Of our neighbours, our most frequent callers were a certain General Lestrange and his wife, whom I used to think very old-fashioned because my nurse told me they believed in ghosts. I imagine they were really bitten by that curious wave of occultism that made itself felt in English society at the beginning of the century. But I am afraid this undistinguished record will become wearisome if I prolong it. My father had long since given up political life, finding, no doubt, that it unduly cramped his energies: “It’s all very well,” he would say, “but you can’t really do two things at once”: consequently, the political life of the period passed us by, and we rusticated amidst a small coterie of country squires, who still (Heaven knows how) kept their estates and their large houses going. But my father’s inattention to the drift of the world around him was to have more fatal consequences. When I was only just fifteen, there came a black day on which he appeared gloomy and preoccupied, and I must not disturb him because he was “worried about business.” He spent all day at the telephone, and we all knew that something must be seriously wrong: indeed, they rang up from the club-house to know whether he was ill. It proved in the end that, through mismanagement on the part of others, he had lost far the greater part of his money, and it would be necessary in future to live in a much smaller house and sell Barstoke to anyone who would offer. By great good fortune, we managed to find purchasers: some Benedictine sisters, who had outgrown their previous accommodation, were willing to pay a good price for it. We were equally lucky on the other side, and secured a comfortable, though far from luxurious house, at Beaconsfield, just opposite the fourth tee.
I have visited Barstoke again not very long since, and the good sisters were very kind to me. They had turned the billiard-room into a chapel, and broken up many of the larger rooms, so that I could hardly recognize them; but it is something to feel that the shell of the building remains, and is likely to remain, intact. And yet I could not be altogether at my ease there, for we like our earliest memories to remain undisturbed: and for me, though I have lived long since then and seen many cities and travelled far from my startingpoint, nothing will ever appeal again as the park did, and the lodge-gates, and the unwieldy tower of the village church beyond them, and the trees of Barstoke, and its fruit garden.
CHAPTER II
SCHOOL DAYS
If the child is father of the man, so also is he, or rather is she, the mother of the woman.—Archdeacon Bunting.
The same change in our family fortunes which made it necessary for us to give up the old home at Barstoke made it necessary also for my parents to send me to school. It was only long afterwards that I realized what bitter heart-burnings this decision caused them, or what anxious discussions preceded it. To understand their reluctance, you have to remember that at the time of which I write no privilege of the governing classes was more tenaciously preserved than their exemption from education. The same instinct of struggle which bade the poor keep away from the workhouse bade the rich keep their children from school. My father in particular had often declared that no child of his should undergo the degradation of being taught so long as he could break stones to avoid it. But our case was really desperate; to keep me at home was almost beyond his means, quite apart from the grant of £200 which, on condition that I kept all my terms, would be paid to me annually for my attendance. My mother protested, indeed, that at fifteen I was far too young to be away from home; but in those days the objection did not carry the weight it would carry nowadays: you would still see poor little mites of ten or eleven being packed off to some place of education, with the knowledge that for eight long weeks they would never see their dolls and their toy horses again. Those were stern days, but I sometimes think the discipline was good for our character.
How vividly, especially in childhood, the tragedies we undergo inwardly print on our minds the recollection of the scenes in which we experienced them! I must often have travelled by train before, yet this was the first railway journey of my life which has left me any recollection of it. It took me but two hours to reach the heart of Berkshire (for this was in the days when the railway was still used for quick travel, and the private companies, often in competition with one another, used to run trains at what we should consider breakneck speed), but those two hours seemed to me like a Purgatory. And yet, in a calmer mood, the scenery at which I peered out through the carriage windows would have seemed beautiful enough. As soon as you passed Maidenhead you were in the country; the leaves were just beginning to turn with the autumn along the comfortable, purposeless banks of the full-fed Thames; to give place, once Twyford was reached, to the burning regiments of dahlias and early chrysanthemums that fringed Sutton’s seed-grounds. Only as we slowed down through the smoky suburbs of Didcot did we slacken speed; and then on again into the Downs, with the spell-stricken glamour of their mysterious repose. At Challow I crept out, a woe-begone little figure, on to the platform, and faced the huge effort of daring which I needed to intercept a porter and ask him to take my luggage out—a necessary expense, for of course we used to take our own linen about with us, and our heavy trunks had to be committed to the care of the guard. The porter was a less formidable character than my fears had painted him, and when I had paid up my two shillings wished me “Good afternoon” with the old-world courtesy of the time.
Miss Montrose’s school, for which I was bound, proved to he a pleasant old Georgian building, standing in a park of its own at the foot of the Downs. It was difficult to imagine, even then, that this huge barrack of a place, which had contained some forty rooms even before its enlargement, had ever been utilized for the needs, and staffed by the servants, of a single family! It was now some three times its original size: and yet a school of a hundred girls found it cramped and uncomfortable enough. I was horrified to find, on my arrival, that I should have to share a maid with five other girls, and that my bedroom would be the only sanctum in which I could find privacy. Miss Montrose herself, a prehistoric old lady who still affected the knitted jumper and the bobbed hair of fifteen years earlier, greeted me with a slightly de haut en bas manner—the legacy, I suppose, of the old days of school-mistressing. She was a fine character, and a few years earlier, though then nearly sixty years of age, had gone up to Oxford and taken her degree in book-keeping and dairy-work. It is no small testimony to her strength of character that she was able to manage a school of a hundred girls with only fifteen assistant mistresses to help her. Most of these I found to be pleasant, civil-spoken sort of women, many of whom had embraced school-mistressing as a vocation, although they might have gone far in one of the learned professions.
I always distrust people who say they look back to their school days as the happiest time of their lives: either they must have been unimaginative women from the first, or retrospect has mellowed for them the sour realities of memory. For myself, during the earlier part of my time at any rate, I was profoundly unhappy. Looking back, I think it was chiefly the irritating restraints which were put upon our liberty that annoyed me. No girl, for instance, might go up to London more than twice a term (unless, of course, she was visiting her parents). No girl might enter the public house in the village. No girl might keep a motor-bicycle—and so on. The science of education was then in its infancy, and school authorities did not realize that, in thus fettering the liberties of their young patronesses, they were unfitting them for positions of responsibility later on, and causing the gravest inhibitions in their subconsciousnesses. These regulations were enforced by a system of punishments which would, nowadays, be condemned as brutalizing. In proportion to the magnitude of the offence, the offender used to receive a quarter of an hour’s, or half an hour’s, or an hour’s “talking to” by Miss Montrose herself. She would make you sit down in a comfortable chair while she sat opposite you on a stiff one, and so would lecture you, by the clock, unmercifully. She would point out that the mistresses, who gave their services in the cause of education for nothing or next to nothing, ought to be treated with admiration and respect; that you yourself, since you were taking pay from the country to learn as much as you could, ought to obey the rules of the institution which made this possible for you. If it was a case of insolence towards one of the teachers, she would dwell especially on the “caddishness” (she was of the old school, and did not mince her words) of bullying one’s social inferiors. If the worst came to the worst, she would threaten to report on you as having reached Standard Eight, which would mean that you would have to leave the school as having finished your education. I never knew one of my school-fellows get through one of these interviews without scalding tears. It was not, I believe, till the fifties that anything was done to curb the severity of such punishments.
The lessons themselves, managed on the old high-and-dry lines, were not calculated to arouse any enthusiasm in young minds. Oh, the drudgery of those hours of geography, when we spent our time constructing hills, valleys, and table-lands out of clay in the garden, or made models of the railway systems across the lawn: when, perched on separate islands in the bathing-pool, we had to launch mechanical boats to one another, freighted with the principal exports of the various countries—it is no wonder that, with these methods, the science took little hold on our imaginations! It might win the assent of the brain, but it could find no lodgment in our hearts. Oh, the dreary mornings we spent in weaving baskets, or making artificial flowers, or calculating our winnings at petits chevaux with the mathematical mistress! The truth is, perhaps, that I was too young for these things, and was all the time having to conform to the standard of a class intellectually in advance of my own attainments. My most grateful memories are of the mistress who, four times a week, drew French out of us: and that, I am afraid, not because she attracted us, but because it was an understood thing that in those periods it was safe to “rag” as much as you liked. The lowest French class was taken by a master, the only man employed on the staff, and him we spared in deference to his sex; but Mademoiselle Amboise was fair game for us, and I am afraid the poor woman must have suffered acutely “Ah, Mademoiselle, que je m’ennuie!” we would say to her from time to time, and the poor soul would rush to your side to comfort you. She would carefully teach us the chorus of a song, and then, when she had sung through a verse of eight lines in her beautiful voice, we would either have forgotten the words of the refrain, or intentionally murder the tune of it, and the whole process had to be begun again. Or she would deliver the whole of the opening soliloquy in some old-world play of Rostand’s, and then look round for the new characters to come in, only to find that we had all played truant and run off into the country, leaving one girl in the seats of the little theatre (Mademoiselle was very short-sighted) to do the applause all by herself! I remember one girl affecting to have lost her memory, so as to be unable to speak a word of French, and our delight when Mademoiselle Amboise, breaking the strict rule against talking English in French class, burst out, “Ah, Miss ——, you are little pig!”
But there are more grateful memories, too, of those all-too-rare half-holiday afternoons (Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, as far as I remember) when we would make off to the old haystack and smoke there, as I suppose schoolgirls always have and always will, and talk of what we would do when we were women: or take car into Didcot for a good “blow-out” and an evening at the pictures: or the rainy days, when one “class-room” would invade another, and leave behind it a confused wreckage of Greek statues, glass cases, and electric light globes. There were the football matches too: it is hard for me, now, to believe that I was once a promising half-back! We played the old “Association” game, of course: as yet very few girls’ schools had taken up Rugby. I suppose I have never experienced, in a long life, such a protracted thrill of excitement as when I played, in my third year, in the great match against Radley, and the fortunes of the game hung in the balance for a full half-hour. Summer has less poignant athletic memories for me, I suppose because we still played cricket for the most part, and could do little to improve our game at tennis with only five covered courts.