August 18, 2025 • 12 mins
In this enchanting memoir, the author takes us on a nostalgic journey through her school days, originally serialized in The Girls Own Paper from October 1896 to September 1897. Filled with heartfelt stories about beloved teachers, cherished friends, and the childhood fears that lingered into adulthood, this account also offers a vibrant depiction of the most memorable summer of her youth. Summary by Cori Samuel.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Part eleven of My School Days by Ensbit. The Slipper
Fox recording is in the public domain. Part eleven. The
happy memories of that golden time crowd thickly upon me.
I see again the dewy freshness as of an enchanted
world that greeted us when we stole down carrying our
(00:23):
shoes in our hands, long before the rest of the
household was astir. I smell the scents of dead leaves
and wood smoke, and it brings back to me the
bonfires on autumn evenings, when we used to play at
red Indians and sit round the fire telling stories, and
when that palled, dig out from the gray and red
ashes the potatoes we had put there to roast and
(00:46):
eat the half cooked, blackened, smoke flavored dainties with keenest appreciation.
The rare days when we went to Dinard and paddled
in the shallow waters of the bay between blue sky
and gold sand, and picking limpets from the rocks, and
wishing for wooden spades, which Dinard then at least did
not produce. A Part of the infinite charm of those
(01:11):
days lies in the fact that we were never bored,
and children abhored much more often and much more deeply
than their elders suppose. I remember an occasion when some
well meaning friends persuaded my mother that my education was
being neglected. I was sent to a select French school,
(01:32):
Mademoiselle fourchets in Devon, but owing to some misunderstanding, I
arrived five days before the other girls. Mademoiselle Fourchet kindly
consented to overlook the mistake and keep me till the
other girls arrived. I had a paint box, which pleased
me for the first day, but the boredom of the
other four days is branded on my memory in gray letters.
(01:57):
Mademoiselle Fourchet was busy in visiting her friends and receiving them.
She took me out for a serious walk every day.
We walked for an hour, and then Mademoiselle Fouchet returned
to her visiting and I to the bear school room.
I had bought few books with me, and these I
devoured in an hour or two. There were no books
(02:19):
in the school room, but lesson books thumbed, dog's eared,
and ink stained. There was no one to talk to,
save the severe cook, who was kind to me in
her way but didn't understand children. There was a gray
walled garden full of fruit that I must not touch,
and a locked bookcase in Mademoiselle Fourchet's salon full of
(02:40):
books that I must not read. I was not conscious
of being unhappy, only bored, bored to extinction. On the
fourth day I persuaded Mademoiselle Fourchet to vary our prim
walk round the town. She asked me where I would
like to go, and I said Lafontaine. Mademoiselle Fourchet meant
(03:02):
to be kind according to her lights, but she was
the ideal schoolmistress, gray haired, prim, bloodless. However, she conceded
this to me, and I was grateful. We started for Lafontaine.
La Fontaine is one of the show places of Divan,
as it has a natural fountain of mineral water. There
(03:24):
is a casino where balls and fates and merrymakings are held,
where bands play, and little colored lamps glimmer in the trees.
All this awakened no associations, stirred nothing in me, for
I had never been to a fete at Lafontaine. But
below the platform on which the casino was built ran
a stream, our stream, our nile, on its way to
(03:48):
join the river. The sight of it was too much
for me. I remembered our happy exploring parties, the muddy
dams we had built across it. I thought the rabbits,
and the garden at home, and my brothers and my mother,
And in the midst of one of Mademoiselle's platitudes on
the beauty of the scene, I began to run. Mademoiselle
(04:12):
Fourchet called after me. She even ran a little, I believe,
but the legs of fifty and not a match for
the legs of ten. I ran faster and faster down
the avenue of Chestnuts. I reached our meadow, where our
stream ran, just the same as in the days when
I was free to make a paradise of it. I
ran on and on up the slope, over the cornfield,
(04:34):
across the road, through our own meadow, and never stopped
till I flung myself into my sister's arms. Then, and
not till then the fact dawned upon me that I
had run away from school. I don't recall the explanations
that must have followed on my return. I know that
(04:56):
I cried a great deal and felt that I had
committed an awful crime. I couldn't explain my feelings to myself,
but I knew that in the same circumstances I should
have done the same again, though I wept heartfelt tears
of penitence for having done it at all. I think
my mother must have understood something of what I went through,
for she did not send me back. Another period of
(05:20):
acute boredom came to me some years later when I
went to stay with some friends of my mother's in
the north of London. They lived in a dreary square
apart from the main thoroughfare, so that if you looked
out over the brown wire blinds, you never saw anything
pass but Butcher's and Baker's carts. If I went for
a walk. The sordid ugliness of Islington outraged the feelings
(05:43):
of a child who had always found her greatest pleasures
and life's greatest beauties in the green Country. The people
with whom I was staying were the kindest hearted people
in the world. They would have done anything to please
me if they had only known what I wanted. But
they didn't know that was just it. The dining room
(06:05):
was mahogany and leather, with two books in it, the
Bible and family prayers. They stood on the sideboard, flanked
on one side by a terracotta water bottle, oozing sad
tears all day into a terracotta saucer, and on the
other by a tea caddy. Upstairs, in the drawing room,
which was only used on Sundays, were a few illustrated
(06:28):
gift books, albums and types of beauty arranged on a
polished oval walnut center table. The piano was kept locked.
There were a few old bound volumes of good words
which I had read again and again. The master of
the house, a doctor, was, my mother tells me, a
(06:49):
man of brains, but I only saw him at meals,
and then he seldom spoke. The lady of the house
had a heart full of kindness and a mind full
of court circuit. She talked of nothing else. Her daughters
were kind to me in their way, and the games
I had with them were my only relaxation. The doctor
(07:10):
talked very occasionally of his patients, and this interested me.
One night I went into the surgery and found the
bottles of medicine which his assistant had made up standing
in a row, waiting for their white paper wrappers. I
didn't in the least realize what I was doing when
I thought to escape from my boredom by mixing the
(07:30):
contents of these bottles in a large jug, and then
impartially filling up the bottles again with a mixture. When
I had filled and corked them all, I slipped away.
It was done in pure mischief, with no thought of consequences.
But when I woke that night in bed and suddenly
remembered that I had heard that medicines that were given
(07:51):
for some complaints were bad for others and absolutely harmful,
my heart stood still. Suppose some poor or sick person
died whom doctor would have cured because I had mixed
his medicine with something else. I fully resolved to own
up the next morning. But the next morning I reflected
(08:12):
that perhaps some of the people that had taken my
mixture might die of it, and then I should be
hanged for murder. It seemed to me wiser to wait
and see what happened. If any one did die and
doctor were accused of poisoning his patience, I would come
forward in a court of justice, as people did in
the books, and own that I and I alone had
(08:34):
been to blame, making my confession among the sympathetic tears
of usher and jury, the judge himself not remaining dry eyed.
This scene so much appealed to me that I almost
forgot that before it could be enacted, somebody would have
to die of my mixture. When I remembered this, I
wept in secret. When I thought of the scene in
(08:57):
which I should nobly own my guilt, I secretly exalted.
I was not bored. Now. Whatever else might be the
effect of my mixtures, they had certainly cured my boredom.
Day after day passed by in spasms of alternate remorse
and day dreaming. Every day I expected doctor to announce
(09:18):
at dinner that some of his patients had breathed their
last in inexplicable circumstances. But he never said anything of
the kind. And when a week had passed, I was
convinced that so good a doctor never gave anybody any
medicine that could do them any harm in any condition,
and that one of his medicines was as good for
any complaint as any others. Whether this was so, or
(09:41):
whether someone had been a witness of my act in
the surgery and had remade the mixtures, I shall never know.
But in the reaction following my anxiety, boredom settled down
upon me more heavily than ever. I wrote a frantic
letter to my mother, begging her to take me away,
for I was so mis miserable I wished I was dead.
(10:03):
Not having any stamps, I gave this letter to Missus
to post. I don't suppose she thought she was doing
any harm when she opened and read it, and I
hope she was gratified by its contents. She added a
note to my mother begging her to accede to my
request and to take me away at once. It was
years before I forgave her for reading that letter, and
(10:26):
to this day I am afraid she has never forgiven
me for writing it. My mother was at Penshurst at
the time. I was sent down to her in deep disgrace,
and my mother received me with gentle reproaches that cut
me to the heart. My sister was exceedingly angry with me,
perhaps with some cause, and pointed out to me how
(10:46):
ungrateful it was to repay Missus by writing such a letter.
I defended myself stoutly. I wrote it for Mamma and
not for her, And though I was sorry for having
hurt the feeling of one that I knew had tried
to be kind to me. Yet I fear the verdict
of my unregenerate heart was serve her right. I felt
(11:09):
that I was being unjustly blamed, and though I was sorry,
I would not say so. And the next morning I
wandered up through Penshurst Churchyard and through a little wicket
gate into the park, where the splendor or a blaze
of buttercups burst upon me. The may trees were silver white,
the skylarks singing overhead. I sat down under a white
(11:31):
may tree. The spirit of spring breathed softly round me,
and when I got up to go back, I was
in love and charity with all men and all women
except missus. I'm sorry if I have been naughty, I
said to my sister. I didn't mean to be, but
(11:51):
that will do, she said, skillfully, stopping my confidences. Now
I do hope you are going to try and be
a good girl and not make dear Mummy unhappy. I
will be good, I said, oh, I will, indeed, And
as long as I stayed among the golden buttercups and
silver may bushes, I believe I was moderately good end
(12:15):
of part eleven,
Part eleven of My School Days by Ensbit. The Slipper
Fox recording is in the public domain. Part eleven. The
happy memories of that golden time crowd thickly upon me.
I see again the dewy freshness as of an enchanted
world that greeted us when we stole down carrying our
(00:23):
shoes in our hands, long before the rest of the
household was astir. I smell the scents of dead leaves
and wood smoke, and it brings back to me the
bonfires on autumn evenings, when we used to play at
red Indians and sit round the fire telling stories, and
when that palled, dig out from the gray and red
ashes the potatoes we had put there to roast and
(00:46):
eat the half cooked, blackened, smoke flavored dainties with keenest appreciation.
The rare days when we went to Dinard and paddled
in the shallow waters of the bay between blue sky
and gold sand, and picking limpets from the rocks, and
wishing for wooden spades, which Dinard then at least did
not produce. A Part of the infinite charm of those
(01:11):
days lies in the fact that we were never bored,
and children abhored much more often and much more deeply
than their elders suppose. I remember an occasion when some
well meaning friends persuaded my mother that my education was
being neglected. I was sent to a select French school,
(01:32):
Mademoiselle fourchets in Devon, but owing to some misunderstanding, I
arrived five days before the other girls. Mademoiselle Fourchet kindly
consented to overlook the mistake and keep me till the
other girls arrived. I had a paint box, which pleased
me for the first day, but the boredom of the
other four days is branded on my memory in gray letters.
(01:57):
Mademoiselle Fourchet was busy in visiting her friends and receiving them.
She took me out for a serious walk every day.
We walked for an hour, and then Mademoiselle Fouchet returned
to her visiting and I to the bear school room.
I had bought few books with me, and these I
devoured in an hour or two. There were no books
(02:19):
in the school room, but lesson books thumbed, dog's eared,
and ink stained. There was no one to talk to,
save the severe cook, who was kind to me in
her way but didn't understand children. There was a gray
walled garden full of fruit that I must not touch,
and a locked bookcase in Mademoiselle Fourchet's salon full of
(02:40):
books that I must not read. I was not conscious
of being unhappy, only bored, bored to extinction. On the
fourth day I persuaded Mademoiselle Fourchet to vary our prim
walk round the town. She asked me where I would
like to go, and I said Lafontaine. Mademoiselle Fourchet meant
(03:02):
to be kind according to her lights, but she was
the ideal schoolmistress, gray haired, prim, bloodless. However, she conceded
this to me, and I was grateful. We started for Lafontaine.
La Fontaine is one of the show places of Divan,
as it has a natural fountain of mineral water. There
(03:24):
is a casino where balls and fates and merrymakings are held,
where bands play, and little colored lamps glimmer in the trees.
All this awakened no associations, stirred nothing in me, for
I had never been to a fete at Lafontaine. But
below the platform on which the casino was built ran
a stream, our stream, our nile, on its way to
(03:48):
join the river. The sight of it was too much
for me. I remembered our happy exploring parties, the muddy
dams we had built across it. I thought the rabbits,
and the garden at home, and my brothers and my mother,
And in the midst of one of Mademoiselle's platitudes on
the beauty of the scene, I began to run. Mademoiselle
(04:12):
Fourchet called after me. She even ran a little, I believe,
but the legs of fifty and not a match for
the legs of ten. I ran faster and faster down
the avenue of Chestnuts. I reached our meadow, where our
stream ran, just the same as in the days when
I was free to make a paradise of it. I
ran on and on up the slope, over the cornfield,
(04:34):
across the road, through our own meadow, and never stopped
till I flung myself into my sister's arms. Then, and
not till then the fact dawned upon me that I
had run away from school. I don't recall the explanations
that must have followed on my return. I know that
(04:56):
I cried a great deal and felt that I had
committed an awful crime. I couldn't explain my feelings to myself,
but I knew that in the same circumstances I should
have done the same again, though I wept heartfelt tears
of penitence for having done it at all. I think
my mother must have understood something of what I went through,
for she did not send me back. Another period of
(05:20):
acute boredom came to me some years later when I
went to stay with some friends of my mother's in
the north of London. They lived in a dreary square
apart from the main thoroughfare, so that if you looked
out over the brown wire blinds, you never saw anything
pass but Butcher's and Baker's carts. If I went for
a walk. The sordid ugliness of Islington outraged the feelings
(05:43):
of a child who had always found her greatest pleasures
and life's greatest beauties in the green Country. The people
with whom I was staying were the kindest hearted people
in the world. They would have done anything to please
me if they had only known what I wanted. But
they didn't know that was just it. The dining room
(06:05):
was mahogany and leather, with two books in it, the
Bible and family prayers. They stood on the sideboard, flanked
on one side by a terracotta water bottle, oozing sad
tears all day into a terracotta saucer, and on the
other by a tea caddy. Upstairs, in the drawing room,
which was only used on Sundays, were a few illustrated
(06:28):
gift books, albums and types of beauty arranged on a
polished oval walnut center table. The piano was kept locked.
There were a few old bound volumes of good words
which I had read again and again. The master of
the house, a doctor, was, my mother tells me, a
(06:49):
man of brains, but I only saw him at meals,
and then he seldom spoke. The lady of the house
had a heart full of kindness and a mind full
of court circuit. She talked of nothing else. Her daughters
were kind to me in their way, and the games
I had with them were my only relaxation. The doctor
(07:10):
talked very occasionally of his patients, and this interested me.
One night I went into the surgery and found the
bottles of medicine which his assistant had made up standing
in a row, waiting for their white paper wrappers. I
didn't in the least realize what I was doing when
I thought to escape from my boredom by mixing the
(07:30):
contents of these bottles in a large jug, and then
impartially filling up the bottles again with a mixture. When
I had filled and corked them all, I slipped away.
It was done in pure mischief, with no thought of consequences.
But when I woke that night in bed and suddenly
remembered that I had heard that medicines that were given
(07:51):
for some complaints were bad for others and absolutely harmful,
my heart stood still. Suppose some poor or sick person
died whom doctor would have cured because I had mixed
his medicine with something else. I fully resolved to own
up the next morning. But the next morning I reflected
(08:12):
that perhaps some of the people that had taken my
mixture might die of it, and then I should be
hanged for murder. It seemed to me wiser to wait
and see what happened. If any one did die and
doctor were accused of poisoning his patience, I would come
forward in a court of justice, as people did in
the books, and own that I and I alone had
(08:34):
been to blame, making my confession among the sympathetic tears
of usher and jury, the judge himself not remaining dry eyed.
This scene so much appealed to me that I almost
forgot that before it could be enacted, somebody would have
to die of my mixture. When I remembered this, I
wept in secret. When I thought of the scene in
(08:57):
which I should nobly own my guilt, I secretly exalted.
I was not bored. Now. Whatever else might be the
effect of my mixtures, they had certainly cured my boredom.
Day after day passed by in spasms of alternate remorse
and day dreaming. Every day I expected doctor to announce
(09:18):
at dinner that some of his patients had breathed their
last in inexplicable circumstances. But he never said anything of
the kind. And when a week had passed, I was
convinced that so good a doctor never gave anybody any
medicine that could do them any harm in any condition,
and that one of his medicines was as good for
any complaint as any others. Whether this was so, or
(09:41):
whether someone had been a witness of my act in
the surgery and had remade the mixtures, I shall never know.
But in the reaction following my anxiety, boredom settled down
upon me more heavily than ever. I wrote a frantic
letter to my mother, begging her to take me away,
for I was so mis miserable I wished I was dead.
(10:03):
Not having any stamps, I gave this letter to Missus
to post. I don't suppose she thought she was doing
any harm when she opened and read it, and I
hope she was gratified by its contents. She added a
note to my mother begging her to accede to my
request and to take me away at once. It was
years before I forgave her for reading that letter, and
(10:26):
to this day I am afraid she has never forgiven
me for writing it. My mother was at Penshurst at
the time. I was sent down to her in deep disgrace,
and my mother received me with gentle reproaches that cut
me to the heart. My sister was exceedingly angry with me,
perhaps with some cause, and pointed out to me how
(10:46):
ungrateful it was to repay Missus by writing such a letter.
I defended myself stoutly. I wrote it for Mamma and
not for her, And though I was sorry for having
hurt the feeling of one that I knew had tried
to be kind to me. Yet I fear the verdict
of my unregenerate heart was serve her right. I felt
(11:09):
that I was being unjustly blamed, and though I was sorry,
I would not say so. And the next morning I
wandered up through Penshurst Churchyard and through a little wicket
gate into the park, where the splendor or a blaze
of buttercups burst upon me. The may trees were silver white,
the skylarks singing overhead. I sat down under a white
(11:31):
may tree. The spirit of spring breathed softly round me,
and when I got up to go back, I was
in love and charity with all men and all women
except missus. I'm sorry if I have been naughty, I
said to my sister. I didn't mean to be, but
(11:51):
that will do, she said, skillfully, stopping my confidences. Now
I do hope you are going to try and be
a good girl and not make dear Mummy unhappy. I
will be good, I said, oh, I will, indeed, And
as long as I stayed among the golden buttercups and
silver may bushes, I believe I was moderately good end
(12:15):
of part eleven,
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