names of some of the people you were learning about in your last
history lesson.'
More glances were exchanged, and a very plain little girl in the
front row, in a brown jumper and skirt, with her hair screwed into
two tight pigtails, remarked cloudily, 'It was about the Ancient
Britons.' At this two other girls took courage, and answered
simultaneously. One of them said, 'Columbus', and the other
'Napoleon'.
Somehow, after that, Dorothy seemed to see her way more clearly.
It was obvious that instead of being uncomfortably knowledgeable as
she had feared, the class knew as nearly as possible no history at
all. With this discovery her stage-fright vanished. She grasped
that before she could do anything else with them it was necessary
to find out what, if anything, these children knew. So, instead of
following the time-table, she spent the rest of the morning in
questioning the entire class on each subject in turn; when she had
finished with history (and it took about five minutes to get to the
bottom of their historical knowledge) she tried them with geography,
with English grammar, with French, with arithmetic--with everything,
in fact, that they were supposed to have learned. By twelve o'clock
she had plumbed, though not actually explored, the frightful abysses
of their ignorance.
For they knew nothing, absolutely nothing--nothing, nothing,
nothing, like the Dadaists. It was appalling that even children
could be so ignorant. There were only two girls in the class who
knew whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the
earth, and not a single one of them could tell Dorothy who was the
last king before George V, or who wrote Hamlet, or what was meant
by a vulgar fraction, or which ocean you crossed to get to America,
the Atlantic or the Pacific. And the big girls of fifteen were not
much better than the tiny infants of eight, except that the former
could at least read consecutively and write neat copperplate. That
was the one thing that nearly all of the older girls could do--they
could write neatly. Mrs Creevy had seen to that. And of course,
here and there in the midst of their ignorance, there were small,
disconnected islets of knowledge; for example, some odd stanzas
from 'pieces of poetry' that they had learned by heart, and a few
Ollendorffian French sentences such as 'Passez-moi le beurre, s'il
vous plait' and 'Le fils du jardinier a perdu son chapeau', which
they appeared to have learned as a parrot learns 'Pretty Poll'. As
for their arithmetic, it was a little better than the other
subjects. Most of them knew how to add and subtract, about half of
them had some notion of how to multiply, and there were even three
or four who had struggled as far as long division. But that was
the utmost limit of their knowledge; and beyond, in every direction,
lay utter, impenetrable night.
Moreover, not only did they know nothing, but they were so unused
to being questioned that it was often difficult to get answers out
of them at all. It was obvious that whatever they knew they had
learned in an entirely mechanical manner, and they could only gape
in a sort of dull bewilderment when asked to think for themselves.
However, they did not seem unwilling, and evidently they had made
up their minds to be 'good'--children are always 'good' with a new
teacher; and Dorothy persisted, and by degrees the children grew,
or seemed to grow, a shade less lumpish. She began to pick up,
from the answers they gave her, a fairly accurate notion of what
Miss Strong's regime had been like.
It appeared that, though theoretically they had learned all the
usual school subjects, the only ones that had been at all seriously
taught were handwriting and arithmetic. Mrs Creevy was particularly
keen on handwriting. And besides this they had spent great
quantities of time--an hour or two out of every day, it seemed--in
drudging through a dreadful routine called 'copies.' 'Copies' meant
copying things out of textbooks or off the blackboard. Miss Strong
would write up, for example, some sententious little 'essay' (there
was an essay entitled 'Spring' which recurred in all the older
girls' books, and which began, 'Now, when girlish April is tripping
through the land, when the birds are chanting gaily on the boughs
and the dainty flowerets bursting from their buds', etc., etc.), and
the girls would make fair copies of it in their copybooks; and the
parents, to whom the copybooks were shown from time to time, were no
doubt suitably impressed. Dorothy began to grasp that everything
that the girls had been taught was in reality aimed at the parents.
Hence the 'copies', the insistence on handwriting, and the parroting
of ready-made French phrases; they were cheap and easy ways of
creating an impression. Meanwhile, the little girls at the bottom
of the class seemed barely able to read and write, and one of them--
her name was Mavis Williams, and she was a rather sinister-looking
child of eleven, with eyes too far apart--could not even count. This
child seemed to have done nothing at all during the past term and a
half except to write pothooks. She had quite a pile of books filled
with pothooks--page after page of pothooks, looping on and on like
the mangrove roots in some tropical swamp.
Dorothy tried not to hurt the children's feelings by exclaiming at
their ignorance, but in her heart she was amazed and horrified.
She had not known that schools of this description still existed in
the civilized world. The whole atmosphere of the place was so
curiously antiquated--so reminiscent of those dreary little private
schools that you read about in Victorian novels. As for the few
textbooks that the class possessed, you could hardly look at them
without feeling as though you had stepped back into the mid
nineteenth century. There were only three textbooks of which each
child had a copy. One was a shilling arithmetic, pre Great War but
fairly serviceable, and another was a horrid little book called The
Hundred Page History of Britain--a nasty little duodecimo book with
a gritty brown cover, and, for frontispiece, a portrait of Boadicea
with a Union Jack draped over the front of her chariot. Dorothy
opened this book at random, came to page 91, and read:
After the French Revolution was over, the self-styled Emperor
Napoleon Buonaparte attempted to set up his sway, but though he won
a few victories against continental troops, he soon found that in
the 'thin red line' he had more than met his match. Conclusions
were tried upon the field of Waterloo, where 50,000 Britons put to
flight 70,000 Frenchmen--for the Prussians, our allies, arrived too
late for the battle. With a ringing British cheer our men charged
down the slope and the enemy broke and fled. We now come on to the
great Reform Bill of 1832, the first of those beneficent reforms
which have made British liberty what it is and marked us off from
the less fortunate nations [etc
., etc.]. . . .
The date of the book was 1888. Dorothy, who had never seen a
history book of this description before, examined it with a feeling
approaching horror. There was also an extraordinary little
'reader', dated 1863. It consisted mostly of bits out of Fenimore
Cooper, Dr Watts, and Lord Tennyson, and at the end there were the
queerest little 'Nature Notes' with woodcut illustrations. There
would be a woodcut of an elephant, and underneath in small print:
'The elephant is a sagacious beast. He rejoices in the shade of
the Palm Trees, and though stronger than six horses he will allow a
little child to lead him. His food is Bananas.' And so on to the
Whale, the Zebra, and Porcupine, and the Spotted Camelopard. There
were also, in the teacher's desk, a copy of Beautiful Joe, a
forlorn book called Peeps at Distant Lands, and a French phrase-
book dated 1891. It was called All you will need on your Parisian
Trip, and the first phrase given was 'Lace my stays, but not too
tightly'. In the whole room there was not such a thing as an atlas
or a set of geometrical instruments.
At eleven there was a break of ten minutes, and some of the girls
played dull little games at noughts and crosses or quarrelled over
pencil-cases, and a few who had got over their first shyness
clustered round Dorothy's desk and talked to her. They told her
some more about Miss Strong and her methods of teaching, and how
she used to twist their ears when they made blots on their
copybooks. It appeared that Miss Strong had been a very strict
teacher except when she was 'taken bad', which happened about twice
a week. And when she was taken bad she used to drink some medicine
out of a little brown bottle, and after drinking it she would grow
quite jolly for a while and talk to them about her brother in
Canada. But on her last day--the time when she was taken so bad
during the arithmetic lesson--the medicine seemed to make her worse
than ever, because she had no sooner drunk it than she began
sinking and fell across a desk, and Mrs Creevy had to carry her out
of the room.
hour, and then school ended for the morning. Dorothy felt stiff
and tired after three hours in the chilly but stuffy room, and she
would have liked to go out of doors for a breath of fresh air, but
Mrs Creevy had told her beforehand that she must come and help get
dinner ready. The girls who lived near the school mostly went home
for dinner, but there were seven who had dinner in the 'morning-
room' at tenpence a time. It was an uncomfortable meal, and passed
in almost complete silence, for the girls were frightened to talk
under Mrs Creevy's eye. The dinner was stewed scrag end of mutton,
and Mrs Creevy showed extraordinary dexterity in serving the pieces
of lean to the 'good payers' and the pieces of fat to the 'medium
payers'. As for the three 'bad payers', they ate a shamefaced
lunch out of paper bags in the school-room.
School began again at two o'clock. Already, after only one
morning's teaching, Dorothy went back to her work with secret
shrinking and dread. She was beginning to realize what her life
would be like, day after day and week after week, in that sunless
room, trying to drive the rudiments of knowledge into unwilling
brats. But when she had assembled the girls and called their names
over, one of them, a little peaky child with mouse-coloured hair,
called Laura Firth, came up to her desk and presented her with a
pathetic bunch of browny-yellow chrysanthemums, 'from all of us'.
The girls had taken a liking to Dorothy, and had subscribed
fourpence among themselves, to buy her a bunch of flowers.
Something stirred in Dorothy's heart as she took the ugly flowers.
She looked with more seeing eyes than before at the anaemic faces
and shabby clothes of the children, and was all of a sudden
horribly ashamed to think that in the morning she had looked at
them with indifference, almost with dislike. Now, a profound pity
took possession of her. The poor children, the poor children! How
they had been stunted and maltreated! And with it all they had
retained the childish gentleness that could make them squander
their few pennies on flowers for their teacher.
She felt quite differently towards her job from that moment
onwards. A feeling of loyalty and affection had sprung up in her
heart. This school was HER school; she would work for it and be
proud of it, and make every effort to turn it from a place of
bondage into a place human and decent. Probably it was very little
that she could do. She was so inexperienced and unfitted for her
job that she must educate herself before she could even begin to
educate anybody else. Still, she would do her best; she would do
whatever willingness and energy could do to rescue these children
from the horrible darkness in which they had been kept.
3
During the next few weeks there were two things that occupied
Dorothy to the exclusion of all others. One, getting her class
into some kind of order; the other, establishing a concordat with
Mrs Creevy.
The second of the two was by a great deal the more difficult. Mrs
Creevy's house was as vile a house to live in as one could possibly
imagine. It was always more or less cold, there was not a
comfortable chair in it from top to bottom, and the food was
disgusting. Teaching is harder work than it looks, and a teacher
needs good food to keep him going. It was horribly dispiriting to
have to work on a diet of tasteless mutton stews, damp boiled
potatoes full of little black eyeholes, watery rice puddings, bread
and scrape, and weak tea--and never enough even of these. Mrs
Creevy, who was mean enough to take a pleasure in skimping even her
own food, ate much the same meals as Dorothy, but she always had
the lion's share of them. Every morning at breakfast the two fried
eggs were sliced up and unequally partitioned, and the dish of
marmalade remained for ever sacrosanct. Dorothy grew hungrier and
hungrier as the term went on. On the two evenings a week when she
managed to get out of doors she dipped into her dwindling store of
money and bought slabs of plain chocolate, which she ate in the
deepest secrecy--for Mrs Creevy, though she starved Dorothy more or
less intentionally, would have been mortally offended if she had
known that she bought food for herself.
The worst thing about Dorothy's position was that she had no
privacy and very little time that she could call her own. Once
where she was under Mrs Creevy's eye, and Mrs Creevy's leading idea
was that Dorothy must never be left in peace for ten minutes
together. She had taken it into her head, or pretended to do so,
that Dorothy was an idle person who needed keeping up to the mark.
And so it was always, 'Well, Miss Millborough, you don't seem
to
have very much to do this evening, do you? Aren't there some
exercise books that want correcting? Or why don't you get your
needle and do a bit of sewing? I'm sure _I_ couldn't bear to just
sit in my chair doing nothing like you do!' She was for ever
finding household jobs for Dorothy to do, even making her scrub the
schoolroom floor on Saturday mornings when the girls did not come
to school; but this was done out of pure ill nature, for she did
not trust Dorothy to do the work properly, and generally did it
again after her. One evening Dorothy was unwise enough to bring
back a novel from the public library. Mrs Creevy flared up at the
very sight of it. 'Well, really, Miss Millborough! I shouldn't
have thought you'd have had time to READ!' she said bitterly. She
herself had never read a book right through in her life, and was
proud of it.
Moreover, even when Dorothy was not actually under her eye, Mrs
Creevy had ways of making her presence felt. She was for ever
prowling in the neighbourhood of the schoolroom, so that Dorothy
never felt quite safe from her intrusion; and when she thought
there was too much noise she would suddenly rap on the wall with
her broom-handle in a way that made the children jump and put them
off their work. At all hours of the day she was restlessly,
noisily active. When she was not cooking meals she was banging
about with broom and dustpan, or harrying the charwoman, or
pouncing down upon the schoolroom to 'have a look round' in hopes
of catching Dorothy or the children up to mischief, or 'doing a bit
of gardening'--that is, mutilating with a pair of shears the
unhappy little shrubs that grew amid wastes of gravel in the back
garden. On only two evenings a week was Dorothy free of her, and
that was when Mrs Creevy sallied forth on forays which she called
'going after the girls'; that is to say, canvassing likely parents.
These evenings Dorothy usually spent in the public library, for
when Mrs Creevy was not at home she expected Dorothy to keep out of
the house, to save fire and gaslight. On other evenings Mrs Creevy
was busy writing dunning letters to the parents, or letters to the
editor of the local paper, haggling over the price of a dozen
advertisements, or poking about the girls' desks to see that their
exercise books had been properly corrected, or 'doing a bit of
sewing'. Whenever occupation failed her for even five minutes she
got out her workbox and 'did a bit of sewing'--generally
restitching some bloomers of harsh white linen of which she had
pairs beyond number. They were the most chilly looking garments
that one could possibly imagine; they seemed to carry upon them, as
no nun's coif or anchorite's hair shirt could ever have done, the
impress of a frozen and awful chastity. The sight of them set you
wondering about the late Mr Creevy, even to the point of wondering
whether he had ever existed.
Looking with an outsider's eye at Mrs Creevy's manner of life, you
would have said that she had no PLEASURES whatever. She never did
any of the things that ordinary people do to amuse themselves--
never went to the pictures, never looked at a book, never ate
sweets, never cooked a special dish for dinner or dressed herself
in any kind of finery. Social life meant absolutely nothing to
her. She had no friends, was probably incapable of imagining such
a thing as friendship, and hardly ever exchanged a word with a
fellow being except on business. Of religious belief she had not
the smallest vestige. Her attitude towards religion, though she
went to the Baptist Chapel every Sunday to impress the parents with
her piety, was a mean anti-clericalism founded on the notion that
the clergy are 'only after your money'. She seemed a creature
utterly joyless, utterly submerged by the dullness of her
existence. But in reality it was not so. There were several
things from which she derived acute and inexhaustible pleasure.
For instance, there was her avarice over money. It was the leading