24. Leila Rendel
Having indicated a preference for Miss Dave as a person to turn to and an oasis of stability, I find myself in an embarrassing situation when it comes to writing about Miss Leila. All due acknowledgement must be given to the fact that she, with Miss Potter, created the Caldecott Community at a time when women were not expected to do anything and for years pioneered methods of caring for children from troubled homes, seeking to discover and bring out their real qualities and send them out ready for life. The story of these early years has been told by Miss Elizabeth. A certain amount of further material could be assembled from books and reports on educational systems in the first half of the 20th century. Many of these can be found in places such as the Internet Archive and include articles written by Miss Leila herself and Miss Potter. At some future stage I hope to assemble as much of this as possible. Other items, not digitalized as yet, call for a professional researcher. Much has probably been lost. Miss Dave once said to me, “There are so many things I wish now I had asked Leila when I could”.
However, this is not a historical study, it is the story of Caldecott as I knew it. By 1961, let alone 1971, all this was in the past. The Community had gained a period of stability and seemed set to remain where it was and as it was indefinitely. As we know, it later had to move again, and perhaps Mersham le Hatch would not have been suitable in any case for the small-unit structure of the Foundation that succeeded the Community. And Miss Leila was getting old.
It seems unchivalrous to start by describing her physical appearance but, I repeat, this is the story of my reactions. Since no one else is so wickedly unkind as me, I can find no reference to the time when, I suppose as the result of some accident, she became effectively a cripple. Up until the war years at the Mote, various memories, including those of Miss Elizabeth, imply normal mobility. When I think of Miss Leila, the first image that comes to mind is her massive figure labouring along with two sticks. Or negotiating the stairs, one step at a time, her second stick under her elbow while she grasped the bannisters with her free hand, releasing a little involuntary whistle as each step was gained. There was a singular obstinacy to this performance, which was repeated, up and down, for each of the three meals, taking up a considerable portion of her day. Simple logistics, let alone the good advice of the Fire Brigade, would have suggested that the first floor of the house was quite roomy enough for her operations. As I say, it seems unchivalrous to dwell on mere physical misfortune. But, just as I cannot equate this impressive but ruined frame with that of a former instructor of physical education, neither can I find in the fumbling, at times mystically incoherent person I knew, the guiding genius of the pre-war Caldecott Community I read about in the history books. She emanated an aura of greatness, of wisdom, and also of kindness. But the dividing line between infinite wisdom and pseudo-wisdom can seem a slender one. I had not long been in the Community when, at the end of dinner, she summoned me to what I thought of as the “royal” table. She sat looking downwards for a while, then spoke as though gleaning the words from afar, sifting them and laying her pearls before me.
“A little bird tells me …. you’re sometimes … sometimes a silly boy”. (About a hundred people at Caldecott could have told her that without troubling the birds). “Sometimes a devil gets into you … and you’ve got to get it out”.
All the more effective for its simplicity? My inner jury is still out. Likewise the old saw “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me”, which she sometimes had us repeat after her. As Orwell said, “Truisms are true”. Do they gain added weight when spoken to little children in awesome tones by a massive old lady? Maybe, though in the words of Tennyson, an author much more congenial to Miss Leila, “Common is the commonplace”.
My recollections of Miss Leila are spattered with things she did not get quite right and things that did not quite cohere. After the Aberfan disaster, she gave an address in Chapel which was basically powerful and moving, except that “slag” was evidently a new word to her and she described it throughout as “shag”. Once, when a group of us were in her sitting room for reading, she spoke to us impromptu and we were so far from grasping what she was saying that one of us ventured to ask, “Excuse me, Miss Leila, what are you talking about?” “The eternal quest”, she replied. In patriotic mode, she could be dated and embarrassing. All this probably sounds petty. I really did want to find and appreciate the genius that was supposedly in her, but if I saw it at all, it was in sporadic glimpses. There were, indeed, addresses in Chapel that impressed me, though I cannot remember them now.
Turning from the detail, certain grand lines were still evident. There was her belief in achievement, the achievement each individual child is capable of, not an abstract concept of what children should be able to do. I will return to this later. Outside the Community, she showed great admiration for men, and perhaps especially women, who had achieved great things. I recall her reading to us in Chapel, in several instalments, the story of Gladys Aylward. Later, I found that the book read was “The Small Woman” by Alan Burgess, also the basis for the film “The Inn of the Sixth Happiness”. This choice also shows Miss Leila as a woman of her time. Gladys Aylward’s efforts were indeed heroic, but they were founded on the idea, which Miss Leila apparently shared, that there could be no higher calling for an Englishman or Englishwoman than to go among foreign people who had religions of their own they were perfectly happy with, and ram Christianity down their throats.
This brings us to Miss Leila’s own religious faith, which was unshakable. The story has many times been told of how she drove everyone around her to distraction over the purchase of Lacton Hall. She insisted on going ahead when the money was not there, repeating over and again “God will provide”. On the very last day a donation arrived that exactly covered the sum.
Miss Leila, after breaking with Miss Potter over the latter’s desire that Caldecott should become fully Church of England, had maintained her non-denominational Chapel – of which more later – while turning personally to Quakerism. We knew she was a Quaker, but she did not particularly talk about it. I was struck to read, in a comment on the Caldecott Community Facebook, that she once (and maybe only once) said that, if she was anything, she might be a Christian Scientist.* I can offer some thoughts about this, since for over forty years I have been organist at, to give it its full name, the First Church of Christ Scientist, Milan (please, no confusion with Scientology, which I would not touch with a bargepole). I very much admire these people and, though I have not gone so far as to become one of them, I, too, might say that, if I am anything, I am a Christian Scientist. In truth, there is no intermediate stage between being one and not being one. Therefore, Miss Leila was not one. Perhaps she had heard something about Christian Science and found some of its ideas resonated with hers. Perhaps, too, the female activist in her admired the fact that it is one of the few Christian denominations (maybe the only one) founded by a woman, Mary Baker Eddy. She certainly shared some of their basic tenets. Written in large letters on one of the inside walls of the Milan Church is a quotation from Eddy’s book, “Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures”: “Divine Love always has met, and always will meet, every human need”. In other words, “God will provide”. In a sense, both Eddy and Miss Leila are simply repeating what it says in the Bible. The originality lies in taking it to mean literally, or scientifically, that nothing else has ever met, or will ever meet, every human need, or that nothing and no one else will provide. I have heard many testimonies from Christian Scientists, including some about buying houses, where they have trusted in God till the very last minute and been rewarded, just as Miss Leila was. But the faith must be total. Most of the people who were so exasperated at Miss Leila would have called themselves Christians and theoretically believed that “God will provide”. But they would have preferred Him to provide a month or two in advance, so they could stop worrying. Alternatively, they would have preferred to have another solution ready in case He forgot. Miss Leila arrived intuitively at something close to Christian Science but if she investigated further, she would have found things that, if she agreed with them, her general conduction of the Caldecott Chapel gave no sign of it, not least in this hymn that we often sang in Junior Chapel:
God has filled the mountains with metals hard and bright;
Man has learned to mine them and bring them to the light;
Man has made them into tools – great machines and cranes –
But who made man? Why God made man,
And God gave man his brains.
This very rare text was published in “Everyday Hymns for Little Children” by Lesbia Scott in 1929. No hymn-book at the very exhaustive hymnary.org website has it. We sung it to an altered version of the tune generally used for “Stand up, stand up for Jesus”. It offers a very different slant on the way in which God provides, closer to Miss Elizabeth’s “Why should God do for us what we can perfectly well do for ourselves?”
Genius has many facets, but one that rarely seems to be priced in is knowing when to stop. In my own field, it is not uncommon to hear octogenarian pianists struggling through pieces they formerly played with nonchalant ease, age-challenged sopranos screeching top notes they used to float so beautifully or elderly conductors propped in front of the orchestra to direct tired-sounding performances. Ah, their admirers will say, but age and wisdom have brought a new spiritual dimension to their music making. On good days and in selected passages and movements, if not entire concerts, this does indeed happen, so it is difficult to say definitely that they should stay at home. On the other hand, younger listeners who know them only in this late phase will find it difficult to realize just how good they once were. So I think it was with Miss Leila. It pains me to have written like this about her, but I have searched my memories, and this is what I have found.
* A Caldecott boy from slightly before my time has recalled, on the Caldecott Community FaceBook page, Miss Leila saying this once at the dinner table. I am not implying any formal adherence by Miss Leila to Christian Science, about which she possibly knew very little.