feeling frightfully bucked with
themselves, too, when they came down, because they hadn’t lost a
match this season. You should see Woollcombe, our leg-break bowler!
She simply made rings round them. I was top last week in gardening,
which was one in the eye for old Monty, because she’d got her rag
out with me rather, as she said I was wasting my time and the
country’s money—such bilge! Only three more blinking weeks now to
the hol.’s;—oh, I say, could you write to Monty and say it’s very
important I should come home two days early? Because I simply must
go to the Rothwells’. They don’t mind your going home early much,
really, even if it does mean missing one or two of these filthy
exams, which are the limit anyhow. A new music master has just
turned up, with top-hole eyes: remind me to show him you when you
come down. I was wondering if perhaps you could let me have a little
more money? Because there’s two of the chaps I must, simply_ must
_buy birthday presents for, and heaps of incidental expenses, and
it’s a fact I haven’t a five-bob note to bless myself with. But not
if it’s going to mean a row with the old bread-winner. Lots of
love._
_Your own_
OPAL
My holidays were chiefly spent at home, and indeed I could have asked
nothing better. Few families, with our moderate income, can have enjoyed
the proximity of London combined with the neighbourhood of such romantic
scenery. Our house, I have said, faced on the fourth tee; and from the
front windows the view stretched away, uninterrupted except by
occasional bunkers, till on a clear day you could distinguish the flag
on the seventh green. I saw little in those days of my father, who
believed with Hector that home was the proper sphere of woman; for
himself, he was out early and late in all weathers: a business interview
would sometimes take him up to London, otherwise nothing disturbed the
noiseless tenor of his daily habits. If there was a championship match
on, we would hear all about it in the evening; for the rest, we knew
that he did not care to be cross-questioned about the little incidents
of the day. Yet, for all his silence, there was no mistaking the fire of
the enthusiast burning in his eye. Nothing could daunt his tireless
energy, though he was already a man of over fifty. I can still picture
him as he was then, a fine, upstanding figure in his wide, loose
knickerbockers and a coat that seemed full of extra seams and double
linings; a trifle portly, yet carrying himself with a sort of natural
swing. We have all too few of his type nowadays!
If my father was a type of manliness, my mother seemed and seems to me a
perfect type of womanliness. The hundred little domestic duties of the
day—in those days, the mistress of the house would order the dinner, go
through the books, supervise the work of the servants, and altogether
behave as a sort of unpaid agent—would occupy her till eleven or
half-past eleven in the morning: only then would she put her season
ticket in her reticule and set out for the mystery of the shops and the
repose of her club. If an exhibition, a call, or a matinée was likely to
detain her, she would leave word that she was not to be expected back
till after tea, and the routine of the household would proceed as usual
in her absence. She never came back from these expeditions without a
catalogue for me, an evening paper for my father—some little token to
assure us that her thoughts had been with us during the hours of
enforced separation. Alas, how old age makes us realize the little
return we made in youth for the loving solicitude of our parents! I
often used to see little or nothing of her for a week, since my doctor
wisely insisted that I should always have breakfast in bed after a
dance. And dance I did, I am afraid, almost every night, if only to
compensate myself for the early hours and rigorous discipline of the
school, where half-past ten saw us at work every morning, and, on whole
school days, preparation would not be over till half-past six. I was, I
think I may say, a good dancer; not that I ever had much ear for music
or sense of rhythm, but my athletic, I had almost said, my acrobatic,
gifts stood me in good stead. I will not attempt to recall, so
old-fashioned do they seem nowadays, the movements that were popular
when I was a girl. What has become of you all now, my partners in those
distant Georgian drawing-rooms? If you still live, do you still remember
as I remember the measures we trod, then so riotous-seeming? The
Monkey-grip, the Kansas scramble, the “Mind your foot, honey,” the
Snake-glide, the Anyhow-slither, the Buzz, the Rattle-snake Fight, the
Darkies’ Stagger, and all the rest of them?
When I remember all the friends so linked together
I’ve seen around me fall like leaves in wintry weather,
I feel like one that treads alone some banquet hall deserted.
—or does nothing really desert us, except our dreams?
But what is this? I am becoming sentimental. Let me return to the grim
shades of my prison, the dull days of school routine. I had an open,
sunny temperament, and made friendship easily; some, as I suppose is
usual at that age, seemed at the time as if they could end only with
life. And yet, how little effect really our school friendships have on
us! Ten years after we have left, we meet the bosom friends of girlhood
as strangers. Some of them, of course, have married: and with them, try
as they may to conceal it, it is hard not to feel that their husbands
have just a suspicion of jealousy against their wives’ woman friends.
But even with the others,
Through what climes they’ve ranged, how much they’ve changed!
Time, place, and pursuits assist
In transforming them—
perhaps, after all, it is best so: for neither our critical faculties
nor our sense of humour are at their best in those early years. My chief
crony was a wild, devil-may-care Irish girl whom we called “Squint”
Hennessy, who led me into plenty of scrapes and more than once brought
me under the threat of “Standard Eight.” One of these escapades cost me,
I think, the most anxious night of my life.
Our religious needs, when we had any, were served by a little old
village church a mile or two away, at Goosey. How well I remember the
atmosphere of the Sunday evening service there, the smell of Sunday
clothes and old books and old, dusty hassocks; the painstaking
harmonium, waking up like an old gentleman from a nap when we sang
_Glory be_ at the end of the Psalms, the clatter of the bell-ringers as
they filed up into church at the beginning of service! It was an old
church, and is still visited by tourists, I believe, for the sake of
some really fine 1850 stained glass. But it will have changed with time:
in those days it had more the appearance we should associate with a
Catholic Church now—the seats, for example, were all on the same level,
and the pulpit was fixed, close to one of the side walls; the sermons
were delivered by word of mouth; the old, sonorous English of Cranmer
was still droned out almost in its entirety, with something of a
ceremonial effect; the congregation knelt for the prayers, or at least
sat apologetically, head buried in hands. We did not, I need hardly say,
appreciate this atmosphere at the time, and seldom went near the
place—compulsory attendance was only inflicted as a punishment on those
who had an unusually dark record of rule-breaking during the week. But
quite recently the Diocesan Board of Finance (the Reading diocese was
always a go-ahead one) had introduced the system by which, while town
congregations contributed to an offertory at the end of the service,
country congregations, as being attracted to Church with more
difficulty, received a slight honorarium instead, in return for their
attendance. “Those that were strong,” as the Archbishop of York said,
“ought to bear the infirmities of those that were weak.” Late on in the
term, when our pocket-money was mostly exhausted, a fair sprinkling of
Biston Hall girls would be in their places to secure the coveted
sixpence after the sermon.
It was on such an occasion that Squint Hennessy and I were making our
way back from Church on a summer evening, feeling particularly good
after a stirring address from the curate, a favourite of ours. At peace
with the world, we each lit a “Woodbine” to light us and cheer us on our
way home. By ill-luck Miss Mersham, the numismatics mistress, met us
half-way, and threatened to report us if we did not put out our
cigarettes immediately. Squint was at the top of her form that evening:
“report if you like, Golly,” she said, “but we’ll make you repent of it
if you do.” Miss Mersham was ill-advised enough to lay information
against us, and each of us had a quarter of an hour’s “talking to”:
special emphasis was laid, I remember, on the crime of setting a bad
example to our mistresses. We wept floods of tears, and for the next
three days did everything to make the informant’s life intolerable to
her. We brought frogs into class, put lamp-black on to her duster,
squirted her with water-pistols—in a word, we behaved as high-spirited
girls will behave when they are smarting under a sense of injustice.
Finally, I remember, we put a large bust of Artemis in her bed. The next
day she seemed curiously silent, and when we came out of preparation at
half-past six the terrible rumour went round—Miss Mersham had run away!
It was a memorable night when the whole school wandered over the Downs,
till nearly two in the morning, searching for the truant mistress.
Squint and I in particular were inconsolable; our action had been merely
thoughtless, and neither of us had really felt vindictive: it terrified
us to think that our victim was now running the risk of expulsion as the
result of our heedless behaviour. She was, in the end, caught by a
porter at Swindon, and sent back to Biston Hall; and we all cheered
lustily when Miss Montrose announced her intention, after considering
the circumstances carefully, of retaining her on the staff. She became
one of our most popular mistresses, and did so well that, three years
later, she was enabled to leave the profession altogether.
I do not know what became of Squint: some of my other friends I have
managed to keep up with, at least by correspondence. “Fatty” Macdonald
became manager of a bank in Sheffield; Tulip Hawkesley went on to the
stage as Yvette Dombrowski; Wynefryde Banks married well and went into
her father-in-law’s business; Jane Palliser, our star goal-keeper, was
later captain of a P. & O. “liner.” But no one fulfilled her early
promise like Juliet Savage, once well-known as the editress of the
_Spectator_ in the fifties. It was with me that she undertook her first
journalistic venture, the _Bilston Hall Rocket_, which ran into four
numbers and attracted a good deal of attention among our fellow-pupils.
I have still the old copies by me; the List of Contents from a single
issue will give some idea of its character:
THE BISTON HALL ROCKET
(AND CHALLOW CHRONICLE, GOOSEY GOSPELLER, ETC., ETC.,
ETC.)
CONTENTS
Page
Lines written in Prep. 1
My old Kentucky Girl (Poem), by E.W. 2
The Adventure of Bloodgush Grange (_continued_) 2
How to get Marks, by One who knows 4
Golly and the Gondola (Anonymous) 5
Spanking Sarah, the Cow-girl of Arizona, by P. F. 5
Football Notes, by Half-back 7
The Pool of Solitude (Poem), by F. F. W. 10
Things we don’t half want to know, by the Editress 10
Blue-face, my Squaw (Song), by R. E. H. 11
Paris at Night, by Wanderer 11
Go, lovely Montrose (Parody), Anonymous 13
The Great Bilston Hall Film 13
How I mean to spend the Hol’s, by Naughty Nan 15
Correspondence 15
Puzzles 16
We wrote the paper merely for fun, and as a way of getting our own back
against some of the mistresses who had been unlucky enough to offend us.
Judge of our surprise, both Juliet Savage’s and my own, when we were
told that the literary promise we displayed had been judged so
considerable as to induce the School Governors to send up copies of the
_Rocket_ as a “thesis” for the St. Lucy’s Hall scholarships!
Scholarships were awarded to both of us; and I was now in the happy
position of being able to spend four years at Oxford, while contributing
a clear £200 a year to the support of my parents. I left Bilston Hall in
the summer of 1934, not with much regret: I had had happy times there,
but I ached for more liberty and a wider sphere of activity, and I felt
that I had been greatly misunderstood there. I have never seen it since.