Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  The men who worked on the farm were patient and kind. The cowmen were too busy to be interesting companions, but the horsemen had time to talk as they took their teams out to the fields, and would let us ride with them either on a broad back or on a loaded wagon (how it would heave and rock, and sometimes the branches of a tree would sweep it so that you had to flatten yourself on the load). The man whose company we most enjoyed was the shepherd. He was alone a lot in outlying pastures, living out in a hut on wheels during the lambing season, and he was glad to talk. He presided over the most interesting ceremonies of the year: lambing, dipping, and shearing. His dogs were watchful and aloof to anything but their master and their job, so that if they wagged their tails when one spoke to them, one felt flattered. Like all shepherds, ours knew his sheep as individuals, and this seemed a magic power.

  For a time, when I was about eight, the shepherd had a boy working with him called Jack Grey. Perhaps he was fifteen years old, but to my brother and me he seemed almost grown-up. His father, who was the woodman, came of gypsy stock and Jack had gypsy talents: he could make sounds which rabbits mistook for other rabbits, he poached, he could climb any tree and knew everything about birds and animals. We envied and admired him for living out of doors so much, and at the same time were impressed by his matter-of-fact attitude towards it, his remarks implying that we would not enjoy it as much as we supposed if it were part of a job. We collected birds’ eggs then, under strict injunctions to take nothing unless there were at least four eggs in the nest and never to frighten the parent birds so that they would desert. Jack could climb higher trees than we could and was uninhibited by rules (which were awkward in the cases of birds which laid only two or three eggs). The treasures of our collection – our jay’s, our heron’s, and our sparrow hawk’s eggs – came from him. We were with him whenever we could be, and he treated us as equals, not as children. Later he shot at and wounded his father, who had come home drunk and had threatened him. He pleaded self-defence but was sent to prison. Much later, when I was eighteen or nineteen, I was at a roller-skating rink (roller-skating had become a passion with me and my friends) and the attendant, a man at once sleek and seedy with heavily oiled hair and a flashy checked suit, knelt down in front of me to fasten my skates. He did not look up. I looked down at the hair plastered in straplike segments across the bent head, and I heard my voice – this is quite literal, I was unconscious of recognition or of forming words – I heard my voice saying ‘Jack Grey’. He looked up and said ‘Hullo, Miss Dinah’, and then, after ‘How are you’ and ‘It’s a long time’, we were at a loss. The exact nature of our earlier intimacy, what we had talked about besides birds and animals, I could not remember, but I was sharply aware of the ghost of friendship standing there between me and this shady-looking man. We smiled at each other shyly and I left the rink feeling shaky and unhappy. Perhaps as a boy Jack had welcomed the company of small children so kindly because already there were things in his life of which he needed to avoid thinking. I hope he knew how much we loved and admired him.

  The friendships children make with their family’s employees seem to the children friendships between equals. If a cowman, or my grandmother’s head gardener, caught us at some mischief and said ‘I’ll tell your grandma on you’, the words were, to us, no more than a formula: it was not the threat but the wrath of the speaker which had authority. It never occurred to us that even when the gardener caught us stealing his beloved grapes he would never actually clout us, nor did we notice that however intimate we were with Jack Grey, he never invited us to his house, nor we him to ours. A relationship which felt natural was possible because the lines laid down for it were so deeply engraved by time and custom that neither side thought of questioning them, but those lines defined a narrow area. When we went back to the Farm ‘for good’ I was in my early teens, no longer a child. I knew all the men on the farm, of course, but without realizing it I had moved out of the realm of friendship with them.

  We were still at our poorest for our first year or so at the Farm, still without servants, though a woman used to come in to do the scrubbing and another to cook lunch. Soon after we settled in, I was sent to the back yard to bring in the cold meat we were going to eat for supper. It was kept in a perforated tin meat-safe hung on the wall in a cool place. I opened the safe, took out the dish – and the shelf was bare. For the first time since my mother had told me about our poverty I felt afraid: there was nothing in our larder once that meat was eaten. At the Manor the larder was an L-shaped room with a brick floor and wide shelves made of slate on which were crocks of preserved eggs, flat pans of milk waiting to have the cream skimmed on them, tins and tins of cakes, biscuits and buns, joints of meat, at least one ham, strings of sausages, pounds of butter, big cheeses, bowls of dripping, bottles of fruit, stone jars of currants – food on which the house could have lived for days if it had suddenly been cut off from the outside world. Whatever the breakfast dish in that house – kidneys on toast, or kedgeree, or bacon and mushrooms – there was always an egg boiled for every person there. A houseful of us could amount to sixteen or so, and sometimes no one ate a boiled egg (what did happen to them?). At our house in Hertfordshire the scale had not been so grand, but always beside what we were then eating there had been the remains of what we had eaten recently and something that we were soon going to eat: the larder had continuity. I stood in front of the empty meat-safe telling myself that it was silly to be scared, my mother would be buying more food tomorrow, but for a few moments poverty had become real. And because food did reappear on the shelf (and as soon as my mother had recovered her nerve, accumulated there as merrily as ever), I soon concluded that ours was not real poverty. I remained far away from the real thing, I hardly ever had the chance of glimpsing it, but that moment in the back yard had made me feel what a bare shelf was like, and understand that it could happen. It would be an exaggeration to say that it made me think, but it may have given me the beginnings of a sense of proportion.

  My mother resembled my grandmother in her generosity towards her children. I never heard her say it, but she must have resolved that we, at least, should not suffer from the financial muddle into which the family had drifted, and it is only now that I see how much unfamiliar work she did about her house at that time. All she expected from me (my sister was five years younger) was that I should help her make beds and clean the bedrooms in the morning, wash up supper and sometimes cook it. It was almost always eggs, usually scrambled – she did not know any other cooking to teach me. Housekeeping generally became rough and ready – a pleasant state for children – and although even at that it must have weighed on her, it was never a bogy for anyone else. She did not mind things which ought to shine not shining, and she did not mind ‘clean’ dirt (earth, grass seeds, spilt dog biscuit). While there was a carelessly arranged vase of flowers on every surface flat enough to hold a vase, she felt her drawing-room pretty, and so it was. It smelt lovely, too, more like a garden than a room, and since most of its untidiness came from the litter of books on chair arms, footstools, and occasional tables, it was an agreeable room to be in.

  That accumulation of books silting up the flower-free surfaces in the house: that, at bottom, I owe to my grandfathers. Both were men who took it for granted that a gentleman should have a good library, and my maternal grandfather’s library was a very good one. In addition to this, my grandmother’s father had been Master of an Oxford college, which meant that however unscholarly his descendants might be, they all esteemed scholarship: they might not read much (most of them, in fact, did), but they considered a house without books in it uncivilized. At the Manor, not only was the library walled with books, but the morning room and my grandfather’s smoking-room as well, while the whole of one upstairs passage was given over to shelves containing more trivial volumes (delightful shelves, badly lit, from which you might fish a handbook on veterinary surgery or The Scarlet Pimpernel). There was an angle of bookshelves ceiling-high in the nursery, and al
though reading in the bath, in the WC, or in bed was forbidden to the younger children, everyone knew why one did it.

  Reading ran in two currents. My grandfather’s interest had been history, and most of the family, including my mother, inherited his tastes. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was my mother’s bedside reading for a long time, and she knew Horace Walpole, Madame de Sévigné, and Mrs Delaney like old friends. On the other hand, one particularly beloved aunt, and my father, most enjoyed imaginative writing and poetry. My mother had no patience with books which were ‘not true’. She always insisted that she actively detested poetry, finding it a lot of words about nothing, and she would not go to see a play by Shakespeare. My father revelled in Shakespeare and made frequent sorties into one poet or another. During the second world war, when, to his great content, he was back in the Army and serving abroad, he suddenly decided that he must read Dryden and wrote home for his complete works.

  In a life where the adults took books so much for granted, it was natural that the children should do so too. About eighty per cent of our birthday and Christmas presents always consisted of books: it would have been impossible not to have become a compulsive reader. I developed the lust early and violently, following my father’s tastes rather than my mother’s, and would smuggle an electric torch to bed almost as early as I can remember so that I could continue to gobble my books under a tent of sheets. I was always puzzled by how they knew. Thump, thump, the steps would come along the passage, under the pillow would go book and torch and I would screw my eyes shut, but the minute the light went on and ‘they’ saw my body stretched so rigidly innocent under the blankets, they would say accusingly, ‘You were reading!’

  At other times they would say ‘You must be skipping’, or ‘You can’t remember books if you read so many at a time, so fast’, but I never skipped, and any that I understood I did remember. Failing to understand did not prevent my reading. Before I was twelve I had been through most of Meredith in my grandfather’s handsome, vellum-bound edition, undeterred by the fact that the involved prose was too much for me. Those submerged, and it was only years later, when I picked up The Egotist for what I thought to be the first time, that I rediscovered those sessions on the window seat in the morning-room. Pages of it seemed new to me, then I would come to a ‘visual’ passage – Clara wearing pink ribbons, finding her young man asleep under the cherry tree, for instance – and I would think, But I have been here before, I have seen this, and gradually the whole thing swam up: the slight warmth of the radiator boxed in under the window seat, the green damask on the flat cushion, the smooth binding and the thick, handmade paper with its ragged edges, and my grandmother coming in and saying ‘Darling, are you really enjoying all those Merediths? He’s rather grown-up for you.’

  Boys, poor creatures, became part-exiles from our world when they were about eight years old and were sent to their preparatory schools. Girls stayed at home, with governesses. I had run through seven of them by the time we settled at the Farm, starting with ‘nursery governesses’ whom I shared with my brother (two years younger than myself), and going on, when he had been exiled, to better-qualified women shared with cousins or the daughters of neighbours. With ponies, goats, dogs, streams, tree houses, fruit stealing, and poetry writing to compete against, lessons could hardly be anything but a chore, and I suppose that it is this which has left me with an ineradicable feeling that work is the opposite of pleasure. I have tried to persuade myself out of this, but in vain. After twenty years of working in jobs usually congenial, I still leave my offce with the sensation of returning to life.

  One of the governesses was sacked because she cowed us, to be forgotten quickly and thankfully. The rest were forgotten slowly and naturally, simply because they meant little to us. Fragments of them remain. A very early one had a kind horse face and was a sucker. Once, when I had irritated her beyond endurance and she had gone out of the room to recover her temper, I leant out of the window, picked a fat, creamy-pink rose from the wall, and laid it on her open book. My eyes must surely have been beady with calculation when she came back to the table, but she noticed nothing, she fell for it, her silly heart melted at the charming ways of children, and I felt a delicious sense of power.

  More of Mademoiselle remains bccause we were cruel to her, and we had not until then realized that it was possible for children to be cruel to grown-ups. Her poor hands purple with chilblains, she would sit there weakly accepting our assurance that it was the custom in England to eat boiled eggs with honey, mustard, Ovaltine, and a pinch of birdseed stirred into them (we did it for several mornings to prove our point). Then she turned, and forced my sister, the baby of the family and not strictly under her jurisdiction, to eat all the fat on her cutlet. My brother and I did not think much of my sister at the time, but she rose to the occasion so well, being instantly sick on the table, that we rallied to her with cries of ‘Poor little girl, you have been cruel to her,’ and bolted into shrubberies and beyond, where we stayed all day, knowing that Mademoiselle would not venture further than lawns and flower gardens. We came in that evening knowing that we had been very naughty, but our mother used other words. ‘You have been unkind,’ she said. ‘How could you have been so cruel to poor Mademoiselle?’ The incident engraved a trace of uneasiness on my conscience which made me slightly less horrible than some to the duller, plainer mistresses once I was at school.

  Only one governess remains solidly a person: Ursula, the last of them, who stayed with us for five years. Her broad red face and her thin, cottony hair augured ill for her, but her common sense and her affectionate heart soon prevailed. She loved dogs, she could corner a recalcitrant pony in a paddock almost as efficiently as my mother, she made jokes we thought funny, and she, too, in her heart, felt that real life was better than lessons. She taught me, one of my cousins, and two girls who lived near us, according to a pleasant system (still practised, I believe) by which we never worked for longer than twenty-five minutes at a time on any subject for fear of tiring young intelligences. Lessons often consisted of looking at smudgy reproductions of pictures by Pre-Raphaelites, then describing them. I was good at this and have loved irises and lilies ever since. When part of the syllabus proved dull – ‘citizenship’, for example, contained in a book with a dreary blue cover and crossheads printed in a clumsy bold type face – Ursula let it fade out and gave us essays on ‘My Best Day’s Hunting’ to write instead. She was ruthless about good sense and good manners, though, and she did us good.

  When the bank’s lack of sympathy finally drove me to school (can it really have been cheaper than governesses, or had I become so uppish by then that they felt I needed it?), the headmistress told my mother that she had never before encountered a girl so badly grounded. I felt indignant on Ursula’s behalf, but it was probably the truth. She enjoyed the things that we enjoyed too much, and skimped the rest. She must have reported me intelligent, because even in her day it was understood that I would be the one to go to Oxford, but what, apart from my lust for reading and my facility for ‘essays’, led her to that conclusion, I now find it hard to see. I cannot remember employing my mind, at that time, on any subject other than horses and sex.

  4

  MY PARENTS’ IDEAS on bringing up children (or rather my mother’s, for my father was not much interested and left it to her), were slightly more progressive than those of the rest of the family. Sex was a distasteful subject to all of them, but I believe my mother would have given us honest answers if we had asked questions. She would have been embarrassed, though, and we knew it, so we did not ask. I cannot remember her telling me of any aspect of it except menstruation, which she did not describe as connected with the tricky subject of childbirth, but only as a boring thing which happened to women and, luckily, did not hurt. She got out of giving us ‘little talks’ or one of those hygienic handbooks for the young by letting us run loose with a lot of animals and forbidding us no book, however ‘grown-up’. With this freedom, she b
elieved, we would soon know all about it and, knowing all, would develop a healthy attitude towards it: which, in her terms, would have meant forgetting it. On the same principle, when I was older, she imposed no chaperonage on me but allowed me to come and go with my young men unchecked, hoping that trust would breed reliability. She was aware of the increasing freedom of the ’twenties, she had come to see her own upbringing as absurdly strait-laced, but she was at that stage of emancipation where it is believed that it can be applied to manners without affecting morals: a touching stage. ‘You know that I trust you,’ she would sometimes say, nervously. I was always grateful for this attitude, partly for its generosity, partly because its consequences were not what she expected.

  Animals unaided did not do the trick. At eight or ten years old you can know all about bitches coming on heat, and how a bull mounts a cow, without connecting it with human beings. It was in a book that the odd, almost inconceivable fact that people do what animals do turned up under my hand, as solid as a stone. I think that my mother, in spite of her policy, had hoped that we would not chance on Marie Stopes’s Planned Parenthood – small and black, it was pushed very far back on one of the lower shelves – but chance on it I did, at the age of eleven. Can I really have pulled it out with a slightly cynical amusement at the idea of our parents reading up on how to rear us methodically, which was what the title suggested to me? That is how I remember it.

  The diagrams, and the clear descriptions of sexual intercourse, astonished and thrilled me: I had stumbled on the Answer. At first excitement was mixed with dismay – I had seen those awkward, panting, heaving animals: could human beings be so undignified? – but I got over that in a day or two and was soon borrowing Dr Stopes’s reverent tone as I explained to Betty, then my closest friend, that it only seemed ugly to us because we did not have husbands: done with one’s love it would be beautiful. Lord, but that was a full week! A summer week in the Hertfordshire house, because I remember hurrying through the fence between our paddock and the park round Betty’s house, loaded almost to bursting point with information and impatient even of the moment it took to disengage my cotton frock from the brambles which caught at it. First the immense discovery, the reading and rereading, the digesting of the principle of the thing, and then of the fascinating details (it was a good idea to put a towel under your hips to keep the sheets clean – years later my first lover was much tickled when I got into bed for my deflowering equipped with a towel); then the complicated shift of focus, the act of faith almost, by which I converted what was dismaying into what was desirable.