Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (10 page)

In spite of his limited qualities of scholarship and his fitful interest in all non-musical subjects, the idea of refusing Edward a university education never so much as crossed my father’s mind. I loved him too dearly even while he was still at school to be jealous of him personally, particularly as he was always my gallant supporter, but I should have been far more patient and docile than I ever showed any symptom of becoming if I had not resented his privileged position as a boy. The most flattering of my school reports had never, I knew, been regarded more seriously than my inconvenient thirst for knowledge and opportunities; in our family, to adapt a famous present-day phrase, what mattered was not the quality of the work, but the sex of the worker.

The constant and to me enraging evidences of this difference of attitude towards Edward and myself violently reinforced the feminist tendencies which I had first acquired at school, and which were being indirectly but surely developed by the clamorous drama of the suffragette movement far away in London.

‘It feels sad to be a woman!’ I wrote in March 1913 - the very month in which the ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act was first introduced for the ingenious torment of the militants. ‘Men seem to have so much more choice as to what they are intended for.’

The passage of time - or so, at least, I fondly believe - has changed my furious Buxton resentments into mellower and more balanced opinions, but probably no ambitious girl who has lived in a family which regards the subservience of women as part of the natural order of creation ever completely recovers from the bitterness of her early emotions. Perhaps it is just as well; women have still a long way to travel before their achievements are likely to be assessed without irrelevant sex considerations entering in to bias the judgment of the critic, and even their recent political successes are not yet so secure that those who profit by them can afford to dispense with the few acknowledged feminists who are still vigilant, and still walk warily along once forbidden paths.

3

Early in 1913, when my hopes of ever escaping from provincial young-ladyhood were almost abandoned, came the first unexpected intimations of eventual release.

One spring evening a Staffordshire acquaintance - an old family lawyer - came to spend the night at our house. Judiciously prompted by my mother, who was now beginning - perhaps because my refusal to adapt myself to Buxton had now convinced her - secretly to sympathise with the idea of college, he began at dinner to talk about Oxford, and I learnt that his elder son, who had won a scholarship there, had only just gone down after taking a brilliant degree.

My father, not to be outdone in parental self-congratulation, thereupon not only mentioned his determination to send Edward to Oxford, but threw in my own continual requests to go to college to make up the balance. To his surprise, our visitor took this expression of feminine ambition entirely as a matter of course, and even mentioned one or two of his son’s acquaintances among the women students. Like many men who have been brought up without academic contacts, my father was at first more ready to listen to family cronies without any special title to their opinions, than to unfamiliar experts with every qualification for offering advice. The fact that his highly respected old friend regarded the presence of women at Oxford as in no way remarkable undoubtedly caused him to revise his opinion on the whole subject of the higher education of daughters. This transformation process was completed by a course of University Extension Lectures given by Mr J. A. R. Marriott - now Sir John - in Buxton Town Hall during the spring of 1913.

Of recent years I have sometimes heard criticisms of Sir John Marriott by his political opponents both at Oxford and elsewhere. These party criticisms usually imply, more or less directly, that long experience as a university teacher does not adapt a man or woman to political life, and that it was probably owing to his academic qualities that Sir John lost the supposedly safe Conservative seats of Oxford and York.

In this country, apart from university constituencies, there is certainly a rigid line, difficult to cross, between the political and the academic worlds - a line which in parts of America is becoming indistinct, with advantages to both sides. Judging from my experience as a graduate of one university and the wife of a professor attached to another, it does seem to me that academic life in any country tends to make both men and women narrow, censorious and self-important. My husband I believe to be among the exceptions, but one or two of his young donnish contemporaries have been responsible for some of the worst exhibitions of bad manners that I have ever encountered. Apparently most dons grow out of this contemptuous brusqueness as the years go by; elderly professors, though often disapproving, are almost always punctilious. On the whole I have found American dons politer than English, and those from provincial universities more courteous than the Oxford and Cambridge variety.

To attribute, however, to Sir John Marriott the brusquer characteristics of academic Oxford seems to me to argue precisely that lack of perspicacity that Party opponents so often encourage in themselves. (I write this without rancour, since I belong myself to that Party whose programme is anathema to Sir John and his colleagues. To-day I can agree with few of his political opinions, but if he believed every clause of the Versailles Treaty to be divinely inspired I think I should forgive him, so deep still is my thankfulness for his breezy and uncalculating intervention in my obscure affairs.) No man could have had less contempt for unfamiliar ways of living, or more interest in the by-paths of experience. On the only occasion that they met I remember how skilfully he persuaded my father - with whom he can have had next to nothing in common - to discourse with lively enthusiasm on the technique of paper-making, and to relate the modest history of our mill.

For me Sir John remains and always will remain the kindly, stimulating teacher in whose genial presence obstacles hitherto insuperable melted away like snow in April. He represents the
deus ex machina
of my unsophisticated youth, the Olympian who listened without a hint of patronage or amusement to the halting account of a callow girl’s vaunting, ingenuous ambitions. To him I owe my final victory over family opposition, my escape from the alien atmosphere of Buxton, and the university education which for all its omissions did at long last equip me for the kind of life that I wanted to lead. It is a debt that I acknowledge with humble gratitude, and can never hope to repay.

The most optimistic enthusiast for adult education could hardly have described that Buxton course of Extension Lectures on the Problems of Wealth and Poverty as a conspicuous success. I stayed away from the first to go to a dance (this far had I already fallen from grace!) but I attended and wrote - the sole regular essayist out of the whole town - for all the five others.

Sir John gave of his vigorous and popular best, but a prophet from heaven could not have impressed his listless and dwindling audience, of which the older and somnolent half had come out of consideration for the feelings of the local secretary, and the younger and fidgety half under compulsion from its parents. It was, I think, at the fourth or fifth lecture that he was moved to tell his yawning listeners that Buxton did not strike him as
particularly
inquisitive - a remark which led to a good deal of adverse criticism of the lectures at subsequent tea-parties. I even heard one voluminous lady (whose husband had launched out upon an essay answering all three alternative questions, instead of selecting one as he had been told to do) remark to sympathetic acquaintances that she never
had
liked ‘the man’s’ manner, and that she had heard he only came to Buxton because they wouldn’t have him in Oxford!

My own persevering essays on the Industrial Revolution, the Problem of Distribution, the History of Trade Unionism and the Rise of the Socialist Movement must have been crude and superficial in the extreme, since neither the local Free Library nor the little collection of schoolbooks on my bedroom shelves contained any relevant works on either history or economics, but the reports that they received from Sir John were sufficiently encouraging to be described by my father as ‘a great honour from an Oxford man’.

No doubt - as indeed I have since discovered when lecturing myself - one wheat-ear of enthusiasm was worth a good many tares of indifference. I signed my first tentative effort with initials only, and when I nervously went up to claim it Sir John showed considerable surprise - as well indeed he might have done, for no one could have looked more immature, or less capable of formulating a coherent idea, than I did in those days. For all my long skirts and elaborate Empire curls, I never succeeded up to the time that the War broke out in appearing older than an unfledged fifteen.

At the request of the local secretary - a cultured woman who was, needless to say, only on the fringe of ‘the set’ - my family agreed to put Sir John up for his last Buxton lecture. On this occasion he returned my weekly essay at home after we came back from the now almost empty Town Hall. His praise moved me to speak, in my parents’ presence, of my longing to go to Oxford, and I asked his advice with regard to the first steps to be taken. The genial matter-of-factness with which he gave it seemed to dispel all doubts, and made the customary objections look so trivial that they were hardly ever mentioned again.

The next morning he departed, leaving a singular feeling of emptiness where his stimulating presence, his tweed coat and his golf clubs had been. I do not suppose that he ever thought again of our household, or realised in the least how completely his flying visit had altered the atmosphere.

4

After Sir John had gone changes seemed, in comparison with the utter stagnation of the previous year, to happen very quickly. I went in for, and won, an essay competition which he had advised me to attempt in connection with that year’s Oxford Summer Meeting; I also received, and accepted, an invitation to stay at St Hilda’s Hall for the meeting itself with my aunt and Miss Heath Jones.

The result of the essay competition further gratified the dawning pride in my modest achievements which Sir John’s encouragement had aroused in my father. Before I went to the Summer School he told me that he had decided to send me to Oxford for a year, and did not seem unduly disconcerted when I returned home with the information - then as much news to me as to him - that if I wanted a Degree I must remain at college not merely for one year but for three.

I went to St Hilda’s in a state of ecstatic entrancement which I do not now know whether to regard as funny or pathetic or incredible; I only wish that I were still capable of feeling it about anything. ‘Oh, when I think of it all,’ I had written in my diary with ingenuous rapture after accepting my aunt’s invitation, ‘I feel as though I were in a dream from which I am afraid to awaken. Oxford! What doesn’t it call up to the mind! The greatest romance of England - the mellowed beauty of time and association, the finest lectures the world can produce, wonderful libraries and fascinating old bookshops, the society of Miss H. J. and Miss B. the best I could desire on earth and the meeting all the interesting intellectual people Miss H. J. knows - oh God, have pity on my fierce excitement and grant that it may come to pass and be even better than I dream!’

When I did arrive at this Earthly Paradise I was not, strangely enough, in the least disappointed. Even the lectures ‘the finest the world can produce’, came up to my expectations - a fact which seems to indicate that few of the usual term-time lecturers can have been included in the Summer School programme. There was a light on my path and a dizzy intoxication in the air; the old buildings in the August sunshine seemed crowned with a golden glory, and I tripped up and down the High Street between St Hilda’s and the Examination Schools on gay feet as airy as my soaring aspirations.

My fellow ‘thirsters’ were the usual Summer Meeting collection of unoccupied spinsters, schoolmistresses on holiday, fatherly chapel-goers and earnest young men in sweaters and soft collars, but I thought them all extremely talented and enormously important. Had anyone told me that less than a decade afterwards I should myself be lecturing to similar gatherings, I should blankly have refused to believe him, for if I was in awe of the audiences, the lecturers seemed to me to be at least on a level with Angels and Archangels and all the company of heaven. And perhaps, since they included not only Sir John Marriott on the Monarchy of France, but Dean Inge, grave, scholarly and a little alarming on Old Testament Eschatology, I had some excuse for thinking that I had strayed by accident into the most exclusive circle of a celestial hierarchy.

The fact that Sir John had asked me to dine with him one evening while I was attending the School added the final drop to my cup of excitement. Palpitating with awe and amazement, I presented myself at his house in Northmoor Road, where I met his beautiful wife and elegant, clever daughter, who afterwards became, rather surprisingly, absorbed in the Girls’ Diocesan Association. So remarkably had my prospects changed since the spring, that we talked of my university future as a foregone conclusion. Sir John, no doubt bearing in mind the sheltered life of a Buxton young lady, took for granted that I should try to enter Lady Margaret Hall, for this has always been the politest of the four Oxford women’s colleges, and in those days it invariably wore, like my Buxton academy, ‘a school for the daughters of gentlemen’ air. (Strictly Anglican gentlemen, of course.)

Trembling but determined, in spite of the gratitude and admiration which almost unnerved me, I contradicted his assumption. I had already talked over the four colleges with a business associate of my father’s, Mr Horace Hart, then Controller of the Oxford University Press, who told me that Somerville was undenominational and that it had become, owing to its high examination standards, by far the most difficult of the women’s colleges to enter.