by Muriel Spark
The advent of my grandmother meant that we were cramped for sleeping-space. From the time of my grandmother’s arrival I had to give up my room. Night after night, for years, I made up my bed on a sofa and fell into a sweet, deep sleep. If anybody had told me then, at the age of eight, that I was under-privileged I would have thought them out of their minds. I knew that other girls had a room to themselves and, on the other hand, others had hardly a bed at all. The two facts, that some had and some hadn’t, didn’t clash in my mind. They chimed together like many other facts in the world around me, that now, looking back, I might find discordant.
My grandmother suffered a stroke about three years later. I was now eleven years old, discovering the delights of poetry and art through that wonderful teacher Christina Kay. My school-days were now extremely exciting, and some of my new awareness of life’s possibilities entered my parallel home life. Just as Miss Kay and her colleagues were forming the basis of the future characters in my novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, so my grandmother’s new problems, created by her disabilities, made me acutely aware of old age, a condition of which of course I had been aware, hitherto, but which, up to now, had been totally outside our intimate family life. I think my experiences in minding and watching my grandmother formed a starting-point for my future novel, Memento Mori, in which the characters are all elderly people.
Before her stroke I had noticed how her memory worked. It came in snatches, vignettes. I was beginning to practise memories myself. When my grandmother talked of her sister, Kitty, gloating over her because she had finer clothes, I would egg on my grandmother: ‘And then what did you say?’ ‘I just walked out of the room and I said, “Goodbye, Rotten Row.”’ I knew that Rotten Row was the famous ‘Rue du Roi’ in Hyde Park where rich people took their daily ride. I thought my grandmother extremely witty, and she knew she could make me laugh. The last time she was able to leave her bed and sit with us, when she left, helped by my mother, she unexpectedly said, ‘Goodbye, Rotten Row.’ We were all rather upset. She remembered her meetings with the suffragettes and the memorable day in Watford when she marched up the High Street for the women’s vote. In practice of my own memories, I then deliberately recalled two years back when my cousin Violet (daughter of my father’s sister, Sarah, a most amusing woman) danced at a benefit performance in the Caledonian Hotel. She was dressed, Maurice Chevalier style, in striped trousers, tail coat and top hat. Vi carried a walking-stick and wore ostentatious gloves which were part of the act as she sang,
I’m Burlington Bertie
I rise at ten thirty.
I saunter along like a toff.
I walk up the Strand
With my gloves on my hand,
And I walk back again with them off.
I checked this event with Vi very recently. Yes, she remembers perfectly giving that song-and-dance act. She was fifteen to sixteen years old at the time. I was eight.
I remembered back how our cat had kittens. I would have been about six at the time. My brother was unsure how the kittens had been born. I informed him that the mother ‘did’ them. How I got this phrase or what exactly I meant by it I didn’t know. I only recalled, looking back a few years later, how mightily amused my mother was by the remark. When the kittens were ready to leave the mother we had no room for them all. What should we do with them? My brother Philip was told to take them to the vet and have them put away. But instead, he touted the kittens round the hotels of Edinburgh and sold them for one shilling each, thus ensuring a good home with plenty of food and mousing prospects for each cat. We were all impressed by Philip’s four shillings. We agreed that the cats would be all the better treated because their new owners had paid for them.
It was about the fourth year of her stay with us that my grandmother had her stroke. This meant that she was in bed most of the day, although after a while we managed to get her up for a few hours in the afternoon. I would find my grandmother sitting in her chair when I got home from school at three thirty or four in the afternoon. She was put back to bed at five. She progressively lost her powers of relevant speech. I tried very hard to discern some logic in what she was saying, but I never succeeded in finding any secret clue. If she referred to my brother she might say ‘dressing-table’, or if I talked about my school she would comment that it was laryngitis. We were all convinced she knew what she meant; it was only that she couldn’t get the word. From my own elementary experiments I found there was no symbolism involved, no rational connection between what she said and meant.
One day in fine weather we thought it would be lovely to take Grandmother for a ride in an open horse-drawn carriage such as she had been used to. We could have managed to walk her step by step down the one flight of stairs that separated us from the street door. My father went off to order the cab while my mother revealed the exciting programme to her mother, and I started to get out my grandmother’s best black clothes. To our astonishment my grandmother panicked. She put up a resistance like a trapped animal, forming all sorts of sentences in hysterical tones. We dropped all preparations and calmed her down. Philip put his head round the door. ‘We’re going to take you to Cramond for tea, Grandmother.’ Cramond was a charming fishing village outside Edinburgh, but my grandmother let forth another unintelligible protest. My father had to return to the cab-agency and cancel the trip. Finally, it emerged by small stages that my grandmother thought we were using this outing as a ruse to ‘put her away’ in a home. This had never been in question amongst us. In those days there were no national health services, and old people’s homes existed only for the very rich and unwanted or the poor and destitute. We were all full of consternation that my grandmother should imagine we could treat her so badly. It made me realize how vulnerable the aged are. I think her inability to communicate gave her a sense of frustration, that the absence of exact information opened her mind to suspicions. Very often we had smiled at my grandmother’s foibles and imaginings, but we didn’t smile at this incident. It was difficult to recognize in her the former outspoken champion for the rights of women.
That was a terrible day for us, and especially for my mother who was a devoted daughter and keenly felt her mother’s unjust reactions. But before long we came to realize my grandmother’s mind was really going. When I was about twelve she had another stroke and was completely bedridden for nearly a year before she died. This involved heavy nursing on my mother’s part. Although my grandmother was physically incapable there were times when she was now more mentally alert than before.
My mother was fairly strong, but my grandmother was heavy. I often stood by as my mother lifted and eased my grandmother from the bed to the bedside ‘commode’, or wooden seat with a lid which opened to the convenience of a deep toilet-pot. I wanted to help my mother with this necessary chore because, unlike other problems involving physical effort, such as lifting trunks or moving heavy furniture, it wasn’t something that could be coped with by my father or brother. My mother said that skill was more important than strength in this business of moving my grandmother gently out of bed and back again. In fact, by watching my mother I came to manage it myself without any strain that I can remember. There were three basic movements: first, I put my arm under my grandmother’s back and helped her to a sitting position in bed, somehow shifting the pillows to bolster her up while I operated the second phase, a swivelling movement of her legs, so that they dangled over the edge of the bed; third, and most difficult, was a sliding, and at the same time, swerving movement of my grandmother’s body until she had shifted her seat from the bed to the commode. It was important that the commode should be aligned with the bed beforehand. Before the return journey to bed, I was able to smooth the sheets and puff up the pillows. When I described this in detail to a qualified nurse, years later, I was happy to know from her that what my mother and I had done by instinct was in fact the correct procedure.
From now on my mother was free to resume some of her evenings out with my father. If anyone had suggested t
hat this nursing of my grandmother was beyond what a child of twelve should be expected to do I would have thought they were simply incapable of seeing my grandmother’s point of view. I would have felt, obscurely, that they were my grandmother’s enemy.
But my mother discouraged me from most forms of housework, except occasional tidying-up. She had a theory that if you didn’t know how to do it you wouldn’t have to do it, and besides, there was plenty of time to learn ‘later’. She herself was a good English cook; but cleaning bored her and she did the minimum necessary. Every week we had a helper to scrub and clean. One was Sarah Coutts who fascinated me with stories about her ‘man’ and how she wouldn’t marry him lest he shouldn’t treat her children right. The other, much later on, was charming Fanny Pagan.
There was a small writing-desk in my grandmother’s room for me to use while I was minding her. It had a sloping leather-covered surface which opened flat, and numerous drawers for papers and secrets. I was always happy at a desk. There, while my grandmother dozed, I did my homework, wrote my poems, read the books that I had brought home from the public library earlier in the evening and wrote letters, usually to my best friend Frances Niven with whom I shared our schoolroom double-desk. Frances wrote letters to me; we would exchange them next day. We neither of us had a telephone in our house. Our letters were comments on the poetry we were reading or on ideas for our nature studies. Those evenings I spent minding my grandmother were interspersed by evenings when our adored Miss Kay took us to a theatre or concert. On those evenings it was my mother who stayed at home to look after the failing old lady.
When my grandmother died, I remember being called to her room to witness her last moments. It was about 9 p.m. The doctor had just left. I had put my hair in curlers. For some reason I felt that this would be unseemly at a death-bed, so I took out the curlers and combed my hair before I went in. My grandmother was unconscious. There was a strange sound. My father said softly, ‘It’s the death rattle.’ Something was happening in my grandmother’s throat. Her eyes were closed. The rattle stopped. She gave a great sigh and died.
My sharpest memories of her went back before her illness, to when she was at Watford, full of perkiness, keeping her village shop. I thought of her dressing up as Bluebell. And I thought of how she dug in her deep pocket for the chocolate she always kept there for us. I remembered above all her sardonic, humorous and robust remarks when privately discussing certain of her neighbours with my mother. One day I had overheard a snatch of conversation between them which I was decidedly not supposed to hear. They were discussing someone’s difficult matrimonial life. My mother asked a somewhat rhetorical question: how do you keep men happy? ‘You have to feed ’em both ends,’ said my grandmother. I was always struck by the fact that many of her pieces of popular wisdom were expressed in terse monosyllabic words.
From my grandmother’s possessions I have inherited an amber-coloured embossed glass bread plate with ‘Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread’ inscribed round the edge and two little Chelsea-china rustic figures called ‘fairings’, because they were given away at a fair about the middle of the nineteenth century. When I look at these, I still see them clearly in the small china-cabinet in Watford in my grandmother’s sitting-room where she kept her best things.
For Hallowe’en, Frances and I made a witches’ room out of one of the basement rooms of her house at 8 Howard Place. I stayed overnight on occasions like this when we had something to celebrate or some parts in a play to rehearse. Hallowe’en was celebrated by a roaring fire in the handsome old fireplace of a room which must once have been a large kitchen or servants’ hall in that thrilling house next door to Robert Louis Stevenson’s birthplace (which was No. 10). I was familiar not only with No. 8 but also with the Stevenson house, by our time a museum. But I have also seen the house in my mature years. I think it altogether charming, possibly mid-Victorian, a town house in a row. Of course it had nothing of the more impressive Edinburgh architecture of Adams, the eighteenth-century lines of Stevenson’s later home at Heriot Row, but to me, and to Frances, it was full of mystery and stimulants to the imagination such as the equivalent, next door, of the old room where, with the lights out, before a flickering fire, we were Hallowe’en witches.
My friend Frances always had an instinctive talent for arranging the ‘atmosphere’ of a room. Her Hallowe’en production, although decidedly low-budget, was a masterpiece of rolled-up rugs propped upright, looking at us in the firelight, and scarily-draped furniture. We sat in our black cone-shaped cardboard hats and ate roasted chestnuts by the fire. We chanted and incanted and read our wildest poems and stories to each other. I read a poem, ‘The Gallop’, which I thought suitable for the All-Hallows; I recently found it again in a long-lost book of my juvenilia, most of which I had composed on those nights when I minded my grandmother. I believe it was on that year’s Hallowe’en that I also read aloud one of my first short stories, ‘The Black Star’. I have a particular affection for the following extract:
‘You mean blackmail?’ Her eyes widened.
‘Exactly.’ Lawrence’s tone was charged with significance.
My poetry was rather more sophisticated than my prose. I was deeply interested in rhythms and curious about what one could make them mean in poetry. My poem ‘The Gallop’ did indeed speed over the pages for five stanzas of which the following are a sample:
Horses wild horses!
Alive as they gallop
In fury along!
As they gallop and gallop
And gallop along!
And gathering speed,
And faster and faster,
Nor heeding disaster,
All trying to lead.
And breathing is strong
As they gallop along,
As they gallop and gallop along.
Meadows and streamlets,
Fields full of clover,
Cows that turn slowly
And moo as they pass.
Cows that stand watching
and watching –
and watching –
Munching the cud,
Knee-deep in the grass.
Blinking from silly old lazy old eyes,
Gaze with surprise
Gazing at horses,
Living and spirited
Beautiful horses!
Spirited, beautiful horses!
At this time, too, I was reading the Border ballads so repetitively and attentively that I memorized many of them without my noticing it. The steel and bite of the ballads, so remorseless and yet so lyrical, entered my literary bloodstream, never to depart.
All during my childhood I was given dolls as presents by aunts and friends. I used them mainly as actors in plays which I improvised as I went along. I recall having a fixed idea about one of the dolls. For some reason it needed an outdoor coat and hood trimmed with fur to fulfil the assigned role, so I bothered my busy mother every day before I left for school to dress up this doll accordingly. I didn’t expect her to do so because she apparently took no notice; but one day I found on coming home that my doll was dressed to order, with my mother putting the last stitches on it. What I remember most about this occasion was how touched I was by my mother’s action. When I was twelve I got a miniature bicycle – that is to say, it was something rather more advanced than the usual child’s ‘fairy-cycle’ as they called it, but not really adapted to riding through traffic, even though it had real blow-up tyres. My father paid three pounds five shillings for it, in three instalments. I used it on the pavements around our home and on the tarmac pathways of the Links and the Meadows. It was an exceptional bike. I found I could make up poetry and stories in my head as I whizzed along, ringing my bell to scatter such of the sauntering population, with their little dogs, as were in my way.
My mother continued to play the piano and my father to sing to her accompaniment. One of the simply sentimental but most truly haunting melodies was ‘Sometimes’, the words of which my mother wrote out for me forty
years later. They are:
Sometimes between long shadows on the grass
The little truant waves of sunlight pass.
My eyes grow dim with memories awhile,
Thinking I see you, thinking I see you smile.
And sometimes in the twilight gloom apart,
The tall trees whisper, whisper heart to heart
From my fond lips, the eager answers fall,
Thinking I hear you, thinking I hear you call.
Outside of school, by the summer of 1929, I had made two new friends, Guy and Denis Fermie. Guy was about my age, Denis a little younger. They lived in Bruntsfield Avenue which was a street at right angles to ours. They therefore shared with us the grassy square which our back windows looked on to and which was for the private use of tenants in our blocks. Guy, Denis and I used to sit in the back green and talk, very often, on long summer evenings when my mother was at home to keep my grandmother company. The boys’ father was an Indian doctor, their mother a Scot. They went to expensive day schools. They were my first male playmates, for my brother, more than five years my senior, had friends who were nearer his age. Guy was particularly interesting and gentle. The other neighbouring boys were generally more inclined to be rough – perhaps not intentionally, but they got carried away with their fights and their more hazardous games. Besides, there were different games for boys and girls. For instance, girls did not often spin tops; boys wouldn’t look at skipping ropes. But the Fermie boys, Guy and Denis, didn’t seem keen to play the known games of childhood. Guy was socially mature for his twelve years, courteous, amused, interested in any subject whatsoever, while Denis listened to his elder brother, fascinated by our talk. It was a ritual that we sat cross-legged facing each other in the middle of the green. We were a sort of oasis, but I am not quite clear why. I remember the Fermie brothers’ alert, dark eyes and pale brown gleaming skins, and Guy Fermie’s shy and diffident smile, his intelligence, as we talked of geography, sex, schools, people, money, flowers, and all things possible. I attributed his difference from the other boys to his Indian side, I think rightly. I lost sight of the Fermies later, during the ’thirties. I supposed they had moved house, but I often wonder what became of them.