This short volume is an intensely personal memoir of the experience of a young girl, tragically bereft of her father, and of a form of education now completely lost in the mists of time. Tracing the daily minutiae of school life over a period of eleven years, it expresses the obligation felt by the author toward the Royal Masonic School for Girls, which she attended by virtue of her deceased father’s membership of that society, from the mid 1930s to just after World War II. And from this innocent portrayal, emerges a revealing picture of the role in society of British women during this era.
It draws extensively upon the extant weekly letters required to be sent between boarders and their families, in Barbara’s case her mother. The letters, quoted at length, are full of remarkable details as to the conditions of daily living, most elements of which were prescribed by a world of “adults”, who knew what was best and demanded absolute compliance. The regimentation, as to dress and behaviour strike a more liberal age as overbearing and oppressive but is accepted with a child’s naivety as the norm.
The correspondence with her mother with whom she shares her constrained environment is full of seemingly trivial detail, “the daily, weekly, monthly routine was so ordered that anything however insignificant to an outsider, was an important event and had to be told,” but through it emerges over time the incredible devotion of a widow to her only child. A woman without any significant means, who stayed in London during the most arduous period of the Blitz and suffered times of unemployment and hardship, she never missed an arranged visit to the school in eleven years and always responded to Barbara’s requests for little items for her handicraft works. The full significance of this was inevitably lost on the child, but the reflective hindsight of the adult reveals a sense of gratitude and love that motivates the entire work.
As a work of social history, the mention of wash days, the flat irons, the mangles, the wooden props on the line, the range and the baking of cakes and pastries, of food obtained from the kitchen garden, the freedom of children to roam unsupervised far and wide, the liberty bodices and big knickers, Eton crops, cod-liver oil and malt, the dirt and fog of London, will resonate with anyone brought up in pre and post war Britain. The deprivation of the war years with its rationing encouraged a whole generation to “make-do”, Barbara even made her own summer sandals and the routine habits of economy have stayed with the author as they undoubtedly have with her peer group. The sense of physical discomfort, of wasting nothing, of patient endurance is very vivid, as is the young girl’s experience of the realities of war, the Anderson shelters, the gas masks, and hurrying to hear Churchill’s messages to the nation.
Barbara Kelland is immensely grateful to the philanthropy of the Masons, and this volume reveals an aspect of a Society that is seldom mentioned or lauded. She includes an interesting history of Freemasonry and a chapter on Chevalier Ruspini, founder of the school in the eighteenth century. It is refreshing to read accounts of Freemasons’ activities that do not concentrate on the secretive and conspiratorial!
This book would be a welcome addition to any library. It will appeal to all those who struggled through similar experiences but should be compulsory reading for members of the “me” generation as a picture of the realities of life in the mid twentieth century.
Jacqueline Sage, Librarian
