Octavia

by Beryl Kingston

  ‘He should come to Roehampton and see our seniors,’ Octavia said. ‘They’ve all got bobbed hair and they all wear short skirts. It’s the fashion.’ But talking about them made her aware of how much she was missing them and she sighed.

  ‘Let’s get on,’ Emmeline said, patting her arm. ‘It will be better once the funeral’s over. Then you can get back to school.’

  ‘I must go back tomorrow,’ Octavia said. ‘I can’t leave them any longer. There’s too much to do.’

  ‘Let her go,’ J-J said, when Emmeline asked his advice about it later that afternoon – and in private. ‘It will do her good to have something else to concentrate on. It’s what she needs. The girls are her family, every bit as much as we are, and you need your family at a time like this, as you know, my dear.’

  He was right. Being back in her familiar chair on her unfamiliar platform with her school assembled before her, smiling and excited, eased Octavia away from the anguish of her loss. The terrible ache was still there but it was covered by the need to make decisions, to respond and listen, to think and plan. On that first day back there was almost too much to do – undelivered stock to chase, two alterations to the timetable to arrange, lessons to teach, studies to supervise and endless queries to answer, although Morag did her best to shield her from the worst of them. On the second day, at morning break, a deputation of senior girls arrived to see her.

  ‘And what can I do for you?’ she asked as they trooped into her study. It wasn’t a serious matter as she could see from their happy faces. But it took a little while before their spokesman began to explain.

  ‘It’s like this, Miss Smith,’ she said. ‘You know you said that being in a new school would mean new directions. Well, now that we’re here and we’ve got such a nice lot of room, we were wondering if we could have a place set aside for silent study. Somewhere absolutely quiet where we could just get on.’

  ‘Which you can’t do in a study,’ Octavia understood.

  ‘Well no, not really,’ another girl said. ‘Studies are fine if you want to ask for help or you’ve got something to discuss but they can be a bit noisy.’

  ‘And when you’re in the fourth year,’ a third said with feeling, ‘you need a bit of peace from the littl’uns. We don’t mind helping them now and then, but not all the time.’

  ‘What we really want,’ a fourth girl said, ‘is somewhere we can depend on to be absolutely quiet.’

  It was a sensible request. ‘Do you have anywhere in mind?’ Octavia asked.

  They hadn’t. So she promised to bring it up at the staff meeting next Monday and see what the rest of the staff had to say. ‘Come and see me again on Tuesday,’ she told them, as they left her study, and watched as they walked away through the empty hall. The empty hall! But of course, she thought. It’s just the place. Large, vacant and, except for the changeover between lessons and studies, extremely quiet. We could have the tables set up immediately after assembly and use it as a study area for the rest of the day. Just for the senior girls of course, and on the understanding that there will be no staff there to assist them and they must maintain discipline for themselves. It will be an interesting experiment.

  The staff agreed with her and thought the hall was the obvious choice. It was almost too easy. Quiet study began on Wednesday morning, at first with the original half-dozen who had come to see her. By the end of the day it was being sampled by nearly thirty girls, all of them hard at work and all of them completely quiet. And by the end of the week even the first years had learnt that if they came out of a lesson or a study for any reason, they had to tiptoe through the hall without saying a word.

  ‘I think,’ Octavia said at her next staff meeting, ‘we can chalk this up as one of our successes.’ Then since they were feeling pleased and happy with their decision she went on to warn them that she would have to be absent the next day ‘for the funeral’.

  They were full of sympathy for her and said so, each in her own practical way. She was not to worry about the school. Everything was well organised. There were no problems. ‘We shall be thinking of you, my dear,’ Morag said, as the meeting broke up. ‘Look after yourself.’

  But it was Emmeline who looked after the event, preparing the sandwiches, arranging the cars, even choosing the hymns. And afterwards when the family were gathered in the drawing room, Octavia had to admit that it had been easier and less distressing than she’d feared. ‘All thanks to you, Em,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what we’d have done without you.’

  ‘That,’ Emmeline said, ‘is what families are for.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Roehampton Secondary School kept Octavia sane that autumn. The new building with all those pristine rooms and all that tempting yet-to-be-used space was an inspiration. Hardly a day went by without someone arriving in her office with an idea or a suggestion for some activity or other.

  Jenny Jones wanted to start a school choir. ‘They’re ever so keen, Miss Smith,’ she said, sounding very Welsh in her excitement. ‘Now they’ve heard themselves in a room with good acoustics there’s no holding them. And it’s such a big room, there’s more than enough space for rehearsals.’

  Morag and Helen Staples were keen to get curtains for the stage so that they could organise a play for the end of the term. ‘There’s bound to be something we want to do,’ Helen said. The sixth form wanted to put on a pantomime and asked if they could write it and rehearse it ‘in secret’. There was some staff discussion about that but in the end they agreed to it, saying they ought to be able to trust the sixth form. Sarah and Phillida offered to make the costumes for whatever play was going and Sarah found an attic storeroom that she said would be an ideal place to store them in. ‘You’d never believe the space up there!’

  Alice wanted to start an ancient history club. ‘With all this interest in Tutankhamun,’ she said, ‘it’s just the thing. There’s so much material for display and the girls are really enthusiastic. There’s a sort of club already and we could meet in my teaching room. We only need the go-ahead.’

  But it was Mabel and Elizabeth who came up with the most far-reaching suggestion and that grew from their concern for the first formers at lunchtime.

  ‘Some of these poor little things are having a really hard time trying to remember where they’re supposed to sit,’ Mabel said. ‘I’ve been watching them. They get muddled every day. In a place this size, they really need someone to look after them, especially in the first few weeks of a new year. How would it be if we ran a house system?’

  It was a novel idea and not one that had occurred to any of the staff until then. In Hammersmith they’d all known exactly where they were and where they were supposed to be because there’d been so little space for them. Here in this big school even the fourth and fifth form had problems finding their way round.

  ‘Prepare a paper about it for the next staff meeting,’ Octavia told her two scientific mathematicians, ‘and we’ll discuss it.’

  It was discussed at considerable length, for although they could all see advantages in such a system, especially in the idea that the girls would sit in houses at lunchtime with a senior at the head of every table to look after the first formers, there were differences of opinion as to how it should be organised. ‘A house system is bound to be hierarchical,’ Morag pointed out. ‘It will lead to prefects and games captains – and a head girl, probably. Is this what we want?’

  Joan Marshall said she’d love some games captains, for house matches and that sort of thing. But who would choose them?

  ‘If the house were to be organised by the girls, they could choose their own leaders,’ Octavia said, thinking aloud. ‘They could have regular elections at the end of every school year to choose the leaders for the next year. That would be a democratic way of going about it. We could call them house officers.’

  ‘But if we were to start it now, how would they know who to choose?’ Morag said. ‘It’s a tall order to get to know all the seniors in a new o
rganisation. I can see them being able to do it after a year, as Octavia says, but not now.’

  ‘Point taken,’ Elizabeth said. ‘They’d need at least a term to recognise the ones they wanted to lead them. But that needn’t be a problem. We could start it as soon as we liked – or were ready – and the senior girls in each house could take it in turns to sit at the head of the tables. The first formers would be looked after and leaders would emerge. They always do, if the process is democratic.’

  ‘And how would we sort out who is to be in which house?’ Phillida asked. ‘If you see what I mean? I wouldn’t like to think we were parting friends.’

  ‘We would have to do it very carefully,’ Octavia said, ‘and take our time over it. If we do it form by form, with each form teacher drawing up a list and everyone considering it, we ought to get it about right. There’s no need to rush.’

  ‘How many houses shall we have?’ Sarah asked. ‘I’ve got thirty girls in my form. That’s seven in each house and two left over if we have four houses. Or five in each house if we have six.’

  ‘When the school is at full strength,’ Elizabeth said, ‘which will be in another three years, we shall have ninety girls in each year plus the sixth form. That will give us a total of at least 460 girls and probably nearer 470. My vote would be for six houses with about seventy-seven girls in each.’

  ‘As we’re in to the logistics of the thing,’ Octavia said, grinning at them, ‘do I gather that the general feeling of this meeting is that a house system would be a good thing?’

  It was.

  ‘We could name them after the primary and secondary colours,’ Phillida said. ‘Red, blue, yellow, green, orange and purple.’

  ‘Just think,’ Helen Staples said dreamily, ‘we could have a house drama festival.’

  Her colleagues laughed out loud. ‘You and your drama,’ they said.

  The house system, carefully thought out and planned, began when they came back after their first half term holiday. By then the school choir was rehearsing every Thursday in the Music room and singing at assembly twice a week, the sixth form had written their pantomime and were busy rehearsing it in the sixth form room, usually to shrieks of laughter, and the ancient history club had put on its first Egyptian display on the new notice boards all round the hall.

  ‘Everything we touch turns to gold,’ Octavia said to Elizabeth as the two of them were walking round the hall with Alice, admiring the exhibits. ‘There are days when I feel as if we’re living in a fairy story and the good fairies have put a spell on us.’

  ‘Long may it continue,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I like that picture of Tutankhamun, Alice. What a handsome young man he must have been.’

  ‘I’d like to see the mask itself,’ Alice said. ‘All that gold and lapis lazuli. It must be absolutely stunning.’

  Octavia looked at the picture and thought how magical it was. Myths and fairy stories, she thought, mystery and magic, the stuff of dreams. I ought to read Antony and Cleopatra with the sixth form while this is on the walls. It’s just the right time for it. But then she sighed. If only the fairies would cast their spell on poor Pa. He was so very unhappy and she didn’t know how to help him. She’d tried special meals but he couldn’t eat them, she’d tried suggesting outings, to see Emmeline and the children or to walk on the heath but he said he didn’t want to go out. In fact there were times when she thought he would never want to do anything again.

  She’d discussed it with Emmeline, of course, because she was the one person who could really understand the state he was in and Emmeline had been sympathetic but not particularly helpful. ‘It takes time,’ she said. ‘He’ll never get over it. You mustn’t expect that. You never do get over it. I think of my darlings every single day at some time or another. The best you can hope for is that he’ll learn how to cope with it.’

  Octavia didn’t like the sound of that at all. She wanted him to enjoy his life a little. This incessant dragging unhappiness was dreadful. It sapped him of all his energy and gave him a jaundiced view of everything that was happening. He seemed to be shrinking into himself, doing less and less. Amy’s clothes were still hanging in the wardrobes and he wouldn’t let her clear them out, her chair was still exactly as she’d left it, crumpled cushions and all and couldn’t be touched, her stick still stood in the hallstand. ‘No,’ he said, when Octavia asked if she should move it. ‘Don’t change things. Leave it. I want it left.’ He read the papers incessantly, but it was all the most depressing and negative news that interested him. He noted that the Germans had been forced to print an entirely new currency because the old mark had no value at all, that the Labour prime minister was being taken to task for corruption, for accepting a car and shares in a biscuit factory from a business man he’d subsequently ennobled, that there was a civil war in China, and riots in India and that they’d passed a new law in South Africa, which would make it illegal for a black man to be given a skilled job. ‘Man’s inhumanity to man,’ he said. ‘What a terrible world we live in.’

  ‘How about a trip out into the country?’ Octavia tried. ‘It’s lovely weather.’

  ‘No thank you, my dear.’

  ‘Or perhaps you’d like to go up to town. We could go to the theatre.’

  But the answer was always the same. ‘No thank you, my dear.’

  The difference between her life at home and her life at school was so extreme that she could feel her mind stretching to accommodate it as she travelled from one place to the other. Poor dear Pa. What could she do to help him?

  Matters reached a climax at the end of November, when Mrs Wilkins came in to see them after breakfast one morning to say that she and her husband would like to retire at Christmas. ‘I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you,’ she said. ‘Not with everything being so difficult, but if you could find someone else, that’s what we’d like to do. We’ve got the chance of a flat by the seaside, you see, down in Devon where my sister lives, and we’d like to take it.’

  ‘And high time too,’ Octavia said. ‘You’ve earned your retirement if anyone has. I hope it’s a really long and happy one.’

  But finding replacements who would do the work they’d been doing and be prepared to live in, was virtually impossible. The best that she could manage was a girl called Dilys who said she was ‘from the valleys’ and could come in daily for the housework ‘if that would suit’ but couldn’t cook.

  I suppose I shall have to do the cooking myself, Octavia thought. She wasn’t sure whether she was pleased or worried by the idea. A bit of both probably. It would be pleasant to eat whatever meals she fancied, but would she be up to cooking them? Could she ever make lemonade like Mrs Wilkins or bake a seed cake or cook a Sunday roast? Even the thought of it was daunting. Perhaps, the time had come to buy a house of her own, at last, the way she’d always planned, somewhere near the school, and equipped with all the nice new modern appliances like gas fires and a gas cooker and a geyser for hot water. And lots of electric light, of course, and points for one of those electric cleaners. And a nice comfortable study for Pa. She could move them both in and run the place herself with a char to do the rough work and a girl to help her round the house. A new gas oven would be a particularly good idea. People said they were really easy to use and an old-fashioned stove could be tricky, as she knew very well. They could buy some new furniture that would be a bit more comfortable than the stuff they’d been using all these years. Some of the armchairs were wrecks. And of course they would have to clear out the cupboards and wardrobes if they were moving. Her mind made up, she went to see a couple of local estate agents at the end of the next school day.

  They were both of the same opinion. ‘Wimbledon Park,’ they said. ‘That’s where you want. There are some beautiful houses up there, Edwardian, good-sized rooms, every mod con, very well kept up, and you’ve got a good road to take you straight to the school. Wimbledon Park. That’s the place.’

  And so it seemed to be. That weekend she went to see four houses an
d liked them all although she had to admit they were rather too big for her. They all had at least four bedrooms and three big living rooms, usually a dining room, a drawing room and parlour, and the gardens were twice the size of the one in Hampstead. But the thought of living in one of them, close to the school and with room for family gatherings and parties, was such a temptation that she arranged to return to the two she liked best and bring Pa to see them too.

  He wasn’t impressed. ‘You don’t want to move,’ he said. ‘We’re all right as we are.’

  It was time to take a stand. ‘No,’ she said, seriously. ‘We’re not. When Mrs Wilkins goes I shall have to do the cooking. I can’t get another couple to live in and cook and care for us. People don’t do that any more. And I might as well tell you, Pa, I can’t cook on that stove. It’s far too temperamental. I need something I can depend on.’

  He frowned at her. ‘What sort of something?’

  ‘One of those nice new gas cookers.’

  His eyebrows rose with disbelief. ‘You’re surely not telling me you want to move house to get a gas cooker,’ he said. ‘You could have one put in our kitchen here, if that’s what you want.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not just the cooker. It’s all sorts of things. A geyser to give us hot water for baths and to wash with. Think how nice that would be instead of having to wait hours for the fire to warm the water like we do here. Gas fires so that we can have warm bedrooms first thing in the morning. Think of that. It would be a better life for both of us in one of these houses.’

  He was surly with disapproval. ‘I can’t see the need to go uprooting ourselves for a cooker and a gas fire,’ he said. ‘No, no, we’re all right as we are.’

  ‘You might be,’ she told him sternly, ‘but I’m not. Oh, come on, Pa. I want a home of my own. I’ve waited long enough for it.’