by Muriel Spark
When I first saw the film of The Prime my immediate reaction was that it was too brightly coloured for a true depiction of the Edinburgh scene. So, indeed, it was. But I think Miss Kay would have felt very happy about the imposed bright colours. She loved colours. She taught us to be aware of them. She could never accept drab raincoats. ‘Why make a wet day more dreary than it is? We should wear bright coats, and carry blue umbrellas or green.’ (In those days umbrellas were universally black or brown.) She said, ‘I would like to see a grey coat and skirt for the spring, girls, worn with a citron beret. Citron means lemon, it is yellow with a sixteenth or so of blue. One would wear a citron beret in Paris with a grey suit.’ We painted the primary, secondary and tertiary colours. I believe that, with Miss Kay, colour came before drawing or form. To her, colour was form. ‘Rossetti knew well how to use the complementary tertiary colours, russet and olive green.’ And she showed us the picture of Dante’s encounter with Beatrice painted with russets and greens. I don’t believe she cared much about Dante or Beatrice or the narrative element in the picture; it was simply a colourfest. ‘You will always know Corot’, she said, ‘by his small touch of red, such as a hat. That makes the painting.’
We could have begun to learn the arts and sciences of colours elsewhere, it is true; Miss Kay’s lessons probably did not differ in substance from anyone else’s. What filled our minds with wonder and made Christina Kay so memorable was the personal drama and poetry within which everything in her classroom happened. Her large, dark eyes were always alert and shining – that, I think, was half of the magic. Shapes and sculptures, arithmetical problems, linguistic points moved easily around each other. Part of our curriculum was the roots of our language. She would often stop in mid-sentence to point out a Latin, Greek or Anglo-Saxon root. I can see her, now, chanting:
‘Merrily, merrily, shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough –
‘And the root of “bough” is?’
Up would go a few hands.
‘Right. Bog, to bend. It describes the flexible bough. Well, as I was saying, Ariel symbolizes freedom …’
In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie I said that Miss Brodie pointed out to us (as Miss Kay so often did) that ‘educate’ derives from the Latin e (out) and duco (I lead). She had strong views on education. She believed it was a ‘leading out’ of what was there already (I believe this is basically an Aristotelian theory) rather than a ‘putting in’. When I saw the play of Miss Brodie I was puzzled and a little amused to see that another character was made, seriously, to put Miss Brodie right on this question: the right derivation was educare. Either the adaptor or one of the producers had not realized that the root of educare is e and duco. I was so pleased with the play as a whole that I didn’t venture to point this out. I didn’t want to nit-pick. And besides, I had the distinct impression that my views, as author of the book, were not really welcome.
Did Miss Kay have a sweetheart in her life? I think she did, long before our time. I would put her age at about fifty in my memory, and, looking at the class photograph, I think that is about right. The two years I was in Miss Kay’s class, the last classes in the junior school, were 1929 and 1930. She was of the generation of clever, academically trained women who had lost their sweethearts in the 1914–1918 war. There had been a terrible carnage. There were no men to go round. Until we ourselves grew up there was a veritable generation of spinsters. At any rate, Miss Kay told us how wonderful it had been to waltz in those long full skirts. I sensed romance, sex.
There was no mistaking the romantic feminine ardour with which Miss Kay recounted her visit one summer, with two other ladies, to Egypt. Miss Kay described to us one of the dresses she wore on the cruise that bore her there – large red poppies on a black background, ‘how right for my colouring’. And the visit to Egypt was recounted in every detail; we smelled the smells and felt the heat. We saw the tall, dignified figure of the guide (the dragoman, as he was called) and sensed Miss Kay’s attraction to him. While discussing with her the different Lord’s days (Friday for the Muslims, Saturday for the Jews, Sunday for the Christians) the dragoman said, with a spiritual smile, ‘Every day is the Lord’s day.’ This impressed Miss Kay greatly, as did his appearance at the railway station when she and her two travelling companions left the country; he bore for each a large bunch of flowers. When I repeated this exotic tale to my mother, she remarked that Thomas Cook (the main travel agent of those days) paid for those flowers. I felt that this was dreadfully cynical, but I couldn’t help feeling at the same time that my mother was probably right, and we had a laugh together about it.
I have said Christina Kay was a devout Christian. She knew how to apply her Christianity. For instance, she felt ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ was basically anti-Christian. And we were expressly forbidden to join in any singing of the lines ‘Wider still and wider Shall thy bounds be set; God who made thee mighty, Make thee mightier yet.’ Of course, she was quite right. Such teachings, the sheer logic of the contradiction inherent in them to the moral culture we honoured, sank in. Miss Kay recommended to us, instead, the lines of Kipling’s ‘Recessional’: ‘The tumult and the shouting dies; The captains and the kings depart; Still stands thine ancient sacrifice; An humble and a contrite heart.’ More than once, Miss Kay brought home to our attention exactly what we were singing so lustily. We were taught not to be carried away by crowd emotions, not to be fools.
Miss Kay’s scriptural lessons were among her most marvellous. She had a true sense of the poetry of the Bible. Before reaching her class, we had been taught the Scottish catechism. I loved the beginning:
Q. What is man’s chief end?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
We also knew the Ten Commandments.
At some stage before I came to Miss Kay’s class, when I was about nine, I had a kind of religious experience. I saw a road-workman knocked down or hit by a tram-car. He ran from the spot with his arms spread out and fell beside the pavement. I saw this from a place where I was playing with some other children from school. We were all speedily ushered out of the way, and so I had no means of knowing if the man had been injured, or maybe electrocuted, or if he lived or died. My father could find nothing about it in the evening paper. But the image of the workman with arms outspread stayed in my mind for a long time. I fancied he had gone to Heaven, and imagined him there in his workman’s cap and overalls. I thought he liked me. I spoke to nobody about him.
This image stayed with me for at least two years; then I ceased to be ‘haunted’ by my workman. I remembered only how he once had been in my mind.
I flourished at my Scripture lessons in Miss Kay’s class, she so well illustrated and explained the symbolism of both the Old Testament and the New. She made us learn the great passages by heart – the prophecy of Isaiah 53 (‘Who hath believed our report?’); I Corinthians 13 on Charity (‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels’); the song of Deborah; the song of Miriam; the Beatitudes; the Annunciation; the song of Simeon. I can recite them still.
At least twice a week after school, I would go to the public lending library in Morningside; it was in a charming nineteenth-century schoolhouse. I had lots of tickets that entitled the borrower to take out books – my own and my mother’s, and also my father’s when Philip didn’t need them for his studies. I would bring home four books at a time, most of them poetry, for I was destined to poetry by all my mentors. Nineteenth-and twentieth-century poets were my preference – Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne, and what were known as the Georgian poets (we were in the reign of George V): Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, Yeats, John Masefield, Robert Bridges, and, the only woman among them, Alice Meynell. I was always discovering new poems for Miss Kay to read. ‘Have you read this? Look at that,’ I would say. I was a passionate admirer of Masefield’s narrative verse, especially The Dauber and Reynard the Fox. It was while I was in Miss Kay’s class th
at I read Jane Eyre, and Mrs Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, and Cranford. I also tackled George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, without much success.
Miss Kay took Frances and me to the theatre and to concerts, sometimes to a good film, paying out of her own pocket. She begged us not to mention this to the other girls, ‘lest they should feel it is favouritism’. Which of course it was. But she told the whole class that they were the crème de la crème, and meant it, because they were hers.
Amongst our clandestine treats with Miss Kay were visits to modern poetic plays. There was at the time a repertory theatre company called the Arts League of Service, which we felt was very romantic. It appealed to us that the actors went round the countryside to act in small towns, sometimes sleeping in barns.
Miss Kay realized that our parents’ interest in our welfare was only marginally cultural. She was determined that Frances and I should benefit from all that Edinburgh had to offer. We loved it. She felt rewarded by our response, as she told my mother years later. One of our special treats was going to hear John Masefield read his poems. This was around the time he became Poet Laureate, in 1930, and his fame was at its height. In those years, a poet could draw an immense audience. Twenty years later, when I wrote a book about Masefield, I recorded that event:
On this occasion Mr Masefield read parts of Dauber – the passage on the rounding of Cape Horn. I remember particularly how well Minnie Marlow’s Story came over. His voice was remarkable. When he began to read everyone was aware that the poet was not shy, after all. He read like a true bard. Since then, I have heard many bards reading their own verse; most are diffident, some try to overcome this by over-dramatizing. I have not heard anyone read his own work like John Masefield, as if he believed in it. He read as he might have read someone else’s work, and that is a very difficult thing for a poet to do. His pronunciation was very pure, his tones very clear.
The most exciting of these outings with our beloved Miss Kay was to the Empire Theatre to see Anna Pavlova, indisputably the world’s greatest dancer of her time – an event mentioned in the letter from Frances which I have already quoted. Actually, this was Pavlova’s last tour. The great ballerina died shortly afterwards. On this occasion, she danced The Death of the Swan. I remember the sinking swan, and the two final death taps of Pavlova’s fingernails, on the floor of the stage, like claws. Frances and I were now twelve years old. Both had already seen ballet-dancing, but we had never thought such dancing as Pavlova’s and her corps de ballet’s could exist. We spoke of it together time and again afterwards. We were busy, too, on various joint projects – nature stories and descriptions of life on Mars, and poems. What happened to those notebooks of ours? Who knows?
That year, I had a batch of five poems published in an anthology of young people’s poems called The Door of Youth. I was one of the youngest contributors. This fact, and the number of poems, drew some attention to them. They had a certain lyrical quality. There was a poem about time (in which I noted that ‘as I write this verse on Time/that self-same Time is flying.’); one about a stag hunt (in which the stag gets away); a poem about the sea, in which it features as a ravenous lion preying on ships and, in another mood, as a horse; a poem against the snaring of rabbits and against fox hunting; and a poem ‘To Everybody’, which was used as the dedicatory item in the book.
My poems in the school magazine were often influenced by Miss Kay’s lessons on relativity. One of the library books recommended by her was The Mysterious Universe by Sir James Jeans, a famous popular astronomer. I wrote poems about the universe, such as one in which the inhabitants of other planets ‘Look up to the sky and say/“The Earth twinkles clearly tonight.”’ Miss Kay predicted my future as a writer in the most emphatic terms. I felt I had hardly much choice in the matter.
Christina Kay was an experimental teacher. Once, she separated us according to our signs of the zodiac: she had read somewhere that children of the same zodiacal sign had a special, mysterious affinity. For a time I was separated from Frances, a Capricorn, and put beside a boring Aquarian. What happened as a result of this experiment was nothing. But even that nothing Miss Kay somehow made into an interesting, a triumphant discovery.
Her father had died when she was still a girl. It had fallen to her to manage affairs for her widowed mother. She told us of the day she had to go and query a bill at the Edinburgh gas office. Our class of girls, incipient feminists, was totally enthralled by Miss Kay’s account of how the clerks tittered and nudged each other: a female desiring to discuss the details of a gas bill! ‘But’, said Miss Kay, ‘I went through that bill with the clerk, point by point. He at first said he couldn’t see any mistake. But when I asked to see the manager he had another look at the bill. He consulted with one of his colleagues. Finally he came to me with a very long face. He admitted there had been an error in calculation. I made them amend the bill, and I paid it then and there. That’, said Miss Kay, with her sweet, wise smile, ‘taught them to sneer at a businesslike young woman.’
Miss Kay always had the knack of gaining our entire sympathy, whatever her views. She could tolerate, even admire, the Scottish aristocracy (on account of their good manners), but the English no. She made a certain amount of propaganda against English dukes, who, she explained with the utmost scorn, stepped out of their baths every morning into the waiting arms of their valets, who stood holding the bath-towels and who rubbed them dry. This made us all laugh a lot. And, in fact, we often had cause for general mirth in Miss Kay’s class.
After school, Miss Kay was an ardent lecture-goer. She attended lectures on such subjects as theology and German poetry, which were available to the general public at the University of Edinburgh. She went to lectures on health and ‘care of the hair and hands’ at some other institution. She went to hear art historians and educationalists. And on Sundays she would generally be at Professor Tovey’s Sunday concerts in the Usher Hall. (Professor Donald Francis Tovey was Edinburgh’s leading musicologist and conductor.) All these events, like her summer, Easter and Christmas holidays, Miss Kay would bring back to school to offer up to us and enrich our lives.
A correspondent has sent me a note from John Steinbeck’s tribute to great teachers, which I think applies well to Christina Kay:
I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.
I continued to enjoy a certain fame as the school’s poet. I should describe at this point the curious and ambiguous experience I had after leaving Miss Kay’s class when we all moved to the Higher Grade, as the senior school department was called. It was 1932, the year of the centenary of the death of Sir Walter Scott. A poetry competition was launched among the schools of Edinburgh by the Heather Club, a men’s club founded in 1823 (for what purpose I do not know, except that it was very Scottish). I won first prize with my poem about Sir Walter Scott, and another girl at Gillespie’s got third prize. The school was doubly jubilant; everyone was delighted. So delighted that I hadn’t the heart, I couldn’t possibly explain how I felt about the prize itself. Partly, it was a number of books, and that pleased me. But partly it was a coronet, with which I was to be crowned Queen of Poetry at some public Scott-centenary celebration. My mother was overjoyed, as was nearly everyone else, in school and out of school. I felt like the Dairy Queen of Dumfries, but I endured the experience and survived it. A star actress, Esther Ralston, did the crowning. It was a mystery to me what she had to do with poetry or Sir Walter Scott. The coronet itself was cheap-looking, I thought. The only person who openly agreed with my point of view was our reserved and usually silent headmaster, T.J. Burnett. He knew I had to go through with it now that I had won the prize, but he showed a sense of the unsuitable nature of this coronet affair. He was essentially an administrator, a man of very few words. ‘Tinsel,’ he said quietly to me, and then he made a congratulatory speech in front of
the school. According to his daughter, Maida, he remarked at home, ‘That lassie can write.’ I know he was indignant for me. After the event, Miss Kay paid us a visit in the upper school with a press cutting in her hand. She said nothing to belittle the affair. But she did say, as she held up the photograph to the class, ‘You can see the sensitivity in that line of Muriel’s arm.’ And, indeed, you can see an involuntary shudder in the line of my arm in the picture.
Frances, on this occasion, made me a small ‘laurel wreath’ of coloured wax, which I still treasure. With it she gave me a verse that she had composed for me:
Though on fame’s dizzy heights you stand,
Though you climb ladders without end,
Please don’t forget me for I am
Your dear and most devoted friend.
Fairly recently, I had occasion to remind Frances about these lines; I was also able to add that ‘fame’s dizzy heights’ are more often than not a great pain in the neck.
One of the good effects of this event on me was my meeting with the adjudicator of the prize, Lewis Spence, an Edinburgh poet and considerable man of letters. The classics teacher Anna Munro (known as Beanie) and I went to tea with him at his home the Sunday after the awful ceremony. Lewis Spence was the first professional writer I had met. We talked about poetry, the essential suitability of certain forms and rhythms to certain themes. The conversation was general. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Some members of his family joined us, dispensing tea. Lewis Spence said to me, ‘Of course you will write as a profession.’ His daughter, very languid and beautiful with long hair, played the guitar and sang ‘La Paloma’. On the way home Beanie Munro said, ‘She made “La Paloma” sound quite original, hackneyed as it is.’