Time to Be in Earnest

by P. D. James

  We had lunch there in a small agreeable café, with a view of the gardens, and then went on to see the Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Blundeston, notable for its round thin tower constructed in about 988. Two women from the village appeared while we were there. They took pleasure in telling us about the church. I said how glad we were that it wasn’t shut, and one of them replied that the police had advised that it should be and that one of their previous vicars had, indeed, closed it for a time but the congregation had insisted that it remain open. She said: “Why should we let vandals close our church when Hitler couldn’t do it?”

  I love visiting country churches although, not being a motorist, the opportunity to do so is limited. Usually now there is someone from the village keeping watch and ready and willing to talk about the church and its history. The pride and the love shown are appealing. The custodians are seldom young and I wonder how long this close personal interest will continue.

  On Friday we drove south to Thorpeness, that extraordinary black and white mock-Tudor holiday village created between the wars, a bastion of middle-class respectability and conformity incongruously facing the bleak wind-scoured beach and the untameable North Sea. For me it is peopled with the ghosts of 1930s nursemaids and small children in their floppy-brimmed hats. A good place to set a detective story? Certainly it provides an intriguing contrast between claustrophobic security and the contaminating disruption of violent crime, but the architecture is too uniform to stimulate the creative imagination. Then from Thorpeness to Aldeburgh, where we ate a picnic lunch at one of the wooden tables with benches outside the Moot Hall. It was warm and sunny, as it was for the whole of the visit.

  One of the delights of being with Tom and Mary is their knowledge of natural history. There isn’t a bird, butterfly, flower or tree which they can’t name. They spend much time travelling, often in some discomfort, in remote areas of Asia, searching for and photographing rare orchids. One, which Tom was the first to discover and describe, is named after him. At Covehithe we saw a butterfly that Tom said was called the Holly Blue and which he recognized as female because of the darker hue round its wings. It lives for just three days, and I wondered whether ours were the only human eyes that had actually seen it during that brief span. As Tom and Mary moved through the gate leading to the abbey ruin, the butterfly fluttered to a leaf close to me and rested motionless. It was one of those rare moments in which a fugitive beauty, briefly contemplated, untouchable, is experienced with a peculiar intensity, the sense of being a privileged spectator of a life which, however brief, is part of a mysterious whole.

  MONDAY, 11TH AUGUST

  I’m back again in London. Last night was swelteringly hot and I awoke this morning to find myself lying in a pool of sweat. The house is again being underpinned and the mess outside is appalling. The two young men on the job, who seem to work cheerfully in this awful heat, have dug deep holes at the front, side and back. Despite my offer of unlimited tea, surely necessary in this heat, they won’t come into the house—I imagine because the firm have a policy that they never do—but bring their own drinks with them. The house today looks particularly depressing and dilapidated. The cracks seem to have widened during the last few days as if the house has resigned itself to decrepitude. I shall have to wait several months after the underpinning is finished before any repairs and redecoration can be carried out. I long to see it restored to what it once was.

  I had lunch with Frances Fyfield at the Belvedere in Holland Park. It is always good to see Frances, whom I admire as a crime writer and value as a friend. Arriving early, I spent some time quietly walking round what must be one of London’s loveliest parks. I have been fortunate all my life to live only in beautiful and historic places, first Oxford, then Ludlow, then Cambridge, and finally London. I can’t remember when my parents moved from Oxford to Ludlow, but it was certainly before I went to school. I don’t think young children respond to natural beauty; people are more important than flowers and trees; but to live in Ludlow from the age of four to eleven meant that my eyes saw little of the world outside home which was without beauty, and this constant exposure to the delights of one of England’s loveliest towns must surely have left its legacy.

  Looking back on my early schooldays, they seem closer to the Victorian age than they do to the life of a primary school child today, and indeed they were closer, in time as well as in attitudes to teaching. I was taken to my first school, which I must have attended from the age of five, not by my mother, but by a boy little older than myself who lived nearby. My memory is of being lugged along at a furious pace by this reluctant but not unkind attendant. The schoolroom was large and square with a huge coal fire burning in winter, the fire surrounded by a high fire-guard. It was a room which came alive in memory when I read an account of the schoolroom at Lowood in Jane Eyre, although I am sure the two establishments had absolutely nothing else in common. There were no inside lavatories and I can distinctly recall the day in which I was sitting on one of the wooden seats in the outside shed when part of the plaster ceiling fell on my head. I was temporarily stunned by surprise—although certainly not hurt, since no one at home was ever told of the misadventure—but I sat there, my head covered in plaster, until one of the children, alerted by the noise, summoned a teacher. I can remember her gazing at me with an expression half-shocked, half-amused.

  We seldom went straight home after school. My small minder had a fertile and slightly morbid imagination (but who am I to complain?) and would lug me down to the river in the hope of seeing drowned bodies of which he seemed in daily expectation. We were disappointed, but I do remember being taken to see a man who had broken his arm. He was sitting in the back garden on a kitchen chair, nursing his arm and moaning, and we children gazed at him through the chink in the wooden fence in fascinated anticipation, although he was a very poor substitute for a drowned corpse.

  The two medical problems of the school were nits and ringworm, the second the more serious. Those afflicted would have their heads shaved and subsequently wore small cotton caps, a badge of shame, in which they looked like diminutive clowns. One compensation, however, was that girls with straight hair—regarded as an affliction in those days—frequently grew it with curls after the shaving.

  My second school, which I remember much more clearly, was the British School, a red-brick building on Old Street, fronted by an asphalt playground and iron railings. The school was named British not from patriotism or any necessity to distinguish it from alien establishments, of which in Ludlow there were none, but because it was one of the schools founded by the British Society, a voluntary and charitable organization established in 1840 to provide elementary education for the children of the poor. The children of the early nineteenth century would still have felt perfectly at home in it. And the name was not inappropriate. A map, permanently displayed in the largest double classroom, with its splurges of red—Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand—its small islands like splashes of blood in all the oceans of the world, enabled our teacher to point out that this was, in truth as well as legend, an empire on which the sun never set. Empire Day was a notable event celebrated with a march round the playground and a salute to the flag. The teaching was not jingoistic but we were imbued with a belief that the empire was beneficent and the rulers well-intentioned, a view which may have been simplistic but was probably no more damaging than the present belief of some young people I meet that everything that has gone wrong with the world in the past century is the fault of Britain.

  My generation’s early years were dominated by the 1914–18 war, a catastrophe which none of us were old enough to remember but which had scarred the lives of our parents’ generation and cast over our own a shadow of uncomprehended vicarious sadness, a universal grieving which reached its apogee on Armistice Day when, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the country would virtually come to a stop as we stood for the silence.

  I learned to read very young, certainly well be
fore I started school, and I can remember the day when it happened. My mother would buy a comic each week, Tiger Tim or The Rainbow, and would find time to read it to me. From the moment the comic was handed over, the waiting to hear it read was intolerable. And then, one morning, to my astonished delight, the curved and angular shapes under the pictures suddenly came together and made sense. From now on I would need no help. I could read. I must have been helped by the pictures and it was probably a matter of relating words to image. But it is one of my earliest memories of great happiness.

  The school had no library and I can remember few books except Piers Plowman’s History of England. History lessons were my joy. In memory they are a jumble of marvellous tales: myths, legends and facts, continents, centuries and characters blissfully muddled together so that I came to see them as a series of vivid pictures. Alfred brooding by the fire as the cakes blackened, a white pall of snow falling on the coffin of Charles I, Hannibal urging his elephants across the Alps, Julius Caesar falling in a welter of blood, Wolfe storming the heights of Quebec. There must have been some attempt at chronology since I clearly recall the Blue River of History which stretched along one wall on which we would stick cut-out figures of kings and queens, insert dates and draw pictures of the main events.

  I was happy at the British School. The Headmaster, Mr. Wynn (I think that is how the name was spelt), seems in retrospect to have been a remarkable teacher. He loved poetry and his choice was eclectic. We learned the poems by heart and I can still remember the poems of the Shropshire countryside, particularly A. E. Housman. We enjoyed the vigour and patriotic fervour of poems which today would, I fear, be regarded as politically incorrect: “Horatio Keeping the Bridge,” “Vitae Lampada,” “Drake’s Drum.” The first poem I was asked to read aloud to the class—I must have been about eight at the time—was “The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna.” I was torn between pride and embarrassment caused by my awareness when scanning the verses that the word “bayonet” was new to me and I could neither understand nor pronounce it.

  All the poems have remained favourites and I am sorry that children, no longer required to learn poetry by heart, are denied this storehouse of pleasure. The day began always with an act of worship and a hymn, although I have no memory of hymn books. I think the hymns were those we frequently sang in church so that the same ones recurred with somewhat monotonous frequency, sung in the sing-song childish voices of the Welsh border. Every morning throughout my school life I heard a reading from the King James Bible. There was, thank God, no Good News Bible, a version which is very bad news for anyone who cares for either religion or literature.

  My parents, ever restless, moved house four times during the few years we lived in Ludlow. The third house, well outside the town, was too large and expensive for my father’s income and we didn’t stay very long. It was called The Woodlands and stood alone in a beautiful garden which ran down to the River Teme. My sister and I walked to school each day carrying our lunch between us in a wicker basket. It was a long walk and I can remember one winter day when we both trudged, weeping rather desolately with the cold.

  I saw great poverty when I was a young child; poverty is not ameliorated by the beauty of its surroundings. There seems to be a belief that urban poverty is worse than rural poverty; I believe the reverse may be true. In cities there are more public places, more libraries, more refuges from the cold. A few of the children I went to school with were almost in rags. I can remember clearly one small boy—his name was George—with the pinched face of an adult, a similarity enhanced by a blob of white foam near his ear which reminded me of my father’s shaving soap. Little else but the child’s face was washed, and he came to school ill-shod and, I suspect, hungry. At one lesson he was very severely caned (the use of the cane, brought sharply across the palm of the hand, was fairly common) and howled with pain and perhaps a less focused misery. For the remainder of the lesson the male teacher was particularly kind to him, colluding with him in small jokes against the rest of us. Even as an eight-year-old I knew that this was because he was ashamed of his severity. From an early age I had this insight into adult motives and sometimes spoke uncomfortable truths aloud, a habit which caused my mother to describe me as a cynical child. I can’t have been an easy one, perhaps, nor a pleasant one. I sometimes regret that my insight into my own motives has been less acute.

  Despite deprivation we never saw a policeman at the school; there was no violence, nothing was ever stolen. What, indeed, was there to steal? It is difficult for people of my generation totally to accept the theory fashionable in the 1960s and still popular with some optimists that the main cause of criminality is deprivation. Deprivation is, of course, relative. The poor then had so much less, expected so much less, were satisfied with less. The inequalities and injustices of society were too readily accepted by the victims as well as by the more prosperous, but they were not constantly emphasized by television advertisements with their cunningly contrived celebrations of material success, nor were we children taught directly or by implication that because we had less, less was expected of us. But I remember George at the British School if I am ever tempted to believe that all was well with England in those years between the wars.

  A Victorian child of the same class—the Pooters’ daughter perhaps—received into our family would have felt immediately at home; a modern child, transported to a house without electricity, central heating, television, telephone or the use of a car, would feel himself banished to a dark age.

  The sitting-room of our first Ludlow house, in a small terrace near the river, was lit by an oil lamp which dominated the square central table. As the shadows lengthened I would watch my mother turn up the wick, draw the match along its narrow oil-soaked edge and gently lower the glass funnel. It was like an evening benison to see my siblings’ expectant faces glowing gently and warmly in the light. Our final house in Linney View was lit by gas. The wall-mounted lights were fitted with short chains which, when pulled, would activate the gas supply or turn it off. The gas-mantels were delicate thimble-shaped domes of what looked like starched muslin, and so fragile that they could be fractured even by the careless thrust of a taper. Most of my childhood errands were to buy new mantels for the gas lights.

  And the Victorian child would have felt familiar with our weekly rituals; the coke boiler lit every Saturday to provide hot water for the weekly bath, the clean clothes laid out for church on Sunday, the weekly administration of a purgative without regard to evidence of need, a prophylactic rather than a remedy; familiar, too, with the oddly named liberty bodice and with the itchy, wash-hardened discomfort of winter combinations.

  We only very rarely saw a doctor. Doctors in the 1920s had little more in their armoury than had their Victorian predecessors, but what they couldn’t offer in scientific medicine was balanced by the patient’s almost superstitious belief in the doctor’s authority over the disease. To call in the doctor was an admission that the illness was serious, family and folklore remedies had failed and the secular deity must be summoned; his fee, found with difficulty, was both a propitiation and a talisman. A child admitted to hospital never saw his mother until he was discharged, there being a belief that the presence of parents only upset child patients unnecessarily and disturbed hospital routine. My brother was admitted to hospital—I think because of a fistula—soon after we arrived in Ludlow, and on his return home called Mother “nurse” for weeks. There was a belief that intractable illness or vague ill-health were due to a focus of infection. Many adults spat out all their perfectly sound teeth into the receiving kidney-shaped bowl, while few middle-class children reached adolescence with tonsils and adenoids intact.

  Children need to play as they need air, and Ludlow was the ideal town for an imaginative child. If we had been given expensive toys or had been brought up with television, video recorders and computer games, I’m sure we would have spent as much time tapping away in front of a screen as does the modern child, but without these excit
ements we had to make our own amusements. The street, almost entirely free of cars, was open to us, as were the water meadows sloping to the Teme, the river and Whitcliffe above, the paths hewn into the rock which surrounds the castle and which, with an outcrop of shrubs and the occasional cave, provided the setting for imaginative play and the acting out of innumerable roles. We had no bicycles and, although I longed for a scooter, my father avoided this expense by his theory that a scooter was a dangerous indulgence since it resulted in one leg being permanently shorter than the other. Similarly bedside lamps were not provided on the grounds that reading in bed damaged the eyesight.

  At school, boys and girls were separated in the asphalt playground and the games we played there were less imaginative, more ritualistic and hierarchical. The two chief ones were skipping, usually accompanied by chanting, and hopscotch. A chalky stone would be used to mark out the hopscotch rectangle of six squares and we played by kicking a flat stone from square to square, sometimes diagonally, sometimes missing a square, or with other variations to test skill. It was important to find the right stone and, once found, it was jealously guarded. It needed to be flat but with rounded edges, smooth enough to slide easily but not so smooth that it skidded out of control.

  On Saturdays in summer we would be taken, or more often sent alone, to paddle in the Teme. Minnows were caught and brought home in jam-jars and their early, much-lamented deaths were followed by ceremonial burying in matchboxes with full choral service. I remember that playing church was one of our enthusiasms. As the eldest I was invariably the parson, draped in one of my mother’s old nightdresses, and indeed seniority established my right to the best role in any of our make-believe games.