by Diana Athill
My own lack of will-power worried me in only one way, which fortunately cropped up only when lessons included doing sums. At these I was so bad that I felt it must be blameworthy. The others understood ‘fractions’ and ‘decimals’ quite easily, so surely I too ought to be able to understand them – surely if I tried hard enough I could? I never did, so that must mean that although I felt that I was trying hard enough, I wasn’t. I was never bullied about it – indeed, much kindness and patience went into attempts to help me – but I still felt twinges of guilt from time to time. It wasn’t until many years into adulthood that I learnt something that suggested the incapacity was not my fault.
Five counters of different colours lined up on a table; the three-year-old child, already so good at the alphabet, being taught to count: one, two, three, four, five. I get it right at once and Mummy is delighted: ‘Look, she can count up to five already!’ But by the time an audience has collected the counters have been shuffled, and this time I say ‘Five, two, four, three, one’. ‘No, darling …’ but I insist ‘Yes’. They try again and again, until suddenly someone understands that I had never been counting, I had been naming. The yellow counter at the end of the row is called ‘five’, and it is still called ‘five’ when it comes at the beginning. They have to give up or I would be in tears at their misunderstanding. It was many days before I grasped what they meant by ‘counting’, and I was to remain a namer, not a numberer, for the rest of my life: a trait as innate as colour blindness, for which I could justifiably feel regret, but not guilt.
Guilt never caused me any serious distress, but humiliation did: humiliation, even if caused by something trivial, hit directly on surface nerves and was the sharpest misery I knew. To look silly. As soon as I took it into my head that something made me look silly, it became impossible to bear.
‘Oh, do stop grizzling. Look, if you’re really cold get down and run – that’ll warm you up in no time.’ Seven years old, I was perched on the front seat of the dog-cart between Mum and Revel, the groom. It was a bitter afternoon in January and we were bouncing over the frozen tussocks of Longmeadow, having taken a bale of hay up to some ponies out to grass. Much of the family’s time was spent in such occupations, pleasures disguised as jobs and pursued as earnestly as any job. Revel could have taken the hay out by himself, but the dog-cart existed, yellow and black, elegant on its high wheels in a wasp-like way, and there was a young mare who would look good in it if she could be broken to harness. Mum was working at this, making use of opportunities to drive her out over the fields, getting her accustomed to being between shafts before taking her out to meet traffic on the roads. We had a car, so it was not necessary to have a horse and cart. It was simply fun that could be taken seriously.
Fun in theory, at least. To me, that day, it was extremely disagreeable. I had on my gum-boots, my fleecy gloves, and a huge scarf over my coat, crossed over my chest and fastened in the small of my back with a safety-pin. I was also wearing two jerseys, a liberty-bodice and a woolly vest, and my black velour hat with its domed crown and saucer brim – a sure indication of exceptional coldness, because we hardly ever wore hats. I was so bundled up that movement was difficult, and within the bundling I was becoming colder and colder, fingers going white and numb within the thick gloves, feet in agony within the socks lining the boots. Naturally I had been pleased to go out for this drive, because I took it for granted that the dog-cart was ‘fun’; but now that we had turned towards home so that the wind was in our faces, pinching our noses to blue and making our eyes stream, I started to whimper and complain.
‘Get down and run,’ said Mum impatiently, pulling the mare to a halt. ‘No, I don’t want to.’ – ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake – go on, hop down quickly.’ – ‘No …’ and the whimpering became a howl. Couldn’t Mum see what I could see: the dog-cart rattling off over the field, while behind – falling ever further behind – stumbled an absurd little figure, its gum-boots tripping over frozen molehills, its arms sticking out because of the thickness of its wrappings, its silly hat like a black mushroom bobbing against the white background of hoarfrost? Think how absurd that figure would look to Revel! So what if running would make me warm – I would rather die of cold than become that figure in this admired man’s eyes.
‘Why won’t you get down?’ asked my exasperated mother. ‘Because it would be so silly,’ I sobbed. ‘But it’s much sillier to sit here snivelling and freezing.’ Howl – howl – howl, because that was true, and Revel, who was keeping out of the scene, staring ahead in an abstracted way, must already have thought me very stupid. But now getting down seemed worse than ever, because the ridiculous figure would be sobbing, its nose would be running, it would be a disgraceful spectacle as well as a comic one – not only my mind, but every muscle in my body locked in refusal of this humiliation.
Another humiliation, even worse, came at about the same time from a sudden reversal of my role in a public place. My mother had taken Andrew and me up to London on one of our rare excursions to buy shoes or visit the dentist. These trips were exciting because moving staircases, the underground, buses, taxis, lifts, crowds – all the commonplaces of London life – were unfamiliar enough to be glamorous. Mum, more beautiful than ever in her best clothes, became extraordinarily impressive because of her assurance: her certainty as to which bus to take, her ability to swoop through the dazzle and glitter of a huge shop straight from the door to the department we needed. To us London was high life, and its highest points were reached in restaurants.
Because the object of these trips was usually Daniel Neal’s, the children’s clothing specialists, or a dentist or doctor in the Harley Street area, we would lunch in one of Oxford Street’s big stores: Marshall & Snelgrove, Debenham & Freebody, or John Lewis. That a restaurant covered a vast floor space and contained a great many tables made it all the grander to us – Lyons’ Corner House would have thrilled us. We would be hushed with pleasurable expectation as the lift carried us up, watching the lift-man’s skilful manipulation of his machine with admiration. Sometimes he had to adjust the level before the doors would slide open smoothly – an inch or two up or down, so that we could step out gracefully onto the silencing carpet of the restaurant floor. Then a black-gowned lady would cast a general’s eye over the confusing vista of tables, single one out and usher us towards it. All would be bustle and tinkle, but muted, and the tablecloths and cutlery, being unlike our own at home, must surely be more elegant.
We knew in advance what we would choose from the menu: fried fish, in its crisply golden coat of breadcrumbs, and fruit salad. We never had fried food at home because it was considered unhealthy, and all the fruit we ate, whether cooked or not, was fresh, so the jewel colours, bland texture and syrupy sweetness of tinned fruit salad was to us unspeakably delicious. We were sure that restaurant food was food at its rarest and best.
My romanticism made me relish these occasions even more than Andrew did. He, although he enjoyed the food and the excitement, never wavered in his certainty that the country was best, whereas I could easily be seduced by notions of sophistication and the mondaine. So when at the end of one such lunch he wanted to pee and I didn’t, I was pleased to be left alone at the table while Mum took him to the cloakroom. I pushed my chair a little way from the table, hooked an elbow over the back of it, and began to examine the lunching ladies, seeing their hats, furs, gloves and handbags as very smart.
Suddenly it occurred to me that now I was on my own at the table, anyone noticing me might think me alone in London. They might suppose that I had been doing my shopping all by myself, was in the restaurant and had ordered my meal all by myself, and was going to pay for it all by myself with money out of my own pocket. How deeply impressed they would be if they thought this! Some of the ladies might be whispering to each other even now, ‘Look at that little girl over there, lunching all by herself in a restaurant and so young!’ This idea enchanted me, and I began carefully to adjust my pose to one of greater nonchalance and
assurance. I let one hand dangle over the back of the chair while with the other I ‘toyed’ with a fork; I tilted my head at what I was sure was a graceful angle, and willed my face into an expression of blasé hauteur. My eyebrows arched, my lips drooped; with perfect conviction I felt my face become that of one of the beautiful mannequins I had admired in Mum’s copies of Vogue. (They were ‘mannequins’, not ‘models’ in those days: ‘models’ took clothes off, rather than showed them off, being the people who posed for artists.)
I was so deep in this role that I didn’t notice Mum and Andrew weaving their way back towards me through the tables. The first I knew of their return was Mum’s furious whisper: ‘For God’s sake sit up straight and stop gaping – everyone will think you’re half-witted!’ I was too stunned by the humiliation of it to cry.
Incidents – and there were many – in which something wished on us by my elders seemed an affront to my dignity, or in which my own image of myself betrayed me into absurdity, were the cause of the most acute mortification I experienced, but it cannot be said that they harmed me. They resulted in dignity’s becoming less touchy and more discriminating, and behaviour better judged. Perhaps a more delicate understanding of my susceptibilities might have hindered more than it helped: the quickest way to learn to avoid or humour wasps is to be stung by one.
The restaurant of a big store was not in our eyes what it was in our mother’s, nor was the flavour of its food on our tongues what it was on hers. We saw grandeur in size and quantity, deliciousness in sweetness and softness. We were easily moved to admire beauty, but had no idea of ‘taste’.
Satin was beautiful because it was sleek; pink was beautiful because it was the colour of roses. So pink satin was very beautiful. So if you could have an enormous room decorated in pink with satin curtains and upholstery, it would be breathtaking, and it would be even better if all the furniture were made of gold and silver, because gold and silver were beautiful for their shininess.
It was the same with pictures. Brightness and richness were what moved us – and also the picture’s subject. In an illustration to a story about children lost in a forest, the children must look like real children and the forest must be elaborately leafy and thorny and dark: we were bored and disappointed if the shapes were simplified and the colours flat. However clever the use of a few flat colours, however enticing those colours in themselves, they were not showing us what we wanted to see. And if an illustration which grown-ups saw as deplorably vulgar did show us what we wanted, and showed it with an ebullience of detail and colour, then we loved it.
Luckily no one bothered much about educating our taste. Every now and then someone who didn’t know us very well would give us for Christmas an artily illustrated book and we would ignore it; and every now and then some grown-up would make it clear that he or she thought comics dreadfully ugly, and we would think ‘Oh well, grown-ups!’ On the whole we were allowed to go on seeing the redness of red and the blueness of blue, even if that red and blue together were boringly ‘obvious’, and experiencing the sadness of sad and the happiness of happy, even if the story which embodied them was painfully sentimental. And there was plenty of more grown-up reading about if we felt like turning to it, which of course we would do sooner or later.
My favourite picture when I was about eleven, more evocative in my eyes even than illustrations by Edmund Dulac or Arthur Rackham, both of whom I loved, was a particularly insipid drawing of a princess in a fairy story by A. A. Milne. This princess, whose anatomy was quite lost in the swirls of her floating hair and raiment (indeed from the disposition of the swirls she could not have had any anatomy), happened to have features which I coveted: a swan-like neck and clouds of black hair. And her dress, supposing any body could have been found ethereal enough to wear it, was wonderfully becoming. The artist had studied Beardsley, so that feeble though the drawing was, it contained echoes of a dreamy decadence. Time and again I would turn back to it, unable to see why my mother and my governess could see nothing in it. To me it was the essence of unattainable elegance – and it was witty, too: there was something about the way the jewelled slipper peeped out, the fingers tapered and the necklace was implied by playful dots which suggested wit. A real Beardsley might have alarmed me. From this bad drawing I was getting as much pleasure and stimulation as I would get from a real Beardsley when I was older, without any reference to the artist’s skill, simply because this, I was sure, was how the princess in the story looked and dressed. And when I discovered Beardsley I did not appreciate him the less for having been seduced by his feeble imitator: instead I enjoyed him the more because he reminded me of my princess.
‘Art’ was the engraving of Dignity and Impudence above the nursery fireplace, and the three watercolours by my great-grandfather on the wall opposite the nursery windows, only one of which was interesting because it was a little bit like the view of the gamekeeper’s cottage near the weir although, disappointingly, it was actually a picture of some unknown place in Yorkshire. Later ‘art’ stretched to include two pleasant silvery-blue East Anglian landscapes by Arnesbury Brown, bought by my grandfather and much more attractive than the other downstairs pictures, most of which were all but invisible behind brown varnish. But – oddly – ‘art’ did not include the five best pictures in the house.
These were portraits of people I knew, so I didn’t think of them in terms of artistry. They would have been bad if the likeness had been at fault, but since in all of them it was excellent I saw the drawings of my aunts Peggy, Joyce and Doro and of my uncle Bill simply as them, as a photograph would have been; and would have seen the oil painting of my mother in the same way if she had not loathed it so much that I had to suppose that there was something wrong with it.
They were all by William Strang, a painter chosen by my grandfather because – I guess – Strang’s portraits made him think of Holbein. One of the most precious books in Gramps’s library was a huge volume, to be looked at only with the utmost carefulness, of Holbein portraits. Because the faces revealed when you turned back the tissues between the pages were often quite old and plain, they did not interest me, but I respected them because we all knew that they were greatly admired by Gramps. There must have been something special about the reproductions to make the book so precious – and indeed, when I think of the book now what I see with my mind’s eye resembles the real thing so convincingly that they must have been exceptionally good.
William Strang drew beautifully and was a gravely honest observer: his portraits do have much of Holbein’s entranced delicacy of line and calm closeness of attention: Gramps had chosen well.
My mother detested her portrait because it was such a good painting of a self-conscious seventeen-year-old resenting the ordeal of sitting for it. She had not wanted to be ‘done’; and when told that she must put up with it had thought that she would be asked to change into a becoming frock, but Mr Strang said no, her beastly old blue serge would do. Then, when he sent her out to pick a few of the wallflowers which were struggling against the frost – it was a bitter day – and she jammed them into a glass just anyhow, expecting him to arrange them attractively, he simply left them like that. And then he wanted her raised up a bit so he made her sit on two cushions, only to go ahead and paint the cushions instead of making it look as though the chair were the right height, and he painted her hands all red and hideous, which they were of course, but only because it was such a cold day. And on top of all that she couldn’t think of a thing to say to the horrid man, so he obviously considered her a bore, and because he was so bored by her he hadn’t bothered to make her look nice. Given her own way, she would have burnt that portrait.
My mother, by William Strang, 1912
Almost ninety years later her nephew Philip, who now owns it, lent it to Norwich museum for an exhibition of Norfolk portraits. When I reached the room devoted to the twentieth century, there was Kitty Carr, dominating it. What an eye-opener! Not till that moment had I been able to see through my mother
’s prejudice to the painting itself, and fully recognize its quality. It was easily the best painting in that gallery.
