Next Stop England II-St. James's School for Young Ladies

A few days into our time at St. James’s, Mademoiselle, the assistant matron on assignment for a year from France, took us into Great Malvern to shop for the essentials that we hadn’t purchased in London when we got our uniforms.  We got brown lace-up shoes, which were to be used for dress-up occasions and walking, and button-strapped shoes for every day.  We got woolen underwear, including undershirts and navy wool bloomers, a garment that was archaic, itchy, and puzzling, to be worn over our regular underpants.  Mademoiselle was also instructed to get us dressing gowns, eider down quilts, and tartan blankets which were called “rugs” in England. Once we were back in school we had to sew name tags into every item that we owned, since everyone in the school had essentially the same clothes, and ownership could be confusing.  I still have my blanket with my name tag sewn on.  It was clear that in the badly heated school, we would need supplemental warmth.

There were about 200 girls enrolled at St. James’s and we were housed in smaller cottages adjacent to the main stone building.  In our second term, Stella and I were housed separately in one of these outlying houses.  Each house had a matron running it and slept between twenty and thirty girls.  I remember only one matron, Miss Agnew, a very nervous lady who once offered me dates from her personal stash.  I didn’t much care for dates at that time, and I didn’t want to be designated a teacher’s pet, so I didn’t accept her offer. I have always regretted my eye-rolling refusal of her offer, because she was obviously trying to be kind.  I recall sharing a room with at least three other girls each term.  We spent little time in the cottages, since all classes and meals were in the main building.  Of course I also remember Mademoiselle, who seemed as disconsolate at being there as we were, and she was always sympathetic.  

The routine was to wake to the bell every morning at 7:00, strip our beds and go for a mile run on the school grounds in our “shorts” which were wool pleated culottes.  We returned to make our beds, dress in our uniforms, eat breakfast and attend classes.  We broke for lunch and resumed classes in the afternoon.  After tea at 4:00 o’clock, we went back to class to do homework for two hours, and then had a little time in the parlors of our respective dormitories before going to bed.  On Saturdays we had chores like sending out our laundry and changing the sheets on our beds.  We had some free time when we could read in the library or walk the grounds (with permission), but were not allowed to leave the school unaccompanied by a faculty member.  Sometimes Mademoiselle would take a few of us on a hike in the Malvern Hills.  This was a new experience for me, since Tehran, where I had lived, was arid, and there were few trees and the vegetation was scrubby.  The Malvern Hills, by contrast, were green and damp.  From the top, one could see Wales.

I don’t remember the teachers much.   There was a Polish refugee who taught history and we addressed her as Countess.  Apparently she was Polish nobility and had to flee Poland during World War II. There was also a very shy young woman who taught us needlework.  I suppose we were being prepared for a life of leisure where we embroidered in our parlors—this subject seems so outdated now.  All the teachers were single women who seemed to me (at age 12) to be middle-aged or beyond.  I learned later that these women were labeled “war surplus” women, because so many men had been killed during the two World Wars, that there were no prospects of marriage for them, and in the 1950s, so much of women’s identities were enhanced by marriage.

I didn’t make any long-term friends at St. James’s, but I remember the girls being quite friendly and returning from the winter break to talk about gymkhanas.  I had no idea what those were, but this was a horsey school, and many of the girls took extracurricular horseback riding so they could compete when at home.  In the spring, they talked of regattas and sailing, something I could appreciate more, even though I had never sailed.  In one instance, a girl came back from one of the breaks and she was now Lady something or other.  I supposed someone must have died and she had inherited the title, although we continued to call her by her first name.  This was all new territory for me, and these girls were as exotic to me as I was to them.  I had no sense at the time of the class system in Britain, so I wasn’t particularly impressed with these titles and activities, as the other girls and staff seemed to be.

I started to get an inkling of the class system when one girl I befriended told me that her full name should be a double-barreled.  Many of the girls had hyphenated last names, but this particular girl’s wasn’t, and she couldn’t get anyone to respect her wish to be called Dring-Morrell instead of plain Morrell.  I didn’t understand why this was so significant to her.  It seemed like so much spelling and writing.  In my school in Iran, I hadn’t been aware of a class system.  My schoolmates were from all over the world, but I didn’t know parents’ statuses or where they stood in society.  I knew that some were children of missionaries, some children of diplomats, and others just well-to-do Iranians, but there was no hierarchy as there seemed to be at St. James’s.

Malvern was known for enacting a play called Piers Ploughman by William Langland, because the medieval miracle play takes place in the Malvern Hills.  I remember this play being performed at the church across the street from the school on a horse-drawn cart, in Middle English.  It was my first exposure to medieval English literature, and I hardly understood any of it.  (Ironically, many years later I wrote my Master’s thesis on Chaucer.)  Also, as part of our cultural education, we put on a performance of Benjamin Britten’s opera, Noye’s Fludde  (based on the Noah story in the Bible) in which I was a bat.  I had to flit about in a black costume flapping ingenious, hinged wings, and like the actual creature, could barely see where I was going, since my face was covered in black gauze. 

On Sundays, we went to church in the morning and had designated hours to write letters home, under supervision from a teacher.  Sometimes on Sunday evenings, we had a guest speaker, usually an explorer or a vicar, speaking on some edifying subject.  I remember one explorer talking about his expedition to some very cold place and how on waking up, he would shift his head gingerly to test if his hair had frozen to his sleeping bag.  I started doing the same when I woke up, because our rooms were cold, and we were required to have a window open for fresh air, regardless of the temperature.

After a few weeks of going to church on Sundays, I rebelled.  I thought having to pray mornings and evenings and before all meals was enough, and even though going to church meant leaving the school for a few hours, it wasn’t worth the outing as far as I was concerned.  Besides, the church was just across the street, so the scenery didn’t change.  I found my way into the headmistress’s office after church one Sunday and told her I was Jewish and did not want to attend church any more.  We argued for a long time, with me getting upset, crying and having a tantrum.   Finally she relented, and after that Stella and I and a few other foreign students were excused from going to church.

The head mistress, Miss Anstruther, felt it was her duty to anglicize us, however, and if the Church of England wasn’t on the agenda, then I had to take elocution lessons.

“We must rid her of that dreadful American accent,” she proclaimed.

So elocution it was, where I had to hold my hands around my ribcage to monitor my breathing and recite poetry for half an hour twice a week. 

England at that time still seemed to be operating under austerity rules or St. James’s faculty thought austerity was good for forming our character, I don’t know which.  We could only bathe three times a week and there was a red tape in the bath tub designating how much water we could use, about three inches.  We had to fill the tub, wash, and get out in ten minutes, so I never felt wholly clean.  Once every two weeks, a hairdresser came and washed our hair for us.  I would have preferred to wash my own hair and to do so more frequently and thoroughly.  I was used to my hair drying in a couple of hours when I was in Iran.  In humid England, sometimes my hair would remain damp overnight and always looked frightful.  Until then, I had no idea I had frizzy hair; in Iran I had wavy hair!

 

Sometime during the year, my mother came to visit.  She hadn’t told us she was coming, and I was swimming in the outdoor pool when she arrived on yet another cool and cloudy day.  She was shocked that I was swimming outside, but it was always cold whether inside or outside, so being in the pool hardly made any difference.  Her first impression of the school itself, like mine, was to feel oppressed by the grey stone and glowering look of the place.  She hated it.  I can’t remember if she stayed long enough to have tea with Stella and me, but I do recall she found it too depressing to stay long.  She told us that she would find another school for us that looked less harsh.  There were other girls from Iran in schools in England, and she would find out where they were going.  When she left, I again felt the desolation of being left behind.  It bothered me that she was in England but we couldn’t be together.

I don’t know what my parents expected from an English boarding school, but I think they felt they had left us in good hands and that the school would take care of everything.  Through a failure in communication, our first school break over the Christmas holiday was almost a disaster.  Stella and I, like all the other girls, packed our trunks and boarded the train for London, accompanied by two or three of the teachers who were also going home for the holidays.  When we arrived at Paddington Station, the other girls were met by parents and whisked home.  The teachers also left, and Stella and I stood on the platform waiting for someone to clarify what we were to do.  We too had assumed that there was a plan in place for us, as we blithely boarded the train, asking no questions about our final destination, just happy to get away from the oppressive school.  After the platform emptied, it became clear that nobody was there to take us anywhere.  We panicked, having no idea where to go.

 

My father had given us a business card of a Mr. Robbins, a business colleague of his, who was responsible for paying our expenses and for the fact that we were at St. James’s in the first place.  He had recommended the school and had helped my father get us admitted there.  We found a public telephone and somehow scrounged the four pennies needed to make a call.  The clerk who answered said Mr. Robbins had already left for the weekend.  At this, Stella, who was the one making the call, started to sob and to try to explain to this man what our situation was.  The man, unlucky enough to have answered the phone, didn’t know what to do.  Finally, to calm us down, he said he’d come to Paddington Station himself.  We had no idea who he was, but obviously were elated to be rescued by any kind-hearted stranger.  Once there he started by asking us if we knew anyone at all in London.  I imagine he was dreading the prospect of taking two hysterical girls home with him for the weekend.  The only people we knew were our family friends whom we had met briefly,  Aunt Hannah and her family, but had no idea how to get in touch with them.  Finally our rescuer found them in the phone book and called. 

This guardian angel gave us all the money he had on him that he could spare and stayed with us until Uncle Bertie arrived, looking bewildered by how he had ended up responsible for us.  In any case, he took us to his mother’s house until we could sort out what to do.  In all the panic, we had forgotten all about our trunks and they were nowhere to be found.  The next day, Uncle Bertie called my father in Iran to try to establish what to do with us.  Of course my father had no clue where we should go and had thought that the school had arranged something.  Uncle Bertie then called the school to see if there was a place that their foreign girls stayed during the school holidays, and they recommended a boarding house in Notting Hill, run by a Mrs. Harris. He also asked where our trunks had been sent, and evidently the trunks never left the school, having nowhere to go, which should have been a clue that there was something amiss.

We spent two weeks at Aunt Hannah’s until our trunks arrived by a very tortured route, and then moved into Mrs. Harris’s boarding house.  Aunt Hannah’s grand-daughters were going to be visiting from Paris and we needed to vacate the guest room.   I have always felt immensely grateful for what Aunt Hannah’s family did for us the entire time Stella and I were in England.  It was a huge imposition for us to be thrust upon them, and they were very gracious and more than kind in taking us into their collective care.  After I left England for the U.S., I always visited them when I was in England and corresponded with them for many years. 

At Mrs. Harris’s, there were other students who had been in London before, and they helped Stella and me to find our bearings.  Once Mr. Robbins got back to his office, he provided us with some spending money and handled our room and board.  At that time, the exchange rate between the Iranian rial and the British pound was emphatically unfavorable, and I was acutely aware that Stella’s and my expenses had to be a huge financial burden on the family.  

It was liberating to be in London, learning to take buses and the Underground, and exploring.  We spent most days window shopping, a novelty for us, since there was only one newly-opened department store in Tehran.  Oxford Street in London, on the other hand, was lined with store after store stocked with beautiful shoes, clothes, and a wealth of ready-made goods for us to gawk at.  For entertainment, we went to the neighborhood movie theaters which cost a lot less than the theaters in the West End and showed slightly older films.  Aunt Moselle came one Wednesday evening when the shops stayed open late, and we all went shopping together.  This was all a new and exciting experience.  To this day, I love London and think it’s the most vibrant city I’ve ever been in. 

Having learned our lesson after the Christmas fiasco, my father made arrangements for our next school break.  He needed to be in Austria for business that spring, so Stella and I met the rest of the family in Vienna.  It was a joyous reunion for me, especially to reunite with my sister and brother whom I hadn’t seen in several months.  We spent time in the Vienna Woods and went to the Vienna Opera, my first exposure to this music, and took in other tourist attractions.  Our hotel was near the Sudbahnhoff, the southern train station, and I would have been happy to eat hotdogs at the kiosks there every day.

   

The following break, the summer of 1959, my father arranged for us to stay with a professor and his wife in Salzburg to learn German.  Stella and I took the train from London to Dover, the ferry from Dover to Calais, and finally a train from Calais to Salzburg.  This was a huge adventure for us, traveling alone overnight on a train.  We had a sleeping compartment and it was quite an adventure to sleep in a cot on a moving train. The Vienna Boys Choir was also on the train, and their chaperones took us under their wings.  We spent most of the time between our compartment and theirs and the dining car, which the chaperones introduced us to.  We somehow communicated in sign language and fractured English.  We even heard them rehearsing.

When we arrived in Salzburg, we found Herr Professor Fellner on the platform.  He spoke no English and we spoke no German, but we managed to make each other’s acquaintance in sign language.  It turned out that the school where he taught had finished with their German courses for the summer, and we were not going to be taking German after all.  As a compromise, Herr Professor Fellner himself tried to give us a couple of hours of tutorials every day.  He didn’t really seem to know what to do with us or why we were there, but his wife was kind enough to show us around Salzburg.  He lined up some of his students to entertain us.  Of course the language barrier persisted, but we seemed to be able to communicate somehow. There were twin girls, about my age, that we saw almost daily and we went on excursions into Salzburg, touring the fortress and Mozart’s home.  Two of his male students took Stella and me dancing one evening, and I lost my shoe in the whirl of a Viennese waltz.  My escort gallantly made his way back in among all those dancing feet to retrieve it.  After a month, all the German I remember learning was “Du bist ein gross schwein,”   a sentence taught me by the gallant young man who waltzed with me.  It amused him to hear me call him a fat pig.

After about a month in Salzburg, Stella and I returned to London and spent the rest of the school break at Mrs. Harris’s.  At the end of August, we started at another school, one my mother found, as she had promised.  I don’t have vivid memories of my time at St. James’s; what I remember is shrouded by the impact of this profound change in the small drama that was my life.  On balance, it is clear to me that I have been very lucky to have encountered a great deal of kindness and generosity from people I didn’t know.  It is quite remarkable how giving people are in situations where there is no particular advantage to them to be open-hearted, and yet they are.  Whenever I feel dubious about humanity, I remind myself that humanity has treated me well.