Nor did he want to see her go the way of his sisters. The Barron girls had fled far from Cotterhall, but their flight had partaken of desperation, and in Rowena’s case had ended in tragedy. He did not speak of them much to Robert and Chrissie, who had to piece the story together for themselves, as best they could.
Rowena Barron had at last gone on her cruise. She had saved her pennies, not for Jesus, but for herself, working for her father and her brother in that little wooden cubbyhole that was called her ‘office’. After years of plans and dreams she had booked herself and her friend Gertie Thomson on to their voyage to the Orient. But it had not worked out quite as expected. Somehow, mysteriously, the moment for departure to Cythera was already past. Rowena had been good-looking, in her early and late teens, but she had been endowed with that healthy, sudden passing beauty which blossoms and dies before it has time to mature. Rowena had grown thin and beaky, and her spirits and bounce had flattened. She had always, according to Ivy, been ‘man-mad’, and she proved this by embarking on a shipboard romance with a rotter from Cape Town, whom she was obliged to marry. She settled in Cape Town, bore a child and died of some illness or other—nobody could quite say what. None of the Barrons ever met the rotter. The rotter had thought Rowena had money, and Rowena had hoped the rotter had money, and as neither of them had much they ended up in a short marriage of mutual recrimination, culminating in early death. Rowena had not set a good example for Chrissie to follow.
Ivy, in contrast, had made a more successful job of emigrating. Her life in Cotterhall had been constricted, though she had tried to make the best of it: she had, for a while, joined ‘the fast set’ with speed-loving brother Phil, and had ridden a motorbike round the Yorkshire moors, but had given this up after a nasty accident. (One of her best friends was found dead in a ditch at the bottom of Stanage Edge.) Unlike Rowena, Ivy decided to avoid sex, and had set up house with a clever piano-playing young woman from Sheffield who gave piano lessons and, more rarely, concerts. Ivy worked in a tearoom as a waitress, and then took over as manageress of a small health-food shop which sold date slices, dried apricots, dried bananas, Fru-grains, rice crackers, Horlicks tablets and other delicacies. It did well during and immediately after the war, during the period of sweet rationing and sugar shortage.
Ivy, who had been shocked by the news of her sister Rowena’s death, had wanted to sail out to see her South African brother-in-law and her orphaned niece. She had a notion of rescuing the niece, of bringing her back to England. She was dissuaded. But the idea of escape increasingly attracted her. At this period, many were planning emigration to the colonies. With victory, many voted Labour, and then left the country, as did Ivy. (She was very proud to have a brother in Parliament, but felt she could not wait for the improvements he was sure to introduce.) She was able to emigrate more easily because she inherited a small legacy from her parents, both of whom had died in 1945, in Cotterhall, in their early seventies, within a few months of one another.
Pa Barron left the business to his son Bennett, and he left small legacies to Alfred and Ivy. He left nothing to Joe or Phil. (This caused trouble, though he had had his reasons.) Ivy decided to spend her windfall on a one-way passage to Australia. She would sail off for ever with her friend Pat, and make a new life for herself. All the Barrons apart from Joe—including Bessie Barron, who was not even a real Barron—were outraged by what they saw as alienation and appropriation of Barron money. Why should Pat Parker from Sheffield, whose friendship with Ivy had given rise to unpleasant gossip, be able to sail round the world on the hard-won profits of Barron Glass? (In fact, though none of the Barrons of that generation were ever to know this, Pat Parker from Sheffield had done nothing of the sort: she had a little nest egg of her own, and was happy to spend it on her shared cabin with Ivy, and to invest what was left of it, when they arrived, in a small market garden.)
Pat and Ivy sailed away in the spring of 1947, after one of the hardest and longest winters in living memory, to the warmth of the Antipodes. What did they talk about in their cabin, as they sailed southwards? We shall never know. They never came back. In England, that winter, snow lay banked up and grimed for months, and Chrissie, a school-trotting satchelled schoolgirl, forgot the natural contours of her hometown, and rediscovered them with surprise when at last the thaw came.
No wonder Pat and Ivy had fled this grim cold dirty rationed land. Joe Barron was to fly out to visit them, many years later, in the 1970s, much to the jealous disapproval of Bessie, and he found them happily settled and apparently content with their lot. They had good friends, and belonged to musical and literary societies. Pat played the piano, and Ivy wrote poems, which she published in the local press. They had not done badly. But he was not sure that he wanted his daughter Chrissie to sail away with a strange woman. And he certainly did not want her to waste herself on a gold-digging remittance man, as Rowena had done. Joe wanted his daughter to live at peace in her own land. He wanted a land fit for heroes, with council housing fit for heroes, but he also wanted a land fit for women. Fit for women such as his wife might have been, such as his daughter might yet be.
The discontent of women was festering and the smell of it spread.
Joe’s mother had not seemed discontented. A shy and kindly woman, a martyr to what would one day be labelled ‘adaptive preference formation’, she had never questioned the patriarchal authority and manners of her husband, nor his occasional outbursts of temper, nor his gloomy silences. Patiently she had stitched her glowing silks, and planted bulbs in her shrubbery, and made bland white sauces, and declared her delight in the meanest portion of chicken wing, and thought herself fortunate. Whereas Bessie, who had so much more, was full of bitterness and complaint. Times were changing. Where would it all end?
Bessie’s sister Dora did not seem discontented either. She had not proved as upwardly mobile as Bessie, nor had she acquired the status symbol of a husband, but in her own way she had done well for herself. She and Auntie Florrie had worked away at their dressmaking business both before and during the war, and had proved very adept at making a little rationed cloth go a long way. They unstitched and restitched, they remade and made over. Their services were always in demand. Auntie Florrie rented a little corner shop, and branched out into fancy goods. Before the war Auntie Florrie’s nephew Sam from the garage had taught Dora to drive, and she got her licence in 1935: when petrol rationing eased, Dora bought a little Morris car and travelled around the neighbourhood buying and selling. In a small way, but profitably. She even went as far as Rotherham and Sheffield and Doncaster and Northam. She became the agent for an insurance company, and sold policies through the haberdashery and fancy goods network. She bought National Savings Certificates, and put her money in a building society, and bought herself a little house in Swinton Road in Breaseborough, two streets away from her parents’ house in Slotton Road. This was considered odd of her, but not very odd. It was understood that Dora wanted her independence. It was also understood that she didn’t want to go too far way, in case she was needed. And anyway, Dora liked Breaseborough. It was her home. But then, she had low expectations, and low tastes. Dora was not refined. She was a simple, undemanding soul. A little workhorse, that’s how she described herself.
It seemed as natural for Dora to stay as it had seemed natural that Bessie should leave. She had plenty of friends there, when she was young, chiefly amongst the young unmarrieds—a couple of primary-school teachers, a gentleman’s tailor, a shop assistant from the department store, Sam the garage mechanic, Len the bicycle repairman and racing cyclist. It was a classless, unpretending little group. Why didn’t Dora marry, when she was so fond of babies? Nobody knew. She just didn’t. She wasn’t the marrying type. She didn’t dislike men—Sam and Len and the gentleman’s tailor were regular visitors—but she didn’t like the marrying type of man.
It never occurred to Robert and Chrissie that their parents might have stayed on in Cotterhall or Breaseborough, and that Joe Barron, given l
ess determination, might still have been working with his brother in his father’s glassworks. This scenario had never crossed their minds. The exodus from Breaseborough was the premise of their birth and being. Joe-and-Bessie were inconceivable, to them, as a married couple in Cotterhall or Breaseborough. Chrissie and Robert had been brought up to regard Breaseborough as a foreign country. Bessie herself never went there. She spoke of it with loathing. She despised her birthplace. She declared, to anyone who would listen, that she hated it and everything about it. It gave her the shudders. Breaseborough, for Bessie, was off the map. She had cut herself off from it for ever. She vowed she would never return.
Her parents, however, were allowed to come out of Breaseborough to visit her. Bert and Ellen were invited to come to stay for Christmas in the spacious Barron house in Hartley, where she boasted two spare bedrooms, and a downstairs cloakroom with a washbowl and a WC. And sister Dora was allowed to come too. Dora came more frequently to Hartley than the grandparents, and when they were little Robert and Chrissie were, as we have seen, very fond of her. It was Dora who took Chrissie to the dental hospital in Leeds when Chrissie broke off both her front teeth, and it was Dora who watched the nerve extraction and the drilling, and it was Dora who took Chrissie on follow-up visits for the fitting of the crowns. Bessie enjoyed her own illnesses, after her fashion, but she was squeamish about the illnesses of others: Dora didn’t like hospitals either, but she braced herself for the ordeal, as a good auntie should.
Bessie bossed Dora, and condescended to her, and told her off, and put her down, and criticized her, but she did not cast her off. Dora was useful.
Bessie had not quarrelled with her parents or her sister, as the second-generation Barrons had all quarrelled with one another. But she made the demarcations plain. They were kin, but they were different.
Bessie, it is clear, had serious problems with her attitude towards her origins. Bessie had suffered a good education and had risen in the world. Breaseborough Secondary School had taught her to despise Breaseborough town and Breaseborough people, and by extension she was obliged to despise her parents and her sister. This was a commonplace social problem in postwar England, where the English class system was at unacknowledged odds with the new welfare state, the Labour Party, and the egalitarian social optimism which Joe and Bessie Barron in principle represented. Many upwardly mobile families found themselves caught in similar contradictions. But Bessie, we suspect, suffered from an extreme form of contradiction. For Breaseborough Secondary School and Miss Heald had taught Bessie an exceptionally high opinion of herself. She was not just one of many bright young girls marching along the radiant way into the socialist future. She belonged to no cohort. She was singled out, elect.
Bessie had clung to this sense of election through illness, crisis, misgiving, the threat of failure. She believed in it. She believed in her own superiority. And on one level, her confidence in her own self-worth was so great that she believed that everything that belonged to her or was associated with her was special and remarkable. Her parents, her sister, even her despised birthplace must be remarkable, because they were hers. She shed on them a reflected glory.
This mind-set created an uneasy and unresolved conflict in her which may, we assume, have accounted for many of her apparent inconsistencies. (For an educated woman, proud of her rationality, she was stacked with inconsistencies.)
Auntie Dora thought that it would be nice if the children came to stay with her from time to time for a day or two, in her little house in Breaseborough, now they were getting to be a little older. Would Bessie let them come? Would the children like to come?
The children said they would like to go to stay, though nobody would have listened to them if they’d said they didn’t. They liked their auntie, and were eager to get away from home.
Bessie was torn by the proposal. Part of her longed to be rid of her children, who were a constant worry to her, even though she paid them little attention. But part of her feared that the shame and dirt of Breaseborough would infect them, and that Dora would enchant them and alienate them and turn them into the wrong kind of children.
It is a curious fact that Bessie, who prided herself on being exceptionally gifted at maternity, did not really like children. She quite liked babies, but she didn’t like children. Children were noisy, and quarrelsome, and mobile, and demanding. Her mother Ellen hadn’t liked children either, as both Bessie and Dora would testify. She preferred rattling along in the sidecar. Ellen, according to Bessie and Dora, hadn’t even liked babies. But maybe Bessie and Dora were bad witnesses. They wanted a conviction and they may have distorted the evidence. Ellen has never been called upon to answer the charge.
Bessie did indeed consider herself to be ‘exceptionally gifted at maternity’, but then she had a way of considering herself exceptionally gifted at everything she undertook. It was impossible even for those who knew her intimately to tell whether this high estimation of herself sprang from vanity, or insecurity, or from the high opinion of Miss Heald, or from her success in the educational system. For she was a success, and that should not be forgotten. The fact that she did nothing with that success may explain why she prided herself so much on maternity. Yet even that pride was deeply ambivalent. Granddaughter Faro, years later, was to recall her grandmother’s frequently reiterated lament that she had spent all the years of her prime ‘wiping babies’ bottoms’. This would have seemed merely a pardonable exaggeration had it not been for the venomous disgust with which those words ‘babies’ bottoms’ were always spat forth. Faro detected in this a deep dislike of her children and of bodily functions, but when Faro mentioned this interpretation to her own mother Chrissie, Chrissie looked at her blankly. She’d forgotten that particular phrase of complaint. Unlike so many others, it had failed to wound. It hadn’t struck home.
What else but maternity had Bessie Barron left to pride herself upon? The conditions of her life seemed to offer no other opportunities for pride. So she conquered the language and the technology of child-rearing, as she had conquered the language of Chaucer and of Marvell and the techniques of I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism. She taught herself all about Truby King, and sterilizing bottles, and formula feeds, and nappy rash, and birth weights, and Harrington squares, and terry towelling, and vaccinations. There was more to maternity in those days. You didn’t just go and buy the new brandname disposable nappies in a supermarket. You spent your time at the tub. You spent your time wiping babies’ bottoms. Oh yes. But that didn’t mean you liked it. Did it? Bessie didn’t seem to like it. And her two children, the fruits of her maternal gift, felt themselves to be a useless and unwanted byproduct of it, rather than its fulfillment.
Nevertheless, she was not entirely happy about letting them go, for they were her justification and her raison d’être. When they were gone, she was nobody. Perhaps she was afraid that her children would like Breaseborough? Would they like it too much? Would they try to hook her back into it, to drag her back?
One thing was clear: whatever suspicions and apprehensions she may have had about her sister, she couldn’t have been jealous of Dora’s single state, could she? A married woman had far, far higher status than a single one. Everyone knew that.
So the children do go and stay with Dora, from time to time. They keep in touch with Breaseborough through Dora. It is more than an ancestral memory for them. It is a real place. They know her house, and their Bawtry grandparents’ house. They are allowed to climb into Auntie Dora’s high bed with Trixie in the mornings, where she tells them stories. They do not visit the Barrons in Cotterhall, for the Barron grandparents are dead, and some kind of family feud has divided the rest of the Barrons. Auntie Dora never goes to Cotterhall. (Many years later, Dora will say to her great-niece Faro, ‘We never had much to do with Cotterhall people. We didn’t get involved with them.’)
Joe is pleased that Robert and Chrissie visit the old place from time to time, though, like Bessie, he rarely goes there himself. And he l
ikes to see little Chrissie kiss her fat old grandma, her whiskery old grandpa. Perhaps she will grow up to be a normal, healthy, happy, affectionate little girl, after all. Joe is beginning to dread the genetic trap.
Joe watched both his children with concern, when he was at home, and would from time to time attempt to defend them from the fallout of their mother’s erratically darkening temperament. (That beating, undertaken on Bessie’s behalf, had been highly uncharacteristic.) Robert gave less obvious cause for anxiety: he was serious, scholarly, a little introverted. He was sent to a conventional prep school, then to a minor Yorkshire public school, well out of his mother’s way. His progress reports were good. He plodded on, sharpening his critical faculties. His point hardened. Wastepaper baskets filled. He discarded, discarded. He was to become picky, pedantic. Even as a boy, he picked and pierced. He defended himself carefully, and protected his own core. Nobody could get near Robert.
Chrissie, in contrast, was emotional, female, flibbertigibbet. She veered and tacked and turned with the wind. She liked the wind. Like her uncle Phil Barron, she liked speed. She adored it. Yes, she took after the Barrons, not after the Cudworths and the Bawtrys, in her sporting skills. She could wack a rounders ball, serve an ace, dive off the top board and jump the long jump. She nearly killed herself when she was given her first two-wheel bicycle, a dashing little red Raleigh: she couldn’t resist freewheeling down from Sowerbrigg Tops at thirty miles an hour, and ended up in hospital with a concussion and a split knee. This taught her no lesson: as soon as she could get back on again, she did. She discovered riding, as middle-class suburban girls did in those days, and she loved it disproportionately: the wind in your face, the thunder of hooves, the rush, the lack of control. And she longed to ski. How she longed to ski! But here, her parents put their feet down. Skiing was expensive. In the fifties, when Chrissie was a girl, foreign travel was still rationed. Only the rich went off to ski. No, Chrissie could not join the school ski party.
The Peppered Moth Page 18