When I remember all the friends so linked together
I’ve seen around me fall like leaves in wintry weather,
I feel like one that treads alone some banquet hall deserted.
—or does nothing really desert us, except our dreams?
But what is this? I am becoming sentimental. Let me return to the grim shades of my prison, the dull days of school routine. I had an open, sunny temperament, and made friendship easily; some, as I suppose is usual at that age, seemed at the time as if they could end only with life. And yet, how little effect really our school friendships have on us! Ten years after we have left, we meet the bosom friends of girlhood as strangers. Some of them, of course, have married: and with them, try as they may to conceal it, it is hard not to feel that their husbands have just a suspicion of jealousy against their wives’ woman friends. But even with the others,
Through what climes they’ve ranged, how much they’ve changed!
Time, place, and pursuits assist
In transforming them—
perhaps, after all, it is best so: for neither our critical faculties nor our sense of humour are at their best in those early years. My chief crony was a wild, devil-may-care Irish girl whom we called “Squint” Hennessy, who led me into plenty of scrapes and more than once brought me under the threat of “Standard Eight.” One of these escapades cost me, I think, the most anxious night of my life.
Our religious needs, when we had any, were served by a little old village church a mile or two away, at Goosey. How well I remember the atmosphere of the Sunday evening service there, the smell of Sunday clothes and old books and old, dusty hassocks; the painstaking harmonium, waking up like an old gentleman from a nap when we sang Glory be at the end of the Psalms, the clatter of the bell-ringers as they filed up into church at the beginning of service! It was an old church, and is still visited by tourists, I believe, for the sake of some really fine 1850 stained glass. But it will have changed with time: in those days it had more the appearance we should associate with a Catholic Church now—the seats, for example, were all on the same level, and the pulpit was fixed, close to one of the side walls; the sermons were delivered by word of mouth; the old, sonorous English of Cranmer was still droned out almost in its entirety, with something of a ceremonial effect; the congregation knelt for the prayers, or at least sat apologetically, head buried in hands. We did not, I need hardly say, appreciate this atmosphere at the time, and seldom went near the place—compulsory attendance was only inflicted as a punishment on those who had an unusually dark record of rule-breaking during the week. But quite recently the Diocesan Board of Finance (the Reading diocese was always a go-ahead one) had introduced the system by which, while town congregations contributed to an offertory at the end of the service, country congregations, as being attracted to Church with more difficulty, received a slight honorarium instead, in return for their attendance. “Those that were strong,” as the Archbishop of York said, “ought to bear the infirmities of those that were weak.” Late on in the term, when our pocket-money was mostly exhausted, a fair sprinkling of Biston Hall girls would be in their places to secure the coveted sixpence after the sermon.