A Clergyman's Daughter Page 23

interest of her life. There are two kinds of avaricious person--

  the bold, grasping type who will ruin you if he can, but who never

  looks twice at twopence, and the petty miser who has not the

  enterprise actually to MAKE money, but who will always, as the

  saying goes, take a farthing from a dunghill with his teeth. Mrs

  Creevy belonged to the second type. By ceaseless canvassing and

  impudent bluff she had worked her school up to twenty-one pupils,

  but she would never get it much further, because she was too mean

  to spend money on the necessary equipment and to pay proper wages

  to her assistant. The fees the girls paid, or didn't pay, were

  five guineas a term with certain extras, so that, starve and sweat

  her assistant as she might, she could hardly hope to make more than

  a hundred and fifty pounds a year clear profit. But she was fairly

  satisfied with that. It meant more to her to save sixpence than to

  earn a pound. So long as she could think of a way of docking

  Dorothy's dinner of another potato, or getting her exercise books a

  halfpenny a dozen cheaper, or shoving an unauthorized half guinea

  on to one of the 'good payers'' bills, she was happy after her

  fashion.

  And again, in pure, purposeless malignity--in petty acts of spite,

  even when there was nothing to be gained by them--she had a hobby

  of which she never wearied. She was one of those people who

  experience a kind of spiritual orgasm when they manage to do

  somebody else a bad turn. Her feud with Mr Boulger next door--a

  one-sided affair, really, for poor Mr Boulger was not up to Mrs

  Creevy's fighting weight--was conducted ruthlessly, with no quarter

  given or expected. So keen was Mrs Creevy's pleasure in scoring

  off Mr Boulger that she was even willing to spend money on it

  occasionally. A year ago Mr Boulger had written to the landlord

  (each of them was for ever writing to the landlord, complaining

  about the other's behaviour), to say that Mrs Creevy's kitchen

  chimney smoked into his back windows, and would she please have it

  heightened two feet. The very day the landlord's letter reached

  her, Mrs Creevy called in the bricklayers and had the chimney

  lowered two feet. It cost her thirty shillings, but it was worth

  it. After that there had been the long guerrilla campaign of

  throwing things over the garden wall during the night, and Mrs

  Creevy had finally won with a dustbinful of wet ashes thrown on to

  Mr Boulger's bed of tulips. As it happened, Mrs Creevy won a neat

  and bloodless victory soon after Dorothy's arrival. Discovering by

  chance that the roots of Mr Boulger's plum tree had grown under the

  wall into her own garden, she promptly injected a whole tin of

  weed-killer into them and killed the tree. This was remarkable as

  being the only occasion when Dorothy ever heard Mrs Creevy laugh.

  But Dorothy was too busy, at first, to pay much attention to Mrs

  Creevy and her nasty characteristics. She saw quite clearly that

  Mrs Creevy was an odious woman and that her own position was

  virtually that of a slave; but it did not greatly worry her. Her

  work was too absorbing, too all-important. In comparison with it,

  her own comfort and even her future hardly seemed to matter.

  It did not take her more than a couple of days to get her class

  into running order. It was curious, but though she had no

  experience of teaching and no preconceived theories about it, yet

  from the very first day she found herself, as though by instinct,

  rearranging, scheming, innovating. There was so much that was

  crying out to be done. The first thing, obviously, was to get rid

  of the grisly routine of 'copies', and after Dorothy's second day

  no more 'copies' were done in the class, in spite of a sniff or two

  from Mrs Creevy. The handwriting lessons, also, were cut down.

  Dorothy would have liked to do away with handwriting lessons

  altogether so far as the older girls were concerned--it seemed to

  her ridiculous that girls of fifteen should waste time in practising

  copperplate--but Mrs Creevy would not hear of it. She seemed to

  attach an almost superstitious value to handwriting lessons. And

  the next thing, of course, was to scrap the repulsive Hundred Page

  History and the preposterous little 'readers'. It would have been

  worse than useless to ask Mrs Creevy to buy new books for the

  children, but on her first Saturday afternoon Dorothy begged leave

  to go up to London, was grudgingly given it, and spent two pounds

  three shillings out of her precious four pounds ten on a dozen

  secondhand copies of a cheap school edition of Shakespeare, a big

  second-hand atlas, some volumes of Hans Andersen's stories for the

  younger children, a set of geometrical instruments, and two pounds

  of plasticine. With these, and history books out of the public

  library, she felt that she could make a start.

  She had seen at a glance that what the children most needed, and

  what they had never had, was individual attention. So she began by

  dividing them up into three separate classes, and so arranging

  things that two lots could be working by themselves while she 'went

  through' something with the third. It was difficult at first,

  especially with the younger girls, whose attention wandered as soon

  as they were left to themselves, so that you could never really

  take your eyes off them. And yet how wonderfully, how unexpectedly,

  nearly all of them improved during those first few weeks! For the

  most part they were not really stupid, only dazed by a dull,

  mechanical rigmarole. For a week, perhaps, they continued

  unteachable; and then, quite suddenly, their warped little minds

  seemed to spring up and expand like daisies when you move the

  garden roller off them.

  Quite quickly and easily Dorothy broke them in to the habit of

  thinking for themselves. She got them to make up essays out of

  their own heads instead of copying out drivel about the birds

  chanting on the boughs and the flowerets bursting from their buds.

  She attacked their arithmetic at the foundations and started the

  little girls on multiplication and piloted the older ones through

  long division to fractions; she even got three of them to the point

  where there was talk of starting on decimals. She taught them the

  first rudiments of French grammar in place of 'Passez-moi le

  beurre, s'il vous plait' and 'Le fils du jardinier a perdu son

  chapeau'. Finding that not a girl in the class knew what any of

  the countries of the world looked like (though several of them knew

  that Quito was the capital of Ecuador), she set them to making a

  large contour-map of Europe in plasticine, on a piece of three-ply

  wood, copying it in scale from the atlas. The children adored

  making the map; they were always clamouring to be allowed to go on

  with it. And she started the whole class, except the six youngest

  girls and Mavis Williams, the pothook specialist, on reading

  Macbeth. Not a child among them had ever voluntarily read anything

  in her life before, except perhaps
the Girl's Own Paper; but they

  took readily to Shakespeare, as all children do when he is not made

  horrible with parsing and analysing.

  History was the hardest thing to teach them. Dorothy had not

  realized till now how hard it is for children who come from poor

  homes to have even a conception of what history means. Every

  upper-class person, however ill-informed, grows up with some notion

  of history; he can visualize a Roman centurion, a medieval knight,

  an eighteenth-century nobleman; the terms Antiquity, Middle Ages,

  Renaissance, Industrial Revolution evoke some meaning, even if a

  confused one, in his mind. But these children came from bookless

  homes and from parents who would have laughed at the notion that

  the past has any meaning for the present. They had never heard of

  Robin Hood, never played at being Cavaliers and Roundheads, never

  wondered who built the English churches or what Fid. Def. on a

  penny stands for. There were just two historical characters of

  whom all of them, almost without exception, had heard, and those

  were Columbus and Napoleon. Heaven knows why--perhaps Columbus and

  Napoleon get into the newspapers a little oftener than most

  historical characters. They seemed to have swelled up in the

  children's minds, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, till they blocked

  out the whole landscape of the past. Asked when motor-cars were

  invented, one child, aged ten, vaguely hazarded, 'About a thousand

  years ago, by Columbus.'

  Some of the older girls, Dorothy discovered, had been through the

  Hundred Page History as many as four times, from Boadicea to the

  first Jubilee, and forgotten practically every word of it. Not

  that that mattered greatly, for most of it was lies. She started

  the whole class over again at Julius Caesar's invasion, and at

  first she tried taking history books out of the public library and

  reading them aloud to the children; but that method failed, because

  they could understand nothing that was not explained to them in

  words of one or two syllables. So she did what she could in her

  own words and with her own inadequate knowledge, making a sort of

  paraphrase of what she read and delivering it to the children;

  striving all the while to drive into their dull little minds some

  picture of the past, and what was always more difficult, some

  interest in it. But one day a brilliant idea struck her. She

  bought a roll of cheap plain wallpaper at an upholsterer's shop,

  and set the children to making an historical chart. They marked

  the roll of paper into centuries and years, and stuck scraps that

  they cut out of illustrated papers--pictures of knights in armour

  and Spanish galleons and printing-presses and railway trains--at

  the appropriate places. Pinned round the walls of the room, the

  chart presented, as the scraps grew in number, a sort of panorama

  of English history. The children were even fonder of the chart

  than of the contour map. They always, Dorothy found, showed more

  intelligence when it was a question of MAKING something instead of

  merely learning. There was even talk of making a contour map of

  the world, four feet by four, in papiermache, if Dorothy could 'get

  round' Mrs Creevy to allow the preparation of the papiermache--a

  messy process needing buckets of water.

  Mrs Creevy watched Dorothy's innovations with a jealous eye, but

  she did not interfere actively at first. She was not going to show

  it, of course, but she was secretly amazed and delighted to find

  that she had got hold of an assistant who was actually willing to

  work. When she saw Dorothy spending her own money on textbooks for

  the children, it gave her the same delicious sensation that she

  would have had in bringing off a successful swindle. She did,

  however, sniff and grumble at everything that Dorothy did, and she

  wasted a great deal of time by insisting on what she called

  'thorough correction' of the girls' exercise books. But her system

  of correction, like everything else in the school curriculum, was

  arranged with one eye on the parents. Periodically the children

  took their books home for their parents' inspection, and Mrs Creevy

  would never allow anything disparaging to be written in them.

  Nothing was to be marked 'bad' or crossed out or too heavily

  underlined; instead, in the evenings, Dorothy decorated the books,

  under Mrs Creevy's dictation, with more or less applauding comments

  in red ink. 'A very creditable performance', and 'Excellent! You

  are making great strides. Keep it up!' were Mrs Creevy's favourites.

  All the children in the school, apparently, were for ever 'making

  great strides'; in what direction they were striding was not stated.

  The parents, however, seemed willing to swallow an almost unlimited

  amount of this kind of thing.

  There were times, of course, when Dorothy had trouble with the

  girls themselves. The fact that they were all of different ages

  made them difficult to deal with, and though they were fond of her

  and were very 'good' with her at first, they would not have been

  children at all if they had been invariably 'good'. Sometimes they

  were lazy and sometimes they succumbed to that most damnable vice

  of schoolgirls--giggling. For the first few days Dorothy was

  greatly exercised over little Mavis Williams, who was stupider than

  one would have believed it possible for any child of eleven to be.

  Dorothy could do nothing with her at all. At the first attempt to

  get her to do anything beyond pothooks a look of almost subhuman

  blankness would come into her wide-set eyes. Sometimes, however,

  she had talkative fits in which she would ask the most amazing and

  unanswerable questions. For instance, she would open her 'reader',

  find one of the illustrations--the sagacious Elephant, perhaps--and

  ask Dorothy:

  'Please, Miss, wass 'at thing there?' (She mispronounced her words

  in a curious manner.)

  'That's an elephant, Mavis.'

  'Wass a elephant?'

  'An elephant's a kind of wild animal.'

  'Wass a animal?'

  'Well--a dog's an animal.'

  'Wass a dog?'

  And so on, more or less indefinitely. About half-way through the

  fourth morning Mavis held up her hand and said with a sly

  politeness that ought to have put Dorothy on her guard:

  'Please, Miss, may I be 'scused?'

  'Yes,' said Dorothy.

  One of the bigger girls put up her hand, blushed, and put her hand

  down again as though too bashful to speak. On being prompted by

  Dorothy, she said shamefacedly:

  'Please, Miss, Miss Strong didn't used to let Mavis go to the

  lavatory alone. She locks herself in and won't come out, and then

  Mrs Creevy gets angry, Miss.'

  Dorothy dispatched a messenger, but it was too late. Mavis

  remained in latebra pudenda till twelve o'clock. Afterwards, Mrs

  Creevy explained privately to Dorothy that Mavis was a congenital

  idiot--or, as she put it, 'not right in the head'. It was totally

  impossible to teach her anything.
Of course, Mrs Creevy didn't

  'let on' to Mavis's parents, who believed that their child was only

  'backward' and paid their fees regularly. Mavis was quite easy to

  deal with. You just had to give her a book and a pencil and tell

  her to draw pictures and be quiet. But Mavis, a child of habit,

  drew nothing but pothooks--remaining quiet and apparently happy for

  hours together, with her tongue hanging out, amid festoons of

  pothooks.

  But in spite of these minor difficulties, how well everything went

  during those first few weeks! How ominously well, indeed! About

  the tenth of November, after much grumbling about the price of

  coal, Mrs Creevy started to allow a fire in the schoolroom. The

  children's wits brightened noticeably when the room was decently

  warm. And there were happy hours, sometimes, when the fire

  crackled in the grate, and Mrs Creevy was out of the house, and the

  children were working quietly and absorbedly at one of the lessons

  that were their favourites. Best of all was when the two top

  classes were reading Macbeth, the girls squeaking breathlessly

  through the scenes, and Dorothy pulling them up to make them

  pronounce the words properly and to tell them who Bellona's

  bridegroom was and how witches rode on broomsticks; and the girls

  wanting to know, almost as excitedly as though it had been a

  detective story, how Birnam Wood could possible come to Dunsinane

  and Macbeth be killed by a man who was not of woman born. Those

  are the times that make teaching worth while--the times when the

  children's enthusiasm leaps up, like an answering flame, to meet

  your own, and sudden unlooked-for gleams of intelligence reward

  your earlier drudgery. No job is more fascinating than teaching if

  you have a free hand at it. Nor did Dorothy know, as yet, that

  that 'if' is one of the biggest 'ifs' in the world.

  Her job suited her, and she was happy in it. She knew the minds

  of the children intimately by this time, knew their individual

  peculiarities and the special stimulants that were needed before

  you could get them to think. She was more fond of them, more

  interested in their development, more anxious to do her best for

  them, than she would have conceived possible a short while ago.

  The complex, never-ended labour of teaching filled her life just as

  the round of parish jobs had filled it at home. She thought and

  dreamed of teaching; she took books out of the public library and

  studied theories of education. She felt that quite willingly she

  would go on teaching all her life, even at ten shillings a week and

  her keep, if it could always be like this. It was her vocation,

  she thought.

  Almost any job that fully occupied her would have been a relief

  after the horrible futility of the time of her destitution. But

  this was more than a mere job; it was--so it seemed to her--a

  mission, a life-purpose. Trying to awaken the dulled minds of

  these children, trying to undo the swindle that had been worked

  upon them in the name of education--that, surely, was something to

  which she could give herself heart and soul? So for the time

  being, in the interest of her work, she disregarded the beastliness

  of living in Mrs Creevy's house, and quite forgot her strange,

  anomalous position and the uncertainty of her future.

  4

  But of course, it could not last.

  Not many weeks had gone by before the parents began interfering

  with Dorothy's programme of work. That--trouble with the parents--

  is part of the regular routine of life in a private school. All

  parents are tiresome from a teacher's point of view, and the

  parents of children at fourth-rate private schools are utterly

  impossible. On the one hand, they have only the dimmest idea of

  what is meant by education; on the other hand, they look on

  'schooling' exactly as they look on a butcher's bill or a grocer's

  bill, and are perpetually suspicious that they are being cheated.

  They bombard the teacher with ill-written notes making impossible