Aunt Daisy said that nurses were not as they had been, so she was told by younger colleagues still not retired. ‘No one these days wants to do a job for the sake of it,’ she said. ‘And look at these modern girls—they won’t do housework any longer.’
‘No,’ said Evelyn, ‘they prefer factories. Who in their right mind could possibly prefer a nasty factory to working in a nice house like this?’ Here the ghost of Patrick Hamilton hovered for a few seconds.
At four o’clock the tea trolley came in again, the aunts putting on aprons to prepare it, taking them off to consume it. On the top tier were scones, butter, jam, crumpets, honey in a comb, little cakes, biscuits of various kinds, while on the bottom tier were two large cakes, one a sponge with fruit and cream, and the other a fruit cake. And now this was serious eating. Lunch, yes, they had done that, because luncheon, and a Sunday luncheon at that, had to be done properly; but this is what they enjoyed. I could see this was the serious meal of the day, and they ate and ate, and pressed on me and Peter more and more, and they drank many cups of tea, Earl Grey for Daisy and Ceylon for Evelyn, oh do have just one more little piece, and then on went the aprons for the washing up, and then it was five o’clock, and we could leave. And as Peter and I went off to the bus stop and waved goodbye, and waved goodbye again, I heard, from Evelyn, ‘And now, Daisy, you just sit down and take the weight off your legs, and I’ll get the supper.’
Peter said, ‘Do we have to go and see them again?’
Taking him to see the aunts was part of my trying to preserve at least a sketch and a scaffolding of family life. But now it was done, and no, he did not have to do it again.
They moved to Salisbury (England), and I went to see them there. Another little old house, and a garden full of bees and birds and butterflies. They occupied themselves with arranging flowers for the cathedral and diligently kept up the fabric of middle-class life, with meals all day, and good works, for they visited the poor, with cheerful words and little gifts of home-cooked cakes and sweets. Then Aunt Daisy said she was coming to London to spend the day with me. She could not be asked to climb those precipitous stairs, so I took her out to lunch, but it was hard now to find the kind of restaurant she was used to, with nice English food. All over Britain in provincial towns, yes; not in London. I took her to Derry & Tom’s roof garden. I took her to tea. Then, unexpectedly, Aunt Daisy asked me to help her get into a good old people’s home. I was so surprised, so taken aback, that I sat there, numbed and dumb. It is useful, this kind of memory, for when you are older and full of competences and know-how, you forget it wasn’t always so. Now, if someone said, Please arrange for me to go into a home, I would know how to go about it, but then it was as bad as if she had asked me to push her on a wheelbarrow from Land’s End to John o’Groat’s. I was still so much on the edge of life in London, just clinging on with my fingertips—so it felt. An immense dismay seized me, a tiredness, and this tiredness was my enemy, for so much of my life I wasn’t doing what I would have liked to do, or enjoyed doing. How was it that Aunt Daisy, who had been in my life since I was born, could not see that she was asking too much of me? Besides, how was it that this woman who all her life had lived in London and for most of it at the heart of what we now call the ‘caring professions’ needed this kind of assistance from me? And what about Evelyn? Were they not sharing their old age? For my attitude was still the common one—the lazy one: ‘Here are two old ladies; how nice for them to live together.’ (And look after each other, so that I don’t have to.) But perhaps they don’t get on? Perhaps Daisy and Evelyn, these sisters who had seen so little of each other, for one had been all her adult life in Japan, didn’t like each other?
I was sitting there, silent, and knew I was a stand-in for my efficient and energetic mother, Maude McVeagh, and was thinking that the heart of the relations between the two women was revealed in this request. My mother had been the dominant one, the competent one, but she had gone back to Rhodesia, but here was her daughter, the goddaughter, a successful writer, no less, and so she would cope just as Maude would have done.
Now I said to her, or blurted out, my voice not only shocked but incredulous, meaning, How can you put this onto me when I am so burdened already? ‘I’m sorry, Aunt Daisy. I can’t. I don’t know how to begin.’
Soon she wrote that she was going into such and such a home, but I don’t know what happened to Evelyn. I didn’t see either of them again, but Aunt Daisy sent me Christmas presents, as she had when I was a child: a postal order for perhaps two and sixpence, or a linen handkerchief with a pressed flower in it. I sent her boxes of chocolates, and my books as they came out.
A long time later, years, it occurred to me that Aunt Daisy had been asking in this indirect way if she could live with me. It did not enter my head, at the time, that she could want to share a life with this rackety atheistical Red. She could not have heard one good thing about me for years. My mother’s letters to her must have been a steady week-by-week indictment of this terrible daughter. ‘Everything you do is deliberately designed to cause your father and me as much hurt as possible.’ Yet if Aunt Daisy was not wanting to live with me what was it all about? I brood about this sometimes; there is something hidden and painful and impossible here, probably the story of two sisters, very unlike each other, who had spent their lives apart but in old age were expected to live together and share their tiny pensions.
It is hard now for younger people to understand what a poor country this was, after the war. Between then and now are decades of money flowing about, things rapidly getting better, ‘affluence’. Even poor people now live better than a lot of middle-class people did then. Few people had central heating: we were a laughing-stock in Europe because of our attitude towards it, for somewhere in a corner of a puritanical national soul there is still a feeling that to be comfortable and warm is self-indulgent. We had gas or electric fires, fed by coins put into a meter. This meant that people returned from work into freezing rooms. Refrigerators were only just becoming common. I had a food safe on a wall and bought milk and meat as I needed them. Most floors had rugs or mats on stained or painted boards; wall-to-wall carpeting was still to become general. You could go into a house or flat full of good old solid furniture, but there was no heating, no refrigerator, the kitchen was still furnished by a china sink and wooden draining boards, and chilly floors shivered under beautiful rugs. A lot of furniture was still ‘Utility’, because of the war. During the war, Utility furniture and Utility clothes were all that could be bought new, and both seemed designed to prove just how ugly necessity had to be.
An average young person taken back to stand in a quite unremarkable home of then, the early and mid-fifties would be…well, what? Embarrassed, probably. All too recent for comfort: the world of their grandparents, a threadbare, cold adequacy in everything.
None of the writers or artists I knew had any money. Attitudes have changed: now young writers demand exaggerated advances and worry about security. For us to worry about what would happen to us was felt to be shameful, ‘bourgeois’. Probably it was the war that destroyed a belief in security. It was not shameful to be poor or to live shabbily: all that was simply not an issue. As for me, I can say with equal truth that I did not worry about money, because I knew things would come right in the end, and that I was always worried about it, short term. My basic optimism, which I think is an affair of the nerves, the flesh—a disposition, a temperament—was just what the situation needed. I did not expect to be rich, for that was not the point; I simply knew I was doing what I had to do, which was to write. And that meant managing my resources so that my time was not invaded by the unnecessary, my energies were not used up wrongly. Easy to say, easy to write—but this is the crux and the heart of the writer’s task. When we go about, having temporarily become talkers, standing on platforms and holding forth, we are always asked, Do you use a word processor, a pen, a typewriter; do you write every day; what is your routine? These questions are a fumbling instinct
towards this crucial point, which is: How do you use your energy? How do you husband it? We all of us have limited amounts of energy, and I am sure the people who are successful have learned, either by instinct or consciously, to use their energies well instead of spilling them about. And this has to be different for every person, writers or otherwise. I know writers who go to parties every night and then, recharged instead of depleted, happily write all day. But if I stay up half the night talking, I don’t do so well next day. Some writers like to start work as soon as they can in the morning, while others like the night or—for me almost impossible—the afternoons. Trial and error, and then when you’ve found your needs, what feeds you, what is your instinctive rhythm and routine, then cherish it.
Now, looking back, I am quite amazed, I am impressed, at how I balanced my way between demands—the child being, of course, the main one. Intense concentrated work, when I could, with always an eye for the energy-eaters.
The first novel, The Grass Is Singing, had done well for a first novel in Britain, America, and Europe, had been much reviewed, and was reprinted. But few serious novels make their authors rich. My second book, This Was the Old Chief’s Country, got good reviews, sold well for short stories, and individual stories from the collection were printed in anthologies and abroad. Martha Quest and A Proper Marriage sold well enough and got published in Europe and America, but neither was the stuff of best-sellers. All my books continue to sell, steadily, are in print, but not until the seventies did I earn big money on advances. In 1958 I calculated that I earned on an average twenty pounds a week, the working man’s wage.
Like all authors, I survived from cheque to cheque. Joan did not mind my weekly rent being paid two weeks or three weeks late. Once, the debt ran on until it was five weeks, and this made me sick with worry, because she did not have much money either. These little sharp memories correct generalisations, like: ‘Having no money did not worry me.’ (I was actually saying this for a time.) There were times when I was worried, all right. I was walking down Church Street, having dropped the child at school, and I was crying because I couldn’t buy food. A man walked rapidly up the street towards me, stopped, and said, Why are you crying? I said, I haven’t any money. He said, Well, cheer up; you will have by this time next week, won’t you? This being true enough, since money always did turn up from somewhere, I did cheer up. I sold my mother’s jewellery. Giving me her heavy gold chain, her gold brooch, her gold bracelets, some Victorian trinkets, was a ritual: mothers hand on their good jewellery to their daughters. I did not want it, asked her to keep it, but she insisted. When I took it to the jeweller’s I was positively asking to be cheated, to be done down, so low was my morale. The jewellery was not fashionable. I remember even pointing this out, apologetically. I was paid less than thirty shillings for what ten years later, when Victoriana became fashionable, would be worth hundreds of pounds. Similarly, I had a Victorian sewing table, from my aunt Daisy. It was very pretty, full of little drawers, fretwork compartments, padded pin-and-needle cushions—a gem of a piece. There was an antique shop downstairs. I begged them to buy it. They refused, said there was no market for it. Soon it was worth a lot of money.
The vicissitudes of a writer’s life mean complicated tax returns. One year I had no money to pay tax The year before I had earned well. The income tax official came, was sympathetic, but it was no good: I had to pay it. How? I don’t remember. Probably I asked for books to review. I don’t think there were allowances then for women in my position—a child, and no support from the father. If so, I would have scorned to take them: a question of pride.
If you are thinking, But you had a lover; why didn’t he help? I always paid my way with Jack. That was a question of principle. Besides, he had a wife and family to support. Yet, if this was poverty, I can’t remember really going without anything much, pining for something I couldn’t afford.
And we ate well. Joan and I both cooked wonderful meals and invited each other. I made good use of that standby for people during hard times, the soup-stew which was continually added to and became better as the days passed.
Sometimes I must have despaired, though, because I applied for a secretary’s job in Mayfair. Seven pounds a week. I said to the employer that it wasn’t a living wage, and he said apologetically: ‘I am afraid we expect them to live at home.’
I sent short stories to The New Yorker, sold them two, neither of them my best. Nadine Gordimer had had a short story accepted, told them to look out for me. (We had not then met.) I sent back a batch they had just returned, and they took one.
Round about then Stalin died, and I wrote a little story called ‘The Day Stalin Died’. King Street—I was told—were not amused.
Isak Dinesen in Denmark was working for broadcasting, and she accepted a couple of short stories.
I did not do much reviewing. It is hard work, for very little money—that is, if you actually do read the books, and think about them, which cannot be taken for granted in reviewers.
Another false start was when I agreed to be Donald Ogden Stewart’s secretary. One of the writers who had left the States because of Joseph McCarthy, he was well known then as a playwright, and a screenwriter: The Philadelphia Story was his work. He was married to Ella Winters: she had been one of the well-known left-wing journalists who had seen the future working in the Soviet Union.* Both were strongly pro-Soviet still. They had a flat in the Finchley Road. Of all my attempts at getting regular money, this was the silliest. He paid me seven pounds a week, the minimum. To go from Church Street, Kensington, to the Finchley Road took almost an hour by bus. Don worked very slowly. He walked about or stared out of the window, while I sat waiting to write down the results of these long thoughts. Then it came out: ‘But it takes three-quarters of an hour to get to La Guardia Airport.’ Was this how successful plays got themselves written? I was going mad with boredom. Meanwhile Ella was popping in and out, and finally said that if I wasn’t doing anything I might as well go shopping for her. It is common for an employee to be competed for by a husband and wife. I stuck it for about three weeks, and we parted amicably. I decided I should try and write for one of the radio soap operas, Mrs. Dale’s Diary, and submitted an episode, but they said it was too extreme. The subject was a delinquent child, so soon to be the stuff of so many run-of-the-mill radio plays and serials. I then decided that all these attempts to earn money in ways other than writing seriously were a mistake.
Juliet O’Hea was my support. She was remarkable because of the range of people she represented. She was a Roman Catholic and a Tory. She looked after at least three communists, one of them myself, and she hated and despised communism. She had other serious writers and, too, writers of romantic novels and adventure stories. She dealt with us on our individual merits, was fair, was kind, and a good friend. I can’t remember her ever giving me bad advice. Since then the world of publishing has been in turmoil, has changed completely, and through it all I have been supported by my very good agents, first of all Juliet O’Hea, and then Jonathan Clowes. He still is my agent, and my friend.
Now my social life changed, because for a time I was part of a group of Canadian and American writers. Most were in London as exiles from McCarthy. Reuben Ship had made The Investigator, a gramophone record ridiculing McCarthy. No one had dared laugh at this man, and the explosions of laughter now all across the United States because of this record were probably the beginning of his downfall, or contributed to it. No one now remembers The Investigator. Its high point was when the devil allots places in hell to applicants for heaven. Reuben had been working in Hollywood and was escorted to the aeroplane in chains because of his dangerousness—which much impressed his family, who, Reuben claimed, were all crooks by profession and had despised him for going straight and being that unprofitable thing a writer. But the chains had redeemed him. Was this true? But Reuben was a very funny man, and who cares about details of the truth when you are laughing? No scion of an ancient family ever made better use of his
ancestors than Reuben did of his criminal family, one a Mafia boss.
Ted Allan had been working in Hollywood. He wanted to write the greatest play, or greatest novel, ever written, which was the style in those days of writers from the other side of the Atlantic, and he did write some good things, but his talent surely was for talking: he was a storyteller, taking incidents from his life and blowing them up into monstrous and very funny inventions.
Some of the group had come from Canada because it was at that time hard to earn a living as a writer there.
Stanley Mann wrote scripts for films.
Mordecai Richler was the baby of the group. Probably hundreds of thousands of young men—millions?—all over the world were casting themselves as imitators of James Dean, a thoroughly unpleasant person, as it turns out, but does that matter? After all, how many millions of communists had pledged themselves to be worthy of Stalin and other brutal oppressors, but as they tried to match themselves to their imaginations of greatness, they acquired all kinds of stern virtues. Mordecai would stand with his back to a wall, a glass in his hand, inarticulate or almost stammering, lovably modest, genuinely so. He would confront me, or Ted Allan, or Reuben, all of us weighed down with responsibility and children, with the earnest and urgent query—straight from the flaming heart of the bohemian myth—Do you think an artist ought to get married and burden himself with children? Surely that destroys talent? Later he married Flo, the wife of Stanley Mann, and had four children, besides taking on Stanley’s son.
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