Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill

by Diana Athill

  I was no longer a pacifist in any formal sense. To make gestures against the war once it had come seemed as absurd as to make gestures against an earthquake or a hurricane. The horror had materialized and it must be endured, but to participate in it any further than I was compelled to do by force majeure did not occur to me. A mute, mulish loathing of the whole monstrous lunacy was what I felt; almost an indifference to how it ended, for no matter who won the war, it had happened; human beings – and I did not recognize much difference between German human beings and English ones – had proved capable of making it happen, and that fact could never be undone. Later, when ‘unconditional surrender’ was the watchword and furtive peace feelers from the Axis were being snubbed, the madness seemed to me to have become so great that my imagination could not even try to comprehend it.

  To have become a nurse would have made sense to me, but I knew in my bones that I had no gift for nursing. To have joined one of the women’s services was something that I could have done, becoming one of thousands of regimented women, learning to talk military jargon, growing ruddy under a uniform cap and broad-beamed in khaki bloomers. It seemed to me an intensely disagreeable prospect, but what particular right had I to avoid it? I cannot remember even attempting to think of a justification. I was determined that I would not do it unless ‘they’ came and got me, and that was that.

  This refusal to take any part not forced on me seems to me now an unmistakable measure of smallness of spirit. To remain detached from the history of one’s time, however insane its course, is fruitless even on the private level, since only by living what is happening (whether by joining it or by actively opposing it) can the individual apprehend its truth. Detestable as the ‘white feather’ mood of the First World War certainly must have been, an expression of all that was most ridiculous in ‘patriotism’ and most hysterical in suffering (‘My man is going to be killed so why shouldn’t you be killed too?’), it had in it a grain of truth: there can be no separateness from the guilt of belonging to the human species – not unless the individual withdraws into a complete vacuum and disclaims participation in the glories as well. There are two honest courses when war strikes: either to make some futile but positive gesture against it and suffer the consequences, or to live it – not in acceptance of its values, but in acceptance of the realities of the human condition. I did neither, and I have no doubt that I was wrong. ‘Living’ the war, for me, would have amounted to no more than putting on uniform and working, most probably, at some kind of clerical job for the purpose of ‘releasing’ a man so that he could kill and be killed. It would have been as stupid a thing to do as I felt it to be at the time, but by handing over my freedom in that way I would have tasted what was happening, which is the duty of anyone who wants to understand, to be aware, to touch the truth. It could be argued that the civilian jobs in which I ended up served the same purpose as a job in the services would have done, since I would not have been allowed to remain in those jobs if the officials responsible for directing my labours had not classified them as ‘essential’. The difference was a subjective one. I chose civilian work because it represented the minimum loss of personal freedom possible in the circumstances, and loss of personal freedom was exactly the phenomenon most characteristic of the situation I should have been exploring. It was the people in concentration camps who were drinking most deeply the poison of what was happening; they, and men like the soldiers from West Africa and the Sudan, carried on the tide of madness into a war that could mean even less to them than it did to me. The actual consequences of any choice of mine were, of course, too infinitesimal to be perceptible outside my own skull; but within my skull, the choice I made was of a kind to build a wall between such people and myself.

  It follows, naturally, that one should be to some extent ‘engaged’ at all times, not only in times of crisis: that I am no less wrong now than I was then, since I still take no part in any sort of political or social activity; I have never marched against the hydrogen bomb, I have never distributed leaflets urging the boycotting of South African goods. Whether, believing this, I shall some day turn to action, I do not know: given my record, it seems unlikely. Both by conditioning and by instinct I continue to cling to the wrappings of self-indulgence which keep safe my privacy and my female sense of another kind of truth running beside the social one: the body’s truth of birth, coupling, death that can only be touched in personal relationships, and in contemplation.

  Determined not to join the services, I answered an advertisement for women to build small boats in a factory at Southampton, supposing that because the boats were small the factory would be small too. I imagined it with a boatyard attached to it in which, though I might not be permitted to build a whole boat single-handed, I would work on recognizable features of boats – shape a tiller, perhaps, or screw cleats into place. The papers I received indicated that I was mistaken. Engagingly, one of them was a form on which I was to state whether I preferred my dungarees to be sky blue, apple green, or rose pink, but the rest of it gave a clear picture of monotonous hours doing something with metal at a factory bench. To anyone as spoilt as I was, the working day seemed atrociously long, and the wages made me sceptical forever of sweeping talk about big money earned by factory hands. Such talk was in the air – ‘Those are the people who have the money, of course’ – but the factory which might have been mine paid a disconcertingly small basic wage and only someone made of steel could have earned overtime. Because I could hardly back down at that stage, I said that I would wear sky blue overalls and waited for instructions, but my relief was great when I received an apologetic letter saying that they had no more vacancies after all.

  Then I heard from a friend that the Admiralty, removed from London to Bath, was recruiting women busily. My enquiry was answered by a kind, discouraging letter asking why I wanted an ill-paid office girl’s job when there were surely other things I could do, but I persisted. I did not want my refuge to be comfortable. To be bored, badly paid, but useful seemed to be what the situation required.

  Bored I would have been, had it not been for Bath and the friends I made there; badly paid I was, pocketing fifteen shillings and ninepence a week after the money for my billet had been deducted; useful I was not. The permanent civil servants, uncomfortably overworked in requisitioned hotels and schools, had little time to teach undisciplined recruits, however willing. They were burdened not only by me, but by a large number of young men and women from the neighbourhood who saw working for them as a good way of filling in time before they were called up (if men) or could persuade their parents to let them go further afield (if women – labour was still undirected at that time). I was so conscious of my own inefficiency that I would have accepted brusque treatment as just, but the regulars were charmingly kind and patient. They gave me and my like documents marked ‘secret’ to carry from one room to another, they let us make tea (although we made it too weak), and they sat us down to use logarithm tables at which they supposed, mistakenly, no one could go wrong. In the end my harassed master used to give me a sheet of paper and say, ‘Copy this on to that.’ I would copy it carefully, he would say, ‘Good, thank you very much’ – but once I saw him slip my copy into the waste-paper basket.

  I felt at first as though I were in an uneasy but not intolerable dream. The close ranks of inky desks in the dining-room of the Pulteney Hotel, the stacks of forms referred to by numbers and initials, the scratching nibs, the tin trays marked ‘PENDING’ – all this made sense to the others, obviously, but not to me. I knew that my sub-section of a sub-section of a department was concerned with transferring equipment for mine-sweepers from one naval base to another, but I could not envisage the equipment and no one seemed to know anything about it either before or after its transfer. Gravely and carefully, these rather tired middle-aged men laboured away at their ant-like task, and in the years they had spent on such things they had built up a small, snug office world with its own rites, necessities, taboos, and humours: not
by any means a disagreeable world, not a world one could dislike or despise when one saw it at close quarters, but not a world to which I could imagine myself belonging. I would leave it each evening and return to a little box of a bedroom in a council house owned by a plate-layer. His wife would give me a sturdy supper, and then I would lie on my bed and read. After Beckton and Oxford, this was too odd to be depressing. I simply felt suspended, waiting dumbly to see if I would ever begin to find my bearings.

  Soon my voice was noticed by a snobbish but helpful woman who had volunteered to drive for the Admiralty and ferried people to work from the remote suburb in which I was staying. Would I not like, she asked, to be transferred to more congenial billets? I had not supposed such a move to be possible, tried to suppress a start of hope (because the plate-layer’s wife, though reserved, was a kind landlady), and mumbled that if it could be done … To my surprise she remembered to speak to the billeting office, and I was whisked into the town to be established with a family of Christian Scientists so astonishingly generous and welcoming that I have had a weakness for the sect ever since. In their benevolent, easygoing flat I could wake up.

  Every day I walked to the office across the Royal Crescent, through the Circus, down Gay Street – oh, lovely Bath! There is no city in England more beautiful than that one, stepping down into its bowl of mist. There was always something to look at – a fanlight, a wrought-iron cage for a lantern, a magnolia growing out of a basement against the soot-dimmed golden grey of stone – but my chief daily joy was the great arc of the Crescent, with its broad, worn paving stones, its spacious view, and the curious silence it holds within its curve. A man who was walking me home one night said, ‘It’s like going into a church,’ and I was speechless for several minutes in outrage at hearing my own feelings put into such clumsy words.

  Before long I had become flippant about the job and had made one of the most charming of all my women friends. She emerged like a dragonfly from the dull envelope of a letter of introduction: ‘Your dear Aunt tells me … We would be so pleased if you would come to tea on Sunday.’ The youngest daughter of a spirited Irish family, polite but unenthusiastic, was sent to fetch me, and within an hour I had tapped a source of amusement and drama on which I can still, today, rely. Where Anne goes, disaster strikes: disaster too extreme for anything but laughter. If we borrowed her father’s car without asking him, it was stolen; if we went to London for a night to meet young men, we lost either our tickets or the keys of our baggage, and our dresses split as we put them on; if we had no money but one penny and one half-crown, it was the half-crown we dropped into the slot on a lavatory door. ‘Imagine what’s happened now,’ Anne would say (and still says), and out would come a vivid, exaggerated story of the bizarre, the macabre, or the absurd. I have always liked to watch pretty women and have enjoyed the company of gay ones: she, one of the prettiest and gayest I know, as well as one of the most generous, courageous, and, at times, infuriatingly perverse, became and remained a friend to be thankful for.

  Living a new kind of life away from home, where I had been my unhappiest more recently than my happiest, I was often at that time able to dodge my misery over Paul. Laughter, frivolity, even silliness and affectation (and Anne and I must often have been silly and affected) are dependable salves in my experience, besides being strong threads in feminine friendships. I enjoyed much of my time at Bath and was sad when I decided that I had better resign before I was sacked, and go home to think about finding a ‘real’ job.

  There was then a dreadful interlude when an aunt persuaded me that it was my duty to teach in the village school, understaffed and overcrowded with children from London to such a pitch that an untrained volunteer would be welcome. I did it for two terms, proving that teaching was not my métier but that I could call upon a certain amount of courage at a pinch. It was during that time that I met the first of my ‘hopeless’ loves, felt myself blaze into life again – it was so good while it lasted that even when I think I can see its unreality, I do not regret it – and sank back into even colder ashes. By the time chance had put me on to a ‘real’ job in the BBC, I was far from being alive.

  It is strange to remember that when I was at Oxford, the BBC had glamour. When, before going down, we visited the Appointments Board which was supposed to help us find jobs, one after another of us said, ‘Well, I rather thought the BBC …,’ only to be laughed to scorn. (Does anyone ever get a job through a University Appointments Board, I wonder? I have never known anyone who did.) This made me see it as a stronghold of rare and brilliant people, so that to join it, although far down in the submerged seven-eighths which never sees a microphone, struck me as extraordinary. I did it because my Oxford friend Margaret had found a job in its recruitment office and tipped me off when a vacancy for which I might be suitable occurred.

  For a time I was still prepared to grant glamour to the greater part of the Corporation, for I never saw it. My section, the part of an information service attached to the part of the BBC which broadcast to ‘the Empire’, had been evacuated to Evesham. ‘The Empire’ included, endearingly, I always thought, the USA, and it was some time before the Corporation got round to noticing this and changed the name of the Service. We worked in an ugly manor house overlooking Housman’s Bredon Hill, and because we were a new development, without which the News Room and so on had managed successfully for many years, few people, to begin with, bothered to consult us. With this job I went into a curious hermit existence so drained of feeling that it seemed even more unreal than it was.

  I became shy, a condition unfamiliar to me. We were scattered about Evesham in billets, with a couple of clubs at which we could meet each other. I went twice to one of the clubs and spoke to no one. Still assuming that they were all unusual and exceptionally intelligent people, and observing that they knew each other well, I felt that they would consider me drab and dull, and did not dare to make any claim on their attention. I went back to my billet and after that I never did anything in my spare time but read: not even when I had realized that most of these alarming people were middle-aged journalists of no particular distinction.

  The only things that I enjoyed at Evesham were the beginnings of the early shift and the ends of the late one. We covered the hours from six in the morning until midnight, and the first and last person to be on duty worked alone. At half-past five in the dark of a winter morning, the BBC bus would put me down at the Manor’s gates and I would make my way slowly up the drive, picking up firewood as I went. Having lit a fire in the grate of what had been one of the best bedrooms, I would fetch tea and sausages from the canteen and eat them sitting on the floor, watching my fire prosper. It was cold to begin with, and still, since only a skeleton staff was on at that hour, none of them in our part of the house. There was something secret and amusing about those picnic breakfasts, as though I were a tramp squatting in abandoned premises, and that slightly dotty pleasure is the only one I can remember from that time.

  When we were transferred back to London and had become an accepted part of the BBC’s machinery, it became an ordinary job and lasted for five years, until after the end of the war. It was never an exciting one but it kept us busy. We were supposed to be able to answer any question at any time, and usually we could: an information service is only a matter of knowing where to look. I liked most of the women with whom I worked, and if there was one I did not like she was usually disliked by all of us; it is not a bad thing in a group, I discovered, to have one unpopular member who will act as catalyst on the others. I came to be head of the section after a time, having first been ‘passed over’ in favour of a more efficient girl, which was supposed to be a drama. I was only slightly pleased when she turned out to be less efficient than had been expected and at last went away to have a baby, while the other women said, ‘It should have been you in the first place.’ I liked their liking me (it was lucky that they did, for it was, in fact, they who kept the section running), but my concem for the work was barely skin-dee
p. My concern for anything, at that time, was barely skin-deep.

  My life became no more closely knit with the war. Paul was killed, but he had already gone away from me. A cousin was killed, but he was younger than I was and I had never been very close to him. Other people I knew were killed, but they did not belong to my daily life. These deaths were as though the poisonous atmosphere had condensed for a moment and a drop had fallen: horrible, but natural. The nearest violence came to my own person was when a room I was to sleep in that night was blown in, and when the curtains of another room suddenly, silently, bellied towards me, sweeping a china bowl off the window sill, and I had time to wonder whether I was having hallucinations before the sound of the explosion followed. I was not even affected by whatever feverish gaiety there may have been about (people speak of it in memoirs); it did not come my way. Years of emptiness. Years leprous with boredom, drained by the war of meaning. Other people’s experience of them was far more painful, more dramatic, more tragic, more terrible than that; but that too, in its small, dim way, was hell.

  During that time my soul shrank to the size of a pea. It had never been very large or succulent, or capable of sending out sprouts beyond the limits of self, but now it had almost shrivelled away. I became artful in avoiding pain and in living from one small sensation to another, because what else could one do when one had understood that, as far as one’s personal life was concerned, one was a failure, doomed to be alone because one did not merit anything else, and when every day a part of one’s job was to mark the wartime papers? I remember particularly a cutting about an elderly Pole who had killed himself, leaving a letter to say that he had tried everything to make people see what must be done for Poland but no one would listen. He was killing himself because it was the only gesture left him by which he might be able to draw people’s attention to what was happening. He was a man who chose the other way, the opposite way to mine, and the poor old fanatic got about an inch and a half in a corner of the Manchester Guardian. If one were not to be a walking Francis Bacon picture, a gaping bloody mouth rent open in a perpetual scream, what could one do but go to the cinema and be grateful for an amusing film; go to bed and feel the smoothness of the sheets and the warmth of the blankets; go to the office and laugh because Helen’s lover was at home on leave and she had asked Kathleen to say, if her mother telephoned, that she was staying with her. After the late shift the tiny sequins of the traffic lights, reduced by masks during the blackout, changed from red to amber to green down the whole length of empty, silent Oxford Street. They looked as though they were signalling a whispered conversation, and they were the kind of thing with which I filled my days.