Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  It wasn’t like that in the serial story I told Andrew every evening, when we were in bed. The story was called ‘Hal’s Adventures’. ‘Why Hal?’ my mother asked – we knew no one of that name – and I explained that it was short for ‘Halbert’. ‘But there’s no such name. There’s Albert or there’s Henry – Hal is short for Henry.’ I could not accept that because the abbreviation of Henry must so obviously be Hen; so Hal went on being short for Halbert, my hero who could command magic at a pinch and was absolute ruler of his people.

  Hal’s closest friend and lieutenant was Thomas, who was trusty and also dull: all I bothered to know about him was that he had brown hair (Hal’s was auburn) and blue eyes. Thomas had a pretty princess with curly golden hair, but Hal’s princess was dark and tragic-looking, with hair that fell to her knees in smooth waves. If I could have had my way the story would have consisted almost entirely of what the princesses were wearing, what kind of horses they were all riding, what jewels adorned their chariots and thrones, what silks were heaped on their beds. Everything in their palaces was what it should be – all the food as delicious as strawberries and peaches, all the colours luminous. Once Hal and his entourage discovered a river of perfect beauty. Its water was as clear as diamonds and it ran over a broad smooth bed of spring-green grass.

  My brother wanted events, not descriptions. I was bad at these, although I knew that marvellous things must happen in Hal’s world if only I could hit on them. Since I couldn’t, it always ended by being another battle between Hal’s forces and the Pubbies.

  We had set out to invent a whole secret language, but it had stopped at a special grunt for ‘goodnight’, ‘jolyon’ for ‘penis’, ‘jellybolees’ for ‘buttocks’ and ‘pubby’. I felt ashamed of our lack of seriousness when we gave up. A pubby person was a person we despised: fat, soft, silly, scared. The Pubbies in the story were an obscene and treacherous army, always defeated, and tortured when taken prisoner. Once Hal and Thomas made them sit naked astride a wall with jagged glass on top of it, and bounce up and down – a stroke of genius which went down so well with Andrew that it often had to be repeated.

  The worst thing we ever did to a pubby in real life was to push him into a bed of nettles as though by accident. Usually we went no further than acting aloof and showing off. The pubby would be handed over by its parents and our own – ‘Why don’t you take Michael to see the calves?’– and after a greeting which adults would think no worse than shy, we would start running along the tops of walls, jumping up to catch a branch over which to somersault, throwing stones at things (risky, because to miss made you look silly). If after a while the pubby joined in and proved as able as we were, he would be promoted – often with enthusiasm – to friend. If he was nervous, or didn’t like to get dirty, or was simply not interested, he was condemned.

  I would never forget the day when I stood by myself on the bridge because it had so much in it: it was summer; it was in this place – our grandparents’ home – which all of us children felt in our bones to be our own; and it was near water. And perhaps also because I was alone, although I wasn’t really. Andrew and two of our cousins were quite near, climbing trees. I was separate because I was sulking. Their enthusiasm for tree-climbing had outweighed mine for something else, and ‘She’s sulking, she’s sulking,’ they had jeered. The way to lift sulks above absurdity was to enlarge and prolong them. If I didn’t speak another word all morning – no, all day – that would show them. At first they wouldn’t notice, then they’d be puzzled, then alarmed. By the evening everyone from our grandmother down to Patience, our little sister, would be pleading with me to speak, or tiptoeing about, consulting in whispers as to what should be done… But while we were running down the slope of the park to the edge of the lake, and making our way along it towards the weir and the bridge, I felt resolution failing: words and laughter were almost escaping. I stayed by the bridge to save what dignity I could. By the time I heard shrieks of ‘A hornet – look, a hornet!’ my immersion in the things I was watching had purged me of resentment so that I could run to see the hornet (there was a nest of them in one of the trees) without noticing that I had capitulated. I remembered it briefly that evening: a whole day – how it would have impressed them all! But what could I do about my own frailty?

  Childhood is so often remembered as summery presumably because summer is the season allowing children in northern climates the most freedom: the longest holidays come then and they can be out of doors, away from the adult-organized house – most themselves. That water is so central is harder to explain. A classic Freudian interpretation is that water and sand represent urine and faeces, essential playthings because with them the child can act out infant fantasies … Can that be true? With us the fascination of water coincided through early childhood with an acknowledged interest in urine and faeces, so there was no need for the latter to appear under a disguise. When we were seven and five years old my brother (who was the younger) asked me: ‘Which do you like best, bigs or littles?’ I knew just what he meant: these things existed in our minds as a subject, in the same way that interior decoration might exist in the minds of adults. When he said ‘I like bigs best’ his preference left me incredulous, as though he’d said ‘I like garden gnomes’. To me littles was far more attractive – when I fell in love with the gardener’s ‘boy’ I imagined him urinating, and I went through a phase of doing it myself in odd places – under a corner of the carpet in the bedroom for example – leaving a few drops here and there like a dog establishing its territory. It did not occur to me that urine smelt: I was stunned when this habit was discovered, and so frightened and ashamed that I must have known all along that I was committing a bad breach of the rules, even though I hadn’t thought about it. I was caught while staying in an aunt’s house, and my flustered nanny shut me in my bedroom, where I waited for some unimaginable punishment contained in the thought ‘They will tell Mummy and Daddy’. I had never been smacked, never deprived of anything I wanted, never even sent to bed or stood in a corner – well, yes, stood in a corner once, but it seemed silly rather than mortifying. Adult disapproval was the only weapon used against me, so it was fully potent: the unimaginable punishment might, perhaps, be that my parents’ disgust would make them unable to love me.

  My aunt came into the room. The only thing I was aware of was a longing to vanish. ‘You are a disgusting little guttersnipe, aren’t you?’ said the aunt, disdainful rather than angry. When I understood that I need expect nothing worse than that, my relief was so great that I could hardly comprehend it. My parents would never know! (When I was home again a doctor came although I wasn’t ill, and pronounced my bladder sound, but I didn’t connect the two events.) The incident soon faded – but I never again experienced the impulse to pee in corners.

  No, the disturbances caused in us by water were not the same as the titillations caused by urine. Water inspired sensations of longing or impulses towards creativity (many dams were built). Water running shallow over pebbles, humped to the shapes of the stones; or over sand, trilling in minute puckers of ripple; water still and shadowy over mud, disorderly and silvered where it broke against an obstacle; water in muscular swirls and eddies: each of its moods had its own quality and evoked its particular response. It frightened only when in flood, yellow with soil, carrying clumps of scum, moving too fast. There was a terrifying book on the nursery shelves about the Mississippi in flood and a family of children swept away, clinging to the roof of their house … A stream in spate, even the disciplined stream which bisected the kitchen garden, was suddenly related to the Mississippi and became a threat – but a fascinating threat. Water linked with poetry rather than with sex.

  Dabbling in streams was not the only way in which we expressed the urge to make things. When it came over us it was always the same – a strong, almost tormenting need to do something – but what? Often it short-circuited into bad temper: ‘What shall we do? – Mummy, we don’t know what to do.’ – ‘Why don’t you go a
nd dress-up?’ – ‘No!’ … everything anyone suggested seemed futile. But usually the urge had its own solution within it, needing only to be recognized. Was this the house-building itch? No. Was it the dam-building feeling? No, not quite. Was it the signal for going over to the farm and finishing the cave we were digging into the side of a straw-stack? No-o-o … not today. What about making a pig-mush? Of course, that was it!

  Fishing for newts in the kitchen garden

  Making a pig-mush had to be done by Andrew and me alone, because no one else had quite the right feeling for it. We had been given an enormous old iron saucepan, now chocolate-coloured with rust, which we left lying about in the bottom orchard (the one for cooking-apples and quinces) for months between each pig-mush fit, and sometimes had trouble finding. The pig-sty was near the orchard, and first we would go and look at the pigs because it was necessary to work up a feeling of love and pity. Poor things. Poor things, in that stinking yard where the muck came halfway up the fence (pigs were not kept scientifically in those days). Nothing to do but lie about in that muck all day waiting for their food, and when the food came it was always the same: meal made into a sloppy porridge with water. Never mind, pigs, you’re going to have a treat now. We’re going to make a pig-mush for you, we won’t be long.

  The basis of it, to give it body, was a few handfuls of the pigs’ own meal mixed with water in the usual way. The mush’s beauty lay in its other ingredients. Some were obvious, such as apples, carrots and wholesome-looking fresh green grass, but as the work progressed the creative fever would mount, and we would scurry about the garden and even up to the house, to beg from the cook. Six pink, six white, six red rose petals; a handful of mint; pinches of salt and pepper; some icing-sugar; two senna-pods (the taste would be disguised and they’d do the pigs a lot of good); a little duckweed? Why not. Then some crumbled Madeira cake and some asparagus tops, and two bruised peaches which had fallen off one of the trees espaliered on the kitchen-garden wall. We might even dare to pick a perfect one – a crime, but what an undreamt of delicacy for the pigs! It could take most of an afternoon before the saucepan was brimming and the feeling came over us that there wasn’t much more to be done to it now. Then a thorough last stirring, and it was carried to the pig-sty and balanced on the fence above the trough. The pigs would come surging and squealing, and there was an anxious moment before the pan was tipped: it would be disaster if the mush splashed uselessly over a pig’s thrusting shoulders instead of into the trough. An opening – quick! … and the mush would be poured. One panful between five or six pigs was gone in a flash, of course, but we were sure that quality made up for lack of quantity, and would stand gazing tenderly at the pigs, deeply satisfied at having gratified such an urgent need.

  Once a year one of the pigs was slaughtered in the lower yard. It was a good thing to be a girl then, feeling no challenge in this. Andrew, at the age of six, was moved by a mixture of curiosity and bravado to feel that he must watch, but it never occurred to me to do anything but stay as far from the yard as possible. Our cousin John was unable to admit that he felt as I did, so the two little boys went down to the yard together. Johnnie gave way before it was through, which was lucky for my brother, who could bolster his pride by sneering. ‘Johnnie was sick – he ran away and was sick into the beech-hedge – but I didn’t mind it at all.’ His face was still greenish as he spoke, and his eyes were furious and scared. I thought him a fool as well as disgusting.

  And in spite of all that bravado over the pig-killing, it was I who had to kill the hedgehog.

  Much of what we were taught by our elders we resented or at best endured; a great deal of it we were later to reject; but some things we accepted without question. These things went into our minds as the kind of lore to which additions can be made if experience warrants it, but which is essentially true. Into this category came anything to do with animals, whether tame or wild. This was accepted so readily because our elders’ attitude towards animals resembled our own, and also because it was obvious that on this subject the grown-ups knew what they were talking about. One article of the lore concerned sick or maimed animals: they must be cured if possible, but if it wasn’t they must be killed quickly and efficiently ‘to put them out of their agony’. We had not only been told this, but had seen it in operation. Out with a gentle-hearted aunt, we had come across a rabbit in a trap. We had seen her tempted to believe that it was less badly hurt than it was, but conclude that it could only die a slow death; we had seen her find a heavy stick and, making an obvious effort to overcome pity and revulsion, kill it with a blow to the skull. Hindsight suggests that there was sometimes confusion as to whose agony was being ended, the victim’s or the spectator’s, but there was no sadism in it: we knew that a hated deed had been performed because it had the moral weight of a duty.

  My brother and I found the dying hedgehog in the Cedar Walk – the ornamental plantation which girdled the kitchen garden. It could still move feebly, but something terrible had happened to it and there was a ragged wound in its side. Andrew stooped over it, and recoiled. ‘It’s got maggots.’ I overcame my horror to peer. The hedgehog was rotting alive.

  We knew we should kill it. We looked at each other, I hoping he would say ‘I’ll find a stick.’ Instead Andrew backed away and said ‘I can’t.’ This collapse put him in my hands. I could have tormented him with it, but instead I felt suddenly aware of my seniority, and protective. I didn’t blame him for dropping his front – he was closer to me for it – and I knew that I must assume responsibility.

  A hedgehog has a very small head and a body which, because of its spines, can’t be gripped. I couldn’t touch it, anyway – my revulsion was such that I could look at it only out of the corners of my eyes. Part of the duty is that death should be instantaneous, so it was out of the question to rain random blows on the hedgehog with a stick: I needed to find a weapon large and heavy enough to be sure of crushing its head even if my aim was not exact. We were near the boiler-house built against the outside of the kitchen-garden wall to heat the vinery on the wall’s other side. ‘We could put it in the stove,’ said Andrew sickly. We knew that we couldn’t, but it drew my attention to the building which had recently been repaired. There was a pile of bricks beside it. ‘A brick,’ I said. ‘Suppose you don’t hit hard enough?’, and I imagined striking the blow only to see the hedgehog worse maimed than before but still alive. But if I put the brick on top of the hedgehog and jumped on it with all my weight …

  Andrew backed further away. Telling myself, ‘Don’t think, just do, it’s got to be done, don’t think,’ I ran for the brick, put it in place and jumped, all as fast as I could. There was a sensation rather than a sound of crunching, but I was hardly aware of it; it was as though I were running away from horror so fast that it couldn’t catch up. But before I could in fact run I still had to kick the brick away to make sure the hedgehog was finished. I kicked it, and we bolted. Relief that it was over swept away the horror, and pride filled me at having been able to do the impossible. I felt strong, and Andrew was subdued by admiration, but there was no question of triumphing over him because we had shared the experience too closely. Soon we started laughing and pushing each other about. Many years later I was to hear someone arguing that the elation of soldiers coming out of battle after having killed proved the existence of mankind’s murderous impulses. ‘Fool!’ I thought. ‘The murderous impulses exist, no doubt, but that’s no proof of them. They’re elated because they’ve survived killing.’ I myself, although I didn’t know it then, had used up my whole reservoir of courage for killing. Never again would I be able to put an animal ‘out of its agony’, however extreme that agony was.

  In spite of this concern for animals ours was a hunting, shooting family: many pheasants, partridges, ducks and hares were killed every winter for its pleasure. No foxes – but only because it was not fox country; the hounds were harriers. The children and women often sprang traps set to catch the ‘vermin’ which might interfer
e with sport, but the women also walked out with the guns and most of them rode to hounds as soon as they were old enough to handle a pony. We were proud of the good shots and good horsemen among us, and aspired to a similar expertise. We and our cousins would have thought anyone arguing against blood sports thoroughly pubby.

  I didn’t want to shoot or watch shooting, though I didn’t question that shooting was part of adult life; my brother was impatient for his first gun. He had no wish to hunt; I daydreamed about it from the day I was first taken out on a leading-rein. My preference for riding to hounds was determined partly by the fact that the rider does not himself inflict death and needn’t even see it, and partly by the inexactness of my eye which meant that I would never be able to shoot well, whereas I was good at riding. Andrew had a good eye but lacked confidence on a horse. Both of us would have adored a tame fox or hare or pheasant, and liked stories of hunted game being saved from pursuers – we could imagine ourselves tricking hounds onto a false scent and sheltering a panting animal in our arms until it could run safely away. We had no inkling of the inconsistency of our attitudes.

  The reason why enjoying blood sports and loving animals didn’t seem contradictory to us was because the two things occupied different areas of experience. The sports were a matter of acquiring skills which were difficult and exciting to practise, of proving yourself able and brave, and of graduating to the status of adult. And not only did they seem as inevitable as the seasons, but they were felt to be particularly ours: class came into it, even for the very young. On the whole ‘poor people’ didn’t hunt or shoot. Those who did, and were good at it, had special merit because their ability was surprising; those who did, and were bad at it, were comic. We felt that these activities and the rituals which surrounded them were somehow part of the superiority with which our families were blessed: an attitude so intrinsic to higher-class rural life at the time that you needed to be distanced from that life in some way in order to escape it.