The Chinese Garden (5 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

                
To submit myself to all my governors, teachers,

                
spiritual pastors and masters …

T
HE
C
ATECHISM

T
HE
school which framed our youth was founded in about 1919 by a group of friends who had met and worked together in V.A.D. hospitals during the Great War. The Caesar of this triumvirate was Delia Faulkner. The Lepidus, who provided the money for the venture, was a Mrs Watson, a widow with a small girl. The Pompey – though here the comparison is less apt – was Miss Gerrard, a brilliant organizer and campaigner in the field of education. Later, a fourth and much younger woman, Miss Murrill, had been added to the group.

Miss Faulkner was always called Chief. Not
the
Chief, but simply Chief.… ‘Yes, Chief, no, Chief.'

The school was an amalgam of Sparta, Rugby and Cheltenham Ladies' College. The first dictated the details of our physical life, the drilling in wind and rain, the cold washing water, the bad food, the inadequate heating and bedding, the hateful runs before breakfast. The third, Cheltenham, contributed the moral tone of the school, but the second influence, that of a boys' public school, was in some respects the most far-reaching, for it governed our social relations with each other and with the staff.

This Bampfield ideal was designed to turn us into English gentlemen,
sans peur et sans reproche
. In justice to boys'
schools, it must be confessed that the discipline savoured more often of a prison camp than of Eton or Rugby. We marched everywhere in line and in step – to meals, to prayers, to bed. Silence must be observed in every passage, and during part of every meal. No personal possessions were allowed except clothes and similar necessaries. A photograph or a trinket was confiscated at once, if found. We wore a severe uniform which never varied, winter and summer, and which, without being actually masculine in style, succeeded in reducing our femininity to unnoticeable proportions.

Though Chief could not alter the physical appearance of the children completely, she did alter her own. She wore her hair severely cropped like a man's. Her face was of a masculine cast, the nose slightly aquiline, the forehead smooth and high, the chin firm and finely moulded – a remarkable face. Summer and winter, she invariably wore a silk shirt, with detachable soft collar, and a silk tie, under suits which were made for her, of good grey suiting, and cut in as masculine a style as they could be without the actual substitution of trousers for a skirt. When she went out, she wore a green pork-pie hat, and a heavy camel's-hair coat, which I believe was actually bought in a men's shop.

She was not tall, and inclined a little to fat when I knew her, but she was very finely made. Her bones were small and delicate. Her hands, in particular, were of great beauty and she used them expressively. Her mouth could express an extraordinary sweetness, but it was marred by her teeth, which were brown and irregular. Her eyes were a light colour, a kind of greyish hazel. In the old photograph I have of her, and often as I remember her in real life, they had an infinitely sad and haunted look. The spark of her will
usually flashed from them, and so dominant and piercing were they that they almost hypnotized one. But in repose, and under the revealing eye of the camera, the scared, unhappy woman that existed in that elegant, tailored dummy, stood out as clearly as ancient earthworks under the turf are revealed by an aerial photograph. A world of mystery lay behind those extraordinary eyes. I used to long to know more about her, but I never discovered very much. According to her own account, she came of an old East Anglian family: she had gone on the stage; she had left it for reasons of health; she was an M.A. of Leeds University (this I never, even at school, believed. I was persuaded that she had selected this university as her Alma Mater partly for its remoteness and partly for the beautiful colour of its Master of Arts hood – a rich blue – which she always wore on Sundays); she had been a V.A.D., and the Matron of a war hospital; and after the war she came to Bampfield to educate girls in accordance with her peculiar principles, certainly no typical schoolmarm, but no normal woman either.

Seated behind her desk, the cropped head above the dark, well-cut suit, the immaculate collar and tie with its unostentatious pin, she gave one the impression of ineluctable masculinity. Parents seemed to find this unexceptionable, and accepted with equanimity the statement that their daughters were to be brought up as public school boys. I can only regard this as a twentieth century refinement of the primitive habit of exposing girl children to perish in earthenware jars.

Chief suffered from what is vaguely termed a weak heart. In 1918, doctors had told her that she was unlikely to live longer than a year. She was then in her early or mid-thirties. She lived, in fact, to be over sixty. And so extraordinarily
potent was the spell that she cast over all who knew her, that when I heard of her death, even though I had not seen her for years, and had come to understand Bampfield for what it was, it moved me profoundly, and for days I could think of little else. It was then that there came into my mind an occasion – rather dim to me – which I had not recalled in all the years since I left the school. It hangs now ineffaceably upon the walls of my mind like one of those Netherlandish pictures of the seventeenth century in which a little scene – a figure poring over a manuscript, or a shepherd looking down at the Child in the manger – glows out from a small patch of light amid a surrounding expanse of black canvas. So I see Chief lying on a couch one winter's night, and the couch was not in her study, but up on the wide first-floor gallery. We were coming up the staircase which divided and ascended to either end of the gallery. The hall lights were out and the corridor itself in darkness. Only the little group round the couch was clearly illuminated. And Chief was dying, it was whispered. One by one we came up to the couch and in hushed tones said good-night to her. We had been told that it was her wish to lie there and see us as we went to bed, to hear our voices bidding her good-night for the last time. She herself did not speak. She recovered, and the incident was never referred to again.

She willed herself to live. The will for her was the most important attribute of human nature. Her creed was not so much ‘Nothing is impossible to him who believes', as ‘Nothing is impossible to him who uses his will-power.' Having proved to herself the undeniable advantages of willing herself alive, she was eager to pass on these benefits to others. Self-control was the watchword of Bampfield, and I am inclined to think there was a fundamental confusion
in Chief's mind between the active principle, the will, and the passive virtue of silent endurance. She herself undoubtedly possessed exceptional power of will which enabled her to endure pain and sudden helplessness without complaint, and also perform, and even more often force others, against all odds and opposition, to carry out work she wanted done. I admired her then and I admire her now for that immense, indomitable will-power which kept not merely material difficulties and physical weakness at arm's length, but compelled even Death himself to wait outside the door till she was ready for him. But for children there were no such high stakes. Death and worldly disaster were remote from us, and provided no noble exercise for our powers, which in any case would hardly have been equal to a combat with such majestic antagonists. No, it was our task to strengthen and train our wills in the limited field of school reverses and discomforts, that we might face and overcome the struggles of adult life, the world, the flesh and the devil. To this end generous opportunities for self-denial and endurance were provided at Bampfield.

None of us ever complained. Indeed, why should we? We were told by Chief over and over again that it was ‘our' school, and we really believed it. The discomforts seemed perfectly legitimate, like bunkers on a golf course. At any rate, I know I came to regard them in very much that light, as a test of skill and endurance. I learned to accommodate my person to the lumps in the flock mattress and my stomach to the bread and margarine which was our staple diet, while my spirit was fortified by the noble words of Galsworthy which I heard at least a dozen times every term, for it was one of Chief's favourite poems (I hope I remember it correctly):

                
If on a Spring night I went by

                
And God was standing there,

                
What is the prayer that I would cry

                
To Him? This is the prayer:

                
O God of Courage grave,

                
O Master of this night of Spring!

                
Make firm in me a heart too brave

                
To ask Thee anything.

We must have felt that not only God, but Chief, was standing there, and a very palpable presence at that. Whatever secret petitions we might in our inner weakness have directed heavenwards, we certainly would have been ashamed to proclaim our cowardice by asking Chief for any remission of our hardships.

Dictator though Chief was, the other two members of the triumvirate which fenced us from the world were more than mere lackeys. Each of them possessed a character of iron, which, joined by the rigid band of a common and apparently uncriticized ideal, dictated the shape of our youth.

The School was called Bampfield Girls' College. I think Miss Faulkner would have liked to call it Bampfield Ladies' College, since Cheltenham was one of her working models, but she hesitated at the plagiarism, and later even the ‘Girls' was dropped. The reason for this was, I believe, that she had come by this time to regard us all as boys and did not wish to be reminded of the biological facts.

To Miss Murrill and to the members of the triumvirate, Chief was known as Dick, a tribute, I presume, to her masculinity. The second member of this trio, Mrs Watson, despite the evidence of a daughter, might also have been taken for a man, except that her rotund figure precluded all
possibility of her wearing trousers. She, like Chief, wore her hair cropped, but her masculinity had nothing of sex about it. She was a grand old woman and a ripe eccentric. Her humour was, for a girls' school, somewhat Rabelaisian, her temper execrable, and her language of doubtful propriety, but there was about her an inalienable air of good breeding. She came of an ancient and cultured family, and showed it, despite the cropped hair, the sagging tweed skirts and the grubby habits (her room smelt abominably). She was known to her intimates as Punch, and the name fitted her exactly.

Her loyalty to Chief was incorruptible. Her keen intelligence and sceptical, inquiring mind could have made her critical, and I knew, later on, that she never hesitated to argue with Chief, or present to her plainly her own views on a situation, but publicly she gave not the slightest indication that even the most monstrous pronouncements, the most impracticable suggestions, on Chief's part, were alien to her own way of thinking, and she supported them not merely with good humour but with a personal bias which seemed to proclaim them reasonable. I have never discovered the springhead of this devotion. Punch was condemned to discomfort, for she lived in one of the most disagreeable, though picturesque, corners of the house; she drew no salary and had devoted a substantial portion of her capital to the school; and her work was a mere dismal round of teaching in a school where the standard of scholarship was low, and book-learning played a subordinate part to character forming. Scripture must be taught, and Geography must appear on the time-table. Punch took both, doling out to us the needful portions of each, much as though it were a matter of brimstone and treacle. She was only diverted – and diverting – when drawn into the bypaths of knowledge.
It became a matter of tactics to trail red herrings across her path, and she relished the game hugely, casting aside with relief the annotated edition of Genesis, or the out-of-date atlas, and embarking on a detailed explanation of the eugenics of the ring-straked and spotted cattle, or the supposed location of the land of the anthropophagi whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.

Punch's rooms were at the top of the house in the Tudor wing of the building, and approached either by the old turret staircase, or from the passages which ran right round the top of the school. Off these passages lay twenty or twenty-five rooms, mostly very small. Some of them were allotted to the junior staff, two or three to the prefects for studies, while the larger ones were used as dormitories. They were bitterly cold in winter and insufferably hot in summer, but they had a magnificent view, and outside them was a stone parapet which was the delight of daring spirits. Punch was too indolent and too absorbed in her books to pay much attention to the children in these dormitories, technically under her care and in her ‘house'. They were notoriously ill-behaved, and the lives of the prefects whose studies were near by were made a misery by their lawlessness.