Contents
Author’s Note
1. The Telegram
2. The News
3. Sunday
4. The Party
5. The Boys
6. Goodbye
7. Arrival
8. Grand-Nanny
9. The New Vicarage
10. Miss French
11. Settling Down
12. Summer Holiday
13. Christmas
14. Broken Resolutions
15. A School Report
16. Another August
17. Autumn Term
18. Influenza
19. Confirmation Day
20. The Punt Summer
21. Isobel Comes Out
22. Vicky Grows Up
Read On
NOEL STREATFEILD was born in Sussex in 1895 and was one of three sisters. After working in munitions factories and canteens for the armed forces when the First World War broke out, Noel followed her dream of being on stage and went to RADA where she became a professional actress.
She began writing children’s books in 1931 and Ballet Shoes was published in 1936. She quickly became one of the most popular authors of her day. When she visited Puffin exhibitions, there were queues right out of the building and all the way down the street. She was one of the first winners of the Carnegie Medal and was awarded an OBE in 1983.
Noel Streatfeild died in 1986.
Books by Noel Streatfeild
BALLET SHOES
CIRCUS SHOES
TENNIS SHOES
THEATRE SHOES
A VICARAGE FAMILY
Author’s Note
An autobiographer is one who writes his own history. This – as far as my growing-up years are concerned – I have, to the best of my knowledge, done. For I am the Vicky of this book.
But how does the autobiographer handle a brother and sisters? How they looked, how they appeared to me as person – yes. But were they like that inside?
It is because of my awareness that my portraits of the rest of my family are probably faulty that I have used no real names. The thin shield of anonymity helped me to feel unselfconscious in drawing them, and in approaching the facts of my own life.
The various vicarages in which we lived were our world; outside them I believe we were never completely ourselves. For this reason I have made my cousin – here called John – a permanent member of the vicarage household. In actual fact he stayed with us during many holidays. Apart from allowing myself this deviation from fact, here is the truth as I remember it.
1
The Telegram
The children had known for days that something was going to happen. There were conferences in low voices behind the study door. The servants talked and then broke off abruptly when one of the children passed by. Miss Herbert, the governess, closed her lips more tightly than usual while her eyes, behind her gold pince-nez, said as clearly as if they had spoken: ‘Wouldn’t you like to know what I know.’
It was a Saturday morning towards the end of the spring term. The boys were still away: Dick, the youngest of the family who was eight, was in his second term at his preparatory school; John, the cousin who lived with them in the holidays because his parents were in India, was at Winchester where he had been for two years, for John was fourteen.
Bundled in overcoats, for the spring was late that year, the three girls were ordered by Miss Herbert into the garden, or into what at St Peter’s Vicarage passed for a garden. It was a strip of lawn not big enough for a tennis court, walled in on the one side by the Parish Hall, along the length of which lay a narrow flower bed. At the far end of the lawn on the top of a bank there was a privet hedge, beyond which, across a path, lay St Peter’s church. This end of the garden belonged to the children for it was divided from the lawn by a wooden trellis, behind which in a row lay their gardens. When as mere babies they had first come to live in the vicarage the children’s voices as they gardened had made passing parishioners think of the twittering of sparrows, but now they were older and had learnt it was ill-manners to raise your voice.
Isobel, crouched over her garden, looked despondently at a daffodil, still only leaves with no sign of a bud in spite of care which had included covering the shoot with sawdust during a hard frost.
‘I wish I’d bought snowdrops and crocuses like I did last year. I like to see the beginnings of spring early.’
Louise, who had been raking a corner of her bed, looked up. Her voice took a pathetic note.
‘If I had all the pocket money you get now you are thirteen I’d have every sort of bulb and every sort of plant. I’d have so many there wouldn’t be a space between the plants.’
At thirteen Isobel’s pocket money had been raised from threepence a week to sixpence. She was a pretty girl with fair hair and clear blue eyes, but she looked, and was, pitifully frail, for Isobel was an asthmatic. Her words had a habit of falling over each other for she could not take as deep breaths as other people and so had to try to say more between breaths.
‘I know sixpence does seem an awful lot but I have other things to buy with it.’
Victoria, the middle girl who was twelve, had not been attending to her garden. With her arms folded she had been scowling up at the church spire. She was the plain one of the family. Instead of Isobel’s fairness she had hair of a colour which she herself described as mid-mouse.
‘I may as well admit to mid-mouse,’ she would say to her friends, ‘because anyone can see it’s true, and you can’t be vain with Isobel on one side of you and Louise on the other.’
This was true, for Victoria was called by those who only knew the girls by sight ‘the plain one’. Actually Victoria and her contemporaries at school could not see why grown-ups raved about Louise’s looks, for in that family of fair or near fair hair and blue eyes – for Dick was as fair as Isobel – Louise might have been a changeling. The reason was that she was the only one to take after her mother’s family. There was some Huguenot blood there and it had left a heritage of faintly bronzed skin, brown hair and grey eyes. Schoolgirls might believe that true prettiness must have a pink and white complexion, fair hair, preferably curly, and blue eyes, but adults looked and looked again at ten-year-old Louise with her straight brown fringe beneath which was a face of startling perfection. Though Louise might to outsiders look like an angel and even appear one to her parents, her sisters had a totally different angle on her. Victoria took her eyes away from the spire.
‘Don’t listen to her, Isobel, you know she’s going to try and make you buy her a plant.’ Then, turning to Louise: ‘And shut up about that sixpence, Louise, you’ve gone on and on about it ever since Isobel had it, just as if you didn’t know that almost all of it goes on extra paints and drawing pencils. So if you want extra seeds or something go looking all sugar and spice at the man in the plant shop. He’ll give you something extra. He always does.’
Isobel was an artist. She had drawn and painted before she could write the alphabet. With her gift went the artist’s temperament; she was a gentle creature but remorseless where her talent was concerned. Now she looked with amusement at Victoria, always the fighter and the rebel.
‘You needn’t bother, Vicky, you know perfectly well I wouldn’t give anything away if I needed a new rose madder or something like that.’ She looked down at her garden. ‘I’m not really keen on gardening. If it wasn’t supposed to be good for me I’d give it up.’
Victoria had brought a rake out with her, now she turned it stem downwards and leant on the prongs.
‘I don’t see how any of us can be keen on anything with all this whisper-whisper hanging over us.’
Louise narrowed h
er eyes, glad to have a chance to bite back at Victoria.
‘If I was Miss Victoria Strangeway I wouldn’t wonder why there was all this whispering. I’d know.’
There was a second’s silence during which colour flooded Victoria’s face while her hands tightened on the rake. She was within a pounce of throwing Louise face downwards on her garden and rubbing her face in the earth.
‘Don’t, Vicky,’ said Isobel guessing her intention. ‘You know she’ll tell Daddy and Mummy and then you’ll be in another row.’
‘Little tell-tale tit,’ Victoria muttered.
Louise disliked it when her sisters ganged up against her. She looked pathetically at Isobel.
‘I’m only ten and I have to tell or I’d get hurt. I don’t tell in the holidays when Dick’s here because then we’re two.’
Isobel disregarded this.
‘I don’t believe whatever it is that is going on has anything to do with your not being able to go back to school next term, Vicky. I mean there are lots of other schools in the town but Daddy and Mummy aren’t looking at them.’
‘I expect you’re being sent to that boarding school for the daughters of poor clergy,’ said Louise. ‘I wish and wish Daddy would send you there, it would be much nicer in term time if there was only me and you here, Isobel.’
Victoria did not answer that. Not even her sisters must know how desperately she longed to be sent to the boarding school for the daughters of poor clergy.
A boarding school, away from the vicarage, and all the clacking parish tongues which said: ‘What a pity the dear vicar has such trouble with Victoria.’ A boarding school where she went alone, without a family, free to be just herself. The boarding school had only been mentioned after that dreadful talk in the study. Victoria loved her father so much that sometimes it almost hurt. It had been shattering when the letter had arrived from Miss Dean and her father had said: ‘I want to see you in my study after tea, Vicky.’ The children seldom went into the study for either their father was working or there was someone to see him, so at all times to be called to the study was an occasion. The room seemed dark for there were heavy curtains and two walls were solid with books in dull bindings. The main pieces of furniture were a huge roll-topped desk and a swivel leather-seated chair. There was also an anthracite-burning stove.
In the early years of the century to be cold was expected. In fact the larger the home the colder it was, for those who had only the kitchen to sit in usually had a good fire. But devoted ladies who worked for the church could not bear to see their beloved vicar with his fingers white – for even in those days his circulation was poor – so they collected the money and bought and presented the stove. In the corner of the study was a prie-dieu with above it a crucifix and a reproduction of Dürer’s praying hands. It took many hours of prayer at the prie-dieu before the stove was accepted, for in some way the children’s father believed being cold and godliness were intermixed; with what horror had he found a hot water bottle one bitter night in Victoria’s bed – Victoria, the healthy one amongst his daughters – so he had removed the bottle as if he were wresting it from the devil. Finally the stove was accepted and kept alight all the winter through and into the spring, for the givers were always popping in and out.
But did the vicar enjoy the warmth? Only he and God knew the answer. Victoria told John, to whom she told everything, that she believed Daddy was glad when his fingers went dead while he was writing a sermon – ‘I think he feels he is giving more.’
Those walls of the study which had no bookshelves were covered in photographs. No man or boy who had ever worked closely with the vicar – either in his first parish as curate, his second a tiny country village where he was vicar, or now at St Peter’s, St Leonard’s-on-Sea, could let an occasion pass without being photographed and sending a copy to the vicar. Bell-ringers ringing bells; choir boys in surplices; men’s societies on outings. There was no end to them and not one was thrown away. The women church workers were only photographed when they were in their graves. There were dozens of photographs of graves, usually at the stage when they were piled with wreaths.
That horrible day over a month ago now when Victoria had been ordered into the study, she had walked in outwardly brave-looking, quietly shut the door and crossed the room to stand by her father’s desk chair. He had swung the chair round so that he faced her. His voice was grave and sad.
‘I have had a letter from Miss Dean, Vicky. She says she will not have you back at Elmhurst next term.’
Victoria was so surprised that for a moment the room seemed to spin round. She steadied herself by putting a hand on her father’s arm. She knew she had been found out – she had already had a shattering interview with Miss Dean. All day she had wondered what Miss Dean had written to her father but this was beyond her wildest imaginings.
‘Expelled!’
Her father paused for a moment. He had spent a long time at his prie-dieu asking for guidance in handling this talk with Victoria – was he meant to let her accept that word expelled?
‘No, not expelled – though it comes to the same thing. Miss Dean says that you will do better at another school. Oh, Vicky, what have you done? Miss Dean said in her letter she would leave you to tell me yourself.’
Now, with her father’s sad blue eyes fixed on hers, Victoria could see her crime as he would see it in all its blackness. Since her twelfth birthday, phrases new when applied to her had been cropping up. They had cropped up before for Isobel, but for Isobel they had not meant much. For Isobel was good; hard-working when she was well enough to go to school, and bearing patiently her bouts of asthma, quietly painting and drawing as soon as she had the breath to do anything. So what did phrases like ‘Having a sense of responsibility’ and ‘You are too old to do such a silly thing’ mean to her, for about her own things Isobel had a sense of responsibility and she never was silly. But oh, how far was this true of Victoria. Yet at the time what she had done had seemed a good idea, a just repayment for injustice. How could she make her father understand? That horrible, unjust Miss Dean did not matter – but hurting her father did.
‘It really goes back to my magazine.’
For six wildly happy months Victoria had gloried in being the editor of a magazine. While the magazine had lasted she had been, as her mother remarked to Miss Herbert, ‘a different child’. The truth was that Victoria had found in the magazine an outlet for almost all that repressed her.
It was supposedly a form magazine, each child being allowed to provide contributions, but in actual fact the lion’s share of the contributions came from Victoria. She wrote a chapter of a serial for each instalment. In these the heroine led the sort of life and had the type of adventure which she in her humdrum vicarage could never have. She wrote thinly disguised, though quite harmless, snippets of school gossip. She wrote poetry occasionally of outstanding charm and she invented competitions. For these, prizes such as sugar mice or pigs were provided by her parents and the parents of some of the other members of her form. Each child paid a reading fee of one penny which covered the exercise books in which the magazine was written, also for their penny they took the magazine home for two days. There were two rules. The magazine must be returned at the end of the two days or there was a fine of sixpence, and under no circumstances must the magazine be shown to anyone in the school outside the form.
Then one day a child developed influenza just when her two days were up, and, in spite of a high temperature, struggled to get to school to return the magazine. She was only calmed when her mother promised to go to Victoria in her place. As far as a blinding headache and a temperature of 103° allowed, the child did give the right instructions, but the bit about not allowing the magazine to be seen by anyone outside the form was muddled or omitted. As a result, the mother, running in to Miss Dean, gave her the magazine to give to Victoria.
The children’s parents afterwards had often discussed what exactly Miss Dean had seen in that harmless children’s effort
to anger her to such an extent that she had torn the magazine into fragments and then, according to Victoria, stamped on them. The truth was, that though they knew Miss Dean was getting old and crochety, neither parent had any idea what the Miss Dean Victoria knew was like. She was a product of the last century. A girl of spirit who had insisted – against bitter disapproval from her family, who believed that a young woman’s place until she married was beside her mother – that she should be properly educated for a teaching career.
But that was in the last century and now, in this new century, especially since Queen Victoria died, it had become increasingly obvious to Miss Dean that her day was over. She was no longer the pioneer slashing her way through a jungle of prejudices. She was an out of date headmistress whom many thought should retire. Her disillusionment showed itself in bouts of violent temper when she could, and frequently did, appear temporarily out of her mind. And it was girls such as Victoria who sparked off her temper, those who did not conform, who thought for themselves, who would not attempt even on the surface to be true Elmhurst types, girls in fact who must have reminded her of herself when she was growing up. Victoria did not understand or attempt to understand Miss Dean, she just loathed her. But how could she make her father see her Miss Dean, when the one he met was all sugar and spice who talked piously about morning prayers, and how well the girls were doing in Scripture?
Her father still had his eyes fixed on hers.
‘But, Vicky, Miss Dean forbade you to write that magazine last term, so what has it to do with this trouble now?’
Victoria dropped her eyes to the carpet. She must tell it – the truth, in which she believed but in which her father not only did not believe but thought wrong – perhaps even thought of as a sin.
‘She had no right to tear up my magazine, it wasn’t doing her any harm, and it wasn’t true I did it instead of lessons, every word was written at home in play time. It was beastly mean of her so I had to get back on her. I know all you say about turning the other cheek but when a person’s as mean as that you can’t – you simply can’t.’