The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  Now, on the banks of the Hammer, she was finding it hard to find a suitably hygienic picnic spot: those wild boys had disturbed her. But she agreed that they had walked far enough, and allowed Ada to select a clearing under a willow tree, where they spread out their cardigans as groundsheets. A marbled white butterfly settled on a tufted purple blossom and spread its wings for them. And there they sat, eating their doorstep sandwiches, watching the flow of the water and the dance of the insects, keeping an eye open for intruders and passersby, while they tested one another on French irregular verbs. ‘Fear, Doubt, Shame, Pleasure, Regret, Surprise,’ chanted Ada dutifully, as they revised the subjunctive. And so they were discovered, prettily disposed, by Joe Barron himself, who was wheeling his new Hercules bicycle from Gurney’s.

  He was accompanied by Alice Vestrey.

  Joe, when he saw Bessie and Ada, blushed red under his freckles to the roots of his red hair. Alice Vestrey, in contrast, remained unnaturally cool, and pretended that there was nothing out of the way going on. And maybe there was not, for both Joe and Alice lived in Cotterhall, and there was no reason why he should not be walking Alice home on a fine summer afternoon. The four young people greeted one another: they were obliged to do so, for a couple of hours earlier they had all been studying Robert Browning in the same room, and therefore could hardly pretend not to know one another. Nevertheless, there was a mutual embarrassment. Perhaps Ada and Bessie thought that Joe might think that they had been lying in wait for him. Perhaps Joe felt that he should not be walking alone with Alice Vestrey after offering earlier that day to teach Bessie to ride his new bike. It was strange that they were all so confused, for Breaseborough Secondary School prided itself on its coeducational Yorkshire common sense. It did not go in for innuendo, flirtation or ‘smut’. Yet confused they were, for a few moments, before bold Ada took the lead, and offered Alice a bite from her bun. No, no, demurred Alice, she had to get home, her mother would be wondering. So on upstream went Joe and Alice, at a slightly faster pace, and at a slightly greater distance from one another, separated by the shining chrome antlers of the Hercules, and after a while Bessie and Ada gathered themselves together and shook off the crumbs and thoughtfully made their way back to Breaseborough. Fear, doubt, shame, pleasure, regret, surprise ... tentative half-feelings, subdued subjunctive feelings, rose and fell in their tentative half-grown bodies and undeveloped hearts. O poor young girls in flower, you poor frail darlings, who will watch over you, who will guide and protect you, and will you ever safely reach the happy bourn? Happy you have been this afternoon, but with so tentative, so frail, so pedantic a happiness, and now you are confused and disturbed even by that small happiness you have enjoyed. What chances have you of survival? Will the wind blow you away? Will you land on stony ground?

  Ada will survive, we may feel sure, for she is robust, and she has confidence and courage: had she not, even in extremity, offered Alice a bite of her bun? Well may she dare and risk and conquer and multiply. But Bessie is delicate and she may wilt and fade before she reaches her goal. Is there enough persistence in her for the hard road ahead, for the steep climb and the airless altitudes, for the as yet undreamed of perils of those heady upper reaches?

  They walk home, along the riverbank and the towpath. And the weeks pass, and the months pass, and the summers pass, and their bodies bloom: see them as they walk, the school blouse lifting, the ankles narrowing, the hips swaying, the lips reddening through art or nature, the little bead necklet added to the throat, the butterfly brooch to the lapel, the bracelet to the wrist, as they walk through the seasons of their young life and their young hope (does hope too take the subjunctive?) towards whatever it is that awaits them—fame, love, loss, triumph, distress. And still it takes no shape as they walk towards it, it will not show its features to them, they wonder if it will ever show its features. Maybe it will for ever vanish out of sight, just ahead of them, around the corner, beyond the branches, behind the trees, lost in the reeds and the willows. What is it, what will it be, will they ever see it face-to-face? Along this stretch and other stretches they will walk in constant flux towards it: their glands secrete and betray and settle, they lose weight and gain it and lose it again, they tan and they pale, they skip, they loiter, they recite Virgil and Verlaine and Lamartine, they quarrel and are reconciled, they laugh and they weep and they sulk, they crop their hair and then try to grow it again, they experiment with hemlines and covet forbidden nail varnish and lipstick and smart sandals, they break out in spots and are suddenly smooth again, they blow hot and they blow cold, they catch trolley buses and trains and see silent movies and go to a theatre matinée and appear as Helena and Hermia in the school play and they write verse and join a debating society and win prizes and honourable mentions and receive decorous floral valentines. See them now, as they walk into view again along the banks of the Hammer, as they pass the clearing where two long years ago Joe Barron and Alice Vestrey surprised them at their French verbs.

  Do they remember that distant afternoon? Perhaps they do, for it is towards Joe Barron’s house that they now are walking, where he now awaits them. They are grown girls now, and they no longer wear striped school shirts. They have just taken their School Certificate, in History, Latin, English and French, and school may no longer be their refuge and their sole field of endeavour and display. It is summer still, and the sun still shines, and the water curls and the midges hover, and spikes of foxglove lean to the water in this semi-rustic semi-industrial hinterland between townships, in this pause between past and future. The marbled white survives, and so does the friendship of Bessie and Ada. They have survived coolnesses and rivalry and the increasingly relentless ratcheting of Bessie’s superior intellectual performance. They have chosen their own paths, and those paths will now diverge. Ada, obligingly, has an out-of-town admirer: she has met a young man down south with whom she corresponds. She will go to teacher training college in Saffron Walden. She will teach for two or three years, then she will marry her admirer. This is what she plans. Her future has a face. If her exam results are adequate, which they will be, she will cut free from Breaseborough, and rear her children in a more pleasant environment. She will do well in her School Certificate. She has not worked as hard as Bessie, but who has? Ada has worked hard enough. She has worked for freedom. She can parse and prose.

  The Barrons still live in Cotterhall, of course, and will remain there for decades to come. And it is towards Laburnum House, the home of the Barron family, that Ada and Bessie now make their way, not as shy schoolgirls, but as invited guests. Mrs Barron has invited them to tea. It is a Saturday in late June. The weather is uncertain: as they walk, the sun clouds over. Perhaps it will rain. The girls are walking to Cotterhall by choice, but it is understood that one of the boys will escort them back. Perhaps they will be offered a lift in the new Morris Minor. (It has been rumoured that Elsie Scrimshaw has been seen on the back of Phil Barron’s brand-new BSA motorbike: can this be true?) The girls are honoured by this invitation, and are dressed in their best: Ada colourful in a bright floral pink frock, Bessie ladylike in a pale blue and cream two-piece.

  The Barrons are one of the most important families in unimportant Cotterhall. This is a neighbourhood without an aristocracy, and with very little of a middle class: there is a public house in Breaseborough called the Wardale Arms, and the hospital, built in 1906, is called the Wardale Hospital, but nobody ever spares much of a thought for the mythical and absent Lord Wardale, whereas there is much talk in town and roundabout about the Barrons. They have done well for themselves. Old Grandpa Bill Barron, recently deceased, had started work at the age of fourteen at Gospel Well Brewery, owned in those days by the Clarksons: he had become a foreman, married a Clarkson, and set up his own little bottle-making business in a warehouse and yard behind the stone quarry. It was long known as Barron’s Yard. The business had prospered, and at this period prospers still. Under Bill’s son Ebenezer (Ben) Barron the firm had diversified from beer and po
p bottles to a range of cheap fancyware: cake stands, jugs, fruit dishes, sugar bowls, tumblers. These are attractive, tubby, friendly pieces, pleasing and familiar to the eyes of most of the locals, and the range does well. Should Ben think of introducing new lines, or should he stick with the old faithfuls? Eldest son Bennett Barron is keen on innovation, but so far he has not had much clout. Bennett has gone into the family business with vigour and ideas, and now he is beginning to get a little impatient with the old man, who is stubborn and will not listen to anything new. Bennett has been to London, to a trade fair at Wembley, where he has fallen in love with the new celluloids and phenolics, and with a magical semisynthetic milk stone which he longs to manufacture and develop. He is sure it is the thing of the future. His father thinks celluloid is trash, and will not last. He will be certain that polymers are a dead end.

  There are four boys in the family. There is go-ahead, industrious Bennett, a chip off the old block. Then comes philandering Phil, in theory in partnership with haulage contractor Stan Lomax, but in practice in love with his motorbike; he spends too much time roaring around the country lanes and over the moors and drinking in the Fox, the Three Horseshoes, and the Ferry Boat Inn. Alfred works for Castle Confections, for a maternal uncle: they specialize in liquorice toffee. Then comes Joe, the afterthought, who hopes, unlike his brothers, to be allowed to go to university. There are two sisters, Rowena and Ivy. Rowena works as bookkeeper for Ben and Bennett, having volunteered to replace a character known as Ratty Red who had been fiddling the figures. She is not very good at figures, but she is much better at them than Ben. She sits in a dark little office filling in ledgers, and is said to be saving up her earnings for a trip to the Holy Land. Ivy left school two years ago, and has done nothing much since, although she reads a great deal, writes poetry, has corresponded with Vita Sackville-West, and published radical verses about colliery disasters in the local paper. She would like to have gone to university, but nobody even thought of it. She intends to make something of her life, does Ivy, but when? How long, O Lord, how long?

  Joe Barron is the baby of the family, the youngest of them all, and it is Joe who is now watching out for Ada and Bessie as they approach the gateposts and high walls of Laburnum House and make their way up its short drive. The walls are surmounted with a nasty boy-proof ridge of sharp-angled black crozzle, a waste by-product of the mining industry: this is decorated with dangerous splinters of broken glass, another product of which there is no shortage. This double defence is intended to prevent boys from breaking into the small orchard and raiding the apple trees and soft-fruit plot. But the house, behind its wall, is not hostile. Its porch is full of scarlet geraniums, and its doors stand open.

  There Joe greeted his guests. He was past the blushing stage, and was now quite the young man, in his white shirt and grey flannel trousers. Quite the ‘Anyone for tennis?’ young man—and he was indeed good at tennis, which he played at the club with Ada’s brother Richard, his brother Phil, and Ernie Nicholson from Sprotbrough. But tennis was far from his mind as he ushered the girls into the large drawing room, into the presence of his mother and Ivy. Joe was thought to be sweet on Bessie Bawtry, and Bessie was thought to return his admiration. Nothing serious, of course—they were too young for that. They were just practising.

  Mrs Barron presided over her second-best teapot with nervous affability. Flora Barron was only in her fifties, though she thought of herself as an old woman, and looked and dressed like an old woman. Unlike Bessie’s mother Ellen, she was thin, not stout: she was a bony, upright figure, and she sat forward on the edge of the chair, her back stiff to attention. She was dressed in a dark patterned maroon artificial silk which reached nearly to her ankles, for she had not even thought of adopting the shorter skirts of the younger generation. Her chest was flat, and seemed to sink and recede from her prominent collarbones. Her hair was grey and abundant: she wore it scraped back into a large bun, secured by a heavy imitationtortoiseshell clasp and pin. This ornament was, in fact, made of celluloid, as many hair ornaments of the period were. The new plastic technology pierced Mrs Barron’s bun, but despite Bennett’s enthusiasm it had not penetrated many other corners of that predominantly Edwardian drawing room.

  Mrs Barron poured tea for Ada and Bessie, for Rowena and Ivy, for herself and Joe. Bessie politely admired the teacups—botanical Spode, with an ornate pink patterning of twining foliage and stylized carnations and roses. Each cup had within its bowl, opposite the sipping lips of the drinker, a passionflower, though Bessie did not recognize it as a specimen of a species she had never seen. Passionflowers were not much cultivated in South Yorkshire. Bessie admired the Spode very much, and thought it in better taste than the Bawtry best, which consisted of a bright and vulgar Crown Derby with too much purple and gold and a lot of random spots. It must be said that Bessie also had a contempt for the Cotterhall-crafted Barron fancy glassware, which she thought horribly common. She was relieved not to find it on the Barron table.

  (Where did Bessie get these notions? Who did she think she was?)

  It appeared that Rowena was indeed planning to take herself off to sea on a luxury cruise. This year, next year, sometime. She was off to the Holy Land, though not for any very holy reasons, and would proceed thence through the Suez Canal and back round the Cape. Rowena went to look for the atlas, when the girls showed an interest, and traced her route with a thin white finger, pointing a sharpened manicured nail. It would be a lark. She would fly south like a swallow. On board was a swimming pool, a gymnasium, an orchestra. She had been saving up for ages and ages and ages. Father said he might chip in. Gertie Thomson from Broom Hill was hoping to go too, and they would share a cabin. Would the girls like to see the brochures? Yes, the girls certainly would. Bessie and Ada wiped their fingers delicately on lace-edged napkins, brushing off the crumbs of scone and jam sponge, and took in hand the lovely leaflets with their bathing belles and young men in boaters, and a promotional photograph of the Yorkshire cricket team and their lady wives playing quoits on the deck of the Ormonde as they sailed away to Australia.

  Even Bessie and Ada, who had not yet reached this level of aspiration, were aware that ocean passages were advertised regularly in the pages of the Breaseborough and Cotterhall Times: tickets were available to ‘all parts of the world’ from the Times office in Bank Street. You could book yourself from here to there. From the dark hole of Breaseborough itself you could buy your voyage on the White Star Line or the Canadian Pacific, on the Caronia or the Carmania or the Empress of Australia or the captured Berengaria(once the German Imperator). You could embark for New York, Vancouver, Yokohama, Shanghai, Honolulu, Suva.

  Will Rowena really sail away, or was this a daydream, a fantasy? Time will tell. The world was speeding up, and the great ocean liners were competing for custom and cutting their prices, eager to forget the Great War, eager to forget the sinkings of the Titanic and the Lusitania and the Waratah. This was the dawning age of the third-class traveller, now reclassified as a tourist. Steerage was no more. The schoolteacher, the student, the clerk and the shop assistant were being tempted onto voyages where they could simultaneously imitate and make fun of the idle rich. Restlessness was sweeping round the globe like influenza. In a few weeks, you could be in Australia, in New Zealand, on the far side of the pink Empire and the turning globe. Bands would play for you, and artistes would perform for you, and you could dance beneath the silvery moon as you were transported across the tepid tropical oceans. Or that was the idea.

  Meanwhile, Joe Barron and the girls would wait for their examination results. All were expected to do well, but Mrs Barron, a kindly, diffident and self-effacing woman, was aware that for Bessie these results were of particular importance. Bessie was to stay on at school that autumn to sit her Cambridge entrance, and she would need a County Major Scholarship to finance her, if she were fortunate enough to get a place. It did not matter much what happened to Joe, for the family business could absorb him whatever happened, and Ada�
��s family was willing and able to support her through teacher training college. But Bessie had nothing to fall back on. She was on her own, and she had to do well. How would this teacher’s pet fare in open competition with the county and the country? Did she have time enough for study? inquired Mrs Barron. Oh yes, said Bessie, her parents were very understanding. She had her own little corner, her own worktable. She had plenty of encouragement at home, said shy, hard-working, pretty, tender little Bessie Bawtry.

  Joe Barron had no intention of spending the rest of his life peddling cheap glass. But he was lying low, waiting for the right moment to confront his father. His father thought education a waste of time—he’d done all right without certificates, and set little store by schooling. In Ben Barron’s view, the universities were overproducing, and creating a generation of idlers. Joe listened, but said nothing, as his mother gently probed Bessie about her prospects. He thought he could count on his mother to take his side if it came to a showdown. Joe was still his mother’s pet. She had nursed him through a dangerous childhood bout of meningitis, and regarded him as her special baby. Mrs Barron did not approve of brother Phil’s motorbike. She would stand by Joe.

  Ivy, grumbling slightly, cleared the tea things onto the wooden trolley, and Ada helped her to wheel it away into the back regions. Rowena, in Ivy’s view, never did anything to help. Rowena took out a violent-hued raffia basket of purple and acid-green which she was constructing, and Mrs Barron took up her embroidery—yet another linen tablecloth, which would join its companions in a drawer full of unused linen tablecloths and tray cloths and napkins and cushion covers. Joe Barron went over to the piano, and began to fool around to amuse the girls—‘On wings of so-ong I’ll bear thee,’ he crooned, in his pleasant tenor, as he picked out the notes with two fingers,