by Muriel Spark
What good times Frances and I had together! I went with Frances to Crail, a seaside town in Fife, to stay at her grandmother’s house for part of the summer holidays. The North Sea was clean in those days but not always hospitable because of its wildness. We would sit on the shore and watch the steel-grey and white-foam breakers tossing the little shipping vessels far away.
At weekends we roamed in the botanical gardens, or went for walks at Puddocky (a puddock is a frog) beside the Water of Leith, then home to tea. We buried a document – I think it was a jointly written story – under an ancient tree in the botanical gardens. But what exactly it was, and why we buried it, I can’t remember, except that I know it had a lot of the Celtic Twilight culture woven into it. There was a room at the top of the school where the wind was especially rumorous. Frances and I called it the Mary Rose room. Mary Rose was a play by J.M. Barrie.
The year after Miss Kay’s last class, when we were in the first forms of the upper, or senior, school, we were fully occupied in coping with our new variety of subjects; each one was taught in a different classroom by specialist teachers many of whom went around with their academic gowns floating from their shoulders. We dashed from class to class. We were now also in different houses, of which there were four: Gilmour, Roslin, Spylaw and Warrender. I was in Warrender, Frances in Roslin. It made no difference to our friendship; the system of houses applied predominantly to sports: hockey, tennis and swimming. (Which house would win the shield?) But Frances and I sat together in class as usual.
Alison Foster (nicknamed Fossil) was an enthusiastic and friendly English teacher who edited the school magazine. Beanie, Miss Munro, taught Latin and Greek; she was pale and quiet and fairly young.
There were a few male teachers. Mr Wishart was our singing master; he got tunefulness out of us, taught us the rudiments of music, and prepared us for our annual Gilbert and Sullivan show and for our concert in the Usher Hall. There, after the prize-giving, a choir of at least seven hundred girls in white dresses and black stockings rendered many a rousing number, to the apparent pride and delight of our parents and their friends. We ended with Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, accompanied on the organ by Herbert Wiseman, Edinburgh’s organist No. 1.
The handsome art master, Arthur Couling, expressly admired my poems, but about my drawings he was expressly silent. Coolie, as he was called among the girls, was himself a practising artist. He had some successful shows; one of his paintings, with the tantalizing title ‘Le Bateau à la Moustache Jaune’, was bought by the Glasgow Corporation for the McLellan Gallery in Glasgow. Dishy Arthur Couling also painted the scenery for our dramatic performances and our light operas.
Frances lived near Coolie’s house; it was in Northumberland Street. We had such a ‘pash’ on Coolie, the infinitely glamorous, that we would walk up and down the street, quite unnecessarily, in the hope of catching sight of him. But Coolie’s favourite girl was Betty Mercer, bold and clever, slightly anarchic, and very handsome. At the school dance he sat and talked to her all evening. He didn’t dance with Betty, just talked. When we asked her what they had talked about, she said, ‘Cosmetics.’
Once, when we were exasperating Coolie by our chatter in class, he said,’ If you girls don’t shut up I’ll smash this saucer to the ground.’ The saucer was held high: he was trying to demonstrate the nature of an ellipse. We didn’t quite shut up, so he smashed the saucer to the ground as promised. We were thrilled and astonished. I used this incident in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
The history master, Mr Gordon, whom we called Jerry, was a short, fair man. I remember well his passion for the industrial revolution. The innocence of our minds and the universal decency of our schoolteachers’ comportment can be gathered from the fact that he used to make me sit at the front of the class so that he could stroke my hair while teaching, without anyone thinking at all ill of him. The girls tittered quite a lot. I liked it quite a lot. There was nothing whatsoever wrong with Jerry Gordon. My former schoolmate, Elizabeth, has reminded me that when he saw that someone was not paying sufficient attention Jerry threw a piece of chalk at her. As Elizabeth remarks, this livened up the class. (When war broke out years later all the male teachers joined up, but Jerry, being over-age, remained, still throwing his chalk, according to reports.)
The Greek class was extra-curricular. Only three girls took Greek. We had to get to school at eight in the morning to fit in this extra lesson from Beanie Munro. I loved crossing the Links to school in the early morning, especially when snow had fallen in the night or was still falling. I walked in the virgin snow, making the first footprints of the day. The path was still lamplit, and when I looked back in the early light there was my long line of footprints leading from Bruntsfield Place – mine only. I loved the Bruntsfield Links in all seasons. In the long summer evenings of Scotland, I would practise on the Links putting green with my brother and his friends. Philip was a good and keen golfer. I would often follow him around the Links golf course for nine or even eighteen holes, helping to hunt for lost balls; and when I was old enough I took round the course my junior-sized set of three essential cleeks (clubs). These were a brassie, a mashie and a putter. Later, my brother gave me a driver and a niblick, the shafts of which my father cut down to size for me.
Miss Forgan (Forgie) taught French. She never appealed to me. She was a large-boned woman of late middle age. She would come into the classroom wearing an invisible crown of thorns and heaving an aggrieved sigh. Looking back over the years, I am convinced she was ill or – who knows? – perhaps burdened with family cares: an ailing father, a war-wounded brother. I would sometimes see her in the street after school, wearily hauling her shopping bags full of ‘messages’ that betokened a plural domestic life. I never offered to help Forgie with her shopping bags (as we were all brought up to do). I was afraid she would say no, nastily. Nevertheless, I did better at French with Forgie than I did with any other French teacher. This included the Mademoiselle who came from France to teach us for a year, and whom we were at great pains to follow. She spoke rapidly and volubly and was delighted with herself. She was very pretty. We were thoroughly dazed. Another French teacher was J.G. Glen, a mild man with white hair. He never taught me, but one of his pupils has since told me that once having learnt Mr Glen’s French there was no possibility of ever pronouncing it right for the rest of one’s life.
Mabel Marr, small and efficient, with her white coat, presided over the science room, alternating with Margaret Napier (Nippy), a highly qualified, rosy-cheeked woman, who also taught mathematics. So far I had been slow at arithmetic, but algebra and geometry appealed to me greatly, largely because of Miss Napier’s teaching. For some odd reason, she showed faith in me, knowing me to be a poet. The result was that I got high marks in both science and mathematics. I still have my science book, in which we wrote up our guided ‘experiments’. I loved the science room, with its benches and sinks, its Bunsen burners, its burettes, pipettes, test tubes, and tripod stands.
‘Unless you specialize in chemistry or physics,’ said Nippy, ‘you will partially forget all this when you leave school. But as soon as you are reminded of any particular aspect it will come back to you.’ She was right. In spite of the claptrap, when I look at my science book it comes back clearly to me that, following an experiment involving the burning of phosphorus in an enclosed space of air over water, the conclusion is: ‘When a substance is burned in air (or tarnish is formed) one fifth of the air is used up. Therefore four fifths will be left. Hence the atmosphere consists of one fifth of active air (a gas able to combine readily with substances) and four fifths inactive air (a gas difficult to combine).’ When I contemplate this in my schoolgirl handwriting, I see again the apparatus – bell jar, phosphorus, crucible lid, the trough, the water. I smell again the peculiar and dynamic smell of Gillespie’s science room. Like all schoolchildren, we called our science lessons ‘stinks’.
An alternative science and maths teacher was the wandlike Sandy Buchan, who imp
ressed on us the dangers of trusting in appearances, especially where colourless, odourless and tasteless matter was concerned. He put to us the awful caution:
Poor little Tommy Jones
We’ll see him no more,
For what he thought was H2O
Was H2SO4.
I remember his enunciation of ‘colourless, odourless and tasteless’ in a precise Edinburgh voice. I reflected then, and still reflect, that there could be people like that: no colour, no taste, no smell. The moral is, avoid them; they might be poison. Sandy Buchan looked very elegant crossing the Links with his hat, gloves, walking-stick and long winter coat, but for sex appeal he couldn’t compete with Coolie.
Another teacher who was under the impression that my bent for literature might add something to her class was Miss Anderson (Andie), who taught gym and dancing and was head games mistress. I was no good, really, at gym, and little better at dancing. As for games, I was what the hockey captain called ‘one of the spectators’. But Andie would ask me to comment on our dancing, mostly folk dancing. She wanted me to give some imaginative life to it. Once, I was sitting cross-legged on the floor leaning against the parallel bars of the gymnasium and watching a group of girls performing a dance called ‘The Mill’ when Andie asked me what I thought of it. I can’t recall exactly what I replied, except that it was an exercise in diplomacy. I stood up and said something about the dancing being lovely but the dance not: to represent a mill the tempo should be speeded up. I think that this satisfied Andie and that she made our accompanist play faster. Frances was a very graceful dancer. In fact, she grew up to be a tall beauty; it was rightly said she moved like a swan. And she always maintained her sweet nature.
Andie herself was an enormous, athletic-looking woman, yet very light on her feet. The girdle of her gym tunic was tied round her hips, as was the fashion then, and tied in a very precise bow. That girdle would have gone three times round the average woman’s hips. Andie’s features were regular, her hair marcel-waved. She would arrive at school in her own little black car, very sporting, wearing a dark leather coat. One of her pupils remembers how excellent she was as a Scottish folk dancer, participating in public performances in Princes Street Gardens. To my memory, her gymnastic feats would have been amazing even if she had not had to heave around that large bulk. She seemed to have built-in springs like the new mattresses that were coming on the market in our parts.
Although I was not much support to my team at hockey, I had to put in some afternoons at our playing fields at Meggetland in south-west Edinburgh. I had a hockey stick that I had acquired cheaply from an older girl who had grown out of it. But I needed hockey boots. My father couldn’t afford them; just at that moment he had bills to pay – no, hockey boots were impossible. I played in my ordinary walking shoes a few times, but very soon afterwards my father appeared one evening after work with a pair of second-hand hockey boots. They were a perfect fit. I was overjoyed, especially as those boots had a rather kicked-about and experienced look; they were not at all novices in the field. My father smiled round the room, delighted with his success.
Who was Blossom? For many years I could not remember her real name, until I was lately reminded by Dorothy (Forrest) Rankine. ‘Blossom was to us Miss McLean, graduate of Edinburgh University, a formidable, white-haired, stately presence who used her black chalky gown to great effect as a Roman toga when she taught Latin with such dedication to us.’ She also taught botany hence, I have always supposed, her nickname. And according to Jean Guild, another of Miss McLean’s pupils, her nickname, Blossom, derived from her name Charlotte; this went from Apple Charlotte to Apple Blossom.
The Misses Kirkwood and Lynn taught sewing in those days before electric machines had reached the school. They both had pretty hands, which I much admired, but no style at all. The summer dresses they made us cut out and sew up were hideous, unwearable. The slippers we were induced to knit made one look like Minnie Mouse. Still, Frances and I filled in the sewing period, three-quarters of an hour a week, with quiet conversations about the poetry we were writing. Quiet, though not whispered, conversations were encouraged in the sewing class, for we sewed in pairs.
John Brash also taught science. He was young and fairly good-looking, but we thought him, in our jargon, ‘a Jessie’. This does not mean homosexual in Scotland; it means slightly effeminate.
According to Jean Guild he was susceptible to the girls. Another correspondent from those days of old, Dorothy L. Forrester, writes that there was more to him than met the eye. Dorothy Forrester tells an anecdote about a reproduction of the Degas dancer bending over to tie her shoe being objected to by some puritanical colleague because of its view of the girl’s behind. This picture, on a wall outside John Brash’s lab, was eventually removed by the headmistress whereupon another colleague said to Mr Brash, ‘I hear you’ve lost your derrière de Degas.’ ‘But I’ve still got my arrière-pensée.’
John Brash never married. He is now in his nineties, still flourishing.
When the staff annually played the school’s first hockey eleven, how vigorous they all were. How they pounded down the field, waving their sticks, especially Coolie and large, lusty, red-haired Mr Tate, a maths teacher. The staff players sometimes slipped and fell on the muddy field, to the heartless applause and ironic encouragement of the onlookers assembled round the edge. Andie led the staff team, sometimes to glory. (‘Go it, Nippy!’ ‘Well saved, Andie!’)
It was sixty years ago. The average age of those high-spirited and intelligent men and women who taught us was about forty; they were in their prime. I cannot believe they are nearly all gone, past and over, gone to their graves, so vivid are they in my memory, one and all.
I think we enjoyed an advantage over boarding-school pupils in our well-organized and friendly day school. We had the benefit of a parallel home life, equally full of daily events, and the impinging world of people different from our collegiate selves.
Comparing our young youth with the lives of teenagers over the intervening years, Frances has lately written to me, ‘We had the best life, Muriel.’ In spite of the fact that we had no television, that in my home at least we had no electricity all during the ’thirties (only beautiful gaslight), that there were no antibiotics, and no Pill, I incline to think that Frances is right.
CHAPTER THREE
We got out of school between three thirty and four in the afternoon and started our parallel life at home in the Edinburgh of the late ’twenties and early ’thirties of this century. In the aspiring Morningside district where cleanliness and godliness shook hands with each other, honesty was the best policy, all was not gold that glistered and necessity was the mother of invention. Nobody questioned these maxims; we had from them a sense of security which the precarious economic position of the country could not shake. The times were, however, decidedly shaky.
In May 1926, when I was eight years old, there had been a general strike in Britain which lasted nine days. Our school did not close but some children could not attend through lack of transport. The motives and social background of the strike had been fully explained to us by our teachers, who I incline to think were on the workers’ side, although they were officially impartial. However that may be, we all had felt the shivery possibility of a revolution.
That summer of 1926 was the last year in which my mother came to meet me from school. After that, I was old enough to make my way home alone. But sometimes on fine days my mother would bring her knitting and sit with other mothers on a bench in the lovely park that was Bruntsfield Links.
With my schoolmates I joined in ritualistic outdoor games that I was soon to grow out of. We had many variations of skipping games. To whirl the skipping rope was to ‘caw’ it.
Raspberry, strawberry, gooseberry tart
Tell me the name of your sweetheart.
The answer was A, B, C, etc. until the appropriate initial was mentioned and the skipping girl fell out. She then revealed the boy’s name.
Ther
e was a ring game for girls and boys, often played at children’s parties, but also outdoors. It was both innocent and sexy. A girl stood in the centre of a dancing ring.
Here’s a poor widow who’s left alone
She has no one to marry upon.
Look to the east and look to the west
And choose the one that you love best.
The dancing stopped. The boy who happened to be opposite the girl in the centre, joined her.
Now they’re married we wish them joy,
Every year a girl or a boy.
Loving each other like sister and brother
We pray the couple to kiss together.
Which they did, to the frank applause of all onlookers. We bowled hoops along the pathways and spun tops.
Counting our parents we were ‘four of a family’, as my father used to say. My brother Philip was interested in science. In the 1950s Philip emigrated to the United States, to become a research chemist in the Navy Department and, with his family, a US citizen. He is now retired in San Diego, and writes from there his reminiscences of our annual holidays to our mother’s home in Watford in Hertfordshire. Philip remembers:
… how I used to put all the chairs together in the hallway like a train weeks before we went. Such a build-up of excitement until the eventful day came and we got a cab down to the Caley [Caledonian] Station. Mother would make sandwiches for the trip – eggs and cress and sometimes ham and fruit and of course her bottle of wine. The most amazing thing was, before the train started to go Mother would be giving our sandwiches to any other people in the carriage, so that by the time we got to Carstairs, all the food was gone and we had to wait until we got to Crewe to get a cup of tea from the wagon that came around. Then on to Stafford and Rugby and the excitement grew as we entered Watford Tunnel, and I knew that it wouldn’t be long before we arrived at Willesden Junction and on to Bushey and Oxhey where Grandfather was awaiting our arrival. I always liked Watford with its market-town atmosphere and its closeness to London. We used to go on many picnics to Hemel Hempstead, Croxley Green, St Albans, etc. and of course a special day set aside for a visit to London on top of the bus, and to Petticoat Lane.