Move toTrevelyan School

                                                MOVE TO TREVELYAN SCHOOL


          Two years had passed and in August 1939 my mother and I returned to Brittany to stay at the Abbaye.  It was only four years since I had left there, but it seemed like a world away.  When we passed Mlle Abilly, the Mother Superior, on the stairs, she greeted me kindly but I shrank away from her.  I had become a nervous, very shy child.  My mother reproached me, but I was no longer used to the nuns in their long black robes and Mlle Abilly had always been a rather severe figure, even more so when I saw her then. I did not see Sister Yvonne, who must have been away.  My relationship with the nuns had changed.  I was no longer one of them, but one of the visitors.

Our visit was notable because we were on the brink of war with Germany.  Although one crisis came after another, there was still a carefree atmosphere amongst the holidaymakers and, much to the disapproval of the nuns, they continued to dance  in the hall at the end of the garden in the evenings.

It was the beginning of September when we were all told we had to leave France straight away.  We embarked hastily at St. Malo and arrived back in England to hear that war had already been declared.

With the outbreak of war, Dulcie and Maureen’s father decided it was time for them to return to New Zealand and they left Blackdown.  It was very soon after this that my mother and I also left.   The name of the new School we were going to was Trevelyan.

            Why did my mother decide to move to another school?  We were  happy where we were.  From my point of view it was a disaster.  I think that she probably felt I would be getting a better education, and also that I would be moving into a better social class, both of which meant nothing to me.  My mother was very aware of her own status, and always insisted on being called a Lady Cook-housekeeper.  As had been the case at Blackdown, my board and education were to be apart of her salary.

            I suppose also my mother might have thought of Trevelyan as a 'proper' school, and not just the dreamchild of Mrs. Hastings.  Trevelyan was a small, private school  for girls  in Haywards Heath in Sussex.  There was one large, redbrick building with about two acres of ground and garden. It was run on strict, almost military lines.  The girls all came from upper class, mostly wealthy, families.  It couldn’t have been more different from the relaxed, easygoing style of Blackdown.

            There were any number of rules and regulations which, if broken,  meant being  given an order mark.  If a girl got six order marks in a half term, she had to go and see the headmistress, which I invariably did.  Many of them were for the most trivial misdemeanours.  I was very absentminded and tended to forget things.  When we left our bedrooms after breakfast, we were not supposed to return to them, but I always forgot a handkerchief or my pencil box or some book. I would creep back to my room, hoping that the housemistress, who slept next door, would not be in.  She always was.  She was a large, bosomy Jamaican woman, Miss Jackman, and she towered over me.  I dreaded her.

            I was by no means a naughty child, but every half term I would find myself in the headmistress’s room being scolded for no reasons that I could understand.   The headmistress, Miss Frances, was a severe looking woman with cropped iron grey hair, and thin tight lips.  I did not warm to her.

I made no friends, as I had nothing in common with the other children.   I had lost my best friend Dulcie, with whom I had had fun and who, in many ways, had protected me.  I no longer saw my mother, as it was forbidden for me to go to her room.  Being naturally shy, I withdrew still more into myself.  Occasionally I made remarks which made them all laugh.  I remember being introduced to a new girl with the words “and this is the Fool.”  I wanted to sink into the floor at that point. 

I began to go around in a state of near permanent anxiety.  I missed Blackdown,  dear Mrs. Hastings and Miss Lane, with her snow-white hair and her kindness and encouragement.

            I was supposed to be getting free elocution lessons, normally an extra, as my mother must have sung my praises.  However, I completely failed to live up to my reputation. The elocution mistress, like Miss Frances,  was a rather cold, formal woman and my combination of shyness, nerves and fright meant that I completely dried up, becoming wooden and lifeless.  I never again displayed any talent in that direction.

            I can recall one mistress, Miss Redman, the history mistress, trying to be friendly to me, but I was too shy to respond.  This was the moment, I am sure, when I developed all the problems which would follow me into my adult life.  I retreated into reading books, my school work and writing.  I amused myself by creating a magazine of which I was the Editor and wrote all the articles and stories.  I still remember one phrase which I wrote: “the salt tears ran down her face and into her gaping mouth”!

             I was clearly not getting on too well, and it was decided that I should go from the Middle School down to the Junior School.   I now found myself with girls a year younger than I was.   I was twelve at the time.  In some ways this was better for me as I felt more at ease with the younger girls.

 There were two sisters whom I remember well, Elisabeth and Helen Birdwood:  their father was a general.  Elisabeth, the older one, was very pretty and it was she who had introduced me as “the Fool.”  I now found myself with Helen, the younger sister.  She was not as pretty as her sister, but a much nicer girl  and we became quite friendly.

            Then disaster struck.  One night in the dormitory Helen and I were playing around, we had taken our pyjamas off and were rolling over each other naked.  It was an innocent game:  we thought we were being deliciously naughty, and we were giggling away.  At that moment the door opened and in walked the matron, Miss Harkness, a large woman, with a florid complexion. She was as starchy as her uniform. 

            We sprang apart. She looked at us with shocked surprise.

            “Whatever are you up to?   Daphne!  Put something on and come with me.”

            She hurried me away and I was put in the sick room to sleep, where I stayed for the next few nights.

            I was now in the doghouse.  Being the eldest, I was held responsible, though I do not think it was even my idea.  I remained segregated in the sick room, and was visited a day or so later by a child psychologist.  I remember him as a kindly and approachable man.  We talked and he asked me questions, and he formed the opinion, rightly, that our play had been perfectly innocent.

            Whilst I was being kept in the sick room I had plenty of time to reflect, and I was as puzzled as ever as to why I was being kept apart from the others, as though I had some contagious disease!  I received a worried note from my mother asking me if I had been telling them “SAY stories.”  What she had actually written was “SEX”, but I read it as “SAY” and I had no idea what she meant. In those days we were very ignorant about all sexual matters, and I was probably even more so, having no father and no brothers.

            The psychologist’s visit was, however, to have a profound effect on my life.  He had come to the conclusion that it was not a good thing for me to be in the same school where my mother was the cook-housekeeper.  Cooking at that time was regarded as a menial occupation, and my mother would have been seen as a servant. 

            I was still doing well in my school studies.  It was decided that I should try and get a scholarship to another boarding school.  I took several exams for different schools, and I finally obtained a scholarship to a minor public school in North Wales.  It was called Lowther College.

            This was a very distressing time for me and I remember hardly anything about it, nor how my mother felt.  She must obviously have been very upset.  My mother had been going deaf for some time now;  even at Blackdown she had worn a large, unwieldy deaf aid tucked down her front and this made it much harder to talk to her.  Now, coupled with her own reticence, we hardly seem to have communicated at all.

            The time came for me to leave Trevelyan.  I did not regret it.  I had one or two good memories:  wrestling with Mary Jackson down in the bunkers during the air raids;  writing a poem to Jean Abel-Smith, who was a cousin of the  queen and making her laugh;  telling ghost stories in the dorm, for which I had developed a talent.

  I was about thirteen and a half years old and I was leaving with a strong inferiority complex and a complete lack of confidence in myself.

It was the middle of the war.  My mother left Trevelyan soon after I did and went to work at a school in Malvern called Lawnside, whilst I started my new life at Lowther College.

           

           

            

Photo Shoot

Aethur and 

My Mother

                                                MY MOTHER

            I feel now that I should write a little more about my mother and her background, as she has been a somewhat shadowy figure in my story.

            (I began my story with the words:  “But I’m alive, I exist.”  One of my intentions in writing my story is to explore what it means to be human:  the nature of existence, of identity; how our identity is shaped by the social mores of our time; how our freedom to be ourselves is curtailed by the demands of society; how much of what we are is determined by nature and how much by nurture.  And then finally, there is the ultimate question:  who or what is God?)

                                                *    *    *    *

            My mother was born in 1889 in a small town called Indian Head, in Saskatchewan, northern Canada, a place of  endless prairieland.  She was baptised Florence Nora, but was always called Nora.  Her father, Arthur Ridsdale, had sailed from England to Canada, met and married her mother, Sarah Sanford, and by the time Nora arrived they already had three children, a boy and two girls.

            Arthur Ridsdale was a farmer and farmed a large area of land up in Saskatchewan.  He was away for long periods and his wife, who was pretty and lively, formed other relationships.  This eventually led to their divorce a short time after my mother was born.  My mother was adopted when she was eight months old by her aunt (her mother’s sister) and her husband.  They lived in Barrie, Ontario, on a lake called Lake Simcoe, thousands of miles away from Saskatchewan, and my mother never saw any of her own family again.

                                                      *   *   *   *

           ( Many years later, when I was trying to find out more about my family, I discovered that Arthur Ridsdale, in order to join the army during the First World War, had declared himself to be fourteen years younger than he really was.  Several months later he was discharged on the grounds of ill health.  He also remarried and, it seems, absconded with his wife’s money!  So he appears to have been both a liar and a thief.  He lived to the ripe old age of 81.

            My mother’s side of the family was called Sanford, and the line was traced right back to 1633 when a Sanford sailed from England to Massachusetts in America, where they prospered and made good.  This lasted until they fought on the side of the English in the War of Independence.  After being defeated they fled over the border to Canada, where they became known as EU Loyalists.)

                                                      *   *    *   *

            My mother was always hyper-sensitive.  She told me how she used to have nightmares when she was a child of being pursued by wild bears. When she was six her little brother was born, named Arthur.  Very sadly, at the age of five, Arthur died after being badly burned in a fire in the home.  This must have had a traumatic effect on my mother, aged 11 at the time.

            Nonetheless, she had a happy childhood.  Her father was a solicitor and a respected member of the community.  They led a comfortable, middle class life. 

           She used to walk several miles to school every day, which probably gave her the strong constitution she needed in later life when she had to cook for a living.  She was a clever child, often coming top in her class.  She thought of going to university, but in those days a pass in subjects such as trigonometry was needed, which was quite beyond her.  She was very artistic and loved dressmaking.  She was making her own clothes at the age of eight, she told me.  When she grew older she started designing and making wedding dresses for all her friends.

            They led a healthy, outdoor life.  In the summer they would go sailing and swimming, and in the winter they would skate on the frozen lake and go snowshoeing across the fields covered deep in snow.  They had a lively social life, with parties and dances.  When having a party they would sometimes go from house to house, each family producing a different course, until they ended up at the final house with the pudding.  It all sounded quite idyllic to me!

             My mother had become a beautiful young woman.  She was leading a happy life;  she had many friends and several male admirers.

            All this came to an end with the beginning of the First World War in 1914.  Many of the young men went off to fight.  All the finest young men were killed in the war, my mother used to say.

            Her mother’s health began to deteriorate. She had always been fragile;  she became an invalid and took to her bed.  My mother nursed her, also taking on many of the duties of running the household and her mother’s social duties.  In 1923 her mother died, and several months later her father also died. My mother had gone away for a few days to stay with friends and she  heard her father calling her in the night. He had died that very same night.  

            My mother was now 32 years old and she was on her own;  unlike most of her friends she had not married.  At some point she had fallen deeply in love with a married man.  They had contemplated eloping together, but had decided against it in the end.

            She now decided to go and study art in New York.  She applied to the School of Fine and Applied Arts to study stage and costume design.  She had not been there long, however, when she had an unfortunate accident.  She was knocked over on a street corner by a car late at night which never stopped.  Her leg and hip were broken.  She had to spend months in hospital;  the hospital fees were exorbitant and living in New York was very expensive.  She felt she could no longer afford to continue her studies there.

            She returned to Barrie and from there she started going to the Toronto Academy of Art.  This was where she met my father, who was teaching there.  My father was an Englishman who had recently come over to Toronto from England, after being offered a teaching post in industrial design.  They began a relationship, but again he was a married man.  She wanted to get away and she decided to go to Paris and study art at the Sorbonne.  On one of the rare occasions when she said anything to me about my father, she told me she had been very lonely at the time.

            At some point in her life my mother  had become an atheist.  Like everyone else at that time she went to Church;  her family were Anglicans, and she sang in the Church choir.   But she read a great deal and she began to read books by Julian Huxley, which influenced her thinking.  Her father once picked up one her books and looked at it.  He said, rather sadly, “this would destroy anyone’s faith.”

            After her father died, his cousin was left in charge of handling the Will and the estate.  As so often happens in families, relatives started squabbling over the possessions;  they descended upon my mother in her home, taking what they wanted from under her nose.  As these were all upright Christian citizens, my mother’s opinion of them as hypocrites was confirmed.

            When I reflect on my mother’s life up to then, although she had had a secure and happy life, there was also much loss and sadness in it.  She was clever, with many talents;  she was beautiful with a great zest for life;  she was adventurous and enterprising;  she was kind.  She was also hypersensitive, with a certain reserve and timidity about her.  Her life was not going to be an easy one, and it would demand enormous strength of character and courage.

           

Life at Blackdown

                                          LIFE AT BLACKDOWN

Once I had settled down I began to be happy at Blackdown.  During the term time my mother was busy in the kitchen.   She was helped by two deaf and dumb girls who were devoted to her.  I did not see her so much, but I was always free to slip into her bedroom when I wanted to.  If she was resting I would curl up and read one of her books.  I do not think I had any awareness of how tired she was,  nor of how hard her work was.  I was absorbed in my own world.

My mother and I were able to stay at Blackdown during the holidays.  This meant that we were there with Commander and Mrs Hastings,  Dulcie and Maureen, and Beryl, whose parents lived in India.

Dulcie and I  at these times were as free as birds.  We would climb the trees in the orchard, play on the swings, or visit Miss Jackson who ran the chicken farm.  She was a friendly woman who always greeted us kindly.  She was permanently in jodhpurs and boots, with untidy, curly brown hair. 

Dulcie was fearless and was the main instigator of all our activities, and I was happy to follow her.  Once Dulcie and I had a fight.  She ran into the lavatory which had an open top.  I chased after her with a jug of water, climbed onto a chair and tipped it over the top.  The next moment out walked Mrs Hastings.  Mrs Hastings was a kind and easy going woman, but even she was annoyed.  To my fury, I got all the blame.

In the summer holidays  we would all go for a week to Branscombe in Dorset.  We slept in huts by the beach, the children in one hut and the adults in another.  My main memory of this was being teased by the bigger and older girls,  even Dulcie, who amused themselves by sticking pins in me at night when we were all in bed.  This stopped after I complained to my mother.

We spent Christmas at Blackdown.  I found an old train set in the waste paper basket which I thought would make a very good present for Dulcie.  I felt rather ashamed when she told me she had thrown it away it herself.   My mother cooked a superb Christmas lunch.  There were crackers and paper hats and we played party games.  During the Easter holidays I remember my mother making a great pile of pancakes for Shrove Tuesday, which we devoured, competing to see who could eat the most.

There was a large playroom with a big table where we would sit, cutting out paper dolls and dressing them with different clothes.  There were board games, snakes and ladders, draughts and ludo.  We would play cards, snap and rummy.

We seemed to be becoming one happy family.  Commander Hastings was a bluff and jovial man and his wife was equally genial, though somewhat ineffectual as a headmistress.

            And of course, I would read.  I read everything.  I read all my mother’s books:  Hugh Walpole, Dornford Yates, Mazo de la Roche, romantic novels.  I remember reading with fascination one of Walpole’s novels, where a naked woman was examining herself closely in the mirror. The love parts interested me most  of all. 

There were also children’s books.  I was given Alice in Wonderland, a Child’s Book of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson,  Winnie-the-Pooh, The Wind in the Willows:  all the classics.  Then there were books  like the Anne of Green Gables series, The Girl of the Limberlost, and Little Women, and Green Mansions by W.H.Hudson, a haunting and mysterious book. The Just William books were then being published.  I loved William, and I also loved fairy stories,  and do to this day.

Rummaging through the Library I came across a book by Lin Yutang on China, its history and philosophy, which fascinated me.  It was my first introduction to philosophy.  

During my time at Blackdown I picked up every childhood disease that was going, as one did in those days.  I was always in the sick room, with Miss Lane sleeping next door, so we came to know each other well.  Once I even contracted diphtheria and scarlet fever at the same time and I was very ill indeed.  One night I felt I was dying, as my heart seemed to keep stopping.  I remember praying:  “Please God, don’t let me die and I’ll never be naughty again.”   The thought of Miss Lane being so close gave me some comfort.

The next day I was rushed to hospital where I slowly recovered.  Of course I did not keep the promise I had made God!   I must have given everyone a scare, in particular my mother,  and I was thoroughly spoiled.  It must have been Easter time as I remember being given a huge Easter egg and my mother  keeping me supplied with all my favourite comics.

I also suffered from sore throats and had tonsillitis several times, and finally had my tonsils removed.  It was shortly after this that I found I could no longer see the blackboard.  My eyes were examined and I was given glasses for short sight.  It seemed like a miracle when I put them on and everything became sharp and clear again, instead of blurred.

During this time I also remember that I was given a small copy of the St. James Bible by the music teacher, Miss Sewell.  She must have been worried that I was becoming a little heathen!  Inside on the front page she wrote “Blackdown 1939”,  “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today and forever.”  I still have that Bible today.  I probably have to thank her for the fact that when I was older I began to read the Bible, as I was very fond of poetry, and remembered it often in later years.

As well as being the house mistress, Miss Lane was the elocution mistress.  She had the gift of drawing out whatever there was in a child.  She certainly succeeded in drawing me out and I developed a talent for elocution. I was entered for the County competitions and always won a prize, usually Silver, never Gold, as I was too shy in the orals.  I loved reciting verse, as I was able to express all my imagination and completely forget myself.  When a School Play was mooted, Miss Lane gave me the leading part, the role of the Prince.  How exciting that was!  It never happened, I don't remember why, and soon afterwards I was to leave Blackdown.

I have often wondered how my life would have turned out had I been able to stay at Blackdown.  But that that is next chapter in my story.

Dulcie

                                                       DULCIE 

       
          During my early days at Blackdown I had many problems with bed wetting and wetting my knickers.  Miss Lane, who was the housemistress, kept a weather eye out for me. Miss Lane was an albino.  She had snow white hair, beautifully waved, and clear blue eyes, with just a hint of red rims.  She had a natural love and understanding of children.  Often she would come up to me and lead me away, take me upstairs, remove my knickers, wash me and dry me, and put a clean pair of knickers on me.  All this was done without any fuss and bother.  There was no judgment, only kindness, and gradually these symptoms of my anxiety disappeared.

           I first encountered Dulcie when we were both in the sick room together with a mild case of chickenpox.   She was three years older than me and much bigger than I was.  I felt intimidated by her.  One day she suddenly jumped on top of me in bed, pulled down her pyjamas, and said:  “Lick my pussy."   I struggled and screamed, but there was nothing I could do.  Miss Lane, who slept next door, was not there.  Reluctantly, I did what she asked.

            After that she left me alone, and the incident was forgotten.  We found a common interest in comics, and soon we were immersed in Beano and Tiger Tim.  By the time we came out of the sick room we were firm friends:  she had just as suddenly taken a liking to me.

             From then on we became inseparable.  We did everything together:  we played together, we were naughty together:  she was the one who always led me on.  We both loved animals, particularly cats.  Dulcie was not bright and though older than me, we were in the same class.   She had a sweet nature.  She liked poetry and wrote little verses.  She had common sense, too, which I did not, and she remained a loyal friend throughout my life.

            Dulcie and her sister Maureen came from New Zealand.  Their father had owned  a tobacco plantation in Malaysia and their mother had been a native Malaysian woman.   Their father, on his return to New Zealand, had married a white woman  and had sent his two daughters to England to become educated and civilised.  Mrs Hastings told my mother that they had both been like little savages when they first came to England.

            Both Dulcie and her sister had round, freckled faces.  Maureen had black hair and brown eyes, but Dulcie’s hair was auburn and she had green eyes with flecks of gold in them.  Maureen was eighteen months older than Dulcie, so already a teenager.

More Poetry

This is a fill in till I write the next piece of my life.

                           
                              I?  What am I?

                                                A net of nerves, joints, sinews,

                                                Bound in a framework of bone and skin,

                                                A mouth to swallow meat and swill down slops –

                                                An eye to see and not perceive

                                               

                                                An ear to hear and to forget –

                                                In short a body – an object movable and

                                                Visible in space – breathing and expelling air,

                                                Endowed with senses and sensibilities –

                                                Ah – there’s the rub.  For you seem to have learnt

                                                The secret of living -  but I

                                                Slip up against the sores of the world.

                                                Yet there’s something within me, elusive

                                                And feather light – unseen – unfelt – unknowable

                                                Tender as a green shoot and shrinking

                                                As a snail without a shell – ready to die

                                                At will and always being born again –

                                                An insubstantial – inconsequential – timid, moody

                       

                                                thing,

                                                That I would willingly be rid of

                                                And yet might tell me what I am.

          I wrote this poem at some point when I was at University.

                                                             THE WAITRESS

                                   

                                    Her life was bounded by little things,

                                    By slops and coffee pots and breakfast trays.

                                    Her life was regulated, like the clock that rings

                                    The hours to mark the passing days.

                                    Her days passed by in meaningless content

                                    And little things of life made up her joys.

                                    On food to swell her body her eager eyes were bent

                                    And clothes to mask her body were her toys.

                                    She bore her body like a queen in June,

                                    Full bosomed, supple, graceful as a cat,

                                    And like a cat she loved to lie abed at noon,

                                    Crooning in sleep, dreaming of this and that.

                                    Within the stately powdered head her mind

                                                Was small and mean,

                                    She looked upon the stars and did not see.

                                    Beyond her small circumference she could not lean

                                    Or grope for truth, but sat and sipped her tea.

                                    Her life was bounded by little things,

                                    Her days were passed in old familiar ways,

                                    Her eyes were closed to the unknown which brings

                                    Life, death and rapture to our transient days.

          

          During the holidays whilst I was at University I used to work as a waitress at a hotel in

Stratford-on-Avon.  We used to call her Kent, and I'm sure she was a nice woman.  This is the 

poem of a very young person.

                                               

WE MOVE TO JERSEY AND ENGLAND

            It was some time in 1935  that my mother took me away from the Abbaye and we moved to Jersey.

            I was overjoyed to be with my mother again.  I do not remember if I felt sad at leaving the nuns.  I am sure they were sad to see me go.  I can imagine that the tender hearted Sister Yvonne must have cried at my leaving, and that I shed a tear on leaving her.  

            My mother had found a job as a cook-housekeeper to a wealthy family.  Their name was Helliwell and they lived in a large house just outside St. Helier in Jersey.  My mother had a bedroom, which I shared with her, and her own sitting room.

            There were three boys in the family, all older than me and bigger.  I was terrified of them.  I spent hours reading in my mother’s sitting room and I became a regular bookworm.  I had somehow managed to teach  myself how to read in English. 

            For my eighth birthday I was given a book called The Water Babies, by Charles Kingsley, by my mother’s friend, Walter Tuck, who was still around.  I loved this book and the story of Tom, the chimney sweep -  his adventures in the river, meeting Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby and Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid and, of course, Ellie.  Looking at this book now it seems a very difficult book for an eight year old, with lots of long words, but I remember reading them all religiously even though I did not understand them.  This was probably the start of my love of words, the longer the better.

            I went to School, which I did not enjoy very much.  I had to walk two miles along country lanes to get there.  Once on my way I passed a Fair.  I loved fairs.  My mother had given me some money to buy a School tie.  I was drawn in to the Fair by the music, I saw the roundabout going round and round, and small children riding on brightly coloured horses.  I was tempted and held out my coin.  I was lifted onto one of the horses.  It was Heaven!  Rising up and down with the music, I never wanted to get off.  I never got a School tie, and I was roundly scolded by my mother.

            At Easter time the Helliwells organized an Easter egg hunt in the garden, and I was invited to join in.  This was a lot of fun;  they had a large garden and there were plenty of  dark places, shrubs, bushes, and flower beds in which to look for eggs, and of course we all found one.

            My mother became friendly with Colonel Helliwell, who had been in the Indian Army.  He taught her how to make a real Indian curry, which was very hot and spicy.  This became one of her accomplishments for many years afterwards.

            Although we were quite happy there, my mother had been thinking about my future education, and so in 1937 we moved to England.  My mother was to work as a cook-housekeeper in a small boarding school called Blackdown, in the small town of Wellington in Somerset.  My education was to be included as part of her salary.

            I had by now become a very shy, retiring child. 

          My mother was constantly saying:  “Daphne’s such a nervous child.”   My relationship with my mother had changed.  She was no longer the comfortable, relaxed presence I had known in France, and I was no longer the prattling child who told her everything.  I had got used to my own company, and my mother was frequently tired, preoccupied or busy.  She was also becoming deaf. She was still a comforting presence and she was always there, but we each now lived in our own world.  I lived in a world of books and my mother was occupied with her work and her worries.

            I hated England.  

          There had still been enough that was French in Jersey for the transition not to be so marked, but England was very different.  People seemed to me to be cold and unemotional, and unfriendly.  The French often say that the English are hypocritical, and from their point of view there may be some truth in this.  French people are very frank and say what they think outright to a person’s face, whereas the English will bend over backward so as not to hurt someone’s feelings, which I used to find very irritating.  The English are reserved, the French are much more extrovert and outgoing.  

          However, this was 1937, and it has to be said that the English character has radically changed since that time, now that we are living in a multi-cultural society, and a much more global world.

            Blackdown School, where we now lived, was a very happy-go-lucky, small private girls’ school.  It was run by Mrs. Hastings, the wife of Commander Hastings, a retired naval officer.  He had always wanted to have a chicken farm and she had wanted a school, so they had managed to combine the two.  There were two school houses, the farm and an orchard.  In many ways it was a lovely place for children.

            Wellington was a small country town.  The School took in boarders and day pupils, who mostly came from the surrounding farms.  There were also girls whose parents lived abroad and who stayed there during the holidays.

            At first I was very lonely and unhappy.  I no longer saw very much of my mother.  I slept in a dormitory, and I was in School whilst she was working.  I found it hard to make friends, having come from such a different background.  After the extrovert and voluble French, the English girls seemed undemonstrative, cold and without feelings.

            I did in the end make a friend.  Her name was Dulcie.