Octavia

by Beryl Kingston

  And Johnnie, having completed his own experiment, looked up at the sound of her voice and gave her a rapturous smile.

  Letters and cards from the Front continued to arrive; the news bulletins were always bad, the casualty lists always terrifying, summer drudged by. Food was in short supply and very poor quality. Bread was ten pence a loaf, to Amy’s consternation, and poor adulterated stuff, gritty with chalk. Tommy came home on leave but was so irritable and preoccupied that their ten short days together left Octavia feeling dissatisfied and bereft.

  The Battle of the Somme went bloodily on and was still a stalemate. In August the newspapers reported that 700,000 men had been killed at Verdun and 650,000 on the Somme and that many more had been wounded. And one of the casualties was Podge, who wrote to his mother to say that he’d been gassed but ‘it wasn’t too bad’ and they’d be sending him ‘back to Blighty’ any day. When she first read his letter Maud was distraught but after a while she recovered and tried to cheer her family up by saying that at least he hadn’t been killed, poor boy, and urging them to be thankful for small mercies. He spent a month in hospital and she visited him every day but he was extremely ill and when he finally came home he was thin and withdrawn and sat in the conservatory all day, coughing endlessly and reading the papers.

  Octavia hadn’t seen him while he was in hospital because visiting was limited to wives and mothers and she was appalled by the change in him. He looked like an old man, not a boy of twenty, with his nails blackened and broken and all that ginger hair cut short. What sort of life had he got to look forward to? They should stop this war now, she thought, before any more young men are killed. But, of course, they didn’t. They just let it go on and on and the death toll rose inexorably. The parks were full of wounded soldiers in their pale blue uniform, taking what air they could and the casualty lists were a daily horror.

  In October Tommy was sent to Salonika and wrote more and more infrequently and with deepening pessimism. She wrote back to him as often as she could, urging him to take care of himself and telling him how Podge was getting on, because she thought he ought to know. ‘It seems such a wicked waste,’ she said. ‘A senseless, wicked waste.’

  It was only at school that there was hope of better sense and a chance to improve things. When the autumn term began she felt more at home in the place and started to study her pupils more intently and to make careful notes. Soon she began to make changes too – offering a choice of class readers and the freedom for every girl to read on her own and at her own pace, acting out a scene from the prescribed Shakespeare play instead of reading it round the class, teaching parts of speech much more slowly and in smaller groups, moving from the known to the new by gentle degrees. Her fellow English teachers started to complain – politely – that she was dominating the textbooks and that her method of offering four books to her classes instead of the normal one, meant that four sets of twenty books were now diminished to four sets of ten, which were too small to be used by anyone else. So that experiment had to be modified to a choice of two school books and the reassurance that, if they wished, her pupils could read novels they had brought from home.

  At the end of her second spring term the headmistress called her in to tell her that experimentation was all very well but that she mustn’t do anything that would jeopardise the girls’ chances in their public examinations. She agreed that nothing damaging would ever be done and promised – keeping her fingers crossed behind her back – that that year’s examination results would be as good as ever, if not better.

  Every evening after dinner, she wrote up her lesson notes, sitting at her desk in the window of her bedroom overlooking the heath and watching as another subdued summer inched into bloom. It grew apologetically, as if richness and lighthearted colour were inappropriate to the sorrow of the time. And no matter how hard she worked, Octavia was subdued too, living from day to day and from letter to letter. There were times when she felt rather lonely and wished there were other teachers who thought as she did. There must be some somewhere. She couldn’t be the only one. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the complications she was making for herself at St Barnaby’s High School and the regular stimulus of her father’s dinner parties, her life would have been rather miserable.

  As the weeks passed, she found she was looking forward to their Thursday evenings as the highlight of the month, seeing it as a time when the darkness would lift and hope and good sense return. The Fabians were stoical about the war, turning their attention away from the slaughter, which they deplored but over which they had no control and no influence, and concentrating instead on how international affairs should be conducted when the fighting was finally over, which was a great deal more positive and a great deal more pleasant to consider.

  ‘I see your friend Wells is still advocating a peace league,’ Edith Bland said to Bernard Shaw, one mellow evening in late October in the third year of the war. She was making eyes at him, knowing how the two men quarrelled and daring him to rise to the bait she was setting. ‘He had an article about it in the New Statesman this week.’

  ‘I read it,’ Shaw said, ginger whiskers bristling. He gave her his most devilish grin and answered the dare. ‘Not too closely, mind, his style being anathema to careful reading, but with sufficient attention to know that he is in the right, for once. Whatever else he may be, he is a gifted thinker. It is manifestly the sort of organisation we shall need.’

  ‘Could it be set up, do you think?’ J-J asked, offering more wine to his neighbour. ‘I can foresee prodigious difficulties.’

  ‘Since President Wilson is expounding a similar idea,’ Shaw said, ‘I should say it stands a fair chance. A league of nations gathered together to give protection to small states and pause to aggressive ones could be a powerful force for peace. It would have my blessing.’

  ‘Anything to prevent another war like this one,’ Amy mourned. ‘It is all very well to say that this is a war to end all wars but we are killing off an entire generation.’

  ‘We must hope that President Wilson will persevere with his idea,’ Edith Bland said, ‘and that he will persuade others to support him. I must say there are some excellent notions coming out of the United States at the moment. I read of another only this morning. An educational idea. It would interest you, Octavia.’

  Octavia was already interested. ‘Indeed?’ she asked.

  ‘Apparently there is a school in New York that is trying out a most interesting educational experiment. They call it – what was it? Let me think – the Dalton method, and it sounds extremely sensible. As far as I can see from the article, they allow their pupils to choose what lessons they will attend and when they will do their work. They say there is no true learning without the freedom to learn at one’s own pace. It seems rather similar to the attitude you are taking to your pupils at St Barnaby’s.’

  Octavia was intrigued. ‘I should like to know more about it,’ she said.

  ‘I will send you the paper,’ her mentor promised.

  ‘High time you were a headmistress, young woman,’ Shaw told her. ‘Influencing a single class of infant minds is all very well, and I’m sure you do it splendidly, but you should have a school of your own where you can put all your ideas into practice. Education will be more important than ever when this war is over. You may smile, but this is a piece of highly valuable advice, which I’ve given you before – free, gratis and for nothing. I daresay I am wasting my breath, for I don’t believe you were listening then any more than you are listening now.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ Octavia told him returning his grin. ‘I am all attention. All I need is the opportunity. I only hold my present position on sufferance. I shall lose it when the previous holder comes back from the war.’

  There was a murmur round the table and then Sidney Webb leant towards Octavia and joined the conversation. ‘As it happens,’ he said, ‘the LCC are looking for a headmistress at this moment. There is an old pupil teacher centre in Hammersmith that they ar
e planning to convert into a local secondary school. They need a graduate with teaching experience and plenty of energy and enthusiasm, so they say. I think you would be admirably suited. Would you like me to recommend you? It would be a challenge. I should warn you of that. It’s an old building and completely unequipped. You would be starting from scratch.’

  But she would be starting and it would be her school. ‘Thank you, Mr Webb,’ she said, keeping her excitement under control. ‘I would like that very much indeed.’

  Mrs Wilkins gentled into the room to remove the dirty dishes and, at a signal from Professor Smith, to turn up the gaslights, which bloomed into golden haloes on either side of the fireplace. Light, Octavia thought, admiring it. Beautiful, necessary, truthful light, which is what education should be about. Understanding what is true and good and seeing it clearly.

  Later that night, when the guests were gone and she and her parents were sitting round the fire in her father’s study discussing the evening’s events, her mother returned rather tentatively to Mr Webb’s offer.

  ‘Do you really want to be a headmistress, Tavy?’ she asked.

  ‘Very much, Mama.’

  ‘It would mean a lot of work,’ Amy said in her worried way.

  Octavia tried to reassure her. ‘I’m not afraid of work, Mama.’

  ‘No,’ Amy agreed. ‘That is true. You are not. I never knew anyone work as hard as you do, my dear. But then again, there is Tommy to consider. He might not approve of it.’

  ‘I suppose that is possible,’ Octavia admitted. ‘On the other hand he might say it’s a capital idea. There’s no knowing what he might think.’

  ‘Perhaps you should write and ask him,’ Amy suggested.

  That sounded too much like asking his permission. ‘There’s no point,’ Octavia said. ‘If I do, he will either agree to it without thinking about it, or tell me not to do it, without thinking about that either. Being in action is such an overwhelming business they haven’t got the energy for anything else. We will talk about it when the war’s over and he’s back home. Time enough then.’ And as her mother was looking upset, she tried to explain. ‘War changes people, Mama. It is changing us all. When he comes home I shall have to get to know him all over again.’ She looked at Amy closely, noticing how much she had altered in the last three years. Her hair was completely grey and, even when she was sitting, her shoulders stooped and she tucked her shawl about her like an old lady.

  ‘I still think you should write and tell him,’ Amy said.

  ‘I’m sure she will,’ J-J smoothed. ‘When the time comes. She has yet to be offered this position. It is not in Mr Webb’s gift.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Octavia agreed, smiling at him for his intervention. ‘Anything could happen.’ Here in Hampstead, in Hammersmith, in Salonika – which God forbid – anywhere. ‘We can’t be sure of anything.’ Except that she would apply for this headship, no matter what Tommy might think. He’d probably be as dismissive about it as he’d been about her present position, and to be realistic, there was little real hope that she would actually be offered the post, or even asked for interview. She was only a class teacher after all and hadn’t even run a department, which was the usual prerequisite for a headship – but she would apply because she knew she could do it and do it well and because it was the right thing to do. The end of the war and marriage to Tommy had receded further and further into the distance all through that awful year.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The last months of 1917 limped miserably by. It was dark and cold, the news was always bad, there were far too many people in mourning, houses were shabby for lack of paint and food was in parlously short supply. There were even shortages of bread and potatoes despite the fact that there were nearly a quarter of a million women working on the land and, as the lean weeks passed, there was talk of rationing being introduced and teams of women were gathered to cope with the paperwork. There could be no doubt in any politician’s mind that whatever their opinion of women’s suffrage might once have been, women had become too crucial to this war to be ignored. They were in France nursing the troops, they worked in munitions, they’d even been given a special dispensation to join the armed forces.

  ‘They will have to give us the vote when this is over,’ Octavia said to her father.

  But when would it be over? The stalemate in the trenches continued endlessly, the casualty lists grew more horrific by the day and the fighting in Flanders went bloodily and muddily on over the same few soured and cratered miles, which were now such a quagmire of mud and filth that if a soldier lost his footing on the duckboards and fell into it he was drowned. Elsewhere the fortunes of the war seemed to vary with the territory. In Italy the Italian army was overrun by the Germans, in Palestine Jerusalem was captured from the Turks by the British, on the Russian front there was a revolution and the Russian troops took off and marched home, refusing to fight the Czar’s wars for him any longer. The British press was considerably alarmed, pointing out that if there were to be a new government in Russia it might make peace with Germany and that would be disastrous because it would release all the German troops on the eastern front to fight in the west.

  Their fears were realised in November, when the British troops in Flanders were being annihilated at a place called Passchendaele and German Zeppelins were dropping bombs on the East End of London and the Isle of Sheppey. By that time there was a new popular leader in Russia by the name of Lenin and the Czar and his family had been sent to Siberia, where, so the newspapers said, they were being well looked after. And just as the West had feared, peace talks between Russia, Germany and Austria were opened just before Christmas.

  Tommy wrote about it to Octavia quite sourly. ‘The one thing you don’t want in a war is for your allies to go sloping off and leaving you,’ he said. ‘We’ve got enough on our plates without that, fighting Johnnie Turk, who is much worse than the Jerries, I can tell you.’ Like so many of his letters it was full of complaints. There wasn’t enough food and what there was of it was poor tack, the guns were in a foul state, they were running out of ammunition, half the army was in the sick bay with dysentery and cholera and other noxious diseases, German spies sat on the quayside in Salonika, bold as brass, and made notes on every arrival. ‘Far too many damned incompetents around, that’s the truth of it,’ he said. ‘If I survive this lot, I shall join the foreign office and show them how things should be run.’

  But for once Octavia wasn’t paying attention to his letters or to the politics of the war because two momentous things had happened – one public and extremely quiet, the other personal and quietly public.

  In January the House of Lords finally approved Lloyd George’s Representation of the People Act and married women over the age of thirty were given the vote.

  ‘It’s not enough,’ Octavia said to her father. ‘It’s a start. I’ll grant you that. But they should have given it to all women over the age of twenty-one, married or not. The campaign will have to continue.’

  However she didn’t have time to think about the campaign because two days later, an advertisement for the headship she’d been advised to apply for appeared in the papers and ten minutes after she’d read it, she was busy composing a detailed application. It seemed obvious to her that a newly formed, small school would be just the place for her to put her newly formed large ideas into practise and she meant to make out the case for them as persuasively as she could. It took her the best part of a week to get her thoughts in order.

  ‘I believe,’ she wrote, ‘that learning should be pleasurable and should bring its own reward. I believe that lack of pleasure in what we ask our pupils to do impedes their ability to do it. A baby learning to feed himself or to stand and walk is utterly absorbed in what he is doing. He doesn’t fear mistakes, since mistakes are one way of learning, he doesn’t tire, he is never bored and when he finally succeeds he is quite rapturously happy. If we could find some way to translate that experience into the teaching situation we sho
uld revolutionise the lives of our pupils. I have made a start at St Barnaby’s by allowing choice, offering praise and endeavouring to use understanding instead of resorting to punishment, but there is much more that could be done. My pupils are much happier than they would have been under a more rigid regime but they are still under pressure because mine is the only subject which offers them freedom of choice. As a headmistress and with a carefully chosen staff, I could extend this freedom to all my pupils in all the subjects they were studying.’

  It was the most demanding piece of writing she’d ever put together and even after she’d posted it she was still remembering other things she felt she should have included. By then, of course, there was nothing she could do except return to her work and try to put it out of her mind – which couldn’t be done. During the day she was kept busy by her pupils but at night she thought and hoped and planned. Oh, if only they’d give her an interview. Just an interview. That was all she needed.

  It came at the beginning of February, on a cold wet day that chilled her to the bones. The fire was slow to take that morning and she and her parents ate their limited breakfast, wrapped in their dressing gowns and shivering. In fact, when Mrs Wilkins came limping in to deliver the letters, Octavia left hers by her plate until she’d drunk a little tea to warm her. But then she opened the third one with a shriek of pleasure.

  ‘Oh, Pa!’ she said, ‘Mama, look! I’ve got an interview. What do you think of that?’

  ‘You must have a new hat,’ her mother said, predictably.

  ‘Nobody dresses up in wartime,’ Octavia told her.

  But her mother prevailed and Octavia wore her new felt hat with her old cloth coat when she took the tram to Hammersmith. As she was led into the interview room, she was so excited her hands were shaking.