Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (7 page)

In the months before I went up to Oxford, when I had to plough, solitary and unaided, through the tedious intricacies of examination syllabuses, I often privately condemned my parents for not sending me to Cheltenham, or Roedean, or even to an ordinary High School, where practised authorities would have saved me from the fret of wrestling with academic mysteries. But of late years I have realised that St Monica’s, although it did not then possess certain routine advantages of a public school, is very far from being a matter for regret. No doubt it did not provide that prolonged and exacting type of education which is now the inevitable preliminary to any professional career; but such training was then mainly obtainable in schools which sterilised the sexual charm out of their pupils, and turned them into hockey-playing hoydens with
gauche
manners and an armoury of inhibitions.

St Monica’s did not, of course, prepare me either for the strain and stress of a very few years later, but I question if the artificial atmosphere of hockey matches and High School examinations would have done this any better, or whether, indeed, the early development of a more critical and less idealistic spirit would have proved, in the long run, an effective weapon against annihilating calamity. A dozen years’ periodic observation of Oxford dons has led me to doubt whether, even for those misguided dupes the boys and girls of the War generation, an over-development of the critical faculty would not have been at least as dangerous as its under-development. The latter, at any rate, does nothing to destroy that vitality which is more important than any other quality in combating the obstacles, the set-backs and the obtuse ridicule which are more often encountered in early youth than at any other time.

We were too young to have had power to divert the remorseless impetus of history; we should probably have gone - have had to go - to the War whatever our psychology, and it is arguable that our early months of illumined faith were a factor in the ultimate return of some of us to life. At least the unexacting demands of the easy lessons at St Monica’s, the mildness of the intellectual competition - a little more substantial than that of the Buxton school only because the girls were drawn from a wider area - and the lovely peace of the rich, undisturbed country, left scope for much reading of Dante and Shakespeare, of Shelley and Browning and Swinburne, and gave opportunity for dreams of which many, in the strangest ways and against all probability, have since materialised.

Only the other day a fellow-journalist, half rueful and half amused, told me that I had made a better thing out of sex equality than she had ever thought possible for such a portentous topic until I began to scatter articles on equal pay and married women’s careers through the pages of the daily and weekly Press. If that is so, I can only reply that I have written nothing on the various aspects of feminism which has not been based upon genuine conviction, and that the foundations of that conviction were first laid, strangely enough, at a school which was apparently regarded by many of the parents who patronised it as a means of equipping girls to be men’s decorative and contented inferiors.

Miss Heath Jones, who from my knowledge of her temperament I now suspect to have been secretly in sympathy with the militant suffrage raids and demonstrations which began after the foundation of the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1905, was an ardent though always discreet feminist. She often spoke to me of Dorothea Beale and Emily Davies, lent me books on the woman’s movement, and even took me with one or two of the other senior girls in 1911 to what must have been a very mild and constitutional suffrage meeting in Tadworth village. This practical introduction to feminism was to be for ever afterwards associated in my mind with the great heat, the railway strikes, the Parliament Bill debates and the international crises of that hectic summer, which provided such wealth of topical detail for my passionate editorial in the 1911 School Magazine.

To this day I can remember some of the lessons which Miss Heath Jones gave us in History and Scripture - lessons which raced backwards and forwards in the same five minutes from the French Revolution to the Liberal Victory in the 1910 General Elections, from the prophecies of Isaiah to the 1911 Italian invasion of Tripoli. From the unimaginative standpoint of pre-war examinations they were quite unpractical, but as teaching in the real sense of the word - the creation in immature minds of the power to think, to visualise, to perceive analogies - they could hardly have been surpassed. In 1908, after Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, she set us drawing maps of the Balkan Peninsula, and in 1911 she arranged a school debate on the Morocco crisis - about which I held forth with vague but patriotic fervour - when Germany sent the
Panther
to Agadir.

Her encouragement even prevailed upon us to read the newspapers, which were then quite unusual adjuncts to teaching in girls’ private schools. We were never, of course, allowed to have the papers themselves - our innocent eyes might have strayed from foreign affairs to the evidence being taken by the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce or the Report of the International Paris Conference for the suppression of the White Slave Traffic - and the carefully selected cuttings invariably came from
The Times
or the
Observer
unmodified by contrary political opinions, but the fact that we had them at all testified to a recognition of the importance of current events far from customary at a time when politics and economics were still thought by most headmistresses to be no part of the education of marriageable young females.

Among the girls Miss Heath Jones’s lessons were not always appreciated, for most of the sheltered young women in that era displayed no particular anxiety to have the capacity for thought developed within them. Even now I recall the struggles of some of my contemporaries to avoid facing some of the less agreeable lessons of 1914. There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think - which is fundamentally a moral problem - must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still goes to war, still encourages the production of unwanted C3 children by exhausted mothers, and still compels married partners who hate one another to live together in the name of morality.

Out of the desultory and miscellaneous reading in which, under Miss Heath Jones’s inspired and unconventional tuition, I indulged between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, a poem, a novel and a challenging triumph of propaganda especially determined the direction in which I was moving. During Preparation one wild autumn evening in St Monica’s gymnasium, when the wind shook the unsubstantial walls and a tiny crescent of moon, glimpsed through a skylight in the roof, scudded in and out of the flying clouds, I first read Shelley’s ‘Adonais’, which taught me in the most startling and impressive fashion of my childhood’s experience to perceive beauty embodied in literature, and made me finally determine to become the writer that I had dreamed of being ever since I was seven years old. I still defy anyone, however ‘highbrow’, to better the thrill of reading, for the first time and at sixteen, the too-familiar lines:

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity . . .

The novel, strangely enough, was Mrs Humphry Ward’s deistic tract,
Robert Elsmere
. Had I realised when I read it that its author was even then portentously engaged in rallying the anti-suffrage forces, it might have influenced me less, but I remained ignorant until some years later of Mrs Ward’s political machinations, and her book converted me from an unquestioning if somewhat indifferent church-goer into an anxiously interrogative agnostic.

To Olive Schreiner’s
Woman and Labour
- that ‘Bible of the Woman’s Movement’ which sounded to the world of 1911 as insistent and inspiring as a trumpet-call summoning the faithful to a vital crusade - was due my final acceptance of feminism. Miss Heath Jones lent me the book soon after its publication, and I can still tingle with the excitement of the passage which reinforced me, brought up as were nearly all middle-class girls of that period to believe myself predestined to a perpetual, distasteful but inescapable tutelage, in my determination to go to college and at least prepare for a type of life more independent than that of a Buxton young lady:

‘ “
We take all labour for our province!
”

‘From the judge’s seat to the legislator’s chair; from the statesman’s closet to the merchant’s office; from the chemist’s laboratory to the astronomer’s tower, there is no post or form of toil for which it is not our intention to attempt to fit ourselves; and there is no closed door we do not intend to force open; and there is no fruit in the garden of knowledge it is not our determination to eat.’

Thus it was in St Monica’s garden, beside a little over-grown pool where the plump goldfish slid idly in and out of the shadows, and the feathered grasses drooped their heavy heads to the water’s edge, that I first visualised in rapt childish ecstasy a world in which women would no longer be the second-rate, unimportant creatures that they were now considered, but the equal and respected companions of men. Indeed, that school garden, now trimly beautiful in its twenty-year-old mellowness, but then recently hewn from the rough surface of the Downs and golden-hedged with tangled gorse and broom, has been for me somehow associated with every past phase of life.

There, at the age of sixteen, I first began to dream how the men and women of my generation - with myself, of course, conspicuous among that galaxy of Leonardos - would inaugurate a new Renaissance on a colossal scale, and incidentally redeem all the foolish mistakes of our forefathers. There, more realistically, I planned my long-desired and constantly postponed career, there sought refuge after the anxiety of college examinations, there waited for news from the War, and felt the sinister shudder of the guns from the Belgian coast shake the Caterham Valley like a subterranean earthquake. There, too, when the War was over, I wandered about after taking the older girls for classes in history and international relations, thinking about relations quite other than international, and wondering whether or not to get married.

But I anticipate. In my last term, as head-girl, I did no examinations and very little work, except for special history and literature classes with a visiting mistress, Miss F., one of those rare teachers who, like Miss Heath Jones, possessed originality and a real talent for inspiring ideas. Her gifts may be judged from the fact that she succeeded in filling me with a tremendous enthusiasm for the works of Carlyle and Ruskin. ‘The most important of all terms so far - as it marked the rising of my Star,’ begins an earnest fragment of sixteen-year-old diary recorded during the holidays after Miss F. first went to Kingswood - though fortunately the reference was not to herself, but to the impetus given by her teaching to the growth of those sentiments which, under the influence of
Past and Present
, I should then have described as my Ideals.

An elegant, introspective, temperamental creature, Miss F. once spent a few days in Buxton with me and my family - who mildly disapproved of her - and told our fortunes on a dull afternoon. Over Edward, who was then sixteen, she appeared indefinite and uncommunicative, but to me she remarked: ‘I think you’ll be married all right’ (the phrase implying acceptance even on her part of what was still supposed to be the major preoccupation of an intelligent girl), ‘but if you’re not married at twenty-one, you’ll have to wait till you’re thirty. By that time you’ll have some kind of a career; I don’t know quite what it will be, but it will turn out well and your marriage won’t interfere with it.’

Just before I left St Monica’s I played the part of the Madonna in
Eager Heart
, Miss Buckton’s Christmas mystery play, which gave a peculiarly memorable and emotional quality to my last weeks at school. Temperamentally, at least, I was thoroughly well adapted to the role, and this fact, to anyone who knows the play, with its half-sentimental, half-mystical detachment from the pedestrian demands of everyday life, will perhaps give a better idea than anything else of the state of mind in which, before I had turned eighteen, I left school to ‘come out’ into the alien atmosphere of Buxton ‘society’.

7

It would not, I think, be possible for any present-day girl of the same age even to imagine how abysmally ignorant, how romantically idealistic and how utterly unsophisticated my more sensitive contemporaries and I were at that time. The naïveties of the diary which I began to write consistently soon after leaving school, and kept up until more than half way through the War, must be read in order to be believed. My ‘Reflective Record, 1913’, is endorsed on its title page with the following comprehensive aspirations:

‘To extend love, to promote thought, to lighten suffering, to combat indifference, to inspire activity.’

‘To know everything of something and something of everything. ’

The same page contains a favourite quotation from Rostand’s ‘
Princesse Lointaine
’: