by Diana Athill
PAIN
THERE WAS, of course, pain, and pain of a kind more serious than that caused by the puzzles and humiliations of being young. Ours came from unhappiness between our parents.
Mothers were more important than fathers because fathers were often away, even when not posted overseas: and ours, though kind, was squeamish. He had a phobia about vomiting, so the ease with which babies spill their contents made him wary of us in our infancy. I know how powerful this revulsion can be because I have shared it, and for many years, if I had the misfortune to see or hear someone throwing up I would feel ill all day and for months afterwards whenever I chanced to recall it. I was eventually cured (more or less) by having from time to time to look after someone ill: in those circumstances, I could, by making a tremendous effort, overcome the phobia. But Dad never had to nurse anyone, so he was always afflicted by it, and it is possible that subconsciously he continued to see us, until we were safely grown-up, as creatures who might give him a horrible experience. He gave only the most dutiful of goodnight pecks and never hugged or stroked us.
We enjoyed him when he was funny, as he often was – indeed, on the only occasion he read to us he made it so tremendously funny that it was a new kind of experience, and I was disappointed that he never read to us again. We were happy to share jokes with him: for instance the Who-is-Captain-of-this-ship-I-AM that had to be shouted to stop a dithering argument about what we were going to do – the first person to get it out won, and it was usually but not always him. And he was brilliant at remembering comic songs. We – or at least I – knew that he was a very nice man. Nevertheless, we mirrored his lack of physical warmth. And, what is more, I have never in my life been attracted to a man of his physical type: fair-haired, blue-eyed, pink-skinned. And my brother once told me that when he was a boy he found Dad repulsive.
How could a trim man with pleasant features, an unusually agreeable nature and a lively sense of humour have become repulsive? It was a fate laid down for him long before he met her by his wife’s mother, my beloved Gran.
Gran believed that no lady could want to be kissed by a man unless she truly loved him enough to marry him; and that no gentleman would dream of trying to kiss a lady unless he truly loved her enough to propose marriage. And this belief she handed down to her daughters. In most families there are both accepters and rejecters of parental beliefs, but in this one all the daughters turned out to be accepters (one of them found it impossible quite to fit in, but she blamed herself for it and did her gallant best to make up for it). Certainly my mother, the youngest, although spirited and full of joie de vivre, cheerfully accepted what her adored mother had taught her.
When she was nineteen, early in the second year of the First World War, she went to a dance and met a young army officer who had been invalided home from the front. Her friends all liked him, he was easy to talk to, and he loved country things as much as she did. He fell in love with her on sight, and before the evening was out had kissed her in the conservatory – and she had thoroughly enjoyed being kissed. It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. My father was one of those gentlemen who would not have kissed a lady unless he had truly fallen in love with her, so very soon afterwards he asked her to marry him. Naturally she said yes. She knew she liked him, but more than that: she was sure she couldn’t possibly enjoy being kissed so much if she didn’t love him. It did not occur to her that lively girls enjoy being kissed because being kissed is fun.
Whether my father was a virgin, as my mother certainly was, I do not know, but I am sure that if he was not, it was by only a very narrow margin. He was a clergyman’s son who had gone from his public school straight to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, and who – four years before meeting my mother – had received the following letter from the man about to be his commanding officer in the regiment he was joining straight from the Academy. And – more to the point – he was going to keep that letter all his life as an inspiration.
Mum and Dad’s wedding day, 1916
… I make section commanders very independent and make them entirely responsible for their men, horses, barrackrooms and discipline, as far as possible. I expect them to know their men and horses intimately, and see to their clothing, kits and all details of the equipment in the gun park, and to be good instructors in gunnery and musketry, riding and driving drills, and a friendly adviser to them in all other matters.
In the same way I expect my officers to come to me whenever in difficulty, official or private affairs, as I make myself responsible for them. A smart, keen officer makes, by example, smart, keen NCOs and men. In matters of duty one cannot be too particular, and I hold that supervision over an officer, to see whether he performs his duty or not, should never be required. An officer holding the King’s Commission should never require supervision in the routine of his duty. He does his work whether seen or unseen as a gentleman, and ‘plays the game’ in spirit as well as letter in accordance with his C.O.’ s desires. Play up for those under you whom you serve, and the result spells success in the Army for a man of ability.
Bad language and an overbearing manner does not get good work out of anyone. The Briton can be easily led but is a tough man to drive. Leading not driving is the system.
On parade I am your C.O. and expect soldierlike smartness in every action and address. Off parade I hope to be your instructor and adviser and companion in all field sports and pastimes. This letter I fear is rather of the nature of a ‘jaw’ but I thought it better to let you know what to expect.
I know you are a keen sportsman, and will stretch points to give you leave for hunting, shooting, fishing, football, cricket etc, but I do not care about ‘racing men’ and the class of people who go off to loaf about in Town. There is plenty of sport here to fill up all your time. We have a regimental pack of harriers – the subscription to it is five shillings a month in winter and two and sixpence in summer. Two afternoons a week we meet and you can gallop to your heart’s content – but you must look after your horses on return! The Tidworth Foxhounds are also handy. There is football and hockey galore.
A keen sportsman usually makes the best soldier. He learns to acquire an ‘eye for a country’ and to keep himself fit, deny himself luxuries to take part in sport, and obtains a knowledge of men and manners which cannot be learnt elsewhere. He keeps himself morally and physically fit and those are the conditions requisite to enable him to learn instruction in soldiering.
To turn to other matters – you can have a good horse from Government for £10 a year, and this will probably be enough to commence with. If another is within your means (and I should like to hear from your people on the subject) no doubt we can pick up a cheap one for £30 or £40. The additional horse would cost you about £3 a month. As regards kit – a good hunting saddle and bridle (Sowters for choice) and a secondhand saddle from Parkers in St Martin’s Lane (or elsewhere) and an exercising snaffle bridle. Bandages and a fawn rug with your initials on it (from the Stores) will set you up in horse kit except for a few odds and ends you can get from Battery stores.
As regards kit – a dark grey hunting frock coat which can be worn with a pot hat and butcher boots, and tan-coloured breeches, make a good harrier hunting kit. Daniells has our regimental hunt button, but if you want to do things cheaply go to Moss, 21 King Street, Covent Garden for the grey frock coat – he also has our hunt button which of course should be black ones, not brass. Later on, as you come along, we can think about white breeches and top boots and a top hat for foxhunting.
When fellows can mount themselves decently and go decently they are allowed to blossom out into a ‘pink’ coat, but there is plenty of time for that! Hunting kit is an economy as people cannot hunt in walking clothes. It ruins them and they look horrible and serve no purpose afterwards.
Butcher boots with soft legs and black tops look well, but plain butcher boots are good enough. Bartley makes the best boots, but old Craig and Davis are cheaper and can make a decent boot
for many people.
A short hunting crop and brown leather thong. I get mine from near Weedon – Sharpe, Whipmaker, Flore, Weedon – and have them made 22 inches long. He is a cheap man.
In other matters write to me, and I will tell you what to do. You can send this letter on to your people in case they want any further information about your future surroundings. … Yours sincerely.
D. G. Geddes
It is clear that any young man to whom D. G. Geddes stood in loco parentis would need to be determinedly dissident if he wanted to ‘loaf about in Town’ – which meant, of course, pursue the company of women, to say nothing of gaining sexual experience of them; and my gentle and honourable father was not even slightly dissident by nature.
My mother had been told nothing about sex, except that she might not at first like the thing men wanted to do, but would get used to it. The only criticism of her mother I ever heard her utter, almost a lifetime later, was that it had been wrong of her not to overcome her embarrassment and say more. My mother’s honeymoon came – as it did to many brides of her generation – as a shock.
Just before the war she had been sent abroad to a ‘finishing school’, as was the custom in her sort of family: it was a way of keeping girls at ‘the awkward age’ (we would say teenagers) occupied. Smart people chose Paris, but Switzerland or Germany seemed less risky to most parents, so my mother’s lot was Dresden and included exposure to a certain amount of Wagner which she described in a letter home as ‘lovely of course, but very long and very noisy’. Another letter, addressed to a sister, is headed NOT TO BE SHOWN TO ANYBODY NOT EVEN MOTHER, and starts ‘I say not even Mother because I am going to be vulgar and I don’t want darling little Mother to know how vulgar I can be.’
She then tells how, when she was out with other girls for an evening stroll chaperoned by Mademoiselle, she saw approaching under the lime trees a group of hussars, and soon realized that one of them was gazing at her with alarming intensity. His gaze held her throughout his approach, and as they passed each other his head swivelled as though her face had magnetized his eyes. She blushed scarlet ‘from head to foot’, and as she walked on she prayed that when the hussars reached the end of the promenade they would leave it, not turn round as Mademoiselle and her charges would do, to walk back. But no sooner had the girls started their return than she saw the hussars coming towards her again, and again he was gazing at her. And this time, when they passed each other, she (though still blushing furiously) lifted her eyes to meet his – and smiled! End of vulgarity.
Not much happened to increase her sophistication between then and her marriage. The discovery of what she was expected to do in bed with her husband threw her. She was a healthily passionate girl, but passion collided with ignorance so disastrously that the connection between the deliciousness of being kissed and the sexual act was broken. Full sex was not just disappointing, it was embarrassing and horrid. And my father – inexperienced, shy about physical demonstrations of affection, and probably ashamed of his own sexual impulses – was far from being able to prove her wrong. He was particularly at a disadvantage because it had not been him to whom she had responded so eagerly when he kissed her, only the fun of being kissed: he was not, physically, the type of man to whom she was drawn.
She did get used to it, and the first years of their marriage went reasonably well, helped by his being away a good deal, then by her being pregnant with me, and then, immediately after the war’s end, by their sharing the adventure in Abyssinia – though that was rather spoilt by the beginning of her second pregnancy. But soon after my brother’s birth she met a man – one of my father’s fellow-officers – with whom she discovered what being in love and making love were really like, and that was the end of any attempt on her part at married happiness.
It was not, however, the end of the marriage. Her parents found out that she was having an affair: found out through the agency of the same sister to whom she had reported smiling at the hussar. That sister, though asked not to show the letter to anyone, NOT EVEN MOTHER, had promptly done just that, as was proved by my finding it in Gran’s collection of all the letters she had ever received from her daughters. ‘She always was a sneak,’ said my mother, aged eighty-five – and so indeed she was. On a visit to London in about 1922 this sister was waiting for a friend in the hall of the University Women’s Club, of which Mum was a member, when my mother swept in accompanied by an unknown man, looking so radiantly beautiful that for a moment she was not recognizable. What was said I do not know, but when my aunt got home next day she reported to their father: ‘Kitty is having an affair.’
My aunt told me this herself, when I was driving her back from London to Norfolk one day, and why she told me I have never been able to work out. She was always slightly given to little paroxysms of confession, but this was not little, and nothing led up to it: we had just been laughing at some extravagance of my mother’s when she suddenly said: ‘Oh, poor Kit – I once did such a terrible thing to her, I could never tell you what it was.’ Naturally I protested that to say so much without saying more was unforgivable, and – not very unwillingly – she gave way. What happened then, she said, was that Gramps wrote to my mother saying that unless she broke with this man at once the family would never see her again, my father found this letter in my mother’s handbag, and my mother had a nervous breakdown and had to go into a nursing-home for a ‘sleepcure’.
Poking about in her handbag is so unlike my father that at first I found it hard to believe. But if the letter arrived by the first post, at breakfast time, and she opened it in front of him – ‘Oh, look, a letter from Dad’ … The shock would have been undisguisable, she would almost have fainted, would certainly have had to leave the room with it as fast as possible. And even if it didn’t happen like that, there were other ways in which he could have known that the letter had come, then seen her dismay. And although he was not a particularly observant man, it seems likely that someone whose wife was so lit-up by an affair that her own sister had almost failed to recognize her, would already have had an inkling that something was up. My father may well have been in a tormented state for weeks, struggling to believe that his suspicions were unfounded, so that her reaction to her father’s letter was the last straw.
‘Sleep-cures’ were popular during the twenties: the patient was sedated so heavily for several days that she was oblivious of whatever was done to her in the way of nourishment and evacuation (it sounds delicious).
I don’t know whether my parents discussed divorce, but I doubt it. If my mother had got divorced she would have been cast out by her parents (perhaps, in the end, not; but she would have been convinced that this would happen at the time) and would have lost her children: it is improbable that my father, who truly loved her, could have borne inflicting all that on her, and certain that she would not have demanded it. Even if her lover was in a position to marry her – and I have no idea whether he was – I think she was too much a daughter to face the prospect of losing her parents in any circumstances, and probably too much a mother (though less so than she would later become) to face losing us.
From then on she knew that she loathed being touched by my father, although her guilt prevented her from entirely denying him his ‘rights’. To continue having sex, even if only occasionally, with someone whose touch has become hateful, is nerve-racking; while on his side, poor man, to be unable to resist making love to someone you adore, even though you know she can hardly bear it, is misery. So the quarrels began – not, or not publicly, about what was really wrong, but about an endless series of little things: his unpunctuality, her extravagance, whether to do this or that, whether to go here or there … It became impossible for them to be together for more than two days running without there being a row, almost always started by her. There was never any physical violence worse than flouncing out of rooms and banging doors, but the emotional disturbance was acute.
It was only after my father’s death that I learnt (again from le
tters) how sad and patient he had been. As soon as the Second World War began he had returned to the Army, and had the good fortune to be sent to Ethiopia to run an officers’ training corps for Haile Selassie (he could speak Amharic – in fact he was probably the only officer in the British Army who could). This was a quirky kind of occupation that suited him – he became known for communicating with his headquarters by means of homing pigeons, which he trained. But the process of demobilization took a long time to reach him at his exotic outpost – a pink palace at Harar – and he was feeling pretty homesick by the time he wrote to my mother to tell her he would soon be back. It is distressing to know that he then, so many years after their trouble began, felt that he must apologize for his imminent reappearance, as something which she was unable to enjoy. ‘I am so dreadfully sorry, my darling, that I have never been able to make you feel about me like Peggy feels about Geoff.’