myself to say, ‘Nor did I’.
All the same, at the very moment when the intemperances and egoism of those years are most vividly recollected there follows an acknowledgement: the failures and blind spots were often one’s own, the exalted teaching, even if one no longer can accept it, remains exalted.
I felt other things: longueurs, unheralded gusts of joy that arose out of nothing and drove one to run the length of the room and launch oneself, exultant, face downwards, on one’s bed. Onsets of love that were for some undefined object – the world, a flower: a storm of tears, unexpected and agonizing, when my mother asked me what I would like for my fifteenth birthday.
‘I don’t know, I don’t want anything, I don’t know.’
‘What’s the matter? Just crying? For nothing in particular?’
‘For nothing at all.’
‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter. It won’t last,’ said my mother.
Here are three persons to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. The first is Canon Jones. He was precentor at Christchurch Cathedral and a man of learning. Once a week he lectured on Church History to the fifth and sixth forms at St Margaret’s. He was a white-faced Welshman with rich curls, burning, pitch-ball eyes and an excitable manner. He wore decent black canonicals and a shovel hat, tilted forward as he himself was tilted, being usually burdened with an armful of books. He was reputed to have the most distinguished private library in New Zealand. Canon Jones walked with a feverish pace and would enter our formroom abruptly, almost at a run.
‘Morning, Sister,’ (we were, of course, chaperoned), ‘Morning, girls,’ he would pant, and dump his books on the desk. On one occasion, he then screamed: ‘Sister! Spiders!’ and Sister Winifred composedly removed a suspended creature while Canon Jones, grinning desperately, backed into a corner.
He lectured to us as if we were adults and we learned more secular history from him than from any of our history mistresses. We followed him avidly, took frenzied notes, since he was very fast in his delivery, and were always chagrined when his period came to an end. He led us down many rococo byways of history.
‘A rooster!’ he ejaculated, ‘a cock, a barndoor chanticleer! Solemnly excommunicated, girls, and I quote, “for the heinous and unnatural offence of laying an egg.’ “ And Canon Jones gave a crowing laugh appropriate to his subject. He spent an entire period over the death of William the Conqueror, dwelling on its horrors with the utmost relish and baring his splendid teeth at us in a final triumphant grimace. In spite of these excursions he was extremely thorough and searchingly critical of our essays. ‘Padding!!!’ he would write in an irritable neo-gothic script in the margin. ‘Not lucid. The line of argument is not sustained.’ Thus from Canon Jones I learned that things which are thought of together should be written together and that they should be stated with becoming economy.
In his cassock, seated to one side of the altar in our chapel during Lenten instruction, he was a different being. He spoke quietly then, without emphasis and with wisdom. He was a person of authority.
Miss Hughes was an Englishwoman with round, rather staring and indignant eyes and pouting lips. She taught English and mathematics and she taught them very well. With her we read Julius Caesar, Hamlet, The Faerie Queene, The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, and a certain amount of English Augustan prose. She did not dramatize like Canon Jones, she was not excitable, and she had a cool voice. Everything we read with her was firmly and at the same time vividly examined. I do not remember that she ordered us to learn great chunks of the plays and poems we studied but somehow or another one found that they were there in one’s memory and they remain there to this day. She was a dragon on the notes and introduced us to considerably more scholarship than they embraced but there was no hardship in this: we hunted after her like falconers, flying at anything we saw. Eng. Lit. with Miss Hughes was exacting, and absorbing, an immensely rewarding adventure. I don’t think she particularly liked me and indeed, during the first onset of devotional fervour, I must have been hard to suffer. Moreover it was a matter of understandable irritation for Miss Hughes that, when I won a Navy League Empire Prize, I did so with an essay containing thirty-one spelling mistakes. For all the time I was at school I think Miss Hughes scarcely spoke three sentences to me out of class and yet she gave me a present that I value more than any other: an abiding passion for the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare.
Sister Winifred, our headmistress, was a tiny woman with blue eyes, a large, pink, inquisitive nose, a wide mouth and excellent large teeth. I think her age could have been little over forty. It may have been less: the veil and wimple are great levellers in this respect. On a single occasion, a short wisp of hair showed itself briefly under the cambric that bound her forehead. It was ginger. Her manner was extremely austere but her smile engaging and rather boyish. Her voice was clear and her style patrician. She had immense authority and a highly developed sense of humour. The only daughter in a long family of boys, she had been brought up in France where her father held a diplomatic post. She told me that when she announced her intention of taking vows her brothers all laughed till they cried and said she’d be back in a fortnight. Her French was exquisite. If she had taken us in this subject we would have undoubtedly gained a much more civilized notion of the language than the extraordinary jargon that emerged from unruly classes held by poor Monsieur Malequin who had no discipline and a most baffling squint.
I had arrived at the age for hero-worship and upon Sister Winifred, in the ripeness of time, did I lavish my homage. It is easy enough to laugh at ‘schoolgirl crushes’ and it is easier still, in these days, to overburden with heavy psychological implications an essentially fleeting, often delicate and always tenuous emotion. No doubt disturbing undertones sometimes appear but when the child’s bewildered devotion meets with a temperate and uncomplicated response there is nothing to regret.
By the time I had begun to admire Sister Winifred so ardently, I had been made head prefect and my duties sent me quite often to her office. It was during those visits that she occasionally told me something of her childhood, discussed school affairs, received my own stumbling and difficult confidences and spoke, once or twice, of the aims and hopes of her Order.
Out of these brief conversations there was to arise, in my final term, a great embarrassment. I called at her office on some prefectorial errand. When it had been dispatched, I tried to express my desire to do something specific for the Church after I left school. I suspect that in doing this I was as much moved by the hope of pleasing Sister Winifred as I was by a devotional intention: if so, I was most effectively hoist on my own petard. Her response was immediate and alarming. To my amazement, she opened wide her arms and, with a delighted smile, exclaimed ‘You are coming to us!’
Nothing could have been farther from my thoughts. Never in my most exalted moments had I imagined myself to have a vocation for the Sisterhood. Immersed in the folds of her habit, I was appalled and utterly at a loss. It was impossible to extricate myself saying: ‘Not at all. Nothing of the sort. No, no!’ I listened aghast to her expressions of joy and left in a state of utmost confusion. It was an appalling predicament.
During the next two or three days, I managed to snarl up an already sufficiently complicated situation. I began to wonder if I was right in thinking it was all a hideous misunderstanding. Suppose that, all unknown to myself, I was indeed called to take the veil and Sister Winifred had been elected as a sort of harbinger and prologue to the omens coming on. Perhaps, after all, she had made no mistake and this acutely embarrassing moment had been one of divine revelation. Which? It was a nice dilemma and I made no attempt to resolve it. I trod water and continued to do so until my last term expired.
My adolescence, as I have suggested, was taken out in religious fervour rather than in any abrupt onset of boy-consciousness. I did not, however, escape the awakening of those emotions
