3. The School and the “House”

 

As my “O” Levels, and subsequently “A” Levels, drew nearer, more responsible councils prevailed at the Grammar School. As a “responsible boy”, I now got increasingly drawn into Betty’s quarrels with the “House”. Though Betty had originally been headhunted by Miss Leila, things did not always go smoothly between them. Betty had come to music the hard way. After an initial phase with a teacher who let her do more or less what she wanted, she went to a rigid disciplinarian, with the result that she was physically sick along the road to the lesson. Her mother called in the local quack, who had a simple solution (they usually do): “If music’s going to make her sick, she’ll have to stop it”. She had no intention of stopping, so she continued to throw up into the nearest hedge while keeping quiet about it when she got back home. A remarkable show of dedication, and she expected no less from her pupils.

This ran counter to fashionable ideas on childcare. Betty was brought up in an achievement-driven society. The whole system in the 1940s and 50s, with its 11-plus exams, its Grammar Schools and its reverential adulation of Oxbridge and letters after your name, demanded that children should achieve. By the 1960s, sociologists were getting worried about the effect of all this on children who did not achieve. The children who “failed” their 11-plus, “failed” to get to Grammar School and all the rest of it, were branded as failures for life. The trouble is that things went too far the other way. One child’s achievement might be another child’s failure. Better, therefore, not to push a child to achieve beyond the capacities of their slowest companion.

Miss Leila was a great believer in achievement. Meeting had a section dedicated to Community achievements. Degrees and diplomas earned by former children, Duke of Edinburgh Awards obtained by present ones, music exams passed and so on. But an achievement-based system is not quite the same as an achievement-driven one. Miss Leila believed that every child has an achievement within them. Achievement, for her, did not necessarily mean degrees and letters after your name. It meant anything that would bring out the child’s natural gifts and enable them to reach a fulfilled life, at school and in the world that came after. It was the sacred duty of her and her staff to find that child’s place in life and draw it out. The fact that she did not always succeed does not entirely disprove the theory.

Miss Leila had no great understanding of music, but she knew it could be a path to personal (not necessarily academic) achievement in a child and encouraged it. The question is, if a child shows an initial flush of enthusiasm for music, then loses it, do you conclude the child’s natural area of achievement is another, or do you go on pushing? Betty Rayment had no doubt. Once it was decided that a child was musically gifted, and once the child had shown initial interest, then the child must be encouraged, cajoled and even coerced into doing their daily practice. Her view was that, after the initial enthusiasm and the immediate discouragement on finding that learning music meant work, the naturally gifted child would pick up and rediscover their enthusiasm once they started to realize they were achieving something. This could not be done without the cooperation of the staff in charge of the various groups and Betty expected none less. They were handed out timetables for the lessons and practice sessions of the children under their care and implicitly required to ensure that the children complied with them.

The new influx of staff in those years had no doubt either, but in the opposite sense. It was a great period for letting children express themselves, alias letting them do what they liked. And not obliging them to do what they did not like. For Betty, this amounted to allowing bedlam to be let loose and then pretending that is what you were aiming for anyway. It was also a great period for qualifications. Back at the dawn of the 20th century when Miss Leila started Caldecott as a nursery, the idea of child psychology as a specific area of study was barely beginning. If you felt this was your vocation, you just did it. It is likely that, up until at least 1960, Miss Leila and her whole team could not produce between them a qualification that would entitle them, today, to go within a mile of a maladjusted child. Gradually, as the old guard retired during the 1960s, new staff entered who, on paper, knew it all, and believed they really did. But childcare had not yet become a profession closed to all that were not nominally trained to do it, and other staff were appointed whose presence could only be explained by the fact that the post was vacant and somebody had to fill it. Miss Leila still retained much of her instinct, but became increasingly mystical in her application of it and her downward slide was obvious.

Thus the battle lines were drawn, leading to almost daily warfare between the “school” and the “house”. For the “school”, Desmond Draper kept out of it, but Muriel Morris was a passionate supporter of Betty Rayment’s views and Effie Devenish was no less loyal, though her gentler, more motherly manner and lively sense of humour managed to get people’s backs up less. The “house” was divided between those who genuinely thought that children should not be pressurized and those who could not care less.

A striking example occurred at the end of the autumn term 1968. Betty Rayment had had a particularly bad attack of bronchitis and been compelled to go home to Nottingham to get over it. Miss Morris and Miss Devenish were both determined that the end of term concert, scheduled for 15 December, should go ahead. Between them, they could handle the choirs and the recorders, while they relied on me to rehearse the string players and the orchestra. For Miss Morris, especially, it was unbreakable that no child currently taking lessons would “give up” in Betty’s absence. If they wanted to give up, they would sort it out with Betty when she returned. And Jethro Starling wanted to give up. The upshot was that Miss Morris worked out a timetable for the string players to practice their pieces with my accompaniment. If one failed to turned up, I was to go to his classroom to get him. Jethro was in Mr. Draper’s class and the conversation went something like this:

CH: Please, Mr. Draper, could Jethro Starling come to practice his piece for the concert?

JS: I don’t want to.

Mr. D: Well, what’s he got to do?

CH: He’s got to practice the piece he’s playing at the concert.

JS: I don’t want to play the violin any more.

CH: Well, Miss Morris said …

Mr. D: All right Christopher, you’ve done your part. I’ll speak to Miss Morris.

I went back to the Music Room to await results. The results could be heard half way across the School Yard as Miss Morris pushed and pummelled Jethro over to the Music Room and ordered him to get his violin out and play it. Somehow, we rehearsed the piece and, as I remember, he played it quite nicely at the concert, but I doubt if he ever played the violin again. He was not, by the way, the “particularly gifted boy” whose loss to music rankled with Betty for years afterwards.

Leaving aside the concert we put on without Betty Rayment, I was dragged in on the “school” side more and more. I frequently I arrived in the Music Room after school, only to be instructed to get on Betty's famous blue and white bicycle and go to the West Wing or elsewhere with a carefully rehearsed message beginning with a timid smile and continuing, “Miss Rayment says …”, followed by details of the person who had not turned up for practice. The West Wing, after Miss Travers, passed through a number of unsuitable hands. These ranged from the charmingly incapable Peter Bishop* to the seditious Gerald Cooper**. Mr. Bishop thought that if you spoke to the little boys like a diplomat, they would reply like diplomats. If words were all, they responded to his treatment very nicely. What they did behind his back was another matter. Mr. Cooper was a highly intelligent man, but he needed a different context. He fancied himself as an original, and a rebel against received authority. He habitually referred to Mr. Marshall as “His Immensity” and to Miss Leila as “Grendel” – the half-formed monster from the swamp in “Beowulf”.

If I delivered my “Miss Rayment says …” message to Mr. Bishop, he would thank me kindly and say something on the lines of “If I see him I’ll tell him”. Whether he saw him and told him or not amounted to the same thing (the young man did not turn up for practice), so Betty’s next stop was Miss Leila. On one memorable occasion, when Mr. Cooper was having a particularly bad day, he did not even give me time to open my mouth. “No, I don’t know where he is and I don’t care and you can tell that old witch over there I said so”, he snapped. I did. “Mr. Cooper said all that, did he”, muttered Betty as she got onto her bike and headed off to Miss Leila.

I am not sure that Betty got all the satisfaction she hoped for from Miss Leila. Once she returned to the Music Room fresh from a session with Miss Leila and warned me that she might not last much longer. “Miss Leila is starting to say perhaps this is not the place for me, and when she starts saying that you have to go”. “Mr. X smiles and says ‘Yes, Miss Leila’. I say ‘No, Miss Leila’.” Then she got back on her bike and I suppose she patched things up.

Miss Leila’s fixed mission was to find that something in the child that would enable them to achieve the potential within them. If a boy needed all that pushing to make him practice the violin, was music really the key to unlock the best in him? Likewise Miss Dave. She once said to me, “Betty feels that, when a child is gifted and has started to learn music, he should be made to continue. I’m not sure that I agree.” At the end of a Musical Evening in the term when the victim of the ping-pong between Betty and Mr. Cooper had been allowed to abandon his violin-playing, Betty gave a fiery speech in which she expressed the need for dedication, the rewards it would bring and the need for proper support from all the staff, adding that “a particularly gifted boy has given up this term”. “Betty will always say her piece”, Miss Dave said to me later, with an amused smile. Why did Miss Dave make a point of saying these things to me? Perhaps she felt I was unduly influenced by Betty Rayment and I should at least be aware there were two sides to the argument.

By this time James King had been appointed Co-Director. Frankly, Betty Rayment regarded him with undisguised contempt. Years later, she told me that James King had been appointed as a sort of “insurance policy”. As Miss Leila got older and frailer, another Co-Director Director was needed so there would still be two if Miss Leila died or was forced to retire. Miss Leila herself wanted that Co-Director to be chosen while she was still in a position to influence the choice. James King was appointed as an interim solution because no one better could be found. This, I repeat, is how Betty saw it. Other accounts imply love at first sight between Miss Leila and Mr. King. After I left the Community, my information about it came exclusively from Betty until I joined the Caldecott Association many years later.

Another reason for this “insurance policy”, and again I am relaying what Betty Rayment told me without any guarantee she had it right, was to avoid a “putsch” by Michael Clover. When I arrived in Caldecott, Mr. Clover was very much in evidence and, with his wife Rosemary, ran a separate group at his own little mansion, “The Paddocks” (now Caldecott House), further down the road. He then left Caldecott, or perhaps I should say “left”, since he regularly turned up for this and that. Like Simon Rodway, who “left” shortly after I came, he was known to be active behind the scenes though no longer on the residential staff. He also opened a school of his own somewhere. At this point, James and Tessa King took over the running of “The Paddocks”. Mr. Clover’s ambition – again, I have only Betty Rayment’s word for this – was to take over the Caldecott Community from Miss Leila when the time came for her to retire. Miss Leila did not think him suitable. I am not sure why. He was very popular with the children, yet knew how to be firm at the same time. Perhaps it was the pushing that got her goat. Her Puritan-Quaker inclinations led her to distrust ambition. Somebody like Mr. Clover who was dead set on becoming the next Director lost Brownie points. Somebody genuinely modest like Mr. King who needed to be persuaded that he was capable of doing the job, gained in proportion. Mr. Clover therefore went off in a huff, took “The Paddocks” back for his own school and the Community bought Lacton Hall. As we know, Mr. Clover later returned to the Community fold. By the time it was necessary to leave Mersham le Hatch, “The Paddocks” was devolved to Caldecott and, as “Caldecott House”, stands at the centre of the Caldecott Foundation. Anyone who has an alternative narrative may well be right. I dare say Betty Rayment was not alone in her interpretation of the events.

Back to “insurance policy” James King. When Betty told me all this, I took it as Holy Writ, or at least as precious inside information. I have some doubts now. For one thing, memories available on the Association site show that Miss Leila’s appointment, all those years ago, of a very young Miss Dave after the departure of Miss Potter aroused similarly unflattering reactions. Few would deny that Miss Leila got that one right. For another, the sort of inspirational Director that Betty perhaps craved for did not fit into the contemporary world. Back in the early days, Miss Leila called the tune. By the 1970s, the tune was called by the local Councils that sent the children there and paid their fees. These had their own teams of childcare experts who laid down what was wanted, and sent children only to schools able to provide it. Amongst all this James King, perhaps the most unflappable man I have ever known, saw his task more as an umpire between the factions. For Betty, this was a weakness. In reality, he was probably the ideal person to guide Caldecott through the dissolution of the Community into a series of pseudo-family units with a high staff-pupil ratio, and hence its reinvention as a Foundation able to meet contemporary demands.

The remarkable thing is that, in spite of all this, after I left in 1971, Betty stayed on until 1987. I suppose she came to terms with James King to some extent. She wrote to me at one point that he “seems to have understood that he has to assert himself sometimes”. The very specialization that broke down the Community may have earned it peace in its last days under that name. Where once everybody knew a bit about everything and everybody and lent their hands to the pump where needed, now the teaching staff taught, the caring staff cared, the administrative staff administrated and, outside their job descriptions, minded their own business. But the history of Betty’s last sixteen years at Caldecott had better be told by somebody who witnessed them. I have seen testimonies showing that some children, musically inclined, found with her an oasis of peace that they failed to find in the “house”. So perhaps I am not alone in having an “alternative Caldecott” to relate.

 * Staff member 1969-1970 (information from Gerald Moran).

** Staff member 1969-1970 (information from Gerald Moran).