Among the Bohemians (19 page)

Neill stuck to his principles, but had to battle to keep the Whitehall ‘busybodies’ from inspecting his school; he knew that they ‘… would certainly be greeted by Colin (aged six) with the friendly words, “Who the fucking hell are you?”.’ Summerhill was nevertheless admired by many, and regarded as a piece of important educational research which could not afford to be ignored.
It was, however, an uphill struggle getting funding to keep it going, and Neill suffered from the fact that, apart from the Russells, he was the only headmaster who would accept seriously delinquent children.
He had to combine the roles of headmaster, therapist, parent, fundraiser.

‘Here am I absolutely gravelled to raise cash for a pottery shed.
Pioneering is a wash out, man…”

he wrote despairingly to Bertrand Russell.

I am getting weary of cleaning up the mess that parents make.
At present I have a lad of six who shits his pants six times daily… his dear mamma ‘cured’ him by making him eat the shit.
I get no gratitude at all… when after years of labour I cure this lad the mother will then send him to a ‘nice’ school.
It aint good enough… official indifference or potential enmity, parental jealousy… the only joy is in the kids themselves…

But despite the growing number of experimental schools, there were few options open to the liberal-leaning parent.
The painter Robert Medley, who attended Gresham’s, attributed the unusual coherence of early twentieth-century artistic society to the narrowness of educational choice available to right-thinking, culturally inclined parents in those days.
He cited brothers and sisters, close friends, loves and artistic bonds between contemporaries, formed at an early age within the precincts of Bedales or Gresham’s.
Stephen Bone was sent by his artist father Muirhead Bone to Bedales, thence to the Slade where he was a contemporary of Medley’s.
Ben Nicholson (ex-Gresham’s) married Winifred Roberts (sister of Mervyn Roberts, also ex-Gresham’s).
John Moorman (ex-Gresham’s) married Mary
Trevelyan (sister of Julian Trevelyan, ex-Bedales).
One could trace many more ‘progressive’ old-boy and old-girl networks.
The homogeneity of tastes, of ethical ideals and social codes experienced at an impressionable age created a kind of freemasonry that for Medley and many other Bohemians like him was to last a lifetime.

*

Nicolette Macnamara hardly went to school.
The sum total of her education was four terms at a Catholic girls’ seminary in Cannes.
Her father, Francis, quoted Rousseau in support of his view that education for women was a waste of time, and refused to pay to send her to school.
In his view the three girls were adequately trained if they could cook and make themselves desirable to men.
The purpose of females was to be beautiful, have babies, and see to the needs of men, so what was the point in filling their heads with useless learning?
Eric Gill was another artist who did not believe in education for his daughters.
The John girls, Poppet and Vivien, were left to drift too.
Their parents held the view, like Ethel Mannin, that school squashed their ‘dear little budding personalities’ and gave them a conventional outlook.
They must be left to run free whittling and climbing and expressing themselves.
In fact they were bored.
Despite pestering for lessons, Nicolette did not learn to read until she was twelve.
Then she found out what she had been missing.
But for the rest of her life she was completely ignorant of arithmetic, historical dates and geography, and came angrily to resent her parents’ ‘enlightened’ theories:

The wastage of time for a person ignorant of the methods of learning is quite appalling.
Having suffered in this way all my life, I now believe in formal education; drilling information into the sensitive little minds, and to hell with the little budding personality.
It will bloom anyway if it is worth anything.

Parents like the Macnamaras were determined to circumvent any kind of formal education, which meant either none at all, as in Nicolette’s case, or selecting an approved tutor or governess to teach one’s children.
Here again, sexual discrimination was manifest.
The John girls, like the Macnamara girls, were abandoned to ignorance, but their brothers and half-brothers benefited from Augustus’s choice of John Hope-Johnstone as tutor.
Hope-Johnstone arrived at Alderney pushing a child’s pram full of rare books acquired on his Middle Eastern travels, and set out to teach the boys to recite long passages from the Old Testament and to write in Gothic calligraphy.
His taste for arcana suited the Bohemianism of his employers perfectly.
He understood
Arabic, played the penny whistle, and could recite the names of the Hebrew kings.
His enthusiasm for practical science led him to set up a laboratory full of flasks and smelly substances in one of the cottages, and he tried to explain the general theory of relativity to Romilly aged ten, but his recondite breakfast-time disquisitions on symbolic logic or four dimensional geometry sent the boys racing for the heath and their games.
Dorelia didn’t mind; she was happy for the children to remain uneducated, and anyway the invaluable tutor would then join her in the kitchen to entertain her and her sister Edie with readings from
The Fairchild Family
, or in discussing food preservation and gardening lore, on both of which he happened to be an expert.

Hope-Johnstone’s younger friend Gerald Brenan also found employment as a tutor to the children of Boris and Helen Anrep.
At twelve, Igor had never learned to read, though he could speak Russian.
Brenan discovered that the boy appeared to have re-ordered the letters of the alphabet in a mysterious personal hierarchy, and when he came to a word he tried to read the letters in that order.
Once it was explained to him he quickly rectified the problem.
Baba was slower than her brother, ‘somewhat retarded’ according to Brenan, but she had a simplicity and fresh outlook that made it a pleasure to teach her.

At Charleston, during the First World War, Vanessa Bell’s endeavours to provide an education for her sons were ill-starred.
At first Mabel Selwood was promoted from nursemaid to teach Julian and Quentin alongside the two daughters of H.
G.
Wells’s ex-mistress Amber Bianco-White.
Julian took violently against the elder girl and pelted her with cow dung, and this experiment ended in tears after one term.
Mabel’s successor, Miss Eva Edwards, was perhaps chosen for her looks rather than her abilities.
She was quite out of her element at Charleston, and after only a month Julian delivered the
coup de grâce
by pushing her into a ditch.
Next came the plain but capable Mrs Brereton, who managed to survive Julian’s violent and recalcitrant stage; he was gradually compelled to submit to her authority.
It was with Mrs Brereton that Vanessa hatched the plan of setting up a school at Charleston.
Unfortunately when she advertised for pupils there was only one taker, and this plan soon bit the dust.

But the Bell children and their friends did have, for a while, their own school; when Lytton Strachey’s younger sister Marjorie set up her blackboard in Gordon Square it was a relief and a blessing for everyone.
All accounts agree that Marjorie was a born teacher, infectious in her enthusiasm, and with a marvellous ability to bring her subject matter to life.
Her pupils at this school included a younger generation of Stracheys, the Anrep children,
Stephens, Furses, Hendersons and Raverats.
Marjorie had the sense to play to their strengths.
Quentin Bell, who went to her for piano lessons, was an inept musician who suffered acutely on hearing himself play a wrong note on the piano.
Perceiving this, she set out to educate his taste by taking him to concerts.
They listened to Beethoven and Schumann together, and he developed a profound love of music.
In the summers of 1924 and 1925 Marjorie’s school took over Charleston.
The children all moved in with their nurses, crowds of them doubled up in attics and bedrooms.
They had their lessons in the downstairs study and crammed into the dining room for their meals.

Angelica found Marjorie somewhat formidable; her emphatic quizzing of the baffled seven-year-old – ‘If you have
five
peas in a pod and take away
two
,
how many
are left?’ – intimidated her and turned numbers into a lifelong battleground; but her approach to drama was inspirational.
Marjorie’s love of Shakespeare was boundless, and she was to be found striding across the Downs reciting
Macbeth
at the top of her voice.
She produced the children in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, with Angelica as Peaseblossom, Baba Anrep as Bottom, and Elizabeth Raverat as Hippolyta.
Vanessa and Roger Fry helped with the costumes and masks.

Igor Anrep’s education lurched onwards by a process of trial and error.
After his mother, Helen, took up with Roger Fry the boy was sent off to a boarding school that had been established in Great Missenden by Fry’s sister Isabel, something along the lines of Bedales but on a much smaller scale.
It was roughly co-educational, but contrary to Bedales was basically a girls’ school, with only five or six boys to its forty girls.
Isabel Fry believed that children should have contact with animals; thus at her ‘Farmhouse School’ the timetable was scheduled according to milking times.
The children were busy in the cowshed for an hour before breakfast and again afterwards.
There were lessons in the afternoon, followed by evening milking – ‘much better than football’ – though Igor much enjoyed the netball and rounders that took its place.

His eccentric schooling did not stand in the way of Igor’s eventual emergence as a professional doctor.
Likewise, with no university education or degree to his name, Quentin Bell was to become a highly respected academic.
It is tempting to conclude, with Rousseau, that early book-learning can be limited and superficial.

*

In the end, some parents gave up on their hopes of finding a reasonable, liberal education.
Attrition set in; they funked the issue and sent their
children away to mediocre boarding schools.
On Roger Fry’s advice the Bell boys were packed off to Leighton Park School, a Quaker establishment in Reading, where both boys were utterly miserable.
Even Augustus John caved in, and he and Dorelia hawked David and Caspar around a number of local public schools until they found one that wasn’t too awful.
‘You must take these two boys,’ declared Dorelia, adding, ‘there are three more somewhere – you may as well have them too if I can find them.’ Dane Court was thankfully small, with only eleven pupils, so the John children numbered nearly half the student population and thus were able to form a combat force against potential tormentors.
‘The boys go to a beastly school now and seem to like it,’ grumbled Augustus.
It was run on conventional lines, but Mrs Pooley the headmaster’s Danish wife added an artistic touch with her taste for preposterous hats; and both she and her husband were tolerant of the John boys’ odd appearance in their home-made clothes and long golden hair.
Nonetheless, Romilly John, with the acute self-consciousness of childhood, was intent on keeping the two sides of his life separate:

I became infected with the disease of schoolboy conformism.
Sometimes I lay awake at night wondering what revelations of home life I might not, in my previous innocence, have made.
I hoped the boys might have forgotten that I had told them how we ran about naked in the fields at home – but that is just the sort of thing little boys do not forget…

I was especially afraid that one of my brothers would let out some frightful detail of our life at Alderney, and thus ruin us for ever; a needless alarm, as they were all older and warier than I.
I contracted a habit of inserting secretly after the Lord’s Prayer a little clause to the effect that Dorelia might be brought by divine intervention to wear proper clothes; I also used to pray that she and John might not be tempted, by the invitation sent to all parents, to appear at the school sports.

Children rarely thank their parents at the time for their upbringing; how much more so in Bohemian families.
The children were sensitive; they hadn’t chosen to be different.
They were aware that their upbringing set them apart, and they grew up instilled with the belief that they were superior to ‘normal’ families, but they were up against the innate conservatism and diehard conformity of their contemporaries, and they were in a minority.
As such, many of them were persecuted.

‘Seager House doesn’t like girls who don’t know who their fathers are and have holes in their socks!’ was the taunt at Kitty Garman’s school.
Bunny Garnett was ridiculed for his literary precocity by his hated schoolmaster Mr
H., while Quentin Bell, overweight and hopeless at games, was mortified by his brief boarding-school experience and left before taking school certificate.
The fictional Sanger children in
The Constant Nymph
were driven almost demented by their feelings of isolation at their school:

DEAR LEWIS,

Will you please come and take us away from here?
It is a disgusting school and we have endured it as long as we are able… We shall kill ourselves if we are not soon taken away; we cannot exist here, it is insufferable.
The Girls are hateful, they say we don’t wash and are liars.
The governesses are a Queer Lot and not fitted to be teachers I’m sure.
They think of nothing but games.
Why should we have to play games if we don’t like?… You will be a murderer if you don’t take us away before we end our miserable Lives…

PS.
Probably we shall hang ourselves.

The values of the independent romantic collided with school and its structured set of values.
Despite hankerings after routine and rules, their imposition brought rebellion.
Bunny Garnett’s aversion to the unpleasant Mr H.
nearly had extreme consequences.
Having watched two little boys who were boarders at his prep school being ferociously beaten by a master, the young Bunny determined that, if forced to endure beating himself, he would murder the perpetrator.
His opportunity soon came.
Mr H.
caned Bunny for some minor incident; the child felt pained and outraged.
Leaving the school, he noticed a crow on the fence, and knowing that Mr H.
had a rifle and was in the habit of shooting these birds he returned and slyly informed him about the crow: