The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  Great-Aunt Selina had qualified as a nurse of insane persons under the auspices of the Medico-Psychological Association of Great Britain and Ireland, and had worked for some years in the asylum at Wakefield, where the legendary misogynist psychologist Henry Maudsley had recently been assistant medical officer. She must have seen some sights there, but Bessie could not ask her about them, because she was dead. Great-Aunt Selina had spent her spare time crocheting lace edges for pillowcases with a finger-punishing small steel hook. The pillowcases survive.

  No, Bessie did not care for The Dairyman’s Daughter, that once-so-popular tract. In contrast, however, she felt a strange and disquieting affection for Mrs Sherwood’s Little Henry and His Bearer, a slightly larger volume in slightly larger print, and with more numerous and more lively illustrations. This had been presented as a Christmas gift to a long-forgotten Samuel Cudworth on 25 December 1859. (What had he been? Butcher, baker, or pattern maker?) Bessie read it many times. It was the story of a neglected little English orphan, brought up in India by his devoted bearer Boosie as a happy heathen Hindoo, then converted to Christianity by a visiting lady of missionary and Methodist leanings. This lady had easily convinced little Henry of the inefficacy of the Hindoo faith by shattering a little Hindoo god of baked earth into a hundred pieces, and pointing out that it could not then get up and move or do anything useful. From this it proved an easy step to turn Henry into a devout Christian, conscious of sin and afraid of hell. (‘They shall look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me; for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched, and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh’, Isaiah 66:24). It was as well that Henry had repented his sins and assured himself of immortal life, for at the age of eight years and seven months he sickened and died, as children did in India. But he did not die before he had converted his bearer Boosie and persuaded him to lose caste by becoming a Christian, with the new name of John.

  This little tale intrigued Bessie Bawtry. It was a stimulating study in what would soon be known as comparative religion: the unredeemed Boosie at one point delivered himself of the challenging, albeit incorrect view that ‘There are many brooks and rivers of water, but they all run into the sea at last: there is the Mussulman’s way to heaven, and the Hindoo’s way, and the Christian’s way, and one way is as good as another.’ It also provided an interesting picture of a way of life quite unlike that in Breaseborough, where English ladies smoked hookahs at tiffin, where Indians consulted gooroos and ground mussala, where the Ganges (not a river of Europe, but an important river none the less) wound its way around the curving shore to lose itself behind the Rajmahal Hills.

  Satisfying though this fable had proved in its own curious and unintended way (though perhaps we cannot be utterly sure of Mrs Sherwood’s intentions), Bessie, at the age of eleven, felt herself ready for stronger fare. And at Breaseborough Secondary School, before she fell ill of the influenza, she was beginning to find it. She had been introduced to English Language and Literature, Reading and Recitation, History, Geography, French, Arithmetic, Algebra, Science, Scripture, Art, Needlework and Nature Study. Riches of learning spread themselves before her. (The subjects of Music and Laundry, although listed as options upon her terminal report, do not seem to have engaged her scholarly attention. Like her mother, Bessie was tone deaf, and she already knew about laundry. She had learned the subject young, by the side of her mother’s copper and her mother’s oak peggy tub, in the hot steaming fug worked up from yellow bars of Perfection Soap, where she played with her own little doll’s washtub and her own little toy wringer.) Bessie was entranced by this brave new world of adult study. And just as it opened up to her, she fell ill.

  Bessie Bawtry fell ill in October 1918. She, who caught every passing germ as punctually and diligently as though her invalid honour depended upon it, could not fail this great opportunity. The avenging virus of influenza settled upon her just as she was attempting to caption and colour in a map showing the pattern of medieval strip farming. It struck her much more rapidly than malaria had settled upon the slowly fading little Henry, or consumption on the virtuous dairymaid. One moment she was feeling fine, but the next moment, even as she dipped her pen into the inkwell, the flu assailed her with peremptory violence. It occupied her nose and throat, it poured hotly through her bloodstream, and speeded up her pulse to fever pitch. She was the first child in the school to surrender: she had that distinction. Others followed rapidly. By the time she got home that afternoon, her temperature was 104, and she was mildly delirious. She was conscious of a pride in her status. But, though proud, she was very, very ill.

  As this was the first moment in which her private history clocks in with that of public recorded time, we may spend a paragraph or two upon the topic of the outbreak of what was known as Spanish flu.

  The influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 was responsible, we are told, for the highest mortality rate of any pandemic since the Black Death of the fourteenth century. According to some authorities, it originated in the spring of 1918—in San Sebastian? in Almeria? The Spanish, who, unlike much of the rest of the world, were not at war, and therefore did not censor their press, rashly admitted the existence of their infection. Thus they had the doubtful honour of giving their name to the sickness and being blamed for it by posterity. Other authorities claimed that the first cases were identified in March 1918 amongst the troops of the United States at Fort Riley in Kansas. Be that as it may, the illness swept across America and Europe, and by July of 1918 had spread ‘in a tidal wave’ to Asia, China and Japan. Chicago succumbed, and so did London, Liverpool and Glasgow. George the Fifth of England, Emperor Wilhelm of Germany and Alfonso the Thirteenth of Spain contracted it, and recovered. Round the world, thirty million died in three months, more than three times the military casualties of the Great War itself: of these influenza victims, two million died in Europe, and 183,000 in Britain. Or so it is said: the figures are hardly likely to be very precise.

  In Britain, schools and cinemas and libraries emptied spontaneously, and some were closed by decree: children drooped at their desks, as one medical officer reported, ‘like plants whose roots had been poisoned’, and died by the end of the week. A single case could infect a whole school. Coffins were in short supply, and so were reliable remedies. Muslin masks and gargling became the fashion. Some tried oil of garlic, and others relied on permanganate of potash or quinine or arsenic compounds. Some doctors prescribed whisky: other doctors forbade it. Dover’s Powder was popular, and so was iodine of lime. Various vaccines proved useless. A good nosebleed or a heavy menstrual period was thought beneficial. Tobacco was proclaimed an effective germicide. Some swore by fresh air, others by isolation in darkened rooms. Despairing doctors of the fresh-air persuasion dramatically broke their patients’ bedroom windows with rolling pins. It was safer to stay at home than to go into hospital, where the mortality rates rose and rose.

  Was influenza connected with swine, or with dogs, or with ferrets, or with pigeons? Was it caused by a bacterium? (Yes, argued Sir Paul Gordon Fildes, who mistakenly backed bacterium Haemophilus influenzae.) Was it a virus? (Yes, argued Sir Patrick Playfair Laidlaw, who was right.)

  The course of the disease was as mysterious as its source. In Britain, the second wave of the epidemic, the autumnal wave that claimed Bessie, proved the most severe. It subsided abruptly in November, with the signing of the Armistice—only to swell up again, equally mysteriously, in a third attack, in a final cathartic roundup, in the spring of 1919. To this day experts declare that ‘the extreme violence of the fall wave has never been explained,’ and now perhaps it never will be, though the whole episode continues to arouse curiosity. Seventy years later scientists were still as yet unsuccessfully attempting to analyse the nature of the virus by exhuming the bodies and examining the lungs of four influenza victims, all coal miners, who were buried and preserved at Spitsbergen in the permafrost of the Norwegian Arctic Circle.

  Was the Spanish f
lu a judgement? Was it a purge? Was it a sign of the wrath of God? Various little Spanish sufferers endured affliction so patiently that they became candidates for sainthood, so they did well out of their early deaths.

  Let us return to Bessie Bawtry, who survived the first four crucial days, but remained ill for twenty days and twenty nights. She was, during this period, promoted to the bed in her parents’ bedroom, though she was never to be sure why: was it for convenience, was it through a superstitious respect? There she lay, as empires crumbled, as fateful peace treaties were negotiated, listening to the echoes of their death throes and to the rapid beatings of her little childish heart. There she felt both safe and happy. Her mind wandered, and she babbled of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers and Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth, both novels that she had devoured that September: the characters of Sam Weller and the abandoned Margaret seemed to stand in person by her bedside. She knew them: they were her friends: they spoke to her. Occasionally she would lapse back into her earlier biblical phase, for the language of the Bible had long outlived its content in her imagination, but fortunately no Mrs Sherwood was waiting by her sickbed to pounce like a vulture of salvation upon these signs of weakness and of grace. The Bawtrys, chapel-goers though they were, were not a religious family.

  The Bawtry bed was the best piece of furniture in the house, and it offered Bessie its own interior world, a haven such as once, aeons ago, the cave beneath the parlour table had provided. Her father said he had bought it secondhand from Arthur Cook’s in Leeds, along with all his household furniture. He liked to boast, with an uncharacteristically romantic flourish, that he had paid for the lot with ‘a handful of golden sovereigns’—the drawing-room suite, the grandfather clock, the bentwood chairs and rocker, the walnut bedroom suite, the mahogany sideboard, the oak table with castors, the hair mattress, and the pièce de resistance, the mahogany ‘Tudor’ bedstead itself. Many of the neighbours had cheap new furniture—chip oak, veneer—although several also possessed the silent, never-to-be-played status symbol of a piano. Bert Bawtry alone had ventured far into the past, and he had chosen well, for the bed was an object of virtue. (It is a pity Bert did not live to see The Antiques Roadshow. He would have enjoyed it. He was a man of curious interests.)

  The bed was a four-poster, far too large for the room, but never mind that: it was a room of its own. Its hangings (original, and antique) were of a pale fawn green with a woven design of dark blue flowers and yellow stars, and pinned into the back curtains were watch pockets of a rubbed and faded crimson velvet embroidered with birds of pearl beading. These watch pockets filled Bessie with inexpressible delight. They were aristocratic, they were poetic, they were historic, they spoke of Sir Walter Scott, whose novels Bessie much admired. (Walter Scott had once, astonishingly, visited their neighbourhood, and had exclaimed upon its great natural beauty—‘there are few more beautiful and striking scenes in England ... the soft and gentle river Hammer sweeps through an amphitheatre in which cultivation is richly blended with woodland’—so had the great Wizard of the North bizarrely described their paltry spoil tips.)

  Above Bessie’s fevered head was a half-tester, also of green and blue: she gazed up into this heavenly canopy, and muttered cajolingly to herself that Assyria would fall, yea, that Damascus and Babylon and the whole of the Austro-Hungarian Empire would be given over to the thorn and the wilderness, and that the vine and all its silverlings would perish. (Bessie did not know what silverlings were. But that made them all the more attractive to her, for in the Beginning was the Word. Miss Hackett at Big Sunday School did not know what they were either, though she had pretended that she did, and had spitefully and fruitlessly warned Bessie against too much random reading of the Old Testament.)

  Bessie rambled on about trumpets in the wilderness, and held conversations with Mr Pickwick and Mr Tupman over gallons of beer and oysters, in smoky snuggeries and hostelries. This should have worried her parents, and it did. Her mother waited on her, and her little sister Dora eagerly ran errands for her. Dora, insensitive, sturdy, a little carthorse, not a highly strung thoroughbred, failed to catch the virus. Dora would have felt proud of her resistance and resilience had not Bessie by now managed to persuade her that they were somehow contemptible. Health, in Bessie’s view, was rude, and therefore the healthy Dora was inferior. Dora, who looked up to her big sister, had come to believe this. Her earlier moments of rebellion had been crushed. No longer would she dare or even wish to dare to tear a page out of one of Bessie’s precious books. Gone were the days when she would plead with Bessie to play with her instead of sitting there endlessly reading. She took her big sister at her own estimate, and accepted her superiority. So we cast ourselves in castes, even when our society fails to provide them.

  Bessie’s mother Ellen waited and watched, for the shame of a dead daughter would have been a black mark, a distress, a pointing finger. Did Ellen suffer during this crisis? Maybe she did, but honestly one would not have been able to tell the difference.

  Bessie tossed and turned in the vast bed, which did not creak under her wasted body as it creaked under the weight of her stout parents. She could think of worse fates than dying here, admired and lamented by all. The Dairyman’s Daughter, by such means, had achieved fame, if not immortality, but Bessie was not yet ready to depart happily and to leave a shining track behind her. She decided that on balance it would be better to survive. If life took a turn for the worse, she could always fall back on her old familiar, bronchitis, as she already did every winter, and regain this lassitude, this luxury, this queenly attendance.

  And so she recovered, slowly regaining her strength through an exceptionally cold winter, pampered by a fire in the grate and a solid round hot-water bottle of cream and brown stone. Dr Marr, who paid regular and courteous attendance, was impressed by her steady progress: in the first four days he had despaired of her. But one of the oddest features of this epidemic was that it killed more healthy adults than it killed children and old people. Again, this has never been explained, though it certainly puzzled Dr Marr. He was particularly attentive to Bessie, for he already knew her well, through her many previous illnesses, and, like the staff of Breaseborough Secondary School, he had a fondness for her. He supplemented the meagre wartime diet by malted milk, and beef tea from his own larder.

  Dora in the meantime made do with bread and cheese. Dora liked bread and cheese. In fact, Dora was a stubborn little eater, and in her early years ate nothing but bread and cheese. She was labelled Mousie by her mother: the nickname was not intended as a compliment, but Dora seized on this small crumb of differentiation as a mark of affection, and she may have been right to do so. Not many compliments came her way, and she had to make the best of what was on offer.

  It is surprising that Dora did not contract scurvy, if her recollections of her own early diet are accurate.

  It was a small town, in those days. (It is still a small town.) In those days, Dr Marr knew all his patients, and paid them home visits when he was needed. It did not cross his mind that there was any other way of conducting his professional life. He saw most of his flock through the flu. Breaseborough did not suffer as badly as Leeds, Glasgow and Manchester. It did not suffer as badly as Chicago, Peking and Bombay.

  Dr Marr’s daughter Ada was a particular friend of Bessie Bawtry, and although she was forbidden access to the important sickroom many messages, doubtfully fumigated, were carried between the two girls by sister Dora in the weeks of quarantine and convalescence. Ada did not fall ill, perhaps rendered immune by her father’s regular contacts with the disease: she envied Bessie her status, for martyrdom of one sort or another was one of the few attractive prospects to an imaginative girl child in those days. But, like Dora, Ada made the best of keeping well. She reported school activities back to Bessie (who was annoyed to have missed the lesson on Babylonian mythology) and pasted carefully saved and cherished little prewar brightly coloured scraps on cards for her—flower baskets, butterflies, nymphs
in flimsy array, ponies and puppy dogs. She also collected autographs from her classmates in a little velvety autograph book—some adorned with crude little drawings of Dutch dolls or sailor boys or coy Mabel Lucie Attwell-inspired pouting babies, some with elegant and uplifting verses from Ella Wheeler Wilcox or from Anon.—

  No star is ever lost

  That we have seen

  We always may be What we might have been.

  The popular conundrum

  Y Y U R

  Y Y U B

  I C U R

  Y Y for ME

  was copied out in various colours by two contributors. And, on 11 November, Armistice Day, equipped with a small patriotic paper flag and a whistle, Ada Marr came and stood under Bessie’s bedroom window and shouted up through the drizzling rain: ‘Bess, the war’s over!’ and Bessie, with unusual boldness, crept out of bed and crossed to the cracked and sooty pane and croaked back to her friend below, ‘Yes, I know.’

  The war was over, and the sun shone down on Breaseborough. We move to May 1922, and rejoin Bessie Bawtry and Ada Marr, taking the short cut home from school through the cemetery. At this time of year, even the windy plateau of the cemetery seemed cheerful. The distant rim of low hills was green, the chestnuts were in bloom, and dark emerald fairy rings of mushroom enlivened the yellowing graveyard grass. The cemetery, conveniently placed next to the grim fortress of the turn-of-the-century hospital, was a favourite walk for courting couples, for old men with dogs, for mothers with perambulators. Breaseborough was not well provided with recreational spaces, but the cemetery served. Bessie, word-addicted, knew most of its inscriptions by heart: she had noted how many had ‘borne the cross’, or been ‘anchored by the veil’, or discovered, often prematurely, that ‘in the midst of life we are in death’. She had wondered about the many ‘beloved daughters’—would she merit the epithet ‘beloved’ when dead? She had read the names of those who had died in colliery disasters. The most eloquent of these epitaphs read, disturbingly, not quite grammatically: