The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  A sudden shock which did appear

  And took my life away.

  At morn I was in health and strength

  At night as cold as clay..

  The uncertainty of the grammar seemed to intensify the uncertainty of life.

  Bessie had overcome her childish fear of the alarming apocalyptic tilt of some of the headstones, the cracked and uneven kerbs of the grave plots: she no longer expected the dead to burst forth through these cracks and crevices, nor did she think that she herself was about to fall through into the underworld. (Though this latter fear was far from irrational: like most of the neighbourhood, the cemetery was deeply undermined and subject to subsidence. A thousand yards below the dead laboured the living.) But she preserved her deep early distaste for some of the funerary materials. She particularly deplored the mottled red and green granite tombstone which surmounted Reuben and Esther Twigg, who had passed away in 1902 and 1906 respectively: it was of a horrible colour and a vile uncertain spotted brawny texture which made her want to gag. She hated mottles and spawns and blotches. How could anyone think such a finish attractive? Had the Twiggs been mad?

  But today, in May, not even the tomb of the Twiggs annoyed her. She and Ada were in high spirits. They were in fine form, and they were in the fine fifth form, and they were doing well. The world was all before them, as they tripped down Cemetery Road, and on, down Swinton Road, under the lime trees, and across the triangle between the Rialto, the bus station and the public library. They forgave the weeds that burst through the asphalt. They jumped across a paving stone, avoided a pile of dry crotted chalk-white dog dirt, and headed downhill, deep in discussion, towards the footbridge over the canal. They had cheese sandwiches and a bottle of pop and a couple of currant buns, and their homework, and they were off for a picnic on the riverbank. They were happy. Bold yellow dandelions, democratic daisies, escaped wallflowers, and blossoming twigs of elder had fought back against the pit-pall and grew in every crevice. The girls too had fought back. Their breasts were budding beneath their striped cotton shirts and gymslips, and a pretty down sprang from their shapely arms. They made a striking couple, and they knew it. Bessie Bawtry was Angle-angel fair, her hair as soft as a silver-gold dying celandine or as sun-touched thistledown, and Ada Marr was as dark as a gypsy, with heavy plaits and olive skin and raven plumage. The light and the dark were they, the princesses of a Walter Scott romance. They bounced along: even the delicate and often listless Bessie had sap and spring in her step.

  They paused at the canal bridge, and looked down at the barges. Their names were poetry, said Bessie, momentarily distracted from the theme of their discussion. There they lay— Guiding Star, Providence, Persephone, Perseverance, Hope, Only Daughter and Fred.

  They laughed at Fred.‘You shouldn’t call a boat Fred,’ declared Bessie censoriously. ‘You should never give a boat a boy’s name. It’s wrong.’

  Bessie knew her grammar, Bessie knew her genders and her declensions. Bessie knew what was what.

  Fred lurked, guilty, insulted, male, on the oily water.

  Would Bessie rather have been an Only Daughter? Did she think she would have got more attention had Dora never been born? Bessie spent much energy negating Dora. But Bessie was not thinking of Dora as she gazed at the pretty, cherished blue and white longboat, with its pots of scarlet geraniums. She was thinking of romance.

  Ada and Bessie were speaking of romance, as they hung briefly over the barrier of the bridge, then made their way on, across the canal, to the riverbank, to look for a picnic clearing. (The canal and the river met here, in confluence.) They were speaking, however, not of Philip Walters, nor of George Bellew, nor of Jimmie Otley, nor of Reggie Oldroyd, nor of Joe Barron, nor of any of the other stars of Form Five: they were speaking of literary romance. They had long outgrown Walter Scott, who had engaged them when they were twelve and thirteen: they now regarded him as hopelessly old-fashioned. They had moved on, under the purifying influence of senior mistress and English mistress, Miss Heald, to the study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Miss Heald had been speaking of Mrs Browning’s strange fate that very afternoon, and Bessie and Ada had been much taken by her story. Its strangeness defied the laws of probability. It defied sense.

  Bessie and Ada were fortunate in their teacher Miss Heald, and they knew it. Miss Heald, with her Leeds degree, her long neck, her braided earphones of hair, and her pleasant, shortsighted, calmly efficient expression, was a marvel. Lest you should think it odd that Breaseborough Secondary School should employ a marvel, let it be said at once that this school, albeit in a later manifestation as Breaseborough Grammar School, was to produce within the next half-century a Nobel Prize winner, a Poet Laureate, a matinée idol, a champion racing driver and a couple of cabinet ministers. Such schools should not be written off. Talent cracks the asphalt, talent will not stay underground.

  It is true that handsome red-haired freckled Joe Barron had recently added to Bessie’s tiny autograph book the following lines:

  Full many a gem of purest ray serene

  The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear,

  Full many a flower is born to blush unseen

  And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

  But he had inscribed these lines because that was the kind of thing that nice boys used to inscribe in the autograph books of nice fifteen-year-old girls. Joe Barron had no intention at that stage of blushing unseen. Nor did he expect the enchantingly pretty Bessie Bawtry to do so either. It would be up and out for him, it would be up and out for her. Particularly if Miss Heald had anything to do with it. Miss Heald was an ambitious woman.

  The Great War and the Spanish influenza had murdered the lovers of Miss Heald and her generation, and therefore the energy and passion of Miss Heald and her generation poured forth like fierce ennobling rays on the young people of Breaseborough, of Doncaster, of Bingley, of Selby, of Grimsby, of York. They must move on, they must gain a better world, they must never slip through the cracks into the slough, the pit, the trenches. They must march into glory. So urged Miss Heald.

  It was not so much the love story or the poetry that had animated Miss Heald, as she spoke of Elizabeth and Robert Browning. It was the miracle of the resurrection, the daring of the escape. From her sickbed Elizabeth Barrett, at the age of forty, had arisen. She had defied her father, and gone forth, and married, and eloped to Italy, and made love, and given birth to a child. Miss Heald found this sequence of events unlikely and astonishing. Miss Heald herself, in 1922, was forty-two years old, and it was unlikely that any Robert Browning would stretch out his hand to lead her like Eurydice from the grimy underworld of Breaseborough. Nor would she have wished for such a deliverance, for, despite the sociological accuracy of that statement about murdered lovers, it is not a statement that applied to the particular fate or inclinations of Miss Heald. She was happy single. She had a good job, and a position of power and influence. She had worked hard and travelled far to acquire superior qualifications, certificates and diplomas, and was in receipt of a more than adequate income. Her salary had risen steadily from £135 a year in 1908 to more than £300 a year by 1920: she was not as well paid as the male staff, naturally, but she had a higher salary than any of the other women teachers.

  What would she want with a man? If she married, she would have to give up her job. That was then the rule. She was happier teaching. She enjoyed the respect of a town where the members of the middle class could be numbered in named dozens. She was independent. The daughter of a Unitarian minister who had warmly supported her in her career, she had a strong sense of mission and was fulfilling it. She was not lonely. She shared a home with Miss Haworth, who taught Latin, and had a First Class Honours degree from Leeds. On their joint incomes they lived comfortably and companionably. What more could they want?

  As it happened, Miss Heald did not think much of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry. She preferred Robert’s. She was inclined to make fun of Sonnets from the Portuguese, and had never rea
d Aurora Leigh. She was of the wrong generation—too late, too early—for Aurora Leigh. But she had discovered that one of Mrs Browning’s most famous anthology pieces, ‘A Musical Instrument’, was a very successful teaching device. The younger children loved its pounding, repetitive rhythm, and its gloomy romantic rhetoric. It was a favourite for recitation choice.

  What was he doing, the great god Pan,

  Down in the reeds by the river?

  Spreading ruin and scattering ban,

  Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,

  And breaking the golden lilies afloat

  With the dragon-fly on the river...

  There was something touching and painful and pleasing to her in the sight of the young unformed faces, reciting, unappre-hending, reverent, solemn, the painful lines of metamorphosis:

  Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,

  To laugh as he sits by the river,

  Making a poet out of a man:

  The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,—

  For the reed which grows nevermore again

  As a reed with the reeds in the river.

  And then, with the older pupils one could discuss the weaknesses of the work—what, she would demand of them, was that odd word ‘ban’ doing there, apart from filling in a rhyme? Discuss. One could even, in the sixth form, prompted by the classical Miss Haworth, look at Ovid’s version of the rape of Syrinx, who was transformed upon Pan’s approach not into a poet but into a reed, or perhaps into a whole reed-bed? Into a plurality of about-to-be-raped maidens, a swaying generation of maidens awaiting the scythe?

  But on balance Miss Heald preferred Robert Browning to Elizabeth. She was modern, and she favoured the masculine, because she was a feminist. She commended the virile intellect of Robert Browning, and had read some of the early dramatic monologues of T. S. Eliot. (She will be one of the earliest readers of The Waste Land, which will be published later in the year in Eliot’s new magazine.) On the whole, Miss Heald tended to shy away from the romantic and the ladylike, and to go for the strong. But she was moved by the story of Elizabeth Barrett. E. B. B. had not been content to waste her sweetness on the desert air. With a quite unladylike determination she had sought pollination and borne fruit.

  Miss Heald did not put it to her mixed-sex class in those terms, but that is how she saw the matter. And a sense of her perception had reached the highly receptive Bessie and Ada, who were now strolling along the riverbank, hoping to see fish lurking in the grimy water, and admiring the brave wayside flowers, the speedwell, the marguerite, the purple vetch. They were too delicate to speak of sexual matters very directly, but the story of the Brownings provided a convenient metaphor for speculation. What had it been like, to be so rapt, so ravished, after waiting for so long, after lying on a couch for so many years of waiting, like the Lady of Shallot? Had it been a shock to the nervous system? Had it hurt? What had it felt like, to escape from a darkened overfurnished Victorian sickroom in a tall dreary forbidding London street to the dazzling light of Florence? Neither of them had been to London or Florence, but Miss Heald was familiar with both, and had tantalized them with vivid descriptions of these two contrasted cities. Bessie and Ada longed to visit London and Florence, and in the confidence of their youth they believed that one day they would. What would it be like, to escape from Breaseborough to Cambridge, to London, to Paris? To Jerusalem, to Jaffa, to Constantinople, to Ceylon? Would it all be glory and awakening? Or would it hurt? Prurience, innocence and desire struggled in their budding breasts as they walked along the verdant riverbank.

  They were walking towards the neighbouring town of Cotterhall, which lay a couple of miles upstream. It was smaller than Breaseborough, and considered itself a cut above it socially as well as geologically. It was possessed of limestone cliffs, an ancient ruined castle and a bluebell wood. It housed fewer miners than Breaseborough, for it stood further from the pithead at Bednerby Main: its residents numbered schoolteachers, railway clerks, a piano tuner, a colliery manager, brewers, maltsters, confectioners, glass manufacturers and other prosperous tradesmen. The air was said to be good, up in Cotterhall. Oh, it had been pretty here once, when Bessie Bawtry’s maternal ancestors had planted their crops and fed their beasts and drawn their water from Gospel Well: when they had milked their cows and churned their butter and winnowed their grain in the distant forgotten pastoral past. Now the whole landscape was mined and undermined, apart from this stretch of river green. Who owned this earth? Nobody that Bessie or Ada knew. They did not think of such matters. They took no interest in the means of production, though they were well versed in iambic pentameters, trochees and heroic couplets. Maybe it all belonged to the lord of the manor, as in the days of Robin Hood and the greenwood. Maybe it belonged to an absentee landlord. Maybe it belonged to the Wadsworths at Highcross.

  For whom did the miners extract the coal? Bessie and Ada did not know. It burned in their own grates, and they knew it did not come for free. Their parents paid good money to have it shunted down their coal holes and into their coal cellars, but they did not know who received that money. Was it the colliery manager, Mr Barlow, whose son was in the sixth form? That seemed unlikely. But they did not think much about these issues. They thought about Miss Heald, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and deferred pleasures, and School Certificate, and self-advancement. Whatever self-advancement meant for them, it had nothing to do with coal.

  Miss Heald spoke sternly of the necessity of deferring pleasure. Work hard now, she said to her young people, and reap the rewards later. Do not grab the instant, like the sluts of Bednerby. The reason why those people live in such squalor is because they have not learned to defer pleasure. They cannot plan. They spend, they borrow, they waste. They are bad managers.

  Can one defer pleasure for too long, so that it withers and dries up and tastes sour? No, said Miss Heald. That is the lesson we learn from the Brownings. There shall be a reward on earth, not the martyr’s heavenly crown of gold. Work hard, and pass your examination, and it shall be yours. You too shall be happy and serene, like that wise Minerva, the clearskinned, clear-eyed, bespectacled Miss Heald. Your pleasures will mature, like fine wine. A good education is never wasted. Poetry and prose will never fail you. A foreign language will never desert you. You will inherit the earth.

  Did they believe her? The diligent and clever ones listened and believed. Their pleasure, she assured them, would be her pleasure. How proud she was of Keith Badger (do not titter, Badger is a good Yorkshire name, and not to be ridiculed)—of Keith Badger, who took a top County Scholarship and matriculated last year at the University of Northam. He will do well.

  Certificates, matriculation, examinations, graduation. Difficult words, difficult concepts, a hill of difficulties, a ladder of steep steps, reaching upwards. Climb, climb, do not look backwards, do not stumble, do not lose heart, do not freeze with fear. Ignore the grazed knee, the scabs, the vertigo. Never look back, and never, ever look down.

  Ada and Bessie turned a corner, ducking under a green branch that bowed heavily towards the water, and surprised three naked boys swimming in the murk. Little white frogs splashing. Ada and Bessie backed and froze, hiding in the dense leaves, but the boys sensed them, and giggled and hooted and waved cheekily, knee deep in the dirty river, splashing and flapping, throwing out showers of water drops, and through the water drops Bessie could see their little winkles, their chickenmeat legs, their white bodies streaked with black. Dirty water, filthy water. Too small to be frightening, but boys, naked boys. Carrot-topped little Saxons, white-skinned, underexposed, undeveloped. Escaped from underground, and frisking briefly in the sunlight. Bessie had never seen a naked boy, and hardly saw one now, through the sparkle and the confusion and the leaves. Ada, who had brothers, had seen many, and anyway, was she not a doctor’s daughter? She was not to be turned back. ‘Shoo!’ she cried, advancing from her leafy retreat, waving her hands before her, protected by the striped carapace of her school shirt. ‘Shoo, you b
oys, shoo, scram, shoo!’ And the boys dog-paddled their way to the far bank, where their boots and heaps of grey garments lay, and waved and whistled and sniggered, hopping like little savages in sooty warpaint, as Bessie and Ada, eyes averted, themselves on the edge of nervous laughter, gathered themselves together, and braved the gauntlet, and marched on with their noses in the air.

  Little doomed free spirits, coal babies, urchins.

  ‘Whatever next?’ said Bessie, demurely, maturely, once they were out of earshot of treble catcall and piercing wolf whistle.

  ‘You can’t blame them, it’s hot,’ said Ada, fanning herself with a swatch of long grasses. She was perspiring and her school shirt was scratchy.

  Bessie, who did not perspire, shuddered slightly. ‘But still, the filth in that river,’ she objected. ‘How could they? They’ll catch diseases.’

  Bessie, on her first day trip to the seaside resort of Mablethorpe, had declared that the sand was ‘dirty’. Which in those days it was not.