Chapter 3
CONTINENTAL INTERLUDE
My brother’s and my upbringing was
unusual; mine in particular, since as a child I attended the same boy’s school as
When
I was nine years old my father, who had contracted tuberculosis, was ordered to
Rapallo, Santa Margharita and Sestri Levanti, Genoa and Milan, Pisa and Livorno, Lupano, Como and Lake Maggiore; driving by carriage and walking long stretches over the Simplon Pass from Domesdossela, whose hotel had, I thought, the unique name “Run to the Post” (courir a la Poste) but actually must have been Couriers of the Mail.
Bright
unforgotten distant years of my most happy childhood spent in some of the loveliest places
in the world, giving
We
attended no schools but were taught for an hour or two a day in winder by an old
German-Swiss tutor in Arosa. Our father
spending his days on a chaise longue on the veranda was always there to answer our
questions and impart knowledge which we could never have obtained from a formal education. We read books and we listened and learned from the
talks and discussions of our parents with friends and acquaintances from many lands in the
cosmopolitan atmosphere in which my multilingual internationally minded father fitted so
well. Since we were never repressed but only
taught good
Unforgettable
among my father’s friends in Arosa were Herr Lockhoff, a jovial Dutch artist and the
dainty fair and smiling Baroness von Klockner from Dresden, who herself resembled one of
that city’s famous porcelain statuettes. Lockhoff
whose tuberculosis was incurable was to die soon after we returned to
In
late summer
I cannot have made much, if any, contribution as “crew” to our triumphs, far out as I see myself leaning in an old photo as we rushed around the most dangerous corner of the course; or by energetically throwing my slight weight backward and forward to help accelerate speed on the straight. It was probably due to my brother’s insistence that I was permitted to participate in these races which actually filled me with a dread I never admitted to Temple, whose belief that anything he could do, I could do, too, spurred me on.
Writing to me a quarter of a century later from the Fiji Islands to congratulate me on the birth of my son in Moscow, Temple recalled my “winning that ice-axe for me” at Champex, where I had outraced the Swiss girls who competed in the two mile race around the Lake.
When
my father was sufficiently cured to return to
So,
when eleven and a half years old, I became a pupil at La Combe, Rolle on the
The
first summer of our separation from our parents I spent three weeks with
So long ago and far away and yet so well remembered, the two years I spent at school in French Switzerland were one of the happiest periods of my life.
At
first I was the only English girl at La Combe and later one of two. I was also the youngest. The majority of the pupils were German girls in
their middle or late teens “finishing” their education by studying the French
language, literature and culture. The
atmosphere was not unlike that of my home environment; studious, tolerant, kindly and with
equal emphasis on study and physical fitness. We
skated in winter, swam and rowed on the
Sport
at La Combe was regarded as a pleasure, not a duty, and study – really hard study
– was expected of us all ensured mainly by pride in achievement. Most of the girls came from middle-class German
Rheinland and
The headmistress of La Combe, Mademoiselle Marthe Dedie, was a cousin of Monsieur Henri Carnal, the headmaster of my brother's school, and everyone expected them to marry. A handsome woman, I remember her best for the marvel of her long, lustrous and luxuriant black hair which reached almost to her feet and which she braided in thick coils in a crown on top of her head. Perhaps she was too strong-minded and independent for Monsieur Henri who was himself as handsome as a movie star and eventually married an American heiress.
The Chateau de Rosey in later years was to become a favorite school for gilded youth from all over the world, including the present Shah of Iran and other royal personages, besides sons of wealthy American families. In my day it had only one American pupil, a youth of about seventeen whose name I have forgotten, but whom I remembered because of the various troubles he got me into. He took me riding in his newly acquired automobile and promptly ran us into a stone wall. On another occasion he so outraged me by kissing me that I seized his best Panama hat and doused it in the fountain in the Chateau de Rosey courtyard. Once he induced me by the bribe of a carton of Nestle’s Swiss chocolate bars to carry a note from him to one of the girls at my school.
This
shameful episode is the more inexcusable because, when
This incident is one of the most painful recollections of my childhood because of the feeling of guilt it gave me for long afterwards. I realized that I had betrayed the trust reposed in me by Mademoiselle Marthe who, because my brother was there, permitted me, unlike the other girls at La Combe, to visit the Chateau de Rosey whenever I wished.
My
favorite among
A
decade and a half after our school days in Rolle, I was tempted to marry Jimmy because I
was very fond of him and he was well-to-do, while I by that time was exceedingly poor.
La
Combe today, although still a more modest establishment than the Chateau de Rosey, has
likewise become a fashionable modern school, as I found when I briefly revisited it in
1953 when driving through
There is the same tinkling of pianos in practice rooms; the same calm, studious atmosphere; the same lovely gardens shaded by ancient trees; the same flagstoned terrace in front of the main building where we sat in late afternoon embroidering or stitching as we listened to reading aloud of French classic literature. And, no doubt, there is the same curriculum demanding the same conscientious study and endeavor as in the days of my childhood, when we walked up and down in the early morning in the open air learning our grammar lessons from Larousse or memorizing French prose pieces, before classes began.
I can still recite the opening passage of the piece by Alphonse Daudet which begins: “Les chevres de Monsieur Seguin s’en allez tous dans la montagne,” telling the tale of the beautiful little white goat who, despite the love and care lavished on her, was eventually gobbled up by a wolf because like Monsieur Seguin’s other goats she would not stay in his lush pastures but sought adventure in the mountains.
So unchanging, widespread and influential are the disciplines of French education and the patterns of French culture that, in Algeria in September 1963, driving in the countryside where goats abound and conversing with my young Arab Moslem chauffeur, I started to quote the above passage and found that he, too, had learned by heart the same Daudet story about Monsieur Seguin’s beloved little white goat!
Our
places in school each week were determined by the “Dictee” which started
classes. By my second year I was often at the
top, and always near the head of the class, being able to take French dictation almost
without spelling mistakes. I had perforce
learned French fast since during my first year there was only one other girl who spoke
English. Her name was Gretel Muthmann and her
mother was an Englishwoman who had married a German velvet manufacturer from Crefeld in
the
Whenever
I now cross the
Gretel’s daughter, Liligret, is today the only woman musician in one of
· Gretel, whose married name was Mohr, died after the type was set for this book.
It is not possible to remember what one was like in childhood. Nor are the memories of old friends reliable since they are prejudiced in one’s favor. But perhaps one’s best aspirations are mirrored in what one would like to believe is true according to their recollections. When visiting Gretel in Braunschweig in 1960 I asked her to help me understand myself and the course of my life by telling me what kind of a child I was. She said: “Even as a little girl, you seemed to me to be motivated by a passion for justice.” Which reply, I realize, may be due not so much to Gretel’s recollection of me at La Combe, as to the books I have written.
Gretel was not the only friend of my childhood days in
** The
Henry Regnery Co. Chicago, Noelke Verlag,
Best of all was to receive word from Madmoiselle Marthe Dedie, already in her eighties, congratulating me on the publication of The High Cost of Vengeance, and telling me she was proud that I had been one of her pupils when I was a child.
On
the other side of the ledger, I was attacked and smeared as “pro-German” or even
as an apologist for the Nazis, by most “liberal” and even some conservative
publications in
especial aggressiveness.
Peter
Blake, himself of German Jewish origin, (and today editor of Architectural Forum in
I
should like to think this is true but in fact my compassion for the Germans arose from my
own experience. Having myself not so long
before lived under the shadow of terror in Stalin’s
In
1952 and subsequent years when again visiting
Tout
change dans ce monde
Vie,
plaisir, climat
Seul,
mon amitie pour toi
Ne
changera pas.
Liselotte’s
son, at the age of sixteen, had been mobilized
during the last months of the war and taken prisoner by the French, who sent him to do
forced labor in the
In contrast to Liselotte’s bitter young son,
there was Else Wollstein-Stolberg, who had been my companion at weekly riding lessons in
I
was in my thirteenth year when, in 1911, I left La Combe to return to
be possible for me to think that my own country, or any other country, was the repository of all virtues, or to believe that “my country right or wrong” is an admirable sentiment. “Menschen sind menschen,” as t he Germans say – meaning that humanity the whole world over is much of a muchness. In short, my “Continental Interlude” had for good or ill given me an international outlook for the rest of my life. Like Tom Paine, who said, “Where liberty is not, there is my country,” I came in later years to identify myself with those struggling for freedom and justice anywhere or everywhere on the globe.
No
doubt I was spoilt at La Combe. Not only
because I was a precocious child among teenagers and for most of the time the only English
girl. There was also the fact that my parents
were then rich, or seemed to be so, since my father spent his money as easily as he them
made it. No other parents in those days came
to visit their children in
I remember only that the special privilege I asked for, by cable to my parents during my first days at La Combe, was that I should not be compelled to consume soup or drink wine at dinner!
How strange this
sounds today when I like nothing better than wine with my meals! In those days on the continent half a century ago
the purity of water was not taken for granted even in
My father and mother, besides ensuring my freedom from alcohol later interfered with the disciplines of La Combe by objecting to the system which was so effective in forcing us all to learn French. This system seemed abhorrent to my liberal parents because it entailed “spying” and “denunciation.” There were some dozen “billets” which one passed on to anyone one heard speaking their native tongue – meaning generally German but in my case English. Anyone in possession of one of these tokens at mid-day dinner time was kept in to write in full every conjugation of a French verb – which task, including I, thou, you and it as well as we and they in every tense, took most of the afternoon.
My parents’
moral objections to this most efficacious system for forcing us all to learn French
eventually persuaded Mademoiselle Dedie to abandon it for a short time during my last
year. Instead of a hectic scramble to get rid
of the “billets” before
I find him one of the nicest men I know, he is very interesting and very
well read, an atheist, a liberal and his socialism is the same as ours, and
he is not at all fast. He does not want at all a big salary. This is my
suggestion, not his.
Following our return
to
Chapter 4
MY
The plunge from
Prior’s Field, Godalming, Surrey, had been founded by Julia Huxley, granddaughter of the renowned Dr. Arnold, Headmaster of Rugby, niece of the poet Matthew Arnold, wife of Leonard, son of the famous Thomas Huxley, and mother of Aldous and Julian Huxley of future fame.* Mrs. Huxley was dead, but her school headed by Mrs. Burton Brown, had been selected by my parents on the confident assumption that it would provide as congenial an atmosphere as La Combe, where I had been educated beyond my years while uninstructed in several basic subjects. Instead, it proved to be no better than a British “public school” for boys.
There was no “fagging” nor infliction of corporal punishment by seniors on juniors, nor hazing of the weak by the strong. Instead there was mental, or perhaps one should call it social, bullying equally effective in enforcing conformity. Such offenses as studying hard, showing originality in dress or any peculiarity of speech or behavior, were punished by mockery or contempt and, worst of all, the loneliness which comes from alienation from the community, particularly hard to bear when one is homesick. Realizing I was having a bad time my parents offered to remove me during my first year, but, thinking that Prior’s Field was typical of English schools, I saw no point in this and decided that I must endure it.
· In Ronald W. Clark’s book, The Huxley’s, McGraw Hill 1968, there are many pages about Prior’s
Field where Aldous Huxley was a pupil when seven years old together with the original six girls.
I was handicapped from the start by my slightly foreign accent as well as by my un-English upbringing. My “r’s” were French “r’s” and I recall my acute embarrassment when made to stand up to say “stirrup” over and over again, unable to pronounce it in an English accent while the whole class laughed.
Other disadvantages due to my lopsided education abroad had to be overcome. At La Combe there had been no mathematics classes, only optional bookkeeping courses for older girls. So although I had a wide-ranging acquaintance with French and English literature and considerable knowledge of European and ancient history, when it came to arithmetic I did not even know what LCM (Lowest Common Multiple) or HFC (Highest Common Factor) meant. And with regard to geometry and algebra, I had to start from scratch. Since I also knew no Latin, I was assigned during my first term to the lowest form with the youngest girls in the school.
Because I had acquired the habit of study, and was blessed with an excellent memory, I quickly caught up and rapidly advanced from class to class winning more prizes than anyone else, and arriving ahead of my time at the sixth, or top form.
My scholastic achievements counted for less than nothing in the opinion of my
classmates, who gave me the nickname of “Brainy,” in no complimentary sense. After I was chosen for the tennis and swimming
teams which competed with other schools I was tolerated, if never fully accepted, as a
member of Prior Field’s “ruling class.”
But I continued to be a non-conformist.
I won a prize for botany because collecting specimens of wild flowers
enabled me to go for walks and escape playing cricket.
Accustomed at La Combe to associate with girls older than myself on terms of equality, I had no inkling of my social misdemeanor when, at the beginning of my residence at Prior’s Field, I talked at length with two older girls sitting together on the “horse” in the gym at a Saturday night dance. This “horse” I should explain, was a leather upholstered contraption above which we vaulted with varying degrees of success during our daily mid-morning’s gymnasium exercises which included climbing up bars and ropes besides marching and running in step. All of which muscle-building and posture exercises were one of the best sides of the curriculum.
My sins against the social code, at first unconscious, became deliberate. The spirit of rebellion was awakened in me as I opposed the social hierarchy and the conventions of my school. In later life the girls of Prior’s Field came to symbolize for me the “imperialist British bourgeoisie:” class conscious, insensitive, sublimely self-assured, scornful of learning, and confident in their divine right to order the universe.
The profound changes brought about by two World Wars and England’s loss of her Empire have since my day transformed the atmosphere of English private schools, as also the composition and outlook of English ruling circles. But, “the Establishment” as it is now called, endures.
I made some friends but they were either rebels like myself or passive non-conformists, or victims of ‘the system,’ whom I tried to help or protect after I had myself achieved the status of a prefect. One among the former was Margaret Waley, cousin of Arthur Waley, the famous sinologist whose translations of Chinese poems are widely known. Margaret, however, was one of those rare characters who are impervious to their environment. She walked alone and did not care whether she was popular or not, whereas I yearned to be liked and appreciated, although unable to make the concessions necessary for social acceptability.
Among other friends there was Nora Buchan-Sydserf – an unforgettable name – who, being Scotch, was better educated than most English girls, and had an amused contempt for the “sassenach” hierarchy which ran our school. Small and wiry with beautiful long, naturally curly golden hair and bright blue eyes, Nora’s appearance was marred by a brace on her front teeth, prominently displayed as she laughed in unconfined enjoyment of her mimicry of the silly pretensions of the “tyrants” who dominated our lives. Tough, intelligent and witty, and still alive today, she was one of those who, in Voltaire’s phrase, see life as comedy because they think, instead of as the tragedy it seems to those who mainly feel.
Another well remembered friend, with whom I have kept some contact over the years,
was Dorothea Bluet from
Others I remember are the older girls who befriended me during my first year at Prior’s Field, Beata Crook and Phyllis Vickers. Beata who looked rather Rossettish inspired me to make such efforts in my attempts to play the violin that I became a minor member of the school orchestra – an achievement which filled me with greater pride than my success in classes, although each time I played my heart palpitated with the dread engendered by my consciousness of my inadequacies as a musician.
Phyllis, after a brilliant career at
I was on good terms with Margaret Huxley, sister of Julian and Aldous. I remember her brothers only as young men who, on the rare occasions when they spent a weekend at the school from which they derived their income, sat in state at the headmistress’ table at Sunday dinner.
As I write and call to mind these and others who were my friends at Prior’s Field, I wonder whether my years there were really as unhappy as I used to think.
During my last year I even became friendly with the girl we called
“Carrots,” a tall superbly built redhead with a freckled face, snubnose, bright
blue eyes and engaging smile displaying perfect teeth, who was both the all round athletic
champion and head girl. Her name was Mary
Cooper, and I had originally hated her as the “boss” of the school and
embodiment of all I most disliked at Prior’s Field.
Carrots, whose leadership I had for long defied, was extremely nice to me after the
descent of my parents from affluence to penury. This
is perhaps not so strange because today I can appreciate the virtues as well as the
defects of the erstwhile British ruling class. As
my brother
Let me not forget in recalling my school impressions of half a century ago, my
tennis partner, Marjorie Clemence Dane. A
tall, sturdy blond girl with few, if any, intellectual or political interests, but with a
good brain and a headstrong and romantic temperament, she was to become my close friend
years later in
The only child of a “widow of high degree” – at least in her
mother’s own estimation – Marjorie had never met the “lower classes”
until I stayed with her one summer in Sidmough in
To me this was just the kind of sea-going holiday I had enjoyed in childhood. But to Marjorie it was romance. She fell in love with a fisherman who was squat and
dark and muscular and almost ugly except for his large, black, long-lashed eyes –
inherited perhaps from some Spanish ancestor cast upon the Western
“Ern” Jenkins was not very bright and his political opinions of the day depended on whether he had just read the Conservative “Daily Mail” or the Labor “Daily Herald.” He was far less interesting and attractive than “Stan” Harris who could neither read nor write but who had opinions he had thought out for himself, and whose physique was that of a legendary Norseman or Greek God. Stan was married to a wonder girl called Kathie who was pretty and witty and well educated and who never let the hardships of a fisherman’s wife get her down. They had a charming child called Peggy and theirs was a happy, life-long love. Both of them recur often in my story since they became and remained dear friends long after Marjorie and Ern had parted.
Marjorie’s mother called in the Bishop of London to try to stop the marriage and took her on a sea voyage round the world on a luxury liner to cure her of her infatuation. It was all in vain. Although, as my brother observed at the time, if Marjorie’s mother had not skimped on this voyage and had taken her on a P. & O. instead of a Japanese boat, she might have met a man who would have made her forget poor Ern.
Marjorie had 500 pounds a year of her own – a not inconsiderable income in
those days. She could afford to play at the
simple life in a comfortably appointed cottage in Sidmouth after she married Ern. He, unfortunately, had all the “petty
bourgeois” prejudices of the respectable British working class and this ruined their
marriage. Marjorie had fallen in love not so
much with him as with his way of life. But as
soon as they were man and wife, he stopped her going out fishing with him at night,
insisted on her wearing a hat and stop wearing shorts or slacks, and in general made her
life so dull that she yearned to return to
Eventually they divorced with Ern keeping the house and being paid quite a bit of “alimony.” Marjorie later married my college friend, Robert Ryan, a clever, sensitive and poetical Irishman in delicate health. This proved to be a most happy marriage, but he dies soon after.
I owe much to Prior’s Field. Not only did my experience there temper and steel me to resist and defy the powers which at all times and places in all societies endeavor to enforce conformity by one means or another. The teaching was also excellent. The trouble was that neither the headmistress nor the staff, with the exception of the games mistress, had much influence outside the classroom.
History, which was my favorite subject, was particularly well taught. At Prior’s Field in my early teens I learned
more history, ancient, medieval and modern, than most American college students. We were also given some understanding of political
realities and the facts of power, so conspicuous by their absence in liberal academic
circles today. For instance, it was impressed
on me that Magna Carta which in later centuries came to be the Great Charter of English
freedom, was nothing of the sort in 1215, at
History as taught in most American schools and colleges only briefly scans, or
passes over as dark ages of little or no interest to the modern world, the millenium
between the fall of the
Many years after, lessons I learned at Prior’s Field, and subsequently at London University, enabled me to realize that China in the aftermath of the war against Japan was at about the same stage of political development as England and France in the Middle Ages, when the great need was for a strong government to enforce law and order and defend the country against its external enemies.
It seemed to me absurd and self-defeating for
To call the Kuomintang Government “Facist” is the very reverse of the
truth. Its powers are not limitless but far too limited. In war it lacks
entirely the simian
efficiency of the Nazi, Japanese and
It interferes with the individual too little, not too much. Its sins of
omission are far greater than its sins of commission. Its gravest fault
is the ineffectiveness of its administration, and its failure to force
through necessary reforms. It is too soft, not too hard.
Naturally, my political realism in writing that “an economically and politically backward country such as China requires an authoritative administration,” called down on me the opprobrium of American “liberals” who accused me of a preference for tyranny even while they themselves were equating willingness to collaborate with Communists as the hallmark of a “democrat.”
Owing to this confusion or the ignorance of most Americans of history prior to
1776, we “lost”
*
Bobbs-Merrill,
** Henry Regnery, Chicago, 1951.
On the other side of the ledger, so to speak, I remember a talk given to us in 1913 by Mrs. Burton Brown, in which she compared Lloyd George’s reforms with those of the Gracchi who had been murdered for their attempt to remedy social and economic injustice and thus ‘save the Republic.’ Conservatives who fail to see the need for change and the remedy of abuses pave the way for dictators who abolish all our liberties.
“B.B.,” as we called our headmistress, was a great teacher and a scholar who related the lessons of the past to the present. She was a liberal in the true and original meaning of that much abused word, but also a realist without illusions concerning the facts of power and the basic motives of men, ancient, medieval or modern.
Few among her pupils appreciated her great qualities or liked her much. She was a big, heavy, majestic woman with a rugged masculine countenance, thick eyebrows and heavy jowels, who inspired awe, not affection. She was too remote to know how little effect either her teachings or her personality and high-minded precepts had on the conduct of her pupils. We were all afraid of her, and it was with a beating heart that we obeyed a summons to her book-lined, chintz-curtained study whose French windows looked out on a garden glorious in early summer with deep blue delphiniums and other brilliant flowers. Even I, one of her favorite pupils, vividly recollect that to be called to B.B.’s study in the early morning made my heart palpitate with nameless dread.
B.B.’s daughter, Beatrice (whose shortened name of Bice we pronounced bitch) was a thin-lipped spinster with an artificial smile who was actively disliked for what we instinctively recognized as only a veneer of sweetness, light and charity covering her lack of warmth and humanity, and the conceit which then as now is the besetting sin of class conscious liberal intellectuals.
“Bice” gave me individual instruction in Greek to enable me to acquire
sufficient knowledge within a year to pass the
My knowledge of Latin, unlike my Greek, was not synthetic. I really learned Latin at Prior’s Field, thanks mainly to our Classics teacher, Miss Richards. She was a neat, small, reserved woman with a well-developed sense of humor who never curried popularity, or like the games mistress and some others, sought to stimulate endeavor by arousing inordinate affection – a “pash” to use our word for the unhealthy, adolescent adoration of pupil for mistress in our exclusively feminine society. I remember Miss Richards although I have forgotten the names and faces of other mistresses at Prior’s Field, because she was an inspired teacher who could make even Latin grammar and composition interesting, and the reading of Roman poetry and prose an absorbing pleasure instead of a chore.
I can no longer read it with ease, but my good grounding in Latin syntax and logic, and the clarity of expression required by the exigencies of the Latin tongue, together with my earlier French education, taught me to endeavor to express my thoughts succinctly and logically instead of taking refuge in the verbosity and ambiguity, or mushiness, which in our day and age enables many writers to hedge on their convictions. I do not pretend that my writings have measured up to classical standards, but I have always endeavored to express my meaning clearly and unequivocally.
Long before I want to Prior’s Field my thoughts and aspirations had been colored by Greek and Roman myths, legends and history.
One of the first books
But until I came to Prior’s Field I had no more than a romantic vision of the
glory that was
Thanks to Mrs. Burton Brown, I also acquired some appreciation of the connection between art and religion, politics and philosophy, truth and beauty. One evening a week in the winter and spring terms, “B.B.” lectured to us on Greek, Roman, and Renaissance art. Her lectures were illustrated by slides, and although I can recollect little of what she said, I can still visualize some of the photographs of temples, statues and pictures shown to us on the screen. Mrs. Burton Brown gave me the small measure of understanding of art of which I am capable, together with a deep and enduring appreciation of the Greek genius and its lasting influence.
The classical influences of my childhood and youth stayed with me all my life. For some twenty years, until her death in 1963 at
the age of 93, I was privileged to count Edith Hamilton among my friends. This outstanding American classical scholar
comforted and encouraged me in
Edith Hamilton also tried to instruct me as to how to get my views heard by a wiser presentation than was my wont.
Mrs. Burton Brown’s lectures on history and art compensated for much else lacking at Prior’s Field. Now that I am much older than she was when I listened to her with rapt attention, I recognize my debt to her teaching and can forgive her for having failed me at a critical period in my life.
I was one of her favored pupils, not because she had affection for me, but on
account of my scholastic record. I won more
prizes each year for proficiency in more subjects than anyone else. I even won a prize for Divinity, although I was a
free th inker, exempted from church attendance. I
acquired a leather bound volume of Meredith’s poems, which I still possess, for
general knowledge of the Bible, in April 1913, when I was fifteen years old and in class
VB. (Lower Fifth) The following term, summer 1913, I won the school
“Essay” prize for a dissertation on Machiavelli.
This time the book given me was
I wish I still had this old essay of mine. All I can now remember is its main argument that Machiavelli’s precepts for Princes – his description of how tyrants maintain their power, which came to be called “Machiavellian,” – was not different in essence to the precepts and practices of the Roman Republic or modern nation states.
Mrs. Burton Brown, expecting that I would reflect glory on Prior’s Field by
future academic achievements at
When the war5 came in 1914, my father was ruined.
I was sixteen and had just passed the entrance examination to
She made it brutally clear to me that my presence at Prior’s Field was no
longer desired, and caused me acute shame by letting it be known that I was at school free
because my parents could no longer afford to pay my fees.
When I passed the
Today, six decades later, I remember the shock and disillusionment of the discovery that Mrs. Burton Brown had never had any personal regard for me, having all along been concerned only with the academic laurels I was expected to win for her school. After I was precluded, on account of poverty, from being of any value to Prior’s Field, she cast me off without compunction or compassion.
Thus in the summer of 1915, I left school with few regrets and some bitterness, thanks to the personal experience which taught me that the social system could fling one into poverty from security, and prevent one from continuing one’s education whatever the proof of one’s mental qualifications.