Lark Rise to Candleford (27 page)

Laura's mother disliked this cheapening of names and named
her third child May, thinking it would not lend itself to a diminutive.
However, while still in her cradle, the child became Mayie among the
neighbours.

There was no Victoria in the school, nor was there a Miss
Victoria or a Lady Victoria in any of the farmhouses, rectories, or mansions in
the district, nor did Laura ever meet a Victoria in later life. That great name
was sacred to the Queen and was not copied by her subjects to the extent
imagined by period novelists of today.

The schoolmistress in charge of the Fordlow school at the
beginning of the 'eighties had held that position for fifteen years and seemed
to her pupils as much a fixture as the school building; but for most of that time
she had been engaged to the squire's head gardener and her long reign was
drawing to a close.

She was, at that time, about forty, and was a small, neat
little body with a pale, slightly pock-marked face, snaky black curls hanging
down to her shoulders, and eyebrows arched into a perpetual inquiry. She wore in
school stiffly starched, holland aprons with bibs, one embroidered with red one
week, and one with blue the next, and was seldom seen without a posy of flowers
pinned on her breast and another tucked into her hair.

Every morning, when school had assembled, and Governess, with
her starched apron and bobbing curls appeared in the doorway, there was a great
rustling and scraping of curtseying and pulling of forelocks. 'Good morning,
children,' 'Good morning, ma'am,' were the formal, old-fashioned greetings.
Then, under her determined fingers the harmonium wheezed out 'Once in Royal',
or 'We are but little children weak', prayers followed, and the day's work
began.

Reading, writing, and arithmetic were the principal subjects,
with a Scripture lesson every morning, and needlework every afternoon for the girls.
There was no assistant mistress; Governess taught all the classes simultaneously,
assisted only by two monitors—ex-scholars, aged about twelve, who were paid a
shilling a week each for their services.

Every morning at ten o'clock the Rector arrived to take the
older children for Scripture. He was a parson of the old school; a commanding figure,
tall and stout, with white hair, ruddy cheeks and an aristocratically beaked
nose, and he was as far as possible removed by birth, education, and worldly circumstances
from the lambs of his flock. He spoke to them from a great height, physical,
mental, and spiritual. 'To order myself lowly and reverently before my betters'
was the clause he underlined in the Church Catechism, for had he not been
divinely appointed pastor and master to those little rustics and was it not one
of his chief duties to teach them to realize this? As a man, he was kindly
disposed—a giver of blankets and coals at Christmas, and of soup and milk
puddings to the sick.

His lesson consisted of Bible reading, turn and turn about
round the class, of reciting from memory the names of the kings of Israel and repeating
the Church Catechism. After that, he would deliver a little lecture on morals
and behaviour. The children must not lie or steal or be discontented or
envious. God had placed them just where they were in the social order and given
them their own especial work to do; to envy others or to try to change their
own lot in life was a sin of which he hoped they would never be guilty. From
his lips the children heard nothing of that God who is Truth and Beauty and
Love; but they learned for him and repeated to him long passages from the
Authorized Version, thus laying up treasure for themselves; so, the lessons, in
spite of much aridity, were valuable.

Scripture over and the Rector bowed and curtsied out of the
door, ordinary lessons began. Arithmetic was considered the most important of the
subjects taught, and those who were good at figures ranked high in their
classes. It was very simple arithmetic, extending only to the first four rules,
with the money sums, known as 'bills of parcels', for the most advanced pupils.

The writing lesson consisted of the copying of copperplate
maxims: 'A fool and his money are soon parted'; 'Waste not, want not'; 'Count
ten before you speak', and so on. Once a week composition would be set, usually
in the form of writing a letter describing some recent event. This was regarded
chiefly as a spelling test.

History was not taught formally; but history readers were in
use containing such picturesque stories as those of King Alfred and the cakes,
King Canute commanding the waves, the loss of the White Ship, and Raleigh
spreading his cloak for Queen Elizabeth.

There were no geography readers, and, excepting what could be
gleaned from the descriptions of different parts of the world in the ordinary readers,
no geography was taught. But, for some reason or other, on the walls of the
schoolroom were hung splendid maps: The World, Europe, North America, South
America, England, Ireland, and Scotland. During long waits in class for her
turn to read, or to have her copy or sewing examined, Laura would gaze on these
maps until the shapes of the countries with their islands and inlets became
photographed on her brain. Baffin Bay and the land around the poles were especially
fascinating to her.

Once a day, at whatever hour the poor, overworked mistress
could find time, a class would be called out to toe the chalked semicircle on
the floor for a reading lesson. This lesson, which should have been pleasant,
for the reading matter was good, was tedious in the extreme. Many of the
children read so slowly and haltingly that Laura, who was impatient by nature,
longed to take hold of their words and drag them out of their mouths, and it often
seemed to her that her own turn to read would never come. As often as she could
do so without being detected, she would turn over and peep between the pages of
her own Royal Reader, and, studiously holding the book to her nose, pretend to be
following the lesson while she was pages ahead.

There was plenty there to enthral any child: '
The Skater
Chased by Wolves
'; '
The Siege of Torquilstone
', from
Ivanhoe
;
Fenimore Cooper's
Prairie on Fire
; and Washington Irving's
Capture of
Wild Horses
.

Then there were fascinating descriptions of such far-apart
places as Greenland and the Amazon; of the Pacific Ocean with its fairy islands
and coral reefs; the snows of Hudson Bay Territory and the sterile heights of
the Andes. Best of all she loved the description of the Himalayas, which began:
'Northward of the great plain of India, and along its whole extent, towers the
sublime mountain region of the Himalayas, ascending gradually until it
terminates in a long range of summits wrapped in perpetual snow.'

Interspersed between the prose readings were poems: '
The
Slave's Dream
'; '
Young Lochinvar
'; '
The Parting of Douglas and
Marmion
'; Tennyson's '
Brook
' and '
Ring out, Wild Bells
';
Byron's '
Shipwreck
'; Hogg's '
Skylark
', and many more. '
Lochiel's
Warning
' was a favourite with Edmund, who often, in bed at night, might be
heard declaiming: 'Lochiel! Lochiel! beware of the day!' while Laura, at any
time, with or without encouragement, was ready to 'look back into other years'
with Henry Glassford Bell, and recite his scenes from the life of Mary Queen of
Scots, reserving her most impressive tone for the concluding couplet:

Lapped by a dog. Go think of it in silence and alone,

Then weigh against a grain of sand the glories of a throne.

But long before their schooldays were over they knew every
piece in the books by heart and it was one of their greatest pleasures in life
to recite them to each other. By that time Edmund had appropriated Scott and
could repeat hundreds of lines, always showing a preference for scenes of
single combat between warrior chiefs. The selection in the
Royal Readers
,
then, was an education in itself for those who took to it kindly; but the
majority of the children would have none of it; saying that the prose was 'dry
old stuff' and that they hated 'portry'.

Those children who read fluently, and there were several of
them in every class, read in a monotonous sing-song, without expression, and apparently
without interest. Yet there were very few really stupid children in the school,
as is proved by the success of many of them in after life, and though few were
interested in their lessons, they nearly all showed an intelligent interest in
other things—the boys in field work and crops and cattle and agricultural
machinery; the girls in dress, other people's love affairs and domestic
details.

It is easy to imagine the education authorities of that day,
when drawing up the scheme for that simple but sound education, saying, 'Once teach
them to read and they will hold the key to all knowledge.' But the scheme did
not work out. If the children, by the time they left school, could read well
enough to read the newspaper and perhaps an occasional book for amusement, and
write well enough to write their own letters, they had no wish to go farther.
Their interest was not in books, but in life, and especially the life that lay
immediately about them. At school they worked unwillingly, upon compulsion, and
the life of the schoolmistress was a hard one.

As Miss Holmes went from class to class, she carried the cane
and laid it upon the desk before her; not necessarily for use, but as a
reminder, for some of the bigger boys were very unruly. She punished by a smart
stroke on each hand. 'Put out your hand,' she would say, and some boys would
openly spit on each hand before proffering it. Others murmured and muttered
before and after a caning and threatened to 'tell me feyther'; but she remained
calm and cool, and after the punishment had been inflicted there was a marked
improvement—for a time.

It must be remembered that in those days a boy of eleven was
nearing the end of his school life. Soon he would be at work; already he felt himself
nearly a man and too old for petticoat government. Moreover, those were country
boys, wild and rough, and many of them as tall as she was. Those who had failed
to pass Standard IV and so could not leave school until they were eleven,
looked upon that last year as a punishment inflicted upon them by the school
authorities and behaved accordingly. In this they were encouraged by their
parents, for a certain section of these resented their boys being kept at
school when they might be earning. 'What do our young Alf want wi' a lot o' book-larnin'?'
they would say. 'He can read and write and add up as much money as he's ever
likely to get. What more do he want?' Then a neighbour of more advanced views
would tell them: 'A good education's everything in these days. You can't get on
in the world if you ain't had one,' for they read their newspapers and new
ideas were percolating, though slowly. It was only the second generation to be
forcibly fed with the fruit of the tree of knowledge: what wonder if it did not
always agree with it.

Meanwhile, Miss Holmes carried her cane about with her. A
poor method of enforcing discipline, according to modern educational ideas; but
it served. It may be that she and her like all over the country at that time
were breaking up the ground that other, later comers to the field, with a
knowledge of child psychology and with tradition and experiment behind them,
might sow the good seed.

She seldom used the cane on the girls and still more seldom
on the infants. Standing in a corner with their hands on their heads was their punishment.
She gave little treats and encouragements, too, and, although the children
called her 'Susie' behind her back, they really liked and respected her. Many
times there came a knock at the door and a smartly dressed girl on holidays, or
a tall young soldier on leave, in his scarlet tunic and pillbox cap, looked in
'to see Governess'.

That Laura could already read when she went to school was
never discovered. 'Do you know your A B C?' the mistress asked her on the first
morning. 'Come, let me hear you say it: A-B-C——'

'A—B—C——' Laura began; but when she got to F she stumbled,
for she had never memorized the letters in order. So she was placed in the
class known as 'the babies' and joined in chanting the alphabet from A to Z. Alternately
they recited it backward, and Laura soon had that version by heart, for it
rhymed:

Z-Y-X and W-V U-T-S and R-Q-P O-N-M and L-K-J I-H-G and F-E-D
And C-B-A!

Once started, they were like a watch wound up, and went on
alone for hours. The mistress, with all the other classes on her hands, had no time
to teach the babies, although she always had a smile for them when she passed
and any disturbance or cessation of the chanting would bring her down to them
at once. Even the monitors were usually engaged in giving out dictation to the
older children, or in hearing tables or spelling repeated; but, in the
afternoon, one of the bigger girls, usually the one who was the poorest
needlewoman (it was always Laura in later years) would come down from her own
form to point to and name each letter on a wall-sheet, the little ones
repeating them after her. Then she would teach them to form pot-hooks and
hangers, and, afterwards, letters, on their slates, and this went on for years,
as it seemed to Laura, but perhaps it was only one year.

At the end of that time the class was examined and those who
knew and could form their letters were moved up into the official 'Infants'. Laura,
who by this time was reading
Old St. Paul's
at home, simply romped
through this Little-Go; but without credit, for it was said she 'gabbled' her
letters, and her writing was certainly poor.

It was not until she reached Standard I that her troubles
really began. Arithmetic was the subject by which the pupils were placed, and
as Laura could not grasp the simplest rule with such small help as the mistress
had time to give, she did not even know how to begin working out the sums and
was permanently at the bottom of the class. At needlework in the afternoon she
was no better: The girls around her in class were making pinafores for
themselves, putting in tiny stitches and biting off their cotton like grown
women, while she was still struggling with her first hemming strip. And a
dingy, crumpled strip it was before she had done with it, punctuated throughout
its length with blood spots where she had pricked her fingers.