Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill - Plot & Excerpts
I had been there a term or two by the time Paul came to us. I had not wanted to go, but I had been too ignorant of school life to dread it as I ought. As most adults accept a disagreeable climate, or a dull job, or illness, so children accept the conditions of life wished on them by adults: not willingly, but with fatalism. As schools go, it was a good school, and I knew as much even at the time. I was also prepared to believe that it would do me good, for at home I had begun to earn accusations of ‘uppishness’, ‘sulks’, and ‘superiority’ which I had not enjoyed. I had only been unable to see what I should do to stop earning them. If school would ‘rub the corners off’ me, as people said it would, if it would ‘teach me to get on with other girls’, then good luck to it. But I was not able, and did not see why I should be expected, to go beyond resigned endurance, and enjoy it. It was a small school looking out over the North Sea. There must, somewhere, have been some kind of land mass between its playing fields and the North Pole, but it did not feel as though there was: in winter the sweat falling from your brow as you ran after a lacrosse ball (you never caught that ball if you were me) all but turned to icicles before it reached the ground.
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