February 2. This morning I heard from Don. He is writing a play, and seems, altogether, quite cheerful. His letter made me feel so happy that I don’t feel too depressed by the frost, which was the worst in years last night and is to be worse tonight. The washbasin in M.’s room is frozen, and the gas pipes are partially frozen, so that our fires will only burn very low. So far the bath is all right, but the kitchen range doesn’t seem to heat the water properly. Three more whole days to go, before I can leave for London!
There have been several events today. A young woman who was born on St. Helena and was perhaps a quarter Negro came to apply for the job of maid here. M. says she liked her. But the fact remains that M.’s manner with her was very grand and quite definitely patronizing—and I quite see how she may have discouraged many promising applicants. Also, because she looks about twenty years younger than she really is, she fails to enlist any sympathy as a “dear old lady” who needs support. I told M. this—also Richard—but of course wasn’t believed. (This evening, the girl called and told us she has another job.)
M. is still amazingly obstinate and, like so many Englishwomen, full of a kind of puritanical glee when things are bad. She is really glad that the weather is so lousy, and she very nearly made me really angry this morning by suggesting that it would do Don good to experience the cold here. She hates getting anything new for the house, and affects, for example, to believe that paper towels are some weird newfangled and somehow degenerate U.S. invention. (I had the satisfaction of proving to her that the High Lane chemist knew all about them.) She nurses an obstinate grudge against the present and cultivates a nostalgia for the “peaceful” Victorian times.
We had lunch at a fish and chip shop in High Lane, where Richard’s strange appearance aroused a good deal of amused curiosity. (He has just now mysteriously taken a taxi, saying he won’t be gone long. M. says he has gone to get beer. Good luck to him. I wish he’d give me some.) The sun shone all day long and the landscape couldn’t have been lovelier. If only they’d invent warm snow!
Now, a stroke of luck. One of M.’s day helpers, a Mrs. Barber—very Cheshire, buxom and loud, has unexpectedly arrived and is fixing us our supper—curry.
Rereading recent parts of this journal, I find far too much pessimism. And why? Neglect of japam. Relying on what is by its very nature unreliable.
February 3. Last night, Mrs. Barber cooked a niceish meal of curried steak (except that it was the wrong sort of curry powder—practically tasteless—the local shops seem, according to M., to delight in stocking the inferior brands of everything). Luckily, we had had supper before Richard appeared, very drunk (on four whole bottles of beer, it seems) and threw the table over, exclaiming: “This is the end! I’m at the end of my tether! I haven’t a friend in the world! You’re all prigs—all of you!” He turned on me, raised his arm, seemed about to hit me: “I hate you! You come up here so smug and tell me my Mother’s overworked. I hate you! I hate you!”
After the first moment of being startled, I felt more amused than anything. I ought to have felt sorry for Richard, I know, and I do, theoretically—but the fact is, there have been too many such scenes in my life during the past few years—Billy [Caskey], Harry Brown, Don, etc. etc.—Well, anyhow, I tried to get him to talk but I couldn’t, properly, because the women were there. M. left the room when I asked her to, but Mrs. Barber—as she mopped up the mess—everything on the table had been smashed—kept reproving Richard like a nanny; telling him he’d be ashamed in the morning, that he knew we were all his friends, that he loved his kind brother, etc. Worse, Richard fell in with this mood and clasped my hand and told me he loved me very much, which only embarrassed me, because I don’t love him—most certainly not as a brother. I have had a hundred brothers already and a thousand sons—and all this talk about blood relationships just nauseates me. It’s the evil old sentimental lie I’ve been fighting for the past thirty-five years. Later Richard was sick, and Mrs. Barber cleaned him off as though he were a dog, and coaxed him to go to his room. A rather disgusting complicity now appeared between the two women. They were fairly used to these attacks, it seemed. The only special feature of this one was that more crockery had been broken. I went to bed reflecting that it is silly to compare this house to Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë would have left it within a week, for Cannes. The gas fire in my room was down to a blue line, and the water faucet was frozen. (But today a man came and fixed the gas. It seems that gas makes water in the pipes; the cold weather had merely hurried up the precipitation. And the faucets unfroze of their own accord.)
When Richard brought me tea this morning, I noticed the smell of beer and vomit still on his filthy clothes. We had a fairly constructive talk at breakfast—on my side, I kept reminding him that he has enough money, and that, if he wants to move to London, it’s entirely possible for him to do so. He agreed—but will he ever do anything as long as M. is alive? The truth is, she’s a miser—with his money. They live like pigs for no earthly reason, because she thinks, deep down, that it’s wicked to be really comfortable or to eat nicely. I’m not being cruel to her in her old age when I write this, because she has always been the same. Indeed, I feel a kind of hard-hearted benevolence toward both of them. From that point of view, this visit is, so far, going better than the others.
Another day of bright blue weather, hard frost. This afternoon I walked to Ridge End, where some townspeople have converted the old inn into a modish roadhouse (would-be) called The Romper. The farm where the Nazi airman landed with a parachute. (“Would you believe it, the police wanted to take the poor boy away before he’d ’ad ’is breakfast?!”) The curving hill (called “Hill Haze”) where my father had the accident on his bike. The haunted wood. The chimneys that let the train smoke out of the long tunnel: they seem like some volcanic phenomena. The view at the Ridge End corner: a wall of dark-mottled piled stones, a corn-golden pony in a field scattered sparsely with snow, and beyond, New Mills smoke stack rising so august and beautiful between the snowy hills. I felt deeply moved. This is my native country. Thank God for it—and thank God, on my knees, that I got out of it!
Later. M. and I went to supper with Mrs. Barber this evening—in a little brick box on Disley Brow, overlooking the church and the chain of lights climbing the opposite hill, up the Old Buxton Road. “With Mrs. Barber” is hardly accurate, because she left us alone most of the time in the sitting room and served us our supper there, while she ate with her husband and youngest son in the kitchen. How to define the essential lower-middle-class quality of the room? It was skirted by a strip of board about four feet above the ground which had cross pieces running diagonally to the floor suggesting the timbering of a “black and white” farmhouse, except that this was brown and coffee. No—that’s utterly undescriptive. More symptomatic, perhaps, was the smallness of the pictures—no more than postcard size, but framed: flower pieces, etc. And the ornaments were all small—a miniature warming pan, china foals—very cute, plates painted with classical scenes. One word to describe it all—dainty.
Toward the end of our visit, Mr. and Mrs. Barber came in for a while and sat with us. But presently Mr. Barber said, “I’ll goa in t’other rume n’ taake a stoomach-taablet.” This was delivered without the least suggestion of humor, apology or embarrassment. A line that would bring down the house if it came at the end of act one of a Noël Coward play.
Returned to find Richard’s friend Alan Bradley just about to leave. He had shaved Richard (for the first time since my arrival) and combed his hair. He often does this. He used to be a farm worker on Wyberslegh Farm, now he’s in the building trade. He has a wife and child and lives in Disley. A rather nice looking man, thin, hawk nosed, in his early thirties, who suffers from stomach troubles and is obviously intelligent above the average.
February 4. It’s snowing hard, this morning. I watch the snow anxiously, wondering if it will interfere with my return to London on Monday. It has already prevented us from visiting Marple Hall today, as w
e’d planned.
In the night, the smudge-eyed cat gave birth to three kittens.
Just finished Elizabeth Montagu’s The Small Corner, which seems to me much above the average in readability. Is this because it is written like a detective story? Yes, largely. What I miss here—and almost everywhere—are characters and a world: characters described with the gusto of scandalous but affectionate gossip, and a world you can enter and inhabit as you read about it.
Am also reading James Agate’s A Shorter Ego (1932–38).289 This at least succeeds on both the above counts—as far as it goes. Agate comes to life in the most embarrassing way. He reminds me often of John van Druten, especially when being sententious. He is coarser and less pompous, and I think I would have liked him better. But, oh dear, what a fool! And how hopelessly subjective and imprecise he makes dramatic criticism seem. I suppose it is, especially because of the conditions under which the critic sees the play and writes the notice.
Many thoughts about my own projected novel. The Dante idea continues to please me, but somehow I can’t transpose it into the right key—that is to say, the same key as the characters and incidents I want to put into the story. If Dante is in C, the “Damned” are in C-sharp minor. I await a sort of musical inspiration which will show me how to integrate them with each other.
Many thoughts, also, about Don. I’ve dwelt nearly always upon his weaknesses in this record—inevitably, because it is the weaknesses that create the problems that “make news.” But I find that, when I look at him from a distance, as now, I don’t at all see him as a weak person. Caskey is fundamentally (whatever that means) weak, I believe. But Don has—or seems at present to have—two immensely strong positive qualities: his capacity for affection and his moral courage (as for instance shown in his dealings with the draft board). I think, however, that he could be cruel, in a way Caskey couldn’t. His laziness is probably just the guilt paralysis of a naturally overenergetic person.
But how futile it is to write about live characters! As futile as dramatic criticism—no, more so. Hence one turns to making one’s own characters. Fiction, as far as I’m concerned, is an attempt to control life—none the less fascinating because it’s hopeless.
Health note: the vitamin B and calcium pills given me by Patrick Woodcock have not only cured my right leg but greatly increased my physical energy. I noticed this while out walking yesterday, but no doubt the cold helped.
11:30 a.m. It has stopped snowing, thank God.
Later. (3:45) The snow has turned to rain and the snow is melting from the soggy fields. Oh the sheer brute miserableness of mid-England! A natural thought, on returning to one’s birthplace: why not die here, as well?
M. disapproves of Princess Margaret, thinks her a show-off. This is very important—for M. always seems to me to embody British upper-middle-class opinion.
We had lunch at the café in High Lane, whose walls are lined with scoops and smears of a custard-colored substance called (M. thinks) “lincrusta”—anyhow, that’s an excellent name for it. The only possible way to decorate such a place would be with murals. Why not a Last Judgment on the ceiling, featuring all the local notables? Then I went to get my hair cut at the only barber’s. He has no shop—just the front parlor of his house. You turn left into it, after running up against a velvet curtain marked “private.” The sort of place one (romantically) imagines people going to get abortions. But the barber was adequately efficient, and he heated the clippers against the oil stove before using them, which I found very thoughtful.
I notice how my appetite for journal writing increases here, day by day. Journals thrive on loneliness.
February 5. The frost has broken and all of the snow has disappeared from the fields in front of the house. A landscape of faintest grey silhouettes under a yellowish overcast. The utter sadness of wet slate roofs. They remind me of the grey sea.
The last day of my confinement.
Yesterday evening, after drinking one glass of sweetish sherry and one of stout, I was sufficiently loosened up to make a declaration which could easily have been avoided. M. had been needling me by talking family—did I remember this or that cousin’s cousin? I didn’t go so far as to say—as I have often said before—that I hate the whole idea of being “related” to anyone. But I did launch into a speech about “living out in the woods,” being “a Protestant,” and having nothing to do with “the people who live in zoos.” As I spoke, I heard in my voice a faint echo of Richard’s hysteria the other evening, when he pushed the table over. And I was conscious of the desire to hurt M., to stab through the hard fat of her wilful, obstinate stupidity. I wanted to denounce her, and the society she represents, and its sanction of motherhood and the marriage bed. It is shocking to realize how insane and immature I must still be—that I can harbor such feelings against a poor old woman. And yet—to be sincere—I must say that I believe this insecurity and immaturity is perhaps also my only protection against smugness and spiritual death. All around me, I see people of my own age cooling and setting hard, like dripping. Ah, the hateful cold fat of the elderly!
I said last night, and this I wouldn’t unsay—I’m glad that my life is what it is—wandering, insecure, imprudent. I’m glad that I have no idea what I’ll be doing ten years from now, glad that I’m still thrilled by Carmen’s words about “la chose enivrante.”290 There’s only one thing I really fear and that’s dependence. That’s why I was and am worried by my reactions under hashish—the fear I felt, then, of being on my own. But that fear passed later as I started to make japam. And I dare to believe that it will always pass.
Finished Agate’s Ego this morning. Poor silly old thing, one can’t help rather liking him for writing it—though he certainly didn’t dream how stupid it was.
Later. This afternoon Richard and I took a taxi and drove over to Marple Hall. Last time I saw it was in the summer of 1948, with Bill Caskey. Then it was dilapidated. Now it is a ruin—indeed, it has an almost gutted look, as though it had been bombed and burned. Several people were wandering around, taking photographs. We went up the back stairs—the front staircase looks unsafe and there is a great hole in the roof above it where the chimney-stack fell through—and had to climb over the bathtub which had been dragged halfway down the steps and left stuck between the banisters. The only intact thing left in the house is the pink marble fireplace which Uncle Henry brought back from Venice and had fixed up in the drawing room.
A double row of red brick villas runs along the edge of the park bordering the main road. Before long, the council is going to force Richard to sell land opposite the house in order to put up a school and lay out sport fields. But before this happens, a good deal more of the Hall will most probably collapse. It is a perfect death trap for children. Richard and I left like two ghosts—the kind that other people see and never suspect of being ghosts until much later, when someone exclaims in horror: “You say you saw Mr. Richard and Mr. Christopher? But, man, they’ve been dead for years!”
On the way home, we stopped to visit the two spinsters who live in the cottage opposite Wyberslegh Farm—Miss Laura and Miss Sadie Storer. Two faintly twittering, thin-legged birds who live on tiny crumbs of gossip—they need so little, you feel, to keep them going. So I was exhibited to them, but there was nothing I could tell them: they knew it all already from M. and Richard. Miss Laura—or is it Miss Sadie—has the tiniest mouth you ever saw. It got even tinier, in prim slyness, as they spoke of some people named Cotton who have a Maltese lodger. Mrs. Cotton is younger than her husband, and “lively.” And—well, you know the Maltese!
Got home and urged M. to have the Venetian fireplace removed. She probably won’t, till it’s too late. I realize now that all kinds of things in the house could have been rescued from theft and vandalism if M. and Richard hadn’t absolutely refused to admit to themselves months ago that it was a doomed ruin. Even now, M. doesn’t admit it. She kept asking if certain parts were still standing, as if it matters.
Well, m
y vigil is nearly over, now. Roll on, tomorrow. Needless to say, I’m quite worried and anxious, wondering how Don has gotten through his week; but at least I can be glad that I’ve done my part—written only one letter, not fussed, not bothered him with phone calls, not come running back before I said I would. Well, I shall soon see—
February 7. Incredible to relate, I actually caught the train, yesterday, that I planned to catch and actually got back safe and sound to Euston, barely two minutes late! I never thought fate would permit it.
Richard came with me to Stockport station. There had been an increasingly intimate atmosphere between us during the last twenty-four hours—he evidently set some special, symbolic significance on our visit to Marple Hall. During breakfast, he told me how he was arrested seven years ago in London for being drunk on the street. M., typically, hadn’t told me this. (No—perhaps that’s unfair—I suppose it really wasn’t her place to tell me.)
M. talked of coming to London, but I don’t know if she really meant it—don’t know if she really wants to, in a strange way. Maybe, at that age, what’s most important is simply not to be disturbed. But I saw her eyes fill with tears as I drove away.
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 85