by Alis Hawkins
‘Undoubtedly.’ Miss Gwatkyn’s whole face changed when she smiled, took ten years off her. I was no great shakes at guessing ladies’ ages but I thought she must be in her middle thirties, at least. Generally, her face had quite a serious cast, as if she was considering everything you said very carefully, but her smile lit her up. She must’ve been very pretty when she was younger and didn’t have the millstone of managing an estate around her neck.
The tea arrived on a big tray. I got the impression that the maid who brought it – a tall, handsome kind of girl – wasn’t the one who’d usually bring tea up because Miss Gwatkyn said, ‘Oh, Susan! Thank you,’ as if the maid had done her a favour. Perhaps the butler thought we needed impressing.
Susan gave her mistress a warm smile. Wouldn’t let me catch her eye, mind. One of the disadvantages of being seen as a gentleman. Maids behaved as if you were floating six feet above their heads, not treading the same floor as them.
‘May I ask where Mr Rowland’s body is lying?’ Harry asked after Susan had left. It was as good a way as any of reminding Miss Gwatkyn that this wasn’t exactly a social call.
‘In the old hall.’ She dipped the sugar tongs into my tea to let the sugar go without a splash. ‘The carpenter’s already taken measurements for the coffin.’
I wondered if Harry was thinking of his father, who’d been laid out in his dressing room. If he was, he gave no sign of it. Apart from thanking Miss Gwatkyn for her condolences two minutes before, he hadn’t mentioned his father once since the funeral. Not once.
‘Miss Gwatkyn,’ he said, ‘without wishing to pre-judge the outcome of the inquest, between ourselves, it seems that Mr Rowland’s death may not have been an accident.’
Miss Gwatkyn’s eyes didn’t leave the spoon she was stirring her tea with. It wasn’t a surprise to her, I could see. Somebody’d brought her that news already. ‘May I ask how you reached that conclusion?’
Harry didn’t reply straight away but she wasn’t going to be put off. ‘Please don’t try to spare me, Mr Probert-Lloyd. It’s entirely unnecessary, I assure you.’
I watched Harry’s face. Poor dab, his upbringing was getting in the way again. Living in London, Harry’d moved in circles that believed that women were the equal of men. Not in working strength, I don’t mean that. But as far as intelligence and ability to reason were concerned.
It wasn’t something he talked about a lot but I’d asked him to explain it to me, once, and the floodgates’d opened, as if he’d just been waiting for a chance to convert me to his way of thinking. Chapter and verse, I’d got, about how society kept women back, treated them like children. He’d quoted writers I’d never heard of. Mary Wollstonecraft. Jeremy Bentham. William Godwin. And he wanted to believe it, I could tell. No, to be fair, I think he did believe it. Trouble was, his upbringing had given him different ideas entirely. Been brought up to see ladies as delicate, tender flowers who’re easily bruised, hadn’t he? I’d watch him having to slap those attitudes down, like a man with a dog he’s been too soft with.
But he’d been getting a lot more practice recently. I’d had to read Lydia Howell’s letters to him. The two of them had been writing back and forth every week or so for months. Ever since we’d met her when we went to Ipswich in search of her brother, Nathaniel. Of course, after Miss Howell had turned up at Glanteifi unannounced and they’d decided that she was going to come and work for him, the letters’d got even more frequent. Not to mention more personal. Nothing improper, I don’t mean that. Nothing I’d even blushed to read to him. There were just a lot of opinions expressed and, presumably, Harry’d done the same in his. Mind, Miss Howell must’ve had the devil’s own job to read Harry’s scrawl. I’d seen what he could produce with the sight he had left and it wasn’t what any teacher would’ve approved of, even when he was taking his time. Goodness knows what it was like when he was hurrying to keep up with his thoughts.
I half-listened while Harry took Miss Gwatkyn at her word and gave her a decent summary of what Reckitt had concluded but the other half of my brain couldn’t leave the subject of Lydia Howell alone. What did she think she was going to do as Harry’s private secretary? I could see that, with me out and about with Mr Ormiston, he needed somebody to help him with paperwork and so on, but why couldn’t he call on Mrs Griffiths, the housekeeper? She’d known Harry since he was a baby and there was nothing she wouldn’t do for him. But no. After Lydia Howell’s flying visit at the end of January, it’d all been decided. She was going to come and live at Glanteifi and work for Harry. Just like that.
Well, whatever it was she thought she was going to do, we’d all see soon enough. Harry was just waiting for a letter to say she was on her way.
While Harry finished explaining Benton Reckitt’s theory about Mr Rowland being smothered, I kept my eyes on Miss Gwatkyn. She was giving nothing away. No ‘oh my goodness’ or fingers to the lips for her. Just sat waiting for the next thing.
Harry put his teacup down. ‘Is there anybody you can think of,’ he asked, ‘who might have wanted to harm Mr Rowland?’
Miss Gwatkyn gave the question some thought. She was another one in the Lydia Howell mould. Used to being in charge. But Phoebe Gwatkyn was eccentric with it. You could tell that by what she was wearing. She might have a perfectly respectable gown on but, over the top of it, she was wearing a long, dark blue, woollen tunic with a full skirt. It had deep red and yellow edging around the open part at the top, and hoops of red and yellow at the bottom of the skirt which came down to just below her knees. It looked outlandish. And the boots she was wearing were just as odd. They were made out of animal hide with the hair still on. Made her look as if, from the waist down, she might be some kind of mythical creature under her clothes.
‘Nicholas – that is to say, Mr Rowland – was well liked in the village,’ she told Harry. ‘You’ll have gathered that much already. The only person in Llanddewi Brefi who’s likely to speak ill of him is the other teacher, Mattie Hughes.’
Mattie Hughes. Enoch’s Old Mattie.
‘Do you think he’ll take over the school, with Mr Rowland gone?’ I asked.
She hesitated. ‘I don’t think so. There are others, now, who might do that.’
‘The assistant teachers Rowland had been training?’ Harry suggested.
‘Yes. The plan was for them to take over later this year anyway, after the summer, so that Nicholas could devote more time to the establishment of the new school.’
That was the second time a new school’d been mentioned and, this time, Harry didn’t let it go.
‘Can you tell us about this plan for another school, Miss Gwatkyn?’
She smiled and stood up in her little, furry boots. ‘I think, if we’re going to start down that long and torturous road, we shall need more tea.’
We drank another two cups of tea, each, and heard the tale of Nicholas Rowland which, as it happened, wasn’t so different from Harry’s story. Like Harry, Rowland had left Cardiganshire for London to make his fortune. Only, where Harry had become a barrister by way of the university at Oxford, Rowland had ended up teaching at London’s new University College.
‘Then,’ said Miss Gwatkyn, ‘came 1847 and the Report.’
The Report. Or, to give it its official title, the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales. Just hearing Miss Gwatkyn mention it made my jaw clench and my stomach knot up.
Was that why Nicholas Rowland had come here, I wondered, to prove that the commissioners were wrong? Or had he come because he’d been afraid they were right?
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Unless you lived in Wales at that time, a government enquiry probably wouldn’t have been of much interest to you, so to understand the treachery of that 1847 report, you need to know how it came to be written in the first place.
Because of all the unrest on the continent – there was always a revolution brewing somewhere or another from Italy to Prussia – the authorities were constantly terrifi
ed of the same thing happening in Britain. Especially with the Chartists and their petitions for radical change. The government was afraid of sedition – saw it everywhere, whether it was really there or not, and nowhere more worryingly than here, in Wales.
To be fair, they had a point. Twenty years ago we’d had the Merthyr rising, with the miners defying Crawshay and running riot through the town. Then we’d had the Chartists in an armed stand-off with the military in Newport. And, most recently, there’d been the scandal of Welsh farmers defying the authorities night after night for the better part of a year and a half as they went out to destroy tollgates and intimidate people they didn’t approve of – in other words, the rebellion known as the Rebecca Riots. Why, the government wanted to know, had our previously docile farmers rebelled like that? And how had they been able to organise themselves so effectively?
And the harder the government looked, the more clearly they saw two things. Our language – which, as far as the English are concerned, we only speak to annoy them – and our chapels. Chapels that encourage dangerous thinking like all men being equal in the sight of God. Chapels which run Sunday schools to teach people to read and which have ministers who might take it into their heads to encourage folk to read things other than the Bible. Newspapers, for instance. Some of which are in our own annoying language and speak to people about their own lives, their own country, which, until then, they’d barely separated in their minds from England.
The government wasn’t in favour of that kind of education. Not at all. So they sent in commissioners of enquiry to take a long, hard look at every school in Wales. Three church-going, landowning English gentlemen who didn’t have a word of Welsh between them, were authorised to sit in judgement on how poor, chapel-going Welsh people with little or no English scratched a bit of an education for their children.
I don’t know what they expected to find. Lines of children chanting, ‘Down with the Queen and her English ministers’, perhaps, or, ‘The church of England is the antichrist’.
But, of course, that wasn’t what they found. What they discovered was a system – if you can call it a system – of schools that popped up with the seasons in all kinds of unsuitable buildings. With teachers who sometimes had little more in the way of learning than the children they were supposed to be teaching. A system run by chapels and churches, charitable ladies, dedicated men and desperate paupers. Fair play, some of the schools were praised but, according to the commissioners, the vast majority were a disgrace.
The trouble was, those three Anglican gentlemen didn’t come in with an open mind about education. No. They were looking for something quite specific: scriptural knowledge and children who could rhyme off the church’s catechism – that, according to them, being the main point of the poor going to school. What they found were schools in which, nine times out of ten, the pupils’ grasp on any of that was weak. And that was putting it kindly.
The reports from each county were more or less alike in the way they condemned pupils’ lack of understanding of basic Christian doctrine. But it wasn’t the children’s fault, was it? If those commissioners’d bothered to spend five minutes with two chapel ministers from different denominations, they’d have heard two pretty different versions of what Christianity was, so how children were supposed to get to grips with it all was beyond me. I suppose children in England just learn the vicar’s catechism by rote and parrot it back as required. Well, if that’s understanding, I’d rather have our ignorance.
But it wasn’t only religious knowledge that the commissioners found fault with. They complained that children couldn’t do simple sums, couldn’t say how many pence they’d have to pay if this was priced at x pence and that at y. Well, the poor children must’ve been baffled to be asked! They didn’t think they were going to school to learn to count and neither did their parents. School was for reading and, if you were lucky, a bit of writing.
Worst of all was the commissioners’ attitude to our language. They decided that speaking Welsh was holding the whole nation back. Worse, it was encouraging backward thinking and immorality. Because, even though they were only supposed to be reporting on education, the commissioners had decided that it was their right to comment on our morals and conduct, too.
According to their report, our mothers were women of low morals who passed on their sinful ways of thinking to their children through our mother tongue and, until our language was replaced by English and our ways amended by education in a proper, decent language, we’d never prosper and Wales would be a festering sore on the western edge of Her Majesty’s dominions.
Well, all right, they didn’t exactly say that, but it’s what they meant.
We welcomed those commissioners into our schools and told them everything they wanted to know. Then they twisted our words and lied about us.
Treacherous bastards.
I unclenched my fists and tried to concentrate on what Miss Gwatkyn was saying.
‘When Nicholas read the commissioners’ report, he felt compelled to act and he decided to set up his own school to show what could be achieved.’
‘But what was it that brought him here, to Llanddewi Brefi?’ Harry asked. ‘This wasn’t his family home, I understand?’
Miss Gwatkyn got up to feed the fire. ‘No. He came here because of Lampeter and St David’s College.’
I watched her picking balls of culm out of the copper scuttle with a big set of tongs. That wouldn’t have happened at Glanteifi. If Harry or I lifted a finger to feed the fire or light a lamp, the servants took it as a criticism of them. Alltybela’s servants were on a different footing, seemingly.
‘Did you know that the college was originally supposed to be here, in Llanddewi Brefi?’
Harry shook his head. ‘No.’
Miss Gwatkyn sat down again. She looked like a pixie in her woollen tunic and heathen boots.
‘There’s a very long tradition of scholarship in Llanddewi,’ she said, ‘stretching all the way back to St David and beyond. There was a centre of learning here for almost a thousand years until the vandals of the Reformation destroyed it. So, when Bishop Burgess decided to set up a university college in Wales, Llanddewi was the obvious place.’
‘What changed his mind?’ Harry asked.
‘Money. Or land, which comes to the same thing. The bishop was offered a prime plot in Lampeter.’
‘So they got the college and prospered, and Llanddewi Brefi stayed a backwater?’ I said. We’d ridden through Lampeter on the way to Tregaron and if ever I saw a town on the up-and-up, that was it. Lots of big, new houses, thriving shops, streets full of well-dressed people, building going on pretty much wherever you looked.
‘That’s the difference a college like St David’s makes to a place,’ Miss Gwatkyn said. ‘Lampeter’s usurped Llanddewi as Wales’s seat of learning.’
‘And Mr Rowland wanted to reinstate it?’ Harry said.
Miss Gwatkyn hesitated and blinked rapidly several times. But, if she was fighting back tears, it didn’t show in her voice. ‘To some extent, yes. But not with any kind of university. Nicholas’s vision was for a collegiate school combining elementary and grammar education. He wanted students with the necessary aptitude to be able to progress from one to the other entirely on merit rather than on the basis of whether their parents were able to pay.’
‘A school funded by endowment, then?’
‘Precisely.’
‘And who was going to endow it?’
Miss Gwatkyn sighed. ‘Initially, things seemed promising. Nicholas had letters of introduction to some of the county’s more influential families and his vision did capture a few imaginations.’ Her eyes moved from Harry to me, as if she was looking for understanding. ‘A different man might have waited until he had sufficient backing to build his school, but not Nicholas Rowland. He was determined to begin teaching immediately. He felt that if he could make his mark as a teacher, even in the least promising circumstances, he might more easily find patrons.’
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‘The least promising circumstances being the cowshed schoolroom, I assume,’ Harry said. ‘You gave him the byre, I gather?’
‘Yes. It was all he asked for. I hadn’t intended him to live there, too, but he said it suited him.’ She turned away from us to look into the fire. ‘I don’t imagine he thought he would still be there more than three years later.’
Three winters living in that draughty loft, with only the stove downstairs between him and freezing to death. The place’d been chilly enough yesterday, in the spring sunshine. I didn’t want to think what it must’ve been like in January.
‘The initial enthusiasm for his project came to nothing, then?’ Harry suggested.
Miss Gwatkyn didn’t reply for so long that I thought she wasn’t going to give him an answer. But I was wrong.
‘When it became clear that there was support for his collegiate school proposals,’ she said, as carefully as if she was picking her way, barefoot, through thistles, ‘an alternative scheme suddenly emerged. A National School, here in Llanddewi.’
‘A National School,’ Harry repeated. ‘It was a church scheme, then?’
‘Yes.’ It sounded like a truth Miss Gwatkyn regretted having to tell. ‘Instigated by Mr Tobias Hildon.’ She waited for Harry to say something but he kept quiet and I followed his lead so she had to go on without help. ‘Enthusiasm for Nicholas’s college immediately fell away,’ she said. ‘Many gentlemen who had previously offered their support felt that it was their duty to support a church school once it had been mooted.’
‘Couldn’t Mr Rowland have joined in the effort for a National School?’ I asked. ‘Or wasn’t he allowed to, as a Unitarian?’