A Clergyman's Daughter Page 25

  'Yes. And plenty of arithmetic as well. The parents are very keen

  on arithmetic: especially money-sums. Keep your eye on the parents

  all the time. If you meet one of them in the street, get hold of

  them and start talking to them about their own girl. Make out that

  she's the best girl in the class and that if she stays just three

  terms longer she'll be working wonders. You see what I mean?

  Don't go and tell them there's no room for improvement; because if

  you tell them THAT, they generally take their girls away. Just

  three terms longer--that's the thing to tell them. And when you

  make out the end of term reports, just you bring them to me and let

  me have a good look at them. I like to do the marking myself.'

  Mrs Creevy's eye met Dorothy's. She had perhaps been about to say

  that she always arranged the marks so that every girl came out

  somewhere near the top of the class; but she refrained. Dorothy

  could not answer for a moment. Outwardly she was subdued, and very

  pale, but in her heart were anger and deadly repulsion against

  which she had to struggle before she could speak. She had no

  thought, however, of contradicting Mrs Creevy. The 'talking to'

  had quite broken her spirit. She mastered her voice, and said:

  'I'm to teach nothing but handwriting and arithmetic--is that it?'

  'Well, I didn't say that exactly. There's plenty of other subjects

  that look well on the prospectus. French, for instance--French

  looks VERY well on the prospectus. But it's not a subject you want

  to waste much time over. Don't go filling them up with a lot of

  grammar and syntax and verbs and all that. That kind of stuff

  doesn't get them anywhere so far as _I_ can see. Give them a bit

  of "Parley vous Francey", and "Passey moi le beurre", and so forth;

  that's a lot more use than grammar. And then there's Latin--I

  always put Latin on the prospectus. But I don't suppose you're

  very great on Latin, are you?'

  'No,' admitted Dorothy.

  'Well, it doesn't matter. You won't have to teach it. None of OUR

  parents'd want their children to waste time over Latin. But they

  like to see it on the prospectus. It looks classy. Of course

  there's a whole lot of subjects that we can't actually teach, but

  we have to advertise them all the same. Book-keeping and typing

  and shorthand, for instance; besides music and dancing. It all

  looks well on the prospectus.'

  'Arithmetic, handwriting, French--is there anything else?' Dorothy

  said.

  'Oh, well, history and geography and English Literature, of course.

  But just drop that map-making business at once--it's nothing but

  waste of time. The best geography to teach is lists of capitals.

  Get them so that they can rattle off the capitals of all the

  English counties as if it was the multiplication table. Then

  they've got something to show for what they've learnt, anyway. And

  as for history, keep on with the Hundred Page History of Britain.

  I won't have them taught out of those big history books you keep

  bringing home from the library. I opened one of those books the

  other day, and the first thing I saw was a piece where it said the

  English had been beaten in some battle or other. There's a nice

  thing to go teaching children! The parents won't stand for THAT

  kind of thing, I can tell you!'

  'And Literature?' said Dorothy.

  'Well, of course they've got to do a bit of reading, and I can't

  think why you wanted to turn up your nose at those nice little

  readers of ours. Keep on with the readers. They're a bit old, but

  they're quite good enough for a pack of children, I should have

  thought. And I suppose they might as well learn a few pieces of

  poetry by heart. Some of the parents like to hear their children

  say a piece of poetry. "The Boy stood on the Burning Deck"--that's

  a very good piece--and then there's "The Wreck of the Steamer"--

  now, what was that ship called? "The Wreck of the Steamer

  Hesperus". A little poetry doesn't hurt now and again. But don't

  let's have any more SHAKESPEARE, please!'

  Dorothy got no tea that day. It was now long past tea-time, but

  when Mrs Creevy had finished her harangue she sent Dorothy away

  without saying anything about tea. Perhaps this was a little extra

  punishment for l'affaire Macbeth.

  Dorothy had not asked permission to go out, but she did not feel

  that she could stay in the house any longer. She got her hat and

  coat and set out down the ill-lit road, for the public library. It

  was late into November. Though the day had been damp the night

  wind blew sharply, like a threat, through the almost naked trees,

  making the gas-lamps flicker in spite of their glass chimneys, and

  stirring the sodden plane leaves that littered the pavement.

  Dorothy shivered slightly. The raw wind sent through her a bone-

  deep memory of the cold of Trafalgar Square. And though she did

  not actually think that if she lost her job it would mean going

  back to the sub-world from which she had come--indeed, it was not

  so desperate as that; at the worst her cousin or somebody else

  would help her--still, Mrs Creevy's 'talking to' had made Trafalgar

  Square seem suddenly very much nearer. It had driven into her a

  far deeper understanding than she had had before of the great

  modern commandment--the eleventh commandment which has wiped out

  all the others: 'Thou shalt not lose thy job.'

  But as to what Mrs Creevy had said about 'practical school-

  teaching', it had been no more than a realistic facing of the

  facts. She had merely said aloud what most people in her position

  think but never say. Her oft-repeated phrase, 'It's the fees I'm

  after', was a motto that might be--indeed, ought to be--written

  over the doors of every private school in England.

  There are, by the way, vast numbers of private schools in England.

  Second-rate, third-rate, and fourth-rate (Ringwood House was a

  specimen of the fourth-rate school), they exist by the dozen and

  the score in every London suburb and every provincial town. At

  any given moment there are somewhere in the neighbourhood of ten

  thousand of them, of which less than a thousand are subject to

  Government inspection. And though some of them are better than

  others, and a certain number, probably, are better than the council

  schools with which they compete, there is the same fundamental evil

  in all of them; that is, that they have ultimately no purpose

  except to make money. Often, except that there is nothing illegal

  about them, they are started in exactly the same spirit as one

  would start a brothel or a bucket shop. Some snuffy little man of

  business (it is quite usual for these schools to be owned by people

  who don't teach themselves) says one morning to his wife:

  'Emma, I got a notion! What you say to us two keeping school, eh?

  There's plenty of cash in a school, you know, and there ain't the

  same work in it as what there is in a shop or a pub. Besides, you

  don't risk nothing; no over'ead to worr
y about, 'cept jest your

  rent and few desks and a blackboard. But we'll do it in style.

  Get in one of these Oxford and Cambridge chaps as is out of a job

  and'll come cheap, and dress 'im up in a gown and--what do they

  call them little square 'ats with tassels on top? That 'ud fetch

  the parents, eh? You jest keep your eyes open and see if you can't

  pick on a good district where there's not too many on the same game

  already.'

  He chooses a situation in one of those middle-class districts where

  the people are too poor to afford the fees of a decent school and

  too proud to send their children to the council schools, and 'sets

  up'. By degrees he works up a connexion in very much the same

  manner as a milkman or a greengrocer, and if he is astute and

  tactful and has not too many competitors, he makes his few hundreds

  a year out of it.

  Of course, these schools are not all alike. Not every principal is

  a grasping low-minded shrew like Mrs Creevy, and there are plenty

  of schools where the atmosphere is kindly and decent and the

  teaching is as good as one could reasonably expect for fees of five

  pounds a term. On the other hand, some of them are crying

  scandals. Later on, when Dorothy got to know one of the teachers

  at another private school in Southbridge, she heard tales of

  schools that were worse by far than Ringwood House. She heard of a

  cheap boarding-school where travelling actors dumped their children

  as one dumps luggage in a railway cloakroom, and where the children

  simply vegetated, doing absolutely nothing, reaching the age of

  sixteen without learning to read; and another school where the days

  passed in a perpetual riot, with a broken-down old hack of a master

  chasing the boys up and down and slashing at them with a cane, and

  then suddenly collapsing and weeping with his head on a desk, while

  the boys laughed at him. So long as schools are run primarily for

  money, things like this will happen. The expensive private schools

  to which the rich send their children are not, on the surface, so

  bad as the others, because they can afford a proper staff, and the

  Public School examination system keeps them up to the mark; but

  they have the same essential taint.

  It was only later, and by degrees, that Dorothy discovered these

  facts about private schools. At first, she used to suffer from an

  absurd fear that one day the school inspectors would descend upon

  Ringwood House, find out what a sham and a swindle it all was, and

  raise the dust accordingly. Later on, however, she learned that

  this could never happen. Ringwood House was not 'recognized', and

  therefore was not liable to be inspected. One day a Government

  inspector did, indeed, visit the school, but beyond measuring the

  dimensions of the schoolroom to see whether each girl had her right

  number of cubic feet of air, he did nothing; he had no power to do

  more. Only the tiny minority of 'recognized' schools--less than

  one in ten--are officially tested to decide whether they keep up a

  reasonable educational standard. As for the others, they are free

  to teach or not teach exactly as they choose. No one controls or

  inspects them except the children's parents--the blind leading the

  blind.

  5

  Next day Dorothy began altering her programme in accordance with

  Mrs Creevy's orders. The first lesson of the day was handwriting,

  and the second was geography.

  'That'll do, girls,' said Dorothy as the funereal clock struck ten.

  'We'll start our geography lesson now.'

  The girls flung their desks open and put their hated copybooks away

  with audible sighs of relief. There were murmurs of 'Oo, jography!

  Good!' It was one of their favourite lessons. The two girls who

  were 'monitors' for the week, and whose job it was to clean the

  blackboard, collect exercise books and so forth (children will

  fight for the privilege of doing jobs of that kind), leapt from

  their places to fetch the half-finished contour map that stood

  against the wall. But Dorothy stopped them.

  'Wait a moment. Sit down, you two. We aren't going to go on with

  the map this morning.'

  There was a cry of dismay. 'Oh, Miss! Why can't we, Miss? PLEASE

  let's go on with it!'

  'No. I'm afraid we've been wasting a little too much time over the

  map lately. We're going to start learning some of the capitals of

  the English counties. I want every girl in the class to know the

  whole lot of them by the end of the term.'

  The children's faces fell. Dorothy saw it, and added with an

  attempt at brightness--that hollow, undeceiving brightness of a

  teacher trying to palm off a boring subject as an interesting one:

  'Just think how pleased your parents will be when they can ask you

  the capital of any county in England and you can tell it them!'

  The children were not in the least taken in. They writhed at the

  nauseous prospect.

  'Oh, CAPITALS! Learning CAPITALS! That's just what we used to do

  with Miss Strong. Please, Miss, WHY can't we go on with the map?'

  'Now don't argue. Get your notebooks out and take them down as I

  give them to you. And afterwards we'll say them all together.'

  Reluctantly, the children fished out their notebooks, still

  groaning. 'Please, Miss, can we go on with the map NEXT time?'

  'I don't know. We'll see.'

  That afternoon the map was removed from the schoolroom, and Mrs

  Creevy scraped the plasticine off the board and threw it away. It

  was the same with all the other subjects, one after another. All

  the changes that Dorothy had made were undone. They went back to

  the routine of interminable 'copies' and interminable 'practice'

  sums, to the learning parrot-fashion of 'Passez-moi le beurre' and

  'Le fils du jardinier a perdu son chapeau', to the Hundred Page

  History and the insufferable little 'reader'. (Mrs Creevy had

  impounded the Shakespeares, ostensibly to burn them. The

  probability was that she had sold them.) Two hours a day were set

  apart for handwriting lessons. The two depressing pieces of black

  paper, which Dorothy had taken down from the wall, were replaced,

  and their proverbs written upon them afresh in neat copperplate.

  As for the historical chart, Mrs Creevy took it away and burnt it.

  When the children saw the hated lessons, from which they had

  thought to have escaped for ever, coming back upon them one by one,

  they were first astonished, then miserable, then sulky. But it was

  far worse for Dorothy than for the children. After only a couple

  of days the rigmarole through which she was obliged to drive them

  so nauseated her that she began to doubt whether she could go on

  with it any longer. Again and again she toyed with the idea of

  disobeying Mrs Creevy. Why not, she would think, as the children

  whined and groaned and sweated under their miserable bondage--why

  not stop it and go back to proper lessons, even if it was only for

  an hour or two a day? Why not drop the whole pretence of lessons

&nb
sp; and simply let the children play? It would be so much better for

  them than this. Let them draw pictures or make something out of

  plasticine or begin making up a fairy tale--anything REAL, anything

  that would interest them, instead of this dreadful nonsense. But

  she dared not. At any moment Mrs Creevy was liable to come in, and

  if she found the children 'messing about' instead of getting on

  with their routine work, there would be fearful trouble. So

  Dorothy hardened her heart, and obeyed Mrs Creevy's instructions to

  the letter, and things were very much as they had been before Miss

  Strong was 'taken bad'.

  The lessons reached such a pitch of boredom that the brightest spot

  in the week was Mr Booth's so-called chemistry lecture on Thursday

  afternoons. Mr Booth was a seedy, tremulous man of about fifty,

  with long, wet, cowdung-coloured moustaches. He had been a Public

  School master once upon a time, but nowadays he made just enough

  for a life of chronic sub-drunkenness by delivering lectures at two

  and sixpence a time. The lectures were unrelieved drivel. Even in

  his palmiest days Mr Booth had not been a particularly brilliant

  lecturer, and now, when he had had his first go of delirium tremens

  and lived in a daily dread of his second, what chemical knowledge

  he had ever had was fast deserting him. He would stand dithering

  in front of the class, saying the same thing over and over again

  and trying vainly to remember what he was talking about. 'Remember,

  girls,' he would say in his husky, would-be fatherly voice, 'the

  number of the elements is ninety-three--ninety-three elements,

  girls--you all of you know what an element is, don't you?--there are

  just ninety-three of them--remember that number, girls--ninety-

  three,' until Dorothy (she had to stay in the schoolroom during the

  chemistry lectures, because Mrs Creevy considered that it DIDN'T DO

  to leave the girls alone with a man) was miserable with vicarious

  shame. All the lectures started with the ninety-three elements, and

  never got very much further. There was also talk of 'a very

  interesting little experiment that I'm going to perform for you next

  week, girls--very interesting you'll find it--we'll have it next

  week without fail--a very interesting little experiment', which,

  needless to say, was never performed. Mr Booth possessed no chemical

  apparatus, and his hands were far too shaky to have used it even if

  he had had any. The girls sat through his lectures in a suety

  stupor of boredom, but even he was a welcome change from handwriting

  lessons.

  The children were never quite the same with Dorothy after the

  parents' visit. They did not change all in a day, of course. They

  had grown to be fond of 'old Millie', and they expected that after

  a day or two of tormenting them with handwriting and 'commercial

  arithmetic' she would go back to something interesting. But the

  handwriting and arithmetic went on, and the popularity Dorothy had

  enjoyed, as a teacher whose lessons weren't boring and who didn't

  slap you, pinch you, or twist your ears, gradually vanished.

  Moreover, the story of the row there had been over Macbeth was not

  long in leaking out. The children grasped that old Millie had done

  something wrong--they didn't exactly know what--and had been given

  a 'talking to'. It lowered her in their eyes. There is no dealing

  with children, even with children who are fond of you, unless you

  can keep your prestige as an adult; let that prestige be once

  damaged, and even the best-hearted children will despise you.

  So they began to be naughty in the normal, traditional way.

  Before, Dorothy had only had to deal with occasional laziness,

  outbursts of noise and silly giggling fits; now there were spite

  and deceitfulness as well. The children revolted ceaselessly

  against the horrible routine. They forgot the short weeks when old

  Millie had seemed quite a good sort and school itself had seemed

  rather fun. Now, school was simply what it had always been, and