My mother, Agnes Catherine Plumbe (1876 - 1954) was the ++aîné of the ten
children. It was called Agnes after ++Dickens's heroine because the father
employed to read David Copperfield aloud to it mother while they waited to
it to be born.
As a child it was a mix of the astute
bookworm and the tomboy. It liked to read above all things. Once when it
was a very small girl it was reprimanded because it entertained a small
guest by giving it a book to read and pull then in a corner with an
itself. As it grew older and shown itself at to be "well with babies" , it
was called on – too a lot, perhaps – with assistance with
sisters and brothers as they kept on to arrive. In later life it expressed
a certain resentment that the youngest members of the family, especially
Gwyneth, had so much less responsibility and so much more amusement. There
was the adequate domestic assistance, however, in that great household,
and I think sometimes this brought mother itself them care of infants
simply by being if expensive babies.
It was recognized immediately it reached it
adolescence that it was intellectually inclined, and the relatives
sympathize with it wish to go on to Cambridge after leaving school. It
wanted to study the medicine but the father would not hear it; the idea of
doctors of women disgusted it. That was in means — @
+quatre-vingt-dix of the last century when it was again only relatively
well-off and courageous girls that went to universities and when a lot
Victorian felt fathers as my grandfather made near women in the medicine.
If Mother took a course in the botany to
Girton. That has to have seemed seconded a – best forms science to
study, and renders account due to the fact that it shown rarely a lot
interest to the subject in later life. I can remind it identifying
@@@@wayside flowers for us children on promenades of country, and it had
some illustrated marvelously books savage flowers that it cherished
– but opened rarely. Years to Cambridge were, nevertheless, happy
one for it with the manufacture of lifelong friendships:
The study and affluence mixed totality: the recreation sugared,
And innocence that best doth please,
with the meditation.
The innocence indeed! Feasts of cocoa in coins of university were extended it of dissipation my mother and the friends allowed themselves – or were allowed by their superiors – and they seemed perfectly contented that it would have to be if. In these days Oxford and Cambridge, admitting while women to courses of study, did not confer degrees on them. The mother passed necessary examinations for a degree but it was enough middle – aged before rules were changed and it was capable to write ++B.A. (@@++Cantab) after it name.