When I was going through my dear mother’s things after her death in ’59 I came across a whole bundle of my old school letters in one of her desks. It was pathetic to see how carefully she had treasured them, arranged them, tied them up in ribbon of different colours according to the year they were written in. The old, blue-black ink we used then has stood the test of time far better than most modern documents will. There is little about the letters that is of general interest; they are just an expression of the aims and interests, the hopes and the solicitudes, of girlhood just turning to womanhood; hopes how buoyantly eager! Solicitudes how lightly borne! I print one of them here, written towards the end of my first year at school, in the hope that, if nothing else about it arrests attention, the prim, stately language of fifteen-years-old in those days will call for a smile or for a blush, which you will, from the precocious, slangy young misses of to-day.
Biston Hall,
Challow.
June 18, 1931.
Dear old Mum,
Hope you didn’t think I was dead, not hearing from me all these three weeks: fact is, I’ve been abso-jolly-lutely full programme just lately with these theatricals coming on. They are going to be some effort, I can tell you. All the chaps say the scene where I come in drunk is like nothing on earth. But I shan’t spoil it for you beforehand; you are coming down, aren’t you? Don’t bring Dad if you think the old thing will be shocked; he is so mid-Edwardian about some things. We beat the London Hospital nurses by nearly an innings last Saturday: they were feeling frightfully bucked with themselves, too, when they came down, because they hadn’t lost a match this season. You should see Woollcombe, our leg-break bowler! She simply made rings round them. I was top last week in gardening, which was one in the eye for old Monty, because she’d got her rag out with me rather, as she said I was wasting my time and the country’s money—such bilge! Only three more blinking weeks now to the hol.’s;—oh, I say, could you write to Monty and say it’s very important I should come home two days early? Because I simply must go to the Rothwells’. They don’t mind your going home early much, really, even if it does mean missing one or two of these filthy exams, which are the limit anyhow. A new music master has just turned up, with top-hole eyes: remind me to show him you when you come down. I was wondering if perhaps you could let me have a little more money? Because there’s two of the chaps I must, simply must buy birthday presents for, and heaps of incidental expenses, and it’s a fact I haven’t a five-bob note to bless myself with. But not if it’s going to mean a row with the old bread-winner. Lots of love.
Your own
Opal
My holidays were chiefly spent at home, and indeed I could have asked nothing better. Few families, with our moderate income, can have enjoyed the proximity of London combined with the neighbourhood of such romantic scenery. Our house, I have said, faced on the fourth tee; and from the front windows the view stretched away, uninterrupted except by occasional bunkers, till on a clear day you could distinguish the flag on the seventh green. I saw little in those days of my father, who believed with Hector that home was the proper sphere of woman; for himself, he was out early and late in all weathers: a business interview would sometimes take him up to London, otherwise nothing disturbed the noiseless tenor of his daily habits. If there was a championship match on, we would hear all about it in the evening; for the rest, we knew that he did not care to be cross-questioned about the little incidents of the day. Yet, for all his silence, there was no mistaking the fire of the enthusiast burning in his eye. Nothing could daunt his tireless energy, though he was already a man of over fifty. I can still picture him as he was then, a fine, upstanding figure in his wide, loose knickerbockers and a coat that seemed full of extra seams and double linings; a trifle portly, yet carrying himself with a sort of natural swing. We have all too few of his type nowadays!
If my father was a type of manliness, my mother seemed and seems to me a perfect type of womanliness. The hundred little domestic duties of the day—in those days, the mistress of the house would order the dinner, go through the books, supervise the work of the servants, and altogether behave as a sort of unpaid agent—would occupy her till eleven or half-past eleven in the morning: only then would she put her season ticket in her reticule and set out for the mystery of the shops and the repose of her club. If an exhibition, a call, or a matinée was likely to detain her, she would leave word that she was not to be expected back till after tea, and the routine of the household would proceed as usual in her absence. She never came back from these expeditions without a catalogue for me, an evening paper for my father—some little token to assure us that her thoughts had been with us during the hours of enforced separation. Alas, how old age makes us realize the little return we made in youth for the loving solicitude of our parents! I often used to see little or nothing of her for a week, since my doctor wisely insisted that I should always have breakfast in bed after a dance. And dance I did, I am afraid, almost every night, if only to compensate myself for the early hours and rigorous discipline of the school, where half-past ten saw us at work every morning, and, on whole school days, preparation would not be over till half-past six. I was, I think I may say, a good dancer; not that I ever had much ear for music or sense of rhythm, but my athletic, I had almost said, my acrobatic, gifts stood me in good stead. I will not attempt to recall, so old-fashioned do they seem nowadays, the movements that were popular when I was a girl. What has become of you all now, my partners in those distant Georgian drawing-rooms? If you still live, do you still remember as I remember the measures we trod, then so riotous-seeming? The Monkey-grip, the Kansas scramble, the “Mind your foot, honey,” the Snake-glide, the Anyhow-slither, the Buzz, the Rattle-snake Fight, the Darkies’ Stagger, and all the rest of them?