CHAPTER VIII
END OF AN ERA
By 1968 three of the key members of staff had left, having reached retiring age or over. Miss Leila expressed annoyance as well as sadness at their departure. Perhaps she had a hope that her staff would stay on for ever. She found it difficult to realise or acknowledge that people might have other commitments than to the Community and that after thirty or forty years her staff might think they had been there long enough and that younger people should take their place.
Miss Leila perhaps made the mistake of staying on so long herself that in the natural course of events her staff did leave all round her and she felt a sense of desertion.
I never quite knew Miss Dave's views on the subject but she did say to me some months before she died that she wished so much that she had persuaded Miss Leila to retire at least fifteen years before she did.
In September of that year the Community held its reunion. These reunions were held every two years and to them came all and any old boys and girls with husbands, wives and children if they were there to come.
This was the last Reunion Miss Leila was to be at: it was probably the largest gathering of former members of the Community ever held: nearly three hundred and seventy with their children, being present.
These Reunions entailed a lot of work but I always found them most enjoyable and supremely interesting as it was fascinating to see who had married who and what their children were like.
By then I too had decided to leave the Community although I was two years from retiring age but I felt the time had come and that the girls should have someone younger to look after them.
Although the last few years had been anxious and unhappy in some ways I knew I should be unhappy too at leaving a place which I had liked and loved for over thirty years.
I was very sad as I said goodbye to Miss Leila at the end of term: I never saw her again as within three months she had died.
I have not wanted to make this account of life at the Community sound either too glowing or too gloomy; sometimes life there did glow, sometimes it did not. Anyone chancing to read this will no doubt at once wonder why some particular event or other was left out but what seems important to one person may not be to another and, despite copious journals that I kept, memory can be defective; each term was so packed and crammed with incident, one crisis hardly solved before another was on the horizon, that you felt you could almost hear the Red Queen rushing breathlessly by shouting "Faster! Faster!"
Although much in the Community changed in the thirty five years that I knew it the basic principles on which it was run remained the same. Jane Austen wrote of some young ladies in "Mansfield Park" that, "in everything but disposition, they were admirably taught." It was one of the Community's aims to teach this "disposition".
I personally found life at the Community a very liberal education in itself. No one there, that I knew anyway, ever worked for self-aggrandisement, it was always a safe place in which children could grow, and, perhaps, become happy. It was a very strong place, much of its strength and its vision deriving from the two people who ran it, Leila Rendel and Ethel Davies, the former never daunted by adverse circumstances, the latter, seldom.