It was in the Latin work that I felt the greatest advantage from my move. In the Upper Fifth the teacher had kept a crib on her lap for even the syntax sentences, and we were not allowed any variety of rendering. A fair copy placed boldly on the desk would have been respectable, but a crib on the lap, hidden (supposedly) by the desk, was quite another thing. Now in the Sixth we encountered a Classic mistress who was a mental aristocrat. She seemed not only superior socially to the bulk of the staff, but she knew her subject, and, more remarkable still, she knew the business of teaching. She might have stepped straight out of a public school or a tutor’s room at the university. When we made a howler she just stopped in her tracks and looked bewildered: ‘Surely, Mary, you would not use the indicative there? Of course…Have you any precedent for it?’ Slips in gender and such trifles she treated with the polite disregard one would mete out to a coffee-spill at table—quick remedy with no fuss. She certainly, more than anyone else, gave the Collegiate touch that justified the title of the school. She was the daughter of the R.A., who had executed the medallion of the Princess of Wales, and no doubt her artistic upbringing had heightened the effect of her natural good looks and vivacity. Meeting an old schoolfellow the other day I asked what she remembered of the school. ‘Nothing,’ was her reply. ‘I can recall nothing except my admiration for Miss Armstead; we used to watch what she had on, because she dressed in such good style.’
More attractive to some of us was Mrs. Bryant, who was by no means a clear teacher, but had the rare quality of inspiring us to work and think things out for ourselves. With her Irish sense of humour and kindly sympathy she gave a good balance to the masterful spirit of Miss Buss. Now and again, too, she would give us glimpses of her subversive political views. We had in the form a girl from Ulster, conservative to the bone, and it was very pretty to see a passage of arms between her and Mrs. Bryant, all the more entertaining because neither dared to be entirely outspoken. The spirit of camaraderie that existed in the Sixth between teachers and taught was quite a new thing to me, and all the delightful dreams with which I first approached the school were more than fulfilled.
The autumn term was to end with the Cambridge Locals. This was a different business from my Senior Oxford of the year before. A mere pass was nothing. Scholarships were awarded to the girls who got the highest places, and we aimed at distinctions. The scholarships took the form of remission of school fees. Now it chanced that my aunt Tony was in one of her low-water periods, owing to the vagaries of the price of tin, and although she would have screwed out the money somehow for me, mother and I were determined that she should not be allowed to. I knew, therefore, that I must win one of those scholarships or leave, and the competition was severe. Mrs. Bryant said years afterwards that we were the best Sixth she ever had. Anxiety, however, could not sit on me, and I gave myself up to the exhilaration and amusement of the whole proceedings.
The school presented so many candidates for Junior and Senior that it was a Centre in itself, and ‘Cambridge Week’ was an annual festival. The desks in the Hall were provided with inkwells, pens, clips, heaps of lovely new paper, and, of course, the dividing boards to prevent cheating. All candidates were required to sign a solemn declaration that during the examination week they would open no school-book, visit no friends or place of entertainment, go to bed at nine, and take the school dinner every day.
Easy—all except the last item. No doubt it was well to ensure that every one had a substantial meal, but it was the fly in the ointment for me. Substantial that school dinner undoubtedly was. Instead of mother’s home-made pasties or dainty sandwiches I had to face pieces of meat (animal unknown) swimming in straw-coloured water, with two soapy potatoes and a lump of warm greens, followed by a slab of suet pudding with treacle. The girl next to me on the first day had had previous experience of these meals, and had come prepared. On her lap she had spread a sheet of paper, and ever and anon she would transfer to it a lump of the pudding. She told me that it got bigger in her throat and swallow it she could not. ‘I don’t mean to try,’ said I, and sat back. Presently an official bore down upon me.
‘You must eat your pudding, dear; it’s a rule of the school that nothing must be left on the plate.’
‘But I can’t bear those bits of suet that seem to ooze out and look at you; and I loathe treacle.’
‘Then you should not have taken it, dear.’
‘Well, they planked it down in front of me without a word; but thank you for telling me what to do. Tomorrow I will refuse it.’
I was fortunate enough to be able to carry out this plan, and supplement the meat course with apples and pears provided by mother, eaten in secrecy and shared with my neighbour of the paper-scheme. I say ‘fortunate’, for if my refusal had come to the ears of Miss Buss there would have been an unpleasant time for me. Let alone fainting, she would not permit any symptom of illness or even weakness anywhere. Her demand for endurance and self-control was carried to a cruel extreme. Coughing was strictly forbidden, and small tortures were endured by both teachers and pupils in their efforts to prevent it. One morning I put a little handkerchief round my throat, as it was slightly sore. It met the eagle eye of Miss Buss. ‘Sore throat! What nonsense!’ she exclaimed, and pulled it from me. Any suggestion, therefore, that a girl couldn’t eat what was put before her would have set the school rocking. I am inclined to think that the official who upbraided me preferred to keep the matter to herself, for in a big storm no one knew who would get the blame.
Among the minor pleasures of life few can equal the excitement of being presented with a fresh examination paper, when you feel at home in the subject. Our set play was Henry V, full of pleasant associations with my father, who used to read to us the glorious brush between Fluellen and Pistol, giving us the Welsh intonation. And quite recently the bombastic speeches had been made lively for me by Mrs. Bryant. It was not her subject, but one morning she had undertaken to hear some of the memory work, and it fell to me to declaim ‘Once more unto the breach’. I had hardly begun when she said ‘Louder’. I started again. ‘Louder’ said she, in the same quiet tone. I started again. ‘Surely Mary you can speak more loudly than that?’ Well, thought I, she shall jolly well have it, and I rolled forth the words with all the strength of my lungs, expecting to be immediately hushed, for the noise must have penetrated into the hall. But there sat Mrs. Bryant, smiling and nodding approval, and the whole class looked round at me as I warmed to the work, and when I roared forth ‘God for Harry, England, and St. George’ they all clapped.
Full, then, of the play and its delights, what was my dismay to see the first question: ‘Give the action of the play.’ Just that, with no illuminating chat about it. I had not the remotest notion what it meant. Action seemed to mean ‘doing’, and all through the play they were doing something. I let it go and devoted myself to the explanation of queer words and contexts that examiners seem to like.
The writing of an essay under examination stress is always a severe trial. But Tom had given me two good hints: always choose the dullest looking subject, because the examiner will be so bored with the others that he will be grateful for the change; and then think up your two opening paragraphs, and scrap the first one, which is naturally dull. The subject ‘Names’ looked the dullest on the list, so I chose that. My first paragraph was to the effect that names threw a light on the history of the people, my second was to illustrate this by Cornish names. So I scrapped the first and went straight to Cornwall, pointing out the effect of the Wesleyan revival on the names. I made great play with an old miner called Mahershallalhashbaz, always known as ‘Lal’. And I made up a good deal else, reflecting that the comfort of an examination essay lies in the fact that you cannot be pressed for evidence of your statements.
I was one of the very few who took Drawing, and they set a grilling test—to draw a chessboard with four men on it. It sounds much easier than it is. But after all, my only real dread was the Arithmetic. Little hope was held out by the form a
t large that I should get through. ‘Concentrate,’ they all advised me, ‘on one or two that you can do, and make sure that they are correct.’ The paper was even worse than I had imagined, full of talkative sums telling you to neglect brokerage and things like that. But one stood out in simple honesty—a very long row of figures whose cube root had to be found. Now in my private school we had been shown how to do this by putting 300 on the left, 30 underneath it, and 3 underneath that. It made a pleasing pattern, and by patient attention to detail (which escapes me now) the answer unfolded itself in due course on the right-hand side. It would take time, I knew, but I went doggedly at it, and it came out! I fancy the examiner must have had a bit of a surprise, for I have never met anyone since who could do this trick. When I told Mrs. Bryant of my triumph she exclaimed, ‘Mary, you never did!’ Then she added, ‘I hope it has pulled you through, for if you have passed you shall begin mathematics with me next term.’
The joy of saying goodbye to arithmetic was tempered by fear of the unknown. What if mathematics should turn out to be worse? The completely unknown is never so fearful as the partially known. At my private school we had ‘begun a little algebra’. This involved spending some two hours a week in turning complicated arrangements of letters into figures, with preliminary notes that a stood for 5, b for 7, c for 3, and so on. When the turning was done we added and subtracted as required and got an answer. One day I asked the teacher why they bothered to use these letters when figures were just as good, and there were plenty of them. She told me I was impertinent.
My brother Dym was at home for the Christmas holidays, and as he knew all about mathematics I confided my fear to him, saying that as far as I could see algebra seemed to be a great fuss over nothing.
‘Fuss over nothing!’ he cried. ‘Why, it’s simply glorious. You’ll never want to do anything by arithmetic when once you’ve smelt algebra.’
Never had I ever wanted to do anything by arithmetic, and was relieved to hear that it could be done without.
‘Look here,’ said he, ‘I’ll show you how useful algebra can be, even when you know very little of it.’ And seizing a book he opened it at some problems, passing over with a gesture of contempt all the torturings of letters in the early chapters. Then he introduced to me the meaning of an equation, ‘only a balance’, and x as only the answer before you had got it. The questions about people’s ages, price of pounds of tea, time taken to get anywhere—he worked them in a twinkling. It was sheer magic. Amused at my enthusiasm, he promised to give me a lesson every day. ‘Just a little algebra and a little Euclid, so that you shan’t go back to school a perfect blank.’
By the time the new year had set in I could solve any simple equation, however long and involved, by merely applying Dym’s three steps: (1) Clear of brackets and fractions; (2) Collect all x on the left; (3) Divide by the coefficient of x.
But I soon perceived that it was the making of the equations that was the real difficulty, when you were faced by a long problem, and I asked Dym if he had any simple tricks in this line.
‘No. For that you must use your common sense, if girls have such a thing. But I’ll give you a tip that will carry you through a great deal: never forget that space equals velocity multiplied by time, and that the area of a triangle is half the height multiplied by the base.’
Geometry gave me little trouble because you could see what was happening. It was only when they proved the too obvious that my reason tottered, as in that nightmare business of showing that one line standing on another makes two right angles, or else enough to make two. Dym, seeing my misery, said I might skip that, and I got on swimmingly enough through Book I. I was impatient for term to begin. ‘Just for a last treat,’ said Dym, ‘I’ll show you a funny thing. Do you think you could draw a circle through any three points I chose to give you?’
‘Of course not. How absurd. Why, I might put two of them here on the study table, and the third at the North Pole. You said “anywhere”, you know.’
‘Quite, I shouldn’t mind,’ and fetching out a big sheet of brown paper and spreading it on the floor he said, ‘Now put your three points wherever you like.’
When I had placed them as nastily as I could I watched him, entranced. ‘Quite easy, you see, but you won’t get to that until the Third Book.’
Then the blow fell. Results of the Cambridge Locals were out. No, I had not failed, I was among the top girls qualifying for a scholarship, and had got three distinctions, one in Latin. But there was a little after-note from the school secretary: ‘We regret to tell you that your daughter cannot receive a scholarship since she has not been the regulation time in the school (two years).’
‘Well, dear,’ said mother, ‘I’m afraid you must leave. But I think that as you have done so well they will probably allow you to leave without exacting the fees for the next half-term, which seem to be required if you go without notice. I shall go and see Miss Buss about it.’
I suppose the sight of my face made mother start at once, and she was back again much sooner than I expected, since I knew the difficulties of approach to Miss Buss.
‘It’s all right, darling, you are to go next term’ were her first words before I had got the front door fully open, and then, ‘Your Miss Buss is a marvellous woman.’
What happened at that interview I never entirely discovered, but from the scraps that mother conceded from time to time I had curious glimpses of the two women, both of whom were accustomed to being treated with subservience and dread by their inferiors. Apparently the two Victorians immediately understood one another and entered into one another’s special difficulties. Mother had been shown in at once, and the matter of the scholarship was dismissed in a few words: ‘Of course Mary shall have the scholarship; we have a fund to meet such cases.’ Then I fancy that mother must have thanked her very warmly, spoken highly of the school and of all that it had meant to me, and among other things said:
‘What a delightful type of girl you have here!’
‘Oh, have I!’ exclaimed Miss Buss. ‘You should see some of them! Mary’s friends are the pick of the school.’ Here some confidences followed that mother didn’t pass on to me, but I guessed why certain girls who were rather noisy on the railway journey had mysteriously disappeared. The interview ended with Miss Buss embracing mother and saying, ‘Mary is our link.’
At tea-time that day, when the episode was related to my brothers they showed great pleasure at my good fortune, but unanimously agreed that the ‘fund’ was no other than an invention of the moment on the part of Miss Buss.
‘But she told me,’ said mother, ‘that an old pupil, now very well off, and grateful for all that the school had done for her, had given a sum of money to enable any girl who was hard up to stay on for an extra year.’
‘A very clever touch,’ laughed Tom. ‘Miss Buss has the tongue of the ready liar.’
Quite shocked, I said: ‘She would never tell a direct lie like that!’
‘Oh, wouldn’t she though,’ said Tom. ‘From all you say of her, she’s far too good a sort to boggle at a little thing like that.’
I never heard all that passed in that fateful interview, but some time afterwards mother told me that Miss Buss had said, ‘You won’t keep Mary long.’ This seemed to both of us supremely funny. And a curious by-product of mother’s visit was that whenever Miss Buss came across me in a corridor or on the stairs she would envelop me in an enormous hug. A group of girls who once witnessed this pretended to be alarmed—‘We thought little Molly Thomas was gone for good.’
§ 3
I began that spring term in the highest spirits, wondering especially what might befall me in the mathematics line. In the usual bustle of rearrangement of divisions there was some hesitation as to where I should be placed, as there were no other actual beginners. But for the first morning Mrs. Bryant said I might as well come along into her division ‘as a visitor’ until a better niche could be found for me.
‘Just sit with the others for
today, Mary, and we will see what can be done to help you. I am glad to hear that your brother has been giving you a few lessons.’ She smiled on me encouragingly, and then announced that they were about to attack Book III, adding in an aside to me that it would be quite beyond me, but that I could just listen.
‘We will begin the subject of circles with a nice little problem. Can anyone tell me how to draw a circle through anny three points?’ (Her Irish pronunciation of ‘any’ made it seem extremely wide.) So saying, she planted three reckless points on the board and sat down to await replies. Puzzled looks everywhere, incredulous smiles, shakings of head, and my heart beating with excitement. Emboldened by the silence I held up my hand.
‘No, no, Mary dear, you keep quiet, this is quite beyond you.’
‘Yes, but I’ve got an idea how it could be done.’
‘Well then, since no one else has a glimmering, you can come up and have a try.’
Walking up to the board amid the indulgent smiles of the class, I took the chalk and said:
‘I think I should begin by joining up the points.’
‘Good, so far. Do it.’
Having done this I stepped back for consideration and then,
‘Next I should find the middle of each of these two lines.’
‘Good!’ exclaimed Mrs. Bryant, and the whole class leaned forward. After further consideration I ventured:
‘I should draw lines upright from these middles.’
‘Yes, yes, the proper word is perpendicular,’ put in Mrs. Bryant eagerly.
‘Then you see, where they meet would do for the centre of the circle.’ Hands were now waving in the class, so I retired to my seat and left the proof to them.
That was a lucky coincidence, but it had its unlucky side, for I was expected to go on all right without any extra indulgence. But I thoroughly enjoyed the struggles over riders, and as for algebra, Bessie Jones was good at it and a tower of strength to weaker ones. A special charm of the Sixth was the licence we had to help one another. We could be trusted not to ask or give injudicious help, and marks were no longer of great importance. Consequently there was a general atmosphere of friendliness amongst us all, and a readiness to pool our resources. One of our number, however, was too unnaturally clever to be a great favourite. She knew every fact, could recall it at will, and use it to the best advantage. Once I remember she was dumb during a very interesting discussion of some question in history. In the cloakroom later she said to me, ‘I knew a lot more about that business in India that Miss Burstall was discussing with us.’
A London Girl of the Eighties Page 7