La's Orchestra Saves the World Read Free

looks. A female child, he felt, needed a woman to look after her, to say and do the things a woman could do. For this reason, he hired a housekeeper who doubled up as mother and, as La realised with shock, as wife. She heard conversation from behind the closed door of her father’s bedroom, lowered voices, but in an unmistakeable emotional register. He could not marry her—no, it was impossible. Nobody knew, he said; and even if they did it was none of their business. And why was it impossible? Silence. Was he ashamed of her, of her very ordinary origins? More silence. That’s it, isn’t it? Ashamed.
    The house they lived in was in Surrey, on the brow of a hill. London, or its very fringes, might be seen through the darkness from that vantage point—a low line of lights—and in the day, if conditions were right, it was there as a distant smudge against the horizon. La liked the fact that they lived on a hill, and would introduce herself as one who came from the top of a hill in Surrey.
    “I am going to university in a very flat place,” she said to her father. “You’re sending me down from my hill to a very flat place.”
    “Cambridge is indeed flat,” he said. “And …” She waited for him to say more, but he often failed to complete these utterances. She asked him once what he was thinking of when his sentences petered out, and he had replied, “Oh, various things, things that …”
    Cambridge had been La’s choice, even if one that had been heavily backed by her English teacher at school, a graduate of Girton. She knew the admissions tutor, she said; they had gone walking in France together as students, and she would make sure that any application would be sympathetically viewed. La wondered what that had to do with her; she did not want to be accepted because of some remote bond of friendship, the outcome of a walking tour.
    “I’m not saying that,” said the teacher. “But you’ll learn as you go through life that friendship, contacts, call it what you will, lies behind so many of the decisions that people make. It’s just the way the world is.”
    Girton accepted her, and she began the study of English literature in the autumn of 1929. It seemed that everybody in Cambridge was talking about Mr. Leavis, who was on the verge of publishing a great work of criticism, it was said. She met Leavis, and his new wife, Queenie Roth, who talked to her at a party about Jane Austen. It was just one of the heady experiences that Cambridge had in store for La, and it made the hill-top in Surrey seem irredeemably dull.
    Her tutor, Dr. Price, was ambitious for her. “You could do a further degree. There’s so much to choose from.”
    That was not how La saw it. In her view there was so little choice—if one was a woman. “It’s men who have all the opportunities,” she said. “Look at what they can do. At the most, we have their leavings, the crumbs from their table. It’s 1931 and that’s all we have. Still.”
    “That’s because women haven’t learned their lesson,” said the tutor.
    “Which is?”
    “To live their lives as if men did not exist.”
    That was easily said by a tutor in a women’s college. But La did not point this out.
    “It breaks my heart,” the tutor went on, “to see all these intelligent girls come to us and then leave, more or less promised to some man. And they go off and marry him and that’s the end. What a waste. What a criminal waste.”
    Seeing La’s reaction, the tutor offered a list of names. “Andrews last year; Paterson, too, such a brilliant person. Married. Buried away in some dim town somewhere, playing bridge and practising domestic economy. Is that what Cambridge is for?”
    La agreed with Dr. Price, on that, at least, if not on other matters. She had not come to Cambridge to find a husband; she found it astonishing that there were girls who did just that—she had met some of them, and they admitted it. Our best chance, one said. You’d have to be a