Jerusalem the Golden by Margaret Drabble Read Free Book Online Page A

was only as she grew older that she began to notice in herself slight doubts about her ability to pursue higher physics and mathematics. The subject known, broadly, as Science was at first her favourite, because she liked playing with Bunsen burners: at home she was not allowed even to switch on the gas fire. She liked it also because of the power which she most rapidly acquired over Mrs Hill, her science teacher: the first power of her life.
    Mrs Hill was a small, plump, middle-aged woman, with fine frizzy hair which she encased in a fine frizzy hair net; she always wore a purple and blue flowered pinny, a garment more in keeping with an
aunt or a cleaner than with a lover of science. She handled her apparatus with the efficient familiarity with which other women handle their baking boards and rolling pins; years of housework had left their mark on her. She had no children, but, unlike most of the staff, she had a husband, and the girls could detect in her manner a faint abstraction, a slight absence from the ingrown matters of school life. She was set apart, by her overall and her laboratory and her marital status, which was lucky for her, as her position otherwise would have been truly grim. For she was one of those born failures as a disciplinarian, one of those teachers whose classes know they can do anything they want. If she had been an ordinary teacher, trying to teach an ordinary sedentary subject like history or Latin, she would have been mercilessly flouted and mocked, but as it was she managed to get by. For one thing, her subject was in itself appealing to most of the girls, or at least intermittently so; they enjoyed watching crystals grow, and weighing small things on small scales, and making little bits of sodium whizz round saucers of water, so they quite voluntarily offered her their attention from time to time. But her great quality was a capacity for being genuinely impervious to inattention. She did not really care whether people listened or not; she was interested herself in what she was saying, and she was quite happy to potter about from bench to bench watching people writing their diaries when they should have been writing up their experiments. Her blackboard technique was also extremely idiosyncratic; she would write up equations, get them wrong, mumble to herself, rub them out, look them up in a book, and all this without any suspicion that she might be forfeiting the confidence of her pupils.
    The girls, although they did not know it, found her relaxing. They affected to despise her, but they did not find their contempt a strain, whereas the other really bad disciplinarian in the school, a Geography mistress, one Miss Riley, inflicted on them an intolerable suffering, for they felt themselves compelled to torment her, and she would sit before them, thin and pretty and anguished, making vain attempts to restore order, miserably transparent in her misery, and unable to conceal the depths of her humiliation – depths which frightened them, but which they could not leave unplumbed. Mrs Hill, on the other
hand, with her vague indifference, did not rouse their cruelty, so their behaviour in her classes left them unashamed. Their behaviour was at times appalling; when little they would spend long stretches of each class on the floor behind the benches, playing with bits of mercury, pricking it with needles and pen nibs, watching it slip into the coarse splintery cracks of the dusty floorboards, and forcing it out again, marvelling at the way it shrugged the dirt off its rounded shoulders. When older, bored with such simple pleasures, they sought new diversions, such as burning holes in the benches with the Bunsen burners. On one occasion Clara’s class purchased a pound of sausages, took them in with them, and roasted them on one of the burners, and ate them, in full scent and in fairly good view; Mrs Hill appeared not to notice, and talked quietly on of Boyle’s law. Clara did not enjoy her sausage,