Singled Out (27 page)

life emerges from Ruth Adam’s novel
I’m Not Complaining
(). Ruth Adam wrote this unsentimental portrayal of the schoolmarm’s life after she herself emerged from five years of teaching miners’ children in a

Nottinghamshire school in the late s and early s. So frank and

authentic is her account that nobody could dispute the author’s mastery of

her subject.
I’m Not Complaining
is drawn from life.

Madge Brigson tells the story. Funny, honest and spirited, she observes

and participates in the lives of the other spinster teachers who are her

fellow-sufferers at Bronton Elementary. The waifs they teach are slum

children; their parents are unemployed, their big sisters turn to prostitution, their community is given over to ignorance, thieving, copulating, breeding and brawling. Madge’s daily descent by tram from her mean little flat in

thinly respectable Upper Bronton to the seething, verminous disorder of

Lower Bronton is like a descent into hell. The reality of the s school

was that, all too often, it was draughty, dirty and ill-equipped. Classes might have as many as sixty pupils. Working conditions for teachers were often shocking; at night the classrooms had to do duty as community centres, so

the local whist drive or rabbit show would take over and the space was

never properly cleaned.

Against this backdrop, the virginal schoolmarms of
I’m Not Complaining
must survive through stealth, stubborn resolve, wits, and industry – or make their escape. And escape is, as usual, only through marriage. Miss Harford the headmistress will never marry; her fiance´ didn’t die in the war, but he had both his arms and both his legs shot off and lives in ‘one of those homes’; as a result she is touchy and difficult to work for. Frumpy Miss

Jones – a middle-aged old maid – dyes her white hair and nurtures hopes

of marriage with a sailor. Miss Simpson, despite her ardent socialism, burns for the local curate, but Miss Lambert, beautiful, carnal and provokingly unreliable, has hooked him. And Madge? She too is jealous of Jenny

Lambert:

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Hardworking, contented women like me get this longing, from time to time, for all the experiences that have passed us by. We do not go mad over it, as women do in psychological books, nor even get a little bit queer. It goes off after a few days and we are ourselves again.

Ruth Adam gives convincing substance to her heroine’s daily life; this

must have been the reality for many teachers in the s – a shared

bungalow with two other spinster teachers, frugal, hasty meals of boiled

eggs, ready-cooked meat pies, and baked beans. On about five pounds a

week, they can afford a charwoman to ‘do’ for them, cinemas and inexpensive holidays, but they count the pennies. Work consists of toiling over endless registers, fear of inspectors, and sick, screaming, primitive children.

Madge is aware of drinking too many cups of tea and gossiping too much.

The painful consciousness of the spinster’s lot recurs with humiliating

insistence. Now thirty, she knows that people regard her as a ‘nervy old

maid’, comical and barren. She knows too that she is nothing special to

look at: ‘My jaw was too heavy. My eyebrows were too thick. My nose

was too large . . . I looked exactly like a schoolmarm . . .’ Sexy Jenny

describes her as ‘the kind of emotion-starved old maid who gets her only

sex-satisfaction by poking her nose into the details of other women’s affairs’.

And yet Madge is not fixated on marriage, or sex. Her work matters to

her. And she feels true despair only when one of her pupils is run over and

killed in a chance accident. Moira was her monitor, an obedient, affectionate child. Now she is ‘a broken, crushed, red mass at the feet of the crowd’.

Madge tries to sleep that night, but cannot; she walks down to the dingy

town canal, and overwhelming thoughts of her own uselessness come close

to defeating her:

My work was all that I had. No personal ties counted with me. And now I felt I would never care to work again. For if my work led to this, then children would be better leading their uncertain lives in happy anarchy, untroubled by weary preparation for the future. I wondered how Moira’s mother was spending this black night . . . Was she suffering so much more? Then I knew that of course she was . . . Outcast and barren virgin that I was, even my sorrow did not belong to me. I was only her schoolteacher, and my loss, in the calculation of the world, was nothing at all.

I felt too humiliated, too broken to take any action at all . . .

This is not the end for Madge, however. She looks on as dowdy little Miss

Jones is granted the ultimate reprieve: the sailor returns from the sea and

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Singled Out

she packs in teaching to become a wife. But not to find happiness: the sailor is a cranky, sexist old boor, who pours cold water on his new wife’s enthusiasms and criticises her domestic failings; like so many teachers, she is amateurish at the ‘complicated business of hot meals and clean sheets and managing gas-cookers . . . But he could not understand it.’ To Madge the message is plain: Miss Jones misses teaching.

And then, unexpectedly, Madge’s turn comes. Love is finally offered to

her, a deep, comforting love that has grown out of friendship and familiarity.

It is as if the dark stinking canal of her despair has transformed itself into a clean sparkling torrent tumbling joyously down a rocky hillside. They will marry; it will be the end of her spinsterhood. Once more at night-time

she cannot sleep but this time, gradually, joy, tumult, and delirium give

way to chill certainty. No, it cannot happen. She cannot be his wife. She

can be nobody’s wife. Madge now faces up to who and what she is, and

knows that no ‘tinsel-trimmed fairytale’ or romantic fac¸ade can replace

her hard-won sense of identity and purpose:

I, if I did not grasp at illusion, could go on steadily with my task and know that, however the world mocked, I was doing the part that I could to heal the sickness of the world. This was reality . . .

So Madge rejects marriage, and so the novel concludes, with the cathartic

if not entirely satisfying feeling that a good schoolteacher with energy and commitment can make a difference. What she can accomplish as a teacher can never be accomplished as a wife.

*

It would be heartening to think that the stoical message of
I’m Not Complaining
helped real teachers in similar circumstances to endure their lot. Miss Hewson, an infant teacher working at a school in Prestwich, Lancashire, was a real-life Madge Brigson, whose  diary seems to echo the defiance and clear-sightedness of the fictional schoolmistress:

Monday morning – I do not know if I am glad or sorry, but I find it annoying to have to get up to a dictated time: nevertheless it seems more pleasing to me to be facing a day where I shall be away from home earning my own living than if circumstances were such that I should have to be attending to the breakfasts of a husband and family. No, I do not want my mother’s life, or the life of any one of the women in our avenue, to cook dinners with love in them. I’d rather be in the gutter than grubbing around the slopstone.

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Yes, I’d rather be padding to school than living in a red brick box called a sunshine house, with the appellation of Mrs. Their married conceits make me laugh. I want to do what I want to do, when I know what that want is, and their conceits are a burden . . . which isn’t to say I don’t want a love affair . . .

I love youth because it looks lovely. Yes, I’m really sorry to be  and not  . . .

Other than having to get up at a dictated time and the obvious trials of a

teacher’s working life, we do not know what adversity Miss Hewson faced

on a daily basis. Evidently she was finding ways of persuading herself that

the single state was a positive one.

But there were cases where this took more control than an individual

possessed. Miss Dudley’s story is one. This most poignant recognition of a

teacher’s fortitude came to me in the recollections of a small boy in her

school, John Edge. John was the son of a vicar, and he grew up in his

father’s parish of St Jude’s in Stoke-on-Trent in the s. This close-knit community encompassed poor factory workers and their ragged barefooted children; shop assistants, railwaymen and clerks lived in a slightly better area of scrubbed steps and brick terraced house fronts. Respectable as it was, this was also the ‘area of the Misses’. The Misses would come to Evensong

at St Jude’s: Miss Stevenson and Miss Cobden, Miss Hall, Miss Burden and

Miss Dearing, Miss Gladys Eason and her sister Doris. And Miss Dudley.

They came, ‘most faithfully, wearing their sensible hats, their grey or fawn coats, their sensible shoes’. Miss Dudley taught at John’s school; she was one of the best teachers, quiet and self-controlled, always dressed in grey; she never had problems with discipline, but she never smiled. John never thought to wonder why.

Every November on Armistice Day the congregation listened when the

names on the War Memorial were read out; to young John the list seemed

never-ending. There must have been  deaths in that one parish. His

mother told him that after the Battle of the Somme whole streets in Stoke

had gone into mourning. The churchwarden, Billy Gimbert, was one of

the lucky few from Stoke who had come back unharmed from the war.

Billy was a kind, likeable man, ‘one of us’, but he had a sharp-tongued

wife.

And then one day scandal broke. The tragic news came that Billy Gimbert

had been found hanging in the office where he worked. John never found

out why; there had been whispers of infidelity, disagreements with his wife; eventually he had resigned his churchwardenship and shortly afterwards took his life. Not long after it came out, John, sitting quietly in the

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Singled Out

kitchen reading, heard the vicarage doorbell ring. His father had so many

parishioners dropping in seeking help that this was not unusual. A little

while later the vicar came back into the kitchen and there, unaware of his

young son’s attentive presence, disclosed to his wife an awful tale of thirty years of disappointment: It was Miss Dudley. She asked if she could speak to me. I took her into the study, and she sat down and just burst into tears. I have never seen anything like it. You see, she and Billy had been engaged before the War, and when he came back safe and sound Mrs Gimbert, who had lost her boyfriend, stole him. He was never happy, ever. She brushed away her tears and said she was alright and as she walked down the street no one would have been able to tell.

And John never told either, until he himself was an old man. Miss Dudley

was probably in her fifties when she saw the man she had loved for so long

destroyed by an unhappy marriage. How had she borne the betrayal, the

loss, the agonizing sense of waste? One can only hope that her religion, her composure, and the acceptance of her own value as a highly-regarded teacher, ‘one of the best’, eventually brought peace in her despair.

*

Acceptance must have been hard faced with so many bitter regrets, but

teachers like Lizzie Rignall and Madge Brigson were able to find meaning

and self-worth through their professional achievements. D. F. P. Hiley, the

author of
Pedagogue Pie
(), an advice book for the teaching profession, was open-eyed about the futility of struggling against one’s fate. ‘What a waste of force, what a wearing of the spirit, all this kicking against the

pricks!’ Yet Hiley also recognised that ageing spinster teachers were liable to stagnate, to become sluggish, bitter and bad-tempered. This, she was quick to point out, was not necessarily due to frustration, but middle age

observably brought with it a sense of regret and finality. ‘That decision of twenty, thirty, years ago, was it the wrong one? Ought we to have been doing something else all these years?’ Hiley had a remedy for this:

It is a good plan . . . at about the age of forty to do something strange and new, such as beginning golf, or buying a car, or writing a detective story. There is nothing very wild-oaty that a respectable, professional female can do, but do let the free part of your personality flap in the wind. Madness is so vitalising. Keep your sense of wonder fresh, and your interests active, especially human, artistic, spiritual interests. Travel to strange and beautiful places.

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In this respect, of course, a reasonable salary helped. Muriel Spark’s fictional creation Miss Jean Brodie holidays in Italy, visits the great cathedrals, goes to art galleries and concerts. And the reality was equivalent: women teachers frequently shared a home for reasons of companionship and economy, and then found they could afford to spend their summer holidays like Miss

Brodie admiring masterpieces in the Louvre and the Uffizi. They took what

they learned back to the classroom with them.

Such a high-minded and idealistic approach to life bore fruit. Now nearly

eighty, author and documentary-maker June Goodfield remembers being

taught at a state grammar school in Solihull in the s. Her teachers, she said, were all from ‘the bereaved generation’. June felt immense gratitude to these teachers for having instilled in her a lifelong sense of civic responsibility. ‘It was a terrific privilege to have been taught by them. They in their turn taught us that it was a privilege to be alive, and that it was our job to feed something back into society. I owe it to them that I can’t pass a piece of litter without wanting to pick it up. They were gifted, educated and cultured, and they had exacting standards. They also taught us that it was