CHAPTER III
GOFF'S OAK
Another great change was now ahead of the Community. Charlton Court was itself part of a larger property and when the owner died the whole estate, including Charlton, was sold up by the new owners and the Community had to leave.
Again, then, the problem arose, where were they to go and would the Community have to end.
Leila Rendel must then have gone off on the second of her treks in looking for a new home for the Community. One was eventually found at Cuffley, a village in Hertfordshire. The house had the rather curious name of Goff's Oak: it was reasonably spacious and had grounds and a kitchen garden and farm buildings. This was the first of many moves to be experienced by Roma Easton and she remembers it as a “dreary place, exchanging as it did, the green fields of Kent for cinder paths, glasshouses and smuts, but it was better than having no Community and we were thankful."
Into the new house and environment in the middle of the tomato growing glasshouses, the Community settled down again.
No one seems to have spoken with any great affection for the house; indeed Roma Easton referred to it as a "rather nasty house". The drains appear to have been defective and when visitors were expected, Kathleen Syer, who was in charge of the garden, would be seen going round with a large can of very strong disinfectant which she put down the drains; the smell of the former masking, it was to be hoped, the smell of the latter. This defective plumbing does not seem to have worried either Phyllis Potter or Leila Rendel when the Community first went there, but it is possible that it was only after some time that the drains gave up the struggle to cope with such numbers as the house had certainly never known before.
For a description of life at Goff's Oak I turn to an account given by a young woman at the time, Marjorie Seaver: she writes, "I answered an advertisement for a temporary vacancy for someone to look after a group of children out of school hours in addition to housework and a small amount of teaching."
She found that "housework" was the one activity in which the whole Community shared regardless of age or status. It was organised on a system by which not only were the basic principles taught both to adults and children, but also a setting for attractive living was maintained in spite of makeshift furniture and the minimum of material comforts.
"To each adult was assigned a part of the house which usually included one large living room or two or more staff bedrooms, dormitories and bathrooms; (no one ever cleaned their own bedroom so that the danger of that becoming a slum was averted). The gardener and the farm manager were the only people whose work was restricted to their own departments.
"The summer of 1930 was one of great perfection so that my recollections of that first term are of life lived strenuously under what seemed to me, almost idyllic conditions.
"At that time there were four children over the age of twelve and none over fourteen, opportunities for adult companionship and adult conversation were therefore greater than at any subsequent time in the history of the Community.
"The children's last meal was "High Tea", but at eight o'clock when they were all in bed the staff assembled for supper. My recollection of those meals is of long trestle tables set up under the trees, large quantities of peas, beans and fruit from the garden and stimulating conversation which continued until the last light had faded. The two Directors sat opposite each other and as they had widely divergent opinions and both enjoyed arguments, it was never dull, nor did the clock impose an artificial closure. An opinion expressed by Miss Rendel followed by Miss Potter's, "I don't agree with you at all, Leila. I think you are absolutely wrong" sparked off further discussions which ranged from Infant Baptism to politics.
"Owing to the fact that all the children were taught in the Caldecott school and that there was no domestic help or outdoor labour, the ratio of grown-ups to children was relatively high and it was this which helped to create a real sense of community. Those were the days of great financial insecurity and there was no state help. The Community was entirely dependent on voluntary contributions, augmented by the fees which were paid by parents or friends for some, though by no means for all, of the children.
"The Directors and many of the staff were "voluntary" and the others, including the teachers, worked for little more than a pittance. Salaries were determined, not by qualifications or experience, but by the minimum amount which would enable each individual to remain. This sense of total commitment remained a Characteristic of Caldecott for many years.
"Commitment was expressed not only in terms of remuneration (or lack of it) but also in the willingness with which, in addition to their own specific work, everyone was prepared to help in any department where they were needed.
"Another feature of Caldecott which made considerable impact on me was the Chapel - a converted farm building of stark simplicity and great beauty."
Towards the end of the Community's life at Goff's Oak something occurred which must have been a saddening experience for all, together with the anxiety and worry which it engendered; this was the break-up and final end of the partnership of Phyllis Potter and Leila Rendel.
The differences of opinion between the two Directors lay in the field of religious belief and the opinions on both sides were strongly held and not to be solved by discussion or tolerance. Phyllis Potter's attitude seems to have been entrenched and she was intractable. It is not at all clear for how long she had been drawn to the 'High Church' position in the Anglican Church but she had finally reached the stage when she wished to run the Community's religious life on a purely Sectarian basis; she wished it to be completely involved with the Church of England.
Leila Rendel was determined that the Community should be non-sectarian and non-denominational, which it had always been right from the start; it was a fundamental tenet and principle and its strength lay in this. There were many shades of religious opinion at the Community: some came with strong Church of England connections, there had been Presbyterians, doubtless there had been and were Roman Catholics and Quakers and there were some who had no affiliations to any religious body. It is perhaps worth noting that Kathleen Syer, who ran the garden, the weaving, handicrafts and needlework and a dozen other jobs that she somehow found time for, although the daughter of a clergyman, was not a lover of the Church and did not attend one, but she went to the Community's Chapel where, for many years, she played the harmonium.
Phyllis Potter finally decided to leave the Community. She would be a great loss: she and Leila Rendel had worked continuously together for over twenty years: she had a flair, an imagination and a kind of 'panache' it would seem, in her directing of the Community's affairs. Her great dramatic ability bore fruit in the various plays she produced. They were generally based on the Biblical Old Testament stories, were beautifully produced and staged at the Rudolph Steiner Hall in London. They brought in a good deal of the much-needed money for the Community.
Although an autocrat who brooked no opposition, Phyllis Potter yet inspired both affection and loyalty in her staff who remained to serve under her. She left and went to live in Essex, where she was eventually put on to the Chelmsford Diocesan Board of Religious Drama and she produced many excellent plays for it.
Meanwhile, Leila Rendel went to the other extreme and joined the Society of Friends. She solved the future of the Community by saying that she would stay on to run it, and after offering a Directorship to one or two members of the staff, who declined it, almost immediately appointed a new Director, a woman in her early thirties who had been on the staff for a few years. Her name was Ethel Davies and her appointment was viewed with astonishment and concern by the rest of the adult Community. She was to work in total harmony with Leila Rendel for over forty years, until in fact, the day of the latter's death at the age of eighty-six.
Ethel Davies was born in Liverpool in 1897, the youngest of the two daughters of a well-to-do ship's chandler; there were three sons of the marriage. They were brought up in a fine old terraced eighteenth century house, one in a long street that runs down to the Mersey and the docks; once an elegant street, lived in by single prosperous families, but now like much of the Liverpool of that century, the houses are let out as single rooms and flats and are shabby and with an air of decay.
The house in Huskisson Street in the early nineteen hundreds was not a peaceful one though, and Ethel Davies had an unhappy and difficult childhood and girlhood there: her parents were living in a state of great disharmony and were literally not on speaking terms.
After leaving school in Birkenhead, Ethel Davies took a Domestic Science Training. Towards the end of the war in 1918, she joined the Ambulance Brigade as a driver, the only time in her life when she drove a vehicle of any sort. She remained in England, probably in Liverpool, for this period.
After the war, she eventually met up with another young woman, Betty Hillyer, a doctor's daughter from Somerset who had also a Domestic Science Training at Gloucester. These two young women took a job together in a family which had seven children. Betty Hillyer cooked and Ethel Davies looked after the house and acted as a kind of'parlour-maid'; it is more than probable that she had a good deal to do with the numerous children. Every evening she and Betty Hillyer changed into some form of evening dress and dined with the family, the former having laid the table and put the food on it and the latter having cooked it.
At the end of nine months there Ethel had to return to Liverpool to look after her mother who was ill. At the end of another nine months she saw an advertisement: it read - "Wanted, someone who enjoys working hard for little money". She answered the advertisement, was accepted and joined the staff of the Caldecott Community at Goff's Oak, in Hertfordshire.
After she had been at the Community for four months she wrote and asked Better Hillyer if she would join her at the Community, which she did at an annual salary of £40.
For the first few months they shared a room, a double bed and a candle, in a lodge at the bottom of a drive to the house.
They worked together in the pantry and dining-room; the latter was used every morning after breakfast for 'gym' classes and all the trestle tables, off which the Community had its meals, had to be taken down, stacked at the sides of the room and, as Betty Hillyer writes, - “rushed up again at the end of the morning in time for the mid-day meal”.
Like the rest of the Community staff they had one half-day off a week, which started at twelve o'clock when, as Betty Hillyer says, "We rushed to the station on bicyles to get the train to London."
"After six months," continues Betty Hillyer “Miss Potter sent for me and said, "Miss Davies tells me you can cook; Miss Lucy [the present cook] is leaving tomorrow and I want you to take over the kitchen and the cooking tomorrow morning." I didn't sleep a wink that night but managed to keep working in the Community for forty-two years.
Ethel Davies, meanwhile, was moved from the pantry work to become the girls' matron. She then became the new Director. Shy, diffident and very unsure of herself, and she must have looked upon this appointment with as much concern as the rest of the Community.
But even more anxious times were ahead of the worried adults. As each term passed it was clear that the Community needed more room: the numbers were increasing, the younger children were growing into adolescence and needed schooling that the Community could not provide. The question was, could schools outside take them in and the answer seems to have been that there were no suitable schools in the Goff's Oak area. There had also been an outbreak of Diphtheria and Scarlet-fever, for which the defective drains of the house were blamed. It was clear they would have to move house again; where was the money to come from for this and above all, where were they to go: many a heart must have sunk at the prospect.
But Leila Rendel was accustomed to hazards of every variety; she had never been defeated and she was not defeated now. Off she went again on the third search for a house and this time it was obvious that it must be a really large one.
The Mote, a very large mansion a few miles from Maidstone was found and leased from its owner, Lord Bearsted.
It is probable that Leila Rendel liked the idea of such a position, as the schools in Maidstone were good and the Director of Education at the time was sympathetic towards her ideas and he and his Committee were prepared to take children from the Community into their schools.
So, in 1932, adults, children, farm-stock, furniture and all the goods and chattels, left Goff's Oak and went to The Mote.
So thirty years of the Community's life passed. For the next thirty-five years I was myself on the staff there and in the following chapters I propose to give some account of those years, as seen from the 'inside': an account that is not fictional in any way, although necessarily coloured by my outlook and temperament.
[Gerald Moran points out that 1932 marked 21 years of the Community's life, and that joining the staff in February 1936, and retiring in December 1968, Elizabeth Lloyd will have spent almost 33 rather than 35 years as a member of staff]