My first day is photographed in my memory. Of course I was delirious with excitement, and sped along Highbury New Park as though on air. I was placed in the lowest class with three other little girls of my own age, who were reading aloud the story of Richard Arkwright. I say ‘reading’, but unless I had had a book I should have understood not a word of their jerky mumblings. Meanwhile I got interested in this barber who outdid his rivals by shaving people for a half-penny, and when my turn came to read I held forth delightedly. Soon there was a whispered consultation with the Authorities, and I was removed then and there into a higher class. Here were three or four big girls. They seemed to me so big as almost to be of the ‘aunt’ type. But my fear of them soon disappeared, for the sounds coming from them purporting to be French were even worse than the English reading had been. Again I sailed ahead, and was asked by the teacher if I had been to France. ‘No,’ said I, ‘but my mother has a lot.’ (I need hardly say that I soon found it best to fall in with the pronunciation used by the others, much to poor mother’s chagrin.)
At lunch-time I was questioned by the girls as to my full name, what my father was, how many brothers I had, and how big a house. After this came instructions for the next day and the acquisition of lovely new exercise-books and a new history book, and then I fled triumphantly home, to find mother waiting for me with the front door open. She embraced me as though I had come from Australia or some great peril, breathed the word ‘darling’, and no more.
My sense of triumph and complacency was short-lived, for the next day, as you may guess, there was an arithmetic lesson. Absurd as it may seem, it is the cold truth that I had done plenty of shopping and had managed the change, and yet in my twelfth year I had never seen an £ s. d. sum laid out, and had to be told what the symbols stood for. Hill Difficulty was nothing to the task of turning farthings into pence, pence into shillings, and shillings into pounds. Then I was expected to take a halfpenny from a farthing, which seemed the height of absurdity. The other girls went to work with easy assurance, raising the eyebrow a little at my dismay. Worse was in store, for there followed something they called ‘mental arithmetic’, of which I had never heard. The mistress stood up and gave forth sums from her head, and, without any slate to work them out on, the girls shouted the answers. One kind of sum smacked to me of black magic: ‘Twelve articles at fourpence three farthings each, how much altogether?’ Hardly were the words out of the teacher’s mouth before the answer came. A kind girl next me told me in a hurried whisper to keep the pence and turn the farthings into threepences. But why? And what were the ‘articles’ that one could buy so quickly? And supposing you only wanted ten?
However, I soon learnt not to ask for explanations, for the explanations were far worse than the original difficulty. For instance, we had object lessons, one day on a snail, another day on a candle, each time a pleasant surprise. The teacher read them out of a little book. ‘How a pin is made’ greatly attracted me. I had used pins without ever thinking, and now I suddenly saw that it must need quite an effort to make one. So I attended carefully. Still there were gaps in my grasp of the process, and I went to the mistress in our lunch-interval, and begged her to explain it to me. ‘Oh, yes, dear,’ said she, and opening her book read aloud to me very slowly and emphatically just what she had said before. ‘You see now, don’t you, dear?’ ‘Oh, yes, I see now, thank you,’ said I brightly, lest she should read it again.
Similar assertions of perfect understanding were ready after an explanation of the treatment of remainders in short division. Short! Surely the word was used in sarcasm. I always ‘did it by long’. No one bothered about method or understanding or anything as long as you got the answer. A kind of sum that gave me immense trouble was this: ‘A man has £85 13s. 4½d. To how many children can he give £7 16s. 1¾d.?’ Well, I proceeded to dole it out, subtracting and subtracting, until my paper ran short. Even when, after an hour’s work, the man was reduced to practically nothing more, I never could be sure of the number of his beneficiaries ticked off on the many bits of paper. One evening at home Dym caught me at this task, and began to laugh.
‘Good Lord!’ he exclaimed. ‘Don’t they teach you how to…Look here, darling, can you do simple long division?’
‘Oh, yes, Dym,’ said I hopefully, for that was my long suit.
He breathed something about fractions, but seeing my blank face, showed me how to bring everything to farthings, and then see how many times I could take the little heap from the big heap—by division.
‘And will the answer be in children?’ said I; ‘because it’s got to be.’
‘Of course,’ said he. And when I got to school it was right. This incident was a Rosetta Stone, for I at last understood why one had had to do reduction, which had seemed to me a silly waste of time.
Not that time mattered. In school ‘time was all withdrawn’. This was brought home to me by a curious experience one dreary morning. I was seated with my school-fellows at a long table, copying again and again ‘Alfred Tennyson is a poet’, my writing getting steadily worse as the hated statement was repeated. Doubt began—perhaps people had denied that he was a poet? Glancing up at the school clock to see how far off it still was to the lunch-interval at a quarter to eleven, I beheld a miracle. As I looked, the big hand slipped from ten past ten to twenty past! If the sun had done a similar turn in the sky I could not have been more astonished. And it was not an answer to a prayer like Joshua’s, though it might well have been. I watched to see what would happen next: the clock resumed its usual duty at twenty past, and nobody noticed anything. We had lunch-time by the clock, and I was too glad of this to point out what I had seen. But thenceforward all clocks for me lost something of their authority. At home we all ‘went’ by the dining-room clock, which was regularly kept at ten minutes fast, ‘to be on the safe side’, as mother said. She also confided to me once that it caused visitors to go a little earlier than they otherwise might to catch a train, for she had observed that they never trusted their own watches. I can hear her saying, ‘Our clock is most reliable,’ which of course was perfectly true.
I have no recollection of any timetable at school, and I rather think that the authorities yielded to clamour oftener than we suspected. But it was usual to do a little Scripture every morning. This consisted in writing out and reciting a verse or two, fortunately without religious comment. One day we were told as a great treat that we might for the following day learn any text we like, and recite it as a little surprise.
‘I know which I shall choose,’ I whispered to my neighbour. Alas! I had been overheard by the lady at the head of the table.
‘I fear, Mary dear, that you are being irreverent. I know which text you mean—a very short one.’
I felt disgraced, but when I came to think of it, how did she guess which one I meant if she hadn’t been a bit irreverent herself?
My new history book was Little Arthur, which one could read like a delightful story. The general spirit of the author about unpleasant things seemed to be that they happened so long ago that they probably never happened at all. Anyhow, we gained a fair idea of the flow of events and the stories of leading people without boredom. Alongside of this we were drilled in the dates of the kings and queens, and could say them off like the multiplication table, for which I have ever been grateful.
What demon invented ‘freehand copies’? And why this name? Anything less free it would be hard to imagine. While Charles was being encouraged to plunge away and paint at Merchant Taylors’, we poor girls used to waste the precious hours labelled ‘Drawing’ in slavishly copying the design of a vase, or a fancy scroll, printed on a card. The only trouble was to get both sides exactly alike. It was ‘corrected’, rubbed out, improved, and finally ‘clear-lined’, that is firmly and fiercely drawn over with a freshly sharpened pencil. It might take two hours to complete one of these horrors; then you turned a new page and were given another. Nothing else was done until you got to the top class, where the big girls copi
ed shaded cottages.
By far the best part of those school-days was the play-time, for the other girls were a jolly lot, whose names and faces and peculiarities I remember as though it were yesterday. Our liberal lunch-intervals were spent in games of tip-and-run and rounders in the big garden, from which we came in all hot and panting. And we hatched schemes of small wickednesses, in which I was always made to take the lead, ‘because you always look so innocent, Mary, she’ll never guess it’s you’.
Indeed I could usually put up some plausible talk and keep my countenance, but sometimes my power of self-control was strained. The lady of the object lessons taught us English from a book called Butter’s Spelling. There were lists of words derived from Latin, with the Latin word at the top. When she pronounced miles as if it were a measure of length, I thought it was some curious conceit of her own, but when in the poetry lesson she spoke of Horatius Codes as if he were a shell-fish, I exploded into a sudden burst of laughter. ‘What do you see that is funny, little Mary?’ I blushed and stammered out that the pattern of the wallpaper had suddenly struck me as funny. She looked at it and at me in a puzzled way, but the matter blew over, and no one was any the wiser. Except of course the boys at tea-time, who loved to hear the strange revelations of a girls’ school.
Of bosom friends I had none at all, but kept several of my school-fellows in fee. The walk home was long and boring, so I would induce any one ‘coming my way’ to accompany me, or more often to go out of their way to do so. I would ask them to hold my books ‘just while I get my gloves on’. On the principle of the Arabian Nights those gloves were never completely buttoned, while I distracted the attention of the book-carrier with the doings of the boys or with stories about the siege of Troy. My victim would sometimes protest, but generally ended by carrying my books almost to my door, and agitated next day for a similar job if I would go on with the story. For some curious reason my memory always failed me if my arms were cumbered up with books.
One big girl, in a long skirt and with her hair done up, hated me. I had once openly set her right on a horrible pronunciation of a French word, and thenceforth she snubbed me whenever she could. One day I could bear this no longer, and with all my force let fly a blow at her most accessible spot, which annoyed me by its mere size. Holding herself as though in great pain she went straight to the head mistress and lodged a complaint. This turn of events was quite new to me—telling! Whatever would happen next? I was summoned to the drawing-room and told that such a blow might be very serious, might set up a terrible internal disease and cause perchance death. Never shall I forget that afternoon and evening. Suppose Louisa Roberts were to die? For me then the gallows. Disgrace and a harrowing end faced me. I had to practise my music, but what was the good when I had to die so soon? I didn’t dare to tell mother, lest she should begin recriminations. I looked longingly at Charles, who would make light of even the Judgement Day, but again dreaded that even he would be horrified at having a murderer for a sister. All through teatime I could think of nothing but the gallows, and I don’t know how I got through the evening and long night. As early as decently possible the next morning I rushed off to school. Racing along Highbury New Park I passed the school and made for the road towards Louisa’s house, so that I might know the worst. Expecting to see something in the nature of a funeral, or straw laid down in the street, what was my astonishment at seeing Louisa herself, bouncing along, swinging her books by the strap, red in the face as usual! ‘Hullo, Mary, good morning,’ says she. ‘You’re rather early, aren’t you?’ My relief was so great that I came near giving her another blow for her heartlessness. Probably it is the memory of that dreadful experience that has made me doubtful of the wisdom of ‘reasoning’ with children instead of giving them a short sharp punishment.
Private animosities were few, but there was always a suppressed war going on between the Scottish girls in the school and the English ones. The head mistress was Scottish herself, and had married a Scot, and of course Scottish pupils were attracted on this account. The glories of their country were thrust upon us in season and out: its scenery was unrivalled, its education marvellous, it had never really been conquered by England, it had given us our kings…. We English underdogs used to hold indignation-meetings, raised to fever-pitch one day when we had been told that an Edinburgh medical degree was better than a London one. The daughter of a doctor lost the power of speech on this point. What a pity that we had never heard of the ‘inferiority complex’—how we might have scored!
The old Scot was the typical sandy-haired, raw-boned dominie, in long frock coat and skull cap. Scottish education may have been marvellous, but his only method was to make us learn a great deal of rubbish by heart. Of course the capes and bays, and county towns, of Scotland, England, and Ireland, but we also committed to memory not only the provinces of France, but also the departments, with their chief towns (quite apart from the map). Beautiful maps we certainly drew, all blue round the edges, and decorated with imaginary rivers, which frequently flowed through the mountain-ranges. Scotland was the usual subject of these, varied by the Holy Land, where I thought the rivers were actually of milk and honey.
However, our geography lessons were our greatest treat. So popular did they become, and our clamour for them so intense, that the foolish old man would allow them to absorb a great part of the day. As soon as we had been ‘heard’ a few facts out of the book the game began—a game as devoid of skill as any I have played. We sat in a semicircle round the desk. The master would then announce the name of some obscure town in the British Isles, known only to its intimates and Bradshaw. Each of us then in turn made a guess at the county. The girl who guessed right went to the top of the class. After a score of guesses had been made the position of the town made no impression at all, but that didn’t matter, the amount of bustle and fun was superb. If by good chance a Cornish town was named I was sick with suspense that some girl would guess it before my turn, and I had to preserve a poker face lest my joy should appear. For they all knew I was Cornish.
Where the old fellow came out really strong was in Grammar. It is almost incredible, but we spent a whole term on the first two scenes of The Tempest. As soon as we had read round once, or even without reading at all, we began to ‘take places’ for parsing. This was not such a wild gamble as the geography because we had to be careful. Every single word was parsed fully, and if a girl omitted the gender or person of the commonest noun, or made the slightest slip, she lost her place to the girl who detected it. It became a point of honour to go as fast as we could, and we learnt to parse like the wind, as much as possible in a breath. Thus, ‘common-noun-third-person-singular-number-neuter-gender-objective-case-governed by-the-preposition-of’. It seems absurd to do this with Shakespeare, but it was better than being bored with the learned notes at the end of the play.
The old fellow never laughed, but he had a few jokes that remain with me from their frequent repetition. One referred to the conceit of a young minister of religion who was invited to take Prayers in a school. Turning to the Head, he asked what prayer would be best to say. ‘We usually say the Lord’s Prayer,’ replied the Head, ‘but of course, if you know a better one, please use it.’ By experience we knew that this was the point where laughter was expected. Another joke also dealt with a young minister. He was praying ‘from the bosom’, and besought the Lord that his congregation might not be ‘like Galileo, who cared for none of these things’.
This joke tickled mother immensely, and she tried it on a visitor, saying airily, ‘You see, Mrs. Peatty, in the matter of politics I’m like Galileo. I care for none of these things.’ To her dismay, Mrs. Peatty replied quite seriously, ‘Oh, quite, so am I.’
‘Well, mother,’ said the boys, ‘now you see what comes of being funny.’
VII. Sunday
THE mere word ‘Sunday’ is apt to give a mental shiver to people of long memories. The outer world closed down. It was wrong to travel except for dire necessity, and then very d
ifficult. It was wrong to work, and wrong to play. In fact, existence in some houses was so dull that Tom said he understood the full meaning of the opening verse of the 122nd Psalm. However, we did the best we could with the day, and it had the advantage of my father being with us all the time. He didn’t take religion too seriously, and left it to mother to enforce all her superstitious restrictions that she had imbibed in her Cornish home.
She for her part put all the cheerfulness she could into the food, against which there seemed to be no Biblical taboo. Instead of the daily tea for breakfast we had coffee—lashings of real strong coffee, with a great jug of hot milk. When the season allowed we always had sausages (‘the British weekly’). But while these appetizing smells were around us we had to learn the Collect and get it ‘heard’ before breakfast. One blessed Sunday after Trinity produced a Collect so free from fulsome flattery, so quick off the mark in its demands, that we learnt it in no time. Even now a Collect smells to me of coffee.
Breakfast over, the whole family walked in detachments to St. Paul’s Cathedral. We had reduced the route to a science, by side streets, short cuts by the New River, along parts of Essex Road, the City Road, Goswell Road, and Aldersgate, and finally past ‘the highest point of London’ in Panyer Alley to the north door of the cathedral. I must have been very little when I did this long walk, because I once described it as ‘continully cwossing’. My father explained to me that the more slantingly you crossed a road the shorter it was. He also alleviated the walk by playing wayside cribbage, a favourite game in the country. In town the points for scoring had to be rather different; thus we had: man carrying baby, 5; three in a hansom, 5; perambulator, 1; cat in a window, 15; ladder, 1; man with a mourning hatband, 5; any one we knew to speak to (very rare), 31, game. I think we must have played this when mother was walking behind, or this game would never have slipped through her rules.
A London Child of the Seventies Page 7