It was on such an occasion that Squint Hennessy and I were making our way back from Church on a summer evening, feeling particularly good after a stirring address from the curate, a favourite of ours. At peace with the world, we each lit a “Woodbine” to light us and cheer us on our way home. By ill-luck Miss Mersham, the numismatics mistress, met us half-way, and threatened to report us if we did not put out our cigarettes immediately. Squint was at the top of her form that evening: “report if you like, Golly,” she said, “but we’ll make you repent of it if you do.” Miss Mersham was ill-advised enough to lay information against us, and each of us had a quarter of an hour’s “talking to”: special emphasis was laid, I remember, on the crime of setting a bad example to our mistresses. We wept floods of tears, and for the next three days did everything to make the informant’s life intolerable to her. We brought frogs into class, put lamp-black on to her duster, squirted her with water-pistols—in a word, we behaved as high-spirited girls will behave when they are smarting under a sense of injustice. Finally, I remember, we put a large bust of Artemis in her bed. The next day she seemed curiously silent, and when we came out of preparation at half-past six the terrible rumour went round—Miss Mersham had run away!
It was a memorable night when the whole school wandered over the Downs, till nearly two in the morning, searching for the truant mistress. Squint and I in particular were inconsolable; our action had been merely thoughtless, and neither of us had really felt vindictive: it terrified us to think that our victim was now running the risk of expulsion as the result of our heedless behaviour. She was, in the end, caught by a porter at Swindon, and sent back to Biston Hall; and we all cheered lustily when Miss Montrose announced her intention, after considering the circumstances carefully, of retaining her on the staff. She became one of our most popular mistresses, and did so well that, three years later, she was enabled to leave the profession altogether.
I do not know what became of Squint: some of my other friends I have managed to keep up with, at least by correspondence. “Fatty” Macdonald became manager of a bank in Sheffield; Tulip Hawkesley went on to the stage as Yvette Dombrowski; Wynefryde Banks married well and went into her father-in-law’s business; Jane Palliser, our star goal-keeper, was later captain of a P. & O. “liner.” But no one fulfilled her early promise like Juliet Savage, once well-known as the editress of the Spectator in the fifties. It was with me that she undertook her first journalistic venture, the Bilston Hall Rocket, which ran into four numbers and attracted a good deal of attention among our fellow-pupils. I have still the old copies by me; the List of Contents from a single issue will give some idea of its character:
| THE BISTON HALL ROCKET | |
| (and Challow Chronicle, Goosey Gospeller, etc., etc., etc.) | |
| CONTENTS | |
| Page | |
|---|---|
| Lines written in Prep. | 1 |
| My old Kentucky Girl (Poem), by E.W. | 2 |
| The Adventure of Bloodgush Grange (continued) | 2 |
| How to get Marks, by One who knows | 4 |
| Golly and the Gondola (Anonymous) | 5 |
| Spanking Sarah, the Cow-girl of Arizona, by P. F. | 5 |
| Football Notes, by Half-back | 7 |
| The Pool of Solitude (Poem), by F. F. W. | 10 |
| Things we don’t half want to know, by the Editress | 10 |
| Blue-face, my Squaw (Song), by R. E. H. | 11 |
| Paris at Night, by Wanderer | 11 |
| Go, lovely Montrose (Parody), Anonymous | 13 |
| The Great Bilston Hall Film | 13 |
| How I mean to spend the Hol’s, by Naughty Nan | 15 |
| Correspondence | 15 |
| Puzzles | 16 |
We wrote the paper merely for fun, and as a way of getting our own back against some of the mistresses who had been unlucky enough to offend us. Judge of our surprise, both Juliet Savage’s and my own, when we were told that the literary promise we displayed had been judged so considerable as to induce the School Governors to send up copies of the Rocket as a “thesis” for the St. Lucy’s Hall scholarships! Scholarships were awarded to both of us; and I was now in the happy position of being able to spend four years at Oxford, while contributing a clear £200 a year to the support of my parents. I left Bilston Hall in the summer of 1934, not with much regret: I had had happy times there, but I ached for more liberty and a wider sphere of activity, and I felt that I had been greatly misunderstood there. I have never seen it since.
CHAPTER III
OXFORD
O, the sweaty clothes, and O, the smashed window-panes, Ecstasy!—Wrigglesworth: Thoughts in a Parsonage.
I find it customary among the writers of reminiscences, if they have had the privilege of an Oxford or Cambridge education, to make great play with the dons who were already greybeards in their time, survivals from a yet earlier past. Thus, we shall be told of old Tommy So-and-So, who was so well seasoned that he could carry his five glasses of port after dinner and get to bed without assistance: or how What’s-his-name was reputed never to have had a bath in fifty years of residence: or how the Master of This was so absent-minded that he delivered a lecture on Homer by mistake for one on political economy, and his audience were so little attentive that none of them noticed the difference, while the President of That used to be a great sportsman in his time, and rode a motor-bicycle at full speed round Addison’s walk on Sunday afternoon for a bet. This is all very well, but it is not first-hand-reminiscence. How many of my young friends who are up at Oxford now know anything about the patriarchal figures of the place, know so much as the very names of them? You have passed them toiling up Headington Hill, that Professor of European reputation who still wears the soft flannel collars and the “plus-four” knickerbockers of the early thirties, that venerable Tutress of St. Veronica’s, whose archaic skirt barely reaches below her knees; and—confess it—you have never had the curiosity to ask who that old blighter is. Why should you expect us, then, who write reminiscences, to tell you stories of the old dons that were already skin and bone when we matriculated? We, like you, were young, and lived in a self-contained world of youth. Let nobody expect from me a description of Oxford which shall represent it as a fossil-museum of the still remoter past. There were elderly dons in my time, but I do not remember coming across them at all, except one whom I met at a tea-party, and mistook for a fresher, because at seventy or so he still looked so incorrigibly youthful!
My academic career at Oxford was destined to be successful beyond my expectations. When I first looked at the list of subjects which I should need in order to go through Pass Moderations, my heart sank within me. Latin! Greek! Logic! Did they think I had stepped straight out of the Middle Ages, that I should be prepared to face examination in such subjects as these? But a reference to Appendix XVIIIc of the Regulations reassured me. I had to take Latin “or some other foreign language”—the old days at Barstoke with my French governess were to come in useful after all. Instead of Greek I could take Mineralogy, Practical Farming, Middle Icelandic, Military Tactics, Geography, Mental Therapeutics, Book-keeping and Short-hand, Levantine Literature, or Old Testament Anthropology. I need hardly say that I selected Geography at once. There was a still longer list of substitutes for Logic, which seemed more formidable, but I was assured that it was almost impossible to fail in the Theory of Statistics—and so indeed I found it. My first two terms, in fact, made little demand on my intellectual capacities, and I was free to look about me, make friends, taste life, and enter into the multifarious activities of the place.
I found little or no jealousy of the freshers, little or no anxiety to keep them in their place, on the part of the second-year women. On the contrary, the breakfast parties at which they used to entertain us were some of the merriest functions of my life. Heavens, what huge breakfasts we ate in those days! Tea, coffee, milk, sugar, porridge, boiled eggs or even eggs and bacon, toast, butter, marmalade, sometimes jam—and yet we felt fresh and energetic after them, ready to discuss any problem of the universe! We would sit round smoking afterwards—pipe-smoking was just coming in—indulging in our interminable conversations, till at last the claim of half-past nine lecture broke up the little company. To be late for lecture was a serious thing in those days; if the lecturer were short-tempered, it meant that you missed your guinea attendance fee. “No, it’s no use!” our geography lecturer, Hoskyns of B.N.C., would shout at us, exasperated but still courteous. “I can’t have you ladies come clattering up the Hall in those great boots, making a noise like a troop of cavalry: go back, and save up your pocket-money!” He was something of a misogynist, but unrivalled at his subject, and I do not think I ever saw a man better tailored. I early decided to read geography for my final schools, so as to continue under his tuition.