17. Roma Easton
Miss E was a perfect illustration of this last point. If written job descriptions existed, I suppose she was in charge of the sickrooms and the children’s health generally. In reality, she was everywhere. You could meet her in the West Wing carrying a basket of sheets, then cross the house to the East Wing and find her climbing the stairs with pile of clothes. At the time I came, she was known to have been there longer than any other member of staff, slightly longer even than Miss Dave. Only Miss Roe went back further.
The other remarkable people I have mentioned were remarkable in an energetic, firm-voiced sort of way. Miss E had a quiet voice that she very rarely raised. This should have been a disadvantage with a rabble of unruly children, but she could often get through where others failed. Her rebukes were withering in their restraint. “You’re too stupid for words” was harsh from her and left you ashamed for that very reason. On one occasion – this was told me by Miss Travers – a particularly hysterical girl was in the sick room and, together with Miss E, sat at the window watching another particularly hysterical girl having a fit on the front lawn. With Miss E giggling beside her, particularly hysterical girl number one was forced to see how ridiculously funny it sounded. At the end of the performance, she turned to Miss E, horror-struck. “Miss E, do I sound like that when I have a temper?” “Oh, but you’re far worse”, exclaimed Miss E. Particularly hysterical girl number one reined herself in forever after.
Miss E’s own room was with the sick rooms on the top floor of the East Wing, overlooking what was later the Kings’ flat and also accessible by an iron fire escape. She slept with the French window open in all weathers – if it snowed, she simply brushed it out in the morning. Since she eventually lived to the age of 103, this sounds like a good system, if you can find enough snow in these days of climate change. She was also a vegetarian. Never ill herself, she recognized sickness in others if it could be concretely proved by the thermometer or a substantial amount of vomit, but tended to disregard mere sensations. After my first bout of flu in the sickroom, my temperature was back to normal but I confessed to Miss E for several mornings after that I still felt “a bit funny”. “Well, you’re to stop feeling a bit funny”, she said. I was soon back downstairs. A junior study boy was repeatedly sick. “He’s to stop being sick”, she ordered. And he did. Colds were not illnesses at all and a boy up in the sickroom coughing his guts out after a bad combination of flu and cold would hear her voice outside the corridor telling him to “stop that silly coughing”.
Personally, I never had anything worse than flu during my Caldecott years. Elsewhere on this site, some have remarked that Miss E was not a trained nurse and there were times when pathologies too serious for aspirins and scolding went undetected for days. I do not remember any instance, but there are doubtless times when only a doctor will do, though a trained nurse would be a start. There was a doctor’s surgery in Ashford where we were taken if necessary. Later, a doctor visited the Caldecott sickrooms once a week. I am not sure if this began in Miss E’s time. There were two doctors. Miss Dave swore by Dr. Cullinan, who had a big house just beyond the roundabout as you entered Ashford from the east side. Miss E’s successor, Mrs. Warrington, complained that Dr. Cullinan “was always in a hurry” and preferred Dr. Montgomery, who was older and greyer and padded from bed to bed reciting the Latin names of our ailments.
Miss E, as I have said, was everywhere and her influence extended, I discovered to my cost, to slippers and toothbrushes.
The slipper incident actually took place at home. Just back for the holidays, I put on my Caldecott slippers and read a bedtime story to my sister – I must have been about twelve, she would have been about six. The slipper had a thin sole of soft rubbery plastic attached to a thicker layer of something like foam rubber. Abstractly fingering the sole, I found it began to peel off. Somehow, the pleasure of imparting “The Wind in the Willows” (or whatever) went hand in hand with that of pulling my slipper to pieces, yielding a sense of satisfaction similar to that of tearing off a scab, but without the attendant pain. I thought my sister was exceptionally absorbed by my reading, but she remembers the incident too and assures me she did not hear a word, but simply watched with baffled fascination as my slipper disintegrated before her eyes. For the rest of the holiday I must have shed bits of foam rubber as I walked around the house. The evening after my return to Caldecott, Miss Travers, under whose care I now was, handed me a new pair of slippers with the stiff admonition, “Miss E wasn’t at all impressed. She says that, if you destroy these like the last pair, you’ll pay for the next”.
The toothbrush was more of an accident. Caldecott toothbrushes were made of the flimsiest plastic and we were expected to clean our teeth with cold water. I vaguely supposed this was some sort of sadistic disciplinary thing, like runs and showers, but the reason became evident when I plunged my toothbrush under the hot water tap one particularly cold evening. The heat caused the plastic to partially melt and the bristles started to come out in my mouth. I saw no alternative but to own up to Miss Travers, who coldly sent me to Miss E to ask for a new toothbrush. “I haven’t got a toothbrush”, snapped Miss E. I don’t know how I managed that evening. The next day, I was issued with a replacement and Miss Travers, never one to invent a new phrase when an old one was ripe for repetition, told me once again that “Miss E wasn’t at all impressed. She says you should know how hot the water is. If it happens again, you’ll pay for the next one”. To this day, I clean my teeth with cold water.
Miss E had a great love of classical music – very classical. When I was on the mend from my termly flu, she would invite me into her room to enjoy her large record collection, which seemed to contain nothing more modern than Schubert. The LPs were expensive ones, carefully chosen with the help of the current EMG “Art of Record Buying”, an elitist annual catalogue containing only discs recommended by the EMG team of reviewers. I became an EMG fan myself and visited their shop in Soho Square several times. They folded up around 1980 but the name is still a legend among classical recording buffs.
Another of Miss E’s sidelines was her mastery of a highly ornate, antique-looking script. There was a notice board in the main entrance hall into which were inserted cards listing all children’s birthdays during the current month, written by Miss E in this beautiful hand. Usually the most generous of persons, she clammed right up if anyone suggested she might teach them this art. “You have to go to a special school”, she would reply. Once, in my junior school days, I found a book that illustrated a range of ancient scripts and, choosing uncial as the one that looked closest to Miss E’s, I laboriously, and doubtless amateurishly, covered a couple of pages with an attempt to reproduce this style. It got a public airing at some sort of school open day and one of the girls, Melissa Brown, went to Miss E saying excitedly, “Look what I’ve found!” Miss E looked at it with cold, grey eyes. “Uncial”, she murmured, then went on to look at something else.
Miss E was a particular friend of Miss Travers and they lived together after their retirement. Miss E left one term after Miss Travers – presumably a generous gesture to avoid pulling too many rugs from under Caldecott’s feet at once. In that last term she looked like a forlorn survivor in a Community that no longer resembled the one she had joined so many years before. Just before I was to play at the last Musical Evening before Miss E left, Miss Allinson whispered in my ear that Miss E “says she forgives you all your sins when you play”. I hope my performance was not distracted by thoughts of which particular sin Miss E was forgiving me at any particular moment.