2. Boarding School
2.
BOARDING SCHOOL
Although her parents—especially her mother—punished without fail and did not express love in a tender way, the house was full of love. Mr. Carmichael often took his children away from the house and grounds to wander the village of Millisle and its surroundings. He introduced Amy to her first clovered field and her first tidal pool. The children never lacked for pets and toys and books. Yes, books they had in plenty. When Amy was very young, her parents had read to her. When it wasn’t the Bible or the Shorter Catechism, it was usually tales of Christian martyrs. Of course, martyrs of Scotland were emphasized, from Patrick Hamilton in 1527 to Walter Mill in 1558. The legends of Robin Hood and King Arthur seemed to have been served to Amy with her mother’s milk, as were Mother Goose stories and Aesop’s fables. Shakespeare was spoon-fed in the form of Charles Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare.
When the children were old enough to read on their own, the richness in the Carmichael library seemed inexhaustible. Among Amy’s favorites was The Pilgrim’s Progress; and the story of its author, John Bunyan, a simple tinker, was almost as uplifting as the Christian allegory of salvation itself. Robinson Crusoe was not as essential but contained the stuff of dreams. What to do on a deserted island? Gulliver’s Travels was available, too; and no child of Amy’s day could miss Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. And like any good girl of Scottish descent, Amy enjoyed George Macdonald’s At the Back of the North Wind:
Diamond walked towards her instantly. When he reached her knees, he put out his hand to lay it on her, but nothing was there save an intense cold. He walked on. Then all grew white about him; and the cold stung him like fire. He walked on still, groping through the whiteness. It thickened about him…he felt swallowed up in whiteness. It was when he reached North Wind’s heart that he fainted and fell. But as he fell, he rolled over the threshold, and it was thus that Diamond got to the back of the north wind….
Amy knew early on that Macdonald’s writing was not the best, yet his storytelling overwhelmed any literary inadequacies. Novels by Sir Walter Scott never raised a parent’s eyebrow, but borrowed literature such as the Victorian novels of Jane Eyre and Charlotte Brontë or the American imports Little Women and Tom Sawyer would draw a suspicious frown from Mother. Any Irish writer, except a Protestant like Maria Edgeworth, would draw an immediate rebuke from Amy’s parents.
THE MAJESTIC POETRY OF JOHN MILTON WAS CERTAINLY ENCOURAGED.
Poetry thrilled her most of all. It soared high above prose in its brilliance. The majestic poetry of John Milton was certainly encouraged. Poetry by Bobby Burns or George Herbert was not suspect. But John Donne and William Blake were close to crossing the line. In Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” Amy was entranced by certain verses; to wit:
To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
When occasionally Amy was able to read Irish poets, she was often startled by their fiery hatred of England. She read the works of many suspect poets, as well as all the expected. In addition to the great changes from Milton to Wordsworth and from Wordsworth to Tennyson, she began to discern subtle differences between contemporaries like Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold. Smitten, she wrote poetry herself. Her rhyme and meter clunked woodenly, but she persisted. And the more poetry she read, the better her own poetry became. Oh, to create poetry like George Herbert or even like the wild, wild William Blake!
Oh, to read poetry and ride horseback along the rocky shores! What a very happy childhood Amy had! And yet, she had worried for some time that the end of her childish reverie might soon be approaching. When the inevitable news was finally announced at supper one night, the realization was a thousand times harder to bear.
“Must I?” she asked her mother, as a lump as big as a watermelon seemed to form in Amy’s throat.
“I’m afraid you must,” her mother answered coolly. “Let’s not make a fuss.”
So one day late in the summer of 1880, her luggage packed with clothing, Amy said good-bye to her mother and her six brothers and sisters and stepped into a carriage to begin her journey to boarding school. Her father accompanied her to the docks in Belfast, fifteen miles due west. As a poetic device, the direction west was death, and Amy felt its figurative truth. She kissed her father good-bye and was off on a steamship, east as it turned out, across the Irish Sea to England. Well-to-do “British” families deemed such remote schooling necessary.
Upon first seeing her destination, Amy muttered with dread, “Marlborough House.”
THEIR CONCERNS WERE TO BELIEVE GOD’S WORD IN THE BIBLE AND TO ACCEPT HIS SON AS THEIR SAVIOR.
The girls’ boarding school in the large town of Harrogate was run by Methodists. Crossing denominational lines obviously didn’t bother Amy’s parents. They were from a Presbyterian background, but they were not such staunch Calvinists that they had a problem with John Wesley’s Methodism. If one could set aside the question of predestination, both were holy equals. Nor did her parents have a problem with Quakers or any other devout group. Their concerns were to believe God’s Word in the Bible and to accept His Son as their Savior.
“We hard-nosed Ulster Irish do not puzzle over questions like ‘How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?’” Amy told her startled classmates.
Harrogate was in the uplands. Mineral springs had been discovered in the area more than three hundred years before, and many came there to enjoy their recuperative powers. Below Harrogate, the rise between the Nidd and the Wharfe rivers slipped down to the larger town of York. This ancient city, called Eboracum by the Romans, still had its medieval walls and four great gates. Each gate comprised a series of barriers that had to be raised. Below the arched stone gateway, trapdoors once lay over deep, cruel pits. Hidden within the gateway were “murder holes,” where boiling oil and a dozen other excruciatingly painful ways of killing men were unleashed. The most decisive battle of the English civil war had been fought in nearby Marston Moor, where on July 2, 1644, Oliver Cromwell had thrashed the first King Charles. York also boasted York Minster, an old Gothic cathedral with more medieval glass than any other church in England.
“It seems hate and violence and heroism and worship were all heightened in these ancients,” Amy shuddered.
She learned much English history from her surroundings. She had been sheltered from much of it in Millisle. Even as Amy went to school, a new chapter in Irish history was being unveiled. She learned that reforms passed in the English Parliament had not satisfied the Irish. They wanted self-rule. Their champion, Charles Parnell, urged the Irish not to pay land rents to the British. For that rebellious act, he was arrested and imprisoned. Then he struck a deal with William Gladstone, the current prime minister of Great Britain, only to have it disintegrate when Irish revolutionaries murdered British officials in Dublin, Ireland.
Among her English schoolmates, Amy preferred to change the subject from politics to something more to her liking. “Botany is the only subject I like,” she told her peers.
Her interest in botany apparently blossomed in her dormitory window, where she nurtured lilies and chrysanthemums from her native soil. Of course, as the oldest child, she had been nurturing her whole life in the role of “little mother” to her brothers and sisters, and her habits prevailed in her new environment as well. At school she not only socialized among her peers but regimented them. She led by example. If the girls desired a certain dessert, it was Amy who brashly approached the cook and persuaded her to prepare it. In admiration, the other girls said she was “wild Irish,” which amused Amy.
Another incident that characterized her role as “ringleader” in the dormitory occurred one night when the girls wanted to stay up late to watch a particularly brilliant comet. When Amy and her dormitory mates were told by Miss Kay, the principal, that curfew would not be relaxed, Amy devised a plan to awaken her friends in time to see the comet. She tied strings to the toes of all her dormitory mates, then stayed awake until it was time to rouse the others by pulling on the strings. Amy and all the other girls were caught by Miss Kay, who staked out the attic where the girls gathered; but she relented and allowed them to see the comet!
Back in the dormitory, Amy said breezily, “Well, girls, now you can tell your grandchildren you saw the great comet of 1882!”
But once lights were out for the night and Amy was lying alone in her dormitory bed, her exhilaration at seeing celestial grandeur turned to gloom. Certainly, as instigator of the disobedience, she would be summoned by the principal the next morning and expelled, bringing shame on her parents. Her misery brought remorse. Oh, why hadn’t she studied harder? Now surely she would lose her one opportunity forever. Oh, God in heaven, spare me this disgrace, she prayed. And miraculously the next day brought her no reprimand at all. Yet she quickly forgot the incident and God’s mercy and continued to idle through her schoolwork. At times, she seemed little more than a prisoner at Marlborough House.
In the spring of 1884, she sang in the choir at the meetings of the Children’s Special Service Mission. Mr. Edwin Arrowsmith had them sing a simple hymn—an import from America—that had become popular:
Jesus loves me! This I know,
for the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to Him belong;
they are weak but He is strong.
The first verse sang to Amy’s heart like a thousand angels! Did she know she belonged to Jesus? The chorus spoke to her just as grandly:
Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.
Jesus loved her. Of course the Bible had told her that. But had she accepted that love? She knew by now how the Wesleys had stressed a second sanctification in a Christian’s development. But it seemed mumbo jumbo to Amy. The last verse of the hymn resonated in her heart:
Jesus loves me! He will stay
close beside me all the way.
Thou has bled and died for me;
I will henceforth live for Thee.1
After the hymn, Mr. Arrowsmith asked the children to be silent for several minutes. Amy brooded. What if what the Wesleys had said was true? Was this her second chance? Did she have to “accept” Jesus? As far as she could remember, she had not once actually asked Jesus to come into her heart. The pain He bore on the cross seemed to crush her. Yes, she would open her heart to Jesus. Then it happened. Suddenly her chains fell away! She was soaring. The years in England that had seemed to her so empty, such a void, took on special meaning now. She had come into the desert as a pilgrim; and away from the distractions of human love at home, she had found God.
SHE HAD COME INTO THE DESERT AS A PILGRIM; AND SHE HAD FOUND GOD.
“I opened my heart to Him and in His great mercy the Good Shepherd has drawn me into His fold!”
At the end of that school year in 1884, her father came to the boarding school to take Amy to visit London before they both returned to Ireland. London was the greatest city in the world at that time, in every way. More than three million people inhabited the city, compared to one million in New York City at that time. London had a glorious history many times longer than any American borough, preserved in blood and paper and stone. Amy saw as much as could be seen in a few days, including Westminster Abbey, the British Museum, the Tower of London, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, and Windsor Castle. She never caught a glimpse of Queen Victoria; but in the houses of Parliament, Father pointed out the white locks and craggy face of Prime Minister William Gladstone.
Amy’s father soon revealed the purpose of the trip to London. It was possibly Amy’s last chance to see such things. Her school days in England were at an end. The mills in Millisle had become unprofitable. There was no future in grinding American wheat, because the market was flooded with imported American flour. Her father and Uncle William were building a new mill near Belfast; and because the family also had to move to College Gardens to be near the new mill, money would be tight for a while. Norman and Ernest were being withdrawn from their boarding schools as well. Amy now appreciated her schooling as never before.
“I loved all my teachers,” she said. “Why didn’t I study harder when I had the chance? I let everyone down as well as myself.”
Amy was ashamed of her performance as a boarding student. She had indulged her “wildness” and wasted her chance at a higher education, a chance her four younger brothers and sisters might never get. She would just as soon forget her shortcomings; but back in Ireland, Amy did not forget her decision to accept Jesus as her Savior. But how was she to serve Him? A girl of sixteen had few options. At home she was once again the “little mother” to Ethel, Alfred, and Walter. Amy went calling socially with Mother, too. She participated in homespun charities, carrying food to the destitute and the elderly.
One experience made her heart ache. Her mother indulged her with a visit to a Belfast tea shop. While sitting at a table sipping tea and sampling sweet delicacies she didn’t want, Amy noticed a face pressed against the window. How charming, she thought, to see a little girl peering in at the sweets. But when they left the tea shop, Amy saw that it was raining, and the girl’s dress was very thin and dirty. With shock Amy realized that the ragamuffin girl was barefoot! Barefoot on a cold, drizzly day. So cold, so hungry, so poor, so sad!
“Oh, how could I have thought there was any charm in being so desperately poor?” she lamented.
In the cozy warmth of her bedroom that night, she set her feelings to verse.
When I grow up and money have,
I know what I will do,
I’ll build a great big lovely place
For little girls like you.2
“And yet at present I do nothing ‘for little girls like you,’” she admitted. “Please, God, tell me what to do.”
Weeks later, she was in Belfast on yet another gray, drizzly day, this time on a Sunday morning. After the service at the Rosemary Street Presbyterian Church, she saw an old lady on the street who was struggling to carry a heavy bundle. “Let’s help her,” Amy impulsively urged Norman and Ernest. So the three helped, one brother carrying the bundle and the other two escorting the old lady along. But when they ran into more and more people on the street who were leaving church services, Amy became embarrassed. Eyebrows were raised. The old lady was dirty and shabbily dressed. Surely, Amy thought, these well-dressed people don’t think we Carmichaels are somehow associated with this wretched old woman. Oh, why had she been so impulsive? Amy became more and more exasperated, blushing as red as an apple, she was sure, by the time they passed a square with a great fountain.
Then words struck her ears like a thunderclap!
WORDS STRUCK HER EARS LIKE A THUNDERCLAP!
A voice boomed, “‘Now if any man build upon this foundation gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble; every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is. If any man’s work abide which he hath built thereupon, he shall receive a reward.’”
First Corinthians 3:12–14, thought Amy numbly.
But who had said it?