Then one day, without warning, she came again. Cousin Geillis, paying what she called a farewell visit, before leaving on a trip to see her and my mother’s family in New Zealand. She would, she said, take messages or gifts, and she would be gone for some time. In those days, before air travel, such a journey took months, and a year was hardly too long to reckon on for a trip which would take the traveller right round the world. There were so many places, she said, that she wanted to see. The names went by over my head; Angkor Wat, Cairo, Delhi, the Philippines, Peru … She would come back when she had seen them all, and meanwhile …
Meanwhile she had brought a dog for me to keep.
It was a collie, black and white, thin and eager and loving. A lost dog that she had taken in, and would not leave to chance and man’s unkindness.
‘Here is the licence. It is Geillis’s dog. She needs—’ I thought she was going to say ‘something to love’, and went cold, but she finished merely, ‘companionship. Someone to go walks with.’
‘What’s his name?’ I was down on the cold flags of the kitchen floor with the dog. It was too good to be true. I dared not look at my mother.
‘That’s for you to give him. He’s yours.’
‘I shall call him Rover,’ I said, into the dog’s fur. He licked my face.
‘Un peu banal,’ said my cousin Geillis, ‘but he’s not proud. Goodbye.’
She did not kiss me when she went. I never saw her kiss anyone. She walked out of the house, and a moment later the bus came along and she climbed aboard.
‘That’s strange,’ said my father, ‘it must be an extra. The regular bus went ten minutes ago. I saw it.’
My mother smiled. Then the smile vanished as her eye fell on the dog, and on me, down beside him with both arms round him. ‘Get up at once. And if you are going to keep that dog, he will have to be tied up. What on earth Geillis was thinking of, saddling us with a dog when there will be nobody here to look after him I do not know.’
‘I’ll look after him! I can easily—’
‘You won’t be here.’
I gaped at her. I waited. One did not question my mother. What she wanted to tell, she told.
She set her mouth till it looked very like the one in my grandmother’s portrait.
‘You are to go away to school. Cousin Geillis is right. You need companionship, and to be brought out of yourself and made less of a dreamer. And since she—’
‘Don’t look so stricken, darling.’ This was my father, gently. ‘You’ll like it. You will, really. And you do need companionship and friends. It’s such a chance for us, we couldn’t possibly afford it ourselves, but Cousin Geillis has offered to pay the major part of your fees. As your godmother—’
‘She prefers to be called a sponsor,’ said my mother, a little sharply.
My father looked grieved. ‘Yes, I know. Poor Geillis. But since she is so kindly helping us, we must seize the chance. You do see, don’t you, Jill?’
The dog was standing very close against me. I stooped and put my arms around him again. Suddenly the bleak lonely vicarage seemed very desirable, the meagre fields and the walks over the starved countryside lovely and beckoning places.
‘Please,’ I said, ‘oh, please, need I go, Mummy?’
She was already turning away, no doubt with clothes-lists and school trunks in her mind. And also, as I think I knew even then, the delectable prospect of eight months of the year free of the presence of a daughter. She did not reply.
‘Daddy, do I have to?’
‘Your mother thinks it best.’ He let it slide, uneasy, but always kind. A hand went to his pocket, and came out with half-a-crown. ‘Here, Jilly. Get him a feeding-bowl of his own. Wood’s shop has some with DOG on them. I noticed yesterday. And keep the change.’
The dog licked my face. It seemed he liked the taste of tears, because he licked it again.
2
The school that was chosen eventually was an Anglican convent, of which Cousin Geillis, safely out of reach on the Atlantic, would have violently disapproved. My mother, indeed, made her protest. Leaning out of my bedroom window one summer evening, I overheard my parents talking beside the open window of my father’s study just below me.
‘My daughter to be brought up by nuns? Absurd!’ That was my mother.
‘She is my daughter too.’
‘That’s what you think,’ said my mother, so softly that I barely caught it.
I heard him laugh. I said he was a saint, and he adored her, always. It never occurred to him to interpret what she said as another man might have done. ‘I know, my dear. She has your brains, and one day she may have a little of your beauty, but I have some claim to her, too. Remember what the old sexton used to say?’
My mother knew when she had gone too far, and never fought a rearguard action. I heard the smile in her voice. ‘“Thee cannat deny thysel’ o’ that one, Vicar …” And neither you can, dear Harry. She’s lucky there – to have got your dark hair, and those grey eyes that I always said were far too beautiful to be wasted on a man … Very well. The convent does seem good enough, if the prospectus is anything to go by. But there’s this other one – where’s the booklet got to? This sounds just as good, and not much dearer.’
‘But much further away. Devonshire? Think of the train fares. Don’t worry, my dear. I know these places are not renowned for scholarship, but—’
‘That’s what I meant. They may try to turn her out religious.’
My father sounded amused. ‘That’s hardly something you can expect me to condemn.’
She laughed. ‘I’m sorry, I put it badly. But you know what I mean. One hears so much about religious teaching being emphasised at the expense of other subjects, especially sciences, and I think that’s where Jilly’s interests will lie. She’s quick, and she’s got a good brain. She needs good teaching and hard work and competition. I should know. That’s the part of her that’s like me.’
Her voice grew fainter as she turned away from the window. I heard him murmur something in reply, and then a snatch or two that, craning from my window, I just managed to catch. Something from my father about ‘the county school’ and ‘only two stations down the line’, and an emphatic speech from my mother which I could not hear, but which I had heard so often that I could supply every word. Her daughter to go to school with the village children? Bad enough that she had to attend the primary, but to go to the local county school till she was seventeen or eighteen, to end up with all the wrong friends, and an accent like the miners’ children? Never!
It was the protest of a lonely woman sealed tightly in her own narrow social sphere, an attitude which for those days was not outrageous, and was indeed common enough, fostered in my mother’s case by the isolated Colonial upbringing with its dreams of ‘home’ still coloured by the standards of Victoria. It was also, as I knew even then, the voice of frustrated ambition. My mother’s daughter (never my father’s on these occasions) must have the chances which had been withheld from her own generation; her daughter must have independence, the freedom, that only education could give her, to choose her own line of life. The higher education, at that; a University degree, and a good one … A First? Why not? Of that, and how much more, would her daughter be capable.
And so on. I could guess at it all, and with it my father’s invariable protest (he was as Victorian in his way as she) that a daughter, a beautiful daughter, would surely get married, and find in that way the greatest happiness, the only happiness and true fulfilment a woman could know. If Jilly had been a boy, then a public school and University by all means, but for a daughter, surely quite unnecessary?
My mother was back at the window again, her voice clear and sharp. Too sharp. This was no longer theory; the hope was about to be realised, and in the heat of actual decision, she was less than tactful.
‘And if she doesn’t qualify to earn her own living, and get out of here, who will she ever meet that’s fit for her to marry? Do you really want her to stay a
t home and become just “the vicar’s daughter”, the parish drudge?’
‘Like the vicar’s wife?’ asked my father, very sadly.
Looking back now, after a lifetime, I can see past my own unhappiness, to what must have been my mother’s. Ambitious, beautiful, clever, and with that spark of manipulative magic that we call witchcraft dormant in her, she must have been worn down, bit by bit, by poverty and hard work and the loneliness induced by my father’s absorption in parish affairs, and by the whole world of distance between herself and her own people in New Zealand. By disappointment, too. My father, contented in his work, even in his poverty, would never push his way into the higher clerical spheres which she would have delighted in, and adorned. I did not think about it then; I just knew that some unhappiness, unexpressed, lay between my parents, in spite of their deep affection for one another.
After a pause she said, in a voice I hardly recognised: ‘I have all I want, Harry. All I have ever wanted. You know that.’ A short silence, then she went on, but gently now: ‘I hope Geillis will have it too, some day. But we have to face the fact that she may never marry, and that we can leave her nothing.’
‘Not even a home. I know. You are right, as usual. This offer of Geillis’s is a godsend – yes, whatever she might want to call it, a godsend. Well, what about it? Can you reconcile yourself to the convent? Your fears may have no foundation. The entrance examination did look a pretty stiff one to me.’
‘I suppose so. Yes, all right. But oh, dear, a convent!’
‘It’s the cheapest,’ said my father simply.
And that seemingly clinched it, for to the convent I was sent.
It was a gaunt place, near the sea cliffs on the east coast, and my mother hardly need have worried that the good nuns would have any undue influence over me. The good nuns, indeed, believed in what they called ‘self-government’ in the school, which meant merely that a form leader was selected, the biggest and toughest and most popular girl in the form, and that all discipline, including punishment, was in her control, and that of her ‘second’, usually her closest friend and crony. As a system to save trouble for the nuns it may have had something to recommend it; from the point of view of a shy and studious child, it was the stuff of a lifetime’s nightmares.
I arrived at school with a reputation for being clever, fostered by that ‘stiff’ entrance examination which I passed with ease, and was put by the good sisters into a class of girls at least two years older than I was. Scholarship not being a forte of the convent, I was soon head of that class, and, longing for approbation, and therefore working harder than ever, I no doubt richly deserved the jealous dislike which was presently meted out to me. I was eight years old, with no defences; school became a place of torment and misery. The days were awful enough; the nights in the dormitories were a hell of teasing and torture. We, the bullied and tormented children, certainly never dreamed of complaining. The punishment for that, in the unsupervised classrooms and dormitories, would have been too horrific. Each evening, after compline, the silent file of nuns would pass through the junior dormitory, heads bent, veils hiding their faces, arms in their sleeves, looking neither to right nor left at the beds where, still and apparently asleep, lay torturers and tortured, waiting till the door closed before the nightmare began again.
Even at home, I told no one. Least of all, at home. My childhood had conditioned me to unhappiness, to not believing I was wanted; to fear. So I lived through term after wretched term, my only resort being books, and the security of the working classroom where of course I went even further ahead of the bigger girls who bullied me. The only gleam of light and love was the thought of the holidays. Not the bleak boredom of the vicarage, or even the gentle companionship of my father, but the single-minded love of my dog Rover.
Too single-minded. He loved, obeyed and followed no one but me. My mother put up with our joyous partnership for something over a year. While I was away he stayed tied up; she would not walk him, so when she released him at all he vanished into fields and village, looking for me. She was, she said once, afraid he might become a sheep-worrier. So at the end of one term I came home from school to be told that he had ‘gone’.
That was all. It may be hard now for modern children to understand that I did not dare even ask how, or when. I said nothing. I did not even dare let her see me crying. This time no one blotted my tears.
The birds and mice, the rabbit, the beloved dog. I did not try again. I stayed within myself and endured, as silently as I could, until, again, help came. It came in a strange and roundabout way. It was discovered (foolish and innocent as I was, I had confided in someone) that I believed in magic. I was young for my years – still barely ten years old – and the myths and legends of the classics and the Norsemen, the stories of Andrew Lang and Hans Andersen and Grimm still trailed their clouds of glory through my imagination. And it must be admitted, also, that the church-haunted life I led, with its miracles and legends, and its choirs of angels, conspired with fairyland to make an Other-world both real and probable.
So it was rumoured that little Jilly Ramsey believed in fairies. It was the senior girls, kinder than my own contemporaries, who hatched a plot. Rather sweet, they said, and wrote tiny notes for me from the Fairy Queen, then they hid and watched me steal out and pick these up from a sundial which stood in a neglected part of the school garden. I do not remember now how it started, nor how much I believed, but it was a happy secret and seemed to mean me no harm. I would take the little letter, then run off into the wood (there was no privacy anywhere within doors) to read it, and write my reply.
The last time it happened was in early June, about the middle of my second summer term. There was the note, tucked into the mossy stone. The minute writing said merely: ‘Dear Jilly, In your last letter you were wishing you had a fairy godmother. I am sure you will be hearing from one soon. Your Queen, Titania.’
What they had planned for me I was never to know. Something, a sound, a movement, made me look up. Behind the bushes I saw the crouching forms of the girls who had perpetrated the hoax.
I got to my feet. I cannot now remember what I felt, or what I intended to do. But at that moment the voice of one of my form mates called my name from the edge of the garden.
‘Jilly! Jilly Ramsey!’
‘I’m here.’
‘There’s a letter for you!’
The stocky figure of Alice Bundle, one of my fellow sufferers, and as such, something approximating to a friend, came running down the path, waving a letter.
I did not look towards the bushes. I said, very clearly: ‘Thanks a lot, Alice. Oh, yes, I know the writing. It’s from my godmother. I was expecting it. She’s going to take me away from here.’
I crumpled the Fairy Queen’s note, threw it to the ground and ran back into school. The senior girls straightened as I passed them. One of them called out something, but I took no notice. I was buoyed up by the first defiance of my childhood, the first deliberate lie, the first don’t care attitude I had dared to take. I left the older girls staring after me. They must have thought that their false magic had somehow worked for me.
It had. The letter, as I had expected, was from my mother. It was the day when her weekly letter invariably arrived. It started with the name she used for me when she was pleased about something.
Dear Gillyflower,
Your Cousin Geillis is home now, and came to see us on Friday. She was not at all pleased when she found out what school you had been sent to. Since she is putting up most of the money for your board we have to give in to her wishes, and she wants you taken away from the convent. You will have to sit for another entrance scholarship, but I have no doubt you will get it. See that you do. The new school is in the Lake District and I hope its record for scholarship is better than your convent, since, as you know, you will have to earn your own living, every penny of it …
Blessed Cousin Geillis. Or rather, since she would have spurned that adjective, beloved Cousin Geilli
s. I could, and would, start again.
3
Life could not be anything but better at the new school. I was still too clever for comfort and not clever enough to hide it, but I had learned to freewheel a little, and to be content with second or third place in class. I was fairly good at games, too, and my talent for drawing, an acceptable one, was admired. So, though I remember little in the way of positive happiness, the years went by smoothly enough.
The school itself was beautiful, a big eighteenth-century house surrounded by park and woodland, where we were allowed to wander at will in our free time. This only in theory; in practice we got little free time, but I believe I was, in fact, the only one who really coveted the privilege. Accustomed to solitude all my young life, I now craved it, and whenever I could escape my schoolmates I found my way into the woods where stood an abandoned summer-house which I thought of as my own. It was dilapidated and dirty, and on damp days the rain dripped through the roof, but near by was the lime walk smelling of honey, and if one sat still enough in the shelter of the summer-house the red squirrels would come right in through the doorway, and the birds fly to their nests under the eaves.
And there, once again, it happened; the one memorable encounter of those green and growing years.
It was half-term, in the summer of my fourteenth year. Almost everyone had gone out with parents, so I was free for the day. My parents of course never came. I sat alone in the summer-house, drawing. I had found globe flowers and herb Paris, and lesser twayblade, and these were in a jar on the rickety wooden table in front of me.
A footstep sounded on the mossy path outside. Cousin Geillis said cheerfully: ‘I thought I might find you here. Have you had tea?’