Miss Bunting

by Angela Thirkell

  It was Admiral Palliser’s habit after doing his business in Barchester to go to the County Club and then take the 6.20 to Hallbury. Before the war he had got home well before seven, but now the train did not get to Hallbury till 7.10, an unconscionably long journey, so that by the time the train had been held up en route and the Admiral had walked up the hill, often with Sir Robert Fielding, it was dinner time. Frank, being eight years old and going to real boarding-school after Christmas, and the evenings being so light, was allowed to sit at the table in his dressing-gown and eat his supper with the grown-ups, with the proviso that he must go to bed at eight exactly or never come down again. It is probable that if left to himself his doting grandfather would have given in to his pleadings for another five minutes, but his mother had determined that she would have the leavings of the day to herself, and steadfastly resisted all attempts on grandfather’s and grandson’s part to modify her rule.

  Supper was enlivened by a classical discussion between grandfather and grandson. Frank, who had been learning Latin under Robin Dale since the preceding autumn, for Robin believed in catching them young, was rather uppish about his knowledge, and certainly Robin had found him, with his quick mind and retentive memory, a very promising pupil. Which was just as well, for Southbridge School under old Mr Lorimer and later under Philip Winter, now a colonel in the Barsetshires, had attained a very high level of scholarship, Percy Hacker, M.A., senior classical tutor at Lazarus, winner in his time of the Hertford and the Craven, being their high-water mark. So Master Gresham, finding it necessary to be a snob about something, as indeed we all do and perhaps bird snobs are the worst, did boast quite odiously about deponent verbs and gerunds, finding an appreciative audience in the kitchen, where the old cook, Mrs Tory, said to hear Master Frank (for to the effete and capittleist title of Master she grovellingly clung) say all his dictation and stuff (which was, we think, a portmanteau word for conjugation and declension) was as good as chapel; though the Reverend (by courtesy) Enoch Arden, Mrs Tory’s pastor, who believed in direct inspiration and that Greek and Latin were works of the devil, would have denounced this belief with fervour.

  Frank, who had spent half an hour in the kitchen treating Mrs Tory and the old parlourmaid Freeman to the first line of Caesar adsum jam, with a promise of the rest when his schoolmaster could remember it, was bursting to try it upon a more widely educated audience. So as soon as the Admiral had begun his dinner Frank, pushing a large mouthful of biscuit into one cheek with his tongue, said, rather thickly:

  ‘Grandpapa, did you do Caesar at school?’

  ‘I did,’ said the Admiral. ‘And if I didn’t do my work properly I was caned.’

  ‘Mr Dale doesn’t cane people much,’ said Frank apologetically, ‘but when one of the boys threw the ink at Tom and it went on the wall instead, he gave him three good ones.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said the Admiral. ‘Have you been caned yet, young man?’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Frank, feeling that he was wanting in the manlier qualities. ‘But Mr Dale said if I gave him the vocative of filius as filie again he’d kill me.’

  He looked hopefully at his grandfather.

  ‘And are you doing Caesar?’ said the Admiral.

  ‘Not quite, grandpapa,’ said Frank. ‘But mother told me a poem about him. Oh, grandpapa, do you know the poem about Caesar had some jam?’

  ‘Caesar had some —? Oh, yes, of course I do,’ said the Admiral, and gravely repeated that short but admirable lyric. ‘And what’s more both your uncles know it.’

  ‘The boys taught it to me one holiday,’ said Jane, going back to her childhood. ‘And I told Frank the first line, but I couldn’t remember the rest.’

  ‘Do you suppose, grandpapa, that Caesar did have jam for tea?’ said Frank, anxiously. ‘I mean did Romans have jam?’

  ‘I couldn’t say for certain,’ said the Admiral, ‘but they did have honey. When you get to Southbridge you’ll learn Vergil, and he will tell you all about bees and honey.’

  ‘Will it be funny?’ asked Frank.

  ‘No,’ said his grandfather, decidedly. ‘Even better than funny. But if you like funny Latin,’ he continued, noticing that it was nearly eight o’clock, ‘I can tell you a good poem. It begins:

  Patres conscripti

  Took a boat and went to Philippi…’

  Frank listened gravely to the end.

  ‘I don’t think it’s funny, grandpapa,’ he said, ‘it’s more what I’d call schoolboyish. I think Tom would like it when he knows Latin better.’

  ‘Touché,’ said the Admiral to his daughter; and the clock melodiously struck eight and the bells of St Hall Friars sounded from the battlemented tower through the chill July evening.

  ‘Grandpapa,’ said Frank, quickly. ‘Mr Dale said the Romans had water clocks. Have you ever seen a water clock, grandpapa?’

  ‘Bed, Frank,’ said his mother.

  ‘Oh, mother, can’t I just wait? Grandpapa hasn’t had time to say if he saw a water clock. Did you ever see one, grandpapa? I should think it would make rather a mess. Tom’s mother has a sand-glass, grandpapa, that tells you how long it takes to preach a sermon. Did you ever go to church where the clergyman had a sand-glass, grandpapa? Tom preached a sermon when Mrs Watson was out, but the sand-glass took much too long and he couldn’t think of anything more to say. He said —’

  ‘Bed, Frank,’ said his grandfather.

  ‘Yes, grandpapa,’ said Frank. ‘And Tom said: “Oh, people be good and you will go to heaven, but if you are not good you will go to a far worse place.” Do you think that was —’

  ‘Bed,’ said his mother and grandfather in one breath, and this time Frank recognized the voice of doom. Getting down from his chair he pressed his face with careless violence against his grandfather’s naval beard and his mother’s cheek, left the dining-room door ajar, came back in answer to his mother’s call, shut it just as Freeman was going in with the coffee, and went upstairs clinging to the outer side of the banisters, as he had frequently been forbidden to do.

  Left to themselves Admiral Palliser and his daughter drank their coffee in peace. Jane told her father about her visit to Mrs Merivale; the Admiral engaged to speak to Mr Adams on the following day. Then they did a little chilly gardening and so the evening passed.

  2

  Sir Robert Fielding, Chancellor to the Diocese of Barchester, had a very handsome house in the Cathedral Close next to the Deanery, and before the war only made use of Hall’s End, his charming little stone house in Hallbury, as a villegiatura, or as a convenient residence for his only child Anne who had perpetual chests and coughs and colds in Barchester; for the houses on the Deanery side of the close are very little above river level and for the greater part of the year have a tendency to damp, while a winter rarely passes without the river coming into the cellars. Indeed in the winter of 1939–40, as our readers will not remember (and we have had the greatest difficulty in running the reference to earth ourselves), rumour had it that the flood carried the Bishop’s second-best gaiters as far as old Canon Thorne’s front doorstep; and as the Bishop had accused the Canon, who was extremely popular, of Mariolatry, everyone hoped it was true.

  In spite of all that care and money could do, Anne Fielding was still an anxiety to her parents. Dr Ford, who had known her all her life, still maintained that two or three winters in a warm dry climate would do the trick, but this was out of the question, so Anne continued to lead a contented but rather remote life, going to Barchester High School when she was well enough. About a year before this unpretentious narrative begins, being then sixteen, she had had to register under the Registration of Boys and Girls Act which frightened her parents a good deal, but Dr Ford, who knew the Labour Exchange people very well, and had been of considerable assistance to them in one way and another by refusing to give medical certificates to various would-be exempteds (notably in the case of the Communist hairdresser with fine physique and no dependants, in the winter of 1940�
��1), told them that no Labour Exchange would even look at Anne. This was doubtful comfort, but her parents took it in the best spirit and retained a firm faith that as soon as the war was over they would take her to the Riviera, or even to Arizona if necessary, and see her make a complete recovery.

  The question of Anne’s further education also occupied their minds. As the war went on it was evident that she could no longer go to the High School, which was crowded to bursting point and though an excellent school, no place for a semi-invalid. Her parents, both extremely busy people, enmeshed in really valuable war work as well as their ordinary work, were at their wits’ end. If it was a case of dire necessity Lady Fielding could give up everything and live at Hallbury: but she knew it would not be a success. She would be too anxious about Anne and Anne not quite at her ease with her. Then, by a great piece of luck, Lady Fielding happened to mention her difficulties to Mrs Marling of Marling Hall after a WVS meeting in Barchester. Mrs Marling had sympathized and looked thoughtful. As they stood talking outside the Town Hall a car stopped beside them, driven by a commanding young woman in Red Cross uniform.

  ‘You know my girl Lucy, I think,’ said Mrs Marling. ‘She is going abroad with her Red Cross next month. Lucy, Lady Fielding doesn’t know what to do about Anne. She gets too tired at the High School and Dr Ford says she must stay at Hallbury. It’s all very awkward.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Lucy Marling, who was obviously going to stand no nonsense from anyone. ‘Why can’t Bunny go to Lady Fielding for a bit? Now Lettice and the children are in Yorkshire she can’t even pretend she’s governessing.’

  Now Bunny was Miss Bunting, an elderly ex-governess of high reputation, who had taught Mrs Marling and her brothers in their schoolroom days, and had come as an honoured and very useful refugee to Marling Hall soon after the outbreak of war. Mrs Marling, a very practical woman of swift decisions, was struck by her daughter Lucy’s suggestion and asked Lady Fielding to meet Miss Bunting.

  The upshot was that Miss Bunting consented, with her own peculiar mixture of gratitude and independence, to come to Hallbury for an unspecified length of time to keep an eye on Anne’s health and wellbeing, and to assist her in her studies; the whole for a very generous stipend.

  We doubt if even Miss Bunting, for all her practical sense and power of organizing, could have run a house in Hallbury in war-time, but that Lady Fielding had already found and installed a Mixo-Lydian refugee recommended by Mrs Perry, the doctor’s wife at Harefield. She was an unusually plain and unattractive young woman of dwarfish and lumpish stature, with manners that struck an odious note between cringing and arrogance, named Gradka. As for her surname, it had so often been rehearsed and so often found impossible to say or to memorize that no one bothered about it. Gradka was studying with all her might to pass the Society for the Propagation of English examination by correspondence course, and had already successfully tackled several subjects. When Lady Fielding discovered this she was anxious, feeling that the housework and food might suffer, but to the credit of Mixo-Lydia it must at once be said that Gradka did the housework and cooking excellently and never wanted holidays, because she barely tolerated the English and actively disliked all her fellow Mixo-Lydian refugees.

  Miss Bunting came to Hallbury with Lady Fielding to inspect her new domain, and in one interview reduced Gradka to a state of subservience which roused Lady Fielding’s admiration and curiosity.

  ‘How did you do it?’ she asked Miss Bunting subsequently, awestruck.

  ‘I was in Russia before the last war with a daughter of one of the Grand Dukes,’ said Miss Bunting. ‘The Russian aristocracy knew how to treat their inferiors. I observed their methods and have practised them with some success.’

  ‘But you can’t exactly call Gradka inferior,’ said Lady Fielding, nervously wondering whether she was listening outside the door. ‘Her father is a university professor and very well known.’

  ‘I think,’ said Miss Bunting, ‘that you will find the facts much overstated. The young woman, who is probably listening outside the door at the moment, is an inferior. No well-born Mixo-Lydian would dream of being connected with a university. Until this war they kept up the habits of a real aristocracy: to hunt and get drunk all autumn and winter, and to go to the Riviera and get drunk in the spring and early summer. For the rest of the year they visited their palaces in Lydianopolis where they entertained ballet girls and got drunk.’

  Whether Gradka overheard this or not, we cannot say, but from that moment she recognized Miss Bunting as a princess and the household went very well, with excellent cooking, and Anne, in her governess’s firm and competent hands, looked better and felt happier. That her charge was grossly uneducated was at once evident to Miss Bunting, who had no opinion at all of Barchester High School and its headmistress Miss Pettinger (now by a just judgment of heaven an OBE), and a very poor opinion of the whole system of women’s education and the School Certificate examination in particular. It was too late to go back to the beginning, as she would have liked to do, so she contented herself with encouraging her pupil to read. Anne, like so many young people of her age, even with a cultivated background, had somehow never acquired the habit of reading, but Miss Bunting, by reading aloud to her in the evenings from the works of Dickens, Thackeray, Miss Austen and other English classics, besides a good deal of poetry, had lighted such a candle as caused that excellent instructress to wonder if she had done wisely. For Anne, a very intelligent girl who had never used her intelligence, fell head over ears into English literature and history, and made excursions into many other fields. Never had Miss Bunting in her long career had a pupil who had tasted honey-dew with such vehemence, or drunk the milk of Paradise with such deep breaths and loud gulps; but it didn’t appear to do Anne’s health any harm, so the two of them had a very agreeable time in spite of the war, the weather and their rather lonely life; for though the Fieldings were liked in Hallbury, they were not natives, as were the Pallisers and the Dales; and were still treated with caution by most of the old inhabitants.

  Pleasant exceptions to this were Admiral Palliser who had known Lady Fielding’s family well, and Dr Dale, the Rector, who after paying a parochial call upon Miss Bunting had conceived the greatest admiration for her peculiar qualities, and talked books and families with her by the hour, which was a good education for Anne; for say what you will, to know who is whose mother-in-law or cousin among what we shall continue to call the right people is as fascinating as relativity and much more useful, besides being a small part of English, or at any rate county history. His son Robin too, back from the wars with his shattered foot, found in Anne another human being who was handicapped physically, and though neither of them complained, each recognized in the other, inarticulately, a disability which had to be fought and as far as possible overcome. With Dr Dale Anne also began to read some Latin as a living language, and when her father approached with nervous determination the question of pay for his instruction (for Dr Dale was a good scholar and his articles in the Journal of Classical Studies were models of precise thought), Dr Dale accepted his wages and put them aside for Robin’s benefit.

  As may be imagined, Miss Anne Fielding, now nearly seventeen years old, had not seen much of life in the way of parties, so the thought of Admiral Palliser and Mrs Gresham and Dr Dale and Robin Dale, all of whom she saw quite often, coming to dine was so exciting as to make her feel rather sick. To add to the excitement her father and mother, who usually only got down from Saturday to Monday, were going to stay at Hall’s End for a whole week and Mrs Morland was coming, and Anne wondered if it would be rude to ask her to write her name in her latest novel which Anne had bought with her own money, or rather with a book token given to her by a dull aunt. Gradka was also excited, for she was going to make a Mixo-Lydian national dish for dinner which needed sour milk; and what with milk rationing and the difficulties of keeping what milk could be spared till it was exactly of the right degree of sourness, she got a good deal
behindhand with her work, which was to write an essay about the influence of Hudibras upon English comic rhyming, as exemplified in Byron, the Ingoldsby Legends and the lyrics of W. S. Gilbert. And how Mixo-Lydians could be expected to write such an essay we do not know, but write it she did, and got very good marks: probably because the examiner had just about as little real sense of humour as the examinee.

  The great Wednesday dawned as grey and blustery as all other days, but the east had gone out of the wind, which was veering, with many capricious rushings back to find something it had forgotten, through north into north-west. By noon it was a mild summer breeze and great loose clouds were billowing away to the south-east, leaving a blue and not unkind sky. By one o’clock it was almost warm, and on the south side of the house really warm. Gradka was in a frenzy of preparation which included decorating the dinner-table with trails of leaves from the outdoor vine. This vine, popularly supposed to be coeval with ‘the monks’ (a date embracing practically everything between St Augustine’s conversion of Kent and the Reformation), grew against the south wall of the house and brought forth in most years rather lopsided bunches of little hard green grapes which occasionally under the influence of an exceptional summer turned purplish, but were none the less sour and unwelcoming, while this year, the weather having been uniformly not only cold but very dry, the miserable grapelets had withered and fallen almost as soon as they formed.