by Bryher;
I had read enough history to know that it was wise to get as close to the throne as possible. Freeman’s Sicily had explained the position. Our Headmistress was a Tyrant and the staff her bodyguard. I left the beings alone whom I had innocently called governesses on arrival but, after a sharp reproof, “the ladies of the staff,” and whenever I wanted anything, knocked at the library door. Dear Miss Chudleigh, I discovered afterwards that she also came from Cornwall, we were adversaries but we respected one another and miraculously she let me argue with her almost daily. Most of her pupils trembled in her presence, it never occurred to me that we were other than equals. There was one difference; temporarily she had power over us but she, in turn, was dominated by our parents. Had I known it, her life was a novel made to my hand because she had fought her way up from a remote Cornish day school to being part owner of one of the best private schools of that day’s England. I did not grasp it at the time but sometimes when people grumble now about the madness of the world, I remember her stern features. We have made progress. In 1910 we were on the threshold of a new era in education and if a particular pattern of Puritan zealousness had not been stamped across “Chud’s” soul, she could have been one of its leaders. She had a grasp of organization, she tried out new teaching methods (not always popular with us), and unless a matter touched her religious convictions she was just. It was the discipline of her youth, she must have been born about the middle of the eighteen seventies, that had hooded her intellect and warped her views. Her Sunday talks were famous and twice a term she lectured us about “unhealthy friendships.” None of us had the faintest idea of what she meant.
Miss Chudleigh took us for literature class, twice a week; in one we read a Shakespeare play, in the other Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. I do not know if it was due to my pugnacious instincts or to my study of Saxon weapons but I distrusted the ability of Tennyson’s knights to stand in the “shield wall.” I asked Miss Chudleigh where he had found the stories and she suggested Malory. I was still not satisfied and, was it destiny again, I found The Legend of Sir Gawain by Jessie L. Weston on a back shelf in a bookshop. It cost four shillings and made an enormous hole in my pocket money. How can I make people understand what gates it opened to me? It seems a simple enough book today, it was published in 1897, but it led me straight to modern science. I discovered that a story accumulated new details whenever it was retold but by patient sifting (how wonderful this was to a would-be historian) it was sometimes possible to trace the outline of some ancient event. Once I had grasped this fact, it was easy to understand the idea of the unconscious mind, a few years afterwards. It was also a summons. The victors of Hastings were trying to claim the Arthurian stories for their own. They had defamed the character and stolen away the exploits of the real English hero, Gawain. There were pages on sun worship and the islands of the dead and I was at the age when one is interested in the soul. Somehow I got her Sir Percival and flung myself into it with almost as much enthusiasm. What were the Enfances but a picture of my own childhood? I, too, had grown up in solitude and had had to learn the usages of not a court but a school, under the mocking eyes of half a hundred Sir Kays.
Years later, when I read Mr. Eliot’s The Waste Land, I smelt ink, furniture polish and disinfectant soap again as I sat in the School Hall at preparation with my comrades around me, all dreaming of half term and the numerous trifles that make up a schoolgirl’s life while I was proudly turning names over in my head, Ferdinand Lot, Bédier and Gaston Paris. I must confess that though I could crawl through some of the less difficult parts of Chrétien de Troyes, I found them boring. It was Miss Weston’s historical ideas, her linking of Gawain with the remote past of Britain and her refusal to accept knights as missionaries that gripped my mind. She became the shining flag of all my rebellions. Besides, she was a woman and where she had gone I could follow. All that I knew about her was the word “Bournemouth” that appeared underneath the introductions to her books and as I knew little about scholars, I pictured her as a retired governess living in that watering place. It never occurred to me, it would have occurred to no Victorian girl, to write her a letter.
I dragged Diu Krone, an obscure poem in which Sir Gawain achieved the Grail, whether it was appropriate or not, into every class. I was eloquent about Tennyson’s misuse of his sources. Miss Chudleigh gave me the lowest marks possible and trapped me over the meaning of an obscure Elizabethan word. Then she made up by calling me into the library and letting me read Miss Weston’s newest article in some learned publication. Of course I was a nuisance, of course I deserved a smacking, but all these encounters sharpened my wits. If I had been left free and encouraged to sit in a library, I should probably have played truant and never opened a reference book in my life.
England has forgotten, after two wars, the terrifying power of the Victorian church. The school’s attitude to religion shocked my Eastern soul. It was the solitary emotional outlet permitted to the girls and it turned into a whirlpool of fear and sentimentality. God cared only for those who obeyed Authority and went to church on Sundays. People mouthed supplications as if they were turning a prayer wheel but without a Tibetan’s faith. The mind was always to be discouraged from inquiry, the mysteries were unimportant.
This creed was not quaint. It was a deadly reality. It could effect both marriages and the getting of work. We were allowed to take one book back to school with us and I chose my favorite Extinct Monsters. I was hardly surprised when Miss Chudleigh confiscated the volume, everything that we liked, however harmless, was taken away at once. I was astonished, however, when she called me into the library and explained that although it was proper for me to read at home whatever my family allowed, she could not allow it to circulate freely at Queenwood because there was a reference to Darwin in a footnote. She would give it back to me when we went home for the holidays.
I simply did not know what she meant and I believe I only fully understood her action when I read about the Piltdown forgery in 1953. I am convinced that this was due to frustration. The antiquity of man had been accepted by most learned societies in 1912 but there was still much opposition in England where it was considered anti-Biblical. I suspect that Dawson was so irritated by the views around him that he wanted some tremendous proof to convince the people at large. It may be that his action was a help to his fellow scientists at the time. It is so easy to forget in a freer age that our forefathers had to work secretly and often in isolation if ever their researches appeared to challenge contemporary theology. Even today I meet people who regard prehistory as a dubious myth and we have the conflict raging, although in a stifled and less violent form, over the Dead Sea scrolls.
Miss Weston herself is out of fashion at present for an almost similar reason. She felt that there were traces of Eastern and probably Indian influence in the very early Arthurian material. Some of her details may be wrong, she was writing over forty years ago, but the original “Matter of Britain” goes back to our remote past when traces of religions brought in by foreign traders under the Romans still existed in isolated Welsh and Cornish valleys. Most scholars now work on the later versions that arose after the Norman Conquest and that were deeply affected by the Christianity of that time. To like and study one or the other is a matter of individual preference but it is unscientific to ignore the fact that the first tales belong to an age when Norman Christianity was unknown in Britain and to blame Miss Weston for being more interested in the beginning than the end.
There was one thing to be said in favor of the Victorians. They believed in their causes. In those days, you were either “for” Tennyson or Browning and no literary group that I subsequently joined ever discussed the merits of two rival poets so vehemently. Browning was said to be obscure; this aroused rage as some people felt that they might be tricked thus into reading heretical views. Let us give Miss Chudleigh her due. We studied Tennyson because he was “set” for examinations but she also took us to outside lectures on The Ring and the Book. I loved Browni
ng, to me he was crystal-clear and, reading him, I was nearer again to Italy, the Italy of my childhood. I think now that he was a forerunner of the documentary film, he photographed what he saw and the problems had an unexpected twist to them for that age. Suppose he believed in happiness, I had need of such a faith at Queenwood. I did not know what was going to happen to me, except for a little reading (yes, this was much), Authority planned almost every minute of my day and the world around me revolved according to incomprehensible laws.
“‘Tis only the coat of a page to borrow,
“And tie my hair in a horse-boy’s trim,
“And I save my soul—but not tomorrow—”
Leave to the sixteen-year-old a flash of color, and to the would-be escaper (without the price of a railway ticket) the feeling that he, or she, is not the only runaway alive.
Yes, Browning was a great comfort when one was young. Waring reminded me of Burton. He was real, unlike the maidens with their tapestries, and how often, after I had been told for the hundredth time, “Showing off, Winifred, is not ladylike,” I had first answered cheerfully that the last thing on earth that I wanted to he was a lady and had then retired, muttering to myself,
“True, but there were sundry jottings,
“Stray-leaves, fragments, blurrs and blottings,
“Certain first steps were achieved...”
because I too had a beginning in a notebook. As soon as I had time, neither at home nor school, alas, was I allowed any leisure, I was going to write a book about “the ladies of the staff.” I felt profoundly sorry for them. One day the door would open and we would bang out of Queenwood but what had they to look forward to but an eternity of terms? I had even heard one of the senior mistresses humbly ask permission to go to supper with some guild at the vicarage and every contact with their pupils outside lessons was sternly controlled. I knew the basic rule in art was to write only of what the author had experienced. I had never, alas, led a charge of Hannibal’s elephants but now by fits and starts I was beginning to learn my trade.
I attempted to slide back and forth within the school, using its code as coloration as I had shifted in Egypt between the East and the West. It did not work. I had grown too analytical and the circumstances were more complex. Still I tried to get behind the teacher’s skin and to imagine her sensations. What did she think about when she saw our row of faces? Did she ever dream, perhaps in the train that took us towards our holidays, of some eventual freedom? Oh, if I could get her down on paper (I still regret that book) I could reform the world. I did not yet possess a typewriter, my observations, my heroine and myself got into such a sorry tangle that I could not straighten them out but it is not the flat-topped cap that makes the apprentice but grimy hours of false beginnings and unproductive work.
After all, it was the start that mattered. I was tired of reading first chapters and about how others had begun their adventures: Marco Polo, for example, who had just walked off and followed a caravan with nobody yelling “come back” at him. I was old, old, by Elizabethan standards and the future seemed a blank wall. Yet if discovery was nowhere else, it was in the wind. It smashed across the trees at night, swept along the grasses, covered the Downs beyond us with leaves. I could hear it whispering, “Do you know where Tierra del Fuego is, have you been round the Horn?” Time was rushing on, time was being spent and what had I to show for it? Only frustration as the bell woke us all from dreams and “Get up, girls, get up,” echoed along the corridor.
There has to be a responsive frame of mind or historical events pass unnoticed. We saw the Coronation procession in July, 1911, but I was in conflict with my surroundings and the details are imprecise. Instead of emperors and kings, I remember rather with malicious clarity that Miss Chudleigh, who had been invited to go with us, swallowed a fish bone at supper and had to be rushed to the nearest first-aid post by my mother. I was thus eyewitness of the fall of greatness and smarting, together with my schoolmates, from reproofs—“Winifred, where is your hair ribbon? Dorothy, have you a button missing from your sleeve?”—we exulted together, as soon as we were alone, that the rulers, as well as the lowly, were subject to the world’s ills.
We went on to watch the Naval Review from the deck of a steamer. One of the Queenwood mistresses who accompanied us still speaks of my family’s kindness and of the occasion being one of the happiest days of her life. My only clear memory is of going aboard an American battleship. I had heard so many stories about the States from my father that I was delighted to be technically upon “American soil.” We were asked afterwards to a party on board but my mother felt that it would be improper to take my schoolfellows without the consent of their parents to a “grown-up” function. I was not quite sure what a party was but felt that it was no place for a cabin boy and intended to wriggle out of it, but my companions were bitterly disappointed. We were allowed to watch the illuminations, however, until quite late at night.
It was during these same summer holidays that we went for a short cruise to Norway. I liked seeing a new country but what was more important than the waterfalls and the harebells growing out of some barn roof was that, in looking for translations of the sagas, I discovered William Morris. He taught me first, I think, to listen to the pattern of words. I could not get the sound of his early poems out of my head. I think that it is his fondness for a few archaic terms such as “sithence” that disturbs the modern reader although most of us have a favorite word that we use too often. At sixteen who notices such things? I read for the pictures, the two children shouting to each other across the “sundering flood,” the riders in the woods, a ship in a gray harbor. One thing I knew from my fencing, Morris understood weapons. I did not like his renderings of Arthurian romance but comforted myself with the thought that he had lived before Miss Weston had made her researches. His damsels could be ignored, they were merely a blazon, a device, or occasionally useful for a rhyme. What I felt and liked in his poetry was his courage.
It takes a Shakespeare to write for the seven ages of man. Morris is youth, speaking to it or to old age, to that moment when, as they tell us, Queen Elizabeth could not listen to State Papers any longer but only to folk stories and ballads. It is not a question of arrested childhood. He expresses unconsciously but fully the first phase of maturity. People say that he wasted his gifts upon too many things but what else do any of us do, if we have guts, when we are twenty? He never attained again the greatness of The Hollow Land that I read then as an adventure story and now as a myth of the pilgrimage of the soul but he chose to fight in many different ways and made it easier for the twentieth-century artist to break through to a greater freedom.
And thus I came from Morris and the sagas, late that summer, for the first time to Scilly.
My first voyage to the islands was an initiation rite. I sat watching the granite cliffs towards the Land’s End from the deck of the Lyonnesse in happy anticipation of the marvels that Doris had promised me. Suddenly the increasing motion blotted everything out except a determination not to be seasick if I could possibly help it. I was quite a normal child. I could have borne the captain or Mr. Banfield watching me hang over the rail but if this should happen, my Queenwood companions would tease me gleefully for days. I need not have been ashamed; men had been known to sail the oceans of the world and then succumb to the choppy crosscurrents off the Wolf but I pretended at first that I was all right, then I repeated lines of poetry in a wild attempt to keep my mind off the roll, then I closed my eyes and gripped my chair until finally a voice said cheerfully, “You’ll feel better in a minute, we are entering the Sound.”
Scilly is a continent in miniature. The islands formed a single land mass, ages ago, and due to the influence of the Gulf Stream, except to westward, the gardens are full of palms and tropical plants. I have never felt a similar atmosphere anywhere else, it is drenched with age, yet of the moment young. On that day, however, I did not notice the white crescent of Samson nor the clear, emerald patches on the eastern side of t
he channel. I was just able to wave half-heartedly to Doris and Ethel on the quay and to struggle ashore, absolutely green but technically undisgraced.
It was the first time that I had come within a cabin boy’s view of the sea and I was out of my mind with joy. There was not a single feeling of disappointment, it was everything that I had wanted and more. The Sound had the color of a gull’s wing and something of its movement, the edges of the waves were like the shells. Sometimes we steamed out in a small launch to fish beyond Annet and then we were tied with life lines to the rails, in case we got seasick and fell overboard. If like a plant we can draw life from a particular soil, I have drawn mine from the islands. There were no tourists in 1911 and no cars. We drove across to Pellistry beside hedges full of a lemon-scented honeysuckle and carried our parcels in a donkey cart or we rowed about in our own punt. Many of the inhabitants had not only never visited the mainland but had never left their own islet. We would not look back when the time came to leave but promised ourselves that when we were “grownup” we would never leave Scilly but live there till we died.
The years passed. Naturally the higher I went up in the school the easier life became for me but at seventeen we thirst to remake the world and I had that illusion badly. I was all zeal. If my companions did not like history it was because their imaginations had never been awakened. (In a sense I was right.) Let us develop our intelligence, find out what had never been discovered before and if I had to cuff a few heads in the process it did not disturb me in the very least. I resented the waste of time and the vast amount of preventable unhappiness. A touch here, an alteration there, and the organization would have revolved so much more smoothly. As for the curriculum, I should have scrapped it at once. Hours were spent upon useless snippets, one girl through a transfer from another school spent three years on the Wars of the Roses and many of my companions left unable to look up a train in a timetable and without knowing how to order a book from a shop. I wanted to introduce business correspondence and have them study the world instead of merely England. I also tried to organize a strike against the carrying of umbrellas. We were used to rain and what were they, I argued, other than an emblem of respectability and, therefore, to be deplored?
