interest of her life. There are two kinds of avaricious person--
the bold, grasping type who will ruin you if he can, but who never
looks twice at twopence, and the petty miser who has not the
enterprise actually to MAKE money, but who will always, as the
saying goes, take a farthing from a dunghill with his teeth. Mrs
Creevy belonged to the second type. By ceaseless canvassing and
impudent bluff she had worked her school up to twenty-one pupils,
but she would never get it much further, because she was too mean
to spend money on the necessary equipment and to pay proper wages
to her assistant. The fees the girls paid, or didn't pay, were
five guineas a term with certain extras, so that, starve and sweat
her assistant as she might, she could hardly hope to make more than
a hundred and fifty pounds a year clear profit. But she was fairly
satisfied with that. It meant more to her to save sixpence than to
earn a pound. So long as she could think of a way of docking
Dorothy's dinner of another potato, or getting her exercise books a
halfpenny a dozen cheaper, or shoving an unauthorized half guinea
on to one of the 'good payers'' bills, she was happy after her
fashion.
And again, in pure, purposeless malignity--in petty acts of spite,
even when there was nothing to be gained by them--she had a hobby
of which she never wearied. She was one of those people who
experience a kind of spiritual orgasm when they manage to do
somebody else a bad turn. Her feud with Mr Boulger next door--a
one-sided affair, really, for poor Mr Boulger was not up to Mrs
Creevy's fighting weight--was conducted ruthlessly, with no quarter
given or expected. So keen was Mrs Creevy's pleasure in scoring
off Mr Boulger that she was even willing to spend money on it
occasionally. A year ago Mr Boulger had written to the landlord
(each of them was for ever writing to the landlord, complaining
about the other's behaviour), to say that Mrs Creevy's kitchen
chimney smoked into his back windows, and would she please have it
heightened two feet. The very day the landlord's letter reached
her, Mrs Creevy called in the bricklayers and had the chimney
lowered two feet. It cost her thirty shillings, but it was worth
it. After that there had been the long guerrilla campaign of
throwing things over the garden wall during the night, and Mrs
Creevy had finally won with a dustbinful of wet ashes thrown on to
Mr Boulger's bed of tulips. As it happened, Mrs Creevy won a neat
and bloodless victory soon after Dorothy's arrival. Discovering by
chance that the roots of Mr Boulger's plum tree had grown under the
wall into her own garden, she promptly injected a whole tin of
weed-killer into them and killed the tree. This was remarkable as
being the only occasion when Dorothy ever heard Mrs Creevy laugh.
But Dorothy was too busy, at first, to pay much attention to Mrs
Creevy and her nasty characteristics. She saw quite clearly that
Mrs Creevy was an odious woman and that her own position was
virtually that of a slave; but it did not greatly worry her. Her
work was too absorbing, too all-important. In comparison with it,
her own comfort and even her future hardly seemed to matter.
It did not take her more than a couple of days to get her class
into running order. It was curious, but though she had no
experience of teaching and no preconceived theories about it, yet
from the very first day she found herself, as though by instinct,
rearranging, scheming, innovating. There was so much that was
crying out to be done. The first thing, obviously, was to get rid
of the grisly routine of 'copies', and after Dorothy's second day
no more 'copies' were done in the class, in spite of a sniff or two
from Mrs Creevy. The handwriting lessons, also, were cut down.
Dorothy would have liked to do away with handwriting lessons
altogether so far as the older girls were concerned--it seemed to
her ridiculous that girls of fifteen should waste time in practising
copperplate--but Mrs Creevy would not hear of it. She seemed to
attach an almost superstitious value to handwriting lessons. And
the next thing, of course, was to scrap the repulsive Hundred Page
History and the preposterous little 'readers'. It would have been
worse than useless to ask Mrs Creevy to buy new books for the
children, but on her first Saturday afternoon Dorothy begged leave
to go up to London, was grudgingly given it, and spent two pounds
three shillings out of her precious four pounds ten on a dozen
secondhand copies of a cheap school edition of Shakespeare, a big
second-hand atlas, some volumes of Hans Andersen's stories for the
younger children, a set of geometrical instruments, and two pounds
of plasticine. With these, and history books out of the public
library, she felt that she could make a start.
She had seen at a glance that what the children most needed, and
what they had never had, was individual attention. So she began by
dividing them up into three separate classes, and so arranging
things that two lots could be working by themselves while she 'went
through' something with the third. It was difficult at first,
especially with the younger girls, whose attention wandered as soon
as they were left to themselves, so that you could never really
take your eyes off them. And yet how wonderfully, how unexpectedly,
nearly all of them improved during those first few weeks! For the
most part they were not really stupid, only dazed by a dull,
mechanical rigmarole. For a week, perhaps, they continued
unteachable; and then, quite suddenly, their warped little minds
seemed to spring up and expand like daisies when you move the
garden roller off them.
Quite quickly and easily Dorothy broke them in to the habit of
thinking for themselves. She got them to make up essays out of
their own heads instead of copying out drivel about the birds
chanting on the boughs and the flowerets bursting from their buds.
She attacked their arithmetic at the foundations and started the
little girls on multiplication and piloted the older ones through
long division to fractions; she even got three of them to the point
where there was talk of starting on decimals. She taught them the
first rudiments of French grammar in place of 'Passez-moi le
beurre, s'il vous plait' and 'Le fils du jardinier a perdu son
chapeau'. Finding that not a girl in the class knew what any of
the countries of the world looked like (though several of them knew
that Quito was the capital of Ecuador), she set them to making a
large contour-map of Europe in plasticine, on a piece of three-ply
wood, copying it in scale from the atlas. The children adored
making the map; they were always clamouring to be allowed to go on
with it. And she started the whole class, except the six youngest
girls and Mavis Williams, the pothook specialist, on reading
Macbeth. Not a child among them had ever voluntarily read anything
in her life before, except perhaps
the Girl's Own Paper; but they
took readily to Shakespeare, as all children do when he is not made
horrible with parsing and analysing.
History was the hardest thing to teach them. Dorothy had not
realized till now how hard it is for children who come from poor
homes to have even a conception of what history means. Every
upper-class person, however ill-informed, grows up with some notion
of history; he can visualize a Roman centurion, a medieval knight,
an eighteenth-century nobleman; the terms Antiquity, Middle Ages,
Renaissance, Industrial Revolution evoke some meaning, even if a
confused one, in his mind. But these children came from bookless
homes and from parents who would have laughed at the notion that
the past has any meaning for the present. They had never heard of
Robin Hood, never played at being Cavaliers and Roundheads, never
wondered who built the English churches or what Fid. Def. on a
penny stands for. There were just two historical characters of
whom all of them, almost without exception, had heard, and those
were Columbus and Napoleon. Heaven knows why--perhaps Columbus and
Napoleon get into the newspapers a little oftener than most
historical characters. They seemed to have swelled up in the
children's minds, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, till they blocked
out the whole landscape of the past. Asked when motor-cars were
invented, one child, aged ten, vaguely hazarded, 'About a thousand
years ago, by Columbus.'
Some of the older girls, Dorothy discovered, had been through the
Hundred Page History as many as four times, from Boadicea to the
first Jubilee, and forgotten practically every word of it. Not
that that mattered greatly, for most of it was lies. She started
the whole class over again at Julius Caesar's invasion, and at
first she tried taking history books out of the public library and
reading them aloud to the children; but that method failed, because
they could understand nothing that was not explained to them in
words of one or two syllables. So she did what she could in her
own words and with her own inadequate knowledge, making a sort of
paraphrase of what she read and delivering it to the children;
striving all the while to drive into their dull little minds some
picture of the past, and what was always more difficult, some
interest in it. But one day a brilliant idea struck her. She
bought a roll of cheap plain wallpaper at an upholsterer's shop,
and set the children to making an historical chart. They marked
the roll of paper into centuries and years, and stuck scraps that
they cut out of illustrated papers--pictures of knights in armour
and Spanish galleons and printing-presses and railway trains--at
the appropriate places. Pinned round the walls of the room, the
chart presented, as the scraps grew in number, a sort of panorama
of English history. The children were even fonder of the chart
than of the contour map. They always, Dorothy found, showed more
intelligence when it was a question of MAKING something instead of
merely learning. There was even talk of making a contour map of
the world, four feet by four, in papiermache, if Dorothy could 'get
round' Mrs Creevy to allow the preparation of the papiermache--a
messy process needing buckets of water.
Mrs Creevy watched Dorothy's innovations with a jealous eye, but
she did not interfere actively at first. She was not going to show
it, of course, but she was secretly amazed and delighted to find
that she had got hold of an assistant who was actually willing to
work. When she saw Dorothy spending her own money on textbooks for
the children, it gave her the same delicious sensation that she
would have had in bringing off a successful swindle. She did,
however, sniff and grumble at everything that Dorothy did, and she
wasted a great deal of time by insisting on what she called
'thorough correction' of the girls' exercise books. But her system
of correction, like everything else in the school curriculum, was
arranged with one eye on the parents. Periodically the children
took their books home for their parents' inspection, and Mrs Creevy
would never allow anything disparaging to be written in them.
Nothing was to be marked 'bad' or crossed out or too heavily
underlined; instead, in the evenings, Dorothy decorated the books,
under Mrs Creevy's dictation, with more or less applauding comments
in red ink. 'A very creditable performance', and 'Excellent! You
are making great strides. Keep it up!' were Mrs Creevy's favourites.
All the children in the school, apparently, were for ever 'making
great strides'; in what direction they were striding was not stated.
The parents, however, seemed willing to swallow an almost unlimited
amount of this kind of thing.
There were times, of course, when Dorothy had trouble with the
girls themselves. The fact that they were all of different ages
made them difficult to deal with, and though they were fond of her
and were very 'good' with her at first, they would not have been
children at all if they had been invariably 'good'. Sometimes they
were lazy and sometimes they succumbed to that most damnable vice
of schoolgirls--giggling. For the first few days Dorothy was
greatly exercised over little Mavis Williams, who was stupider than
one would have believed it possible for any child of eleven to be.
Dorothy could do nothing with her at all. At the first attempt to
get her to do anything beyond pothooks a look of almost subhuman
blankness would come into her wide-set eyes. Sometimes, however,
she had talkative fits in which she would ask the most amazing and
unanswerable questions. For instance, she would open her 'reader',
find one of the illustrations--the sagacious Elephant, perhaps--and
ask Dorothy:
'Please, Miss, wass 'at thing there?' (She mispronounced her words
in a curious manner.)
'That's an elephant, Mavis.'
'Wass a elephant?'
'An elephant's a kind of wild animal.'
'Wass a animal?'
'Well--a dog's an animal.'
'Wass a dog?'
And so on, more or less indefinitely. About half-way through the
fourth morning Mavis held up her hand and said with a sly
politeness that ought to have put Dorothy on her guard:
'Please, Miss, may I be 'scused?'
'Yes,' said Dorothy.
One of the bigger girls put up her hand, blushed, and put her hand
down again as though too bashful to speak. On being prompted by
Dorothy, she said shamefacedly:
'Please, Miss, Miss Strong didn't used to let Mavis go to the
lavatory alone. She locks herself in and won't come out, and then
Mrs Creevy gets angry, Miss.'
Dorothy dispatched a messenger, but it was too late. Mavis
remained in latebra pudenda till twelve o'clock. Afterwards, Mrs
Creevy explained privately to Dorothy that Mavis was a congenital
idiot--or, as she put it, 'not right in the head'. It was totally
impossible to teach her anything.
Of course, Mrs Creevy didn't
'let on' to Mavis's parents, who believed that their child was only
'backward' and paid their fees regularly. Mavis was quite easy to
deal with. You just had to give her a book and a pencil and tell
her to draw pictures and be quiet. But Mavis, a child of habit,
drew nothing but pothooks--remaining quiet and apparently happy for
hours together, with her tongue hanging out, amid festoons of
pothooks.
But in spite of these minor difficulties, how well everything went
during those first few weeks! How ominously well, indeed! About
the tenth of November, after much grumbling about the price of
coal, Mrs Creevy started to allow a fire in the schoolroom. The
children's wits brightened noticeably when the room was decently
warm. And there were happy hours, sometimes, when the fire
crackled in the grate, and Mrs Creevy was out of the house, and the
children were working quietly and absorbedly at one of the lessons
that were their favourites. Best of all was when the two top
classes were reading Macbeth, the girls squeaking breathlessly
through the scenes, and Dorothy pulling them up to make them
pronounce the words properly and to tell them who Bellona's
bridegroom was and how witches rode on broomsticks; and the girls
wanting to know, almost as excitedly as though it had been a
detective story, how Birnam Wood could possible come to Dunsinane
and Macbeth be killed by a man who was not of woman born. Those
are the times that make teaching worth while--the times when the
children's enthusiasm leaps up, like an answering flame, to meet
your own, and sudden unlooked-for gleams of intelligence reward
your earlier drudgery. No job is more fascinating than teaching if
you have a free hand at it. Nor did Dorothy know, as yet, that
that 'if' is one of the biggest 'ifs' in the world.
Her job suited her, and she was happy in it. She knew the minds
of the children intimately by this time, knew their individual
peculiarities and the special stimulants that were needed before
you could get them to think. She was more fond of them, more
interested in their development, more anxious to do her best for
them, than she would have conceived possible a short while ago.
The complex, never-ended labour of teaching filled her life just as
the round of parish jobs had filled it at home. She thought and
dreamed of teaching; she took books out of the public library and
studied theories of education. She felt that quite willingly she
would go on teaching all her life, even at ten shillings a week and
her keep, if it could always be like this. It was her vocation,
she thought.
Almost any job that fully occupied her would have been a relief
after the horrible futility of the time of her destitution. But
this was more than a mere job; it was--so it seemed to her--a
mission, a life-purpose. Trying to awaken the dulled minds of
these children, trying to undo the swindle that had been worked
upon them in the name of education--that, surely, was something to
which she could give herself heart and soul? So for the time
being, in the interest of her work, she disregarded the beastliness
of living in Mrs Creevy's house, and quite forgot her strange,
anomalous position and the uncertainty of her future.
4
But of course, it could not last.
Not many weeks had gone by before the parents began interfering
with Dorothy's programme of work. That--trouble with the parents--
is part of the regular routine of life in a private school. All
parents are tiresome from a teacher's point of view, and the
parents of children at fourth-rate private schools are utterly
impossible. On the one hand, they have only the dimmest idea of
what is meant by education; on the other hand, they look on
'schooling' exactly as they look on a butcher's bill or a grocer's
bill, and are perpetually suspicious that they are being cheated.
They bombard the teacher with ill-written notes making impossible