§ 4
Father, being an elementary schoolteacher, did not send Catherine to an elementary school. She went to Albany House (principal, Miss Leary, L.R.C.P.). Miss Leary wore her hair in a knob and said to Catherine: “Darling, if you do that again I shall have to smack you hard.”
Catherine learnt: Solomon was the wisest man that ever lived; Gibraltar belongs to England; the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; Henry the First never smiled again; three barleycorns one inch; the messenger rushed up to Wolfe saying, “They run, they run!”—“Who run, who run?” cried Wolfe....
On wet winter days the fireguard was hung with steaming clothes. The row of benches was a mere misty vista of wet noses and pocket-handkerchiefs. Everywhere was the stench of damp mackintoshes. Catherine sat by the window and looked through the streaming panes. She could see Polly, who brought them cups of cocoa in the middle of the morning, washing up the breakfast things in the kitchen. Every now and then the water gurgled out of the slopstone into the sink and made Jack, the black retriever dog, cautiously open one eye in his kennel. Catherine liked Jack. He was very staid and solemn, his sole dissipation being the crunching of snails. Miss Leary said: “Catherine, I do declare you are looking out of that window again! How often have I told you ...” etc., etc.
Every Friday afternoon as a special treat they had reading out of a reading-book. It was not like “Pat sat on the mat: is that Pat’s mat?” and the sentences about the cat and rat; it was a real book of adventures, the adventures of a boy and his uncle at the seaside. The avuncular relationship seemed to consist entirely in a readiness to return prompt and plausible answers to all sorts of questions. Uncle Tom and his nephew carried between them a complete outfit of odds and ends, marbles, pieces of string, oranges, scissors, card-board, cubes and prisms, even jars and glass-funnels, and it was their custom to perform experiments with these upon all suitable occasions, wherever they might chance to be. The observations of passers-by, including park-keepers and bath-chairmen, were not recorded. Local byelaws seemed never to impede them from digging up roots and defacing flower-beds.