Octavia (24 page)

Emmeline chortled with delight at the memory and denied such an accusation at once – because it was true. ‘The tales you do tell, Podge. It’s all fairy stories, children. What shall we play next?’

It was charades, by universal acclaim, and Podge was the star of the show to make amends for the terrible way he’d been treated when he was little.

‘It’s been a lovely Christmas, Aunt Amy,’ Emmeline said, when the clock had struck midnight and they were finally leaving. ‘What a difference peace makes.’

‘Let’s hope it will be the first of many many more,’ Amy said, kissing her. And she held out her arms to the children. ‘Come and kiss your old aunty and then you really must get home to bed.’

And so on to the last excitement of the day, which was being driven home by their Aunty Tavy – all five of them squashed together on the back seat of her car, with barely room to breathe. Oh, it was lovely!

‘Although,’ Emmeline said, looking over her shoulder at them and pretending to be stern, ‘what your father would say if he could see you I dread to think.’

After the euphoria of the party and the unaccustomed luxury of good food, the New Year brought them back to reality with a palpable shock. It was cold and dark and the streets were full of ex-servicemen, standing in queues for what little work was on offer and looking much older than their years, their faces lined and war-weary. No one had given any thought as to how they should be treated once they were out of the army and few jobs had been kept open for them, although because so many had been gassed or wounded they couldn’t have
coped with the sort of hard labour they’d endured before the war, even if it
had
been available. The impact of so many suddenly unemployed men could hardly be ignored, but the weeks went by and the politicians had little idea what could be done about it.

It was the Glasgow trade unions that came up with a possible answer. What they suggested was a statutory
forty-hour
week for all manual workers, without loss of pay, to create extra jobs for returning soldiers. It was a simple and obvious expedient but the employers were opposed to it. Why pay two men to do a job when you can get it done at half the price by one? In the end the dispute came to a general strike and, according to the newspaper reports, things got nasty. Twenty thousand demonstrators massed in George Square, bottles were thrown, the police charged and forty men were injured.

‘Disgraceful,’ Octavia said angrily. ‘It was a good idea. They could at least have given it a try.’ In the last two months she’d been carrying a niggling, useless anger with her wherever she went, at herself for having treated Tommy so badly, at Tommy for not understanding, at society for its stupid rules and regulations, at all the follies and idiocies of their war-torn times. Nothing was right with the world. She was living in an unexpected and cramping limbo, needing change and a new impetus to carry her forward but unable to reach out for it, missing Tommy so much that the lack of his presence was a physical pain, feeling guilty because the pain was self-inflicted. ‘There are times when I despair of people, I really do.’

She despaired again later in the month when the disinfectant teams began to appear on the trams and buses. The Spanish flu had broken out again even more virulently
and the authorities were hiring ex-servicemen to spray disinfectant in various public places, in a vain attempt to contain it.

‘It’s like King Canute,’ she said to her father at breakfast time. ‘What earthly good do they think a little disinfectant will be? It won’t stop people coughing all over one another and that’s how flu is spread.’ This time there was fear in her anger for so many people were falling ill and the death rate was alarming. ‘They’re talking about closing the schools if it gets any worse.’

‘And colleges,’ her father told her.

‘That would be no bad thing,’ she said. At least it would keep him at home and out of harm’s way. He was too old and too dear to her to be risking this awful disease because he still had to go to work. ‘The sooner you retire the better.’

‘At the end of the academic year,’ her father promised. ‘You have my word.’

‘You know my feelings on the matter,’ Amy said. She was afraid of this awful flu too. ‘It can’t come too soon.’

What came a mere three days later was a terrified telephone call from Emmeline. Octavia had just got in from school and was standing by the hallstand unpinning her hat when the phone rang so she took the call.

‘Oh, Tavy!’ Emmeline’s voice said. ‘I’m so glad you’re home. You couldn’t come over could you?’

She sounded so distraught that Octavia was alerted at once. ‘Something’s the matter,’ she said.

‘It’s Eddie,’ Emmeline explained, and now she sounded tearful. ‘He’s really ill and Ernest won’t have the doctor. He says he’s not to be a milksop. And he’s not. I know he’s not. He’s really ill. He keeps on cough, cough, coughing all the
time and that’s not like my Eddie. I’m at my wits’ end. I’ve phoned Ma three times and I can’t get her. I think they must be out. You couldn’t come and see him, could you?’

‘I’m on my way,’ Octavia said. ‘I’ll be with you in five minutes.’

And she was.

Eddie was lying on the chaise longue in the drawing room, limp with fever and looking very ill indeed. His skin was clammy to the touch, there were two red fever patches on his poor pale cheeks and although he managed to open his eyes when Octavia felt his pulse, he was too ill to focus them.

‘Get the doctor,’ Octavia said.

‘What about Ernest?’ Emmeline worried.

‘I’ll deal with Ernest,’ her cousin said grimly. ‘You phone the doctor.’

Emmeline was dithering with worry. ‘Oh dear, Tavy,’ she said. ‘You don’t think it’s the flu, do you?’

‘Get the doctor.’

He came with remarkable speed and his diagnosis was instant. Yes, it was the flu, he was sorry to say. The child should be put to bed and given plenty of water to drink and a blanket bath to bring down the temperature, and kept away from his brothers and sisters. That was imperative. He would require careful nursing. Would Emmeline be able to manage or did she need assistance? He couldn’t promise her much help because the district nurses were run off their feet but he would do his best.

Emmeline was calmer now that she knew the worst. ‘I shall manage,’ she said. ‘My cousin will help me, won’t you, Tavy? And my mother. We will look after him, poor little man.’

She and Octavia sat up with their patient all night, as he
tossed and sweated and coughed. They gave him a blanket bath in the hope of making him cooler but it didn’t seem to do much good. In fact, he coughed more after it than he’d done before. At one in the morning Ernest came clumping home from wherever he’d been all evening, stamped up the stairs and disappeared into the master bedroom, banging the door behind him. At a little after two, Eddie began to sleep more peacefully and Emmeline told Tavy to go to the spare room and catch a few minutes’ sleep herself. ‘I’ll call you if I need you.’ But at four she was at Tavy’s bedside saying the child was worse and could she come.

Octavia got up at once, buttoned her blouse, put on her boots and her cardigan and was in the corridor in minutes. But as she headed for Eddie’s sick room, the door to the nursery opened and Dolly came out in her dressing gown looking worried.

‘Oh, Miss Octavia,’ she whispered. ‘What a blessing you’re here. Could you come and see Dickie for me? He’s just been sick and I don’t like the look of him at all, only I don’t want to worry poor Mrs Freeman if it’s nothing.’

The horror that Octavia had been dreading ever since she heard about Eddie was happening. The sickness was spreading. They had another patient. Within an hour she had taken charge of the household, carrying Dickie back into his own bedroom and settling him as well as she could in his own bed, phoning the doctor, sponging both her patients down, insisting that Emmeline should eat breakfast with her other three children and then take a nap – ‘Or you’ll be no good for anything and that won’t do’ – and finally, when the doctor had visited them and confirmed their fears, phoning Aunt Maud and breaking the news to her.

‘I’ll be straight over,’ Maud said. ‘Oh, my poor Emmeline! What a dreadful, dreadful thing!’

Only Ernest took the news with calm. He came down to breakfast at his usual time, dressed and ready for work and was annoyed when Octavia told him that Emmeline wouldn’t be joining him because two of his sons were ill.

‘They will pull through,’ he said.

‘Your sons,’ she corrected him furiously, ‘have an illness that is killing people in their thousands. They are very seriously ill.’

‘I will trouble you not to talk nonsense, Octavia,’ he said coldly. ‘My sons don’t die.’

‘I have never talked nonsense in my life,’ she told him, her anger growing. ‘I am renowned for telling people the truth. If you choose not to believe it, that is your prerogative and your folly.’ And she took her cup of tea and went back to the better company of the sick room. ‘I’m off to school now,’ she said to Emmeline. ‘You’ll be all right, won’t you, now Aunt Maud is here? I’ll be back at teatime.’

Emmeline had been crying but she dried her eyes to kiss her cousin. ‘Take care of yourself,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you falling ill too.’

The one who should fall ill is Ernest, Octavia thought as she walked out to her car. It would do him good to suffer a bit, nasty pompous creature.

But the devil took care of his own and Ernest stayed pompously fit as his sons struggled with the fever that was inching their lives away. And nobody could do anything about it.

Dickie was the first to slip away, dropping out of his short life as gently as a leaf dropping from the tree, and two hours
later while his mother was still too stricken with grief to move away from his bedside, Eddie stirred back to consciousness, tried to look at her, coughed, gave a deep sigh and followed him.

Emmeline was felled by grief, defeated, lost. ‘They were my babies,’ she wept, crumpled on the floor between their two beds. ‘Such dear good boys, such dear, dear good boys, and so young. Oh Tavy, what did they ever do to deserve this? It isn’t fair. It really isn’t. They were such good boys, always trying to please their father and do the right thing. And it was so hard for them and they went on trying and trying. Such dear good boys. It’s not fair. And after that lovely Christmas too and your mother saying may it be the first of many. It’s not fair.’

‘No,’ Octavia said. ‘It’s not. There’s no justice in the world at all.’

‘Haven’t we suffered enough,’ Emmeline wept, ‘with that awful war and Squirrel killed and Podge in such a state and all those millions and millions killed and wounded? I used to say I believed in God but I don’t now. If there really were a god he wouldn’t allow such things. Oh, my poor dear boys! They were my life, Tavy. What shall I do without them?’

It was a bleak and anguished time. And the funeral with its two pathetic white coffins lying side by side in the grave was more terrible than any of the family could bear. Octavia stood beside her cousin and held her poor trembling arm all through the service and wished with all her heart that there was something she could do or say to comfort her and knew there was nothing. And Dora and Edith and little Johnnie clung to their grandmother’s skirts and cried with grief and confusion. For how could this be happening? How could their brothers be gone? Ernest stood apart at the foot of the grave and
revealed no feelings at all. Glancing at him, Octavia couldn’t help wondering whether he was cloaking his emotions with that stern expression or simply being heartless. If it had been Tommy, she thought, and he’d lost a child, he would be weeping. And despite herself she yearned to see him again.

What she saw six weeks later, when they were beginning to ease away from the first and most terrible anguish, was an announcement in
The Times
. ‘Mr and Mrs HE Drewry…were pleased to announce the engagement of their elder daughter, Elizabeth to Major Thomas Meriton…’

It was unexpectedly and exquisitely painful. Oh, Tommy, she thought, staring at the paper, we only parted in November and you’re engaged to someone else. How could you? But then she thought about it and decided to be sensible and was ashamed of herself. If he’d found someone else she could hardly complain. He’d made it quite clear that was what he wanted. ‘A warm bed and a warm wife.’ And I chose my career. Well, it’s no good sitting here feeling sorry for myself. That’s a fool’s game. I must get on with my life. There are things to be done.

‘I think,’ she said to her parents, ‘it is time I booked my passage to New York.’ And after that she would start
house-hunting
.

The SS
Olympic
eased her storm-dishevelled grandeur towards the port of New York, obedient to the bark of the tugboat, engines throbbing. Most of her first class passengers were standing at the rail watching as the great city rose into view, pointing and exclaiming. It had been an unusually difficult crossing, for they’d hit a force nine gale in the mid-Atlantic and most of them had been extremely seasick, but now they were within sight of land and their six-day water torment was nearly over. And what land it was, this brave new world, this teeming incredible continent of new inventions and new men and new ideas. It made Octavia catch her breath simply to look at it. Such magnificent buildings, she thought, scanning the skyline, and so tall, and so many of them. They’re like a great cliff face. She couldn’t wait to be walking among them, seeing the city at first hand, but for the moment she stood quite still, elegant in her russet coat and her Cossack hat, contained and steady, because her unexpected happiness was so great she was afraid it would spill and be lost if she made the least movement.

She felt exactly as she’d done on her first release from prison, set free to enjoy her life again. I’m here, she thought, at last. She could see the Statue of Liberty so clearly she could pick out the spikes on her crown, and the closer they got to shore the more shipping they encountered – ferries and tugs and cargo ships, all following their allotted paths across the choppy water, each leaving a froth of foam in her wake and a frisson of excitement in the
Olympic
’s watching passengers.

‘How’s that for a skyline, honey?’ the woman beside her asked.

‘It’s extraordinary,’ Octavia said, with perfect truth.

‘You staying long?’

After six days afloat Octavia had grown accustomed to the outspokenness of her American fellow travellers. At first it had worried her to be asked personal questions by total strangers but after a day or two she’d realised that what appeared to be rudeness was simply natural curiosity and that it was invariably friendly. Now she answered happily. ‘Just for the Easter holiday, I’m afraid. I wish it could be longer.’

The interest continued, brightly. ‘Where are you staying? Have you made a reservation?’

‘With a friend,’ Octavia said. ‘She’s coming to meet me.’ And wondered how on earth they would find one another among the crowd of passengers who would be disembarking.

She needn’t have worried, for there was a small slender woman in a blue suit standing at the foot of the gangplank with a placard held in front of her proclaiming ‘Miss Octavia Smith’ in letters a foot high. It made Octavia feel like a celebrity. She was blushing as she stepped forward to greet her new friend.

‘Connie Weismann,’ the lady said, introducing herself. ‘I’m
so glad you could make it. Did you have a good crossing?’

The quayside was full of noise and movement, hemmed in by massive cranes and jostled by swarms of porters in heavy jerseys like sailors yelling, ‘Carry yer bag, lady?’ and striding forcefully up the gangplank as the passengers tottered gingerly down still feeling the swell of the sea. Horse-drawn carts stood stolidly in the traffic or inched through the confusion, wheels creaking; honking cars and taxicabs fidgeted and throbbed, emitting a strong sharp smell of petrol; and a chorus of voices called and shouted in a bewildering variety of accents, raucous as gulls. It was an excitement simply to be standing in the middle of it. But it made hearing difficult.

‘I’ve gotten us a cab,’ Miss Weismann shouted at her. ‘If you’ll just follow me.’

The luggage was loaded and the cab rattled away, faces passing the window jerkily and out of focus like pictures from the cinema. They were edged into a street crowded with vehicles and picked up exhilarating speed. Now images jostled upon Octavia with kaleidoscopic irregularity; here a group of young men, hats at a jaunty angle, dodged across the road between the cars, missing their approaching bumpers by inches, grinning and shouting; there a man sat in a huge chair casually smoking a cigar and reading a newspaper while a bootblack crouched before him buffing his shoes to a gleam; here a pair of delivery boys wobbled their bicycles between the traffic; there an elegant lady walked a white poodle with a blue ribbon tied in a bow between its ears.

Octavia answered Miss Weismann’s questions as well as she could, explaining that her journey had been ‘quite eventful’ but making light of the storm, while this amazing city racketed and roared around her. Inside her head, her thoughts
shifted and intermeshed like cogs. It seemed to her that all the experiences of her life were culminating in this visit – the easy lessons she’d learnt at school and at home, the hard ones forced on her as a suffragette, the rich talk around her father’s Fabian table, the hesitant speech of her first and youngest pupils, being secretly loved and publicly unmarried. Even the anguish of Cyril’s death, the distress of seeing Podge crippled by that awful gas, the agony of watching Emmeline’s two poor little boys succumbing to that awful influenza, the dragging misery of refusing Tommy and knowing she would never see him again. These things, good and bad, had been her education and had brought her to this invigorating city and the questions that would soon be answered. Oh yes, yes! The questions that would soon be answered.

After the bustle of the city, Aristotle Avenue was like an oasis – wide, tree-lined and already leafy, traffic-free and gently quiet. The Dalton school was a large white building at the corner of the road and that was quiet too, although, as Octavia saw at once, every classroom was full of pupils.

The principal was waiting in the foyer to welcome her. She was an impressive lady with iron-grey hair, a very straight spine and a disarming smile, who introduced herself as Amelia Barnes and, having settled Octavia’s luggage in the school office and handed her hat and coat to the school secretary, set off at once on what she called ‘a short tour of inspection’ explaining that Octavia would just have time to see a few studies at work before they adjourned for lunch.

‘The study period is the core of our system,’ she said, as they walked along a corridor, ‘as I believe I told you in my letter, so I felt sure you would wish to see it at the first
opportunity. Let us start with an English study, shall we, since that is your subject.’ And she opened the door to the nearest classroom.

Octavia was prepared for something out of the ordinary but even so she was surprised by the impact of this room. For a start it was full of cheerful voices, not gossiping or chattering, as she could see and hear, but deep in earnest discussion. So much for the doctrine of
‘sit up straight and stop talking!’
she thought and remembered how very unpleasant she’d found that instruction the first time she’d heard it. Then as she continued to look around, she saw that the pupils were of all ages, from serious fifth formers who went on reading as though there were no interruption, to inquisitive first formers who looked up at her as soon as she entered the room. They seemed perfectly at ease and not at all put out by her arrival. She smiled at them but hesitated in the doorway uncertain as to whether it was in order to walk in, steadying herself as if she was about to embark on another long voyage.

Miss Barnes moved to the front of the class, treading lightly, her skirts silkily a-swish. ‘This lady is Miss Smith,’ she said. ‘She is the headmistress of a grammar school in London and she’s come all the way from England just to visit us, which is a great honour.’ Even the fifth formers looked up and smiled at that. ‘I’m sure you will answer all her questions and show her the work you are doing. And I’m sure she will answer your questions in her turn. Is that not right, Miss Smith?’

Octavia agreed that it was and edged to the nearest desk, as quietly as she could. There were two small girls sitting side by side with their heads close together discussing the essays they’d just written. They were very friendly and stopped to
explain what they were doing. ‘It’s full stops, ma’am. We have to be sure they’re all there.’

The teacher in Octavia took over. ‘I know a useful trick for full stops,’ she told them. ‘Would you like me to tell you about it?’

They would. So she did. ‘You use a full stop to show you when to breathe when you’re reading out loud,’ she said. ‘That’s what it’s for. I expect you know that. If one of you were to read, the other would hear when she was breathing. If it’s a little gulping breath it might be a comma but if it’s a nice long breath, it’s sure to be a full stop.’

They tried it at once and were delighted to find that it worked. And Octavia was delighted too because she had made a good start to this visit and given before she began to take. She smiled at the two girls and moved on to another group, this time a pair who looked like third formers and were working though a page full of adverbial clauses. The variety of work being done in the room was impressive – studying poetry by Longfellow, reading
David Copperfield, Emma
and
Julius Caesar
, parsing and clause analysis, writing essays – and so was the ease with which the teacher turned from one pupil to the next as girls arrived at her desk with their queries.

Later, over lunch, she asked the English teacher how she managed to cope with such variety. ‘It’s much the same as coping with the difference between lessons, I guess,’ the teacher said. ‘Only quicker. As long as you’re well prepared and have all the material you need to hand, you can cope with pretty much anything and of course if you don’t know the answer you can promise to find it or suggest that you find it together. They quite enjoy doing that.’

This begged the first of the questions that Octavia had
planned to ask. ‘How long does it take to gather all the material you need?’

‘When we first began,’ Miss Barnes told her, ‘we allowed ourselves six months in which to prepare and we needed every second of it. Now we aim to keep half a term ahead of ourselves – more if possible. We give every girl a syllabus of work in every subject, a month at a time for the first two grades, half-termly for the others, and we check and change at regular intervals so as to keep up to date. You can’t afford to rest on your laurels when you operate this system. So yes, to answer the question you haven’t asked, it means a lot of work. But the rewards far outweigh the effort.’

‘Tell me,’ Miss Weismann said, leaning forward across the table. ‘What roused your interest in our system in the first place? Was it a particular concern or just general curiosity?’

They get to the heart of things so quickly, Octavia thought, and answered carefully. ‘It was a combination of things,’ she told them. ‘Having heard about you from the Fabian Society started me thinking, as I told you in my first letter, but there were worries too, about the efficiency of what we were doing, about the lack of impact our teaching was having.’ Miss Barnes was looking a question at her, so she continued. ‘I’ve been aware for quite a long time that many of our pupils are bored, no matter how hard we try to inspire them, and sometimes I only have to read their written work to see how little of what I’ve said has actually gone in. Some have understood and made great strides, others have tried hard but missed the point and some are floundering.’

‘Exactly so,’ Miss Barnes said. ‘Because you have been teaching them at one speed and one speed cannot possibly suit an entire class. Once you give them the freedom to work at
their own speed, in their own time and to ask for your help when they need it, you will notice an enormous change. There is no reason, when you think about it, why all children should learn at the same rate. Some will come to understanding slowly and after much discussion, sometimes with their friends, sometimes with their teachers, as you’ve already seen, but given encouragement and time they will all get there in the end. Not scrappily and unsure whether they understand or not, but completely and happily. There is nothing quite so happy as a child who has learnt and understood.’

‘I saw that this morning,’ Octavia said. ‘Happy and sociable. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a classroom that was quite so friendly.’

‘Exactly so.’

‘You will see more of it this afternoon,’ the Art teacher said. She wore a rather gorgeous Indian shawl over her shoulders and had hair so black it looked blue in the sunshine that streamed in upon them through the high windows of the staff room. ‘I hope you will visit my studio and see what a joy painting can be.’

Octavia visited the studio, a French study and a Science one, in a lab full of retorts and Bunsen burners and the usual faint smell of gas, and then went on to the gymnasium where a group of juniors were climbing the ropes, leaping a horse and exercising on the wall bars.

‘Gym and Games are the only lessons on the curriculum with no studies attached,’ Miss Barnes explained, as they stood amid the twirling bodies. ‘Much enjoyed, as you can see.’

‘Could they opt out if they wanted to?’ Octavia asked.

‘Indeed yes. Some do, on occasions.’

‘What do they do instead?’

‘Join a study group,’ Miss Barnes said, ‘visit the library, go to the studio to paint or make pots, or the Cookery room to bake cakes. There’s always plenty to do in a Dalton school. The choice is theirs.’

‘Which is the essence of the system,’ Octavia said. ‘You give them the freedom to plan their own lives. Rather as one does at university.’

‘Exactly as one does at university.’

There was only one more question that needed asking – at least for that afternoon. ‘How many lessons do they have to attend?’

‘It varies,’ Miss Barnes said, ‘depending on the age of the girl and the number of subjects she wishes to study. As a rule of thumb, the juniors have about fifteen lessons a week, one or two in each subject including Gym and Games and Religious Instruction of course, and the seniors have about ten or so. It works out at two a day, which gives them plenty of time for private study. And fun.’

The word sang in Octavia’s head. She smiled happily at her new friends. ‘You believe in fun too.’

They all did and smiled and nodded to prove it. ‘High days and holidays,’ Miss Barnes said, ‘are the icing on the cake. Christmas and Santa Claus, Thanksgiving and turkey, Easter for eggs and bonnets. We have an Easter parade to mark the end of the spring term, which you will see in two days’ time. Every girl makes an Easter bonnet and they wear them for the end of term assembly. It’s a great occasion. They love it. Why aim for a dull life when you can have a life full of richness and variety? It’s the great moments we remember, is it not? And the richer the ritual the more keenly we look forward to it.’