Instead of a Letter

by Diana Athill

  Because of Beckton, this was easy to do. A house with twenty bedrooms, standing in a large garden and park with a thousand acres of land round it, can absorb children far more easily than can a neat six-bedroomed house with a two-acre garden, like that of my paternal grandmother, who lived in Devonshire. It was more sensible to go to Beckton for the holidays. And if we or any of our cousins had been ill, or our parents were abroad, Beckton Gran could house us with much pleasure and little inconvenience, while Devonshire Grannie, fond though she was of us, would have had to turn her house upside down. Besides, my father was an Army officer with, during all my childhood, the rank of major, and with private means so small that they hardly counted. He lived above his income, modestly and anxiously, from the day he was married, but even by doing that he could not afford to give his wife and children so good a time as they had at Beckton: he would have felt churlish had he prevented their visits. I doubt, indeed, whether he could have done so if he had tried. My mother was strong-willed and he had the disadvantage of being the one qui aimait. So although I and my younger brother and sister knew that our official home was where he happened to be working—Woolwich, or when he retired from the Army and took a job in the city, Hertfordshire—our ‘real’ home, the place to which we ‘came home’ from other places, was Beckton.

  Having bought a small glass bottle made in about 1785, club-shaped, with a delicate spiral rib from neck to base, I was looking at it with affection, enjoying the colour of the glass and the hint of irregularity in the shape. Why, I began to wonder, are objects made in England during that period so much my home territory when it comes to aesthetic pleasure? The products of other centuries and of other countries I have learnt to appreciate, but I cannot remember having to learn to delight in those of the English eighteenth century. Probably, I concluded, it is because so much of my upbringing took place in an eighteenth-century house. It was a thought with gratifying implications. I am glad that I have not inherited money or possessions, and I would be glad if I could be sure that I had not inherited any prejudices or attitudes of mind towards other people, but I liked the idea of a child’s mind and eye unconsciously trained by graceful shapes, just proportions, and the details of good craftsmanship. It suggested that whatever faults the middling English gentry might have, they would be likely to possess a certain feeling for grace and style: good for us!

  Then, unfortunately, I began to remember various objects bought by my relatives, prized by them and admired by myself before I left home and began to sniff round museums and listen to the opinions of people better educated in such matters than myself. I remembered certain lamps and pieces of china and materials for curtains or chair covers…. It was true that we were all familiar with one kind of beauty so that if any of us became interested in aesthetics, that kind, being familiar, would be easy to start with; but it was clearly not true that we had gained from it any ingrained, generally applicable sense of quality or style. If the inhabitants of Beckton had to buy something new and were unable to afford to go to the right place for it (the family’s fortunes have been coasting downhill all my life), choice would be conditioned not by knowledge, but by familiarity. The new object would be a pitiful, decadent bastard of the old and we would be cheerfully blind to the difference between patina and French polish, cut glass and moulded, a graceful curve and a clumsy one. Only a few members of my family had, if left to themselves, more natural taste than the people they most pitied and despised: the dwellers in suburbia. (The working classes were allowed a few distinct and even endearing merits: suburbanites—no!)

  New purchases were not often made, partly because everything in Beckton Manor was certainly ‘good’ in the sense of being solid and enduring, partly because, even early in my lifetime, extravagance was condemned. It was still a rich man’s house compared to those of the vast majority, but the family did not feel itself a rich family. There was a strict line drawn between necessities and luxuries, and luxuries were suspect.

  During my early childhood, necessities included a head gardener with two men under him, two grooms, a chauffeur, a butler and a footman, a cook and a kitchenmaid with a scullery maid to help them, a head housemaid with two under-housemaids, and my grandmother’s lady’s maid. They included, too, animals for our pleasure and governesses and schools for our instruction. They included books, and a great deal of wholesome food, linen sheets rather than cotton, and three separate rooms for being in at different times of the day, not counting the dining-room, the smoking-room, the front hall, in which, for some reason, my grandmother always had tea, and the nursery. Capital being inviolate, there can, indeed, have been little income left over after the maintenance of all this at what was felt to be its proper level.

  Clothes for my mother’s generation and then for us were almost all made at home or in the village, except for the obligatory coat and skirt, and riding clothes, for which we went to a good tailor. My mother, happily for me, was the extravagant one of the family. She used to make gleeful and guilty forays to London for clothes, but it was an adventure, not routine. My grandfather had travelled a little (since it was before I can remember, I see it as Making the Grand Tour), but after his death it was unusual for anyone to take a holiday abroad, while to buy curtains for your bedroom simply because you were tired of the old ones was unheard of. If the old ones fell to pieces so that you had to replace them, you only considered the cheaper ranges of material (even my mother never considered the most expensive), and then—alas for that instinctive taste which, for a moment, I attributed to us. If you liked pink roses you chose pink roses, regardless of how the rest of the room was furnished. Sometimes you would recognize aesthetics to the point of saying ‘The blue in the pattern picks up the blue in the carpet,’ indicating a tiny blue motif in the design which, if examined closely, could be seen almost to match an equally inconspicuous blue twirl in the carpet’s pattern; or sometimes you would speak the words which have sealed the fate of so many British interiors, and of the appearances of so many Englishwomen: ‘It is a good colour because it goes with anything.’

  Yet Beckton Manor was a charming house to be in, and so are almost all the English houses of its kind that I have known. Like its fellows, it had plenty of lovely things in it by chances of inheritance or the good taste of individuals, and it had something else as well. Its inhabitants might not be interested in decoration, but they were interested in nature: to flowers, trees, skies, landscapes and weather they responded with a strong sense of beauty, and without thinking of it they brought into the house as much of nature as they could. The tables loaded with cut flowers, the flowery chintzes, the indifferent water-colours of beloved places expressed the life lived from the house, and they pleased.

  As a child, of course, I thought it not only lovely but inevitable: that was what a house should be. Any house which did not have those things in it, and which did not look out over terrace and park to a lake beyond which rose the Lake Covert (landscaped by Capability Brown, we all mistakenly believed), was only a poor attempt at a house. When my mother scolded me for bragging to a friend of the number of bedrooms at Beckton and the two islands in the lake, telling me that one should never show off about good fortune to those with less, she may have improved my manners but she did not diminish my sense of superiority. Even the cold was a matter of pride. Warmth did not rate as a necessity, since it was held to be the opposite of fresh air and therefore unhealthy, so everyone was crippled by chilblains from November to February. ‘My sponge is often frozen solid in the morning,’ I remember boasting to some less hardy, less fortunate child.

  How guilty do I feel at having come in on the tail end of such a life and having loved so passionately a place founded on privilege the earning of which had become remote? I do not often refer to it, and when I think about it a figure appears opposite me: that of some faceless friend brought up in a Manchester back street, with a childhood very different from my own stored in his head. At his most charitable, I feel, he would be giving me a quizzi
cal look; and if I were to repeat to him the kind of thing my grandmother, my parents, my other relatives of their generation and even some of my own would say about his accent, his clothes, his attitudes…Well, how could I repeat that kind of thing? And if he were a Jew or a Negro, or some other kind of foreigner not of noble birth (for a foreigner can only be guaranteed a gentleman by a title), then what could he feel towards my background less than disgust?

  That smug, matter-of-fact assumption of superiority! Many landed families were richer and better bred than mine; nuances which mine recognized but which made no difference to their certainty. Except when it came to lords, whose acquaintance gave them a pleasure verging on the undignified, they were convinced that they were the best kind of people to be (indeed there was something a little fishy about anyone not a lord who was richer or grander than they were). When my grandparents dismissed someone as ‘not a gentleman,’ their unthinking certainty had the force of a moral judgment; while the tinge of apology or defiance that crept into the same judgment when pronounced by my parents’ generation was only faint.

  This attitude was at the best comic, at the worst repulsive, for with what could that particular family support its certainty of being ‘the best’? The abilities of most of its members were respectable but ordinary, their achievements no more than commonplace. None of them was unusually intelligent or energetic and most of them lacked imagination to a remarkable degree. Generous and affectionate they could be, but they hardly ever extended these qualities outside the family circle. Like anyone else they had their charms, their interesting quirks, their endearing or impressive aspects, and their standard of behaviour was, within certain limits, civilized and reliable, but it was not just in matters of taste that they were no better than anyone else: physically, intellectually, and morally they were no more than middling. Yet they despised almost all the rest of the world, excepting people as nearly as possible replicas of themselves, as though their status as English country gentlefolk made them exceptional beings; something of which they fell short even by their own standards, for they were not well enough connected, and Beckton was not a large enough estate, for them to come anywhere near the top of the ladder of snobbery.

  What made my family so profoundly self-satisfied? That question has puzzled me more with every year of my life. The satisfaction in itself was not objectionable, since people can only function comfortably if they have it; but its obverse—the disdain or distrust of anyone not of their kind—that was stupid, ugly, and pitiful, and it is a curious sensation to be bound by enduring ties of love and habit to a set of people who so stubbornly displayed it. All that money spent on education, and so little thinking done as a result of it! Reactions still triggered by the sound of a vowel, the cut of a coat, the turn of a phrase…. ‘He was wearing what I think he would have called a sports jacket,’ said one of them, only the other day (he would have called it a tweed coat), and that, as far as the wearer of the sports jacket was concerned, was that. Once imbued with such reactions, it is impossible entirely to escape them: I know that until the day I die I shall be unable to avoid noticing ‘raound’ for ‘round,’ ‘invoalve’ for ‘involve’ (on that one an Army officer of my acquaintance used to turn down candidates for a commission), because a built-in mechanism will always click, however much I dislike it, ‘placing’ everyone I meet as though for a second it was my parents’ eyes and ears at work, not mine. But once it has clicked it can very easily be disregarded. The puzzle lies in the choice not to disregard it.

  An old man near death once gave my uncle great pleasure by telling him that a treasured memory—something which had remained for years in his mind as a vignette of the England he loved—had been a glimpse, once caught as he was driving by, of my uncle riding in the park at Beckton. It is a pretty park, well planted with groups of beech and oak trees, sloping gracefully down to the lake beyond which the wood known as the Lake Covert rises, and mildly dominated by the house (to the left of the picture as the old man approached it), standing on its balustraded terrace with a great cedar tree at one corner of it to break its slightly austere Georgian lines. ‘It was a perfect October afternoon,’ said the old man. ‘There was the Lake Covert, all golden in its autumn leaves, reflected in the water, and there were you, cantering along beside the lake on that black of yours—what a beautiful horse he was—with a couple of dogs running behind you. I watched you and I thought, Now that’s a lovely scene, that’s England, and I’ve never forgotten it.’

  Describing the conversation, and the old man’s emotion, my uncle gave a slight deprecating laugh, but he was not only touched, he was satisfied. That man had recognized in him and his setting what he himself felt deeply to be their true nature, and as he savoured it he was likable rather than absurd. He was moved by a vision of something which he dearly loved and which had comforted him when, during the war, he was badly wounded: he felt genuinely that it was worth dying for. To have said to him, ‘But you are not England. You and what you represent are only a tiny fraction of England and an archaic one at that, preserved not by deeds or virtue but by money most of which you yourself do not earn’—to have said that would have been to have attacked not a fancy but a rooted belief. He might have answered, ‘All right, so it is preserved by money: money in the hands of the right people, of people like us. What further argument do you need for the existence of such people and such money?’ He and his like have been snug all their lives, and snugness breeds smugness—but smugness is too small a word for what it feels like from inside. From inside, it feels like moral and aesthetic rightness; from inside, it is people like me, who question it, who look stupid, ugly, and pitiful—and ungrateful, too. Why admit that the grammar-school boy, the self-made businessman, the artist, the foreigner or whatever are just as likely to be ‘the best’ as we are, when such an admission must attack certainty, the cosiest of all the gifts bestowed by privilege? It is not only ingratitude, it is treachery.

  Treacherous I may be, but ungrateful I am not. I consider it good fortune to have been born of Beckton’s youngest daughter, not of its son, at a point in time and a position in the family where diminishing resources had brought unthinking certainty up against the facts of life and worn it comparatively thin. Never to have broken through its smothering folds would have been, I have always thought, extremely depressing. But on the other hand, not to have enjoyed a childhood wrapped warmly in those folds—that would be a sad loss. There I used to be, as snug and as smug as anyone, believing with the best that we were the best—and if security is the thing for children, which it surely is, then how lucky I was.

  Beckton and Gran: they blur together. When I think of her I may see a handsome woman with crisp, pure-white hair (it turned when she was thirty), wearing a black, black-and-white, or grey dress with a cross-over bodice and a lace collar (she was in her eighties before she forgot her widow’s status to the point of wearing a dress made of soft, pinky-red wool). Her eyes, with lids that droop slightly in an odd way at the outer corners, are speckled green and grey, capable of an ironic expression but usually full of affection, and she will be looking at me attentively, ready to be amused or interested by what I am saying (for one did not say to Gran the things which would have shocked or displeased her). I may see this woman, or I may think of getting out of the car to open the white gate between park and lawn, breathing that first, almost drinkable, smell of grass, flowers, and cedar tree which was the assurance that we were home. Then images come crowding in: the stream in the kitchen garden in which the newts and tad-poles lived; the marble children under a tree on the library chimneypiece; the scalloped black-green leather which would pull off from the edges of the nursery bookshelves; the goat-shed in the lower stable yard made into a bower of beech branches by a cousin and myself, because tender young beech leaves on the branch were what our goats liked best (we gave them senna pods, too, when we thought they needed them, and sometimes an aspirin or a spoonful of cough linctus). Very clear is the chasm between the back of the s
ofa and the bookshelves in the morning room, where I would squat for hours to read bound volumes of Punch, and the smell of the plush curtains over the double door between morning room and front hall, in which I had only to muffle myself, at one time, in order to begin writing a play in which a cousin was to take the part of a good, blond and slightly insipid princess while I was to be the dark, wicked one, like Sir Rider Haggard’s She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. ‘Go and play in the morning room, darlings,’ people would say. It was the room to which children graduated from the nursery, where one could bounce on the furniture or litter the floor with Meccano or cutting-out.

  There was only one unpleasant thing in that house: the ghost in the night nursery, where at our smallest we usually had to sleep. It was not an ordinary ghost but a disgusting presence, a slimy grey thing like a stubby elephant’s trunk which reached down over the gutter and groped at the window one morning while I was sitting alone on my pot. No one liked that room, which was at the back of the house, looking out on to a gloomy thicket of yew trees, on the old principle, not otherwise observed, of pushing children out of the way with the servants. But no one thought of telling my grandmother about that, so it was nothing to do with her. Every other sound, smell, and texture in the place I loved quite consciously from the earliest time I can remember, and I loved it so much not only because I felt it to be beautiful, but because its presiding genius, my grandmother, loved me.