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

Charley-wag! Old Charley-wag!

Ate the pudden and gnawed the bag!

 

The other children expected the heavens to fall; for Mr. Ellison’s

Christian name was Charles. The shout was meant for him and was one of

defiance. He did not recognize it as such. There were several Charleses

in the school, and it must have been inconceivable to him that his own

Christian name should be intended. Nothing happened, and, after a few

moments of tense silence, the rebels trooped off to get their own

account of the affair in first at home.

 

After that, it was not long before the station fly stood at the school

gate and Miss Higgs’s trunk and bundles and easy-chair were hauled on

top. Back came the married Miss Holmes, now Mrs. Tenby. Girls curtsied

again and boys pulled their forelocks. It was ‘Yes, ma’am’, and ‘No,

ma’am’, and ‘What did you please to say, ma’am?’ once more. But either

she did not wish to teach again permanently or the education authorities

already had a rule against employing married-women teachers, for she

only remained a few weeks until a new mistress was engaged.

 

This turned out to be a sweet, frail-looking, grey-haired, elderly lady

named Miss Shepherd, and a gentle shepherd she proved to her flock.

Unfortunately, she was but a poor disciplinarian, and the struggle to

maintain some degree of order wore her almost to shreds: Again there was

always a buzz of whispering in class; stupid and unnecessary questions

were asked, and too long intervals elapsed between the word of command

and the response. But, unlike Miss Higgs, she did not give up. Perhaps

she could not afford to do so at her age and with an invalid sister

living with and dependent upon her. She ruled, if she can be said to

have ruled at all, by love and patience and ready forgiveness. In time,

even the blackest of her sheep realized this and kept within certain

limits; just sufficient order was maintained to avoid scandal, and the

school settled down under her mild rule for five or six years.

 

Perhaps these upheavals were a necessary part of the transition which

was going on. Under Miss Holmes, the children had been weaned from the

old free life; they had become accustomed to regular attendance, to

sitting at a desk and concentrating, however imperfectly. Although they

had not learned much, they had been learning to learn. But Miss Holmes’s

ideas belonged to an age that was rapidly passing. She believed in the

established order of society, with clear divisions, and had done her

best to train the children to accept their lowly lot with gratitude to

and humility before their betters. She belonged to the past; the

children’s lives lay in the future, and they needed a guide with at

least some inkling of the changing spirit of the times. The new

mistresses, who came from the outside world, brought something of this

spirit with them. Even the transient and unappreciated Miss Higgs,

having given as a subject for composition one day ‘Write a letter to

Miss Ellison, telling her what you did at Christmas’, when she read over

one girl’s shoulder the hitherto conventional beginning ‘Dear and

Honoured Miss’, exclaimed ‘Oh, no! That’s a very old-fashioned

beginning. Why not say, “Dear Miss Ellison?”’ An amendment which was

almost revolutionary.

 

Miss Shepherd went further. She taught the children that it was not what

a man or woman had, but what they were which mattered. That poor

people’s souls are as valuable and that their hearts may be as good and

their minds as capable of cultivation as those of the rich. She even

hinted that on the material plane people need not necessarily remain

always upon one level. Some boys, born of poor parents, had struck out

for themselves and become great men, and everybody had respected them

for rising upon their own merits. She would read them the lives of some

of these so-called self-made men (there were no women, Laura noticed!)

and though their circumstances were too far removed from those of her

hearers for them to inspire the ambition she hoped to awaken, they must

have done something to widen their outlook on life.

 

Meanwhile the ordinary lessons went on. Reading, writing, arithmetic,

all a little less rather than more well taught and mastered than

formerly. In needlework there was a definite falling off. Miss Shepherd

was not a great needlewoman herself and was inclined to cut down the

sewing time to make way for other work. Infinitesimal stitches no longer

provoked delighted exclamations, but more often a ‘Child! You will ruin

your eyes!’ As the bigger girls left who in their time had won county

prizes, the standard of the output declined, until, from being known as

one of the first needlework schools in the district, Fordlow became one

of the last.

XII

Her Majesty’s Inspector

 

Her Majesty’s Inspector of Schools came once a year on a date of which

previous notice had been given. There was no singing or quarrelling on

the way to school that morning. The children, in clean pinafores and

well blackened boots, walked deep in thought; or, with open spelling or

table books in hand, tried to make up in an hour for all their wasted

yesterdays.

 

Although the date of ‘Inspector’s’ visit had been notified, the time had

not. Some years he would come to Fordlow in the morning; other years in

the afternoon, having examined another school earlier. So, after

prayers, copybooks were given out and the children settled down for a

long wait. A few of the more stolid, leaning forward with tongues

slightly protruding, would copy laboriously, ‘Lightly on the up-strokes,

heavy on the down’, but most of the children were too apprehensive even

to attempt to work and the mistress did not urge them, for she felt even

more apprehensive herself and did not want nervously executed copies to

witness against her.

 

Ten—eleven—the hands of the clock dragged on, and forty odd hearts

might almost be heard thumping when at last came the sound of wheels

crunching on gravel and two top hats and the top of a whip appeared

outside the upper panes of the large end window.

 

Her Majesty’s Inspector was an elderly clergyman, a little man with an

immense paunch and tiny grey eyes like gimlets. He had the reputation of

being ‘strict’, but that was a mild way of describing his autocratic

demeanour and scathing judgement. His voice was an exasperated roar and

his criticism was a blend of outraged learning and sarcasm. Fortunately,

nine out of ten of his examinees were proof against the latter. He

looked at the rows of children as if he hated them and at the mistress

as if he despised her. The Assistant Inspector was also a clergyman, but

younger, and, in comparison, almost human. Black eyes and very red lips

shone through the bushiness of the whiskers which almost covered his

face. The children in the lower classes, which he examined, were

considered fortunate.

 

The mistress did not have to teach a class in front of the great man, as

later; her part was to put out the books required and to see that the

pupils had the pens and paper they needed. Most of the time she hovered

about the Inspector, replying in low tones to his scathing remarks, or,

with twitching lips, smiling encouragement at any child who happened to

catch her eye.

 

What kind of a man the Inspector really was it is impossible to say. He

may have been a great scholar, a good parish priest, and a good friend

and neighbour to people of his own class. One thing, however, is

certain, he did not care for or understand children, at least not

national school children. In homely language, he was the wrong man for

the job. The very sound of his voice scattered the few wits of the less

gifted, and even those who could have done better were too terrified in

his presence to be able to collect their thoughts or keep their hands

from trembling.

 

But, slowly as the hands of the clock seemed to move, the afternoon wore

on. Classes came out and toed the chalk line to read; other classes bent

over their sums, or wrote letters to grandmothers describing imaginary

summer holidays. Some wrote to the great man’s dictation pieces full of

hard spelling words. One year he made the confusion of their minds

doubly confused by adopting the, to them, new method of giving out the

stops by name: ‘Water-fowl and other aquatic birds dwell on their banks

semicolon while on the surface of the placid water float the

wide-spreading leaves of the Victoria regia comma and other lilies and

water dash plants full stop.’

 

Of course, they all wrote the names of the stops, which, together with

their spelling, would have made their papers rich reading had there been

any one there capable of enjoying it.

 

The composition class made a sad hash of their letters. The children had

been told beforehand that they must fill at least one page, so they

wrote in a very large hand and spaced their lines well; but what to say

was the difficulty! One year the Inspector, observing a small boy

sitting bolt upright gazing before him, called savagely: ‘Why are you

not writing—you at the end of the row? You have your pen and your

paper, have you not?’

 

‘Yes, thank you, sir.’

 

‘Then why are you idling?’

 

‘Please, sir, I was only thinking what to say.’

 

A grunt was the only answer. What other was possible from one who must

have known well that pen, ink, and paper were no good without at least a

little thinking.

 

Once he gave out to Laura’s class two verses of The Ancient Mariner,

reading them through first, then dictating them very slowly, with an air

of aloof disdain, and yet rolling the lines on his tongue as if he

relished them:

 

‘All in a hot and copper sky,’ he bawled. Then his voice softened. So

perhaps there was another side to his nature.

 

At last the ordeal was over. No one would know who had passed and who

had not for a fortnight; but that did not trouble the children at all.

They crept like mice from the presence, and then, what shouting and

skipping and tumbling each other in the dust as soon as they were out of

sight and hearing!

 

When the papers arrived and the examination results were read out it was

surprising to find what a number had passed. The standard must have been

very low, for the children had never been taught some of the work set,

and in what they had learned nervous dread had prevented them from

reaching their usual poor level.

 

Another Inspector, also a clergyman, came to examine the school in

Scripture. But that was a different matter. On those days the Rector was

present, and the mistress, in her best frock, had nothing to do beyond

presiding at the harmonium for hymn singing. The examination consisted

of Scripture questions, put to a class as a whole and answered by any

one who was able to shoot up a hand to show they had the requisite

knowledge; of portions of the Church Catechism, repeated from memory in

order round the class; and of a written paper on some set Biblical

subject. There was little nervous tension on that day, for ‘Scripture

Inspector’ beamed upon and encouraged the children, even to the extent

of prompting those who were not word-perfect. While the writing was

going on, he and the Rector talked in undertones, laughing aloud at the

doings of ‘old So-and-So’, and, at one point, the mistress slipped away

into her cottage and