Octavia's War (40 page)

She was remembering as he spoke. There was something about the earnestness of his voice. That and the cowlick. ‘You were one of the ones who came up to talk to me afterwards,' she said. ‘You said you wanted to teach in a Dalton School. Did you ever manage it?'

‘No,' he said. ‘I went to an elementary school where they were very repressive.'

‘I'm sorry to hear it.'

‘Come and sit by the fire,' Miss Ellis said, leading the way, ‘and let me tell you what we have in mind.'

They sat in a semi-circle round the limited warmth of a reluctant fire. ‘I suppose you've heard that free secondary education is going to be given to all our children as soon as the war is over,' Miss Ellis said. And when Octavia nodded, ‘Yes. I thought you would have done. What you will not have heard, as the news hasn't been released yet, is that the government plan to set up emergency teacher training colleges for returning servicemen to provide all the extra teachers we shall need for the expansion. We were wondering whether you would consider a post as a principal of one of these colleges. We are only talking about colleges in the London area you understand, although there will be others in other parts of the country.'

‘I'm honoured that you should think of me,' Octavia said, ‘but I must tell you straight away that my answer has to be no.
I couldn't leave my school and all the good work we're doing there, no matter how tempting these colleges might be.'

‘We rather feared that was what you might say,' Miss Ellis told her. ‘Then perhaps we could tempt you into a post as a visiting lecturer to spread the word about how children learn.'

‘That would be possible.'

‘With visits to your school?'

‘That too,' Octavia said. ‘We had a lot of visitors before the war. It was quite a regular thing. I would have to ask the staff of course, but I think they would be happy about it.'

‘So far so good,' Miss Ellis said. ‘Your turn now Brian.'

‘You will probably think I'm being presumptuous,' Brian Urquhart said, brushing the cowlick away from the top of his glasses, ‘but I was wondering if you'd write us a sort of booklet as a teaching aid. How children learn and what gets in the way of the natural learning process and how you see the future of education in this country. That sort of thing. I know it's a lot to ask but it would be invaluable to us. I've never met anyone who explained it as clearly as you did. No. Correction. I've never met anyone else who explained it at all. There are still far too many teachers who think teaching is a matter of shouting at children and bullying them and telling them what to do and mocking them if they can't do it.'

‘Put like that,' Octavia laughed, ‘how can I refuse?'

The coals shifted in the grate and one of them began to hiss. ‘I think we should go down to the canteen and have a spot of lunch,' Kathy Ellis said. ‘It's warmer down there and we've got something to celebrate.'

‘What do you think of that?' Octavia said to Emmeline over supper that night.

‘Just so long as you don't go working all the hours God
sends,' Emmeline warned. ‘I know what you're like when you get a bee in your bonnet. And don't forget it's Christmas.'

‘I haven't forgotten,' Octavia said. ‘I'm going to buy a gramophone.'

But Emmeline was right about bees and bonnets. Her
new-old
friend's request had been perfectly timed and cunningly expressed. It upset her to think that there were still teachers who knew nothing about the art of teaching and believed that all they had to do was stand up in front of a class and tell the children what to do. That idea should have been shown up for the stupidity it was long, long ago. After school next day she got out her files and started to reread the notes she'd made for the talks she'd given before the war. It took her three evenings to sort them all through but on the fourth she was ready to write. She made up the fire in the drawing room, settled herself in her armchair with a note book on her knees and a pencil in her hand and began.

‘I shall begin at the beginning,' she wrote. ‘The first and most important thing for any intending teacher to understand is that learning is a natural process. We are all capable of learning and, if we are not impeded or made fearful or despondent, we learn throughout our lives. So let us start by looking at the process.

‘It begins with something that is inborn and natural to all living creatures, namely curiosity. The child (or adult) wants to find out, to know how something is done, to discover a new skill, to follow an idea, as you are doing as you read this. Like all appetites it needs feeding. A good teacher will provide the ‘food' as and when it is needed but he won't offer it before the child is ready for it and his initial appetite for it has been roused. Rousing the appetite is the first and most skilled part of our job as teachers and it can be done in a variety of ways,
which I will deal with later.

‘The second stage I shall call discovery. The child takes whatever food he needs and uses it. It is a time of trial and error and thought and effort and children vary in their approach to it. Some plunge into it happily, others need to be sustained and encouraged. A good teacher will praise whenever praise is truly earned. He will never scold a mistake, however silly it might appear to him. The golden rule is to remember that a mistake is not a sin or stupidity or deliberate naughtiness. It is one of the ways in which we all learn. In other words, it is a natural part of the process.

‘The third stage comes when the child has acquired his new skill or found the answer to his questions. If the first two stages have gone well it is marked by serenity and satisfaction. Then there is a fourth and resting stage when the child moves on to a new topic and the completed investigation seems to be forgotten. It may surprise you to know that there is a fifth stage when the child returns to the skill he has learnt and he is still a complete master of it, remembering everything that is important about it with ease. Teachers who subscribe to the chalk and talk method of education are always surprised when they see this happen. Their surprise is an indication that they do not understand the natural process.'

‘Are you still at it?' Emmeline said, appearing in the door. ‘It's half past eleven. I'm off to bed.'

Octavia looked up, pushed up her glasses and stretched her back, surprised at how stiff she'd become and how much her neck was aching. ‘I'm writing my credo, Em,' she said.

‘Well don't write it all night,' Emmeline said.

But now that she'd begun, Octavia couldn't stop. There was so much she wanted to say and she was hot with energy and couldn't wait to get it down on paper. She knew from
her years in the classroom that it is better to have too much information than not enough. When the whole thing was written she would get Maggie Henry to type it for her and send a copy to Kathy Ellis and Brian and they could sort out what they needed. Meantime she would make a list of all the topics she felt she ought to tackle. Things that get in the way of learning. The value of praise and the destructive power of blame. Ways to spark a pupil's interest. What do we mean by discipline? It was nearly one o'clock before she decided that she really was too tired to go on writing any longer.

From then on she wrote whenever she had an opportunity, which wasn't as frequently as she would have liked with Christmas rushing upon them and the school abuzz with preparations. She bought her gramophone and a collection of records, wrapped presents and wrote cards and tried to enter into the spirit of the season but her mind was never far from the book.

On Christmas Eve, Tommy arrived bearing a hamper to say that he was throwing himself on their mercy because he was all on his own. ‘Lizzie's gone to her friend Poppy's for Christmas,' he said, ‘and Mrs Dunnaway's deserted me and gone back to Gloucester in my hour of need. I'm an orphan of the storm.'

‘We can't have that,' Emmeline said, helping him out of his coat, ‘and in all this cold too. Come in and have a drink, you poor, lorn critter.'

The poor lorn critter entertained them royally that Christmas, pulling crackers and carving their precious turkey at the Christmas table, leading the dance during the afternoon, telling impossible ghost stories round the fire in the evening. When the children had been sent to bed, despite very loud protests, and Emmeline had restored a little order to the
drawing room, they sat round the fire and roasted chestnuts and discussed the war.

‘It can't be very much longer now, surely,' Edith said.

‘We're being held up by the weather,' Tommy told her. ‘It's pretty impossible in the Low Countries by all accounts. Drifts four feet deep in some places. Once the spring comes and the tanks can get moving again, we shall cross the Rhine and then it won't be long before it's over.'

That was Ben's opinion of it too.
This is the worst winter I've ever known,
he wrote to Lizzie.
If it isn't bloody snowing, it's freezing fog and we can't see more than a foot in front of our faces. The Jerries lay fresh mines on top of the snow and wait for the next fall to cover them up. Crafty buggers. We've lost two men that way. I hate this war. I feel as if I've been stuck in it for ever. Love you, love you, love you. Can't wait to get home.

Lizzie and Fiona followed the news every day, sitting in their kitchen with the wireless on the table between them, listening to every word. The German break-out, which was being called the Battle of the Bulge, was finally being contained and Fiona said she thought they'd be pushing the Germans back ‘any time now' but Lizzie was thinking of Ben fighting in the snow with the Germans laying mines he couldn't see and aching with that terrible, crawling anxiety.

‘In one way, I shall be quite glad to get back to school,' she said. ‘At least when I'm working I don't have time to worry so much.'

Fiona leant across the table and patted her hand. ‘Soon be over once the spring comes,' she said. ‘You'll see.'

On New Year's Day, while Em and her daughters were clearing the table and doing the washing-up and the children were
playing Pit, Octavia sat by the fire and started to write the section on ‘Things that get in the way of learning'. She didn't finish it until term had started and by then the Battle of the Bulge was over and the Germans were retreating again.

‘I'm so slow,' she said to Emmeline. ‘At the rate I'm going, the war will be over before I've finished.'

‘It's not a race,' Emmeline said.

But there were times when it felt like one, especially when there was so much going on at school that she was too tired to write or when she was woken in the night by the sound of yet another rocket and couldn't sleep again afterwards and was exhausted in the morning. Trivial news items triggered her into irritability. The BBC had been in the habit of preceding their news bulletins by playing the national anthems of all the Allied powers and suddenly all sorts of obscure nations, like Ecuador, Paraguay, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, decided to jump on the bandwagon and declare war on Germany and they wanted their national anthems played too. A new one was added to the list at every bulletin and playing them all took longer and longer.

‘It's downright ridiculous,' Octavia said. ‘Where were they when we were fighting the Germans all on our own? I didn't notice them rushing to join us then.'

But at least it was a sign that the end was coming and it was one of many. The German prisoner of war camps were being liberated one after the other and much too slowly to suit Edith. But in fact it wasn't very long before she had her
hoped-for
letter from Arthur to say that he was free.

I can't come home just yet, though,
he wrote.
We've got to stay in hospital for a little while because they kept us a bit short of rations and we need building up. Not to worry. I'm not ill or wounded or anything, just a bit on the thin side.

Edith was very upset and complained bitterly about it. ‘We fed their damned prisoners,' she said. ‘Years and years. We should have tried starving
them
, if that's the way they were going on.'

‘Look on the bright side, Edie,' Dora said. ‘At least he's free and he hasn't been hurt and he'll come home when they say he can. See if I'm not right.'

In February, while Octavia was busy writing the section on discipline, Tommy was sent to Yalta in the Crimean for a Big Three conference between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. He left in a bad mood saying that they were going to carve Europe up between them and that Uncle Joe would get the lion's share. ‘The victors dividing the spoils,' he growled, ‘and we're not even over the Rhine yet.'

The Rhine was crossed five weeks later. From then on everything was sped up. Ben wrote to tell Lizzie that they were fairly charging through Germany and had covered a hundred miles in one day. The rockets stopped coming. The Russians and the Americans were racing to be the first to enter Berlin. The German army in Italy finally surrendered and without his German protectors Mussolini was hung by the partisans and his dead body strung up by the heels outside a garage for everyone to see, like a dirt-smeared side of pork. And there were rumours that Hitler had committed suicide.

‘Look sharp,' Emmeline said to Octavia when she read the news, ‘or it'll be over before you've written the last word.'

‘It's written,' Octavia told her with great satisfaction. ‘I wrote it yesterday evening.'

But she was wrong. There was still one more thing that had to be said.

At the end of the week, when the daffodils were brightening the garden and there were birds nesting in the hedges and
Octavia was feeling pleased with herself and her efforts, Tommy arrived to tell her that she must come to the pictures with him to see the newsreel.