George Orwell

A CLERGYMAN'S DAUGHTER
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5

Next day Dorothy began altering her programme in accordance with Mrs Creevy’s orders. The first lesson of the day was handwriting, and the second was geography.

‘That’ll do, girls,’ said Dorothy as the funereal clock struck ten. ‘We’ll start our geography lesson now.’

The girls flung their desks open and put their hated copybooks away with audible sighs of relief. There were murmurs of ‘Oo, jography! Good!’ It was one of their favourite lessons. The two girls who were ‘monitors’ for the week, and whose job it was to clean the blackboard, collect exercise books and so forth (children will fight for the privilege of doing jobs of that kind), leapt from their places to fetch the half-finished contour map that stood against the wall. But Dorothy stopped them.

‘Wait a moment. Sit down, you two. We aren’t going to go on with the map this morning.’

There was a cry of dismay. ‘Oh, Miss! Why can’t we, Miss? PLEASE let’s go on with it!’

‘No. I’m afraid we’ve been wasting a little too much time over the map lately. We’re going to start learning some of the capitals of the English counties. I want every girl in the class to know the whole lot of them by the end of the term.’

The children’s faces fell. Dorothy saw it, and added with an attempt at brightness—that hollow, undeceiving brightness of a teacher trying to palm off a boring subject as an interesting one:

‘Just think how pleased your parents will be when they can ask you the capital of any county in England and you can tell it them!’

The children were not in the least taken in. They writhed at the nauseous prospect.

‘Oh, CAPITALS! Learning CAPITALS! That’s just what we used to do with Miss Strong. Please, Miss, WHY can’t we go on with the map?’

‘Now don’t argue. Get your notebooks out and take them down as I give them to you. And afterwards we’ll say them all together.’

Reluctantly, the children fished out their notebooks, still groaning. ‘Please, Miss, can we go on with the map NEXT time?’

‘I don’t know. We’ll see.’

That afternoon the map was removed from the schoolroom, and Mrs Creevy scraped the plasticine off the board and threw it away. It was the same with all the other subjects, one after another. All the changes that Dorothy had made were undone. They went back to the routine of interminable ‘copies’ and interminable ‘practice’ sums, to the learning parrot-fashion of ‘Passez-moi le beurre’ and ‘Le fils du jardinier a perdu son chapeau’, to the Hundred Page History and the insufferable little ‘reader’. (Mrs Creevy had impounded the Shakespeares, ostensibly to burn them. The probability was that she had sold them.) Two hours a day were set apart for handwriting lessons. The two depressing pieces of black paper, which Dorothy had taken down from the wall, were replaced, and their proverbs written upon them afresh in neat copperplate. As for the historical chart, Mrs Creevy took it away and burnt (...)

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