Instead of a Letter

by Diana Athill

  ‘They are filthy!’ I thought.

  Poor parents, what are they to do?

  From Christmas 1935 to October 1936 I stayed at home, losing the last shreds of my desire to conform to my family’s plan for me by going up to Oxford. I had tried for a scholarship and failed; something of which I was ashamed but which was just becoming a relief when a great-aunt stepped in with an offer to help with my fees. ‘Darling Aunt Mary,’ they all said. ‘How wonderful of her’—and I thought ‘Interfering old crone.’ Now this is a bad thing to remember: that never, other than formally, did I thank Aunt Mary for the three best years of my life.

  I did not know that they were going to be so delightful because I saw them as a continuation of school. Here was I on my eighteenth birthday, and still they wanted to stuff education down my throat. But because the months ahead of me, before the first term began, looked so rich and free—a clovery green meadow to a pony who had stood in a stall all winter—I kicked up my heels and forgot about the future. New dresses, friends to stay, dances, reading what I liked, horses, hunting, tennis parties…. If I had been asked ‘Do you want to do this forever?’ I should have answered with an emphatic no, critical as I had become of the structure on which it all rested, and depressing as I found even then the spectacle of girls older than myself who were doing it forever—taking the dogs for walks, arranging the flowers, helping their mothers at garden fêtes. No, I did not intend to be like that. But I did want to do it now.

  Not all of it was pure pleasure. The tennis parties, for instance, almost amounted to misery. My eye sent messages to my hand no more quickly for a tennis ball than for a lacrosse ball; I was always the worst player there and I hated to show at a disadvantage. But they were a large part of our social life as soon as summer began, and that I would not miss. Besides, the white-clad figures against green lawns, the smell of new-mown grass, the taste of iced home-made lemonade, and the presence of men—once the playing was over the parties became enjoyable. Driving to them, I would practise a fierce self-discipline: ‘It does not matter if you make a fool of yourself, it does not matter what they think. It is only vanity which makes you think that it matters and if you stop thinking it, it won’t.’ When this had only depressed me further I would switch to ‘And anyway you dance better than they do, and you ride much better, and you read more, and you’re a socialist.’ It did not do much good, but even so the parties’ pleasures were never wholly obscured by their pains.

  Hunting had no pains—or rather, its pains were both private and shared, and sharpened its joys. That I was nervous almost to the point of throwing up at every meet, hearing the crack as my horse’s forelegs hit the top bar of a gate, the crunch as one of its hooves came down on my skull, was at the same time an internal matter and something in which I was not alone. During the waiting about before the field moves off, many people are likely to be either unusually silent or unnaturally hearty. The more frightened you were, the more miraculous the vanishing of fear as soon as things started to happen; the more exciting the thud of hooves, the creak of leather, the more triumphant your thrusts ahead by risking a blind bit of fence while others were queuing for a straightforward bit. What instinct it is in a horse that gives it its passion for following hounds I do not understand. It is not only the obvious herd instinct, for I have often known horses who continued to quiver and dance, to be alert in every nerve, when we had lost the field and were riding alone, stretching our ears for the hounds’ voices, and I once had a pony who was so mad about the sport that she would not eat when she got home after a long day but would lean against the door of her loose-box, straining to hear the intoxicating sounds from which I had had much trouble turning her away several hours before. Whatever it may be, it is shared by the rider, and it is not lust for blood. I used, whenever possible, to avoid being in at the kill, and of all the many people I have known who enjoyed hunting, not one took pleasure in the chase’s logical conclusion.

  A long hack home after a hard day could be physical torture: cold, stiff, often wet, you could reach a stage when your mount’s every stride seemed a jolt, and every jolt drove your spine into the back of your head. That, and the nerves, were part of the game that made it more than a game, that extended you more than you thought you could be extended. At the Manor there would be a groom to take our ponies when we got in, but in Hertfordshire and at the Farm, where we looked after them ourselves, it went without saying that we rubbed them down, fed and watered them and put on their rugs before we plodded our own aching bodies up to their hot baths (oh, the agony of numb fingers coming alive in hot water) followed by tea-with-an-egg. Absurd though one may think the English gentry’s obsession with animals, a child gains something from their care. To be able to feel your own chills and fatigues in the body of another creature, to rub them away with a twist of straw and solace them with a bran-mash, is to identify with a being outside yourself.

  My family’s way of talking about its animals—horses, dogs, and goats—would have sounded absurd to anyone who had no experience of them or liking for them. We saw them not as docile or bad-tempered, ill-or well-trained, but as personalities with attributes similar to those of humans. ‘Poor Cinders, he gets so bored in the lower shed,’ we might say of a pony; or of a dog, ‘Lola is in a very haughty mood.’ This anthropomorphic approach to animals, despised by those who do not share it, can be taken to foolish extremes but does not seem to me to be an error. I think Freya Stark put her finger on it when she described the death of a lizard she had once owned. She was grieved to a degree she thought exaggerated until it occurred to her that the distance between the lizard and herself was far less than the distance between her and God, and in that way she expressed a truth which urbanized people forget: that Homo sapiens is not a creature apart, but one development of animal life. The more subtly developed animals do share with human beings certain muscular movements and actions which express similar states of consciousness; in them these actions are released more directly, by simpler stimuli, but at bottom they are not different and we flatter ourselves if we suppose too great a distance between our own behaviour and that of Pavlov’s salivating dog.

  I have always taken great pleasure in the company of animals, or even in their neutral presence—a rabbit hopping across a lawn or a bird teasing at some berries in a tree—and I am glad that I was brought up in such a way that this pushing out of feelers into a part of nature other than my own is possible to me. I am also glad that circumstances enabled me to go one step further in this than most of the people among whom I was raised, and ask myself the question ‘If I feel like this about dogs and birds and horses—what about those poor foxes?’

  It was hares and stags in my case, for ours was not a foxhunting county and we had to make do with harriers and a pack of stag-hounds which hunted deer maintained for the purpose and captured alive after the day’s sport, to be returned to their paddock. It was sometimes argued that the older, more experienced deer knew that this was going to happen and fled from the hounds for the fun of the thing, but they did not look as though they thought it fun. I hunted in order to ride. The subtleties of working hounds meant little to me, and throughout my youth the pleasure I got from riding was so great that I averted my eyes and shut my mind to thoughts of the creatures the hounds pursued, but the images registered, all the same. I cannot be certain whether I would have acknowledged them if those months between school and Oxford had ‘gone on forever’ and my country pleasures had continued unbroken, but I believe I might have done. My father did: he did not merely give up shooting, but came to loathe it.

  As it happened I was living in London, and no longer killing anything, by the time I acknowledged that to kill for amusement was barbaric. Now I detest blood sports. I would never hunt again, nor would I go out to watch anyone shoot, nor even, I think, catch a fish unless I were without food. Living creatures have to prey on each other in order to exist, but not one of them can annihilate another for its own amusement without committing an out
rage.

  For the rest of that time I feel no guilt, though I often behaved badly. Badly in the conventional sense in that I flirted extravagantly with any man willing, considering a dance a failure unless I had been kissed at least once by someone, it did not much matter whom; and badly in another way, in that I became affected and a little arrogant, feeling myself more intelligent than most of my acquaintances, and sometimes (where were those Left Wing principles?) socially superior to some of them. I did not put it like that. At the smaller parties, the local parties, with the sons and daughters of parsons and estate agents and wine merchants and veterinary surgeons, I simply allowed myself to feel that I and my cousins were more dashing and stylish than they were, and showed off accordingly. We could be the stars of those parties (or felt we could be) and I can only hope that the good manners in which we had been trained prevented us from making such monkeys of ourselves as we might have done. If I went to a more sophisticated dance—a dance with people from London at it—it was another story. On such an occasion I would be hushed with admiration, and grateful for any attention I received: only if I went to such a dance with Paul could I be quite at ease.

  But that exuberant, slightly gauche girl, wearing her hair in a curly fringe because a young man had said that she resembled Katharine Hepburn, does not weigh too much on my conscience. Even if I had never gone to Oxford, I would soon have stopped being eighteen years old.

  9

  I WENT UP TO Oxford in 1936 and I did not join the Communist Party while I was there. I cannot claim that this was because of intelligent criticism of Marxist principles, nor that I had an instinctive prescience greater than that of many of my more serious contemporaries: it was simply that I was lazy. Bad smells were as acrid in my nose as they were in the noses of any other Left Wing undergraduate at the time, and it seemed to me, as it did to others, that only an extreme, a revolutionary opposition to capitalist society would be effective. But to become an active Party member—that looked to me like hard work. As I had slid away from the Church of England, so I slid away from Communism, but with less excuse: for the first sliding I had felt valid reasons stirring behind the laziness, while for the second, at that time, I could feel none. I greatly admired anyone who committed himself and I did not believe that to be, in a desultory way, a member of the Oxford Labour Club and to cut sandwiches for hunger marchers was an appropriate response to the circumstances. ‘I am,’ I felt with regret, ‘an essentially frivolous person.’

  I felt like that not only when I considered the state of society, but whenever anything forced me to acknowledge that the war would soon be on us. ‘We who live in the shadow of a war…’ Stephen Spender’s poetry I knew by heart several years before I went to Oxford—he had been one of my adolescent passions—and neither he, nor anyone else I read, nor the daily evidence of the news permitted ignorance. But ‘Oh shut up, let’s talk about something else,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing we can do, anyway.’ It was only at night that I would sometimes say to myself the words: ‘It is really coming, you know. As things are, it can’t fail to come.’ One summer night at Oxford there were aeroplanes droning for an hour, circling or streaming over the town for what purpose I do not know. Bombing raids: Spain had given us plenty of book learning about them, but it is odd that I should have known so certainly that the steadily throbbing hum was that of bombers, not fighters. That’s how they will sound, I thought, and almost, in the chill of dread, That’s them. I cannot remember ever feeling colder or more hopeless when lying in later beds listening to real raids. It was no good pretending that it might not happen: it would. And I cried tears soon dried by their own inadequacy. All I could do about the coming war was to cry. Once I said to a friend, ‘I shall kill myself when it starts,’ and she replied, ‘But that’s silly—to kill yourself to avoid death.’ It was not death I was thinking of avoiding, it was having to know this horror about life.

  So yes: I was frivolous, and I was lazy, and it seems to me now that I was lucky to be those things, because by being able almost all the time to slide sideways, not to think, I could store three years away like jewels before it came.

  All the way from home to Oxford I was in a near-coma of alarm, sleepy and detached as though I were watching events from far away and they did not really concern me. Nervousness still has this effect on me, which (though it had unfortunate results during University examinations, making me slapdash and flippant) is a fortunate quirk. Apart from going to school, the only journeys I had ever made alone had been for short visits to friends, for parties, when on arrival I would be met by expected faces and carried off to do expected and pleasurable things. Leaving home frightened me. The super-school for which I supposed myself bound chilled me. I had not believed that those lush green months were going to end so soon.

  I had been to Oxford earlier for my interview, so I knew about the gasworks and the marmalade factory and the prison, those melancholy outriders to beauty when you arrive by rail. I knew, too, that my college was an undistinguished building, or sprawl of buildings. If my spirits had been high enough to be dashed, they would not have been dashed by these things. But I did not know quite how institutional my room would be, with its dark-blue curtains of cotton repp, its dark-blue screen round the washstand, its dark-blue cover on the bed and its mud-coloured carpet, limp with use. Oh dear. And then to have to venture out down those long corridors, peer at notice boards, find those other fresh women (‘freshers’ I would have to call them, I supposed with distaste), all so confident and clever-looking. One had got out of a taxi just in front of me, tall, wearing a fur coat and carrying a bag of golf clubs. Another I had talked to at our interview and she had almond eyes, wore exquisite little shoes, and had dismissed some girl as ‘the sort of girl who keeps count of the men who have kissed her’—which I did, too. It was strange that my two best friends should have been the first to catch my attention and to strike awe: Nan, terrified, paralysed with shyness, not knowing what to do with the horrible golf clubs her father had insisted on giving her; Margaret, more like the effect she made but as absorbed by love as I had ever been.

  We trooped from interview to interview, being told what we were to do, what classes we were to attend, who was lecturing where, on what; and we were given copies of the Statutes to read. Good God, the restrictions! This would be worse than school. The Statutes have been revised since then, but at that time they appeared to date from my mothers’ generation when a girl had to be accompanied by a woman don as chaperone if she went to tea with a man, and naturally no one explained that most of them were ignored.

  The first day or two were much as I had feared they would be, though too fully occupied to allow homesickness. It was not until the weekend that the clouds lifted. On the Saturday there was a telegram waiting for me in my pigeonhole: ‘flying down to collect you ten o’clock tomorrow wear riding clothes paul.’

  On Sunday I went in to breakfast in riding clothes. The haughty Nan, her fur coat and golf clubs still casting their aura, had kindly kept me a place. Erroneous though my impression of her had been, it was nothing to hers of me when I casually mentioned that my young man was coming to see me by aeroplane and that we would spend the morning riding together—it was several days before these two dashing creatures faded away and the real girls met.

  Paul had tried to please his father by working for Cadbury’s but had not been able to endure it and had bolted into the Royal Air Force after a few months. He was stationed in Lincolnshire but could borrow a plane from time to time and land at Abingdon, where he could borrow a car. I did not much want to ride with him because I despised hired horses and it embarrassed me to see him doing anything at which he was not good—he hardly knew how to ride—but that he should have thought up this way of making me feel at home touched me so deeply that I would have ridden a donkey round Rotten Row all day. And after we had ridden he said, ‘I’m going to take you to my favourite place.’ We drove to Appleton and there I was, going into the taproom of the Plough for th
e first time, being introduced to Maggie, who, twenty years later, was to cry ‘My God, it’s Paul’s girl.’

  Maggie had a husband, known as Dad, but he was not a very efficient man. It was typical of him that when Paul was staying the night and had to get up at four in the morning to be back in Grantham in time for work, Dad would test the alarm clock to make sure that it was working and would forget to rewind it. He used to smile and nod and be gently shooed into the background by his wife, who ran the place. She looked a little cottage housewife rather than a pubkeeper (in spite of the occasional Guinness hangover), and she gave the impression that opening time was the beginning of a party. Gay, brisk, endlessly generous, she adored an invasion by any of the enterprising young men who had discovered her pub while they were at Oxford, calling them ‘her boys’—and of all ‘her boys,’ Paul seemed to be the favourite. She would always find a bed for him, lend him money, tell lies for him, scold him, pet him, give him good advice, and welcome his girls without giving any of them a hint that there had been others. She approved of me.

  The taproom was narrow and dark, with a solid table down the middle of it and wooden settles along the wall. That was where evenings would begin, or where we would drink when we visited the place at lunchtime. But towards the end of an evening the sheep would divide from the goats—ordinary customers would stay in the taproom, while the more solid ‘regulars’ and honoured guests would move into the parlour. There was a piano with a pleated silk front in there, and a good deal of shabby furniture in a small space so that we could sit down. It was in the parlour that I spent the first of many Plough evenings, and that I heard the Poacher sing.

  Maggie was all for a bit of music and would play herself when she could escape from the taproom. It started, that night, with songs like ‘Shenandoah,’ or ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,’ which everyone knew, then went on to the soloists. In the corner sat the Poacher, his cap pulled down over his red face, shuffling his feet and grinning into his mug when people began to urge him. He was coy about it—heaven knows how many pints had to be poured down him before, suddenly, he lurched to his feet. There was a shout of pleasure and he was jostled into the cramped middle of the room. He took off his cap, looked into it for a moment, then slammed it back on to his head the wrong way round. Deliberately, dramatically, he got into his singing posture: one foot advanced, the knee bent, his right arm extended stiffly in front of him (the only other person I have seen in that position was a Maharajah posing for a photograph at the time of King George V’s Jubilee). Everyone leant forward in their chairs, and a deep droning sound began, so that I thought ‘But what was all the fuss about, the man can’t sing at all!’ and then I began to hear the words. The Poacher was singing songs composed by the people who had composed the ‘Ballads’ in my grandfather’s wicked white volumes.