My mother, Agnes Catherine Plumbe (1876 - 1954) was the eldest of the ten children. She was called Agnes after Dickens's heroine because her father used to read David Copperfield aloud to her mother while they were waiting for her to be born.
As a child she was a mixture of the clever bookworm and the tomboy. She liked reading above all things. Once when she was a very small girl she was scolded because she entertained a little guest by giving her a book to read and then retiring into a corner with one herself. As she grew older and showed herself to be "good with babies", she was called upon—too much, perhaps—to help with the sisters and brothers as they kept on arriving. In later life she expressed some resentment that the younger members of the family, especially Gwyneth, had so much less responsibility and so much more fun. There was adequate domestic help, however, in that large household, and I sometimes think that mother brought on herself the care of the infants simply by being so fond of babies.
It was recognised by the time she reached her teens that she was academically inclined, and her parents sympathised with her wish to go on to Cambridge after leaving school. She wanted to study medicine but her father would not hear of it; the idea of women doctors disgusted him. That was in the mid-nineties of the last century when it was still only the relatively well-to-do and courageous girls that went to universities and when many Victorian fathers felt as my grandfather did about women in medicine.
So Mother took a course in botany at Girton. This must have seemed a very second-best form of science to study, and accounts for the fact that she seldom showed much interest in the subject in later life. I can remember her identifying wayside flowers for us children on country walks, and she had some beautifully illustrated books of wild flowers that she cherished-but rarely opened. The years at Cambridge were, nevertheless, happy ones for her with the making of lifelong friendships:
Study and ease together mixed: sweet recreation,
And innocence which best doth please, with
meditation.
Innocence indeed! Cocoa parties in college rooms were the extent of dissipation my mother and her friends allowed themselves-or were allowed by their superiors-and they seemed perfectly content that it should be so.
In those days Oxford and Cambridge, while admitting women to courses of study, did not confer degrees on them. Mother passed the necessary examinations for a degree but she was quite middle-aged before the rules were changed and she was able to write B.A.(Cantab) after her name.