The Peppered Moth

by Margaret Drabble

  Bert and Ellen’s interest was not astronomical. The eclipse happened to coincide with their wedding anniversary, and it happened to reach totality in their own county of Yorkshire, which made it seem special. The eclipse had been made for the Bawtrys, and they intended to see it at its best. Bert negotiated two days off work, days owed to him from previous unclaimed holidays, and willingly granted in recognition of his public-spirited and voluntary efforts at the cinema. The eclipse was due to occur at 6.23 a.m., well to the northwest of Breaseborough, and Bert and Ellen were off on their motorbike and sidecar to spend a night with cousins in Darlington. The Great North Road would be crowded with eclipse spectators, travelling towards the sensational morning darkness. It would be a spree.

  Bessie could not decide what line to take about the eclipse. Was it proper to find it exciting? On balance, she thought it was not. She would ignore it, and think of higher things. She thought of Women’s Suffrage, and almost attended a rally in Barnsley in favour of its extension to all women over twenty-one. (Married women and property-owning women over thirty had won the vote in 1918, when Bessie was still a child.) Bessie was to call herself a feminist for the rest of her life, though it is not clear how she herself contributed to the feminist cause. She was to read, on publication, Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, the first of the Penguin Pelicans, and always claimed that it had affected her profoundly. And maybe it did. The reading of a book can be a contribution to a cause.

  The days of waiting seemed long. It was an anxious time. Would the examination results be published in The Times, as some but not all Tripos results were? (Women’s were published in a separate column, demarcated from the men’s, indicating that they were not recognized as full members of the university.) Would they be published in the Breaseborough Times, which, though chiefly concerned with advertisements and sporting and social fixtures, did, as we have seen, take a sporadic interest in the intellectual successes of the children of its town? Did humiliation await her? Well, we have all been through this. There is nothing special about this. So Bessie told herself, each morning, as she got up to see if there was an envelope for her.

  The Breaseborough Times published aerial views of collieries and reports of accidents. A seventy-five-year-old man, injured in a fall on a night shift at Bednerby Main, had died in Wardale Hospital. He had fallen into a four-foot-two-inch manhole while walking down Wardale Plain, miles underground. (The hospital, in June, was briefly closed because of an outbreak of smallpox, as the paper reported.) Did Bessie think it odd that a man of seventy-five should be working underground in the middle of the night? Yes, to be fair to her, she did. This life seemed horrible to her. There must be a better world than this. Had she any idea what Wardale Plain might look like? She had read her Virgil, and could guess. The smoky vale of Acheron, the highway of the dead.

  Even women died at the pit. On 25 June, a Mrs S. A. Harrison was killed while working at Denvers Main. What was her job there? We do not know. The Breaseborough Times does not say. Presumably she was not working underground. By the 1920s the days of Zola’s Germinal were over, surely.

  The coal fire at college had flickered so cheerily in its little grate. If she failed, would she be allowed back to Cambridge to try again? Or would she be obliged to descend into obscurity? No, she would never descend. She would keep her head above the closing fissures. She would keep a clean house.

  Beneath your feet they tramp and dig and hack and choke.

  The insulted earth smoulders, heaves and splits. The toxic gases cluster, leak and spill.

  The envelope arrived ten days before the sun went out, nine days before her parents set off on their outing. Bessie did not fail. She passed. She did not pass with good grades, with scholarship-justifying grades, as she had earlier hoped and expected, as others had hoped and expected. She, who had always been top of the class, had to be satisfied with what was colloquially known as a ‘Two Two’—a Class Two, Division Two pass. But she had passed, and she was relieved. Her parents were not familiar with the niceties of grades. Bessie made sure they did not take too much interest in them now.

  Bert and Ellen Bawtry congratulate their daughter. Is she a graduate yet? It seems she is only halfway there, but so far, so good. They will never understand the Cambridge jargon. They are happy, as they take to the open highway. Ellen puts on her goggles and her weird horned and ear-flapped wool hat, Bert dons his motorbike gear, they wave, and off they go. The Great North Road, with its famous staging posts, its new AA signs, its sprouting of bed and breakfast accommodations, its teas with Hovis, its beauty spots, allures them with its promise of displacement and romance. They rattle along in fine spirits. Cousins Ada and George Cudworth have boldly embraced the new Motoring Age, and have opened a B and B with Homemade Teas just this side of Darlington. They take in travellers from Edinburgh on their way south, from London on their way north. They brew tea and burn toast and fry bacon and bake rock cakes, and they dry sheets in their backyard on a clothesline with a wooden prop. Eggs, boiled, 4d each, poached or scrambled 5d each, with bread and butter for your tea. Dora would have loved to go to Auntie Ada’s for the eclipse, but there is not room for her in the sidecar. She will have to stay in Breaseborough with Bessie. But, as she admires and believes she loves Bessie, she does not feel left out. Well, not much, anyway.

  The people of the coalfields love the dales and the moors and the open roads. The people of Yorkshire love the Great North Road, the highway to adventure, and will complain when it is renamed the Al. Dora has done an original school project on the Great North Road, for which she got good marks. She would like to have gone too.

  Does a workforce gather on coal, like insects on a wound? Sheep graze the short sweet turf of the dales. Nobody herds them underground.

  Back in Breaseborough, Bessie was visited by Joe Barron. Were Joe Barron and Bessie Bawtry courting? Dora, who was deputed to chaperone them as they sat on the couch in the front room, thought that they were, though she was not quite sure what courting involved. This was an age of sexual innocence, and Dora was to remain an innocent all her life. Bessie and Joe sat close to one another, and whispered. Had Bert and Ellen gone to Darlington partly in order to give Joe Barron a sporting chance? They approved of Joe. He was a polite young man, of good family. They would be delighted if Joe made an offer for Bessie. It would be a step up in the world for Bessie. Bert and Ellen didn’t care much about such things, but they were not wholly indifferent to them either.

  Bessie and Joe Barron spoke of many matters. They were young, and they were idealistic and hopeful, and they agreed with Bernard Shaw that there must be a better world than this. They went together to a lecture at the Settlement in Sheffield on Anglo-Soviet relations, which took a mildly pro-Soviet line. They went together to see Greta Garbo in a movie at the Rialto, and they went to see a production of Dr Faustus by the Northam Players.

  Joe Barron, she had been informed by Reggie Oldroyd, would be joining her in Cambridge next October, to read Law at Downing. She now, on home ground, discovered this to be true. Joe had wasted two years of his life selling glass, but his father had relented, and he had been coached, and had worked through long evenings, and had sat his entrance examinations and obtained a place. His mother and his sisters had supported him. His long wait was over, and his real free life was about to begin. So it’s a pity, you might think, to find him still hanging around his hometown sweetheart, just when he could have made a break for it, and got away from it all.

  Bessie was very pretty, in those days. She wasn’t as handsome as Garbo, but she was much prettier than the young woman who played Helen in Marlowe’s Faustus in Northam. Her extra toe remained well hidden.

  Sexual attraction and pity do not mix well. They are a dangerous combination, as granddaughter Faro, whose conception begins to seem more and more unavoidable, will one day discover.

  So Bessie Bawtry took her degree, and she got a Two One in part two of the English Tripos (Part Two, Section A
, held under the Old Regulations). She appears to have written, amongst other topics, on Greek Tragedy, Donne, Paradise Lost, Swift and Samuel Butler, and to have addressed Samuel Richardson’s sneer ‘that had he not known who Fielding was, he should have believed he was an ostler’. One wonders what she had to say about this. She left Cambridge, armed with references from Miss Wellesford and the great F. R. Leavis himself, but jobs were hard to come by in those days of slump, and she found herself, to her dismay, back in Breaseborough, teaching at her own old school, and living at home again with Ellen and Bert. She had not travelled far. Her Yorkshire accent had perhaps prejudiced interviewers against her. This was not her opinion, for she did not believe herself to have a Yorkshire accent, but this is what others suspected. Miss Heald felt obliged to take her back into the fold. Her protégée, her prodigal, had come home, to the town she had sworn she would leave for ever. It was a defeat, though nobody dared to say so. She came home, as one less favoured member of staff brutally whispered, ‘with her tail between her legs’.

  Dora once risked a remark about Breaseborough not being so bad after all, but Bessie ignored it. She did not want to reconcile herself to Breaseborough.

  In later years, she was never to speak of this period. She did not speak of it to her children or to her granddaughter. But it was there, on record. Also on record was a prize-winning review she had written for the Yorkshire Post of the Sheffield Settlement’s production of Journey's End. The Breaseborough Times had reproduced it in full, with the headline ‘High Literary Quality: Breaseborough Teacher Wins Award’, and a photograph of pretty twenty-three-year-old Miss Bawtry. Her father was quoted as saying, ‘I thought she would stand a good chance, so I had a little bet with my daughter, and now we have both won something.’

  Joe was still at Downing, making up for the two years he had lost, and enjoying himself: he played tennis (quite well), went boating and, unlike Bessie, drank claret (though not much). He escorted young ladies to tea dances at the Dorothy Café, in the approved manner, and to May Balls. He was charming, good-looking and good-hearted. Too good-hearted, perhaps, for he considered himself by now to be morally bound to Bessie Bawtry, despite the fact that she had almost become engaged to a young man from Pembroke. That commitment had been broken off for reasons that were never to become clear, but Joe could have used it as an excuse, had he wished to. He too got an upper second degree and liked to tell the tale of how, bracing himself to read the class lists pinned up at the Senate House, he began at the bottom and, not finding his name in either the thirds or lower seconds, at first concluded he had failed.

  Joe embarked on a precarious and initially penurious life as a barrister in Northam, and taught at the WEA in the evenings, partly for the money (though the work was ill paid) and partly through a sense of social duty. He and Bessie were married a couple of years later in Breaseborough Church, which was odd, as they both came from chapel families. This part of the story is full of oddities and lacunae. It is not clear why they married at all. But they did.

  If this story were merely a fiction, it would be possible to fill in these gaps with plausible incidents, but the narrator here has to admit to considerable difficulty, indeed to failure. I have tried—and I apologize for that intrusive authorial T, which I have done my best to avoid—I have tried to understand why Joe and Bessie married, and I have tried to invent some plausible dialogue for them that might explain it. They must have had a lot to say to one another while they were courting in the front room, while Dora made herself scarce and made herself a cup of tea out the back. There must have been pleasantness, once, surely. There must, surely, have been a pleasant beginning, before the bitter end. Molly used to say that there was a strong sexual attraction between Joe and Bessie when they were young—and certainly Bessie seems to have had no difficulty in conceiving, although she had other gynaecological difficulties. But perhaps Molly said that to please or appease Bessie’s children, over whom the storm clouds of discontent were to gather. It was not their fault, motherly Molly wanted to say. The children were not to be blamed for the misery of the parents.

  Maybe there was love, once. But later bitterness has utterly obscured it. The water is dark with resentment and contempt. Bessie had always been strong on contempt, even as a child, but who could have foreseen that it would have thickened and spread until it stained and darkened and poisoned all things? Joe did not foresee it, or he would not have married her. Nobody warned him.

  We are left with the facts, and they are sparse. Joe Barron and Bessie Bawtry married, in St Andrews Church in Breaseborough, with Dora and Ivy as bridesmaids. They set up house in a nice suburb in Northam in a semi-detached purchased for them by Joe’s father. The Barron parents had been neither pleased nor displeased by the match: socially, Bessie was not much of a catch, but she was a polite, well-educated and thoroughly respectable young woman, so she would do. The Barrons were not ambitious. Bessie, of course, gave up her teaching career, as married women were obliged to do in those days. She said she regretted this, but she did not say it with much conviction. She was certainly glad to get out of Breaseborough at last. Perhaps she married Joe to get out of Breaseborough.

  Did Joe marry her because he felt he had to play the knight in shining armour and rescue her from the humiliation of her return home, from the shock of being jilted by that cool largetoothed young man from Pembroke? Did he pity her? Or did he love her, had he always loved her? He had no need to marry her. He could have looked elsewhere and married out. He had no need to marry into Hammervale.

  We would not be asking these questions had all turned out well for Joe and Bessie. But all did not turn out well. We do not know the details of what went wrong.

  Joe and Bessie married, and moved to Northam. Bessie had two miscarriages before being delivered of a healthy son, Robert. Three years later, war broke out.

  Bessie’s second child, Christine Flora Barron, was born in the Montagu Maternity Hospital in Northam, at two thirty in the afternoon, towards the end of the phoney war, before the bombs began to fall in earnest upon London and the industrial cities of the north of England. Christine Flora Barron is of more interest to us and to geneticist Dr Hawthorn than her brother Robert, for she is in the direct matrilineal line of descent. Robert is consigned (or will consign himself) to a minor role: almost to a non-speaking part. We shall come back to Chrissie and her childhood shortly, but meanwhile let us return—or rather let us leap forward in time—to Chrissie’s daughter and Bessie’s granddaughter Faro, whom we left, if you remember, in a Nonconformist chapel in Bessie’s birthplace, Breaseborough, in the company of Bessie’s sister, her Great-Aunt Dora.

  Faro, as we are reunited with her, is still to be found in Breaseborough, but she and Auntie Dora have left the chapel and the assembled Cudworths, and are now sitting together in Dora’s little house on Swinton Road. This is the house where Dora has lived alone for many decades, so close to the house on Slotton Road where she was born. Faro has driven Dora home, and now they are sitting together over cups of instant coffee: Faro’s coffee is black, and Dora’s is made with old-fashioned full-cream silver-top milk and a dash of hot water. (Faro, who had prepared these beverages to their respective tastes, had not at all liked the look of the contents of Dora’s fridge-freezer.) Dora’s house is small, cramped and stuffed, and it smells of old woman, of Minton the cat and his predecessors, of geranium, of paraffin and of the soot of centuries. The pits are dead, and the air in Breaseborough is purer now, cleansed by the Clean Air Acts of the late 1950s, but the smell of the past lingers and loiters in cushions and soft furnishings, in curtains and cupboards. Faro sniffs, inquisitively, diagnostically. It is an interesting smell, but not to be endured for long. Faro has made it clear that she cannot stay long, as she has to hit the road to London. This is a lie, but it is a white lie. Faro intends to spend the night in the Phoenix Hotel on the Northam bypass. Faro suspects that Dora knows she is lying. Dora is no fool, although she has often been treated as one.

/>   Faro stays for an hour, chatting, hearing the same old stories, and some new ones. Faro is interested in the past, and is intrigued by Dora’s many-layered décor. Dora enjoys talking about what she calls her ‘treasures’. A strange mixture of styles and substances and periods presents itself in Dora’s small front room: its furnishings include a Victorian dresser covered in knickknacks, cross-stitched antimacassars, brass fire-irons in front of a bricked-up fireplace, flooring of patterned linoleum covered by peg rugs and a Turkey carpet runner, and a three-piece suite clothed in worn dark green chintzy loosecovers that had been handed on many years ago from sister Bessie. The scorched plastic lampshades, pleated, fluted and heavily stitched down their ribs, defy all categorization: they are, claims Dora, original Barron pieces, dating back to the twenties or thirties. And that range of table napkin rings displayed on the mantelpiece—rings representing bunny rabbits, pussy cats, doggies and chucky hen—those too, Dora says, are Barron designs. This is news to Faro, and she gets up to inspect them more closely. There is, she finds, something unpleasing in their texture, in the streak and mix of their browns and greens. (Faro, it is to be recalled, is her grandmother’s daughter’s daughter, by directly traceable mitochondrial descent.) The table lamp, in contrast, is a dated futuristic 1951 piece inspired by the Festival of Britain, and nothing to do with Barron design at all: Dora had purchased it on one of her jaunts to Sheffield.

  The wallpaper is flowered in autumn tints of orange and brown and yellow, and a frieze of leaves runs below the picture rail. (Do people still have picture rails? Faro thinks not. Seb’s pad has a picture rail, but Seb is not people.) From Dora’s picture rail depend various items—a framed embroidery picture of a bluebell wood, a watercolour of an estuary which Dora says her Grandma Bawtry won at a whist drive, a green Wedgwood plate with a pattern of ivy and a leaning plastic container from which a spider plant, in every stage of death, rebirth and pupping, dangles dreadfully, at an uncomfortable angle, sprouting feebly but as it were perpetually, in papery stripes of yellows and whites and browns and greens. A row of pots, filled with geranium, begonia, cactus, African violet and shrimp plant, stands upon the windowsill: they thrive more pleasantly than the spider plant, despite the fact that Auntie Dora claims they like to be watered from time to time with hot tea. And all this accumulated clutter is dominated by an enormous television set of the very latest model, which has every possible new device attached to it. Dora cannot work them all, but she likes, as she puts it, to be up to the minute. Who knows, she may need Sky or subtitles or digital or sign language any day? She’s not sure what they are, but she wants the option.