Instead of a Letter

by Diana Athill

  In relationships outside her family she was not a loving woman, nor a tolerant one. Her servants she distrusted, not (the older, long-established ones anyway) in terms of honesty so much as of sense. She expected them to be ninnies, and to be dirty, and how they managed not to be the latter is hard to see, considering that it was years before anyone thought of putting in a bathroom on the attic floor where they lived, while they were not allowed to use ours. Of people who differed from her on politics or religion she was fiercely scornful, particularly of anyone who believed that the Pope spoke God’s word, or who was a socialist. Of foreigners she was not only scornful, but distrustful as well. If they thought that they could govern their own countries better than we could she considered them both fools and traitors. Outside the ramifications of what might be called the greater family as opposed to the central family—the second cousins and so on, about whose fortunes she was always completely and mysteriously informed and whom she wished well—she had no intimate friends.

  Described like this, she sounds a disagreeable woman, yet no one ever met her without being charmed. The charm came from the warmth of her personality, and the warmth came from the dynamo of love at work in her for the benefit of her children and her children’s children. She was not soft with them. She mocked them if their politics veered to the left, scolded them if they did not eat properly, and criticized any folly they might get up to unless it was something really grave, like marrying a foreigner or having an extramarital love affair. About that kind of thing she would either keep silent, or would choose not to know. But although her family could cause her impatience or grief, they could not diminish her love—and the only grief they could have caused her when still young would have been by illness or death. In her house we could be excited by our own misdemeanours, but we could never feel that they put us in peril, so for us this autocratic woman, whose sharp intelligence was deliberately confined to so narrow a range, created a benign air which we could always breathe again, even in middle age, simply by going back to the place where she lived.

  I shocked her once. I was about ten years old and had thought of an image for life. I thought that it was as though people were confined in a bowl which was floating on a sea. While snug at the bottom of the bowl they lived their lives complacently, but the bowl spun and tossed on the sea and its spinning sometimes sent one of them up its side until he could see over the rim. All round would be the endless chaos of dangerous, cold grey water, unsuspected till then, and anyone who had seen it and had understood that what he had thought was safety was only a little bowl, would not be able to bear it. That, I decided, was the origin of madness. I was proud of this idea, described it to my grandmother, and was disconcerted to see her so upset. It was not at all clever, she said sharply, to think that life was aimless, and she told me to remember the then Prince of Wales, who had recently made some statement of high purpose and idealism to a gathering of Boy Scouts.

  I was disappointed by this response, which did not seem to me to recognize the implications of my idea, but I remember it because in spite of my disappointment, its inadequacy did not matter. I noted that in some ways I would have to differ from Gran but I did not feel betrayed, because there she was as she spoke, wearing the kind of dress she always wore, with her beautiful hair and her dear, kind eyes watching me with the anxiety I thought was a joke and the love which I would never think of questioning. I myself might incline more to the bowl theory than the Prince of Wales theory, but clearly whatever Gran believed was good, because it was believed by Gran.

  3

  I FELT OUTRAGED WHEN someone first pointed out to me that my grandmother’s house was not ‘mine.’ When she died, or decided to make way for my uncle, it would be his, and then his son’s, or, if he had no son, his daughter’s. Supposing he had no children, I asked hopefully (he was still unmarried at the time). Working on the assumption that succession to the estate would follow the pattern established by the monarchy, it appeared that at least twelve people, seven of them my contemporaries, would have to die before I would have a claim, and I hardly felt I ought to pray for this however much I would have liked to.

  Perhaps this realization came near the time when I lay sprawled on short grass in the back park one spring morning—there were lambs about, and daisies—facing the knowledge that in three years’ time I would be thirteen. What made the passage of so long a stretch of time real to me I cannot remember, but it was appalling, giving me a horrible sensation as though my insides had gone cold and empty. To be in my teens, I saw suddenly, would be to leave childhood behind, to be in a world where impossible things could happen. I would become able to believe that the place would go to my uncle; I would become able to foresee a time when, perhaps, I could no longer return to it as though it were my home. Where would my home be? Some place like those in which I had already lived with my parents and brother and sister; a house and garden just big enough for us, with none of our past worked into it and no territory round it to call our own. Already, when we rode across country from the house my parents rented in Hertfordshire, we had to ask permission from the owners of the land, which had seemed to me humiliating. And the business of earning my living—it would not be something my father talked about when he was feeling pompous (‘You will have to earn your living one day’), but something I should have to do. I do not think that I was shocked by the prospect; only frightened. It would surely be difficult and disagreeable, and, because the norm of existence was life at Beckton, it would be unnatural.

  In fact, my grandmother went on living in the house until the beginning of the war, when I was twenty-two; it was fully there to go back to. But whoever had given me that early, painful glimpse of the truth had done me a good turn. From that time my love of Beckton began, slowly, to take a wistful, nostalgic turn: I felt that I must treasure every detail of it against the future, and I remember standing under the great beech tree by the lawn, trying to will some essence of myself into the still green air so that after I was dead my ghost would materialize there. But at the same time my fear of what would follow began, with acceptance of mutability, to rub away and other things entering my life increased in value. That particular bowl, it seemed, spun on no grey sea. It would be sad to be pushed over the rim, but what surrounded it was a landscape, and the landscape, as it became increasingly real, began to look interesting.

  My fear of ‘thirteen’ had been prophetic, all the same, for I believe I had reached that age when my mother told me that we had ‘lost our money.’ What really happened was that, having lived above their income for too long, my parents were at last rapped over the knuckles by their bank. We were in the Hertfordshire house at the time, my father having retired from the Army to avoid transporting his reluctant family to India, and taken a job in the City with a firm connected with the mining of mica. Our house was called The Cottage, but it had six bedrooms and was staffed with Margaret, the cook; Violet, her sister, who was not exactly a nanny but looked after the children; Ursula, the governess; Doris, the housemaid; Mrs Knight, who ‘came in,’ and deaf Gatwood, full-time gardener. My parents felt that they were living austerely because we ourselves looked after our ponies and they had not kept on their own hunters, nor did they indulge in any luxuries. My mother had no fur coat and no jewels except a couple of mediocre diamond rings and the string of small pearls given her as a wedding present by her father. There was rarely any drink in the house beyond a bottle of sherry, and the furniture was a job lot of stuff, none of it valuable or beautiful and some of it as utilitarian as the hospital beds inherited from a convalescent home for officers run by a great-aunt during the 1914–18 war. According to their lights, my father and mother were not extravagant people, but still the bank said that unless they followed a certain clearly defined plan they might not cash any more cheques.

  My mother did not take this with any enduring seriousness, being a practical and energetic woman with no objection to doing things for herself, and having the comfortable feeling that
Beckton was still there in the background. She broke the news to me, however, with an almost dramatic gravity—she always had an appetite for ‘the worst’—so that I was impressed.

  ‘Are we really poor?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, darling, I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Will Violet have to go? And Ursie?’

  ‘Yes, I expect you will go to school.’

  Doris, Margaret, and Mrs Knight went too, and we had to make our own beds and dust the bedrooms. As my mother said soon afterwards, ‘the really bloody thing about being poor is that if you leave something on the floor when you go out, you know that it will still be there when you get back.’ At that time I was exchanging two letters a term with a boy I had been in love with since I was nine years old, and I must have described our plight because I remember a letter of his beginning, ‘Dear Diana, I am sorry to hear that you are now poor.’ I was touched by his delicacy in saying no more about it than that.

  It was not long before Beckton came to the rescue. We were going to leave Hertfordshire and live at the Manor Farm, we were told, and to the children the whole thing instantly became a delight. My mother probably had other reasons for making the move, but to us it seemed merely the happy solution of the family’s financial problems, and we were so pleased by it that it did not occur to us to worry about my father, who would continue to work in London and could not, therefore, live so far from it except at week-ends. He took lodgings with the family of a man who had once been his own father’s coachman, and bicycled to the station every day because my mother had to have the car. I suppose that we felt, vaguely, that it was horrid for him, but it was a relief not to have him in the house. My brother and I had worked out a formula by then: ‘Mummy and Daddy are both very nice people, but they don’t suit each other, they should never have got married’—this, perhaps, was borrowed from Ursula or Violet. They were quarrelling fiercely at the time, and it was a relief not to have to watch for signs of trouble and to know that if, at weekends, it came (as it usually did) it could only last for two days.

  I always liked my father—he was a likeable man—but if I ever felt anything warmer than liking it was when I was so young that I cannot remember it. I did not consciously take my mother’s side when they quarrelled (indeed, I often felt something like hatred for her irrational flares of temper, and considered that my father, not she, was in the right)—but in our nerves all three of us children were more sympathetic to her than we were to him. It was not until much later that I understood the trouble to come from the simple but deadly poison of physical incompatibility which my father did not feel and my mother had been too inexperienced to recognize during their courtship, but even as small children we could sense the nature of her irritability.

  To be constantly loved and desired by someone whose touch is repulsive to you is a profound outrage. You may be in such a situation by your own fault or folly, but whatever the surface facts, you remain the situation’s victim because the offence you are receiving goes beyond reason, into such deep recesses of your being. Feeling wicked for her reactions, my mother stubbornly and bravely, though with occasional half-rebellions, went on being my father’s wife, but her offended nature got its own back in many ways, and her children’s instincts chimed with her instincts more readily than they did with my father’s reason.

  The scenes were always over trivialities. My mother was an impatient person, hating to wait about, hating slow meals, hating almost to hysteria being late for anything. My father was slow, deliberate, unpunctual. Taking his time over anything gave him a positive pleasure—as it does me. If, on a shopping expedition, he went into the post office to post a registered letter, he would certainly find someone with whom to gossip. Waiting with us in the car, my mother would know that he would do this: she would begin to simmer before two minutes were up. I would resent the way she was working up for a scene, since time mattered to me as little as it did to my father, but still I would begin to feel irritated by his slowness, even to despise it. My brother and I, in the back of the car, would exchange warning looks, and later one of us might say, ‘Why is Daddy so silly—he always does just the thing to make her lose her temper.’ Another thing in which, by nature, I was on my father’s side but which came to irritate me, was his scrupulous honesty. He was the sort of man who will seek out the guard on a train to pay the excess fare if a crowd has caused him to travel in a first-class compartment with a second-class ticket. My mother had a streak of bandit in her, was usually prepared to get away with what she could, and used deliberately to enrage him by describing some minor delinquency of her own. With one side of me I admired my honourable father, but with another I saw him as absurd. Because my mother’s irritation with him on such matters was a symptom, a release of nervous tension through permissible outlets, it had an infectious force beyond its apparent triviality.

  Apart from this, my father did not much care for children. He was always pleasant to us, but he did not find childishness in itself seductive. When he sang, ‘Bat, bat, come under my hat, and I’ll give you a slice of ba-a-a-a-con,’ or ‘Bony was a warrior,’ he was funny and we enjoyed it. We thought him clever when he made up nonsense verses for us, and later wrote plays for us to act, but the things he enjoyed doing with us were things which he enjoyed doing anyway because they exercised his talents or his sense of humour. Just to be with children, to watch them, to enter into their imaginations, was no pleasure to him, and he had no physical rapport with them. Nowadays I sometimes watch my brother handling three small sons, and I see exactly what it was that my father could not feel. My brother will throw his boys about, fondle them, sniff them, stand by a window to watch them as they play in the garden with an unconscious smile of pure pleasure on his face. He loves them with a comfortable, animal warmth, and they respond to it like crocuses in the sun. That is something that was outside my father’s nature.

  Much of myself comes from my father—my equable temperament, my powers of detachment, my enjoyment of poetry and of the absurd—and the better I knew him as an adult, the more clearly I saw that he was an agreeable, intelligent, upright and witty man. But I never felt closely bound to him; never felt, as I did about my mother, that for good or ill, this person and myself were made of the same substance.

  So being separated from my father for so much of the time seemed, when I was thirteen, more of an advantage than otherwise, while living at the Farm—that was delight. It was a house to which we could go only to be happy. We knew it intimately, having already stayed there when we were younger and my father was abroad, and spending much of our time there when we were at the Manor. My mother’s generation had passed legendary holidays there, to be near my great-grandparents. It was part of Beckton and for children the best part: a pleasure ground richer and more absorbing than garden or park, with the real business of the country going on in it. The first time we had stayed there, my brother and I had become distressed in our loyalties, because surely it was impossible for us to love any place better than Gran’s house, and yet…It was my brother, then six years old, who had discovered the pleasures of nostalgia for us. We shared a large bedroom looking out over the farm-yard, at the end of a passage and remote from the rest of the family so that we could talk and play with impunity for what seemed like hours after we had gone to bed. One evening, when we were leaning out of the window watching the horses drinking after late haymaking, a cuckoo began to call in the distance. ‘Listen,’ said my brother. ‘It makes me feel funny—it makes me think terribly of being at the Manor.’ I listened, and soon each hollow note seemed to be struck on my own heartstrings: tears began to come into my eyes. Past summers—not just the eight I had lived, but innumerable past summers, long and golden, and all experienced at Beckton Manor, seemed to be saying goodbye.

  A few days later we discovered that when we heard a cuckoo while at the Manor, we could summon up exactly the same feeling for the Farm. After that we decided that the two houses were part of the same place, so that it did not matter whic
h we loved best.

  They were less than half a mile apart. You went out of the back door of the Manor, into the gravelled space between its two wings which in summer was decorated with tubs of fuchsias, down past the stables, through the bottom orchard and a corner of the plantation girdling the kitchen garden, and past three beech trees on which everyone had, at one time or another, carved their initials. The highest initials had grown blistered and blurred; the lowest—mine and my brother’s—were clear and still the colour of sawdust. From there a footpath ran along the bottom of the back park beside a line of bat willows planted by my great-grandfather (they were never made into cricket bats, reaching and passing their prime during the last war, when no cricket bats were being made). This led to the stream, at the point where it slid over a little weir to become the beginnings of the lake. You crossed it on a broad footbridge, pausing to drop sticks into the water or just to stare into it, and came to the water meadow—a boggy meadow crisscrossed with little ditches choked with marsh marigolds and ragged robin. The path here was slightly raised, with planks, usually collapsed, over the drains which traversed it. We knew it so well that even in darkness we could tell where we had to take a long stride, or step to the left, or balance carefully because a plank was extra narrow. At the far side of the water meadow the path rose steeply to the small wooden gate into the Farm orchard, and at the top of that was the benevolent Dutch end-gable of the house, curving comfortably above white walls and partly screened by the row of beeches which bordered the back yard. The working buildings sprawled to the left, not at that time the responsibility of those who lived in the house, but definitely part of their territory. This house was to be the background of my growing up (we continued to live there, all but rent-free, for about twelve years); but the love we all felt for it was already established and was rooted in the knowledge we had of it from our earliest childhood.