by Rose Tremain
The moment where Master Kay, in The Midnight Folk, finds the ‘Invisible Mixture’ stayed with me for a long time. Here, invisibility isn’t the dangerous, addictive state Tolkien contrives so grippingly in Lord of the Rings, but rather a wonderful lark, told wryly. Both author and boy are fascinated by what’s happening and yet are also on the verge of laughing at it.
[Kay] had some old sugar lumps put away under the carpet. He took out one of these and carefully opened the bottle. The mixture had a warm, rich smell, like the smell of green bracken on a very hot day. ‘I must be very careful of this,’ he thought. He dropped three drops on to a lump, popped it in his mouth and re-stoppered the phial. A glow went through him, as though he were sucking the loveliest peppermint ever made. He hid the phial in a mouse-hole in the skirting board behind the valance and then stood up. He felt a pepperminty feeling go tingling along his toes, and lo, he looked at his toes and could not see them, nor his legs, nor his pyjamas, and though he looked at himself in the glass, he was not there: he was invisible. ‘I say, what fun,’ he said.fn1
An idea that came early to us – or perhaps was suggested by Robbie – was to spend some of the art class time making pictures of scenes from Masefield’s books. The art teacher, Miss Felicity Ashbee, a splendidly handsome bohemian woman, with the face of a gypsy and fine, expressive hands, had to be consulted, but she gave her blessing to this and so we began on a series of pictures of pirates and gamekeepers, desert islands, raging seas, three-masted clippers, witches and wise owls.
We worked in poster paints on coarse sugar paper. The idea of the ‘series’ gave a satisfying professional edge to our labours and bonded us further. We were the ‘John Masefield Class’. Elsa’s pictures were the best, but mine weren’t too bad and everybody worked hard at this enterprise.fn2 Robbie was so delighted with the end result that she hung them all round the English room walls (my Keats blunder having mercifully disappeared), and they stayed there a long time. She also wrote to John Masefield asking him if would like to see them, and this letter led, eventually, to a visit to Oxford and an encounter with the great man.
I can’t remember when this took place, or how many of us were there, in his house in Oxford. I know the party included Jane McKenzie and Elsa. What I can recall is that the elderly Masefield was extremely kind to us. While his daughter, Judith, brought in a wonderful spread of tea and cakes, I confided to the elderly Laureate that I wanted ‘to follow him’ and become a writer. What he said to me in reply is lost in the mist of time. Perhaps, like Master Kay, when confronted by something surprising, he just smiled and said, ‘I say, what fun!’
Recently, I’ve discovered, in a forgotten drawer, a small cache of letters and cards from Masefield, virtually unfaded by time. These reveal that I tried to keep in contact with him by sending him not stories (in which I probably had no confidence and didn’t want to embarrass either myself or him by asking him to read them) but flower pictures. In one of the letters, from his house, Burcote Brook, near Abingdon, he writes to thank me for ‘these beautiful Columbines and for writing your welcome kind greetings to me in that exquisite script of yours. So many grateful thanks to you. I ought to blush to be writing my thanks to you in a hand like this; but a lot of these old fellows are really past blushing. I think with gladness of your kind young friends and shall ever bless you all and wish you every happiness and delight. I thank you all and shall put your Columbines on my ink stand (made of my old ship). Gratefully yours, John Masefield.’
Was ever an elderly writer more kind and courteous to a group of schoolgirl fans?
One inescapable feature of boarding school is all the ‘dead time’ that blights each and every day: the time between lunch and afternoon games; the gap between the end of lessons at five o’clock and supper at seven; the peculiar, exhausted hours between supper and bed.
Certain extramural activities were arranged for us. Every term, we were compelled to knit a ‘charity garment’ for orphaned babies. We had to provide our own patterns and our own needles and wool, and if your garment was so badly made that it couldn’t be passed on to the orphans’ charity, you were punished by missing the last-night supper, where cider cup was served.
Jane McKenzie was tragically bad at knitting, and her charity garments – pocked moonscapes of holes and dropped stitches – had to be unpicked and rescued term after term by her friends. Jo and I, who had been taught to knit by Nan, had no difficulty with this task. I remember that I found knitting consoling in its slow, repetitive unfolding. And after a few terms, I began making designs on graph paper for knitted motifs – ladybirds, flowers and birds – to be incorporated into my garments. I remember liking the idea that some little orphan girl or boy would be dressed in a matinee jacket decorated with wild things.
The knitting hour came after lunch, while we digested the grey mince and watery cabbage, the sponge cake and custard that had to sustain us till supper time. We sat around in the big school drawing room, where we sang evening prayers and where the vicar of Braughing church sometimes came to talk to us about God, which he liked to emphasise as ‘the Word made Flesh’. The room smelled of mothballs and beeswax polish, but we were so crowded together in the knitting hour that after we’d all been there for half an hour, it smelled of flesh – of unwashed armpits, dirty hair and menstrual blood.
In the cold hour between the end of lessons and supper, we congregated in the wooden prep hall. This was when I raced through my work and started drawing what became known as ‘Rosie’s beauty contests’, passing my rough book, with crayoned pictures of girls’ heads, sporting different colouring and hairstyles, surreptitiously from desk to desk till it came back to me with the results, which would arrive with comments something like these: from Elsa, ‘Number three is a clear winner. Super hair!’ From Heather, ‘I love number one. Wish I was blonde.’ From Julie, ‘Number nine reminds me of me – but better.’ From our only French girl, Sabine, ‘J’aime ta dixième. Son nez retroussé surtout. C’est elle qui gagne.’
Something shocking and extraordinary was related to us by Sabine when she was fourteen: she wasn’t a virgin any more, as the rest of us were; she had made love with her father. She told us this very calmly, explaining that her father believed that ‘The first lover of a woman must take great care of her and I can only reassure myself that this will happen by taking care of her myself.’ Looking back, I can’t remember any signs that Sabine was traumatised by this. She spoke about it in a contented, almost boastful way. Had it, in fact, happened, or was it some teenage illusion of hers? If it had happened, then perhaps, in later life, she came to suffer for it and even see her life destroyed by it. Or perhaps not. She was a wide-faced, almost pretty girl, with a gentle temperament and eyes of piercing blue. I have often wondered what became of her.
Despite knitting and prep and beauty contests, time still dragged. In my third year, aged thirteen, my friend Heather Gray and I decided our lives would be much more interesting if we were in love. There were no men to fall in love with – only the tennis coach, Ray, who couldn’t say his r’s properly and so was unkindly known as ‘Way’. (Naturally, he called me ‘Wosie’.) We settled on the mannish but striking geography teacher, Miss Jean Howard.
It was summer. We stole a red rose from one of the garden borders and scattered the petals in front of her cottage. We approached her after one of her lessons and told her we adored geography and wanted her to supervise extra work. We offered to do more drawings of artesian wells and Maori warriors.
What were we hoping for? Deep attention, I think: something that told us Jean Howard thought we were special. All children sent away from home, as we had been, long to be singled out by their teachers and others in positions of authority. I know that Heather and I also fantasised what it would be like to be kissed by her. In fact, we never made that kind of approach, never indulged in any physical touching of Miss Howard. But the more we told ourselves we were in love, the more real and absorbing this fantasy seemed to be.fn3
/> In the studies, the only heated rooms in the main house, two daily newspapers were laid out for us, The Times and the Daily Telegraph. We were expected to use some of our free time to read these and learn about the world. Once a week, at Saturday assembly, our knowledge was tested. This test was known as current events, and such was the paper shortage in the 1950s, that we wrote our answers on the backs of old envelopes extracted from Mrs Baines’s waste-paper basket.
Perhaps it was the fact that we were in a rural prison, so that the great happenings of the post-war world seemed so very distant from us, but I remember that we always found this test irksome, mainly did badly at it because we hadn’t spent enough time reading The Times and the Daily Telegraph, and longed for it to be over.
Elsa has found a passage in a diary she kept in 1956, at the time of the Suez Crisis, where she reveals Robbie saying: ‘The only way we can help is to trust in God and He alone will help us.’ We know now what a dark moment this was for the Western world, and no doubt we tried to answer questions about it on our torn envelopes during current events, but at age thirteen, despite Robbie’s intimations of apocalypse, the elements that had brought the crisis about somehow floated free of our attention. We knew that Britain and France, the old, arrogant colonial powers, were now trembling before a dark-browed ‘villain’ called Colonel Nasser, but who exactly was he, and even if we understood properly who he was, what could we do about it?
Did we talk about Suez amongst ourselves? I can’t remember. There was no debating society at Crofton Grange, no nurturing of political awareness, so I think we probably said almost nothing to each other about a world in crisis, but just carried on with our minuscule, girlie lives. Round come the thermometers dunked in TCP, Tuesdays dawn and serve up the wonderful bacon pudding, our charity garments begin to take shape, tea is bread and jam again, a cold wind sighs over the lacrosse field, one of Mrs Baines’s Norfolk terriers shits on the kitchen step, the Italian cooks scream at each other, Robbie recites Hamlet, Heather and I wait outside the vegetable garden for a sighting of Miss Howard, I lie in the dark, not sleeping …
During these vacant, exhausting nights, I thought often about my lost father and, as a kind of homage to him, decided to begin writing plays.
The school acknowledged that drama coaching might be important for the developing mind. Under the careful eye of Miss Jill Bostock, the young drama teacher, our form had already embarked on a herculean production of an adaptation of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. The most arduous task for this production was the painting of the scenery. But unspoken in us, I think, was a yearning for the arduous, to take our minds off the home lives we couldn’t quite forget. Elsa agrees with me about this. Making things challenging for ourselves was a fundamental aim of our Crofton lives.
We’d resolved that ‘the whole three walls of the stage’, normally draped with faded red curtains, against which a few token props were installed, had to be completely covered by the stone walls of the castle. To do this, Miss Ashbee agreed to order in swathes of canvas and supporting batons. We laid the canvas out on the grass in front of the art room and, kneeling – or even lying down – in our brown overalls, gradually painted in a colossal acreage of gothic stonework, mullion windows, crumbling pillars and colonies of bats.
It was a work of weeks and weeks. I think we spent more time creating the castle than we did rehearsing the play, but when the curtain finally went up on its one night of existence, the whole school broke into astonished applause. No matter if the acting was a bit mediocre, if Jane McKenzie, as the heroine Emily, was a touch wooden, if Heather, as the dashing Valancourt, was a bit too beefy for her velvet breeches, if my death as Emily’s father was stagey; the set was brilliant. And for this, our Udolpho won the end-of-term drama cup. I remember that we all trooped up to receive it, and no actor climbing the scintillating stage to receive her Oscar has ever felt more proud.
It was a short step, then, from here to the idea that I might write a play we could perform.
My first effort was about two pampered girls who decide to see the world by offering themselves as cleaners to rich Italians, Americans and vodka-quaffing Russians. The whole idea was preposterous and the play deserved the mediocre reception that it got. It was a disappointment to me, of course, but I thought of Keith and all his disappointments, and pressed on.
I followed this first play with a work titled Always a Clown, thus ushering in another epic period of scene-painting, to create a circus arena. This, coupled with a rather moving performance from Jane Stern as the titular clown, and some stirring music (Sibelius’s symphonic poem Finlandia) to accompany his/her dream of thwarted love, gave a sentimental story some much-needed ballast. At least it expressed its distance from the short mysteries and drawing-room comedies that were the normal fare of form plays. And once again, the difficulty of the whole project inspired us as a group and brought us together. Another good thing happened, all the more miraculous for being unexpected: on the morning of the play, a telegram arrived from Keith, saying, ‘Congratulations on your first first night. Love, Dad.’
I kept this for a long time, but eventually it got thrown out, along with all my teenage letters and notebooks. I would give quite a lot to have some of these bits of my juvenile archive back. I envy Elsa her diary. But ninety per cent of all my records are gone and that’s that. What I can remember is that after Always a Clown, I was no longer unhappy at Crofton Grange. In fact, I was enthralled by all the work that could be done there. And – ironic though this may sound – when the longed-for holidays came round, I discovered in myself a peculiar unease that at first I couldn’t identify. Then, one afternoon, in my comfortable room at Frilsham Manor, I realised with something like shock that I was bored. I wanted to be back at school, painting scenery, learning Shakespeare, singing in the choir, playing the piano – and writing.
Throughout my professional writing life, which has now lasted forty years, I’ve very often been asked: ‘How did you come to be a writer?’ Are writers ‘born’? people wonder. Or do we struggle extremely hard to rebirth ourselves in this new guise? And if so, when and how is this rebirthing achieved?
The origins of our writing selves are all different. Some writers, like my old friend and mentor Angus Wilson, who didn’t ‘discover’ himself as a novelist until he was forty, come to it late, after they’ve embarked on other careers. The great Penelope Fitzgerald ‘knew’ she was a writer when an undergraduate at Oxford, but wasn’t able – because of family commitments and the need to earn regular money – to find the time to write novels until she was sixty.
For me, there are various answers, or perhaps what I should call ‘a list of ingredients’ present in the true answer. These ingredients go more or less like this:
My father was a writer. For all Dad’s lack of real success, I grew up with the idea that a writer was an honourable thing to become.
My mother had no job or profession whatsoever. I knew I didn’t want to copy her life.
My sister was destined to be an artist. I wanted to be destined to be something.
I quickly found that trying to evoke alternative worlds in stories or plays was an efficient antidote to homesickness and self-pity.
Through all the work done in the English room at Crofton Grange with Ida Robinson, I began to understand that great literature shed light on the human condition in a way that nothing else could. (No, not even art or music – or not for me, anyway.) So why not try to contribute, in however small a way, to that necessary illumination?
But there is also one memorable moment, a summertime epiphany, when I was thirteen or fourteen, which confirmed in me the certainty that writing was the only thing I wanted to do, and that my life would be somehow half lived – or what Martin Amis has memorably called ‘thin’ – if I couldn’t establish this at the centre of my world.
It was a summer afternoon at Crofton. I’d been playing tennis after tea. The sun was just beginning a showy descent above the hayfield that
separated the tennis courts from the garden. My tennis partners had wandered away and I found myself alone, wearing shorts and a white Aertex shirt, carrying my tennis racquet (in its wooden press, of course), on the path through the hay, which had just been cut.
I stopped walking and stood still on the path. The perfume of the hay, the heat of my body after the tennis game, the sky the colour of coral, the silence surrounding me – all combined to fill me, suddenly, with a profound feeling of wonder, a fleeting sense of the marvellous, which, in its intensity, was almost a visionary experience.
I told myself that if I continued standing still, this moment would last and might even change me in some way that I couldn’t quite foresee. But I stood there so long that the sun almost disappeared and the field became full of shadows. And with the dusk came a feeling of desolation. The desolation was simply a mundane recognition of the fleeting nature of everything, which even teenagers (or perhaps especially teenagers) understand. A moment of happiness as intense as this slips quickly away with the turning of the earth. So I asked myself, there in the hayfield, with the sweat of the tennis game drying down my back and making me shiver: was there any way in which the experiences of my life, like this one, could be captured and locked away, not just in capricious, gradually fading memory, but in some more concrete form?
