by Diana Athill
When the bank’s lack of sympathy finally drove me to school (can it really have been cheaper than governesses, or had I become so uppish by then that they felt I needed it?), the headmistress told my mother that she had never before encountered a girl so badly grounded. I felt indignant on Ursula’s behalf, but it was probably the truth. She enjoyed the things that we enjoyed too much, and skimped the rest. She must have reported me intelligent, because even in her day it was understood that I would be the one to go to Oxford, but what, apart from my lust for reading and my facility for ‘essays,’ led her to that conclusion, I now find it hard to see. I cannot remember employing my mind, at that time, on any subject other than horses and sex.
4
MY PARENTS’ IDEAS on bringing up children (or rather my mother’s, for my father was not much interested and left it to her), were slightly more progressive than those of the rest of the family. Sex was a distasteful subject to all of them, but I believe my mother would have given us honest answers if we had asked questions. She would have been embarrassed, though, and we knew it, so we did not ask. I cannot remember her telling me of any aspect of it except menstruation, which she did not describe as connected with the tricky subject of childbirth, but only as a boring thing which happened to women and, luckily, did not hurt. She got out of giving us ‘little talks’ or one of those hygienic handbooks for the young by letting us run loose with a lot of animals and for bidding us no book, however ‘grown-up.’ With this freedom, she believed, we would soon know all about it and, knowing all, would develop a healthy attitude towards it: which, in her terms, would have meant forgetting it. On the same principle, when I was older, she imposed no chaperonage on me but allowed me to come and go with my young men unchecked, hoping that trust would breed reliability. She was aware of the increasing freedom of the ’twenties, she had come to see her own upbringing as absurdly strait-laced, but she was at that stage of emancipation where it is believed that it can be applied to manners without affecting morals: a touching stage. ‘You know that I trust you,’ she would sometimes say, nervously. I was always grateful for this attitude, partly for its generosity, partly because its consequences were not what she expected.
Animals unaided did not do the trick. At eight or ten years old you can know all about bitches coming on heat, and how a bull mounts a cow, without connecting it with human beings. It was in a book that the odd, almost inconceivable fact that people do what animals do turned up under my hand, as solid as a stone. I think that my mother, in spite of her policy, had hoped that we would not chance on Marie Stopes’s Planned Parenthood—small and black, it was pushed very far back on one of the lower shelves—but chance on it I did, at the age of eleven. Can I really have pulled it out with a slightly cynical amusement at the idea of our parents reading up on how to rear us methodically, which was what the title suggested to me? That is how I remember it.
The diagrams, and the clear descriptions of sexual intercourse, astonished and thrilled me: I had stumbled on the Answer. At first excitement was mixed with dismay—I had seen those awkward, panting, heaving animals: could human beings be so undignified?—but I got over that in a day or two and was soon borrowing Dr Stopes’s reverent tone as I explained to Betty, then my closest friend, that it only seemed ugly to us because we did not have husbands: done with one’s love it would be beautiful. Lord, but that was a full week! A summer week in the Hertfordshire house, because I remember hurrying through the fence between our paddock and the park round Betty’s house, loaded almost to bursting point with information and impatient even of the moment it took to disengage my cotton frock from the brambles which caught at it. First the immense discovery, the reading and rereading, the digesting of the principle of the thing, and then of the fascinating details (it was a good idea to put a towel under your hips to keep the sheets clean—years later my first lover was much tickled when I got into bed for my deflowering equipped with a towel); then the complicated shift of focus, the act of faith almost, by which I converted what was dismaying into what was desirable.
According to the sort of theory half-held by my mother, that should have settled that: fully informed, Betty and I should have relapsed into thinking only of our animals, our games and our lessons, with sex pigeonholed until the time came for it. Instead, intoxicated by our discovery of what was clearly the most exciting thing in life, we rarely thought or spoke of anything else from the day I first read the book to the time, a couple of years later, when Betty’s mother found one of my letters to her daughter and forbade the continuance of the friendship on the grounds that I was a dirty-minded little girl. This was unfair. I had access to more information than Betty had, but her interest in it was no less avid than mine. It was also humiliating, but one of the reasons that I believe my mother was prevented from helping us about sex more by shyness than by a fundamentally prudish attitude towards it is that she comforted me in my shame by taking the incident in a matter-of-fact way: it did not seem to surprise her that we had discussed such things—she did not consider me a monster, as I had half expected her to.
Marie Stopes taught me the facts; anonymous English ballad writers confirmed my belief that they were pleasures. The spring following my initiation we went, as usual, to stay at Beckton. My grandmother never allowed anyone else to spring-clean my grandfather’s books: each year, with a scarf tied over her hair, she would spend weeks going through the shelves—clap-clap, a flick with a duster, then a quick polish to already gleaming bindings with some unguent prepared from an antiquary’s recipe. She was doing the smoking-room one day, kneeling on the floor among stacks of books while I lolled on the sofa. ‘What are those?’ I asked idly, reaching for the top volume of a pile of six lovely ivory-coloured books with the one word ‘Ballads’ gleaming on their spines. I felt smug at asking. Ballads, I knew, were the kind of poem one ought to like best at my age, but I usually found them dull and preferred Elizabethan conceits or eighteenth-century elegancies (‘Cupid and my Campaspe played/At cards for kisses’ was one of my favourites). ‘You wouldn’t enjoy those,’ said my grandmother too quickly, and added, half to herself, ‘Horrible things, I can’t think how they got here.’ (‘Men!’ she must have been thinking.)
I was on to it at once, put back the volume I had picked up, and talked of something else. That evening I sneaked down, took one of the books at random, and carried it off to my bedroom.
The first poem I read was a long one, and dull, but it was about the gelding of the devil so it had its anatomical passages. Others were far more exciting. The collection was an orgy of rustic bawdy, full of farting and pissing and sex spelt out, embalmed in an atmosphere of guffawing, leering naughtiness. I went through four of the volumes in a fever, hiding them in my underclothes drawer, for in some ways children are as trusting as adults and it did not occur to me that they would be found there. They were, of course. The strange thing, considering how little we did for ourselves in the way of folding up or putting away, was that it did not happen sooner. No one said anything about it—they felt, I suppose, that the incident should be played down rather than up—but when I went to fetch the fifth volume, the whole set had gone. My sense of deprivation was violent; not far, I am sure, from what an alcoholic would feel if his secret stock of whisky was discovered and removed.
Those poems gave me physical sensations of excitement, which Planned Parenthood had not done. Flushed and wriggling, searching greedily back and forth for the sexiest passages, I must have been a displeasing sight as I read them. If, now, I found a little girl reading those books in that way, my impulse would be to stop her doing it. But I do not think it did me any harm. ‘Dirty-minded’ Betty’s mother thought me, and dirty-minded I was, doing furtively what I felt to be wrong, but what is the dirty-mindedness of adolescents? Where does it come from, in families where the parents have made no attempt to force their children to think in such terms?
There are always the nuances of behaviour which betray adults’ reactions to things whatever the
ir rational policy may be; nuances picked up by children with infallible accuracy. There is always the sense of taboo which comes from silence. And there are always the effects of experiences connected with excretion—‘dirty little girl’ over a wetted bed, or merely an adult’s expression of distaste over a smelly chamberpot (or one’s own distaste over it)—to attach an idea of dirtiness to anything belonging to the private parts of the body. But beyond these things there is something else which no attitude, however ‘wholesome,’ can be sure of getting round: the fact that sex is an activity. To learn about it, then put it in cold storage—it is not so simple as that. Learn about sex, and you want, if it has not been deliberately smeared for you, to act it; and while, according to the mores of the society in which you live, you are too young for that, you must inevitably go through a period of tension and frustration. ‘Dirty-mindedness’ is the way—or one of the ways—in which this tension relieves itself, and what is so dreadful about that? ‘Laughter of the wrong sort,’ as a woman I knew called the titters released in classrooms by paintings of the nude, is not a charming sound, but it is a harmless substitute for illegitimate babies bred between teenage children. I dislike the picture of myself reading those ballads, but I do not wish that I had never done so.
Perhaps children who act it out by masturbating spend less time thinking about sex than I did. If I had known of the activity I should certainly have indulged in it, but I did not know of it, and not having a strong practical bent, I did not invent it. I doubt whether it would have made much difference. Physically precocious as I happened to be, I was bound to go through an obsessed stage; and having been spared neurotic extremes in my parents’ attitude I was not likely to be damaged by it. I believe now that the way a person feels about sex, once he has struggled through adolescence, depends largely on other things than his ‘sex education’: on, for example, his imagination, his honesty, his capacity for tenderness, and his ability to comprehend the ‘reality’ of other people. Those are the things to fret about, rather than the little horror’s passion for looking up rude words in the dictionary or peeping through keyholes.
Absorbing though my obsession with sex remained throughout my teens, it stayed in a watertight compartment: it did not leak out, or hardly leaked out, into my relationship with boys. From the age of nine to the age of fifteen, right through the hot early stages of the fever, I was protected by being in love with a boy of my own age, for the reason that he was kind, gentle, brave, honest, and reliable: the most rational love of my life. In my daydreams he and I would rescue each other from appalling perils in order to melt together in an endless kiss; but in real life I should have been astounded if he had so much as pecked my cheek—something unthinkable: the nearest he came to expressing affection was to tell his mother that I was a good sport. Only once did a glimmer of true sexual feeling occur. At the end of a violent afternoon spent sliding down a haystack, he came panting up and flopped beside me. ‘How red and sticky he looks,’ I thought, with what I expected to be distate—and suddenly, strongly, wanted to feel that hot cheek against mine. I recognized what was happening. ‘So that,’ I thought with surprise, ‘is what it is really like!’ and I felt adult for having experienced it—adult and secretive. It was not among the things on which I reported in my ill-fated correspondence with Betty.
5
‘GOOD EVENING…. Oh, my god, it’s Paul’s girl!’
‘Maggie, you recognized me!’
‘Recognized you? Of course I recognized you.’
Maggie held my arm for a moment after kissing me, looking as though she might cry, while I stood there feeling a curious internal vertigo. It was almost twenty years since I had last gone through the narrow door into the taproom of the Plough at Appleton, a small village about ten miles from Oxford; almost twenty years since Maggie and I had seen each other.
I had returned to it by chance. An Oxford friend not seen for years had come home to England with his family on leave. The village in which he had rented a house happened to be Appleton, and he had asked me to stay for a week-end. He had once known me very well, and remembered that it had been ‘my’ village although by the time I had met him I had become unwilling to visit it again because it was the place to which I had always gone with Paul. To my dismay, this friend was delighted that now, when everything was safely distant, he could be my escort along two hundred yards of country lane into such a significant patch of my past. It was the sort of thing which he himself enjoyed—he was a great man for pious pilgrimages, for gently melancholy evocations of youthful emotion. I had not thought of Maggie’s for a long time and was horrified to feel such a violent revulsion from his sentimental kindness. It seemed to me a shocking intrusion on something which had nothing to do with him, and if a refusal would not have been even more sentimental than the visit, I would have been guilty of that rudeness.
And Maggie looked just the same; or perhaps as though she were having one of her ‘bad days’ after a thick Guinness evening, only now it was twenty years, not a hangover, that made her look like that. When I saw that she, too, did not know what to say, it was almost intolerable. It had taken a long time, but the whole thing had at last been put away as though behind a glass door—always there to be looked at, it need no longer be felt. But standing there in the taproom, with Maggie’s hand on my arm…. ‘Oh, my god, it’s Paul’s girl!’ Of course I was. And yet finally, conclusively, forever, I was not. So vision skidded and squinted into dizziness.
Paul began long before the days when we went to Maggie’s. When I was fifteen my parents decided to employ a tutor during the holidays, to cram my brother for the entrance examination to his public school. They offered the job to the son of a friend of theirs, who was at Oxford, and he, unable to take it, recommended a fellow undergraduate whom he knew to have run out of money and to be looking for a way of earning some. I was beginning to find my pure and unrequited love for the boy who thought me a good sport too quiet for my taste, so I fell in love in advance, first with the friend’s son, then, when I heard that Paul was coming instead of him, with Paul. If he had been ugly or shy or snubbing I might have fallen out of love again when he appeared, but he was none of these things, so within two days the lines of my life were laid down.
I wrote to a friend of mine: ‘The tutor’s come, and he’s a perfectly marvellous person. He’s got brown eyes and fair hair and I suppose he ought to be taller really but he has got broad shoulders and a good figure, and he’s country and London at the same time. He would be at home anywhere. He’s very funny and he reads a lot, but he isn’t a bit highbrow. We took a boat up the stream yesterday, through all that tangly bit beyond the wood, like going up the Amazon, and he made up a tremendous story about who we were and what we were doing. He knows more about birds than anyone I know, but he dances well too.’
Paul was very much as I described him. Fair-skinned myself, I am rarely attracted by fair people, but he, in spite of hair which in summer would bleach into golden streaks as though he had peroxided it, had an almost Latin pigmentation: sherry-coloured eyes and a matt skin which went with the compact, smooth cut of his features. He was commonsensical and quick-witted rather than clever, good-humoured and high-spirited rather than witty, but the distinctions were not at that time perceptible to me. He was confident, a charmer, and was considered by some of his elders and by more sober young men to be slightly delinquent because he was rarely out of money trouble and would make love to any willing woman, even though she might be the wife or daughter of a friend.
His chief quality—the thing I hit on with ‘he would be at home anywhere,’ the thing for which I most loved him, the thing which influenced me, I now gratefully believe, more than any other quality in any other person—was that he went like steel to magnet for the essence of any person, place, activity, or situation, working from no preconception or preferred framework. He had his own touchstone for what he called ‘genuineness,’ his own unformulated laws which determined whether people were ‘real’
or not. This eager acceptance of diversity of experience was immensely exciting to me, and of great value, coming as it did when I was ready to take any imprint which came my way. I had reached the stage of being vaguely and for the most part privately in opposition to the laws governing my family’s outlook, but it was not a strong or reasoned opposition because there was not enough to oppose: I loved my family and my home, and I enjoyed all the things we did. It was Paul, with his simply expressed but passionately felt dicta—‘The great thing to remember is to take people as they come’ ‘I hate people who aren’t natural in any situation’—who broke down my conditioning and made me anxious to meet people as people, regardless of class or race: a freedom from shackles which did not then chafe me, but which would probably have become locked on me, for which I shall always thank him.
Paul used to boast of his ‘sense of situation’ and his ‘way with people.’ It was because he felt his way through life with such whiskers that he became at once a member of the household at the Farm. He enjoyed the place and us as we felt we should be enjoyed; he steered clear of the divergencies that might have alienated my parents; and he plunged happily into the ‘situation’ of moulding admiring youth as he felt it ought to be moulded. As far as I can remember he managed to hammer a certain amount of information into my brother’s then resolutely closed mind, but chiefly he concentrated on opening our eyes to Life.
His family lived in London but spent most of each summer on the coast not far from us, where they had a cottage. His father was a businessman and, without being rich, had more money than mine. Paul had gone to Eton; my brother was going to Wellington. Paul, if his father had his way, would leave Oxford for a job in some organization like I.C.I. or Unilever; my brother, unless he developed some strong bent in another direction, would probably end up like my father, in the Army. Anyone who lived in London and who made money as Paul’s father did (he sometimes lost it, too), by knowing what went on in the Stock Exchange, seemed to us so dashing as to be almost disreputable, while anyone who lived in the country and either just had money or, failing that, earned a salary seemed to them so salt-of-the-earth as to be almost dull. In spite of this the two families liked what they knew of each other and no one frowned on the intimacy which soon developed between Paul and me. After that first summer of employment as a tutor, he would come to stay for parties to be my escort, or I would go to stay at the cottage to sail with him and the youngest of his three sisters. She, two years older than he was, became for a time my substitute for Paul, the object on which I focussed my love and admiration, for I had found a letter in his bedroom from a girl with whom he had clearly slept, and this, with the four years between our ages (to fifteen, nineteen is grownup), had persuaded me that this love, too, must stay unrequited for a time. I was too sensible to hope to compete while still in pig-tails. So deliberately and fairly calmly, hanging about his sister as much as I was able, I settled down to wait.