I am not being masochistic. I have my own ideas, often far removed from theirs, and I like to hear these discussed. If I agree with my opponents, I will gladly say so, and reconsider my position. If I do not, I remain unshaken. I have, I think, still workable brains, a long career behind me, and greater experience than they in the intricacies of human relationships. (Let no one dare to speak like this before the age of sixty. It is cheek.) I expect them to give me, which they invariably do, a serious hearing. They, for their part, are more widely-travelled, far better educated, and they understand their peers as I cannot.
So, if we all wish to dispose of the pernicious – even vicious – nonsense about the ‘generation gap’, we must meet each other in debate on terms of equality and respect.
I was often at odds with my mother. But never did I feel that we were animals of different species – she, for instance, a jaguar, I a warthog. Dissent was conducted on the terms of equality. I have felt little of it with my own children, except, perhaps, with Lindsay, when she was in her teens. Never seriously, though.
The ‘generation gap’ has been, then, a modern journalistic invention on a par with the non-existent ‘Angry Young Men’. Family strife, rupture, misunderstanding, is ages old. Nevertheless, we are not to believe that a new gulf has been created, across which communication is impossible. Communication is always possible, if the will on both sides is there, if heads and tempers are kept cool, and tribute given to one of the noblest of goddesses ever conceived, though not in terms of Robespierre and the Champs de Mars: the goddess of Reason.
22. Migraine
I am reluctant to write about so depressing a subject. Still, I had about thirty years of it.
My first attack came when I was eleven years of age, and was then not believed in. Children didn’t ‘have headaches’. I was only believed when, one Sunday at lunch time, when we were having chicken (something of a luxury then, and of which I was very fond) I did not appear at the meal, but was found in the bedroom praying miserably for release from pain. From that time, till my late teens, attacks were sporadic: then, for many years, they became frequent. My worst periods of suffering were in my early thirties and early forties. (Pregnancy would release me from them for a blessed nine months at a time.) Through some of these attacks I would work: I had to. But for the most part, they were totally incapacitating.
Let nobody think these are just common ‘headaches’. In my case they were the classical hemicrania, the ‘half-headache’ of the Ancient Greeks, on one half of the head only. I don’t want to indulge in melodrama: but I remember several occasions when, at the height of an attack, I would bang my head frantically against a wall, less in the hope of knocking myself out than in the hope that one pain might overcome another. At those times, death would have seemed preferable to what I was going through. I mean that.
If migraine were depressing to me, it was also depressing to my family. For there is a curious thing about it: it tends not to happen at times of crisis, but afterwards, when relief should bring relaxation. It is precisely then that the horror springs (it has a great affection for weekends), having been preceded often by a strange state of euphoria. I got used to these moments of unnatural well-being, and knew with sinking heart what they meant.
Migraine would also ruin something to which one had been looking forward. A dinner. A theatre party. A visit to the cinema. I well remember, in the fifties, looking forward with eager anticipation to an evening party being given at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in the garden, by our friend Jack Plumb (Professor J. H. Plumb, the historian). I had a new dress for the occasion, new shoes. I hoped to have a wonderful time. We were staying, Charles and I, at the Master’s Lodge. I was quite happy until, about an hour before that party was due to begin, I knew the familiar aura which heralded trouble: series of pothooks and hangers looping up and down before my eyes wherever I turned them. I had to lie down, and to send Charles off on his own. After an hour and a half in darkness, I managed to dress myself, and went out to the party. There I wandered about holding, but not drinking, since in a migrainous attack, alcohol makes one feel infinitely worse, a glass of white wine, and trying to beam socially at the many people of whom I was fond. What should have been a delight, became a nightmare. The ironical thing was, that just as the party was dispersing, my migraine dispersed also. I was able to sit for a while talking and drinking some whisky, in Jack’s rooms.
During the worst periods of my life, I would have an attack every fortnight, each one lasting for five days.
Now I think I have grown out of it. But there are records of those who continue to suffer into extreme old age.
Who, then, not having experienced it, cares? Migraine is not I a killer, though I believe that years of it can bring about serious personality changes. It is not, like cancer, murderous: though it has something in common with it: the causes are multiple, so that anything in the nature of a ‘cure’ may be far ahead in the future. For migraine, the Greeks had their word, I believe there are even mentions of it in the archives of Ancient Egypt. It is, of course, if the industrialists cared to investigate, the cause of a great loss of man-hours. Some realise this, and do what they can to help. Others simply do not.
In the early sixties, I wrote a novel, The Humbler Creation, which contained a very frank account of a classical migraine attack. This attracted the attention of Peter Wilson, who had devoted every minute he could spare from his working life, to founding the Migraine Association, based on his home in Bournemouth. (He was later to receive a decoration for his pioneer work.) This was a lay body, of which he asked me to become President. Out of this little acorn sprang a sizeable oak: the Migraine Trust, at first under the chairmanship of the late Lord Brain. Our patron is H.R.H. the Princess Margaret, herself a sufferer: and if I may presume to speculate on how many official engagements she must gamely have carried out, while migraine had her in its grip – well, perhaps she would not like it if I did speculate. But I could, if only she were a Ruritanian princess and not a real one.
The Migraine Trust has been a success, though enough money is hard to raise. Nevertheless, it did establish a clinic in the City of London where sufferers could go at the beginning of an attack: and furthermore, if that attack were sufficiently advanced, would not be required to stagger there under their own steam, but would be called for. Here, they were treated with the best analgesics that we now know, and allowed to rest quietly in the dark, till the worst of the pain was over. Here, also, an attack could be observed from its very beginning – or almost its beginning – through its various stages: which has, of course, been greatly helpful to research. The Clinic has now moved to more spacious premises in Charterhouse Square – the Princess Margaret Clinic.
Here I know I am in a quandary. I promised to write of what has been of prime importance in my own life. And, damn it, this has been. Suave mari magno: but I cannot regard, from my welcome shore, all those other strugglers in that hideous sea, with equanimity. To those who have never ever had a bad headache most of the foregoing will appear meaningless, even hysterical.
By those who know something of that black spider in the brain which grips with suddenness and infinite tenacity, I shall be understood.
And by those who have watched others suffer, such as my husband Charles, who has never had a headache in his life, and yet has supported the Migraine Trust for all he is worth, I shall be understood also.
23. A Reluctant Note on Music
At the age of about ten, I was allowed to do something very peculiar indeed. My mother’s friend, who had two rooms in our house, was harpist with the orchestra at the London Coliseum, under the direction of Sir Alfred Butt. (Her name was Edith Strong.) He had no objection to my sitting beside her harp, on a stool in the orchestra pit, provided I kept quiet – which I could see no reason not to do. I must have been perfectly visible from the stalls, but my presence appeared to cause no comment. In the intervals, I was taken down the echoing corridors to refreshments in the band-room.
I was learning to play the piano myself, and one of my joys was to sit in the room next to Edith’s listening to her practising. From her, I learned to love Debussy. ‘En Bateau’, on the harp, at a slight distance, on a still summer afternoon, falling like drops of cool water, was a magical experience.
At the Coliseum I watched, for the most part, music-hall. I best remember Du Calion (‘the Loquacious Laddie on the Tottering Ladder’) who used to do precisely what this description indicated: to climb an unsupported ladder of great height, and chatter blithely on the top of it. He used to swear at the Coliseum draughts – they would be the death of him, one day. I was there the night he fell. But he did not die.
Then came the season of Russian Ballet – Colonel de Basil’s, I think. I saw Lopokova, Karsavina, Woizikovsky, Massine. It was entrancing. Later, something gradually dawned on me: I did not enjoy the performances of these wonderful dancers unless I liked the music. Whose Petrouschka did I love? My memory is vague. But here was dance, completely married to music. Who danced Falla’s ‘Miller’s Dance’, and ‘La Jota’? I don’t know. Perfect again. But if the music bored me, then the dance did also. This explains my present indifference to ballet: I cannot appreciate La Fille mal gardée, because I find Hérold’s music tepid. A weakness, I suppose. But, in the whole, I get little pleasure from ballet, and less from balletomanes. You might think that such an early experience would have indoctrinated me. Not a bit of it.
I turned to music pure.
It was evident that my own skills could have no outlet. My practisings in freezing rooms before breakfast put me off. And besides, there was my difficulty with the scale of octaves. But listen, I could.
In my teens and early twenties, I regularly attended the Promenade Concerts at the old Queen’s Hall, which was burned down during the war. I was never skilled enough in tactics to find myself a place near the fountain, to the borders of which one could cling if, from sheer exhaustion, one felt a little faint. I was stuck in the standing crowds. But oh, the sight of Sir Henry Wood ascending the rostrum!
The Bach nights were most intoxicating to me, as Bach is still, above all composers. But they were gruelling. If the evening was hot, there was a constant thud of fainting bodies. I never joined them: I invariably got out into corridors when the first sweats broke out.
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for? (Browning)
But Bach’s reach did exceed his grasp, and heaven was opened for all of us. The skies opened wide, the heavenly hosts descended, within full view, all blazing, all gold, wing-tip to wing-tip.
Wagner nights. I was, and am, a lover of Wagner, though he can have passages of excruciating dullness. But he won’t let us endure them for long. Siegfried’s horn—
‘Le son du cor au fond des bois—’
The leitmotivs, painstakingly picked out afterwards on the home piano.
Damn Hitler and his Wagnerian passions. Bad men can have sound tastes.
I remember Churchill’s wartime statement that he had no objection to Bach, Beethoven, or German music in general: but that he might take exception to a spirited rendering of Deutschland Über Alles.
Bach is Paradisal, in joy or in sorrow. But for the sheer essence of the Earthly Paradise, I will nominate Sviatoslav Richter’s playing of L’Ile Joyeuse, which reminds me of The Departure for Cythera, Fragonard’s painting in the National Gallery. A boatload of beautiful persons, a ‘jet-set’ perhaps, setting out for a voyage of pure hedonism. Empty-headed, doubtless, and empty-hearted, but sailing out on the wings of ineffable pleasure.
I am sorry that Richter, as it is said, didn’t like England. I remember looking out from my study window in Cromwell Road, to see him striding on, red-head lowered, through the snow. I hope he changes his mind: after all, we may not be so bad as he thinks.
Anyone who is a true musician, reading the foregoing, will gather that I am not a musician in their sense at all. I have musical freaks, I have literary freaks: I do not respond to Jane Austen, and I do not respond to Mozart. Apart from Wagner, I have no love of opera.
My son Andrew, a genuine musician, far better than I am, appears to regard music as a purely solitary activity.
I do not regard music as a solitary activity. I want to share it. In the intervals of a concert, I need to express excitement. It has been my ill-luck that Neil, though enjoying many things in an eclectic fashion, did not care to go to concerts: and Charles likes to describe himself as tone-deaf. (Not altogether true, as I have discovered.) Charles and I very rarely listen to the radio; and television, in the musical aspect, makes its offerings rarely.
So I have drifted away from music, far more than I like, and my ignorance distresses me. There is a current T.V. quiz called ‘Face the Music’, which gives me much pleasure: I would swop a dinner party for it any day. But I feel myself very fortunate if I can get 30 per cent of the answers right. It charms me because it sometimes brings in the most extraordinary floodings of memory. Where did I hear that? I know. I used to play that, didn’t I? (Memories of numbed fingers on frozen piano-keys, in the drawing-room under Irving’s chandelier.)
Singing I loved. No one who hears me now would believe that, as a schoolgirl, I had a high soprano voice: this was broken by an excess of training, or rather, by being induced to cope with a Rhinemaiden before that voice was sturdy enough. Almost overnight, I descended to a baritone range. My children, when I sang to them, did not appear to find this disagreeable. Still it is not something I should care to put upon public display.
I should not have embarked upon this subject at all, had I not promised to mention the importances of my life, and music was important. I could once read a score pretty adequately: now I am sure I could not. It has all gone, except for the occasional unexpected bonus: for instance, when a bus had just disembarked its tourists in the Grande Place of Bruges, the radio still playing, of all things, a great favourite of mine: d’Indy’s Symphonie Cévenole. So can music spring upon all of us miserable musical drop-outs, and re-ignite us for a moment with its flame.
24. Education
‘To each according to his abilities: to each according to his needs’ – putting it a different way.
Children, even from earliest infancy, are obviously not all the same. Some are clever, some are average, some find school-work hard, whether as a result of the genes, the home environment, or a combination of both. The aim of education should be to raise the level of the second two groups, while not penalising the first.
Take your gifted child. Allow him to proceed only at the pace of the dullest, and his performance will certainly suffer: for he will get bored, and may soon become a drop-out. In the eyes of some educationalists, he is to become one of a penalised class. The idea is that these children should take no credit for their brains: in a sense, they can’t. Their brains are not their fault. They just chance to be able. I have heard the theory that the bright child should devote his efforts to raising the mental level of the less fortunate. (Sometimes he will indeed do this, on his own initiative.) But is he not to deserve an education that stimulates him? Our country, like others, needs its bright men and women, if it is to be efficiently run. So, at a higher level, does the human race, if it is going to achieve any heights.
We must not overlook the achievements of the Chinese system of competitive examination. The Americans have, in the past, made every educational mistake in the book. But things are slowly changing there. Must we go back to the point at which they set out?
I believe in the importance of primary school training, and that it should have its serious side. Most children, even at four, love to learn, and take pride in the skills they are taught to acquire, all is a voyage of discovery, and their capacities for discovery are fresh and great. Plenty of play-time, yes: but to keep them messing about all day with finger-painting, basket-work, etc., is in a sense to insult those capacities. Some of the pre-preparatory schools (yes, yes, privilege I know, but we w
ill tackle that problem later) will not take a child unless, at five and a half, he has a decent grasp of reading, and some idea of arithmetic. So it can be done.
What comes next? Secondary education. And here we come to the real quarrels. It is obvious, for practical purposes, that we must have our comprehensive schools, though here the units are often too great. But I vigorously oppose the idea of destroying our grammar schools, though this is the conventional wisdom of the day and presumably won’t be resisted. Yet, with a modicum of social imagination, grammar schools could still be valuable to some of our brightest children. They have been agents of social mobility, curiously enough – much more so than comprehensive schools are likely to be. In 1969 (the last year to produce full records), 7 candidates from comprehensive schools won open awards at Oxford and Cambridge, out of just under 1,000. Grammar schools, like the comprehensives, are nowadays non-fee-paying: so there would be no monetary problems here.
There might be, as has been suggested, social ones. The perpetuation of a class system. The idea behind this is that a middle-class child is rather more likely than a working-class one – though this is by no means inevitably true – to come from a home with books in it. But are families then, to be penalised for providing their children with the tools of education, if those children care to use them? (This is usually quite voluntary on the young child’s part.) It all seems pretty ridiculous. A great many children do not take to academic work, and long to go out into the world as wage-earners: sometimes they must. But others do wish to continue, with an eye on the universities. I do not believe, for the sake of the former, that the school-leaving age should compulsorily be raised to sixteen. This means that teachers (there is a shortage), will have to cope with enormous classes – as they do already – each with their quota of resentful, frustrated teenagers who are determined to learn nothing at all. At fifteen, there should be a clear choice. If the child has hated education up to then, and has had to be driven like a mule, it is highly unlikely that another year of it will reveal to him its delights.
Important to Me Page 16
