Grace was anchored next to the wharf, so that she was the first of a long line of lived-in craft—barges, landing craft, and even one minesweeper. They were connected by a series of gangplanks which were anything but safe, so that the postman and the milkman had, very sensibly, refused to go on delivering. There were other drawbacks, too—the boat owners were only allowed to let out wastewater, and to use the lavatories, on a falling tide. Our great consolation was that a Thames barge, because of the camber of the deck, never sinks completely. On this point I could give evidence, because we went down twice, and on both occasions the deck stayed just above water. We were taken off the first time by a kindly Swede in a dinghy, and the second time by the river police in their patrol launch. Among our drenched and floating possessions I saw a bottle of champagne that had been intended for a party. I was glad to be able to retrieve the champagne so as to have something to give, in gratitude, to the police, who reminded me that they were not allowed to drink on duty but agreed to put it aside for later. Poor Grace, much loved, was towed away to the Essex marshes to be broken up. I dedicated my novel Offshore (1979) to ‘Grace and all who sailed in her.’
It was a pity that the title was translated into various European languages with words meaning ‘far away’ or ‘far from the shore,’ which meant the exact opposite of what I intended. By ‘offshore’ I meant to suggest the boats at anchor, still in touch with the land, and also the emotional restlessness of my characters, halfway between the need for security and the doubtful attraction of danger. Their indecision is a kind of reflection of the rising and falling tide, which the craft at anchor must, of course, follow. This novel did win the Booker Prize, and I knew then that some of the people who read it must have understood it.
Why don’t you teach? people used to ask me, for women are supposed to be able to do this. I did teach while we were on Grace, and one of the places where I taught was a theatrical school, Italia Conti’s. It has moved premises since, but at that time it was in the depths of South London. The large front room was used on Sundays by a Christian community who practised adult baptism, so that there was a large bath on the raised stage. The Conti children (who seemed to be much wilder than ordinary children, as though they were giving a performance of wildness) knew how to unlock the cold tap, and, if they didn’t care for their classes, flooded the hall.
Freddie, the school’s owner in At Freddie’s (1982), was not at all like Italia Conti. I transferred her, or rather she appeared to transfer herself, from another school where I worked later. She was a freakish tyrant, kindhearted by fits and starts, a natural grande dame of a species that, allowed to flourish unchecked, becomes in time uncontrollable. My job at Conti’s, on the other hand, I have described pretty nearly exactly as it was. I had to help give the pupils what was called their ‘education,’ and they did not disguise their lack of interest in it. I don’t mean that they were bored—it was much more positive than that, a fierce electric thrill of rejection that ran from one end of the class to the other. They wanted not education but ‘work.’ Work was largely in TV commercials and small movie roles, but there were those, especially around Christmastime, who actually got a stage part, and this gave them a certain dignity, the almost-vanished magic of belonging to a venerable profession. The authorities allowed them to stay in one show for six months at a time, and to make up for their lost schooling I had to go round backstage and attempt, as they came back to their dressing room in a state of pitiable excitement, to calm them down and give them their lessons. A little arithmetic (we still taught arithmetic then), a little spelling. They were brilliant with confidence. ‘How was I, Miss? Why don’t you go and see it from the front?’ But after a certain age—say ten or eleven—these children, particularly the dancers, were never likely to get another part. That was why I was being paid to teach them to spell. They might, in the future, need a tedious everyday job, such as I had. And under their bravado, they knew this, and even knew that I knew it.
I have tried, in describing these books of mine, to say something about my life. In my last two novels I have taken a journey outside of myself. Innocence takes place in Italy in the late 1950s, The Beginning of Spring in Moscow in 1913. Most writers, including the greatest, feel the need to do something like this sooner or later. The temptation comes to take what seems almost like a vacation in another country and above all in another time. V. S. Pritchett, however, has pointed out that ‘a professional writer who spends his time becoming other people and places, real or imaginary, finds he has written his life away and become almost nothing.’ This is a warning that has to be taken seriously. I can only say that however close I’ve come, by this time, to nothingness, I have remained true to my deepest convictions—I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities which I have done my best to treat as a comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?
Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series,
Gale Research, Detroit, 1989
* * *
1PF went on to write 11 stories in total, posthumously collected in the volume The Means of Escape. One story remains uncollected.
SCENES OF CHILDHOOD
Well Walk
Hampstead Village, London NW3, is now such a desirable residential area that you can’t find anywhere to buy a reel of cotton or a stick of licorice. When I was a small girl in Hampstead in the Twenties, there were sheep grazing on Hampstead Heath, chair menders, knife grinders, and muffin men in the streets (the muffin men, like the sheep, were seasonal), lamplighters who walked at dusk from gas lamp to gas lamp, and small shops that sold pennyworths of licorice and Phillips soles, with which you repaired your own shoes. Milk came round in a pony cart. There were still plenty of horse-drawn vans.
At 11 a.m. on Armistice Day, no matter what day of the week it was, the traffic stopped dead for two minutes. That was hard on the horses if they were on one of Hampstead’s steep hills, and the drivers sometimes threw out a drag, like a kind of anchor, to keep from slipping. But during those two minutes, you really listened to the silence. Not that Hampstead, in those days, was in any way a noisy place. Today, it is very different, full of cars and bustling shoppers.
Our home was No. 34 Well Walk. The Well is still there, on the north side of the street, although it no longer connects with the Hampstead spa water, which was the right thing to drink in the eighteenth century and apparently contained enough iron to make it the colour of dark sherry. The spa itself lost favour, but the rows of small houses like ours, built for the visitors, remained. No. 34 was a Queen Anne house with two rooms on each floor, which my father rented for £40 a year.
He was a journalist, and at that time had to write a weekly humorous article for Punch. A messenger boy cycled up from the printer’s in Mount Pleasant to collect the copy. Being funny is a very hard way to earn a living, and as my brother and I listened to my father pacing to and fro in the study overhead, our hearts ached for him. Usually, the boy sat whistling cheerfully in the hall until past the last possible moment. Nothing had to be typed, however—printers, in those days, still worked, if necessary, straight from handwriting.
Meanwhile, like so many other children, we produced our own weekly, humorous article and all, on an almost unmanageable device, a John Bull toy printing set. Why our mag was called IF, or Howl Ye Bloodhounds, I can’t remember now.
Well Walk has always been a place for writers and painters. No. 40 was No. 6 when the great English landscape painter Constable lived there with his two motherless daughters (who, at times, got out of hand and put a broomstick through one of his canvases). D. H. Lawrence lived at No. 32, and eloped from No. 40. I don’t pretend that as a small girl I had heard of him, but because poetry was read to us at the earliest possible age, I did hear of John Keats. He and his brother Tom lodged, in 1817—18, at No. 46, just past the pub on the corner—once the Green Man, now, rather more grandly, the Wells Hotel. Their landlor
d was a Mr Bentley, at that time the only postman in Hampstead. He was kindness itself when poor Tom died of TB, and helped John to move his books out, carrying them in a clothesbasket.
In my Well Walk days, No. 46 had long since been knocked down. The trouble was Keats’s ghost. Two doors from us lived a quiet, well-established actor, Leslie Banks. His life was made intolerable by taps (gas and water) being turned on and off by unseen hands and a rich, mysterious smell of cigar smoke in the garden. Why Keats, who didn’t smoke and could never have seen a house with gas and water laid on, should have been blamed for the haunting, I don’t know. A priest was called in to exorcise the unwelcome presence, but the cigar smoke continued to drift.
Before I went away to school I had lessons in the afternoons with Miss Lucas, a retired infant teacher who lived in a discreet room within walking distance. Miss Lucas was devoted to her ginger tomcat, Bubbles, a rapist and pillager who ranged the neighbourhood, springing through unwisely opened kitchen windows and helping himself to large pieces of fish from the slate shelves of other people’s larders. Bubbles was almost as broad as he was long.
One day Miss Lucas confided something in a low tone to my mother. ‘You will think me very foolish, but I have engaged myself to be married.’ Before long a coughing, grumbling, sodden-looking man—‘this is Mr Green, my husband’—was seen occupying Bubbles’s favourite armchair by the front window. ‘Work of any kind makes him feel dizzy,’ Miss Lucas explained. My mother worried. Surely he was after her savings? But, in fact, Miss Lucas had a strange need for arrant, repulsive selfishness in her companions. Bubbles (now sulky) had done pretty well at this, but he couldn’t compare with Mr Green.
By autumn, Mr Green had moved away from the window and must certainly have been close to the fire, which was the only place in any room in those days, except possibly the kitchen, where you could get properly warm. There was no heating at No. 34, and it needed real resolution to face the chilly climb upstairs to bed.
Our beloved coal fires, of course, polluted London and clouded its skies, but they made incomparable toast, and on late-winter afternoons (when the fifth post of the day arrived through the letterbox) they created a glowing illusion of security and peace that can never be recovered. And if you were thought to be poorly, you might have the fire lit in your bedroom. Then, as you dropped off to sleep, it would throw a changing shadow play across the reflection of its broad golden light on the ceiling. By morning, it had died down, but there was still a breath of warmth left in the room. I used to get dressed under the bedclothes and make (like a seal under ice) a small clear patch to look through on the frosty window. Our neighbours, a husband and wife who were retired missionaries, might be venturing out onto the glassy pavement with their knitted socks over their boots. This was the way they had managed, I was told, in Tibet.
The Queen Anne houses on Well Walk have fared very well, through time. They are all still there just as I remember them. In later years, I passed No. 34 quite often. The knocker looked wrong because it seemed much lower than it once had, but the front door was painted the same green. Then, a few years ago, I had a telephone call from the owner of the house. She was someone I had known as a little girl and hadn’t seen since she married. Now she was moving, with her small daughter, to a new home in Dorset. Everything was packed up, they were going that very afternoon, would I like to see the house once again before she locked up? She meant, would I like to see my childhood once again? Yes, all things considered, I would.
Because so much had been crated up, I could easily imagine our furniture back in the empty spaces. The little boiler (though surely it can’t have been the same one) was in the same place in the dark basement kitchen. The built-in solid shelves were still there, and with no effort at all I could conjure up the old standbys—arrowroot, suet, sago, blacklead, starch, Reckitt’s Blue, Monkey Brand soap, Borwick’s Baking Powder. I’m not sure I’d know what to do with sago or blacklead now.
A passage led from the kitchen, past the small dining room and out into the garden. In my time, the back of the house had been covered with a vine. The sooty grapes had ripened, I think, only in one year—the heat wave of 1926. The vines were gone, but the indestructible fig tree, usually figless, still offered its shade.
On the ground floor of the house, I looked into the room where my brother had laid out endless war games on the worn-out Turkey rug. I was allowed to run the field hospital, wearing my nurse’s outfit. My brother disposed of the toy troops, which included Serbian light infantry, the King’s African Rifles and Generals, with their staff, on horseback. When all the forces were drawn up, we opened the door and let the dog in. He rushed towards us with a furiously wagging tail, and everything he knocked over counted as a casualty. Then he was banished once again, protesting, to the garden.
At the top of two more flights of steep, narrow stairs was, and is, the bathroom, dear to me, as it is to most children. The window had a tremendous view to the southwest. On a clear day you could see the Houses of Parliament, and the flag on top of the building that showed that they were sitting. Miss Lucas had told me that they were all hard at work there to keep us safe and at peace, since the last war (in which my father had been wounded) had been the war to end wars. Although the bathroom window is still there, just as it was in my youth, the view has definitely changed. Today, hundreds of new buildings fill the skyline, and you can no longer see Westminster from Well Walk.
Nowadays, the chair menders, knife grinders and muffin men have vanished from Hampstead. Up and down the High Street, it seems that the only way for shopkeepers to pay the rent is to regularly open and close restaurants and boutiques. During my childhood, there were none of these in Hampstead. People did go out to dinner in restaurants, of course, but that meant dressing up and making an expedition into London. As for boutiques, Gazes the drapers sold all that you were likely to want in the button, woollens, stocking, and knicker line. But you had to know what you wanted: the stock was not on display, but was kept in deep wooden drawers behind the counter. There was a bead shop where beads were sold separately; in those days, Hampstead women wore long necklaces ending in a tassel. I used to be allowed to help to sort out the beads: amber, ivory, jet, cornelian, jade, and the cheaper ones made of sealing wax, china, and glass. In the windows of Knowles Brown, the clock-maker, there was a wonderful sight—a silver clock in the shape of a panting spaniel whose tongue moved up and down with every tick.
A few years ago, Knowles Brown closed down. He was last of the old Hampstead tradesmen, I think, and now there is hardly anyone who remembers the way it used to be.
Daily Mail, 1994
Thinking of Balcombe
When my father was demobilized from the army in 1919 he had no job to go to and nowhere to live. He was supporting his wife and two small children by writing a poem every week for Punch. Before the war he had taken the lease (or so he thought) of a small house looking on to Hampstead Heath, in London. But now it turned out that the writer Katherine Mansfield was living in it, and although she disliked the place it seems to have been impossible to ask her to leave. So, when I was two years old, we went to live in Balcombe, in West Sussex.
That meant I had my own room, looking out over a lawn with a cherry tree, splendid with white blossom in spring and splendid, too, in the cherry season—but then the birds more or less lived in it, and I can’t think there was ever much fruit left for us. With the walnut tree we did better. Mrs Ticehurst, who came in once a week to help out, knew the best (she said the only) recipe for walnut ketchup. Unfortunately, it was unaffordable: a hundred very young green walnuts, half a pint of best port wine, anchovies, brandy, horseradish, nutmeg, wine vinegar. Mrs Ticehurst herself admitted she had never made it. She pickled the walnuts, and so did we.
The garden was small, I suppose, for the country. I have been back to look at it since, but only once. I prefer to think of it as it was then, when I knew it was enormous. A large garden is one that a tame rabbit can get lost in, and m
y brother’s rabbit was lost most of the time. I, too, had my hiding place. This was between the bushes of a double rose hedge that ran along one side of the lawn. They must, I think, have been Rosa gallica; they certainly grew too tall for a tidy-looking hedge. Where I used to sit, beneath the level of the crowded leaves and the pink flowers, the ground was never quite dry, and the light fell only in patches. You could sit in a patch of sunlight and move along with it gradually as it shifted.
After a while I would be called back into the house to help. I couldn’t be of help, but someone stood me on a chair at the kitchen table to see what was going on. I remember the business of ‘going through’ the raisins, bought from the grocer’s by the shovelful—you had to sort out the small pieces of gravel. How did they get there in the first place? The rice, too, had to be ‘picked over.’ There were so many long, slow processes, but I knew (because I had heard people say so) that we were lucky to be living in modern, labour-saving times. We had no refrigerator and no telephone, but we had a clotheswasher, worked by turning a handle, and coloured tablecloths (that needed no bleaching) and stainless-steel knives (that needed no cleaning). And however much there was to do there was a time, on hot summer afternoons, when everything seemed to run down almost to a stopping point. The garden was silent, not a murmur even from the hens in their run behind the rose hedge, and inside the house the only sound, apart from the kitchen clock, was the red-currant juice dripping slowly through the strainer into the jelly pan.
A House of Air Page 45