by Muriel Spark
When James Gillespie, a snuff merchant, died, in 1797, a part of his fortune went to found a day school for boys and girls. This was the school that it fell to my happy lot to attend. Gillespie’s endowment allowed for parents like my own, of high aspirations and slender means, to pay moderate fees in return for educational services far beyond what they were paying for. When I first attended, at the age of five, it was coeducational but after some years we lost our little boys and we were James Gillespie’s High School for Girls, to this day one of Edinburgh’s best-known schools.
I spent twelve years at Gillespie’s, the most formative years of my life, and in many ways the most fortunate for a future writer.
The infant department led to the very top, grade by grade. Never were we allowed to forget the history of our dear Mr Gillespie, a frugal but benevolent bachelor. Each year on Founder’s Day the school gathered for a ceremony which began, on the earliest occasion I remember, with the ‘Our Father’ and ended in general hilarity as the pupils watched the staff, on the platform, take a pinch of snuff in honour of the Founder’s profession. Founder’s Day was held on a Friday in June. While our elders recovered from their sneezes the senior prefect always put up an eloquent and prolonged plea on behalf of a holiday for the school on the following Monday, which was invariably granted. In between these opening and closing events would come a homily, reminding us of the worthy Gillespie legends. In the 1930s, the snuff-taking ceremony was waived.
The story of James Gillespie, Esq. of Spylaw, is in many ways the most charming of all the merchants’ histories, he was so satisfactorily and completely an Edinburgh character. He was humbly born, a son of the people. He is depicted with a shrewd eye; his bulbous nose and protuberant chin form a nutcracker profile; his mouth has the set of prosperity.
James Gillespie and his elder brother John went into the snuff and tobacco business in the early part of the eighteenth century. James had his own mill in the Edinburgh district of Spylaw while his brother ran a tobacconist shop in the High Street. Neither brother married. They had a reputation for extreme frugality and at the same time, benevolence. The Gillespies flourished all the more when the American War caused a scarcity of tobacco and sent up the price. I like to reflect on the fact that my good schooling is partly due to the American War of Independence. James appears to have outlived his brother, working on to a ripe age and accumulating a large fortune. He kept a carriage, and the story is told that, meeting a friend of the nobility, James asked him to suggest a motto to place upon it. The friend (Henry Erskine) obliged with the couplet:
Wha wad hae thocht it
That noses had bocht it.
Gillespie put nothing of the kind on his carriage, content with only his initials. A memoir of this fine old man records:
Mr Gillespie lived among his workmen in homely and patriarchal style, and though far from being miserly was extremely frugal and industrious, his favourite maxim being ‘Waste not, want not.’ Even in extreme age one might have seen him with an old blanket round him and a night-cap on, both covered with snuff, attending the mill and superintending the operations of his man, Andrew Fraser.
There was one young man, evidently a relation, whom James Gillespie brought up as his heir; but Gillespie’s death revealed that this, his next of kin, was disinherited. It sounds a mean act on the part of the Laird of Spylaw, reputed as he was to have sat at the table familiarly with his servants, to have been an exceptionally indulgent landlord, to have nourished affection for his horse and cared greatly for his household animals and livestock. Why did James Gillespie disinherit the younger man? It is said that he did not want to indulge in the vanity of being remembered by a thing called after himself. There is no verification for the story beyond a history of the Parish of Colinton written while James Gillespie’s name was ‘still green’ in the parish. It was certainly an attitude typical of Edinburgh to deny feelings for the sake of principle, and maybe that is the chilly truth about the disinheritance of the young Gillespie. Certainly, no member of his family benefited at all from James Gillespie’s will.
His fortune was originally left in trust for a hospital and a school for poor boys. Gradually the object of the charity was changed until a modest fee-paying establishment, James Gillespie’s School for boys and girls, came under the benefit of his foundation. For most of my school-days it fell under the care of the Edinburgh Education Authority, and after 1929, was mainly for girls. Today, it is a state board school, coeducational. What happened to James Gillespie’s money is a question that has cropped up throughout all these changes, never failing to occupy correspondence columns in the newspapers. Some say that the funds were simply absorbed by the Edinburgh educational authorities. An interesting point is that at a committee meeting in 1938 the school was reported to be overcrowded with a membership of fourteen hundred girls. There was a waiting list of four hundred. As a solution to the problem it was proposed to raise the fees. To which the chairman replied, ‘Every time we have increased the fees the number of pupils desiring to attend has risen.’
Despite the introduction of fee-paying, one of the main benefits to be derived from James Gillespie’s fortune was the system of bursaries and scholarships which enabled the more intelligent girls from free schools to attend Gillespie’s, while girls already at Gillespie’s who obtained sufficiently good marks could continue their higher education without further fees. This was a godsend to parents like mine, who could not afford the rising cost of education. After the age of twelve I did not involve my parents in school fees.
The official religion of James Gillespie’s School was Presbyterian of the Church of Scotland; much later this rule was expanded to include Episcopalian doctrines. But in my day Tolerance was decidedly the prevailing religion, always with a puritanical slant. Nothing can be more puritanical in application than the virtues. To enquire into the differences between the professed religions around us might have been construed as Intolerance.
Many religious persuasions were represented among the pupils. There were Jewish girls in practically every class. I remember one Hindu Indian named Coti whom we made much of. There were lots of Catholics. Some girls were of mixed faiths – mother Protestant, father Jewish; Irish Catholic mother, Episcopalian father. It meant very little in practical terms to us. The Bible appeared to cover all these faiths, for I don’t remember any segregation during our religious teaching, although in other classes some pupils may have sat apart, simply ‘listening in’.
Scotland was historically rich in sects. James Gillespie himself was an admirer of the Covenanters, those worthy bearers of Bible and sword who rebelled against the imposition of the English liturgy on the Scots in the seventeenth century. The Covenanters could be said to be reformers of the Reformation. But James Gillespie went further than that. He inclined towards a stricter sect, the Cameronians, a section of the Scottish Covenanters named after their chief exponent, Richard Cameron. In 1743, during James Gillespie’s lifetime, they became the Reformed Presbyterians. Politically, they strongly opposed the union of England and Scotland.
One Founder’s Day, Friday 12 June 1931, after the ceremony, twenty-five Gillespie girls set off for the Covenanters’ Grave in the Pentland Hills to sing the Scottish paraphrase of the One hundred and twenty-first Psalm in Mr James Gillespie’s honour.
I to the hills will lift mine eyes
From whence doth come mine aid.
My safety cometh from the Lord
Who heaven and earth hath made.
The schoolhouse had been built in 1904, first for another school, Boroughmuir, But Gillespie’s took over in 1914. It was an Edwardian type of building, and, for those days, modern inside, with large classrooms and big windows that looked out over the leafy trees, the skies and swooping gulls of Bruntsfield Links. From where I lived the school was a ten-minute walk through avenues of tall trees. Leading further away from the school was another avenue of hawthorns, flowering dark pink in May. We called these may-blossoms. The school was surrounded by the large
public moorland of the Links. A very attractive cottage which had belonged to a fashionable photographer, ‘Swan Watson’s’, was attached to the school, but shortly after my arrival, to our mixed sorrow and delight, it was pulled down to make way for an extension that comprised a wonderful science room, a spacious gymnasium and a totally new infants’ department.
Of the infant school I remember comparatively little. My home life was still of the first importance, and remains imprinted in memories that I can still share with my brother Philip.
But of those first years at school I retain an impression of Plasticine-modelling, carol-singing and reading aloud (which I did well). A medal was circulated every week. One week I won it for a crayon drawing of a tomato. I remember my big red tomato on the dark brown drawing-paper background; I couldn’t see anything very special about it. I played the triangle in the percussion band. All I had to do was bang it rhythmically, something that would have driven my parents mad at home. I played a milkmaid in a tableau.
There were always flowers in the classrooms, on the window sills and on the teachers’ tables, all throughout my school-days. The girls or their parents usually provided these, but the teachers were always tending plants. Some of them would lift the flower-vases each morning to see if the cleaners had cleaned properly underneath. We had hyacinths in the spring. My mother sometimes put a bunch of daffodils in my hands to take to school in the afternoon.
The furnaces for the central heating were stoked by Jannie (the janitor, an ex-policeman whose real name was John Bremner). Jannie it was who, with his ally, Parkie (the park-keeper), kept an eye on the leafy meadows surrounding the school so that no potential molesters or peeping men in mackintoshes ever got near us. All the same, we were cautioned not to turn somersaults on the low iron railings that lined the pathways, lest ‘passing men might see your underwear’. Alas, those iron railings went, like so much other civic ironwork, to make armaments in wartime, never to be replaced.
From the earliest days we each tended to have a special friend, our ‘chum’. My chum until I was nine years old was Daphne Porter, an only child whose father had died ‘out in India’. Daphne had been told about sex and she gave me her elementary version of the affair in a matter-of-fact way: I well remember that she was concentrating on something else, like making a daisy-chain, while she informed me what ‘the gentleman’ did to ‘the lady’. We used to have tea at each other’s houses after school. One day Daphne was absent, and many days went on into months. Daphne was in hospital and eventually died, taking all her information with her, and her very pretty looks. I had no idea what she died of. Her mother appeared like a ghostly wraith, walking along the street in deep mourning, which in the Edinburgh of those days consisted of a long black head-veil over a black coat, and black stockings and shoes. At the passing-by of Mrs Porter, I thought of the possibility of my own early death, and was far more unhappy for my mother’s imagined grief than I was for myself. I didn’t know what to say to Mrs Porter. I just walked along with her for a block. I don’t think she knew what to say to me.
So for a while I had no chum, but soon I found another best friend, Frances Niven. I already knew Frances quite well. We were both deeply interested in poetry and imaginative writing of all kinds. From then, Frances was my closest friend all through my school-days.
The walls of our classrooms had hitherto been covered with our own paintings and drawings, records of travels, pages from the National Geographic, portraits of exotic animals and birds. But now I come to Miss Christina Kay, that character in search of an author, whose classroom walls were adorned with reproductions of early and Renaissance paintings, Leonardo da Vinci, Giotto, Fra Lippo Lippi, Botticelli. She borrowed these from the senior art department, run by handsome Arthur Couling. We had the Dutch masters and Corot. Also displayed was a newspaper cutting of Mussolini’s Fascisti marching along the streets of Rome.
I fell into Miss Kay’s hands at the age of eleven. It might well be said that she fell into my hands. Little did she know, little did I know, that she bore within her the seeds of the future Miss Jean Brodie, the main character in my novel, in a play on the West End of London and on Broadway, in a film and a television series.
I do not know exactly why I chose the name Miss Brodie. But recently I learned that Charlotte Rule, that young American woman who taught me to read when I was three, had been a Miss Brodie and a schoolteacher before her marriage. Could I have heard this fact and recorded it unconsciously?
In a sense Miss Kay was nothing like Miss Brodie. In another sense she was far above and beyond her Brodie counterpart. If she could have met ‘Miss Brodie’ Miss Kay would have put the fictional character firmly in her place. And yet no pupil of Miss Kay’s has failed to recognize her, with joy and great nostalgia, in the shape of Miss Jean Brodie in her prime.
She entered my imagination immediately. I started to write about her even then. Her accounts of her travels were gripping, fantastic. Besides turning in my usual essays about how I spent my holidays I wrote poems about how she had spent her various holidays (in Rome, for example, or Egypt, or Switzerland). I thought her experiences more interesting than mine, and she loved it. Frances, too, fell entirely under her spell. In fact, we all did, as is testified by the numerous letters I have received from time to time from Miss Kay’s former pupils.
I had always enjoyed watching teachers. We had a large class of about forty girls. A full classroom that size, with a sole performer on stage before an audience sitting in rows looking and listening, is essentially theatre.
From my first days at school I had been far more interested in the looks, the clothes, the gestures, of the individual teachers than I was in their lessons. With Miss Kay, I was fascinated by both. She was the ideal dramatic instructor, and it is not surprising that her reincarnation, Miss Brodie, has always been known as a ‘good vehicle for an actress’.
It was not that Miss Kay overacted; indeed, she never acted at all. She was a devout Christian, deeply versed in the Bible. There could have been no question of a love-affair with the art master, or a sex-affair with the singing master, as in Miss Brodie’s life. But children are quick to perceive possibilities, potentialities: in a remark, perhaps in some remote context; in a glance, a smile. No, Miss Kay was not literally Miss Brodie, but I think Miss Kay had it in her, unrealized, to be the character I invented.
Years and years later, some time after the publication of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Frances Niven (now Frances Cowell), my dear best friend of those days, observed in a letter:
Surely 75% is Miss Kay? Dear Miss Kay! of the cropped iron grey hair with fringe (and heavy black moustache!) and undisputable admiration for Il Duce. Hers was the expression ‘crème de la crème’ – hers the revealing extra lessons on art and music that stay with me yet. She it was who took us both (who were especial favourites of hers –? – part of the as yet unborn Brodie Set) to see Pavlova’s last performance at the Empire Theatre. Who took us for afternoon teas at McVities.
Frances and I were not alone in finding Miss Kay exhilarating and impressive. I don’t think any one of us ever forgot her. One of her former pupils, Elizabeth Vance (formerly Betty Murphy), from a class following mine, has written to me about ‘the wonderful years with Miss Kay’. Elizabeth was quick to recognize the element of our Miss Kay in Miss Brodie. A recent letter of hers from her home in Australia gives some flavour of Christina Kay’s extra-curricular teaching. (‘Teaching’ is not quite the word, however. It was, rather, pure and riveting entertainment.) Here are part of Elizabeth’s reminiscences:
I wonder if Miss Kay had one Italian parent, or perhaps a grandparent, as I remember her with dark eyes and an olive complexion – and such a great love of Italy and its art treasures: the paintings, the statues, the buildings. I have never seen the Colosseum, the catacombs, the Sistine Chapel, the Ponte Vecchio or the Doges’ Palace but through Miss Kay I feel I know them quite well. Interspersed with the Italian masters and the French Impressionists of
the 19th century and the Dutch School (Rembrandt’s portraits in particular) and literature and poetry and interior decorating (I moved all the ornaments on our sitting-room mantelpiece to form a more pleasing ‘line’) we still had such an excellent grounding in the traditional three Rs (useful, even today). How did she manage it. With Miss Kay I liked mental arithmetic and long division and multiplication sums, and those spelling lists, and found grammar thoroughly enjoyable …
But it is in another letter that Elizabeth Vance brings back to me the flavour and sense of Miss Kay in her classroom sixty years ago.
During recent scenes on television of the reunification of Germany, from Berlin, and over the sounds of bands playing and fireworks banging, I heard the commentator mention Unter den Linden – and I was back in Miss Kay’s class and she was saying ‘In Berlin there is a street called Unter den Linden – that means “under the lime trees”, girls, and there are many furriers’ shops in that street.’
‘Many furriers’ shops …’ That was typical of those dazzling non-sequiturs of Miss Kay’s which filled my young heart with joy. One could see in one’s mind’s eye a parade of rich overindulged German ladies, already swathed in furs, stepping out grandly under the lime trees of Berlin.
Cathie Davie (now Mrs Semeonoff), a brilliant scholar and school dux, was a senior girl when I was still a junior. She excelled at everything – acting, poetry-composition, mathematics, English. I had never known quite such an intellectual; even my clever cousin Mossie, who collected gold medals in medical school, seemed less intelligent. Cathie seemed unaware of her talents. I saw comparatively little of her but, as she lived near me and took the same route home at lunch-times and in the afternoons, I used to catch up with her and sometimes introduce a topic. Whatever it was she would discourse upon it without divergence while traversing the leafy avenues of the Links. I was fascinated. She discussed Chaucer or Spenser as living people, but living people she never discussed at all. Cathie was infinitely kind. Of course, I was already known in the school as a poet. Some years ago, when someone had been making a claim in the newspapers for Miss Brodie’s origin in a different teacher – the indefatigable and enthusiastic Alison Foster, of the upper school’s English department – Cathie, who had experienced Miss Kay’s classroom in her own junior years, was quick to inform the claimant that ‘anyone who had been in her class knew that the character was based primarily on Miss Kay’.
