by Bryher;
There were compensations in England. I liked the food so much better than what I called “foreign messes” and after the too familiar “No, darling, that is too heavy to pack” I had my library jealously arranged in a special order in my own bookcase. Reading was limited to twenty minutes after lunch and the same amount before bedtime. I had to be in the open air. This rule taught me concentration because the time was so precious to me that a dozen people could have banged drums above my head and I should never have heard them. To this day, I avoid a quiet place in which to work. I also learned pages by heart to repeat to myself during walks. It was a form of oral transmission ideally suited to the training of a writer but at that time I dreamed only of going to sea. I had discovered Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast and used to get out of bed at night and sleep rolled up in a blanket on the floor to prepare myself for a voyage round the Horn. It proved an excellent training for the wars to come and a couple of Arctic voyages.
It was not the custom then to give children the presents that they get today. I had a shilling a week pocket money but it never stretched far enough to buy the things that I wanted: books, plants for my garden, presents for my family and extra biscuits for my dog. I rolled the lawn, picked peas and ran messages to add to my supply. My mother was partially deaf from an attack of scarlet fever and the maid was frightened of the telephone so I took over that instrument. Probably any business instinct that I possess comes from a saturation in messages from or to my father. I did not always understand them but I knew that I had to be accurate or lose the post of which I was so proud.
It annoys me when people boast that they know nothing about money as if it were a virtue instead of a symptom of bad citizenship. Mankind has used some form of barter since prehistoric times and I feel most strongly that economics should form a basic part of elementary education, to be learned with reading and counting. Wealth may consist of technical skills or gold but the essential test is the use that we make of our gifts. It is the evasion of responsibility that is evil.
I was always more interested in money, I think, than my father. He was a mathematician and his interests were in abstractions. I have seldom known anyone more remote from the things of this world. The success or failure of an equation meant a great deal to him, its rewards to himself very little. He possessed the detachment that lifts finance into an art, creates “risk capital” and is one of the nation’s most valuable assets. In antiquity, I suppose that he would have been an austere Pythagorean.
I never remotely belonged to such a sphere. Words had wings for me but never numbers. All the same, I wanted to go into business but my father forbade it because I was a girl, “Women will never be accepted at conferences,” he said. I wriggled my way in to some extent after his death but, as psychoanalysts will understand, never in England nor in any industries with which he had been connected. I learned what little I know about finance largely alone and, oddly enough, I found my study of history of great practical value. It helped me to assess the future and to be aware of change. My destiny was to write books rather than run a factory but I have always been passionately interested in economics.
The chief interest of this time of my life, however, was fossil hunting. I was dinosaur-mad from the age of eleven. “But what happened before the ancient Britons?” I asked continually until I found the answer in an article about the earth in some children’s magazine and chanted “Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous,” whenever we went for a walk. My mother gave me Hutchinson’s Extinct Monsters and I copied the illustrations endlessly with sticks of charcoal on red flower pots, in imitation of the vases that I had seen in Italian museums.
Did people know that Triceratops had overspecialized himself? He had developed three horns and these had made his head too heavy to lift so he had become extinct. (I often think of him if I meet some arrogant specialist today.) A Brontosaurus was so big that it needed a swamp to support the weight of its tail. Could I go and dig in the Pevensey marshes? I might find a bone. Those little dinosaurs were very dangerous although they looked like kangaroos, they often ate beasts bigger than themselves.
I found an ammonite under a clump of blue borage at the bottom of a landslide. I added Hutchinson’s Prehistoric Man and Beast to my library and stormed the British Museum with an arrowhead that turned out, alas, to be an ordinary flint. I made my peace with fairy tales; mermaids were Eskimos in kayaks that a gale had swept to Scotland. Cuvier and Buckland became familiar names. The stories were so exciting; I could understand Hugh Miller’s struggles to get an education because I was eager for explanations that I could not always find and who could be more adventurous than Marsh, digging up a skeleton from the Arizona sand while his men kept the mounted Indians from charging him? What I could not comprehend was why people had laughed at them and sometimes at me. There were many who preferred to believe in dragons rather than know that there had been life on the earth millions of years before man. How could they say that it was an attack on the Bible when fossils were just as much a part of creation as myself?
It is sad that paleontology is often neglected in schools, because it is the proper bridge between science and art. A complex discipline is needed to reconstruct a monster from two bones. A pterodactyl can fly to the utmost heights of some philosophical speculation. How secure the Cretaceous age must have seemed to its inhabitants. Then either slowly, or was it overnight, a change in temperature rubbed out a landscape or a sea, leaving a few footprints or a shell as the epitaph of a continent. It is good for our pride to realize what newcomers we are, how fresh to this ancient earth.
I was sent occasionally to stay with my uncle and aunt at Edgbaston near Birmingham. It was the Victorian world with a vengeance, far stricter than home.
My Aunt Ida was the elder of my father’s two sisters. She was born on July 28, 1856, and died on February 3, 1959, aged a hundred and two years. At the time of my first visit she was a slight but imposing figure dressed in the fashion of an earlier day with skirts that trailed over the ground and what I called “a coachman’s tippet.” Unlike my parents, she did not believe in either exercise or fresh air. I know that she wanted to win my affection but she frightened children, perhaps because she thought of us as naturally wicked beings who had to be scolded in order to be “saved.” She had a fund of stories, each more gruesome than the last, about the fruits of disobedience. Most of the boys and girls whom she had known seemed to have fallen out of carriages into rivers where inevitably they had been drowned. She did not approve of the way in which I was brought up and considered my navy blue clothes too gay. One alarming afternoon she walked me round and round the big lawn questioning me about my knowledge of the Bible to make certain, as she said, that I really understood the meaning of an oath. Fortunately my Victorian books had prepared me for such an occasion and I was wary, I would not give my word in advance. She wanted me to promise her solemnly that even if my father offered me an oyster, I would never eat it. If I did, she warned me, I should inevitably die from typhoid. I must also never touch salad. (I think that this must have been a memory of her own childhood when cholera was still rampant throughout England.) If I were her daughter, she would never allow me to go abroad (I heard this in horror), I ought to have been sent to school but now it was too late (I was ten), she was so sorry for me, how I should regret my ignorance when I grew up. I listened patiently and with reasonable politeness in the hope of hearing something about my father’s boyhood. Alas, all that she ever told me was that he had been very fond of a monkey, the pet of a friend.
Southern England might have abandoned itself to the Edwardian age but Birmingham remained a fortress of the manners and customs of the eighteen seventies. The day began at eight with family prayers. I had been up since six and was ready for the huge meal that followed, bacon, eggs, sausages on Sunday as a special treat, bread, butter and marmalade, all of a quality that I have not tasted since 1914. Breakfast has always been for me, unlike most people, the most important meal of the day. I walked with
my uncle afterwards to the neighboring station and waved to him as he went off to his office, he was a solicitor, on the puffing, local train, then I played in the garden or read in the library while my aunt was busy with her household duties. We never went outside the gate without a definite errand. The more respectable a family was the more afraid they seemed not of gossip, that was unthinkable, but that somebody’s cook might remark casually that she had seen us going up the road. In such a case, there had to be a precise reason for our expedition, there was no idle walking except in the countryside. We did visit friends, “my brother’s child” had to be inspected to see if it had grown but oh, what trouble I got into for confessing that I had never even heard of the ritual of calling and leaving cards. Twice a week the maids came into the dining room to be taught scripture and needlework and once a group of my aunt’s friends met to read a severely censored copy of a play by Shakespeare. On that occasion I was sent happily upstairs with a plate of cakes. There was no set lunch for the grownups although I was always given something to eat at noon but directly my uncle returned from Birmingham a four-course dinner was served at about five thirty when the news of the day was discussed; I was allowed to ask questions but never to interrupt, “A child should be seen and not heard,” and at seven thirty I was sent to bed. My elders had “tea” at nine and the cold meat and tarts that I saw arranged on the dining-room table always looked nicer than the meal that I had just eaten. It was a familiar atmosphere from one of Mrs. Molesworth’s stories but very different from either Henty or home.
The house was a dark, rambling place with engravings from Landseer hanging on the walls. It was a time when animals meant more to me than people and I admired them very much. The garden was larger than ours and full of tiny, gold raspberries. I have never tasted so sweet a berry since. There were beds of old-fashioned mimulus as spotted as its name and a greenhouse where I crouched under big maidenhair ferns because their hot, green scent suggested a jungle. The cocker spaniel, Roy, had a trick of standing on his hind legs to nibble the choice bits out of pears. It is rare for a full-grown dog to eat fruit and I was afraid that I might be blamed but my uncle knew the spaniel’s habits.
Every visit Aunt Ida took me over a factory with the double purpose of demonstrating The Child’s Guide to Knowledge and convincing me that I must never value material possessions. I saw pencils being made and spoons being plated. The workshops were exciting; question after question came to my lips but I was too shy to ask them in front of my aunt and to crown my misdeeds forgot to say “thank you” properly after one of these tours. I think a lot of bad manners in children is due to shyness. I remember lingering beside a little girl who was fitting pencil leads into cedarwood cases. I thought that she looked happy but as soon as we left the building, my aunt explained that it was my duty as soon as I grew up to see that such children went to school and not to work. I wondered whether adding sums up on slates was not much worse than sitting on a factory bench but was prudent enough to keep such thoughts to myself. The nineteenth century did more than we do, I think, to keep children in touch with manufacturing processes, we were nearer to the times when most articles had been made at home or in the villages, but actually to be told that a pious heart was better than a golden sovereign made me sigh regretfully that I had so few opportunities to earn more funds.
Fate seemed bent, however, in 1905 on making an Arab out of me. My uncle was wonderfully kind. He loosed me in a library full of Oriental books, smelling of leather and dust. His father had been a scholar who had spoken sixteen languages. I could not find out much about him, they said that he had studied too hard and died from brain fever while still quite young. I plowed through the romance of Antar in a Victorian translation, it was very heavy going, tales from The Thousand Nights and a Night, not in a child’s version, and pages from the Koran. It seems odd that this vast mince pie was not considered somewhat advanced reading for a ten-year-old but in my aunt’s eyes I was retarded and babyish. “Your grandmother was head of a household when she was little older than you are” was a favorite reproach.
They wanted to be kind. They took some Hentys out of the library to which they belonged although one was a three-volume novel that I found strangely disappointing. Gorged with books and feeling slightly guilty because I had disobeyed my mother’s instructions “to play in the open air as much as possible” I was glad when the time came to return home although I knew that trouble was inevitable after my aunt’s invariably adverse report upon my manners. Nobody stopped to think that the standards in the two households were not the same. Life was one long scolding for the Victorian child; it toughened us, I suppose, but it had its dangers. We were often genuinely bewildered and the seemingly irrational prohibitions led only too often to neurosis in later life.
SEVEN
We arrived at Palermo in December, 1906. It rained for seventeen days on end and there was no heating. One evening we managed to get a stove installed in the sitting room. My mother discovered that there was no chimney and I shall never forget her saying to me, “Don’t tell your father, darling, it is New Year’s Eve and I long just once to get really warm.” I was in my outdoor coat and my dressing gown at the time. We both thawed out peacefully until my father returned from one of his “brisk walks.” (I realize now that one reason for the clarity of his mind was that he lived like an athlete in training until 1914.) He sniffed the smoke, examined the heater and extinguished it immediately. That night, in spite of the occasion, we were all in bed by nine o’clock.
Palermo at that time was a mixture of races and cultures. I am not in love with unity when it comes to experience and the different patterns in countries such as Switzerland and the United States have always attracted me. It is the early instilling of a tradition into a child that is important, not the geographical site. I feel the essence of England the more deeply because I have lived most of my life in Europe, apart from two wars. Understanding depends upon a measure of detachment; emotion, and we need both, upon unreason.
I had read Freeman’s History of Sicily and watched the crowds eagerly as a result for a Carthaginian face. The idea of the lingua franca also gripped me. How wonderful it would be to travel from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, speaking a mixture of Arabic, Punic and French! Palermo was terribly noisy, coachmen cracked their whips, peddlers yelled their wares, but it was also a realm of donkeys. A red-robed king, a Moor whirling a scimitar through the air, all the folklore of the Sicilian past appeared on the panels of their tiny carts that were full of oranges or artichokes or threatened to tip up under the weight of an entire Sicilian family. The people were poor but gay, there was less of the desolate misery that had so oppressed us in Spain. My nurse had once brought me back a bottle of colored sands on her return from her annual holiday when I had been about three and I often thought of it as we shoved our way along some alley; the boy in front of us had a Greek head and a straw-covered amphora of wine under his arm but the three women at the corner with black shawls over their heads might have been watching there since the eighteenth century for a pigtailed English sailor.
The drawback of that winter was the weather. If it did not rain, there were blistering winds. A small tornado actually lifted me off my feet one day and into the air. My father caught me but we had to cling to some railings till the tempest dropped. The Mediterranean must have been a hazardous place for the ancient ships and it is not surprising that so many epitaphs in the Greek Anthology are addressed to sailors.
We explored the countryside bravely, in spite of the rain. A few orange flowers were in bud among the damp leaves. We got out of the carriage once to walk across a sandy bar to look at some view and I picked up a piece of coral. It was faintly splashed with rose but I doubt if I should have recognized the corrugated lump in my hand if I had not read that the place was a “coral beach” in Baedeker. For some reason, I suddenly linked my experience of the English shore to this southern strand, they fitted together like the two halves of a shell. I hav
e often wondered why I remember this incident so clearly when so many days full of sunshine and maturity have vanished without a trace? It is, I believe, because such an impression in childhood is really new. Repetition may not blunt pleasure but the moments flow into each other without any sharpness of impact. A never-previously-experienced sensation can be just as vivid in old age as in youth.
One late afternoon as it was dusk, we were taken into the catacombs. Nobody had prepared us for the sight that met our eyes. The walls were surrounded by skeletons that, in the half light, appeared to move or even to beckon to us. A shipload of earth had once been brought to the churchyard from the Holy Land and in order that as many people as possible could share its virtues, the corpses were disinterred after so many years and the bones set up in the vault. It was really not a spectacle to commend to the nervous but it was all part of the lingering medieval tradition and we took it philosophically if without enthusiasm.
