Although, for three years, I had elocution lessons from Miss Driscoe both summer and winter, it is the summer lessons I remember now. I remember the hot walk down Rectory Road, the smell of rambler roses, the pavement made a shadowed lane by overhanging trees, the old houses behind high, well cut hedges. Miss Driscoe's garden was the only one in the road with a lattice fence. Fastened to it was a long brass plate which read: 'Enid Driscoe - Teacher of Elocution.' Along the path to the front door were thick borders of London Pride and on the door itself was a heavy knocker shaped like a dolphin. There was a little card above the dolphin on which Miss Driscoe had printed, 'Will pupils kindly not use the knocker but walk straight into the hall'.

Every Tuesday afternoon, wearing a navy blue blazer and a panama hat with a navy and white striped band, I would push open the door and sit on an oak chest in the hall to wait for the ending of Miriam Tattershall's lesson. The hall was dark and cool, like the inside of a country church, and on the hatstand hung Miriam's school hat with the then white and gold band of Avonleigh. Over the gas mantle by the door, strung together to make a shade, were oblong pieces of coloured glass which tinkled and fluttered when there was a wind. In the corner by the stairs was a green umbrella stand. Painted on the front of it was a stork stranding on one leg and it was filled with Miss Driscoe's golf clubs and an orange garden umbrella.

When it struck five o'clock I would hear Miriam Tattersall come slowly down the stairs. She was a shy, thin little girl who liked to take her own time over things. Sometimes she would pause on the second landing to look out of the window at the Rectory Road gardens. Although our elocution lessons had, for many months, brought us together on Tuesday afternoons we never did more than smile at each other as she picked up her hat and passed through the hall into the garden. Very often she left on the chest, before going upstairs, a pair of skipping ropes done up in a neat bundle. While I waited for Miss Driscoe to call me over the banisters I would watch Miriam unravel them on the top step and then skip away down the path between the borders of ‘London Pride’. Miss Driscoe had told me that Miriam lived in rooms over the Westminster Bank and that her favourite elocution piece was, 'Very Nearly!' It was a favourite of mine too, and began with 'I never quite saw fairy folk a-dancing in the glade...' Miriam was to recite it all before all the pupils when Miss Driscoe gave her August party in the drawing-room.

The elocution room was on the top floor of the house in Rectory Road. To reach it one had to pass the bedroom door of old Mrs Driscoe who was never seen downstairs. It was a moment to beware of for, one afternoon, she had put out her head, wrapped up in a black shawl, to say, "You sound as if you had clogs on, child."

Miss Driscoe sat her pupils on a chintz-covered sofa while she herself stood on a low platform at the far end of the room. She had a very deep voice and grey hair parted down the middle, then arranged in two plaited rings over her ears. In the summer she wore sandals, and cotton dresses of brown and white stripes like the lady in the Kodak pictures. Miss Driscoe was always good-tempered but she would allow no conversation until the lesson was over. She would begin the hour in the same way every Tuesday. "Now stand up - face the window - and repeat after me, Ooh - Ah - Ooh -Ah. The cool pool, the far star..." Between each ‘Oh’ and’ Ah’ and each ‘pool’ and ‘star’ we would both take a deep breath and quickly let it out again. For the ‘Ee’ and ‘Ow’ vowels Miss Driscoe preferred illustrations which gave more scope for dramatic inflection. Drawing on a still deeper breath we started off together, Ee - Ow - Ee - Ow. Came we to see the sands of Dee, No sounds of hounds within the grounds', and Miss Driscoe's voice would become very rich and low as she laid a rounded emphasis on 'sounds' and 'hounds'.

Through the open window while I breathed and declaimed I would often see, on the lawn below, Mr Driscoe and his friend, Mr Poyser,   practising tennis over a clothes line slung between  

two posts. Sometimes Connie, Miss Driscoe's elder sister, sat under the orange umbrella, shelling peas or cutting of the tops of gooseberries. When the breathing half hour was ended Miss Driscoe took up her volume of recitations and said briskly: "Now, which shall we have first? 'Wishes' or the Beetle poem? I should like you to say both from memory." Miss Driscoe started off all her younger pupils on Rose Fyleman. "Begin, please, ‘I don't like beetles tho' I'm sure they're very good...’ Without actions, please, the first time." Then would come the important moment of stepping onto Miss Driscoe's platform and, with hands clasped tight behind, announcing with an aweful clarity, "I Don't Like Beetles By Mis Rose Fyleman". The beetle poem did not allow much scope for action until the line, ":And that dreadful slimy skinny stuff on top of the hot milk" when, with an expression of extreme distaste and with a calculated fastidiousness, an imaginary piece of skin was removed between thumb and forefinger. But it was not beetles and Rose Fyleman for long. It was soon:

'And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees, When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas

When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,

A highwayman comes riding -

Riding - riding,

A highwayman comes riding up to the old inn-door...'

Here, with a moon and a road and a galloping horse, action was abundant and untrammelled. No elocution pupil could have asked for more. It was an exhilarating experience, on those summer Tuesdays, to watch Miss Driscoe start off on a preliminary ride through 'The Highwayman'. It was hardly possible to believe that one was still in Rectory Road as, tugging her horse to a standstill under Bess's inn window, Miss Driscoe affirmed passionately, "Then look for me by moonlight, watch for me by moonlight, I'll come to thee by moonlight, though HELL should bar the way." And then on a later afternoon, without actions, there was a different kind of poem which suddenly changed Miss Driscoe's room into a gentle and, at the same time, a sad place:

'Softly along the road of evening,

In a twilight dim with rose,

Wrinkled with age, and drenched with dew,

Old Ned, the shepherd goes...'

By the afternoon with Walter De La Mare, Miriam Tattershall had long since left off her elocution lesson. She had not stayed more than a year and had never got far beyond 'Very Nearly!' On that August day at the end of our first term, sitting with twenty other little girl pupils, Miriam had been too shy to say anything but her recitation. Miss Driscoe insisted that, at her drawing-room party, each pupil must say at least one piece of poetry. I can see Miriam Tattershall now, small and thin, standing with one hand on the mahogany table in the old-fashioned drawing-room and lifting her eyes to picture in a far corner where she kept them fixed throughout her recitation. Only in this flight from Miss Driscoe and her pupils was Miriam brave enough to go on to the last verse without being prompted:

'I never quite saw Goblin grim

Who haunts our lumber room,

And pops his head above the rim

Of that oak chest's deep gloom:

But once - when Mother raised the lid -

I very, very nearly did!...'

It was not long after the party that Miriam stopped coming to Rectory Road. I missed seeing her panama hat beside mine on the hall-stand. And for many Tuesday afternoons I almost disliked the chatty little girl who took her place at the four o'clock lesson. She would come very noisily down the stairs, then hitch herself on the oak chest - she was the kind of little girl who was always hitching herself about - while she talked eagerly of her latest elocution piece. She sat there until she heard Miss Driscoe's voice calling over the bannisters. Then, wearing neither hat nor socks, she would run off into the sunshine through the dark, sunless hall.