A London Girl of the Eighties

by Hughes, M. V. ;

  ‘Why Atlas, of course, Tom dear,’ came from Nelly without looking up from her knitting.

  ‘Oh yes, that’s right,’ said Tom, and then exclaimed in sudden amazement, ‘but how on earth did you come to know that?’

  ‘Why, of course, we were taught mythology at school.’

  So far as we could judge that was the only subject she had seriously studied. She had probably used a text-book like one I found in the book-case at Reskadinnick—a fascinating little volume some four inches by three, with copious illustrations and lively details of the gods and goddesses. Nelly had been born and brought up in Brighton, and her school must have been one of those finishing academies against which Miss Buss fought so hard. Her ignorance of Nature and the ordinary affairs of life was almost past relief. Little Viv ran in one day calling out excitedly, ‘Moon! Moon! Come see, moon,’ for I had just pointed it out to him.

  ‘Nonsense, dear,’ said his mother without stirring, ‘it can’t be the moon in the daytime; the moon shines only at night.’

  Nelly never opened a newspaper, and when Tom was reading us an account of a burglary and the shooting of a man by the burglars, she broke in with, ‘Well, I never! I had no notion that burglars were allowed to carry firearms.’ Another day apropos of some trouble at sea that was recorded, she meditated aloud on the difficulties of a sailor’s life, and wondered how people found their way about on the ocean.

  ‘It’s fairly easy,’ said Tom, ‘there are regular fines that they follow.’

  ‘How funny,’ replied Nelly, ‘to think of the number of times I’ve been out on the sea at Brighton, and I never noticed them!’

  In early days Tom had been optimistic enough to get her to try some good books, and hoped for the best with his own favourite Vanity Fair. But she put it aside as ‘not quite nice’. Wondering what she could have comprehended so rapidly, he asked her to explain.

  ‘Thackeray uses such bad language.’

  More mystified still Tom asked to be shown the passage, and she replied that every time a regiment was mentioned it had ‘—th’ in front of it.

  Novels of a simpler kind, however, made a great appeal to her, and she always had one on hand, though it was a matter of speculation to us what she got from it. Like most mothers she was continually interrupted by someone at the door, a cry from one of the children, or the need to look in the oven. Stuffing her handkerchief into her novel to keep the place, she would slip out. Tom’s delight was to shift the handkerchief some distance forwards or backwards and wait for Nelly’s reaction to it on her return. If the shift had been forwards it made no difference at all, and she would placidly go on from the fresh place; but if the shift had been backwards she would occasionally complain, ‘How this man does repeat himself!’

  News came one day that there was a theatrical company in Middlesbrough, and that Hamlet was to be played. There were no second thoughts about it—we must go. There was no great expense; as well as I remember the fares on the little railway branch line came to as much as our four stalls. Scenery and properties were of the crudest—pillars waving in the breeze, the ghost grotesquely attired, the by-play all folding of arms and strutting about. But—it was Hamlet, and what more does man require? A little before the end Tom passed the word along that we must go or we should lose the last train home. We had plenty to discuss on the way, not about the production so much as the rapt attention of the audience and the eternal pull of the play itself. Tom said how amazed he had always been by Shakespeare’s knowledge of madness—the real in Lear, the assumed in Hamlet and Edgar, the peculiar mental twists of a young and innocent girl in Ophelia—all seeming to point to intimate medical lore. While Gamble and Tom and I were going at these points Nelly wore a peevish air.

  ‘What’s the matter, Nell?’ said Tom at last.

  ‘It’s too bad,’ said she, ‘to have come away like this before the end. I did so want to know which won that fencing match.’

  That was the only large-scale outing we had. Our regular dissipation of an evening after 9 o’clock was a game of tiddlywinks. We four sat round the table with a small wooden cup in the middle; into this we flipped coloured counters in turn, and the one who flipped all his counters in first took the cupful. The counters were a penny the dozen, and one or other of us would sometimes go to bed the richer by as much as eight-pence. It was absurd, but we developed quite a technique, and Gamble got as excited as anybody, especially if one of us in our zeal played out of turn. She said to me she had seldom enjoyed a holiday more, or had such a brainless one.

  This remark was made when we were back again in Kensington. And my reply was that it seemed a pity that a man of Tom’s mental capacity should spend hours in such a game as tiddly-winks.

  ‘Well, there was a time when I should have felt the same. What ambitions I had for him I From his very birth. I remember how his father and I were almost alarmed at the responsibility of being trusted with the care of an immortal soul. And as he grew strong and clever we imagined a great future for him. But I have come to see that greatness is all nonsense. Just ask yourself—what better thing could he be doing than making a happy home for his own family, and putting manly ideas into the heads of all those Middlesbrough boys in the school? Even if he had become a headmaster, as we so often hoped, he would have done no better work—probably much less. And as for tiddly-winks—a game is a game. A solemn game of chess looks well, but doesn’t create the uproarious fun and relaxation we had together over our ridiculous coloured counters. I used to say to myself as I watched Tom’s fervour in grabbing them, ‘A great mind engaged in trifles is like the sun when setting; it pleases more while it dazzles less.’ ‘Mother!’ said I, ‘where did you get such an elegant sentiment? Don’t say you made it up!’

  ‘No dear; when I was a little girl at school in Falmouth, where they taught very little indeed, they made a great point of Penmanship, and I had to copy this sentence out with such frequency, such pains, such flourishes, that I could never forget it.’

  XIV. Easter at Elstow, 1890

  § 1

  THE last of the eighties was a patchwork of bright-coloured streaks on a drab background. No doubt the jolly times were all the jollier in contrast with that cramping boarding-house existence. But mother and I were always plotting a get-away. I worked harder than ever at my books for the B.A., expecting with any luck to get my degree in ’90. With this I could look out for a better post, and we two would be able to live together, no matter where. I had great hopes of doing some work in the training of teachers, for even while I was in Darlington Miss Hughes had written to say that she intended to have me eventually as her vice-principal at Cambridge. So with this rosy prospect we put off our escape from the boarding-house. Mother suffered far more from it than I did, for she could only get away by long walks, while I was thoroughly enjoying the work at school. Few teachers can have had such a fine set of pupils as fell to my lot just then. Among them were the three sisters who had been the nucleus of the school when it started. Their mother had been kind enough to call on us in our ‘greengrocer days’, and the whole family gradually became our close and life-long friends. The visits of Mrs. Sergeant to mother therefore became one of our chief assets. She had two sons at St. Paul’s, her husband was a leading journalist, and the whole household was ultra-intellectual, with literary people of the day continually dropping in on them. Mr. Sergeant I liked best of all, chiefly because he and Arthur got on so well, smoking together over their politics or chess. At the latter I was rejoiced to see Arthur badly beaten. He said that his defeat was owing to Mr. Sergeant’s large board, but that excuse hardly held good for long. Mr. Sergeant had to be careful, but his eldest son, Philip (now a well-known authority on the game), could beat Arthur without being even careful. Mrs. Sergeant reviewed the novels for her husband’s paper, and always had one in hand. This seemed to me delightful, but on my eager inquiries she could never say what it was about. ‘They are all about the same,’ she burst out one day, ‘and the very sigh
t of a novel makes me feel queer.’

  Arthur and I managed to get a good deal of common life by reading worth-while books, noting passages and comparing these notes during his fortnightly visits. A few of these I recall were Amiel’s Journal, The Egoist, Plain Tales from the Hills (Mrs. Sergeant had recommended Kipling to us as a promising young writer), and above all others the Letters of Dorothy Osborne. Browning we had somehow discarded, but we were never tired of Keats, whose Eve of St. Agnes we knew almost by heart, haunted by the mysterious fulfilment in the lines:

  And they are gone; ay, ages long ago,

  These lovers fled away into the storm.

  Books we never could resist buying, but we made a solemn agreement never to waste our hard-earned money on mere ‘presents’ to each other. However, I felt that it would be within the rules if a present were made, and in this mother backed me up. Arthur’s cover for his cherished violin was a disgracefully old and shabby black silk handkerchief, that had belonged to his father (and probably his grandfather!). It was dropping to pieces. So I conceived the idea of making him a new one. If he had but known it, I could give no greater proof of my devotion than to face a needle for his sake. The hours of consultation that mother and I spent on that cover during our walks and ‘between times’! At last we agreed on silk and fine wool for material and old rose for colour. All by myself, but with mother abetting, I contrived to join the silk to its lining and to work an initial A in one corner. Arthur was full of admiration on receiving it. But the next time his fiddle appeared, lo! the same old black handkerchief. I forbore any comment, thinking horribly of Dora Copperfield’s activities. I also reflected on the superiority of a brother to a lover, as a critic. Each one of my four brothers would have said to such a present—‘Coosh’.

  An ever-welcome visitor in any circumstances of joy or sorrow, dullness or excitement, was Mary Wood. She certainly typified the ‘modern girl’ of that time, tame though it must seem to one of today. She had been long before this one of the first women to ride a bicycle, to go on the top of a bus, and to indulge in mixed bathing. But her companions in these excesses were always of the kind that would be called today ‘highbrow’. As the boarding-house atmosphere was no fun, she and I used an occasional lecture or an educational meeting as an excuse for an evening together. This was definitely for fun, with no alloy of desire for mental improvement. What we liked best was the acrimony with which the followers of Pestalozzi and Froebel would attack one another, each maintaining that his particular idol was the real originator of some world-shaking method of teaching. Wherever we happened to be there was sure to be found one particular man, a well-known educational enthusiast. He was a secretary of some Guild or Circle that met in Gower Street and wore the worried look of one whose main objects are good attendances, ‘fruitful’ discussions, and subscriptions paid up. But these were not quite all his objects, as it turned out. He would sit by Mary and me, and urge us by word and look to keep the discussion going. This we did light-heartedly, being happily ignorant of the subject, and totally indifferent as to the issue. One night he astonished me by asking if he might see me home. Me! an old Londoner! to be seen home! ‘Thank you,’ said I, ‘but I can get a bus all the way from Gower Street to Kensington, and there are no real dangers on the route.’ But no protests would keep him off, and there stood Mary suppressing her laughter. Too enraged to laugh or be even decently polite, I gave the curtest answers to all his queries during that bus-ride about ‘your friend, Miss Wood’. How mother laughed when I regaled her with this incident on my return.

  ‘Why, he’s in love with Mary of course.’

  ‘Nonsense, mother, if so, why didn’t he see her home?’

  ‘My dear, you don’t understand the oddities of a man’s adoration. Mary was too unapproachable, and you were the next best thing. “Je ne suis pas la rose, mais j’ai vécu auprès d’elle”.’

  ‘What a silly! Anyhow, I could have told him that he hasn’t the ghost of a chance.’

  Mother and I were both correct. He was foolish enough to propose to Mary by letter, and got the reply such a poor-spirited approach deserves.

  A gay interlude for mother and me was a visit from Tom. Whatever the occasion he managed to spread gaiety about, even in the present case, which does not sound cheerful. He came up for his M.A. London degree, a matter in those days not of a thesis merely but of a stiff examination. He made it the excuse for a jolly little dinner or theatre every evening for mother and me, to keep his brain fresh, as he argued. I was awe-struck by his papers. In one of the Latin ones he said he had done all except one piece of translation.

  ‘Why did you leave that out?’ I asked.

  ‘Couldn’t do it.’

  ‘Nonsense, Tom, it looks quite possible. Why even I can make out the general hang of it.’

  ‘Yes, so could I…all but one word that beat me.’

  ‘But you could have put a blank.’

  ‘No. Blanks aren’t done. They are like mother’s idea about a darn—confessed poverty. But to leave out a whole passage suggests an accident, that you misread the instructions or something, and that you could do it as perfectly as your first bit if necessary. No sensible examiner is going to reject a good man for that, but imperfect work in Latin is disgusting. So I pulled my ready-loaded pipe out of my pocket and sauntered out of the examination room an hour before the time, to the pitying astonishment of the other fellows.’

  ‘If you are so sensitive about bad Latin,’ said I, ‘you must suffer a good deal over your boys’ mistakes.’

  ‘Not a bit. The boys have got to do perfect work. It’s just as easy to be absolutely correct in Latin as in mathematics.

  You don’t say about some problem in algebra that bits of an equation are quite nicely done—the thing is either right or wrong.’

  ‘But surely your boys make pardonable mistakes?’

  ‘Oh yes, careless ones, but they get no mark for a sentence unless it is absolutely perfect, order and all, without alterations.’ ‘Don’t they grumble, when it is a tiny slip in a long sentence, and they have corrected it tidily?’

  ‘No, because I get them used to this rule from the very first, and it makes them jolly careful, and able to hold a sentence in their head before they start to write it. Of course, I allow any variety of renderings, if good.’

  Fired by this, I began the plan at once with my group of stalwart pupils. I explained the idea, and they leapt to it with enthusiasm. A by-product of the new régime was an improvement in Violet Gask’s handwriting, for if a word were illegible the sentence had no mark.

  I told Tom that I wished I could see him at work with his Sixth Form. He admitted that they had a good time, and were a sort of star turn for any visitor to the school. One day he was taking them in Livy when the door was flung wide, and there stood the headmaster heralding the approach of none other than the Archbishop of York, who had dropped in to have a look at one of the leading schools in his diocese, and expressed himself specially interested in what was being done in Classics.

  ‘Ah, Livy, I see. I should like to take the boys for a little,’ said he, all geniality and condescension.

  To the horror of the headmaster, who was standing behind in a lather of inferiority, Tom replied as he handed the book: ‘Oh, certainly, but I think your Grace may find it a bit beyond you.’

  The book was taken with a touch of surprise and hauteur, and a boy was put on to translate. All went swimmingly for a sentence or two, and then the boy stuck, for it was Livy in one of his tougher moods. With a hearty laugh the Archbishop returned the book to Tom:

  ‘Carry on, Mr. Thomas. You were quite right. It’s beyond me. My Latin is not what it was.’

  As he retreated he asked Tom to come and have lunch with him at his hotel, only too pleased, no doubt, to find someone who didn’t toady to him. It was an enjoyable lunch, with exchange of yarns on old public-school ways, and Tom told us how he had amused his host with descriptions of the sermons he had sat under at Ayton. One ha
d been devoted to the doctrine of the Trinity; the vicar described at some length his visit to Switzerland, ‘and there before me, at the end of the valley, stood those lovely mountains, Jungfrau, Monch, and Eiger—to my mind, a proof of the Trinity!’

  ‘If he had shifted a little farther along he could have proved a fourth. That is nearly as foolish as a “proof” of the Trinity offered to his congregation by one of my young vicars. He placed on the edge of his pulpit (so I am credibly informed) three tumblers of water, and explained quite fully that the water was the same although the vessels were different. I hope, Mr. Thomas, that you follow the reasoning? This proved that it was the same God in three different persons.’

  ‘Our man at Ayton,’ said Tom, ‘could beat him at vivid presentation. In his view one Sunday we were all too apathetic and lukewarm—Laodiceans. In his mind’s eye he saw a long train of carriages standing motionless on the railway, because the engine had become uncoupled. He saw the people sitting quite unconcerned, some eating, some playing cards, some chatting, and some (alas) even laughing. But they could not move! “Now to my mind,” he added, “that engine is God.”’ ‘How do you manage to keep from laughing?’

  ‘Oh, well, I suffer fools gladly; and even such queer history as a reference to David’s worshipping in the Temple of his fathers adds a bit to one’s gaiety, but when he said that Jerusalem was destroyed in 68 I nearly got up in my pew and protested. After all, ideas about extending the Trinity may differ, but dates are sacred things, aren’t they, Sir?’

  This little episode, and many another in which Tom showed himself quite unperturbed by ‘important’ people, aroused the jealousy of the headmaster; and this was greatly increased when Tom took his M.A., for the headmaster was only a B.A. However, his M.A. was one great advantage to Tom, for thenceforth his work was almost entirely confined to Classics. In earlier years he had been obliged to teach uncongenial subjects, simply because there was no one else in Middlesbrough who could do them at all. The following is taken from a letter to me in ’87: