by Amanda Cross
“Do you know what college this is, little girl?” they asked.
I leapt to my feet, and got my English accent firmly into place. “Yes, sir,” I said. “This is Wadham.”
“Do you know the names of the others?” he asked.
“Arthur,” his wife said.
“You wanted to see the University,” he told her. “We might as well learn something. Would you,” he said, turning to me, “like to show us around Oxford? If, that is, you’ve nothing better to do?”
And so, as though some fantasy had materialized, some miracle quietly occurred, I led them through the colleges, telling them all the obvious things. Merton, Balliol, Trinity, All Souls—which I described from the outside; one was not allowed to enter. I knew only that there were no students, and no visitors, and that important men met there for profound, empire-shaking, discussions. I was on my way to Christ Church when the woman said her feet hurt, and the man said, “I guess we’ll have to let it go at that. We’ve learned a lot, thanks to you.” And he handed me two half crowns. A fortune, in those days, to an eight-year-old.
And thus began my career as a child Oxford guide. I borrowed, undetected, a small three-legged stool from the night nursery, and would sit where the tourists were likely to appear. I learned how, ingratiatingly, to offer my services. I made up a school to say I went to; my accent was impeccable, at least to foreign ears. I always wore my school uniform, even in the hot Oxford summer days, and learned to leap to my feet, and say “sir” and “ma’am” in every sentence. Part of my earnings, which I mostly stored away, I spent on a boy’s school cap; the girl’s hat that had been part of my uniform I thought soppy. I used to lift my cap, and put it back, as though I were a boy. It had an emblem on it, and I made up the name of the school to fit the cap.
I told Cyril nothing of this career, which I only practiced when he was off with his friends, having scorned me. To go with him or his group anywhere was worth anything to me: to be a boy, one of them. I would have given up any other opportunity for that. Yet I did not tell him of my service to tourists, though certainly it would have stood me in good stead with him and his friends. I know that I rationalized my failure to confide in him my newfound source of income and importance as a plan to spend the money on a gift for him; in reality, as I knew even then, had he offered himself to the tourists they would not have chosen me. Who would take a girl if they could get a boy?
Most of the time, however, Cyril and I were alone together through the long summer days of England. My aunt, when the Trinity term was over, had gone for a month to Europe. Cyril’s father went to his college just the same, or perhaps to the library; we did not ask. He dined, even during the leave, in hall. In the long evenings, when “we had to go to bed by day,” as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in one of the poems, Cyril’s mother read to us. Our bedtime was made more bearable by Alice in Wonderland and other English stories and poems that I can still hear the voice of Cyril’s mother intoning, gently, and with much expression. Because Cyril and I, catching one another’s eye, could pretend that we listened for her sake, we could abandon ourselves to Leigh Hunt’s Jenny, to A Child’s Garden of Verses, to E. Nesbit’s children; above all, to Alice.
In the day, when we were together, we never talked about what we had read, or about our elders. We raced about Oxford together, bareheaded (my cap was solely for business uses); on some afternoons, waiting by the boat-rental place in the hope that someone—for we were, Cyril especially, appealing children—would offer us a ride with them in a punt. On rare occasions my aunt, when she had returned from her vacation, took us on outings, to Blenheim, which we did not tell her we knew better than she; to the Cotswolds—the towns with the leaping trout and friendly pubs—and several times to London. For these occasions our uniforms were carefully pressed; we were given freshly ironed shirts to wear, and were very well behaved.
I fear I have painted my aunt as rather stern and unbending. This was not always the case. She was one of those people, I think, who never claim to like children, and who therefore treat them with a certain distant respect that is returned. Children, I have noticed, are quick to observe where respect is not required. Where they recognize its rights, however, they are able to establish relationships with adults that combine formality and intimacy in a particularly appealing way. So it is, I like to think, with my relationship to Jean and Ted’s children; so it was with my aunt and Cyril and me. I know that I won certain points with Cyril because she was my aunt, however honorary; he would not, without my presence, have had the trips, the ice creams. She treated us scrupulously alike, which I might have resented, were I another sort of child. Since, however, I accepted Cyril’s superior claims as a boy, I was pleased enough to be treated on a par with him. And, needless to say, I adored being taken for an English child, even an English girl. My aunt liked my crisp, formal manners, and began, I sensed, to approve of me more as the summer went on. Perhaps it was during our outings that she was deciding whether or not to have me back to visit in future summers.
One day, toward the end of summer, my aunt asked me alone (that is without Cyril) to tea in her apartment. He ran off, pretending to join his friends, and I felt disloyal to him, going alone. But I had asked that he might come too, and she had told me firmly that she wished to talk with me, just the two of us. I had never before been to her apartment, which had its own entrance at the rear of the house, and occupied the top floor and an attic. She had gone to the trouble to buy an elegant cake for our tea, which she served at a table near the window overlooking the garden. I had thought I would be shy with her, but she was so direct, so unmanipulating, that I found myself able to address her directly, without dropping my eyes, my voice, or my tea.
“Would you like to come here every summer, and stay with Cyril and his parents, and have outings with me?” she asked. I said that I would, very much; that I loved England, adored Oxford, and would prefer, if asked, to live all year round here, and go to a real school with a real uniform.
“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” she said. “For one thing, during the winter Cyril is in school all day, and I am very busy indeed. Besides, your people in America would miss you.”
“No they wouldn’t,” I said. “I’m sure they wouldn’t.”
“Your father would miss you,” she said. “Think about it a minute. Surely you can see that.”
“It would be easier for him if I weren’t there,” I said. “Then he could spend all his time with her.” My aunt knew I meant his wife, who was nice enough to me—but I did not contribute in any way to the intimacy of their first years of marriage. I was willing, furthermore, to let her have my father, in exchange for Cyril and England.
“I think that is not quite fair to him,” my aunt said.
“But I like England better than America. People behave better.” Since my aunt certainly agreed with me, she found this argument difficult to counter.
“That,” she said firmly, helping me to another piece of cake, “is not the question. I have not asked you where you want to live. I have asked you whether you would like to return next summer.”
I nodded, afraid that I might cry. Among my fantasies under the copper beech at Wadham (and, indeed, everywhere else) had been that my aunt would tell me I could stay forever. Somehow, I cannot now imagine why, I thought it harder to turn into a boy in America. Probably it was the clothes; in the States at that time, girls wore very girlish clothes: blue jeans for both sexes were far off. Perhaps it was the manners I liked, or to show people around the colleges at Oxford; perhaps I found that the formal ways of English childhood distinguished less between the sexes.
“Never mind,” my aunt said briskly, pleased, I guess now, that I wanted to stay, but fearing an outburst. “You have next summer to look forward to. Cyril’s mother seems happy to have you back. She’s a lonely woman, as you may have noticed. Well, that’s settled anyway. There’s only one other thing.” I
looked up at her. “I’m not, as you already know, your aunt. Neither your mother nor your father have any siblings. But I was a good friend of your mother’s, and I shall serve well as an honorary aunt. We shall be honorary relations to each other, which is the best kind. In years to come, someone may suggest to you, it may occur to you, that I am really your mother. That’s the sort of romantic story people like to dream up. Well, I’m not your mother. But I shall be as good a friend to you as I can, and I hope that will suffice. And, what is more, I will promise you this. If, when you are ready for University, you would like to go to one of the Oxford women’s colleges—Somerville or Lady Margaret Hall for preference—and are clever enough to get a scholarship, I shall see to it that you can go. Is it a bargain? You must, you see, work hard and get good grades, and prepare for the English entrance exam in time. I shouldn’t think it would be hard to be a good student in America, and we shall be certain to pick up the slack if we have to.”
The idea of Oxford, even a woman’s college (and in the remaining days of my stay, I spent a good deal of time looking at them, particularly Somerville, where my aunt had been a student; women’s colleges had never been part of my guided tour), came to fill my dreams, secretly, a pact with myself should I fail to become a boy. But, somehow, well before I was ready for University, I knew I would have to settle for an American college. The reasons were never stated; I suppose Oxford was too hard to arrange, or too expensive. There may have been other reasons to do with my aunt’s health, or position. There were other summers with Cyril and my aunt—eventually Cyril’s father found out about the guided tours, and shamed Cyril about not having thought of that and, Cyril’s refusing to join me, I had to give them up if I was to keep his friendship—other trips to London, a time when we were allowed to go alone; a time when we were allowed to take a punt out by ourselves. But for me England is always that first year, when I was not unalterably committed to a girl’s destiny, and had found a friend.
Chapter Five
Winifred’s Journal
On the farm, each day was the same, varying only as Ted or Jean decided to assign me another afternoon task from four to seven, in place of the milking, which they then took on. I quite liked driving the tractor over the fields, with a corn chopper behind me, behind it the wagon to collect the silage. But that was only in the fall. In the summer, when not milking, I drove into the fields to cut grass for the cows, leaving it for them on large tables in the near fields. My tasks varied with the seasons, but not as much as Ted’s and Jean’s, for I had only the constant milking, or its substitute. They often worked far into the evenings in the summers; in the winters, they did the necessary repairs, and indoor jobs.
The sameness of my days, with only the change of seasons to mark time’s passage, the hard work alternating with the reading, and writing, and pondering, were what I needed then: that I had been able not only to invent it for myself, but to bring it into being, seemed to me wonderful. How often we live wholly the prisoner of events we summoned, or did not summon, with no knowledge of what they would entail. I had made the life I now lived. There were minor, unforeseen surprises. Sometimes, oftener than I would have chosen, one of the children would be waiting for me outside the milking parlor, to be allowed to clean the cow’s teats, and release her food into her milking place. Stanchions were no longer used; in the parlor the cows stood each in her place, eating, content to be milked by the machine I slung into place beneath each: the milking machines were too heavy for the children. The milk ran directly into the cooler, so it was, in fact, untouched by human hands, as they used to say, even before it was pasteurized—except for the fact that I would dip into it for the cats’ milk, and Jean or Ted always took the milk for the house from the cooler. (I dislike milk, and only took some if I needed it for some unusual concoction.) None of us ever drank pasteurized milk, though Jean told me that when the babies were weaned, she bought milk in the store, the doctor having so advised. Occasionally, a cow would have to be stripped by hand; not often. The work became rhythmic, instinctive; and the children would talk to me about one thing and another, offering to help. Remembering my own childhood loneliness, I did not send them away. But I did not answer personal questions, and kept them at a certain distance.
One day a week, Jean, on her way to Pittsfield for one thing or another, would drop me off in Lenox, which had the best library in that area. I took out many books, the maximum allowed, each week, and brought them back the next. Waiting for Jean to return, I would begin to read in the library, rarely walking through the town, which in summer was terribly touristy, and in winter without major interest. But there was a bookstore I visited, having, in general, no money for books, but occasionally seeing a title I would determine to get from the library.
On one such bookstore visit, a month or so earlier, I had seen a biography of my aunt. I picked it up, already transported to another world. Had the bookstore exploded at that moment, I would not have noticed. There was the picture of her as Principal of her college on the cover. The biography was not authorized; indeed, the author had had no help with it at all, as she proudly announced, except for some old acquaintances, glad enough to say a few bitter words about my aunt. The book called her a snob, of course, and “revealed” that she had had an illegitimate child: me, I supposed. I had heard this rumor often, though few knew who the child was, or where she lived, or even, for certain, if she was a she. By now, the whole subject irritated me.
At this time there had been a trend in the world that I found deeply puzzling: the search, by adopted children, for their “real” parents. Some law, in England and America, opened the adoption records to these children, and they searched for their mothers with an assiduousness that, inevitably, found its way into novels I read from the Lenox library. It seemed to me a particularly female need, this finding of the “real” mother; what did it matter? I suspect the truth to be that women have so little adventure in their lives, after the days of “romance,” or at the time of the failure of “romance,” that they look for drama, not in future stories, as yet untold, but in the past story of their birth, the same old plot. It is not that I think the truth of their parentage should be kept from adopted children, but rather that this backward search, which makes good novels, makes bad living.
I think back, of course, but not to my parents: to Oxford, and those delicious summers. When I first came to work for Ted and Jean, and fell into a satisfactory way of life, I read all the books on Oxford I could find in the library. Most of them did not satisfy me at all; there were only two, in fact, that I relished, one by James Morris, who had lived near Oxford, and rendered it with a happy grace combined of experience and good writing. The other book, a collection of essays by those who had attended Oxford, intrigued me less, except that John Betjeman had gone to the Dragon School—so, to my astonishment, had Antonia Fraser (Cyril never mentioned girls in the school, and indeed, had he, my universe would have whirled about my head); Betjeman’s description recalled Cyril and his talk of school through all those golden summers.
James Morris relates best the inevitable recollections of Oxford weather, as opposed to the real weather. (Is real weather, to be discovered by diligent research, as important as “real” parents?) “The meteorological records for those parts,” Morris wrote, and I copied out, “assure us that July 4, 1862, was ‘cool and rather wet’; but on that day Lewis Carroll first told the tale of Alice in Wonderland to four people in a Thames gig, rowing upstream for a picnic tea, and to the ends of their lives all four remembered the afternoon as a dream of cloudless English sunshine.” Morris reports that Oxford weather is the foulest to be found in England, yet “summer is more summery here than anywhere else I know; not hotter, certainly not sunnier, but more like summers used to be, in everyone’s childhood memories.” So I was not alone in remembering that. If it was nostalgia, it was a universal nostalgia, somehow less threatening to one’s sense of reality. I knew as a child, of course, loitering b
eneath the copper beech in the Wadham gardens, that one summer term a great cedar tree there had been killed by a snowstorm. I knew too that Cyril and I, each equipped with a blanket and stern instructions about coming directly home, were allowed to go to outdoor night performances of Shakespeare, and that almost always (it seems now) we watched in the rain, making it a part of honor to stay until the end as the audience, ever more cowardly, or damp, thinned out.
Were all the summers the same? I know that the farm children here will remember all the summers as the same, with only special events to mark different “times.” Perhaps that is why in childhood it is always summer.
“Did you ever milk cows when you were a little girl?” Pamela asked one day. I simply shook my head. Could I answer her that I had never been a little girl, but a chrysalis waiting to become the boy for which destiny had designed me? Pamela, the older, does everything her brother does, and Jean is as reliable as Ted on the farm. Had I grown up at such a time, in such a way, what should I have become?
I had bought the biography of my aunt, terrible as it obviously was. I rationalized the spending of the money, as I had done even as a child, by calling it a birthday present. The falseness of the whole book astonished me; it was a picture of my aunt drawn by one who had hated or envied her, someone (I suspected) who, secretly admiring her, wrote the book to defeat that admiration. My aunt, who was the author of novels that sold very well and as a formidable scholar and the Principal of an Oxford college, incurred the particular wrath of many influential English intellectuals at the universities after the war. The lengths they went to to jeer at her in books and journal articles were indeed a compliment, as I know she considered it. But they did provide, in future years, permission to treat her with more rudeness than is usually accorded Oxbridge people, however irritating. Had her friends authorized a biography in the first place, they might have avoided all this; now they could hardly complain of outrageous suppositions, when they had refused the very papers that would have made those suppositions impossible.