Although her father worried about her all summer and grew more and more concerned as September approached, Octavia slipped into scholarship as easily as a swan into water. Learning was natural to her, for she was an inquisitive child and accustomed to having her questions answered; a classroom held no terrors, because her cousins had taught her how to wait her turn and stand her ground; but above all, she was happy in her skin so naturally she expected to find friends and helpers in this new adventure of hers, and naturally she wasn’t disappointed.
By the end of her first week she had made more than a dozen friends and by the end of the second had established one of them, a small, pale, rather nervous little girl with owl-like glasses, as ‘my best friend, Betty Transom’. By the end of her first term she had decided that Mrs Bryant, their headmistress, was the most wonderful woman she had ever met, not counting Mama, of course. ‘She says we are all capable of great things,’ she reported to her parents when she came home after the final assembly on the last day of term. ‘All of us, every single one. She says times are changing and by the time we are in our twenties there will be all manner of opportunities for us and we are to seize them with both hands. Isn’t that splendid?’ It was so exactly what she wanted to hear that her face was glowing with the delight of it. ‘I think being at school is the best thing ever.’
Her cousin Emmeline found the experience far more difficult and in that first term she spent many of her playtimes weeping on Octavia’s shoulder, complaining that the other girls were beastly and she wished she hadn’t come. ‘It’s all very well for you, Tavy,’ she wept. ‘You’re clever. You know the answers.’
‘Not all of them,’ Octavia admitted honestly. ‘Just say you don’t know, Em. They won’t kill you.’
But Emmeline took a lot of persuading. She’d been the big sister for so long it was hard to be an unimportant newcomer in a class full of larger and more determined girls who all knew their way around. ‘I shall never fit in,’ she mourned.
Cyril was delighted to see her at a disadvantage for once and said she was being silly. He’d found himself a new friend that term and was full of reflected importance, quoting him on every occasion. ‘Meriton Major says school stinks.’ ‘When he grows up, Meriton Major’s going to be a Member of Parliament.’ Now he offered his friend’s philosophy to quell his sister’s fears. ‘I told Meriton Major about you, and he says it’s sissy to be afraid of school.’
‘I’m sick of Meriton Major,’ Emmeline said. ‘He should try being at our school.’
‘It’ll get better, Em. Truly,’ Octavia soothed. ‘It’s just you’re not quite used to it yet. Some of it’s good, you’ve got to admit.’
But Emmeline couldn’t see good in any of it. ‘I think it’s all horrid,’ she said. ‘You can’t speak unless you’re spoken to and you mustn’t call out and you mustn’t run and you have to say “please” all the time and they keep making you sign the Appearing Book – I’ve signed it four times already and I was only talking to Sissie – I don’t see why you can’t talk to your best friend – and Pa says I’ve got to stay there until I’m sixteen. Sixteen! That’s five whole years, Tavy, and I never wanted to go there in the first place. Oh, I know I said I did but that was just to please people. What I really want is just to grow up and get married and have lots of babies.’
‘Fathers are awfully funny,’ Octavia observed. ‘Here’s yours really keen for you to be a scholar and I don’t think mine wanted me to go to school at all.’
That surprised her cousin. ‘How do you know that?’ she asked. ‘Did he say?’
‘No,’ Octavia admitted. ‘He never actually says. That’s how you know it’s important. He goes round and round things, sort of talking at the edges. He was fussing about it all summer and asking me if I was really sure and saying I didn’t have to go there if I didn’t want to. And I love it.’
And loved it more with every new day. Even when the weather grew cold and the sports field was sharp with hoar frost, she couldn’t wait to get out to play, and in the relative warmth of the classroom every lesson brought a new challenge. There were so many books to read and so much to find out. By the end of her second term she had established herself as one of the most intelligent girls in her class. By the time she was eleven and had been elevated to the main school she was being spoken of as ‘university material’ and her father had quite forgotten his anxieties and was happily admitting that he and Amy had made a wise choice in this school.
‘She has a natural aptitude for French,’ he quoted from her latest school report. ‘Her grasp of mathematical principles is commendable. This is all very gratifying, Amy.’
‘She is a natural scholar,’ Amy agreed and smiled at him. ‘Like her father.’
‘She shall go to the pantomime,’ he decided, ‘as a reward for good work. And to the Egyptian Hall to see Mr Maskelyne and his magic.’
Octavia enjoyed the pantomime and was intrigued by the famous magician but she would have worked well without any recompense, for learning was now its own reward. The months passed happily, punctuated by feasts and festivals and successes. Now there was a new century coming and the newspapers said it would be the start of a brave new world and would bring much change and progress, which didn’t surprise Octavia at all for wasn’t that exactly what the redoubtable Mrs Bryant had predicted? They all sat up to welcome it in and Octavia and her two older cousins were allowed to drink watered wine to toast its arrival, which was a first for all of them and made them all giggly.
But once the Christmas holiday was over, life at home continued in its old comfortable way and, as far as Octavia could see, the new century was just like the old one only with a different name. There were wars going on in various parts of the world – but weren’t there always? – the Italian king was shot by anarchists, and in Great Britain a new political party was inaugurated. It called itself the Labour Party and was led by a man called Keir Hardie. Her father grew very animated at the news and said that Mr Hardie was first rate and that this was the start of a bloodless revolution and the masters would have to look to their laurels, but Octavia wasn’t interested. She was more concerned with her Latin declensions.
Her life was changing but the change was so gradual and easy that she barely noticed it. She had grown taller – that was obvious because Mama had let down all her skirts and dresses and last year’s gym slip didn’t fit at all – but the face that looked back at her from her early morning mirror was unaltered, long and serious, the hair still sandy in colour and very frizzy, the eyes still blue under sandy eyebrows, nose long and straight, mouth wide and pale, teeth white and crooked, hands long-fingered and skinny. Out in the garden the cherry tree had doubled in size, but like her, it had grown gradually and in season and nobody remarked on it. Em and Squirrel had grown taller too, and, at fourteen, Em was beginning to round out into a pretty femininity, but they still wore the same childish faces and fought and argued in the same childish way. Only Podge revealed the passage of time. In the three years since she and Em had started school he’d grown from a plump baby in a pram to a roly-poly toddler, staggering about in his baby skirts, and eventually to a little boy in his first sailor suit with all his pretty curls cut off and his hair trimmed to a big boy’s cut, four and a half years old and full of himself. Emmeline cried to see the sudden change in him and said she’d lost her darling baby but Cyril said it was high time he stopped being a duffer and learnt to stand up for himself. ‘You want to be a big boy, don’t you, Podge? Not a soppy baby.’
And Podge, who was standing on Octavia’s knee so that he could admire his new image in the looking glass, said, yes, he did, and sounded defiantly confident even though the expression on his face was anxious and doubtful.
* * *
In the summer of the first year of the new century the North London Collegiate School reached the fiftieth anniversary of its foundation and the entire school went to a special service in St Paul’s Cathedral – no less – to celebrate. It was an impressive occasion and Octavia was duly impressed, thrilled to think that they were in the self-same cathedral that had welcomed the queen, overawed by the imposing clergy, stirred by the wonderful sound the choir made as their voices echoed up and up into the high spaces of the great dome, uplifted by the rousing speeches in praise of the great work already done by the school, encouraged to think that even greater things lay in the future and that she would be part of them.
In the autumn the Conservative party won the general election with four hundred and one seats to everybody else’s two hundred and sixty-eight, and Keir Hardie was elected as Labour MP for Merthyr Tydfil, to whoops of delight from Professor Smith. Then on the second of January in the second year of the new century, the papers were printed with black margins to announce the death of ‘good Queen Victoria’. ‘It is the end of an era,’ The Times said, ‘and we shall never see her like again.’ Special prayers were offered up for her at school and in church, most social functions were cancelled as a mark of respect, and her death and its repercussions were the main topic of conversation wherever the Smith family went. This time Octavia wasn’t impressed at all. It had been exciting to watch the living queen in her carriage by the steps of St Paul’s but it seemed silly to make a fuss about her because she was dead. There was no need to go cancelling parties and staying at home all the time.
‘If it had been someone we knew,’ she said to her cousins when they were all sitting round the drawing room fire on Sunday afternoon, ‘it would have been different. I can’t see the point of making a fuss over someone we don’t know. I don’t see why they’ve got to cancel Betty Transom’s party.’
‘Nor do I,’ Emmeline said. ‘It’s not her fault the queen’s gone and died. What do you think, Squirrel?’
‘Meriton Major’s got one of those new bicycles,’ Cyril said. ‘I’m going to ask Pa if I can have one too. It’s ripping fun.’
‘It’s always Meriton Major with you,’ Emmeline said scornfully. ‘I’m tired of hearing about him. Aren’t you, Tavy? It’s so boring, worse than the queen.’
‘That’s all you know,’ her brother said, tossing his dark hair and picking up the poker to give the coals a good whacking. ‘Actually he’s a dashed good egg. If it hadn’t been for them cancelling Betty’s party you’d have seen him there and then you’d have known.’
But as it was they were denied sight of his hero and on the day of the party they had to content themselves with playing Pit and roasting chestnuts by the fire.
The new century rolled on. A wireless message was sent right across the Atlantic Ocean, which was quite amazing; the coronation was postponed because the new king had appendicitis and had to have an operation, which was very serious; the bell tower in Venice collapsed into a heap of rubble – there were pictures in the paper to prove it – and Emmeline finished her unwanted years at school, failed her final examinations and was allowed to leave. She was pretty with relief. Within a week she had put her hair up and left her childhood behind her. She and her mother visited the dressmaker in Flask Walk, on Amy’s recommendation, studied the catalogues and went for several shopping expeditions to the West End. Soon she was fully kitted out as an adult, with all the clothes necessary to her new status: walking costume, day dresses, gloves, hat, silk stockings, button boots and all. She was totally and glowingly transformed.
‘Pa’s going to take me to a play on Friday,’ she confided to Octavia, ‘and a concert on Saturday. I intend to meet lots and lots of people. That’s the best way if you mean to be married and I mean to be married just as soon as ever I can. Oh, you don’t know how lovely it is not to be at school! It’s going to be such fun. You can’t imagine all the things Ma’s got planned for me. It’s going to be a splendid summer.’
‘Aren’t you coming down to Eastbourne with us?’ Octavia said. The two families always took their summer holidays together, always for four weeks and always in Eastbourne.
But apparently not. She and Aunt Maud were going to stay in Highgate all summer, Cyril was going to France with Meriton Major’s family and only Podge would be playing on the Eastbourne sands that year. It was very disappointing.
‘I shall miss you,’ Octavia said. And did, for the holiday wasn’t anywhere near so much fun on her own. Despite having a brand new swimming costume – and a very pretty one in sky blue cotton with two thick white frills at knee and elbow and another all round her cap – and despite excellent weather and having Podge to look after and with plenty to do and see, she was often lonely. The donkeys stood in patient lines on the beach, or plodded their well-worn hundred yards of sand, the band played its usual medley of cheerful tunes in the bandstand, the Pierrot company entertained as brashly as ever on the pier, the Punch and Judy man set up his customary stall at the top of the beach, but these things only increased her loneliness. What was the good of them, if there wasn’t anyone to discuss them with? True, she had long talks with her mother and father when they all went for their daily promenade, but adult conversation is not at all the same thing as a gossip with your oldest friend, and a postcard isn’t the same thing either, although she wrote one religiously every day. Emmeline did write back, but only now and then, and with diminishing interest, and by the time the four weeks were over, Octavia had begun to accept that her life had changed whether she would or no.
‘It’ll be nice to see Emmeline again,’ her mother said, as they packed their clothes in the trunk on that last busy day.
Octavia agreed that it would, although privately she wasn’t quite so sure and the expression on her face revealed her feelings to the perceptive eyes of her mother.
‘And Cyril too,’ Amy pressed on. ‘I wonder how he got on in France. Don’t stand on the towels, Podge, there’s a good boy. You’ll be glad to see your mama again, won’t you? And your brother and sister.’
‘Not much,’ Podge said. ‘There’s no fun in them. Squirrel’s off with Meriton Major all the time on his rotten bicycle and Em’s got new clothes. It’s all she ever talks about. She says I’m a pest. I’d rather stay here with Tavy and ride the donkeys.’
Quite right, Octavia thought. He’s got a lot of sense for a little ’un. But the holiday was over and they would all be having tea together on Sunday, the way they usually did, so perhaps…
It was the oddest tea party. Emmeline was now a most superior young lady, wearing a pink tea gown and a knowing expression. She’d joined her father’s tennis club in Brookfield, had been to so many plays and concerts she couldn’t remember them all, had acquired an artless laugh and a new trick of patting her mounded hair, and was going to have what she called ‘a proper party’ at Christmas for all her new friends. ‘You must come too, Tavy. You’ll adore them.’ And Cyril had come back from his holiday with hair as long as Oscar Wilde and the dark shadow of an incipient moustache on his upper lip, boasting that he’d been speaking French like billy-oh and dropping French phrases into the conversation all the time to prove it. Octavia wanted to laugh at him but she knew it would upset everybody if she did, for his parents were gazing at him in admiration and even Emmeline seemed wary of him.
‘I suppose you’ll soon be going back to school,’ Aunt Maud said as they kissed goodbye. ‘I wish you luck.’
‘Thank you,’ Octavia said. ‘I’m looking forward to it.’ Which was true. At school she knew where she was and what was expected of her. At school there were friends to confide in.
‘I just don’t understand my cousin,’ she said to Betty Transom on their first day back. ‘All she ever talks about is what she’s going to wear. And what a lot of young men she’s meeting. It’s really boring.’
‘Carlotta was just the same,’ Betty said, polishing her glasses. ‘Do you remember her? Long fair hair. Good at games. Sang in the choir. And then the minute she left it was all hats and gloves and “you’ll never believe who I saw at the tennis club!’’ And putting on airs as if she’d never learnt anything in her life.’
‘I hope I never get like that,’ Octavia said. ‘I think it’s horrid.’
‘You’ll have to if you want to get married,’ Betty said sagely. ‘That’s how they all go on then.’
‘If that’s the case, it’s just as well I don’t want to get married,’ Octavia said.
‘Don’t you?’
‘No,’ Octavia said firmly. ‘I don’t. Not for ages and ages anyway.’
‘What do you want to do then?’
Octavia had no doubt about that. ‘I want to go to college,’ she said, ‘and get a degree and be a graduate like Mrs Bryant. And after that I want to find a cause, so that I can do something worthwhile. Something that will make a difference.’
‘What sort of something?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ Octavia admitted. ‘I shall find out though. When I’ve got my degree probably.’
‘You’ll have to work ever so hard if you want to go to college,’ Betty warned, putting on her glasses. ‘You have to matriculate in Cambridge Junior for a start and then you have to stay on in the sixth form and do the senior exam and get a scholarship. It takes ages and ages. Pa told me.’
The earnestness on her friend’s face revealed a fellow ambition. ‘Is that what you want to do too?’
‘I’d like to,’ Betty admitted. ‘The trouble is I don’t think I’d be clever enough.’
‘Of course you would,’ Octavia said. ‘Passing exams is just a matter of how hard you work. That’s all. I’m going to pass mine with credits and distinctions. And so will you. I tell you what, we’ll study together and compare notes. Two heads are better than one.’
‘Will they let us?’ Betty wondered. ‘I mean, are we supposed to?’
‘I ask my father when I’m not sure about things,’ Octavia told her, ‘so I can’t see why you shouldn’t ask me. Let’s try it and see what happens. It’s two years before the exams. We could learn an awful lot between us in two years.’
Betty was touched by the offer. ‘You’re my very best friend,’ she said, her brown eyes moist with tears. ‘My very, very best.’ She was trying to think of something she could offer in return, something equally worthwhile and important, but her mind was stuck in gratitude. ‘If I can ever help you with anything,’ she urged, ‘you must tell me straight away. You promise?’
The promise was given with an easy kiss and their cooperation started that very evening with a difficult mathematical problem. It seemed intractable until Professor Smith enlightened them both in the quiet of his study and then it was perfectly simple.
‘Fancy that!’ Betty said, much impressed.
‘What did I tell you?’ Octavia said. ‘It’s just a matter of seeing straight. That’s all.’
After such a rewarding start, their lives rapidly acquired a pattern and the pattern didn’t vary for the next three years. They did their homework together in Betty’s house in Highgate every Tuesday evening and in Octavia’s every Thursday and Friday and consulted Professor Smith whenever they had need of his mathematical clarity, and the longer they studied together the stronger their confidence became. Octavia still saw her cousins every week when the two families took tea but she and Emmeline had grown so far apart that they no longer had anything in common and Cyril got sillier and sillier with every passing week, showing off about his marvellous bicycle and his marvellous examination results and his marvellous friend Meriton Major. It was a relief to get back to school and talk to Betty Transom. By the time their mock examinations began, in the spring term of their fifth year, they had grown into the sort of bosom friends who could tell one another almost anything and they were both so well prepared, especially in Mathematics, that Betty declared she was hardly nervous at all.
Which was obvious from their results, for both did well enough to stay on in the sixth form and to start studying for the Cambridge Senior Examination. The first year of their new studies passed easily enough and it seemed no time at all before they were sitting their second set of mock examinations.
‘I feel as if I’ve been studying for ever and ever,’ Betty sighed, late one January evening before their first English paper. Outside her bedroom it was dark and cold and she was feeling the strain of so much application.
‘Once this is over and we’ve got our results, we’ll go out and celebrate,’ Octavia promised. ‘I’ll get Papa to look and see if there’s anything nice on at the theatre or the music hall.’
But in the event it wasn’t a theatre they went to visit. It was a hall in Central London.
On the morning after their mock results had been handed out – and most of them as good as they’d hoped – Betty came running into the form room waving a printed handbill. She was flushed with excitement. ‘Look at this, Tavy!’ she said, holding out the little paper. ‘I’ve found our cause.’
Octavia caught her excitement. ‘What is it?’
‘Votes for women,’ Betty told her. ‘It’s what Mrs Bryant was telling us about at prayers last week. You remember. Women’s suffrage. She called it the greatest cause of our time and I think it is. You just read it. Gwen got it last night when she was coming out of the telephone exchange. There was a lady there with a pile of them.’ She spread the leaflet out on Octavia’s desk. ‘Read it. It’s all about a meeting they’re going to have right here in London and how they’re going to make the government change the law so that women can vote the same as men and what a scandal it is that women are ignored. All sorts of things. Gwen says she’s a good mind to go and I’ve a good mind too. What d’you think? Shall we?’
Octavia was reading the leaflet, scanning the close-printed lines, her heart throbbing with excitement. ‘Yes,’ she said, looking up. ‘Let’s. It sounds wonderful. We can’t miss it.’ Then a thought struck her. ‘I’ll have to ask Papa, of course.’
‘Ask him tonight,’ Betty urged. ‘He’ll let you, won’t he? He’s into all sorts of things like that, isn’t he? I mean, the Fabians and everything.’
So Octavia asked him.
‘Well, well, well,’ he said, beaming at her, ‘so my little bird is going to stretch her political wings.’
‘Yes, Papa. If that’s all right.’
‘It will be an education,’ he said and beamed at her. ‘Wear warm clothes and try not to get arrested, that’s all.’
Mama was looking worried, biting her lower lip, her forehead wrinkled. ‘Don’t say such things, J-J,’ she reproved him. ‘Even in jest. There’s many a true word spoken in jest.’
Why is she scolding him? Octavia wondered. Meetings aren’t dangerous, are they? It was only a joke. He’s always making jokes. They don’t arrest you for going to meetings.
‘You’ve worried her, my love,’ J-J said, patting his wife’s hand. ‘No, no. You go, Tavy. Go, look, mark, learn and inwardly digest. And then come home and tell us all about it. I think you will enjoy it.’
‘We’re barely into March,’ Mama objected. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to wait for warmer weather? March and April can be such difficult months. Think how they were last year. I wouldn’t want you taking cold.’
‘I’ll wrap up really warm,’ Octavia promised. ‘Muff and everything.’
Her father spoke up for her in the same breath, ‘She’ll be fine, my love.’
‘It’s all very worrying,’ Mama said, biting her lip again. ‘She’s too young for this sort of thing.’
‘I shall be with Gwendoline, Mama,’ Octavia pointed out. ‘She’s nineteen. She’s been out at work for nearly three years.’
‘That’s as may be,’ her mother said. ‘But you are only sixteen.’
Octavia bristled. ‘I shall be seventeen in August.’
‘That is still too young,’ Amy said firmly, and she turned to scold her husband again. ‘It’s all very well for you to be light-hearted, J-J, but there are women in this movement who go out on the streets to demonstrate. I was reading about it only the other day. Do we really want her mixing with that sort?’
‘From what I’ve read of the Pankhurst ladies,’ J-J said, ‘they are altogether reasonable and proper. Bernard Shaw speaks highly of them. However, since you are concerned – and yes, yes I can see how concerned you are, my love – I will don my chaperone’s hat for the evening and pack my duelling pistols or wear my broadsword, whichever you wish, and we will wrap our young firebrand in cotton wool and I will accompany all three of them to and from their appointment. Would that reassure you?’
‘It would,’ Amy said, smiling at the thought of her gentle J-J carrying any sort of weapon, let alone a broadsword, and thinking what a dear, sensitive, ridiculous man he was. ‘If you are with them, my love, I shan’t worry at all.’
So that Saturday, the three girls put on their best hats and their buttoned boots, hung their muffs about their necks and, with Professor Smith to squire them, took a tram to Westminster to attend their first political meeting.