by Diana Athill
Once my headmistress had sized me up, she used to deal with it by savaging me once a term, at a well-judged moment about two weeks before the end-of-term examinations. ‘Diana – she wants you in her study.’ With my heart in my boots and my record only too clear in my head I would trail along the dark corridor and tap at her door. She would be standing in front of her fireplace, wearing one of her brown or bottle-green knitted suits, hitching the skirt up a little, perhaps, to warm the backs of her legs. ‘Miss Beggs tells me … Miss Huissendahl tells me …’ and the shameful evidence would be put before me in a voice of such disgust, with such ponderous sarcasm, that I could have hit her. Almost in tears with resentment and humiliation, I would go back to the study and defiantly read a novel or write letters all through the next preparation period – but mysteriously, when the examinations came, my marks would be adequate. After a couple of years of this ritual I should have been dismayed if she had skipped it, for I liked to do well. I remember feeling indignant one term, when she left it until too late so that the only subject in which I came top was English. That I came top in anyway, because I liked it.
Even my headmistress, however, could not inject adequacy in mathematics. At the sight of figures I became, and still become, imbecile; and this is a block so immovable that I do not feel guilt at it – there is nothing I can do about it. What set it up I do not know. My first lessons in arithmetic, given by a beloved aunt, I remember with pleasure. We played with matchsticks and it made sense. But once I had mastered adding, subtracting, and dividing I reached a point beyond which nothing could make me go. So profound is my aversion to the symbols of number that I cannot even trust myself to number the pages of a typescript with any reliability: I will find on looking back over it that I have written ‘82, 83, 84, 76, 77’. Recognizing a hopeless case when they saw one, my teachers recommended that I should drop mathematics and take one of the permitted substitute subjects for the obligatory School Certificate examination of my day – botany, it was. I enjoyed dissecting blackberries and the heads of poppies and then making drawings of them, and was so thankful to be relieved of those nightmare numbers that I did quite well in it.
I do not regret knowing nothing about mathematics, but I am sorry that I had another, slightly less serious block about Latin, and I believe that it could have been undermined. If, after the barest minimum of grammar had been taught me, I had been let loose with a dictionary and, say, Ovid’s Ars Amatoria … But oh, how badly Latin used to be taught! Those nameless girls, constantly making presents of goats to that boring queen! I used to hang on to the goats for all I was worth – I liked goats, goats interested me immensely – but they were never allowed to do anything in the least goatlike, so it was no good. I tried hard with Latin. If there was a choice of verbs to learn I would pick the ones which meant something to me, such as ‘to dance’, ‘to ride’, ‘to drink’ – and, of course, ‘to love’ – and I found that the future tense, which could be used as an incantation, stayed with me fairly well. ‘I will dance, you will dance, he will dance’ – pause to dream about ‘he’ – ‘we will dance – I shall be wearing a dress with a huge skirt of shell-pink tulle – no, heavy gold lamé, perhaps – and he will …’ Even more memorable was the form ‘Let him love.’ ‘Let him love!’ – my hair, for that scene, would have had to go raven black … I struggled through the school examinations; with stubborn holiday coaching from an elderly clergyman I survived the entrance examination for Oxford, and once there, with more extra coaching, I got through the first-year examination known as Pass Mods. And then, having spent all those years on it, having learnt what must have amounted to quite a lot of it, with one great ‘Huff!’ of relief I blew the whole language out of my mind. The only words of Latin I know today are a few future tenses and veni, vidi, vici.
In the Hall of my school, used as a chapel and for all communal occasions, there was, and I suppose still is, a board carrying the names of all the head girls. Mine (and this still seems to me very odd) is on it, which only goes to show how closely biographers should examine evidence. I had been there a long time by then, and had made myself comfortable. By having my appendix removed I had been excused games for all of one term, and the headmistress was tactful enough never to withdraw this blissful dispensation (perhaps the games mistress implored her not to) so that while others were thumping about after balls, I could go for walks. Once in the sixth form, I was free to sit in the little library instead of in the communal study, and attempts to stop me going to bed at eight-thirty, with the little ones, had long been abandoned. The point of that was that the little ones were too much in awe of me to bang on the bathroom door. I could lie alone in hot water for as much as ten minutes at a time (and Blanche Dubois was no more addicted to hot baths than I was while suffering school), and once in bed I might have, if I was lucky, a precious half-hour in an empty room. To begin with, a few girls had been mildly unkind to me for being bad at games and reading so much, but the two things had now become part of my public persona, funny and rather engaging. I was good-tempered and obliging, and had an easily won reputation as a wit: I could feel that people liked me. I expected my last year at school to be almost pleasant, particularly as School Certificate was behind me and I was specializing in English, my best subject, in preparation for Oxford.
It had not occurred to me that everyone else had left. Like flotsam stranded by a receding tide, there remained of the senior girls only myself and a large, kind, dull girl called Jennifer. The departing sixth form had to go through an almost parliamentary procedure for electing the new head girl, and after their session an anxious delegation came to me as I peacefully read Sparkenbrooke in the library, and said, ‘We are awfully sorry, we know that you will hate it – but Jennifer can’t be head girl – you can see that, can’t you? So we had to elect you.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘I won’t do it. You can’t make me if I don’t want to.’ They pleaded for a little while, then went away to ask the headmistress what they should do. While I waited, I examined my feelings. Horror had been my first reaction, but after that, had I been putting it on a little, was I not faintly pleased, underneath, at the prospect of such eminence? With immense smugness I decided that I was amused, yes, but not pleased: I really was a girl who so despised everything to do with school that nothing would persuade her to accept.
Then the old woman stumped in and said, ‘Come into the garden.’ She put her arm through mine and walked me briskly up and down among the roses, chuckling and saying flattering things like ‘Look, you’ve got enough sense to see that all this is quite unimportant, but it would make life easier for me if you accepted.’ I was fond of her by then. She had once nearly expelled me and had shouted, ‘Have you no moral sense at all?’ to which I had shouted back ‘None, if that’s what you call moral sense,’ so we had battle scars to share. Soon I was arguing to myself ‘Ah, why make so much fuss, it’s not worth it,’ but a secret feeling of importance was swelling in me. I made my own terms. I would have nothing to do, I said, with the head girl’s traditional responsibility towards games (making up teams and so on); Jennifer must do that. All right, she said, and I accepted. And I did not feel ashamed. I still felt amused, and I did not feel very pleased, but I did, alas, feel a little pleased. I had shown that I did not want it, and now I had got it; I had made my little omelette, and it was not ungratifying to find the eggs still there.
I can truthfully say, however, that by the end of that short spell as queen of a tiny castle I came back to my first frame of mind. The very fact that I could from time to time feel myself becoming slightly corrupted by an apparent eminence – feeling self-satisfied, when no one knew better than I did how little reason there was for self-satisfaction – ended by confirming in me a native indifference to matters of status. It was all a lot of nonsense, I concluded, and whenever since then I have been in situations where official status was held to be important, I have continued to find that true.
On my last day of school, Packing
Day, the day of joy, the day when we stayed up late after fruit salad for supper and sang, heaven knows why, the Eton Boating Song and Harrow’s ‘Forty-Years On’, I looked down from my heights at the cheerfully bellowing crowd of girls and thought, ‘Now perhaps – yes, surely – you will feel a moment of regret that it is ending?’ But I did not. I knew that I had learnt a lot there, had made some good friends and had some amusing times. I remembered lying flat on my back on the big table in the middle of the study, so overcome by laughter that I thought they would have to carry me up to bed. I remembered drawing lessons in the summer garden, and playing the part of Mr Badger in Toad of Toad Hall. I remembered standing for Labour in the mock election we had run at the time of a real one (my grandmother sent my opponent a bundle of Conservative literature as ammunition). I had not, after my first two terms, been unhappy except when in trouble through my own fault – I had even enjoyed a lot of it. But never, for, a single day, had I been doing anything but wait for it to end and now it had ended. Thank God.
7
THAT I STOOD as Labour candidate in the school’s mock election when all my family were unquestioning Conservatives was partly the result of Paul’s influence, partly of my headmistress’s. Paul was more or less apolitical, but he had jolted me out of conformity with my family’s mores, He was anti-Them. Particularly he was, as an undergraduate disgusted by standards of material success which threatened to involve him in the kind of career he would detest. His father hoped that he would settle down as a Man in a Grey Flannel Suit, and of that, by temperament, he was the antithesis. He talked of most conservative conventions as tedious or funny and of some of them as immoral, and since, at that stage, whatever he said was Revealed Truth to me, rebellion rather than conformity inevitably became my line. It went with the modern poetry to which he had introduced me. His first present to me, some time in my fifteenth year, had been the complete works of Oscar Wilde and T. S. Eliot’s collected poems, and while the Wilde had been just my cup of tea, the Eliot had been champagne. It was a brilliant present, coming from someone not himself a great reader of poetry (‘I don’t understand much of this,’ he wrote in it, ‘but I expect you will. Love, Paul’), but he had a flair for present-giving. Nonchalantly but neatly he pushed me into a kind of reading of which I knew nothing but for which I was ripe.
Whether my headmistress voted Liberal or Labour I do not know, but she and her sisters, one felt, had spent their distant youth in earnest concern for women’s rights or the reform of education and the prison system: she came of a family with a good old-fashioned radical tradition, she was a pacifist, and she saw to it that the school library was salted with pacifist and Left Wing reading. She made no overt attempts to influence her pupils politically, seeing her task as that of teaching us to think for ourselves (not to mention that of retaining the confidence of our parents), but one of the reasons why she liked me in spite of my shortcomings was that in so far as I thought at all, my thinking went in what seemed to her the right direction. The national newspapers and the weeklies were always spread on a long table in the school’s entrance hall; we were not forced to read them, but we were encouraged to. In the ’thirties anyone who had had her shell cracked for her and was not a moron could hardly read the papers without veering to the left. By the time I finished school I was an imperfectly informed but convinced socialist, pacifist, and agnostic.
My agnosticism did not have my headmistress’s blessing, though, true to her principles of non-intervention in matters of conscience, she took no action when I stopped taking Communion. I had been brought up as a member of the Church of England, liking God. He knew everything about me but he was Love and he was Understanding, so it would be hard to do anything for which he would not forgive me. In the book of Bible stories from which my grandmother read to us on Sundays, he was a figure of benevolence manifesting himself in a landscape remarkable for its beautiful sunsets, and later, in the Bible itself and in Beckton Church (as familiar and beloved as the morning-room), he was a less material, more complex development of the same spirit. I have friends who turned their backs on the churches in which they were brought up because of the churches’ irrational rigours; I was able to drift out of mine so easily because of its mildness.
The early vision of meaningless chaos beyond the rim of human experience with which I had confronted my dismayed grandmother had come to me, as far as I can recall, unprompted. It is echoed in the sensations given me by cloud landscapes, and was crystallized in an experience I had when going under an old-fashioned anaesthetic at the age of sixteen, when I had my appendix out. As a small child I had known the usual terror, no worse than anyone else’s, of things under my bed. I had readily accepted that these monsters were imaginary and was not troubled by them for long, but while I was going under the anaesthetic, one of them came out and killed me. I had lost consciousness, then regained it, perhaps because the anaesthetist had reduced the flow too soon. Opening my eyes in a strange white room, I had not the least idea where I was, why I was there – the strong white light seemed to be that of terror at my helpless ignorance of my situation. Then something came down over my face and I knew in a flare of horror that it was a claw – the claw of the monster who had been under the bed all the time, in spite of what they had said. Now it had come out and got me, and in a moment I would be dead. I pitched over the edge of a cliff and began to roll down into blackness, gasping to myself, ‘They were lying, they were lying!’ I got a fingerhold on the cliff and clung to it frantically, knowing that once I could hold on no longer I would be gone – gone into what I expected to be nothingness. But as I peered into the blackness I saw that it was worse than that, it was not nothingness. In cold, absolute horror I saw that the endless night was full of moving shapes, galaxies of dim light circling and interweaving according to laws of their own which I, by my very nature, could never understand. I thought that I was screaming aloud ‘At least let me change!’ but I could feel conclusively that I was not going to change. I would have to let go of that cliff and plunge into this new order of being, equipped with nothing but my usual, totally inadequate self. It occurred to me that I might start believing in God, and that if I did it might work – it might give me whatever faculties were needed – but at the same moment I felt it so shameful to clutch at belief simply because I was in extremis that I could not bring myself to do it. So in desolation and despair I let go, and down I went.
I did not draw any conclusions from these experiences, nor did I consciously relate them to my religious belief, or lack of it, but I suppose they were symptoms of an innate sense that God was not so simple as man invented him; that if there was a God, he did not necessarily exist to answer man’s questions and smooth his way, as did the kindly God of whom I had been taught. The older I grew and the more I read of what was happening in the world, the less likely that seemed, but when I started to attend confirmation classes I was still assuming that in this matter ‘they’ were more likely to be right than I was, still expecting that with further instruction my doubts would vanish.
The clergyman who came to the school twice a week to prepare us was a gentle, ascetic-looking man of obvious goodness and subtle intelligence. He was better at talking to us about Plato than about Christ, which made me admire him, but at the same time his burnt-out face was that of a man moved more by the spirit than by intelligence: he clearly felt the real object of his classes to be more important than the interesting ideas with which he adorned them. I liked him and admired him, and was impressed by the picture he gave of the Protestant Christian faith. It was beautiful, I could see. It was something to which, if you believed in it, you would have to dedicate your whole life as this man had done – indeed, to believe in it and not to dedicate your whole life, not to give all you had to the poor, not to go out among the unenlightened as a guide, would surely be to make a nonsense of it. I was confirmed, and took Communion for the first time. ‘You will find it such a great help and comfort in times of trouble,’ wrote my godmother, but
I was ready for more than that. It would not have surprised me if this mystery had tipped the balance of my doubt for good. It would not have surprised me, but it would most definitely have dismayed me: for if I did turn out to believe with all my heart, if as a logical consequence of belief I did have to give all I had to the poor and so on – just think what I would be giving up!
So how can I be sure what was the real cause of the complete lack of meaning which the sacrament had for me? I only know that I took it reverently, thought with concentration of Christ’s crucifixion, and came out feeling just the same as I had felt when I went in. I was well enough instructed to know that to expect ‘a sign’ was absurd, but still I felt let down. Having gone through this I ought not, any longer, to be saying to myself things like ‘But if it is not really the body and blood of Christ that I have tasted, why all this fuss about it? It is not – of that I am sure. It is a piece of symbolism to remind us, and how can a piece of symbolism be so holy as they make this out to be?’ It looked as though God had not made up my mind for me, so I would have to make it up for myself.