The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  I like to think that my aunt was happy, as I was, during those summer evenings in Somerset. I always anticipated her visits with a mixture of pleasure and apprehension, because she could be a very rude and demanding guest. Graciousness was not her forte. She belonged to a generation that expected younger people, even younger people in their fifties, to behave with deference. Once, driving back towards Porlock Weir over Exmoor from an excursion, my daughter, my daughter’s friend and I engaged in a lively dispute about which route to take back. All were beautiful, so which to choose? Should we take the coast road, or drive inland over the moor via Simonsbath? After a few minutes of this banter, my aunt said, and not as a joke, ‘Oh, do shut up about it, you’re making me feel sick.’ We fell silent at once, but when we got back home my daughter’s friend confided to me that she had never heard an adult speak to another adult in that tone.

  (This elegant friend, Guyanese-born and educated in England, now lives in Johannesburg, whence she sent me a jigsaw of camouflaged African animals that at first sight looked easy, but was far more difficult to complete than Rousseau’s tiger. I emailed her to say, ‘The African jigsaw is impossible,’ and she responded, ‘The African jigsaw is difficult, but not impossible.’ I think that is still her view of the situation in South Africa.)

  Auntie Phyl’s eating preferences were also a little tricky. She was not a good cook, but when we were little she had cooked for us what I remember as delicious snack meals, like Welsh Rabbit (sic) and Scotch pancakes and drop scones and omelettes (a word that she pronounced, as I do, with three good syllables). She was not keen on anything continental. Late in her life she came round in a big way to the notion of the pub lunch, but she considered herself allergic to mushrooms, and it was surprising how many pub menus on Exmoor seemed to feature mushrooms in almost everything. I remember one potentially disastrous meal in the Notley Arms in Monksilver when she was presented with some dark dish (perhaps an omelette?) covered in mushrooms, but luckily the lighting in the pub was so dim that she didn’t see them. She ate them all, and there were no ill effects.

  I maintain (though she queried this) that it was I who usefully introduced her to scampi and chips, at an excellent but now defunct castellated hostelry overlooking the Bristol Channel at Linton. On a fine summer day, as wasps circled the cider, the view was as glorious as the French Riviera, and we felt on top of the world. She took to scampi very well once she had got over the shock of the novelty. Fish and chips wrapped in newspaper she had always enjoyed, and she used to go out to get them from the van at Long Bennington when it did its weekly round of the villages.

  She always insisted that she deeply disliked mayonnaise, but one day, making egg sandwiches for our picnic, I thought, what the hell, and mashed in a generous spoonful of Hellman’s while she wasn’t looking. We ate our sandwiches in a green sloping field beneath an azure sky, surrounded by the surreal pink sheep of Somerset, as happy as can be, and she devoured every morsel. That evening she rang my sister Helen and I heard her say that she had had a lovely day out, and that Maggie’s egg sandwiches were ‘out of this world’.

  I wasn’t as nice as I should have been to her succession of dogs. I didn’t pat them or speak to them, and when I took them for walks I was silently morose. Auntie Phyl used to tell them, ‘Now, be good for your Auntie Maggie, she doesn’t like it when you make a mess on the carpet.’ And she was right, I didn’t. The first little white dog – a rescue dog called Kelly, whose original owner was in gaol – metamorphosed at some point into a slightly smaller and slightly better-behaved but otherwise almost identical West Highland terrier called Daisy. These were part of the summer deal, and they did alarm the rabbits, which since their visits ended have become completely out of control. When I was a small child, I had loved her large collie dog, Chum, but in my recollection Chum was a much better-trained dog.

  A friend of mine once suggested that the later dogs became so naughty because my aunt had de-trained them, and that, by allowing them to pee on the carpet, lick her face and feet, masturbate against her ankles, jump at visitors, and bounce on beds, she was expressing the bad behaviour that had been pent up in her by a lifetime of schoolmistressy propriety and younger-sister, maiden-aunt syndrome. I think there is truth in that.

  My aunt preferred animals and birds to people. In general, despite the condoned anarchy of Kelly and Daisy, she was good with animals. In Doncaster, she had had a green budgerigar called Skippy who used to be able to say, ‘Auntie go to school,’ as she set off for her day’s work at Woodfield Primary. She wore a little green Skippy feather in her hatband, which I thought was stylish. His death in the hard winter of 1946 was a sad loss to all of us, and the subject of eloquent letters of condolence from her nieces, which she preserved for the rest of her life.

  Creatures accepted her. Cats would come to sit on her lap, and calves offered their noses to her for a scratch. Birds flocked into her back garden, and sometimes came right into her large farmhouse kitchen. She called them ‘her little dicks’, an unselfconscious abbreviation of the already curious phrase ‘dicky bird’. Pheasants often visited her, flaunting their handsome plumage amongst the motley assembly of potted plants in her yard, and for a long while a little free-range hen, escaped from a neighbouring flock, came to peck about beneath her kitchen window. She was very distressed when a fox got it, leaving nothing but feathers.

  Bryn was full of pot plants on windowsills – geraniums, cactuses, African violets, streptocarpus – not all of them in perfect health. In the summer, she would put most of them out in the yard, by the stone trough full of the sturdy grey-green rosettes of stonecrop and houseleeks. ‘If they thrive, they thrive,’ she said. ‘If they give up, well, that’s it, they’ve had their chance.’ One of these plants she called a ‘hot water plant’, and she watered it direct from the boiling kettle. It seemed to like this treatment and responded with a small purple flower. She gave me a pot of little hot water plant pups, and they did quite well for a few years in London. I don’t know what their botanical name was.

  I still have in London a fine orange lily, a clivia, which I bought for her one Christmas, and reclaimed when she had to leave Bryn. It blossoms unexpectedly, I think every other year. I am pleased that it continues to flower.

  In Somerset, she enjoyed a visit to Home Farm at Blue Anchor with her great-great-nephews and nieces, to look at the sheep and the goats and the ducks and the piglets. She had no fear of animals, nor they of her. The only animal I saw her take against was a very large sow at Home Farm, who was lying on her side in her straw, exposing a vast, bald, yellowish underbelly of teats, over which various piglets squabbled and fought. The sow’s expression was one of bored contempt. She was an unpleasant heap of flesh – ‘Not a pretty sight,’ said Auntie Phyl, with a slight shudder. I think the sow reminded my aunt of her mother, who was not a pretty sight either. Grandma Bloor was a stout, grim and unyielding woman.

  Auntie Phyl, in old age, was not pretty, though this did not prevent her from criticizing the appearance of others. ‘Not very attractive, is she?’ she once said, bluntly, of one of the new girlfriends of one of her great-nephews, to which the proper retort, the retort she would best have understood, would have been, ‘Look who’s talking!’ But in fact, as a girl, she had been bonny: slim, with fair hair, fair skin, and blue eyes. Most of the Bloor women were slim as children and adolescents; it was in middle age that their figures thickened, their waists spread, their bosoms swelled and drooped. I used to look at these women and hope I wouldn’t get like that, but of course it was the genes that did it, not the diet or the lack of exercise. A waistless stoutness lay in wait for all of us. A piggish, balding, bristling yellowish pinkness was our genetic fate.

  My mother disliked exercise and became agoraphobic, but my aunt enjoyed walking through the village with her dog.

  We used to think the Bloors had Dutch blood, because many of them were potters, and because of their Dutch-doll colouring, but in fact Bloor (or Bloore or Blore) is a
n old English name. The Bloors (like the Drabbles) were English through and through. There is a little village in Staffordshire called Blore, which I once went to visit when doing family research for the background of The Peppered Moth. Our car got stuck in the deep damp unmown grass of the churchyard, and we had to ask some funeral mourners for a shove. They were more than happy to oblige. Helping hapless strangers was more fun than burying the dead.

  Auntie Phyl had little vanity, though she was proud of her yellow hair, and even in her eighties fancied that it kept a golden tint. (It did, but it was the tarnish of age, not the bright flax of youth.) As far as I know, she never had a boyfriend or a love affair. When I was a small child her single status seemed natural and desirable to me, for it enabled her to concentrate her affections on her nieces and her nephew. Later, I wondered whether she had lesbian leanings. She had several close female friendships, some dating from her college days when she did her teacher training course at Homerton, but none of them seemed to me to have a sexual component. (One Homerton couple lived together, but I doubt whether they were practising lesbians. Sexual abstinence, like sexual ignorance, was far more common then than it is now.)

  Born in 1909, she was too young to be considered a member of the tragic generation that lost its fiancés and lovers to the Great War, so I assume she lived alone by choice. She had several male friends, some of them connected with the trade that my grandparents had plied at Bryn, which they bought when it was already established as a bed and breakfast and tea garden. These friends included the toffee boys, as we called them, who drove a lorry full of confectionery up and down the Great North Road; another couple called Len and Arthur; and a young man who worked at a gentleman’s outfitters in Grantham. I think now that maybe these men were what we would now call gay.

  I do not think my aunt had any sexual interest in men, although she liked children, and in my mother’s view would have liked to have had a baby. Maybe she was asexual.

  In the late 1960s and 70s she and my parents came every year to stay with me in Hampstead for a few days over Christmas, and Arnold and Dusty Wesker, then living in Highgate, adopted a kindly habit of dropping in for a smoked-salmon high tea on Christmas Eve. I think they felt sorry for me, coping alone with such an intense and loaded domestic celebration. And, indeed, I sometimes felt sorry for myself. It was exhausting, for my first husband Clive and I had by this time separated, and it was a lot of work for one person. I don’t know how it happened that I became the daughter who always did Christmas, and when I suggested that it was somebody else’s turn, I was met with a blunt refusal. ‘They wouldn’t want to go anywhere else’ was the miserable excuse I was given. This was disingenuous, to say the least.

  Arnold closely observed the bickerings and manoeuvrings of the elderly trio (these became so fractious that eventually my father used to sleep in a friend’s house over the road) and speculated at one point that maybe Auntie Phyl had been in love with my father when young. Arnold is a writer, and he saw a plot. Two sisters, both in love with the same handsome, eligible, upwardly mobile bachelor in Mexborough: one wins the man, marries him and has children, the other stays single all her life. An Arnold Bennett story. (My aunt’s middle name was Bennett and, as we are from the Potteries, we claim some as yet unverified connection with the great man.) But I don’t think Arnold Wesker can have been right. Arnold is strong on family and aunts, but his imagination is (or in those days was) inexorably heterosexual. I do not believe that my aunt loved and lost. It was not like that. I don’t know how it was, but it was not like that.

  My aunt survived both my parents by nearly ten years, and that is one of the reasons why I now think of her so often. She lies more recently in my memory. And my memories of her are less painful than my memories of my parents. It is true that she could be rude, cutting, ungrateful, demanding, even offensive, but her insults or rejections were not wounding. One Christmas, she examined her newly opened gifts with some scorn, and complained that the book she had been given would be too big for her bookshelf, and that the chocolates were very near their sell-by date. I think the rest of the family just found this funny, whereas my mother’s criticisms of presents I gave her wound me to this day. I remember them word for word.

  I cherish Auntie Phyl’s remark about the queen’s corgis. I arrived at Bryn one year from my hideout on the A1, furnished with a newspaper I had acquired at the Ram Jam: it was a tabloid, bearing a banner headline proclaiming CORGI BITES QUEEN. Auntie Phyl read the item with interest, and a naughty, girlish, sideways little smile lit up her face.

  ‘Good!’ she said.

  She preferred animals.

  I tried to write about her and my mother in my novel The Peppered Moth, where she became dressmaker Auntie Dora, and her white dog Daisy became a marmalade cat called Minton. (My grandmother, before her marriage, had been a dressmaker, and I think one of my Wadsworth great-aunts, Auntie Lizzie, was a wigmaker.) I caught some of her eccentricities and mannerisms, but in fictionalizing her I moved her into a dark territory that was not her natural habitat. It was my mother’s, but it was not my aunt’s. By writing this book I would like to rescue her (and thereby a part of myself) from that contamination, to show her in plainer, brighter and more cheerful colours and in simpler prose. Many of the happier times of my childhood I owe to her, and although I often tried to tell her this, she was not much of a one for compliments or emotional declarations. She did not know how to deal with them.

  I see some of those childhood scenes at Bryn in bright colours and clear blocks, like the large pieces of a child’s wooden jigsaw. I see the house with its red-tiled roof and its Virginia creeper and its front door set squarely in the middle, as a door should be. (The Virginia creeper was of a great age, and I think Bryn, a century earlier, had been called Ivy House.) I see the sash windows with their small square panes, the apple loft that served as a bedroom for us children, the stone pump in the back yard, the shallow muddy pond in the field, where once I thought I saw a fish. I see the greengage tree, the Victoria plum, the apple orchard, the bonfire, the deep gulley of the hedge bottom, the stone slab over the dangerous cesspit. I see and smell the cool larder, with its perforated zinc window and its rows of bottling jars and its pre-war tins of corned beef and its leaning towers of tea plates and its shelves of little cracked cream jugs.

  I see the rhubarb rearing up through an upside-down tin bucket in the yard, and the houseleeks growing in the stone trough and on the outhouse roof.

  The deep hedge bottom reminded me of the poetry of John Clare. Or, more chronologically, I should say that when years later I came to read the poetry of John Clare, I was reminded of the hedge bottom. He had a ground-level, tree-root view of the natural world, not a prospect view. I knew in my bones that the hedge bottom dated back to the enclosures of 1796.

  It was an old house, and it smelled of old England, and it seemed full of folk memory. But it wasn’t a family house, an inherited house. My grandparents bought it in the 1930s. My grandfather gave up his job as an electrician in Mexborough in industrial South Yorkshire and bought it as a going concern. He borrowed some of my aunt’s teacher’s savings to help him to do so, or so she later claimed. She did not resent this, or not much. She might have resented it a little, or she would not have told me. But she thought he had pluck to take a chance in middle age with a new life. That was the word she used. ‘Pluck’.

  My grandparents came from a background of northern urban streets. My grandmother, who was born a Wadsworth, came from the nineteenth-century, densely terraced housing of Leeds, now occupied by students, and my grandfather Bloor from the Potteries. Photographs of now unidentifiable young women standing on well-scrubbed, white-edged doorsteps on bleak pavements suggest a life of hard-working respectability. Neither of my grandparents was country born, but they chose to escape the coal mines and pot banks to move to a not particularly picturesque Midlands village, to an old house on an ancient thoroughfare. Was this a sort of Mr Polly-ish, Wellsian escape to a clea
ner, happier world? I wonder whether they had any sense of returning to a way of life that their grandparents, before the industrial revolution, might have known. The towns and cities of the North of England and of the Midlands, which had expanded with such rapidity during the industrial revolution, were still informed with a sense of the nearness of a countryside that was felt to be a common birthright. Novelists of the North and of the Midlands, from Elizabeth Gaskell to D. H. Lawrence, J. B. Priestley and Alan Sillitoe, have described these Arcadian longings, these strangely intermingled neighbourhoods where fields and paddocks and quarries pock the haphazard housing developments. I have always felt an affinity with these landscapes.

  Sillitoe, a writer who emerged from a red-brick estate of council housing on the outskirts of Nottingham, and whose working life began in a factory at the age of fourteen, writes that he lived in ‘a street with houses behind and fields in front’. As a boy he could walk, carrying a stick and a sandwich, through nettles, Queen Anne’s Lace and elderberries the mile or so to his blacksmith grandfather’s cottage. This cottage had neither gas nor electricity and smelled, in his view wholesomely, of stale lavender, lamp oil, strong soap and turpentine. His grandfather Burton was granted the gleaning rights to the wheat that grew too close to the hedges to be harvested by the combine harvester, a right that now sounds medieval. This was a life on the edges of two worlds, in which the memory of the old country ways persisted, and Sillitoe, a self-educated scholar, in his novels consciously evokes the pastoral idyll and Virgil’s Eclogues. Working men spent their days in the factory and at the weekends bicycled, hiked and fished by canals. The countryside was penetrable and close.

  The Easter visit of a men’s cycling club was one of the big annual events at Bryn, and it made my dour grandmother almost girlish. She loved the bicycle boys and spoke of them flirtatiously. She liked to cook them their eggs and bacon.