‘Why didn’t you bring it out then?’
‘I had been reading an article on it in the Nineteenth and knew several points that she didn’t.’
‘How splendid,’ said I, ‘but why didn’t you bring them out?’ ‘I didn’t want the others to know, because they’ll come in useful for the examination.’
A better example than this could hardly be found of the evils of competitive work. Fortunately the bulk of the prizes in the school were ‘standard’ ones, that is, they were awarded to all who attained a certain percentage of marks. But a few were competitive, special prizes awarded on the result of an examination. Now to this girl, Emily, marks and prizes seemed to be meat and drink. She always got every possible standard prize and usually the competitive ones, too. On Prize Day she used to stagger off the platform steadying the pile with her chin. As long as it was standard work she was able and willing to help any lame dog, and we were all proud of her attainments. There was a rumour that she could repeat the names of all the Popes, and backwards, too, if necessary. In short, she was our show piece.
One of the subjects for a special prize was Political Economy, with which I was fascinated. I taught mother all about rack-rents and diminishing returns, and between us we demolished every fallacy we could lay hands on. I got her to cut out illustrative paragraphs from the newspaper to paste in my notebook. Lessons with Mrs. Bryant were full of excited argument, and we all looked forward with pleasant confidence to see what the examiner could possibly ask that we didn’t know. I may add that the few ‘laws’ still lingering in my memory have all been exploded now. This prize was the only one I ever worked for, and I was one of the favourites for the race. On the eve of the trial my backers gathered round me with the request: ‘For goodness’ sake, Molly, do come out top, we are so tired of seeing Emily getting everything.’ I needed no urging, and felt like a Derby jockey being encouraged by the shouts of the crowd. The paper was an interesting one, and I felt to have floored it quite comfortably. Sitting back a few minutes before the end I glanced at Emily, who happened to be at the next desk, separated by the usual board. To my dismay she was still writing feverishly, and sure enough she beat me by four marks. Looking back half a century I am amused to think how much sweeter to me was the disappointment of the Field than any prize could have been.
I did once try for a holiday prize, but it was not competitive. Books were lavishly given to girls who did anything in the holidays, so great an evil was mere idleness considered. Mary Wood and I were looking at the list before the holidays and saw ‘Needlework Prize’.
‘Let’s go in for that,’ said Mary.
‘Me! Needlework!’
‘But look, there’s a choice, you can make either a frock or a chemise. Surely even you could do a chemise?’
‘Well, after all our Dorcas times I could do that.’
So we entered our names, she for a frock and I for a chemise. Since there was a regulation that the work must be unaided, I couldn’t ask mother how much material to buy or how to cut it out. I guessed at the quantity of stuff, and imagined that cutting out must be quite simple; after all a chemise hasn’t much shape, and you just cut it out. Laying the material fully out on the study table I slashed away with confidence, and showed the result to mother with some pride.
‘I’m afraid, darling,’ was her comment, ‘that you haven’t allowed for turnings. It will be a very small garment.’
Indeed it seemed to get smaller and smaller, for I had to keep cutting off bits to make both sides alike; but I put exquisite work into the actual sewing, literally spilling blood in my fervour. Charles’s comment was pointed when he saw the small result, ‘For the future, I take it?’
I managed to wash off the marks of blood, wrapped my treasure in tissue paper, and then in brown, tied it up firmly and gave it in. Mary arrived at school in her holiday task, a pretty brown woollen frock. When I told the boys they said what a good thing for me it was that such a test as appearing in it could not be applied to my chemise. Anyhow I won the prize, and chose Brachet’s French Dictionary, which is a constant witness to my sons that I could sew once.
§ 4
Although we were all very friendly together in the Sixth, Mary Wood’s was the only house that I visited. She and I used to spend any half-term or odd holiday together, she with me and my brothers or I with her and her sisters. I had no sister, she no brother, so it fitted well, and all through life she has been more of a sister to me than anyone else. We were never very emotional in our friendship, and that is perhaps why it wore so well. Her people came from Shetland, and that always seemed romantic to me. Her mother used to tell me of the ways of the country people there, and these had the same tang of reality that we had in Cornwall. The inhabitants of Lerwick, she said, are not at all Scottish, but speak a mixture of English and Norsk. When my aunt Tony was staying with us she hailed Mary ecstatically:
‘Why, my dear child, you are thoroughly Norsk—the shape of your head, your peculiar type of golden hair, yes, and your ready laugh.’ It was a disappointment to Tony that Mary could not speak Norsk, for they could have conversed together—the rarest of treats for Tony.
Of Mary’s sisters I was rather in awe. The eldest was an artist who exhibited regularly in the Academy; but she was very jolly to us younger ones and amused us with acting and reciting. Another sister had been to Girton and was reading for a medical degree, and to this day I have not quite overcome my original fear of her. Mary also had a twin sister, whose chief ambition was to leave school and pursue her art studies. She never expressed the least interest in any school subject, having remained in the same slough of despond into which I fell on my first arrival, although (by some scholastic hydraulic pressure) she reached one of the Fifth Forms. But for the grace of God, I thought, or rather for my mother’s starting me in Latin, there goes Mary Thomas.
The person I ought to have been frightened of was their father. But I have never felt alarmed at a man, and although Mr. Wood was in aspect and manner quite forbidding, I took great delight in him, and I think he was surprised and amused to find anyone to treat him so cavalierly. Full of fierceness and severity of criticism, especially against radicals and nonconformists, he would break his brooding silence at any moment with some caustic remark. At breakfast, buried behind The Times, he would read out a bit of the less cheerful news here and there. If Gladstone’s name occurred he would mutter in brackets, ‘Damned old scoundrel’. One morning, in a specially morose mood, he read out to the family the statistics of the inmates of the workhouses: so many agricultural labourers, so many bank-clerks, so many plasterers…. Seeing the gloom round the table deepening, I broke in:
‘Does it say how many barristers?’
At this he ran his eye over the list again, looked solemnly at me over his spectacles and replied, ‘I see no mention of them. The truth is that there are so many that they gave up counting them’; and then he added that his net income during the past year had been fourpence-halfpenny.
When I was spending a week-end there he would take Mary and me to the Temple on Sunday morning, and before Service would take us into his chambers at No. 1 Hare Court. These were on the ground-floor and looking into the old court. Everything here had a peculiar attraction for me—the portraits of famous judges on the walls, the rows of Law books on the shelves, the musty aroma of the room, and, above all, the scope for imagination of all the fateful conferences and decisions that went on in ‘chambers’. I made up my mind that if ever I married it must be to a barrister, little thinking that by sheer coincidence that very room was to be my husband’s.
Mr. Wood’s dislike of nonconformity was very much the same as my father’s—an objection to anything openly perfervid in the religious line, but unlike my father he fell in with the Victorian custom of assembling the family and servants for prayers every evening. They were conducted in the same off-hand style in which he used to look into his hat for a few moments before the Service in the Temple. We read round a verse each of
the Bible, during which my interest was absorbed in watching for Libby’s trouble with difficult words. Then followed a few short prayers, mumbled so hastily that I had the impression of his being ashamed to bother the Almighty and that he was hoping not to secure attention. A little girl on a visit there had been warned to be very quiet during the proceedings, and in the middle we heard a shocked whisper, ‘Mamma naughty bo nose’.
Libby had been their cook for untold years, and seemed to rule the entire establishment. Her name was the children’s corruption of Elizabeth, and with them she remained to her dying day. Mary and Ursula (her twin sister) and I were not considered old enough to be present at the family evening dinner, and had supper by ourselves in the study; but Libby would always sail in with some tit-bits for us, such as gooseberry-fool or lemon-sponge. We could also make a raid on the kitchen at any time, and be sure of good sustenance from an over-indulgent Libby. The housemaid had also been with them from babyhood, for there were stories of her sternness in giving the twins their bath, allowing no splashing till the end, when she would exclaim, ‘Now waller’. Her standard of morality was high and she never laughed, while Libby, a devotee of Spurgeon, would break into joyful smiles on any provocation, and I gave her plenty.
§ 5
During the summer holidays of ’84, mother decided that I looked in need of a change. We hadn’t been able to afford an excursion from home for two years, and she said we would have a bit of sea air now, whether we could afford it or not. She had heard that rooms could be had at a little place near Walton-on-the-Naze, called Clacton. The name sounded comic, like something in Dickens, and far from aristocratic, mother thought. The look of the place appalled us when we walked out of the station. Bare. A few houses were trying to look as if they were in streets here and there, with encouraging names put up. Leaving our luggage at the station we set forth to look for lodgings, and soon found some, with a view of the sea. Indeed, the sea had nothing to hide it from any of the houses. We engaged our rooms, told the landlady that we would have our luggage sent up, and then added that we should ‘lunch out’, so as not to trouble her at once. At this she looked a little surprised, but said nothing.
‘Now, Molly dear,’ said Mother as we stepped forth briskly, ‘let us look for some nice confectioner’s.’
We made for the commercial centre of Clacton, and certainly found a few shops—a butcher’s, a fancy shop, a greengrocer’s, an ironmonger’s with some pink and white crockery ware, and some other nondescript shops, but the nearest approach to a confectioner’s was a small baker’s stocked with loaves and some weary looking jam tarts. After these the town seemed to cease and we were getting into ‘country’ and half-made streets again. We looked at one another in dismay, for it was long past 2 o’clock and we were violently hungry. Presently, at a corner of two of the projected roads I detected another thing that might be a shop. It had little red curtains and some uncooked chops laid out.
‘Let’s try in here,’ said I. ‘At all events there are some chops that they could cook for us.’
We were told that we could have the ‘Farmers’ Ordinary’, and were given seats at a table with a sort of cloth laid. As it was rather late we were the only customers, and almost immediately there was brought a plate of food each. I had no idea that the Potteries made such enormous plates. Even so, the huge slices of beef fell over the edge. Potatoes, cabbage, and Yorkshire pudding were ranged around in decent plenty, while the whole was awash with rich gravy. ‘If this is a farmer’s ordinary,’ said I, ‘what must be his extraordinary?’ How we laughed as we picked bits here and there and found it really good; and indeed it would have been princely if there hadn’t been so much of it. What was our astonishment to find the charge only 10d. each. This is the meal I picture whenever I see ‘Good pull-up for carmen’.
We did not patronize the circulating library, for we had brought with us for evenings or wet weather a most exciting book, called Progress and Poverty, by Henry George, lent to me by Mrs. Bryant. His main point was that since the sea and air were free for everybody, so also should be the land. He was indignant at the preservation of fish by the landlords. Why should it be theirs? Does a salmon carry a label addressed to the landlord ‘with the compliments of the Almighty?’ I forget all the rest, but remember my conviction that nationalization of the land was so obviously just that no doubt George’s views would be put into force at once. Mother was not quite so hopeful on this point and seemed to think that it might take some time to carry out the idea.
What with our long tramps and our dip in the sea every morning before breakfast, we grew strong and brown and even a bit fatter. We returned after our fortnight to London to find Charles rather excited. He had left Ireland, where prospects were none too good, and had already secured a post at a school in Bedford, where he was to teach nothing but drawing and music. I little thought what difference that new post would make both to him and to me
V. Maesta Abeo
§ 1
MOTHER and I had a little shock at the end of the summer holidays of 1884, on realizing that in October I should be eighteen. It was the buff form for the renewal of my season ticket that brought home the unpleasant fact. Beyond this age you were not allowed the scholar’s half-price. While mother was exclaiming ‘Fancy your being eighteen, and you hardly look fifteen!’ I was thinking what a dreadful waste of money the full fare would be.
‘I tell you what, mother, I’ll walk to school.’
‘Oh no, dear, you can’t possibly.’
‘Yes, I can. Lots of the girls come from long distances, and all I should have to do would be down Grange Road, through a bit of St. Paul’s Road, along Holloway Road, and up Camden Road. I walked it one day with Tom, to show him where the school was.’
Mother was wavering, and then suddenly saw a bright side. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said. ‘I always take a long walk some time in the day. I can easily go with you most of the way, or all of it, and then come home by any new ways I can find. Anyhow, we could try it and see.’
Except in really forbidding weather, that is what she did for the last year of my school days. Those walks were a real enjoyment to both of us, for she entered with zest into every detail of my work, and I was able to point out to her several of the girls and teachers of whom I had talked. She had a quick eye, too, for anything amusing that we came across during our tramp, and best of all she managed to see beauties in the clouds and shadows and perspective of the streets and buildings, translating everything into terms of her water-colour box. I think she was never bored when out alone. But I didn’t leave her entirely alone when I went into school. When Charles returned from Ireland for good he brought back to Canonbury with him his much-loved Irish terrier, to whom he had given the absurdly grandiose name of ‘Trevor’. On going to Bedford he had left Trevor in my keeping, since I had grown very fond of the dog and had taken him on all my walks in the neighbourhood. If ever I missed him I never worried, for he would always turn up in his own good time. So, of course, he went with us every morning on our walk to the school, and was jumping about in eager anticipation as soon as we got up from breakfast. And as I turned into school I liked to hear mother’s cheery ‘Come along, Trevor’.
On the rare occasions when mother was prevented from coming, Trevor would trot along beside me and beguile the way by making various investigations and bringing reports to me. At any point en route if I looked at him and said firmly ‘Home’ he would at once turn tail and trot back. I seldom took him the whole distance, but generally dismissed him at the Athenaeum, just before the last lap to school.
I found mother rather perturbed one day when I reached home as usual at about half-past two. Trevor had not arrived. She had been watching in the window, but———
‘Oh, he’ll be all right,’ said Tom. ‘Where did you see him last, Molly?’
‘At the Athenaeum, about nine o’clock, when I told him to go home.’
‘Then I’ll find him,’ said Tom, and started off. By tea-ti
me he had returned with Trevor. He had found him lying quite patiently on the steps of the Athenaeum, and, of course, we never knew what had caused this break in his routine. It was in the following year that I took him out for a walk not far from Canonbury Park, missed him, but returned home, expecting him to turn up later. We never saw him again, and could never solve the mystery, for he had a collar, and was not valuable enough to be stolen.
The chief drawback to the no-train situation was the walk back after school. I couldn’t get away before about twenty minutes to two, and was too fagged to have pleasant mental occupation along the horribly familiar Holloway Road. I had Mary Wood’s company for the first bit of the way, and used to cajole her to come a little farther, ‘just to see the time by the Athenaeum clock’. This clock was painted a dark blue, as though to prevent its being seen, and this suited me because it involved Mary’s having to come close up to it to see the time. Not, of course, that either of us wanted to know the time, but it was a good excuse for my having Mary’s company for a few minutes longer. After that I had nothing to distract my mind from my craving for dinner. The halfpenny mid-morning bun had lost its effect and Holloway Road stretched endlessly. One of those days I remember absurdly vividly: Mary couldn’t come on to the Athenaeum because there were friends to lunch and she had to get home at once. As I went up to her front door to say goodbye there floated through to me the smell of roast duck. No nearer approach to a barmecide feast has ever come my way.
A London Girl of the Eighties Page 8