by Diana Athill
The acceptance of a constraint which may seem strange to many people nowadays, gained me, in the years between fourteen and eighteen, an intense experience of erotic pleasure, getting nearer and nearer to that of full lovemaking, which was thoroughly enjoyable. The first time a man’s hand closed on mine and I turned mine so that our palms met was so exquisitely exciting that it still stirs me to remember it. Then came the first time someone sitting beside me in the back of a car put an arm round me and pulled me towards him so that my head rested on his shoulder; the first time a man, having done that, brushed my forehead with his lips (urgent question: would it be cheating to count that as being kissed?); the first real kiss, followed by the first open-mouthed kiss; the first hand on a breast, followed by the first unbuttoning leading to hand and lips on a bare breast (a tremendously exciting leap forward, that was) … And so it went on, incident by incident, each one pondered, savoured, dreamt about: the haze of sexy daydreaming through which I floated in those days must have been almost tangible.
It didn’t matter much who was doing the touching or kissing, because I had fallen in love when I was fifteen (goodbye, dear David, goodbye!) and was quite sure that it was Paul’s bed into which I would eventually sink; but he was five years older than I was and I had to catch up with him before I could expect him to fall in love with me. I was practising … and loving every moment of it.
Dances were where it mostly happened, ranging from modest ‘hops’ in small houses to full-scale balls in big ones, and including going with a group of friends to places such as the Assembly Rooms in Norwich where public dances were held, usually on a Saturday night. Mine was the first generation of country-house girls allowed to go to dances unchaperoned. To begin with we were driven in my grandmother’s sedate car (complete with fur rug, footwarmer and speaking-tube) by Mr Youngman, her chauffeur, who collected us at midnight. The earliest moves in love’s game were therefore given an extra thrill by taking place secretly, under that rug. But soon young men with wheels were invited to dinner and drove us to the dances … The true beginning of the sexual revolution for us came long before the sixties, with the car. Once a man and girl who had been dancing together all evening were able to drive home alone together in that little capsule of safe privacy, the deliciously slow progress towards loss of virginity accelerated to a rush.
Being sent to boarding school helped to check this rush, as far as I was concerned, and probably for other girls, too (though I gained the impression that I was looking forward to its conclusion more eagerly than most of my friends). School happened to me when I was fourteen, and made freedom part-time. A result of no one’s recognizing the teens as a separate condition was impatience to be grown-up: although I no longer felt like a child, I was having to bide my time before bursting forth as what I did feel like, which was more or less adult. Boarding school was a good way of getting through this not-quite-yet time; it controlled restlessness within a discipline that I could accept because it was part of the set-up as a whole, not directed at me as an individual.
There was one moment, some time in my seventeenth year, when I broke ranks. A particularly good dance was being given by some grand neighbours of ours, not long before the end of my school’s winter term. It seemed a pity that I should miss it, so much so that my mother hit on a solution: my teeth did in fact need attention, so she asked my headmistress if she could take me for a day’s visit to a London dentist, which would mean keeping me out for a night – and the date of the dentist’s appointment (this, of course, was not revealed) was that of the dance, for which we could get back from London just in time. It was a delightfully daring plan: no present-day schoolgirl can have any idea of the convent-like seclusion imposed by headmistresses in my day. Letters were censored, outings apart from those at half-term were forbidden, no girl was ever allowed to leave the school grounds alone, and it didn’t occur to anyone that parent and child might communicate by telephone. Permission to visit a London dentist was a favour so great that even by its agonizing self (no injections in those days except for extractions) it would have been a treat.
Early on the morning after the dance my father drove me back to school, and left a note for the headmistress, with whom he got on well, confessing that I had been to a dance. His almost obsessive honesty compelled him to it, but he certainly didn’t feel that he was purging a serious sin: he expected her to find it funny.
Instead, I was summoned to her study and threatened with expulsion. So violently did she berate me that what began as a schoolgirl’s dismay at being found out suddenly switched to an adult’s astonishment at absurd over-reaction, so that when at last she thundered: ‘Have you no sense of honour at all?’ I answered coldly: ‘Not if that is what you mean by a sense of honour.’ I can no longer remember how the interview ended, except for having a gratifying sense that she was disconcerted; and she must, when she recovered from her rage, have seen that she was making a mountain out of a molehill. She did, to my father’s amusement, write him a pompous little note telling him that he had not behaved like a gentleman, but she did not expel me – indeed, I ended as the school’s head girl. The incident remained in my mind as a pleasing one – the tip of a toe in the sea of being grown-up.
At no time was school as painful for me as it had been for Andrew. A person of fourteen has a better sense of time than one of eight, so although the thirteen weeks of my first term looked hideously long, they did not look endless, and even during that term I could see the point of being educated. Later, although my recognition of the school’s quality was always grudging and I never stopped wanting to be free of it, I did see that as schools went it was a good one. I enjoyed the friends I made there, it taught me a lot and got me into Oxford, and it also turned me round and shoved me gently but firmly away from what was behind me, towards real life.
Diana Athill, 2000
NOW
LOOKING BACK, I see that I moved away from childhood expecting the answer ‘Yes!’ And to begin with it was a return to Eden – to the house, the horses, the dances, the freedom to read what I liked – and an Eden with wider horizons than formerly. There was a year between school and university which I spent at home as a grown-up, which might have become claustrophobic if I had thought it would last longer than that, but Oxford was coming and after Oxford real life, so I felt free to luxuriate in that year rather than to chafe at its restrictions.
It is extraordinary that in 1935–36 anyone could have felt so sure that the future was going to be happy. At school we had access to all the serious newspapers and weeklies, and were encouraged to think about what we read. Considering myself a serious-minded girl, I had also read a certain amount of left-wing and pacifist literature: I knew that Britain was a scandalous mess and that the Versailles Treaty had sown the seeds of a second world war, and I had responded by glibly declaring myself a socialist and a pacifist. But my guts were not listening to my head.
I was not alone in this. The Sunday Observer, more than any other newspaper, was alert to what was going on in Germany and prescient as to where it was heading: every weekend its Cassandra-like leaders wailed their warning. And my father cancelled his subscription. This was not because he disbelieved the message, but because he found it all too easy to believe. He knew what he was going to do when the worst happened: he was on the reserve, so he would be back in the Army straight away without a moment’s hesitation; but he was damned if he was going to waste good time brooding on it in advance. And I suppose I, in a less reasoned way, felt the same. But how I managed to make this work – to go on actually feeling as though my future was a happy one – I can’t explain.
Perhaps it was being in love, and knowing at last that the man I called Paul in Instead of a Letter, for whose response I had been waiting trustfully since I was fifteen, was now in love with me. We were going to be married (he was in the RAF, flying bombers: why was I not terrified for him?). So perhaps the gut-expectation of the answer ‘Yes!’ came from my certainty of that, as much as
it did from conditioning. I ought to have been able to feel the reality of the ‘No!’ which was soon to come to the world’s peace, but I had no way of foreseeing the ‘No!’ ahead of me within my own life.
Both came. The gates of Eden clanged shut. I have told the story of unhappy love and my recovery from it in Instead of a Letter, so I will say no more here than that first his letters stopped coming, then one came asking me to release him from our engagement because he was about to marry someone else, and soon after that he was killed. I have also, in Stet, told the story of the good life I had in publishing in spite of this unhappiness – some of it even while the unhappiness was still there. And now I can see more clearly than I used to, how the roots of this life-saving career can be traced back to the childhood I have been describing in this book.
Someone from a family in which everyone obviously found books one of life’s main sources of pleasure could hardly fail to grab at a chance to work in publishing if offered. I had been brought up in the knowledge that books were fun, as well as important. My father’s passion for P. G. Wodehouse, which I shared, almost amounted to an addiction, so that when he came home with the latest Wodehouse which he, naturally, had to finish before anyone else could so much as touch it, I was so frantic at having to wait for it that I would have darted in and snatched it if he had given me the smallest chance. And at the same time the greatness of great writers was seen as greatness of the most solemn kind. Books were up there with nature and love as the things which mattered most.
And so, in my old age, they still are. To me the radio always meant music, so when my hearing began to go I listened less and less, and now not at all; and television, which never seemed as enjoyable as I hoped it would be, has become something for which I can rarely be bothered to walk into the next room (I wouldn’t dream of having it in my own). So books are impossible to do without.
Some of this dependence is a matter of habit: lacking a book which I actually want to read, I will munch away on one which means little to me, though never on one which annoys me – I would rather clean the silver or patch a sheet than do that. And when this happens, I will forget the book within a week. Most often it will be a novel because fiction, these days, has to be more than just well-written (as most of it is) to hold me. Like most of the old people I know, what I am looking for is material for my own imagination to work on, rather than experience predigested by someone else into a story.
The fiction-writers I am still able fully to enjoy are those like Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Pat Barker or Hilary Mantel who pay such close attention to their subject that one almost forgets their intervention between oneself and whatever it is. ‘Look-at-me!’ writing of the Martin Amis kind, much as it attracts many people, has always left me cold, as do fanciful capers however inventive. To me they seem to intrude between the reader and the raw material of life, rather than to illuminate it, and never having had much patience with them, now I have none. Although eccentricity does not necessarily put me off. A recent discovery, David Foster Wallace, who seems to be obsessional almost to the point of madness so that too often he threatens to smother the reader, has nevertheless done some of the best writing I have ever read, for which I am very grateful.
As well as turning more often to non-fiction, I indulge in another habit common among old people: rereading old favourites, some of them so old as to come from my earliest days. In the little Norfolk house where I spend many weekends there are shelves still full of books from my cousin’s childhood, many of which also figured in mine, and it is amusing to pull out, say, The Count of Monte Cristo and find that it is, indeed, an excellent story; or one of Daphne du Maurier’s lesser works and think ‘Oh my God, how could I ever …!’ A few books which I read greedily, not in childhood but as a very young woman, I avoid reading again because I suspect they would fill me with shame: the novels of Charles Morgan, for instance, best sellers in their day, well reviewed and eagerly consumed by many, including me – and now I’m pretty sure they were pretentious garbage. And some of my most beloved books – those of Tolstoy and Jane Austen, for example – I have deliberately left aside for a long time because I want to come back to them once more before I die with a fresh eye.
Two other occupations which I love, and which came to me late in life as though they were discoveries, grew in fact from long-buried roots: gardening and needlework.
My mother and my aunts were enthusiastic and knowledgeable gardeners and I always enjoyed what their enthusiasm produced, but I never felt the smallest tingle of interest in the actual occupation of gardening – never pulled a weed or sowed a seed, or imagined myself doing so in the future, until I was in my sixties, when Barbara, leaving London to do a six-year stint for her paper in Washington, said to me rather apologetically: ‘Do you think you could just sort of keep an eye on the garden so that it doesn’t go quite wild?’ The garden was a neglected London lawn with a rose-bed at one side of it, full of valiant roses which had been old when we moved into the house. It had one crab-apple tree planted when Barbara’s son was born, a vast laurel and even vaster and fiendishly thorny pyracantha which combined to shade most of the space, and very little charm. It had served a happy purpose as a playground for children and habitat for guinea-pigs, but had never been much loved for itself. The day after Barbara left I leant out of my bedroom window, gave the garden a long look, and found myself thinking ‘There’s nothing for it: I’ll have to re-seed the lawn and do the whole thing over from scratch’. Which I did, at considerable expense of money and work, and as soon as one plant put into the earth by my own inexpert hands performed the miracle of actually growing, I was hooked.
Now, alas, I can no longer do more than a very little gardening with my own hands, and have had greatly to simplify the London garden; but in the much larger and more complicated Norfolk garden I have luckily been able to call on the help of a neighbour who is as full of ideas as she is of energy, and – as we tell each other constantly – ‘we are getting there’. And pottering about in it, doing the small things that I am still able to do, is a deep and peaceful pleasure.
That I also followed my mother into doing needlepoint embroidery is even odder, because I used to watch her at it with amazement – almost with horror – at the slowness of it, at the patience it required. If she decided that something had gone wrong, so that she must unpick what she had done and start again… no, I couldn’t see how anyone could bear such a task, and as for finding it enjoyable …! What tempted me into it was a book we published – A Pageant of Pattern for Needlepoint Canvas by a brilliant American amateur called Sherlee Lantz – which showed me that I could work to my own designs instead of following patterns painted on the canvas, as my mother had always done. Stitching your own design is far more exciting, because you are never quite sure how it’s going to turn out. I had always wanted to paint and had even gone through a spell as a Sunday painter, abandoned when I realized that I was not going to be able to give enough time to it to become any good. Now I discovered that if I didn’t think of myself as ‘drawing’, but simply as marking out what I wanted to put on the canvas – then I could in fact draw! And away I went, having a lovely time and not hesitating for a minute if it became apparent that something needed to be unpicked and done over again. It is true that there comes a time when one can’t think of anyone else for whom to make a cushion or a chair-seat or a fire-screen or a hanging … but all the same, I expect I shall go back to it when I have finished writing. There is something astonishingly satisfying about holding in your hands a physical object that didn’t exist until you made it.
If you took a group of octogenarians – let’s say a hundred old reservoirs of experience – my guess is that about a quarter of them would look as though their contents were mostly disagreeable: as though, if they were turned inside out, you would see disappointment, disapproval, pain. None of my family has looked like that, and neither do I. And my reluctant conclusion is that this is because of the privileges we all enjoyed as a result
of being born into the upper reaches of the middle class, and in the country.
To take the simplest things first: we were fed on ample amounts of healthy food, all of it fresh, and we had access to up-to-date medical care and sanitation and were taught the basic rules of hygiene such as enough sleep, plenty of fresh air and exercise, and don’t drink too much. On top of that we were given good educations so that we could keep our minds occupied and find interest in a wide range of subjects, and enough leisure to indulge in enjoyable hobbies. And the standards of behaviour set by our forebears were reasonable, because they had not been over-privileged to the point of becoming arrogant or self-indulgent (that balance, I believe, has been important). In my generation, anyway, our childhood was directed with common sense as well as with love, and our surroundings were so secure and pleasant that we could be free of constant surveillance. And above all we lived in a place which we felt was ours and which we loved: we were rooted.
Of course I don’t mean that people with other backgrounds cannot flourish. It is self-evident that they do – and remarkably, so do some people with backgrounds insalubrious enough to cripple, proof that innate qualities can withstand lack of nurture in a marvellous way. Those are the people who most deserve celebration: the ones who challenge easy pessimism about humanity, and who have warmed me, when I have met them, with currents of hope. Two of them, Morris Stock and Daphne Anderson, I remembered in Stet; and a third, to my great good fortune has become a friend in my old age: Andrea Ashworth, whose Once in a House on Fire never fails to leave a sort of amazed happiness in those who read it. The opposite can also be true: people born in fortunate circumstances can prove to have natures which warp in spite of it. So it would be absurd to claim too much on the grounds of any individual’s experience, and all I mean to say is that it seems likely to be easier to reach a contented and sturdy old age if you have had my kind of luck, and I can’t imagine myself having done so without it. Apart from anything else, there is that ingrained self-confidence which comes from the indecent sense of superiority which we were allowed to have as children. My own surface self-confidence was smashed when Paul jilted me, and I am not sure that I would have survived without the support of the secret – the inadmissible – self-confidence which underlay it.
