by Diana Athill
The editor-turned-author was, without realizing it, contributing to the birth of a new kind of literature. Memoir has grown to be a popular genre, unveiling lives whose richness lurks in private moments rather than public achievement. But in the late 1950s, when Athill began to write, there was no obvious and welcoming category to contain what she was saying and how she was saying it. She expressed herself with a literary and emotional openness that was remarkable for its time – and helps to account for the enduring freshness of her writing.
In this uncannily still-vivid book, Athill offers – lightly, generously – a kaleidoscope of meditations on love, sex and rejection, on pain, humiliation and loss, on aloneness and friendship and faith, Englishness, class and race. Her thoughts are often ebullient with wit, always marked by a passionate push towards personal and social honesty, a commitment ‘to understand, to be aware, to touch the truth’. Instead of a Letter shows us how a person can save herself by ‘seeing things’, keeping her eyes open and on the world.
Andrea Ashworth
1
MY MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER died of old age, a long and painful process. Heart and arteries began to show signs of wearing out when she was ninety-two years old, but it was not until two years later that they failed her and precipitated her – still lucid, still herself – into death. By the end, pain and exhaustion had loosened her grip on life so that when she ‘recovered’ yet again from a heart attack she would whisper, ‘Why doesn’t God let me die?’ but for a long time she was afraid of what was happening to her. She was afraid of death, and she was sorrowful – which was worse – because she had much time in which to ask herself what her life had been for, and often she could not answer.
I was not much with her at that time. Her son and her daughters, who lived near or with her, laboured through it at her side, but her grandchildren were scattered and saw her only when they visited their parents. But once I happened to be there when she was very ill and everyone was more than usually worn out, so I took a night watch. I sat in her cold room (if the windows were shut she felt suffocated), watching the dark hollows of her eyes and the shocking dark hole of her mouth – it was unbearable that Gran, always so completely in control of appearances, should lie with her mouth agape. I listened to the rhythm of her breathing. Sometimes it would stop for a whole minute and the winter night would be absolutely still. In the long silences I prayed to her God, ‘Please, please don’t let her start breathing again,’ and knew that if she died it would not be frightening, that I should feel peace. But each time the harsh, snoring breaths would begin again, hauling her back to another awakening and to more pain and physical humiliation. It was some weeks after that, when she had rallied to the extent of writing an angry letter to the local paper about a new road of which she disapproved, and of ordering a dentist to her bedside to make her a new set of false teeth, that she turned her beautiful speckled eyes towards me one aftemoon and said in so many words: ‘What have I lived for?’
It was she who should have been able to tell me that. All her life she had been a churchgoing Christian of apparently unshaken faith. But she was on her own then: not suffering, like Doctor Johnson, from fear of the consequences of her sinfulness according to the teachings of that faith, but simply unsupported by it. I said to her what I believed: that she had lived, at the very least, for what her life had been. The long, hard months of dying could eclipse her life, but they did not expunge it. What she had created for us, her family, by loving and being loved, still existed, would continue to exist, and could not have existed without her. ‘Do you really think that it has been worth something?’ she asked, and I held her hands and told her that I believed it with all my heart. Then I went away, and wondered. For her it might well be the truth. She had created a world for us. Even if I had been the only one of her descendants to have been rooted in that world (and perhaps I was one of the least deeply rooted of them all), something that her love had made would still be alive. But what of a woman who had never had the chance, or had missed the chance, to create something like that? What of myself? That was a question to whistle up an icy wind, and I was out in it. I waited for the shivering to start.
Well, it has not started yet, and I would like to know why. Which is my reason for sitting down to write this.
2
IT IS STRANGE to have loved someone like my grandmother, with whom I came to disagree on almost everything of importance. In anyone but her the values she held seem to me absurd or shocking, yet there she is: the dominant figure in my curiously matriarchal family, her memory warm with love, pleasure, and gratitude.
When she was a girl, one of four handsome daughters of a Master of an Oxford college, she swore that she would never be kissed by any man but the one she would marry, and she never was. She met her husband when he was an undergraduate: a man with frosty blue eyes and a trace of Yorkshire accent (‘cassel’ for castle, ‘larndry’ for laundry), who read for the bar but did not practise for long because he inherited his father’s estate, which I shall call Beckton. It was not in Yorkshire but in East Anglia, to which his family had moved because his mother was supposed to be delicate and to need a softer climate. She must in fact have been a hardy woman in spite of delicate looks, for she lived to a good age, and if the climate of East Anglia is softer than that of Yorkshire, heaven forbid that I should ever have to winter in the latter.
My grandmother bore her husband four daughters, of whom my mother was the youngest; and at last, when I suspect that a sense of failure was beginning to prey on her, one son. She despised women, or thought that she did. Intelligent herself, happy to send two of her girls to Oxford when it was still uncommon, and proud of any success her female grandchildren might achieve in unwomanly careers, she yet insisted that women’s minds were inferior to men’s. There was some kind of ambiguity at work here, for although masculine superiority was never questioned, the climate of my grandmother’s house was markedly feminine and her daughters’ husbands always seemed to be slightly on the fringe of it. On a subject suitable to men – war, politics, a question of local government, the appointment of a clergyman to a living – she would turn to a son-in-law with a formal deference: ‘I have been wanting to ask you – ought I to write to the bishop …?’ but if she intended to write to the bishop, that was what she would do, whatever the son-in-law said. It was not that the deference was false, but perhaps it was paid to a figure too masculine, too infallible to exist: a pattern of manhood to which the real men in the family failed wholly to conform.
Whether my grandfather conformed to it or not I do not know, for he died when I was six. If he did not, it was through no fault of his wife’s. All I know of their relationship is that their two writing-desks in the library at Beckton Manor were so placed that his was near the fire and hers far from it, and that when, after his death, she referred to him it was always as though he were unquestionable in whatever he said or did. The references were infrequent, but they followed a pattern: ‘Grandpapa always said …’ and so it was; ‘Grandpapa would never let the children …’ and so they never did; ‘Grandpapa was very fond of …’ and so it was good. That she had adored him was an article of faith in the family, but during her last illness she disconcerted one of her daughters. They were talking of her fear of death. ‘I don’t understand why you are so afraid,’ said her daughter. ‘You have always been religious – surely you believe in an afterlife and that you will meet Dad again?’ My grandmother, it seems, said nothing. ‘But,’ I was told, ‘she gave me such a very odd look, it quite shocked me.’ The look may have referred to the afterlife in general, but her daughter had an uncomfortable feeling that it referred to Grandpapa.
What do I know about him? That he had blunt, North Country good looks; that he had discriminating taste in silver and wine and built up a large and excellent library with its emphasis on history; that when he enlarged Beckton Manor, making it U-shaped instead of L-shaped, he set up a kiln to make small bricks matching those of the house, which was
built in about 1760, and employed skilled workmen to carve stone to a Georgian design round his new front door and to mould plaster swags to crown the Adams chimney-piece he put in his new drawing room. A man of taste, but backward-looking. He would give sixpences to his children for learning Lycidas before they were eight, wrote in well managed Johnsonian cadences a thesis on the Serbs (whom he called Servs), and travelled modestly in Italy and Greece, bringing back stone urns for the terrace wall and insisting that his accompanying children put permanganate in the foreign water with which they had to brush their teeth. He was a good farmer. The estate at Beckton is of a thousand acres, some of the land rented out to tenants but much of it attached to the Manor Farm. My grandfather employed a bailiff from Yorkshire, but he took most of the management on himself and did it well.
I cannot recall any word spoken to me by my grandfather. His children’s talk of him has always been as unquestioning as his widow’s, and sometimes affectionate. He was not quite a tyrant, perhaps, but they convey that he ruled his roost as though by divine right, and I do not think that I would have liked him. Death lent him a sort of holiness for a time. His soul flew out of open sash windows and ‘went to Heaven to be with God’, which gave him a share of God’s benevolence. After that he did a miracle for me, permitting me to walk unstung through a bed of nettles. Each spring, when we made cowslip balls for my grandmother’s birthday, we put the best of them on his grave, an austere grey slab with the words ‘Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new’ carved on it, but the feeling of piety and love which attended this tribute was engendered by the act rather than directed towards the memory of a real man. And the things I owe him – Beckton as a place in which to grow up, books as an indispensable part of life – soon came to seem Gran’s dispensation, not his.
She went on being there. After breakfast she would put on an overall and brush the dogs out on the terrace by the steps which led into the library. Wearing thick leather gloves she would garden in her greenhouse, or the rose beds, would cut flowers for the house and would arrange them in the ‘flower room’, where the vases were kept and where the dogs slept. She wrote many letters on small sheets of black-edged paper, in writing so like shorthand that only her daughters knew the secret of reading it. She went for a long walk every day and took a strong dose of senna pods every night: fresh air and open bowels were, she considered, all that was necessary for health. Her housekeeping, to which she paid vigilant attention, was simplified by custom. Vegetables, milk, eggs, and butter all came from the estate; hams were cured, honey was harvested, or jam was made at fixed times, and the groceries were ordered by post every month, from the Civil Service Stores in London. It was a simple, rhythmical life in which she was only concerned with the management, not the execution, but when much later she moved to a smaller house and staff problems combined with the dwindling of a fixed income forced her to do things herself, she knew how to clean, dust, polish silver, and so on much better than the rest of us, who had been doing it for years as a matter of course.
The pleasures of her life were the place itself, which she adored, her family, and reading: her existence should have been a tranquil one. What was it that made anxiety such a distinct thread in it? Never could anyone go away from Beckton without my grandmother’s eyes expressing real unhappiness. The journey might be a short one, made for pleasure, but she still felt a clutch of fear. We were not going to eat enough, and what we ate would be unwholesome; we were going to sleep with our windows shut; we were going to catch some infectious disease; a car was going to skid or a train run off the rails. Bad things were likely to happen to people if they went away. I have noticed this attitude in other people whose lives are secure, comfortable, and sheltered by privilege so that one would expect disaster to be far from their minds. I suppose, whether they recognize it or not, it is an acknowledgment of the forces besieging their position. My grandmother had a good knowledge of history and read The Times daily: she knew what was happening in the world. Wars and rumours of war; communists abroad and socialists at home; rising taxes and falling respect for tradition. She, a conservative, a gentlewoman, a devout Protestant Christian and an owner of property, was automatically on the defensive against powers outside her control. She did not trust ‘outside’ and converted her distrust into fear of accident and careless eating. Over and over again I have heard her, or someone like her, say in a voice of real dismay, ‘But you can’t go on that train, you’ll miss lunch!’ as though they had become obsessed by the value of food because of some experience of hardship or starvation. In their time measured out not by coffee spoons but by dishes of roast beef, steak-and-kidney puddings, apple pie and cream, they have never once felt or expected to feel a pang of true hunger, so from where does this irrational panic come if it is not a symbol of something else?
My grandmother’s anxiety increased as she grew older, because she felt that the right, the natural order of things would be for her to be able to provide for us all on her death, and it was clear that she could not do so; but when I was a child it was less explicit. It was simply darling Gran fussing, and if you teased her about it she smiled back ruefully, half amused by herself, half expressing ‘It is all very well for you to laugh, if only you knew.’
My father had a family, but it did not own Beckton. It owned no land at all. My paternal grandfather, a clergyman in comfortable circumstances, shot himself for no good reason while I was still a baby (the coal had not been delivered on time, I believe: he had high blood pressure and would therefore fly into violent rages over small matters). It was as ‘good’ a family as my mother’s and although it had left East Anglia long ago, it had a better claim than hers on our own beloved county, having several tombs and brasses there to prove the existence of rustic Athill knights and one fishmonger at a respectable distance in time. In spite of this my mother felt it to be a family inferior to hers, and somehow, I can no longer remember exactly in what way, conveyed this idea to her children. She always felt that possession by her was nine-tenths of anything’s value, even a dog’s. A woman who loved animals to the point of absurdity, she rarely admitted charm or breeding in a dog belonging to someone else. ‘It’s not a bad-looking puppy, I suppose,’ she would say, ‘but it’s going to be leggy’ – or, ‘One of those hysterical dogs, always ready to make a fuss of strangers.’ In the same way, her husband’s family bored and irritated her. It was as though when they were first married and conflicting loyalties emerged – with whom, for instance, should they spend Christmas? – she had said like a child ‘Bags I my family,’ and had got away with it ever since.
Because of Beckton, this was easy to do. A house with twenty bedrooms, standing in a large garden and park with a thousand acres of land round it, can absorb children far more easily than can a neat six-bedroomed house with a two-acre garden, like that of my paternal grandmother, who lived in Devonshire. It was more sensible to go to Beckton for the holidays. And if we or any of our cousins had been ill, or our parents were abroad, Beckton Gran could house us with much pleasure and little inconvenience, while Devonshire Grannie, fond though she was of us, would have had to turn her house upside down. Besides, my father was an Army offcer with, during all my childhood, the rank of major, and with private means so small that they hardly counted. He lived above his income, modestly and anxiously, from the day he was married, but even by doing that he could not afford to give his wife and children so good a time as they had at Beckton: he would have felt churlish had he prevented their visits. I doubt, indeed, whether he could have done so if he had tried. My mother was strong-willed and he had the disadvantage of being the one qui aimait. So although I and my younger brother and sister knew that our official home was where he happened to be working – Woolwich, or when he retired from the Army and took a job in the city, Hertfordshire – our ‘real’ home, the place to which we ‘came home’ from other places, was Beckton.
Having bought a small glass bottle made in about 1785, club-shaped, with a delicate spiral rib from
neck to base, I was looking at it with affection, enjoying the colour of the glass and the hint of irregularity in the shape. Why, I began to wonder, are objects made in England during that period so much my home territory when it comes to aesthetic pleasure? The products of other centuries and of other countries I have learnt to appreciate, but I cannot remember having to learn to delight in those of the English eighteenth century. Probably, I concluded, it is because so much of my upbringing took place in an eighteenth-century house. It was a thought with gratifying implications. I am glad that I have not inherited money or possessions, and I would be glad if I could be sure that I had not inherited any prejudices or attitudes of mind towards other people, but I liked the idea of a child’s mind and eye unconsciously trained by graceful shapes, just proportions, and the details of good craftsmanship. It suggested that whatever faults the middling English gentry might have, they would be likely to possess a certain feeling for grace and style: good for us!
Then, unfortunately, I began to remember various objects bought by my relatives, prized by them and admired by myself before I left home and began to sniff round museums and listen to the opinions of people better educated in such matters than myself. I remembered certain lamps and pieces of china and materials for curtains or chair covers … It was true that we were all familiar with one kind of beauty so that if any of us became interested in aesthetics, that kind, being familiar, would be easy to start with; but it was clearly not true that we had gained from it any ingrained, generally applicable sense of quality or style. If the inhabitants of Beckton had to buy something new and were unable to afford to go to the right place for it (the family’s fortunes have been coasting downhill all my life), choice would be conditioned not by knowledge, but by familiarity. The new object would be a pitiful, decadent bastard of the old and we would be cheerfully blind to the difference between patina and French polish, cut glass and moulded, a graceful curve and a clumsy one. Only a few members of my family had, if left to themselves, more natural taste than the people they most pitied and despised: the dwellers in suburbia. (The working classes were allowed a few distinct and even endearing merits: suburbanites – no!)