Catherine "Cathie" Calvert Post

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.

 

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.