Noble in Reason (4 page)

But I was entirely ignorant of all this until my youth was past. I therefore walked in fear and anger, half the days of my life.

As for Beatrice Darrell, she was doubtless an ordinary little
girl enough, torn between flesh and spirit like the rest of us, and hampered by the limitations imposed on women at that time; but, unluckily for the Jarmaynes, because of the circumstances of her first appearance and the unease of our family life, she appeared to us a symbol of grace and beauty.

My first experience of school—I return now to a period slightly preceding that of the Sambo incident—was agreeable. I attended, in the morning only at first, a small private school newly founded nearby. I was eager to go; for life at home had somehow become flat and dreary lately; there were long periods in which I did not know what to do with myself. I hung round the stairs and passages of the house, shooed away from the kitchen by our rather cross cook, disregarded in the nursery by my mother, inventing odd games in which the balustrades and carpet rods played sentient parts; day-dreaming the hours away.

Henry escorted me to school on my first morning, and was very much vexed to discover that I ought to have taken slippers into which to change. We had not apparently been informed of this rule—or more likely my mother had been told and had forgotten—and accordingly I was not carrying footgear in a neat holland bag with my initials stitched in red, like the other small boys and girls. Henry was so cross about this omission and scolded the younger of the two Miss Craddocks, who was superintending the cloakroom arrangements, so severely, that far from feeling nervous when he left me alone in this new world, I was only too anxious for him to go. I trembled with anguish, I hung on tenterhooks, while he lingered arguing with poor Miss Martha Craddock (the fair one who wore eyeglasses). At length I even pulled his sleeve and murmured
timidly that he would be late at his own school if he stayed any longer here.

“That's of no consequence,” returned Henry shortly, and he fired off several more shots—now at the elder Miss Craddock, the dark one with the moustache, who had reinforced her sister—before at last, to my immense relief, he hurried away.

So emphatic had been his scolding that the dear Miss Craddocks were convinced of sin, and showed me all the delicate consideration they felt due to one they had wronged. All the other pupils regarded me also with sympathy, as one who through no fault of his own had been thrown into a disadvantageous position of inferiority, and so my passage into this outer world was eased.

At this school we modelled in clay and made paper mats by drawing narrow strips of coloured paper over and under other narrow strips secured in a paper frame. These paper mats formed my first conscious contact with beauty; I can see some of them yet and feel the thrill of joy aroused by their rich gleaming blue and silver, green and bronze.
(Silver! Bronze!
There was beauty not only in the colours but in the very words which described them.) I don't remember when I learned to read, when the portals of literature first opened to me. I don't remember when I first realized that, whereas in modelling and mat-making and drawing I was slow and clumsy, in all that concerned the written word I had an easy mastery. I seem to have known this, to have taken it for granted, all my life. I do, remember, however, very clearly, the day my ability to read was discovered at Ashroyd.

This discovery occurred one evening as we all, except my mother, sat round the dining-table waiting for our high tea, which was inexplicably (to me) delayed. The day had been one of some excitement and alarm, terminating in satisfaction, for I had been bidden to stay at school for dinner and the
afternoon, for reasons unknown to me; I feared this new procedure, but found I had enjoyed it. Now there was a certain tension in the air; my father looked cross and anxious and rather less immaculately neat than usual, my brothers were silent and glum. Presently Henry rose and left the room, returning with the local evening newspaper, the
Hudley News,
in his hand. My father shook the paper open and buried himself in its folds; silence and gloom continued. Then Henry said suddenly:

“Chris, you're reading the headlines. I saw your lips move.”

I was abashed, and coloured as if detected in some crime. My father emerged from his newspaper and enquired:

“Can you read, Christopher?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Why didn't you tell me before?” enquired my father sharply.

I gaped at him; the thought of voluntarily telling anything to my father seemed entirely monstrous.

“Well, never mind. Come here,” commanded my father. I went timidly across to him. “Read this, my boy.”

He folded up the
News
and pointed with his finger.

“JARMAYNE,”
I read.
“April 14th, at Ashroyd, Walker Lane, the wife of E. E. Jarmayne, of a daughter.”

The family gazed at me in fond astonishment as I successfully pronounced these difficult proper names, not understanding that I had read them, on the street wall, the gate, my cloakroom peg at school, before. I was equally astonished, for reading was by then no new thing to me, to be seized and fervently kissed by my father, who exclaimed with enthusiasm:

“Perhaps you're going to be a clever boy after all!”

“It may be only a flash in the pan,” warned Henry.

“Don't make him conceited, Father,” growled John.

But I detected even in these ungracious brotherly comments an undercurrent of esteem, and basked in the unusual sunshine of my father's approbation. I even ventured to ask him a question.

“But what does it mean?” I murmured.

“It means you have a little sister, Christopher,” said my father portentously. “Come, you shall see her.”

He took me by the hand and led me upstairs. My mother, lying pale but calm in bed with her dark hair streaming about her on the pillow, received the news of my ability to read with her usual slow smile and said nothing, but drew me down to her and kissed me. At her side lay a small red sleeping infant, whose gentle breathing alone showed it to be alive. I took this human morsel into my heart at once.

The only other item I remember of my time at the Miss Craddocks' school was an incident, also of a reassuring kind, which occurred during a dictation lesson a year or two after Netta's birth. I wrote so much faster, I spelled with so much more certainty, than my contemporaries, that I usually had some time to wait between phrase and phrase. This had happened as usual to-day; but while gazing out of the window dreaming I had removed my attention from the lesson too long and when I returned it, I found to my horror that I had missed a phrase—the words Miss Martha was now uttering did not make sense. The shock was awful. If this, my only skill, was to fail me, what had I left in the world to live for? I burst into tears and sobbed aloud. But dear Miss Martha, distressed, came and bent over me and examined my exercise book and my large childish writing in the double lines. Out of my sobbed laments she gathered my meaning.

“You've only missed three words,” she said consolingly.
“To go to
—that's all. Write them now—we'll wait for you.”

What kindness! What help! With a trembling hand I wrote
the words; the next phrase fitted; the earth was solid beneath my feet again.

Once I discovered that reading, hitherto a school achievement and a private joy, was actually considered valuable and permissible at home, I very soon read every book in Ashroyd, including the musical dictionary and the bound
Strand Magazines.

There was, as usual, much more involved in my first going to school than I was then at all aware of. The approach of Netta's birth had sunk my mother into lethargy—whether morose or satisfied was not very clear. The two Miss Craddocks were young women of advanced and progressive ideas—for there are advanced and progressive persons at all stages of the world's history. The clay modelling, the mats, were features of the new kindergarten methods just then becoming fashionable. My father, distressed by the neglected state of his little son, on hearing of the projected school went to visit the Miss Craddocks and offered me as a pupil. The fees required were higher than he could really afford and the social status of most of the pupils was superior to mine, but my father would take no refusal.

My brothers considered my father unkind in taking this step. John, who detested book-learning, thought it a shame to deprive me so soon of my childhood freedom. Henry feared the hurly-burly of school for a child so delicate, dreamy and incapable as he thought me to be. It was always Henry's sense and intelligence upon which my father relied for making the best possible presentation of our family to the outer world, and Henry accordingly was instructed to convey me to school. It was his loving fear for me which made him so irritable.

The amusing coincidence of my first appearance in a scholar's rôle at home with Netta's birth had, as I see now,
important results. My natural reaction to my supplanting by a younger child (how right, how true that Jacob should be called
supplanter
by his elder brother Esau) would have been jealousy of Netta, for from the first my mother was peculiarly devoted to her—whether from a weariness of the male, a dissatisfaction with my father as a person or a longing for vicarious happiness through her daughter, a desire that Netta should have and be all that her mother as a woman had failed to achieve, I do not know. Looking back at it now, I perceive there was some such jealousy of Netta on my part, but somehow or other it sublimated itself into devotion. Whether the masochist part of my temperament led me to punish myself for my jealousy by “leaning over backwards”, to use the slang phrase, that is to compensate my jealousy by behaving especially well to Netta, or whether a natural protective male tenderness towards a female overpowered my jealousy, or whether after brothers so irrevocably and markedly older and stronger, Netta's smallness and weakness were a relief and support to me, again I do not know. But I am certain that the conjunction of Netta's birth and my first scholastic success at home confirmed and strengthened both my dedication to the scholar's life and my devotion to Netta. A boy who could read so well could afford to treat this tiny weeping creature with lofty generosity and remain untroubled by her rival claims. Besides, she seemed to belong to me in an especial way; I had read out the announcement of her birth, I had been the first of her brothers to see her.

One further Craddock matter strikes me now with some amusement as possibly significant. All around us, as we sat in our little desks, lay the West Riding of Yorkshire, whose whole economic and social structure depended on the art of weaving. In the making of our coloured paper mats we children at the Miss Craddocks' school practised that art. But the connection was never drawn to our attention. It was not till I reached my
fifties that I saw it. If the textile manufacture had been linked in my childish mind with the beautiful coloured strips which gave me so much pleasure, I might have been spared much later pain.

If at the Miss Craddocks' establishment I gained the conviction that the world of school was a kind world, a happy world, a world where reason and truth held sway, my sojourn in the Hudley Grammar School, which I entered at the age of eight, taught me to draw a sharp distinction between the world of “lessons” and the world of “school.” In lessons I found I still had a quick ability and its resultant joy. In school I was a complete failure; I was delivered to the tormentors, the executioners; the jungle was upon me, the red of my blood on its tooth and claw.

I learned this at “break” my very first morning at school. Emerging shyly into the great concrete playground and gaping about me with an innocent wonder, I smiled in welcome as a boy rushed up to me and could not believe my eyes when he snatched my new purple cap from my head and threw it into the air. I was the more astonished because this boy, E. G. Graham by name, had already attracted my favourable notice in the two lessons we had sat through together. He seemed quick and clever, and would, I had thought, like the same books as I did. He was tall and personable, too, with dark hair and long sea-blue eyes; also he had a refinement of speech which pleased me. My moment of dismay as he plucked off my cap was succeeded, heaven help me, by an attempt at reassurance and even pride—surely this was some agreeable game to which he wished personally to introduce me. But the cap was tossed from hand to hand, kicked through puddles, thrown into a tree. Awakened too late to the reality of the situation, I ran wildly about from boy to boy, grabbing
at the cap without success, crying with continually increasing urgency: “My cap! Please! My cap!” Being slighter and younger than the rest of my class, I was shoved and buffeted and rolled in the mud, but this did not hurt me as much as the circle of hostile faces about me with open mouths from which issued loud jeering laughter, the conspiracy to prevent me from reaching the cap if it fell short of someone's hand, the obvious enjoyment of my distress. At last, as I said, my cap landed in the branches of a tree which grew just outside the playground wall, and stayed there, caught on a twig.

“Cry-baby!” cried Graham, laughing heartily—and indeed by this time tears lay wet on my cheeks—“Cry, baby, cry! Put your finger in your eye! Baby's cap's stuck in a tree!”

Goaded to desperation—for what would my father say if I lost my costly new purple cap?—I turned to the wall and tried to climb it. The toes of my new school boots were scratched and scuffed by the stones, my finger-nails broke against the mortar. The circle of boys about me fell silent and watched with interest. The wall had been well pointed so that my progress was slow, but at least I was putting all my strength into the atttempt. At this moment Graham suddenly sprang into the air. He was tall, his arms were long; by stretching to his full extent he managed to touch the branch with the tips of his fingers. The slight jerk was enough; the twig shook, the cap fell to the ground. Crying joyously: “Thank you!” I jumped down and stooped to pick it up.