Alive, Alive Oh!

by Diana Athill

  The best adventure of the early fifties was the discovery of Club Méditerranée, just launched by the Belgian family Blitz. My cousin Barbara and I saw a little advertisement for a holiday in Corfu costing only £21, and decided to risk it. We had to get ourselves to Venice, where we would board a Greek ship, travelling steerage in a crowd of Club Med members, all of us equipped with long necklaces of white Pop It beads issued to us when we signed on, to be used instead of money when we reached Corfu. This simple but brilliant device added greatly to the holiday’s charms, because (although we had paid for the beads in London) using them instead of coins felt so deliciously carefree. Every transaction at the Club’s bar, or at the office where we booked excursions and so on, seemed as though it was free.

  It was early enough in the Club’s history for the accommodation to be in tents – yellow tents and orange tents, scattered quite far apart among the olive trees on a big estate – olive orchards and scrubby woodland, with islands of magnificent plane trees, one group sheltering the dining area, another the bar, a biscuit-toss from the water, where the water-skiing motor boats took off. The air smelt of herbs, at night the only sound was the strange cry of the little skops owls. Every need was catered for with inconspicuous ingenuity: for example, if you needed to iron a garment there was a power-point among the roots of one of the plane trees which had an ironing board propped against it with an iron attached.

  Each time a batch of gentils membres (as they called us) arrived, they were given a little talk by the woman who ran the camp, a member of the Blitz family. We were welcomed charmingly and given information about the amenities, available excursions and so on, and then lectured rather sternly about how we should behave outside the Club’s premises. Within them we were free to behave however we liked, but outside we must remember that we were guests of the Corfiots, who were unaccustomed to flocks of foreigners and had sensibilities of their own which it was essential to respect. So we must dress decently and avoid rowdy behaviour, and this was important. Barbara and I were favourably impressed by this talk – an opinion not shared by the only other English people in our group, a pair of young men. On that very evening they went out, got drunk at a local bar, stripped off their clothes and ran naked into the sea. Next day they were sent home. It has not been Club Med’s fault if since then tourism in Corfu has become more louche.

  The tents were all labelled with the names of their inhabitants, and Barbara and I were, at first, surprised at how many French people had double-barrelled names. The penny soon dropped. We, I think, were the only so-to-speak rogue women there; all the others were part of a couple, married or not. The place was staffed by young men hoping for a holiday in the sun, where they expected plenty of girls to be available. Few were, so we became perhaps over-valued by the staff. Barbara settled for a very handsome Corsican, who was a bit too macho to be easily managed; I for a rather older Belgian, good value there (he danced a mean tango), but a great bore when he turned up later in London. We confined these conquests to the evenings, when there was always dancing at the bar, because we wanted to see as much of Corfu as possible during the days. For that we picked up two very respectable middle-aged Corfiots, mine being the island’s chef de tourisme, called (as so many Corfiots are) Spiridon, Spiro for short.

  Spiro’s job, he said, was difficult, because there was not as yet any money for it. He had, however, been able to buy four little cypress trees which he had just planted in such a way that when fully grown they would most gracefully frame a particularly beautiful view. He drove us to see these little trees, and to help us envisage the lovely effect they would eventually have. It would indeed have been deplorable to offend dear Spiro’s sensibilities.

  While this holiday made us admire Belgian efficiency and good taste, it had a sad effect on our opinion of the French, who were the majority of the Club members. On the ship from Venice we had eaten one supper. Being a Greek ship, it served Greek food, and since we were steerage passengers it was cheap Greek food: rather tough meat, a salad of roughly chopped-up cucumber and tomatoes, and rice pudding with dollops of jam . . . and oh, the moans and groans and even vomiting noises with which this meal was greeted by our French companions; they might have been offered dishes of pigswill. Thank God, they told each other, that soon they’d be in the camp where, they had been promised by the Club’s promotion booklet, they would be reunited with cuisine française.

  Cut to our first meal in the camp’s open-air dining space. Corfu being a Greek island, the food, not surprisingly, was Greek food, and given the large numbers catered for daily, cheap Greek food: rather tough meat, a salad of roughly chopped-up cucumber and tomatoes and rice pudding with dollops of jam. And they fell on it with cries of joy. So much, we felt, for the French’s reputation as sophisticated foodies. And their manners were pretty crude, too. Each table seated eight people and at its centre was a big dish piled with chunks of bread. If the bread ran out you could ask for more, so why, every mealtime, was there a scuffle as people tried to be the first at their table so that they could pile many chunks of bread on their side plates? But though dining was a bit primitive, the bar made up for it, by providing the most exquisite citrons pressés. There was, of course, plenty of alcohol as well, but for us, who hadn’t set eyes on a lemon for years, that was what we most enjoyed.

  The only disappointment in that holiday was that neither of us was any good at water-skiing. How lovely to be one of the people skimming so gracefully over the sea, and how mortifying that neither of us ever stayed upright on that bloody board for more than a few seconds. Perhaps we would have mastered it given time, but there were always people lounging about, waiting their turn, so embarrassment made us give up.

  Perhaps my fondest memory of the place is of the afternoon when, feeling unsociable, I took a book and a blanket for lying on to a tiny hidden beach far from the tents, which was so lovely and peaceful that it was seducing me from my book, when crunch, crunch: slow – furtive? – footsteps approached through the bushes, betrayed by the dryness and brittleness of the grass and leaves underfoot. Oh no! I thought, sitting up furiously. There was no one there. Had I imagined it? I lay down again. Crunch, crunch. This time I stood up. Still no one. Till another crunch drew my eyes down, and there was a large tortoise labouring his way through the grass towards the water.

  I’ve never been to a modern Club Med, which would be, I gather, very much more glossy, but I still think of the organization fondly. To me it means that tortoise, the voice of the skops owl, the scent of sun-baked herbs, Spiro’s trees, moonlit tangos, and those citrons pressés. It all seemed the very essence of Life returned to what it ought to be.

  At home, too, that feeling prevailed; and it embraced a sense that we could make it more like it ought to be than it was before the war. In the 1930s middle- and upper-class people had been having a very good time, but many of them had felt at least a little guilty about the ugly rift between the haves and the have-nots. The young people I knew when I was up at Oxford were all (apart from a few with scholarships) benefiting from their parents’ politics, but none of them was in sympathy with those politics. Many of us, including me, felt we ought to join the Communist Party, and some of us did. The reason why I was not among them was not worthy of respect. I did feel uneasy about ends justifying means, which I understood should be believed by a good Communist, but I held back mostly because of laziness. It seemed to me that devotion to the cause would be hard work and leave little time for the pleasant frivolities which I was enjoying so much.

  Obviously if we, the privileged, had been feeling twinges of guilt, the many underprivileged were seething. The country was, in fact, in a bad way. Therefore it was not surprising that the election immediately after the war’s end was won by the Labour Party. I was working at the BBC, in a humble part of it: the information library attached to the news room for the World Service. We all stayed up all night in the news room, listening to the results coming in and getting happier and happier, because they wer
e what everyone in that room wanted. None of us questioned Churchill’s importance as our wartime leader, but none wanted the old man to steer us back into the past. It is sad to remember how sure we were that we could now set about building a good future in which fairness and justice would reign at home while we ceased to profit from our overseas ‘possessions’, having ‘given’ them their freedom to go their own ways. Yes, it is certainly sad now, given where we are and what we have become; but it was happy to live through at the time.

  And there were genuine good things ahead, the NHS for one. We were soon taking it for granted and now spend more time lamenting its shortcomings than acknowledging its achievements, but to anyone who remembers medicine before the war it remains an almost miraculous institution – the one huge, solid gain achieved by our society that we must hang on to whatever else we lose. Education, too, leapt ahead. It still leaves much to be desired, but it is immensely better than it was pre-war. And the standard of living rose. Many people on very low incomes began to join the rest of us by taking for granted indoor toilets, refrigerators, and other household comforts . . . which makes our present dive into poverty horrifying. During those ‘dreary’ years we got so used to simple, material things getting better that their getting worse now seems to be against nature.

  In middle-class life those years sparkled in many ways. Fashion came alive again dramatically when Dior’s New Look crossed the Channel. During the seemingly endless war years we had been stuck with square shoulders, straight up-and-down silhouettes and hems a few inches below the knee. Now, suddenly, we could look feminine again, and embark on the delightful journey of sudden absurd changes (colours were constantly being called ‘the new black’) that turn the necessity of clothing the body into fun. And just as enlivening as the new styles of dress were those in design generally. It became a matter of great interest in every field. Before the war the smartest look in the furnishing and decoration of houses was all-over whiteness, and the most common was cream-coloured walls cheered up by flowery chintz curtains and chair covers. Now, if walls weren’t orange they were covered with adventurous wallpaper. I can’t remember the exact date of a wallpaper exhibition at (I suppose) the new Design Centre, but I can vividly remember how enchanted I was by it. I managed somehow to scrape together the money to paper the walls of my bedroom (how? The BBC was paying me £380 a year) and I had it done in ivy – life-sized ivy leaves swarmed from floor to ceiling on all four walls (luckily I wasn’t bold enough to put different patterns on each wall, which became quite the thing). I was tremendously pleased with it and it was hideous. I hadn’t the faintest idea of how to decorate a room successfully. I see now that this was not because I had no eye for good furniture and pictures, but because the house I had known and loved best as a child, my maternal grandparents’ in Norfolk, although not furnished quite as grandly as the houses regularly featured in Country Life, was in that style. That house, that magazine, museums and picture galleries: it was those that had formed my taste. Given a Greek shipping millionaire as a husband (or perhaps even better, as a lover) I could have done my drawing room beautifully, with ravishing pieces of eighteenth-century furniture, fine Persian rugs and truly good paintings, but it didn’t even occur to me that someone with very little money could make a room look pretty. I just managed with bits of stuff my parents had let me take from home and the occasional object, however unsuitable, that had caught my eye. I was nearly sixty before I made a room look (I hope) attractive.

  I didn’t see anything of the official celebrations – the Festival of Britain, organized in celebration of the New Elizabethan Age, as it was called. This was partly because, having left the BBC not long after peace returned, I was soon very busy helping to launch a new publishing firm, and more because I had no man to do things with, being at that time between two love affairs.

  Later, when the sixties began, most people frothed with excitement about them. To me they appeared to be just a continuation of the good times following the bad ones, and I was too contented to take much notice of the development of the Cold War. I knew, of course, that it was generally considered threatening, but I remembered what real ‘threatening’ had felt like in 1939, when everyone knew in their bones what was coming (the surge of relief felt when the Prime Minister returned from a visit to Hitler and announced that we could expect ‘peace for our time’ had been no more than superficial). Sniffing the air during the various post-war crises, I could detect no whiff of that threat, whatever was going on in foreign affairs. But although my instinct about that happened to be right, I was no more aware than anyone else of what was really going on in this country after the war.

  This was not surprising, because the process seemed to be as slow, and thus imperceptible, as the shifting of tectonic plates which change the nature of the planet, although in fact it was very much faster than that. If people had paid more attention to history they would have remembered that it doesn’t take long for an empire to collapse. When I was a child I used to pore over an atlas, deriving much satisfaction from how much of the world was coloured pink, which meant, they told me, that it was ours. I pitied other countries with their little patches of inferior colours, and I suspect that when a personal misfortune in my early twenties gave my confidence a nasty shock, that childhood schooling in feeling proud contributed a good deal to my recovery. It went deep, that feeling that we, the British, were Great: deeper, it turned out, in a lot of other people than it did in me, because it would not be long before I grew out of it, and by the time I went to university I had become sure that we ought to be giving all our pinkness back to its real owners. But, being ignorant of economics, I was unaware that this would mean our having to change our nature – an ignorance which appears to be true of our politicians to this day. The difference between being at the hub of a vast empire and being a tiny island off the shores of, but not belonging to, Europe seems to be something they are unable to understand. Their attempts to become European indicate awareness of a problem, but the blundering reluctance of those attempts – an apparent feeling that Europe ought to be grateful for our condescension in joining it – makes it clear how superficial these attempts are. Perhaps the task of making our island work well simply as such is actually impossible, and we will have to settle for being a tax haven for the rich of other countries? (I am glad that I shall be dead before the answer to that question becomes clear.) But although it is probably tragic that the people running our country in the years immediately after the war knew no better than ignorant citizens such as me what was beginning to happen to no-longer-great Britain, and what to do about it, it remains true that while they were going on, those were lovely years to live through.

  ‘Oh, tell me, Gentle Shepherd, where . . .’

  Thoughts on the attempted revolution

  in Trinidad and Tobago

  The pelicans circled all morning, lifting and sinking on air currents, but always at more or less the same height above the silky sea. They looked aimless, but they were not. Every minute or so one of them saw what it was looking for, and the gimlet-twist with which it stabbed down into the water was so swift that surely the bird must pierce right to the bottom, disappearing for a long time. Instead, the splash had hardly settled before it was bobbing duck-like on the surface, gulping its catch. I liked watching them because the presence of creatures which at home were seen only in zoos was delightful proof that I really had arrived, at last, in a faraway and long-imagined place.

  The birds didn’t scream or squawk as fishing gulls would have done and their silence increased awareness of the greater silence. Insects chirred and creaked, of course, but so constantly that they stopped being heard. The tiny yellow and black sugarbirds chittered and fidgeted in the bush of their choice, but that was a sound so slight that it mingled with the insects’. A hummingbird’s presence was noticed only because a flower trembled. At other times of day there were frogs, some of them sounding like birds, and birds, some of them sounding like frogs, but in midmorning
the silence of the sea surrounding Tobago seemed to flow right over the island. Even in the villages people’s voices, cocks crowing and dogs barking, donkeys braying and boys practising – plink plonk – on a pan slung from a mango branch would not have registered so distinctly were it not for the silence. Cars were heard approaching a long way off and at nightfall, when the few fishing boats came in and their catch was being driven round the neighbourhood, the sound of the conch which summoned customers – a sea cow lowing mournfully for its lost calf – was like an important event.

  The silence was only one of many pleasures. The heat might not count as a pleasure in some circumstances – one was drenched in sweat at the least agitation, to say nothing of exertion – but when activity is a matter of lazy choice, as it was for a visitor, heat becomes a luxury, and so is being physically untrammelled: the constrictions of underclothes, stockings, shoes are taken for granted until they are shed, but being rid of them is delicious.