Time to Be in Earnest (10 page)

But these commercial sanitary towels were expensive and poorer families cut up old sheets into squares, which were hemmed and folded into a kind of bandage, attached to the waist-band with safety pins. Our Victorian forebears had probably coped with just the same unsatisfactory contrivance. Modern sanitary protection is one small victory of modern technology over biological inconvenience, and perhaps not such a small one.

Many of the lessons of Cambridge High School have remained with me although I am not sure whether the classroom in which they were taught still exists. Not long after I left, the school moved to new premises. But fifty years ago we were next door to the Art School, the windows of which overlooked the hard tennis courts and the netball court and from which one of the art students, the young Ronald Searle, could look down on our energetic galumphings. He was even then gaining a reputation as an artist, although I prefer to believe that the allegation that he took us High School girls and, in particular, one dark tousle-haired specimen, as models for the harridans of St. Trinian’s, is a canard. For one thing, we seldom wore pigtails. They were more typical of our rivals at the Perse School, one of the many subtle social distinctions. Our hair was bobbed, shingled or pudding-basin trimmed under the blue felt hats of winter and our summer panamas.

And how good we were, or rather, how biddable. Admittedly my best friend and I did one afternoon play truant as a gesture to some ill-defined need for self-expression and cycled up the Gog Magog Hills where we brewed up tea and fried sausages in our Girl Guide billy cans. I can’t recall that it was particularly enjoyable and it must have necessitated
some fibbing since this wasn’t a school where absences went unnoticed.

We were well behaved by conditioning, not by nature. When children are en masse, barbarism always lurks beneath the surface. We knew our limitations—this was not the age of child-centred education—but a timid, inexperienced teacher or one still in training could be given a hard time. Not, however, when it came to her examination lesson, at which the examiner would sit at the side of the class, notebook unobtrusively in hand. Here fair play, unstated but instinctively understood, took over. We would sit bolt upright, bright-eyed, hands shooting up like pistons to answer the questions. By the time my younger daughter went to a teacher-training college in the 1960s such a class—attentive, disciplined and obviously learning—would probably have disqualified the student from any chance of becoming a teacher.

History, my second favourite subject and taught by Miss Back, was pure pleasure. I never knew her Christian name. I doubt whether any of the form did. Sixty years ago that was privileged information although those girls given to “pashes” made it their business to discover the secret and pass it on in giggling triumph to their friends. But I can’t remember that anyone had a “pash” on Miss Back. She exuded common sense, a rational and cheerful dignity which wasn’t conducive to such follies. I knew nothing of her life outside the school. I remember seeing her one Saturday evening at a meeting of the Peace Pledge Union to which I had gone out of curiosity; then, as now, I was a non-joiner but an indefatigable taster of ideas. Was she a convinced pacifist? It is impossible to think of her as other than totally rejecting the madness of war, yet I remember that I was surprised to find her at the meeting, perhaps because we could never quite believe that the staff had any life outside the classroom. Did we imagine that they disappeared each evening into some chalky limbo until summoned by the morning assembly bell? Yet if she was a member of the PPU we were never indoctrinated with pacifism or with any other opinion. She saw her job as teaching, not as proselytizing, and yet I am in no doubt of the values—liberal, Christian, scholarly—by which she lived.

We were taught, as much by example as precept, to respect our minds and to use them; to examine the evidence before rushing in with our opinions; to distinguish between fact and theory; to see history through the eyes of the poor and vanquished, not merely those of the powerful and the conquerors; not to believe that something is true simply because
it would be pleasant or convenient if it were and, when exposed to propaganda, to ask ourselves, “In whose interest is it that I should believe this?”

Like all the staff except for one widow, Miss Back was a spinster and we took this for granted as we took so much. The post 1914–18 war generation of women, robbed by the holocaust of Flanders of their chance of marriage and motherhood, may have resented their loss, yet in retrospect they seemed to have been neither bitter nor unhappy and the generation they taught, born in the aftermath of that war and destined to reach adulthood at the beginning of the next, benefited from an education which wasn’t circumscribed by the demands of the teacher’s husband and family. That dedication, too, we took for granted, flourishing unthinking on their deprivation. But even if their chances of finding a husband had been greater, we still wouldn’t have been taught by a married woman. In those years—and indeed until the war—marriage meant resignation from the job.

English was marvellously taught, by Miss Scargill and Miss Dalgliesh, after whom I named my detective, Adam Dalgliesh. Years later when she had retired to Edinburgh I visited her after speaking at the book festival and she told me that her father had been called Adam. It never occurred to either teacher that we were incapable of enjoying Shakespeare or reading the great English poets or the major novelists. Miss Dalgliesh would, I suspect, have been incredulous to read today’s A-level syllabus. Before the war, even at the level of what was then called the School Certificate, we learned more English literature than many present-day applicants for the English School at university.

And we enjoyed a remarkable continuity of devotion. It was rare indeed for a teacher to leave the High School except by retirement. We were not faced at a critical stage of our pre-examination work by new faces, different methods, unknown personalities. And the school was the right size, large enough to be a lively and diverse community, small enough for each girl to be individually known. We didn’t waste time carrying our books from classroom to classroom or building to building at the dictates of a complicated timetable. We all had our own place, our desk, chosen in a noisy scramble at the beginning of a new school year where, surrounded by our cronies, we could create our small island of security. In our lidded desks we could arrange our exercise and text books, fountain pen and pencils and small possessions, knowing that we should find them each morning precisely as we had left them.

In the educational system between the wars there were, of course, wrongs to be remedied and the worst have been remedied. But I sometimes wonder whether we haven’t lost almost as much as we have gained. I am not sorry that I was at school at a time when the word “kid” was reserved for the young of goats.

A memorable day. I caught the Oxford Tube—that convenient inter-city coach—at Notting Hill Gate at 8:40 and had a trouble-free and quiet journey. I stopped at Gloucester Green for an iced coffee, and then to St. John Street where I chatted to Alixe while watering the garden. The sky was overcast with the promise of rain which never came, but there was a slight breeze and the morning was less oppressive than in London.

My youngest grandchild Beatrice arrived to drive me to her home where her father Peter was cooking the lunch while listening to the ball-by-ball BBC cricket programme. Jane had been feeling under the weather and had vigorously cleaned the house, it being her policy that the less agreeable chores are best kept for unpropitious occasions; feeling really well inclines her to pleasure, not duty. Peter interrupted his cooking to pour me a glass of wine and I gossiped with Jane until lunch was ready, an excellent meal of mixed grilled fish and oven-baked vegetables in olive oil.

In the afternoon we drove to Rousham and walked in the gardens. We saw very few other people and the ordered beauty of lawns and trees was wonderfully refreshing, particularly the view down to the lake with the water-lilies in flower and the golden carp sliding under the dark green surface. We visited the kitchen garden and then sat in the rose garden, Jane and I in silence, listening and inhaling the subtle scents of high summer, while Peter roamed among the rose beds. I thought that I could not have felt happier anywhere else in the world, however beautiful, but then I often think this in England. It is a great disincentive to the ardours, dangers, delays and inevitable disappointments of travel. And a perfect day should be recorded. It can’t be relived except in memory but it can be celebrated and remembered with gratitude.

Sunday was a non-productive day. I meant to go to Mass at 11 o’clock but indolence overcame me. I slept for an hour in the afternoon, which was unwise as I had some difficulty getting to sleep last night and was awoken in the early hours by a noisy party in a flat in the Mews which went on until 3 o’clock. I like to sleep with my window open and one of the drawbacks of summer nights is the increase in noise. Tonight the constant loud thud of a pop group was particularly obnoxious.

The small hours are the worst to lie awake in. I switched on the bedside light and tried to read—P. G. Wodehouse or Nancy Mitford are the best providers of consolation in the treacherous small hours—but couldn’t get comfortable and my eyes felt tired and kept watering, smudging my spectacles. I have friends who overcome insomnia, or at least cope with it, by getting up and making tea, but this seems like giving in to sleeplessness. I tried to relax, hoping to slide into unconsciousness.

In theory I could use these uninterrupted hours to think about the next book; after all, I am the first to complain that there isn’t enough solitary thinking time. But at three in the morning the mind slips free of conscious control and the thoughts which come are more often depressing than creative.

Last night I found myself back in Cambridge. I can’t remember how old I was when my mother was compulsorily admitted to Fulbourne Mental Hospital, nor can I remember how long it was before she came home again. The weeks, perhaps months, before she was finally compulsorily detained must have been extremely difficult, particularly for my father, but for me they are a complete blank, except for one incident. I was in the double bed asleep with my sister when Father came in and asked me to go quickly and fetch Mrs. Mallett, one of our neighbours. I put on shoes and my coat and ran down the street. There was a small pile of gravel deposited there by workmen who were surfacing the road and I ran into this and fell and lay for a moment winded but unhurt. I can remember nothing further of that night except my father coming in after Mrs. Mallett had left and ruffling my hair. It was a gesture of tenderness which I don’t remember him ever making during my childhood except
at that moment. There must have been others, perhaps when I was very young, but this is the only one I remember.

I would go with him every Saturday to visit Mother in hospital, my brother and sister being left at home. All I recall of this is the occasional bus ride—a miscellaneous group of passengers making the same journey for the same purpose—the driveway up to the hospital and the smell of the ward. The drug used in those days to sedate the patient permeated clothes, hair, the air we breathed. The visits were always painful. My mother would sit clutching at her hospital dress with restless fingers, looking at us imploringly and constantly reiterating her wish to come home.

While she was away we initially managed. My father had always been extremely capable and, though not demonstrative, he was certainly dutiful. He did his best. Most of the shopping was done on his way home from the office and I cooked the evening meal and the meals at weekends, and tried, with the help of Monica and Edward, to keep the house reasonably clean. The biggest problem was washing; these were the days before washing machines or detergent and it was a problem ensuring that the three of us had clean clothes for Monday school.