Lark Rise, Flora Thompson [most life changing books .TXT] 📗

impressive tone for the concluding couplet:

 

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