by Bryher;
Yes, Fate must have been behind my father’s mistake. Even a year’s difference in age can be a barrier at school so if it had not been for that first walk, I might never have gone to Scilly. Think what I should have lost if Doris had not taken me all over the islands or if we had not groaned in seasick sympathy on the rolling deck of the Lyonnesse. We were inseparable by the time that the transfer to my correct age group had been completed but Miss Chudleigh gave us permission to continue to sit together at my family’s request although she sometimes complained that we encouraged each other in irresponsible pranks. We have only grown nearer to each other throughout the intervening years.
So the days followed each other, each a long training in rebellion until the term ended in July and the holidays began.
I spent August sulking with Shakespeare. Caliban attracted me because there seemed some resemblance between his state and my own and I knew that I could never return to my island innocence, no matter what future enchantments might be in store for me. It was no wonder that I felt confused. The long painful obediences of childhood had been wiped away at a stroke. It was useless to explain my feelings, nobody believed me. “She is spoilt and resents discipline,” people said smugly yet oddly enough, in some ways, life at school was less strict than at home. “It will be the making of her,” they added and this was true, though not with the meaning that they intended because I rejected their standards for ever. My parents kept saying that they wanted me to be happy. “Then Jet me go back to my drawing classes,” I begged but they shook their heads. I was not to hear the name of Freud for another ten years but Queenwood was the perfect preparation for me to become his adherent as I fought to find out how the unbearable frustrations could be eased.
I think now that it was society itself and not my family that was to blame. It endeavored to enforce conformity through pressure at an individual’s most sensitive point, his children. It needs great courage to disregard the opinions of the day and yet, as I have seen so often, the virtues of one epoch become the crimes of the next generation. I was also mature in a number of ways but, like most of my generation, ignorant of what were called “the facts of life.” I suspect that my parents were afraid that I might make “undesirable friends” at any school of art. I learned subsequently that I was not more stupid than my fellows. After all, as I said afterwards, the Victorians outwardly gave up sex and received an empire in exchange.
Of course I was difficult and my parents began to wonder whether Queenwood were a good idea or not (it was, if one could survive it), so in order to sweeten the final summer days my father took me to Cornwall. I began to breathe as soon as I reached the West. We went to Tintagel, I remember, and as we stood on the top of the cliffs I knew that there was no adventure that I would not dare and no opinion that I would not question. I looked up at the gulls in a state of exultation but then, the next minute, the approach of a new term flooded me with terror. I should have run away there and then, only, having a practical nature, I knew that I should not get very far on the ten shillings in my pocket.
Our journey ended at Penzance. It had never occurred to me to question Doris about her family but I did have her address. “Oh, you mean Mr. Banfield the ship-owner,” the hall porter said when we inquired the way to the house. My father was delighted, in the whole school I had picked out the one pupil whose father was a colleague and likely to have interests identical with his own. Nobody was at home when we called but Mr. Banfield came to see us that evening. His wife, Doris and her sister were over at St. Mary’s but it was arranged that Doris would come to us for part of the Christmas holidays and that I should accompany them to Scilly the following summer.
The second term at Queenwood passed more easily than the first. I learned to lie, easily and efficiently, it was a valuable accomplishment. I also became a boarder, strangely enough, I felt freer and it lessened the tension. A day girl has to cope with three dimensions at once, all pulling in different directions: her own development, the wishes of her parents and the laws of the school. The moment that I was inside Queenwood, I became one with my companions; we were usually in a state of dissembled revolt but the struggle was shared, I was not fighting alone. It deepened our friendships and I have noticed since that whereas those who have been educated at day schools often lose contact with their classmates, I have only to cross a room to greet someone I have not seen for thirty years and, because of our shared experience, it is as if we had parted yesterday. There is everything in favor of the properly run boarding school from the child’s point of view, exceptional cases apart; they lessen considerably the strain of growing up. Contrary also to European opinion they strengthen rather than decrease the ties with home because both sides are more tolerant of each other when they are not permanently under the same roof. Doris and I remained inseparable but two others joined our group, Dorothy Pilley who first took me up a mountain and Dorothy Townshend who with her vivid imagination and intellectual interests was even more rebellious than I was at Queenwood. We were conventional as to names. There were eight Dorothys and six Marjories in the school but luckily for me only one other Winifred.
I rapidly evolved a technique of avoiding our dreary rambles over the Downs. My favorite device was to jerk off the bow at the bottom of my pigtail, then, with luck, by the time that I had been sent to replait my hair and find another ribbon, the walk would have started. The games were almost as dreary, apart from a few girls, we all played badly. I faced a hockey ball not with a stick but with my eyes towards the heavens, declaiming Beaumont and Fletcher,
Hence, all you vain delights,
As short as are the nights
Wherein you spend your folly:
There’s naught in this life sweet
If man were wise to see’t,
But only melancholy,
O sweetest melancholy!
It was intolerably smug but they merely yelled patiently, “Get on with the game,” and there was an occasion when my meditation was rudely disturbed by a cricket ball falling into my pocket instead of my hands. On the whole, however, I adjusted in fits and starts and as I had to find something to occupy my mind (I had been suspended from the history class under the pretext that I had learned as much as was necessary!) I persuaded Miss Johns to teach me Sanskrit.
It was a pity that I did not learn Greek. I might have mastered the verbs at that age that are so intractable in later life but I had read some dreary translations of Greek plays and the East still dominated my imagination. I never considered Latin. The tongue of the hated Romans was a key fumbling at the wrong door but Arabic, the growling consonants that came straight from hippo-hide drums, or whatever was Oriental, helped me to escape from school through another language into my former life.
We had exercise books bound in different colors for different subjects. (Does one still use the term? It is years since I have heard it.) I drew out the mottled brown one reserved for Latin and wrote Sanskrit on it in enormous letters. After all, pride in adolescence is a stimulus to learning. Unfortunately I found the language extremely difficult, I had not heard messengers and water carriers shouting the words at each other and though I was able to cope with vowel points, the Sanskrit habit of running the words of a sentence into a single line of letters proved too much for me. I struggled through a third of our “Elementary Reader” to end triumphantly, but I imagine for ever, at “The two elephants smell the perfume.” It was an illustration of the dual.
I grew devoted to Miss Johns though I was her solitary adherent. She had taken two degrees, at the time this was most unusual for a woman, and specialized in philology. She was plump, good-natured and Miss Chudleigh’s shadow although often scolded by her because of an incapacity to control anyone, pupil, parent or dog. I found out after I had left that she was of Welsh descent. Eventually she was relegated to the domestic side of Queenwood in spite of her learning. Is it imagination or did I really see her bustling about in a white apron with a bunch of keys at her waist? I think of her in retros
pect as the housewife who would have busied herself sorting apples when some survivor brought the news of the Norman victory at Hastings but who would have understood the consequences of the battle better than her master the thane.
Miss Johns was a scholar and remarked shrewdly enough that I should never take kindly to academic tuition because my mind shot off in too many directions at once; I was considering reincarnation while she was explaining the locative or dreaming about Egypt instead of learning my declensions, but I owe to her, rather than to Mademoiselle, a further advance in my apprenticeship. We had to read a good book for an hour on Sunday afternoons but I got permission to read French. I suppose the baste idea was that we must not enjoy what we were doing. One hot summer day just before the bell rang for reading to begin, I was summoned to the dining room and handed a copy of Flaubert’s Salammbô. I am sure that it must have been Miss Johns because I doubt if Mademoiselle would have dared to give it to me, even though it were a classic.
I sat on a hard chair in a crowded form room smelling of varnish and ink. It was not the words, it was what they caused to happen to me. All young artists have such moments of awakening and mine were intensified because of my extreme isolation. On that Sunday I entered into the creative dream, into the veritable handing down of the secrets of art from one generation to another, partly because it gave form to ideas that because of my inexperience were naturally nebulous and also because of its reassurance. I almost yelled a battle cry in triumph. I was right, Queenwood was wrong, I was not a solitary rebel.
I have read since that Colette preferred Salammbô to Flaubert’s other novels and I think that I understand the reason. Bourgeois life had changed because all Europe has been affected by two wars and their migrations. Flaubert helped to prepare the ground for modern psychology, he was not a doctor’s son for nothing, and it is a measure of his greatness that we respond to different books of his at different times. It was another fifteen years before I understood Madame Bovary. Perhaps his study of Carthage and the mercenaries (how one can smell the lions!) is nearer to us now with our memories of blitzes and invasions than his greater but narrower studies of French provincial life.
I am profoundly grateful to Miss Johns. She knew and gave me what I needed although I was still too undeveloped to realize that we both belonged to the same band of scholars or to show her the slightest return for her kindness. She did all that she could to make my lot easier and I wish that she had lived to read Roman Wall; she would have criticized it furiously but what a talk we would have had about the Roman Empire afterwards!
I was not the only child to beat against the intellectual starvation of an Edwardian education that was sometimes worse than physical hunger. There were a dozen girls there with better brains than mine though none had, I think, my impudence. I ought to have known Nellie Kirkham but she remains a fleeting impression of a lovely, fair-haired creature whom I passed occasionally on the staircase. Some years after leaving Queenwood she wrote a novel, Unrest of Our Time, that was both modern in approach and an extraordinary study of Derbyshire lead miners in the Elizabethan period. Perhaps it appeared too early? It ought to have been a best seller but it seems to have been overlooked. She is now a recognized authority on lead mines and their history but where are her other novels?
I also like to think that Sylva Norman’s witty and tolerant observation of human nature began in our drafty corridors, perhaps while we were waiting “to peck” Miss Chudleigh when we said good night or, if we had colds, shake her hand. I have always been envious of those wonderful first chapters in Tongues of Angels. Possibly only someone who has lived in Switzerland can appreciate how remarkably she has portrayed certain phases of Helvetian life. It is simply not true that books survive on their merit. Why has her Nature Has No Tune never been reprinted? It is an enchanting account of a pension in the Italian hills in the far-off days of the twenties.
Martita with her developing art and Dorothy Townshend with her clear Latin mind both suffered more than I did from our diet of crumbs. It would have been the same at the time in any school either in Europe or England, we were girls and so sacrificed to the prevalent spirit of the age; knowledge might make us discontented. To use the current phrase, it was “dinned” into us that it was selfish and disloyal to the community to take a job. Woe to the conformers! Thirty years later that same community punished the obedient who had listened to them. Fortunately for ourselves, most of us were rebels.
Yet Queenwood was a modern school for its time. Greatly daring. Miss Chudleigh took us to a reading by Ellen Terry for the benefit of the suffragettes. I remember only a little old lady and a voice, nothing was said about votes but we listened to Portia’s speech and the proceeds from the tickets went to the cause. It was enough to have made many parents remove their daughters immediately. At the time, I did not worry about political rights. I had to be self-centered to survive and there was nothing in any manifesto about votes giving me the chance to be a sailor.
Queenwood, however, had its lighter moments. “Girls!” Miss Chudleigh came forward to the edge of the school platform. “Girls!” Our lines tautened because it was better to give the effect of listening even if our thoughts were far away. “Mr. Smith has consented to give a lecture with lantern slides for the benefit of missionaries in Somaliland this evening. It will be a silver collection. Preparation will begin in consequence at half past four instead of a quarter to five.” There was an almost audible attempt on our part not to groan. Miss Chudleigh removed her glasses, wiped them, and took a step nearer the edge. (We always hoped that she might fall off but she never did.) “And girls,” the voice sank to its famous, whispering tone, “I had presumed that coming from homes of every possible refinement, it would be unnecessary to teach you the elements of social courtesy. I was surprised yesterday...and sadly shocked...to hear a titter, a perceptible titter, when the page boy had the misfortune to drop a leg of mutton on the floor. Surely you know that no lady ever laughs at an accident?” Slowly, majestically, Miss Chudleigh descended the steps, no Queen ever left an Assembly with more dignity.
A pause, a sign, the youngest child led out first, two thin plaits jerking behind her ears. At the far end of the hall, the head girl of seventeen and a half with precisely the same expression, the same black bow on her hair and the high-collared blouse that was the symbol of the constriction of our days, waited her turn to leave. It was army life but it had its compensations.
Only three men ever entered Queenwood, the doctor, the clergyman and a teacher of music. Parents were confined to the drawing room and the garden. Apart from brothers or an occasional cousin, few of us ever mentioned a boy. If even our mothers had used make-up, they would have been requested to remove their daughters from the school. On that particular day a rumor passed round the corridor that the music master had somehow missed his train and would have to stay to lunch.
“Chud’s put on her striped linen” There was nothing that we did not observe.
“No talking in the passage,” the mistress on duty snapped, “ten lines for anyone who speaks again.”
We sat down. The girls began to pass the plates of soup. The striped linen shone among us with its newness. Miss Chudleigh and the master discussed music in strained, polite tones. Chatter subsided or broke out in painful gasps. The ladies of the staff seemed more uneasy than their pupils. We finished the first course, the page boy gathered the plates, the top one half full, into his clumsy arms. It was a pity that the pyramid overbalanced precisely as he passed Miss Chudleigh’s chair. The room froze into silence. Nobody moved. The page boy stood staring at the damage. Drenched with soup Miss Chudleigh was pinned between the table and the plates, until, after what seemed minutes, hands began to snatch the pile away. “Coming from homes of every possible refinement, no lady ever laughs at an accident,” we muttered over and over to ourselves for fear of possible reprisals if we smiled. The music teacher glanced covertly under the table for possible damage to his trousers, Miss Chudleigh rose, apol
ogized to her guest and left the room. “I think we are going to have rain,” Miss Hulbert remarked loudly with immense presence of mind. The tables burst into hysterical giggling as if it were Saturday and not the middle of the week with nothing to look forward to but a damp walk on the Downs and a missionary lecture in the evening. Did I hear the babies in the Third Form humming “When the cat’s away, the mice will play”? A week later, the page boy left.
White walls, the misty Downs and the wet asphalt or else moss roses climbing through the windows of the School Hall on a summer day, these are my exterior impressions and I see them more vividly in memory than the lines of my companions in white blouses and blue skirts. I felt aloof to my last day there and what my comrades thought about my attitude was completely indifferent to me. My elders argued that it was selfish not to try to fit into the group. I shrugged my shoulders (a foreign gesture that they disliked) and remembered the conscripts in the Paris streets. There was a continuous sense of being in the wrong place with no appeal possible to justice, mercy or even to common sense. One of the fundamental differences between school and myself was that I accepted all races and religions, had I not mixed with Moslem, Christian and Copt in the Cairo streets, and although so deeply English that I often aligned myself with the lost, unpopular cause, my concern was with freedom. Queenwood preached acceptance of the customs of the age.
Languages saved me. The upper forms were given Racine to read when their vocabulary was perhaps two hundred words. Our accents were ruined for ever through an idiotic rule that we must talk French during certain periods of the day. There was no phonetic training and most girls simply tacked French endings onto English phrases. Everybody hated the lessons and so if I wanted to escape some corvée, I found substitutes in plenty if I roughed out their translations for them. Europe rescued me from many difficulties and I was very grateful for her assistance.
