by Bryher;
My joy in the book was so intense that I wanted to keep it forever. In case it was lost I desired to be able “to make it up” again. How were words printed and who put pages between covers? I could not yet write the alphabet but I could imagine stories even if these were not original but about myself in the guise of Ernest or Jack. Fritz was too old and too perfect. “When I grow up,” I insisted to everybody, “I am going to be a sailor.”
I was sitting under the scrapbook-red cloth of the nursery table one winter morning, pretending that it was Rock Castle and that I need not hear Ruth if she called me. It was warmer than rowing on an upturned chair—the tub-boat—towards the cupboard that was land because the wind was whistling under the windowpanes, and the garden was white with sleet. The door opened, the draft blew the tablecloth over my face, “Where is she?” it was my father’s voice, “Put her coat on as quickly as you can, there’s a wreck.”
A wreck! Just as in the book! So, in spite of the grownups, “But it’s just a story, darling,” adventures were true. They did not have to call me twice, I pushed my arms correctly into the right sleeves, they buttoned up my raincoat collar. I gasped as we got outside, the hurricane had made a funnel of the street and in spite of holding tightly to my father’s hand, it almost knocked me down. My mackintosh hood had a strange, rubbery smell, our neighbors passed us as they hurried up the road and I was soon so breathless that I wished that I were back under the nursery table long before we reached the front.
Half Worthing was already standing along the beach. It was strewn with gold. Oranges rolled across the pebbles, the breakers tossed them up like ingots or floated them ashore in a surge of weed and spars. Women joined hands, their bonnets tied firmly under their chins, to try to reach a breakwater where the fruit piled up in heaps. Several of them had baskets, a boy ran past us with his cap full to the brim and driftwood under his arm. More oranges bobbed in on the crest of waves exactly like escaped balloons. Water broke over us and flooded the gardens. “The salt will kill the shrubs,” a man bellowed and I wondered why. My great delight was to be taken out to sea in summer on my father’s shoulder, he was a noted swimmer, and they had always told me that the salt would do me good.
“Look! Over there! Look!” Men in cork jackets and high rubber boots were trying to launch the lifeboat. They shoved, the sides stuck to the shingle, men joined them and heaved. The crew pushed and sprang, they were riding the waves like a picture in another of my books, then they seemed to disappear in the trough of the waves. “Portuguese.” I caught the murmur around us, it was, my father explained to me, a country south of England. We stared into the distance but there was no sign of the ship, strangers spoke to each other (this was most surprising in Victorian England), it got very cold. I did not grumble when the time came to go home. I knew now what wreckage looked like and what a storm could do to the girders of a pier. They told me afterwards that the Portuguese sailors had been picked up by a coaster but I immediately suspected that this was said to reassure me.
A short time ago I went through Worthing on my way to see friends living in the neighborhood. I had not been back for over fifty years. I found the Queen’s Road, but a small block of flats had been built on the site of the house where we had lived and the garden where I had played. There were fewer changes otherwise than I expected. The driver of the car was a Worthing man and, by one of those extraordinary coincidences, remembered being taken as far as the beach when a toddler to see the wreckage and pick up oranges. It was the color against the violence of the sea, I imagine, that made such an impression upon us children; perhaps it was also our first experience of the forces of nature threatening our limited but familiar world.
The first time that we revisited London I was lifted into the train and put on a cushion in the corner where my short legs only just reached the rim of the seat. There were big flat buttons in the upholstery; naturally I tried to pull them out and was scolded for being fidgety. It was October so I must have been just over four years old. We rambled slowly through a landscape of bare bramble hedges and smoky blue sky that has always seemed to me part of the essence of England. Sometimes a big cart horse, in those days they were usually called Dobbin, ceased grazing, shook a shaggy mane and looked up at us. We stopped eventually at a junction in front of two big posters. There was a bottle of spilt ink on one of them and an old man on the other, he seemed to be a chimney sweep, holding out a cake of Pear’s soap. “We are just halfway,” my mother said encouragingly, lifting me back into my place. The train began to move, seemed to hesitate. At that moment I became conscious of time. Why, I thought, the instant just past has gone. I breathed, that particular breath would never recur again. I tried breathing more and more quickly. It did not help. I could not keep pace with time. I knew that I was alive but that I would die (though this was simply a word to me) and that merely sitting still used up moments and moments of life. I was not afraid but immensely interested. Dr. Sachs, the psychoanalyst, said later that it was early to have had such an experience but people are usually more concerned with “how” a child ought to develop than with “when” and few of us are allowed to be natural. We are all born with a rhythm of our own, it may be slow but nothing is ever more dangerous than to interfere with it.
We stayed in London with a friend of my mother. She was an elderly Devonshire lady with cheeks like wild roses and white hair under a lace cap. Her house was so old that it seemed to have lost interest in people. It was less ghostly than aloof as though too many thoughts had fretted themselves to nothingness against its high walls. The curtains, the furniture and the banisters that ran the length of the narrow staircase seemed an identical mahogany brown. Sometimes we could not see across the road for fog. It was somewhere in Bayswater, then a fashionable part of London, but I cannot recall the name of the street nor can I remember our mornings there, though we must have gone often to the park, in memory we seem to have lived in a perpetual afternoon. My father had gone away on some mysterious journey but my mother was happy to be in London again among people she knew. She was isolated at Worthing where we had few acquaintances. It was far less easy in Edwardian times to make new ties than it is now. People lived on reefs of their own making, even if they reached them by bus or carriage rather than by ship, and barely knew their neighbors’ names. It was the same with all social groups. Our cook was stricter than my family about making new friends.
The old lady spent most of the day sitting in an immense armchair. Her daughter was a widow with nine children of her own; most of them were grown-up but Gerald, the youngest boy, was not much older than myself. She liked to tell me stories and I loved listening to them if they were about Gerald who went alone to school, had laces in his boots instead of buttons and a clanging iron hoop. I was just as pleased if they were about the family collie, Roy. Only too often, however, as I was settling myself on my hassock, I heard the, to me, grim words, “Once upon a time.” I felt that I was being tricked when people told me fairy stories. I wanted to know how many planks were needed to build a boat in precise numbers and not general terms. I certainly did not want to hear about fabulous beans. My father had explained to me how fast and far a man could walk so why expect me to believe in “seven-league boots”? The outside world was such an exciting place that what I craved for was information about the things that I could touch and smell and see. Once I had my facts, I could make up my own stories and I think that has been the way with me all my life. I had to sit politely and listen, however, whether I liked what I heard or not. I knew only too well what happened if children were rude. They were smacked and sent to bed.
Most children are realists. A Victorian hobby was the making of scrapbooks and a few months later Ruth was cutting up some pieces of red material to make a cover for an album. “Here,” she said, handing me some cloth and meaning to be kind, “take this and pretend you are Red Riding Hood.” I flung the stuff on the ground, stamped on it and kicked her. “I want to be myself,” I screamed, my vocabulary as usual
being unequal to my feelings. It was not egotism; it was simply that I felt perhaps more than most the wonder of the world and dreaded having it taken from me.
One autumn day my father returned. He brought me an Indian standing on a small piece of scented wood with Quebec on its base. A few days later we returned to Worthing, our own garden and the sea.
I was just five when I was given a new and exciting picture book. Unfortunately I then had a disagreement with Ruth that ended again in my kicking her. Retribution was swift, “After being so naughty, nobody will read to you.” I decided not to howl but took my present with me to a favorite hassock in the shelter of the drawing-room sofa. I opened the book at the picture of two girls and a small boy sitting round a tea table in a garden. There were a dog and cat in front of them and verses about them on the opposite page. I had had some alphabet blocks with the usual symbols of “A is for Apple” and “Z is for Zebra” but I had never learned to put syllables together. Full of fury, I sat and struggled. Dog and tea were easy but there were some longer words that were baffling and difficult. “What can she be up to?” I heard, “She is so very quiet.” It was such a wet afternoon that for a wonder I had not been dragged out for a walk. Teatime came, I wasn’t even hungry, “Come along, darling, whatever are you doing?”
“I am reading my book,” I replied proudly.
There were the usual incredulous smiles so I read the poem out to them, slowly, stammering a little over one or two long words but without making any mistakes. I can still hear my mother’s astonished words, “She has taught herself to read.”
Alas, we are so concerned with morals when it comes to children that we fail to recognize how much motive power there is behind anger and stubbornness. Few remember that to learn to read and write is one of the great victories in life. I would never allow anyone to read to me again but I devoured every scrap of print that I could find from my father’s novels to the timetable. It did not matter to me what it was so long as it was a book although I always rejected fairy tales, “They are not true,” The Victorian age denied us so much that I wanted reality, not magic. I soon acquired an immense speed, reading like my father not in words but paragraphs. It gave Authority a weapon over me because from that moment onwards a favorite punishment was the threat, “Your books will be taken away from you,” but I cannot be grateful enough that they never attempted to censor what I read and one way or another I collected quite a library.
I am inclined to think now that much of the best writing of late Victorian times went into children’s literature. It is a myth to suppose that the nineteenth-century child felt particularly secure, the stories were mostly in the Zola tradition and stressed suffering, poverty and the evils of drink. I had one extraordinary volume largely taken up with an account of a small boy’s struggles not to compete with his drunken father in emptying tankards of porter. A Bible teacher saved him, of course. There were also grim accounts of disaster through a father’s death leaving the family without funds when dogs and possessions had to be sold and the children scattered as “poor relations” among harsh and unforgiving aunts. Such a fate was usually ascribed to the indulgence of the parents. They had given the family a pony or a trip to the seaside instead of saving every penny against a possible “rainy day.” The cloud that seemed to hang over all of us in a far more sinister way than any horror of giants or dragons has been brilliantly described by Dorothy Richardson in the opening pages of Pointed Roofs. Her account of the disruption of a family through the father’s failure in business differs only by the maturity of its writing from one of the major themes of our childhood fiction. It was essentially religious in character; what we had today might be gone tomorrow. I was never afraid of animals or the dark but I always began to tremble when I heard that trade was bad.
Virtue might be rewarded on the final page but it was a point of honor to endure countless tribulations first. Fortunately it was the righteous who died. The sinners were left to go on battling against temptation. Death was presented factually and boldly, my mother protested mildly when Ruth gave me Little Dot, or the Grave-digger’s Daughter one Christmas but I read it all the same. It was a remarkable tale. The heroine gathered daisies to strew on graves and taught her boy playfellow to pray. One character after the other was carried to the churchyard until “after a cruel winter” Dot, herself, died and only the old gravedigger was left to scatter the appropriate daisies on her tomb. Whenever I hear now of conferences to determine the vocabulary to be used in books for children and of the care taken not to upset their delicate imaginations, I can understand why they prefer their horror comics to literature. Our age treated us properly. The world was a harsh place and the sooner we learned the difference between good and evil the better. Ludicrous as some of the stories were, they spoke of realities and this was healthy.
There were gay stories like Bunchy, or When I Was a Little Girl by lost, anonymous authors who recorded their own simple experiences. I read a lot of bad poetry in an Empire Reader that I enjoyed without understanding what it was all about. I supposed Barbara Frietchie for example to be an English heroine. Chatterbox followed a little later. The tale I liked best was about a boy and girl escaping from a house during the French Revolution. Years afterwards, I discovered that it was by G. A. Henty. It must have been the first story by him to fall into my hands.
We had our problem novelist, Mrs. Molesworth, the Virginia Woolf of the nursery. She wrote on envy, jealousy and hatred as well as of the things that we wanted but she also understood our fundamental problems, the difficulty of obeying arbitrary rules or of making father, mother, teacher or nurse comprehend why we were frightened or why we wanted things when our words were few in number and abstractions were shadows. She dominated also because of her style. If she wrote of bread and jam, you saw it on the table and were hungry or you looked up at the familiar nursery walls after a smacking and knew that the heroine’s feelings on a similar occasion were your own.
I could scarcely have been six when my father gave me Peter Simple to read. Why Captain Marryat should ever have been considered nursery fare I cannot imagine but his stern and often bitter tales were on most of the children’s bookshelves of the period. I have a copy of Jacob Faithful given me by my mother on July 20, 1901, when I was six. The first chapter contains the starkest description of two deaths through drunkenness that I have read anywhere during my adult life. I have never forgotten Peter’s struggles with his sea chest on joining his ship nor Jack raking over the shingle to find a piece of rope to sell but otherwise Marryat really was “too old” for me. It was excellent, however, to have so realistic a basis for one’s literary beginnings; how innocuous Zola and the Plague Pamphlets seemed afterwards.
Happy and epic as my childhood was, I wonder that I recall so clearly the gray of that Victorian world. Yet in one of my earliest conscious moments I wondered if adventure had died just before I was born. It may have been the landladies who alarmed me, those yellow-faced women who let rooms to us for holidays. So often there was no husband, “He went off, ma’am, and left me with four children,” or he was ill, “No, he’s never been the same since he took cold on his lungs,” and there were glimpses of babies in shawls in the basement to confirm Ruth’s stories. Most of the infants she had known seemed to have died. Was it the stiff dresses that little girls wore or the burden of my own long curls? I know that I was convinced that if I wanted to be happy when I grew up I had to become a cabin boy and run away from the inexplicable taboos of Victorian life. We were ruled by gods that were neither Athene, Poseidon nor the Nine Muses but thou shalt sit down to lunch every day at the same hour, thou shalt not go out without gloves.
It has become fashionable recently to extol the nineteenth century with its quaint and charming womanliness. Nothing proves so completely the loss of an entire generation in the First World War. It was not an album of family portraits of people living in security and ease. Up to the eighties children were imprisoned for a variety of minor offenses, the educa
tional methods were usually barbarous, unmarried women without incomes were treated like slaves. Those of us who were born even at the end of the period do not idealize it. How could we ever wish to see such conditions return?
The Easter of being five, spring got into my blood and I started running away. Contrary to what most psychologists believe I never wanted security but always longed to be “on my own.” We were spending the holidays at Bognor and I was playing in the garden. Suddenly I knew that neither toys nor tenderness could make up for not having the chance that I wanted with my whole mind and strength. I had to explore the world myself. I felt that I should suffocate if I stayed any longer on a quiet lawn. I flung down my playthings and darted out of the gate.
I ran along the sea wall, feeling alone and free. I wanted to linger near some drying nets but it was dangerous to stop too close to the house. If I could reach the little steamer, a quarter of a mile away, I could scramble aboard and hide; they could not send me home again once we were afloat and there would be no more voices saying, “Don’t worry your head about such things. You are too young, darling, to understand.”
It was late afternoon before I was recaptured by two old fishermen who talked to me while Authority stole up in the rear. I was not smacked but the return after such a taste of freedom was a humiliating disappointment. It was torture to be cooped up inside a house, I ran away twice more in as many weeks and something died in me every time that I was brought home, I had to obey and bolt whenever the call came; it was like falling in love without its timidities and hesitations, yet I knew then as I know now that I was not running away from fear but rushing towards life, full of an almost mature desire for experience and danger.
