After Bessie’s death, Chrissie Barron had bought all her puddings from a shop.
Afterword
This is a novel about my mother, Kathleen Marie Bloor. The epigraph is a poem by my daughter, Rebecca Swift. Neither Rebecca nor her brothers appear in this volume, and my brother and sisters have also been excised. The later parts of the story are entirely fictitious.
My father died in December 1982, and my mother shortly afterwards, in April 1984. After her death several friends—mostly novelist friends—suggested that I should try to write about her. Use your mother’s blood for ink, one of them urged me. So I tried, but it wasn’t easy. I think about my mother a great deal, uncomfortably. Night and day on me she cries. Maybe I should have tried to write a factual memoir of her life, but I have written this instead.
I encountered great difficulties. The worst was the question of tone. I find myself being harsh, dismissive, censorious. As she was. She taught me language. One way of escaping from this would have been through comedy. And my mother did often teeter on the brink of appearing as a figure from an Alan Bennett comedy—opinionated, provincial, ridiculous. But I do not have the talent for that kind of comedy, and my mother was not a comic character. She was not funny. She was a highly intelligent, angry, deeply disappointed and manipulative woman. I am not sure if I have been able to find a tone in which to create or describe her.
I recognize that I appear to betray a bias in favour of my father, and that I may not have been able to bring him to life. I find myself repeating that he was ‘a good man’. And so I believe he was.
The plot also presented difficulties. I knew something about the early lives of my parents, and drew on letters which my father wrote to his best friend. This correspondence began in their schooldays and continued through the period when my father was acting as travelling salesman for Drabble’s Sweets, through his years at Downing College, through the early years of his marriage and the birth of my elder sister, and through the war, when I and my younger sister were born. On my father’s death, that friend, also now dead, gave me these letters, and I think he would have wanted me to use them. They gave me many social details about raffia baskets and coffee sets and T. S. Eliot. So my descriptions of those early years are backed up by documentary evidence and by some research, though I have also filled out the record with invention. But the Drabble social background continues to mystify me. What are my father’s sisters doing on skis in the Alps in the 1930s? Is the photograph a studio fake? Where did the money come from? How much money was there? And what was the family of Leila Das doing in South Yorkshire? How did they get there? I could spend years trying to answer these questions. Maybe, one day, I will.
I have checked some, but not all of my mother’s stories. The trauma of her Tripos was, I believe, as she and I have described it. She often spoke of Miss Strachey, and she was taught by Dr Leavis: somewhere I have the reference he wrote for her when she began to apply for teaching posts. She admired Virginia Woolf, and in particular, curiously, Orlando, though she cannot have read this as early as she thought she did. Of course, she may have told different stories to my sisters and my brother. Each child has a different mother, as I believe Winnicott says somewhere.
I never visited Mexborough during my childhood, for my grandparents, unlike Chrissie’s, had moved away during the 1930s to run a bed and breakfast business on what was then the Great North Road. The first time I visited Mexborough was with my aunt, after my mother’s death. My mother hated Mexborough. I have not exaggerated her feelings towards Mexborough. She may have done, but I have not. My aunt liked the town, though she also moved away, to Doncaster, in the thirties, where she worked as a primary-school teacher. She inherited the bed and breakfast house on her parents’ death.
My aunt, as I write, is still alive. I have sanitized my account of the old people’s home where Aunt Dora lives. It isn’t as nice as that. Nor is she as content as I have made her appear. Minton’s alter ego, in the form of a small white dog, does not live with her, but is taken to visit her regularly, by neighbours whose kindness is beyond all praise.
I wrote this book to try to understand my mother better. I went down into the underworld to look for my mother, but I couldn’t find her. She wasn’t there.
It’s all very well, imagining a happy ending, imagining Faro Gaulden’s happy memory of a happy Christmas. It wasn’t like that. For moments, it seems to me that it might have been like that. If I try very hard, I can induce in myself a brief, unconvincing, unsustainable trance of happy memory. My mother did enjoy Christmas, and she did make good Christmas puddings. I didn’t, and I don’t. She wasn’t unrelentingly anxious and unhappy, as I have portrayed her. She had a capacity for enjoyment. I should have taken her across the Atlantic on a luxury liner. I tried, but I failed. I lacked Chrissie’s courage.
There is an underworld story from another mythology about a woman who wished to enter hell to seek for her loved one. Only the dead could enter hell, so she made herself as one of the dead. She rubbed herself with dead rat water in order to disguise herself with the smell of dead rat, and thus she was able to pass the guardians of the dead. I feel, in writing this, that I have made myself smell of dead rat, and I am not sure how to get rid of the smell. I cannot remember if the woman from the rat story was able to release her loved one from bondage.
I cannot sing, my mother could not sing, and her mother before her could not sing. But Faro can sing, and her clear voice floods the valley.
Reading Group Guide
1. What purpose, if any, is served by tracking “the Bawtrys back to prehistory, taking in on the way Bessie herself, and all her descendants and ancestors”? How might such an exercise affect the lives of Bessie, Chrissie, and Faro? How might a similar genealogical search affect you and your family?
2. Drabble writes of the young Bessie, “Something had set her apart, had implanted in her needs and desires beyond her station, beyond her class.” What is the “something” that sets Bessie apart? What needs and desires does she harbor that are beyond her station and class? How do “station and class” impact Drabble’s principal characters and each of us?
3. We are told that Bessie “was to despise her mother. That is the way it is with mothers and daughters.” To what degree might every daughter despise her mother—and every son, his father? To what extent do we all ignore our parents’ struggles and note only their shortcomings and defeats? How would you answer the later question, “Were all mothers a burden to their daughters, as fathers were to their sons”?
4. “The exodus from Breaseborough is part of our plot,” Drabble writes. How important in the novel are patterns of exodus, exile, and return? How would you explain the widespread impetus “to retrace these journeys”?
5. “Talent cracks the asphalt, talent will not stay underground,” Drabble writes, in reference to Breaseborough Grammar School’s best students. How is this illustrated in the novel? In what ways do individual characters “crack the asphalt” or otherwise rise from “underground,” or not?
6. What opportunities and prospects for personal advancement and independence are open to the women and men of Bessie’s, Chrissie’s, and Faro’s generations? To what extent are they determined or precluded by class, gender, family, and/or economic status? In what ways is the situation similar or different for adolescents and young adults today?
7. What are the role and importance of Dr. Robert Hawthorn’s state-of-the-art methods of DNA research? In what ways are the elements of his study relevant to our understanding of the lives of Bessie, Chrissie, and Faro? What is the “grand understanding” to which Hawthorn repeatedly refers? What might be the significance of our ability to trace matrilineal DNA descent and not patrilineal?
8. Dr. Hawthorn tells the residents of Breaseborough that “one of the most interesting riddles facing humanity lies not in the future but in the past. ‘How did we get here from there?’” Do you agree or disagree with his insistence that “where we come from is the mo
st interesting thing that we can know about ourselves”? To what extent do you think Chrissie and Faro might agree? How does the novel illustrate Dr. Hawthorn’s perspective?
9. In what ways does Bessie’s “nervous prostration” following the Easter party at Highcross House function as a metamorphosis from one phase of her life to another? To what extent does it represent the shedding of a life-form that has served its purpose and a transformation into a more advanced life-form? What other instances of metamorphosis do Bessie, Chrissie, Faro, and other characters experience?
10. We are told of Bessie, during her first term at Cambridge, “She seemed to be in control.” How important is it to the principal characters—and to you—to be in control of one’s life? In what ways is such control juxtaposed to determination of character and fate by genes, family history, society, landscape, and/or locale?
11. Drabble writes of Bessie at Cambridge: “She has escaped. Surely she has escaped.” Later we learn that for the teenaged Chrissie “getting away fast and far was her plan.” How important are the idea and actuality of “escape” to Bessie, Chrissie, Faro, Joe Barron, and others? To what degree can we escape our family, our upbringing, our pasts, and the personal character they shape? How is the desire for personal independence juxtaposed with inescapable aspects of one’s own and one’s family’s past?
12. In her first conversation with Peter Cudworth, Faro asks, “How could one ... believe that everything was genetically or environmentally determined, and at the same time that all mutation was random?” How would you answer Faro’s question? How does Drabble handle the linked themes of determinism and randomness? What is the relevance of each in the lives of the principal characters and in the evolutionary and social histories of Breaseborough and its families?
13. Drabble writes that Bessie’s illness “stretched back too far for [her children] to know its origins. It stretched back beyond old Ellen Bawtry ... The infection of habit, from generation to generation. Do these two think they can escape?” What is this “infection of habit”? How and why does it persist “from generation to generation”? To what extent do Chrissie and Robert, and Faro, escape it or succumb to it’
14. What is the importance of the various kinds and instances of reclamation, recovery, renewal, resurgence, and resurrection in the novel? How are these related to the theme of redemption? What do various characters and organizations try to reclaim or recover? Does Drabble provide an answer to the question: “If land and air may be reclaimed, may the dead live again?”
15. What methods of studying, attempting to understand, and attempting to recapture the past appear in the novel? With which character or characters is each associated? What results from the application of these methods, and what is revealed about individual, family, social, and cultural pasts?
16. Drabble refers to Joe Barron’s widening musical interests as “another example of successful adaptive preference formation.” What other instances of “adaptive preference formation” occur in the novel? How does such a process benefit an individual, group, or species? What do this concept and related occurrences have to do with the peppered moth of the title?
17. In what ways is the peppered moth and its natural history related to life in Breaseborough over the years and to the lives of Bessie, Chrissie, and Faro? Why does Faro’s account of the peppered moth appear three-quarters of the way through the novel? What significance and reverberations does it have here that it would not have had if presented earlier? How does the peppered moth, and the evolutionary processes it illustrates, provide a focus for the novel’s various themes?
The Peppered Moth Page 39