Blenheim, the only non-royal stately home in Britain designated a palace, accommodated 500 boys and staff from Malvern College in 1939–40.
A good sermon should be like a woman’s skirt: short enough to arouse interest but long enough to cover the essentials.
Monsignor Ronald Knox
It is hard to imagine that the idea of isolating fifty-four teenage girls, fifteen nuns, a nursing mother with an expanding family and an agonisingly shy, middle-aged male scholar in a large, draughty house with a leaking roof and several ghosts in a remote corner of Shropshire was a good one. However, this pot pourri co-existed happily – with few hiccoughs – at Aldenham Park, near Bridgnorth, for the whole of the Second World War. The tangible by-products included a new translation of the New and Old Testaments. The intangible were a lifetime’s memories of a remarkable time and of the holiest and wittiest man any of the girls would ever meet.
While the government was keen to ensure that children were moved from vulnerable areas to safe zones with all possible speed, it did not interfere with organisations it felt should be able to take care of themselves. Private schools fell into that category and their fates over the next six years were varied with a small number of them closing permanently. Convent schools, with their connections in the world of the Roman Catholic country families, seemed to fare better than others. The Convent School of Our Lady of the Assumption in Kensington Square was one example of this, although giving up city life for a rural idyll at Aldenham Park did not always live up to expectations.
The house’s owners, the Acton family, were prominent Catholics, whose ancestors included a nineteenth-century cardinal, Charles Januarius Edward Acton. The family had received a baronetcy in 1643 for loyalty to Charles I and had been settled at Aldenham for centuries. Thomas Acton first acquired the Manor of Aldenham in 1465. At that stage the house was a fortified manor, but it was rebuilt in the early seventeenth century and underwent modifications over the next two hundred years.
Aldenham Park stands proud on a ridge of high ground with an avenue falling gently away through some twelve hectares of gardens and grounds, leading down to a magnificent gate screen and railings that form the entrance to the grounds. The drive, which is half a mile long, is set in an avenue of trees, the design of which dates back to the seventeenth century. The house as it stood in 1939 was substantially the design constructed by William Smith for Sir Whitmore Acton between 1716 and 1720, and was made up of two storeys and extensive attics, with a stable block built in the eighteenth century, a chapel, a cottage for the gardener and a gate house.
In 1869, Sir John Acton, historian and liberal commentator, was created a peer on Gladstone’s recommendation, becoming Baron Acton of Aldenham. After building a great library at the house which contained 60,000 volumes, he went on to become a professor of modern history at Cambridge. It was he who coined the dictum that ‘power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. He died in 1902 and the park was inherited by his son, Richard, who died in 1924, when it passed to John, third Baron Acton and owner of the estate at the outbreak of the Second World War. The first baron’s fortune had derived from the Dalberg family estates in Germany, which had to be forfeited in 1914, so by the Second World War things were financially tight. Lord Acton worked for a firm of stockbrokers in Birmingham to supplement the rents he received from the tenants of the farms which made up the estate. On the outbreak of war he took up his commission with the Shropshire Yeomanry, a regiment he had been affiliated to since the 1930s. His salary ceased and in order to make ends meet he needed to find a solution for the house.
Lord Acton, whose full name was John Emerich Henry Lyon-Dalberg-Acton, was born in 1907 and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. In 1931 he married Daphne Strutt, daughter of the fourth Baron Rayleigh, and it is her story and that of one shy scholar which shaped the war years at Aldenham. Daphne Acton was a great beauty who, though her only education was from a private governess, was a woman of great intellect. Both her grandfather, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics after discovering the gas argon, and her father were eminent scientists and outstanding scholars. Her home at Terling Place in Essex had been full of intellectual debate and curiosity. Brought up a Protestant, Daphne dismayed her family by her choice of fiancé and her father only consented to her marriage on the condition that Lord Acton agreed to forego a Catholic wedding and ‘refrained from raising any children according to his faith’.1 The Actons’ oldest daughter Pelline explained that it was Daphne’s aunts, who were evangelical Christians, who made most fuss about the fact that their niece was marrying a Catholic. In those days it was considered a disgrace on the Catholic side to marry ‘outside the Church’ and those who did so could not expect other Catholics to attend their wedding. She believes her father was sacked from his job for the same reason. The couple married at Chelsea Registry Office in November and the society press was outraged that Daphne had not worn a hat to her own wedding. They had quite expected the marriage to take place in Westminster Cathedral.
Pelline was born on Christmas Eve 1932 and a second daughter, Charlotte, arrived two years later. Daphne had already begun to have qualms about the conditions under which Lord Acton had agreed to marry her and when Charlotte developed influenza at three months, Lord Acton baptised the dying baby in line with his Catholic faith. The tragedy proved to be a catalyst for a sequence of events that led to Daphne’s conversion to Catholicism in 1938.
Two years after Charlotte’s death, Daphne Acton was introduced to Father Ronald Knox who had agreed to instruct her. He was dreading the prospect. Shy, retiring and at times conspicuously uncomfortable in female company, he had been frightened into believing Lady Acton to be a formidable bluestocking. As it was, he was captivated by her and thus began a long intellectual and entirely platonic love affair which resulted in him moving to Aldenham after he had retired from the chaplaincy of Oxford University. Lady Acton provided him with the peace and quiet of rooms at the Park where he could enter into his life’s work.
Ronald Knox is little known today outside Catholic circles but in his time he was considered to be one of the most outstanding scholars of the twentieth century. He was known and celebrated for his wit, his brilliant sermons and speeches and his ability to do The Times crossword by doing the down clues and then guessing the answers to the across clues without reading them. As he had such a profound impact on the Acton family and on the school that was soon to invade the peace and quiet of the Shropshire countryside, I would like to look at him in a little more detail.
Born Ronald Arbuthnott Knox in 1888, he was the youngest of four sons and two daughters of a distinguished Church of England family. His mother died when he was four and he went to live with his uncle and grandmother until he went to school. It was a blissfully happy childhood and he entered Summerfield School in Oxford at the age of eight full of quiet confidence. There he met three boys who would become intimate friends for the rest of their lives: Julian and Billy Grenfell and Edward Horner.
Ronnie, as he was known to his friends, was not sporty but he had exquisite poise: ‘He had an acrobatic gift of balance which later made him an expert at the delicate arts of punting a canoe, walking on a garden roller, going upstairs on a pogo stick and holding the attention of a class of seminarists while he tilted his chair, raised his feet from the ground, and, gravely addressing them, remained poised for minutes at a time on its back legs.’2
In 1900 he went up to Eton where he excelled academically and found the school just challenging enough to entertain his enquiring mind. He made friends easily and they were intensely loyal to him. The masters appreciated his outstanding, effortless intelligence and enjoyed, most of the time, his quick wit. He wrote for the school magazine and his contributions, though anonymous, were easily recognisable for their satire and brilliant use of language. His ability to support any view in the debating society meant that he acquired an unenviable reputation for defending the indefensible. He wrote, ‘I have once, owing to a shortage of speakers, opened and opposed the same motion.’3 In 1906 he was spoken of as the cleverest Etonian in living memory.
Ronald’s father was a Church of England clergyman who remained resolutely firm in his faith for the whole of his life, eventually becoming Bishop of Manchester. To his dismay he discovered that his youngest son had come to consider joining the Roman Catholic Church. It caused a rift between the two of them which was never fully healed. Ronnie designated Christmas Day 1903 as the birth of his Catholicism. In one of his early and finest works A Spiritual Aeneid he wrote:
I think I could still point to the precise place on ‘Chamber Stairs’ where I knelt down at the age of seventeen one evening and bound myself to a vow of celibacy. The uppermost thought in my mind was not that of virginity. I was not fleeing from the wickedness of the world I saw round me . . . I thought it my obvious duty to deny myself that tenderest sympathy and support which a happy marriage would bring. I must have ‘power to attend upon the Lord without impediment’.4
In 1907 Ronald left Eton and went up to Oxford, which in the pre-First World War era was a little world of its own. It was a place where ‘the sun rose over Wadham and set over Worcester’.5 Balliol welcomed him as one of the most promising scholars in the memory of the college and he did not disappoint them. A friend described the man he got to know at Oxford: ‘. . . his face was always seen alight with humour, affection and flashing intelligence.’ Evelyn Waugh, who wrote a biography of Knox in 1959, said: ‘Ronald had no desire to grow up. Adolescence, for him, was not a process of liberation or of adventure. Manhood threatened him with tedious duties and grave decisions. His mind had flourished and matured while his heart was still a child’s. He grew up slowly. Each stage of his growth imposed a burden; each enlargement of spirit, the loss of something fond.’6
In 1912 Ronald, by now a devout Anglo-Catholic, was ordained a priest in the Church of England. Two years later his world changed forever with the outbreak of the First World War. His health, which had been poor since he nearly died of peritonitis in 1906, precluded him from being called up and he was painfully aware that he could be regarded as a coward, so he wore a cassock rather than civilian dress throughout the war. He was so haunted by the futility of wartime Oxford that he took a teaching post at Shrewsbury School where he was a popular, if somewhat bewildering, teacher for the younger boys, and seen as a breath of fresh air with his entirely self-constructed lessons in Greek and Latin. He set the boys tests and puzzles, teased them with his own witty sentence constructions and gave them something to look forward to. He concluded that the younger boys needed to be entertained whereas the older ones were probably destined for the trenches and would not survive the war.
In 1917 Ronald Knox converted to Catholicism. After leaving Shrewsbury he worked in the War Office in a civilian capacity until the end of hostilities and then went to St Edmund’s, a new school set up by Cardinal Bourne. He was there for seven and a half years.
Of his seven friends who had gone up to Oxford together, only two survived the slaughter of the Great War. The Grenfell brothers, sons of Lord and Lady Desborough, died two months apart in 1915. However, it was the death of Guy Lawrence, a man he had guided into the Catholic faith and whom he loved deeply, killed in August 1918 that affected him the most.
It was during his time at St Edmund’s that he began to write detective stories to supplement his income: ‘he was not seeking to write novels. He had no concern with the passions of the murderer, the terror of the victim, or the moral enormity of the crime. He eschewed psychology, violence, the occult and the macabre.’7 Rather these stories were games between the reader and writer, like his crosswords and the puzzles that he set for his students. His first book, The Viaduct Murder, was described as a classic golden age ‘whodunit’ and was published in 1926. While they never brought him worldwide acclaim, his seven detective stories gave him a healthy income and the opportunity to satirise institutions or habits that the modern world seemed to him to accept without critical thought. He particularly wanted to lampoon pretentious behaviour. The books are delightfully irreverent and full of parodies, with characters like Mordaunt Reeves, a retired spy and keen golfer who does not like to give up his sport to solve a murder, and the Hon. Vernon Lethaby, a flamboyant headline-seeking exhibitionist with serious gambling debts. Ronald was a founder of the Detection Club alongside Agatha Christie and G. K. Chesterton, and wrote ten ‘rules’ for detective fiction, which prohibit the inclusion of more than one secret room or passage, as well as the use of undiscovered poisons, doubles or twins (unless the reader has been suitably prepared).
In 1926, Ronald caused a sensation by broadcasting a hoax on the wireless. He presented a short programme from Edinburgh on 16 January, which interrupted an academic lecture from Oxford, to announce that rioters were gathering in Trafalgar Square and had been seen on the steps of the National Gallery; the transport minister had been hanged from a lamppost; the Savoy hotel had been destroyed; and Big Ben blown up. The report was accompanied by sound effects and, as this was still in the very early days of broadcasting, it was taken seriously by the public. ‘Women fainted, mayors dusted off their emergency plans and one angry listener called the Admiralty and demanded that the Navy be dispatched up the Thames to quell the riot.’8 ‘Terror caused in villages and towns!’ screamed one headline of the day and the BBC received many complaints with John Reith having to step in and assure the public the ‘revolution’ was just a gaff. In fact, Ronald had made it very clear at the outset of the programme that it was ‘a work of humour and imagination’ and his style was quite obviously a parody of the then official manner of the newsreaders: ‘Mr Popplebury, the Secretary of the National Movement for Abolishing Theatre Queues, has been urging the crowd to attack the National Gallery. The desirability of sacking the National Gallery is being urged by Mr Popplebury, Secretary of the National Movement for Abolishing Theatre Queues. One moment please. London calling; continuation of the news bulletin from reports which have just come to hand. The crowd in Trafalgar Square is now proceeding at the instigation of Mr Popplebury . . .’9 and so on.
There was widespread indignation about the broadcast and Ronald came in for some stern criticism from Cardinal Bourne in the Catholic newspaper The Tablet. He wrote: ‘Few literary deeds are more facile and more tiresome than the shoving of serious things into a droll context . . . There are in England groups of hireling Communists who must have been enormously encouraged by the fact that many Britons were badly scared last Saturday.’10 The New York Times accused the British of being naïve for being taken in by the spoof but of course the smile was on the side of the face when, twelve years later, Orson Welles terrified America when he broadcast the War of the Worlds. Far from putting the BBC off it encouraged Reith to order more of the same kind of programmes. Ronald was not put off either. He was delighted when he heard himself roundly abused by two men in a local pub over their beer. A few months later he delivered a parody of a popular scientific talk illustrating the sounds made by vegetables in pain.
The year of the great hoax, Ronald returned to Oxford and lived for the first and only time of his life in a home of his own. The Old Palace, Rose Place, was his house for thirteen years. By this time his reputation had spread far beyond the confines of St Edmund’s, London and Oxford. He was a speaker and preacher in high demand. People from all over the world consulted him on anything remotely related to Catholicism, and sometimes not even related. He had become, he complained, the wastepaper basket for crackpot ideas of people who wanted to change the world. He was too polite and generous a man to deny requests and he found himself increasingly depressed by his lack of personal private time. It was at about this time that he met Daphne Acton. Lady Acton had made it clear to her family after the death of her second daughter that she wished to prepare to be accepted into the Catholic faith. Lord Acton’s brother-in-law, Douglas Woodruff, had come to know Ronald over the years and was now working as editor of The Tablet. He said he knew of no finer mind nor better priest to help instruct Daphne and so he set up their first meeting at his home at Stanford Dingley in Berkshire in 1937. In his biography of Knox, Evelyn Waugh wrote:
He found a girl of strong and original intellect, certainly; a tall, elegant beauty, but one who looked younger than her 25 years; was as shy as himself and fermenting with a radical, spontaneous humour in which there were echoes of the laughter of his lost friends of 1914.11
Despite it not being Ronald Knox’s first choice of holiday, he was so taken by Lady Acton that he agreed to join the party on a cruise around the Greek islands. To the other passengers’ irritation he spent his time exclusively with her, getting to know her and finding complementary tastes and talents. According to Waugh ‘they began the accumulation of common experiences, private jokes and private language . . . Within a few days of sailing she told him that she wished to be received into the Church and asked him to prepare her.’12
Ronald was captivated and confided in her his deepest desire for privacy and ‘his ambition to write something of permanent value.’13 She listened while he outlined his ambition to translate the Old and New Testaments from the original Latin Vulgate. She was impressed and immediately suggested that he could withdraw to Aldenham to undertake this monumental task. They agreed, in a childish pact, that he would no longer write detective stories, which she did not enjoy reading, and she would no longer wear the lipstick that he disliked. So in a defiant gesture, Daphne Acton threw a copy of Double Cross Purposes and her lipstick into the Adriatic. With that their fates were sealed.
It took two years to get Ronald out of Oxford and into Aldenham. It was completed, furniture and all, by June 1939. He was happily ensconced in a study working on a book he had conceived in 1918 and learning Hebrew for a few hours in the day. He relished the peace and quiet of the countryside, the lack of any distractions other than beautiful views and head-nodding communication with the two gardeners who looked after the grounds. It was an ideal set-up in every possible way. But, like everything else in the summer of 1939, it was set to change.
Two months later the peaceful atmosphere of Aldenham was interrupted by the arrival of the sisters and pupils of the Convent of the Religious of the Assumption. The order was founded in Paris in 1839 by Anne Eugenie Milleret, who had the vision to transform society through education. She taught her nuns and pupils to live by the Gospel and to love ‘the world and all peoples’. Based in Kensington Square, London, the convent ran the first Montessori school in Britain. It had catered for girls up to the age of thirteen, but in the war older girls were educated until they were ready to take their higher certificates.
In 1939, the building in Kensington Square was required by the ARP and the sisters had to find other accommodation for the school and the teaching nuns. Various offers of help came, including from Lord Acton, who had served at the altar at the convent’s church at Kensington, while two of his sisters had briefly attended the school as teenagers. Lord Acton invited the school to Aldenham partly in an effort to ensure there would be an income for the estate while he was with his regiment, but also to see that Aldenham would not be requisitioned by the military. However, Lord Acton was resistant to the idea of a formal agreement, which caused the Reverend Mother Superior endless headaches. She wanted to know the extent of her rights and liabilities for a house that had not been permanently lived in for years. One of the problems at Aldenham was a leaking roof and fourteen attic rooms, where the sisters would live, which had neither heating nor any form of sanitation. On the other hand, the house did boast a lavatory on the first floor that flushed with hot water. It took almost three years to thrash out a legal agreement between the convent and the Actons but the basic points were settled before the nuns arrived in September.
On Thursday 31 August, Lord Acton received a telegram at his office of Barham & Brooks in Birmingham announcing that the convent would be moving in the following Saturday. In fact they arrived a day early on Friday. Ten choir sisters and five lay sisters travelled from Kensington by coach. The nuns, in their striking purple habits with white wimples and black travelling veils must have cut strange figures as they disembarked from their bus in front of the house. Rather wonderfully, there exists in the Religious of the Assumption house in Kensington Square a small archive box which contains papers and photographs from the war years, as well as a notebook. This is described by the author as ‘The Annals of those of the Kensington Community who resided at Aldenham Park from Friday, Sept 1st 1939 to the date appointed by God for their departure.’ In fact the book only goes up to February 1940, but for the first five months of the war it provides a priceless and at times funny record. Written by Sister Dominic, who was the school’s games mistress as well as teaching French and history, and who had a delightful eye for the humorous as well as for detail, the annals give a vivid picture of life in the early days at Aldenham. They begin:
We were greeted on the steps by Lady Acton and Monsignor Ronald Knox. We were not greeted by Potiphar, who remained tied to his bench. It was only later on that we made his acquaintance; he slobbered over our aprons and soon seized Sister Perpetua’s blue sleeve, but did not chew it, D.G. [Deo Gratias]. Potiphar is fat – he cannot walk, he can only waddle. He sometimes hops like a frog. They say bull dogs are intelligent. He is not.14
The following day their luggage, including bed frames and crates of books, arrived from Kensington. There was much to do in order to make the house fit for purpose and there were plenty of unexpected surprises to contend with. Sister Margaret and Sister Clare had a visit from four bats. Sister Clare screamed but Sister Margaret was smug: ‘I’ve got my bonnet de nuit on!’ she told her roommate. Sister Clare was ‘of a nervous disposition’ and very anxious about the risk of fire in the attic, so she persuaded the others to carry buckets of sand up to all floors. As it turned out, there was a far greater risk of leaks and flooding than fire. During a particularly rainy night in November she had a long row of bowls in her room catching the water that was pouring in from the leaking roof. Sister Dominic was so tickled by the sight that she drew a sketch of it in the annals.
Although the beds had already arrived from Kensington, the mattresses had not. These came a fortnight later in a horse box:
Unpacking is a hilarious business. Pelline with her hair in curlers watches it from the nursery window. Procession of mattresses, chairs, desks, beds, seems unending. When our beds appear, Sister Clare does a pirouette and Sister Margaret kisses her boards! Sister Francoise begins the superhuman feat of providing beds for mattresses and room for beds. Mattresses continue to perambulate the house, propelled by invisible bearers.15
The day before the children arrived Sister Alethea had ‘a nocturnal visit from a RAT – or rather, of her companion rat, because he sat up all night, pulling off strips of wall-paper. He made a lot of noise walking round between the wall and the paper, in between moments of chewing.’16 The gamekeeper was summoned to block the rat’s hole but it was only a temporary solution and the rat made more appearances during the autumn until they decided they had to lay down poison to get rid of it. Sister Dominic’s description of the rat’s end is as theatrical as anything else she wrote in the annals: ‘His last fling was to jump upon Sister Clare (no joke for her of course) because she was standing in the semi-darkness near another of his HOLES in the children’s refectory.’ The following day she wrote: ‘He has eaten the poisoned BREAD, has drunk the water, and must have retired to burst somewhere in secret. R.I.P!’17
Potiphar, the bulldog, was in no shape to chase rodents. He was generally found lying in the sun or sitting by the bench waiting for Lord Acton to appear. Whenever he saw the nuns he would amble over to them and lick their habits and try to chew their sleeves. Sister Dominic wrote: ‘The objectionable Potiphar is due to go into camp on Saturday. Sister Clare’s gratitude to Providence is visible. Perhaps our aprons will be cleaner now.’18 The following day they caressed him and were chewed for the last time. ‘At 7.15 he was taken into Lord A’s car, sitting beside him on the front seat; and he has gone into camp with the British Army!’19
The loose agreement between the Religious of the Assumption and the family was that the tenancy would include the house, grounds, gardens and garden produce, with the exception of two rooms for the children and Nanny, who cooked for the youngest children in the day nursery and slept with them in the night nursery. One bedroom on the first floor was for Lady Acton and the sitting room on the ground floor to the left of the front door was shared by her and Ronald Knox. There would be no rent payable to the family but in return the convent agreed to pay the rates, lighting and the wages of certain employees, which meant the gardeners and Bazley, the estate handyman. In addition, they were responsible for cleaning the gutters and having the chimneys swept.
The financial outlay for the convent to live at Aldenham was £419 a year. At the outbreak of the war, the school fees were £30 per term, which had to cover the running of the school as well as the house itself. Lord Acton agreed the nuns would not have to pay for wear and tear related to the leaking roof and promised to get it repaired in July 1939, but it was still leaking badly in 1942 and a section of the library ceiling collapsed during a visit by the Mother General in 1945. Catherine Northcote, now Sister John-Mary, remembered the fuss that this accident caused and the desperate rush to find screens to hide the damage from their illustrious visitor.
The school was the senior school of the Assumption, the junior section being at Boxmoor, so Pelline, then aged seven, was taught with a handful of other younger girls whose parents had insisted on sisters being together at Aldenham. They were taught by Sister Alethea in the small drawing room. Hitherto she had been educated ‘more or less successfully’, she said, by Daphne and Nanny who had taught her to read. Sister Alethea introduced more formal teaching. ‘She was very kindly and we all loved her. She used to make me write stories and illustrate them,’ Pelline said.
Ronald Knox was initially dismayed by the arrival of the nuns and girls. His peace would be broken and he was daunted by the prospect of having to act as chaplain to the school, which he agreed to do only reluctantly. He was to receive no pay but get food, fuel and laundry in lieu. ‘He stipulated only that a substitute should be found for him when he was asked to preach elsewhere and that he should not be expected to sing Mass or perform any ceremony except giving the ashes on Ash Wednesday.’20
He had to move out of the house as it would not have been seemly for a priest to sleep under the same roof as the sisters and a group of teenage girls. So he moved in with Bazley and his wife Gertrude, who lived in the original priest’s house adjoining the chapel. He kept his desk in the small drawing room, a room that was declared a quiet zone and the schoolgirls were not allowed to make any noise that might disturb him at work. This was the only space he used in the main house and he shared it with Lady Acton, Pelline and sometimes a visitor. It was in here that he stored his reference library, laid out his patience cards, ate, typed and read. It was in this room, amidst the hubbub of school life rather than the peace and quiet that he and Lady Acton had envisaged, that the greater part of the Knox Bible was translated.
In the three weeks the nuns were busy getting the house ready for the arrival of the girls Ronald kept out of their way. The weather was glorious so he spent his days studying Hebrew and bathing in the Shore Pool. When the girls first arrived at Aldenham they barely noticed him, except in chapel or when he was teaching a class. He kept to his study and never walked through the house, although they would sometimes see him walking round the garden saying his office. On one early occasion he was coming out of the chapel when a rank two-girls wide strode towards him. Normally he would have expected the crowd to part and allow him through but they surged on and he found he had to leap to one side to avoid being mown down by this energetic female juggernaut. Sister John-Mary told me that after that he was very wary of groups of girls and developed the ability to hug the walls so as to become almost a shadow to avoid being careened into.
The inside of the house began to look more like a school with the refectory, formerly the dining room, and classrooms on the ground floor and dormitories on the first. The refectory, which had been earmarked before the war for Ronald, was emptied of his furniture and filled with tables and chairs from Kensington. The nuns were grateful for his generosity in offering the school any furniture of his that they could make use of. The tables sat six, except for the large table in the centre, and each girl had her own personal cutlery that was kept in the drawer in the table she habitually sat at.
The cooking and cleaning was done by lay sisters who also did the girls’ washing on site. Alannah Dowling, who was a pupil at Aldenham, told me that they were only allowed to change their underwear once a week and that washing was equally infrequent. As a result, two girls sent their washing home and it came back in biscuit tins, sometimes with a cake. The uniform was a navy-blue dress with a white removable collar. In the early days of the school the dress material came from France but during the war they had to resort to blue serge.
Out-of-doors preparations for games facilities got underway. Bazley mowed a piece of land very close to the house which was to be used for senior games. ‘Volley ball, over a net, with a net-ball. There’s nothing big enough for net-ball or hockey without going a long way away.’21 Meanwhile, Father Broderick from nearby Bridgnorth helped to create a home-made gymnasium, begging a pole from the local builders to make a horizontal barre. ‘It turned out to be too soft for the purpose, but he said that a very long broom handle is the right thing.’22
As the lay sisters were responsible for feeding the family as well as the school, they took charge of the vegetable garden and another large area of the land close to the house, which they worked with the help of the gardeners and the girls. It proved both vital and very productive once the planting got going and began to yield fruit and vegetables.
Aldenham’s extensive gardens were soon ringing to the sounds of laughter and games’ whistles as the schoolgirls enjoyed sport and leisure. The nuns had the pleasure of long walks around the gardens and the estate in the weeks before the girls arrived, making use of the shade of trees by Shore Pool to have picnics after their hard work bringing the house into use as a school. More used to life in the city, the nuns found themselves in trouble on their second weekend. They decided to have a picnic by the Shore Pool and gathered together and lit a fire under a big tree so they could bake damper bread, a traditional Australian soda bread typically baked in the coals of a campfire, so ideal for the picnic. Suddenly there were loud shouts of ‘Get Out! Get Back!’ in angry tones. ‘A peppery colonel ordered us first in one direction then in other to get out of line of fire while they shot duck off the lake. Half an hour later, polite apologies all round, general explanations.’23 The colonel was so embarrassed by his outburst in front of the nuns that he personally delivered a brace of duck to the kitchen the next day.
The countryside turned out to be full of hazards for the sisters, used to the more genteel life in Kensington Square. Shooting parties were one thing but then they had an encounter with a sow that scared them all so much that they had to climb several fences and leap over half-frozen marshes in order to get away from the dangerous hog. ‘Sister Oswin landed in the mud, once, (and shrieked of course!) and Sister Anthony nearly left one of her galoshes behind.’24
The first-floor dormitories among others were called the Pink Dormitory, the Oak Dormitory, the Sacred Heart and Our Lady of Peace. Downstairs there was a further dormitory in what was known in the family as Uncle Peter’s Room. It would have been Ronald Knox’s bedroom in other times. The nuns lived in the leaky attic rooms which had fireplaces but no central heating and, initially this floor had neither electric lights nor lavatories, prompting a letter to Lord Acton begging at least one lavatory for the sisters. The infirmary was housed in the servants’ quarters and sufficed until an outbreak of flu meant dormitories had to be used to cope with the number of sick.
Within days of arriving at Aldenham the nuns became convinced the house was haunted. There were several ghostly happenings which frightened them and the girls alike but Alannah remembers the nuns denying all talk of ghosts until they moved to the next school premises in 1946. Others, such as Sister John-Mary, recall the nuns making light of the subject. The first ghost was believed to be linked to a murder from the distant past that had taken place in the bedroom overlooking the stable yard where Sister Dominic had been sleeping before the girls arrived. First she heard whistling and then she heard a coach and horses coming up the drive at high speed and racing into the yard but when she looked out of the window there was nothing to be seen. Another happening was in the room next to the Pink Dormitory where a dozen girls who had not gone back to London because of the danger of bombing spent their holidays during the first year of the war. Alannah said: ‘there was a room facing the drive that was really creepy – I remember well sleeping there in the holidays and on perfectly still nights the curtains flew right in, up to the ceiling, it was very scary!’25 One of the sisters had experienced the same phenomenon, finding herself lifted out of her bed. The Turret Room, at the top of a spiral staircase leading from the library, was also haunted. Girls sleeping there occasionally heard someone walking up the stairs and past the bedroom. They believed it to be a former Lord Acton. The dormitory called St Christopher’s overlooked the front of the house and on quiet nights they sometimes heard someone walking up and down on the gravel. He – it was assumed it was a ‘he’ – was referred to as ‘the Night Watchman’ and seemed to hold a particular terror as more than one girl had strong recollections of his night-time wanderings, even three-quarters of a century later.
By the end of September 1939, the house was swarming with girls, and for six years every corner of Aldenham was inhabited as the school expanded, including buildings that had been hitherto little used. The chapel, completed in 1837, was probably the first private Catholic chapel in England after restrictions were relaxed by the Relief Act of 1829, also known as Catholic Emancipation. It fell into disrepair but was restored by Lord Acton after he had made an excellent sale of a racehorse in early 1939. Perfect Part was tipped as the favourite to win the Grand National and the sale went through just before the race. For the record, the horse fell at the fourth fence and never raced again, but the chapel was repainted. Sister Dominic wrote: ‘Visited the chapel – Our Lord was there already. Chapel very dank because unaired.’ They rolled up their sleeves, shooed out spiders and dusted away the cobwebs, throwing open the windows to let the sunshine stream in. The chapel nave was approached down a set of steps and it was always a squash to accommodate the whole school, especially when the numbers of girls increased to more than fifty, but there were few complaints about it.
The pupils came mostly from London and some had been at the school before the war. Parents answered an advertisement in The Tablet and applied for their children to be allowed to attend, so that by the middle of the war the school was granted LEA (Local Education Authority) status, which it had lost in 1937 owing to a drop in numbers. Many of the families knew one another and a few were from old Catholic families. There were also local girls who attended as weekly boarders. Being invited to go home with a friend was a great treat for the London girls. During the first year of the war some girls stayed at Aldenham for the holidays, using it as a country house. Parents and other family members boarded at the Acton Arms in the local village of Morville. ‘Skating on the pond in winter and burning the bracken in the summer holidays were major highlights of the year,’26 one young girl recalled. On the whole, the girls loved life at Aldenham.
Nicola Macaskie, who was a pupil at Aldenham from 1940 with her twin sister, Claudia, told me that it had been a remarkably free and easy life. ‘We did little enough work!’ she said. ‘You started the week with 100 points for conduct and none for work. You had to get up to eighty for work and not less than eighty for conduct. The biggest scare was spilling ink – that was a big conduct no-no. As was talking on the stairs.’27 When I visited Aldenham in May 2015 the owner, Hettie Fenwick, showed me an ink stain on the floor in what had been the schoolroom. She told me that one of the girls had visited the house a few years earlier and had admitted it was her ink stain. I wonder how many conduct points she lost for that. Sister John-Mary remembered stricter rules than Nicola. She said that if a girl was late for a meal the whole dining room had to eat in silence and they were constantly lectured on wartime austerity such as shallow baths to save hot water, checking socks for holes every evening and turning off lights. Ten-year-old Jane Anton wrote in the Assumption Chronicle – the school’s annual magazine – that her dormitory took these suggestions so seriously that they dressed and washed in the dark and wore their socks until they were more holes than sock.
The education followed the standard curriculum with plenty of scripture and religious tuition. The girls were fortunate to have Sister Alethea, a fine pianist, who played the organ in chapel and they even had the odd visit from actors from Birmingham. Dafne Bidwell remembered when the actor Robert Speaight, who was a regular performer on the wireless, came to stay with the Actons for the weekend. He gave performances of all the Shakespeare soliloquies from Macbeth, Henry V and Hamlet. She wrote in the Assumption Chronicle: ‘His representation of Shylock in the Merchant of Venice was so realistic that one of the juniors began to cry. We are all very grateful for such a treat.’28 I don’t think she meant to imply it was a treat to see a junior crying.
On 30 September 1939, Lady Acton gave birth to her third child, Catherine. She arrived at 1:30am and the nuns were as delighted as the family. Ronald Knox was uplifted by the birth of the baby and celebrated the occasion by translating the first chapter of Genesis. Pelline, Lady Acton’s oldest daughter, wanted the baby to be called Josephine but her parents settled on Catherine. Catherine’s birth was recorded in the annals as was a funny exchange between seven-year-old Pelline and Sister Dominic: ‘Pelline yesterday asked me, in a worried way: “Can you see any resemblance between her and Potiphar? Daddy says they are just like each other. Of course, her nose is a little flat!” ’ Two more babies were born at Aldenham during the war, Richard in 1941 and Charlie in 1943. Ronald baptised Richard in the chapel and he became the first Acton heir born in England since the eighteenth century and was probably the first heir ever baptised at Aldenham, all the other heirs having been born and baptised abroad.
Ronald was beginning to enjoy giving talks to the girls in a way that he never thought possible. Daphne Acton had shown him that youth was no different than it had been when he had been a chaplain at Oxford before the last war. He simply had to open his mind to the delights of young intellect once again. Although he never quite lost his shyness in front of the nuns he learned that the girls loved his sense of humour and he theirs. He told them that the call of ‘Last bell, last bell!’ was not very good for an old man to hear. He sometimes regaled them with stories from his past. Several girls remembered being told of the great BBC hoax, but they were far more amused by the story of the squeaking vegetables, which he told them while adding the noises of carrots and potatoes in pain for effect. His quick mind meant he could come up with witty puns and rhymes quickly. One of his aphorisms the girls remember with delight is ‘a baby is a loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other’. He told them limericks that he had made up while he was at Oxford:
There was a young man who said ‘God
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there’s no one about in the quad.
Reply:
Dear Sir: Your astonishment’s odd;
I am always about in the quad.
And that’s why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.
So what was it like having this extraordinary man in your midst? I asked the girls of the Assumption. ‘Father Knox was incredibly significant to us. He always made you feel that he was preaching to you and you only,’ one girl said. Nicola Macaskie added, ‘We didn’t realise how famous he was and I think in a way he rather liked that. My sister Claudia and I were used to grown-ups and we were not intimidated by him. He responded to that by being very friendly and open with us. The nuns were the people he was wary of!’ She remembered that he was a great Scrabble player and of course keen on crosswords.
Ronald never lost his good looks, even into his sixties. His hair was grey by his fifties but his face maintained its youthful features so that he looked much younger than his fifty-one years. Although he often appeared solemn when contemplating a problem in the Bible or worrying about talking to the nuns, his natural expression with the girls was of suppressed merriment. There is a photograph of him taken at Aldenham showing him unsmiling but with his eyes twinkling and alive with life and probably mischief. When the Macaskie twins arrived at Aldenham they were given the traditional do-or-dare challenge by the sixth-form girls. Claudia, who was athletic, had to climb around the first-floor balcony over the main hall. Nicola, who they thought might fall off and hurt herself, was dared to knock on Father Knox’s door and ask him if he liked pink blancmange.
She did not realise that there was a cordon of silence around his room so she walked boldly up to the door and knocked. He called her to come in and she asked him the question. He answered the question solemnly and then laughed. He realised she had been put up to the prank and had no idea of the rules surrounding his working space. That broke the ice and when she asked him about his work on the Bible he answered her questions with his engaging smile. She remembered how he always had a pipe either in his mouth or in his hand. His desk was covered in files with a typewriter perched on one corner; there were books on shelves and piled upon the windowsills, and there was a card table set up with patience. ‘He told me that he always had patience laid out so that he could play it if he came to a very difficult bit in the Bible,’ she said. She remembered him explaining to her that he ate his meals at the central table that had to be cleared of books and cards to be laid for his lunch or evening meal. Daphne Acton also had a desk in the room at which she dealt with her correspondence, so the two of them often worked in silence. She relied on him for more than just company and intellectual conversation: the family was always short of money and Ronald paid for items such as the children’s shoes. They all had flat feet, Pelline explained, and had to have special shoes sent from far afield.
Nicola and Claudia became Ronald Knox’s favourite pupils. He lent Nicola his bicycle, because she did not have one, so she could go off on rides around the estate or to nearby Bridgnorth. Once she was playing the role of a bishop in a Victor Hugo play and he lent her his vestments so that she could look the part. ‘We did so many plays over the years and I think he came to all of them when he was there. The house had a great trunk of old uniforms which we could use as costumes. It seems extraordinary now how much drama we undertook.’29
The plays everyone enjoyed most were the ones written by the girls. Joan Ackroyd wrote The Wizard Who Wanted Power, a modern fairytale inspired by the war. The wizard was of course Hitler and all the princesses he stole were from the countries invaded, so Princess Holland, Belgium, France and Greece as well as Princess Poland and Czechoslovakia. The wizard was finally defeated by Prince England with the help of Fairy America. It was so successful that they were invited to play it in the village where they had a packed house and a rapturous reception. The plays at Aldenham took place in the library. Pelline explained: ‘It was empty by then, all the books from the first Lord Acton having been sent to Cambridge, and I’m sure the building was not structurally safe but needs must during wartime. The girls were forbidden from going up into the gallery but they used the ground floor for their plays and it worked very well.’30
Ronald Knox took a weekly sixth-form class in which he read some of his old, humorous papers to the girls. French with Tears, was a favourite. He described the agony he felt when he was expected to chatter away in French, something he found distasteful in any language. Not for him small talk about the weather or flowers. The inner schoolboy came to the surface and worried over the correct declension or past participle. He explained his discomfort: ‘If I were going out for a country walk with a Frenchman, I should find myself immediately wanting to express more sudden and arresting thoughts. I should want to say, for example, “That cow looks rather like a parson I know” – I am merely suggesting that by way of illustration.’ This is followed by three minutes of constructing the sentence which ends in ‘Cette vache-ci a l’air d’un ministre de religion de l’église d’Angleterre’.31 By which time, he admits wryly, the cow has now disappeared over the horizon with its companions. So he says nothing and the Frenchman thinks him profound and inscrutable. When out with a German the situation is completely different:
If we meet with a cow on our walk, a sudden idea occurs to me; I point at it, so that there can be no mistake, and say ‘Kuh!’ I am not sure that it ought not to have a couple of dots on its back, but it works all right; he bursts into a roar of laughter . . . Then he makes a great effort, and says something like ‘cow’. I take both his hands in mine, and we stand there, the tears starting in our eyes at this evocation of our Indo-European origins. We are brothers – because I never learnt any German, or he any English, at school.32
The girls loved him not just for his humour and entertaining lessons, but for his holiness: ‘He explained the action of the liturgy as they had never heard it explained before, but it was in participation in his Masses that their understanding flowered.’33 Faine Meynell, another pupil, spoke of Ronald Knox as an inspiring teacher giving wonderful sermons: ‘I’ve never really enjoyed one since,’ she said matter-of-factly, seventy years later. ‘He wrote one a week for us. The sermons spoke to us, the children, and we thought “he is preaching to us”.’34. They were magical. We found him very shy and he appeared to want to avoid us but actually he knew everything about us.’35 The nuns also appreciated his sermons: ‘We all, nuns and children, look forward to Monsignor Knox’s weekly sermons, in which he expresses irresistibly his acute observation of our foibles and joins deep spirituality with so much interesting knowledge.’36
While many of his sermons were focused on religious topics, he sometimes diverted and addressed issues of the day. In 1942 he gave a sermon called ‘Sword of the Spirit’ in which he celebrated a positive aspect of the war: toleration between peoples of different nations and classes, which was new in England. The sermon made a big impact on the girls, especially when he urged them to see that there was ‘relapse into the old selfishness. Foreigners must still be real people for us.’37
Although he was a brilliant speaker, able to extemporise on any given subject, Ronald Knox never gave a sermon without notes. ‘You would not know that he was speaking from notes,’ Alannah Dowling said. ‘He spoke naturally, fluently but thoughtfully and without rush’. He spoke in the clipped upper-class manner of the time but he radiated warmth rather than authority. It was through his strength of personality which shows through his sermons that he won the girls’ attention. They were all aimed at their level without in any way appearing to be diluted for their benefit. After the war, the sermons were published in a series of books entitled The Mass in Slow Motion, The Creed in Slow Motion and The Gospel in Slow Motion.
The Mass in Slow Motion, dedicated to Nicola Macaskie, was the first series of sermons he delivered to the girls and he described the twelve different parts of the Mass, emphasising the importance of the actions as well as the words:
The Christian faith has a religious dance of its own; all the twisting and turning, and bobbing and bowing, and lifting and parting and rejoining his hands, which the priest goes through in the course of the Mass, really add up to a kind of dance, meant to express a religious idea to you, the spectators.’38
He teased them: ‘Of course that sounds nonsense to you, because what you mean by a dance is the wireless in the hall playing revolting stuff and you lounging around in pairs feeling all gooey.’39 They knew exactly what he meant and that made them laugh out loud.
The sermons are a delightful mixture of history, theology, liturgy and humour. None of the girls had imagined they might enjoy his sermons, still less to laugh during them, but they relished them. Over the months and years he came to know them so well and to enter into the life of the school that he even managed to adopt their speech and alluded to their routine in his sermons. In an article in the school’s annual magazine, the Assumption Chronicle, one of the nuns commented: ‘One expects a schoolgirl to be excited over many things on returning to school after two terms’ absence. Constance Webber declared that one of her reasons for being so excited was the prospect of hearing Mgr. Knox’s Sunday sermons again.’40 Another girl wrote: ‘Half-terms are so popular that very few go home.’41
In an article for the Chronicle Knox described how they should answer Mass. He wrote that he once said Mass for an elderly lady who was stone deaf and ‘accustomed to answer a priest who took about five minutes less to say Mass than I do. So it was a bit of a scramble.’ But he encouraged the girls to learn to work with the priest:
If two people are answering Mass together (as at Aldenham) the senior should go ahead as if she were answering alone, the junior should chime in as best she can. Don’t wait for one another, or hustle one another. Above all, when you come to a difficult-looking word in the Latin, don’t both think simultaneously, ‘That looks a bit of a stinker; I’ll leave it to Mary-Jane.’ Laetabitur is pronounced like ‘late arbiter’, not like ‘later bitter’; it is confitAYbor, not confittybor, and PeccARtis, not PECCotis.42
Ronald was always prepared to be self-deprecating to make a point. In one of his sermons he described how he was the conduit between their prayers and the Almighty. He gave this visual image:
When you see me standing up there mumbling to myself and apparently taking no notice of you, all dressed up in silk like a great pin-cushion, you mustn’t think of me as something quite apart, at a distance from you, uninterested in your feelings and your concerns. On the contrary, I am standing there like a great pin-cushion for you to stick pins into me – all the things you want to pray about, all the things you want for yourself and all the worries that are going on at home, are part of the prayer that I am saying, and I couldn’t prevent them being part of my intentions in saying the Mass, even if I wanted to.43
Aldenham was not all about the Mass or Father Knox’s sermons. The girls were there to learn, though all of them I spoke to commented on the laid-back attitude towards the education they were supposed to receive. ‘I don’t think any of us did very much work!’ Alannah Dowling said but the examination results do not bear this out. While the school did not turn out a full fist of Oxbridge candidates, several went to university while others joined the services. The studies were broad: with the help of the Lady Acton’s library at Aldenham, which contained not only Shakespeare and Milton but also a full set of Punch, which was particularly popular, the girls benefitted from small class sizes and great diversity. Pelline remembered the nuns often gave commands in French ‘Depechez vous!’ and ‘Taisez vous!’ being the ones she recalled most clearly. She didn’t like learning French but she felt desperately sorry for the French teacher who burst into tears when she learned of the fall of France.
The proximity of beautiful countryside and the formal gardens, including the Shore Pool, meant that there was plenty of opportunity for outdoor activities. Faine Meynell had a pony at the school and Alannah Dowling borrowed one from the Meynell family, which gave them both great pleasure. Jane Dowling remembered that some of the weekly boarders came with their ponies as well so that there was quite a string by 1941. The girls eventually had netball baskets on the tennis courts for winter use, which were then returned to their intended purpose in the summer. They played tennis, croquet, rounders and swam in the pool in warm weather and skated in the winter. The Aldenham Guide Company was formed in 1940, and the camping excursions, lessons in Morse code, patrol drill and first aid were popular. They took guiding seriously, as girls did all over the country. A skipping display was no light-hearted undertaking. It had to last exactly five minutes; ‘we had been practising for weeks to perfect even the most difficult steps’44 wrote Jane Ackroyd. One of the badges they aimed for was the war service badge which required ninety-six hours of voluntary war work within one calendar year, such as salvage collection, gardening or potato picking. Even though Aldenham was remote some of the girls succeeded in clocking up the hours.
Lady Acton, the leader of the First Aldenham Guide Company, accompanied Lady Baden-Powell on an inspection of the Guides at Bridgnorth in 1943. She wrote a very complimentary letter to Sister Dominic, praising the Guides for being smart and well coordinated but ‘not Prussian officers, which unfortunately is the tendency of the efficient Guiders.’45
The first June of the war enjoyed record sunshine and temperatures. In the strange contrast that was the war, the evacuation of over 350,000 British, French and Allied troops from Dunkirk was underway while the girls were lounging on the grass at Aldenham, enjoying picnics by the pool on their recreation days or working in the kitchen gardens. They helped the gardeners and nuns in the vegetable patch and ran an active rabbit club. This began in an ad hoc way with pet rabbits, which were allowed on account of the large amount of space at Aldenham. They were fed on carrots and rolled oats although everyone knew that animals should not eat human food during the war. Sister Dominic soon followed the national drive to keep rabbits and thereafter they were entitled to bran rations as an official club. Monica Lawlor, a pupil, wrote in 1941: ‘There are about twenty of all breeds and sizes. Pat Bartlett had great success with hers and some of the baby ones are destined for the pot.’46 Sister Dominic explained in her official notes: ‘Being an integral part of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries’ Scheme for increasing the food supply in wartime, we feel that the Report of the Aldenham School Rabbit Club should consist mainly in statistics. Breeding does eight; number of young rabbits potted thirty-nine, of which twenty-four in the summer term. Next year . . . we have hopes of doing some trade in Chinchilla skins.’47 The girls were in two minds about rabbit keeping. Marie-Anne Zarine wrote: ‘our moments of distress, when our pets must go into the pot, are forgotten when we enjoy their chicken-like meat in Sister Placid’s famous rabbit pies.’48 By 1945 the rabbit club was closed and Dean Swift wrote an epitaph:
For rabbits young and rabbits old,
For rabbits hot and rabbits cold,
For rabbits tender, rabbits tough,
We thank Thee, Lord: we’ve had enough.
Lady Acton kept pigs, starting with a single piglet but raising her herd to one hundred. She dispensed with skirts and started wearing dungarees, still cutting a striking figure. The girls remember her as being tall and very beautiful. Jane Dowling described the scene outdoors at Aldenham once Lady Acton had got started: ‘Pigs grovelled in the sties, the stables, the orchard, the bracken, and some of us learnt to feed them, and – which needs much greater skill – to catch the escaped ones.’49 The pigs eventually had pens in the stable block and they were separated according to size – rather like the school girls, Pelline observed.
Ronald Knox tried to learn the vocabulary of pig husbandry and read to Lady Acton out loud in the evenings from pig-keeping manuals and papers from the government. This was a change from his former quiet time with her when they would read religious works to one another. It marked a slight shift in their relationship. Where she had once been his most assiduous and successful pupil, he was now her somewhat less successful student. Practical matters were not his forte and the girls would watch him following her around trying to help in the garden or with the pigs. He gave up picking fruit when a ladder he was standing on to pick damsons slipped and he fell, spraining his ankle, but he continued to enjoy slashing nettles according to Pelline. The girls, on the other hand, were enthusiastic gardeners and helped locally with haymaking in June and the potato harvest each September. This was backbreaking and often very hard work, especially if the crop contained a lot of rotten potatoes, as it did in 1941. That year they were rewarded for their work by Lady Acton who presented the complete works of Kipling to the library, which was a treasured addition.
Mr Rowe, the Actons’ gardener, was in charge of the kitchen garden and produced abundant vegetables in season. The nuns wrote that he ‘works marvels in the kitchen garden and never fails to give a helping hand in any emergency.’50 He encouraged groups of girls to plant their own beds of salad or vegetables. The Guides had beds of lettuce which appeared in large quantities, while Susan Wood grew tomatoes and Violet Lucchesi Palli’s garden produce became famous, according to the Assumption Chronicle. Bazley was a favourite with the girls as he could solve most of the practical problems in the house and gardens. ‘Run and ask Mr Bazley’ was the invariable answer to such complaints as ‘the electricity has fused’; the ‘water is cold’; ‘my rabbit’s ill’; ‘I have no hutch for my new guinea pig’ or questions such as ‘is the pond safe for skating?’
On feast days they would hold dances, swaying to the ‘revolting’ music from the radio that Ronald teased them about. The dances were very popular as Lady Acton gave them a dressing-up trunk full of old family uniforms so that some of them could attend as men. On another feast day they had ‘an exciting game invented by Sister Dominic, British versus Nazis [which] kept us very busy. The park and house were filled with fighters; prisoners of war were shut up and guarded, and one, wilder than the rest, escaped by a sheet to the garden.’51
Reading this chapter it is hard to believe there was a war on but the Aldenham inhabitants were aware of what was happening in the outside world. The news was relayed to the schoolgirls via the nuns and in letters from home. Sometimes they learned of friends and family who had lost their lives in the Blitz and on the battlefields. There were always prayers in chapel for those caught up in the war and Father Knox regularly referred to the war in his sermons. It was a grim reminder of the Great War in which he had lost so many close friends.
For the younger Acton children, their father’s leave was the only reminder of the war, about which they had no real understanding. As Lord Acton was not allowed to sleep in the house, he and Daphne would stay with the Bazleys and Ronald when he had leave, so that the younger children rarely saw him even when he was at home. In 1944 they were staying with their grandparents at Terling Place and could see London burning during the V2 attacks, which made an impression on the boys in particular.
Rationing affected the household as it did everyone in the country and, despite the valuable addition of fruit and vegetables from the gardens, the wartime fare was described as revolting. Pelline hated eating rabbit, ‘it has that horrible, musky smell that doesn’t go away. My mother shot rabbits and sold them to the butcher but we got some on our plates too.’52 Nicola Macaskie recalled that ‘the bread was always stale, so you did not eat too much. There was spam, pilchards in tomato sauce and corned beef with lumps of disgusting yellow fat. Our sweet rations were sent from home and that was a high point. The only thing we all loved was Assumption tart. This we had on feast days. It was a triangular puff pastry tart covered with jam and it was delicious.’53
After the food, what the girls remembered most was the cold. The main problem with the house was that it had not been designed for so many inhabitants. The boiler frequently broke down during the bitterly cold winter of 1940, and the overriding collective memory was of freezing basins and gutters, arctic conditions in the dormitories and classrooms and of frozen towels in the bathrooms. ‘We had to scrape the ice off the inside of the windows in the dormitories – they were freezing the first winter of the war, though the rooms on the ground floor were kept slightly warmer.’54 Everyone got chilblains and in the mornings there was an unseemly race to the one radiator at the bottom of the stairs. Alannah Dowling remembered how ‘we would make a bee-line for that radiator, the only hot one I remember, but there was always a nun there first. My chilblains burst and I was not the only one. They were extremely painful.’55
The damp, cold conditions brought with them streaming colds and outbreaks of flu every year. Two girls developed German measles but the most serious illness was the streptococcal infection. Nicola Macaskie remembered the night when her sister Claudia nearly died: ‘Lots of the girls were poorly. Dormitories became make-shift sick bays. Claudia and I slept in the pink room with two others. She had an abscess in her throat and one night she woke up with a massive haemorrhage. She stumbled around the room trying to find something to stay the bleeding and when it was light the next morning the room looked like a battlefield: blood everywhere.’56 Claudia was taken down to the sanatorium and there a kindly but unwise nurse gave her a warm drink which caused another colossal bleed. The doctor was called and pronounced her fatally ill. Father Knox was summoned and gave Claudia the last rites, the only time he administered them in his life. Nicola was sent in to see her sister and later sat with Ronald, who tried to assure her that Claudia might not die. The twins’ mother sent a specialist ear, nose and throat surgeon from Birmingham to Aldenham who was able to lance the abscess and Claudia slowly recovered. It was probably the most dramatic incident that occurred at Aldenham and it was the only one that unsettled Lady Acton and knocked her off her usual intrepid stride. She took the children to her parents’ house, Terling Place near Chelmsford, where Pelline remembered being warm and well fed: such a welcome change from the freezing-cold house they had escaped from. On another occasion the boot was on the other foot. The Acton children developed whooping cough and if any of them went out of the nurseries and into the corridors they had to ring a large hand bell, known as the ‘Leper’s Bell’, to warn all the others to hide out of the way so they would not become infected.
The only time the school was seriously short of food was during the freezing weather of early 1940. On 28 January, there was an ice storm which the novelist Virginia Woolf described in her diary: ‘Everything glass glazed. Each blade is coated, has a rim of pure glass. Walking is like treading on stubble. The stiles and gates have a shiny, green varnish of ice.’57 It was one of the most extreme weather events of the century. The country was paralysed as roads turned into skating rinks, railway points froze solid and thousands of telegraph poles collapsed. For the animal population it was often fatal. Wild ponies in North Wales became entombed in ice and birds in Kent died in flight when their wings locked solid. All the pipes at Aldenham seized up, both hot and cold, water in the sinks froze and the lavatories were out of order. It was the severest storm of the century and people all over the country found themselves in difficult situations. The roads to and from Bridgnorth, five miles away, were impassable so there were no deliveries for several days. The shortage of bread became a problem and Sister Dominic described how: ‘Lady Acton and Mgr Knox trudged to Bridgnorth with a sledge and brought out fourteen loaves in a suitcase. The next day there was no meat, for the same reason. The milkman drove up in a steam tractor, which he also lent us when they delivered the coal for the furnace at the bottom of the drive, and the men couldn’t get it up. The VIth form went and dug out the coal-cart before the tractor came.’58
For six years the school thrived at Aldenham. The peak of joy was the midnight picnic, a reward for the tidiest dormitories. ‘Sister Margaret, Sister Clare and Sister Francoise Irene with Anne Cecilia Baring set off early and we had to follow clues which led us miles round the park in the dusk. We found them hidden in the bracken, with a delicious supper. Night fell and the glow-worms came out in their hundreds, and we were loath to go in on such a perfect night.59
Joan Ackroyd summed up her years at Aldenham in an essay for the Assumption Chronicle in 1944: ‘I see how different the atmosphere of this school is from any other. We are given great freedom and we are trusted by the nuns, who in return demand absolute trustworthiness and loyalty from us. This immediately transforms the school into something more like home.’60 In the friendly atmosphere of Aldenham the school coped despite the wartime shortages. The girls continued to put on plays, learn from the nuns and enjoy the vast library that continued to benefit from new editions of books, thanks to the generosity of Lady Acton.
And meanwhile, the great life-work of Father Knox progressed. It took him nine years to translate first the New and then the Old Testament. The NT was published in 1945, having been translated over the space of just three years. It was a remarkable achievement and one that few thought could possibly be achieved. The delay in publishing the work had little to do with wartime paper shortages and everything to do with interference and criticism from scholars, priests and lay people alike. He wrote in the introduction to Trials of a Translator:
If you translate the Bible, you are liable to be cross-examined by anybody; because everybody thinks he knows already what the Bible means. And the form which these questions take is a very interesting one; nearly always it is, ‘Why did you alter such and such a passage?’ Why did I alter it? When you say you are going to translate the Bible, why do people assume that you do not mean to do anything of the kind? They think you mean to revise the existing translation, with parts of which we are all familiar; changing a word here and a word there, like a compositor correcting proofs with a pair of tweezers. The more you plagiarise from the work of previous interpreters, the better your public will be pleased.
That was not what he was aiming for, of course. He wanted to introduce a new translation that would be a fresh interpretation of the original source. You can sense his frustration when he wrote: ‘ “Etre ou ne pas être, c’est bien la la question” is not Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be . . .” ’
The Knox Bible is still regarded by some academics, not least former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, as one of the finest scholarly literary translations of the Old and New Testaments. It is little used nowadays, except of course by his former pupils at Aldenham, most of whom still own an original signed copy from ‘Mr Translator’. It made a significant difference to the Church’s finances, bringing in more than £50,000 in the first decade after its publication, about £3.6 million in today’s money.
The war drew to its end and life at Aldenham was about to change once again. VE Days were celebrated by Victory Games in the recreation room and picnics for each form in a different room as the weather was miserable. The sixth form wrote up the account: ‘We spent all Monday in anxious waiting for the radio announcement of peace, and by 9pm when peace and the two VE holidays were proclaimed our pent-up excitement broke out in prolonged cheers. Flags of all nations suddenly appeared from all the windows.’61 The fifth form’s play was entitled What Really Happened to Hitler. He was discovered to be hiding in the convent, disguised as a nun and was converted by the girls into an honest house painter. They played cricket and had an enormous bonfire on the school field. It was a last hurrah for the Assumption nuns and girls at Aldenham. The school had to leave and move to another house, Exton Hall in Rutland, as the buildings in Kensington Square were designated to be a new teacher-training college and the Acton family needed Aldenham Park for their own private use.
The Convent of the Religious of the Assumption’s stay at Aldenham had secured the school for the future and given its pupils a far broader education than if they had remained in London. Neither the nuns nor the girls were in any doubt of that. Pelline, who had lived for half her life surrounded by the sisters and pupils, remembers what an enormous change it was for her when the school left Aldenham: ‘The house was quieter now. I remember how loud the girls’ footsteps were on the uncarpeted stairs and that was all gone. The rooms were returned to their former functions, our cousins moved in and a new chapter in our lives began.’62