A. I was supposed to go back a little later, but I missed again, and that time I was in real trouble—with both sides at once. It was just about a thousand years later, when the French and English were fighting each other.
Q. You seem to have made a rather dismaying number of mistakes.
A. I would never have learned anything if I had been afraid of making mistakes. Anyway, the bishops were the ones I had to fear the most, and when they started questioning me, I—
Q. Was it they who told you about the Saxons being invited to come in?
A. No, indeed. By that time, scarcely anyone knew anything any more, except prayers, recipes and how to supposedly cure warts. Later on, there was a revival and everyone became very clever, but I was in Italy at the time and I never got to hear about the Saxons until long afterward—my last trip but two, in fact. I was at a school in England....
The headmistress of St Agatha's prided herself on being fair. Her way of being fair was to avoid favoritism by being equally unfair to all the girls and to those of the assistant teachers who would stand for it. Some of them didn't, and they usually left after their first term, as the headmistress didn't believe in contracts. Besides, at the beginning of the twentieth century, contracts for teachers were a novelty.
The result of this policy was a rapid turnover in the young and intelligent teachers, and a small permanent staff of compliant sheep. That St. Agatha's had any scholastic standing was due to the fact that Miss Wakefield had taken honors at Girton, and the school's social standing was due to her being the cousin of a Peer of the Realm. The girls were fed almost enough, the school uniform was expensive, and nobody had much free time. French was well taught—by Miss Wakefield herself—and so was Latin, but games were also stressed. The school was run on what Miss Wakefield called the Honor System, which had the effect of dividing the pupils into tale-bearers and secret rebels.
On a raw November afternoon, Miss Wakefield sent a prefect for Sarah Stone, who was one of the new girls. "Tell her to come straight to my office. She can have her shower later," she said, and Sarah arrived in the jersey and serge skirt she had been wearing on the hockey field. Her bare knees were blue and her nose was running. She stood waiting while the headmistress looked with prominent eyes at some papers on her desk. Sarah could see that they were examination papers and one of them was in her own handwriting.
Without looking up, Miss Wakefield said, "I hear that your mother is in trouble with the police."