Collected Works. George Orwell
knights in armour and Spanish galleons and printing presses and railway trains—at the appropriate places. Pinned round the walls of the room, the chart presented, as the scraps grew in number, a sort of panorama of English history. The children were even fonder of the chart than of the contour map. They always, Dorothy found, showed more intelligence when it was a question of making something instead of merely learning. There was even talk of making a contour map of the world, four feet by four, in papier mâché, if Dorothy could “get round” Mrs. Creevy to allow the preparation of the papier mâché—a messy process needing buckets of water.
Mrs. Creevy watched Dorothy’s innovations with a jealous eye, but she did not interfere actively at first. She was not going to show it, of course, but she was secretly amazed and delighted to find that she had got hold of an assistant who was actually willing to work. When she saw Dorothy spending her own money on text-books for the children, it gave her the same delicious sensation that she would have had in bringing off a successful swindle. She did, however, sniff and grumble at everything that Dorothy did, and she wasted a great deal of time by insisting on what she called “thorough correction” of the girls’ exercise books. But her system of correction, like everything else in the school curriculum, was arranged with one eye on the parents. Periodically the children took their books home for their parents’ inspection, and Mrs. Creevy would never allow anything disparaging to be written in them. Nothing was to be marked “bad” or crossed out or too heavily underlined; instead, in the evenings, Dorothy decorated the books, under Mrs. Creevy’s dictation, with more or less applauding comments in red ink. “A very creditable performance,” and “Excellent! You are making great strides. Keep it up!” were Mrs. Creevy’s favourites. All the children in the school, apparently, were for ever “making great strides”; in what direction they were striding was not stated. The parents, however, seemed willing to swallow an almost unlimited amount of this kind of thing.
There were times, of course, when Dorothy had trouble with the girls themselves. The fact that they were all of different ages made them difficult to deal with, and though they were fond of her and were very “good” with her at first, they would not have been children at all if they had been invariably “good”. Sometimes they were lazy and sometimes they succumbed to that most damnable vice of schoolgirls—giggling. For the first few days Dorothy was greatly exercised over little Mavis Williams, who was stupider than one would have believed it possible for any child of eleven to be. Dorothy could do nothing with her at all. At the first attempt to get her to do anything beyond pothooks a look of almost subhuman blankness would come into her wide-set eyes. Sometimes, however, she had talkative fits in which she would ask the most amazing and unanswerable questions. For instance, she would open her “reader,” find one of the illustrations—the sagacious Elephant, perhaps—and ask Dorothy:
“Please, Miss, wass ’at thing there?” (She mispronounced her words in a curious manner.)
“That’s an elephant, Mavis.”
“Wass a elephant?”
“An elephant’s a kind of wild animal.”
“Wass a animal?”
“Well—a dog’s an animal.”
“Wass a dog?”
And so on, more or less indefinitely. About half-way through the fourth morning Mavis held up her hand and said with a sly politeness that ought to have put Dorothy on her guard:
“Please, Miss, may I be ’scused?”
“Yes,” said Dorothy.
One of the bigger girls put up her hand, blushed, and put her hand down again as though too bashful to speak. On being prompted by Dorothy, she said shamefacedly:
“Please, Miss, Miss Strong didn’t used to let Mavis go to the lavatory alone. She locks herself in and won’t come out, and then Mrs. Creevy gets angry, Miss.”
Dorothy dispatched a messenger, but it was too late. Mavis remained in latebra pudenda till twelve o’clock. Afterwards, Mrs. Creevy explained privately to Dorothy that Mavis was a congenital idiot—or, as she put it, “not right in the head.” It was totally impossible to teach her anything. Of course, Mrs. Creevy didn’t “let on” to Mavis’s parents, who believed that their child was only “backward” and paid their fees regularly. Mavis was quite easy to deal with. You just had to give her a book and a pencil and tell her to draw pictures and be quiet. But Mavis, a child of habit, drew nothing but pothooks—remaining quiet and apparently happy for hours together, with her tongue hanging out, amid festoons of pothooks.
But in spite of these minor difficulties, how well everything went during those first few weeks! How ominously well, indeed! About the tenth of November, after much grumbling about the price of coal, Mrs. Creevy started to allow a fire in the schoolroom. The children’s wits brightened noticeably when the room was decently warm. And there were happy hours, sometimes, when the fire crackled in the grate, and Mrs. Creevy was out of the house, and the children were working quietly and absorbedly at one of the lessons that were their favourities. Best of all was when the two top classes were reading Macbeth, the girls squeaking breathlessly through the scenes, and Dorothy pulling them up to make them pronounce the words properly and to tell them who Bellona’s bridegroom was and how witches rode on broomsticks; and the girls wanting to know, almost as excitedly as though it had been a detective story, how Birnam Wood could possibly come to Dunsinane and Macbeth be killed by a man who was not of woman born. Those are the times that make teaching worth while—the times when the children’s enthusiasm leaps up, like an answering flame, to meet your own, and sudden unlooked-for gleams of intelligence reward your earlier drudgery. No job is more fascinating than teaching if you have a free hand at it. Nor did Dorothy know, as yet, that that “if” is one of the biggest “ifs” in the world.
Her job suited her, and she was happy in it. She knew the minds of the children intimately by this time, knew their individual peculiarities and the special stimulants that were needed before you could get them to think. She was more fond of them, more interested in their development, more anxious to do her best for them, than she would have conceived possible a short while ago. The complex, never-ended labour of teaching filled her life just as the round of parish jobs had filled it at home. She thought and dreamed of teaching; she took books out of the public library and studied theories of education. She felt that quite willingly she would go on teaching all her life, even at ten shillings a week and her keep, if it could always be like this. It was her vocation, she thought.
Almost any job that fully occupied her would have been a relief after the horrible futility of the time of her destitution. But this was more than a mere job; it was—so it seemed to her—a mission, a life-purpose. Trying to awaken the dulled minds of these children, trying to undo the swindle that had been worked upon them in the name of education—that, surely, was something to which she could give herself heart and soul? So for the time being, in the interest of her work, she disregarded the beastliness of living in Mrs. Creevy’s house, and quite forgot her strange, anomalous position and the uncertainty of her future.
§IV
But of course, it could not last.
Not many weeks had gone by before the parents began interfering with Dorothy’s programme of work. That—trouble with the parents—is part of the regular routine of life in a private school. All parents are tiresome from a teacher’s point of view, and the parents of children at fourth-rate private schools are utterly impossible. On the one hand, they have only the dimmest idea of what is meant by education; on the other hand, they look on “schooling” exactly as they look on a butcher’s bill or a grocer’s bill, and are perpetually suspicious that they are being cheated. They bombard the teacher with ill-written notes making impossible demands, which they send by hand and which the child reads on the way to school. At the end of the first fortnight Mabel Briggs, one of the most promising girls in the class, brought Dorothy the following note:
“Dear Miss,—Would you please give Mabel a bit more arithmetic? I feel that what your giving her is not practacle enough. All these maps and that. She wants practacle work, not all this fancy stuff. So more arithmetic, please. And remain,