A Mansion and its Murder by Robert Barnard

Author:Robert Barnard [Robert Barnard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780749011819
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2012-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

False Start

To go up to Cambridge in 1898 was to enter an institution where women were accepted but unwanted. They themselves were so aware of this, so desperate to be wanted and valued, that the college principals and academics fenced girls in with so many rules and prohibitions that they were hard put to find a way off the rails even when they had a mind to it.

Nevertheless, for me it was liberation.

It was no more family, no more Blakemere. But it was more positive than that as well: it was friends who were my intellectual equals, it was teachers who were penetrating thinkers (some – and the ones who were not, I avoided), it was sitting in libraries and it was going shopping, it was attending exciting new plays at theatres, it was singing in the college choir, it was circumventing regulations and, just occasionally, talking to a man about men’s matters without his displaying condescension or surprise.

When the end of my first term approached I sent a note to Mrs Merton, the Blakemere housekeeper, telling her when I would be arriving back. When the end of my second term came near, as an experiment, I wrote a note to my father, ending it ‘Your loving daughter Sarah.’ Somewhat to my surprise I received a reply. It was a hand-tinted postcard of one of the stars of the Doyly Carte Opera, typewritten on the back, doubtless by one of the Bank’s secretaries – a new breed of employee, representing a new if subservient role for women. The note read:

Will be delighted to see you again. Place not the same without you. Would invite eminent mathematicians for weekend if knew any. You will have to make do with bankers and politicians.

Your loving father

Claud Fearing

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