The Pure Gold Baby

by Margaret Drabble

  Jake and Ike, my babies.

  Sometimes Jess and I would have a glass of wine, after these teatime child-minding sessions, and talk about grown-up matters. I would report on ethical dilemmas in the charity where I worked, or spill Whitehall secrets from my husband’s ascendant career at the Home Office, and she would tell me about whatever she was reading or reviewing, and about the thesis on which she was working. I learnt a lot of second-hand anthropology from Jess. She aired her ideas on me. I liked to hear her talk about the shining lake, the children and the shoebill, and about Dr Livingstone, whose grave she said she had visited. We were both mildly obsessed by Livingstone, then a deeply unfashionable and intellectually provocative figure. She knew far more about him than I did, but I had missionaries in my family background, and old missionary books on the family bookshelves, and as a child I had browsed through my great-grandfather’s school prize of Livingstone’s Travels, with its thrilling engravings of ‘The Missionary’s Escape from the Lion’ and ‘Natives Spearing an Elephant and Her Calf’. I was always interested in reports about Livingstone. We speculated about what he had really, truly believed.

  Jess and I talked a lot. We talked about everything.

  When the children got tired they would watch Blue Peter, or whatever came on after Blue Peter. Ike used to suck his thumb when he watched telly. I’m sorry to say I used to like to see him suck his thumb. It was strangely comforting. And he did grow out of it.

  Children’s television seemed very wholesome and educational in those days, although now we’re told it wasn’t all it seemed.

  Playgroup and nursery group were easy enough for Anna, surrounded by neighbourhood friends. Jess worried that when she went to primary school she would be exposed to potentially hostile strangers, even though she would still be in the company of Tim and Tom and Polly and Ollie and Ike. Jake and Stuart, two years older, had already gone ahead to defend her in the playground and taught her the ropes. And Anna’s skills sufficed in the first year of Plimsoll Road Primary, with the other five-year-olds and six-year-olds, under the benevolent and knowing eye of pretty, long-legged, mini-skirted Miss Laidman. Miss Laidman, who had studied pedagogy at an avant-garde teachers’ training college in Bristol, was well aware of Anna’s difficulties, and became expert at including her in group activities. Anna and Jess were lucky in Miss Laidman, and the school itself had a benevolent regime. Jess was grateful for this, but knew that such luck and such participation with her tolerant peers could not last for long. The next stage must come soon.

  It was considered by the professionals and indeed by Jess that Anna would, in time, be unable to cope with the demands of state primary education. A special school of some description would have to be found, where she could acquire special skills. In the right environment, she might even be able to learn to read. Miss Laidman encouraged Anna to write her letters, but she could not teach her to read.

  Miss Laidman had a colleague called Fanny Foy, who taught music at Plimsoll Road and at one or two other schools in Stoke Newington and Finsbury Park. Miss Foy loved Anna, and would spend extra time with her. Miss Foy had a little sister like Anna. Fanny Foy, I discovered, moonlighted and played the violin in a theatre orchestra at night. She had a double life. She knew all the musicals. She taught Anna the tunes and a lot of the words.

  When Anna was seven, Jess moved out of the upstairs flat above Jim and Katie, feeling perhaps that she should not become too attached to, or dependent on, them or their residence. Or perhaps she was getting irritated by the competitive marital discord occasionally displayed in the household. Jim and Katie were relieved, though they did not say so, because they needed the extra space for their own growing family: when Jess announced that she was moving, Katie had a third child on the way. They needed the space and, prospering on two incomes, they no longer needed the rent. And probably they were not happy with a witness to their domestic discord. Better to rage in private than in earshot of a highly acute and perceptive lodger and her innocent and perhaps too guileless child. Jim’s ambitions and Katie’s ambitions were increasingly in conflict, and the conflict was becoming increasingly overt.

  Jess moved to a shabby little three-storey terraced property a few streets away, in easy reach of her old friends and our reliable support system. Houses were cheap then, and, although it was difficult for a single woman to get a mortgage, Jess must have produced a satisfactory deposit for No. 23 Kinderley Road N5, raised from her father, or from the Professor, or from some other undisclosed source of finance. She must have found a friendly broker. She was, after all, a graduate in what was considered respectable and regular, though not very remunerative, professional employment. Maybe the Professor gave her a good reference. He could hardly, one might think, do less: although really, when considering the Professor, it is hard to know what to think that he might have done.

  Sometimes I wondered if Jess made up the story of the Professor. She told it to us in instalments, over those early years, and perhaps improved and embellished it at each telling. We are all adept at rewriting the past, at reinventing it. Perhaps Anna was the result of a one-night stand, or of a liaison with a fellow-student of which Jess was ashamed, and which she had decided to disown.

  The story of the Professor was, as Jess unfolded and disclosed it to us, dramatic and colourful. It had those virtues. Jess was a good storyteller. She has told me many stories, over the many years of our friendship, and some of them have certainly altered in the telling. Some of them have become so entangled with my own memories that I feel as though I have witnessed events that are part of her life, not mine. This is partly, but not wholly, to do with Anna’s love of repetition. Anna would say, ‘Tell us about that time when Gramps tried to jug the hare’, or ‘Tell us about when you went swimming in your nightie’, or ‘Tell us about the tree-frog’, or ‘Tell us about when Gramps ate the mouse’, and Jess would tell.

  Jess is a good listener as well as a good narrator. I have told her things I have never told to anyone, should never have told to anyone. Jess was, and is, an attractive woman, with a hypnotic intensity of attention that tends to mesmerise an interlocutor. She concentrates on others in a manner that sucks out the soul. It would be fair to say that we were all rather in awe of her. Not a great beauty in any classical style, but noticeable, memorable, one might even say seductive, although seduction was not on her agenda in Anna’s primary-school days. She must have mesmerised the Professor. When she is talking to you, she transfixes you. Her short-sighted eyes are very fierce and piercing, a cornflower-blue. This explains some of her history. Had she not given birth to Anna, her life would have been different. It might have been played at fast and loose.

  She wasn’t a great beauty, but she had a style that turned heads, a confident way of walking and of being in her body. I don’t know how a man would describe her, but men (including the Professor, or whoever the Professor represents) were attracted to Jess. If it hadn’t been for Anna, we would have feared for our husbands.

  In her new home in Kinderley Road, Jess gave enterprising little suppers at which she amused herself and us by cooking, usually successfully, odd little dishes, some composed from ingredients from the West Indian store round the corner. Her pigs’ trotters were a triumph, and once she ventured on pigs’ ears. She enjoyed confronting taboos. She and Anna were fearless eaters. You need not feel too sorry for Jess. Some sorrow is appropriate, but she was not, as I hope I have made clear, an object of pity. We regarded her with respect, affection and alarm. She was good company. We laughed a lot, over our cheap meals and cheap wine, on our excursions to the park, on our turns on the swings and the roundabouts.

  There were park attendants in those days, some of them rather bossy and disagreeable, officious little despots of their small domains, and I remember an unpleasant altercation when one of them reprimanded Anna for tipping some sand from the dog-frequented sandpit on to a miserably bare adjacent flowerbed. Jess leapt to her daughter’s defence with an impassioned speech which
impressed and alarmed us all. She was a fierce mother, a cat, a lioness, guarding her kitten. She never allowed anyone to criticise Anna.

  And not many wished to do so. Anna was a good girl.

  If Jess longed to pursue her academic career more actively, she did not let us know. She did not complain. She appeared to have accepted, on Anna’s behalf, the home front and the life of the mind. She continued to read, to study, to think, to write, to venture into the wilder wastes of intellectual speculation. One can do all those things from a little house in a back street off the Blackstock Road near Finsbury Park tube station, with reasonable access to the SOAS library and the British Library and the Royal Anthropological Institution.

  Some think, indeed, that the brain grows keener in confinement. In the field, the brain wanders and cannot settle. As Guy Brighouse’s was so fatally to do.

  Jess managed, during this early period of Anna’s infancy, to teach two days a week at an adult education college, and with Guy Brighouse’s help she obtained a generous bursary to write a thesis. Guy looked after Jess well. Her thesis, you may not be surprised to hear, dealt with the assessment and treatment of mental incapacity and abnormality in the area of Central Africa that she had visited in that first youthful escapade into what was not to her the heart of darkness. (Northern Rhodesia became Zambia even as she was working on this project.) She had toyed for a while with the idea of writing about representations of the enfant sauvage in the literature of anthropology, a subject of great cultural richness, but too open-ended for a beginner, or so Guy Brighouse, by now her supervisor, told her. So she confined herself under his not very attentive guidance to the impact of missionaries on the practice of traditional remedies and ‘witchcraft’ (for this was Dr Livingstone’s realm, the land where he strove and died)—and, tangentially, with the variability of the concept of IQ with reference to ‘the savage mind’. (The word ‘savage’ was still, at that period, almost acceptable, although it sounded better in French.) She had to rely very heavily on secondary sources, but she made the best of a bad job.

  She had enjoyed exploring the nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century accounts of explorers and big-game hunters and native commissioners, discovered in periodicals and learned journals and government reports. She noted their degrees of condescension and racial prejudice and their appalled condemnation of insanitary living conditions in the African colonies. (The laziness, the dirtiness, the unhealthiness! The smallpox, the jiggers, the worms, the ticks, the syphilis, the scurvy, the leprosy!) She had learnt that the people of the big lake went mad when sent to work in the copper mines, and would not eat of the flesh of the amphibious land-dwelling fish called nkomo, because if you ate of this mad non-fish it would drive you mad. She longed to see a nkomo, but doubted if she ever would.

  She had noted that tolerance of mental disability and mental disturbance appeared to have diminished with the advent of Christianity: ‘lunatics’ had rarely been attacked in the old tribal days, as one theory held that if you killed a lunatic, you would catch his lunacy. This superstition had served a useful purpose, Jess seemed to suggest in her thesis, and it was a pity that it had been undermined by science and by the Christian religion.

  She now, several decades later, disagrees with her 1960s position. She now thinks that Christianity has had, overall, globally, historically, in Africa and elsewhere, a favourable impact on our perceptions of mental disability and birth defects and congenital irregularities. It has been kinder, for example, to twins and the mothers of twins. Some African cultures slaughter twins at birth. The mothers of twins, like slaves, were attracted by Christianity. They were reluctant to slaughter their babies and glad of a reason to defy tradition.

  Jesus did not have views on twins, as far as we know, but we believe we know that he favoured the simple-minded.

  Jess was then in most ways a child of her secular, progressive time, and distrusted missionaries on principle. She disapproved of Livingstone as a proto-imperial trader with a gun, as she had been taught to do at SOAS. She did not share his view that commerce inevitably elevated culture. She noted with interest the cool detachment of his comment that ‘the general absence of deformed persons is partly owing to their destruction in infancy’, and his equally detached views on abnormality or transgression summed up in the African term tlolo. But she could not prevent herself from being moved by his tender accounts of the tree-frog and the fish-eagle, the forest and the mountain and the waterfall. He had seen the natural world too closely for any kind of comfort, but he had loved some of its manifestations. Livingstone, like the lobster-claw children, worked on in her memory.

  She read his diaries and letters, and worried about the poor orphan Nassick boys, the young Bombay Indians who faithfully accompanied him as servants on his travels. Jess always worried about orphans. She used to try to tell me about the Nassick boys but it was a complicated story and I’ve never worked out quite who they were, though their unhappy name has stuck with me. They hadn’t featured in the school-prize version of Livingstone’s travels that I’d read.

  Jess’s supervisor Guy Brighouse had spent some years with a dry, grey-black-skinned, long-legged and dwindling tribe that made, according to him, the most sophisticated pots in Africa, and the most beautiful conical dwelling places man or woman had ever seen, of wattle and decorated clay. These mason-potters were dying out, according to Guy’s theory, through aesthetic despair, as modernity overtook them. Plastic and corrugated iron were killing them. Their hearts and souls were dying.

  Jess liked Guy, and the freedom of his fancies. He was considered a wild card at SOAS, but she liked that too.

  She managed to work into her thesis a mention of the children with fused toes, but to her regret was not able to find out anything more about them. Livingstone did not seem to have met them, though he noted the dwarf, the albino and the leper, and Guy, who had seen them, did not show much interest in them. Nobody then or now seemed to have studied them. Did they and their children and their children’s children play still by the shining lake upon the immortal shore?

  The analogue of the children continued to haunt her. She found documentation of a cluster group of the families of similarly afflicted children in Scotland: the parents had told the eminent investigating statistician that the little ones didn’t miss their fingers and toes—‘Bless’ee, sir, the kids don’t mind it, they don’t miss what they’ve never had’—and that they were remarkably adept with the vestigial digits which they did possess, with which they produced fine handwriting and needlework.

  Jess had noted how deftly the lake children had punted their small canoes.

  Of all the explorer narratives, Jess liked Mungo Park’s best. She was touched by this lone romantic Scottish adventurer’s desire to see the best in others, even in those who were exploiting him, robbing him, exposing him mercilessly to lions and starvation. A child of his time, he wished to believe in the universal goodness of human nature. And he did meet with some goodness in Africa, as well as much cruelty.

  Jess liked best the episode when he was denied hospitality and shelter by the suspicious king of a tribe near the Niger and forced to sit hungry all day beneath a tree, and to take refuge at night in its branches from wild beasts, as nobody would give him food or accommodation. But he was befriended by a woman returning from her labours in the field. Observing that he looked weary and dejected, she heard his story with ‘looks of great compassion’, took him to her hut, lit him a lamp, spread a mat for him and fed him with a fine fish broiled on the embers. She assured him he could sleep safely in her hut, and during the night she and her female company sat spinning cotton and singing an improvised song:

  The winds roared, and the rains fell. The poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree. He has no mother to bring him milk, no wife to grind his corn. Let us pity the white man, no mother has he . . .

  This song can bring tears to Jess’s eyes whenever she wants.

  The less friendly and more avaricious Moor
s were puzzled by Park’s pocket compass and the way its needle always pointed to the Great Desert. Unable to provide a scientific explanation comprehensible to them, Mungo Park told them that his mother resided far beyond the sands of the Sahara, and that while she was alive the iron needle would always point towards her. If she were dead, he said, it would point to her grave.

  As it happened, his mother outlived him. He came to a sad end, though not on this recorded expedition. He pursued his fate.

  Jess found these stories deeply touching.

  Mungo Park didn’t think much of the slave-trading, intolerant and bigoted Moors, who hissed and shouted and spat at him because he was a white man and a Christian. They abused him and plundered his goods and refused to let him drink from the well. He had to drink from the cow trough. They ill-ireated their slaves and their womenfolk.

  He preferred the native Africans with their simple superstitions and their kind hearts.

  Mungo Park was an Enlightenment man.

  Who could have foreseen what would happen to the Blackstock Road in the next millennium? We didn’t. Nobody did. The mosque and the halal butchers took over from the barrels of salt pork, and young men with beards from the West Indians and the Irish. The friendly Arsenal at Highbury, home of the Gunners, moved to the glittering Emirates Stadium, built and sponsored by money from the Middle East, and Miss Laidman married the head of a college of further education and went to live in North Kensington. The balance of power and the balance of fear shifted. But by this time many of us, like Miss Laidman, would have moved on to more up-market neighbourhoods. Some of us are still there, in the old neighbourhood, and our properties have appreciated a hundredfold, as properties in London do, but the area is still not what you would call fashionable. Those of us who are loyal to it appreciate it, indeed love it. Some streets, with their modest little mass-produced brickwork and tile decorations, have hardly changed at all. There are old lovingly pruned rose bushes growing still in small front gardens. They predate the booms and slumps of property.