That Glimpse of Truth

by David Miller

  RASPBERRY JAM

  Angus Wilson

  Angus Wilson’s (1913–1991) writing has never truly been recognized for what it is: utterly and brilliantly English. He was born in Bexhill -on-Sea in 1913. He spent too much of his life reviewing, helping administer institutions (the British Museum, travelling for the British Council, teaching at the University of East Anglia) and died in near penury in Suffolk. The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot is a quiet masterpiece, as is Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, which should be made into a film.

  “HOW ARE YOUR funny friends at Potter’s Farm, Johnnie?” asked his aunt from London.

  “Very well, thank you, Aunt Eva,” said the little boy in the window in a high prim voice. He had been drawing faces on his bare knee and now put down the indelible pencil. The moment that he had been dreading all day had arrived. Now they would probe and probe with their silly questions and the whole story of that dreadful tea party with his old friends would come tumbling out. There would be scenes and abuse and the old ladies would be made to suffer further. This he could not bear, for although he never wanted to see them again and had come, in brooding over the afternoon’s events, almost to hate them, to bring them further misery, to be the means of their disgrace would be worse than any of the horrible things that had already happened. Apart from his fear of what might follow he did not intend to pursue the conversation himself, for he disliked his aunt’s bright patronizing tone. He knew that she felt ill at ease with children and would soon lapse into that embarrassing “leg pulling” manner which some grown-ups used. For himself, he did not mind this but if she made silly jokes about the old ladies at Potter’s Farm he would get angry and then Mummy would say all that about his having to learn to take a joke and about his being highly strung and where could he have got it from, not from her.

  But he need not have feared. For though the grown-ups continued to speak of the old ladies as “Johnnie’s friends”, the topic soon became a general one. Many of the things the others said made the little boy bite his lip, but he was able to go on drawing on his knee with the feigned abstraction of a child among adults.

  “My dear,” said Johnnie’s mother to her sister, “you really must meet them. They’re the most wonderful pair of freaks. They live in a great barn of a farmhouse. The inside’s like a museum, full of old junk mixed up with some really lovely things all mouldering to pieces. The family’s been there for hundreds of years and they’re madly proud of it. They won’t let anyone do a single thing for them, although they’re both well over sixty, and of course the result is that the place is in the most frightful mess. It’s really rather ghastly and one oughtn’t to laugh, but if you could see them, my dear. The elder one, Marian, wears a long tweed skirt almost to the ankles, she had a terrible hunting accident or something, and a school blazer. The younger one’s said to have been a beauty, but she’s really rather sinister now, inches thick in enamel and rouge and dressed in all colours of the rainbow, with dyed red hair which is constantly falling down. Of course, Johnnie’s made tremendous friends with them and I must say they’ve been immensely kind to him, but what Harry will say when he comes back from Germany, I can’t think. As it is, he’s always complaining that the child is too much with women and has no friends of his own age.”

  “I don’t honestly think you need worry about that, Grace,” said her brother Jim, assuming the attitude of the sole male in the company, for of the masculinity of old Mr Codrington their guest he instinctively made little. “Harry ought to be very pleased with the way old Miss Marian’s encouraged Johnnie’s cricket and riding; it’s pretty uphill work, too. Johnnie’s not exactly a Don Bradman or a Gordon Richards, are you, old man? I like the old girl, personally. She’s got a bee in her bonnet about the Bolsheviks, but she’s stood up to those damned council people about the drainage like a good ’un; she does no end for the village people as well and says very little about it.”

  “I don’t like the sound of ‘doing good to the village’ very much,” said Eva, “it usually means patronage and disappointed old maids meddling in other people’s affairs. It’s only in villages like this that people can go on serving out sermons with gifts of soup.”

  “Curiously enough, Eva old dear,” Jim said, for he believed in being rude to his progressive sister, “in this particular case you happen to be wrong. Miss Swindale is extremely broadminded. You remember, Grace,” he said, addressing his other sister, “what she said about giving money to old Cooper, when the rector protested it would only go on drink – ‘You have a perfect right to consign us all to hell, rector, but you must allow us the choice of how we get there.’ Serve him damn well right for interfering too.”

  “Well, Jim darling,” said Grace, “I must say she could hardly have the nerve to object to drink – the poor old thing has the most dreadful bouts herself. Sometimes when I can’t get gin from the grocer’s it makes me absolutely livid to think of all that secret drinking and they strange silences and sudden tears, and, my dear, the awful nightmares he has! About a fortnight ago, after he’d been at tea with the Miss Swindales, I don’t know whether it was something he’d eaten there, but he made the most awful sobbing noise in the night. Sometimes I think it’s just temper, like Harry. The other day at tea I only offered him some jam, my best home-made raspberry too, and he just screamed at me.”

  “You should take him to a child psychologist,” said her sister.

  “Well, darling, I expect you’re right. It’s so difficult to know whether they’re frauds, everyone recommends somebody different. I’m sure Harry would disapprove too, and then think of the expense … You know how desperately poor we are, although I think I manage as well as anyone could …” At this point Mr Codrington took a deep breath and sat back, for on the merits of her household management Grace Allingham was at her most boring and could by no possible stratagem be restrained.

  Upstairs, in the room which had been known as the nursery until his eleventh birthday, but was now called his bedroom, Johnnie was playing with his farm animals. The ritual involved in the game was very complicated and had a long history. It was on his ninth birthday that he had been given the farm set by his father. “Something a bit less babyish than those woolly animals of yours,” he had said, and Johnnie had accepted them, since they made in fact no difference whatever to the games he played; games at which could Major Allingham have guessed he would have been distinctly puzzled. The little ducks, pigs and cows of lead no more remained themselves in Johnnie’s games than had the pink woollen sheep and green cloth horses of his early childhood. Johnnie’s world was a strange compound of the adult world in which he had always lived and a book world composed from Grimm, the Arabian Nights, Alice’s adventures, natural history books and more recently the novels of Dickens and Jane Austen. His imagination was taken by anything odd – strange faces, strange names, strange animals, strange voices and catchphrases – all these appeared in his games. The black pig and the white duck were keeping a hotel; the black pig was called that funny name of Granny’s friend – Mrs Gudgeon-Rogers. She was always holding her skirt tight round the knees and warming her bottom over the fire – like Mrs Coates, and whenever anyone in the hotel asked for anything she would reply, “Darling, I can’t stop now. I’ve simply got to fly,” like Aunt Sophie, and then she would fly out of the window. The duck was an Echidna, or Spiny Anteater who wore a picture hat and a fish train like in the picture of Aunt Eleanor; she used to weep a lot, because, like Granny when she described her games of bridge, she was “vulnerable” and she would yawn at the hotel guests and say, “Lord I am tired,” like Lydia Bennet. The two collie dogs had “been asked to leave,” like in the story of Mummy’s friend Gertie who “got tight” at the Hunt Ball, they were going to be divorced and were consequently wearing “corespondent shoes”. The lady collie who was called Minnie Mongelheim kept on saying, “That chap’s got a proud stomach. Let him eat chaff,” like Mr F’s Aunt in Little Dorrit. The sheep, who always played the part of a bore, kept on and on ta
lking like Daddy about “leg cuts and fine shots to cover”; sometimes when the rest of the animal guests got too bored the sheep would change into Grandfather Graham and tell a funny story about a Scotsman so that they were bored in a different way. Finally the cat who was a grand vizier and worked by magic would say, “All the ways round here belong to me,” like the Red Queen, and he would have all the guests torn in pieces and flayed alive until Johnnie felt so sorry for them that the game would come to an end. Mummy was already saying that he was getting too old for the farm animals: one always seemed to be getting too old for something. In fact the animals were no longer necessary to Johnnie’s games for most of the time now he liked to read and when he wanted to play games he would do so in his head without the aid of any toys, but he hated the idea of throwing things away because they were no longer needed. Mummy and Daddy were always throwing things away and never thinking of their feelings. When he had been much younger Mummy had given him an old petticoat to put in the dustbin, but Johnnie had taken it to his room and hugged it and cried over it, because it was no longer wanted. Daddy had been very upset. Daddy was always being upset at what Johnnie did. Only the last time that he was home there had been an awful row, because Johnnie had tried to make up like old Mrs Langdon and could not wash the blue paint off his eyes. Daddy had beaten him and looked very hurt all day and said to Mummy that he’d “rather see him dead than grow up a cissie”. No, it was better not to do imitations oneself, but to leave it to the animals.

  This afternoon, however, Johnnie was not attending seriously to his game, he was sitting and thinking of what the grown-ups had been saying and of how he would never see his friends, the old ladies, again, and of how he never, never wanted to. This irrevocable separation lay like a black cloud over his mind, a constant darkness which was lit up momentarily by forks of hysterical horror, as he remembered the nature of their last meeting.

  The loss of this friendship was a very serious one to the little boy. It had met so completely the needs and loneliness which are always great in a child isolated from other children and surrounded by unimaginative adults. In a totally unselfconscious way, half-crazy as they were and half-crazy even though the child sensed them to be, the Misses Swindale possessed just those qualities of which Johnnie felt most in need. To begin with they were odd and fantastic and highly coloured, and more important still they believed that such peculiarities were nothing to be ashamed of, indeed were often a matter for pride. “How delightfully odd,” Miss Dolly would say in her drawling voice, when Johnnie told her how the duckbilled platypus had chosen spangled tights when Queen Alexandra had ordered her to be shot from a cannon at Brighton Pavilion. “What a delightfully extravagant creature that duckbilled platypus is, Caro Gabriele,” for Miss Dolly had brought back a touch of Italian here and there from her years in Florence, whilst in Johnnie she fancied a likeness to the angel Gabriel. In describing her own dresses, too, which she would do for hours on end, extravagance was her chief commendation; “as for that gold and silver brocade ball dress,” she would say and her voice would sink to an awed whisper, “it was richly fantastic.” To Miss Marian, with her more brusque, masculine nature, Johnnie’s imaginative powers were a matter of far greater wonder than to her sister and she treated them with even greater respect. In her bluff, simple way like some old-fashioned religious army officer or overgrown but solemn schoolboy, she too admired the eccentric and unusual. “What a lark!” she would say, when Johnnie told her how the Crown Prince had slipped in some polar bears dressed in pink ballet skirts to sing “Ta Ra Ra boomdeay” in the middle of a boring school concert which his royal duties had forced him to attend, “What a nice chap he must be to know.” In talking of her late father, the general, whose memory she worshipped and of whom she had a never-ending flow of anecdotes, she would give an instance of his warm-hearted but distinctly eccentric behaviour and say in her gruff voice, “Wasn’t it rum? That’s the bit I like best.” But in neither of the sisters was there the least trace of that self-conscious whimsicality which Johnnie had met and hated in so many grown-ups. They were the first people he had met who liked what he liked and as he liked it.

  Their love of lost causes and their defence of the broken, the worn out and the forgotten met a deep demand in his nature, which had grown almost sickly sentimental in the dead, practical world of his home. He loved the disorder of the old eighteenth-century farm house, the collection of miscellaneous objects of all kinds that littered the rooms, and thoroughly sympathized with the sisters’ magpie propensity to collect dress ends, feathers, string, old whistles and broken cups. He grew excited with them in their fights, to prevent drunken old men being taken to workhouses and cancerous old women to hospitals, though he sensed something crazy in their constant fear of intruders, bolsheviks and prying doctors. He would often try to change the conversation when Miss Marian became excited about spies in the village, or told him of how torches had been flashing all night in the garden and of how the vicar was slandering her father’s memory in a whispering campaign. He felt deeply embarrassed when Miss Dolly insisted on looking into all the cupboards and behind the curtains to see, as she said, “if there were any eyes or ears where they were not wanted. For, Caro Gabriele, those who hate beauty are many and strong, those who love it are few.”

  It was, above all, their kindness and their deep affection which held the love-starved child. His friendship with Miss Dolly had been almost instantaneous. She soon entered into his fantasies with complete intimacy, and he was spellbound by her stories of the gaiety and beauty of Mediterranean life. They would play dressing-up games together and enacted all his favourite historical scenes. She helped him with his French, too, and taught him Italian words with lovely sounds; she praised his painting and helped him to make costume designs for some of his “characters”. With Miss Marian, at first, there had been much greater difficulty. She was an intensely shy woman and took refuge behind a rather forbidding bluntness of manner. Her old-fashioned military airs and general “manly” tone, copied from her father, with which she approached small boys, reminded Johnnie too closely of his own father. “Head up, me lad,” she would say, “shoulders straight.” Once he had come very near to hating her, when after an exhibition of his absentmindedness she had said, “take care, Johnnie head in the air. You’ll be lost in the clouds, me’ lad, if you’re not careful.” But the moment after she had won his heart for ever, when with a little chuckle she continued, “Jolly good thing if you are, you’ll learn things up there that we shall never know.” On her side, as soon as she saw that she had won his affection, she lost her shyness and proceeded impulsively to load him with kindnesses. She loved to cook his favourite dishes for him and give him his favourite fruit from their kitchen garden. Her admiration for his precocity and imagination was open-eyed and childlike. Finally they had found a common love of Dickens and Jane Austen, which she had read with her father, and now they would sit for hours talking over the characters in their favourite books.

  Johnnie’s affection for them was intensely protective, and increased daily as he heard and saw the contempt and dislike with which they were regarded by many persons in the village. The knowledge that “they had been away” was nothing new to him when Mr Codrington had revealed it that afternoon. Once Miss Dolly had told him how a foolish doctor had advised her to go into a home, “for you know, caro, ever since I returned to these grey skies my health has not been very good. People here think me strange, I cannot attune myself to the cold northern soul. But it was useless to keep me there, I need beauty and warmth of colour, and there it was so drab. The people, too, were unhappy crazy creatures and I missed my music so dreadfully.” Miss Marian had spoken more violently of it on one of her “funny” days, when from the depredations caused by the village boys to the orchard she had passed on to the strange man she had found spying in her father’s library and the need for a high wall round the house to prevent people peering through the telescopes from Mr Hatton’s house opposite. “They�
��re frightened of us, though, Johnnie,” she had said, “I’m too honest for them and Dolly’s too clever. They’re always trying to separate us. Once they took me away against my will. They couldn’t keep me, I wrote to all sorts of big pots, friends of father’s, you know, and they had to release me.” Johnnie realized, too, that when his mother had said that she never knew which was the keeper, she had spoken more truly than she understood. Each sister was constantly alarmed for the other and anxious to hide the other’s defects from an un-understanding world. Once when Miss Dolly had been telling him a long story about a young waiter who had slipped a note into her hand the last time she had been in London, Miss Marian called Johnnie into the kitchen to look at some pies she had made. Later she had told him not to listen if Dolly said “soppy things” because being so beautiful she did not realize that she was no longer young. Another day when Miss Marian had brought in the silver-framed photo of her father in full dress uniform and had asked Johnnie to swear an oath to clear the general’s memory in the village, Miss Dolly had begun to play a mazurka on the piano. Later, she too had warned Johnnie not to take too much notice when her sister got excited. “She lives a little too much in the past, Gabriele. She suffered very much when our father died. Poor Marian, it is a pity perhaps that she is so good, she has had too little of the pleasures of life. But we must love her very much, caro, very much.”

  Johnnie had sworn to himself to stand by them and to fight the wicked people who said they were old and useless and in the way. But now, since that dreadful teaparty, he could not fight for them any longer, for he knew why they had been shut up and felt that it was justified. In a sense, too, he understood that it was to protect others that they had to be restrained, for the most awful memory of all that terrifying afternoon was the thought that he had shared with pleasure for a moment in their wicked game.