Lark Rise - Flora Thompson (read more books .TXT) 📗
- Author: Flora Thompson
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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.
‘Oh, Laura! What a dunce you are!’ Miss Holmes used to say every time
she examined it, and Laura really was the dunce of the school in those
two subjects. However, as time went on, she improved a little, and
managed to pass her standard every year with moderate success until she
came to Standard V and could go no farther, for that was the highest in
the school. By that time the other children she had worked with had
left, excepting one girl named Emily Rose, who was an only child and
lived in a lonely cottage far out in the fields. For two years Standard
V consisted of Laura and Emily Rose. They did few lessons and those few
mostly those they could learn from books by themselves, and much of
their time was spent in teaching the babies and assisting the
schoolmistress generally.
That mistress was not Miss Holmes. She had married her head gardener
while Laura was still in the Infants and gone to live in a pretty old
cottage which she had renamed ‘Malvern Villa’. Immediately after her had
come a young teacher, fresh from her training college, with all the
latest educational ideas. She was a bright, breezy girl, keen on reform,
and anxious to be a friend as well as a teacher to her charges.
She came too early. The human material she had to work on was not ready
for such methods. On the first morning she began a little speech,
meaning to take the children into her confidence:
‘Good morning, children. My name is Matilda Annie Higgs, and I want us
all to be friends–-‘ A giggling murmur ran round the school. ‘Matilda
Annie! Matilda Annie! Did she say Higgs or pigs?’ The name made direct
appeal to their crude sense of humour, and, as to the offer of
friendship, they scented weakness in that, coming from one whose office
it was to rule. Thenceforth, Miss Higgs might drive her pigs in the
rhyme they shouted in her hearing; but she could neither drive nor lead
her pupils. They hid her cane, filled her inkpot with water, put young
frogs in her desk, and asked her silly, unnecessary questions about
their work. When she answered them, they all coughed in chorus.
The girls were as bad as the boys. Twenty times in one afternoon a hand
would shoot upward and it would be: ‘Please, miss, can I have this or
that from the needlework box?’ and poor Miss Higgs, trying to teach a
class at the other end of the room, would come and unlock and search the
box for something they had already and had hidden.
Several times she appealed to them to show more consideration. Once she
burst into tears before the whole school. She told the woman who cleaned
that she had never dreamed there were such children anywhere. They were
little savages.
One afternoon, when a pitched battle was raging among the big boys in
class and the mistress was calling imploringly for order, the Rector
appeared in the doorway.
‘Silence!’ he roared.
The silence was immediate and profound, for they knew he was not one to
be trifled with. Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, he strode into
the midst of them, his face flushed with anger, his eyes flashing blue
fire. ‘Now, what is the meaning of this disgraceful uproar?’
Some of the younger children began to cry; but one look in their
direction froze them into silence and they sat, wide-eyed and horrified,
while he had the whole class out and caned each boy soundly, including
those who had taken no part in the fray. Then, after a heated discourse
in which he reminded the children of their lowly position in life and
the twin duties of gratitude to and respect towards their superiors,
school was dismissed. Trembling hands seized coats and dinner-baskets
and frightened little figures made a dash for the gate. But the big boys
who had caused the trouble showed a different spirit. ‘Who cares for
him?’ they muttered, ‘Who cares? Who cares? He’s only an old parson!’
Then, when safely out of the playground, one voice shouted:
Old
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