A London Girl of the Eighties

by Hughes, M. V. ;

  ‘So you have done some Mechanics, I understand?’ Then in answer to her diffident ‘A very little’, I went on, ‘Let’s see how far you have gone. You can give me Newton’s Laws of Motion, of course?’

  She began glibly with the first, and my heart sank. What if she rattled them all off? What should I ask next? But like myself she had gone aground after the first, and while she was hunting in her mind, the blessed word ‘lever’ hopped into my memory.

  ‘Never mind,’ said I, ‘don’t worry. We’ll drop that. Tell me now, what different kinds of levers are there?’

  Here her confusion was still worse, and much to her relief and my own I was able to suggest that she would have to revise the subject from the beginning. I went upstairs to report my conclusion, without dwelling on my method of obtaining it. I have played the humbug in life often enough, heaven knows, but never with such abject shame as I felt that day.

  Naturally, after this, our staff had to be stiffened on the mathematical side, and the new assistant, to my immense comfort, was endowed with humour as well as with mathematics. Her name was Williamson, and (as I heard in later years) the staff became at once known to the girls as ‘Benny, Tommy, and Willy’. And there was another way in which Willy was a comfort to me. She shared the blame when things went wrong, and these things were sometimes so small as hardly to be visible to the naked eye. We would be hauled over the coals for not taking off a mark if a girl had omitted to put a full stop at the end of a sentence. The slightest blemish on a desk had to be notified. Every Friday afternoon there was a grand cleaning of the desks by the pupils with little bowls of water, sponges, and towels. For every stain detected after this process the culprit had to put a penny in the missionary box. This last tough was discontinued after the rebellion of one of the senior girls.

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said she, ‘being fined for ink-blots on my desk, but I do object to having little niggers converted with the proceeds.’

  This smacked of profanity to Miss Bennett, who was deeply religious, and I think she must have been shocked at the amusement it afforded to Miss Williamson and me. For she invited us both to tea with her on the following Sunday, when conversation almost naturally turned to ‘What church do you attend?’ and thence to religious views. We soon found ourselves involved in ‘baptismal regeneration’. While I looked profound and stared at the tablecloth, poor Willy was blurting out her disbelief in the eternal loss of a child who hadn’t been sprinkled with water. The party broke up with some tenseness of feeling. On the way home:

  ‘Do you believe all that about baptism?’ asked Willy.

  ‘Heavens! No!’

  ‘Then why didn’t you say so?’

  ‘What on earth is the use of arguing with someone whose mind is closed?’

  We then found that we had a good many more daring views in common, and were thenceforth fast friends. She was not only an alleviator of school fidgets, but also an asset to mother and me in the boarding-house, where she egged mother on to demoralize meal-times.

  ‘Mending stockings!’ exclaimed mother one day, when this duty was being over-pressed on the boarders. ‘For my part I’m like a Beau Brummell, who would never have any garment mended. “A tear or a hole,” he used to say, “may be the accident of the moment; but a mend is premeditated poverty.”’ Her remarks on school affairs, however, were never made in the presence of the boarders, but were reserved for Willy and me after they had gone to bed. She thought that all the nonsense about ‘interesting’ pupils was overdone. ‘If they don’t care to work, I shouldn’t begin to woo them by being amusing, but give them something really dull, like dictation. Interesting stuff ought to be the reward of good work.’

  This particular talk was in connexion with the failure of a young assistant teacher who had been engaged to help with our increasing numbers. She was fresh from the Training College, and full of ideas and talk about giving ‘interesting lessons’. One day she had prepared an elaborate demonstration of the cause of day and night; not for the little ones but for the elder girls who already knew as much about it as she did. She lit a candle, and swung a potato from a string round it, to represent the earth’s movements. It became a little complicated and required so much explanation that no notice was taken of our school Touchstone, who was waving her hand in the back row all the time. At last she was observed and asked what her difficulty was. ‘How many times,’ said she, ‘must the potato go round before it gets roasted?’ The poor young teacher, instead of enjoying the joke, or seeing an alluring astronomical speculation, burst into tears.

  Another importation that lasted only a short while was a French mistress. Her accent, of course, was all that could be desired, but was hopelessly unintelligible to those English girls, for the glad days of the direct method were then unknown. In fact the school seemed to get on better with only Benny, Tommy, and Willy to do the teaching. If only we had been free from fidgets! I was severely reprimanded by Miss Bennett for lending Vanity Fair to one of the elder girls who was hopelessly incapable of the usual school subjects, and whose home reading I had discovered to be sentimental tosh. Thackeray would be ‘dangerous’ for her. I never could guess which episode in Becky’s career would have led that great stupid pupil into the path of sin. But any least breath of the opposite sex was to be guarded against, with some rather ridiculous results. Several brothers of the pupils went to St. Paul’s School, and used to meet their sisters in the road. Occasionally they fell in with somebody else’s sister. Miss Bennett took alarm, and insisted on my being stationed in a first-floor window, every day before and after school, to scan the road and report to her all I saw. Needless to say I saw nothing, but I shall never cease to be grateful to the elder pupils who let me see how they sympathized with me in my dreadful job.

  One morning after prayers the assembled school sustained a shock of joyful surprise. Miss Bennett in her most solemn tones announced that she had found a letter lying about, containing these most disturbing words: ‘Darling Edwin, you are ever in my thoughts’, followed by further foolish expressions of a similar nature, which she ‘preferred not to read’. After a sweeping glance over the whole school, she said, ‘I am afraid I must insist on knowing who this boy is…. Who is Edwin?’ All eyes turned to the most daring pupil, but she was obviously as much puzzled as anyone. The question was then repeated in still more impressive tones. A row of tiny juniors were right in front, and from this there was raised a little hand and a piping voice, ‘It’s me’. Even Miss Bennett was obliged to smile. Two little girls had played at being Edwin and Angelina and had spent spare moments in writing love letters.

  For our little community such a mystery was a pleasing interlude in the work. Miss Bennett was a capital headmistress in the latitude she gave for experiments in teaching and in the warm acknowledgement of successful results. Miss Williamson and I enjoyed our struggles with the few dull pupils and the rapid advance made by a few girls of exceptional ability. It was only just now and again that Miss Bennett’s passion for perfection passed the bounds of moderation. Such an occasion was the Prize Day, involving an entertainment for parents. These displays ought to be put down by law, for they foster evil thoughts in all who have to do with them. If each form were allowed to spring a surprise item on the audience, it might be fun. In our case the over-preparation killed any pleasure there might have been in the poetry recited. Some Elizabethan schoolmistress must have asked Shakespeare to write a play that would do for her prize day—to have plenty of useful history, nice long speeches, and not too much love interest. And he responded with Richard II. Fortunately Miss Bennett undertook the serious business of drilling the elder girls in this, while to me fell the humbler duty of getting a class of thirty to put some life into reciting The Schooner Hesperus in unison. One girl would insist that it was the schooner Hesperus. I told her that I never said it wasn’t, but that had no effect on her, and the devastatingly silly poem was dinned in my ears day after day, when even arithmetic would have been more exhilarating fo
r us all. Of course, on the day of the actual performance the children made all the mistakes they had been trained to avoid, but nobody paid the least attention to anything but clothes and prizes.

  It was not only the recitations that consumed so much time. The big room had to be arranged to accommodate the parents, visitors, and pupils, with due regard to their respective importance. Miss Williamson and I had to stay on after school hours, while Miss Bennett kept changing her mind as to which end the platform should be, in what order the pupils should come up for their prizes, where the piano should be placed, and endless smaller details. Mother was greatly amused at all this, and said that Miss Bennett was like ‘Old Jasper’ in the Bab Ballads, with the ‘mystic selvagee’, the ‘swifting in’, and ‘turning deadeyes up’. Indeed, the parallel was fairly close, for as Rodney was to the captain in the poem, so was Miss Buss to Miss Bennett. ‘What would Miss Buss have done?’ was her constant criterion, and ‘How shocked Miss Buss would have been!’ her most serious reproof. Another literary parallel occurred to us and we fetched out Uncle Remus, to read once again about Brer Rabbit in the sapling—‘he feared he gwineter fall, en he feared he wer’n’t gwineter fall’. That’s just like Miss Bennett, we agreed; yesterday she was afraid that the number of visitors would be too few for the big room, and today she was afraid they would be too many. When on the following day she met us with, ‘I think after all the piano had better be on the other side’ we had to hide our laughter behind the piano as we shifted it for the fourth time.

  For the girls the holidays began after the prize-giving, but for us there remained the Reports. Let no parent think that these are thrown off with careless ease. We had several meetings for them, in order to discuss every turn of phrase. Miss Williamson was far too straightforward in her remarks, and was therefore asked to write them in faint pencil, in case they should need toning down. Our English had to be above reproach, and the expression, ‘she must try and improve her spelling’ was changed to, ‘she must try to improve her spelling’. We were warned to avoid metaphor and literary allusions. Miss Bennett told us that she had once written of a stupid girl, ‘She is not possessed of all the ten talents’, and the mother wrote to ask why ten talents were required. We racked our brains for fresh epithets to decorate the deserving, and for synonyms for ‘bone lazy’ and ‘naturally deficient’. Our star pupils who positively never erred, such as Ethel Strudwick and Edith Calkin, gave us so much trouble to praise sufficiently without seeming fulsome, that we were positively grateful to Violet Gask, another champion, of whom we could always say that her writing needed care. When all the spaces had been filled and Miss Williamson’s remarks finally adjusted and inked in, Miss Bennett signed them, while Miss Williamson stood by with blotting-paper and I addressed the envelopes. We then offered to post them on our way home, feeling safe from any alterations when once they were slipped into the box. Then at last our holidays began.

  Mother and I knew all about our trains for Cornwall, but Miss Williamson lived on a more tricky railway, with all its affairs squeezed into half a page of Bradshaw. But she said that when once she reached Cumberland she knew every inch of the way to her home at Maryport. Her part of England was as remote as Cornwall, and we enjoyed comparing notes on the talk and intonation of the country people. There was a porter whose voice she loved to hear as he sang out, ‘Spiátry loop oot—Spiátry loop oot’, which conveyed well enough to the people of the district, ‘Change here for Aspatria’. And there was an old farmer she knew who used to say of his glass of port that he liked to feel it ‘splashing from rib to rib’. He was a lover of the Turf as well as of wine, and would say to anyone in the dumps, ‘Don’t make Despair first favourite—’edge a bit on ’Ope’.

  We started off in high spirits to our wild regions, far north and far west, promising to bring back more stories from Cornwall and Cumberland. I little guessed that I was to explore a far more outlandish part of Britain than either.

  XI. My New People, 1888

  § 1

  WE had been only a short time in Cornwall, enjoying ourselves as usual with riding and picnics and tennis with my brother Dym and our cousins, when there came an invitation for me to spend the rest of my holiday in Wales. Arthur had told me of his home in a remote Welsh valley, a house called Fronwen that his father had built when he was married, and where he and his three brothers had been brought up. Unfortunately his father had not realized that the actual land on which he built the house was not his, and that anything built on it belonged legally to the landlord; it was therefore a great blow to his widow to find herself, a few years after his death, turned out of her home without the slightest compensation. Indeed it was brutally sudden, for Arthur knew nothing of it when I had seen him last in Kensington. His letters told me that he had hurried to Wales as soon as his term was over, in order to find a new house for his mother and to help her move her furniture. He had settled her in Aberdovey, and everything was still in rather a muddle, but at least there was a spare room ready, and I was begged to come and help put things straight.

  Mother and Tony and Dym all insisted that I should write and accept the invitation, and I needed no pressing. Although perfect from my schooldays in the counties and chief towns of Wales, I knew nothing of its intimate features except a few Welsh words my father had taught me, and his remark that ‘it’s always raining cats and dogs in Wales’. Being a tiny child I had pictured these animals hurtling through the air, and conceived a distaste for the country.

  The Irishman’s saying, ‘You can’t get to Armagh from here’ began to seem more sensible when Dym and I tried to plan out the route from Camborne to Aberdovey. As the crow flies, easy, but as the trains went, no. Reskadinnick could produce no Bradshaw issued in historical times. ‘Never mind, Dym,’ said I, ‘it’ll be fun just to push along; I’ll be sure to get there some day.’ He advised starting by the night mail, so as to get into Wales by daylight on the following day, and not be involved in Welsh local lines when it was dusk or dark. The mail didn’t deign to stop at Camborne, so I had to take a slow train to Redruth. Mother went with me so far, and we were full of grumbles about it, not on account of the extra trouble, but because of the age-long jealousy between the two towns. The idea that the Great Western should pass Camborne and stop at Redruth! This grievance kept our tongues busy and away from my real trouble the dread of having to meet my new relations, especially a future mother-in-law.

  ‘Don’t you mind anything, darling,’ was mother’s parting injunction on Redruth platform, as the mail fussed in. ‘You will be all right. Arthur’s mother must be splendid. Mina you help her all you can, and remember the girl-guest’s rule, never to stay up for a moment after your hostess has gone to bed.’

  I settled down comfortably for the certainly uninterrupted run to Bristol, and was therefore annoyed to hear the cry ‘all change’ when we reached Plymouth. For some reason the last few coaches were to be taken off and we passengers in them had to get out and push in ahead wherever we could. Dym had advised me to travel light, in order to avoid worrying about heavy luggage at the junctions. So I had put everything into a bag that I could carry. A cheery sea-captain took this from me and made room for me in the already crowded carriage that I approached. When we had gone a little way he took out some apples, and that reminded me that I was hungry, and might as well have a bit of supper out of the basket of provisions that Tony had made up for me. Among the really bitter moments of life I reckon that one, lingering in the memory when weightier sorrows are decently forgotten. I had left my parcel on the rack in the other carriage. In my look of disappointment I must have betrayed what had happened, for that ever-blessed captain gave me an apple.

  On learning at Bristol that it would be two hours before the Midland train came in, I settled down to read the only light literature I had brought—a sixpenny edition, in small print, of a highly recommended book, which I hoped would be as good as Jane Eyre. But a gaunt and empty waiting-room, with no refreshments to be had, round abo
ut midnight, was not the best milieu for attacking Wuthering Heights. Or perhaps it was, for the steady application to find out who was who, and the hope that surely the next chapter would bring some cheerful happening, helped me to pass the time until my train came in. I was instructed to change at Birmingham, and having ascertained from my fellow passengers that I was not likely to run through Birmingham without knowing it, I stilled the cravings of hunger as a dog does, by going off to sleep.

  Birmingham turned out to be larger and more desolate than Bristol. For all its many platforms there was only one miserable little waiting-room open, and that very stuffy, and occupied by two sleeping women. If Mrs. Elton thought there was something direful in the sound of Birmingham, I certainly thought there was something direful in the sight of it. Walking up and down and pretending to be an explorer in Africa, I came across a genial-looking porter.

  ‘Any chance of a cup of tea anywhere?’ I asked him.

  ‘Not till 8 o’clock, Missy, refreshment room’s shut up.’ Then seeing my look of distress he added, ‘But if you come along of me, I’ll get you a cup.’

  I went ‘along of him’, and we reached a little shanty in a backwater of the vast station. It was like those alluring coffee stalls tucked away in odd corners of London. A man was dispensing tea to porters on their way to and from work. For a penny I was given a cup of steaming elixir, with a biscuit in the saucer. The cup was so thick that my lips could hardly get round it, and the tea slopped over and soaked the biscuit. But it was the greatest value for money I have ever obtained. Indeed, I felt as if I ought to pour it out as a libation, as David did the cup of water.