Octavia

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘I should like to see it, my dear,’ her father said, ‘if you could bear to show me.’

  ‘I’m sorry about the way I went on in there,’ she said again and tried to explain. ‘It was the way they were talking. As if he was someone different, someone inhuman. I’ve been standing here remembering him at his twenty-first. Do you remember that? All giggly and happy and so drunk he couldn’t stand up. That was the real Cyril – rushing into things, hero-worshipping Tommy, dreaming of being an explorer, playing bears with Dora and Eddie, bringing us presents when he came back from his tour. Full of life. A person. And they stand there talking nonsense about him. I couldn’t bear it.’

  ‘I don’t think they were talking at all,’ J-J said in his gentle way. ‘They were making sympathetic noises, that’s all. It’s the best some of us can manage when we’re grieving. The most some of us want. Human beings can only take a limited amount of truth.’

  Eased by his gentle support she began to recover. ‘But if you don’t tell the truth,’ she protested, ‘you lie.’

  ‘You see things in such black and white terms, my Tavy,’ her father said. ‘Truth is rarely absolute and opinions vary, as you know. Do we not teach our pupils to examine every possibility, to be open to shades of opinion, to respect the fact that others might not think as we do?’

  All this was correct and she accepted it.

  ‘Facts,’ J-J went on, leaning back in his chair, ‘that one man will accept as entirely true from his limited knowledge and experience will be – shall we say – questionable from the point of view of another man with wider information at his disposal. You see that too, I am sure. They vary, as opinions do.’

  ‘Cyril thought he was a coward,’ she remembered. ‘That’s what he said in his letter. And that certainly wasn’t true. Fact or opinion. I knew that when I read the letter. I think he was brave. Amazingly brave.’

  ‘Exactly so,’ J-J said. ‘So we are of one mind.’

  ‘Possibly,’ she admitted. ‘But not entirely. I still think it’s important to tell the truth.’

  ‘I might go so far as to say that most truth is relative,’ her father said, coaxing her away from grief by way of philosophy. ‘I might go so far as to say that one man’s truth is another man’s prevarication. That knowledge and experience influence every fact we know or think we know. That all facts need constant re-examination and all opinions constant readjustment. Then again, there are occasions when we don’t tell the whole truth in order to protect someone we love. There are times when I protect your mother by half-truths, as you know. And I daresay there will be times when Tommy will protect you in exactly the same way.’

  That she couldn’t and wouldn’t accept. ‘I sincerely hope not,’ she said. ‘If we are to make a go of our marriage we’ve got to be truthful. All the time.’ But hearing his name reminded her of him just a little too powerfully and her mind drifted, as it so often did when somebody mentioned him. She wondered where he was and what he was doing and whether he was thinking of her. She knew where he was going. He’d told her that on their last leave together. He and his company were sailing to Gallipoli to fight the Turks. In fact, the last letter she’d had from him, in which he’d apologised for missing Squirrel’s memorial service, had been posted in Egypt. Oh, dear Tommy, what a long, long war this is.

  J-J watched her reverie with pity. ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘You and Tommy must discover your own way. But I think we should rejoin the others, don’t you, my dear, and be sociable.’

  She didn’t want to be sociable. She would rather have stayed where she was and thought about the things he’d just said to her. But she did as he suggested because he was so plainly expecting it. Dear Pa, she thought. You always say exactly the right things to me. You know me so well.

  ‘We will go in together,’ he said and offered her his arm.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  In the long weeks after the funeral service, Octavia lived in a half world, missing Cyril and fraught with worry about Podge and Tommy, even though both of them sent fairly regular letters and postcards to report that they were well and unhurt. Even a letter a day wouldn’t have been enough to reassure her now. She was far too aware that they could have been killed after the mail was sent, could be lying dead even as their messages were being read. Her world was thoroughly out of kilter. Nothing was what it had been. She started work at St Barnaby’s High in a dream, as if she’d been anaesthetised; and although she worked hard and took some comfort from what she was doing, she was often ashamed to think that she wasn’t responding to her new pupils as well as she ought to have done.

  ‘There are times,’ she said to Emmeline, as the two of them were taking tea at the end of a wet school day, ‘when I think that the only thing that’s normal nowadays is having to prepare lessons and teach classes and mark exercise books.’ Raindrops wept down the windowpane, soundless and incessant.

  Emmeline was trying to spoon a mash of rusk and milk into the reluctant mouth of her youngest. ‘Come along, Johnnie,’ she coaxed, ‘one more teeny-weeny mouthful for Mama. Be a good boy.’

  Johnnie screwed up his face and turned his head away from the jab of the spoon, waving his hands defensively in front of his mouth, fingers splayed like starfish. One of them caught the edge of the spoon and tipped the mash down the front of his bib.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done, you naughty little thing,’ Emmeline said in exasperation. ‘Your papa is quite right about you. You’re impossible.’

  The baby began to cry, his mouth square with distress. Octavia felt quite sorry for him. ‘Let me try,’ she offered.

  Emmeline handed over the baby spoon. ‘He won’t take it,’ she warned. ‘He’s always troublesome at mealtimes. I don’t know what to do with him.’

  Johnnie was sucking his fingers for comfort. ‘Maybe he’d suck a dry rusk and get it down him that way,’ Octavia said. ‘Shall we try that?’

  ‘Try anything you like,’ his mother said wearily. ‘I’m sick of him.’

  Octavia removed the offending bowl and put a dry rusk on the baby’s tray. She didn’t offer it to him but just left it, lying there. ‘You haven’t found another nursemaid, then,’ she said to her cousin.

  ‘No,’ Emmeline said. ‘You can’t get servants for love nor money these days. They can earn so much more in munitions, that’s the trouble. We’ve still got our Dolly, bless her, and she’s very good. She gives the others their tea and puts them to bed and everything but she can’t handle Johnnie. I’m at my wits’ end with him some days, especially since Squirrel was killed.’ And she began to cry too.

  The baby had recovered from his scolding and was picking a small piece of mash from his bib. He placed it carefully on the tray alongside the rusk, and considered it with solemn gravity, patting it with the palm of his hand. Then he put it in his mouth and ate it.

  ‘There! You see!’ Emmeline wept. ‘How can he be so aggravating?’

  ‘Maybe he wants to feed himself,’ Octavia said, watching him.

  ‘He’s not old enough.’

  Johnnie went on feeding himself. He was completely absorbed.

  ‘There are times when I wonder why I ever said I wanted babies,’ Emmeline wailed. ‘I must have been mad. If I’d known how difficult they were going to be I’d have said something quite different. Oh quite, quite different. Or not had so many. Not that there’s anything you can do about that. You just have to take them as they come, don’t you? Oh Tavy! Everything’s so impossible.’

  It was an opportunity to help, a chance to give poor Emmeline some much-needed practical advice, something Octavia had thought about on many occasions when she’d seen her cousin weary with childcare. Until that moment she’d always been restrained by delicacy or the presence of too many sharp-eared children, but now, the combination of Emmeline’s distress, Johnnie’s happy concentration and her own ingrained determination to tell the truth, gave her the daring she needed. ‘You don’t have to just have them these days,’ she said. ‘
There are things you can do.’ And then blushed at the thought of what she would have to say next.

  Emmeline stopped crying and blushed too, staring at her, her blue eyes still tear-washed but wide-open with embarrassment and curiosity. ‘What things?’ she asked. Surely they’re not going to talk about ‘that’! Nobody ever talks about ‘that’.

  Octavia pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, her own embarrassment having made them slip. ‘I’ve got a leaflet about it,’ she said. ‘It’s quite straightforward.’

  Emmeline waited, ducking her head to hide her blushes.

  ‘There have always been things that men can use if they don’t want babies,’ Octavia explained. She was hot with embarrassment by then and the more deeply her cousin blushed the hotter she became. She knew she couldn’t talk about the things men use, that would be just too embarrassing for words and it was words she needed and hadn’t got. It was going to be difficult enough to find a way to talk about birth control for women, but now that she’d started she felt she had to go on. Emmeline had been overburdened with babies for far too long. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘nowadays there are things for women to use too. The leaflet explains about them. It’s written by a doctor called Marie Stopes, so it’s all perfectly proper. I could lend it to you if you’d like.’

  Emmeline knew she would like but it took her a little while to pluck up the courage to say so and the effort made her cough. ‘I don’t know what Ernest would think,’ she said. ‘He says babies are a gift from God. It’s odd really because he doesn’t like them a bit. He’s always shouting at them to behave and telling them how dreadful they are.’

  ‘If I were you I’d just read the leaflet and not tell him about it,’ Octavia advised. ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘How did you find out about all this?’ Emmeline wanted to know.

  ‘They were talking about it at one of Pa’s Fabian dinners,’ Octavia told her. She had recovered her balance by then and could speak calmly. ‘I asked Mrs Bland afterwards.’ Then she paused, remembering what a long time ago it had been. Back in that lovely summer, just after she and Tommy had started their affair.

  ‘Heavens!’ Emmeline said. ‘I wouldn’t have dared. And I’m married.’

  Johnnie was still happily picking up bits of mash so the two women returned to their own tea. The information had been given. They could move on to an easier topic now, if they could find one.

  ‘Do you remember how we used to sit in your garden and plan our lives?’ Emmeline said. ‘Under the cherry tree. On the little seat.’ They both remembered – for several quiet seconds and with consuming sadness. ‘I said I wanted lots and lots of babies and Squirrel was going to be an explorer – poor Squirrel – and you were going to change the world. What innocents we were! And now here we are in the middle of a war and nothing’s the same. Everything’s changed.’ Tears welled into her eyes again.

  ‘Not quite everything,’ Octavia said, speaking quickly to forestall any further weeping. ‘I still want to change the world.’

  ‘Votes for women, do you mean?’ Emmeline said, blinking. ‘I thought that had all gone quiet.’

  ‘So it has,’ Octavia agreed. ‘We called off the campaign for the duration. But no, that’s not what I mean.’ And when her cousin looked surprised, she went on, ‘Don’t misunderstand me. I’m sure we should be given the vote and I shall go on campaigning for it, but I think it will happen now, one way or another, once the war is over.’

  Emmeline was impressed by how knowledgeable her cousin was. ‘Do you? What makes you say that?’

  The reason was obvious and had been for some time. Mrs Pankhurst’s prescience was being justified. With so many young men killed or too badly wounded to work, more and more women were doing men’s work and making a very good fist of it. They would have to go on doing it, even when the war was over, because there would be very few men left to replace them. It was becoming plain that once people understood what had happened, it would be hard for the government to ignore the WSPU’s demands. But she couldn’t say so, not now Cyril had been killed. She would have to choose her words with care or she would upset her cousin all over again and she couldn’t bear to do that. They’d passed through grief and embarrassment together and now they needed the sort of talk and thought that would calm them.

  ‘Before the war,’ she said at last, ‘most women were at home. That was the way things were. Only a handful were out at work and most of them were indoors somewhere, fairly well-hidden, in a school or a hospital. Now they’re out in the streets, where everyone can see them: driving trams and delivering coal, working on the railways, cleaning windows, even sweeping chimneys. Lloyd George is a shrewd man, too shrewd not to realise he’ll have to give way. I think he’ll pass a bill quietly, once the war’s over, and open the door to us when our opponents aren’t looking.’

  ‘So you’ll have won,’ Emmeline said.

  ‘We were bound to in the end.’

  Emmeline smiled. It was her first smile since the conversation had begun. ‘So what will you change next?’ she said and her tone was teasing.

  Octavia wasn’t quite sure where to begin because her ideas were still at the pondering stage. She looked at the baby who had picked all the bits of chewed rusk from his bib and was searching his tray for more. ‘There you are, Johnnie,’ she said to him and absentmindedly put his dish on the tray with his baby spoon beside it. Then she turned her attention to Emmeline again. ‘The thing is, I’ve been wondering why some children find learning easy and others don’t.’

  ‘That’s obvious,’ her cousin said. ‘Some are clever, like you, and some aren’t, like me.’

  ‘That’s an oversimplification,’ Octavia said, ‘and besides, it isn’t true. I’ve watched you doing your household accounts and you’re every bit as clever as I am.’

  Emmeline grimaced such an idea aside. ‘That’s different.’

  ‘I don’t think it is,’ Octavia said seriously. ‘In fact I’m beginning to think we’re all quite capable of being “clever”. It all depends on what we’re asked to do and how we’re asked to do it. The teachers at Bridge Street used to say that, apart from the handful they were coaching for the scholarship, the children there were dumb and couldn’t learn anything. But they were wrong. They were all perfectly capable of learning, all of them, even the boy who drew pothooks all day. What was getting in their way and making them look unintelligent was boredom and being asked to do things that didn’t make any sense to them. Once they saw the sense of what they were doing there was no stopping them. My girls at St Barnaby’s are the same. Some of them leap into any new task I set them and really enjoy it, but the others are bored. They don’t say so, because that would be complaining and they don’t complain. They’re all much too well brought up for that, but I can see how hard it is for them. And I want to do something about it.’

  ‘Heavens!’ Emmeline said. ‘So what will you do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Octavia told her honestly. ‘I shall think about it, try things. I have a feeling that part of the problem is never giving them any choice. Think how it was when we were at school. Did we ever have a choice about anything we did? I can’t remember a single occasion. We simply sat at our desks and did as we were told and that was all there was to it. That’s the way the system works, the way it’s always worked; all right for those who enjoy it, misery for those who don’t.’ She was warming to her subject now, speaking with more passion. ‘Well, I don’t think it works well, even for those it seems to suit. In fact, I’ve started a little experiment. I’ve given my first form the freedom to choose. I started this week. Instead of setting one essay for the entire class, the way we’re supposed to, I’ve given them half a dozen different titles and let them choose the one they like best.’

  Emmeline laughed. ‘I thought it was going to be something revolutionary,’ she said, ‘and it’s only essays. You are funny, Tavy.’

  ‘It is a revolution,’ Octavia told her seriously. ‘It may not look li
ke it but it is. You should have seen their faces when I told them they could actually choose what they wanted to write about. They were all smiles and disbelief, just like my Bridge Street children were when I told them they could skip and play tag and hopscotch instead of doing that awful drill.’ And as Emmeline was still looking baffled, she joked, ‘Anyway, it gives me something to think about.’ Apart from this dreadful war and whether Tommy and Podge will survive it and whether it will ever end.

  ‘Will you look at that baby,’ Emmeline said. ‘Now just you tell me that isn’t naughty.’

  They both looked at him. He had put the little spoon in the centre of his bowl and was packing it with mash, piece by piece and very delicately, patting the mixture down with great deliberation. It took a long time but finally he was satisfied with it and, holding the spoon in his plump little fist, began to steer it with great difficulty towards his face. Most of the mash fell out as he lifted it but there was still enough left to make a solid mouthful, which he sucked off the spoon with great relish. He was feeding himself.

  ‘I despair of him,’ Emmeline said. ‘All that fuss when I tried to feed him and now look at him. He’s just a naughty wilful little thing.’

  ‘Yes,’ Octavia agreed. ‘He’s certainly wilful but…well maybe that’s a good thing, Emmeline. Perhaps he wouldn’t let you feed him because he wanted to feed himself. Perhaps that’s the start of learning.’

  ‘If that’s learning,’ his mother said, wrinkling up her nose at his efforts, ‘I don’t think much of it. He’s making a fine old mess.’

  ‘Yes,’ Octavia had to admit. ‘He is. But the point is, he’s feeding himself and he’s getting better at it. If you were to let him feed himself every day he’d get the hang of it in no time.’

  ‘No jolly fear,’ Emmeline said. ‘I’d be forever scraping food off the carpet. I’ve got enough to do in this house without that. Experiments are all very well in a school but a nursery is not the place for them.’