Then I had a good idea. We took our dilemma on to the stage, and called it ‘ The Sorrows of a Stage-Manager’. I entered alone, hopefully, and then our three performers came on to the stage again and again, bringing the most absurd and ridiculous excuses from the absent ones. With every defection, I recklessly told the few who remained to double, treble, and quadruple their parts.
We made the most grotesque and impossible doubles. The bride ‘played opposite’ to herself as bridegroom: the victim was her own executioner, and cut off her own head: the subject of a robbery picked her own pocket. The actresses became contortionists, twisting themselves about to be in two places on the stage at one time. We enjoyed it immensely, and so did the audience, who had no idea that anything else had been contemplated. But it was not a tactful thing to do in face of those who should have been behind the scenes.
Fortunately, after this I was ill for some weeks, and before I was able to return to the world of St. Hugh’s, Miss Moberly told me with a lurking smile that she had heard of my lack of good college manners. I had talked to my seniors, lounging in a chair with my hands, clasped behind my head, and I had even been heard to whistle in one of the passages. This last crime showed great acuteness of hearing on somebody’s part, for my whistle has always been fainter than a grasshopper’s chirp. Miss Moberly said I must conform to the customs of the college.
In those days, the education of schoolgirls was mainly in the hands of people who believed in the segregation of spinsters. Many schoolmistresses had seldom spoken to a man unless he stood to her in the relation of father, pastor, or tutor. Born a spinster, she had found herself at school with other little spinsters, being taught by more spinsters a few years older than themselves. At those early women’s colleges, she met other spinsters from schools like her own. Having passed her university examinations, she hastened back to school to become a teacher in her turn. Her evenings were spent in the Common Room with her fellow-teachers, and her holidays with them, climbing the Alps. In the eyes of the young men of her class, she had always seemed too learned to be spoken to, so there could be for her no escape from this vicious circle. Not of course literally a vicious one, for this mode of life produced more vacuums than vices; and it might indeed be said that the vacuums of yesterday are filled with the vices of to-day.
The life lived by Women University Students was a great surprise to me, as my ideas of a women’s college were derived from Tennyson’s ‘Princess’. Here was no ‘Rosebud garden of girls’. Instead I found a lot of young women who seemed to look upon their Oxford years as merely the prelude to a troublesome examination, which would in its turn be the prelude to the life of a schoolmistress.
At St. Hugh’s I made acquaintance with what I called the Femme Servante, a genus produced where two or three are gathered together, and those two or three are girls. The Femme Servante is what her name suggests. When she takes a fancy to another girl (and it is her characteristic to do this very often), her happiness lies in becoming the slave of her friend. St. Hugh’s was a poor college with an inadequate staff of servants, and the students had to do a good deal of domestic work for themselves. It was, therefore, a great convenience to find amateurs who were willing to keep fires in, fill hot-water bottles, make toast, boil kettles, run errands, brush clothes, wash gloves, or darn vests. I soon possessed several of these invaluable little creatures, and as I generally saw them doing these very dull things, the impulse was, not primarily to feel gratitude, but to connect them in the mind with all those things which one most disliked doing for oneself.
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf remarks on the austerity of life in a women’s college compared with those inhabited by men. This was certainly exemplified at St. Hugh’s in my day. No one had two rooms, not even the Vice-Principal, and there were even one or two double rooms shared by two students. But the general rule was that everyone had a ‘Bed-Sitter’, the bed disguised as a sofa in the day, and often sat upon in the evening by half a dozen of the guests at one of the rather tepid ‘ Cocoas’ which took for us the place of the wines of our ‘fast’ brothers. Food in college was plain and boring—mostly very large cods, and legs of mutton, washed down by water. As the term went on, however, and faces grew pale and nerves jumpy, there appeared all down the table, bottles of Burgundy, each labelled with its owner’s name. These were meant to stimulate the waning vitality of these strenuous students, for they were one and all extremely strenuous. Their years at Oxford meant little beyond lectures, essays, and the
