by Bryher;
“‘tis not a life,
‘Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away.”
On Tuesday I went to Queenwood.
NINE
The bomb crashed. We were lying on the floor. The walls of the room seemed to rush towards us. Small objects fell from the tops of the cupboards. “If this is the end, it is not as bad as school,” flashed through my mind. Unexpectedly the walls stopped moving. The foundations rocked slowly backwards and forwards till they settled. We got up, choking with dust, but alive.
The house had held although there was a large crater underneath the windows but I knew now what my last thoughts would have been. I had neither seen my life flash past in a second nor recollected friends nor happiness. What I had remembered was Queenwood.
School for me was a violation of the spirit.
The scarlet geraniums on that May morning shone in the sun. I knew as I passed them that a part of myself would be dead before evening and there is something even in the most adventurous among us that shrinks from so final a change. Time seemed to move and at the same instant to stand still. I was never to be the same person again and I was looking back at what had been an intense spiritual experience through an ever less transparent veil. I walked through the school gates as into an enemy town. Nothing remained to me but courage.
I had hardly entered Queenwood before I was hustled out once more to march two by two in my first “crocodile” as far as the Town Hall. It was May 6, 1910, the date of the proclamation of George the Fifth as King, another landmark if I had had the wits that morning to think of my mistress, Clio. The vacant space in front of the building was entirely filled with children, standing by schools in separate groups. I could hear only a confused murmur of words, I remember nothing of the pageantry and this is what happens, I suspect, to most of us on such occasions. The end of an age may be a clear-cut symbol to the scholar but the people themselves are absorbed by their own affairs: they may notice a face but it is rationing, the call up or higher taxes that teach them history, not their having been part of a crowd at a given moment in a certain place.
It is hard to make people understand what I felt like during the next weeks because mine must have been a somewhat isolated experience. I had lived most of my life outside England and I had never had friends of my own age. Now I was flung into a crowded boarding school to sink or swim alone. I kicked and spluttered in an agony of bewilderment and very nearly sank. Nobody gave me any explanations; it was a perfect preparation for Freud. The experience could have driven me to insanity or suicide and it was as crippling for a time as a paralytic stroke. I did not recover from it until after a long psychoanalysis and I survived only because I was tough, I am a poet, even a visionary, but I am not an intellectual type. Had I been some sensitive misfit, I should have gone crazy during the first month. The more I learn about the mind, the more surprised I am that, hardy as I was, I survived the first shock.
I made no secret of my determination to become an artist. It was as natural as breathing and it never occurred to me to conceal it. Mistresses and pupils alike roared with laughter. I am thankful now for their mockery, it drove me to learn my craft the hard but sound way, alone. The world said I was too young to study art. Too young! It was the whole of my desire. I knew that my powers of reasoning were mature, something flamed in me that was perhaps the spirit and because of this I understood that years of technical training were necessary before I could draw. Yet I was too much of an Elizabethan to wait. They might take my pencils away but they could not stop me thinking. Perhaps if I wrote a book I should be free.
There were eighty boarders and a few day girls at Queenwood and we ranged in age from nine to seventeen. We were too few in number to be considered a public school in the English sense of that term but we conformed to the system, with the disadvantage that as we were all in one house, we were under strict and continuous supervision.
The training was harsh but it had two advantages, in view of our unsuspected future of wars and financial disaster. We were hardened physically and they stressed the fact that we were all equal links in the unit, Queenwood, and that the aim of life was service.
The hardening process was simple and efficient. Windows were kept open throughout the damp, English winters, there were abundant drafts, we were not allowed a fire in the classrooms unless the temperature fell below sixty Fahrenheit and then the ones in front roasted while the back row shivered. I do not think we had even heard of central heating. A favorite trick was to fill small medicine bottles with hot water and keep them in our pockets to warm numb fingers. The rain might fall in torrents, there might be a raging gale but we were either sent to the playing fields or for a walk across the bleak, exposed Downs. “I cannot think why we did not all die of pneumonia,” a mistress said to me long afterwards but somehow we survived although we often had colds. Thoughtful mothers stitched strips of flannel inside our uniforms and we wore thick underwear and black woolen stockings. It was particularly hard on the girls who had been born in India. If we went to the drawing room on some special occasion we collected the cushions to pile outside in the hall because we were not allowed to sit upon anything soft.
Of course we hated the discomfort but afterwards, when the wars came and we had to wait in queues for our rations, it was almost a familiar experience. One day, holidays—or peace—would come again, and in the meantime we stuffed our shoes with newspaper and if we got wet through shrugged our shoulders and did not expect to die of pleurisy. It had happened so often before chasing a ball on the hockey field or trying to stand upright against a nor’easter on the cliffs.
It is true that we came roughly from the same social group but while some parents were wealthy, others were officials whose meager salaries were barely sufficient to pay the year’s fees. It did not matter. We all wore uniforms, so that there could be no competition as to clothes and, to within a few pence, we had the same pocket money. I have never lived in so classless a society before or since.
A bell woke us in the mornings, a second one sent us to our knees where we stayed until released by a third bell, live minutes afterwards. We had breakfast, made our beds and were drilled; no time was allotted to the needs of nature; it was a standing joke that Authority supposed us to be without digestions. Classes started at nine and continued till one, with a short break at eleven. After lunch there was hockey in the winter, cricket and tennis in the summer or a walk. The team took precedence; Authority considered that it was healthier and morally superior to be better at games than lessons, (I think now that this was right within reasonable limits. What is the use of erudition without health?) Little attempt was made, however, to teach us to play correctly; we were shoved onto a field and ordered to run. I used to wonder if sport were so sacred an institution that instruction in it was irreverent. Tea was at four, there was preparation till supper, then the younger girls went to bed. The over-fourteens had various duties, there were missionary lectures or, bribed with cakes, we met to speak French or German. The bell sounded at nine to summon us to our dormitories. There was no leisure for outside interests or hobbies, I was lucky if I got a quarter of an hour once in a while to read a book. This routine continued throughout the year for three terms, each lasting about thirteen weeks.
The weekdays were dull but they were joyful compared with Sundays. We were allowed to get up half an hour later and after breakfast and one of Miss Chudleigh’s famous talks about our sins during the week, there was compulsory letter writing home until it was time to go to church. Lunch followed our return. Afterwards there was an hour’s silent reading of a good book, a Bible class, tea, and compulsory hymn singing until we went to evening church. We had supper as soon as we got back but were then sent immediately to bed. What all this had to do with religion in any real sense it is hard to imagine.
Queenwood could boast one virtue rare among English schools. The food was simple but while we were pupils the quality was good and it was well cooked. I heard afterwards that the standards d
eteriorated during the first war and that the meals became as tasteless as in other institutions. This was not the case when I was there.
My verdict upon the intellectual standards at Queenwood used to be pitiless but now I am less sure. The very few who went on to a university had to spend an additional year elsewhere preparing for the entrance examinations but it was the usual custom at that time. We forget that in 1910 the battle for the equal education of men and women was far from being won. Many parents objected to intensive training of the mind and if we spoke wistfully about jobs we were sharply reproved and told that we must not take the bread out of a poor girl’s mouth. Yet one of the babies of the school, Martita Hunt, became famous as an actress on both sides of the Atlantic, the writers included Sylva Norman and Nellie Kirkham, there was Doris Banfield who created a number of new daffodils, Dorothy Pilley whose name is well-known in mountaineering circles for her climbing books and her ascents in the Far East and the Alps, and Dorothy Townshend who was a pioneer in the psychological treatment of children and the author of an excellent study on the education of girls in France. After we had left some of the subsequent pupils wrote best sellers. With such a record, can our education have been as bad as I then thought? I simply do not know.
It would be unfair to judge the school by my own particular case. I arrived there completely lopsided. My brain was mature as far as literature and history were concerned but I had the emotional development of a boy of nine. My two years at Queenwood were an intellectual disaster but it would have been the same anywhere else. I was not a model pupil, far from it, my marks were seldom above average for my age group. First of all, I had never been taught to prepare neat answers, then my mind raced along much faster than my hands so that although I knew the details perfectly well I often forgot to write them down and I was apt to plunge into the intricacies of chain mail when all that was required was the simple date of Hastings. Still, I could read French as easily as English, I knew a fair amount of German and I am afraid that thanks to Henty and the wide reading to which he had led me, I knew more about history than my teachers. I was a day girl in the Fourth Form my first term. In September I became a boarder and moved up to the Fifth; the following year I was in the Sixth. It was lucky for me that I did not belong to the next generation. I should then have ended in some class for the maladjusted because I was totally unable to add up figures and might have hated learning for the rest of my life.
It was a simple place. Nobody expected us to be trained for either marriage or a career. What we were grounded in was virtue and though we may not have been glamorous, we were tough, and came through “the revolution of the forties” with honor.
My first exploit was to present our Headmistress, Miss Chudleigh, in perfect good faith a plan for the reorganization of the dining room. At breakfast and supper two girls were sent in turn from each of the tables to fetch the food from a hatch. They crowded haphazardly together so that there were long waits and the meals got cold. I worked out a scheme whereby we could have been served in rotation in about a minute.
Miss Chudleigh received my piece of foolscap in amazement. She read it and remarked with reasonable gentleness that service was more important than organization. Oh no, I replied, I could not agree, I had no objection to taking my turn with the others but what I wanted was efficiency. If she would try my suggestions, she would find that they would help us all.
I was genuinely surprised when she sent me back to my schoolmates.
There were many other difficulties. First of all, there was the strange language. I had never heard slang before and, as I had seldom read a school story, I had never even seen the terms “funny old fish” or “bags I this seat” in a book. Often I literally did not know what they meant. It helped me to understand the feeling of those savages who were trapped and dragged aboard a pinnace by Elizabethan sailors but this was not very useful in ordinary life. There was also the question as to what I was called. I had grown up under a variety of nicknames to which I still answered when at home. I thought that my real name was Winifred but I was not sure, and it seemed silly to ask.
Compulsory games were dull after fencing or riding across deserts. Still, although bewildered, I was not unresourceful. How could the Games Mistress watch everywhere at once?
Queenwood was built in a saucer of land below the Downs. The hockey fields were outside the walls but this was summer and the tennis courts were beneath the school in what would otherwise have been a lawn. They ended on one side in a tangle of bushes and long grass. A ball flew into this shrubbery and I scrambled after it, another new girl as unhappy as myself followed on all fours. We crept most carefully into a place where the Games Mistress could not see us and moaned in unison, “School is horrible.” My companion was perhaps the youngest child there and I was among the oldest but already, as the Elizabethans would have said, she was “all fire.” Was she as beautiful then as she is now? I think it came later, created by her own inner gifts. All that I remember is hair tied back tightly into our regulation black ribbon knot, the white flannel shirt with our red and black school tie and a quivering, indignant face. “What are you going to do when you grow up?” she asked me passionately as I ducked to avoid my head showing over a bush. “I want to go to sea,” I think I answered, it was a moment when I saw no future but only a daily battle with both school and home. “I am going to be a great actress,” she declared and looking at her, I never for a moment doubted it although I wondered what obstacles her family would put in her path. Fate was kind and ultimately she had her wish. It was Martita Hunt.
Does some natural instinct lie behind the separation of age groups? I arrived at Queenwood free from prejudice but a taboo that I never questioned was the one that divided the Upper from the Lower School. This division swept Martita and myself apart and we seldom had an opportunity of talking together afterwards. I know now that I ought to have sought her out, she found the environment even more cramping than I did, but though it was my first encounter with genius, I was too immersed in my own misery to profit from it.
I remember very little of those first three months. The major incidents of childhood have never faded from my mind but at Queenwood I dropped into a trance in which I felt nothing, realized nothing, cared for nothing, a form of Lethe in reverse. “Everybody is unhappy the first term,” people said. It did not help that this was often true. It is easier now to understand from a distance of years that it was not calculated cruelty but the custom of the age that the objective of the school was to break a pupil’s spirit. I had never heard of the unconscious mind and I had to work every step of my rebellion out for myself. It was part of the Game if you wish. I had asked to be tough since babyhood and I was getting my desire. Only two things sustained me and they were neither love nor fear. I remembered the Athenians in the quarry at Syracuse and Sir Richard Burton’s expeditions to the “black tents.”
Halfway through the term an incident occurred that increased my bewilderment still further. My mother was anxious about germs, having lost her hearing through a second attack of scarlet fever. For years I had been forbidden many trifling pleasures because “you might catch something, darling,” and I had the grimmest memories of my week with German measles. I had treated plague and smallpox with indifference, rats, scorpions or thunderstorms had no terrors for me, but when I heard during our morning break that there was a girl in the sickroom with a rash, I slipped away from the others and ran home, it was only ten minutes away. I burst into the hall, screaming “measles, measles” and I honestly expected to be praised for my prompt action. My mother looked up in surprise, remarked, “I have made you too nervous” and marched me back to school without a word of explanation. It was as if I had landed on the unseen side of the moon.
Destiny, however, had not quite forgotten me. Being a day girl that first summer, I stayed at home on Sundays and we sometimes drove across my favorite marshes. It was the moment when the yellow flags rose out of the ditches in full flower and whenever we passe
d through this landscape, with the sunlight catching the points of the reeds, I used to hear a word, “Ru-an, Ru-an,” echoing in my ears. I did not know consciously for another twenty years that it was a Cornish word meaning running water. It was simply a sound ringing like a bell with its promise of shelter to a fogbound traveler.
I had been flung into the whirlwind to be made “like other girls.” I had guts enough to resent so forcible a transformation of my character and decided to confine my conversation to such brief answers as were required to reply politely to questions. The system worked perfectly for some weeks until we were sent to church unexpectedly one morning instead of into our classrooms.
It was a rule that we could choose our companions for our afternoon walks but we sat at meals or went to church according to our age. My father had inadvertently entered me in the register as being a year younger than I actually was but although he immediately rectified the mistake, like all red tape matters, this took time. I only had lunch at Queenwood so I had been passed from table to table wherever there had happened to be a vacancy but I was paired that day with the girl whose birthday was nearest to my own. We started in silence but we were hardly outside the gates before my companion said cheerfully, “You live here, don’t you? I come from Penzance.”
It had never occurred to me that I should meet a Cornish girl. All that I knew was that I regarded the West Country with awe. It had everything that I desired, color, the sun, sheltered valleys and little, wandering paths; above all, it seemed closer to the sea. Besides, even Miss Chudleigh was not able to resist my companion’s dark, merry eyes or her enchanting smile. Her name, she said, was Doris Banfield, this was her first term as well as my own but she had an older sister, Ethel, who had already been at Queenwood for two years. Did I like dogs? She had a fox terrier called Sampie with a black spot above his tail and she thought that he must miss her very much.