Read Online Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child by Noel Riley Fitch - Free Book Online

KBS.
    All the teachers were women, with Miss Branson as the formidable and intimidating headmistress, who taught Latin. Her ancestry was English, Welsh, and Scot. She was called a “patrician with humor and gentle wit,” whose Keatsian motto was “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The girls never felt they measured up to her high idealism—until they took national tests. She was severe-looking and high-minded. Julia remembers her “enormous blue eyes,” probably because they were often trained on her. Miss Branson “enjoyed a good laugh,” explained Clara Rideout, who remembers that Miss Branson’s “favorite” girls were “very naughty and prankish, and rather quirkish girls, but bright.” Another student, Roxane Ruhl, Julia’s classmate from Oregon, said, “I remember her often smiling with amusement at Julia.”
    Julia herself was attracted to strong and independent girls, as she had been to Babe. One girl, Berry Baldwin, was a classmate who lived almost across the street from the school in her grandfather’s house, where her uncle served as her guardian. “Berry was a wonderful crazy individual,” said her classmate Aileen Johnson. Some days, after school, Julia would visit Berry and they would make themselves martinis from her uncle’s liquor supply.
    In addition to Miss Branson, Miss Martha Howe, the English teacher, was an influential adult in Julia’s high school education, as she was for most of the students. When Howie, as Julia called her behind her back, repeated yesterday’s lesson, the girls did not once giggle, out of respect and fear. Howie was small and strict and “very forceful … she was a terrier nipping at your heels,” said Clara Rideout. The material that appeared in The Blue Print , the literary annual (there was no school paper or yearbook), is testimony to her high standards.
    Julia’s essay in The Blue Print her senior year is a model of essay form, complex sentence structure, and articulate expression. In “A True Confession,” she admits “I am like a cloud.” With a passing reference to William Wordsworth, she attributes her childhood tearfulness to “weak tear glands,” and thus “mechanical” tears: “So think of me, if you must, as a pregnant rain-cloud, a weak-glanded maiden with hot tears laden; but bear in mind always that an X-ray would show my heart to be no softer than a rock!”
    Her junior short story the year before appeared in The Blue Print and was entitled “A Woman of Affairs.” In it she captures her sense of unease riding on a public train by herself and her desire to appear sophisticated and a woman of the world in the train’s dining car. “The idea of going down [to the dining car] alone was not at all unpleasant to me, it gave me a sense of proprietorship over my soul.” Economizing by ordering only a salad, she politely takes a small helping from a bowl “as big as a bathtub.” Suddenly the waiter sweeps the bowl away and she is left with an inadequate meal and only a few cents for a tip. A series of other stumbles ensues, yet she forges ahead. The story is based on her train trips from Pasadena to San Francisco, where the chaperone always met the KBS girls and took them to the ferry.
    She would call on these writing techniques in her future career. Fortuitously, she studied French; surprisingly, she did not do very well. This was not French taught in the language as much as the study of verb forms (explained in English), vocabulary tests, and reciting French sentences. The first year Mademoiselle Begue recorded that Julia’s pronunciation was “not as true” as it should be: “explosive consonants attributed to Scotch ancestry!” The second year Mademoiselle Liardet recorded an “inability to detect shades of sound in French.” And Miss van Vliet later said that her “grammatical and inflectional vagaries are constant and alarming!” The final record says she was musical but had no ear for French: “Oral is