England, March 26 1941. Wennington Hall, via Lancaster
Dear
It is a long time since my last letter, and a great deal has happened, both to the world and to me, in the meantime. You will notice that the address is different. Right in the middle of the chaos of war we have launched out on a venture that we had planned for years – a new school. What we were afraid to do in peace time without at least five thousand pounds we are now doing with next to nothing. We have not done it exactly of our own free will, but circumstances have given us a kick in the pants, as you would say. It happened in this way. At the very end of the summer term last year at Bedales the cleavage between myself and the headmaster, which had been chronic but not to bad to prevent general cooperation, became acute over the question of certain drastic proposals that I made for the reorganisation of the school to meet war conditions. These proposals involved a more equalitarian community and more spartan living, but as it happens they were only the trigger that fired the charge. The headmaster had been feeling more and more that so long as I was in the school he was frustrated; I was the dominant influence with both the children and the younger staff, the bed was prepared and the seed sown always before he got there. He could bear it no longer and he put it to the Governors that they must choose between us. This created a very difficult situation, especially as in my outlook and intentions I had strong sympathy from the founder and former head, J. H.Badley, now one of the Governors. To cut a long and painful story short I was persuaded eventually to retire, lest my fighting out the issue should injure the school, and I was promised the sympathy and help of the Governors in starting a school of my own. The whole matter arose and was settled in the course of one hectic day. Not exactly settled, for the headmaster behaved rather badly afterwards, and I had to apply some rather vigorously worded restraint. A good deal of anger was mixed with my sorrow at leaving the school and youngsters that I loved, but what helped me more than anything was the sympathy (and anger!) of the older boys and girls when they knew about it. The affair was finally tidied up (outwardly) at a Governors meeting in London, when I was assured of their gratitude (and agreement) for what I had worked for in the school. It was too comic – having to leave because I did my job too well. To put it another way, in the words of my friend John Macmurray: you ought to have known that it is unforgivable in this country to combine being right with getting your own way! It prevents the decent segregation of theory and practice.
The day after that last meeting I heard of this place – being offered for use as a school that would provide facilities for voluntary evacuation of children from bombed areas. After some negotiations I secured it, and in the early days of the September “blitz” we dismantled our house at Petersfield while bombers droned overhead, machine guns crackled and an occasional “Jerry” floated down on the end of a parachute, and I dashed out every now and then to look after my A.F.S.[Auxiliary Fire Service] unit. It nearly broke my heart to leave my laboratories, full of stuff that I had designed in my ten years at the school and lots of new and fascinating apparatus that I had recently acquired. My wife went a few days ahead of me with her sister’s baby under one arm, the family cat under the other, and our two children in tow. I intended to follow almost immediately, but traffic disorganisation made me later than I intended, and I arrived two days late, in the middle of the night after coming through a shower of incendiaries in a most unexpected spot in the Pennines, to finds my wife had given me up for lost and was contemplating the bleak prospect of carrying on with the project alone. She thought I was a ghost.
The building was fully furnished as a guest house when we took it over. It had been the elaborate country residence of a Victorian cotton magnate. It is a vast place, built like a castle with battlements, mullioned windows, postern gate, courtyard – but hardly any of it more than a hundred years old. There have been halls on this site for nearly thousand years, but they seem all to have been burnt down in turn. It is by no means convenient for school, but it might have been a lot worse! We had no resources other than my term’s salary when we came in September. Heavens knows how we should have survived even that term if we had not received on morning, after a night of almost despair, a surprise cheque for two hundred pounds from Geraldine Cadbury (who has just recently died, to our great sorrow. Friends may remember her striking championship of the younger generation at the World Conference)
We gathered our staff from among others who had offered their services when the building became available. It was part of our plan that there should be no separated domestic staff herded in the kitchen quarters, so everyone has to do his or her bit in the day-to-day maintenance of the house. The daughter of a former Quaker headmaster offered her services as cook, and right nobly she has worked. An ex ship’s-captain came to take on furnaces and other practical jobs about the house, and his wife as music teacher. The other married couples, all teachers, came too, with what seemdd (sic) to us mountains of furniture, most of which had to be stored in lofts, for the first term; for there was only one room for each couple! We all paid for our keep during the first term; there was no other way to keep the school going. Gradually we got pupils, at fees varying from nothing (our own children!) or perhaps a pound a week, up to hundred pounds a year. It was our intention to grade fees according to circumstances of parents, and we are doing our best to carry this out. At the end of last term there were twenty children and ten staff, now there are about 35 and fifteen staff. This term the staff have had their keep provided, buy no salary yet. One or two staff proved temperamentally unsuitable, and they had to go. It is not easy to live in as close a community as this, all of us living within the same building; it needs a degree of sensitiveness and consideration that by no means all people possess. But we are gradually getting the type of person we need. We have gained enormously this term by the addition of two people, artist and his wife, recently trained at the Spicelands Camp for war-relief workers. They are vigorous, practical people with any amount of initiative and resource, and what a difference they have made to the household! They carry incredible loads of stuff about the estate on their cheeky-looking nine-horse-power three-wheeler.
Our children come from a variety of places, but mostly from Merseyside, where bombing has been bad. They vary from four to fourteen in age. They are nearly all new to the freer sort of education that we provide, and this of course brings us difficult problems. Impulses and feelings that would remain repressed or suppressed in other circumstances, come to the surface. We meet wild activity, terrific excitement, a good deal of misdirected grumbling, a curious oscillation between eager friendliness towards staff and sly opposition, and many other phenomena that are most interesting psychologically but demand a great deal of thought and wise judgment to handle. We work harder than ever in our lives before and we are lucky if we get a few hours off in our seven-day week. We are often depressed by our difficulties, especially by the difficulty establishing and maintaining the right human relationships among children and staff.
I think that we have to face trials far greater than anything we have yet experienced, whichever way the war goes. A quick end can only come through a German victory, and one’s mind shudders away from the consequences. One may have confidence in “that of God in every man” as the ultimate reality even in the Nazi, but one has become too well aware of the tremendous forces of evil, both active and latent, in massed humanity, to believe that it –the Inner Light – will be easy of access in a German-ruled post-war Europe. A victory for us can only be after a prolonged struggle and great suffering. It will be of value, this “Victory”, only if throughout the war we can maintain our cultural life, the vigour of our democratic institutions, our faith in the principles upon which we wish base our post-war social reconstruction. At present we hear very little of the demand for vengeance, and it is tremendously important that such a demand should not grow, for if it does, our morale will decline and our present relative steadiness vanish.
In two days I must go back to the school and get on with the many jobs waiting for me, including the task of puzzling out how many children we can afford to take in at a pound or thirty shillings a week. We are going to get out an appeal, to be signed by one or two prominent people, asking for financial help in subsidising a few poorer pupils. It is hopeless to try to raise an endowment fund at a time like this for we should need something like ten thousand pounds. But if we can get a number of people between them to promise us an annual contribution of fivehundred (sic) pounds for the duration of the war, it will enable us to help ten pupils into the school. (Our normal fees are £90-£100 for the three terms, i.e. for about 36 weeks of the year; but only about six of our pupils are paying this). I wonder whether there are any Americans known to any of you – people who perhaps don’t feel like helping to buy Spitfires, but who would welcome an opportunity to help in getting children away to safety. By the way, I should say that although there has been extensive “evacuation” of school children to the country, it has been very far from complete. There are many “neutral areas” that ought really to be classed as dangerous, and many have kept their children in dangerous areas rather than send them away to unsatisfactory billets and schools in the country. Many thousands of children have been killed in the great raids. We feel that there ought to be lots of schools like ours where children can be housed and looked after by competent educationalists (I hope we justly claim to be such!) rather than be subjected to bad billets land crowded school conditions.
I have another problem that concerns America. We have as a student teacher on our staff a most interesting and intelligent German girl, who had to leave Germany because of some Jewish blood in her ancestry. A former colleague of mine found her in Florence, after she had been successively in France and Spain, brought her to England, where she did brilliantly in a secondary school, and then asked me to take her on. She has taken catastrophes with incredible fortitude – the death of her father, the disappearance of a brother, and imprisonment of her mother in a French concentration camp after their escape from Franco in Spain. One other brother escaped to the States, and she wishes to follow him someday. At eighteen, after all this she is still full of life and joy, and quite fearless. Speaks four languages, and English with no perceptible accent. She knows that it may be years before it will be possible for her to go to the States, but in the meantime she is putting in an application to the American consulate. She has to face the usual guarantee problem. If any of you know anyone in the States who is still concerned in the matter of guaranteeing refugees I shall be most grateful if you would pass on information about this girl. She is very different from most of the refugees that we have known - not the sort of person one would help out of pity, but rather because she is such a fine character that she would be an asset to any country that would accept her. Her name is Renate Lepore, [Lepere] (Note: typing smudged here so difficult to decipher) and her brother, or rather half-brother, is Wolfgang Wasow, c/o Robinson, GO1 W. 110th Street, New York City.
I ought to bring this letter to a close, but whenever I am about to do so, another topic occurs to me. I expect you wonder how we are managing about food. Well we haven’t smelt an orange or a grapefruit or a lemon for months - in fact we have had not fresh fruit since Christmas. We give the children raw turnip for vitamins! Cheese vanished at about the same time as fruit, but we are now getting an occasional taste of it. It is very difficult to keep up the protein proportion in the diet, and that of course is a very important matter for children. A tremendous amount of anxious thought goes into the catering, and of course it is going to be much more difficult yet. Can you imagine an English breakfast without marmalade? The children get perhaps a teaspoonful once a week, and jam is now almost equally scarce. I supplement the small meat ration by shooting rabbits on the school estate. At dusk I go creeping through the undergrowth, and the children going to bed in the dormitories wait to hear the bang that promises another rabbit pie later in the week! So far there has been no adverse effect on health, but during the last few gloomy days of the retreat in Greece and Africa my mind has been almost morbidly anticipating the horrors to come if Britain fails to keep open the lifeline across the Atlantic. The thought of hungry children is a nightmare that at three o’clock in the morning leaves one almost without hope, and makes it almost impossible to believe that the tiny spark of goodness in humanity can ever live through this flood of evil. During the day one can plant potatoes and sow seeds and thus assert one’s faith in life, but when the hand and body are inert the mind goes shuddering down into horrible depths – and knowing that it’s hideous anticipations have become realities to many of the people of Europe. However, I think the daytime feelings have more roots in reality – and I can comfort myself with the thought of the way we shall fill ourselves with the tomatoes from our own hothouses, from June to October.
I am reminded that of something that I said at a Sunday morning meeting in Philadelphia in 1937 – that many of our worst fears would be realised, but in spite of it, humanity and civilisation would survive. One has to pause and take a deep breath before saying that now, but I think I can still say it!
May 27th 1941.
How difficult is seems to get this letter finished and away. But tonight it really must be done. We came back from our brief holiday to a mountain of work. Our staff in charge of livestock had unwisely arranged to have two pigs killed the day before term began. We had never tackled curing bacon before and did not know what a large amount of pig must be eaten straight away. So we were inundated with spare rib, liver, heads, trotters and heaven knows what – just when parents were arriving with their children, and I had often to wipe blood and salt off my hands before dashing off to interview the latest parent. What a week-end that was. It must be put into a book some day. The most crazy of my career. But we came back also to a profusion of flowers; the estate was covered with tens of thousands (literally!) of daffodils, jonquils, narcissus. And many are still blooming. Nature seems more lavish than ever with her beauty, defying the horror of war in it’s bid for the master of our spirits.
We are nearly killed with work. In addition to being Headmaster, I am also the odd-job man, handicraft instructor, science master and estate manager. And as we are still without a professional cook, my poor wife staggers through the cooking for sixty people with hardly a breath to spare. We fall into bed between midnight and 1a.m. and tear ourselves dazedly out at about 7.30. what a life!
With good wishes to you all, and pleasant memories of visits and excursions in the States – seeming now alas, impossibly fair and impossibly remote.
Sincerely yours,
[Signature] Kenneth C.Barnes.
Archive Reference PP KCB 7/7/1 document 01