Not quite so easy to understand was the objection to the teachers having any interests outside their work. Now it is obvious that no teacher, and no parent, can inspire children if he thinks too much about them; he must have some wider outside interest about which they must be left guessing. But for Miss Buss the school, the scheme, the orderly plan—this was the one absorbing thought.
III. Bright Intervals
FOR the first week or so I was definitely under a cloud, disappointed with the work and disheartened by the atmosphere. But as it was almost a point of honour in our family to squeeze as much enjoyment as we could out of everything, I soon began to see some good things around me.
I shall never forget my excitement at first seeing the great assembly hall. It seemed to have something of the splendour of the Merchant Taylors’ Hall in Charterhouse Square, where I had so often been present at my brothers’ Speech-days. To Miss Buss I think it represented all her glorious aspirations, and she had thought out every possible means of investing it with dignity. She could not have the dignity of the M.T.S. hall, with its flavour of great age, heroic men, and eminent scholars. So she wisely struck out on a different line. Everything of importance had been ‘presented’ and bore the name of the donor with a date. On the high platform was the throne. Behind this rose the great organ. At the other end was the gallery, with a medallion of the Princess of Wales, to commemorate her having opened the hall. A stained-glass window, in memory of someone, gave a cheerful bit of colour when the morning sun poured in. The rows of folding desks and benches were kept spotlessly clean, a contrast to the roughly handled forms at Merchant Taylors’.
On my second day I was present at Prayers, and saw the Hall at its main function. The idea of prayers at school was quite new to me, and I was certainly amazed. The girls came in from cloakroom or classroom, one by one as into church, and took their seats in perfect silence, while a voluntary was played on the organ. As soon as Miss Buss ascended the platform every one stood up, and then followed a hymn, a short reading from the Bible, and a short prayer. A lively march tune accompanied our filing out in due order to our form-rooms. If Miss Buss had been content with these simple dignities we should all look back on that Hall with unmixed affection. But she required absolute silence in it, not only during Prayers, but also at any time during the day when pupils were casually passing through it, and they were in honour bound to report themselves and sign, if they had uttered a single word in the holy precincts.
During Prayers, however, a sterner vigilance was kept; honour was evidently not to be trusted; a teacher, prefect, or monitor was stationed over each form, to make sure that silence should be absolute. Now it chanced that the Upper Fourth had fallen to the charge of my prefect friend, Mary Worley. Imagine her dismay when she noticed that I made casual remarks quite freely to my neighbour morning after morning, while we sat waiting for Miss Buss to appear. Nothing would have induced her to order me to sign, but in the train on our way home she very tactfully approached the point:
‘I’m a bit bothered, Molly, by the way you talk in Hall. The rule is quite a good one when you come to look at it. If they all talked there would be such a babel.’
‘Of course there would,’ said I, ‘and I’ll never do it again.’
My respect for Mary was enormous, and I kept my word, suddenly discovering that a good deal of fun might be got out of keeping all the rules, no matter how needless they seemed. Indeed, they were not much trouble when once you got used to them, and in this cynical spirit I became a model pupil.
One advantage of the school I felt immediately. Ever since my father’s death we had been hard up. And I was quite miserably ashamed of it, in a way that modern boys and girls can’t imagine. In those days people never dreamt of saying they couldn’t afford a thing. Actual privations were as nothing to this wretched feeling. I didn’t mind going without a summer trip to Cornwall or the sea-side, not having fires enough in the winter, never having a new dress (only ‘passed-ons’ from cousins), and dreading every order for a new text-book. But I did bitterly mind that the girls in my private school should notice my poverty. For instance, one day the news had gone round that Mary Thomas had got a new dress, and I was elated, until one keen-eyed girl discovered that it was only an old one turned.
Now at the North London I sensed at once a different atmosphere. No one asked where you lived, how much pocket-money you had, or what your father was—he might be a bishop or a rat-catcher. Girls would openly grumble at having to buy a new text-book. The only notice taken of another girl’s dress that I ever heard made a funny contrast to what I had experienced in the private school. I was told after I had left school that I had been a constant wonder for the length of time that one dress had lasted me, and that this had called forth admiration, not contempt.
Every now and again we were besought by Miss Buss, in her addresses on moral subjects, not to waste our parents’ money by being extravagant with exercise paper or careless with books. One special delinquency in this line would rouse her to boiling-point. Since she couldn’t track down the culprit she was obliged to pour forth her wrath on the school at large. A stall was opened every day on the premises for the sale of text-books, paper, pencils, and so on. Again and again it happened that a girl would buy a book, lay it down in the cloakroom while she did up her boots, and forget to take it home. A horribly efficient underling would find it and transfer it to the Lost Property Office. Here there always tended to be a great accumulation of goods, for one could only get anything out of it by signing twice—once for leaving it about, and again for not having a name on it. So naturally the girls preferred to sacrifice a good many articles. When Miss Buss saw an expensive new text-book among the unclaimed store she must have realized how some girl had cajoled her mother into giving her the extra money for another copy. ‘Lying and robbery!’ exclaimed Miss Buss in her moral lecture. But as long as the foolish rules existed she was beating the wind.
In my new-born enthusiasm for keeping all the rules ‘for fun’ I discerned some practical advantages. I made a habit of getting everything ready overnight, so as to be unflustered for the start in the morning. Much wear and tear, physical and mental, have been spared me throughout life by always being ‘ten minutes ahead of schedule’. Waste of time from being occasionally too early for an appointment has been amply compensated by peace of mind.
The advantage of strong discipline, too, was brought home to me during my first term. Some kind of theatrical display was being given in the Hall when suddenly the top part of the temporary stage began to give forth smoke. As this was before the days of regular fire-drill in schools, there was no recognized procedure. We all sat like graven images, glaring at the outbreak, frightened of the fire, but still more frightened of Miss Buss’s wrath if we showed our alarm by moving or ‘speaking in Hall’. As it was, the fire was quickly got under and the play proceeded. But Miss Buss seized the chance at her next moral lecture to praise us for our self-control, and to point out the dreadful consequences of anyone person’s showing fright in a large assembly. ‘Sit tight and look calm,’ said she, ‘no matter how frightened you really are.’
Any incident from school life, or the newspaper, would be pressed into the service of those moral talks. It was the period of tight waists, when girls were vying with one another to get the smallest girth. One young society woman (Miss Buss told us in a solemn undertone) pinched her waist so much that her liver was completely cut in two! I always longed to know how they found this out, and whether she ‘died on them’; but the story was sufficiently alarming anyhow.
The fallacy of the slogan ‘Spending money is good for trade’ was brought home to us by a hypothetical case: Little Tommy bought too many jam tarts and was ill. The confectioner was encouraged by his ‘demand’ to make more jam tarts. More little boys bought too many tarts and were ill, and so on. ‘Who then,’ asked Miss Buss triumphantly, ‘was benefited?’ The question was rhetorical, or we might have suggested both the confectioner an
d the doctor. But we gathered that the fewer sweets we bought the more sweet-makers would be driven to some nobler work, and to this day I buy sweets with a sense of guilt.
It was not long after term began that I went home one day in almost a cheerful frame of mind, full of the news that we were to be taught some quite new subjects. Mother was properly impressed by the title ‘Political Economy’ of which even she had never so much as heard. But she was to learn a great deal of it before she was much older. Another subject called ‘Domestic Economy’ puzzled her still more, but sounded as if she would be quite au fait in it. However, she became meeker when I began after a time to talk familiarly of hydrogenous foodstuffs and carbohydrates. ‘Foodstuffs!’ she exclaimed, ‘what a funny word!’ The lessons were entirely theoretical, as there was neither kitchen nor laundry at our disposal, and I darkly suspected that our teachers had never entered such places. Now I could make a rice pudding blindfold, so mother and I were greatly tickled at my having to write down and learn a recipe for it. Her notion of a recipe is best shown by a conversation I heard one day. A dropper-in to lunch had enjoyed her pudding and began:
‘How do you manage to get such good rice puddings, Mrs. Thomas? My cook is so uncertain—one day we can swim in it, and the next day we can dance on it. Do tell me exactly how you get it just right like this.’
‘You take a pie-dish.’
‘What size?’
‘Oh, the ordinary size. Put some well-washed rice in it.’
‘How much?’
‘Enough to cover the bottom. Then add a bit of butter.’ ‘How big a bit?’
‘As big as a walnut. Then add salt and sugar.’
‘How much?’
‘Oh, as much as you think will do. Then bake in a very slow oven.’
‘For how long?’
‘Until it seems to be done.’
The curious part about this recipe was the complete satisfaction shown by the visitor, who nodded her head at each item of information, for mother took care to emphasize the really important point. Nothing whatever remained to me of those recipes at school, nor of the elaborate menus for a family of seven, and I never had any idea whether my sons were consuming nitrogen or carbon or what.
Another new subject called ‘Laws of Health’ was far more attractive, for it involved lots of drawing. We had to draw lovely skeletons and lungs and hearts, with tubes in red and blue. Underneath we could put neat little ‘keys’ to show the observer what A, B, C, a, b, c, stood for. One day there was brought into the room a life-size model of the human trunk, which took to pieces. A bit was lifted off and behold the stomach with appurtenances. After a short exposition another bit was lifted off, with still more intimate revelations. Notes were dictated, but when we were told that the intestines were thirty feet in length I wrote down thirty inches, arguing to myself that thirty feet was an impossible length to get into one’s body. When my notebook was corrected, the ‘inches’ was allowed to pass, but a mark was taken off for the spelling ‘intestins’.
The one thing I remember from those lessons is the way in which the blood managed to get up the veins. Valves seemed to me a most ingenious device of the Creator. In doing my diagrams with such loving care I little thought of the use to which they would be put. Some years later I found that my brother Tom had captured my notebook, and with its aid had been able to give some lessons in physiology to a pupil in a Yorkshire town, where that same pupil is now a leading doctor.
Needlework should naturally have been included in the Domestic Economy course, but very little attention was paid to it. Whether Miss Buss, like my mother, had been so overdosed with it herself that she did not care to inflict it on the young, or whether she considered it a feminine and feeble pursuit, easily picked up at home, the result was joyful enough for me. And yet, much as I hated the sight of a needle, sewing was the cause of some of my pleasantest memories of the school. Turning her back on the frivolities of embroidery, Miss Buss encouraged both plain sewing and Christianity by ordaining a Dorcas meeting once a month. To most of us it was a treat, providing a change from the usual routine. It involved a lunch at school and staying for the afternoon, with a possible game in the gymnasium thrown in. Surprise packets were prepared by our mothers and eaten, picnic fashion, in the dining-room, rousing envy among the girls who were enduring the school lunch. Since the work was more of a good deed than a lesson, we were allowed to talk a little within reason while we sewed. The only thing we had to sign for was forgetting to bring a thimble. I generally forgot mine, but Bessie Jones could always be relied on to have brought a few spare ones, in order to meet such cases.
For two hours we sewed horribly coarse cotton, of a dull biscuit colour and queer smell, with little blackish threads poking out of it here and there. It was to become in time chemises for the poor. We were not taught how to cut them out, for our mistakes would have been wasteful. Our duty was to join long stretches of stuff together. It seemed to me much the same as hemming, but the expert girls called it running and felling. Where did the pleasure come in? The reward for our noble work consisted in being read aloud to by the form mistress. As she was not required to improve us, she chose some jolly book that she herself liked, and we were encouraged to discuss any little point that arose in it, even while we sewed—a delightful change from the usual procedure of a lesson. Two of these books are still vivid in my memory, always recalling those cheery afternoons: The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, giving us a taste of a new kind of humour, and Aristotle’s Ethics.
Even here marks pursued us. Since they were not to be taken off for talking in this blessed instance, ten or less were allotted for the amount of sewing we had achieved. At the close of the time the mistress went round to examine and award. During one reading of Aristotle my whole output was some twelve inches.
‘This is very little, dear, for two hours.’
‘Ah, yes,’ I replied, ‘but the book was so interesting that I had to stop to think.’
‘Ten marks,’ said she with a grin, passing on to give my neighbour only five for an enormously greater stretch of sewing. But we looked at one another and laughed, for the Dorcas marks never ‘counted’.
These joyful afternoons came only about twice in the term, but there was always some little excitement going on. Fully aware, no doubt, of the mental limitations of the rank and file of her staff, Miss Buss obtained the help of occasional outside lecturers, who gave us real contact with the science and art of the day. Lantern slides were then a rare treat, involving the darkening of the hall, a pungent smell and the joyful possibility of an accident, or at least a hitch of some kind, when the lecturer would call out ‘next please’ and get either no response or the next slide upside down. A man called Proctor gave us a course on ‘The Birth and Death of Worlds’ and ‘The Life Story of the Moon’. As my ideas in these matters had been confined to those of Moses I found the new knowledge entrancing, its only drawback being that we had to write an account of each lecture afterwards.
Henry Blackburn, the editor of Academy Notes, gave us a course on modern art, far more fascinating to me than the astronomy, for instead of using a lantern he made drawings for us then and there, illustrating his remarks on good composition, perspective, the use of figures, and so on. I was able to jot these down, and mother and I went over them eagerly when I got home.
A certain Captain Speedy had just returned from Abyssinia, and gave us an amusing talk about it, dressing up, like a quick-change artist, as a general, a priest, a merchant, a courtier, and so on, and throwing in some amazing details of their religious rites, wedding ceremonies, and methods of commerce. He won our gratitude, too, by saying: ‘I understand that you girls have to write an account of my talk to you. Well, the very word Abyssinia means confusion, because the races are confused, the religion is confused, the mountains and valleys are confused, the climate is confused, and I know that I am confused in addressing so many girls. So the more confused your accounts are, the better they will represent the countr
y and the lecture.’
The father of one of the girls was a sculptor, so he came to give us the story of how a lump of marble is gradually turned into a statue—a mysterious business on which we were completely ignorant. My chief pleasure in this consisted in the little bits of marble that he distributed among us with the hint that if put in the sugar-bowl they would cause much innocent mirth when a visitor stirred and stirred in vain.
These are only samples of the outside lectures that were liable to occur at any time, and hardly a week went by without one. But in addition there were two men who were habitués of the school. They were so unattractive that some of us fancied that Miss Buss had imported them to show us what men might be like. One of them came once a week to teach the upper forms composition. He seemed to use the lesson for venting some secret grouch. At first a few of us who were new to his ways took the trouble to write some interesting essays on the themes he set. But he seemed to derive pleasure from reading bits aloud and sneering at us for ‘trying to be clever’. What else did he expect us to try to be? However, we could have borne the ill-tempered remarks if he had shown us how to improve, and had not mixed his remarks with a mouthful of biscuit which he was continually munching. We were quite glad when he washed the crumbs down with some of the sherry that always stood on the desk for him. One day, to the general astonishment, an essay received high praise and was read aloud to us all.
‘How did you manage to get at all that stuff in the time?’ we asked the writer of it.
‘I copied it straight out of an encyclopaedia, just to see what he would say.’
That was enough, and thenceforth we copied from any book that we could find and took no more trouble with him. Round this man I have since woven an absurd fancy that it was a case of blackmail, put into my head by one of the Sherlock Holmes stories in which a teacher holds his post by this means. Miss Buss blackmailed by a sinister-looking man who drank sherry opens up exciting possibilities.
A London Girl of the Eighties Page 5