Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 Read online

  When, a few years before the War, I first went to St Monica’s, the young school had not yet reached the high educational standards of its later days, and though my budding ambition to go to college - which developed as soon as I discovered that such places as women’s colleges existed, and learnt what they stood for - met with real sympathy from both Principals and staff, it received no practical preparation for the necessary examinations, which were not then taken as a matter of normal routine. No doubt my father’s persistent determination throughout my schooldays that I should be turned into an entirely ornamental young lady deterred both my aunt and Miss Heath Jones from the efforts that they would otherwise have made on my behalf; the most benevolent and aspiring headmistresses are, after all, singularly helpless in the hands of misguided but resolute parents.

  My classroom contemporaries regarded my ambitions, not unnaturally, with no particular interest or sympathy. Many of them were fashionable young women to whom universities represented a quite unnecessary prolongation of useless and distasteful studies, and they looked upon my efforts to reach the top of a form, and my naïve anxiety to remain there, as satisfactorily exonerating them from the troublesome endeavour to win that position for themselves.

  Socially, of course, I was quite without standing among these wealthy girls, designed by their parents for London or Edinburgh society, with their town addresses in Mayfair or Belgravia, and their country houses of which the name ‘Hall’ or ‘Park’ was frequently a part. My parents could not afford the numerous theatres and concerts to which many of them were taken by request of their families; my ‘best’ clothes were home-made or purchased from undistinguished shops in Buxton or Manchester; and the presents that I received at Christmas or on birthdays did not bear comparison with the many elegant gifts that my class-mates displayed for the admiration of contemporaries on returning to school after the holidays.

  It is hardly surprising that few of the girls coveted the reputation unenthusiastically conceded to me for ‘brains’, or even envied my comparative freedom from refused lessons, but regarded these assets as mere second-rate compensations for my obvious inferiority in the advantages that they valued most. In those days as in these, girls’ private schools attracted but few parents possessed of more than a half-hearted intention to train their daughters for exacting careers or even for useful occupations. Both for the young women and their mothers, the potential occurrence that loomed largest upon the horizon was marriage, and in spite of the undaunted persistence with which both the Principals upheld their own progressive ideals of public service, almost every girl left school with only two ambitions - to return at the first possible moment to impress her school-fellows with the glory of a grown-up toilette, and to get engaged before everybody else.

  Although I was then more deeply concerned about universities than engagements, I shared the general hankering after an adult wardrobe which would be at least partly self-chosen, since all girls’ clothing of the period appeared to be designed by their elders on the assumption that decency consisted in leaving exposed to the sun and air no part of the human body that could possibly be covered with flannel. In these later days, when I lie lazily sunning myself in a mere gesture of a bathing-suit on the gay plage of some small Riviera town - or even, during a clement summer, on the ultra-respectable shores of southern England - and watch the lean brown bodies of girl-children, almost naked and completely unashamed, leaping in and out of the water, I am seized with an angry resentment against the conventions of twenty years ago, which wrapped up my comely adolescent body in woollen combinations, black cashmere stockings, ‘liberty’ bodice, dark stockinette knickers, flannel petticoat and often, in addition, a long-sleeved, high-necked, knitted woollen ‘spencer’.

  At school, on the top of this conglomeration of drapery, we wore green flannel blouses in the winter and white flannel blouses in the summer, with long navy-blue skirts, linked to the blouses by elastic belts which continually slipped up or down, leaving exposed an unsightly hiatus of blouse-tape or safety-pinned shirt-band. Green and white blouses alike had long sleeves ending in buttoned cuffs at the wrist, and high collars covering the neck almost to the chin, and fastening tightly at the throat with stiff green ties. For cricket and tennis matches, even in the baking summer of 1911, we still wore the flowing skirts and high-necked blouses, with our heavy hair braided into pigtails; it was not until after the War that the school went into sleeveless white linens for summer games. Only in the gymnasium class did our handicapped limbs acquire freedom, and even then the tight, long-sleeved blouses were worn under our weighty pleated tunics. In spite of these impediments, the games and drill did make us lithe and hard, and during the War I had reason to thank them for the powers of endurance of which they laid the foundation.

  The only intimate friends that I made at Kingswood were a small, dark, half-foreign girl and a pretty, fair, sweet-natured Anglo-Saxon, whose names might very suitably have been Mina and Betty. Mina, a younger daughter in a large and wealthy family, displayed at school a real artistic talent, while Betty possessed intellectual possibilities which she was never sufficiently interested to explore, owing to a quite frankly acknowledged desire to marry and have children. In neither case did the intimacy long survive our departure from school.

  Mina, during the War, developed under the stress of a perturbing love-affair a strong disapproval of my character, which led her to conclude that I had never been worthy of her friendship. When I was nursing in London in the early part of 1916, and she was cultivating her considerable gift for drawing at an art school, she made an appointment with me at - of all appropriate places for a moral condemnation - the Albert Memorial, in order to inform me that I was selfish, insincere, ambitious, and therefore no longer deserving of her affection. I can see her sturdy little figure now, conspicuous in a coat and skirt of strange pink cloth against the solid stone basis of the immaculate Albert, as she arraigned me for the harsh, unmelting bitterness into which I had been frozen by the first real tragedy of my experience.

  ‘You never really cared for Roland; you only wanted to marry him out of ambition! If you’d really loved him you couldn’t possibly have behaved in the way you’ve done the past few weeks!’

  It was, of course, typical of the average well-to-do girl of the period to assume that the desire for power, which is as universal among women as among men, could only be fulfilled by the acquisition of a brilliant husband. I do not recall the mood in which I spent the long ’bus ride back to Camberwell, but I probably minded dreadfully at the time. At any rate, we parted for good, and I cannot recollect that I have ever encountered Mina since that morning.

  With Betty the association lasted longer and I owe far more to it; for nearly two years during the War we served by arrangement in the same military hospitals, and even after it was over kept up the kind of friendship that renews itself at Old Girls’ Association meetings and exchanges of annual Christmas cards. But real intimacy between us became difficult as soon as we left school, for our homes were in different parts of England, our parents cherished different social aspirations, and our personal ambitions were not the same. Betty had no desire for a university education or the independence of a professional woman. The War, which frustrated individual as well as national hopes, caused her future to remain uncertain until 1922, when she married a man considerably her senior who soon afterwards became a Conservative Member of Parliament. To-day her two pretty children, a little older than my own, still provide a point of contact between lives which in other respects could hardly differ more widely.

  6

  I remember Kingswood very clearly as it looked twenty years ago, with the inviolate Downs stretching away to Smitham, and the thick woods unbroken by the pink and grey eruption of suburban villas which has now torn them ruthlessly into sections. On summer evenings one of our favourite rambles took us across the sloping fields, sweet with clover and thyme and wild roses, between Kingswood and Chipstead; there as twilight descended we look
ed a little nervously at the darkening sky for indications of Halley’s Comet which was said to herald such prodigious disasters, or listened more serenely to the nightingales in a stillness broken only at long intervals by the lazy, infrequent little trains which ambled down the toy railway line in the valley. The thyme and the roses still blossom bravely about those doomed meadows, but I have never heard the nightingales there since the War, and the once uninterrupted walks have long been spoilt by barbed-wire barriers and notices drawn up for the intimidation of stray trespassers.

  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.’