by Jane Gardam
Europa Editions
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www.europaeditions.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 1985 by Jane Gardam
First publication 2012 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
ISBN 9781609458829
Jane Gardam
CRUSOE’S DAUGHTER
For my mother, Kathleen Helm.
‘The pressure of life when one is fending
for oneself alone on a desert island is really no laughing matter.
It is no crying one either.’
VIRGINIA WOOLF, The Common Reader
PREFACE
This, by far the favourite of all my books, was written thirty years ago after the run of short novels I had rushed off in joyous release but a bit of a sense of sin, the minute the last of my children had gone to school. I knew that one day there would be one that mattered and sub-consciously I suppose I knew what it would be; and because I had become a popular novelist and won some prizes I hoped that it might find a publisher. I wanted to write a novel with more depth, less comic-sardonic, less self-congratulatory, less about my childhood adventures and passions: in fact I wanted to obliterate self and become a writer of substance and wisdom. It took me a while to realise that I was putting the cart before the horse. Without the horse the cart stands idle. It is something outside the critical consciousness that decides what a novel will be about. To my surprise and slight annoyance I found that there was nothing I wanted to write about so much as the old-fashioned north-east English world of my mother’s childhood.
But it would not be a nostalgic, romantic or historical novel of bonnets and bustles and tea parties and endless summer days. I would show women of the early nineteenth century as I knew they had been—starved of money, employment, sex and the love of men who were not their ‘class’. Their success in life in these immovable, unrelenting country places was judged by their ability to get married as soon as possible to a suitable man who could support them, to breed, to live chaste and never to think of working for their living. They must not show any hankering after intellectual knowledge—to hide it if they had it. To read the Bible and attend a place of worship, only whisper to a particular friend about bodily functions and tell their soul’s secrets only in Confession to a priest. In our part of North Yorkshire Christianity was ‘High Church’ and the priests often unmarried. My mother went to Confession every week. What she had to confess I can’t imagine. She used to come home singing to herself. The Priest loved her!
My mother had been removed from her convent school at twelve on account of her poor health. She was pushed along by the sea in a ‘bath-chair’ and not expected to live. Hypochondria governed the town. My mother lived, hale and hearty, until she was ninety. From the age of fourteen she ran her mother’s house and brought up two delightful but spoilt little brothers while her parents were abroad. My grandfather was a merchant-navy sea-captain: a rogue and a hero and didn’t like girls. My mother took her duties very seriously and was a woman of great love and kindness. There were very few men available—I remember how the world seemed full of women in the twenties and thirties after the four-year massacre of World War I. My mother married however at twenty-two, to a tiny, very attractive Mathematics and Physics teacher, highly intelligent but, it was thought, socially beneath her for he was the son of a farmer. It was not a very happy marriage. It took years for me to be conceived and the fact that I was a girl was a bitter disappointment to my father’s family. Six years later when my brother was born there was huge rejoicing. But the six years of my mother’s love and storytelling were wonderful.
And the place where I was born was wonderful. It had been in the eighteenth century a little fishing village where my mother’s forebears had had a little school for the fishermen to learn to read and write. One of them had been a sailor on Lord Nelson’s flagship, Victory, and he gave my great-aunt Nelson’s corner cupboard, from his state-room,which now hangs in our sitting-room. The sea swished along beside the town and then a wonderful marsh stretched to the Cleveland Hills, full of rare flowers and buds and colours and strange people. Huge houses of the eighteenth century rich stood here and there, people with little money but half a dozen servants, lovely paintings, flimsy old furniture, threadbare silk curtains, who sat with their prayer books and folded hands. The women were very proud and totally uneducated (there was always money to educate the boys). These lovely buildings nearly all vanished in World War II and the marsh was covered up by a vast chemical works, which in its turn is now derelict. The best thing that probably ever happened to me was in 1936 when a small public library appeared in the town. My school was almost bookless and the town library made me. I became a scholar at the University of London and hardly went back. But I swore to bring my mother to better things and took her to the London theatre and opera and the ballet which she found very strange. All she did was write letters home about it. She wrote wonderful letters. They were her life-line. She once said of Robinson Crusoe ‘He couldn’t even write home’.
And so—what of this great universal novel I hoped to write? It became clear to me that I could write only of what I knew. The academic world I had longed to belong to grew pretty hollow after I married in London and had children. It was the elf-light of childhood that still hung about, the wonder of the marsh. The people still more real to me in the vanished place than most of the people I’ve met since.
Suppose I had stayed there—like my mother. Let me suppose a sort of castaway girl who lived there all her life like Robinson Crusoe. I’d give her a library—her dead grandfather’s vicarage books. I’d give her a wonderful lover. I’d give her a nervous breakdown when he is taken from her. I’d give her alcoholism (my mother never drank!). I’d give her children and knowledge of the holiness of the heart’s affections. And I’d show the power of her childhood landscape, the enfolding murmuring magical marsh so flooded with light, sunshine, silvery rain and mist, and the running sea. When I had finished I felt I needn’t write any more books. Take it or leave it, Crusoe’s Daughter says everything I have to say.
I did go on, and the later books were considered better. Became best sellers. Never mind.
Crusoe is talking to Polly Flint, my heroine, on the last pages of Crusoe’s Daughter. He is being his usual magnificent but unromantic self. He is assessing her life, telling her she has lived only for books. ‘I never loved you, Polly Flint. Characters in fiction are eunuchs. Frozen eunuchs.Your life, as a life—not bad. Marooned of course. But there’s something to be said for islands’.
What my mother would have made of this book I don’t know.
Jane Gardam
Sandwich, Kent, England
November 2011
CRUSOE’S
DAUGHTER
I am Polly Flint. I came to live at the yellow house when I was six years old. I stood on the steps in the wind, and the swirls of sand, and my father pulled the brass bell-knob beside the huge front door. Together we listened to the distant jangle and to footsteps padding nearer. My father did a little dance on his short legs, and whistled.
Then there followed sharp scenes of confusion and dismay. ‘Shut the door. Shut the door. The sand, the sand!’ and figures stood about the hall on coloured tiles.
We were not expected. My father was bringing me to live with my aunts—bleak Miss Mary, gentle Miss Frances. They were my young mother’s elderly sisters. My m
other was dead.
A fat maid led me away to drink tea in the kitchen and then I was led away again by the gentle aunt to a huge and vaulted chamber which must have been the little morning room. With the gentle aunt I did a jig-saw the size of a continent. I did not look up as high as the aunt’s face but watched our four hands hover over the oceans of mahogany.
Now and then a door across the hall would open on incisive conversation and once a woman with a green face who carried black knitting and was dressed in black knitting came and glared round the morning room door at me. She said, ‘She looks tubercular,’ and put her handkerchief to her mouth and went away.
Perhaps my father stayed at the yellow house for a number of days. I remember an afternoon walking with him by the sea, dodging waves, and his figure dozing (disgracefully in the morning) in a button-back chair beside the catafalque of the drawing-room chimney-piece.
And one evening he sang. I knew that he sang very dreadfully but at the same time he danced, and I knew that he danced well—a heavy little man on dainty feet. Sailor’s feet. He pirouetted and twirled about the room and Aunt Frances in a rabbity tippet played the piano. It was a sea song.
Aunt Mary sat apart. The little knitted woman retired to the other end of the room and bent to her needles in an arbour of potted ferns, and the maid coming in with coals for the fire put them down and hid her head in her apron at the singing. This I found out soon was very unlike her, for Charlotte was bland and nearly invisible. But she had once been in a choir.
I sat on a stool and knew that my father was having all these funny people on.
It was 1904 and my father died two months later on the bridge of his ship in the Irish Sea, on the coal-run to Belfast. They told me that he had rejected a place in the last life-boat and had stood in the traditional way—to attention in his merchant sea-captain’s uniform—but holding and swigging a great stone bottle of gin. He had always been known as a droll man, said Aunt Frances.
The doorstep, the cold waves, the button-back chair were my only memories of my father—these and the journey that we had made together towards the yellow house. My mother had died just before I was one, and the following five years I had spent with various foster-mothers in sea-faring places where the Captain might possibly dock but more often did not. These people were hazy and the last of them the haziest of all, though she should not have been since she was a dipsomaniac who spent much of her life beneath the kitchen table. I spent much of my life on the kitchen floor, too, alongside the three or four—I think—other children in her care. I learned how not to fall in the fire and how to negotiate the locks on the larder door in order to eat. She hugged me sometimes.
Captain Flint, arriving unexpectedly one day, removed me to a first-class railway carriage (he was improvident) and in a series of these we made our way from Wales to the North East.
I remember light and shadow over pale fields—black towns, cold moors—stone walls swooping through rain and a night in what must have been a railway hotel, for there was a blackened glass roof below a window. Steam leaked up through this in spires. There were booms and echoing clanks. Fear and joy.
On the rich fur of the penultimate carriage seat, with its embroidered tray-cloth on which to rest the head—though far above my head—we sat, the Captain and I, side by side. On the rack above me was a very small suitcase. On the seat beside me was a Chinese work-box full of Chinese sewing things—my father’s coming-home present: his last voyage had been long—and a scruffy doll or so, and a china mandarin.
The train lolloped between plum-coloured brick, the railway sheds of the North. Very noble. Then came high tin chimneys, centipedes of clattery trucks, serpents’ nests of pipes, then mud-flats with whitish pools. There were furnaces, rolling and flapping out fire, and glimpses of diamond bars held fast in enormous fire-tongs in the heart of flames.
Out of the carriage window on the other side of the train, fields stretched out to colourless hills with a line of trees along the tops. The light showing through them made them look like loops of knitting pulled off the needles. The train rocked and my father whistled through his teeth.
The last train stopped at stations which were only wooden platforms. Gritty-faced men got on and off at these but nobody came near the first-class carriage. Whenever the train stopped it was quiet enough to hear the voices of the men talking through the carriage-walls and when they passed our window I saw sharp faces and bright eyes and heard the squeak of the battered tin tea-cans they all carried. All the men were black, but not black like the black seamen in Wales who sometimes came to the foster-mother’s house and when they washed were black still. These men were only very dirty and trickly with sweat which left white marks. Those men in Wales used to throw me up in the air when I was little and catch me. Big white teeth.
The train ran out of the grit and the chimneys when the last of the men got out, and between high sand-hills. In between the sand-hills, far away, there were cold gleams of sea.
Then the Captain shared between us a huge meat pie. He took it out of an oily cardboard box and pulled it into two parts with his hands and laid the pieces carefully on the Chinese sewing box. I felt interesting contradictions in my father. ‘This’, he said, ‘is a great pie. There are good meat pies. This is a great meat pie.’
It was Aunt Mary, the older sister, who told me he was dead, waiting very tall just inside my bedroom door until Aunt Frances had finished brushing and plaiting my hair. I don’t remember the words, only the white starched bow beneath Aunt Mary’s chin. Under her indoor hat her hair was silvery fair, and on her chin the bristles were silvery too. Behind her on a shelf was the Chinese work-box with the mandarin sitting on top. Its head slotted into a hole in its china shoulders and it nodded in rime to the up-and-down ribbon bow. A cold wind was blowing through the open bedroom window. A glassy, flashing, pitiless morning, the sea roaring.
I said (I think) ‘Can I go out now and see the hens?’ and ran past Aunt Mary into the yard. Through the diamonds of the chicken-wire the bow and the mandarin still bobbed and wagged. ‘It is so,’ they said. ‘It has occurred. It must be borne.’
The chickens hopped on and off their perches and talked to each other in long rusty sentences and I wound my fingers about in the wire. Then Aunt Frances came and took me indoors and gave me lemon jelly on the kitchen table—in the middle of the morning. The little green-faced woman watched from the landing window as we crossed the yard.
It was the light at first that was troublesome—the light and the space of the yellow house. Light flowed in from all sides and down from the enormous sky. In Cardiff and Fishguard there had been little sky and the only light was reflected from the rainy slates of the terrace across the street.
Here the wind knocked the clouds about over the hills and the marsh and the dunes and the sea, until the house seemed to toss like a ship. I remember that I clutched on to things a good deal.
For to a head not much higher than the door-knobs, the ceilings and cornices of the yellow house might have been up in another atmosphere. The distance between the loose-tiled hall and the foot of the staircase was a landscape, and the newel-post and the banisters had to be held tight. The drawing-room was a jungle of tables and rugs and foot-stools and glass-topped cabinets, and the dining-room a terror. People sat there, silent, at great distances from one another, their mouths chewing slowly round and round. My eyes were on a level with heavy rows of forks and spoons. The knives were for giants. Doom was in the dining-room.
Solemn grace was said before and after the food, so solemn that the sun took notice and never shone in, as it did in the rest of the house, even when it could be seen outside flashing cheerfully to Jutland.
I knew I felt all this when I was six because of the height of the privet hedge outside the window, a poor thing, withered by salt. It never grew higher than three feet in all its years, but then it blocked the view.
All these early mysteries are very clear—forks and privet; and looking throu
gh the side of the glass fruit-bowl and the tapping acorns high above the blinds.
Yet I cannot at all remember the day my father went away. Perhaps I never knew it, or perhaps he went away at night after I had gone to bed. Yet I remember very clearly indeed what happened the moment he had gone.
Bowls of water were placed on the kitchen table which had first been covered with newspapers and a lump of opaque soap like rancid butter was put out, and some black liquid in a bottle and a tremendous washing of hair began. I shrieked and Charlotte rubbed and poured and swirled about and said, “Well, she can shriek, anyway,’ and Mrs Woods—the knitted green woman—stood watching at the kitchen door. She said ‘Work it well into the roots.’
Then, after torrents of rinsing, I had to sit with my back to the table, the hair spread all over the newspapers—Charlotte began to tug and drag a comb through it, a comb with tiny teeth, like the backbone of a fish. A dover sole. I shrieked again and said some words from Cardiff. Charlotte made a gulping noise and Mrs Woods cried out like a parrot.
‘Are there any?’ asked Mrs Woods. ‘There baint,’ said Charlotte.
‘Are you sure? The Welsh are very dirty.’
‘Never a one.’
‘Would you know one, Charlotte?’
‘Aye, I would. They’re running with them down the cottages.’
Mrs Woods then went quickly away and I sat on the fender while Charlotte rubbed the hair all dry.
‘It’s not bad hair,’ she said. ‘There’s that to be said. It’ll be the clothes next.’
I remember the clothes. They came out of dark shops far away in a black town which may have been Middlesborough. Two thin ladies made more of them, in a house built for princesses—it had a spire and was at the end of a white terrace somewhere along by the sea after a slow ride in a horse and trap.
