by Jane Gardam
When Miss Gowe had been removed from us into respectability—with a broken arm—Alice said ‘All right then. I’m speaking.’
‘You’re speaking, Alice.’
‘I’m speaking. I’ve seen it coming. You’ve seen it coming. It stops, or I go.’
‘What stops.’
‘The drinking stops. You don’t drink when Mr Thwaite’s here. Nor for maybe a week after you get a letter from him or from that Maitland. So you don’t have to have it. It’s not essential yet. I know. I remember my father.’
‘It helps my work.’
‘Rubbish it helps your work. You sit there sozzled at your so-called work. You’re a show, Miss Polly, and a disgrace. Everyone’s talking.’
‘Who is everyone? Everyone’s no one to me.’ This struck me as a fine epigram, brilliant and sad.
‘Look at you—hair in a tatter, face blubbered out, stockings in drapes. Ashamed. I’m ashamed of you. Ashamed to say I know you.’
‘You drink, too.’
‘That I do not. Not no more. I did and I don’t, having pride and sense—and proper work. Do you ever think of your aunts?
‘No.’
‘Or your friends of bygone days?’
‘No.’
‘That lovely soldier dead and gone, God rest him, who thought so much of you. Wrote those lovely poems about you.’
‘They weren’t about me. How d’you know that?’
‘I can read.’
‘Help me up.’
‘I’ve read them. As I’ve read that colouring game you play at. And I’m ashamed.’
‘Be quiet. Call me what you like. I dare say I do drink, and much I care. But don’t call my work or—’
‘What?’
‘Well, you can go. I’ll dismiss you. Help me off with my dress. I’m going to bed. If you say anything about my work—’
‘Always in bed. When did you wash your hair? When did you take a bath? You never hardly leave the house. No—the time’s come. Oh, Miss Polly, you were a pretty girl, and clever. Where’s your will?’
‘It never grew. I’m in a mess, Alice. I missed education.’
‘Now you’re telling the truth. A mess. But you haven’t missed education. And stop crying. There’s Mr Benson wants to talk to you. There now—Will you do this one thing for me, Miss Polly, and see Mr Benson?’
‘What about? I don’t see Mr Benson doing much for me. Let me get some sleep.’
‘Will you see him tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow, tomorrow—’
‘Right. Tomorrow. I’ll keep you to that then.’
‘You take a lot upon yourself, Alice.’
‘Just as well,’ she said, ‘or God help you.’
‘He doesn’t.’
‘I’m scarcely surprised.’
God only helps the strong, I thought, holding my head the next day. Crusoe, so much stronger than I was, helped with visions bringing certainty and joy—Crusoe, who husbanded his supply of brandy for twenty-five years, so that there was even some left for Friday’s father when he was recovering from nearly being eaten by cannibals. Crusoe, the controlled, the respected, the beloved of God.
Selwyn Benson, when he knocked at the book-room door, did not seem as eager to see me as Alice had led me to expect. He hung his face only a little way round the green curtain that was there to preserve silence from the house for me at my desk. I had combed my hair that morning, my headache was abating, for there had been a letter from Thwaite and I felt, seeing his hesitance, rather in the ascendant.
‘Oh come in, Mr Benson. I hope everything is all right?’
‘Oh thank you. Yes, Miss Flint.’
‘Do sit down.’
He was a very small man. In among Grandfather Younghusband’s furniture he seemed a pigmy.
‘Would you like—?’ The decanter seemed to be missing. ‘Coffee?’ (I could hang on a bit.)
Silence fell. I felt a sort of emanation behind the book-room door, the waves of Alice beating. He was no more wishing to see me than I him, but she wasn’t going to let him out yet. I wondered if Alice were trying to make some sort of a match.
‘We are rather in trouble at the school,’ said Mr Benson eventually.
‘Oh dear. I hope it isn’t going to close. I heard it was doing rather well.’
‘Oh yes. Very well. A great many boys. It’s mainly boys unable to be accepted by the better-known schools and it’s not expensive. It will survive.’
‘Oh, good.’
‘We are, however, rather—er—short of staff. I understand you have academic qualifications?’
‘None.’
‘Mr Thwaite and Alice have spoken of Modern Languages?’
‘I’m not a man. It’s a boy’s school.’
‘Since the war men have been hard to find. We wondered if, perhaps—a little French?’
‘My German’s better.’
‘Alice tells me that your mother was a teacher. She has the idea that you would be good with children.’
‘I don’t see how she knows. I’ve never met any.’
‘Alice knows,’ he said. We looked at each other. We warmed to each other.
‘Perhaps one English lesson a week as well? For pleasure?’
‘Yes, I see. I’d like—But is it legal? I thought you had to have qualifications?’
‘No.’ I could see that he thought this fact appalling. So whyever was he doing this for me?
‘Perhaps you might just come to the school to see us? Have a try? Perhaps just tell them a little about your—er special subject.’
‘That is Robinson Crusoe.’
‘Yes.’ (He did look doleful, now.) ‘Of course, if you feel—’ Outside the door I felt Alice planning to wring his delicate neck. He sat very still in the carved oak chair, looking as if he were never going to move.
‘I shall have to get on with my work now, Mr Benson.’
‘Yes, of course.’ He picked his way across the clutter of the room and gazed round it. ‘I might be able to help you as well as your helping me,’ he said, ‘I might teach you something of indexing—filing.’
‘Well now—will you go?’
‘I think I’m too busy.’
‘You’re frightened that if you leave that desk you’ll find there’s been no cause to sit at it, and then you’ll have nothing.’
‘You’re cruel.’
‘Aye, I am. And need to be. It’s time.’
‘I’ve not had a drink today.’
‘Well, that’s a start. But you’ll be drunk again by bedtime. Drunk with fear—and cowardice and dissolution.’
‘I can’t go teaching boys, Alice. Look at me.’
‘It could be set right still. Just. Out with Mr Thwaite, you looked a girl again. Come on—let me get at your hair.’
‘Certainly not.’
‘What are those scissors?’
‘Cutting contrivances. Now—’
‘Alice—stop. Whatever are you doing? You’ve cut off a yard!’
‘Put your chin down. Shut your eyes. Now then.’
‘Alice!’
‘Hold still.’
‘Alice.’
On the floor fell dreadful black lumps, heavy as felt. The scissors crunched and crunched.
‘Alice.’
‘Now here—mind the kettle. I’ve a sachet of camomile shampoo. Great Heaven, look at the water!’
‘Alice—all this has happened to me before.’
‘Pray God it won’t have to happen again.’
‘And here’s a good washing cotton.’
‘Wherever from?’
‘The new emporium. In the High Street. The Bon Marsh.’
‘Who on earth is Bon Marsh? The marsh is nearly gone.’
‘It’s French—you ought to know if you’re going teaching. It means cheap. Not that it was. Nothing’s Bon Marsh now we’ve lost the lodgers. Here get in to it. My—you’re thin. Well I never, you do look nice. New shoes—I’ve got you ankle-straps with bucket backs.’
‘They sound awful.’
‘Well you can’t wear your galoshes on the bus.’
‘The bus. To The New House? It’s scarcely a mile. I’ll go in my old lace-ups.’
‘There’s these of Mrs Woods. I kept them as curios—I think they’re African.’
‘I like those.’
And so with bobbed hair with streaks of grey in it and savage slippers and a cotton frock of the very latest design and Mrs Woods’s knowledge stored within me, I set forth to become a school mistress.
As I walked the well-known mile, waves of cold fright passed through me followed by surges of excitement of a new kind connected with my coming exposition of the great book, Robinson Crusoe, to a room full of children—for Mr Benson suggested that I begin with the subject in which I felt most at home.
The fear rose from the fact that the book, being so much more than a book to me, might lie so deep in the bone that it would be difficult to lay bare. The solitary work I had done upon it as spiritual biography, my later studies in the examination of it, not as fiction but as metaphysical landscape, had been written in the precious quiet of a study—a room I had made as remote from outsiders and as unknown to them as the texture and colour of the brain within the skull.
As one piece of work upon the book had been completed I had begun the next, placing the first carefully on a shelf. All my years had given the lie to the writer’s lust for fame. I was too deep down, too separate, too simple, too mad even to trouble myself with the distractions of publication or communication and I did not even think, ‘Perhaps when I am dead—’
Now I was to communicate some of my immense knowledge, and to children, when I had known no child since I was one myself and that one Stanley, who had responded by throwing hot coals at my face.
Yet I remembered his large eyes, his ‘it’s grand, it’s right grand’, and the feeling that he stirred in me before the cinder and the burning of the book that I had taught. Some small flame had spurted and sparked. And the book’s curling pages, the shoots and sparkles and the flap of its flames had not stayed in my mind as a destruction but as a triumph, the completion of an act. I only knew now, and it rose out of an unconscious place, from some deep water-table, as I crossed the stile and on to the tarmac road and through the iron gates and up the familiar drive, weedless, rude cement—I only knew now that as I read and translated the French to Stanley, I had recognised an inherited power. ‘Your mother was a wonderful teacher, I’ll say that,’ all of them had said. ‘Oh, it was a loss to the teaching profession when she had you.’
And so today I willed as I walked that the power would return. I should tell the boys, these new Stanleys, receptive, rich, already well educated, things that they would not forget.
I would begin by discussing the concept of the novel: the English Novel, how it had emerged from jumbled and simplistic sources some three hundred years ago into the literary form we now recognise, its purpose to give solace and simultaneously to disturb; though its true genesis lies deep within man himself, in his urge to tell a tale. I would describe how, as blobs of jelly and the flat ribbons in the sea became fish, became birds, became mammals and intricate man, so the grunts and the snuffles of the cave became anecdote, joke, tale, tale set to music, saga, song-cycle and glorious traveller’s tale. And then arose Defoe from the smelly streets of London, honest man (and criminal) prolific genius (and hack) to produce the great curiosity, the extraordinary masterpiece, the paradigm, Robinson Crusoe itself, the novel elect, fully realised and complete like the child Athene springing from the head of the rough god Zeus.
Having said a little of this I would continue in an analysis of the novel along the following lines (someone sloped by me along The New House School drive—it was the sexton, with his sideways look and I greeted him heartily):
1. Development of narrative during C18. Particular influence of Defoe on English and European fiction. RC and its roots—current journalism. The subtle transcendence of these sources. Brilliant manipulation of the reader. We read with the pleasure gained from the best dramatic journalism, unaware at first that we are reading more.
2. Imitators of, then reactors against Defoe, esp. ref. Fielding, Richardson. Outline gulf-stream imitators, sports, curiosities; C18 pattern of novel, its waves sweeping wider: and riding these waves (sub-section) original, unrelated wks. of genius: es. Swift (note Swift’s opinion of Defoe!)
3. Rise of the women as novelists: Fanny Burney, Bluestocking writers, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. ‘Embassy Letters as Fiction.’ The only book Dr Johnson read entirely for pleasure.
3(b). Interesting developments: horror novel, sickly childhood of the thriller. Dexterity, passion, brilliance at Haworth Parsonage etc.; the five miracles at Alton, Hampshire by a lady beset by domesticity and a querulous mother.
Final Point Every serious novel must in some degree and unnoticeably carry the form further. Novel must be ‘novel’. To survive—like the blob in the ocean, the seed, it must hold in itself some fibrous strength, some seemingly preposterous new quality, catch some unnoticed angle of light—and unselfconsciously. It may fail—but better to sorry than safe. All the time it must entertain. No polemics. No camouflaged sermons.
The novel in the later nineteenth century, I thought I might leave perhaps until the second lesson.
There was no reply at the peeling front door of The New School House so I walked round to the back and saw the tennis-court scarcely more in trim than when the army had taken it to pieces in 1914. A net sagged, big plants grew, there were holes in the rusty wire. The orangery the Zeits had not quite completed was still beautiful in outline, but—I opened the door and walked in—the stone flags were dirty and covered with splintery dining-tables and cheap old chairs. All smelled of mince.
A boy roamed about. He told me that the Headmaster’s room was upstairs. I said, ‘Will you run up and tell him I’m here? Miss Flint,’ and he went. While I was still thinking about my voice speaking to him as if it knew some of the rules, and wondering why my fluttering stomach wouldn’t behave likewise, the boy returned and said, ‘You’re to take 1c. I’m to show you.’
‘What a terrible noise,’ I said as we approached Mrs Zeit’s old morning-room where she had set up The Depot for the relief of the trenches.
‘Mr Benson’s not here,’ said the boy. ‘It’s in there.’ Without opening the door he went off and I walked in.
There were about twenty little boys. I knew nothing of ages but their hair was still floss or fledgling down. They showed great gaps of gum or the stubs of new frilly-edged teeth coming through gums. They had stick-legs with heartbreaking dents in the backs of the knees. Sagging socks. Most of them were rolling in combat on the floor.
Of those who were not, two were on window-ledges being the Royal Air Force and two more banging their desk-lid with a steady and hypnotic rhythm. Others were gathered at the teacher’s tall desk and tall stool, scrabbling and kicking each other to get at what was inside, which didn’t seem to be much. The blackboard was covered with faces and words beginning with ‘b’.
The noise slowly faded as I stood at the door—the desk lids, mercifully, being the first things to die down, like a thunderstorm receding. Boys on the floor began to recline, then to sit up, those at the teacher’s desk laughed less, and fought their way self-consciously back into the body of the room. Two last parachute descents were achieved from the window-ledge a little nonchalantly. A white china ink-well flew, smashed, trickled. I sat on an empty desk by the door.
In the moment of something like silence, the fuzzy photograph of the firm young woman with fat me on her lap in Grandfather Younghusband’s study said decidedly, ‘Now Polly! Before they start again.’
‘Before you start again,’ said I, ‘pick up that ink-well. Thank you. You—with the torn shirt—go and clean off the board those filthy words. Yes—and stay there. The rest of you sit at your desks if they are not piles of firewood. Shut all the lids. Thank you. Now—take a deep breath.�
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‘Go on. All of you. Go on.’
‘That’s better.’
‘Now then—I am Miss Flint. I am like SHEET STEEL. Write that on the board and I want your names every one of you. STOP THAT,’ as a foot snaked from under a desk and hooked itself round the rail of the chair in front and jerked. ‘Get up there beside the board, too, and write your name. Ss don’t go that way round. Write me twenty.’
‘Now then, I’m your new teacher and you’d better be careful because I’m a terrible woman. I know a great deal about cannibals. On desert islands. I eat boys far lunch. Who can spell cannibal? Quite wrong. Go back. Someone else have a try—oh, very good. It’s a difficult one. What’s your name? Gegg? Well I never.’
‘How dare the rest of you laugh! What’s wrong with being called Gegg? He can spell cannibal. I won’t eat him, ever.’
(How very delightful! How utterly delightful this was being!)
‘Now then, I’ll tell you something to stop you sniggering at things people can’t help like their names, unless they’re ladies and they can sometimes improve things by getting married, though not always—’
‘There was a little boy once in a London school called Tim Crusoe and it was a very unusual, queer name and I expect he got laughed at for it. But one of the other boys in the class when he grew up, remembered it and wrote a story about it, and who can tell me what it was?’
‘What’s the dead silence? What? Gegg—Gegg knows—“Robinson Crusoe.’’ That’s right! What was the story about? Who was he?’
‘He had a wooden leg, miss.’
‘He had a wooden leg, Miss Flint. No, he hadn’t. Yes?’
‘Please Miss—Flint—he had a parrot and a hook for a hand.’
‘One point for parrot. No point for hook. You’re mixing up sailors. You’ll be saying Flint next.’