A London Girl of the Eighties

by Hughes, M. V. ;

  There was no stint of time, and the three hours proved far too long for the French, and every one had finished by half-time. But it was one of Miss Buss’s rules that we must not leave before the time was up, in case we should think of something we could add or improve. Envying the candidates from other schools who walked out early, we North Londoners stuck to our desks, stared at the dirty windows, and grinned at one another until the weary time came to an end, too sick of our papers to look at them again. A workman coming to wind the clock and having to walk rather perilously along a ledge made a welcome interlude.

  One of those days at Burlington House stands out painfully in my memory. To bolster up my chance of a scholarship I had entered my name for an extra subject (Drawing, it must have been). Such degrading things were relegated to odd hours and sometimes shifted about. Whatever the reason, I found myself obliged to stay one afternoon when I had expected to go home to dinner, as the rest of the North Londoners were doing. The trouble was what to do for dinner. I had only just enough money for my return bus fare. I couldn’t borrow from a stranger, nor could I mingle with the other candidates who were having a meal in the canteen, and pretend that I didn’t want any dinner. I thought of sitting among them and saying it was one of my fast-days, or the doctor’s orders or something, but I knew that the sight of food would be too great a trial. So I returned to the now deserted examination theatre, hid behind a remote pillar in a corner lest anyone should see me and beg me to come for some dinner, and waited. After all it was already more than half-past twelve, and I could easily hold out till two, when the examination would begin. As soon as I had something to do it would be all right—it was the blank waiting that was so trying. Unfortunately the rules of the school had forbidden our bringing any book with us, so I had nothing to distract my attention from my hunger. I raked my pockets to see if there were a bit of biscuit anywhere. Nothing! By 1 o’clock I was ravenous, and thought with sympathy of the lions at the Zoo roaring punctually at their feeding time. By 1.30 I had ceased to care whether I got a scholarship or not, rushed out and made for home. Mother was greatly disappointed at my missing the examination, and as she plied me with food begged me to take a cab and go back. But I made out that it would be too late, for the expense of a cab all the way from Canonbury to Piccadilly was too great for me to stomach. Mother argued that an occasional expense never mattered, and implored me to go. But I stuck to my point about the time, too angry with myself for having wasted so much in that foolish waiting.

  The appointed day came for the results to be out. Mrs. Bryant went to the University to get them and we candidates passed the time as well as we could until she returned. By a kind device the few who had failed were quietly drawn away and had the news broken to them privately, without the rest of us being aware of their absence. Then Mrs. Bryant came in with the remark, ‘All in this room have matriculated.’ Five of us were named Mary, so we were able to say that there was not ‘one Mary Beaton’. We had had to stay till the afternoon for the news, but Mary Wood had promised to come home to tea with me, either to celebrate our triumph or to drown our cares. She had to call in at her own home on the way, first, of course, to tell the good news, and secondly to show me her new niece (the offspring of her sister’s marriage aforesaid). We rushed up to the drawing-room to find Mrs. Wood ‘in baby’, and everywhere cluttered up with baby things. When we burst out with, ‘We’ve passed the matriculation…we’re members of the University,’ we received the response, ‘Yes, dears?…and did it love its Ganny den!’

  ‘Oh, come on, Mary,’ said I, ‘let’s get home to my mother, who knows what’s what.’

  Yes, mother had a big tea ready for us, with new saffron buns and apple-cake, and she kept on cutting bread and butter for us, and pouring out tea, and hearing all about everything to our hearts’ content. I don’t think I ever ate so much at a sitting in my life. I can see mother now, standing to her task of cutting and laughing at our continual demands for more.

  A few days later I was told that I was high enough in the Honours list to be a Platt Endowment scholar, which meant that I was to carry on my education somewhere else—all very vague, but I didn’t mind much, for life at school was very jolly while it lasted. Mary Wood was to stay on at school and work with the élite in the Library, for she was destined for Girton. She was doing Greek, and thought that I ought to begin it, too; so she used to come over to Canonbury and give me serious lessons in our study, ‘hearing’ me the verbs mercilessly. When I flagged, she warned me that one never knew when a thing would come in useful. Mother backed her up on this point, telling us how all her life she had regretted not having learnt to speak Norsk when she had the chance.

  § 4

  Except Mary Wood, who was definitely fixed for Girton, we were all rather wondering about our future. Miss Buss took a personal interest in all her ‘leavers’, and had shrewd ideas about suitable careers. At this time a new opening for women attracted her attention—the instruction of the deaf and dumb. Clever and sensitive fingers were specially desirable for this work, and one of the girls at school in my time was well endowed in this way and seemed indicated as a pioneer. When approached on the subject, however, she repudiated the idea entirely. But Miss Buss was not so easily put off and pressed upon her again and again the glories of such a noble career. At last, annoyed beyond endurance, the girl burst out:

  ‘No, I will not teach the deaf and dumb. I would rather be a.…’ There was a pause and the expected word was ‘hangman’, but the word that came out was ‘dentist’. This was a curious case of the subconscious mind getting a chance when one is in a temper; for she told us that on the way home, feeling calmer, she said to herself, ‘A dentist? Whatever made me say that? Why, that is the very thing I should like to be!’ She then went to Miss Buss to unfold her ambition.

  ‘How absurd, child! There is no such thing as a woman dentist.’

  Determined, however, to be a dentist if it were at all possible, the girl got her parents to make inquiries. They drew blank in England, but found that there was a chance of admission in Edinburgh. They managed to send her to Edinburgh, where she came out head of the list in the final examination. Miss Buss of course congratulated her, and also showed generosity by acknowledging her own stupidity in having tried to drive her into a career she disliked. Truly Miss Buss illustrates the saying that ‘personality is a tissue of surprises’.

  The majority of us who had matriculated faced the fact that we should have to become teachers. It seemed a fairly pleasing prospect, mainly consisting, as far as work went, in talking and putting red crosses on other people’s mistakes. But we now heard that you could be taught how to teach—a funny idea. Soon a chance arose for me to hear more about it. Along with some other enthusiasts Miss Buss was trying to raise teaching into a real profession, like Law or Medicine. To this end they formed a Society, called eventually ‘The Teachers’ Guild’. Of course, the most irritating stumbling-block to such a scheme was the amused indifference of mankind. My brother Tom seemed to Miss Buss a promising convert, and in the hope of getting him interested she invited me to bring him to one of the first meetings of the infant Society.

  So he and I made our way to the appointed spot—one of London’s gloomiest halls (in Farringdon Street, as well as I remember). About a hundred earnest-looking people, mostly women, were percolating into the seats, and in due time the platform was occupied by a few men of weight. A bishop spoke at great length, and was followed by two public school masters—not over-enthusiastic. The weather was dull, the audience heavy-going, and the speeches in sympathy with both. But Tom could suck fun from the most unpromising material, and the more melancholy the speakers became the more absurd they seemed, and the more sidelong glances Tom shot at me. At last Mrs. Bryant rose to speak, and put some life into the audience with a breezy talk. She evidently was speaking from deep conviction and a full heart; but she became so involved in a tirade against the indifference of the world at large to ‘this great question’,
with many an ‘if only’ and ‘if however’, that Tom whispered to me in apparent alarm, ‘She’s forgotten her apodosis’. I believe the lady on my other side thought it was some part of her toilet.

  Probably Miss Buss and Mrs. Bryant were disappointed with that meeting. They were doers rather than talkers, and a new scheme was fertilizing in their busy brains. ‘Here we are,’ they were saying, ‘with a big school, and a deplorable deficiency of really good teachers. Let us pick a few of our best girls and venture some money in training them properly for their work.’ The Training Colleges already in being did not satisfy their ideals, and they looked round for some appropriate place and for some appropriate person. Undoubtedly Cambridge, with its colleges for women as encouragement, was the right background for general culture. And a certain Miss E. P. Hughes, one of the most brilliant of Newnham’s graduates, was the exactly right one to be the Principal. To her could be entrusted the entire working out of the scheme.

  Of course I knew nothing at the time of all this activity behind the scenes. The first news of it that reached me was that I had been selected as one of the four North Londoners who were to be among the first students in ‘a new college at Cambridge’.

  VI. Breaking Fresh Ground, 1885

  § 1

  CAMBRIDGE! From early childhood the word had borne a magic charm. It must have affected me somehow through mother, whose dream it had always been to have a son at Cambridge. I shall never forget her joy on receiving a telegram from Dym: ‘Elected scholar of Jesus.’ I feel sure she attributed that election to some heavenly preference. So when I came home with the news that I, too, was to go to Cambridge her enthusiasm took fire.

  ‘Yes but, mother, it isn’t like Girton or Newnham, it’s quite a beginning place.’

  ‘That’s all the more fun. And anyhow it’s a College, and you will be going UP.’

  Unfortunately the boys were away, at work or on holiday, during the summer of ’85; so that mother and I had to fall back on our imagination of what Cambridge life was like. A brother’s communications are usually scanty, and all that Dym had ever waxed eloquent about was the rowing. He had frequently referred to Jesus as ‘head of the river’, and on my being puzzled about this had carefully explained the nature of a ‘bump’. He referred to his ‘rooms’, to his having been mixed up in a row and being nearly ‘sent down’; he gave me a silk scarf of Jesus colours (black and red), and told me of his trouble in coming across an unpronounceable name in the Old Testament one day when he was reading lessons in Chapel. This chapel I imagined must be a building like the horrible little Wesleyan chapels disfiguring the villages in Cornwall. That was all mother and I could actually recall of Dym’s talk about Cambridge, but we knew that he had gone there a diffident and rather morbid schoolboy, and had become almost at once an animated and charming young man.

  It was a great comfort to me that the unknown was not to be faced alone. Two of my special friends at school were of the chosen few—Bessie Jones and her own fidus Achates, Bessie Davies. We three had tried to extract from Mrs. Bryant, during our last few days at school, some idea of what our actual work at Cambridge would be. She was almost as vague as we were; all that she was certain about was a subject hitherto unheard of by any of us, called psychology. Was there any book on it, we asked. Yes, a friend of hers, a Mr. Sully, had written a whole treatise on it, but it was rather expensive. Now the Sixth were allowed to choose their own prizes, so I went to the school secretary and asked if she would lump two or more of my prizes together and let me have ‘Sully’s Psychology’.

  ‘Wait a moment, dear, and I’ll see what the price of it is’, and so saying she pulled down her fat catalogue of titles and publishers. Idly looking on I observed her running her finger down the letter S, and muttering Sa—Se—Si. There was a closer perusal here, and it suddenly struck me that she was hunting not for the author but for the subject. Tactfully breaking to her that it began with a P and then went on to an s and a y and a c and an h, I saw that she was quite incredulous; so we both looked it up in laughter, and to her astonishment found it.

  To such points as this mother gave no thought at the moment, for her energy was concentrated on the material side of my new adventure. I had been instructed to bring silver and bed-linen. Of both these mother had plenty, since all the old family stuff was on her hands—the remains of our palmy days when she had bought the finest linen she could find, and when there had been spoons and forks enough for a large family and visitors.

  But my dress—that was the rub. I had no notion about it, having always put on whatever was assigned to me. Mother’s theory was that one dress for each main occasion was the acme of comfort, since there need be no worry as to which to put on. She even envied our vicar’s wife who wore but one style always—a nun’s costume. It was usual to have three dresses: one for very best, for parties or any stately affair; one for Sundays; and one for every day. These were known as ‘hightum’, ‘tightum’, and ‘scrub’. Now obviously my historical school dress, my ‘scrub’, was not possible for Cambridge, and my Sunday one had got too small. Mary Worley had lately gone to Girton and we called on her for advice. She was as uninforming about Cambridge as she had been about school, but we managed to extract from her that colleges always had evening dinner and that one was expected to change for it.

  This meant three new dresses at least—one for every day, one for dinner, and one for Sundays. By sheer good luck at this juncture my young aunt Fanny, well-to-do, of fashionable tastes, recently widowed, sent me three of her coloured dresses, hoping they might come in useful. They took ages to get into, with their close-fitting bodices, endless hooks and buttons, skirts to the ankle, and a kind of gathering-up behind called a crinolette. But they fitted all right when once on, and the pleasure of looking grown-up atoned for my diminished mobility. Before long I developed a technique for getting out of the everyday one; while each one of the little round buttons down the front had to be done up, they could all be released by a sudden jerk given to the bottom one.

  A few days before I had to leave home, our old vicar paid a call to say goodbye to the house and family before its dissolution. As his spiritual duties were now over he allowed himself to be absolutely jovial, and I like to remember him in his new and human light. He was a Cambridge man himself, and though he could not think of anything useful about it to tell me, he assured me that it was the only place in the world, and at the same time gave me half a sovereign. ‘I thought you might have to buy John Stuart Mill, or some such book,’ said he. Mother expressed her surprise at his encouraging such a heretic, and they laughed together, and I am sure that he winked.

  My trunk, bulging with everything mother could imagine I might possibly want, on the model of the white knight, was hoisted on a cab, and I was dispatched to Liverpool Street Station in the care of our one servant. Mother waved to me as lightly as if I were only off for a week-end with Mary Wood. It was not till years later that I realized how dreadful that parting must have been to her. Not only had I never been separated from her before, but the boys had all gone, with no hope of reunion in that house where she had been through such extraordinary changes of fortune. She was left alone to face the sale of all her furniture and the accumulated treasures of fifteen years. And she was going to live with her straitlaced sister Lizzie in a dreary suburb of south London. Is it a provision of Nature that young people cannot sympathize with the grief of their parents, or else they would have no reserve of strength to meet their own troubles later?

  § 2

  It was late afternoon when I reached Cambridge, and dusk as I drove through the streets to Crofton Cottages (the address given to me). After a long drive the cab pulled up outside a row of mean little houses all stuck together, such as one might see among the less cheerful outskirts of London, with ‘Apartments’ in the window. The cabby asked me which house it was, and while I was hesitating and about to tell him that there must be some mistake, a tiny door opened, disclosing a brightly lit narrow passage, and a
staircase to the side, on which one could immediately step. Then a welcoming voice:

  ‘Is this Miss Thomas? Come in, come in. We heard the cab and guessed it was you. The others have all arrived.’

  This was the first time that I had been called Miss Thomas. My long dress didn’t seem so absurd as before, and the new title gave me aplomb. My welcomer was Miss Rogers, a large and genial Newnhamite, considerably older than the rest of us. As soon as the idea of the college had been adumbrated she had entered her name as a student, and for some time had been the only one actually on the books. She had been known in Cambridge as ‘Miss Hughes’s lamb’—the point of the joke being that she was quite twice the size of Miss Hughes.

  When my trunk was landed I was shown my room. This was some twelve feet square, on the ground-floor, with one small window flush with the pavement, a narrow bed, a scrap of carpet, a basket chair, one upright chair, and a bureau. A bright fire crackled in the hearth.

  ‘Is this mine?’ cried I in ecstasy. I had always had a bedroom of my own at home, but that had been almost entirely occupied by a big double-bed, a washing-stand, and a chest of drawers. But here was a real sitting-room (for the bed looked like a couch), such a one as Dym must have had, a room in College.

  Around me there was soon a small crowd of the earlier corners, for of course everyone was anxious to know how many students there were and what the other rooms were like. Miss Rogers, acting as M.C., introduced us all to one another before dinner, giving rapid information as to whence each had come, and hoping that we should like our rooms and get on happily together. She told me afterwards that some of them were painfully shy, and how thankful she was when I told her in confidence that I was the scourge of any society into which I was thrown. ‘I needn’t bother about Miss Thomas,’ thought she, ‘I can put her among the assets instead of the liabilities,’ and she looked to me to help her make things go. There were twelve of us that first night, and two more were to follow in a few days. Half of us had to be out-students in neighbouring cottages since the College could only accommodate seven. It would amuse the present-day students in their fine buildings in Wollaston Road to see those meagre beginnings. Two tiny houses had been made to communicate by the removal of party walls. There was nothing at all between the door and the pavement. Stairs were so narrow that we had to squeeze to pass one another. Sanitary arrangements were of the most primitive, and a bathroom, of course, was unheard of.