A little further on I have a note of a poem in use at a school, marking an early attempt at the co-ordination of elementary education with undenominational morality:
20 pence are ¹⁄₈,
Wash your face and comb your hair.
30 pence are ²⁄₆,
Every day to school repair.
(Here is a lamentable gap.)
80 pence are ⁶⁄₈,
Mind what you are taught in school:
90 pence are ⁷⁄₆,
Never call your brother a fool.
Write it myself? Certainly not. I could have managed the mathematical part, but the ethical deductions would never have occurred to me.
Elsewhere I come to notes of odd names borne by the children. Here is a girl called Himalaya, because she was born in the troopship of that name, the ship that carried Charles Ravenshoe to Malta and the East. She was a lucky girl, felix opportunitate nativitatis, for the other troopers were Serapis and Crocodile. Who would marry a Crocodile?
Also there is a child named Laste. I asked the Rector whether I should say Last, or Lastee? and whether It was a boy or a girl. It was a boy, and the Rector well remembered baptizing It. “Name this child,” he said, and the father replied “Last.” “How do you spell it?” said the puzzled priest. The father said he didn’t spell it at all, but It was the tenth, and he wasn’t going to have any more. But he had three more.
“What did he call them?”
The Rector did not know! What amazing indifference! The Curate suggested “Knave, Queen, King,” and was “Highly Commended.”
The ingenuity of parents in choosing names for their offspring was truly remarkable. At the end of one note-book I find this list, the result of six months’ collection: in each case I have the name of the school in which the child was enrolled:
“Loral, Iho, Bylettia, Jerusia, Fitty, Belden (girl), Asabiah (boy), Dees (boy), Atelia, Ebert.”
I suspected Jerusia and Asabiah of Biblical extraction, and after searching Smith’s Dictionary I can identify them with Jerusha, and Hashabiah, whose history I do not remember. Atelia must have been Athaliah. “Fitty,” the note says, “is a nickname, but his mother doesn’t know any other.” Why not Commodus? “who, under the appellation of Commodious, was held by Mr. Boffin not to have acted up to his name.”