The Complete Novels Of George Orwell (78 page)

The girls looked puzzled. There was a momentary silence, and then a chorus of voices round the room:

‘Please, Miss, what does that mean?’

Dorothy explained. She explained haltingly and incompletely, with a sudden horrid misgiving–a premonition that this was going to lead to trouble–but still, she did explain. And after that, of course, the fun began.

About half the children in the class went home and asked their parents the meaning of the word ‘womb’. There was a sudden commotion, a flying to and fro of messages, an electric thrill of horror through fifteen decent Nonconformist homes. That night the parents must have held some kind of conclave, for the following evening, about the time when school ended, a deputation called upon Mrs Creevy. Dorothy heard them arriving by ones and twos, and guessed what was going to happen. As soon as she had dismissed the children, she heard Mrs Creevy call sharply down the stairs:

‘Come up here a minute, Miss Millborough!’

Dorothy went up, trying to control the trembling of her knees. In the gaunt drawing-room Mrs Creevy was standing grimly beside the piano, and six parents were sitting round on horsehair chairs like a circle of inquisitors. There was the Mr Geo. Briggs who had written the letter about Mabel’s arithmetic–he was an alert-looking greengrocer with a dried-up, shrewish wife–and there was a large, buffalo-like man with drooping moustaches and a colourless, peculiarly
flat
wife who looked as though she had been flattened out by the pressure of some heavy object–her husband, perhaps. The names of these two Dorothy did not catch. There was also Mrs Williams, the mother of the congenital idiot, a small, dark, very obtuse woman who always agreed with the last speaker, and there was a Mr Poynder, a commerical traveller. He was a youngish to middle-aged man with a grey face, mobile lips, and a bald scalp across which some strips of rather nasty-looking damp hair were carefully plastered. In honour of the parents’ visit, a fire composed of three large coals was sulking in the grate.

‘Sit down there, Miss Millborough,’ said Mrs Creevy, pointing to a hard chair which stood like a stool of repentance in the middle of the ring of parents.

Dorothy sat down.

‘And now,’ said Mrs Creevy, ‘just you listen to what Mr Poynder’s got to say to you.’

Mr Poynder had a great deal to say. The other parents had evidently chosen
him as their spokesman, and he talked till flecks of yellowish foam appeared at the corners of his mouth. And what was remarkable, he managed to do it all–so nice was his regard for the decencies–without ever once repeating the word that had caused all the trouble.

‘I feel that I’m voicing the opinion of all of us,’ he said with his facile bagman’s eloquence, ‘in saying that if Miss Millborough knew that this play–
Macduff
, or whatever its name is–contained such words as–well, such words as we’re speaking about, she never ought to have given it to the children to read at all. To my mind it’s a disgrace that schoolbooks can be printed with such words in them. I’m sure if any of us had ever known that Shakespeare was that kind of stuff, we’d have put our foot down at the start. It surprises me, I must say. Only the other morning I was reading a piece in my
News Chronicle
about Shakespeare being the father of English Literature; well, if that’s Literature, let’s have a bit
less
Literature, say I! I think everyone’ll agree with me there. And on the other hand, if Miss Millborough didn’t know that the word–well, the word I’m referring to–was coming, she just ought to have gone straight on and taken no notice when it did come. There wasn’t the slightest need to go explaining it to them. Just tell them to keep quiet and not get asking questions–that’s the proper way with children.’

‘But the children wouldn’t have understood the play if I hadn’t explained!’ protested Dorothy for the third or fourth time.

‘Of course they wouldn’t! You don’t seem to get my point, Miss Millborough! We don’t want them to understand. Do you think we want them to go picking up dirty ideas out of books? Quite enough of that already with all these dirty films and these twopenny girls’ papers that they get hold of–all these filthy, dirty love-stories with pictures of–well, I won’t go into it. We don’t send our children to school to have ideas put into their heads. I’m speaking for all the parents in saying this. We’re all of decent God-fearing folk–some of us are Baptists and some of us are Methodists, and there’s even one or two Church of England among us; but we can sink our differences when it comes to a case like this–and we try to bring our children up decent and save them from knowing anything about the Facts of Life. If I had my way, no child–at any rate, no girl–would know anything about the Facts of Life till she was twenty-one.’

There was a general nod from the parents, and the buffalo-like man added, ‘Yer, yer! I’m with you there, Mr Poynder. Yer, yer!’ deep down in his inside.

After dealing with the subject of Shakespeare, Mr Poynder added some remarks about Dorothy’s new-fangled methods of teaching, which gave Mr Geo. Briggs the opportunity to rap out from time to time, ‘That’s it! Practical work–that’s what we want–practical work! Not all this messy stuff like po’try and making maps and sticking scraps of paper and such like. Give ’em a good bit of figuring and handwriting and bother the rest. Practical work! You’ve said it!’

This went on for about twenty minutes. At first Dorothy attempted to argue, but she saw Mrs Creevy angrily shaking her head at her over the buffalo-like man’s shoulder, which she rightly took as a signal to be quiet. By
the time the parents had finished they had reduced Dorothy very nearly to tears, and after this they made ready to go. But Mrs Creevy stopped them.

‘Just
a minute, ladies and gentlemen,’ she said. ‘Now that you’ve all had your say–and I’m sure I’m most glad to give you the opportunity–I’d just like to say a little something on my own account. Just to make things clear, in case any of you might think
I
was to blame for this nasty business that’s happened. And
you
stay here too, Miss Millborough!’ she added.

She turned on Dorothy, and, in front of the parents, gave her a venomous ‘talking to’ which lasted upwards of ten minutes. The burden of it all was that Dorothy had brought these dirty books into the house behind her back; that it was monstrous treachery and ingratitude; and that if anything like it happened again, out Dorothy would go with a week’s wages in her pocket. She rubbed it in and in and in. Phrases like ‘girl that I’ve taken into my house’, ‘eating my bread’, and even ‘living on my charity’, recurred over and over again. The parents sat round watching, and in their crass faces–faces not harsh or evil, only blunted by ignorance and mean virtues–you could see a solemn approval, a solemn pleasure in the spectacle of sin rebuked. Dorothy understood this; she understood that it was necessary that Mrs Creevy should give her her ‘talking to’ in front of the parents, so that they might feel that they were getting their money’s worth and be satisfied. But still, as the stream of mean, cruel reprimand went on and on, such anger rose in her heart that she could with pleasure have stood up and struck Mrs Creevy across the face. Again and again she thought, ‘I won’t stand it, I won’t stand it any longer! I’ll tell her what I think of her and then walk straight out of the house!’ But she did nothing of the kind. She saw with dreadful clarity the helplessness of her position. Whatever happened, whatever insults it meant swallowing, she had got to keep her job. So she sat still, with pink humiliated face, amid the circle of parents, and presently her anger turned to misery, and she realized that she was going to begin crying if she did not struggle to prevent it. But she realized, too, that if she began crying it would be the last straw and the parents would demand her dismissal. To stop herself, she dug her nails so hard into the palms that afterwards she found that she had drawn a few drops of blood.

Presently the ‘talking to’ wore itself out in assurances from Mrs Creevy that this should never happen again and that the offending Shakespeares should be burnt immediately. The parents were now satisfied. Dorothy had had her lesson and would doubtless profit by it; they did not bear her any malice and were not conscious of having humiliated her. They said good-bye to Mrs Creevy, said good-bye rather more coldly to Dorothy, and departed. Dorothy also rose to go, but Mrs Creevy signed to her to stay where she was.

‘Just you wait a minute,’ she said ominously as the parents left the room. ‘I haven’t finished yet, not by a long way I haven’t.’

Dorothy sat down again. She felt very weak at the knees, and nearer to tears than ever. Mrs Creevy, having shown the parents out by the front door, came back with a bowl of water and threw it over the fire–for where was the sense of burning good coals after the parents had gone? Dorothy supposed that the ‘talking to’ was going to begin afresh. However, Mrs Creevy’s wrath seemed to
have cooled–at any rate, she had laid aside the air of outraged virtue that it had been necessary to put on in front of the parents.

‘I just want to have a bit of a talk with you, Miss Millborough,’ she said. ‘It’s about time we got it settled once and for all how this school’s going to be run and how it’s not going to be run.’

‘Yes,’ said Dorothy.

‘Well, I’ll be straight with you. When you came here I could see with half an eye that you didn’t know the first thing about school-teaching; but I wouldn’t have minded that if you’d just had a bit of common sense like any other girl would have had. Only it seems you hadn’t. I let you have your own way for a week or two, and the first thing you do is to go and get all the parents’ backs up. Well, I’m not going to have
that
over again. From now on I’m going to have things done
my
way, not
your
way. Do you understand that?’

‘Yes,’ said Dorothy again.

‘You’re not to think as I can’t do without you, mind,’ proceeded Mrs Creevy. ‘I can pick up teachers at two a penny any day of the week, M.A.s and B.A.s and all. Only the M.A.s and B.A.s mostly take to drink, or else they–well, no matter what–and I will say for you you don’t seem to be given to the drink or anything of that kind. I dare say you and me can get on all right if you’ll drop these new-fangled ideas of yours and understand what’s meant by practical school-teaching. So just you listen to me.’

Dorothy listened. With admirable clarity, and with a cynicism that was all the more disgusting because it was utterly unconscious, Mrs Creevy explained the technique of the dirty swindle that she called practical school-teaching.

‘What you’ve got to get hold of once and for all,’ she began, ‘is that there’s only one thing that matters in a school, and that’s the fees. As for all this stuff about “developing the children’s minds”, as you call it, it’s neither here nor there. It’s the fees I’m after, not
developing the children’s minds
. After all, it’s no more than common sense. It’s not to be supposed as anyone’d go to all the trouble of keeping school and having the house turned upside down by a pack of brats, if it wasn’t that there’s a bit of money to be made out of it. The fees come first, and everything else comes afterwards. Didn’t I tell you that the very first day you came here?’

‘Yes,’ admitted Dorothy humbly.

‘Well, then, it’s the parents that pay the fees, and it’s the parents you’ve got to think about. Do what the parents want–that’s our rule here. I dare say all this messing about with plasticine and paper-scraps that you go in for doesn’t do the children any particular harm; but the parents don’t want it, and there’s an end of it. Well, there’s just two subjects that they
do
want their children taught, and that’s handwriting and arithmetic. Especially handwriting. That’s something they
can
see the sense of. And so handwriting’s the thing you’ve got to keep on and on at. Plenty of nice neat copies that the girls can take home, and that the parents’ll show off to the neighbours and give us a bit of a free advert. I want you to give the children two hours a day just at handwriting and nothing else.’

‘Two hours a day just at handwriting,’ repeated Dorothy obediently.

‘Yes. And plenty of arithmetic as well. The parents are very keen on arithmetic: especially money-sums. Keep your eye on the parents all the time. If you meet one of them in the street, get hold of them and start talking to them about their own girl. Make out that she’s the best girl in the class and that if she stays just three terms longer she’ll be working wonders. You see what I mean? Don’t go and tell them there’s no room for improvement; because if you tell them
that
, they generally take their girls away. Just three terms longer–that’s the thing to tell them. And when you make out the end of term reports, just you bring them to me and let me have a good look at them. I like to do the marking myself.’

Mrs Creevy’s eye met Dorothy’s. She had perhaps been about to say that she always arranged the marks so that every girl came out somewhere near the top of the class; but she refrained. Dorothy could not answer for a moment. Outwardly she was subdued, and very pale, but in her heart were anger and deadly repulsion against which she had to struggle before she could speak. She had no thought, however, of contradicting Mrs Creevy. The ‘talking to’ had quite broken her spirit. She mastered her voice, and said:

‘I’m to teach nothing but handwriting and arithmetic–is that it?’

‘Well, I didn’t say that exactly. There’s plenty of other subjects that look well on the prospectus. French, for instance–French looks
very
well on the prospectus. But it’s not a subject you want to waste much time over. Don’t go filling them up with a lot of grammar and syntax and verbs and all that. That kind of stuff doesn’t get them anywhere so far as
I
can see. Give them a bit of “Parley vous Francey”, and “Passey moi le beurre”, and so forth; that’s a lot more use than grammar. And then there’s Latin-I always put Latin on the prospectus. But I don’t suppose you’re very great on Latin, are you?’

‘No,’ admitted Dorothy.

‘Well, it doesn’t matter. You won’t have to teach it. None of
our
parents’d want their children to waste time over Latin. But they like to see it on the prospectus. It looks classy. Of course there’s a whole lot of subjects that we can’t actually teach, but we have to advertise them all the same. Book-keeping and typing and shorthand, for instance; besides music and dancing. It all looks well on the prospectus.’