by Bryher;
There were two glorious hours when I got as dirty as I wanted, paddling along the edge of the sea. I almost spoke to a group of small, noisy boys who were pelting each other with seaweed but decided correctly that I should not know how to play their games. I watched them and looked for pebbles, the blue ones with white markings that were like marbles and glistened when they were wet. Alas, on that occasion hunger drove me home. Ruth was in charge and calmer than my mother would have been, she had decided that I would return at teatime and contented herself by watching for me from the window.
Some scientists think that truancy is a survival of migration. It may well be so, I have always loved change. It was also the age. There was no outlet for energy, particularly for girls although I was luckier actually than the next generation. Nobody then had thought up child care! The nursery routine was casual. Ruth spent most of the morning dusting or making beds while my mother was busy shopping. There were no telephones and no vacuum cleaners. I played by myself most of the time and ate exactly the same meals as my parents; because they enjoyed their food and there were no taboos I had the digestion of an ostrich. I was happy at home apart from the law that is still a basic part of adult theory. I suffered until I was twenty from well-meaning but conscious efforts to retard my development; intelligent children, they said, had to be “kept back.” Why? It cost me years of difficulty afterwards to repair what need never have happened. If a prisoner is left in a windowless dungeon, he loses the power of sight. Exactly the same thing happened to my brain. Growing up was a denuding of the intellect, it was not progression. I can forgive now some of the educational mistakes that were made (it is difficult to train a child), but not the social customs that deprived me of the rich development that might have been my portion. People have said that I am erudite; this is not true if I am matched against specialists but whatever I know I have learned the hard way, alone. At least the isolation preserved me from influences; the important thing is clarity, the ability “to flow” and sometimes to adjust. Yet how much natural intelligence is wasted, generation after generation, because of the imposition of blindly traditional laws?
Eventually my father found a temporary cure. If I would promise not to cry if a ball hit me “and they can sting” he would take me with him to watch the local football matches. This was a challenge that I accepted joyfully and to this day there is a special magic about Saturday afternoons. It was usually too cold to sit on the stands so I trotted up and down beside my father, stamped my feet as he did to keep warm, and under his instruction soon mastered the finer points of the game. How exciting it was! Of course I would not cry, boys never cried, but it was a deliciously frightening moment when the enormous ball hurtled towards us. Once my father caught it and flung it back to the players. It was a proletarian introduction to sport because I watched our butcher’s boy toss an orange-striped sweater to my father to hang over a bench, I joined in the applause when the milkman’s son kicked a goal. I never saw a first-class match but once. My father thought them too mechanical, he liked the small-town atmosphere of our local team, perhaps it reminded him of his own schoolboy games?
Nobody then had heard of football pools. It was just a friendly, probably not very skilful, game. According to my mother it was brutal but I loved the speed, the shifting patterns and the shouts. No matter how cold it was I pleaded to stay till the last moment. Then if I had been good during the week we went to a shop and I was allowed to choose a book.
My father had retained a boyish streak of gaiety and gave me a paper-bound copy of Jack Harkaway’s Schooldays, the nearest that I ever came, I suppose, to a penny dreadful. I found it extremely valuable, it taught me to balance a jug of water on top of the door if Ruth had been particularly trying and to stuff my drawers with a towel for the smacking that was bound to follow. I am afraid that in infancy I linked most colorful events with my father. It was only later that I realized how much I had in me of my mother’s temperament. It was she who first took me for a motor ride and who said after her first flight when she was well over seventy, “Oh, how easy this is! I should like to fly around the world.” As a child, however, I completely disappointed her. She could have been a famous dressmaker and I think she would have enjoyed having such an establishment but her whole life was devoted to my father. She embroidered beautifully and was noted for her skill in dressing dolls, copying old pictures in minute detail, and then giving the group to a charity sale to benefit some hospital. I would only play with animals, hated clothes and was the roughest urchin of our neighborhood. The ideal Victorian child was a frail creature whereas I was as tough as a hippopotamus and as mischievous as an ape. The first time that I was taken to a toyshop to pick out what I wanted, I chose a book and a toy sword. Eventually my mother surrendered and gave me a wonderful fort with both a drawbridge and a secret passage. The only disadvantage was that to use the passage I had to turn the fort upside down. I am not ashamed that I was so belligerent when young. It is better to be a leader of lead soldiers than to repress the wish and explode into something far more dangerous aged twenty. How much more peaceful the world might be if there were fewer checks upon development imposed in childhood! I do not mean license, there must be discipline but to save ourselves trouble we do not let children work through the various stages of development at their own time and there is too much imposition of socially acceptable ideas upon a growing mind.
I have no clear memory of the arrival of a new century but plenty of the Boer War. My parents were not pacifists but both disliked war and would not have it discussed in my presence. All this only increased my curiosity and I built up a distorted picture of South Africa from posters, newspaper headlines and words overheard by chance. What did I imagine war was like? I supposed that soldiers slept in tents, got as dirty as they liked, yelled and shot their rifles. Every penny that I could collect went on a toy army and “caps,” bright pink rounds of paper that banged when fired from an inch-high cannon. My mother told me in vain about children who had blown off their finger tips or singed their eyelids; she even appealed to my affections to spare her nerves. I should normally have listened to her but the glory of the noise, the smell of burnt paper, were too exciting to be relinquished.
I added new words like veldt and kopje (only I did not know how to pronounce them) to my vocabulary. I watched the local volunteers leave, not in scarlet but in khaki, for Southampton. Then on a winter morning I noticed that the greengrocer’s wife was crying as she weighed the potatoes. I stood there level with a sliding bin of lemons, other people came into the shop and they too wiped their eyes with their handkerchiefs. Something sinister and most mysterious had happened. “Her son has been killed,” my mother explained as we walked away, “he was shot through the head.” In spite of ray books I still had no real consciousness of death. Oh, I tried to explain, it was a story that had ended the wrong way but perhaps it could be rewritten? “No,” my mother shook her head, it was something that none of us could change, the boy was buried in Africa. In a shadowy way for which I had no words I supposed that there would be no time if one were dead.
The seasons passed. I remember chiefly the food, roast beef with a light Yorkshire pudding that was dipped in real gravy, hot toast spread with dripping in front of the nursery fire on a winter day, farmhouse butter and tiny farthing buns. I preferred bacon to chocolate and loved suet puddings. There was little fruit and in general few vegetables although, due to my father’s French upbringing, some were served at home. I remember being given a tomato as a special treat one birthday, they were extremely rare. Alas, the excellence of English traditional dishes disappeared with the First World War. The mass production of crops is economically necessary but they will never have the flavor of different varieties grown to suit particular soils. Unless I was reading or out of doors, I rocked on a steed with a red saddle and reins that for once was in the shape of a donkey, not a horse. It stood in front of a tall, folding bed that shut up during the day and could be let down at night. I often won
dered what would happen if it closed up silently while the occupant was asleep. There were the sea and the stories that I made up about myself as a Robinson explorer and between them that shadowy world of “must and must not” so unlike the graces of the gods.
These were the years when my father was probably at the top of his powers. He had many interests but he had taken to shipping “like a duck to water” as somebody once wrote of him and he was still in the North Atlantic trade. The problems must have been tremendous and yet every weekend he took me for walks along the sea front and towards its (for a five-year-old) so distant pier while he taught me the countries of Europe and their capitals. He loved traveling as much as I do now myself. Years later I saw his application for a passport. In answer to a question “Do you often travel abroad?” he had replied “As much as possible, it broadens the intelligence.”
At dusk between tea and bedtime I arranged the animals two by two across the carpet and into my wooden Noah’s Ark while my mother or father, no matter how busy they might be, told me stories. There was a sad one about a sentinel at Pompeii. He had watched the lava coming towards him but he had never left his post. Yes, my mother had seen Vesuvius and the picture of a dog much bigger than Vick, made in tiny stones on a pavement at the entrance to a house. An avalanche had carried my father away in the Alps, he had been almost suffocated by the soft, tumbling snow. Sometimes he went to places called America and Canada or he showed me sketches that he had made of landscapes during his visit to India. Such things rather than nursery rhymes were the folk tales of my infancy and a time was coming, perhaps quite soon, that would be the mythical first day of “going abroad.” I had only to learn to sit still in a train, to be more obedient and to say some French words. I stuck two lions on the ladder leading to the ark and wondered.
All my life I have suffered from “geographical emotions.” Places are almost as real to me as people. At eight o’clock one May evening my mother’s voice woke me up. “We are going to the Paris Exhibition tomorrow if you are good.” It was 1900 and I was five years and eight months old.
The hour on the ship, my first, blurs into other voyages. There were to be so many of those hot summer crossings in my childhood. I expect that I took my father’s hand and followed him to watch the baggage being lowered into the hold. Everything was heavy or where possible solid and I have wondered since whether it was the constant shifting of such tremendous weights that first gave men the courage to build skyscrapers. Certainly a historian could reconstruct the age from its luggage. Trunks had hooped lids bound with straps and buckles. Square hatboxes were new. I seem to remember that they were considered a little “fast.” Light cases must have been synonymous with a lack of morals because nothing less ponderous than pigskin studded with brass nails was ever carried.
There were always oilskins thrown over a line of deck chairs and apprehensive faces under wide, uncomfortable hats. “So long as you close your eyes, my dear, the motion is hardly perceptible,” we would hear while I watched the seamen enviously because the thing that I wanted most was a boy’s sailor suit. “I go below and lie on my back until the stewardess tells me we are inside the harbor.” Such phrases were as much a part of the trip as the heavily fringed rugs and bright yellow bags.
At Dieppe the train surprised me, the steps were so high. It was hard to climb them, even with the guard pulling at my arms. To my astonishment, quite big boys raced along the platform in blue blouses and socks. I had been promoted to long tan stockings for the journey, only babies in England had their legs uncovered. Fisherwomen held up baskets of fish or, shouting against the wind that refrilled their white bonnets, offered us dolls dressed in bright banded petticoats and wooden sabots exactly like themselves.
The white pattern of the seat covers is so early a recollection that I seem always to have known it. They were very clean in contrast to the dusty floor but rough to the hands. I remember that the compartment was full with three people on each side and that I made a tremendous effort to be still and not ask too often, “Shall we soon be in Paris?” All the same, it was an eternity, those four hours.
Discipline might be suspended in private but in public I was supposed to be seen and not heard. I might not run about, there was no question of nibbling a biscuit between meals. Thus in a train I had nothing to do but look out of the window, read or make up stories.
My children’s paper that day was full of animals dressed as boys. Jacko, the monkey, with a scarf flying out from his neck, was pelting an elephant with snowballs, I stared at the drawings hoping that I might get into the world on the other side of the pictures because then the danger of my “worrying about the time” would be over but that afternoon I was too excited for any magic to work. I could not say that I had been to Paris until I had set foot in the city and I was afraid that if I were disobedient, my parents would turn round and take me home.
At five I knew nothing of history. I had seen people shake their heads and whisper the word “Dreyfus” but I did not know what that name meant nor that fifty thousand English had marched in protest to Hyde Park. I had heard others say, however, that they would not venture to the Exhibition on account of the hostile feelings of the French about the Boer War.
My first impression of Paris is of walking down a street from the station and seeing Americans wearing tiny flags in their buttonholes lest they be mistaken for the English and molested. In my then frame of mind I was hopeful for a fight. I remember perfectly well that I clenched my fists, shouted the words of a patriotic song of the moment that I must have learned from my nurse and waited eagerly for a Frenchman to reply. It never occurred to me that I could not knock him down. I was plump and small, of less than average height, so it must have been an incredibly comic spectacle but pride and a magical belief that being English I was certain to win blinded me to reality. I neither thought of leaving an attack to my father nor that my truculent behavior might bring retribution upon my parents.
Aggression is a part of nature and a special need of childhood, it was the hours of inactivity that made me clench my fists, and how much of history is not due to such simple psychological reactions? We have the knowledge now to understand but how often do we use it?
Curiously enough, I could have played more easily with French than with English children. My father had been partly brought up at Caen in Normandy and I think that this must have been the happiest time of his life. Certainly my training at home was more French in character than English. Wherever my father went, he took me with him. If he discussed politics with elderly gentlemen whose black beards came to the bottom of their waistcoats, it was not only expected that I should listen but I was occasionally allowed to express an opinion, naturally echoed from my father’s views. My political education began in Paris because we lunched most days at a restaurant near the Madeleine that was popular with ministers. I soon discovered that government was an exciting game, it resembled the animals in my picture book defending their snow fort. There was a party working for the good of the country; everything that they suggested was right. Then there was a second, possibly secret group that was plotting to come to power and if this happened it would be, almost certainly, the end of the world.
I listened greedily. France was a republic. I was not quite sure what this meant but I knew that England was a kingdom because it was ruled by a Queen, an old lady in black for whose sake I had been snatched from my mud pies. Anybody might govern France, the boy riding his bicycle or (as I thought then!) the woman selling balloons. The royalist system was safer, my father explained. Safer! Then I knew that I was a republican. Liberty, equality, fraternity, to be free, equal and friendly, these were the signs of adventure and being a boy whereas to be royalist was to be old, careful and as prudent as a governess. “I believe in the Republic,” I announced and the old gentlemen (I wonder now which ministers they were) patted my head.
The entrance and the symbol of the Exhibition was an immense arch. It was the magnified twin of a hair ornament of the
period, a two-pronged comb over which the convolvulus of many decorations ramped in flowery dots. Everything at that time had to curl; there ought to be some special term to describe the horror a blank space evoked in 1900. I have often wondered how English lawns survived. It must have hurt their owners to see them bare of hillocks and curves; the formal borders of yellow calceolarias, blue lobelias and the pink geraniums that were beginning to be considered more discreet than their scarlet fellows were a riot of geometry gone mad.
There was a long wait before we could buy our tickets, then we walked through the archway into an avenue lined with white pavilions. My first impression was of gravel. It was deceptively like sand and seemed to be endless. We turned into a building (was it to the right of the entrance?), it contained Krupp’s exhibit of long, burnished guns.
My mother hurried me out. My father explained that it was wrong to spend money and labor upon tools of war. I ought to record my own dismay but nothing in the Exhibition interested me so much. I wanted to touch the shining barrels of the cannon, it was, at that age, the normal reaction of any child towards the models, say, in a science museum and little different from my feelings about the toys in the next gallery that we visited. This contained a “set piece,” a corner of the Champs Élysées arranged with dolls dressed in the costumes of the day. A soldier flirted with a nurse, she was very lively in her wide skirt with bright, flowing ribbons, a little girl was running after a hoop (I decided critically that she was grasping her stick in the wrong manner), and small boys, again in short socks, were playing an unfamiliar game. How odd! Just look at the soldier’s red trousers! All the English knew that khaki was better than scarlet because it blurred into the landscape. And that baby in front of them, howling wildly, with tears streaming down its face! Were the tears paint, I asked, but my mother shook her head and explained that they were made from some transparent type of glue. The pebbles, the park bench and the trees were familiar enough but remembering Kensington Gardens and that I had been in London as well as Paris, I felt secretly superior to the woman beside me, holding a long skirt up in her left hand. I hoped that she did not think that I liked toys. I really had no desire to play with the figures but only to know how they were made.