If the child is father of the man, so also is he, or rather is she, the mother of the woman.—Archdeacon Bunting.

The same change in our family fortunes which made it necessary for us to give up the old home at Barstoke made it necessary also for my parents to send me to school. It was only long afterwards that I realized what bitter heart-burnings this decision caused them, or what anxious discussions preceded it. To understand their reluctance, you have to remember that at the time of which I write no privilege of the governing classes was more tenaciously preserved than their exemption from education. The same instinct of struggle which bade the poor keep away from the workhouse bade the rich keep their children from school. My father in particular had often declared that no child of his should undergo the degradation of being taught so long as he could break stones to avoid it. But our case was really desperate; to keep me at home was almost beyond his means, quite apart from the grant of £200 which, on condition that I kept all my terms, would be paid to me annually for my attendance. My mother protested, indeed, that at fifteen I was far too young to be away from home; but in those days the objection did not carry the weight it would carry nowadays: you would still see poor little mites of ten or eleven being packed off to some place of education, with the knowledge that for eight long weeks they would never see their dolls and their toy horses again. Those were stern days, but I sometimes think the discipline was good for our character.

How vividly, especially in childhood, the tragedies we undergo inwardly print on our minds the recollection of the scenes in which we experienced them! I must often have travelled by train before, yet this was the first railway journey of my life which has left me any recollection of it. It took me but two hours to reach the heart of Berkshire (for this was in the days when the railway was still used for quick travel, and the private companies, often in competition with one another, used to run trains at what we should consider breakneck speed), but those two hours seemed to me like a Purgatory. And yet, in a calmer mood, the scenery at which I peered out through the carriage windows would have seemed beautiful enough. As soon as you passed Maidenhead you were in the country; the leaves were just beginning to turn with the autumn along the comfortable, purposeless banks of the full-fed Thames; to give place, once Twyford was reached, to the burning regiments of dahlias and early chrysanthemums that fringed Sutton’s seed-grounds. Only as we slowed down through the smoky suburbs of Didcot did we slacken speed; and then on again into the Downs, with the spell-stricken glamour of their mysterious repose. At Challow I crept out, a woe-begone little figure, on to the platform, and faced the huge effort of daring which I needed to intercept a porter and ask him to take my luggage out—a necessary expense, for of course we used to take our own linen about with us, and our heavy trunks had to be committed to the care of the guard. The porter was a less formidable character than my fears had painted him, and when I had paid up my two shillings wished me “Good afternoon” with the old-world courtesy of the time.

Miss Montrose’s school, for which I was bound, proved to he a pleasant old Georgian building, standing in a park of its own at the foot of the Downs. It was difficult to imagine, even then, that this huge barrack of a place, which had contained some forty rooms even before its enlargement, had ever been utilized for the needs, and staffed by the servants, of a single family! It was now some three times its original size: and yet a school of a hundred girls found it cramped and uncomfortable enough. I was horrified to find, on my arrival, that I should have to share a maid with five other girls, and that my bedroom would be the only sanctum in which I could find privacy. Miss Montrose herself, a prehistoric old lady who still affected the knitted jumper and the bobbed hair of fifteen years earlier, greeted me with a slightly de haut en bas manner—the legacy, I suppose, of the old days of school-mistressing. She was a fine character, and a few years earlier, though then nearly sixty years of age, had gone up to Oxford and taken her degree in book-keeping and dairy-work. It is no small testimony to her strength of character that she was able to manage a school of a hundred girls with only fifteen assistant mistresses to help her. Most of these I found to be pleasant, civil-spoken sort of women, many of whom had embraced school-mistressing as a vocation, although they might have gone far in one of the learned professions.

I always distrust people who say they look back to their school days as the happiest time of their lives: either they must have been unimaginative women from the first, or retrospect has mellowed for them the sour realities of memory. For myself, during the earlier part of my time at any rate, I was profoundly unhappy. Looking back, I think it was chiefly the irritating restraints which were put upon our liberty that annoyed me. No girl, for instance, might go up to London more than twice a term (unless, of course, she was visiting her parents). No girl might enter the public house in the village. No girl might keep a motor-bicycle—and so on. The science of education was then in its infancy, and school authorities did not realize that, in thus fettering the liberties of their young patronesses, they were unfitting them for positions of responsibility later on, and causing the gravest inhibitions in their subconsciousnesses. These regulations were enforced by a system of punishments which would, nowadays, be condemned as brutalizing. In proportion to the magnitude of the offence, the offender used to receive a quarter of an hour’s, or half an hour’s, or an hour’s “talking to” by Miss Montrose herself. She would make you sit down in a comfortable chair while she sat opposite you on a stiff one, and so would lecture you, by the clock, unmercifully. She would point out that the mistresses, who gave their services in the cause of education for nothing or next to nothing, ought to be treated with admiration and respect; that you yourself, since you were taking pay from the country to learn as much as you could, ought to obey the rules of the institution which made this possible for you. If it was a case of insolence towards one of the teachers, she would dwell especially on the “caddishness” (she was of the old school, and did not mince her words) of bullying one’s social inferiors. If the worst came to the worst, she would threaten to report on you as having reached Standard Eight, which would mean that you would have to leave the school as having finished your education. I never knew one of my school-fellows get through one of these interviews without scalding tears. It was not, I believe, till the fifties that anything was done to curb the severity of such punishments.

The lessons themselves, managed on the old high-and-dry lines, were not calculated to arouse any enthusiasm in young minds. Oh, the drudgery of those hours of geography, when we spent our time constructing hills, valleys, and table-lands out of clay in the garden, or made models of the railway systems across the lawn: when, perched on separate islands in the bathing-pool, we had to launch mechanical boats to one another, freighted with the principal exports of the various countries—it is no wonder that, with these methods, the science took little hold on our imaginations! It might win the assent of the brain, but it could find no lodgment in our hearts. Oh, the dreary mornings we spent in weaving baskets, or making artificial flowers, or calculating our winnings at petits chevaux with the mathematical mistress! The truth is, perhaps, that I was too young for these things, and was all the time having to conform to the standard of a class intellectually in advance of my own attainments. My most grateful memories are of the mistress who, four times a week, drew French out of us: and that, I am afraid, not because she attracted us, but because it was an understood thing that in those periods it was safe to “rag” as much as you liked. The lowest French class was taken by a master, the only man employed on the staff, and him we spared in deference to his sex; but Mademoiselle Amboise was fair game for us, and I am afraid the poor woman must have suffered acutely “Ah, Mademoiselle, que je m’ennuie!” we would say to her from time to time, and the poor soul would rush to your side to comfort you. She would carefully teach us the chorus of a song, and then, when she had sung through a verse of eight lines in her beautiful voice, we would either have forgotten the words of the refrain, or intentionally murder the tune of it, and the whole process had to be begun again. Or she would deliver the whole of the opening soliloquy in some old-world play of Rostand’s, and then look round for the new characters to come in, only to find that we had all played truant and run off into the country, leaving one girl in the seats of the little theatre (Mademoiselle was very short-sighted) to do the applause all by herself! I remember one girl affecting to have lost her memory, so as to be unable to speak a word of French, and our delight when Mademoiselle Amboise, breaking the strict rule against talking English in French class, burst out, “Ah, Miss ——, you are little pig!”

But there are more grateful memories, too, of those all-too-rare half-holiday afternoons (Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, as far as I remember) when we would make off to the old haystack and smoke there, as I suppose schoolgirls always have and always will, and talk of what we would do when we were women: or take car into Didcot for a good “blow-out” and an evening at the pictures: or the rainy days, when one “class-room” would invade another, and leave behind it a confused wreckage of Greek statues, glass cases, and electric light globes. There were the football matches too: it is hard for me, now, to believe that I was once a promising half-back! We played the old “Association” game, of course: as yet very few girls’ schools had taken up Rugby. I suppose I have never experienced, in a long life, such a protracted thrill of excitement as when I played, in my third year, in the great match against Radley, and the fortunes of the game hung in the balance for a full half-hour. Summer has less poignant athletic memories for me, I suppose because we still played cricket for the most part, and could do little to improve our game at tennis with only five covered courts.

When I was going through my dear mother’s things after her death in ’59 I came across a whole bundle of my old school letters in one of her desks. It was pathetic to see how carefully she had treasured them, arranged them, tied them up in ribbon of different colours according to the year they were written in. The old, blue-black ink we used then has stood the test of time far better than most modern documents will. There is little about the letters that is of general interest; they are just an expression of the aims and interests, the hopes and the solicitudes, of girlhood just turning to womanhood; hopes how buoyantly eager! Solicitudes how lightly borne! I print one of them here, written towards the end of my first year at school, in the hope that, if nothing else about it arrests attention, the prim, stately language of fifteen-years-old in those days will call for a smile or for a blush, which you will, from the precocious, slangy young misses of to-day.

Hope you didn’t think I was dead, not hearing from me all these three weeks: fact is, I’ve been abso-jolly-lutely full programme just lately with these theatricals coming on. They are going to be some effort, I can tell you. All the chaps say the scene where I come in drunk is like nothing on earth. But I shan’t spoil it for you beforehand; you are coming down, aren’t you? Don’t bring Dad if you think the old thing will be shocked; he is so mid-Edwardian about some things. We beat the London Hospital nurses by nearly an innings last Saturday: they were feeling frightfully bucked with themselves, too, when they came down, because they hadn’t lost a match this season. You should see Woollcombe, our leg-break bowler! She simply made rings round them. I was top last week in gardening, which was one in the eye for old Monty, because she’d got her rag out with me rather, as she said I was wasting my time and the country’s money—such bilge! Only three more blinking weeks now to the hol.’s;—oh, I say, could you write to Monty and say it’s very important I should come home two days early? Because I simply must go to the Rothwells’. They don’t mind your going home early much, really, even if it does mean missing one or two of these filthy exams, which are the limit anyhow. A new music master has just turned up, with top-hole eyes: remind me to show him you when you come down. I was wondering if perhaps you could let me have a little more money? Because there’s two of the chaps I must, simply must buy birthday presents for, and heaps of incidental expenses, and it’s a fact I haven’t a five-bob note to bless myself with. But not if it’s going to mean a row with the old bread-winner. Lots of love.

My holidays were chiefly spent at home, and indeed I could have asked nothing better. Few families, with our moderate income, can have enjoyed the proximity of London combined with the neighbourhood of such romantic scenery. Our house, I have said, faced on the fourth tee; and from the front windows the view stretched away, uninterrupted except by occasional bunkers, till on a clear day you could distinguish the flag on the seventh green. I saw little in those days of my father, who believed with Hector that home was the proper sphere of woman; for himself, he was out early and late in all weathers: a business interview would sometimes take him up to London, otherwise nothing disturbed the noiseless tenor of his daily habits. If there was a championship match on, we would hear all about it in the evening; for the rest, we knew that he did not care to be cross-questioned about the little incidents of the day. Yet, for all his silence, there was no mistaking the fire of the enthusiast burning in his eye. Nothing could daunt his tireless energy, though he was already a man of over fifty. I can still picture him as he was then, a fine, upstanding figure in his wide, loose knickerbockers and a coat that seemed full of extra seams and double linings; a trifle portly, yet carrying himself with a sort of natural swing. We have all too few of his type nowadays!

If my father was a type of manliness, my mother seemed and seems to me a perfect type of womanliness. The hundred little domestic duties of the day—in those days, the mistress of the house would order the dinner, go through the books, supervise the work of the servants, and altogether behave as a sort of unpaid agent—would occupy her till eleven or half-past eleven in the morning: only then would she put her season ticket in her reticule and set out for the mystery of the shops and the repose of her club. If an exhibition, a call, or a matinÉe was likely to detain her, she would leave word that she was not to be expected back till after tea, and the routine of the household would proceed as usual in her absence. She never came back from these expeditions without a catalogue for me, an evening paper for my father—some little token to assure us that her thoughts had been with us during the hours of enforced separation. Alas, how old age makes us realize the little return we made in youth for the loving solicitude of our parents! I often used to see little or nothing of her for a week, since my doctor wisely insisted that I should always have breakfast in bed after a dance. And dance I did, I am afraid, almost every night, if only to compensate myself for the early hours and rigorous discipline of the school, where half-past ten saw us at work every morning, and, on whole school days, preparation would not be over till half-past six. I was, I think I may say, a good dancer; not that I ever had much ear for music or sense of rhythm, but my athletic, I had almost said, my acrobatic, gifts stood me in good stead. I will not attempt to recall, so old-fashioned do they seem nowadays, the movements that were popular when I was a girl. What has become of you all now, my partners in those distant Georgian drawing-rooms? If you still live, do you still remember as I remember the measures we trod, then so riotous-seeming? The Monkey-grip, the Kansas scramble, the “Mind your foot, honey,” the Snake-glide, the Anyhow-slither, the Buzz, the Rattle-snake Fight, the Darkies’ Stagger, and all the rest of them?

—or does nothing really desert us, except our dreams?

But what is this? I am becoming sentimental. Let me return to the grim shades of my prison, the dull days of school routine. I had an open, sunny temperament, and made friendship easily; some, as I suppose is usual at that age, seemed at the time as if they could end only with life. And yet, how little effect really our school friendships have on us! Ten years after we have left, we meet the bosom friends of girlhood as strangers. Some of them, of course, have married: and with them, try as they may to conceal it, it is hard not to feel that their husbands have just a suspicion of jealousy against their wives’ woman friends. But even with the others,

perhaps, after all, it is best so: for neither our critical faculties nor our sense of humour are at their best in those early years. My chief crony was a wild, devil-may-care Irish girl whom we called “Squint” Hennessy, who led me into plenty of scrapes and more than once brought me under the threat of “Standard Eight.” One of these escapades cost me, I think, the most anxious night of my life.

Our religious needs, when we had any, were served by a little old village church a mile or two away, at Goosey. How well I remember the atmosphere of the Sunday evening service there, the smell of Sunday clothes and old books and old, dusty hassocks; the painstaking harmonium, waking up like an old gentleman from a nap when we sang Glory be at the end of the Psalms, the clatter of the bell-ringers as they filed up into church at the beginning of service! It was an old church, and is still visited by tourists, I believe, for the sake of some really fine 1850 stained glass. But it will have changed with time: in those days it had more the appearance we should associate with a Catholic Church now—the seats, for example, were all on the same level, and the pulpit was fixed, close to one of the side walls; the sermons were delivered by word of mouth; the old, sonorous English of Cranmer was still droned out almost in its entirety, with something of a ceremonial effect; the congregation knelt for the prayers, or at least sat apologetically, head buried in hands. We did not, I need hardly say, appreciate this atmosphere at the time, and seldom went near the place—compulsory attendance was only inflicted as a punishment on those who had an unusually dark record of rule-breaking during the week. But quite recently the Diocesan Board of Finance (the Reading diocese was always a go-ahead one) had introduced the system by which, while town congregations contributed to an offertory at the end of the service, country congregations, as being attracted to Church with more difficulty, received a slight honorarium instead, in return for their attendance. “Those that were strong,” as the Archbishop of York said, “ought to bear the infirmities of those that were weak.” Late on in the term, when our pocket-money was mostly exhausted, a fair sprinkling of Biston Hall girls would be in their places to secure the coveted sixpence after the sermon.

It was on such an occasion that Squint Hennessy and I were making our way back from Church on a summer evening, feeling particularly good after a stirring address from the curate, a favourite of ours. At peace with the world, we each lit a “Woodbine” to light us and cheer us on our way home. By ill-luck Miss Mersham, the numismatics mistress, met us half-way, and threatened to report us if we did not put out our cigarettes immediately. Squint was at the top of her form that evening: “report if you like, Golly,” she said, “but we’ll make you repent of it if you do.” Miss Mersham was ill-advised enough to lay information against us, and each of us had a quarter of an hour’s “talking to”: special emphasis was laid, I remember, on the crime of setting a bad example to our mistresses. We wept floods of tears, and for the next three days did everything to make the informant’s life intolerable to her. We brought frogs into class, put lamp-black on to her duster, squirted her with water-pistols—in a word, we behaved as high-spirited girls will behave when they are smarting under a sense of injustice. Finally, I remember, we put a large bust of Artemis in her bed. The next day she seemed curiously silent, and when we came out of preparation at half-past six the terrible rumour went round—Miss Mersham had run away!

It was a memorable night when the whole school wandered over the Downs, till nearly two in the morning, searching for the truant mistress. Squint and I in particular were inconsolable; our action had been merely thoughtless, and neither of us had really felt vindictive: it terrified us to think that our victim was now running the risk of expulsion as the result of our heedless behaviour. She was, in the end, caught by a porter at Swindon, and sent back to Biston Hall; and we all cheered lustily when Miss Montrose announced her intention, after considering the circumstances carefully, of retaining her on the staff. She became one of our most popular mistresses, and did so well that, three years later, she was enabled to leave the profession altogether.

I do not know what became of Squint: some of my other friends I have managed to keep up with, at least by correspondence. “Fatty” Macdonald became manager of a bank in Sheffield; Tulip Hawkesley went on to the stage as Yvette Dombrowski; Wynefryde Banks married well and went into her father-in-law’s business; Jane Palliser, our star goal-keeper, was later captain of a P. & O. “liner.” But no one fulfilled her early promise like Juliet Savage, once well-known as the editress of the Spectator in the fifties. It was with me that she undertook her first journalistic venture, the Bilston Hall Rocket, which ran into four numbers and attracted a good deal of attention among our fellow-pupils. I have still the old copies by me; the List of Contents from a single issue will give some idea of its character:

THE BISTON HALL ROCKET
(and Challow Chronicle, Goosey Gospeller, etc., etc., etc.)
CONTENTS
	Page
Lines written in Prep.	1
My old Kentucky Girl (Poem), by E.W.	2
The Adventure of Bloodgush Grange (continued)	2
How to get Marks, by One who knows	4
Golly and the Gondola (Anonymous)	5
Spanking Sarah, the Cow-girl of Arizona, by P. F.	5
Football Notes, by Half-back	7
The Pool of Solitude (Poem), by F. F. W.	10
Things we don’t half want to know, by the Editress	10
Blue-face, my Squaw (Song), by R. E. H.	11
Paris at Night, by Wanderer	11
Go, lovely Montrose (Parody), Anonymous	13
The Great Bilston Hall Film	13
How I mean to spend the Hol’s, by Naughty Nan	15
Correspondence	15
Puzzles	16

We wrote the paper merely for fun, and as a way of getting our own back against some of the mistresses who had been unlucky enough to offend us. Judge of our surprise, both Juliet Savage’s and my own, when we were told that the literary promise we displayed had been judged so considerable as to induce the School Governors to send up copies of the Rocket as a “thesis” for the St. Lucy’s Hall scholarships! Scholarships were awarded to both of us; and I was now in the happy position of being able to spend four years at Oxford, while contributing a clear £200 a year to the support of my parents. I left Bilston Hall in the summer of 1934, not with much regret: I had had happy times there, but I ached for more liberty and a wider sphere of activity, and I felt that I had been greatly misunderstood there. I have never seen it since.