Octavia (26 page)

‘Now I will tell you a little more about it. When you get back to your classrooms you will each be given a folder. Take great care of it, for this is where you will keep the syllabuses of all the work you will be doing in the coming half term. Every girl will get a syllabus for every subject she is going to study and every syllabus is a guide. It will tell you what you are going to learn, which books and equipment you will need and when your written work has to be handed in. You will not be going to lessons all the time, as they do in other schools, so it will be up to you to decide when you do your work and how you will do it. For example you may find some subjects quite easy and, if that is the case, you might like to do all the tasks you have been set in those subjects in the first few days after you get your syllabuses. Other subjects will be more difficult and you will find you need to spend more time on them and take them step by step. Your teachers will be in their rooms to
help you and that’s where you will find all the books you need too.

‘In the first few days it will probably be a bit puzzling but after a while you will get used to it and begin to see what freedom our new system will give you and what fun it will be. If you are confused, don’t battle on alone. Ask for help and it will be given. We shall expect great things of you and I know you will not disappoint us.’

She opened her hymn book ready for their first hymn and smiled round at them before she gave Miss Fletcher the nod to start playing the opening bars. ‘Good luck!’ she said.

Within a week she was recording how easy the transfer had been.
‘Most of the girls have taken to it like ducks to water,’ she wrote in her journal, ‘and those who are confused have the good sense to ask for help. There has been a certain amount of muddle at the start of the study periods when the first formers weren’t sure where they ought to go, and some study rooms were full, but that was to be expected and it was pleasing to see how quickly the older girls came to their assistance. It is very encouraging.’

John Algernon Withington was heartily sick of being called Podge. Not that there was anything he could do about it. The family habit was too firmly entrenched. He’d had words with Em about it once, but that was a long time ago – four years at least, must be – just after he was invalided out of the army and when he was feeling dicky. Anyway he’d spoken to her – several times actually – and she
had
promised she would try to remember but it didn’t do the slightest good, even though he’d scowled at her every time she forgot and she’d put her hands over her mouth and made apologetic faces. The name kept slipping out, and usually on embarrassing occasions, like Uncle J-J’s retirement party.

True to his promise, although somewhat belatedly, Professor Smith retired at Christmas, having agreed to stay on for one more term to ease his successor into the post.

‘And not a minute too soon,’ Amy said, brushing invisible dust from the lapels of his dress suit. ‘I was beginning to despair of you.’

‘I think your timing is perfect, Pa,’ Octavia laughed. ‘Now
we can have a proper retirement party. If you’d done it any earlier I wouldn’t have had the energy for celebrations, even for my father.’

‘In that case, I’m glad I didn’t discommode you,’ J-J said, adjusting his bow tie. ‘I would not have wished to have been given an improper party.’

It was a splendid occasion and a very happy one with all his old colleagues there to salute him and his entire family around him to congratulate him. Even Podge cheered up after a glass of champagne and Dora and Edith, who were allowed half a glass to mark the occasion, were soon giggling with the best.

Emmeline said it was the first time she’d really enjoyed herself since her babies died. ‘Which is not to say I haven’t been glad of all the outings you’ve arranged,’ she said to Octavia. ‘I wouldn’t want you to think that. It’s just that my heart hasn’t been in them.’

‘I know, my darling,’ Octavia said. ‘Nor has mine sometimes.’

‘But it
is
now, isn’t it?’ Emmeline said. ‘For both of us. Because it’s family, I suppose. That makes the difference. Doesn’t your pa look well?’

He made a sparkling speech, as they all knew he would, thanking his guests for their presence, his family and colleagues for their unfailing, and sometimes incomprehensible, understanding and support. Then he turned to Octavia and told them ‘by way of a closing remark’ that he was handing on the torch of learning to his daughter, ‘confident that whatever fuel she might use to keep it alight, it will burn freely and brightly if – shall we say – occasionally unexpectedly. My advice to you would be, watch for fireworks over Hammersmith.’

‘Quite right,’ John Algernon said, grinning at his cousin as the laughter died down and the drinking was resumed. ‘We shall be lucky if the entire place doesn’t go up in flames.’

J-J’s friends were a little surprised by such a blunt criticism, and showed it.

‘Ignore him,’ Octavia advised. ‘He’s my cousin, Podge. He’s renowned for hyperbole.’

‘What an unusual name!’ they said, looking at his skinny wrists and his gaunt cheeks, as people always did when they heard it for the first time. ‘How did you come by that?’

He explained, as
he
always did, but it was very tedious and he found himself glancing at his watch as soon as he’d finished, wondering when he could make his excuses, thank his aunt and uncle for their hospitality and slip away. The
palais de dance
was waiting for him and so, with a bit of luck, was Olga. Absolutely top hole place the
palais
. A life-saver. Saved his life on innumerable evenings in the last year, especially when another God-awful day at the bank had bored him crazy. Couldn’t wait to get there most evenings if the truth be told. Although he had to find excuses for his mother and that could be tricky. Couldn’t let on to
her
where he was going. That would never have done. She’d have hated the idea. She said dance hall girls were common. Which they probably were. But good fun, common or not.

They were dancing the quickstep when he arrived that evening and for a few seconds he just stood at the edge of the dance floor and wallowed in the sight of them. They were so young and brightly coloured and alive, a million years from the blood and slime and mud-stiff khaki of the trenches. It did him good just to be with them, listening to the band and letting his feet tap in rhythm, while his eyes adjusted to the
yellow half-light from all those art deco wall lamps and his lungs coughed their first protest against the blue fog of the cigarette smoke. It made him cough every time, but what the hell, it was worth it. And there was Olga, waving to him, wearing her red dress with its short skirt showing her lovely long legs and its low neck showing her lovely brown back, and her painted mouth as red as her dress.

‘Algy!’ she said as she walked off the floor towards him. ‘You’re late ain’tcher? I thought you wasn’t coming. Where you been?’

They were playing the next dance and it was a waltz. ‘Dance?’ he hoped.

She slid into his arms, all artificial silk and cheap perfume and tempting flesh, and he bent his head to kiss her as he walked her backwards onto the floor.

‘Now look at the state of you,’ she pretended to scold. ‘Mucky pup. You’re all over lipstick. Stand still.’ And she took a handkerchief from her little bag, spat on it and rubbed his mouth clean where they stood. Oh, she was delectable. She could rub his mouth with her hanky any time.

‘There’s ever such a good picture on up the Ritz,’ she told him as they danced.

He took his cue at once. ‘Would you like to see it?’

She made eyes at him, her black eyelashes spiky with mascara. ‘I might.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘I never knew a bloke like you,’ she said. ‘You can’t wait five minutes fer nothing.’

‘No,’ he admitted happily. ‘I can’t. Tomorrow it is then.’ And he put his hand on the small of her lovely naked back and pulled her body towards him, lusting at the touch of those
delicious titties and that luscious curved belly. Tomorrow they would be sitting in the back row at the pictures and he could take even more liberties. I’m twenty-three, he thought, and I’m alive and that lousy war is over and I’m going to live all I can.

‘You never said where you was,’ she said languidly as they shifted their feet to the music.

‘Only some boring old party,’ he told her, too lost in sensation to remember it.

The boring old party was still going on, although Emmeline and her children had gone home to bed and some of the academics had retreated too. J-J was sitting on his ancient sofa talking to his brother-in-law, who had just confessed that he was going to retire too, probably in the summer.

‘A very good idea,’ J-J said. ‘If this is retirement I can’t recommend it too highly.’

‘I thought the end of July,’ Ralph told him. ‘That will make forty-four years I’ve worked for the firm, and forty-four years is enough.’

‘I would have said it was more than enough,’ J-J agreed. ‘Have some more brandy?’

‘What will you do now that you’re a gentleman of leisure?’ Ralph asked, holding out his brandy glass.

‘As little as possible, I daresay,’ J-J said, filling it generously. ‘I’ve promised my womenfolk that we shall have a Sunday breakfast every morning.’

‘I can’t imagine Tavy taking a leisurely breakfast,’ her uncle said. ‘She’s always in such a rush.’

‘That’s what comes of being a headmistress.’

‘Is she happy?’ Ralph asked.

J-J gave it thought. ‘She’s busy,’ he said, ‘and that’s tantamount to happiness where Tavy is concerned.’

‘Is she still working for the suffragettes?’

‘Not as often as she used to,’ J-J said, ‘but now and then. She’s more interested in the League of Nations at the moment.’

Octavia had great hopes of the League of Nations and followed its progress in every newspaper. Buoyed up by her success at Hammersmith Secondary School, and with a new year coming and a new and peaceful decade, she was in the mood to be hopeful, even if she still hadn’t got round to buying a house. This proposed League seemed a sensible organisation since it was restricting its activities to the prevention of war. In fact its sole reason for existence was to prevent them from breaking out in the first place and they intended to do it by dealing with disputes between nations by diplomacy and compromise – although it had to be admitted that there was a war being fought in Russia even while the plans were being formulated.

‘Which I am sure they will deal with the moment they are fully organised,’ she told her father. ‘We can’t expect them to start work before they are ready. That would be unwise.’ Didn’t she know it?

Life at Hammersmith was still burdened with work. The teachers were busy preparing their second and third syllabuses, and learning how to handle a study group by daily trial and error and, what seemed to them, far too many mistakes. And as if that weren’t pressure enough, they also discovered that they were suffering from a troubling shortage of books. Now that their pupils were allowed to read as
widely and as often as they liked, they were getting through textbooks and subject libraries much more quickly than their teachers had originally estimated they would.

‘We should have ordered three times the number of Science books,’ Miss Fennimore said to Octavia. ‘I’ve never seen such an appetite.’

‘That’s a triumph,’ Octavia told her, ‘and a result of your good teaching. I hope you will take it as such.’

Elizabeth wasn’t placated. ‘Shortage of books is a disaster,’ she said.

Octavia went cap in hand to Mr Gillard, but this time he couldn’t help her. ‘We are running over budget as it is,’ he said. ‘I will do what I can but I’m not promising anything. Not till after April in any event.’

So they had to find a way to make do, partly by advising their pupils to join the public library and partly by setting up a rationing system, which didn’t please any of them, for the girls didn’t like waiting, especially when it was for the one book they really wanted to read, and the staff all said it was defeating the object of the exercise if they had to ask their pupils to defer the pleasure of finding things out just at the very moment when they’d started to discover how pleasurable that could be.

Octavia did what she could to cheer them up by organising an Easter parade for the last assembly of the spring term, and prevailing on Phillida Bertram to help all the girls who wanted to take part to design their Easter bonnets, which since they were mostly cloche hats was easily done with coloured cardboard and crepe paper and discarded ribbons and trimmings. But April was a long time coming even so.

The newly formed League of Nations was having a hard
time of it too, despite having been inaugurated at St James’s Palace. The civil war in Russia went on and they didn’t seem to be able to do anything to stop it.

‘Although,’ as Octavia said to her father, ‘the solution is staring them in the face. They should use their influence to stop foreign powers sending troops and arms to help the Whites and just let the Russians sort it out for themselves. And yes, I know what you’re going to say, the foreign powers are America and Great Britain, but the principle should be the same whoever they are.’

‘Unfortunately, you are talking about wealthy capitalists,’ her father said, ‘and they are not open to persuasion, British or American. A communist government would affect their trade.’

‘So young men have to be sent to another war so that they can go on making money, is that what you’re saying? That’s scandalous.’

‘It is,’ J-J agreed. ‘But there is a worse scandal, I fear. The ruling class are not above calling out the troops to attack their own workers if they come out on strike, even in this country. There are plans already laid for the use of the military against strikers. It won’t just be police with batons next time. They’ve got tanks and machine guns waiting and ready.’

‘That,’ his daughter said, ‘is downright disgusting. It shouldn’t be allowed.’

‘It is the way our society is organised,’ J-J said.

‘Then we should change it,’ his daughter said trenchantly. ‘We should use the ballot box and change it. Being rich shouldn’t give a man the right to dictate to his fellow creatures and he certainly shouldn’t be allowed to send them to their deaths or call out the troops to attack them if they ask for a living wage.’

‘We shall see you in Parliament yet,’ J-J said, laughing at her.

‘Oh, I do hope not,’ Amy said, pouring more tea for them both. ‘They work all night in Parliament. We should never see her.’

But for the moment Octavia was fully occupied in changing her school.

In the summer term the visitors began to arrive, most of them teachers who were curious to see for themselves what this new system was like. So, as well as writing her own syllabuses and helping her staff with theirs, chasing the books that hadn’t been delivered and badgering the governors for more money, Octavia had sightseers to escort round the building and endless questions to answer. She was proud to think that her new ideas were acquiring a reputation and it pleased her to show how well the system was working, even in their rather cramped quarters and with inadequate stock, but it left her with too little time for her family. Her outings with Em and the children often had to be cancelled at the last moment because there was school work that just had to be finished.

‘I’m a poor cousin, these days,’ she apologised to Emmeline.

‘You can’t help being busy,’ Emmeline told her. ‘But you will help me with Pa’s party, won’t you? You’re so good at organising parties and I’d like him to have one as good as Uncle J-J’s.’

It wasn’t quite as good because there were fewer people who were able to attend it and bank clerks don’t have quite the same ebullience as eccentric academics, so the conversation was limited, but they made a great fuss of him and drank a great deal of champagne and he said it was the
best party he’d ever had and told them all he was looking forward to his retirement and then sprang a surprise.