Octavia (29 page)

Octavia got up and walked round the table so that she could put her arms round her mother’s neck and kiss her. ‘Dear Mama,’ she said. It was all that needed to be said for they both understood the subtext underneath their exchange. How well you know me, Octavia thought, looking down at her mother’s grey hair. And how sensible your advice is, even if you don’t spell it out and you don’t know why it’s necessary. I shall act on it this morning. It will be the first thing I do. If I have been bullying people, the sooner I put it right the better.

In fact, although she got to school rather earlier than usual, she had another matter to attend to before she could apologise to her colleagues. There were three fifth formers waiting for her in the playground, looking very pretty in their white blouses and their straight short skirts with their hair neatly bobbed and brushed shiny, but rather anxious she thought. Penny Seaward, wasn’t it and her two friends, Thomasina and who was the other one? Jane? Joan? They stepped towards her as she walked through the gate.

‘Were you waiting for me?’ she said.

They were. ‘We’ve got something to ask you, Miss Smith,’ Penny said.

‘Then you’d better come in.’

‘It’s like this, Miss Smith,’ Penny explained when they were settled in her study. ‘We would like to put on a play at our next assembly.’

Octavia approved at once. ‘What a splendid idea.’

‘The thing is,’ Penny said, ‘we don’t want to make the others think they’ve got to put on a play too, not at this time of year, with exams and everything, so we thought we ought to do it right at the end of term, if that’s all right. Only we know the final assembly is a bit special.’

‘The final assembly,’ Octavia told her, ‘is a ritual. We daren’t change it. There would be a revolution. What about the penultimate one?’

That would be lovely.

‘Do you know how long it will take, this play of yours?’

‘About fifteen minutes,’ Thomasina said. ‘Would that be all right?’

It would be exactly right. ‘That’s settled then,’ their headmistress said, wishing all problems could be solved as easily. ‘I shall look forward to it.’ And she shook their hands before sending them on their way.

It wasn’t until she was walking down to the staff room that she realised it had provided her with the perfect introduction for what she wanted to say.

‘I’ve just had a deputation from three of the fifth formers,’ she said as she walked into the room. ‘Wanting to change the date of their assembly.’

Their reaction was upsetting. They looked wary, or worried, or both and Genevra was anxious. Because they’re her form, Octavia thought, and she’s frightened something’s gone wrong. Oh yes, I
have
been putting them under pressure. They’re showing all the signs of it. And she went on quickly. ‘They want to put on a play.’

They relaxed a little. They were approving. ‘What a splendid idea,’ Elizabeth said. ‘What is it going to be?’

‘I’m afraid I didn’t ask them,’ Octavia said, smiling at them.
‘It was all done in a bit of a rush because I wanted to get down here before registration.’ And she told them what had been said and what decision they’d come to, aware even as she spoke that she had broken her own timetable and proved what a bad decision it had been.

They approved of that too.

‘Very sensible,’ Morag said. ‘They’re a good lot, our fifth form. I wonder what it’s going to be.’

‘It’s Pyramus and Thisbe from
The Midsummer Night’s Dream,’
Phillida told them. ‘I’ve promised to help them with the costumes.’

More approval. Several smiles. Now, Octavia thought, while they’re happy. Now I must do it. She realised she was feeling nervous and ashamed. Yes, she thought, I have been bullying them. It was obvious from their reactions and the way she was feeling. ‘I wanted to see you before registration,’ she said, ‘because I’ve got something I want – something I need – to say to you. I’m afraid I’ve been treating you badly over the last few days. There’s no excuse for it. It’s in my nature to want change. I need to feel I’m moving forward, achieving things, but that doesn’t excuse the way I’ve treated you. You must have thought I was turning into Signor Mussolini. Last night I was beginning to wonder myself. Anyway what I want to say to you is, I’m sorry for putting pressure on you. And for being so undemocratic. If I could put the clock back and it could all be undone, it would be. My word how ungrammatical!’

They were moving towards her, their faces open and reassuring, speaking at once, Elizabeth leading the way. ‘Grief takes us all in different ways, my dear,’ she said, ‘as most of us know only too well. We
do
understand.’

‘I was angry when my brother was killed,’ Sarah Fletcher told her. ‘I wanted the whole world to be changed. I wanted to go out and shoot the generals. I still do sometimes.’

‘We’ve all had to face grief for someone,’ Morag said gently. ‘All of us and sometimes more than once, I fear, as you have. It’s never easy.’

Their warmth as they rushed towards her, their understanding and their dear open kindness was too much for her. After a night spent sleepless and worrying she was more vulnerable than she knew. The tears welled into her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. ‘I’m so very, very sorry,’ she said.

Their concern was instantly practical. Elizabeth put her arms round her, someone else was rubbing her back, Genevra was holding her hand and telling her it was all right, a handkerchief was produced, clean and still neatly folded, and she shook it out and tried to dry her eyes, someone was filling the kettle. She could hear the rattle of the water. ‘Oh dear,’ she said ‘What a way to go on!’

‘You carry formidable burdens, my dear,’ Morag told her. ‘It doesn’t hurt to lay them down now and then.’

‘I’m supposed to be taking assembly in ten minutes,’ Octavia said, looking at the clock.

‘Plenty of time,’ they told her. ‘Have a nice cup of tea while we take the registers and you’ll be right as rain.’

‘You are good friends,’ she said and meant it. ‘I don’t deserve you.’ She felt relieved and exhausted, as if she’d been standing on the edge of a precipice and they’d pulled her back from it.

‘Yes you do,’ Elizabeth said as she gathered her bag and her register. ‘We deserve each other.’

It was an unusual assembly and not the one that Octavia had planned.

‘In this school,’ she told her girls, ‘your teachers and I make it our business to provide syllabuses and books and equipment and the most interesting lessons we can give you, so that you can all enjoy what you are learning. I think I can probably say that, by and large, you do.’ Much beaming agreement from along the benches. ‘However there are times when it is life that teaches you and learning from life can be a very different matter. When you learn from life, it can often – not always, but often – be a very hard lesson. So what advice can I give you about learning from life?’ She paused and looked round the hall and smiled at her staff.

‘Well, not a lot I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘for we all have to tackle that sort of learning more or less on our own. But you will notice that I said “more or less”, so there is hope. It is at the hard times in your life that you need your family and your friends. They are the ones who will support you and help you and see you through. Hang on to your friendships. Treasure them. They are more valuable than any gold.’ Friends all over the hall were sending eye messages to one another. ‘And now that’s enough of a sermon for one morning, I think. Time for a hymn to take us into the day. “Glad that I live am I, that the sky is blue.” Miss Genevra.’

So despite her dark night and her anxiety, despite the shame of having to face the fact that she’d treated her good friends badly, the day began well after all and continued better. That afternoon the postman delivered a most welcome letter. She took it down to the staff room at once, with an explanatory note.

‘This has just arrived,’
her note said.
‘It’s an official 
notification that for the first time we have more applicants for next year’s first form than we have places to offer them. Sixty-eight applicants for fifty-six places, as you see. Our reputation is spreading, as well it should. I shall write to Mr Gillard to warn him that we shall soon be needing bigger premises. OS.’

The summer term was taken up with state examinations and grew steadily hotter and hotter. Octavia interviewed her new applicants and their parents, and arranged outings for her existing scholars whenever they were possible. And life at Hammersmith Secondary School was good.

In the middle of June, Algernon-Podge took ship for Australia and they all went down to Tilbury to see him off – Octavia and her father and mother in the car, Emmeline and all three of her children on the train. It was an unseasonably cold day and very early in the morning. The quays were swathed in mist, which rolled in towards them from the marshes, obscuring and chilling. They stood close together on the crowded quayside, a sad group among a hundred farewells, choked by the smell of dusty steel and stagnant water, assaulted by the swoop and scream of the gulls, shivering in the damp air as the emigrants toiled up the gangplank with their battered luggage. Even their deliberate cheerfulness couldn’t disguise the fact that it was a miserable occasion.

‘Now, be sure to write,’ Emmeline urged, tugging at her brother’s lapels as if she were pulling the promise from him. ‘I shall worry till I hear from you.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ he told her. ‘It’ll make a new man of me. You see if I’m not right. I shall come back in a few years’ time and I shall be such a great fit strapping bloke you won’t know me.’
But he coughed before he kissed her and when he turned to say goodbye to Octavia his face was bleak. ‘Keep up the good work at that school of yours,’ he said to her, ‘and write and tell me what you’re doing.’

‘I will,’ she told him, torn with the old yearning sense of loss.

They watched him as he struggled up the gangplank and Emmeline hung on to her control and didn’t cry until he had disappeared into the black hulk of the ship. Then she crumpled into tears. ‘It’s one thing after another,’ she wept. ‘We were such a lovely big family, all of us together going on holidays and everything and now look at us. First Squirrel and then my darling boys in that awful flu, and then Ma and Pa in that stupid car and now Podge. And I know what you’re going to say, Tavy. He’s only gone to Australia but what good is that? It’s halfway round the world and I shall never see him again. No, there’s only you and me and Uncle J-J and Aunty Amy and Eddie and the girls left.’

‘And Ernest,’ Octavia said. ‘You mustn’t forget him.’ But they both knew he didn’t count because she was talking about her family and he kept himself deliberately apart from any involvement with any of them nowadays. Poor Em, she thought. It’s very hard for her. I’ve got the school to go back to but she’s only got him.

The school grew more rewarding as the year progressed. On the day that Emmeline got her first letter from Podge and was tearfully happy about it – even though he’d signed it Algy and underlined the name three times – the fifth-year assembly finished the summer term in high style; in August the results of the General School Certificate examinations were so good
that they coloured the entire summer holiday; and then it was September and they had ten girls in the Lower Sixth and their new full-sized first year arrived. They took a bit of getting used to.

‘There are first formers wherever you look,’ Morag said.

‘Wait till next year,’ Octavia told her. ‘We shall have a
full-sized
first and second year by then. They’ll be no stopping us. And think what fun it’s going to be with all these little ones.’

The fun that first term was mostly Egyptian. In November an explorer called Howard Carter discovered a cave full of treasures in the Valley of the Kings. It turned out to be the burial chamber of a handsome young king called Tutankhamun and the newspapers were soon full of amazing pictures – of his golden death mask, and his golden throne, of statues and jars and gilded beds and canopies. There was no end to it. Naturally the Art classes were soon as devoted to it as the newsmen and by Christmas the hall was full of golden masks and drawings of strange Egyptian gods.

‘What happened to holly?’ Miss Ollerington wanted to know.

‘They’re saving it for the final assembly,’ Phillida told her, ‘for when they sing the “Twelve Days of Christmas”.’

‘We must be thankful for small mercies,’ Miss Ollerington said.

In the New Year, the school reassembled to discover that their headmistress had bought one of the new radios. It was on a stand in the corner of the hall and she said it could be used whenever there was an item of news that would interest them or whenever Miss Gordon thought it would be helpful to her History classes. Wonders would never cease.

The news was actually rather troubling that year, for in January the French government grew tired of waiting for Germany to pay the reparations they owed and sent their army to occupy the Ruhr. Not long afterwards the German currency, which had been struggling for a long time, finally collapsed. Soon German banknotes were virtually worthless and there were pictures in the papers of children using piles of them as building bricks. The sixth form were most concerned about it and asked Miss Ollerington to explain how the value of currency could fall so quickly. She ran three extra classes, all of them well attended, and told Octavia that she’d never expected to find eighteen-year-olds who could actually understand Keynesian economics. ‘They’ll be a gift to their universities,’ she said.

That year they had four girls who were daring to apply for a university place, a fact that Octavia detailed with great satisfaction in her half-yearly report to the governors. And in May, when Emmeline’s daughter Dora was struggling with the General School Certificate examination and telling her mother it was very, very difficult, the list of next year’s applicants for the first form at Hammersmith arrived on Octavia’s desk. Just as she’d predicted they had more applicants than places for the second year running. In September 1923 they would have eight forms and a sizeable sixth form and they only had eight classrooms. Octavia wrote at length to Mr Gillard, who wrote back to say that he would scrounge two classrooms from the floor below,
‘for the time being’
but that what was now obviously needed was a move to bigger premises.