London - Edward Rutherfurd [540]
“You’re like your father,” she complained to the girl. “There’s never any compromise with you. Everything’s always either black or white!” According to Bull, however, the trouble was that Violet was too like her mother. A rebel. “But I was never unreasonable,” Mary Anne would retort.
Violet had always been irritating. Mary Anne remembered the time when she had found her as a little girl trying on her clothes. The child had been soundly smacked for that, of course. A few years ago when Violet was sixteen, Mary Anne had noticed that she was getting really too close to her father. She would fuss over him, bring him his pipe, try to go about with him. Bull seemed rather to enjoy this, but Mary Anne had taken her daughter to one side and told her firmly: “I am his wife; you are his daughter and just a child. Please behave accordingly.”
But the real trouble lay with her education. Like most girls of her class, she had a governess – a scholarly woman who told them Violet was gifted and who had taken her far beyond the standard required. “You should have seen what she was up to and put a stop to it,” Bull had complained bitterly to Mary Anne when he dismissed the poor governess that autumn. It was certainly the governess’s fault that the girl had got the foolish idea that she should go to university.
The idea, of course, was preposterous. Until forty years ago the possibility did not even exist. Though there were small women’s colleges attached to Oxford and Cambridge, only a handful of women attended them and they were still not accepted as full members of the university. Thinking the girl could not really be serious her mother had remarked: “Your father would never allow you to live away like that, unchaperoned.” But Violet had immediately objected: “I could stay at home and go to university in London.”
As her mother soon discovered, she was right. The University of London was a curious affair. Started just before Queen Victoria came to the throne, as a place where religious dissenters, still denied access to Oxford and Cambridge, could study, it was a progressive institution. Its buildings were scattered; there was no requirement that students live in university colleges; and for several decades now, it had allowed women to take degrees. But what sort of woman would do such a thing? Mary Anne had no idea. Her eldest son Richard had been to Oxford. He had gone up as a gentleman of course and had told her proudly that he had never read a book while he was there. When she asked him about the women undergraduates he had only said: “Bluestockings, mother. We avoided them.” And he had pulled a face. Others she asked were just as discouraging. Besides, what would Violet do with all this knowledge? Become a teacher, or a governess? This was not at all the thing the Bulls had in mind.
Edward Bull had done even better than he had hoped. His greatest stroke of luck had come in the fifties when Britain fought its brief and unsatisfactory war with Russia in the Crimea during which he had been awarded the government contract to supply the army with drink. If everyone else remembered the Crimean War for the nursing activities of Florence Nightingale and the heroic charge of the Light Brigade, Edward Bull remembered the war because it had made him a very rich man. It was Edward who lived in the big house on Blackheath now; like other rich brewers at this time, he was almost ready to make himself a gentleman. And the daughter of a gentleman had only one destiny: to be a lady of leisure. “She may employ an educated woman as a governess I suppose,” Edward remarked, “but she certainly can’t become one.” So Mary Anne, herself the daughter of Silas the dredger, discouraged her own daughter from getting any higher education because it might make the rising family look too middle class.
“You’re not plain,” she assured the girl. “You’ll find a husband. But men don’t like women to be too intelligent, you know; and if you