by Muriel Spark
Trains in those days were steam-driven, with a stoker to keep the fire burning all during the night. (Ours was an eight-hour journey.) Before our departure the station was filled with smoke, stinging our eyes. The guard, armed with a red flag and a green, would finally wave the green. He would blow his whistle. Then the train would be off, but only after numerous grunts and unbalancing jerks. At every stop a man with a lantern and an iron mallet would come examining and sounding the train’s steel joints and wheels with loud, and yet comforting, clanks in the night.
Our holidays in Watford form the basis of my story ‘The Gentile Jewesses’ which is nearly factual, but in which I have written mainly about my grandmother, Adelaide. A high-spirited character, she was rather plain compared with my red-haired grandfather, Tom Uezzell, who was reputed to be fifteen years her junior.
Tom’s parents had been corn dealers of Watford. He was tall and stooping; his well-worn country jacket hung loosely from his shoulders; his trousers were dark grey and baggy at the knees. I never saw him dressed in anything else but those old clothes, in which, however, he had a casual, superior look. Visibly, he loved my grandmother, following her everywhere with his eyes. Uezzell is a rather rare old English name, deriving from French. In Watford I had a great many Uezzell connections, and one of the streets was called Uezzell Close.
My parents put everything they could into making our annual holiday fun for us and for themselves. My happiest memories are country walks with my grandfather who could name every bird, even by its call, and every plant or flower. We would cross running streams on stepping-stones only, and later Grandfather would be blamed for my wet feet. His names for me were Canary or Ladybird. My grandmother, who kept the village shop, bustled about all morning and reposed all afternoon.
Watford has now spread and sprawled. It is no longer a market town. The old High Street where at No. 288 my grandmother kept shop, is now on the margin of the town. I went back to Watford a few years ago. It has happened to me three times in my life that I have revisited a place where I have stayed to find that the house was only just in course of reconstruction or, as in the case of my grandmother’s shop, and the house where we spent our holidays, had been newly demolished. The two other houses in that little part of the street were still standing. For some reason, on the site of the demolished building someone had planted a row of roses. They were young plants and looked as though they were freshly placed. It was mysterious to me to see those roses flourishing on the place where my grandparents flourished, kept shop, brought up their children and welcomed their grandchildren. The flowers seemed to have been planted in their honour, but this was a fantasy – my grandparents were dead so long ago, and other tenants had taken their place. On that day I could almost hear my grandfather’s voice again, as he mounted the creaky stairs with a cup of morning tea in his hand. ‘Wake up, Canary!’
Another discovery that moved me was that one of the remaining houses was still, on the street floor, a newsagent and tobacconist shop as it had been in the days when my father used to go along there for his ‘ten Players’ each day. It was so unchanged externally – almost the same advertisements lining the outside walls – that I went inside on a pretext. I fancied that the counter had changed position but that was all. Obviously there were living quarters at the back of the shop and upstairs. Identical with my grandparents’ house, the garden at the back could be seen through two windows from the street. The young woman who served me had only newly taken over with her husband. She knew nothing of the people who had lived in the demolished house where roses were planted.
In my grandparents’ day there was a privy attached to the house, but approached from outside. My brother showed me a hole in the wall of a scullery which gave on to the privy and, always ready to show off in front of me, his best audience, Philip got a broom and poked the handle through the hole. Whereupon my grandmother shot right out of there, loudly exclaiming, with a flurry of white petticoats.
My grandparents’ parlance often retained some flavour of the eighteenth century. Adelaide Uezzell didn’t go for a walk, she ‘went abroad’. As she kept a shop and had little time for household chores she sent the bed and table linen out to be washed. My grandfather, Tom, referred to this as ‘the larndry’. I have heard elderly English people pronounce it so well into the 1940s.
My hands stroked Flossie, my grandfather’s golden spaniel. He also had a ginger cat that he loved. ‘You’ve got carroty hair,’ quipped my grandmother, ‘and you’ve had carroty children and now you’ve got a carroty dog and a carroty cat.’ My mother was the only dark-haired member of the family. All the rest of us were more or less ‘carroty’ including my Uncle Phil’s six children, with whom we sometimes played on our Watford holidays.
Our great-aunts Nancy and Sally Uezzell lived in Vicarage Road, which I felt quite just, since ‘vicar’ was a key word in their universe. The vicar usually wormed his way into any discussion on any of the admittedly limited topics they discussed. Their house smelt of themselves uniquely – a mixture of carbolic soap and other cleaning materials of the age, such as black lead (for the stove and the grate in the fireplace), beeswax for the woodwork, paraffin to mix with rotten-stone (powdered limestone) for the brass candlesticks and the door knockers, chloride of lime for bleaching linen, turpentine for mixing with the beeswax, vinegar for the rinsing-water and ammonia for God knew what. The punk arising from these lethal products clung to my great-aunts’ clothes and hung around the curtains. To me, their tea-biscuits tasted of camphor mothballs.
My mother took her aunts flowers from her father’s garden. They were set aside for the altar.
Sally was the succubus of Nancy. For evidence of this I have only my strong childhood intuition, and various inferences to be drawn from my elders’ comments. Sally would have been nicer if she hadn’t been with Nancy. I was definitely glad that I didn’t ‘belong’ to that pair.
They were known to have disapproved of their brother Tom’s marriage to Adelaide, but that was a thing of the past. Sally sat with her hands folded while Nancy did the talking, so mournful-sounding to me. It was she who was always the first to write and spread the news of any young lady in Watford who was pregnant before marriage. I remember my mother once remarking, on reading one of Aunt Nancy’s letters, ‘After all, it’s only Nature.’ These sisters were often described by the family as ‘strait-laced’, which was an image drawn from the tight-laced stays worn by the women of their time.
My mother was later to be really incensed by a notice inserted in the Watford Observer by Nancy, and proudly forwarded to us, when my grandmother died at home with us in Edinburgh: ‘After long suffering patiently borne she fell asleep in Jesus.’ There followed a verse beginning, ‘For now she wears a golden crown …’ My mother rightly objected to the ‘long suffering’ since my grandmother, although disabled by a stroke, did not suffer long or noticeably. We took great care of her. As for falling asleep in Jesus, it was a moot point.
My grandmother’s father had been a Jew, her mother a Christian. During her lifetime she belonged to every new group in Watford whenever it was formed. She was a suffragette, marching for the women’s vote. She belonged to the Church of England Mothers’ Union and tried out both spiritualist and Methodist meetings. They were her only social occasions. When she died in Edinburgh the Watford Women’s Church Union sent a gravestone which my mother placed on her grave. This was in a Jewish cemetery, so it was swiftly removed. Forty years later my son, who had never known her, put up a gravestone with Jewish wording to mark her resting place. My Uezzell cousins believe she was not of Jewish inheritance at all, which is at least correct in that Jews inherit religious identity through the mother. But I think she had a definite Jewish connection through her father, although most of her life was lived in a country environment of Christian churches and church events. It could be that there was a note of defiance in my great-aunts’ claim in that newspaper notice, ‘she fell asleep in Jesus’, which they sent to my mother.
In Watford we used to go to the fair. I remember a tall Indian in a turban. (My mother doubted he was an Indian. She said he had covered his skin with walnut juice.) He was a phrenologist and read my brother’s ‘bumps’. This process consisted of pressing his hands all over my brother’s skull. His fee was a shilling. I forget what glamorous future he predicted for Philip but I recall that he looked at my hands and said I would be musical. I noted how satisfied my parents were for their shilling’s-worth.
In September when we took our annual holidays the blackberries would be thick in the hedgerows. We picked basketfuls, taking them home for jam-making. My grandmother’s neighbours would pass by with bags of plums and apples from their trees, figs and apricots. My grandfather would put on long boots to wade into the river where there was a watercress bed, and bring it home in bunches; he grew raspberries and vegetables. It was he who made the butter for the household, by whisking and churning from a jug of thick cream, fresh from a friendly neighbouring cow.
I was in my eighth year when, on the death of my grandfather, our idyllic annual holidays at Watford came to an end. A curious event preceded my grandfather’s death which made a great impression on me. We had on the wall of our kitchen above the fireplace an enlarged photographic portrait of a patriarchal type of man from my father’s family. I don’t know who he was apart from the fact that he was not a relation, and for that reason I often wondered what he was doing there. Perhaps he was some famous professor or rabbi, held in esteem. One evening the picture fell. No one was hurt, but the glass was shattered. My mother was distressed. She said it was a bad omen. I think she was worried about her father being ill with bronchitis at the time. Sure enough, there came a wire next day, summoning my parents to Watford; in fact my grandfather died of pneumonia shortly before their arrival. The patriarch was never replaced on the wall.
This was the second death in the family in my experience. The first had been some years earlier when my mother’s younger brother, Harry, died of the effects of poison gas to which he had been exposed in the trenches during the First World War. I remember my Uncle Harry only as being first young and merry, next, suddenly thin, bent and ghost-like and very soon afterwards not there at all. He was buried in Edinburgh in a Church of Scotland graveyard at Corstorphine. Some of my father’s sisters accompanied his wife, Bessie, and my parents to the funeral; they came afterwards to our house, wearing black clothes.
Bluebell
My grandmother shut up her shop that summer. We went all four to fetch her; she came to live with us in Edinburgh for the last four years of her life. My mother and I helped her to pack. What fascinated me most about this operation was the vast difference between her clothes and ours. To begin with there were flannel garments worn against the skin winter and summer, which my grandmother called ‘my chemises’. Then came frilly tops, ‘my bodices’, to be followed by ‘my stays’ which were flexible corsets inset with whalebone and laced, criss-cross, with tape to pull in the waist-line. Next, ‘my drawers’ which had long legs to below the knees and no gusset, so that the ‘private regions’ had no covering at all. These drawers were frilly with elaborate hand-made tucks and pale-coloured ribbons tying them together under the knees and at the waist. ‘My petticoats’ were voluminous, gathered at the waist; one in each set was cream-coloured or grey flannel, one was white linen edged with lace and one was black. My grandmother’s stockings were black wool. They were kept up by pink elastic bands, her garters. ‘My night-shifts’ were white flannel for winter, cotton for summer, spacious, with high necks and long sleeves, very frilly. I had the impression, which I believe is correct, that all these numerous garments had been in use for a very long time, perhaps twenty or thirty years or more. Perhaps since her marriage. They were well cared for, the cotton starched and ironed; there were neat little patches here and there on these clothes, and darns that were works of art in themselves.
One group of objects puzzled me. They were cotton bags about six inches square, attached to long tapes. It was explained that these were pockets. My grandmother had her pocket tied round her waist between the top petticoat (the black one) and the skirt of her dress. This meant that to get anything out of her pocket my grandmother had to heave up her skirt to the knees and thrust her hand into this mysterious hanging bag (from which she frequently produced a piece of chocolate for us).
Among the garments we helped to pack was an intriguing item of underwear which my grandmother wore seldom, and only in deep winter. It was called combinations. It was an all-in-one wool suit with knee-length leggings and wrist-length sleeves, and, like the drawers, it had no gusset. These were very ‘modern’ to my grandmother. They belonged to that generation of young ladies one of whom is described by T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, as drying her combinations on the window sill.
During the time my grandmother stayed with us she never acquired any new clothes. Her outer wear was far less abundant than her underwear. She had four dresses. They all came in two pieces, a bodice and a skirt. The bodice hooked together with a strong but invisible hook-and-eye arrangement. The skirt hooked at the side. It was gathered at the waist and went over at least two of the petticoats, depending on the season. Also depending on the time of year was the colour of the dress. For everyday wear, my grandmother wore a silver-grey dress in summer, a black woollen dress in winter. Her skirts reached to just above the ankles, a concession to the times when young women were already wearing knee-length skirts. For any evening parties or special occasions she wore a black satin dress heavily beaded with jet. Glittering-black jet formed my grandmother’s favourite jewellery although she also wore a gold chain and locket with a picture of my grandfather in it.
In her clothes-trunk she had a pair of slippers, a pair of house shoes and a pair of black ankle boots for walking abroad. The other items of personal use were largely embroidered handkerchiefs, a case to hold them, and various pincushions.
But I have kept Bluebell to the last. Bluebell was what I called my grandmother’s lovely blue silk brocade going-away dress the colour of cornflowers. I have never seen anything quite so beautiful, nor touched anything so sensuous before or since. When she came to us, Adelaide had no thought of ever wearing it again. She must have had her small, plump, Queen Victoria-like figure when she was married, about 1 876, for it was still her right size. The reason I called this magnificent garment Bluebell is that a few years earlier, around 1923, she had written to tell my mother that she had been to a fancy-dress evening party at the Watford Church Union. She had gone dressed up as ‘Bluebell’ in her rich blue brocade gown, having arranged for a hat to be made with imitation bluebells laid on the brim, and a basket on her arm to be filled with the same fabric flowers. Adelaide Uezzell won a prize for the ensuing appearance, consisting of a two-pound jar of fig jam and a cherry cake. And so, when we packed the famous Bluebell dress in my grandmother’s chest, and unpacked it again in Edinburgh, I felt as if I were handling a real historic museum piece. Of course I tried it on, and although it was far too big, I swept around in it, thinking of all the parts I could take in period plays. Alas, after the death of my grandmother, when I was thirteen, I succumbed to the current fashion and, with my mother’s approval, cut up the Bluebell gown to make cushion covers. They looked wonderful, but the dress itself should never have been touched. It glowed with its deep and heavy brocaded blueness. It was sewn by hand, with a minutely stitched lining.
The first three years of my grandmother’s stay with us she was able to join in most of our family excursions and fun. She didn’t go out in the evening. My parents, both hard workers, used to go out almost every evening, either to friends or to see a film. My grandmother would be in bed by seven in the evening, and so I would often be left alone with her. I would usually be reading or studying while my grandmother snoozed or listened to the radio, which we called the wireless. This was a wonder to my grandmother. We had progressed from those early days when, in my infancy, my brother had constructed our first wireless,
a crystal set. Our present ‘set’ was a Pye radio on which we could get the BBC and even some foreign stations. Philip, who was also studying, made tea or Ovaltine for us at about nine o’clock. By ten we were all in bed.
Earlier in the ’twenties my Auntie Gertie had emigrated to Australia to be married to her elder sister Lena’s brother-in-law. We had letters from her, full of scenic effects. We also heard from the United States from our old friend Professor Andrew K. Rule. One of his letters told of his wife Charlotte’s death. My mother cried bitterly at the news.
Towards the beginning of the ’thirties, Andrew Rule wrote suggesting that my father emigrate with us all to join him in the United States and take up the job of chief engineer at Louisville Seminary, of which Professor Rule was the head. My parents, I know, had been tempted by this suggestion. But my mother’s feeling for her family held her back. My parents also felt that such a move, although economically it would have been an obvious advantage, might disturb their children’s education.