Time to Be in Earnest

by P. D. James

  Most of the girls came from the lower-middle or working class; the daughters of university dons and professional men were more likely to go to the Perse School, which was our greatest rival and against whom we played ferocious games of hockey with much clashing of sticks and shouts of encouragement. I wasn’t good at games but I was fleet of foot and achieved a precarious place in the Second XI.

  There was no member of staff employed to look after our psychological or moral welfare. I think all teachers at that time saw it as part of their job to instill accepted values of personal morality, social responsibility and good behaviour. It requires an immense effort of imagination to picture what the reaction would have been had a girl ever become pregnant. No doubt she would have suddenly disappeared from school, indeed from Cambridge, with soothing explanations of mysterious illness or the need to stay with distant relations. Sex was never discussed, not even in biology lessons, which formed part of General Science in the syllabus. My memory is of producing evil smells from test-tubes with little understanding of the process, experiments with iron filings and magnets, and being told that the atom was the smallest possible element of matter and as such could be neither split nor destroyed. It is ironic to remember that it was even then being split a mile or less away at the Cavendish Laboratory!

  Not only was sex a taboo subject but there was an extraordinary reticence about natural functions, including menstruation. I can remember cycling home—I suppose I was about twelve at the time—with a school friend and suggesting that we should hike up the Gog Magog Hills on Saturday afternoon. She replied in a deeply mysterious voice that she couldn’t because she wouldn’t be well. As she seemed, as usual, in the rudest of health, I was curious as to why she was expecting such a misfortune, but she would only reply: “Ask your mother.” I didn’t ask my mother; parents were the last people to be asked about anything potentially embarrassing. I think my mother did make an attempt when I was younger to prepare me for menstruation, but the explanation must have been incomplete since I somehow got the idea that it occurred once a year; when it did, I complained bitterly that August was a bad month to have started since all future summer holidays would be inconvenienced! I can also remember that my great anxiety was how on earth, if I married, I could conceal this regular event from my husband. I took it for granted that it was a sacred female mystery and that, by disclosing it, I should be a traitor to the whole of my sex.

  I suppose that nothing demonstrates the difference in attitudes more clearly than watching television advertisements for sanitary protection where young women wearing tightly fitting white trousers leap in and out of sports cars with happy cries of liberation. There was no internal protection in the 1930s and the commercial sanitary towels were made of cotton wool, cumbersome, not very absorbent and liable to chafe. There were loops at either end for attachment to a belt, giving them the name “bunnies.” We bought them in Boots the Chemist at a special counter presided over by a grey-haired nurse in full uniform with a great winged cap who handed over the embarrassing package with practised discretion.

  But these commercial sanitary towels were expensive and poorer families cut up old sheets into squares, which were hemmed and folded into a kind of bandage, attached to the waist-band with safety pins. Our Victorian forebears had probably coped with just the same unsatisfactory contrivance. Modern sanitary protection is one small victory of modern technology over biological inconvenience, and perhaps not such a small one.

  Many of the lessons of Cambridge High School have remained with me although I am not sure whether the classroom in which they were taught still exists. Not long after I left, the school moved to new premises. But fifty years ago we were next door to the Art School, the windows of which overlooked the hard tennis courts and the netball court and from which one of the art students, the young Ronald Searle, could look down on our energetic galumphings. He was even then gaining a reputation as an artist, although I prefer to believe that the allegation that he took us High School girls and, in particular, one dark tousle-haired specimen, as models for the harridans of St. Trinian’s, is a canard. For one thing, we seldom wore pigtails. They were more typical of our rivals at the Perse School, one of the many subtle social distinctions. Our hair was bobbed, shingled or pudding-basin trimmed under the blue felt hats of winter and our summer panamas.

  And how good we were, or rather, how biddable. Admittedly my best friend and I did one afternoon play truant as a gesture to some ill-defined need for self-expression and cycled up the Gog Magog Hills where we brewed up tea and fried sausages in our Girl Guide billy cans. I can’t recall that it was particularly enjoyable and it must have necessitated some fibbing since this wasn’t a school where absences went unnoticed.

  We were well behaved by conditioning, not by nature. When children are en masse, barbarism always lurks beneath the surface. We knew our limitations—this was not the age of child-centred education—but a timid, inexperienced teacher or one still in training could be given a hard time. Not, however, when it came to her examination lesson, at which the examiner would sit at the side of the class, notebook unobtrusively in hand. Here fair play, unstated but instinctively understood, took over. We would sit bolt upright, bright-eyed, hands shooting up like pistons to answer the questions. By the time my younger daughter went to a teacher-training college in the 1960s such a class—attentive, disciplined and obviously learning—would probably have disqualified the student from any chance of becoming a teacher.

  History, my second favourite subject and taught by Miss Back, was pure pleasure. I never knew her Christian name. I doubt whether any of the form did. Sixty years ago that was privileged information although those girls given to “pashes” made it their business to discover the secret and pass it on in giggling triumph to their friends. But I can’t remember that anyone had a “pash” on Miss Back. She exuded common sense, a rational and cheerful dignity which wasn’t conducive to such follies. I knew nothing of her life outside the school. I remember seeing her one Saturday evening at a meeting of the Peace Pledge Union to which I had gone out of curiosity; then, as now, I was a non-joiner but an indefatigable taster of ideas. Was she a convinced pacifist? It is impossible to think of her as other than totally rejecting the madness of war, yet I remember that I was surprised to find her at the meeting, perhaps because we could never quite believe that the staff had any life outside the classroom. Did we imagine that they disappeared each evening into some chalky limbo until summoned by the morning assembly bell? Yet if she was a member of the PPU we were never indoctrinated with pacifism or with any other opinion. She saw her job as teaching, not as proselytizing, and yet I am in no doubt of the values—liberal, Christian, scholarly—by which she lived.

  We were taught, as much by example as precept, to respect our minds and to use them; to examine the evidence before rushing in with our opinions; to distinguish between fact and theory; to see history through the eyes of the poor and vanquished, not merely those of the powerful and the conquerors; not to believe that something is true simply because it would be pleasant or convenient if it were and, when exposed to propaganda, to ask ourselves, “In whose interest is it that I should believe this?”

  Like all the staff except for one widow, Miss Back was a spinster and we took this for granted as we took so much. The post 1914–18 war generation of women, robbed by the holocaust of Flanders of their chance of marriage and motherhood, may have resented their loss, yet in retrospect they seemed to have been neither bitter nor unhappy and the generation they taught, born in the aftermath of that war and destined to reach adulthood at the beginning of the next, benefited from an education which wasn’t circumscribed by the demands of the teacher’s husband and family. That dedication, too, we took for granted, flourishing unthinking on their deprivation. But even if their chances of finding a husband had been greater, we still wouldn’t have been taught by a married woman. In those years—and indeed until the war—marriage meant resignation from the job.


  English was marvellously taught, by Miss Scargill and Miss Dalgliesh, after whom I named my detective, Adam Dalgliesh. Years later when she had retired to Edinburgh I visited her after speaking at the book festival and she told me that her father had been called Adam. It never occurred to either teacher that we were incapable of enjoying Shakespeare or reading the great English poets or the major novelists. Miss Dalgliesh would, I suspect, have been incredulous to read today’s A-level syllabus. Before the war, even at the level of what was then called the School Certificate, we learned more English literature than many present-day applicants for the English School at university.

  And we enjoyed a remarkable continuity of devotion. It was rare indeed for a teacher to leave the High School except by retirement. We were not faced at a critical stage of our pre-examination work by new faces, different methods, unknown personalities. And the school was the right size, large enough to be a lively and diverse community, small enough for each girl to be individually known. We didn’t waste time carrying our books from classroom to classroom or building to building at the dictates of a complicated timetable. We all had our own place, our desk, chosen in a noisy scramble at the beginning of a new school year where, surrounded by our cronies, we could create our small island of security. In our lidded desks we could arrange our exercise and text books, fountain pen and pencils and small possessions, knowing that we should find them each morning precisely as we had left them.

  In the educational system between the wars there were, of course, wrongs to be remedied and the worst have been remedied. But I sometimes wonder whether we haven’t lost almost as much as we have gained. I am not sorry that I was at school at a time when the word “kid” was reserved for the young of goats.

  SATURDAY, 23RD AUGUST

  A memorable day. I caught the Oxford Tube—that convenient inter-city coach—at Notting Hill Gate at 8:40 and had a trouble-free and quiet journey. I stopped at Gloucester Green for an iced coffee, and then to St. John Street where I chatted to Alixe while watering the garden. The sky was overcast with the promise of rain which never came, but there was a slight breeze and the morning was less oppressive than in London.

  My youngest grandchild Beatrice arrived to drive me to her home where her father Peter was cooking the lunch while listening to the ball-by-ball BBC cricket programme. Jane had been feeling under the weather and had vigorously cleaned the house, it being her policy that the less agreeable chores are best kept for unpropitious occasions; feeling really well inclines her to pleasure, not duty. Peter interrupted his cooking to pour me a glass of wine and I gossiped with Jane until lunch was ready, an excellent meal of mixed grilled fish and oven-baked vegetables in olive oil.

  In the afternoon we drove to Rousham and walked in the gardens. We saw very few other people and the ordered beauty of lawns and trees was wonderfully refreshing, particularly the view down to the lake with the water-lilies in flower and the golden carp sliding under the dark green surface. We visited the kitchen garden and then sat in the rose garden, Jane and I in silence, listening and inhaling the subtle scents of high summer, while Peter roamed among the rose beds. I thought that I could not have felt happier anywhere else in the world, however beautiful, but then I often think this in England. It is a great disincentive to the ardours, dangers, delays and inevitable disappointments of travel. And a perfect day should be recorded. It can’t be relived except in memory but it can be celebrated and remembered with gratitude.

  MONDAY, 25TH AUGUST

  Sunday was a non-productive day. I meant to go to Mass at 11 o’clock but indolence overcame me. I slept for an hour in the afternoon, which was unwise as I had some difficulty getting to sleep last night and was awoken in the early hours by a noisy party in a flat in the Mews which went on until 3 o’clock. I like to sleep with my window open and one of the drawbacks of summer nights is the increase in noise. Tonight the constant loud thud of a pop group was particularly obnoxious.

  The small hours are the worst to lie awake in. I switched on the bedside light and tried to read—P. G. Wodehouse or Nancy Mitford are the best providers of consolation in the treacherous small hours—but couldn’t get comfortable and my eyes felt tired and kept watering, smudging my spectacles. I have friends who overcome insomnia, or at least cope with it, by getting up and making tea, but this seems like giving in to sleeplessness. I tried to relax, hoping to slide into unconsciousness.

  In theory I could use these uninterrupted hours to think about the next book; after all, I am the first to complain that there isn’t enough solitary thinking time. But at three in the morning the mind slips free of conscious control and the thoughts which come are more often depressing than creative.

  Last night I found myself back in Cambridge. I can’t remember how old I was when my mother was compulsorily admitted to Fulbourne Mental Hospital, nor can I remember how long it was before she came home again. The weeks, perhaps months, before she was finally compulsorily detained must have been extremely difficult, particularly for my father, but for me they are a complete blank, except for one incident. I was in the double bed asleep with my sister when Father came in and asked me to go quickly and fetch Mrs. Mallett, one of our neighbours. I put on shoes and my coat and ran down the street. There was a small pile of gravel deposited there by workmen who were surfacing the road and I ran into this and fell and lay for a moment winded but unhurt. I can remember nothing further of that night except my father coming in after Mrs. Mallett had left and ruffling my hair. It was a gesture of tenderness which I don’t remember him ever making during my childhood except at that moment. There must have been others, perhaps when I was very young, but this is the only one I remember.

  I would go with him every Saturday to visit Mother in hospital, my brother and sister being left at home. All I recall of this is the occasional bus ride—a miscellaneous group of passengers making the same journey for the same purpose—the driveway up to the hospital and the smell of the ward. The drug used in those days to sedate the patient permeated clothes, hair, the air we breathed. The visits were always painful. My mother would sit clutching at her hospital dress with restless fingers, looking at us imploringly and constantly reiterating her wish to come home.

  While she was away we initially managed. My father had always been extremely capable and, though not demonstrative, he was certainly dutiful. He did his best. Most of the shopping was done on his way home from the office and I cooked the evening meal and the meals at weekends, and tried, with the help of Monica and Edward, to keep the house reasonably clean. The biggest problem was washing; these were the days before washing machines or detergent and it was a problem ensuring that the three of us had clean clothes for Monday school.

  And then Dusty arrived. She was a young—but not particularly young—woman living with her sister in Roseford Road, and came by the day to help look after us. I can’t imagine why she was living with her sister or why she should have taken the job, since I can’t believe that she was paid more than a pittance. I suppose it was convenient as she only had about thirty yards to walk each morning. She was tall, rangy, with bright eager eyes behind large spectacles, a wide mouth and dark springy hair. Her two great pleasures, indeed obsessions, were the National Front, to which she belonged, and the Women’s League of Health and Beauty founded by Prunella Stack. She went off to meetings of the former wearing black trousers and a black turtleneck shirt. Once she took me to a demonstration of the Women’s League, and I can recall the rows of women in black satin tight-fitting pants and white blouses, waving and stretching their arms, bending and twisting in unison, an extraordinary if not unimpressive sight.

  Dusty made no attempt to indoctrinate us into her Fascist beliefs and as far as I can recall they consisted of admiring the young men who went to the meetings, and of being intensely, if naïvely, patriotic. I often wonder what happened to her when the war broke out and disillusionment set in. But she was kind, even-tempered and cheerful, finding no difficulty in coping with my father,
and while she was with us life was changed for the better.

  One memory is particularly acute. It happened very soon after she arrived. I went up to my bedroom and there, lying folded on the sill beside the open window so that it was aired by the sun, was a clean, ironed nightdress. It is still a powerful image of conscientious caring and it lifted my heart. After trying, not always successfully, to cope with housekeeping and school, I was going to be looked after.

  Of we three children I think it was my sister Monica who suffered the most from Mother’s illness. Monica was Mother’s favourite child. I had the privilege of seniority and was regarded as my father’s favourite, and Edward was the youngest and the boy. Monica in between, the least enviable position in any family, always felt herself at a disadvantage. When, a few weeks ago, I talked to her about that time in our lives, she said that no one had ever explained to her what had happened. I had merely told her and Edward one morning that I was taking them for a long walk. When we returned, Mother had disappeared. Monica didn’t see her for nearly two years and wasn’t even told what had happened to her. I find this astonishing but I believe it to be true. I must have thought that Father was explaining things to her; he must have thought that I would do it. Certainly I can’t remember that I ever discussed my visits to the hospital with either of my siblings. If I did indeed leave Monica in ignorance, then I had failed her in a matter more important than cooking breakfast, keeping the house clean and seeing that she had a clean blouse for school on Monday.