'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
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