The Day Gone By (16 page)

Still the time had now come when I too at least had to be up at a reasonable hour. I was going to school - to the mixed kindergarten of the Newbury Girls' High School at the foot of Wash Hill.

The school, which charged moderate fees to the respectable Newbury bourgeoisie, was run by Miss Jane Luker and Miss Cobb. They were true blue-stockings in the tradition of Miss Buss and Miss Beale.

(‘Miss Buss and Miss Beale

Cupid's darts do not feel.

How different from us,

Miss Beale and Miss Buss.')

To a six-year-old, Miss Luker (‘Old Jane') seemed a remote and formidable figure, inspiring awe and even fear by her reserve, her incisive manner and lack of humour. However, in the kindergarten I had little enough to do with her. The kindergarten mistress, Miss Binns, was a good teacher, with a kindly warmth to which we could all relate. She seemed ‘one of us': she understood us. I owe her a lot, for with her I found that I liked learning and enjoyed the business of becoming literate, doing elementary arithmetic and finding out how to tell the time. My school-mates were either friends already - Jean and Ann were both in the class - or soon became friends. There wasn't a bully or an enemy in the lot.

Whom else do I remember from those days? Well, principally Miss Langdon, perhaps the most sheerly kind-hearted person I have ever known. Miss Langdon surely deserves to be recalled. She was the Nature mistress, and she also taught us what I suppose must be called Divinity (Bible stories). In both these subjects she was, as far as I was concerned, completely successful; that is to say, she excited my interest by being herself committed. I can't remember anyone ever wanting not to listen to Miss Langdon. That, surely, is the secret of good teaching. She was gentle to the point of simplicity; rather like Mrs Do-As-You-Would-Be-Done-By; and because she expected us to be good, we mostly were.

I remember her bringing into class a thick glass tank half-full of straw, from which she enticed a fine toad onto her hand. It had never occurred to me to take a toad onto my hand; but now I was eager to - and did. Spiders, too, I handled happily; and once, a mole. (They don't bite.)

At one time, while I was in the kindergarten, I began, at home, to make a sort of ‘collection' of butterflies. This could not have been more crude or useless. I simply caught the butterflies - cabbage white, peacock, red admiral, painted lady - killed them by pinching off their antennae and heads, and put them loose, all together, in a cardboard shoe-box. One day, when Miss Langdon came to tea, I showed them to her. Without actually saying an unkind word, she succeeded so well in conveying her pity and revulsion that I then and there gave up, and never killed another butterfly.

One day in class she was telling us the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis, Chapter XX). ‘And,' she finished, Abraham was
so
glad that God had said he hadn't got to sacrifice his dear son Isaac after all.' My friend Denis Hodder put up his hand. ‘Yes, Denis?' ‘I bet Isaac was jolly glad, too.' I felt that Miss Langdon - dear, kind Miss Langdon - had rather asked for it.

She was a great stickler for correct, clear, rounded diction on all occasions, whether appropriate or otherwise: my sister, up in the sixth form, once told me how she - Miss Langdon - was directing a school play in which some people had to be shut up in a locked cupboard. They were beating on the door and calling, under Miss Langdon's tutelage, ‘Let - us -
owt
! Let - us -
owt
! This, too, became a family catchword.

Singing we learned, of course: and here I remember one experience which had a great effect on me. One morning I was called up by Miss Binns and given a note to deliver to Miss Luker in her study. This involved walking the whole length of the school while classes were going on. The long corridor was empty and very quiet, but from behind doors and frosted glass walls, as I passed them, came murmurs which showed that lessons were in progress. It was like hearing the Niebelungs working underground: nothing to see, but evidence enough that hundreds of people were close at hand and concentrated.

Suddenly I heard, though from a distance, a louder sound; the sound of singing. As I approached, I could recognize the tune. In the silence filling the school, a class were singing ‘Dashing Away with the Smoothing-Iron'. I stood entranced. It seemed unbelievably beautiful, like the song of angels.

All the brio of the song, its immediacy and delightfully happy melody, hit me as few other musical experiences have ever quite done. I stood and listened entranced. It was all just for me; or that was how it seemed.

‘'Twas on a Thursday morning

And there I saw my darling.

She looked so neat and charming

In every high degree.'
¹

‘Now then, young Richard, what do you think you're doing?' It was Miss Muirhead, the gym. mistress, on her way down the corridor. I hurriedly explained and then I, too, went speedily off.

I said I had no enemies; but perhaps I had a sort of one. Anyway we didn't get on, and I reckon it was mostly my fault. Ruth Hubbard was a hefty little girl, a bit older than I. She was the daughter of our village policeman, and so bitter sometimes was our scrapping that I rather wonder, now, that he didn't step round and have a word with Dr Adams. Small children, of course, always tend to quarrel unless they are restrained; but Ruth and I would often go at it, restrained or not. I discovered that although Ruth was bigger and stronger, with her it was mostly tongue. She didn't punch much. However, the tongue could be mortifying and painful, as I knew from dealings with my big sister. I reacted to Ruth with anger and resentment. Usually it was I who got the reproof from Miss Binns, partly because I deserved it and partly because I was a boy. In those days boys were taught that girls were to be teated with courtesy, looked after and protected. (I hope they still are, but Ah whiles hae ma doots.)

One day our lot were taken out for a nature walk. Miss Binns, not Miss Langdon, was in charge. We went along the Buckingham Road and so to the Enborne Road, with its gravel pits on waste land west of the Grammar School. Here the ground was rough, broken by low mounds of left-over gravel and corresponding pits full of stinging nettles and brambles. Yellowhammers and greenfinches flew up from bushes and yellow-and-black cinnabar moth caterpillars throve on groundsel and ragwort.

It was here that Ruth and I began to quarrel once again. I can't remember what about; only that this time it was unusually bitter. It grew worse and worse, until I lost my temper completely. Reckless what I did, I took a step forward and pushed Ruth. What happened next had been no part of my intention. She staggered backwards, lost her balance, screamed and went over the edge of a pit into the nettles.

I was aghast. It seemed — and perhaps was — the worst thing I had ever done. Whatever would happen? Somehow Ruth scrambled out, sobbing bitterly. There was no fight left in her. Her face was all covered in white lumps, and her arms and knees too. I had never seen such a sight. She was obviously in horrible pain.

And now came something which I still feel to have been unjust. Miss Binns refused to take Ruth's part. ‘It was
your
fault, Ruth,' she said. ‘You started it.' I didn't think she had, but seeing which way the wind was blowing, I kept quiet. So did the others. All the way home poor Ruth was crying and pressing her lumpy face, but Miss Binns remained like flint.

Ashamed, I had no more quarrels with Ruth for a long time.

Yet this episode taught me something else besides. When you think - or even if you feel sure - you're in the wrong, keep quiet. You may be lucky – even inexplicably lucky. If there is a judge and a ruler over you, you're under no moral obligation to blame yourself. The thing will be sorted out and if they blame you, then you can start, if you feel it, admitting wrong. But to
start
by admitting wrong - is wrong. You may not have been. You may have a natural tendency to think yourself in the wrong whether you are or not. Leave it, initially, to the judge, who is detached. (Unless, of course, you have reason to think he isn't.) I'm still sorry for Ruth: I think she was unjustly blamed, and considering her serious pain, unkindly treated (which was unlike Miss Binns). But perhaps I'm still wrong?

Martin Butcher was something else. He gave most of us the willies. No one could make him out. I think he must have been one of the unhappiest people I have ever known. Solitary, subservient and silent, he kept himself apart, even in playtime. He seemed life-defeated: there was no least go in him. Invitations to join in play he would quietly refuse. No one ever knew him to sing. When you could hear him - which wasn't often, for he seldom spoke - he had a low voice and a noticeable Berkshire accent, which put us snobbish little middle-classers off. The quality of his work was poor. At kindergarten level we weren't in competition, but you couldn't help knowing about Martin, from the way Miss Binns would look over his shoulder and say ‘No, not quite like that, Martin,' or again ‘Come along, Martin, don't copy Richard's book any more.' But he was sly and unscrupulous in his efforts to keep out of trouble, and would not only copy your book but, as though desperate, pinch your india-rubber to copy your later corrections. (We worked in pencil, of course.) The flesh-creeping thing about him was that he so obviously hated the whole set-up and was beyond any attempt to fit in or make friends. He lived in another world, where he simply suffered. Lacking all aggression, he had no resort but to keep his head down. We let him. It might, we felt, be Miss Binns's job to try to break the barrier and get him out. It certainly wasn't ours.

One episode I recall about Martin may, I think, throw a swift, momentary shaft into a murky woodshed. One day Miss Binns, going round the form to look at our work, stopped at Martin and said ‘Not coloured, Martin? Where are the crayons you had on Tuesday?' In a low, expressionless voice he replied ‘Dad took ‘em away.' (We didn't refer to our fathers as ‘Dad'.) It was, plainly Miss Binns rather than Martin who felt embarrassed and anxious to end the conversation. What I have never understood - setting other considerations aside - is why, given that Martin's father had presumably agreed to send him to the High School, he should take away his crayons. But Martin's world was beyond guessing or comprehension.

He represented something new to me — something hitherto unexperienced. I suppose all of us – a few consciously but most unconsciously - felt the same. I had never before come up against someone who was openly unhappy all the time, as though that were his natural condition. Martin didn't try to do anything about his unhappiness; he merely endured it; for him it was normality. As a child of six or seven years old I had always, unthinkingly, taken it for granted that happiness was the natural condition of myself and all children - all those whom I knew, anyway. Martin was unhappy as a matter of course. In all actuality he had neither will nor power - so it seemed - to take a step to meet you. In such a case children feel no particular obligation. Faced with something they don't understand, they do their best to ignore it. If Martin had some strange
gestalt
of unhappiness, it was no business of ours to go out of our way to penetrate or mitigate it. The class distinction thing made it worse. Since we didn't fear him, his presence embarrassed and irritated us. We felt no particular pity for this poor creature who had nothing to say to us, whose home was, one could infer, very different from any of ours and who patently disliked his life. But beneath this - to me, at any rate - lay something more frightening. It was possible for a boy - here it was, before your eyes - to be wretched all the time and to have no way out. What
did
he want? What
would
he have liked? No one knew: he didn't know himself. He'd never known anything he liked. This actuality was disturbing and best avoided. However - as will be plain by now – I never, from that day to this, entirely got Martin off my mind. Things ought not to be like that for anybody: but they are. To come up against this — and instinctively to duck - is part of growing up.

Becoming literate was also part of growing up. I can't remember any particular moment when I realized that I could read – read anything I wanted to and read for pleasure. Nor can I recall any particular book as being the first I read. Nevertheless, before I was eight I had become a passionate reader. This was better than having to go to parties and getting into trouble for saying the wrong thing: better than the uncontrollable world of real people and their crushing remarks which often hurt so much more than they can have been meant to. A printed story was predicted. It was there, in the book, and my pleasurable task was simply to follow it, to experience it as though it were real, to seek it out to the end. Poetry was also predicted, but here there was the added delight of memorability. If you read a poem often enough, it stuck in your mind. The sound, the metre and the mood they generated were what came across to me. The meaning — the real meaning — often escaped me: it didn't matter. For example, a poem I discovered for myself and have more or less had on board ever since is Thomas Hardy's ‘Friends Beyond'. The mood - and, unconsciously, the effect of the metre — seemed to me, at that age, kindly and reassuring. These nice, dead people were still around, talking to Thomas Hardy and not in the least frightening. The characteristic Hardyesque irony completely passed me by. But no doubt it would pass by any young child.

Reading was highly reassuring. It was the perfect escape - into other worlds which often seemed more valid and valuable than the real one. And no one found fault with you or blamed you for it: no, they were pleased to see you reading. And the thing that happened in books didn't evanesce, like last Christmas or yesterday's picnic. They stayed put, to become familiar, to be re-experienced as often as you wanted; and as they were dwelt on they grew in grace and power. Jim Hawkins was for ever and ever poised on the cross-trees. ‘One more step, Mr Hands, and I'll blow your brains out!' That stuck all right. Or the Artful Dodger sidled across the road to the exhausted Oliver. ‘Hullo! my covey, what's the row?' (The Dodger's dialogue throughout, culminating in his glorious appearance before the magistrates, has been a resource and solace to me for years. But again, the pathos of the Dodger's braggadocio escapes a child.) The permanence of books and the memorability of dialogue are well up among the most supportive things I have ever found. Becoming literate put me in possession of a new expanse, constituting a better bolt-hole than I could have dreamt of; far better than being behind the bedroom door at the Punch and Judy party. Words, and my own imagination, could open wider prospects and make the world more lucid and vivid - yes, and enjoyable - than I had known to be possible. Years later, when I was grown-up and living in Islington, I was privileged to pass this lot on to a friend, an East End boy. ‘I never knew there
were
such books,' he said to me.