In the long weeks after the funeral service, Octavia lived in a half world, missing Cyril and fraught with worry about Podge and Tommy, even though both of them sent fairly regular letters and postcards to report that they were well and unhurt. Even a letter a day wouldn’t have been enough to reassure her now. She was far too aware that they could have been killed after the mail was sent, could be lying dead even as their messages were being read. Her world was thoroughly out of kilter. Nothing was what it had been. She started work at St Barnaby’s High in a dream, as if she’d been anaesthetised; and although she worked hard and took some comfort from what she was doing, she was often ashamed to think that she wasn’t responding to her new pupils as well as she ought to have done.
‘There are times,’ she said to Emmeline, as the two of them were taking tea at the end of a wet school day, ‘when I think that the only thing that’s normal nowadays is having to prepare lessons and teach classes and mark exercise books.’ Raindrops wept down the windowpane, soundless and incessant.
Emmeline was trying to spoon a mash of rusk and milk into the reluctant mouth of her youngest. ‘Come along, Johnnie,’ she coaxed, ‘one more teeny-weeny mouthful for Mama. Be a good boy.’
Johnnie screwed up his face and turned his head away from the jab of the spoon, waving his hands defensively in front of his mouth, fingers splayed like starfish. One of them caught the edge of the spoon and tipped the mash down the front of his bib.
‘Now look what you’ve done, you naughty little thing,’ Emmeline said in exasperation. ‘Your papa is quite right about you. You’re impossible.’
The baby began to cry, his mouth square with distress. Octavia felt quite sorry for him. ‘Let me try,’ she offered.
Emmeline handed over the baby spoon. ‘He won’t take it,’ she warned. ‘He’s always troublesome at mealtimes. I don’t know what to do with him.’
Johnnie was sucking his fingers for comfort. ‘Maybe he’d suck a dry rusk and get it down him that way,’ Octavia said. ‘Shall we try that?’
‘Try anything you like,’ his mother said wearily. ‘I’m sick of him.’
Octavia removed the offending bowl and put a dry rusk on the baby’s tray. She didn’t offer it to him but just left it, lying there. ‘You haven’t found another nursemaid, then,’ she said to her cousin.
‘No,’ Emmeline said. ‘You can’t get servants for love nor money these days. They can earn so much more in munitions, that’s the trouble. We’ve still got our Dolly, bless her, and she’s very good. She gives the others their tea and puts them to bed and everything but she can’t handle Johnnie. I’m at my wits’ end with him some days, especially since Squirrel was killed.’ And she began to cry too.
The baby had recovered from his scolding and was picking a small piece of mash from his bib. He placed it carefully on the tray alongside the rusk, and considered it with solemn gravity, patting it with the palm of his hand. Then he put it in his mouth and ate it.
‘There! You see!’ Emmeline wept. ‘How can he be so aggravating?’
‘Maybe he wants to feed himself,’ Octavia said, watching him.
‘He’s not old enough.’
Johnnie went on feeding himself. He was completely absorbed.
‘There are times when I wonder why I ever said I wanted babies,’ Emmeline wailed. ‘I must have been mad. If I’d known how difficult they were going to be I’d have said something quite different. Oh quite, quite different. Or not had so many. Not that there’s anything you can do about that. You just have to take them as they come, don’t you? Oh Tavy! Everything’s so impossible.’
It was an opportunity to help, a chance to give poor Emmeline some much-needed practical advice, something Octavia had thought about on many occasions when she’d seen her cousin weary with childcare. Until that moment she’d always been restrained by delicacy or the presence of too many sharp-eared children, but now, the combination of Emmeline’s distress, Johnnie’s happy concentration and her own ingrained determination to tell the truth, gave her the daring she needed. ‘You don’t have to just have them these days,’ she said. ‘There are things you can do.’ And then blushed at the thought of what she would have to say next.
Emmeline stopped crying and blushed too, staring at her, her blue eyes still tear-washed but wide-open with embarrassment and curiosity. ‘What things?’ she asked. Surely they’re not going to talk about ‘that’! Nobody ever talks about ‘that’.
Octavia pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, her own embarrassment having made them slip. ‘I’ve got a leaflet about it,’ she said. ‘It’s quite straightforward.’
Emmeline waited, ducking her head to hide her blushes.
‘There have always been things that men can use if they don’t want babies,’ Octavia explained. She was hot with embarrassment by then and the more deeply her cousin blushed the hotter she became. She knew she couldn’t talk about the things men use, that would be just too embarrassing for words and it was words she needed and hadn’t got. It was going to be difficult enough to find a way to talk about birth control for women, but now that she’d started she felt she had to go on. Emmeline had been overburdened with babies for far too long. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘nowadays there are things for women to use too. The leaflet explains about them. It’s written by a doctor called Marie Stopes, so it’s all perfectly proper. I could lend it to you if you’d like.’
Emmeline knew she would like but it took her a little while to pluck up the courage to say so and the effort made her cough. ‘I don’t know what Ernest would think,’ she said. ‘He says babies are a gift from God. It’s odd really because he doesn’t like them a bit. He’s always shouting at them to behave and telling them how dreadful they are.’
‘If I were you I’d just read the leaflet and not tell him about it,’ Octavia advised. ‘You don’t have to.’
‘How did you find out about all this?’ Emmeline wanted to know.
‘They were talking about it at one of Pa’s Fabian dinners,’ Octavia told her. She had recovered her balance by then and could speak calmly. ‘I asked Mrs Bland afterwards.’ Then she paused, remembering what a long time ago it had been. Back in that lovely summer, just after she and Tommy had started their affair.
‘Heavens!’ Emmeline said. ‘I wouldn’t have dared. And I’m married.’
Johnnie was still happily picking up bits of mash so the two women returned to their own tea. The information had been given. They could move on to an easier topic now, if they could find one.
‘Do you remember how we used to sit in your garden and plan our lives?’ Emmeline said. ‘Under the cherry tree. On the little seat.’ They both remembered – for several quiet seconds and with consuming sadness. ‘I said I wanted lots and lots of babies and Squirrel was going to be an explorer – poor Squirrel – and you were going to change the world. What innocents we were! And now here we are in the middle of a war and nothing’s the same. Everything’s changed.’ Tears welled into her eyes again.
‘Not quite everything,’ Octavia said, speaking quickly to forestall any further weeping. ‘I still want to change the world.’
‘Votes for women, do you mean?’ Emmeline said, blinking. ‘I thought that had all gone quiet.’
‘So it has,’ Octavia agreed. ‘We called off the campaign for the duration. But no, that’s not what I mean.’ And when her cousin looked surprised, she went on, ‘Don’t misunderstand me. I’m sure we should be given the vote and I shall go on campaigning for it, but I think it will happen now, one way or another, once the war is over.’
Emmeline was impressed by how knowledgeable her cousin was. ‘Do you? What makes you say that?’
The reason was obvious and had been for some time. Mrs Pankhurst’s prescience was being justified. With so many young men killed or too badly wounded to work, more and more women were doing men’s work and making a very good fist of it. They would have to go on doing it, even when the war was over, because there would be very few men left to replace them. It was becoming plain that once people understood what had happened, it would be hard for the government to ignore the WSPU’s demands. But she couldn’t say so, not now Cyril had been killed. She would have to choose her words with care or she would upset her cousin all over again and she couldn’t bear to do that. They’d passed through grief and embarrassment together and now they needed the sort of talk and thought that would calm them.
‘Before the war,’ she said at last, ‘most women were at home. That was the way things were. Only a handful were out at work and most of them were indoors somewhere, fairly well-hidden, in a school or a hospital. Now they’re out in the streets, where everyone can see them: driving trams and delivering coal, working on the railways, cleaning windows, even sweeping chimneys. Lloyd George is a shrewd man, too shrewd not to realise he’ll have to give way. I think he’ll pass a bill quietly, once the war’s over, and open the door to us when our opponents aren’t looking.’
‘So you’ll have won,’ Emmeline said.
‘We were bound to in the end.’
Emmeline smiled. It was her first smile since the conversation had begun. ‘So what will you change next?’ she said and her tone was teasing.
Octavia wasn’t quite sure where to begin because her ideas were still at the pondering stage. She looked at the baby who had picked all the bits of chewed rusk from his bib and was searching his tray for more. ‘There you are, Johnnie,’ she said to him and absentmindedly put his dish on the tray with his baby spoon beside it. Then she turned her attention to Emmeline again. ‘The thing is, I’ve been wondering why some children find learning easy and others don’t.’
‘That’s obvious,’ her cousin said. ‘Some are clever, like you, and some aren’t, like me.’
‘That’s an oversimplification,’ Octavia said, ‘and besides, it isn’t true. I’ve watched you doing your household accounts and you’re every bit as clever as I am.’
Emmeline grimaced such an idea aside. ‘That’s different.’
‘I don’t think it is,’ Octavia said seriously. ‘In fact I’m beginning to think we’re all quite capable of being “clever”. It all depends on what we’re asked to do and how we’re asked to do it. The teachers at Bridge Street used to say that, apart from the handful they were coaching for the scholarship, the children there were dumb and couldn’t learn anything. But they were wrong. They were all perfectly capable of learning, all of them, even the boy who drew pothooks all day. What was getting in their way and making them look unintelligent was boredom and being asked to do things that didn’t make any sense to them. Once they saw the sense of what they were doing there was no stopping them. My girls at St Barnaby’s are the same. Some of them leap into any new task I set them and really enjoy it, but the others are bored. They don’t say so, because that would be complaining and they don’t complain. They’re all much too well brought up for that, but I can see how hard it is for them. And I want to do something about it.’
‘Heavens!’ Emmeline said. ‘So what will you do?’
‘I don’t know,’ Octavia told her honestly. ‘I shall think about it, try things. I have a feeling that part of the problem is never giving them any choice. Think how it was when we were at school. Did we ever have a choice about anything we did? I can’t remember a single occasion. We simply sat at our desks and did as we were told and that was all there was to it. That’s the way the system works, the way it’s always worked; all right for those who enjoy it, misery for those who don’t.’ She was warming to her subject now, speaking with more passion. ‘Well, I don’t think it works well, even for those it seems to suit. In fact, I’ve started a little experiment. I’ve given my first form the freedom to choose. I started this week. Instead of setting one essay for the entire class, the way we’re supposed to, I’ve given them half a dozen different titles and let them choose the one they like best.’
Emmeline laughed. ‘I thought it was going to be something revolutionary,’ she said, ‘and it’s only essays. You are funny, Tavy.’
‘It is a revolution,’ Octavia told her seriously. ‘It may not look like it but it is. You should have seen their faces when I told them they could actually choose what they wanted to write about. They were all smiles and disbelief, just like my Bridge Street children were when I told them they could skip and play tag and hopscotch instead of doing that awful drill.’ And as Emmeline was still looking baffled, she joked, ‘Anyway, it gives me something to think about.’ Apart from this dreadful war and whether Tommy and Podge will survive it and whether it will ever end.
‘Will you look at that baby,’ Emmeline said. ‘Now just you tell me that isn’t naughty.’
They both looked at him. He had put the little spoon in the centre of his bowl and was packing it with mash, piece by piece and very delicately, patting the mixture down with great deliberation. It took a long time but finally he was satisfied with it and, holding the spoon in his plump little fist, began to steer it with great difficulty towards his face. Most of the mash fell out as he lifted it but there was still enough left to make a solid mouthful, which he sucked off the spoon with great relish. He was feeding himself.
‘I despair of him,’ Emmeline said. ‘All that fuss when I tried to feed him and now look at him. He’s just a naughty wilful little thing.’
‘Yes,’ Octavia agreed. ‘He’s certainly wilful but…well maybe that’s a good thing, Emmeline. Perhaps he wouldn’t let you feed him because he wanted to feed himself. Perhaps that’s the start of learning.’
‘If that’s learning,’ his mother said, wrinkling up her nose at his efforts, ‘I don’t think much of it. He’s making a fine old mess.’
‘Yes,’ Octavia had to admit. ‘He is. But the point is, he’s feeding himself and he’s getting better at it. If you were to let him feed himself every day he’d get the hang of it in no time.’
‘No jolly fear,’ Emmeline said. ‘I’d be forever scraping food off the carpet. I’ve got enough to do in this house without that. Experiments are all very well in a school but a nursery is not the place for them.’
And Johnnie, having completed his own experiment, looked up at the sound of her voice and gave her a rapturous smile.
Letters and cards from the Front continued to arrive; the news bulletins were always bad, the casualty lists always terrifying, summer drudged by. Food was in short supply and very poor quality. Bread was ten pence a loaf, to Amy’s consternation, and poor adulterated stuff, gritty with chalk. Tommy came home on leave but was so irritable and preoccupied that their ten short days together left Octavia feeling dissatisfied and bereft.
The Battle of the Somme went bloodily on and was still a stalemate. In August the newspapers reported that 700,000 men had been killed at Verdun and 650,000 on the Somme and that many more had been wounded. And one of the casualties was Podge, who wrote to his mother to say that he’d been gassed but ‘it wasn’t too bad’ and they’d be sending him ‘back to Blighty’ any day. When she first read his letter Maud was distraught but after a while she recovered and tried to cheer her family up by saying that at least he hadn’t been killed, poor boy, and urging them to be thankful for small mercies. He spent a month in hospital and she visited him every day but he was extremely ill and when he finally came home he was thin and withdrawn and sat in the conservatory all day, coughing endlessly and reading the papers.
Octavia hadn’t seen him while he was in hospital because visiting was limited to wives and mothers and she was appalled by the change in him. He looked like an old man, not a boy of twenty, with his nails blackened and broken and all that ginger hair cut short. What sort of life had he got to look forward to? They should stop this war now, she thought, before any more young men are killed. But, of course, they didn’t. They just let it go on and on and the death toll rose inexorably. The parks were full of wounded soldiers in their pale blue uniform, taking what air they could and the casualty lists were a daily horror.
In October Tommy was sent to Salonika and wrote more and more infrequently and with deepening pessimism. She wrote back to him as often as she could, urging him to take care of himself and telling him how Podge was getting on, because she thought he ought to know. ‘It seems such a wicked waste,’ she said. ‘A senseless, wicked waste.’
It was only at school that there was hope of better sense and a chance to improve things. When the autumn term began she felt more at home in the place and started to study her pupils more intently and to make careful notes. Soon she began to make changes too – offering a choice of class readers and the freedom for every girl to read on her own and at her own pace, acting out a scene from the prescribed Shakespeare play instead of reading it round the class, teaching parts of speech much more slowly and in smaller groups, moving from the known to the new by gentle degrees. Her fellow English teachers started to complain – politely – that she was dominating the textbooks and that her method of offering four books to her classes instead of the normal one, meant that four sets of twenty books were now diminished to four sets of ten, which were too small to be used by anyone else. So that experiment had to be modified to a choice of two school books and the reassurance that, if they wished, her pupils could read novels they had brought from home.
At the end of her second spring term the headmistress called her in to tell her that experimentation was all very well but that she mustn’t do anything that would jeopardise the girls’ chances in their public examinations. She agreed that nothing damaging would ever be done and promised – keeping her fingers crossed behind her back – that that year’s examination results would be as good as ever, if not better.
Every evening after dinner, she wrote up her lesson notes, sitting at her desk in the window of her bedroom overlooking the heath and watching as another subdued summer inched into bloom. It grew apologetically, as if richness and lighthearted colour were inappropriate to the sorrow of the time. And no matter how hard she worked, Octavia was subdued too, living from day to day and from letter to letter. There were times when she felt rather lonely and wished there were other teachers who thought as she did. There must be some somewhere. She couldn’t be the only one. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the complications she was making for herself at St Barnaby’s High School and the regular stimulus of her father’s dinner parties, her life would have been rather miserable.
As the weeks passed, she found she was looking forward to their Thursday evenings as the highlight of the month, seeing it as a time when the darkness would lift and hope and good sense return. The Fabians were stoical about the war, turning their attention away from the slaughter, which they deplored but over which they had no control and no influence, and concentrating instead on how international affairs should be conducted when the fighting was finally over, which was a great deal more positive and a great deal more pleasant to consider.
‘I see your friend Wells is still advocating a peace league,’ Edith Bland said to Bernard Shaw, one mellow evening in late October in the third year of the war. She was making eyes at him, knowing how the two men quarrelled and daring him to rise to the bait she was setting. ‘He had an article about it in the New Statesman this week.’
‘I read it,’ Shaw said, ginger whiskers bristling. He gave her his most devilish grin and answered the dare. ‘Not too closely, mind, his style being anathema to careful reading, but with sufficient attention to know that he is in the right, for once. Whatever else he may be, he is a gifted thinker. It is manifestly the sort of organisation we shall need.’
‘Could it be set up, do you think?’ J-J asked, offering more wine to his neighbour. ‘I can foresee prodigious difficulties.’
‘Since President Wilson is expounding a similar idea,’ Shaw said, ‘I should say it stands a fair chance. A league of nations gathered together to give protection to small states and pause to aggressive ones could be a powerful force for peace. It would have my blessing.’
‘Anything to prevent another war like this one,’ Amy mourned. ‘It is all very well to say that this is a war to end all wars but we are killing off an entire generation.’
‘We must hope that President Wilson will persevere with his idea,’ Edith Bland said, ‘and that he will persuade others to support him. I must say there are some excellent notions coming out of the United States at the moment. I read of another only this morning. An educational idea. It would interest you, Octavia.’
Octavia was already interested. ‘Indeed?’ she asked.
‘Apparently there is a school in New York that is trying out a most interesting educational experiment. They call it – what was it? Let me think – the Dalton method, and it sounds extremely sensible. As far as I can see from the article, they allow their pupils to choose what lessons they will attend and when they will do their work. They say there is no true learning without the freedom to learn at one’s own pace. It seems rather similar to the attitude you are taking to your pupils at St Barnaby’s.’
Octavia was intrigued. ‘I should like to know more about it,’ she said.
‘I will send you the paper,’ her mentor promised.
‘High time you were a headmistress, young woman,’ Shaw told her. ‘Influencing a single class of infant minds is all very well, and I’m sure you do it splendidly, but you should have a school of your own where you can put all your ideas into practice. Education will be more important than ever when this war is over. You may smile, but this is a piece of highly valuable advice, which I’ve given you before – free, gratis and for nothing. I daresay I am wasting my breath, for I don’t believe you were listening then any more than you are listening now.’
‘On the contrary,’ Octavia told him returning his grin. ‘I am all attention. All I need is the opportunity. I only hold my present position on sufferance. I shall lose it when the previous holder comes back from the war.’
There was a murmur round the table and then Sidney Webb leant towards Octavia and joined the conversation. ‘As it happens,’ he said, ‘the LCC are looking for a headmistress at this moment. There is an old pupil teacher centre in Hammersmith that they are planning to convert into a local secondary school. They need a graduate with teaching experience and plenty of energy and enthusiasm, so they say. I think you would be admirably suited. Would you like me to recommend you? It would be a challenge. I should warn you of that. It’s an old building and completely unequipped. You would be starting from scratch.’
But she would be starting and it would be her school. ‘Thank you, Mr Webb,’ she said, keeping her excitement under control. ‘I would like that very much indeed.’
Mrs Wilkins gentled into the room to remove the dirty dishes and, at a signal from Professor Smith, to turn up the gaslights, which bloomed into golden haloes on either side of the fireplace. Light, Octavia thought, admiring it. Beautiful, necessary, truthful light, which is what education should be about. Understanding what is true and good and seeing it clearly.
Later that night, when the guests were gone and she and her parents were sitting round the fire in her father’s study discussing the evening’s events, her mother returned rather tentatively to Mr Webb’s offer.
‘Do you really want to be a headmistress, Tavy?’ she asked.
‘Very much, Mama.’
‘It would mean a lot of work,’ Amy said in her worried way.
Octavia tried to reassure her. ‘I’m not afraid of work, Mama.’
‘No,’ Amy agreed. ‘That is true. You are not. I never knew anyone work as hard as you do, my dear. But then again, there is Tommy to consider. He might not approve of it.’
‘I suppose that is possible,’ Octavia admitted. ‘On the other hand he might say it’s a capital idea. There’s no knowing what he might think.’
‘Perhaps you should write and ask him,’ Amy suggested.
That sounded too much like asking his permission. ‘There’s no point,’ Octavia said. ‘If I do, he will either agree to it without thinking about it, or tell me not to do it, without thinking about that either. Being in action is such an overwhelming business they haven’t got the energy for anything else. We will talk about it when the war’s over and he’s back home. Time enough then.’ And as her mother was looking upset, she tried to explain. ‘War changes people, Mama. It is changing us all. When he comes home I shall have to get to know him all over again.’ She looked at Amy closely, noticing how much she had altered in the last three years. Her hair was completely grey and, even when she was sitting, her shoulders stooped and she tucked her shawl about her like an old lady.
‘I still think you should write and tell him,’ Amy said.
‘I’m sure she will,’ J-J smoothed. ‘When the time comes. She has yet to be offered this position. It is not in Mr Webb’s gift.’
‘Quite right,’ Octavia agreed, smiling at him for his intervention. ‘Anything could happen.’ Here in Hampstead, in Hammersmith, in Salonika – which God forbid – anywhere. ‘We can’t be sure of anything.’ Except that she would apply for this headship, no matter what Tommy might think. He’d probably be as dismissive about it as he’d been about her present position, and to be realistic, there was little real hope that she would actually be offered the post, or even asked for interview. She was only a class teacher after all and hadn’t even run a department, which was the usual prerequisite for a headship – but she would apply because she knew she could do it and do it well and because it was the right thing to do. The end of the war and marriage to Tommy had receded further and further into the distance all through that awful year.