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Text originally published in 1936 under the same title.
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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.
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A LONDON GIRL OF THE EIGHTIES
by
M. V. Hughes
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS 3
I. An Ordinary Girl, 1881 4
II. Under Law, 1883 15
III. Bright Intervals 29
IV. Under Grace 38
V. Maesta Abeo 53
VI. Breaking Fresh Ground, 1885 64
VII. The Furies Amuse Themselves 76
VIII. My First Post, 1886 89
IX. At Hell’s Mouth, 1887 104
X. My Second Post 116
XI. My New People, 1888 122
XII. ‘A dwfn yw tonnau Dyfi’ 136
XIII. Under Roseberry Topping 149
XIV. Easter at Elstow, 1890 157
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 167
I. An Ordinary Girl, 1881
§ 1
Your father, dear old chap, is always so anxious about you, and afraid of your becoming an ordinary schoolgirl, with an ordinary schoolgirl’s tricks and mannerisms.
THIS sentence is part of a letter from my mother to me in 1879, when at the age of twelve I was spending my summer holiday in Cornwall. The term ‘old chap’ was merely one of endearment, for he was only a little over forty, and to us children more like an elder brother than a father. He never worried us about our behaviour, so that any hint he let drop was the more significant. And when a few weeks later in that same year he met with a fatal accident, it was natural for us to treasure everything that we remembered about him. The particular hint quoted above was occasioned by a letter I had written home with several postscripts and facetious turns of phrase. I knew quite well that what he meant by ‘ordinary’ was the silly attempt to be extraordinary, and that he wanted me to be as simple and straightforward as possible. The same idea had been rubbed in by my four elder brothers, with less delicacy. So, paradoxically, I tried to carry out the wishes of these my household gods by being as ordinary and as little conspicuous as I could, suppressing a child’s desire to shine by using grand words and witticisms—all that the boys summed up in the dreaded phrase ‘trying to be funny’.
My mother’s ideas for me gave a healthy make-weight. She was for encouraging any scrap of originality in anybody at any time, and allowed me to ‘run free’ physically and mentally. She had no idea of keeping her only girl tied to her apron-strings, and from childhood I used to go out alone in our London suburb of Canonbury, for a run with my hoop or to do a little private shopping, and once even went to Cornwall by myself. Her precepts were extremely few and consequently attended to. ‘Never talk to anyone in the street except to tell them the way.’ To back this up, lurid stories were told me of children offered sweets by a ‘kind lady’, or taken for a ride in a gig by a ‘kind gentleman’, and never heard of again. The mystery of their fate was alluring, but deterrent enough. When a little older, I was warned, ‘If out late, walk fast and look preoccupied, and no one will bother you.’ Why I should be bothered I had no idea, but adopted the line of conduct without question. One striking instance of the potency of fewness in commands comes to my memory. Mother came in rather agitated one day; she had seen some ‘very dreadful pictures’ in a shop in a side street not far away; she begged me not to walk down that street ever. Although curious enough to know what the pictures could be, I never dreamt of going to look. She showed even greater restraint in refusing to give advice; when I applied for such help she would nearly always say, ‘Use your own judgement’.
Another policy of my mother’s was not so commendable. She wished to make me indifferent to my personal appearance, provided only that I was tidy and had no buttons missing. She snubbed me once quite severely for remarking that I thought I looked nice in my new dress: ‘It’s no business of yours what you look like.’ She told me that the moment anyone put powder or paint on her face she was taking the first downward step. This was not from a moral point of view, but self-regarding. ‘You have to keep on with it more and more because you look queer without it, and then when you get older you look like poor Miss Dossit.’ This was a dressmaker who served as a helot in another direction, too: she was never punctual, and we had to say that a dress was required three days before it actually was, in order to get it in time. My mother drove home the moral, concluding with the remark, ‘The Queen is never unpunctual’.
By common conspiracy, as I discovered in later years, all of them, father, mother, and brothers, kept me from any knowledge of the evils of the world. Today this seems ridiculous, if not dangerous, but there was some wisdom in it after all, for my life all along has been fresher and jollier for being free from fears and suspicions. As for little points of savoir-faire I picked these up unconsciously from hearing the boys’ comments on the behaviour of their numerous acquaintances. The characteristics of the girls who came to the house were freely discussed in the family circle, and I easily discovered some types that were not popular. There was the extravagant girl, who was always wanting to be taken out, making serious holes in pocket-money. There was the managing kind, who knew how to deal with men. There was the empty-headed silly giggling kind, bearable for only a very short time. The wonder-struck girl with big eyes, who said, ‘Oh, Tom, fahncy!’ to everything he said, lasted only a little longer. Then there was the intense and interesting type—‘all right, you know, mother, for a chat, but not much as a companion for life’. Least popular of all, I gathered, was the aggressively sensible girl who was never taken in.
The family tea-time, when such opinions were let loose as we all sat round the table, was a pleasant and I think useful part of our education. The main work of the day was over and the family pooled what gossip they had got from school or books or friends, discussing future plans and telling the latest jokes. Mother, pouring out at the head of the table, liked us to chatter freely, but I, as the youngest, seldom got a word in and was often snubbed when I did. Thus, after venturing, ‘I did well in French today’, I had the chilling reminder from Charles, ‘Self-praise is no recommendation’. If I related a joke, ‘We’ve heard that before’ would come as a chorus. Once when I confided to Dym that we had begun America, he called out, ‘I say, boys, at Molly’s school they’ve just discovered America’. In short, I was wisely neglected.
I say ‘wisely’, because at the private school to which I trotted off every day I was a person of importance. I shared with another girl the glory of being dux, as our Head called it. We took places in class, and the one who was top at the end of the morning wore a silver medal. This nearly always fell to Winnie Heath or me. She and I were good friends and shared a hearty contempt for our teachers. The only things they taught us quite thoroughly were the counties and chief towns, dates of the king
s, French irregular verbs, and English parsing. Since these were immutable and mainly irrational, they were unsullied by explanations and remained useful possessions.
One day Winnie came to school all flushed and excited, took me aside, and said, ‘I’ve got an idea. Let’s work at something for ourselves. Yesterday I came across in a book all about the different races and languages in Austria. You wouldn’t believe what a lot there are—so jolly. And I thought, why not get the things we want to know out of books?’
‘Splendid,’ said I. ‘Why, I’ve got lots of books at home. My brothers will show us where to find some things worth learning, and you and I can lend books to one another.’
We set about our new plan at once, and soon became quite intoxicated with this furtive pursuit of information and all our learned notes and diagrams. We would come to school bursting with news about such things as the cause of an eclipse, what the Renaissance was, the effect of climate on national character, the legend of Barbarossa. Dym lent a hand on the science side and Charles on the literary, although I had to warn Winnie that Charles was more imaginative than reliable. One evening Dym brought me a grand notebook of blank paper that he had bought for Optics, but didn’t really require (so he said). This became for Winnie and me a joint magazine of treasured notes and illustrations, boundless in its range of subject. It seems ludicrous that at the age of fifteen we should have attacked knowledge in general in this way. The modern attempt to make use of this desire to dig for oneself seems to have erred in being over-organized and thus to have destroyed the mainspring. If Winnie and I had been presented by the school authorities with a full programme of work, lists of books of reference, access to a library, and proper time and place to work in, with judicious assistance always at hand—most of our zest would have melted. More in line with our method was that of a schoolmaster who fostered a love of history in his boys by putting some attractive books on a high shelf and asserting that they were ‘too difficult at present’.
As it was, we taught one another and ‘heard’ one another in odd corners of the school and playground, sometimes sitting on the stairs. In those old-fashioned private schools no one minded what you did, nor when nor where. Winnie was good at arithmetic, and at last made me able to face a complicated simplification of fractions, and indeed to get fun over seeing it come out. But we were both unable to fathom the reason for turning a division ‘upside down and multiplying’, although Barnard Smith explained it at length. We laughed and agreed to ‘never mind but just do it’.
A few weeks later it was I who came to school brimful of an idea. It had been suggested to me by my eldest brother, Tom, who had seen that we were wasting energy by lack of any system. ‘Winnie,’ said I, as soon as I could get her alone, ‘let’s go in for the Oxford Senior Local.’
As I expected, she stood aghast, but under my pressure she soon caught my enthusiasm, and we approached the Head with our ambition.
‘What, dears? What is this you say? The Senior Oxford? I fear this is quite beyond your reach. However, I can but write for particulars and then you can see for yourselves…far out of your depth.’
In a few days’ time we were handed with a pitying smile the ‘Regulations for 1882’. How queer the date looked, as if it were in the next century; and regulations for it seemed almost impious. We took the pamphlet to a quiet corner and eagerly ran our fingers through the many injunctions in types of varying emphasis, muttering them aloud and occasionally exclaiming, ‘Not really impossible!’ At last we reached the set books. ‘Only a play of Shakespeare’s and some Addison—Coo! We can do that. I know a good bit of Macbeth already. Infirm of purpose, give me the daggers,’ I cried, seizing the Regulations and waving them in the air.
There followed crowded hours of joyful acquisition. Mother helped with French in the evenings, Dym worked out for us any specially bad problem, and Tom gave us some learned views on the character of Lady Macbeth that we could ‘lug in’ as he called it.
Few of life’s scanty triumphs have exceeded my reception of the parchment declaring that I had ‘satisfied the examiners in the Rudiments of Faith and Religion’, and (on the back) had satisfied them in several other large-sounding things, including, yes, arithmetic.
‘Hm! they’re easily satisfied,’ was my brother Dym’s comment on this last item. He was a mathematical scholar of Jesus, so of course…but the other boys were unstinted in their admiration of how their little Molly had been able to hoodwink the examiners in so many different things. I pictured these examiners, grave and reverend signiors, all bearded, gazing at my answers and leaning back with complete contentment—satisfied.
I was now an ASSOCIATE IN ARTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. How those capitals delighted me, and it seemed that I was entitled to put A. A. after my name. We were down in Cornwall when the glad news arrived, so that my many cousins were duly impressed. As I had left school at the end of the summer term, I returned to London that autumn with the idea that life’s summit had now been reached.
§ 2
But mother had begun to think a bit, as mothers will, and when October brought my sixteenth birthday she took me seriously into the dining-room and began thus:
‘Listen, dear. Now that the boys will soon be all scattered at their various work we shan’t need such a big house as this. And we needn’t be tied to London. Suppose you and I were to go and live together in a cottage down in Cornwall? Somewhere by the sea, such as St. Ives or Marazion—within reach of Tony at Reskadinnick?’
She paused, giving a chance for these magic names to take effect, and then added: ‘You could work at literature and read French with me. We could do lots of sketching. In fact we could do whatever we liked. You could have a horse and ride to all those parts of Cornwall that you’ve always wanted to see—Mevagissey, Zennor, Tintagel. Perhaps we might travel abroad, to Italy, Norway, Spain.’
‘But how could we afford to’ I broke in, knowing how limited were our means, but she stopped me with,
‘I have already talked to the boys about the idea, and they have assured me that we shall always have enough to live on—they will see to that.’
Then, looking away from me out of the window for a few moments in silence, she turned and said in a dull, careless tone, ‘Or—would you rather earn your own living?’
I hesitated. Rosy visions of Cornwall and its romantic villages, possession of a horse (always a passionate desire), the sea, Italy and Rome, floated in my imagination. It must have been a bit of my father’s blood that made me say,
‘It’s awfully good of the boys to say that, and I know they mean it, but I would rather be independent.’
Mother smiled and admitted that the ‘lady of leisure’ idea had been the boys’ and not hers. I know now that she must have hoped for that decision; for it was habitual with her to load the dice in favour of the result she least wanted, for fear of influencing the choice.
In those few moments the current of my life was definitely set towards hard work and uncertainty, and although these two have been my constant companions, and several times I have been in very low water, never have I regretted my choice.
The next point to consider was how the earning of a living was to be done. In those days it was not considered the thing for a girl to ‘earn’, although she might toy with a little work. Any other career than teaching was practically unknown. For me it would have to be teaching in a school, since the word ‘governess’ had become a grim joke in our family. During my last term at school one of the girls had told me that a friend of hers knew a girl who had actually become a B.A. We had both been awe-struck that a woman one might meet could attain such glory, but we neither of us connected this pinnacle with an ordinary teacher in a school. Indeed, I fancied that one just ‘took up’ teaching in the same casual way that I had taken a Sunday-school class last summer in Cornwall.
By the way, that bit of experience might well have given me pause. My cousin Lucy had been distracted by the vast number of children committed to her car
e on Sunday afternoons, and implored me to come and take a class. The section she assigned to me consisted of some forty children, aged from three to twelve, herded in a stale-smelling room, and supposed to be seated on long wooden forms. However, the only restriction to their jumping up or crawling about was the tightness with which they had been sewn into their Sunday clothes. Not even the death of Jezebel (the lesson appointed for the day) had any appeal, and my efforts to draw what moral I could from this story were continually interrupted by such remarks as ‘Please, teacher, stop Tommy crawlin’ on ’is best trowsies’ and other intimate requests requiring immediate personal attention. Of course, truly Cornish, they wanted to know where I had come from, why I had had my hair cut short like a boy’s, and what I had paid to have it cut. I was foolish enough to admit that I had come from London. This started a new excitement, and I was asked if the pavements were really made of gold, and whether there were lions there. Seizing this last as a godsend, I abandoned Jezebel and spent the rest of the lesson in the Zoo.
I suppose it was the memory of this at the back of my mind that made me say to mother that I felt a bit young to teach in a real school.
‘Yes, exactly,’ she replied, ‘and it is only this morning that I’ve had a letter from Tony suggesting that you should go to the very best school that can be found, and that she will pay the fees, no matter how high.’
Tony was mother’s favourite sister in Cornwall, an aunt who never knew how to do enough for us. She had been told of the birthday choice to be put before me, had guessed how I should decide it, and was determined that her present to me should consist in a proper preparation. ‘I know what she will say,’ ran the letter, ‘so look sharp and find a good school.’ Now it chanced that as I used to go along Highbury New Park to my school I had frequently met a girl on her way to the station, carrying books and obviously going to school herself. After a while we used to smile on one another and then came to saying ‘good morning’, and finally used to stop for a few moments’ gossip.
A London Girl of the Eighties Page 1