by Diana Athill
As Diana’s former publisher, I edited three of the four books that make up this collection. Very little needs to be said about that. The typescript arrived, a few suggestions for changes were made, Diana absorbed them with her quick editorial brain, and a slightly amended typescript was soon in the post. Editing her was pure pleasure because I loved reading her; it was like having someone speak into your ear, someone humane and self-amused and wise that you wanted to hear. ‘Good writing’ is difficult to define, and definitions differ according to taste, but you know it when you see it, which is rarer than publishing companies would have you suppose. I remember my excitement when I read the first few pages of the typescript that became Somewhere Towards the End (Diana’s choice of title and a good one, as her titles always are). The book arose out of a brief conversation and the exchange of a postcard or two: it seemed to me that while the memoir genre abounded in accounts of youth – the ‘coming-of-age narrative’ is a literary cliché of our times – very few books have let us know about life at the other end of the road. In fact, other than self-help guides (take a cod-liver oil capsule every day) and the late novels of Philip Roth, I could think of none. There are, of course, books about the process of dying by victims of cruel and slow terminal disease, but writers have been shy of the subject of just being old, as if shame and indignity had replaced wisdom and experience as the best-known qualities of great age. Our conversation hardly amounted to an editorial briefing and I had no word of progress for a couple of years. Then a few early pages arrived and with them the first vivid sense of what it is like to become old, like reports from another country that we shall all, if spared earlier elimination, shortly be moving to. In different hands, the book could have been filled with a sentimental longing for the past, brittle cheer towards the present, or the religious consolation of the future. None of those things could ever have appealed to Diana. Instead, Somewhere Towards the End is a beautifully turned series of episodes, none of them sermonic, in which the author reveals how she has come to terms (or not) with what she calls ‘falling away’ and the unavoidable fact of death. It was, wrote the late Simon Gray – no stranger himself to intimations of mortality – both ‘exhilarating and comforting’ in its good sense, candour and lively spirit. Every passage is rooted in specifics. On the second page, she describes her new tree fern (£18 from the Thompson & Morgan plant catalogue) and her doubts that she will live long enough to see it reach mature height: a small thought, but it immediately takes us inside the mind of someone going on for ninety. She has ‘got it right’, and continues to get it right throughout the book, in the sense that we utterly believe that this is how life is and was for her. She describes her final lover, Sam:
We rarely did anything together except make ourselves a pleasant little supper and go to bed, because we had very little in common apart from liking sex … We also shared painful feet, which was almost as important as liking sex, because when you start feeling your age it is comforting to be with someone in the same condition. You recognize it in each other, but there is no need to go on about it. We never mentioned our feet, just kicked our shoes off as soon as we could.
Stet, Yesterday Morning, Somewhere Towards the End: they may not be her last books – fingers crossed again – but they represent the late flowering of a writing career previously conducted in sporadic bursts. All were written when she was in her eighties and all are memoirs. Sometimes they overlap; they weren’t planned as a sequence. A few places and people in them wear a light disguise; when Diana began to write, it wasn’t done to name names in intimate personal histories. Now it seems reasonable to name two of them, because of the important part they played in shaping her life.
The first is a place. ‘Beckton’, the country house and estate where Diana spent so much of her childhood, is in fact Ditchingham Hall in Norfolk, just across the river Waveney from Suffolk. Her mother’s grandfather, a Yorkshire doctor enriched by railway shares and a good marriage, bought it in the 1890s. A cousin of hers still lives there. (Diana herself is far from well off. Publishing never paid her much, partly owing to her indifference about asking for more, which she came to see ‘as foolish, if not reprehensible’, and she had no inheritance. Having no money, Diana finds it easy to talk about. The royalties from her greatest success, Somewhere Towards the End will pay for her stay in the old people’s home, somewhere closer towards the end.)
The second is a person. ‘Paul’, the young pilot who broke her heart, was Tony Irvine. As squadron leader A.T. Irvine he died in the late afternoon of April 13, Easter Sunday, 1941, when his Blenheim bomber crashed into a mountain near the village of Vigla in northern Greece. Germany had just begun its invasion of Greece and a squadron of seven Blenheims set out to bomb troop formations before they poured south through the Monastir Gap. German fighters attacked the Blenheims (‘dreadful, clumsy planes’ in Diana’s recollection) and six were shot down in the space of four minutes. Irvine’s plane was last seen climbing into the mist that surrounded the mountainside, possibly trying to escape. The following day its wreckage was found eighty-four feet below the peak. Irvine had married by that time and his wife was pregnant with a son. When Irvine’s father died, long after, this son found a letter from Diana among his possessions and got in touch with her. They met one or twice. He must now be a man in his late sixties.
‘Just say,’ I said to Diana, ‘that Paul hadn’t jilted you, that you’d married him. Would you have written a book?’
Her reply was quick but thoughtful. ‘If I’d been an air force wife, I probably wouldn’t have written a book. If I’d been an air force widow, I might have done.’
In any event, a long time passed before she started on the book that became Instead of a Letter. She said she had no intention of writing it, no premeditation, no structure, no model presented by the books of other writers. ‘That book happened to me,’ she said, meaning that it had somehow taken charge of her and couldn’t be stopped. She had written nine stories for her collection and begun a tenth. ‘It was going to be about my grandmother but it fizzled out and I put it away. Then I took it out again and it simply went on. I couldn’t stop. I wrote it even in the office in any spare moment. There was no plan and it’s remained for me a very baffling book, but it worked as a piece of therapy to a quite extraordinary extent.’
She realized she could write, and that she was best at it when not covering reality with the polite wallpaper of fiction but by recounting experience as it really had been, as honestly as she could evoke it to her own satisfaction: ‘I’ve never actually planned a book,’ she said. ‘I’ve never thought of readers.’ In the forty-seven years since, only six books have followed, which brings her total to eight. She said, ‘I’ve never written anything unless I’ve wanted to. I really am an amateur.’
I thought of her self-description – ‘amateur’ – as I went down the stairs and began to walk across Primrose Hill. Really, we should have more of them. More people who write only when they feel they have something to tell us; more writers driven by the scrupulous need to make us see clearly and exactly what they have witnessed and felt.
I walked on over the rise. London was now spread all across the horizon in its familiar jumble of offices and monuments. I thought of how Diana was born somewhere off to the right in Kensington during a Zeppelin raid (December 21, 1917) and of how she had seen this city in so many different ages and moods. In Instead of a Letter, she and Paul take a ride in London’s last hansom cab – before the war and before her humiliating rejection. Before The Fall, you might say sadly, until you remember how Diana rose from it to find her singular voice. If anyone in future wants to know how an intelligent Englishwoman led her life in the twentieth century, her inner and outer life, from birth to a very old age, hers are books that will need to be read. As for now, they can simply be enjoyed.
Ian Jack
May 2009
YESTERDAY MORNING
Diana Athill with her mother, 1918
NOW
‘OH MY GOD,’ said my mother. ‘Can I really have a daughter who is seventy?’ and we both burst out laughing.
She was ninety-two. It was eight years since she had driven a car, six since social services had supplied her with a seat to help her bathe without getting stuck in the tub. She needed two sticks when she made her daily inspection of her garden, and had given up the needlepoint embroidery she loved because her sight was no longer good enough. She was well aware of being a very old woman, but she still felt like the Kitty Athill she had always been, so it was absurd to have another old woman as a daughter.
Another person, however, might have forgotten her own name before reaching that age, so it is impossible to generalize about growing old. Why, I was once asked, do so few people send back reports about life out on that frontier; and the answer is that some no longer have the ability because they have lost their wits, some no longer have the energy because they are beset by aches and pains and ailments, and those lucky enough to have hung on to their health feel just like they felt before they were old except for not being able to do an increasing number of things, and for an awareness of their bodies as sources of a slight malaise, often forgettable but always there if they think about it.
I belong to the last group, touch wood (once you have made it into your eighties you don’t say something like that without glancing nervously over your shoulder). The main things I can no longer do are drink alcohol, walk fast or far, enjoy music, and make love. Hideous deprivations, you might think – indeed, if someone had listed them twenty years ago I would have been too appalled to go on reading, so I must quickly add that they are less hideous than they sound.
Drink, for instance: I did not have to say to myself ‘Drink is no longer good for me so I must give it up’. What happened was that I began to wake up in the night quite often with a horrid pain which got worse and worse until I threw up, and eventually concluded that what caused this unpleasantness was alcohol. I took a long time to get there because often I had drunk no more than one or two glasses of wine with dinner, and who would suppose that one or two glasses of wine could make one ill? But they did, and by the time I understood as much, I was so tired of all that miserable sickness that I said goodbye to alcohol quite happily and began positively to enjoy water.
Being bad at walking is tiresome, but not so tiresome for me as it would be for some. In my youth I never walked where I could ride a horse, and later never where I could drive a car, which I can still do. My happiest times have been spent in chairs or beds: possibly I would actually like it if I became wheelchair-bound.
The loss of pleasure in music because of increasing deafness is sadder. The sounds can still be heard, but are distorted into ugliness. The piano comes through almost unaltered, but strings and birdsong are scratchy and painful, while most high voices are squawks. But against that, silence, like pure cold water, has become lovely.
As for sex – some very old women say that it still gives them pleasure, so clearly it varies from person to person. With me its ebbing was the first of the physical indications of old age: my body began slowly to lose responsiveness in my sixties, long before my mind did. For a while it could be restored by novelty, which allowed me an enjoyable little Indian summer, but when it became a real effort, and then a mockery, it made me sad: being forced to fake something which had been such an important pleasure was far more depressing than doing without it.
It seems to me that once one has got over the shock of realizing that a loss is a symptom of old age, the loss itself is easy to bear because you no longer want the thing that has gone. Music is the only thing I would really like to have back (whisky would be nice, but not nice enough to fret about). If a hearing-aid is developed which truly does restore their real nature to those nasty little scratchy sounds which make silence seem lovely, then I will welcome it.
The big event of old age – the thing which replaces love and creativity as a source of drama – is death. Probably the knowledge that it can’t fail to come fairly soon is seriously frightening. I say ‘probably’ because to be as frightened as I suspect I might be would be so disagreeable that I have to dodge it – as everyone must, no doubt. There are many ways of dodging. The one I favour is being rational: saying ‘Everyone who ever was, is and shall be, comes to the end of life. So does every thing. It is one of the absolute certainties, as ordinary as anything can be, so it can’t be all that bad.’ Having said that, you then allow your mind to occupy itself with other matters – you do not need to force it, it is only too pleased to do so.
And I have also been granted another specific against unseemly fear, which is remembering the death of my mother. She died in June, 1990, the day before her ninety-sixth birthday. That week she had bought a eucalyptus tree, and Sid Pooley, who with his wife had been working in her garden for years, came to plant it for her. She went out to show him where, and when he looked up from digging the hole he saw that she was not quite herself. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, and she said she was feeling a bit odd and had better go back to the house. When Sid had helped her back and put her into her chair in the sitting room, he telephoned Eileen Barry, her home help and friend, who came quickly. Having had much experience of old people, Eileen suspected heart failure, so before telephoning me and my brother she got my mother into the little cottage hospital which we are lucky enough still to have. It used to be run by Anglican nuns who have a convent in the village, and my grandfather was one of its founders. At that time it had only two private rooms and two wards, one for old women, the other for old men (most of its patients are very old: younger people are treated at the county hospital. An elderly cousin of mine, on hearing a rumour that our little hospital might be closed, exclaimed: ‘Oh no! Where shall we die?’). Both the rooms were occupied, and the women’s ward was full, so they found my mother a bed in the men’s ward and put screens round it.
I got there, after a misleadingly reassuring telephone call, early next morning, and found my brother Andrew and my cousin Joyce beside my mother’s bed. My sister could not be there because she lived in Zimbabwe. It was frightening: my mother’s face was almost purple, she was gasping for breath, and they told me she had just vomited black stuff. It seemed that she must die at any moment. When I put my hand on hers and leant over her, she opened her eyes, which wandered for a moment and then met mine – and a wonderful thing happened: a smile seemed to come flaming up from deep inside her, illuminating her whole face. Andrew was to say later ‘That was an amazing smile she gave you,’ and so it was: the complete expression of a lifetime’s almost always unspoken but never doubted love, coming to me like a precious gift.
Eventually a doctor came and gave her a shot – morphine, I suppose – and one of the little rooms was made ready for her. She fell into a deep, drugged sleep and the sister in charge said firmly that nothing was going to happen that night (the day had seemed endless – it was astounding to realize that it was over), so we had better go away until next morning. Andrew drove off to his home sixty miles away in north Norfolk, and Joyce and I went to my mother’s house, fed her dog, scrambled some eggs and went to bed – I in my mother’s bed, which felt odd but comforting.
And next morning she was better, sitting up against a bank of pillows in her quiet little room, pale but like herself. Her voice seemed almost strong when she said ‘Oh darling – could you brush my hair? It feels so horrible.’ When I had done that I went to find Sister, exclaiming when I did so ‘She’s much better!’ That kind woman put her hand on my arm and said: ‘She’s feeling much better, but she is still very very poorly’ – and I understood that she was warning me not to expect recovery.
All that day my mother was sleepy, but herself. From time to time she murmured that she would like a sip of water, or the bedpan, and she told me that although her desk looked untidy I would find her will and other necessary papers in one of its drawers. ‘But Aunt Kit,’ said Joyce – my mother’s eldest niece, and the one dearest to her – ‘you’ll be back there yo
urself in a few days,’ to which she answered sharply ‘Don’t be absurd, I could go any minute.’ Twice she emerged from a doze into a state of slight confusion, once thinking her dog had been in the room, then reminding me to pay for the wreath of poppies she put on my father’s grave every November, which was five months away. The next time she woke, after quite a long sleep, she said: ‘Did I tell you that Jack drove me over to Raveningham last week to buy that eucalyptus?’
‘You told me he was going to,’ I said. ‘Was it fun?’
And she answered in a dreamy voice: ‘It was absolutely divine.’
Then she turned her head away and went back to sleep.
Jack, who drove her that afternoon, told me later that it had been an exceptionally lovely day – June at its most beautiful – and that she had asked him to go by a lane she specially loved because she often rode that way as a girl. ‘She did enjoy every minute of it,’ he said.
A few minutes after she had fallen asleep Joyce and I decided that we had better go to feed her dog, and before we had been in her house fifteen minutes, Sister telephoned to tell me that she was dead.
The nurse who let me into her room when I went back to say goodbye to her was embarrassed because, although they had closed her eyes, they had not propped up her chin. She looked just as she sometimes looked when she went to sleep in her chair with her head leaning back, so that her jaw dropped: not a dignified deathbed image, but too familiar to be distressing. And anyway, I was far from distress. I was full of gratitude because she had come to the end of her days with an image in her mind of an afternoon that had been ‘absolutely divine’. One dreadful day, one of sleepiness, then that. She had bequeathed me, as well as that wonderful smile, the knowledge that an old person’s death is not necessarily terrible.
