Octavia went back to school after the funeral in her most rigidly determined mood. Changes would have to be made. How well she knew that now. She set about making them at once.
‘By next September,’ she told her staff at their next meeting, ‘I should like us all to be in a position to provide syllabuses for the full school year. This will be our third year as a Dalton school, so writing syllabuses should be a great deal easier than it was at the beginning. I’m sure being thoroughly prepared will make things easier for us as the year progresses.’
‘I don’t doubt that,’ Elizabeth Fennimore said, surprised by the tone Octavia was taking, ‘but it’s a tall order. We’re well into May now and the state examinations are almost upon us. I doubt whether we could write syllabuses for the entire year in three months. For half a year, maybe, but not a year.’
The others began to agree but their headmistress was all brisk determination. ‘We have to move forward,’ she said and there was something so implacable about her tone that dissent was quashed – for the time being.
‘What on earth’s the matter with her?’ Morag said when she and Elizabeth were alone in the cloakroom afterwards, putting on their straw hats. ‘I’ve never known her ride roughshod over us before. Have we done something wrong?’
‘It could be grief,’ Elizabeth said sagely. ‘It takes people in all sorts of odd ways. But we mustn’t let her do it, no matter what the reason might be. It isn’t sensible to put us all under pressure, especially at this time of year.’
The pressure was maintained. The next morning there was a notice on the staff notice board detailing the dates by which each syllabus should be completed.
‘Good heavens!’ Alice Genevra said. ‘She’s given us our marching orders.’
‘Then we must subvert them,’ Elizabeth said.
The orders continued. The next morning it was a list of instructions for the invigilation of the examinations. ‘Totally unnecessary,’ Morag said. ‘They’re exactly the same as they were last year. Nothing’s changed. We can invigilate them in the same way.’
The next morning it was a list of the senior forms that would be required to take assembly together with the dates on which the assemblies would be.
‘We do this by consultation,’ Morag said. ‘Not dictate. It might not be convenient for a form to take assembly at the time she’s specified. Mine certainly couldn’t. They’ve got Geography that day and I want them fresh for it. I shall go and see her.’
It didn’t get her anywhere. The headmistress was adamant. It was, as Morag reported to the others, as if she’d become a different person.
‘What are we to do about it?’ Mabel Ollerington wanted to know. ‘I can’t possibly get a year’s syllabuses ready by September. I’ve only just found out how to write them.’
‘We will have a staff meeting without her,’ Elizabeth said, ‘and decide which of her suggestions – we will assume that that is what they are – which of her suggestions we are prepared to agree to.’
‘And then?’ Mabel asked.
‘Then I will see her again and tell her what we have decided.’
‘Would you like company?’ Sarah Fletcher offered.
‘No,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It would be better if I were on my own. I’m the oldest member of her staff, so she would expect me to take the lead.’
Even so she found it daunting to face her transformed headmistress with such a task in hand, and could feel her heart quailing when she admitted that they had called a meeting without her.
‘Really?’ Octavia said. ‘That is a little extraordinary surely.’
‘We are in an extraordinary situation.’
Octavia let that pass. ‘So what decisions have you made? Since I assume that was the purpose of the meeting.’
‘We are not at all happy about having to prepare a year’s syllabuses by September,’ Elizabeth told her. ‘It’s very short notice and none of us think it can be done, or at least, none of us think it can be done to our satisfaction, which is what we would all like to do. Half a year’s syllabuses would be possible, a year’s no.’
‘I see. Is that all?’
Now that she’d begun, Elizabeth was finding it easier. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We discussed the invigilation timetable too and would prefer to work to the old one, the one we used last year. It worked very well and we’re familiar with it. And we’d like to draw up the rota for assemblies between us, so that we don’t ask too much of our girls at exam time.’
‘Anything else?’
‘No,’ Elizabeth said, adding, rather stiffly, ‘If there were any way we could accede to your requests we would have found it. Unfortunately there is not.’
Octavia was angry. She couldn’t deny it. And although she did what she could to control it, her anger was clear in the tone of her voice. ‘I would have thought my requests, as you put it, were perfectly reasonable,’ she said, ‘and well within the bounds of acceptance. I intend to draw up my own syllabuses by September. I’m not asking you to do anything I am not prepared to do myself.’
They were being so coldly distant with one another that Elizabeth lost her temper too. ‘It’s all very well for you,’ she said. ‘You are superhuman. We are mere flesh and blood with clay feet. We can’t keep up with you and it is, if you will forgive me for saying so, unrealistic of you to expect us to.’
‘I have never claimed to be superhuman – as you put it,’ Octavia said. ‘I am merely looking for ways to make our lives easier and that seemed an obvious way.’
‘To you perhaps, but not to us.’
It was a quarrel and they’d reached stalemate. ‘Very well then,’ Octavia said. ‘If that is really your unanimous opinion.’
‘Yes, Miss Smith, it is.’
That ‘Miss Smith’ was just a little too formal not to have been deliberate. It’s as if she’s putting a barrier between us, Octavia thought, and there have never been barriers between us. ‘Then we will consider my suggestion rejected,’ she said. ‘Personally, I think you are being unwise but this is a democratic school and I will abide by the democratic process.’
Elizabeth pressed on. ‘And your other suggestions?’
‘I will abide by the democratic process,’ Octavia said. ‘If you wish to use last year’s invigilation timetable that is up to you. I think that’s unwise too, but it’s your decision. I trust you will inform me as to the matter of the assemblies. And now you must excuse me, I have a telephone call to make.’
So Elizabeth gathered up her papers and left. She might have won her case, but she was extremely unhappy to have done it in this angrily formal way. It hadn’t been natural to either of them, as she told her colleagues later in the day.
Once she was on her own, Octavia realised how extremely upset she was. She was glad she’d been able to maintain her dignity and accept their decisions more or less gracefully, but it was profoundly troubling to have found herself in the middle of a quarrel. It wasn’t necessary to call me superhuman, she thought. That was uncalled for. It was almost as if she was baiting me. I can’t understand it at all. I’ll sound Pa out this evening and see what he has to say.
She chose her moment carefully and asked her question as casually as she could, making a joke of it. ‘One of my staff called me superhuman today,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that ridiculous?’
J-J gave her a shrewd look, sensing that she’d been hurt. ‘Odd perhaps,’ he said, ‘but not entirely unexpected.’
‘Oh, come on, Pa,’ she said. ‘That’s not fair. You’re as bad as Elizabeth. I’ve never claimed to be anything other than ordinary, now have I? I’m an ordinary woman.’
‘Ordinary women don’t usually get themselves arrested and go to gaol for their beliefs,’ her father told her, wryly. ‘Nor travel across the Atlantic on their own, come to that. Nor…’
‘Ordinary woman do all sorts of things when they’re in extraordinary circumstances,’ Octavia argued. ‘But they don’t lay claim to anything special about their personalities. Not even Mrs Pankhurst does that. Others do it for her but she is modesty itself.’
‘You are not going to claim that you are modest, surely to goodness,’ J-J laughed.
‘I don’t see any reason why not,’ Octavia said crossly. ‘I never brag. Or lay claim to talents I don’t possess. And I don’t ask my staff to do anything I’m not prepared to do myself. I don’t understand what’s got into them.’ Then she realised that she’d said more than she intended and stopped abruptly, noticing the quick eye messages that were being sent between her parents.
‘Maybe,’ Amy said, joining the conversation gently, ‘it is something that has got into you, my dear. It is just possible you should consider that. You’ve been like a bear with a sore head ever since Maud and Ralph were killed.’
‘That’s understandable, surely.’
‘Indeed it is,’ her mother said. ‘But you must remember that we are your family and understand you better than your teachers might be expected to do.’
‘We’ve been working together for four years,’ Octavia said. ‘And working closely. They ought to be able to understand me by now.’
J-J decided it was time to change the subject. ‘Have you any more of that excellent tart, my love?’ he said. ‘Mrs Wilkins has excelled herself for us this evening.’
‘I think I shall go and see Em tonight,’ Octavia said, following his lead. ‘It’s high time I did. She must be wondering what’s got into me to leave her for so long.’ And escaped.
But she couldn’t escape her thoughts and they kept her awake and unhappy all night. That awful word had burnt itself into her brain. Superhuman, she thought. It was ridiculous. And unkind. I’ve never claimed to be anything other than ordinary, no matter what Pa might say, but from the way she was talking you’d think I’d been acting like a dictator, like that terrible man Mussolini who’s bullying the Italians. You’d think I’d been imposing my will on them instead of working with them. I haven’t done that, have I? Or maybe I have. Maybe she was telling me something I ought to hear. Or at least listen to.
But it was hateful to call me superhuman. It was diminishing. It made me sound less than human. It was uncalled for. Especially when all I was trying to do was to make their lives a little easier. That was all it was. Why couldn’t they see it? I’d thought it all out, the way I always do, and it was helpful and necessary or I wouldn’t have done it. So why did they have to turn down every single thing I suggested? It doesn’t make sense. Unless they were bad suggestions. But I don’t make bad suggestions. I’ve never made a bad suggestion in all the years I’ve been teaching. At least not as far as I know. But then again that could be because nobody’s ever told me they were bad suggestions. So they could have been bad, if I’m honest, and I simply haven’t known it.
But why did they call a meeting behind my back? They didn’t have to do that. It’s as if they were afraid of me, as if I were an enemy instead of a friend and ally. Am I an enemy? No surely not. We’ve worked together like friends. Good friends. I can be a bit dictatorial sometimes, I’ll admit that – but not an enemy. What was it Ma said? That I’d been like a bear with a sore head. Was that the sign of someone being dictatorial? Grumpy certainly but surely not dictatorial. Or was it? Have I really lived thirty-three years without knowing myself? It was an appalling thought. But do we ever really know ourselves? Maybe there are corners of our personalities that we shy away from and keep hidden, because we can’t bear to face them. Maybe this is one of them. I don’t want to think I’m a bully. That’s obvious. So maybe I ought to.
If I were still with Tommy, she thought, he’d tell me straight out. He was always so open. It was one of the best things about him. I only had to look at his face to know what he was thinking. And the memory of him suddenly filled her mind – his tender mouth, those passionate eyes, his strength and good sense, and for a few anguished minutes she missed him as keenly as she’d done when they first parted and ached to be in his arms and comforted. Oh, my dear Tommy, she thought, if only you were here now, you’d know what I ought to do. But she was being foolish. They had parted and she was on her own, for good or ill, and she must make the best of it. If she had been a bully she must come to terms with it and then do something about it.
But it was all distressingly difficult and when the hall clock struck six, she was no nearer to finding an answer to her questions than she’d been when she went to bed. At that point, she abandoned all hope of sleeping and got up. The house was so quiet it was as if she were all on her own. She put on her dressing gown and walked over to her desk. She was up and wide awake and she might as well make use of her time by writing up her journal. Heaven knows she had enough to write about.
And there, staring up at her from the last page she’d written were her own peculiarly prophetic words. ‘It is always war and fighting, the illogical and non-proven belief that one human being can prevail over the wishes or needs or beliefs of another by hitting him or bullying him…’
‘Physician heal thyself,’ she wrote.
She came down to breakfast obviously tired and with dark shadows under her eyes, which her parents, having talked about her late into the night, were careful not to comment upon.
‘Pa,’ she said, as she spread butter on her toast, ‘you wouldn’t say I was a bully, would you?’
J-J smiled at her. ‘Is that a statement or a question?’ he asked.
Her heart sank. ‘In other words “yes”.’
‘You’ve always wanted to change the world,’ he told her. ‘Ever since you were a little thing. You see a problem, a difficulty, something unfair or unkind and you immediately want to change it. Women’s suffrage, the education system, war, the state of the country. Nothing is safe when you’re on your warhorse.’
‘But does that make me a bully?’
‘When you have the bit between your teeth, you do tend to gallop.’
‘In other words, “yes”,’ she said again. It was very dispiriting.
‘On the other hand,’ Amy said, taking a second slice of toast from the rack, ‘there are other aspects of your personality that more than make up for it. For a start, you are loving. Very loving. You would never willingly hurt anyone in any way and we all know it. And secondly, you admit to your mistakes. You always have. Even when you were quite a little thing and you knocked the tea tray over in the hall – do you remember? – you owned up to it straight away and washed the carpet when your father told you to and never complained. These are great strengths, my darling, and very admirable.’
Octavia got up and walked round the table so that she could put her arms round her mother’s neck and kiss her. ‘Dear Mama,’ she said. It was all that needed to be said for they both understood the subtext underneath their exchange. How well you know me, Octavia thought, looking down at her mother’s grey hair. And how sensible your advice is, even if you don’t spell it out and you don’t know why it’s necessary. I shall act on it this morning. It will be the first thing I do. If I have been bullying people, the sooner I put it right the better.
In fact, although she got to school rather earlier than usual, she had another matter to attend to before she could apologise to her colleagues. There were three fifth formers waiting for her in the playground, looking very pretty in their white blouses and their straight short skirts with their hair neatly bobbed and brushed shiny, but rather anxious she thought. Penny Seaward, wasn’t it and her two friends, Thomasina and who was the other one? Jane? Joan? They stepped towards her as she walked through the gate.
‘Were you waiting for me?’ she said.
They were. ‘We’ve got something to ask you, Miss Smith,’ Penny said.
‘Then you’d better come in.’
‘It’s like this, Miss Smith,’ Penny explained when they were settled in her study. ‘We would like to put on a play at our next assembly.’
Octavia approved at once. ‘What a splendid idea.’
‘The thing is,’ Penny said, ‘we don’t want to make the others think they’ve got to put on a play too, not at this time of year, with exams and everything, so we thought we ought to do it right at the end of term, if that’s all right. Only we know the final assembly is a bit special.’
‘The final assembly,’ Octavia told her, ‘is a ritual. We daren’t change it. There would be a revolution. What about the penultimate one?’
That would be lovely.
‘Do you know how long it will take, this play of yours?’
‘About fifteen minutes,’ Thomasina said. ‘Would that be all right?’
It would be exactly right. ‘That’s settled then,’ their headmistress said, wishing all problems could be solved as easily. ‘I shall look forward to it.’ And she shook their hands before sending them on their way.
It wasn’t until she was walking down to the staff room that she realised it had provided her with the perfect introduction for what she wanted to say.
‘I’ve just had a deputation from three of the fifth formers,’ she said as she walked into the room. ‘Wanting to change the date of their assembly.’
Their reaction was upsetting. They looked wary, or worried, or both and Genevra was anxious. Because they’re her form, Octavia thought, and she’s frightened something’s gone wrong. Oh yes, I have been putting them under pressure. They’re showing all the signs of it. And she went on quickly. ‘They want to put on a play.’
They relaxed a little. They were approving. ‘What a splendid idea,’ Elizabeth said. ‘What is it going to be?’
‘I’m afraid I didn’t ask them,’ Octavia said, smiling at them. ‘It was all done in a bit of a rush because I wanted to get down here before registration.’ And she told them what had been said and what decision they’d come to, aware even as she spoke that she had broken her own timetable and proved what a bad decision it had been.
They approved of that too.
‘Very sensible,’ Morag said. ‘They’re a good lot, our fifth form. I wonder what it’s going to be.’
‘It’s Pyramus and Thisbe from The Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ Phillida told them. ‘I’ve promised to help them with the costumes.’
More approval. Several smiles. Now, Octavia thought, while they’re happy. Now I must do it. She realised she was feeling nervous and ashamed. Yes, she thought, I have been bullying them. It was obvious from their reactions and the way she was feeling. ‘I wanted to see you before registration,’ she said, ‘because I’ve got something I want – something I need – to say to you. I’m afraid I’ve been treating you badly over the last few days. There’s no excuse for it. It’s in my nature to want change. I need to feel I’m moving forward, achieving things, but that doesn’t excuse the way I’ve treated you. You must have thought I was turning into Signor Mussolini. Last night I was beginning to wonder myself. Anyway what I want to say to you is, I’m sorry for putting pressure on you. And for being so undemocratic. If I could put the clock back and it could all be undone, it would be. My word how ungrammatical!’
They were moving towards her, their faces open and reassuring, speaking at once, Elizabeth leading the way. ‘Grief takes us all in different ways, my dear,’ she said, ‘as most of us know only too well. We do understand.’
‘I was angry when my brother was killed,’ Sarah Fletcher told her. ‘I wanted the whole world to be changed. I wanted to go out and shoot the generals. I still do sometimes.’
‘We’ve all had to face grief for someone,’ Morag said gently. ‘All of us and sometimes more than once, I fear, as you have. It’s never easy.’
Their warmth as they rushed towards her, their understanding and their dear open kindness was too much for her. After a night spent sleepless and worrying she was more vulnerable than she knew. The tears welled into her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. ‘I’m so very, very sorry,’ she said.
Their concern was instantly practical. Elizabeth put her arms round her, someone else was rubbing her back, Genevra was holding her hand and telling her it was all right, a handkerchief was produced, clean and still neatly folded, and she shook it out and tried to dry her eyes, someone was filling the kettle. She could hear the rattle of the water. ‘Oh dear,’ she said ‘What a way to go on!’
‘You carry formidable burdens, my dear,’ Morag told her. ‘It doesn’t hurt to lay them down now and then.’
‘I’m supposed to be taking assembly in ten minutes,’ Octavia said, looking at the clock.
‘Plenty of time,’ they told her. ‘Have a nice cup of tea while we take the registers and you’ll be right as rain.’
‘You are good friends,’ she said and meant it. ‘I don’t deserve you.’ She felt relieved and exhausted, as if she’d been standing on the edge of a precipice and they’d pulled her back from it.
‘Yes you do,’ Elizabeth said as she gathered her bag and her register. ‘We deserve each other.’
* * *
It was an unusual assembly and not the one that Octavia had planned.
‘In this school,’ she told her girls, ‘your teachers and I make it our business to provide syllabuses and books and equipment and the most interesting lessons we can give you, so that you can all enjoy what you are learning. I think I can probably say that, by and large, you do.’ Much beaming agreement from along the benches. ‘However there are times when it is life that teaches you and learning from life can be a very different matter. When you learn from life, it can often – not always, but often – be a very hard lesson. So what advice can I give you about learning from life?’ She paused and looked round the hall and smiled at her staff.
‘Well, not a lot I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘for we all have to tackle that sort of learning more or less on our own. But you will notice that I said “more or less”, so there is hope. It is at the hard times in your life that you need your family and your friends. They are the ones who will support you and help you and see you through. Hang on to your friendships. Treasure them. They are more valuable than any gold.’ Friends all over the hall were sending eye messages to one another. ‘And now that’s enough of a sermon for one morning, I think. Time for a hymn to take us into the day. “Glad that I live am I, that the sky is blue.” Miss Genevra.’
So despite her dark night and her anxiety, despite the shame of having to face the fact that she’d treated her good friends badly, the day began well after all and continued better. That afternoon the postman delivered a most welcome letter. She took it down to the staff room at once, with an explanatory note.
‘This has just arrived,’ her note said. ‘It’s an official notification that for the first time we have more applicants for next year’s first form than we have places to offer them. Sixty-eight applicants for fifty-six places, as you see. Our reputation is spreading, as well it should. I shall write to Mr Gillard to warn him that we shall soon be needing bigger premises. OS.’
The summer term was taken up with state examinations and grew steadily hotter and hotter. Octavia interviewed her new applicants and their parents, and arranged outings for her existing scholars whenever they were possible. And life at Hammersmith Secondary School was good.
In the middle of June, Algernon-Podge took ship for Australia and they all went down to Tilbury to see him off – Octavia and her father and mother in the car, Emmeline and all three of her children on the train. It was an unseasonably cold day and very early in the morning. The quays were swathed in mist, which rolled in towards them from the marshes, obscuring and chilling. They stood close together on the crowded quayside, a sad group among a hundred farewells, choked by the smell of dusty steel and stagnant water, assaulted by the swoop and scream of the gulls, shivering in the damp air as the emigrants toiled up the gangplank with their battered luggage. Even their deliberate cheerfulness couldn’t disguise the fact that it was a miserable occasion.
‘Now, be sure to write,’ Emmeline urged, tugging at her brother’s lapels as if she were pulling the promise from him. ‘I shall worry till I hear from you.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ he told her. ‘It’ll make a new man of me. You see if I’m not right. I shall come back in a few years’ time and I shall be such a great fit strapping bloke you won’t know me.’ But he coughed before he kissed her and when he turned to say goodbye to Octavia his face was bleak. ‘Keep up the good work at that school of yours,’ he said to her, ‘and write and tell me what you’re doing.’
‘I will,’ she told him, torn with the old yearning sense of loss.
They watched him as he struggled up the gangplank and Emmeline hung on to her control and didn’t cry until he had disappeared into the black hulk of the ship. Then she crumpled into tears. ‘It’s one thing after another,’ she wept. ‘We were such a lovely big family, all of us together going on holidays and everything and now look at us. First Squirrel and then my darling boys in that awful flu, and then Ma and Pa in that stupid car and now Podge. And I know what you’re going to say, Tavy. He’s only gone to Australia but what good is that? It’s halfway round the world and I shall never see him again. No, there’s only you and me and Uncle J-J and Aunty Amy and Eddie and the girls left.’
‘And Ernest,’ Octavia said. ‘You mustn’t forget him.’ But they both knew he didn’t count because she was talking about her family and he kept himself deliberately apart from any involvement with any of them nowadays. Poor Em, she thought. It’s very hard for her. I’ve got the school to go back to but she’s only got him.
The school grew more rewarding as the year progressed. On the day that Emmeline got her first letter from Podge and was tearfully happy about it – even though he’d signed it Algy and underlined the name three times – the fifth-year assembly finished the summer term in high style; in August the results of the General School Certificate examinations were so good that they coloured the entire summer holiday; and then it was September and they had ten girls in the Lower Sixth and their new full-sized first year arrived. They took a bit of getting used to.
‘There are first formers wherever you look,’ Morag said.
‘Wait till next year,’ Octavia told her. ‘We shall have a full-sized first and second year by then. They’ll be no stopping us. And think what fun it’s going to be with all these little ones.’
The fun that first term was mostly Egyptian. In November an explorer called Howard Carter discovered a cave full of treasures in the Valley of the Kings. It turned out to be the burial chamber of a handsome young king called Tutankhamun and the newspapers were soon full of amazing pictures – of his golden death mask, and his golden throne, of statues and jars and gilded beds and canopies. There was no end to it. Naturally the Art classes were soon as devoted to it as the newsmen and by Christmas the hall was full of golden masks and drawings of strange Egyptian gods.
‘What happened to holly?’ Miss Ollerington wanted to know.
‘They’re saving it for the final assembly,’ Phillida told her, ‘for when they sing the “Twelve Days of Christmas”.’
‘We must be thankful for small mercies,’ Miss Ollerington said.
In the New Year, the school reassembled to discover that their headmistress had bought one of the new radios. It was on a stand in the corner of the hall and she said it could be used whenever there was an item of news that would interest them or whenever Miss Gordon thought it would be helpful to her History classes. Wonders would never cease.
The news was actually rather troubling that year, for in January the French government grew tired of waiting for Germany to pay the reparations they owed and sent their army to occupy the Ruhr. Not long afterwards the German currency, which had been struggling for a long time, finally collapsed. Soon German banknotes were virtually worthless and there were pictures in the papers of children using piles of them as building bricks. The sixth form were most concerned about it and asked Miss Ollerington to explain how the value of currency could fall so quickly. She ran three extra classes, all of them well attended, and told Octavia that she’d never expected to find eighteen-year-olds who could actually understand Keynesian economics. ‘They’ll be a gift to their universities,’ she said.
That year they had four girls who were daring to apply for a university place, a fact that Octavia detailed with great satisfaction in her half-yearly report to the governors. And in May, when Emmeline’s daughter Dora was struggling with the General School Certificate examination and telling her mother it was very, very difficult, the list of next year’s applicants for the first form at Hammersmith arrived on Octavia’s desk. Just as she’d predicted they had more applicants than places for the second year running. In September 1923 they would have eight forms and a sizeable sixth form and they only had eight classrooms. Octavia wrote at length to Mr Gillard, who wrote back to say that he would scrounge two classrooms from the floor below, ‘for the time being’ but that what was now obviously needed was a move to bigger premises.
‘My sentiments exactly,’ she wrote back. ‘Meanwhile I shall need three extra teachers by September. Is that within the bounds of possibility?’
At the end of May, Miss Jenny Jones, who came from Cardiff and was small and dark and had a beautiful voice, was appointed to teach Music and Miss Joan Marshall, who came from Battersea and was tall and hearty with strong limbs and the shortest haircut Octavia had ever seen, was chosen to teach Games. Helen Staples, who was pretty and blonde, joined the staff at the beginning of July to teach English and French. And just before Christmas, when the girls were rehearsing their now customary Christmas play, Octavia got the letter they’d all been waiting for.
The excellent work done by the headmistress and staff at Hammersmith Secondary School had been noted, particularly in the matter of the General and Higher Schools’ examination results and the success of the four applicants who had applied to London University. It was felt by all the governors that the time had come for the school to transfer to bigger premises so that its work could expand as they all had every confidence it would. They had consequently made representations to the LCC to that effect. By great good fortune a new secondary school for girls was currently being built in Roehampton to serve the new LCC Roehampton Estate. It was be called Roehampton Secondary School and was intended to be a three-form entry grammar school and would be ready for occupation at the start of the autumn term 1924. The governors had the greatest pleasure to inform Miss Smith and her staff that this school was to be the new premises of the current Hammersmith Secondary School.
He was, yours most sincerely,
Edward Gillard.
‘Break open the champagne,’ Octavia called, rushing into the staff room letter in hand. ‘They’re giving us a brand new school. Just listen to this.’ And she read the letter aloud.
There was instant uproar in the little room. Their efforts in this difficult building were being rewarded at last. They were being recognised, endorsed, praised.
‘Success!’ they cried. ‘We’ve made it!’ ‘A brand new school. We couldn’t get better than that!’ ‘Wonderful! Wonderful!’
‘If that’s not a pat on the back,’ Elizabeth said above the din. ‘I don’t know what is.’
Maggie Henry had been clearing the notice board of all its out-of-date material. Now she stood, drawing pins in hand, transfixed by the celebration that had broken out around her. ‘My stars!’ she said. ‘When do we move in?’
‘Well, they say the start of the autumn term,’ Octavia said, beaming round at them all, ‘but let’s be generous and say sometime in September.’
‘It’ll be a red-letter day, whenever it is,’ Maggie said.
‘Oh, it will,’ Octavia said.
It was, but not quite in the way she envisaged.