by Muriel Spark
To grow from childhood into adolescence, and live as a teenager in the 1930s of Edinburgh, was to be aware of social nervousness. There was no possible way of hiding it, even though Edinburgh was not the worst-hit of Britain’s cities during the great depression of the ’thirties. Men and women stood in long lines waiting for their dole, as their meagre weekly unemployment pay was called. There were still groups of ex-servicemen, bemedalled veterans from the 1914–18 war, playing band-music in the streets for the pennies of passers-by. Some of these men had wooden legs, sewn-up sleeves, scarred faces. All those unemployed people were known in Scottish parlance as ‘the idle’, not in any deprecative sense.
There was, in fact, a world depression, counterbalanced by an urge, amongst young people, for change, for a greater freedom of life. This was achievable in everyone’s shaky economic circumstances; in fact, with little to lose, the freedom we wanted was all the more realizable. ‘Advanced’ people, even of our bourgeois acquaintance, began to let their children run naked on the beach. All-vegetable nature-cures became popular. Health and beauty classes sprang up in all parts. ‘Do you believe in free love?’ intelligent teenagers asked each other. At the same time, there was little sex before marriage among the middle classes. It wasn’t unheard of, but mostly it was all talk. Hiking holidays cost hardly anything. Trade competition was evident. Prices everywhere came down and continued sinking till the outbreak of war in 1939.
Before I left school at the age of seventeen I was reading T.E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a mighty tome of which I don’t remember a word. There was still a moneyed fringe in the country, but money as a factor had been changing hands. Wealth was no longer an attribute of the upper class, and was in fact slowly slipping through the fingers of those who had hung on tight to their fortunes. Many well-known families, at this time, were obliged to treat their own relations as ‘paying guests’ when they came to stay.
What was I to do with my life? I would have liked to have gone to a university but merely in order to obtain a degree, and that only for the uncertain purpose of getting a better job. I was studious, but I liked my own form of studies, picking and choosing books in the public library. I loved poetry anthologies of all sorts so that I could compare poetic forms and rhythms and consider their aptness for the theme. But I don’t know if I would have made a good academic scholar. The chance of finding another inspiring teacher like my later ‘Miss Jean Brodie’ in the form of Christina Kay was very slight. Anyway, there was really no money for me to go to a university. Even if my fees had been covered by scholarships, the extra expenses involved for over three or four years for a young woman without means, and the meagre chances of getting a job at the end of it, combined to make such an ambition, for me, something of a luxury.
And I saw the reverse side of the situation. I noticed that many older girls who were studying at Edinburgh University in those days were humanly rather dull and earnest, without adult style or charm, indeed there was a puritanical atmosphere. Charm was shunned like a work of the devil. In contrast to the universities of today they were then largely an extension of school. Children matured later than now. I doubt if many of those university students could have told you who Gary Cooper was, Conrad Veidt (my pin-up), Madeleine Carrol, Marlene Dietrich. They could on the other hand write a dissertation on John Donne by the time they were twenty. (But so could I.)
However, I inscribed myself at the Heriot Watt College (now a university) to complete my education in English prose. I was particularly interested in précis-writing, and took a course in that. I love economical prose, and would always try to find the briefest way to express a meaning. Heriot Watt College had a reputation for practical and businesslike teaching.
The college, like my school, James Gillespie’s, belonged to that group of educational institutions that had been heavily endowed by Edinburgh merchants and benefactors from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The ‘Heriot’ of the name referred to that George Heriot (Jingling Geordie), goldsmith and court jeweller. He was commemorated in Sir Walter Scott’s Fortunes of Nigel. When he died in 1624, his fortune was bequeathed to the founding of a school. The ‘Watt’ of the college’s name was James Watt (1736–1819), most famous for his invention of the steam engine. The watt, a unit of power, is named after him and the term horsepower was first used by him. There is an anecdote often told of James Watt, that his aunt reproved him for indolence: ‘I never saw such an idle boy as you; for the last hour you have not spoken one word, but taken the lid off the kettle and put it on again, holding now a cup and now a silver spoon over the steam, watching how it rises from the spout, catching and counting the drops it falls into.’
Heriot Watt College was subsidized from the Heriot funds, mainly for scientific and technical instruction. The idea of a more scientific atmosphere in general, and a more scientific approach to English, in contrast to the broad, humane, poetry-loving approach of Gillespie’s, appealed to me when I started attending classes at the college. My friends thought Heriot Watt’s a strange choice for me. But in fact it offered something I wanted and needed. The use of language in the daily life of commerce, of trade, banking, even politics, was plainly more genuinely based in proportion as it was less rhetorical. I found that the work I put in, and the knowledge I absorbed at Heriot Watt College was useful – for instance, later in my life when I had a job as an industrialists’ speech-writer for a public relations firm. I still find myself fascinated by good managerial-type speech, adopted by the more successful young politicians of the last decade. I find ‘managerial’ speech unpretentious, direct, quite expressive enough. One doesn’t need sermons, figures of speech, drawling cadences and sonorous poetics in modern parliaments, congresses or conventions.
But in order to write about life as I intended to do, I felt I had first to live. From about this time the essentials of literature were, to me, outside of literature; they were elsewhere, out in the world. Life in our part of Edinburgh had changed very little during the ’thirties. A few shops had changed hands. Our upstairs neighbour, good Mrs Kerr, had died, leaving her daughter, the soprano Maudie, still practising her scales and songs every evening. She was presently joined by a handsome baritone a good deal younger than herself who accompanied her in their duets. Maudie gave singing lessons; Bill Logan, the baritone, was, she said, her best pupil. The neighbours were amused to hear his shoes going one-clump, two-clump upstairs on the bedroom floor as he took them off at night. When Maudie and Bill decided to get married, speculation was rife as to whether Maudie would get married in white. In the event, she stopped on the way to her wedding to show us her outfit: autumn tints for herself and her four bridesmaids. They looked extremely theatrical in their large yellow and russet picture hats, and similarly coloured organdie dresses. Although he was the younger, Bill died first, sadly, an alcoholic. Maudie’s singing voice, which in fact improved with time, trilled on into the last hours of the night. To go to sleep listening to Maudie insisting on ever higher and higher notes, that she knew that her Redeemer liveth, gave one a sense of continuity.
I loved going to dances with my brother. I was allowed any boyfriends I liked so long as I brought them home. But my favourite men were my brother’s much older friends, American medical students. There were three of them to whom my parents took a great affection: Jay Snyder, Dave Simon and Phil Prinz. For many years, in fact until they graduated, they joined us for a special supper every Sunday night, sometimes with other of our friends, so that we had a weekly party at home. Jay was the youngest, the most sensitive, and my mother’s favourite. I think he was homesick; he played ‘Home Sweet Home’ on our piano. One of the others on one occasion introduced a saxophone into the house: ‘The music goes round and round… and it comes out here.’ Now Jay is retired and lives in Florida, and writes to me sweetly about those merry days of our youth.
I was too young as yet to be a girlfriend of any of these students. Both Frances and I had left school the same year, 1935, aged sevent
een. When I attended Heriot Watt’s, Frances, I think, went to a secretarial college as did many of my schoolmates who didn’t continue on an academic route. Secretarial colleges were expensive, but I knew some secretarial skills would be useful in eventually getting jobs. So I got a teaching job at a small private day school, the Hill School, at 35 Colinton Road in the Murchiston district of Edinburgh not far from my home in Bruntsfield Place. Instead of pay I was given free tuition in shorthand and typing by the school’s secretarial teacher. I have found this to be enormously useful all my life. Although I compose by hand it was a great benefit when I first became a published writer to be able to type my own stories and essays quickly. And it is always an advantage for an author to be able to take verbatim shorthand notes of meetings, encounters, chance remarks overheard on a train, in a restaurant.
At the Hill School during the day I taught English, arithmetic and nature studies to small classes, each of about six pupils. There were some small boys and older girls aged from ten to sixteen. Some of the girls, not much younger than myself, were also taking a secretarial course. School work here was not assumed in the serious light I was used to at the school I had attended for twelve years, and just left. The girls were only filling in their school-days until it was time for them to go to a finishing school somewhere on the Continent. The small boys were preparing for boarding schools. Although they were children of wealthy families, they were not over-indulged or spoilt in the slightest way. They were naïve and friendly, somewhat over-sheltered. It was the easiest thing in the world to keep them occupied with this or that lesson. I largely followed their textbooks. Perhaps they learned something from me. What they liked to talk about most were their own brothers, sisters and cousins, naming them, giving their ages, the colour of their hair and eyes.
Even before I had acquired a good standard of shorthand and typing I realized I was being exploited. The Hill School ‘for senior girls, and preparatory school for boys’ was established in a fairly large house, with a pleasant garden, and was entirely run and owned by two sisters, then in their fifties, the Misses Philip, one fat and one thin, jolly and tart respectively. Again, so very, very unlike the school I had attended, these headmistresses aimed all their efforts, without pretext, at pleasing the parents. I felt sure that their main thought was to rake in the considerable fees. This is always a danger in privately run schools.
The teacher of shorthand and typing, a faded lady who had no abilities outside of her field, the two sisters and I made up the whole of the staff. It was a genteel and paying concern.
I was giving four or five hours of lessons a day besides helping with casual jobs in the office. For this I was receiving one hour’s tuition. After a year I felt it was time that I was paid something. But at that age I wasn’t equipped to ask for money, I simply didn’t know how to go about it. Instead, I told them that I had to look for a secretarial job, now that I was able to speed along on the typewriter without looking at the keys and slash shorthand across the pages. I thought the sisters were fairly pleased with my teaching so far. I thought then they would ask me to continue and offer me some pay, but no. They just said all right, and let me go. I suppose they soon found another unqualified, unpaid young teacher on the same terms.
For pocket-money, that year, I had at weekends coached a small boy through his repeat year for the vital qualifying examination, which children took at about the age of twelve to move them from the junior to the senior school department. He passed the exam on his second try, and now I was free to look for a job with pay; I was eighteen, and didn’t want to depend on my parents any more.
I was adult, although the official coming-of-age was twenty-one. Gone were the days when my father dressed up in a sheet to play the ghost and give me a fright if I came home late. (‘Late’ was ten o’clock while I was still a schoolgirl.)
The centre of attraction for a job was Princes Street and the stately New Town of lovely squares. On one side of the famous street were the sunken Princes Street Gardens; and, looming above them, the mighty castle rock with the ancient castle on its summit. The other side of the mile-long street was lined with elegant shops and exclusive clubs. I thought it would be good to work near Princes Street, probably in one of the great squares behind it.
Jobs were extremely scarce. I applied for a few which were advertised in the papers, knowing I was one of hundreds. I had a few replies, calling me for an interview. These were very enlightening. Some of the employers, lawyers or town councillors, were curious as to my ‘foreign’ name, Camberg. (My father had always refused to change his name to ‘Camber’ as had the rest of the family, his brother and cousins, who were mostly in business. As an employed mechanical engineer my father felt he had nothing to change his name for, and nothing, moreover, to be ashamed of. He used to say, jokingly, that the Royal Family, who had changed their name during World War I from Battenberg to Mountbatten – a literal translation – could do as they liked, but he wasn’t going to change to Mountcam.) When asked about my name I said it was a Jewish name, evidently of German origin. This often caused surprise, for I didn’t have any particular Jewish features. The Cambergs themselves were fair with blue eyes. In colouring I mainly resembled the Uezzells of Watford. But otherwise I looked rather Scottish with reddish hair, blue eyes and a round face with a sort of bloom. All my youth I was inclined to be fat, sometimes more sometimes less, as the photographs show. I didn’t look at all like a poet or an intellectual.
Anti-Semitism was rife in the ’thirties all over Europe, but I can’t say that in the Edinburgh of 1936, when I was looking for a job, I had the sense of any racial discrimination. What was difficult was my lack of experience and meagre secretarial qualifications. I was only once ‘offended’ at one of these interviews, and I have put the word in quotes because actually I was more intrigued than offended. I forget what line of business was concerned. It was a small office with a plump little man no more than thirty. The interview took place after office hours, as was quite normal. I was still eighteen. I was asked to sit on a chair beside his desk. He asked me a few questions, then pulled his chair over to face mine, so that we were almost knee to knee. Then he looked at me with steady piercing eyes without speaking for at least five minutes. I kept my gaze somewhere beyond his shoulder. In the Scotland of those days it was not unusual for employers to ‘look well’ at candidates for jobs, but I was not so naive as to suppose that this man was looking well. I knew that he was having a good letch, as I called it in my private lingo. My instinct told me not to move. Eventually the interview was at an end. He would write to me, he said, in the usual formula, and let me know his decision. I was amazed when two days later a letter arrived from him asking me politely if I would come for a second interview, to which, of course, I didn’t go.
Soon after this I got a job at 106 Princes Street at the west end, in the office of the elderly owner of an exclusive women’s department store, William Small & Sons. They took me on without further ado because they liked my letter of application. My sweet employer was William Small himself. His office was really an enormous drawing-room with a grand piano, a luxurious carpet and lots of flowers. My new-found Pitman’s shorthand speed was completely wasted on Mr Small’s leisurely dictation, punctuated as it was by scraps of meditative philosophy, Scottish wisdom, and sheer information such as ‘The majority of old people die in November.’ He himself at this time was probably well over seventy. His son, Gordon, a tall, handsome and agreeable young man of thirty who now ran the business, would occasionally come in, play the piano for a while, and go out again. Sometimes I would find Mr Small the elder contemplating a mass of textile samples, cotton in various stripes, from which he was choosing his personal supply of shirts for the forthcoming season. His taste was very avant-garde for an elderly Scot. I helped him to choose the faintly-coloured stripes, then egged him on to agree to ever more bold ones, before compiling a detailed letter ordering the substantial consignment of shirts. Another way in which we passed the dreamy
hours was by coping with his considerable list of charities. His system was to donate a sum of money to trustees of a central fund for distribution to the charities which he marked on the list provided by the trustees. With great patient diligence he weighed up the merits and needs of each beneficial fund.
This old-fashioned, tranquil way of using time gave me to wonder how he had built up the flourishing business from which he had retired in favour of his son. In the shop’s offices, called the counting house, there was a good deal of industry but no bustle. I went to type letters there, and to help with various jobs when Mr Small stayed at home, which was rarely. (Only the deepest snowdrifts daunted him.) In the middle of the office was a long desk divided length-wise. On each side sat two people, each of whose share of the sloping desk was locked every evening. These four constituted a chief accountant, Miss Ritchie, and three ledger clerks, all women. They bent over their ledgers all day, pen in hand. The pens had fitted nibs or points and they dipped these pens into ink as they worked. Sometimes they dipped into red ink, sometimes into blue. I myself possessed a fountain pen which my brother Philip had given me some years back. But fountain pens were considered rather upstart. These lady-clerks often drew lines with their rulers. I was interested to see how bookkeeping was done, but beyond learning that one ledger was called a Day Book, and the other merely The Ledger, I wasn’t encouraged to pry into the firm’s secrets.