Curriculum Vitae

by Muriel Spark

  My mother was full of superstitions and presentiments. She wouldn’t wear green. But I knew that this was mad from the evidence of perfectly happy people I saw wearing green. Her terror of thunder and lightning likewise had no effect on me. She would huddle with me into a darkened room during a thunderstorm, but as soon as I got away on holiday to the seaside at Crail in Fife, I ran down to the wonderful beach to watch thunderstorms in progress over the North Sea.

  For my mother, shoes on a table were bad luck. But who would put shoes on a table? Crossed cutlery was a bad omen. My mother turned over her money in her purse when she saw the new moon and bowed three times to it, no matter who was watching her. (I still do this, myself. True, I do it for fun; but all the same I do it.) She and her mother were fond of quoting maxims. My grandmother:

  A whistling woman, a crowing hen

  Is neither fit for God nor man.

  My mother (rousing herself to action): ‘This won’t pay the old woman her ninepence;’ ‘Laugh before seven, cry before eleven;’ and (burdensome forewarning to me) ‘A son’s a son till he gets a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter all her life.’ There was also the oft-repeated, ‘The eyes are the windows of the soul.’ (She herself had lovely large brown eyes.)

  My father’s sayings were more humorous and savoured of the music-hall. If there was a lull in the conversation he might say, ‘If this weather continues, we’ll have no change.’ And setting forth for a walk: ‘Take my arm and call me Lucy.’ There was also a mysterious person named by my father ‘Mr Poomschtok’, whose chief characteristic was that he didn’t exist, so that a great many happenings could be attributed to him. My father also performed a strange dance to the tune of ‘In a Persian Market’. He did another country-type dance, holding in his fingers the knees of his trousers as if they were a skirt.

  When he took my mother to a dance, he wore an evening suit with a white scarf and kid gloves, which, I was told, he kept on while dancing, as was the custom. My mother went out in a white beaded dress with an uneven hem, which made her square in shape but was greatly approved of by Auntie Gertie.

  On fine Sundays we would walk on the Braid Hills or round the Blackford Pond, and in the summer we would go with spades and pails and sandwiches on the tram-car to the sands at Portobello for the day.

  I was woken in the middle of the night and taken to the window to see the fireworks in the back greens. ‘It’s 1922!’ my mother said. I was given some warm port-wine.

  I had measles and saw my face in the mirror, all red freckles. Dr Thatcher arrived in his black frock-coat, or morning coat, as it was sometimes called, his striped trousers, and his top hat which he placed upside down on the bed, while my mother stood aside, more concerned about the clean towel and basin of water for the doctor to wash his hands than she was about me. The tram-cars rattled past while Dr Thatcher bade me say ‘Ah,’ and frowned against their noise. Dr Thatcher knew about my mother’s much-vaunted nervous breakdown, which she had had some years before I was born. She still boasted a nervous condition, in so far as she couldn’t be left in the house quite alone; she was afraid. But she could go out alone. I took this robustly for granted; it was part of life.

  Legends and stories of that time before I was born were also enfolded in the passing of the day. My father, the youngest of eleven, had run away to sea at the age of fourteen. He reached Kirkwall in the Orkneys, very seasick, and was put ashore at the local police station where his father came from Edinburgh to recover him. There was the story of his engagement to my mother long ago – it must have been 1909 – and of how the engagement was at one time broken off at the insistence of my mother’s Aunt Sarah; this worthy woman learned that my father had given my mother a pair of gloves. It was regarded with blank horror for a man to present an unmarried girl with what was termed an item of apparel. It was the end of the world. I don’t know how the affair was put right. But the end of the world, the Great War, did come to pass, and had passed, before I was four years old and heard this story, now a matter of amusement. Just about the time I was born society was changing rapidly.

  I never knew my paternal grandparents, who were known to their family as ‘Pa’ and ‘poor Ma’. It was said that poor Ma could sit on her hair and that she sat reading the Bible by the window all day. I imagined her doing both at the same time.

  The Doorbell

  That ring at the door that I loved so much would bring, in the afternoon, my mother’s friends or, on rare occasions, my married aunts. In the evening a much more exciting variety of family friends rang the bell, many of them fairly eccentric, in whom I took a deep interest.

  Only a few months ago I had a letter from one of my parents’ friends, an American who was then a young medical student, Jay Snyder, who recalls that (at a date much later than my pre-school infancy) as a child I was very shy and used to run and hide under the table. I believe this must be true; a table covered by a long cloth is a good hiding place and listening post for children. Still, I can’t for the life of me remember this. As an infant I was certainly shy, as were most children. We were all discouraged from showing off, and unless invited to recite a poem or play or sing, we wouldn’t open our mouth.

  A pulley on the landing, or doorlifter as we called it, would open the street door for visitors who pulled that wonderful doorbell. In those days before I went to school, people were far more important to me than toys or nature. The beauty of walks over the hills and by the sea was beginning to seep into my consciousness by way of the sensations of smell and of sheer liberty and the lyrical suggestiveness of nature-verse, but it had not yet formed a positive delight in my mind such as people presented.

  The magic pulley on the landing would often admit a voice first of all, calling up the stairs, for there was a curve in the staircase and one could not see immediately who the visitor was. Then on stage to us, as it seemed, came one of the following:

  Miss Pride, her small face covered with tiny red veins, in a neat brown coat and hat, fawn gloves, and fawn wool stockings. What she had to do with my parents, what was the basis of their friendship, I can’t think. She was neither of the race of Auntie Gertie, who practised the Charleston with my mother on the kitchen waxcloth, nor was she of the class of tall, fair, gentle Fanny Pagan, then wife of a bus-driver, who used to come and give my mother a hand in scrubbing floors, and who later was widowed, and remarried well, and was widowed again, and, still beautiful, had a special friendship with my father; and who, what’s more, after his death, was to become my mother’s best friend. Sweet Fanny Pagan! Fanny was still mainly a character of the future, but even now she had nothing whatever to do with Miss Pride of the present. This I knew perfectly well, as Miss Pride sat primly chatting with a clipped voice, and drinking her cup of tea. I never knew Miss Pride’s first name.

  There was Miss Macdonald whose name was Margaret, as I gathered from a piece of conversation she reported. Miss Macdonald was dressed in navy blue with a white blouse. She was finer-bred than Miss Pride, but it was said she was not all there. I think my parents were sorry for her. All the time she spoke tears coursed down her cheek. They trickled down into her cup of tea. She couldn’t ever stop crying. She was bound up in a court case against someone who had wrongly accused her. Her brother, a lawyer, couldn’t do much more than he had already done. The word ‘like’ peppered her conversation. ‘My brother, like, wouldn’t go, like, any further with it, like …’

  Bella Myers, large-hipped and full of cheer, was much less of a puzzle, and a much closer friend. Nobody understood why she hadn’t married except that she was less beautiful than her married sister, Gertie Rosenbloom. She brought stories of her office life, she discussed music, she gossiped wildly about people. She reported office puns, such as ‘Many are cauld [Scottish for cold] but few are chosen,’ the heating in her place of work having broken down. Bella Myers hardly noticed my presence; which, to me, was all to the good.

  Another of the random and varied characters that the doorbell brought was a Ba
varian fräulein whose name I can’t remember. She was tubby and had a large round face with reddish-gold hair drawn back in a bun. I am not clear what she was doing in Edinburgh but I think she was a private nurse. How did my parents know her? Later in the ’thirties this lady disappeared; my mother supposed she had been ‘called back’ to Germany by Hitler. The same applied to a young philosopher, also reddish in colouring, who sometimes frequented our house. He went for walking tours. Mr Anchutz was his name. He had nothing to do with the Bavarian woman; their visits never coincided. He spent a great deal of time urging my parents to vote Labour. But, more understandably since he was a university man, he too went back. And I wonder, indeed, what happened to him.

  Mary Wright was an afternoon crony of my mother’s, flighty, powdered and painted and fox-furred. She was the mother of Billy who, with my brother, dressed me up as a boy and plastered back my hair with water, so that I caught a cold. The Patersons with their schoolgirl daughters Doris, especially dear to my mother, and Consie (Constance), were most glamorous of all. There was a son, Atholl, a grown schoolboy on whom I took a shine, and whom I would follow everywhere. I remember following him over stretch upon stretch of grass, and picking up windfall apples; I suppose this was in the Patersons’ garden.

  The Royal Visit

  I learned that children could be born out of wedlock, and I gathered this information in a very simple way. The King (George V) and Queen Mary came on an official visit to Edinburgh. For this animated occasion our friend Mrs Hardie (or, as she preferred, Mistress Hardie), who was then an active ninety, had obtained seats on the balcony of a smart shop in Princes Street. I sat between Mrs Hardie and my mother. We were right in the front. Flags were flying everywhere, all up Princes Street. Mrs Hardie sat very erect as was her wont. It was a lovely sunny day. The royal entrance began: carriages, horses, plumes bobbing up and down. Kilts, bagpipes. The first carriage, flanked, in state, by cavalry, contained a gentleman with a cocked hat, uniform and a pointed beard. ‘The police escort,’ murmured my mother, ‘Chief Constable Ross.’ At this, Mrs Hardie leaned across me and touched my mother’s arm. ‘That’s King Edward’s bairn,’ she said. As is common with adults, she didn’t think for a moment that a child would understand her. I didn’t quite understand at first, although I knew that King Edward had been the present King’s father. Then came the enlightenment: the next carriage contained a gentleman almost the twin image of Chief Constable Ross. With his plumed hat, gleaming uniform and pointed beard, he would have been the Chief Constable all over again, except that, with pink-and-white Queen Mary, wearing her usual toque, at his side, and his arm raised in salutes and greetings, he was obviously King George V, another of King Edward’s bairns. I put two and two together, full of wonder, while Mrs Hardie proceeded to explain to my mother that Queen Mary’s beautiful complexion was ‘all enamel’.

  1923

  My aunts and uncles, my cousins, were another world. My mother’s family, the Uezzells, lived in Watford where we went for our summer holidays. My maternal grandmother and grandfather were there, in their shop of all sorts in the High Street. They lived above and at the back of the shop, but there was room for us all. It was always the first fortnight of September when we went to Watford on the puffing and clanging overnight train, changing at London. Somehow I gained and noted the information, irrelevant to me at the time, that this annual jaunt cost a total of eight pounds.

  My Watford cousins were at this time five in number, but since I clearly remember six, I presume that my memory of the whole family only stretches back to a later time after I went to school, when the youngest, Alec, was born. Four were red-heads with my Auntie Alice and Phil Uezzell. They lived in a different part of Watford from my grandparents, who kept the shop in front of their house and chickens at the back.

  My more vivid recollections of my Edinburgh aunts and cousins refer to a later time in my childhood. This is because they seldom rang the doorbell at random. We tended to pay and return visits to our relations when they were expected. When my aunts Rae and Esther did call unexpectedly it was always in the late afternoon, and they always put my mother in a flap. Rae was a fresh-air fiend and insisted on my mother throwing open all the windows, complaining that our house was stuffy. Auntie Rae was a Francophile; the best compliment she could pay was ‘very French’. Esther, the eldest of my father’s family, was a practising, if not absolutely orthodox, Jew and my mother was always anxious to hide from Esther evidence of ham, bacon, pork sausages or any other unholy delicacy that she had in mind to prepare for our high tea, when my father and Gertie should come home from their work. But Auntie Esther took a keen interest in my reading and writing, and I loved her for that. I remember her best at a time when I was wearing my dark red (we called it maroon) school blazer and could show her my first school-books.

  In the summer of 1923 I already had my new school-books, ready to start school in September. Nelson’s Infant Primer, bought at Thin’s in Chamber’s Street, was my first reading book. I read it avidly all summer and still have a detailed impression of the pastoral illustrations (for nobody, in those story-books, lived in a city). My brother, now on his school holidays, was making a model of the Forth Bridge with his Meccano set; it was augmented by various spare parts that my father brought home from his work place, having made them specially with his own hands. Those summer evenings of Edinburgh go on till ten at night, and I would see from the window the golfers returning with their cleeks (as we called golf clubs) in their hands from their round of golf on the Bruntsfield Links where my school-to-be was situated. My brother also played golf; I was promised a putter for next year. My mother lingered at the piano on the long summer evenings. I had a pencil case and some new-smelling notebooks to go with my Infant Primer. I had outdoor shoes with laces to tie up as well as my normal house shoes with a strap to button up with a button hook. I had a black velour hat with a red and yellow band and a JGS monogrammed badge on it. The yellow JGS stood for James Gillespie’s School. On my maroon blazer pocket was another badge, a rampant yellow unicorn surmounting the school motto: Fidelis et Fortis. My parents had informed themselves that this meant Faithful and Strong. How clever we all were!

  I don’t know at what point before I went to school I became aware of poor men or women, sometimes accompanied by children, singing for pennies in the back green. When my mother told me they were hungry, I looked out at them with tears. Usually my mother wrapped up a penny in a piece of newspaper and threw it out, as did a few others among our neighbours. No one remarked on the quality of the performance, the singing itself; it would have seemed irrelevant. This was part of the distress following the First World War. The men who had returned could not find work and the social services were inadequate. I once saw a child of about seven selling newspapers at Toll Cross on a winter night, without so much as a vest underneath the thin jacket of his coat. He was barefoot. My mother was dismayed. Such children were mostly destined to die of tuberculosis. It was said, I think truly, that their parents drank every penny they could lay hands on, including their children’s gains. Children clustered outside the smelly public houses as we passed, waiting for their elders. I was not exposed to many of these sights but certainly before I went to school I was conscious that others suffered. Poor as we certainly were, there were others greatly poorer, positively in want, and I, in the safety of holding my parents’ hands, saw it.

  Sometimes I compare my early infancy with that of my friends whose very early lives were in the hands of nannies, and who were surrounded by servants and privilege. Those pre-school lives seem nothing like so abundant as mine was, nothing like so crammed with people and with amazing information. I was not set aside from adult social life, nor cosied-up in a nursery, and taken for nice regular walks far from the madding crowd. I was witness to the whole passing scene. Perhaps no other life could ever be as rich as that first life, when, five years old, prepared and briefed to my full capacity, I was ready for school.

  CHAPTER TWO


  From the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, the worthy and prosperous merchants and burghers of Edinburgh vied with each other to leave their fortunes for the founding of schools throughout the city. Education was held in awe, and the Scottish idea was that nobody should be denied this privilege. The schools, only a few of them having undergone change in nature and in buildings, still exist.

  Heriot’s School, founded by George Heriot, otherwise known as Jingling Geordie, still flourishes. Jingling Geordie was a jeweller, goldsmith and moneylender to James VI of Scotland (I of England). Daniel Stewart, an exchequer officer, endowed a school that still stands in its turreted splendour of 1814. Mary Erskine, ‘relict of James Hair, druggist’, left a fortune for the foundation, in 1707, of the girls’ school named after her. Fettes College was founded by Sir William Fettes, a late eighteenth-century tea and wine merchant and Lord Provost of Edinburgh. George Watson, an early eighteenth-century merchant and first accountant at the Bank of Scotland, left considerable funds for the foundation of today’s boys’ schools and girls’ schools which bear his name. James Donaldson, publisher of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, left a fortune that now provides a school for deaf children, Donaldson’s Hospital. And splendid Andrew Carnegie, whom we all know by his bequests to universities and libraries, came from a linen-weaver’s family in Dunfermline, close to Edinburgh. Carnegie’s endowments included handsome trusts for a school and library in Dunfermline, and for Scottish universities, among them the University of Edinburgh, of which he was Rector.