Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (6 page)

During my father’s uproarious days at Newcastle High School, a Hanley boy, two or three years his junior, named Enoch Arnold Bennett, was more profitably pursuing his studies at the Middle School in the same town. There was, needless to say, very little communication between the pupils from the Middle School, and the domineering young tyrants at the High School. Even after the author of
The Old Wives’ Tale
had won his lasting place in English literature, my relatives still thought nothing much of the Bennetts, whom they characteristically described as ‘very ordinary people’.

The education given to my parents, in both quality and quantity, was of a type at that time shared, and considered quite adequate, by almost the whole of the provincial middle-classes. Its shortcomings were in no way compensated by the superior attainments of their friends, for throughout my childhood in Macclesfield and Buxton, I cannot remember that anyone ever came to the house of more interest to me than relatives, or mentally restricted local residents with their even more limited wives.

These families were typical of the kind that still inhabit small country towns; the wives ‘kept house’, and the husbands occupied themselves as branch bank-managers, cautious and unenterprising solicitors, modest business men who preferred safety to experiment, and ‘family’ doctors whose bedside manner camouflaged their diagnostical uncertainties. Schoolmasters were not encouraged, as my father found their conversation tedious. Always a staunch Free-Trader, he was ready to join issue against any supporter of Joseph Chamberlain in the topical controversy of Free Trade
versus
Tariff Reform, but he did object to being diverted from the enthralling discussion of paper manufacture to subjects of such remote interest as the bombardment of Port Arthur, the Turkish atrocities in Macedonia, or the policy of the Russian revolutionary party which was bloodily agitating for the establishment of a Duma.

To my own immature ears, hardly an echo of these or other far-off and rather more divine events ever succeeded in penetrating; even the elements of fiscal argument, though respectable enough, were regarded as beyond a schoolgirl’s understanding. I suppose it was the very completeness with which all doors and windows to the more adventurous and colourful world, the world of literature, of scholarship, of art, of politics, of travel, were closed to me, that kept my childhood so relatively contented a time. Once I went away to school, and learnt - even though from a distance that filled me with dismay - what far countries of loveliness, and learning, and discovery, and social relationship based upon enduring values, lay beyond those solid provincial walls which enclosed the stuffiness of complacent bourgeoisdom so securely within themselves, my discontent kindled until I determined somehow to break through them to the paradise of sweetness and light which I firmly believed awaited me in the south.

I often wonder how many of my present-day friends were themselves limited by a horizon as circumscribed as that which bounded my first thirteen years. Up to the time, indeed, that I was twenty-one, my sole contacts with life outside England were confined to a Cook’s tour to Lucerne, where I developed mumps immediately on arrival and spent the rest of the fortnight in a sanatorium, and a brief visit to Paris, during which my father was knocked down by a taxicab and promptly insisted upon all of us returning to Buxton.

I believe that it is Albert Edward Wiggam, the American author of
The Fruit of the Family Tree
, who has calculated that half the world’s distinguished men and women are produced by only one per cent of its population, and that all the teeming mediocre millions of the rest of mankind are required to contribute the other half of its leaders. But when I consider - and in my later teens I often used to consider - the incalculable advantages of heredity and early environment that are involved in merely being born a member of such families as the Huxleys, the Haldanes, the Frys, the Darwins or the Arnolds, what really seems remarkable is not that the undistinguished residue produces only half the sum of human talent, but that those who belong to it ever emerge at all from the blackest obscurity.

5

At the age of thirteen, small for my years and still very much of a child in spite of my mature Fifth Form associates, I was sent away to school at the recently founded St Monica’s, at Kingswood in Surrey - a safe choice, because the eldest and ablest of my mother’s sisters was one of the two Principals. Her partner, Louise Heath Jones, a brilliant, dynamic woman who had been educated at Cheltenham and Newnham, alternately inspired and intimidated both girls and mistresses by her religious idealism and the strongly individual quality of her teaching. The
tempo
at which her ardent spirit caused her to live wore out too quickly her fragile constitution; a premature breakdown led to her early retirement soon after I left the school, and she died in 1931 after many years of illness.

My aunt, level-headed and self-reliant, remained in charge from 1914 until the end of 1930, and though she possessed neither college degree nor technical training in education, her personal dignity and her natural gift for organisation soon raised St Monica’s to a high position, with a refreshingly enlightened and broad-minded regime among girls’ private schools. It has recently passed out of this category into the hands of an exclusively masculine committee, and now ranks as a public school.

When, a few years before the War, I first went to St Monica’s, the young school had not yet reached the high educational standards of its later days, and though my budding ambition to go to college - which developed as soon as I discovered that such places as women’s colleges existed, and learnt what they stood for - met with real sympathy from both Principals and staff, it received no practical preparation for the necessary examinations, which were not then taken as a matter of normal routine. No doubt my father’s persistent determination throughout my schooldays that I should be turned into an entirely ornamental young lady deterred both my aunt and Miss Heath Jones from the efforts that they would otherwise have made on my behalf; the most benevolent and aspiring headmistresses are, after all, singularly helpless in the hands of misguided but resolute parents.

My classroom contemporaries regarded my ambitions, not unnaturally, with no particular interest or sympathy. Many of them were fashionable young women to whom universities represented a quite unnecessary prolongation of useless and distasteful studies, and they looked upon my efforts to reach the top of a form, and my naïve anxiety to remain there, as satisfactorily exonerating them from the troublesome endeavour to win that position for themselves.

Socially, of course, I was quite without standing among these wealthy girls, designed by their parents for London or Edinburgh society, with their town addresses in Mayfair or Belgravia, and their country houses of which the name ‘Hall’ or ‘Park’ was frequently a part. My parents could not afford the numerous theatres and concerts to which many of them were taken by request of their families; my ‘best’ clothes were home-made or purchased from undistinguished shops in Buxton or Manchester; and the presents that I received at Christmas or on birthdays did not bear comparison with the many elegant gifts that my class-mates displayed for the admiration of contemporaries on returning to school after the holidays.

It is hardly surprising that few of the girls coveted the reputation unenthusiastically conceded to me for ‘brains’, or even envied my comparative freedom from refused lessons, but regarded these assets as mere second-rate compensations for my obvious inferiority in the advantages that they valued most. In those days as in these, girls’ private schools attracted but few parents possessed of more than a half-hearted intention to train their daughters for exacting careers or even for useful occupations. Both for the young women and their mothers, the potential occurrence that loomed largest upon the horizon was marriage, and in spite of the undaunted persistence with which both the Principals upheld their own progressive ideals of public service, almost every girl left school with only two ambitions - to return at the first possible moment to impress her school-fellows with the glory of a grown-up
toilette
, and to get engaged before everybody else.

Although I was then more deeply concerned about universities than engagements, I shared the general hankering after an adult wardrobe which would be at least partly self-chosen, since all girls’ clothing of the period appeared to be designed by their elders on the assumption that decency consisted in leaving exposed to the sun and air no part of the human body that could possibly be covered with flannel. In these later days, when I lie lazily sunning myself in a mere gesture of a bathing-suit on the gay
plage
of some small Riviera town - or even, during a clement summer, on the ultra-respectable shores of southern England - and watch the lean brown bodies of girl-children, almost naked and completely unashamed, leaping in and out of the water, I am seized with an angry resentment against the conventions of twenty years ago, which wrapped up my comely adolescent body in woollen combinations, black cashmere stockings, ‘liberty’ bodice, dark stockinette knickers, flannel petticoat and often, in addition, a long-sleeved, high-necked, knitted woollen ‘spencer’.

At school, on the top of this conglomeration of drapery, we wore green flannel blouses in the winter and white flannel blouses in the summer, with long navy-blue skirts, linked to the blouses by elastic belts which continually slipped up or down, leaving exposed an unsightly hiatus of blouse-tape or safety-pinned shirt-band. Green and white blouses alike had long sleeves ending in buttoned cuffs at the wrist, and high collars covering the neck almost to the chin, and fastening tightly at the throat with stiff green ties. For cricket and tennis matches, even in the baking summer of 1911, we still wore the flowing skirts and high-necked blouses, with our heavy hair braided into pigtails; it was not until after the War that the school went into sleeveless white linens for summer games. Only in the gymnasium class did our handicapped limbs acquire freedom, and even then the tight, long-sleeved blouses were worn under our weighty pleated tunics. In spite of these impediments, the games and drill did make us lithe and hard, and during the War I had reason to thank them for the powers of endurance of which they laid the foundation.

The only intimate friends that I made at Kingswood were a small, dark, half-foreign girl and a pretty, fair, sweet-natured Anglo-Saxon, whose names might very suitably have been Mina and Betty. Mina, a younger daughter in a large and wealthy family, displayed at school a real artistic talent, while Betty possessed intellectual possibilities which she was never sufficiently interested to explore, owing to a quite frankly acknowledged desire to marry and have children. In neither case did the intimacy long survive our departure from school.

Mina, during the War, developed under the stress of a perturbing love-affair a strong disapproval of my character, which led her to conclude that I had never been worthy of her friendship. When I was nursing in London in the early part of 1916, and she was cultivating her considerable gift for drawing at an art school, she made an appointment with me at - of all appropriate places for a moral condemnation - the Albert Memorial, in order to inform me that I was selfish, insincere, ambitious, and therefore no longer deserving of her affection. I can see her sturdy little figure now, conspicuous in a coat and skirt of strange pink cloth against the solid stone basis of the immaculate Albert, as she arraigned me for the harsh, unmelting bitterness into which I had been frozen by the first real tragedy of my experience.

‘You never really cared for Roland; you only wanted to marry him out of ambition! If you’d really loved him you couldn’t possibly have behaved in the way you’ve done the past few weeks!’

It was, of course, typical of the average well-to-do girl of the period to assume that the desire for power, which is as universal among women as among men, could only be fulfilled by the acquisition of a brilliant husband. I do not recall the mood in which I spent the long ’bus ride back to Camberwell, but I probably minded dreadfully at the time. At any rate, we parted for good, and I cannot recollect that I have ever encountered Mina since that morning.

With Betty the association lasted longer and I owe far more to it; for nearly two years during the War we served by arrangement in the same military hospitals, and even after it was over kept up the kind of friendship that renews itself at Old Girls’ Association meetings and exchanges of annual Christmas cards. But real intimacy between us became difficult as soon as we left school, for our homes were in different parts of England, our parents cherished different social aspirations, and our personal ambitions were not the same. Betty had no desire for a university education or the independence of a professional woman. The War, which frustrated individual as well as national hopes, caused her future to remain uncertain until 1922, when she married a man considerably her senior who soon afterwards became a Conservative Member of Parliament. To-day her two pretty children, a little older than my own, still provide a point of contact between lives which in other respects could hardly differ more widely.

6

I remember Kingswood very clearly as it looked twenty years ago, with the inviolate Downs stretching away to Smitham, and the thick woods unbroken by the pink and grey eruption of suburban villas which has now torn them ruthlessly into sections. On summer evenings one of our favourite rambles took us across the sloping fields, sweet with clover and thyme and wild roses, between Kingswood and Chipstead; there as twilight descended we looked a little nervously at the darkening sky for indications of Halley’s Comet which was said to herald such prodigious disasters, or listened more serenely to the nightingales in a stillness broken only at long intervals by the lazy, infrequent little trains which ambled down the toy railway line in the valley. The thyme and the roses still blossom bravely about those doomed meadows, but I have never heard the nightingales there since the War, and the once uninterrupted walks have long been spoilt by barbed-wire barriers and notices drawn up for the intimidation of stray trespassers.