Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady by Edith Olivier

Author:Edith Olivier [Olivier, Edith]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Chapter VI

A GENTLEMAN EVERY TIME

As I think over my lady lodgers, summing up my thoughts about them, I naturally set them against the background of professional opinion; for, quite early in my career as an amateur landlady, I asked a neighbour who has taken lodgers ever since her husband died some fifteen years ago, whether she preferred ladies or gentlemen.

“A gentleman every time” was her prompt reply, and I find that this opinion is shared by most professional landladies. In my case, the decision has seldom been in my hands. I accept whoever is sent to me, and I keep an open mind. If I allow myself to think too much about the weaknesses which lodgers, like the rest of us, are bound to possess, those weaknesses gain strength. They grow until one can see nothing else.

If I say that my lady lodgers have generally stayed longer than the gentlemen, that proves nothing; for their movements are determined from above, and those who stay the longest would possibly have fain gone first.

For a short time, I had the pleasure of giving a home to two mistresses from our evacuated school. I loved these guests. I have seldom met anyone who more clearly gave one the sense of Vocation that did the headmistress. Hers was what is called a “ junior school” and all the children were under eleven years old. It used to be thought that anyone could teach the little children, and the really trained teachers should be reserved for the elder ones. The education authorities have now realised that the opposite is the case. Far more imagination is required from teachers of small children, but given that imagination, the mistress of a junior school is much to be envied. There is more skill in the technique of teaching small children, and if the foundations of knowledge are not assimilated before a child is eleven, they will never be assimilated at all. This too is the period when the love of learning is born. I believe it was Sir Robert Peel who said that everything he had learnt of any value in his life, was taught him by his nurserymaid; and there is no doubt that the success of every senior school greatly depends on the schools from which their pupils come.

This lodger of mine was, as I have said, like a character from one of the broad-minded convent schools in seventeenth-century France. While she was with me, her responsibilities were great. The school was accommodated in three separate buildings, so the actual arrangement of the classes was a complicated business. She turned it into an advantage. When the children moved to a new classroom for a new subject, they had to run for some way out of doors, and I often watched the way in which they enjoyed this little break, though it must have been a troublesome matter for the headmistress and her staff. That staff worked wonderfully together, and they treated each other like the members of an Oxford Common Room.

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