by Rose Tremain
Everything was done terrifyingly fast. During our first holiday from Crofton Grange, when Nan was invited back to look after us once again, we thought some portion of our old lives would return – our little routines with the swimming baths, the picnics in Cadogan Gardens. But we were wrong.
The day came quickly when Nan once again set out the tea things for elevenses, once again braced herself for news of change escaping from bottled secrecy. So up Jane came to the nursery, to the chocolate biscuits and the tea, but this time she was smiling. It was winter, and cold in the room, and Jo and I were sitting on the hearthrug, near the gas fire. And then she told us: she was going to marry Ivo, and Ivo was buying us all a house in the country. Our lives in London, in our house, so sweetly regained in this brief holiday, were over.
That was when we cried. Both of us had been mute at the news of our father’s departure, but now, at the idea of our mother as the wife of Sir Ivo Thomson (our ‘new father’), we began to howl. Nan got down onto the rug and put her arms round us. Jane looked on in dismay. Then she began to cry too. She cried, I think, because she realised for the first time – perhaps for the only time, because she always resisted emotional analysis – how much had already been taken away from us, and how impossible it was for us to feel happy for her. The grown-ups had entered a period of sexual madness, quite beyond us to comprehend. And now, to Jane’s shock and dismay, the reality of that madness was being put to judgement by our unstoppable wailing.
She tried to console us with promises: Ivo would buy us a dog; we were going to live in a country house by a river; Mawkie and Carol would become our siblings and friends; everybody would soon get used to everything …
We clung to Nan, hysterical with fear and sadness. ‘Mummy darling,’ Nan said eventually, in her calm, untroubled voice, ‘perhaps it’s better if you go downstairs for now.’
That night, my eyes hurt. To try to relieve the swelling and the ache, I began to tug out my eyelashes, one by one. I must have looked like a weird albino monkey.
Mother
My mother had been sent away from Linkenholt to boarding school – St Monica’s in Buckinghamshire – when she was six years old; two years younger than everybody else at the school.
How had this come about? Had St Monica’s been bribed to take this hapless little girl? How did they, or my grandparents, imagine a child of six – whose education up to that time had been sporadic, presided over by a lazy governess – was going to cope in a class of eight-year-olds?
Jane told us that she couldn’t cope at all. She just sat at the back of the classroom ‘not understanding a thing’. The teachers seemingly couldn’t be bothered, even, to learn her first name, and called her ‘Little Dudley’. She was so homesick and unhappy, she couldn’t eat, but she was made to eat and then she was sick. She was sick almost every day. She got so thin and weak, she was dumped in the school sanatorium for weeks on end. My grandparents never visited.
Surely Charles Dickens in his blacking factory can scarcely have been more miserable than my mother was at this young age? If Jo and I felt like outcasts when we were sent to Crofton Grange, I can’t begin to imagine the pain in six-year-old Jane’s heart at this terrible childhood banishment. And I think it’s true to say that, emotionally and to some extent physically, she never quite recovered from it. I now have a six-year-old beloved grandson, Archie. The idea that any comparable exclusion from the family could be inflicted upon this beautiful, vulnerable child makes my blood turn to ice.
Jane said that the only thing that gave her ‘hope’ was the coat our grandmother had bought for her before she left. She said it was a beautiful little coat, lined in silk, with a short cape sewn into the collar seam and covering the shoulders. Jane reasoned that if her mother cared enough about how she looked to buy her this expensive coat, then that might be proof that she loved her – ‘at least a bit’.
I never saw this precious garment, this supposed emblem of a mother’s affection, but it has always seemed clear to me that Mabel Dudley loved nobody on this earth (including my grandfather) except her two sons. At the time she sent her daughter away, her elder son, Roland (who was soon to die), was at Harrow, and no doubt she missed him. I can only believe that it irked her to give house room to Jane when Roland was forcibly absent; better, in her selfish mind, to get rid of Jane and leave the adorable Michael, then aged four – too young for school of any kind in those days – as the only child, to be spoiled and petted at home.
It was at this time, at St Monica’s, made miserable by being called ‘Little Dudley’, that Jane decided to change her name. She had been christened Viola Mabel: Viola, perhaps, after Shakespeare’s feisty heroine, or more likely – in a philistine household that nevertheless took pride in a beautiful garden – after the sweet pansy flower, and Mabel after her mother.
But she didn’t feel that either of these names belonged to her. Nobody at the school could pronounce Viola properly. Once they’d abandoned ‘Little Dudley’, they began calling her ‘Vi-oh-ler’, which Jane knew was ugly and wrong. And it was difficult for her to live up to ‘Mabel’ – to try to be like the mother who had sent her away. So she made a decision. She explained that ‘All my life I’d been told that I was plain, so I said, right, I’ll be “Plain Jane” from now on and that’s what everyone must call me.’ She kept the V.M.T. initials for legal documents and chequebooks, but she was Jane to her family and friends until the day she died.
I’ve always admired her for this. She got her way. She understood that names are important, that you need to own them and feel that they fit the person you imagine yourself to be. Throughout my childhood, I was always called ‘Rosie’. The name just followed me along, except at school, where I was ‘Rosemary’ (my given name) to most of the teachers, and at Linkenholt, where I was often ‘Rosebud’ to Grandpop. But I never felt comfortable with any of these names, and I can sometimes conceive of my childhood as a long journey towards the one-syllable noun I could properly own: Rose. Just as Jane, from the age of seven or eight, refused to answer to Viola, so I, from the age of twenty, refused to answer to Rosie.fn1
It is from the St Monica’s time that my mother’s struggle with food can be dated. At Linkenholt – as I experienced as a child – the food from the farm and the vegetable garden, beautifully prepared by Florence and her helpers, was nourishing and abundant. Jane knew how good food should be cooked, and when she married Keith, she took herself on cordon bleu courses to learn how to do it. My father mocked these endeavours as the ‘strain-in-champagne-and-throw-away’ school of cookery, but this was unfair. Having been through the war and its aftermath of rationing in England, my mother, though keen to acquire new ‘professional’ skills, hated waste in the kitchen and was always clever at finding ways to use up leftovers. Jo and I grew up with fond memories of her recycled lamb shepherd’s pies, scented with fresh sage.
Jane’s real trouble was that she thought she loved food. She talked about it eagerly, greedily. She certainly loved it in her mind, but her body was almost perpetually in rebellion against it. The sickness she’d endured at St Monica’s followed her throughout her life. Sometimes she vomited in the middle of a meal. Her rush from the room was something we came to dread but had to get used to.
In consequence, she was as thin as Wallis Simpson, and like Wallis, prided herself on this lean body shape, this almost-flat silhouette, and on the exquisite clothes it could slip into like a shadow.fn2 She despised fat people. And she wanted Jo and me to be modest little reeds of girls. At puberty, we were made to wear elastic girdles, ‘because nobody wants to see the cheeks of your bottoms under a skirt. That is a quite disgusting sight.’
There was so much in the world that disgusted her. She once told me that cleaning her teeth made her feel nauseous. How she got on with sex with either of her husbands, I don’t know. At the time of her first marriage, she’d had to go into hospital for an operation to make her vagina wider to accommodate my father. Perhaps this narrow, clenched vagin
a was quite stimulating and exciting (again, as it was reputed to be in Wallis Simpson’s body), and kept my father by her side until he found somebody he truly loved and who loved him back.
Jane had no schooling in love. She had never been given it – except a little, perhaps, by her easy-going, sweet-natured brother Michael – and so she didn’t know how to feel it or how to show it. This was the tragedy of her existence.
Near the end of her life, she kept desperately repeating that she loved me, and she certainly had a deep affection for three (but only three out of seven) of her grandchildren: Jo’s eldest son, Guy, her elder daughter, Kate, and my only daughter, Eleanor. But these protestations came too late to be believed. Love needs words and deeds to be perceived as love, and Jo and I grew up entirely without the feeling of being loved by our mother. We skirted round her moods and furies like the undernourished cubs of a wild she-wolf. We crept away to Nan’s comforting lair, where the sound of her voice was sweet and calm.
As an antidote to her struggles with food, Jane chain-smoked. She inserted du Maurier cigarettes into a black holder from Dunhill’s of Mayfair, which contained a filter that captured some of the tar. From time to time she would change the filters, and I can remember clearly the sight of the little plastic oblongs, sticky and brown, which she told us saved her lungs from becoming congested by tar.
But the word ‘tar’ always bothered me. In the 1950s, a lot of municipal tarring was going on in London, as cratered roads were repaired and new pavements laid after all the destruction of the Second World War. Jo and I liked to watch the giant steamrollers pressing this pungent, treacly substance into the earth.
I particularly remember one tar engine, moving back and forth at the end of Walton Street, outside a fishmonger who sold live eels, shiny and black as the tar, in white pails. Ever since, black eels and molten tar have always been associated in my mind, as though the tar might have emanated from the eels’ bodies, a lava of petroleum-scented caviar, bringing London back to life.
But the idea that some of this same suffocating, burning roe could end up inside my mother felt strange. This is one of the troubles and the wonders of childhood: you imagine things wrongly. And later, when the truth is known – assuming there is an absolute truth – the unwinding of the imagined thing is tangled, because the first image keeps on obstinately breaking through. You’re adrift in mystery and ambiguity. And yet for a writer’s imagination, the unfixed place is sometimes a promising place to dwell. Black eels and tar; a caviar of tar in my mother’s thin-chested body: these are absorbing images. When Keats presented his enabling concept of ‘negative capability’, he was reaffirming the creative power that ‘uncertainties, mysteries and doubts’ can provide.
Now and then, I experienced the du Maurier tar first hand. There was a game Jane and I occasionally played, when I was eight or nine, in which I would pretend to be her and she would pretend to be me. My essential prop was the black Dunhill cigarette holder. I would stick this between my teeth and taste both the tar residue and the Chanel lipstick that always smeared the end of it. I would sit on a sofa with my legs discreetly crossed, doing pretend smoking, and then pick up the telephone to dial the speaking clock, then known as TIM, talking back to it in ‘Jane language’: ‘Darling. How are you, darling? Are you, darling? Are you really?’
Jane, in her turn, would mime eating sweets and dropping the sweetpapers all over the floor, and I’d order her to pick them up and she’d do pretend crying. Then, with surprising athleticism, she would walk round the floor on her hands (a feat I’d perfected in the Francis Holland gym), and her skirts would sometimes fall down over her body and I’d see her elastic girdle and her suspenders and stockings and her expensive knickers from Harrods. And all of this would always make us laugh.
I remember that I felt closer to her during this game, in which our identities were hilariously swapped, than at any other time in my childhood. We were teasing each other, for once, and this gave us a kind of equality of status. I remember one day when we were both lying on the sitting room carpet, giggling unstoppably, my father walked in and said, ‘What is this? Did Lettice Leefe drop by? Don’t tell me I’ve missed her?’ And he joined in the laughter and the sound of it was beautiful.
Why could there not have been more times like this? Why was Jane so often perched on an abyss of anger with her girls?
One day, when I was six or seven, she took me with her to Liberty’s to buy some dress material. While she was paying for her fabric at the pay desk, housed just outside the department itself, I found myself mesmerised by a free-standing display cabinet, made of wood and glass and resting on spindly legs. The cabinet was full of buckles, and the thing that fascinated me was the idea of a buckle without a belt – as though this object might suddenly have multiple uses of which I’d never dreamed. I think I must have gone into a kind of buckle trance. The next thing I was aware of was an immense shattering sound, as of a bomb being dropped, and then I saw that the whole cabinet had fallen and lay in a thousand shards on the wooden floor.
I stood there in shock. I didn’t, at first, understand that by leaning on the cabinet to gaze at the buckles, I’d knocked it over; I thought something else must have happened: a rocket had come down from the ceiling or a wicked genie had surged out of the floor.
Jane began screaming at me. She told me I was a thoughtless, clumsy ‘idiot child’. She said she would have to pay a ton of money to Liberty’s to compensate them for the broken cabinet and it was all my fault. So then I saw that I’d done something worse than anything I’d done before in my life, worse than breaking the bell on my bicycle, worse than not waiting for Nan at a road junction on my scooter, worse than refusing to wear a hated blue mackintosh to school. I was lost to my own awfulness.
I screamed so hard, I think the customers downstairs in the gifts department must have heard me. I screamed so disturbingly hard I lost the ability to breathe. I imagined that anybody hearing about this crime would hate me as Jane seemed to hate me, so the thing I began to babble was ‘Don’t tell Nan! Don’t tell Nan!’ And this, no doubt, was the last straw for Jane – that I should dread so much the idea that Nan would think me bad. So she hit me, whack! on my ear, and I fell backwards against the Liberty’s panelled wall.
Sales assistants from the fabric department came running. The next thing I was aware of was a kindly-seeming woman kneeling by me and holding out to me little miniature swatches of material. She pointed out the different colours, the different patterns. I can see them still, these swatches. Cotton and silk and chintz and damask. And I can still feel the warmth of this person, her hand on my arm, her voice gentle like Nan’s. Little by little, I stopped screaming, and I remember turning and seeing the staircase going down towards the street, and the carpet on the stairs was green, the exact colour of the hearthrug in the nursery. And I thought only about being back there, with the gas fire flickering blue and Nan sitting in her armchair doing her knitting, and voices on the radio.
Maggie Tulliver, come away.
All through our London years, before the great Casting Away, we spent part of our summers at a house in Cornwall, owned by the Trusted family, on the dunes above Constantine Bay.
Mrs Trusted, or ‘Auntie Eileen’ as we were instructed to call her, was one of Jane’s best friends. She was as broad and jolly as our mother was thin and anxious. She cooked enormous egg-and-mushroom pies for us to take on beach picnics. She called Jane ‘Janet’ and I remember that I liked the sound of this name, as if it would, in time, alter Jane and make her kinder.
The Trusteds inhabited a sprawling stuccoed house on a windy point. They stayed there all summer. When we visited, the house contained only women. There was Auntie Eileen, her daughters Susan and Sarah-Jane, and their nanny, Gladys, known as ‘Glad Eyes’. Then there was Jane and Nan and Jo and me. Neither Mr Trusted – Johnnie – nor our father ever came on these holidays. But there was one male presence: Eileen and Johnnie’s youngest child, their son Timmy.
But I couldn’t find any other companion. I was stuck with Timmy and he was stuck with me. Jo and Susan Trusted were close friends, and Sarah-Jane, two or three years older than me, preferred being with them. Even the nannies, Nan and Glad Eyes, got along well, while Jane and Eileen smoked and drank and laughed and boiled hams and made crumbles in the kitchen. I remember lying in my room feeling sorry for myself, longing for this holiday to be over, longing to be at Linkenholt – an Indian chief once more, not a sulky squaw.
There were moments of strange delight. It was Glad Eyes’s task to collect all the bread crusts and leftover cake that was thrown away in the household and feed this to the seagulls. The ritual went like this: Glad Eyes put all the food in a big enamel tin, walked to the end of the garden, then banged on the tin with a wooden spoon. I used to marvel that even before she had started hurling out the bread, a great screaming, wailing flock of gulls would appear in the sky and then descend – in numbers worthy of Hitchcock’s film of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds – onto the lawn at her feet. It was like a terrifying magic trick. In minutes, the gulls pecked and gobbled all the bread and cake and took off once more into the air.fn3