by Diana Athill
My mother in her garden
That a woman of ninety-six was lucky enough to die an easy death without losing her wits or the ability to enjoy her chosen way of life in her own house: there was nothing much to mourn in that. Naturally I was to miss my mother – would often catch myself thinking that I must tell her something amusing or ask her something important – but I would also come to feel that mothers are never quite lost. Increasingly I see how much of her is still with me, literally in that I carry her genes within me, and also because of how much my attitudes and outlook were shaped by the upbringing she gave me. And when she died I avoided – though narrowly – what is sometimes the worst part of mourning: the burden of guilt about the dead person’s last years which can threaten people after a parent’s death.
My mother would never have dreamt of saying that she was lonely and sometimes afraid, but of course she was; and it became worse when, a few years before her death, she began to have attacks of vertigo. She knew they were not dangerous (unless one of them caused her to fall dangerously), but they were very unpleasant and enduring them alone called for considerable courage. My brother and I bullied her into accepting one of those lockets which send out an alarm call, but we couldn’t make her wear it. I knew she ought to have someone living with her – and I also knew how relieved and happy she would be if that someone was me.
Because I was one of the founding directors of the publishing house André Deutsch Limited, I was still working there, and I still needed to work. Publishing had been rewarding in many ways, but not financially (partly owing to my own indifference, which I now see as foolish, if not reprehensible). I had almost no savings, nor did my mother have any money to spare. She was the extravagant one in a set of sensibly frugal siblings, and although her extravagance was touchingly modest (buying a hundred daffodil bulbs instead of twenty, for example) it had left her in an awkward position. My father had retired from the Army as a lieutenant-colonel, so the pension paid to his widow was small, and although my maternal grandfather had set up a trust for his four daughters which no doubt seemed generous when he did it, by the time my mother reached her nineties it brought her in less than a thousand a year. Like her sisters, when widowed she gravitated home, which meant to the estate then owned by my uncle, where their mother still lived. My uncle sold her very cheaply a tumbledown cottage, and she somehow scraped together the money – helped, I think, by a sister – to convert it into a charming little house … and then found herself without enough money to live in it. Her brother came to the rescue. He bought back the now much more valuable cottage and let her go on living in it on condition that it would return to the estate after her death, so she was able to buy herself an annuity. It was a relief to her children that she could continue living in the house which suited her so well, but it did mean that if I were to give up my job she could offer me no security in return.
The truth was that I would not have much in the way of security whatever happened, so this was not really so much of a problem as I tried to think it was. I fear that I dwelt on it in the hope of convincing myself that I had a good reason for not moving in with her. It was hard to admit how appalled I was by the prospect of giving up my job – or more exactly, of giving up the life I had made for myself in London. My brother, who had a family to support, offered to have her to live with him if it became necessary, and it was not his fault that nothing would have made her accept life in someone else’s household. My sister in Zimbabwe also had a family. I have no children, and the man with whom I live has always been as little possessive as I am myself, so theoretically I had the mobility to move in with her, and no doubt if we had absolutely had to we could have managed financially. But I, too, was an old woman, only twenty-one years younger than she was. I, too, had built myself a life which suited me, and the prospect of giving it up seemed to me dreadful. All the more so in that although I loved her, we had little in common beyond kinship, so when I was with her I always had to put my own nature on hold and exist in terms of hers. When younger, she had entered into her children’s interests rather well, but by about her mid-eighties she stopped bothering to make the effort to do so. It was on her ground that we had to meet, and although I liked her ground, it was astonishingly exhausting to be cut off so completely from my own, even for the few days of a weekend. To bear it all the time, I felt, would be beyond me.
But during one of the many weekends I was now spending with her she had an exceptionally severe attack of vertigo. I was sitting up late over some work, so I heard the thump as she fell down in her bedroom. I rushed upstairs and was able to heave her into a chair, wrap a blanket round her (she went ice-cold during these attacks), and supply her with a basin before the retching began – the way the dizziness affected her like sea-sickness was the worst part of it. Usually the attacks lasted about half an hour, but this one went on and on. There was nothing for me to do but hold her head and add to her wrappings, and as the night went by I became frightened. Every now and then she gasped ‘It will pass, it will pass,’ but it didn’t, and surely the strain of all that dreadful retching must be more than her poor old heart could stand? So I decided to call out the doctor. He came quickly, gave her an injection, and stayed with us to make sure that it would work, which it soon did. As I helped her into bed at about three in the morning, I realized that the time had come when I must take action.
I decided on a compromise: from then on I would divide each week between London and Norfolk, three days in the office, four with my mother. When I was not there I would gamble on her being kept safe by Eileen Barry early every morning, Sid and Ruby Pooley looking in every afternoon, and the generous alertness of kind neighbours (oh, the luck of Sid, in fact, being there when the time came).
Even that limited sacrifice of my own time seemed painful at first. The day I arranged it with the office and announced it to my mother, I collapsed with what I thought was flu, but understood two days later, with shame, to be nothing but strangled protest. It is extremely humbling to remember that my cousin Joyce, who like me was only twenty-one years younger than her mother and who adored her own house, moved in with my aunt full-time for months and months and never gave the slightest hint of boredom or regret. But once the first resistance was over, the arrangement worked well. My mother was happy – knowing there would be no more than three days alone seemed to make it feel less like loneliness and more like waiting for something agreeable to happen – and her happiness made me glad. And when she died, if I had believed in God I would have gone down on my knees and thanked him for the extra time I spent with her during her last two years.
What caused the kind of grief that twists the guts was not losing my mother, but losing the place where she lived which, wherever I myself happened to be living, had always been ‘home’. My maternal grandparents’ estate in Norfolk, just across the border from Suffolk, was where my mother, her siblings, her children and most of their cousins were rooted. This was because my grandmother was so much loved by her four daughters and her son that they all came back to her whenever they could, bringing their children with them and leaving them with her when they had to live abroad. Her son was a cavalry officer and her three married daughters chose military husbands, two in the Army, one who moved from the Army to the RAF after being one of the founder members of the Royal Flying Corps, so a good deal of living abroad went on. My brother and sister and I spent a large part of our early childhood and all our teenage years in the Hall Farm, just across the park from my grandparents’ house – which we thought of as ‘Gran’s house’ because my grandfather died when I was six. When it passed to my uncle and then from him to his daughter, the house ceased being the magnet it had been previously, but its land, the two little villages within its sphere of influence, the local market town – all that went on being ‘home’ while my mother lived there. Driving from London, when I reached the market town and turned into the road which I had traversed hundreds of times more often than any other road, I used to get – still
get – an extraordinary feeling of entering my own body, as though I had become something like the giant human figure that was on display in the Dome and was at the same time a person moving through it.
It took us a month or so to sort out my mother’s possessions and prepare her house for its return to the estate, which promptly sold it – luckily to great friends of ours. Then, one day, I suddenly realized that I was driving that road for the last time. I would of course be returning to Norfolk to stay with my brother, or with Joyce, but I would no longer have a reason to drive this way – and the thought of doing the trip not because I was coming home, but just to see what was going on there, seemed so horrible that I almost wept. Realizing it was ridiculous to mind so much, I made a great effort to reason myself out of this grief, but was successful only on the surface. It did not occur to me that the grief might soon be dispelled.
This happened thanks to my cousin Barbara, to whom I already owed my home in London. Although she is eight years younger than I am we have been friends since the mid-fifties when, soon after coming to London for her first job, she was looking for somewhere to live and I had half a flat to offer. It was very much a young person’s first flat, with nothing on its floors but dingy underfelt, and a sparse collection of furniture cast off by other people; but it was large enough to take a lodger, which helped us to pay the rent. When Barbara, after finding her way into political journalism, married the lodger, I moved off to a happy spell in Chelsea, sharing a house with a friend; but some years later the ground shifted simultaneously under both Barbara’s life and mine, she bought a large house and I moved into it with her, renting its top floor. And when eventually my ineptitude with money made me unable to afford even the modest rent I had been paying, Barbara let me go on living there anyway, so that I have continued to enjoy a life civilized far beyond my means. Without her generosity I and my old companion would, by now, be living in a pair of bedsitters in Stoke Newington … in other words, our gratitude is inexpressible.
Barbara’s mother, like mine, had been drawn home after her husband’s death and had bought and converted a cottage on the estate – just one field separated the sisters, who had tea with each other every day. My aunt was the older of the two, but she outlived my mother by eighteen months; and she, whose husband had retired as a general and whose scrupulous frugality ought to have been a lesson to us all, was able to leave her house to her son and daughter. They agreed that Barbara should buy her brother out, and Barbara then suggested that I should add a room to it (André Deutsch added enough to my savings to make this possible), thus making it just large enough for us to share it as a country retreat. So here I am, still driving that old road almost every weekend, which has made the difference between a bearable old age and a happy one, and has given birth to this book.
Something I like about old age is that you can so easily let your mind drift. The present no longer contains much that demands concentrated thought: no more love affairs, no more work excitements or problems, no more (or very little) planning of entertainment or travel. Day-today life is so much simpler and more repetitive than it used to be that you can allow your mind to wander. The best times for it are in the morning, snug in bed putting off getting up, and in the evening, idling one’s way towards sleep. Sometimes I find myself telling a story which has grown out of some small incident – perhaps a man in the park that morning was humiliated by his lack of control over his dog, and a minidrama weaves itself round him. Or I have heard that a friend is ill, and spend a long time recalling her and her ways, imagining her feelings, foreseeing her future. Often I choose a time or place and let myself loose in it: Venice on a September morning, perhaps, or Santa Fe full of flowering lilacs as it was when I once spent a week there. One scene will lead to another, one event connect mysteriously with another of a different kind, and people I haven’t thought about for years will materialize. And since the place where I spent my childhood has been restored to me … well, everyone knows that what comes back to the old most often is their distant past, and that is confirmed again and again in my own experience. In the last two or three years I have learnt what a vast amount of my childhood is stuffed away below the level of consciousness, much of it probably never to emerge but a surprising amount of it ready to become available, and all of it there. It has become obvious that what an old person is – provided he or she has not gone gaga – is not just the deteriorating body going through its necessarily simplified and sometimes boring occupations, but a mobile reservoir of experience.
Being this reservoir expands one’s sense of importance, but because people are usually unable to benefit from experience which is not their own, it is better not to talk about it too much. Perhaps it is otherwise in societies which traditionally revere their elders (lucky old them!), but not with us. Generally what one has to expect is that the accumulation so essential to oneself is destined to vanish quite soon in a puff of smoke out of a crematorium chimney. (In fact it won’t have even that amount of visibility: how a modern crematorium deals with the smoke problem I do not know, but certainly it is not allowed to upset the neighbours.)
The knowledge that this is so must, I suppose, be one of the chief triggers of autobiography. ‘But if I turn it into a book,’ one feels, ‘there it will still be.’ Whether anyone will want to read it is up to them: at least it will be there for whoever does. I have acted on this impulse twice before, once in relation to my experience of love (Instead of a Letter), once in relation to my life in publishing (Stet), and both times there was a fair number of people who wanted to read the resulting book; so now, when what has bubbled up asking for the same kind of expression is the material at the bottom of the reservoir – the stuff which, on the whole, causes a person to be what he or she is – I dare to do it again.
Aged seven, with my brother Andrew and little sister Patience
THEN
LESSONS
I LONG TO BE a fish, water flowing as easily through lungs as over skin and allowing supple movement or lazy suspension. I lean over the rail of the bridge which spans the weir, and stare into the pool below it. Brown yet transparent, with golden gleams, like clear dark jelly. It makes me lick my lips with thirst.
The summer of my ninth year was hot, so the lake was low and only a little water spilt over the weir into the pool. After heavy rain it roared over and to prevent a flood the gate in the weir’s bowels was cranked open so that, in addition to the overspill, a flying buttress of water escaped lower down, out of the lake’s depths. Today’s trickle was less exciting, but it allowed the pool to lie at peace. It was hard to decide between violent beauties and tranquil ones because things ought to have an order – good, better, best – and when they didn’t it made me uneasy. But if it was impossible to decide between the tumultuous weir and the still pool, at least it was obvious that each was best when it was ‘most’ – and the pool today could not have been more what a pool on a hot summer day ought to be.
There were yellow water-lilies – wild ones, which I believed to be rare. The ones up in the garden, big and white with golden centres, were specially planted and originated in the Orient (was I told that, or was it just that they looked like it?), and that was surely usually the truth about water-lilies. We might be the only people in England who had wild ones growing in their pools as though living in India or Persia … one of those places from which precious things came. And my uncle saw a kingfisher here. All I could see now were dragon-flies zigzagging swiftly between hover and hover, and a moorhen stepping through the grass near the bridge, probably a parent of the eggs my brother and I ate that spring. The nest was anchored beyond arm’s reach, so we took the eggs with a spoon tied to a long cane. Luckily they were new-laid – cracking a moorhen’s egg was always an anxious business.
The contents of an egg which was too far gone echoed other horrors: there was sometimes, for instance, a dead animal hidden in long grass. The gamekeeper’s ‘larders’ in the woods – wire strung with the rotting corpses of weas
els, stoats, rats, jays, carrion crows and other threats to his pheasants and partridges – these were bad enough, but I knew where they were and could avoid them, or if I had to pass one because I was with someone who might think me silly, I could steel myself in advance, and look away. But sliding into a ditch to get at a clump of primroses: then, if there was suddenly a dead animal, my very blood recoiled. The worst was last summer, wading through a field of wheat (though trying not to trample it down, which was forbidden) for the pleasure of being in all that gold and smelling its warmth. My foot came down on a dead rabbit. Swerving, I almost landed on another, and realized that all round among the wheatstalks, partly hidden by the undergrowth of weeds, were collapsed skeletons with their loathsome tatters of fur – a sort of rabbit graveyard: how to escape without treading on another? Then panic sent me plunging out of the wheat. I could remember it only in quickly blinked-away glimpses, it was so dreadful. It did not stop me walking again through tall growth, or climbing into ditches, or exploring woods, but I was much more careful which diminished the pleasure.
It was a puzzle, the way things were rarely exactly what they ought to be. If I had run myself into a sweat, and the grass was so soft and green that it should have been caressing when I flopped down in it, there was usually a thistle or a hidden stone, or after a few seconds my legs would start to itch because of ants crawling over them. And if music started to climb higher and higher, instead of going up into absolute height it always turned and came down again. Height, depth, softness, sweetness – there was never quite enough of them. ‘Why can’t all food be sweet?’ I had asked not long ago, and the answer was ‘You couldn’t have sweet if you didn’t have sour’. What a senseless rule!
