I will tell you a little of my life when I was younger than I am now, though six years older than the man himself.”
She leaned against the elm. It was one of the last autumn days when the leaves were falling in little gusts. They fell on the children who were thankful for this excuse to wriggle and for the allowable movements in brushing the leaves from their hair and laps.
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. I was engaged to a young man at the beginning of the War but he fell on Flanders Field,” said Miss Brodie. “Are you thinking, Sandy, of doing a day’s washing?”
“No, Miss Brodie.”
“Because you have got your sleeves rolled up. I won’t have to do with girls who roll up the sleeves of their blouses, however fine the weather. Roll them down at once, we are civilized beings. He fell the week before Armistice was declared. He fell like an autumn leaf, although he was only twenty-two years of age. When we go indoors we shall look on the map at Flanders, and the spot where my lover was laid before you were born. He was poor. He came from Ayrshire, a countryman, but a hard-working and clever scholar. He said, when he asked me to marry him, ‘We shall have to drink water and walk slow.’ That was Hugh’s country way of expressing that we would live quietly. We shall drink water and walk slow. What does the saying signify, Rose?”
“That you would live quietly, Miss Brodie,” said Rose Stanley who six years later had a great reputation for sex.
The story of Miss Brodie’s felled fiancé was well on its way when the headmistress, Miss Mackay, was seen to approach across the lawn. Tears had already started to drop from Sandy’s little pig-like eyes and Sandy’s tears now affected her friend Jenny, later famous in the school for her beauty, who gave a sob and groped up the leg of her knickers for her handkerchief. “Hugh was killed,” said Miss Brodie, “a week before the Armistice. After that there was a general election and people were saying, ‘Hang the Kaiser!’ Hugh was one of the Flowers of the Forest, lying in his grave.” Rose Stanley had now begun to weep. Sandy slid her wet eyes sideways, watching the advance of Miss Mackay, head and shoulders forward, across the lawn.
“I am come to see you and I have to be off,” she said. “What are you little girls crying for?”
“They are moved by a story I have been telling them. We are having a history lesson,” said Miss Brodie, catching a falling leaf neatly in her hand as she spoke.
“Crying over a story at ten years of age!” said Miss Mackay to the girls who had stragglingly risen from the benches, still dazed with Hugh the warrior. “I am only come to see you and I must be off. Well, girls, the new term has begun. I hope you all had a splendid summer holiday and I look forward to seeing your splendid essays on how you spent them. You shouldn’t be crying over history at the age of ten. My word!”
“You did well,” said Miss Brodie to the class, when Miss Mackay had gone, “not to answer the question put to you. It is well, when in difficulties, to say never a word, neither black nor white. Speech is silver but silence is golden. Mary, are you listening? What was I saying?”
Mary Macgregor, lumpy, with merely two eyes, a nose and a mouth like a snowman, who was later famous for being stupid and always to blame and who, at the age of twenty-three, lost her life in a hotel fire, ventured, “Golden.”
“What did I say was golden?”
Mary cast her eyes around her and up above. Sandy whispered, “The falling leaves.”
“The falling leaves,” said Mary.
“Plainly,” said Miss Brodie, “you were not listening to me. If only you small girls would listen to me I would make of you the crème de la crème.”
II
MARY MACGREGOR, although she lived into her twenty-fourth year, never quite realised that Jean Brodie’s confidences were not shared with the rest of the staff and that her love-story was given out only to her pupils. She had not thought much about Jean Brodie, certainly never disliked her, when, a year after the outbreak of the Second World War, she joined the Wrens, and was clumsy and incompetent, and was much blamed. On one occasion of real misery—when her first and last boy friend, a corporal whom she had known for two weeks, deserted her by failing to turn up at an appointed place and failing to come near her again—she thought back to see if she had ever really been happy in her life; it occurred to her then that the first years with Miss Brodie, sitting listening to all those stories and opinions which had nothing to do with the ordinary world, had been the happiest time of her life. She thought this briefly, and never again referred her mind to Miss Brodie, but had got over her misery, and had relapsed into her habitual slow bewilderment, before she died while on leave in Cumberland in a fire in the hotel. Back and forth along the corridors ran Mary Macgregor, through the thickening smoke. She ran one way; then, turning, the other way; and at either end the blast furnace of the fire met her. She heard no screams, for the roar of the fire drowned the screams; she gave no scream, for the smoke was choking her. She ran into somebody on her third turn, stumbled and died. But at the beginning of the nineteen-thirties, when Mary Macgregor was ten, there she was sitting blankly among Miss Brodie’s pupils. “Who has spilled ink on the floor—was it you, Mary?”
“I don’t know, Miss Brodie.”
“I daresay it was you. I’ve never come across such a clumsy girl. And if you can’t take an interest in what I am saying, please try to look as if you did.”
These were the days that Mary Macgregor, on looking back, found to be the happiest days of her life.
Sandy Stranger had a feeling at the time that they were supposed to be the happiest days of her life, and on her tenth birthday she said so to her best friend Jenny Gray who had been asked to tea at Sandy’s house. The speciality of the feast was pineapple cubes with cream, and the speciality of the day was that they were left to themselves. To Sandy the unfamiliar pineapple had the authentic taste and appearance of happiness and she focussed her small eyes closely on the pale gold cubes before she scooped them up in her spoon, and she thought the sharp taste on her tongue was that of a special happiness, which was nothing to do with eating, and was different from the happiness of play that one enjoyed unawares. Both girls saved the cream to the last, then ate it in spoonfuls.
“Little girls, you are going to be the crème de la crème,” said Sandy, and Jenny spluttered her cream into her handkerchief.
“You know,” Sandy said, “these are supposed to be the happiest days of our lives.”
“Yes, they are always saying that,” Jenny said. “They say, make the most of your schooldays because you never know what lies ahead of you.”
“Miss Brodie says prime is best,” Sandy said.
“Yes, but she never got married like our mothers and fathers.”
“They don’t have primes,” said Sandy.
“They have sexual intercourse,” Jenny said.
The little girls paused, because this was still a stupendous thought, and one which they had only lately lit upon; the very phrase and its meaning were new. It was quite unbelievable. Sandy said, then, “Mr Lloyd had a baby last week. He must have committed sex with his wife.” This idea was easier to cope with and they laughed screamingly into their pink paper napkins. Mr Lloyd was the Art master to the senior girls.
“Can you see it happening?” Jenny
