by Diana Athill
Alive, Alive Oh!
And Other Things
That Matter
DIANA ATHILL
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
Independent Publishers Since 1923
New York • London
For Phil and Annabel, with love
and endless gratitude
Contents
Introduction
My Grandparents’ Garden
Post-War
‘Oh, tell me, Gentle Shepherd, where . . .’: Thoughts on the attempted revolution in Trinidad and Tobago
Alive, Alive Oh!
This Bit Ought Not to be True
The Decision
A Life of Luxuries
Lessons
Beloved Books
Dead Right
What Is
Acknowledgements
Introduction
‘Sometimes I sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits’: I have forgotten who it is who is supposed to have said that, but it is a good description of a state quite often observed in a retirement home, and considered pitiable. Disconcertingly, I recently realized that I myself (not often, just now and then) might say those very words if someone asked me what I was doing. It is not a welcome thought, but less dreadful than it might be because I now know from experience that the state is not necessarily pitiable at all. It is even rather pleasant – or it can be. That probably depends on the nature of the person sitting. To me it has been, because the thinking turns out to be about events in the past which were enjoyable, and when my mind relaxes itself it is those same events which float in and out of it.
Until about two months ago, those events included people, usually men. I talked about it the other day with someone who is also in her nineties, though not so far into them as I am, and she said, ‘Yes, of course, men. What I do when I’m waiting to fall asleep is run through all the men I ever went to bed with,’ whereupon we both laughed in a ribald way, because that is exactly what I did too. It cheered me up to learn that I had not been alone in indulging in this foolishness.
But then something odd happened. The things floating out of the past did often still include events which involved men, but just as often, and just as pleasurably, they were images of places and objects: all the most beautiful places and things that I once experienced.
About halfway through my seventies I stopped thinking of myself as a sexual being, and after a short period of shock at the fact, found it very restful. To be able to like, even to love, a man without wanting to go to bed with him turned out to be a new sort of freedom. This realization was extraordinary. It was like coming out onto a high plateau, into clear, fresh air, far above the antlike bustle going on down below me. It was almost like becoming another sort of creature. Well, I had in fact become another sort of creature: I had become an Old Woman! And to my surprise, I don’t regret it. In the course of the ninety-seven years through which I have lived I have collected many more images of beautiful places and things than I realized, and now it seems as though they are jostling to float into my mind.
For example: because (I suppose) it will soon be May, I have just caught the scent of bluebells in my room. Once a booksellers’ conference took me and some colleagues to Yorkshire, near Fountain’s Abbey. An energetic colleague said to me, ‘Let’s get the hotel to call us at 5 o’clock tomorrow morning, so that we can nip out and have a good look at the Abbey before the day begins.’ Never an early riser, I was at first appalled, then felt ashamed of myself and agreed, so we did it, and the Abbey was indeed very lovely, standing there in the silent and delicate mistiness of an early morning in May; but even more magical was the nearby woodland sloping down to the river, carpeted with bluebells which were responding to the rising sun by releasing a great wave of scent – a wave more powerful than I’d known their flowers could possibly produce. The little new leaves on the branches above them were that first green, which looks as though made by light, and which will be gone in a day or two, and blackbirds had just started to sing. Those few minutes in that wood were so piercingly beautiful that I ought not to be surprised at their still being with me.
Venice is the source of many more such memories – the special greenness of its water, the way rippling reflections pattern its walls, facade after facade, painting after painting that stop one in one’s track – oh, how hopeless it is to try to put paintings into words. There are so many paintings which turn the ‘I’ into ‘eye’, take you right out of consciousness of self, and make you see, when you leave their presence, that everything has become more alive. All of Italy always seems to be waiting there to over-whelm me with its acute pleasures, so that dismal news of its political squalor becomes unbearable – although I’m sure that if I were able to go there again, my tourist-eye view of it would soon obliterate all but its art, its architecture, its olive trees, its cypresses. And surely its food would still taste like it ought to taste?
Food: in Tobago, friends once drove me to a little almost-round bay where forest came right down to the water’s edge, and there we swam and lay on the sand drinking rum and grapefruit juice (as my hostess said, all that fruit juice surely made it very good for you) until their motor boat came puttering into the bay piloted by the island’s only happily sea-going man – Joe was his name – who had been fishing as he came, carrying with him a big black iron pot and a chest containing their collection of spices. On that island surrounded by fish-filled ocean most people ate nothing but salt-dried fish – you rarely saw a boat. My friends found that absurd, so discovered Joe, bought him the boat, and every evening jeeped down to the little jetty under their house to meet him, unload his catch, and drive it slowly up the hill while they announced the arrival of fresh fish by blowing a conch (such an ancient and mournful sound). And out of the darkness came silent women, to buy their very cheap and delicious suppers. Which, if they were anything like our lunch that day . . . No, they probably were a little less good, because much of that wonderful fragrance which came wafting along the beach from the crackling fire over which Joe was stirring the big black pot was the result of well-chosen spices. The fish he cooked for us was easily the most beautiful meal I have ever eaten. Or ever will eat (alas!).
Other beautiful things? Oh yes, the Folk Museum at Santa Fe. The words ‘folk museum’ bode ill, suggesting rough brown pottery, more worthy than seductive. But folk produce much that is not brown (the Rio carnival for example), and the stuff in this museum was collected from all over the world by a man of the theatre, a master of the art of Display, which makes it a splendiferous palace of colour and fantasy in which you are soon running mad in your attempt to see everything, and there is so much that it’s impossible to do that but you end up feeling dizzy with joy. To go to Santa Fe without visiting that museum would be a grave mistake.
And closer to home, the landscaping at Kenwood, contrived by Repton, matured to match what must have been his dream, and perfectly preserved: an exquisite prospect of green parkland sweeping down to water with woodland beyond, and a graceful bridge precisely where it ought to be. No other city has a romantic landscape so lovely, still there to soothe the spirits of innumerable Londoners, including me.
Looking at things is never time wasted. If your children want to stand and stare, let them. When I was marvelling at the beauty of a painting or enjoying a great view it did not occur to me that the experience, however intense, would be of value many years later. But there it has remained, tucked away in hidden bits of my mind, and now out it comes, shouldering aside even the most passionate love affairs and the most satisfying achievements, to make a very old woman’s idle days pleasant instead of boring. And giving me this book, of memories, thoughts and reflections, which does – roughly – add up to being a report on what living for ninety-seve
n years has taught one rather lucky old woman.
April 2015
Highgate, London
My Grandparents’ Garden
Ditchingham Hall, to which this garden belongs, is in Norfolk: an early Georgian house of red brick, which was bought by my great-grandfather and enlarged by my grandfather, who reactivated the old kiln where the bricks for the house had been made. Georgian bricks were smaller than modern ones. Gramps had the bricks for the extension of the house made the same size as the old ones, as well as of the same clay, so the join between old and new, still perceptible if you knew where to look when I was a child, has now become invisible. The house looks exactly as though it was originally built the size it now is.
When I was a child, in the 1920s and 1930s, the garden was looked after by scrawny, bearded Mr Wiseman – so like Beatrix Potter’s Mr McGregor that they might have been brothers – with two men under him. It was large, much of it sloping slightly down from the house (more steeply so towards the lake), and it didn’t exist only for ornamental purposes, but also to support the house. As well as lawns, shrubberies and a rose-garden there were stables, barns, pigsties, potting sheds and glasshouses. Because it was a pre-Jekyll garden, the rose beds were the only flower beds except for those for picking, tucked away in the kitchen garden. The glasshouses were the vinery, the nectarine house, the melon and cucumber house, and the big one full of colour, which was called Gran’s greenhouse and was for the flowers in pots which came into the drawing room. And there may have been another small one behind Gran’s, presumably for propagation.
The parts of the garden were distinct. There was the terrace with its view over the front park and lake, onto which the library opened from a door which used to be the house’s front door before my grandfather changed things round. The terrace felt more like house than garden because one stepped out onto it so easily, and after breakfast Gran used to sit on its stone steps while she brushed Lola, her poodle. It was a place for civilized behaviour, where we interacted with our grown-ups more than in most places. The urns that stood at intervals on its wall had been brought back from Italy by Gramps, and small pink roses, with a lot of heavily scented honeysuckle, clambered over the walls – on summer evenings, through the bedroom windows over looking the terrace there used to come delicious waves of honeysuckle. At one corner of the terrace a path led off along the side of the house to the big shrubbery that sloped down to the stackyard, where the outdoor privy intended for the men servants was concealed. After breakfast Gramps would tuck The Times under his arm and proceed in a stately way to that privy, which he happened to prefer at that time of day, and if you noticed him going past a window you must pretend you hadn’t. (I’m not sure if that is a memory of my own or one handed down by a cousin six years older than I am who knew things from before I was born.) At the terrace’s other end, round the corner on the gravel sweep leading to the front door, was the cedar tree. There were other cedars, but this was the cedar tree, magnificent and surely everlasting, which gave the house’s front view its beauty. (Of course nothing is ‘everlasting’. Eventually the cedar’s roots began to threaten the house’s stability, so it had to go.)
Beyond the gravel stretched the lawns, the area for hospitality, which included the Mound, an oddly unnecessary little Edwardian feature which small children liked to roll down, but which had no other conceivable purpose, and, opposite the front door, the tennis courts, with two handsome cedars beyond and the Spreading Tree on the far right. The Spreading Tree must have been a very early Victorian, or perhaps even Georgian, folly – it was a larch, with a trunk stout enough to indicate considerable age. At the height of a tall man it had been fiercely trained to grow sideways in all directions (how this was done, God knows), supported where necessary by posts, so that it had ended up looking like a large, feathery green table, perfect for climbing into because its flattened and intertwined branches provided several comfortable hammocky places where you could lie reading, unseen by anything but a passing bird.
The lawn tapered off to the right, separated from the park by inconspicuous iron railings. Nowadays there is a beautiful herbaceous border between the lawn and the shrubbery, but in my childhood there was a gravel path, with a summer house tucked into the shrubbery and Gran’s rose garden on the lawn side. The rose garden consisted of six, or perhaps eight, long narrow beds, each containing a different kind of tea rose, with between them pillars swathed in climbing roses. The rose garden was the place where Gran, who knew a great deal about gardening, actually got her hands on it. Near a back door of the house was a small room called the Flower Room because vases were kept and flowers were arranged there (and wet dogs were dried off). In it Gran kept her leather gauntlets, secateurs, trowel and a big watering can with a long brass syringe. At the first sight of a greenfly that can was filled with a mixture of water and soft soap, and out she went to give the roses a good drench. No chemical ever touched them, and they were always radiantly healthy. I think Gran pruned them, too – all her daughters grew up to be skilled pruners.
The part of the shrubbery next to the Mound was shaded by a tree as splendid in its way as the cedar: a glorious great beech. Beeches, alas, are comparatively short-lived trees. Many of them were planted in the park and garden, all at the same time during the eighteenth century when the grounds were first laid out, and they really were the glory of the park (though no individual tree was more splendid than this one, so near the house) . . . and now: all gone, not because of anyone’s decision, just because of their age. We used to have tea under that tree, and once we acted a play there, the first play I ever was in. I think I was a mushroom – not a speaking part, so I can’t have forgotten my lines, but I do have a dim sad little memory of having to be forgiven for getting something wrong – perhaps the mushroom had hopped about. Which didn’t prevent me from loving that tree so much that a few years later I stood underneath it trying passionately to will my ghost to haunt that place after I was dead.
My grandfather’s extension of the house had made its ground-plan U-shaped instead of square. Every spring six big pots of fuchsias were set out in the space between the wings. The back door of the original house was never used. ‘Our’ back door was in the wing on the left (as you looked back at the house). Beside it were hung mackintoshes and several hooded loden cloaks, which could be used by anyone, as could the several pairs of ‘jemimas’ standing in a row beneath them. Jemimas, which I’ve never seen or heard of elsewhere, were clumsy overshoes made of waterproofed felt, fastening over the instep with a latchet. Galoshes were considered sissy, whereas jemimas, although they looked much more old-womanish, were perfectly acceptable on manly feet. The last door into the house in the other wing led into the laundry, which once a week became a quite alarming steamy hell when an old woman called Mrs Rayner came to do the house’s washing in an enormous copper. Some of it was hung to dry on racks on the floor above the copper, but most of it dried on the bleach, which was a feature of most large houses.
The bleach was a grassy space slightly larger than a tennis court where linen was hung or spread to be whitened by sunlight. Ours was sheltered from the wide gravel way down to the stables by a tall and solid yew hedge. At the bleach’s end were the kennels, so-called in spite of the fact that no dog was ever kept in them. When my cousin Pen and I were respectively about twelve and ten, we kept our goats in the kennels, or rather we milked them and put them to bed there. All day they were tethered out of doors in places carefully chosen by us for their lushness. We had goats because I was supposed for a time to be consumptive, or nearly so (a false alarm), and cow’s milk was thought to be the cause of it, which it well might have been in those days. The scare was one for which I was grateful: because of it I spent a whole year living with Gran rather than just visiting her frequently as the rest of the family did. Living there, and not having to do lessons: my idea of pure heaven, and at that age a year seems like for ever. Apart from a few setbacks, I have been lucky all my life, and that unforgettab
le year was the start of it.
The stables came next – or rather the top stables, built of the same brick as the house, and sedately overlooking a small lawn round which the back drive swirled. The first door into the stables led to the room where the house’s electricity was made, too mystifying to be familiar. Next came the harness room, Seeley’s stronghold. He had been my great-grandfather’s coachman, so he went on being called coachman rather than groom all his life. When my great-grandparents came to Norfolk from Yorkshire, Seeley rode the two grey carriage horses all the way down, so I suppose my great-grandmother’s brougham must have been purchased after the move. There were two stalls and one big loose box in the stable, the big box being Susan’s. She was the smart little black hackney mare who pulled Gramps’s dog cart and covered the twelve miles to Norwich within an hour. When they reached Norwich Gramps would stop at a respectable pub on its outskirts, where Susan was well looked after while he walked about his business in the city. The two stalls were usually inhabited by hunters belonging to my uncle who came and went complete with their own groom. The last part of the stables was the coach house, which quite soon became the garage, where the chauffeur, Mr Youngman, cherished my grandparents’ boringly sober car. (Youngman, with his wife and daughters, lived in a cottage which had a plaster cherub above its front door, which for some time my brother and I thought was Mr Youngman as a baby.)
Our ponies, when not out to grass as they mostly were, lived in the lower stables. Since both Pen and I, and later my sister Patience, were horse-mad, these were important. There was a steep drop at that point, so we reached the lower stables either by a flight of steps at the corner of the bleach, or by the back drive which circled down to it round a grassy hillock on which there grew a handsome walnut tree. Backing onto the top stables there was a row of smaller loose boxes, each with a halfdoor, looking out onto a rough square. On the left there was a large coach house where the dog carts were kept (later assorted cars). Opposite there was a big black barn where for a long time Great-granny’s brougham and the wagonette slowly mouldered away under ever-thickening layers of dust, and the governess cart, still often used by us, stood by Uncle Bill’s goat cart. I was familiar with a photograph of Bill as a little boy proudly driving his goat, but never saw the cart in use. The fourth side of the square was occupied by a row of low buildings for keeping things in, only one of which was special: the one in which every year Seeley cured the ham – the pigsty, by the way, was attached to the end of the barn, and if you were me you were careful to avoid the lower yard on the dreadful day when the annual pig was killed. Seeley, a good Yorkshireman, knew the secrets of curing a ham in the proper Yorkshire way, and after the pigkilling there would be several days when he abandoned the stables, retreated to one of these little houses, and became almost priestly in devotion to his grave task. You must not disturb him, though you could peep. Usually he was very ready to talk, full of fascinating horse information. (One white foot, buy a horse / Two white feet, try a horse / Three white feet, look well about him / Four white feet, do without him.) Seeley’s hams were wonderful. There was always one on the sideboard at breakfast time, and if anyone was foolish enough when carving it to ‘scoop’ it in a misguided attempt to avoid fat, Gramps became very cross indeed. (Those breakfasts! As well as the ham there was always a boiled egg each for every person there, as well as the main dish – perhaps sausages and bacon, or grilled kidneys. And quite often no one ate a boiled egg. What on earth happened to them? A present-day kind of solution such as eggs mayonnaise for supper would certainly have had no place in Mrs Wiseman’s kitchen. Mrs Wiseman, by the way, was Wiseman’s daughter, not his wife. The ‘Mrs’ was an honorary title always given to cooks. In spite of all that food no one was fat, I suppose because we walked and rode so much.)