The Foundress, and a hundred and fifty years

The maiden of the storm

St Elowen was a maiden of old Cornwall who kept a lantern burning through a night of storm to guide the fishing boats safely home.

That is the whole story. It is not a large story, and it does not need to be. Everything the school has, it has from her: its name, and the seven-pointed star on its crest, and the silver star hidden in the pudding, and the lantern in the tower, and the lanterns of the parade, and the words carved over the door, and even a custom, two hundred miles away, that the school did not know it shared. A light kept for someone you cannot see, on the chance that they are out there, and lost, and coming home. That is the whole of St Elowen’s, and it began with her.

Honoria Elowen

A hundred and fifty years ago, a woman named Honoria Elowen bought a rambling old house in the Weald of Kent and made it into a school for girls. She was not a young woman when she did it, and she had been a long way to get there.

As a girl, she had been a pupil at a school on the banks of the Seine, outside Paris, more than a hundred and sixty years ago now. She came home to England carrying the idea of a school inside her the way some people carry a tune, and one day she built it, on a hill, at the end of a drive, with a tower she could see from every field on the estate.

And in the window of that tower she kept a lantern burning, every night of her life, so that no homesick girl, waking in the dark in a strange new bed, need ever believe herself the only soul awake in the world. If she looked from her dormitory window, there was the light. Someone was up. Someone had thought of her. She was not alone.

The promise

When she grew old, and knew she would not always be there to climb the stair, she did a characteristic thing. She did not leave money for the light, or a rule about the light, or a plaque explaining the light. She asked a boy.

He was a gardener’s son on the estate, and she asked him to promise that the lantern would go on burning after she was gone. He promised. He kept it for more than thirty years, until his own legs would no longer take the tower stairs, and then he did the same thing she had done: he passed the story, and the duty, and the old iron key, to his own young son.

That son is our Mr Wells. He has kept the light for sixty years, alone, and until very recently, in secret, telling nobody, climbing that stair every single night for girls he had never met and never would. What the school found at the top of the tower, in the end, was not a ghost, and not a mystery. It was an old gardener, keeping a promise he made as a boy, because he said he would.

The whole of that story, the discovering of it, is told in The Star of Promise. And the light burns still, in the sight of the whole school now, every night, at dusk.