Mavis Williams
A pupil of eleven who has spent a term and a half filling books with pothooks. Her mother pays the fees regularly and believes she is only backward; Mrs Creevy knows otherwise and has not mentioned it.
The book
At a glance
- A pupil at Ringwood House Academy, Southbridge
- Eleven
- A term and a half, all of it spent on pothooks
- Chapter 4
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeMavis Williams is eleven, and she is a pupil at Ringwood House Academy, the small private day school in the London suburb of Southbridge where Dorothy Hare, the clergyman's daughter of the title, teaches after she loses her memory and her place at home. Dorothy finds her on the first morning at the bottom of the class, among the girls who can barely read or write. Mavis cannot count at all.
What she has instead is a pile of exercise books filled with pothooks, the looped practice strokes that come before handwriting. She has produced nothing else in a term and a half. George Orwell describes the pages as looping on and on like the mangrove roots in some tropical swamp.
Dorothy spends her first few days trying to get her past them and cannot. Mrs Creevy, who owns the school, later explains privately that the child is not right in the head and cannot be taught anything, and that she has not said so to the parents, who believe their daughter is only backward and pay their fees regularly. Her mother is one of the six who come to the school in a body later in the term to complain about Dorothy's teaching, and Orwell describes her as a small, dark, very obtuse woman who always agrees with the last speaker.
How the book draws them
- How the book describes herA rather sinister-looking child of eleven, with eyes set too far apart.
- The pothooksBook after book of them, and nothing else in a term and a half. Given a pencil and told to draw pictures and keep quiet, she draws pothooks, and stays quiet and apparently happy for hours together with her tongue hanging out.
- When she is asked for moreAt the first attempt to get her to do anything beyond pothooks, a look of almost subhuman blankness comes into the wide-set eyes.
- The questionsShe has talkative fits in which she asks the unanswerable. She finds the elephant in her reader and asks what that thing there is; told it is an elephant, she asks what an elephant is; told it is an animal, she asks what an animal is; told a dog is an animal, she asks what a dog is. It could go on indefinitely.
- How she speaksShe mispronounces her words in a way the book calls curious, and writes it out as she says it: "Please, Miss, wass 'at thing there?"
- The lavatoryShe asks to be excused with a sly politeness that ought to have put Dorothy on her guard. A bigger girl explains, too late and shamefacedly, that Miss Strong never used to let her go alone, because she locks herself in and will not come out. Mavis stays there until twelve o'clock.
- In the mutinyWhen the class turns on Dorothy Hare late in the term and chants the nickname they have made of her false name, Mavis takes it up with all the rest.