But the generosity of Wesleyan, in paying us for getting on with our own work, is something I can never forget. It was a noble conception, and I think no Fellow of the Centre was ungrateful. I should like to visit it again, under the guidance of Paul Horgan – ‘Oom Paul’, as we call him, though with no special reference to Kruger. However good it was, I think he must have made things better. He makes everything better. (Alas, he has retired now from the office of Director.) So perhaps I shall never again be persona grata.
16. Amy
Amy was my mother, the second of three daughters. Her elder sister Clélia (by eighteen months) was handsome in an Italianate style. Her youngest, Emma, was downright beautiful, though destined to become irremediably fat.
Amy was pretty, in an extremely delicate way. Rather small eyes, very small tipped-up nose, tiny mouth: a white skin, and that very rare kind of black hair with a blueish gloss on it. She was, in the modern sense, something of a ‘pin-up’. Photographs of her, as a super in Dick Whittington, Bluebeard, Mikado, Patience, Princess Ida, found their way as far as Kimberley. She kept her black hair, and her strange appearance of youth, until her middle sixties, when osteo-arthritis and depressiveness took over.
Following the death of my father, we became very close. She had a great sense of fun, a huge repertoire of music-hall songs (all of which I, at some time, passed on to my children), and a brilliant talent for mimicry, which talent she could never produce on demand. No. But on thinking of someone, she would immediately look like him or her: we would guess of whom she would speak before she even opened her mouth.
In her heavy widow’s weeds, she looked very nice indeed. None of the family, myself included (and willing) doubted that she would soon marry again. But she never did. She was absorbed in me. I, of course, in later adolescence (I was too busy before in trying to look after her) occasionally wanted to cut the cable. But when I suggested that I should like a flat somewhere of my own, her answer was tragic: ‘So I have completely failed!’
She lived with me and my first husband during our entire married life. When I suggested to my second husband, Charles, that she should now make a home with my Aunt Kalie, his answer was one I shall never forget: ‘How can we build happiness upon the unhappiness of other people?’ It was splendidly unselfish, but I am not sure that it turned out to be wise.
However, that was many years ago.
As I have said, there was great fun in her. If she played the duenna, my friends and myself hardly realised it. She danced to the gramophone as we danced, she was a good dancer; she had a flow of anecdotes: and she supplied our peculiar refreshments. It was only when she felt me old enough to go unescorted by her to dances with a young man, that she would become nervous. Then she would stand at the window watching for me. She had watched before, because my spectacularly good-looking friend, Teddy, had been brought up in Malaya and she had a strange fear that he would slay me with a kris, and leave me in some awesome hiding-place on Wimbledon Common. A sillier fear could not be imagined: Teddy was the soul of gentleness.
In 1934 we moved from 53 Battersea Rise (it had become a David Greig’s shop when I saw it last) to Chelsea, our Mecca, and the Mecca of Dylan Thomas, who had by then absorbed my attention. The place was on the first floor of No. 1 Tedworth Square: it had a sitting-room, two bedrooms, and a kitchen with a bath discreetly hidden under the kitchen table: the lavatory was one floor down. We had not been moved in for long, before Amy discovered a bed-bug. What horror! (My own opinion is that a squashed bed-bug smells of gardenias.) So we had to be fumigated. To my mother, this was degradation beyond belief: to me, merely funny.
The trouble was, however, the rapidity in which we made our move from Battersea Rise. Aunt Kalie was going off on her own. I was busy writing my first novel, This Bed Thy Centre, on packing-cases with the removers removing about me. God knows what we lost: none of us had time (and I no inclination) to find out. What did disappear among other things was a first edition of the Sherlock Holmes stories, not rebound from the Strand Magazine (of which I had acquired a full set) but published as a whole for the first time.
As I say, God knows what else we lost: I was too occupied with my writing to concern myself.
I had always been writing: and for years earning a pittance to supplement my income from the bank. Some of it was trash and I knew it. I then fell in with Victor Neuburg’s circle: he had been a friend, if you can call it that, of Alastair Crowley, and appeared to have of him, even now, an unwholesome fear. (It might be valuable to refer to Arthur Calder-Marshall’s The Magic of my Youth.) Victor had contrived to get a poetry column in the Sunday Referee, somewhat gruesomely called ‘The Poet’s Corner’. With his beautiful friend Runia (or Sheila McLeod) he managed, himself on a pittance, to keep open house for his ‘poets’ at various swiftly-changing addresses in St John’s Wood. He was an eccentric with a vast literary knowledge, especially of Blake, whose Marriage of Heaven and Hell he would expound to us in a ragged, rambling garden, while the green twilight fell. Summer nights. Sunsets. Did it ever rain?
Amy was at first much alarmed by all this, since she had heard scandals about Vicky from a barrister friend. But when she met him, she was completely won over. Apart from his tendency to facetious blasphemy (which worried nobody but me) he was respectful of his young friends, and treated them impeccably. To the garden came David Gascoyne, David Haden Guest (who was to die in Spain), A. L. Morton, Geoffrey Pollitt (a poet who took his own life), and eventually Dylan Thomas, who was to make a fairly rapid withdrawal. Dylan was so much aware that he was better by a thousand times than the rest of us. The story of Dylan, as much as I care to say, I shall save for another chapter.
I was the first to win the Sunday Referee’s annual poetry prize, which was the subsidisation of a book of poems. They were chosen from the prize poems published each week: mine was called ‘Chelsea Reach’: it was not devoid of rhythmic interest, but totally devoid of sense. It had probably pleased Vicky’s Swinburnian leanings.
How excited I was! I made the most careful choice of my own work; I corrected the proofs. It was only when I finished surveying the finished production, that it dawned on me that I was no poet. Of that I was sure. And the majority of critics agreed with me. (Many years after this, during the war, I was offered the remainder, if I wanted them: I accepted, and burned the lot. That is the reason why Symphony for Full Orchestra – an impossibly pretentious title – is so rare, and fetches such a relatively large sum today.)
The next poet to win the prize was Dylan. I cannot refer to him as ‘Thomas’ anymore than I can refer to Yevtushenko, a braver man than many think, and my friend, other than as ‘Zhenya’.
Everyone at the bank was delighted with Symphony for Full Orchestra: not so I. For I knew what I thought, and worse, what Dylan thought. As I say, the second year’s prize went to him. The Sunday Referee and Parton Press publication was the famous 18 Poems, no portrait, no absurd introduction – just the poems. Amy found it hard to believe that I held myself a poetic failure, but to an extent she was realistic: she believed I could turn what gifts I might have to something else.
Short stories, of which I wrote a good many and sold a good many too, failed to satisfy me. I had more to say than would pack within so small a compass. So I went resolutely on with my novel.
Here I had a stroke of luck, though it didn’t seem so at the me. In the autumn of 1934, my mother and I went to stay with Dylan, and with his parents, at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, Swansea. Amy and I shortly moved out to an hotel at the Mumbles where we saw Dylan every day. Before long, I began to feel ill. (Was this because I knew things were going wrong between Dylan and myself?) Anyway, I consulted a doctor, who found out a heart murmur. But nothing serious. Could I take a month or so’s absence from my office job?
I could, and I did. Within a month that book was finished (the title, This Bed Thy Centre, was an unwise suggestion of Dylan’s: it had originally been called Nursery Rhyme) and within another month, was accepted for
publication by Chapman & Hall. No trouble at all.
So I said to Amy, ‘If this book brings me in any money, and I can live on my writing, may I leave the bank? I promise you that if it doesn’t, I will look for another job.’
She considered. Then she said, ‘All right. But in the meantime, I can only allow you half a crown a week for pocket money.’
This offer was accepted, but of course it meant hardship. At last the book came out, and by today’s standards would be considered a signal success; the nearest thing to it that I can think of is Lucky Jim, in the very early fifties.
I had not known that it would bring me so much misery. The book was not at all autobiographical: but I believed it was a pretty faithful portrait of the ambience in which I had lived. And I believed that it told the truth, so far as any girl of twenty-one, carefully nurtured, knows what the truth is. The reception of This Bed Thy Centre, was widespread and startling. It was considered ‘outspoken’ – which means dirty. The late Richard Church, who later became my friend and my supporter until his death, used the word ‘lewd’. (I have since republished this novel, which is very mild by today’s standards: and no one, naturally, raised a voice.) But there it was. I was sick with fear lest it should become a subject for prosecution, and I mean, literally sick, as well. My father’s family, for a while, virtually disowned me. Persons at the Ministry of Transport asked my Aunt Kalie how she could have allowed her niece to do such a thing. The local (Battersea Rise) library refused to stock the thing. A friend of my mother’s, also a minor novelist, wrote to me more in sorrow than in anger, pointing out that books could sell without ‘sex and cancer’. I received many obscene postcards. Throughout all this, Amy was stalwart: I had her entire support.
But, apart from Vicky’s circle, I had few literary friends: and certainly no academic ones. Dylan wrote me, however, a somewhat embittered postcard: ‘God, aren’t you successful!’ He could not have foreseen his own future. (Charles later told me that, as a young don at Cambridge, he had much admired the book, and had been on the point of writing to me about it. If only he had done so! It would have meant so much.)
I was saved from further suffering by Cyril Connolly, who had written in praise of the book, and who asked me to call upon him. I was both awed and terrified, but he gave me much comfort. That the book was in any way ‘shocking’ had not occurred to him at all. A second meeting with him took place in the Six Bells in the King’s Road, Chelsea: his friend John Banting was with him, and I forget who else. I was so enthralled by the conversation, that I did not notice five pints of beer stacking up in front of me. When I did, it seemed to me obligatory to drink them.
How I got home I do not know – I can remember nothing of the walk there – but when I arrived I smiled blissfully at Amy, and passed right out. Oddly enough, I had no ill effects from this.
I owe Cyril Connolly much.
A year or so after that, came the beginning of a series of anonymous postcards, which were to plague me, two at a time, at intervals of between five and eight years, and continued for the best part of twenty. They were horrible. The writer knew both Amy and myself, knew about my history, about my goings-out and comings-in. There was a terrible closeness about them, as if an invisible presence were at my very elbow. I took them rather ridiculously. If anyone could say such things about me, surely I must be wicked? I should not be so much of an ass nowadays. Nevertheless, I have never met anyone receiving an anonymous letter, who had not been disturbed by it. (Charles’ friend and mine, Harry Hoff, who writes as William Cooper, later scoffed at me: until he received one of the beastly things himself.)
I believe that such letters give pure delight only in the writing: pleasure may cease when they fall through the slit in the pillar-box. I do not believe the writer is still living, for I have not heard from her (it was obviously a woman) for a long time. All I can say, if she can still hear me, is that yes, she did give great pain. In what she set out to do, she succeeded. Is that a comfort to her? I don’t give a damn now whether it is or isn’t.
Letters, now infrequent, from lunatics (mostly paranoid) have now no effect at all.
When I married Neil, we lived with Amy for a while, in close quarters, in Tedworth Square. Then, our prospects having become rather more bright, all three of us moved in 1937 to a flat in Beaufort Mansions. This, after Tedworth Square, was grandeur. Now we had five rooms, kitchen and bathroom, accommodation many Russians would envy. Neil had a job, Amy her small pension, and I the increasing – though not glittering – earnings from my writing. I had published two more novels, decently received, though no more than that. Amy had given up her typing and was acting as cook-housekeeper.
Marriage: politics: Spain: A.R.P.: war: children. Through all these things she was faithful, though I do not believe that we gave her loneliness a thought when we disappeared in the night on ‘yellow messages’. Was she afraid? I never thought to ask.
In 1946 Neil was discharged from the Army and returned from India to the son he had only seen briefly in infancy, and the two-year-old daughter he had never seen at all. At first all was well. And then, I am afraid, Amy began gradually to play her part in what was not. She did the shopping, and part of the cooking, I looked after the children and had to do my writing, necessary to our joint incomes, late at night. I shall never work at night again. I was always tired, and I think some of my earlier books show this strain. But she had had me (and the children) too long to herself: and I think she became jealous. Tensions developed over three years, and the end was inevitable. But it was very sad.
In 1950, I remarried: C. P. Snow, who had been a friend of the family since 1941. That we are both writers was never a source of rivalry or jealousy: it has been a binding factor: after all, there is always something to talk about. We moved first into a large house in Hyde Park Crescent, taking with us the children, Amy and my Aunt Kalie. Amy’s spirits revived: her old sense of fun came back to her, and she enjoyed having the work taken off her shoulders. Then, when I found with joy that I was pregnant, it was Charles’ idea that the coming child should be born in the country. He was perhaps more enthusiastic than I was, but when the ideal house seemed to present itself, I caught his excitement. This was a half-timbered, yellow house in the wide main street of Clare in Suffolk, with a fine garden running down to an arm of the Stour (where Andrew fished, and had a canvas coracle) and, across the way, a cottage, with a vegetable garden behind it, which housed the gardener and his wife. We had seen it before, by chance, when visiting friends in Glemsford, and had been enchanted by it: suddenly it came on to the market.
It had been built largely in 1644, but the foundations were much older. From the huge stone entrance hall there rose, contiguously, then branching out into the east and west wings, two fine staircases; one built by the proud say-maker who had come to prosperity while in possession of the house, the other and wider, was of the time of William and Mary. We arrived in the heat of high summer, and only later learned that the draughts rushing down these interesting architectural features, were to make the hall uninhabitable for the greater part of the year. Now, really, Amy didn’t like it at all, and I had a reason for disliking it myself, for Charles went up to London from Tuesday to Friday each week, and I was lonely. No sound by night. Not even the mooing of a cow. For this was sugar-beet country. Perhaps the occasional soft plop of beets falling off a lorry. But there was, both for Amy and me, the compensation of the coming child. We moved to Clare in June. In August, the baby began to manifest itself, a full month early, at about four in the morning. Charles called Dr Stewart, who said I must go at once to the Mill Road maternity branch of Addenbrookes, in Cambridge, and sent for an ambulance.
Meanwhile, the dawn broke: a magnificent dawn, the sky raging vermilion and gold. Charles and I looked out of the garden window, while we waited, and both imagined we saw on the lawn blackbirds larger than life: celestial blackbirds, harbingers of our coming son – for Charles had always said it was to be a son.
W
hen I was installed in Mill Road, there came something of an anticlimax: for nothing happened at all, and no one seemed to expect anything for some time. Twenty-four hours passed. Charles came in to see me: he was due to dine in Christ’s that night, but was apprehensive, and afraid to go. I told him he must; nothing would happen yet. I said this with the utmost sincerity. But just as I was listening to his footsteps retreating along the passage, I suddenly knew that the birth was imminent. This gladdened me: he would spend the evening free from anxiety, and by morning it would be all over.
In fact, it was over by a minute or so past midnight on 26th August. Curiously enough, it was rather a more painful birth than I had previously experienced: Philip only weighed 4lb 6 oz. but seemed to have an abnormally large head. (I am pleased to say that he has grown into it since.) So Charles, who had finished his dinner and his port, and had retired from the Combination Room to bed, was telephoned with the joyful news that he had a nice little son. The word ‘little’ might have warned him, but it didn’t. When he came next morning to see me and the baby, he was first shown one of only three pounds; presumably this was kindly meant, so that he should find his own son much larger, but it gave him a shock, all the same.
Philip was not allowed to leave hospital till he weighed five pounds. This was a slow process – a quarter of an ounce, at most, at a time, was added to his tiny bulk. I hung around Mill Road as long as possible till my bed was required, then moved over to the University Arms to be near him, and from where I could visit him every day. But after a week, I was taken by such appalling post-natal depression that I had to return to Clare. Every day, early, I telephoned to Mill Road: yes, a quarter of an ounce. Once, half an ounce! At last I was allowed to bring him home, and obtained the services of Nanny Page, who was to stay with me for a fortnight, and remained for eight years.
Important to Me Page 11
