Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (11 page)

From the University Press windows Mr Hart and I had looked across Walton Street at the terra-cotta walls of Somerville drowsing in the afternoon sun. I had found irresistibly fascinating both its closed garden and the idea of its arrogant, intellectual impregnability, but perhaps what chiefly attracted me - still theologically dominated by
Robert Elsmere
and the rationalistic Buxton curate - was its religious toleration. So I told Sir John that it was not the socially safe Head of Lady Margaret Hall whom I had arranged to see, but the scholarly and intimidating Principal of Somerville.

My appointment with her was fixed for eight o’clock one evening after dinner. I felt indescribably elated, yet definitely insecure about the legs, when I found myself for the first time within the walled garden, and saw the wide lawn and the heavy, drooping elms and sycamores in the fast-vanishing light. I came upon the Principal - ‘who is just like a tiger-cat’, I noted afterwards in my diary - before I expected to see her, sitting over her after-dinner coffee with the History tutor on the narrow stretch of grass outside the Senior Common Room.

As I followed the scout across the garden, the Principal got up to greet me. Her immensely tall, angular figure seemed to go on unfolding for several minutes before my apprehensive eyes, and the vast gulf of lawn between us made me even more conscious than usual of my insignificant stature. Being quite ignorant of the plain-Jane-and-no-nonsense conventions of Oxford women dons, I had carefully changed, in accordance with the sartorial habits of Buxton, into evening dress, and was wearing a flimsy lace frock under a pale blue and grey reversible satin cloak, and an unsubstantial little pair of high-heeled white sue‘de shoes. So unlike the customary felt hat and mackintosh of the average 1913 woman student was this provincially modish attire, that the Principal actually referred to it when she interviewed me during the Scholarship examinations in the following March. ‘I remember you,’ she said immediately, ‘you’re the girl who came across the lawn in a blue evening cloak.’

But on this first occasion my frivolous appearance, combined with my complete lack of examination certificates and my deplorable ignorance of even the Greek alphabet, obviously convinced her that I was a singularly unpromising candidate. Nevertheless she patiently described to my appalled ears the barbed-wire fence of examinations that had to be scaled before an ambitious but totally unqualified young woman could hope to enter Somerville, and, incredible as it must have appeared to her that I did not know it, endeavoured to make me understand the difference between University Responsions and the College Entrance Examination.

In conclusion, she advised me to take English (then, as now, the ‘woman’s subject’ at Oxford), to exempt myself from Responsions (since I knew no Greek) by means of the Oxford Senior Local, and on no account to try for a scholarship. Finally she left me at the gate with a sheaf of printed regulations in my hands and returned to her companion, probably calculating with some satisfaction that she was never likely to see me again.

For the greater part of an anguished night, I sat up in my little room at St Hilda’s and puzzled over those documents. My aunt and Miss Heath Jones had already departed; the maiden ladies in whose charge I had been left were, I knew, even more ignorant than myself about women’s colleges, while I was only too well aware that no one either at home or in Buxton would regard those lists of bewildering alternatives with any sentiment more helpful than mystified impatience. More than once I dissolved into angry tears of baffled despair. No one familiar with examination rules has any idea what Arabic and Sanscrit they can appear to an anxious, unsophisticated young candidate whose very chance of success may depend upon her correct interpretation of their complex intricacies.

As it was, I never grasped from the Somerville data the fact that if I wanted a Degree in some distant and improbable future when Degrees for women were attained, the Oxford Senior would not exempt me from Responsions Greek, and that I would still have to take the subject after I went up. So instead of tackling the easy rudiments of Greek grammar, I set myself the unnecessarily difficult task of reaching a high standard in mathematics - always a weak point - and in Latin, with which I had the merest nodding acquaintance, since it was not included in the regular curriculum at St Monica’s before 1914.

When at last I went to bed with the dawn, sleep was effectually banished by a return of the black despair that had so often overwhelmed me in Buxton. Why, I wonder, do people who at one time or another have all been young themselves, and who ought therefore to know better, generalise so suavely and so mendaciously about the golden hours of youth - that period of life when every sorrow seems permanent, and every set-back insuperable?

During that miserable night I fully believed that I had overcome the psychological objections to the life that I so much desired, only to be frustrated by inexperience and academic shortcomings. My slowly relenting father, I felt, must not be asked to finance two sets of coaching for two separate examinations, and even if he could be persuaded to do so, who was there in Buxton capable of preparing me for College Entrance papers?

These difficulties, and my weakness in Latin and mathematics, meant that it was the dreary Oxford Senior for which I must be coached. Somehow or other I should have to do my best with the Somerville English unaided, although I had no books, no notion of the standard that I ought to reach, no knowledge - since public and High School girls were quite outside the range of my experience - of the probable attainments of my competitors, and no one - for I feared to trouble the magnificent Sir John any further - to whom to turn for advice. Apprehensively I quailed at the prospect of simultaneously preparing, in the Bridge-and-dance dominated atmosphere of Buxton, for two examinations, the Somerville Entrance to be taken in March, and the Oxford Senior in the following July.

Not until I returned to Buxton, and encountered the cheerful equanimity of Edward, home for the holidays, did I finally resolve, not only to take my chance of success despite unfavourable appearances, but to adopt an even bolder policy than I really thought feasible.

‘Why not take the Somerville Schol.?’ demanded Edward, as we were practising tennis strokes against a brick wall in our circumscribed back yard one afternoon. ‘Why stick at the Entrance? You’ve got far more brains than most girls.’

‘How do I know I have?’ I inquired, with some reason.

‘Oh, I’m sure you have! Most of the chaps’ sisters are such idiots . . . Besides, old Marriott wouldn’t have made all that up about your essays. I’d try for the Schol. if I were you, I would really. You won’t get one, of course, but you’ll have a much better chance of getting in than if you take the potty Entrance papers.’

So at length I decided, in the teeth of the Principal’s sagacious advice, to shoulder the additional burden of the Scholarship examination, partly to spite her obvious and pardonable assumption that I was a complete fool, partly in order to keep Edward’s respect, which I valued, and partly because in those days the difficult thing had a will-o’-the-wisp fascination, luring me, in spite of a great deal of natural timidity, down unfamiliar and alarming roads of experience. I had been rash enough to select the college with the highest standard of scholarship; I might as well be a little more foolish, and attempt to enter it by the most resistant of doors.

5

The next few months were an uphill grind enough, but I thoroughly enjoyed them. No longer did my conscience prick me because I omitted to read about gun-running in Ulster, or to study those tentative treaties in the too-inflammable Balkans which so nearly coincided with that curiously ironic ceremony, the opening of the Palace of Peace at the Hague. Even the suffragette movement in which I was so deeply interested became for the time being a mere far-away fable of window-smashings and bomb explosions and damaged pictures in public galleries. To have some real work to do after more than a year of purposeless pottering was like a bracing visit to a cliff-bound coast after lethargic existence on a marshy lowland.

The mornings I gave to the Scholarship examination, getting up every day at six o’clock and working steadily till lunch-time in a chilly little north-west room, known as ‘the sewing room’, at the back of the house. It was on the ground floor and dark as well as cold, but I was not allowed a fire out of consideration for the maids, though we then kept three and a garden-boy. But I gladly endured my frozen hands and feet in order to obtain the privacy and quiet which none of the living-rooms in ordinary use would have given me.

Books were as usual a problem. The Free Library appeared to stock nothing that had been published since 1880, and the local circulating libraries, justified by the exclusive demands of their customers, supplied little else but fiction. So I spent the greater part of that autumn’s tiny dress-allowance on the necessary volumes of Fielding and Goldsmith, Wordsworth and the
Cambridge History of English Literature
. Friends and relatives helped at Christmas with haphazard volumes of criticism, chosen entirely at random but with the best of intentions, on the Lakeland Poets and the Romantic Revival. After luncheon the energetic twitching of my athletic limbs drove me, fortunately for my health, out of doors to an afternoon’s golf or tennis. From this I returned to tussle, often lacrimoniously, with mathematics and Latin for the rest of the day.

At first the complications of finding tuition for these two nightmare subjects had appeared almost insuperable. Help was naturally not to be expected from establishments founded for the creation, out of very raw material, of matrimonially eligible young ladies. The lackadaisical and self-conscious young masters from the local boys’ preparatory schools were approached in vain. My rationalistic curate might have proved adequate, but his days were already overcrowded, and the numerous remaining clerics understood the social gradations of Anglican unctuousness better than the scientific pitfalls of mathematics.

I had already begun to contemplate a tedious journey two or three times weekly into Manchester, which would greatly have interfered with my work for the Scholarship, when the problem was solved by a neighbour of ours who ran a small institution for pushing backward boys by force into Sandhurst or Woolwich. Financially this coaching school was always on the rocks - it did not, in fact, survive my need of it by many weeks - and any apprehensions which its owner may have felt about the occasional presence of a young female among his feather-brained students was swallowed up in his relief at the prospect of some unexpected fees. The ages of the youths in his charge varied from seventeen to about twenty-three. As the whole dozen had between them barely enough intelligence to fill the head of a normal Sixth Form schoolboy, it can well be imagined that the coaching obtainable there was not of a very remarkable order.

The owner of the school, a social acquaintance of ours, took me himself for mathematics. He was patient and benevolent, but not very resourceful in coaching devices, and could only repeat helplessly, ‘Oh yes, you do, you know!’ in response to my frequent and quite honest asseverations that I did not understand almost all the algebraical propositions that he put before me. For him his rowdy pupils had some rudiments of respect - which was not, however, accorded to his elderly classical assistant, who wore a beard, spoke with a lisp, and owned a singularly infelicitous cognomen which cannot have helped him to manage the ruthless young adolescents who came under his charge.

The tedious hours which I spent in listening to this unattractive individual’s elucidations of the Aeneid appeared to the young gentlemen to be humorous in the extreme. A sudden enthusiasm for the reference-books on the shelves of my class-room was apt to seize them as soon as my coachings began, and one after another would come in at intervals to borrow a dictionary or return an encyclopædia. Strange phenomena invariably followed these periodic visitations. Piles of books would fall with a crash to the floor; pieces of furniture would mysteriously collapse, and on one occasion a gramophone concealed behind the window-curtain burst forth zestfully into ‘Stop yer ticklin’, Jock!’

After each of these
poltergeisterisch
disturbances my teacher would look suspiciously round like a puzzled old dog, but it never seemed to occur to him to connect them with the boys.

6

Any reader who has succeeded in following up to this point my warfare against Buxton young-ladyhood will probably feel that I have given far too much time and space to the adolescent subject of examinations. Readers, as almost all my editors have informed me at one time or another, are apt to remain quite untouched by any topic that is not well saturated with ‘human interest’ (i.e. love-affairs, sex crises and maternal self-indulgences, irreverently familiar in journalistic terminology under the comprehensive abbreviation of ‘H.I.’).

Unfortunately, the persevering introduction of ‘H.I.’ at this stage of my development would not in the least represent the true situation. Between August 1913 and April 1914, examinations did in fact occupy not only all my time but both my waking and sleeping thoughts. It must have been shortly after my visit to St Hilda’s that I received the proposal of marriage already mentioned, but after the first shock of instinctive revulsion, sex and its concomitant emotions were completely obliterated by the
Cambridge History of English Literature
and the elusive secrets of quadratic equations. Marriage, to any man that I then knew, would merely have rooted me the more firmly among the detested hills and dales of Derbyshire; the Somerville Scholarship and the Oxford Senior Local appeared to provide the only road that would eventually lead me southward. I did not dream that the War Offices of France and Germany were busily preparing another.