My mother, Agnes Catherine Plumbe (1876 - 1954), was the eldest of the ten children. She was named Agnes after Dickens' heroine because her father used to read David Copperfield to her mother while they waited for her to be born.
As a child she was a mixture of clever bookworm and tomboy. She read about everything. When she was a very small girl she was once scolded for entertaining a young guest by giving her a book to read and then retiring to a corner with a book herself. As she grew older and showed that she was "good with babies" she was asked - perhaps too much - to help with the sisters and brothers who were arriving in increasing numbers. She later expressed some resentment that the younger members of the family, especially Gwyneth, had so much less responsibility and so much more fun. There were, however, enough domestic servants in the large household, and sometimes I think that Mother took the care of the young children upon herself, simply because she loved babies so much.
When she reached her teens it was recognised that she was academically inclined, and her parents understood her desire to go to Cambridge after school. She wanted to study medicine, but her father would not hear of it; the thought of women doctors disgusted him. This was in the mid-1890s, when only relatively wealthy and brave girls still went to university, and when many Victorian fathers felt the same way about women in medicine as my grandfather did.
So Mother studied botany at Girton. This must have seemed to her the second best form of science, and this explains the fact that she showed little interest in the subject later in life. I can remember her identifying the flowers by the wayside for us children on country walks, and she had some beautifully illustrated books of wild flowers which she cherished - but rarely opened. The years at Cambridge were nevertheless happy for her, as she made lifelong friends:
Study and relaxation mingled: sweet recreation,
And innocence, which is best, with
meditation.
Innocence indeed! Cocoa parties in college rooms were the level of debauchery my mother and her friends allowed themselves - or were permitted by their superiors - and they seemed perfectly content with it.
In those days Oxford and Cambridge admitted women to courses but did not award them degrees. Mother passed the necessary examinations for a degree, but was already middle-aged before the rules were changed and she could write B.A. (Cantab) after her name.