‘You will be bored stiff with me and my Russian Revolution,’ I concluded with some reason, ‘but I feel rather oppressively the responsibility of an educated person who has to lecture to and probably influence considerably a whole crowd of the ignorant . . . It will be a desperate matter if the Socialists throw eggs at my new black gabardine and satin frock.’
With my long-established reverence for lectures and their givers, I was still far from realising how many speeches have to be made on any subject before a normal English audience remembers a week later even what it was, let alone anything that has been said about it. Needless to say, my carefully prepared lecture - which I read, word for word, with laborious conscientiousness for fear that I should forget to maintain my determined impartiality - made not a stir upon the lethargic surface of Y——parish; its chief effect was that of clearing my own brain on an acute political topic. ‘It would have been as useful to lecture on a turnip at Y——,’ I remarked ruefully to Winifred, but my disappointment was overshadowed by the B.A. Degrees which had been conferred upon us both in the academic splendour of the Sheldonian Theatre four days earlier, and by the London bazaar in aid of Somerville finances two days later, at which we both assisted with jubilant eagerness at a bookstall presided over by Rose Macaulay.
In January 1921, the Oxford women’s colleges had begun their three years’ special appeal for financial aid. Poorly endowed, and frequented chiefly by students who were obliged to earn their living and had no money to give, the women’s colleges, as I had realised with such dismay in 1914, had none of the resources which made Oxford a comparatively luxurious university for men. After the War, the economic outlook seemed darker than ever, and the funds of Somerville especially were depleted by the return to a building in which everything had deteriorated. The War Office ‘compensation’ by no means compensated in full for the numerous structural alterations that had to be made, and sufficient spare cash was not even available for the cleaning and repairing of the numerous college clocks which had remained untouched during the War.
Reluctantly Somerville was obliged to descend to appeals and bazaars, and immediately after our return from Italy, a letter asking me to help Miss Macaulay to sell books offered that prospect of a temporary acquaintanceship with a really famous writer which had hitherto seemed utterly unattainable by a struggling journalist whose persistent onslaughts on London newspapers remained lamentably fruitless. Enthusiastically I attended one or two of the bazaar committees at the University Women’s Club; ‘the meeting lastedhours,’ I related to the envious Winifred, whose co-operation had not then been invited; ‘I promised desperately to try and collect books; it’s a great bore, but I think that to run the bookstall with Rose Macaulay is worth the price.’
The collection of books had perforce to continue during the period of jaundice, and The Dark Tide was frequently abandoned for the bedside opening of colossal parcels, and the half-excited, half-apprehensive reading of novels and articles by my eminent stallholder.
‘I must send you this review by Rose Macaulay out of Time and Tide,’ ran one perturbed letter to Yorkshire, written when the bazaar’s near approach had rendered me even more conscious than usual of my literary shortcomings. ‘Let us, oh! let us both remain for ever silent if we are going to deserve such a review. Let us at least not deserve it, even if we get it. I have just finished Dangerous Ages. It is not a story but one of the most brilliant and cruel satires I have ever read . . . Winifred, I am terrified of that woman - terrified of meeting her on the 7th of Dec . . . . I feel tempted to scrap “Daphne”; it’s as bad to add to the stacks of literary sloppiness as to add to the number of potential unemployed.’
In the end the bazaar proved much less alarming than I had feared, and, painstakingly and elaborately dressed in brown marocain and a brown velvet picture hat with a flame-coloured ‘glycerine’ feather trailing over the edge, I stood entranced and watched Rose Macaulay, far more appropriately clad in a neat blue coat-frock, casually conversing with the half-legendary gods of literary London. John Buchan was there, brisk and unpretentious, and the bluff and cordial Hugh Walpole, over whose new novel, The Cathedral, I was to laugh and weep so rapturously in the next few months. It was too wonderful, too incredible, actually to stand within speaking distance of these Olympian presences. But best of all, perhaps, was the quiet, fatigued moment in which, as we were clearing up the stall, Miss Macaulay asked me what I meant to do with myself now that I’d gone down from Oxford, and I answered, breathlessly daring, that I was trying to be a writer and was half-way through an Oxford novel entitled The Dark Tide.
3
By the end of the year, after three months in Kensington, I had had more than enough of being the unmarried daughter at home. It was not, certainly, as exasperating an experience as it would have been in Buxton, where my mother’s acquaintances would have expressed an endless patronising solicitude for my failure to achieve marriage ten years after ‘coming out’, combined with charitable references to the fortunate compensation of my literary interests. But I was clearly enough aware that parents brought up in the nineteenth-century tradition would have preferred, not unnaturally, a happily married daughter producing grandchildren to a none-too-triumphant Oxford graduate floundering unsuccessfully in that slough of despond which lies just inside the gateway of every path to the literary life. So I welcomed the late December day when I could remove my disappointing spinsterhood, together with my typewriter and rejected manuscripts, to the penurious but unhumiliating independence of Bloomsbury.
The Doughty Street studio, chosen for its nearness to the British Museum at a time when we still expected to put in months of research on Metternich and Alexander, consisted of one large high room lighted only by windows in the roof, and divided by thin matchboard partitions into two tiny bedrooms, a minute sitting-room, and a ‘kitchen’ so small that two of us and the gas-cooker could not comfortably inhabit it at the same moment. As the partitions reached only just above our heads, every sound made in one ‘room’ was completely audible in all the others, so that when I coached my Welsh graduate in the sitting-room, Winifred, temporarily banished to her bedroom, had to sit perfectly still for an hour without rustling her papers, sneezing or coughing. As the roof was so high, and the sunless rooms were fitted only with infinitesimal penny-in-the-slot gas-stoves, the studio was always freezingly cold unless we lighted a fire in the huge ‘passage’ grate, which consumed a sackful of coal in an afternoon, and emitted volumes of smoke that covered ourselves and everything else with a black layer of sooty dust.
Each morning a scanty breakfast was brought to us on a tray by the blowsy, henna-haired housekeeper from the lodging-house off which the studio was built, and for an hour, directly afterwards, we conscientiously cleaned and tidied our rooms. Luncheon was always ‘eaten out’ in a restaurant in Theobald’s Road, but we bought and prepared our own tea and supper. Every moment not required for meals or cleaning was strenuously devoted to work, and hour after hour, for weeks on end, we crouched with cold feet and red noses on either side of the flickering sitting-room gas-fire, drafting the final sections of our novels, getting up speeches, preparing classes, correcting childish essays, and writing scores of permanently homeless articles.
Superficially it was a supremely uncomfortable existence - and yet I felt that I had never known before what comfort was. For the first time, I knew the luxury of privacy, the tranquil happiness of being able to come and go just as I wished without interference or supervision. There had been no privacy in Victorian or Edwardian childhood, and from the age of thirteen to that of twenty-seven, I seemed to have lived in public. At school I had gone to bed and got up in dormitories, walked in ‘crocodiles’, read and worked in the company of others; nothing, perhaps, is still so oppressive in traditional boarding-school life as the inability of a boy or girl ever to be quite alone. Buxton, no doubt, could hardly have been called community life, for I had the physical seclusion of a bedroom to myself, but it certainly did
not allow privacy of any other kind; no member of that pre-war provincial ‘set’ could hope to live to herself even if adult, and local and family searchlights had played continuously upon the dearest hopes, the most intimate relationships, of every ‘young person’. As for the next seven years, four in the Army and three in college, they had represented community life at its most complete. Astounded relatives who occasionally dropped in to see me wondered ‘how on earth I could stand’ such ‘Bohemian’ discomfort, but to me it was Paradise.
We both felt quite guilty, sometimes, for revelling in the uninterrupted companionship of those crowded days, so busy and yet so free, so stimulating and yet so dignified with their deep undercurrent of memory, when so many of our Somerville contemporaries were going through purgatory and humiliation in their first teaching posts. Letters from twenty-two-year-old girls, gay and confident and irresponsible less than twelve months ago, telling us of the ‘awful time’ that they were having with rigid, domineering headmistresses in conventional schools, arrived so often that Winifred, who had once thought it her duty to share their fate, was filled with melancholy compunction because she could afford the risk of becoming a writer.
‘People like you and me . . . possessed of sufficient means to choose the form of expression their intellectuality shall take, are very few and far between and yet very much needed,’ I had portentously urged her just before Christmas, in terror lest her social conscience should persuade her to abandon, just because she so much enjoyed it, the literary life for which she was best fitted. ‘Aristotle was so right that the work of a citizen . . . needs at any rate sufficient leisure to enable one to think. I think it would be wrong not to take advantage of the fact that fate has made one such a person. I don’t think the B.s and J.s do more good to the world just because they have an awful time. I think they are victims of a system which exploits women as much in some schools as in some hospitals. We should do no good by voluntarily joining those victims. It is much more our job to remain outside and if possible acquire a standing which may enable us one day to combat that system . . . I think that where the compensation comes in for the victims of the system is that they do not have to leave so much to chance as we do. People like us may work for years and then find it’s all in vain - that no one wants to read the book or learn the lesson. Whereas those others do get some direct return for every hour’s work they put in.’
When, as soon as we had settled in Bloomsbury, I began my one-morning-a-week expedition to the fashionable little South Kensington school with which I had been in negotiation the previous autumn, I realised clearly enough that this comfortable money-making expedient had no relation to the gruelling experiences in which some of my fellow Somervillians were so miserably immersed. I had only to give one lecture or class to each of the three higher forms in this polite, unexacting academy for wealthy Society girls, and the headmistress, a small humane woman with a sense of humour who always treated me with respect and kindness, realised at least as keenly as I did the intellectual limitations of her pupils.
Each Tuesday morning began with a quiet and reasonably intelligent Sixth Form, continued with an uproarious and unmanageable Fifth which exhibited at their worst the characteristics of pampered, uncontrolled adolescence, and concluded in the cheerful company of a pleasantly naughty Fourth to which I taught Greek and Roman history, incidentally learning it myself in the process. To this class of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds came an earl’s daughter of fifteen, accompanied by an elderly, spectacled governess who looked as though she had walked straight out of Miss Pinkerton’s Female Academy.
My ex-pupil is now one of the much-photographed Bright Young Things of London Society, but in those days it was difficult to believe that she would ever be bright, or even young; her large, timid eyes blinked at me behind her shining, old-fashioned glasses, and I wrestled perpetually with the problem of finding some truthful criticism for her smudgy, infantile essays which would not get my kind employer into trouble with the parental earl and countess. Why this aristocratic little rabbit was sent to my classes I could never understand, but perhaps her parents thought it would be an ‘experience’ for her (as indeed it was, and judging from her worried expression, a very painful experience) to be taught a safe minimum of history by an Oxford graduate. She never appeared at my classes without the governess, who clung to her like a burr - presumably as a safeguard against the risk that I might mention the Hetairai, or discuss the less repeatable irregularities of Alcibiades.
The term after I began this visiting work in South Kensington, my St Monica’s aunt invited me to spend a similar weekly day at Kingswood, where one of the forms was taking the Higher Certificate examination and wanted some special coaching in history. I agreed to undertake this coaching, and on the same day to give four or five classes to other forms, as well as correcting a large number of essays and exercises. The standard of scholarship in the school had improved beyond recognition since my own day; public examinations in both English and French were now taken and passed in triumph, and although, in too many cases, I still felt that it would all end at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, or Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, I enjoyed the endeavours that I made for nearly three years to interest my youthful successors in the idea of self-supporting professional work which would not necessarily terminate with marriage.
My classes, I knew, were never first-rate; I was too anxious to write myself, and to take part in political movements, to feel any great enthusiasm for teaching children about the writers and politicians of the past. But at least, through my work at Oxford and my subsequent reading of F. S. Marvin and Gilbert Murray and H. G. Wells, I had come to realise history as the whole story of man’s development from the cave to comparative civilisation, with his constructive experiments in science and art and government, and his blind, tentative efforts at international co-operation, demanding the limelight that had once been exclusively shed by teachers upon his destructive wars and his insignificant monarchs. And, strangely enough, in my efforts to render humanity’s complicated story vivid and interesting to the girls at St Monica’s, I found myself associated with no less a colleague than Sir John Marriott himself.
Sir John and my aunt, it seemed, had remained acquaintances ever since the pre-war Summer School at St Hilda’s, and he now visited Kingswood two or three times a term to give Extension Lectures to the girls on European History. Thus unexpectedly I came into contact for the third time with the dignified arbiter of my destiny; as usual he recognised me, expressing pleasure at the re-encounter, and I went to one or two of his lectures to get new stimulus for my own strenuous classes. Again I was impressed by the enormous vitality of this remarkable man, who after a long life of university teaching was still lecturing to the immature in 1922 with as much verve and inspiration as he had expended upon his apathetic Buxton audience in 1913. I have heard many other extension lecturers who as age crept over them began to seem tired and indifferent, but Sir John never wearied, and never failed to illuminate both past and present by bringing them into close relationship with one another.
It was certainly a complex and fateful Europe before which Sir John and I endeavoured to hold the mirror of historical perspective. The numerous conferences - Cannes, Washington, Genoa, Lausanne - which took place three or four years after the War were singularly reminiscent of the post-Napoleonic Congress period which I was taking with my intelligent Upper Fifth, and seemed likely, as I was beginning reluctantly to realise, to be just about as effective in the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. Dr Nansen, lecturing in London that spring, vainly endeavoured to instil pity for the victims of the Russian famine in the hearts of a sceptical and unimaginative Government, complacently satisfied with itself for having voted £50,000 the year before in aid of the campaign against typhus in Poland. In March, exactly a month before Germany signed the Treaty of Rapallo with the Bolsheviks, the independence of Egypt was proclaimed; Austria, under the new Seipel Cabinet founded in May, tottered nearer and nearer to fina
ncial ruin, and growing disorder in Germany led to the murder of Dr Ruthenau on the very June day that a great Hyde Park demonstration proclaimed enthusiastic national support for the League of Nations.
None of these political topics were as popular with my pupils as the summer exploits of the Everest expedition and the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb at the end of the year, but no event caused more temporary excitement than the culmination of the Irish troubles, which had revived after the establishment of the Free State at the end of 1921, in the murder of Sir Henry Wilson on June 22nd.
This former Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who had been returned unopposed as M.P. for North Down the previous February, was shot in broad daylight on the doorstep of his London house as a result of his anti-Sinn Fein policy, and for over a week a somewhat confused popular imagination endowed him with the halo of a great national hero and martyr. One chill, rainy morning at the end of June, Winifred and I pushed our way through half-hysterical crowds to the Blackfriars end of Fleet Street, and there watched Sir Henry’s funeral procession majestically mount the curve of Ludgate Hill. As the bier crept upwards to St Paul’s, the divine wailing of Chopin’s Funeral March - swelling, at the steps of the Cathedral, into its final outburst of triumphant sorrow:
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