1. Diana Howarth and the Nursery
Miss Diana had charge of the Nursery for almost more years than anyone could count. The Nursery was reached through a blue door in the corner of the schoolyard diametrically opposite the Music Room. Immediately on the left was the classroom, which I came to know well since it contained a worn-out piano, available for practice after school hours. In front of the door was a flight of stairs leading to the living quarters. I went up there so rarely that I have no memory of what it was like. I was eight when I joined the Community so I went straight into the next group, the Junior Study.
Technically, I believe Miss Diana was in charge of the Nursery schoolroom while a genuine nurse – some of them wore a nurse’s uniform – did the caring part. In reality, I think Miss Diana ruled the whole roost, but the inner workings of the Nursery will have to be told by someone who was there. All the same, in my first term or so, Miss Diana was the scourge of my existence during the morning break between lessons.
How this came about requires a little explanation. Before I came to Caldecott I had the habit of shutting myself into my room at home and bouncing energetically up and down. This set my imagination going and in fact my mother referred to it as my “imagining”. My sister remembers my mother telling her never to disturb me while I was “imagining”. Transferral to a residential school where we were all constantly visible to each other was not conducive to “imagining”. The only places where complete privacy could be momentarily enjoyed, the lavatory cubicles, were hardly big enough for a decent bounce. So, how about a nice secluded spot among the trees during the morning break?
After you had gone through the arch leading in and out of the schoolyard, there was a path sharp left to the potting shed and the kitchen garden. It was strictly out of bounds. The drive to the main house was out of bounds during school hours. A further drive led right towards a gateway (gateless) that took you to the official school playground. The playground was quite large, but rather open for “imagining”, though a large tree in front of the stables was permitted territory. As you went along this drive, you had the West Wing playground on the left, forbidden to all but West Wingers and, on the right, a tempting piece of garden attached to the “Bothy”, which were staff quarters. It seemed an ideal spot for “imagining”, but was very strictly out of bounds. We were not even supposed to linger on the drive, only to use it as a path from the arch to the playground.
Miss Diana was not alone in ordering me off, but other teachers had kindlier tones and seemed to pass only casually. Miss Diana, once she had discovered that I liked to linger there, made it her life’s mission to stop me. I would have barely set foot on that little patch of grass when her deep, bluff, authoritarian voice, aided with ferocious barking from her dog Gwynne, could be heard ordering me off even before she hove into sight. One morning, however, the coast seemed miraculously clear. For several full minutes, I gave energetic vent to my pent up imagination. Suddenly, it occurred to me that things were too quiet to be good. I looked towards the Bothy and there was Miss Diana, standing against the wall and watching the performance with open-mouthed astonishment. I nearly died of embarrassment. After that, it had to be the tree near the stables. I fondly supposed that my contemporaries were unaware of my “imagining”, but I dare say most of them knew and found it highly amusing.
Gwynne was an essential part of the Miss Diana performance. I was never a dog lover, but even those who were drew a line at Gwynne. She looked like a sheep dog but she behaved like a Rottweiler. Legend had it that Miss Diana beat her regularly with a stick as a sort of bad temper training but I never actually saw this and it hardly seemed necessary. Gwynne would bark furiously at anyone and anything, including passing cars, whose tyres she tried to bite. Her one saving grace was that Miss Diana had trained her – perhaps this is where the stick came in – so that if you shouted “SIT”, she would put her tail between her legs and, with growling ill grace, obey. Not that Miss Diana often gave such a command. Once, I was trying to get out of the Nursery classroom after my practice, while a snarling Gwynne out in the corridor tried to keep me penned up inside. Miss Diana just watched gloatingly, telling me to “take courage in both hands”.
One umpteenth evening after I went to practise in the Nursery schoolroom and just about got past Gwynne with repeated shouts of “SIT”, a spirit of contradiction took hold of me. I determined to get through to this creature so, having commanded her into a sitting position, I started to pat and stroke her. After a while she put her head against my knee and asked for more. Peace was made. The downside was that in future, when I went to do my practice, she did not bark, but she often put her head on my lap while I was playing and whimpered till I stopped to pat her. I suppose she never knew till then that humans can be kind. After Gwynne died, Miss Diana got a very small, fluffy dog, but I have no real memories of it.
Even Miss Diana herself could occasionally act out of character. I have heard quite recently how she once took a little girl on her knee and cuddled her when she badly needed moral support. A one-off, maybe, but it happened. Most people agree that she mellowed a little with the years. Perhaps we can date the change to around 1967, when Miss Travers retired. Miss Diana was an expert rider, but the stables, riding lessons and the gymkhana had always been firmly run by the equally expert Miss Travers. Miss Diana took over after Miss Travers left. Perhaps the opportunity to organize something she loved allowed her to relax her iron grip on the children.
Another softening influence may have been music. It cannot be said that she ever achieved much on the cello and the beginnings were not auspicious. Betty Rayment had her play something at a Musical Evening early on and one of my contemporaries, Cuthbert Claude, remarked that “it did a world of good to her hard image to see her making a complete hash of something in public”. Unkind but I could not disagree. Yet she persevered and often joined the various groups that went to hear concerts, alternating with Effie Devenish as chauffeur. There had been music in her family – perhaps some memory spurred her on. There was a row of scores on the shelf below the window in the Music Room, behind the piano, all signed W. G. Howarth, one of her forebears. The scores, lent permanently by Miss Diana, were mostly German Lieder.
Returning from one of these concerts, Betty Rayment and maybe Muriel Morris had been deposited at Holly Cottage so I was alone with Miss Diana for the short drive to the Hatch. I do not remember anything we said, but afterwards it seemed to me strange that I had been chatting person-to-person with someone who normally just imparted orders. The really funny thing is that the day after, she said to Betty, “I don’t know what came over Christopher yesterday evening. He seemed almost human”. So it was my fault all along!
Though I personally made peace with Miss Diana in my later years at Caldecott, there are younger Caldecott contemporaries of mine who remember the Nursery as a place of arbitrary punishments such as forced mouthwashes and where they lived in constant fear. At the time of her death, in 2010, some who had been in the Nursery a decade or more before my time recalled her with affection, feeling she had been strict but just. One of those who offered an obituary tribute was Miss Dave’s adopted daughter, Anne Coningham-Naylor. Funerals tend to be times when euphemisms and eulogies become one and the same. In her memories, available on this site, “Miss Anne” (as I remember her), painted a picture in line with that of my younger contemporaries:
The first few years of my life in the Nursery at Mersham le Hatch were ruled by cocoa with skin on it, and struggling with cold chewy meat mixed with salty tears, and hair washing night, and being scared of being caught talking in the dormitory after lights out and having the mouth washed out with soap if heard being rude; but there were quiet moments before bed-time when we were read aloud to, sitting on the floor in our pyjamas and dressing gowns in front of a crackling fire that was nice.
Miss Diana’s presence and methods in a school that had its origins in the Montessori system may seem a puzzle. It is true that Miss Leila and Miss Potter soon abandoned the Montessori theories as unworkable, but documentary evidence points to a more benevolent approach than the one described by Miss Anne and others. Miss Diana’s presence is easily and not very creditably explained: she was a younger cousin of Miss Leila and of Baroness Stocks. As for her methods, we can only suspect that her birthright entitled her to a certain freedom of action that might not have been granted to others.
A check on Miss Diana might have been the nurses that were supposed to do the actual caring. Maybe they shared her mid-Victorian mindset. I have no memories of any of them, though I do know that one of them left to marry Graham Thomas, whom I remember well as a French teacher at Ashford Grammar School and a former athlete.