I came upon your blog, and would like to contribute--Woodsdale was one of the most important parts of a very peripatetic childhood. We had come to live with our grandparents--my father was a career army officer, and had been sent to the Korean war, and my mother decided to bring my sister and me "home" to her parents at Linsly. We've got long roots there--I have a daguerreotype of my great-great grandfather from the 1840's, marked "Wheeling, Virginia."
My grandparents were teachers, house-parents, and a mass of other things at the school over their 30-plus years. They lived in Merriman Hall when it was unreconstructed, still a gracious Victorian house with sweeping porches and lofty ceilings and a mysterious turret which, I was sure, a little girl long ago had used as her hideaway--I wanted to climb to find out, but never had the gumption. The house made wonderful background to endless hours playing Hospital, or School, or banister sliding, or, for me, reading my way through bookshelves of Victorian children's books left behind by the Storers.
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| Calvert Family in front of Merriman Hall (Cathie is standing next to her Father) |
We, however, lived in a one bedroom apartment over a
Linsly outbuilding, still close enough to walk in the evening with my
grandparents as they cared for their rose beds, and for my grandmother to appear
on Sunday mornings, before we all went downtown to church, with a large platter
of just-made pancakes. It was bliss--lots of room to play imaginary Indians,
with our campus friends--Edsie Rhine, Susie Lockhart-- making pemmican out of
mashed berries, and teepees out of low hanging trees, and, if we weren't caught
(as we were strictly forbidden to) detaching a tiny bit of birch bark and
writing a message on it. There were only two frightening aspects of
paradise--the swinging bridge was the first. My grandfather had built it to
bridge the creek that led from one side to the academic building on the other.
It was frightening enough when someone would deliberately go to the middle, and
give it a good sway, but when we crossed the
bridge when he had removed planks for repair, which meant a long drop if
you tripped....well, that was hair raising. But nothing frightened us like the
"crick" and the quicksand.
The floods were interesting, if dramatic. But
quicksand--the only strong words and threat of a paddling my sweet grandfather
ever uttered, were about the quicksand down the hill, and how my mother as a
child had been swallowed up to her knees, until her brother rescued
her--leaving her Sunday shoes in sand.
The second ominous development was Woodsdale School. I
would go with my downstairs neighbor Marcia, who would walk me there as she was
in fifth grade when I was in first. It was a long walk down Leatherwood lane,
then to the corner where the Jolly Fat Policeman would escort us across. I
remember the school as enormous, and having Googled old pictures--indeed it
was, a fortress of stone that seemed to frown.
I was a shy and timid child, and this was already my
third school, with 4 more to come, and I was one of those nose-in-a-book girls
who were often silent. We had a Mean Teacher. She hit. She not only hit, she
used a ping pong paddle on small children's bums, and screamed at everyone. I
huddled in my metal-and-wood desk and stared in horror. Her patience may have
been tried because the baby boom was in full swing, and the year began with
sixty-four children in the classroom, though that thinned. I shook in my shoes
when she hit my best friend Francis in front of the class, for writing in her
reader. But what caught my heart, and reverberates to this day, were the
orphans. They came from up the hill, and everyone knew who was an orphan.
Tommy was small, and very round, and not a little
disruptive, and one day the teacher jerked him out of his chair, and onto a
square of butcher paper on the floor, then taped his mouth shut with scotch
tape, and left him, with his tears flooding past the big 'X" of tape she
had plastered there. I can't help but wonder how he grew up, and be grateful
schools have evolved since then.
I left after the first semester of second grade, off to
Philadelphia, Kansas, Virginia, Germany, and grew up to be a writer and editor
in New York, and now live in London, as I married a British man. Wheeling was
our fixed point in a changing childhood, and Woodsdale its center, and I don't
know where I'd be without memories of summer evenings running like hares across
the broad green fields with our posse of faculty children, or piling into the
car for a trip to Isley's (rainbow sherbet!) or standing on one of the cannons
and spinning the wheels, or going downtown for decorous ladies' lunches at
Stone and Thomas, where my grandmother and mother stocked up on Bridge Mix
(well, they did play bridge!)
We continued to visit and spend summers until the early
60's. It was our one reliable place. In fact, the big old Victorian house we
have bought now on Shelter Island has much of the feel of that Victorian house
I knew so well (except for the basement, where my grandmother kept her canned
goods--we knew that was certainly haunted--and we weren't too sure about the
attic, either). I often, as a writer, used those memories that lay so engraved
on my consciousness.
