A London Girl of the Eighties

by Hughes, M. V. ;

  But no student’s room or suite of rooms in the best appointed university could possibly produce the pride that we felt in ours. The main charm was our power to shut the door, or even lock it, and put up a notice ‘engaged’ on it. I had a notion to give my room a name, and the other students followed suit. I called mine ‘The Growlery’, after a room in Bleak House, intimating thereby that anyone wanting to growl could come in and laugh it off. This proved, as time went on, no empty invitation, and I had many visitors for the purpose. One of our number was an aesthete, and hung up a portrait of George Eliot, whom she resembled. She dressed in dull green velvet and was a freethinker. Another had had mysterious romantic experiences, of which she spoke at length in an allusive manner, and would play on her piano and sing at any odd moment. Another was a Russian aristocrat of charmingly gracious manners; she was so strict a vegetarian that she refused on principle to pass close to a butcher’s shop, and had some difficulty in getting along Silver Street because there were two butchers nearly opposite one another, obliging her to take the middle of the road. We were a strangely odd team. The only one among us who was really normal and proper shone forth as original by her very commonplaceness.

  The first morning that I awoke to my new surroundings I saw a policeman passing my window so close that I could have summoned his aid with a touch. At breakfast I tried to break the rather nervous strain by relating the incident and pointing out the convenience of having the Force literally ready to hand. Miss Hughes overheard, and suggested that perhaps it would be advisable for me to get some curtains. This meant a visit to the town, and it soon turned out that everybody had something to buy—cups and saucers, cocoa, biscuits, condensed milk, note-books. Miss Rogers then offered to show us the way, and as soon as morning work was over we all straggled off. Straggling in twos and threes was necessary, because to go in a larger body was against the code. We were warned also by this unwritten code not to greet a fellow student in the street, and not to take a short cut through the same college more than once a day.

  We were eager learners from Miss Rogers of these bits of etiquette, and of the usual pitfalls to be avoided. We learnt which was the freshman’s church and which the freshman’s college. We knew how many balls there were on Clare bridge, and why it was bent in the middle. Those first glimpses of the town were unforgettable. The curious little streets and passages reminded me of those walks through the hinterland of the City that my father used to take us children on a Sunday. But the University had a peculiar flavour of its own, and I was intoxicated by the cobbled courts of the colleges, the smooth lawns, the bridges, and the stately avenues. In those days there was no such thing as an excursion to ‘see’ a university town, and it never once occurred to either Dym or me to ask mother to come to see it; and how she would have gone crazy over so many sketchable bits!

  The shops, too, were unlike any I had seen, even in London. Bookshops especially were wickedly tempting, and the crockery shops almost as bad. But curtains were the subject of my story, and resolutely I turned my face from anything else. I must buy them in Petty Cury; the name drew me like a magnet; here I found some cheap ‘art’ muslin of the brightest rose colour. ‘That’, said the young man who served me, ‘will make your room always look as if the sun were shining.’

  And he was right. With the new curtains the Growlery always had a gay aspect, even in the dreariest weather. This was as well, for otherwise the room looked very bare. While the others had been buying little ornaments and framed views of the colleges, my limited pocket-money kept me to the barest necessities. So I made a bold move by adopting the role of a hermit, and telling everyone that I preferred my room to be severely plain, that this indeed was the latest fashion among people who really counted. Pictures, I maintained, distracted thought, and ornament merely for the sake of ornament was démodé. On a piece of cardboard I illuminated the words, ‘Thou shalt think’, and hung it over my mantelpiece. That would set the tone and prevent any tiresome remarks.

  After the atmosphere of school the most striking feature of this new existence was its freedom. We were hampered by no restrictions, and it was assumed that we had come to work. No one took any notice as to who was present at prayers before breakfast every morning, when Miss Hughes read a short passage from the Bible and a collect. Work usually began with a lecture from which no one was ever absent. We were advised not to work in the afternoon until 3 o’clock, and not to sit up late at night. Country walks were encouraged, as there was no chance for any other regular exercise.

  The ‘staff’ consisted of three: Miss Hughes, a lady housekeeper, and a maid of all work. Obviously Miss Hughes had her time cut out. Not being at all satisfied with the kind of training of teachers hitherto in vogue, she had to create the whole curriculum along new lines. Nearly all the tuition was provided by herself. And she had to live in extremely close quarters with fourteen girls, one or two of whom were temperamental, not to use a stronger term. She told us later on that when the task was first proposed to her she refused it flatly, but that Miss Buss had pointed out to her that it was a grand opportunity, that she was cut out for it, that there was no one else to do it, and that she simply must. We North Londoners were well able to picture that scene. To this day I am amazed at her pluck. Psychology and logic had been her special subjects at Newnham, and these gave her no trouble, but she had to give us lectures on the history of education, hygiene, speech production, methods of teaching, and theories of discipline and school management in general, in all of which she was merely feeling her way.

  Our ‘lecture room’ was a source of much entertainment to the Cambridge people who came to visit the new ‘Training College’. In the top room of one of the cottages was placed a trestle-table covered with American cloth. Around this the fourteen of us managed to squeeze, leaving just room for the lecturer at one end, and a blackboard behind. There were no means of heating the room, and Miss Rogers used to sit with her feet in a muff. The difficulty of speech-training in so small a space was overcome by making the students go the length of the passage (not far) and declaim a piece of poetry through the closed door. I never hear the words ‘The quality of mercy is not strained’ without recalling the scene when our Russian student made them penetrate, in absurdly foreign accents, to the rest of us, doubled with laughter, inside the room.

  Miss Hughes’s style of lecturing was entirely her own. Although she gave us some definite principles and theories that were fairly well-established, the greater part of the time was spent in practically working out some problem, in simple psychological experiments, in discussion, or in probing our own mental experiences. For instance, we had agreed one morning that one could always distinguish interior from exterior sensations, when the Russian student told us that on her first awaking in England she was distressed by a strange happening inside her, only to find later that it was the breakfast gong. I doubt whether any modern training college, endowed with every advantage of reference books and special lecturers, can offer its students anything better than we enjoyed in that little upper room. Whatever we did was real. Not one of us was allowed to take refuge in mere words, for every point one tried to make was pursued and considered or exposed as rubbish. Yet no one was ever snubbed. The supreme value to us was the contact with a lively mind—a lasting good in itself; so that in spite of the great advances in the study of psychology, we have had little to unlearn.

  The only thing I regret is the cruel waste of time and energy in reading and trying to understand our one text-book (the aforesaid prize). I suppose Miss Hughes hardly liked to disparage the book, but it was enough to put anyone off the study of psychology for good and all. One anecdote is all that remains to me of that heavy tome; and that only because it illustrated neatly an important point of mental workings: ‘What do you do in a storm?’ a passenger asked an old sailor. ‘I couldn’t rightly say, Sir, but when the storm comes on I does it quite natural.’

  We were handicapped by having nothing remotely resembling a library—only
a few books lent from one to another. Or was it a handicap? Books of reference are invaluable, but such a lot of earnest rubbish has been written on education that I think we were the gainers by not having so many bewildering treatises around us. One of our founts of wisdom was a book by Fitch, which seemed to cover every possible want, but much of it seemed silly to us even then, and we were in the spirit to get as much fun as possible. A book on ‘Class Management’ (which was apparently a special branch of educational science) gave a great many hints, one of which made me dubious about the rest: ‘Avoid unconscious humour.’ How could one avoid what one wasn’t conscious of? And surely unconscious humour was better than none? Another hint sounded splendid at first, and fired us with enthusiasm, but led to absurdities in practice: ‘Never tell a class what you can get them to tell you.’ Everything however trivial should be ‘elicited’, apparently. Thus Miss Rogers, in describing the people in Aix before the good news arrived, wanted to impress the idea that they were getting anxious. ‘What do people get when they are expecting something?’ she asked. A hand waved. ‘Please Miss, a telegram.’

  There was no need for Miss Hughes to point out the folly of such ‘hints on teaching’. Miss Rogers was never exempt from covert allusions to ‘telegrams’ and the joke did the work effectively. The few worth-while books at our disposal we were shown how to read sensibly, and how to make abstracts of them. To me this was quite a new pursuit and had a fascination of its own. One day Miss Hughes chanced on me as I sat at my bureau busily making an abstract on some footling book I had found on ‘Education in the Home’. Glancing over my shoulder she said: ‘Remember what Bacon says about books—some to be tasted, some to be swallowed, only a few to be chewed and digested.’ The quotation sounds a commonplace now, but coming pat at the moment it was wanted it made a lasting impression on me. I saw at once that the book I was ‘abstracting’ was not even worth tasting, and the burden of my childish conscientiousness of never skipping fell from me like Christian’s bundle. In fact Miss Hughes had the fine teaching knack of making her students aware of what they ‘needn’t bother about’. Like the Yorkshireman’s direction to a stranger: ‘Follow t’ road till the coomst to a cloomp o’ trees. Now, tak no notice o’ t’ cloomp, but…etc.’

  As a make-weight to our free and easy discussions round the table, we were taken to the Divinity Schools to hear real lectures. For these we had tickets, sat with real undergraduates in their gowns, and provided ourselves with special new notebooks. The course on psychology from James Ward might as well have been delivered in Hindustani for anything I understood of it, for it was on the lines of his article in the Encyclopedia Britannica. We all took notes as fast as possible, trusting that the future life would make them intelligible, but not one of us faced them again. Bass Mullinger gave a course on the history of education, quite intelligible, thorough, and dull; sufficient to make us feel that we never wanted to hear any more about Great Educationists. Perhaps Miss Hughes had an inkling of the relief we felt in returning to our home lectures after these efforts. Mrs. Bryant came from London to give us a course on Ethics. We understood her better, or thought we did, and wrote long papers for her. What pages of rubbish I must have written on moral questions. I used to sprinkle capital letters to give point and dignity to my remarks, causing ribaldry among the others by speaking of the Infinitely Postponed, in a passage that was read aloud by Mrs. Bryant with grave approval.

  One of these odd courses in the town was on the Hebrew Prophets, by Dr. Westcott. He looked like one of those old prophets himself, his face all radiant as he rolled out passages from Isaiah, and I wrote full accounts of him to mother. When she happened to see Dym she said:

  ‘Molly writes to me a lot about a man called Westcott lecturing to undergraduates at Cambridge. Did you know anything of him when you were there?’

  ‘Did I know the old bloke!’ was my brother’s succinct reply.

  To all these lectures in town we made our way in parties of two and three, and once a rearguard detachment heard a man say to his companion: ‘There goes that wonderful Miss

  Hughes.’ She was a well-known figure in Cambridge, not only on account of her academic honours, but still more for her social charm. She could persuade anybody to do anything, and sometimes she would induce a real five don to come and give us a short course of lectures in our own college. I think these big people from their ancient and stately colleges must have been vastly amused by our little attic and the eager group round the table, ever ready to fire awkward questions at them in sheer simplicity. One of these visitors was big physically as well as mentally, so tall that he had some difficulty in getting into the room and ranging himself into position for his lecture. This was William Cunningham of Trinity. Miss Hughes had begged him to take any subject he liked, for as she pointed out to him the best preparation for teaching was to have something sensible in one’s head. So he chose his special subject, a kind of historical political economy. It was impossible to be solemn in our tiny room, so he let himself go in a simple and merry way, inventing ludicrous illustrations of important points, and then joining in our ever-ready laughter, obviously enjoying himself. At the close of his course he went the length of asking Miss Hughes to bring a few of us to tea with him one afternoon. I happened to be one of the three she selected, and shall never forget my first experience of a don’s tea-party. Far too ignorant of the kind of thing to be nervous, I determined to make the most of such an opportunity. I was too much impressed by the combination of comfort and odour of learning in the beautiful great room to notice what the actual tea was like, but when the great man came to sit by me for a few moments in his Orbit of Grace round the many guests, I seized my chance. In response to his smiling inquiry as to what interested me most in Cambridge, I replied:

  ‘Oh, all the great thinkers everywhere; and now that I have you to myself for a moment I want to ask you what you think really happened at the Resurrection.’

  The poor man might have been suddenly apprehended for murder, so taken aback was he. Perceiving that I had committed a social indiscretion I gave a nervous laugh. Then we both laughed a little awkwardly, and muttering something about a ‘large question’ he passed on to the next guest.

  In Miss Hughes’s eyes anyone who was an expert in anything could help her students to be more efficient teachers. One day we had a talk from an actress, a Miss Shaw, who was taking the part of the Princess Ida. She showed us how to stand in front of a class with ease and grace, so as to make ourselves more impressive, and how to make effective pauses between the main parts of a lesson, and how always to ‘set the important in silence’. ‘If you want to make anything emphatic,’ she said, ‘you must do as a good actor does—change your voice. No need to raise your voice, it’s often far more striking to lower it, but change is essential.’

  §3

  A far more arduous business for Miss Hughes than lecturing on strange subjects, or finding generous lecturers, was getting schools for us to practise in. Such as were available were situated in remote streets the other side of Cambridge, and one lesson a week for each of us was the most that she could get. For us it was enough. In order to get the utmost benefit from such scant experience, it was customary during our first week or two for Miss Hughes and all of us to attend every lesson. In the halcyon week before any of these lessons were started we were rather light-hearted about them. Give a lesson! Pooh! Anyone can do that. But it seemed that we were expected to write notes of what we were going to say—an unforeseen nuisance. It was quite a new and rather shocking idea that a teacher needed to prepare a lesson; we thought that lessons just flowed forth.

  The first ordeal was at hand, and an afternoon was fixed for two lessons to be given in an elementary school right across the town. Miss Rogers and I were selected, she because of her age, and I, no doubt, for my insouciance. She was to begin with an object lesson and I to follow with a grammar lesson, and we prepared and gave in to Miss Hughes elaborate notes. When we reached the school we found abou
t twenty young children in a block of desks, and in a similar block at the side we students were invited to be seated, while the Head and Miss Hughes sat on chairs to command the view. Miss Rogers stood forth and began. She produced a large piece of rock-salt, and held forth on its properties. She had become very hot with the walk, and still hotter with nervousness. I can see her now, perspiration streaming from her, as she talked ever faster and faster about this lump of stuff. Nothing coherent reached my mind, for I was sick with dread at the thought of my own ordeal to come.

  The subject allotted to me had been the Noun—easy enough it seemed. I was actually able to remember my own first lesson on it, when my mother had shown me the list of the Parts of Speech, and then introduced me to the Noun as the name of all the things to be seen in the room or indeed anywhere. ‘Everything?’ I had asked: ‘Well then what is the use of all those other words in the list?’ ‘That, dear, you will find as we go along’, had been her reply. In making my notes I had foolishly thought to improve on this wise approach, and settle the meaning of a noun once for all. But I hadn’t reckoned on the immense space of time that half an hour can be when you are faced by a mass of indistinguishable humanity, when you are incapable of asking a question, and are afraid to stop talking. So utterly gravelled was I to think of anything else to say about the noun that I plunged into philosophical remarks about the nature of ‘things’. I heard myself saying, ‘a thing is anything you can think about; that gas-bracket is a thing; you yourselves are all things’. At this I was horribly aware that the students were smiling. But unfortunately the children had evidently been told to behave, and no relief came from them; they merely stared at me, no doubt regarding the whole affair as a kind of gala performance. And like some dramatic background I was aware of the students busily taking notes.