Fatal Glamour by Paul Delany Page B

large tub under their beds; they began the day by filling it with cold water and jumping in. They were driven on long cross country runs; they froze in winter and were hungry year round; they bullied each other and were beaten, though not so regularly or savagely as at more conventional schools. But Bedales found its supporters among the bohemian fringe of the upper-middle class and grew steadily. In 1900 it moved from Sussex to newly built quarters on a farm at Steep, near Petersfield, where it remains and flourishes.
    Like many things at Bedales, the students’ work on the land combined idealism and practicality. Badley certainly believed that nature was the best of teachers, but he also thought that there was more to be done than sit around in it. At harvest time, Bedalians put in a full day in the fields.The rest of the year they studied in the morning and worked with their hands in the afternoon. The emphasis on country pursuits gave Bedales some reputation among the Continental landed aristocracy, such as the Békássys of Hungary who sent all six of their children there. Nearly a fifth of the early Bedalians were foreigners, recruited by Badley to avoid the imperialist chauvinism of the established public schools.
    Backed up by his wife, Badley took on the other kind of chauvinism in 1898, when four girls entered the school. “We dubbed [them] ‘beastly shes,’” recalled Peter Grant Watson, “and set about to make their lives as intolerable as possible.” 24 It was a typical Bedales paradox, however, that when Watson fell in love with one of the girls it was now his own life that was made intolerable, with one of the younger masters leading the hue and cry. When he was fifteen, Jacques Raverat was taken aside for a lecture by the captain of the school. “The Chief (as Badley was called) doesn’t like stupid and obscene jokes about women,” he was told. “It’s not something to joke about – and also there’s nothing funny about something perfectly natural . . . Sooner or later you’re bound to know what women are like. I myself have bathed with naked girls.” 25
    Seen through French eyes, Badley’s ideas on sex were at once touching and absurd, and so were the female teachers that he dutifully hired: “The mistresses were almost always advanced women, feminists, socialists, Tolstoyans, etc. They dressed according to their theories: sandals, hygienic Jaeger fabrics, dresses without waists or shape called Gibbahs . . . usually in a deliquescent green, thought to be artistic; no corsets, naturally – not hygienic – the hair drawn into flat
bandeaux;
in a word, everything needed to make women as unattractive as possible.” 26
    Carrying all this ideological baggage, how did Badley succeed as well as he did? Unlike Reddie, he was no raving crank, and he was a highly gifted and devoted teacher. He had to keep up the appearance of a reputable, fee-paying school for the middle class. There would be self-expression without anarchy, nudity without fornication. Badley’s vaguely leftist ideals owed more to William Morris than to Marx. He wanted his pupils to appreciate arts and crafts, physical labour, and country life. In the early years, little was done to prepare Bedalians for competitive examinations. Instead of stringing his students up for the battle of life, Badley taught them the arts of peace, leisure, domesticity.
    At Bedales, the symbolic space of the public school was turned inside out. The buildings had no mock fortifications, nor did they enclose their playing fields. Instead, they opened on the woods and meadows wherethe students would learn to cultivate the land, but could also roam at will. Badley’s personality dominated his school as much as Arnold’s had dominated Rugby; but one cannot imagine Arnold shovelling out the school’s earth-closets for a waiting line of boys with