Octavia (33 page)

What happened was that there was overwhelming support for a tree protection scheme. It was suggested by one of the third forms who said they thought the way to deal with the problem was to have
‘a tree planting day followed by a week during which all the senior girls would take it in turns to be in the school grounds to remind anyone who needs reminding of the proper way to treat young trees.’
It was a great success, especially as the new tree was planted by the two youngest girls in the school who also happened to be the
most agile climbers. By the end of the tree protection week there was already talk of forming a school parliament; by the end of the term two representatives from each form had been elected, the Art room had been chosen as the best place for the council chamber, and everything was ready for their opening session, which would be in the first week of the spring term.

The school years passed happily, with a series of academic successes, of problems solved by parliament, and of high days and fun days of every description. By the start of their fifth year, the now renowned Roehampton Secondary Girls had grown out of all recognition and beyond even Octavia’s most optimistic expectations. It had nearly five hundred pupils and twenty-four members of staff and even an upper sixth of a select half a dozen who were preparing for the Higher Schools Certificate and university entrance. The garden was maturing splendidly, the flowering cherry was superb, all the class libraries were well stocked, the school choir was much admired and had begun to win prizes at competitions, the sixth form play was a regular romp, and the school parliament was such an established institution that nobody could remember a time when it didn’t exist.

‘Teaching,’ Octavia told her father at breakfast, at the start of that fifth year, ‘is the most rewarding job in the world.’

J-J dabbed his mouth with his napkin and smiled at her. ‘I am glad our opinions concur,’ he said. ‘I gather things are going well.’

‘They are,’ Octavia said with great satisfaction. ‘Oh, they are indeed. There are moments when I feel capable of
absolutely anything. As if I could fly through the air if I put my mind to it.’

‘I trust you will not put your belief to the test,’ her father said. ‘I should hate to see you splattered all over the front garden. Think how it would upset the neighbours.’

Emmeline was cross. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ she said to Octavia. ‘I mean to say, she’s twenty-one, come of age. She’s been working for five years. If
she
’s not grown up I don’t know who is.’

The two of them were sitting in Octavia’s parlour on a mild March afternoon, pretending to drink tea, but Emmeline was too cross to do more than sip. Her dear Dora had found herself a nice young man and just when her family ought to have been praising her and petting her, Ernest was raising objections. ‘She’s so unhappy, poor girl,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what to do about it. He just keeps on and on.
She’s too young. Where would they live? What would they live on? It’s out of the question
. And I have to watch her drooping and getting more and more miserable.’

‘You were twenty-one when
you
married
him
,’ Octavia said. ‘I should point that out if I were you.’

‘Oh, I have,’ Emmeline said. ‘Don’t you worry. It was the first thing I did. But he says that’s different, because he had enough money to live on. He was a provider.’

‘What does he do, this young man?’

‘He’s a carpenter,’ Emmeline said. ‘So I suppose he’s right. He won’t be a very good provider. There’s precious little work for carpenters these days. But he’s such a dear and so fond of my Dora.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘John. John Erskine.’

‘What if I were to invite them to dinner?’

‘He’s terribly shy,’ Emmeline said. ‘And very much in awe of you, being a headmistress.’

‘Tell him I don’t bite,’ Octavia said, ‘except on Wednesdays.’

But he was embarrassingly shy. He stood on the doorstep clutching his best hat in front of him like a shield and dithered for such a long time that in the end Dora put her hand into the small of his back and pushed him into the house. He was tall and skinny, with lank brown hair and uneven teeth, and he seemed to be all awkward angles, his wrists protruding from the sleeves of his jacket, his feet splayed, his Adam’s apple bouncing in his neck. But he had a handsome pair of brown eyes and gazed at Dora with such obvious affection that Octavia took to him despite his gaucherie.

Even so the dinner was hard work, for although she questioned him extremely gently, his answers were monosyllabic and gruff with embarrassment. In the end she gave up trying to find out anything about him and asked Dora how her brother and sister were instead.

‘Oh, poor Johnnie,’ Dora said. ‘Pa’s after him too.’

‘Why is that?’

‘He wants to be an architect and Pa says he’s got to work in the bank.’

‘Time enough for him to talk your father round perhaps,’ J-J said. ‘After all, he’s only fourteen. He doesn’t have to make up his mind to anything yet awhile.’

‘He’s made it up, Uncle J-J,’ Dora said. ‘He wants to be an architect and Pa won’t let him. He says it’s nonsense.’

‘He says everything’s nonsense,’ John put in, and then blushed.

‘Quite right,’ Dora encouraged him. ‘It’s either nonsense or it’s sinful.’

‘Come and see us again,’ Octavia said as she said goodbye to them on the doorstep, ‘and don’t give up. We’ll win him round between us. Even a
paterfamilias
doesn’t hold all the trump cards these days. Just think, Dora, if this new bill is passed, you’ll be given the vote. He won’t be able to say you’re too young then.’

It was passed a few days later. When Dolly brought the newspaper in to set it beside Octavia’s breakfast plate, the headline blazed,
‘Votes for women’
and the article beneath it explained,
‘Last night the House of Commons voted overwhelmingly for the popular Equal Franchise Bill which will give the vote to all women over the age of 21.’

‘Isn’t that splendid?’ Octavia said, passing the paper to her father. ‘I shall have a special suffrage assembly this morning to celebrate. I must look out some of my old posters and put them up round the hall. And wear my brooch, of course. It’s just the time for it. Just think, my sixth form will be among the first of the new voters.’

‘It’s taken long enough, in all conscience,’ J-J said, reading
the article. ‘When you think what a long time ago the campaign began.’

‘Twenty-five years,’ Octavia said. ‘I was fifteen when the WSPU was formed and now I’m nearly forty. And yes I know they gave the vote to married thirty-year-olds at the end of the war but that was just a stopgap. Think how grudgingly it was given. I’m sure they only did it because they wanted more women in the workforce. No, this is the real victory. This is the one to celebrate. This is the red-letter day.’

‘I’m sure it will be,’ J-J said.

Octavia took a passionate assembly, speaking of the long fight the suffragettes had had and how cruelly the early pioneers had been treated. At break the hall was thronged with girls all eager to see the posters she’d told them about. There were still small groups reading and exclaiming when the afternoon’s visitors arrived. Visitors came to the school so frequently that the girls took very little notice of them even when it was quite a large contingent, as it was that afternoon, being sixteen members of staff from a men’s teacher training college lead by their principal. He noticed the posters at once.

‘I see you keep them up to date with the news,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ Octavia said. ‘That is part of a school’s function, as I’m sure you agree.’

He was thrown as much by her assumption that he would share her opinion as for the political nature of her exhibits. But the tour was already under way and, given her reputation at county hall, he was prepared to reserve judgement.

They visited the study rooms, the gym, the garden which was bright with daffodils, the Art room, where the girls were putting up a display of their latest work and the Music room,
where the chairs were being set out for a choir practice. But it was the atmosphere in the school hall that amazed them most and when their tour of the school was over and they were gathered for a final meeting with the staff, it was the subject they returned to, as visitors always did.

‘How do you manage to keep them so quiet in the hall,’ they asked, ‘without a teacher to look after them? Surely there ought to be a member of staff up on the platform to maintain discipline.’

Octavia explained, as she’d explained to group after group over the years, always in the same words and with the same patience. ‘Our pupils are self-regulating. They discipline themselves. That is one of the basic principles of our method.’

‘But can you trust them?’ they asked.

‘Indeed we can. It’s essential that we do. And I will tell you before you ask, we have never had cause to regret our trust. They make their own rules, as you saw when you visited our school parliament, and they adapt them if and when they need to, so naturally the rules are obeyed. It was their idea to set up a silent study area in the first place and that is what it has always been.’

‘But what if they want to discuss something or to ask somebody a question?’ they asked.

‘If they want to discuss something,’ she told them, ‘they will go to a study room. If they want to gossip they will go out for a stroll around the playing fields. In the hall it is quiet because that is the way they want it to be. I could ask one of my teachers to supervise but she would have nothing to do.’

‘Aren’t you afraid,’ a young man asked anxiously, ‘that they might get out of hand?’

‘It hasn’t happened yet,’ she told him, ‘and we’ve been running the system for more than a decade.’

‘It would if they were boys,’ the young man said. ‘They get out of hand at the least little thing. You have to keep a very tight rein on boys.’

‘Perhaps with a different system,’ she said, giving him a sly smile, ‘you wouldn’t need reins at all.’

But he couldn’t believe that and his expression showed it.

‘You’re so patient,’ Alice Genevra said, when the visitors had finally asked their last question and gone. She and Morag had stayed behind to gather up the tea things and set the staff room to rights and now they were all standing in front of the mirror in the staff cloakroom, adjusting their hats and getting ready for the journey home. She looked at Octavia’s reflection in the long mirror. ‘I don’t know how you keep your temper with them sometimes.’ And she mimicked the worst question that had been asked that afternoon.
‘‘‘Under what circumstances would you cane these girls?”
For heaven’s sake! What sort of people do they think we are?’

‘They assume that we are the same as they are,’ Octavia explained. ‘They advocate caning, so they assume that we would too.’

‘It’s barbaric,’ Alice said.

‘It is,’ Octavia agreed. ‘And one day everybody will agree with us. For the time being, it’s part of our job to try and wean them away from their barbarity.’

‘Will we do it?’ Morag asked, smiling at her. ‘I can’t imagine it with that lot.’

‘We shall eventually,’ Octavia said. ‘We’re introducing them to a very new idea, don’t forget, and new ideas are tender plants. They need careful propagation and years to take root. It’s not something we can rush.’

‘Do you really think it will take years?’ Morag said.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘How many?’

‘Twenty-five at least,’ Octavia said, ‘if the progress of the suffrage movement is anything to go by.’ She grinned at them. ‘So we have a long way to go.’

‘I’d have been more comfortable with this lot if they hadn’t had such a poor opinion of their own sex,’ Morag said, pulling on her gloves. ‘Boys have to be caned, otherwise they’d run riot. Did you notice that?’

‘Well, if it’s any comfort to you,’ Octavia said, ‘I don’t think we shall see them again.’

But she was wrong. The next morning a letter arrived from the principal, thanking her for her
‘unfailing courtesy’
and for sparing so much of her valuable time to show them round and answer their questions. It was more or less what she expected him to say but the letter went on to ask her if she would do them the very great honour of speaking at their annual founder’s day in July.
‘We pride ourselves on being a progressive institution’,
he wrote,
‘and would welcome the chance to hear your views again in more detail.’

‘That just serves me right for saying I could do anything,’ she said to her father when she’d shown him the letter.

‘I cannot imagine you would need to worry about it,’ he said. ‘You are used to taking assembly and this will be very similar, will it not?’

‘This,’ she told him rather grimly, ‘will be entirely different. At assemblies I’m speaking to the converted. These young men will certainly be sceptical and probably hostile. If I can convert even one of them it will be a miracle. They believe boys are a wild breed who can’t learn and have to be beaten to keep them in order.’

‘Ah!’ her father said. ‘Then you expect a rough ride.’

‘Yes. I do.’

He considered for a moment, wearing his serious face. ‘You could refuse the invitation,’ he suggested.

‘No, Pa,’ she said. ‘That’s the one thing I can’t do. I won’t sink to cowardice. Not again. It would be too shaming. Once is enough.’

J-J found it hard to imagine a single occasion on which his daughter could ever have been accused of cowardice, but he sensed that there was more to her determination than he knew and that it would be indelicate to enquire any further.

‘I can’t say it takes me by surprise,’ Octavia said. ‘I’ve shown so many visitors round the school, I knew I would have to speak in public sooner or later. I just wish it wasn’t to this particular audience.’ She lifted her head and took herself in hand, smiling at her father rather shamefacedly. ‘But listen to me. Such a fuss to be making! You’d think I was being sent to Holloway or the trenches. They’re not machine guns. They’re only lads. The worst they can do is to mock me. I ought to have enough strength of character to cope with that.’

‘You must make careful preparations, notwithstanding the strength of your character,’ J-J advised. ‘If I were you, my dear, I would follow Bernard Shaw’s advice.’

‘Which advice would that be?’ Octavia asked, laughing. ‘I can think of a great deal of advice being given from that quarter and on a great many occasions.’

Her father explained. ‘That you must win your audience over with your opening words.’

‘Actually,’ Octavia said, grinning at him, ‘I’ve already thought of that. I’m going to call my offering “Punishment and the Dalton System”. If they think I’m going to talk about
how necessary it is to cane, and what other punishments are available to them, I should have their undivided attention at the start of my talk even if I’ve lost it by the end. What do you think?’

‘You are downright naughty sometimes,’ her father said, enjoying the idea. ‘I shall be interested to read the final script.’

‘I’ll show it to you in July,’ she said.

The college of St Gregory and All Souls was an august
brick-built
edifice designed to impress and overawe and even on that July day with summer flowers in all the borders, it reminded Octavia of Holloway prison and was exactly what she’d steeled herself to expect. She sniffed the scent of the flowers to give herself a little more courage and then marched briskly through its imposing portal refusing to be cowed, announcing her arrival to the waiting porter in a clear firm voice.

After a short wait, she was escorted to the principal’s palatial study, where she sipped sherry and made small talk until her audience was ready for her. Then she and the principal progressed to the main hall, which was a huge,
oak-panelled
, gloomy space, hung about with shields. A place for warriors, she thought, and wondered whether they had crossed canes above the platform, which was high, wide and imposing and contained a long oak table and a row of stern high-backed chairs. The principal’s chair was like a bishop’s throne.

Her audience was exactly what she expected in such a place too. They sat uncomfortably in regulated rows and were careful not to turn their heads as she walked between the lines. Most of them were wearing tweed jackets, some with
the regulatory leather patches already covering their elbows, and every head of hair had been neatly and severely cut. They were conformists to the last controlled expression. Octavia’s heart sank despite her preparation.