Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill Read online

  When we went up to the attic it was on our way to the roof, or to the dressing-up chest, or to visit Ethel, Gran’s lady’s maid. She worked up there as well as slept: her pleasant room was a bedsitting room with a sewing-table, a pigeon-bosomed dressmaker’s dummy, and much interesting bric-a-brac. Her photographs and ornaments had stories attached to them, which she liked to tell, and she would give us snippets of material and ribbon. A gentle, sentimental woman, she was affectionate to the little ones and admiring to the older ones, whose dresses she often made; and we were fond of her, partly for her genuine kindness and partly because no one else accepted – or seemed to accept – our superiority so unthinkingly and whole-heartedly. She appeared to love ‘the gentry’ for being what it was.

  The dressing-up chest belonged with bad weather – preferably a thunderstorm. There would be the restlessness and uneasiness caused by the heavy feeling of the approaching storm and the unnatural darkening of the air, then the excitement of the crashing thunder, the sudden drumming of rain, gutters filling and spilling, and a scurry in the house as maids ran from room to room shutting the tall sash windows which squealed as they were slammed up or down. Voices would be raised: ‘Have you shut the Corner Room? Oh Lord! The garden chairs are out on the terrace.’ The house would become a fortress of security and because outdoor activities were so decisively cut off, indoor ones would take on their full significance.

  The chest was such a tangle that although we knew everything in it, we always felt that some unfamiliar treasure might emerge. Old evening dresses, satin shoes with cut-steel buckles, lengths of gauze, peasant blouses bought in fits of mistaken enthusiasm on holidays, ribbons, feathers, sequin trimmings, velvet jackets … Everything was crushed and smelt slightly musty, and the grown-ups used to laugh and exclaim in dismay at it – ‘that dreadful old kimono!’ – but to us it was all beautiful. We rarely quarrelled over who would wear what. If we were dressing in order to act in a play, choice was dictated by the character one was playing, and if we were dressing for dressing’s sake – as we often were – it was almost as strictly dictated by our personalities. One cousin would be aiming for a comic effect, another for something swashbuckling, another for the regal; and the older ones, taking it less seriously than their juniors, would be prepared to sacrifice a cloak or a muslin rose for the sake of peace.

  I early and ruthlessly established a claim on what was most romantic, dressing up in order to become a princess or a bride. The trailing, the gauzy, the feathery, the white were what I ferreted out of the heap, with a special preference for veils. My only rival for the romantic was Pen – the others thought me so funny as I teetered about in my princess’s raiment that they indulged me. And I could usually defeat poor Pen by the strength of my passion. She would have liked to wear the white velvet bodice and the gauze veil secured by the tinsel crown, but I, once in the mood for dressing-up, had to wear them. I thirsted to become what I felt I became in these garments, so much so that even being laughed at failed to weaken their spell. Once, when I was seven, I hit on a headdress which seemed to me inspired. I wanted to be a princess in a twin-horned coif with a veil suspended from the horns – I had seen such a princess in an illustrated history book. There was no such headdress in the chest, but it came to me that I could take off my knickers and wear them on my head. I was skinny, so the waist-elastic fitted snugly, and the legs stuffed with tissue paper stood up firmly enough as the horns to hold the veil. Although my elders’ laughter was fond, I knew perfectly well that it arose from their thinking me absurd, but this had no effect on my own belief in what I had become. I went into a bedroom to look at myself in a long mirror, and I saw myself graceful and beautiful, my face grave under the bloomers, slightly tragic – utterly remote from whatever they were seeing. (One day I would be driving along a road in Holland and would catch sight of a grotesque little figure wandering dreamily through an orchard: a child of about seven wearing a pair of her mother’s evening shoes, a tattered chiffon dress which trailed in the grass, and a length of white butter-muslin over her head. The whiff I caught of what that child was being almost took my breath away.)

  The boys did not dress up, except for plays. Nothing was ever bought for the chest, and women cast off far more clothes than men, so there was little in it with which a boy could express what he wanted to be: no cowboy hats, no bandoleers, no Indian feathers, no weapons. Before being sent to their preparatory schools at the age of eight the boys were subjected to no propaganda about manliness beyond the often disregarded rule that they must be gentle and considerate towards girls, but in two ways, however different the temperaments within the sexes, there was a clear divergence from the start: the girls responded to dress and the boys thought it a bore, and the girls loved horses while the boys were indifferent to them. Being brave was admired regardless of gender, and when we went up on the roof there was nothing to choose between us for daring.

  Daring came into it because the point of going up onto the roof was walking round the gutters. The two wings of the house were topped with pitched roofs sloping down to ordinary gutters, but the original part of the house – its main rectangular body – was different. When you climbed up the little stairs next to Ethel’s room and unbolted the door at the top of them, you emerged onto a flat field of lead islanded with stout brick chimneys and surrounded by a tiled ridge too high to see over. If you clambered up the inner slope of this ridge and peered over its top, you saw that its steep outer slope, from which dormer windows jutted at intervals, ran down to a flat-bottomed lead gutter almost a foot wide. The idea of sliding down the tiled slope into this gutter at any point between the windows was a little frightening because one would be unable to control the speed of the slide; but if you went down beside one of the windows you had a sort of narrow channel into which to wedge your feet and could find hand-holds on the window, so it became child’s play. There would obviously be no problem about walking along that nice wide gutter once you had reached it.

  Now that I am old I have a bad head for heights, and it was not too good even in middle age: I remember very disagreeable sensations taking me by surprise when, at the top of a tower somewhere in Italy, I looked down and found that I could see the faraway ground through the open-work iron structure on which I was standing. So ghostly pangs of vertigo now afflict me when I think that once I stood in that gutter, wondering what on earth my mother was fussing about as she stood far below me, clutching her throat in evident anguish while calling up to us to stay quite still – quite quite still – until someone had rushed upstairs and opened the window just ahead of us so that we could climb in. So strictly speaking, I suppose, it was not daring that the boys and girls shared in that particular bit of child’s play, so much as unawareness of the need for it.

  The most important thing about the place, for us children, was its feeling of permanence. It was possible to imagine going away from it, but not possible to imagine its not being there, unchanged, to come back to. This may have been less strongly felt by the grown-ups – only our uncle was young enough to have almost no memory of the time before they lived there – but for us it was what we had always known. And if anyone had told us, as we perched on the roof-ridge and looked out over the park, ‘This view will cease to exist long before you die’, we would have thought him mad. Indeed, much later when I was twenty-two and facing the fact that war had come, I leant my forehead against the trunk of one of the beeches which were such an important part of that view, and comforted myself by saying: ‘Well, thank God that whatever happens to us, you will still be here when it’s over.’

  By the end of the war that beech tree had gone. So, very soon afterwards, had the long stand of beeches which rimmed the back park, the noble island of beeches round which the front drive curved, and – most incredible of the lot – the grandest of them all, the huge beech guarding the entrance to the shrubbery behind the rose garden under which I once stood willing my future ghost to inhabit its shade. No person was responsible for their
vanishing. Beeches have a lifespan of about two hundred and fifty years, and these, having all been planted at the same time, all died more or less together. Later, Dutch elm disease laid low several other of the park’s great beauties, then the most splendid of the cedars was cut down because its roots were threatening the house’s foundations, and fierce winds blew down other important trees. Quite gone, now, is the eighteenth-century landscaping of park and garden which used to give the place its charm.

  I was once told by a man whose job was looking after the estates of rich people, that one of his dreams was that he would be allowed to sweep away the decaying remains of some great piece of eighteenth-century landscaping, and replant it to a new design. Patching, he said, was useless. Such parks were works of art, and when time destroys them, as it inevitably must, the only right answer is to replace them with another, different, work of art. But who, nowadays, has the money or the vision to plant for the future on a grand scale? He knew that his dream was a crazy one. And certainly in ‘our’ park the band of quick-growing trees that has now been planted along its edge, between it and the road, although it must have cost a great deal, makes no claim to be landscaping. All it does is shelter the house from view.

  How glad I am that it was impossible to imagine the future, and that I had the luck to take – or to mistake – for granted an eighteenth-century landscape just before it fell to pieces, as my natural habitat.

  GOD AND GRAMPS

  EVEN IF WALKING the gutters was fun, not brave, courage was considered an important virtue – perhaps not more important than honesty, but more attractive. We knew we ought to be honest, but we wanted to be brave.

  Much of this feeling about courage was derived from Geoffrey Salmond, husband of my mother’s eldest sister Peggy and father of Joyce, Anne, Pen and John. He was the uncle who ended in the RAF – indeed as head of it. When he was a dashing and amusing young army officer he, with his brother Jack and a small group of friends, became enamoured of that fascinating invention the flying machine, which at that stage appeared to be put together of cardboard and string. They were among the first Englishmen to fly, first as amateurs, soon afterwards as members of the Royal Flying Corps, which they got going. Early in the First World War Geoff played an important part in persuading the War Office that airborne men would be invaluable at finding out what was going on behind the enemy’s lines – he was one of the Flying Corps thinkers, as well as a daring pilot. After the war he made the first ever flight across the Himalayas, when navigation was a matter of peering earthwards and following rivers and (when there were any) roads. He also became the commander of the RAF in India, and contributed a good deal to the development of civil aviation.

  His adoring wife understood from the beginning that on no account must she betray how much she feared for him when he was flying: if you were married to a hero it was your duty to be heroic too, and never to burden him with an image of yourself being unhappy for fear of losing him. She played her part to perfection: all their lives her daughters would remember how proudly their father told them that she was ‘as brave as a lion’.

  She was to need this courage, poor Aunt Peggy. First Geoff died of bone cancer when he was only middle-aged, then their son John, who had followed his father into the RAF, was killed in the Second World War. I did not see her under the immediate impact of these two terrible blows, but I know what got her through them: the conviction that to give way would be unworthy of Geoffrey Salmond’s wife. She and her daughters, although they never spoke of it, were always thereafter to have about them a faint aura of dedication to an inspiring memory. They were examples of the valuable aspect of that Good Behaviour so well understood by the novelist Molly Keane.

  It is an ideal that can, of course, be damaging. Once, when my mother was eighty, the husband of a good friend of hers died suddenly, and when I arrived for a weekend two days later she told me about it with feeling, knowing how deeply her friend would feel her loss. I said ‘Oh God, I must call her’; and when I had done so my mother muttered in a shamefaced way ‘How brave you are.’ – ‘Brave?’ – ‘She might have cried.’ It turned out that she had not yet dared to get in touch with her friend: a fear of raw emotion that can cripple human responses, as well as support endurance.

  When we were children there were, of course, no undercurrents to being brave. It was just a stylish way to behave, at which the Salmonds were a good deal better than I was. I was well aware that if we were faced with a really hairy jump in cold blood, Pen would be much readier than I to put her pony at it; anyone could be brave out hunting because of the excitement, but she was always brave. From time to time it worried me: in a situation which required real heroism – if someone was drowning in a turbulent river, perhaps, or trapped in a burning house – would I be able to rise to the occasion? It didn’t feel likely, but on the other hand it was possible that nobody felt it likely – that given such a situation you responded in the right way either automatically, or because you were so frightened of what people would think if you didn’t that doing it was the lesser evil. I could only hope …

  We knew the Bible well – or rather, those parts of it read to us by Gran, starting when we were very young: Joseph and his brethren, Samson and Delilah, David and Jonathan, Samuel and Eli, Christ walking on the water, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and of course the story of Jesus’s birth. Gran read or told those stories as though they were about real events which were parts of everyone’s knowledge and life. She loved most of the books she read to us, but she loved the Bible best: the Old Testament stories, particularly, she told with contained relish. She introduced us to poetry only through narrative verse, chiefly Macaulay’s and Scott’s, but it was to poetry more broadly speaking that she led us through the Bible, by the vibration of her response to it. To poetry, rather than to morality, in that it made little impression as a source of a sense of right and wrong.

  My grandparents were sensible and modest people, so I doubt that either of them would have presumed to claim that he or she was a good Christian, but equally I am sure neither of them doubted that Christians they were. They were regular churchgoers; they respected the Sacraments; they obeyed the Ten Commandments; they felt strongly – even passionately – that faith should be drawn as directly as possible from the Bible without the intervention of a priesthood (hence their detestation of Roman Catholics). But if they actually believed in the Incarnation, which I take to be Christianity’s central tenet, their conduct concealed the fact. It seemed much more like the conduct of people moved by common sense combined with an ideal of gentlemanly behaviour than it did like the conduct of people seeking communion with God.

  What people like them would have said in response to such a thought was that a person’s beliefs – his really important, inner beliefs – were a matter between himself and God, too important to be lightly exposed. About which I feel doubtful. It seems to me more likely that what could not be lightly exposed was a person’s really important inner disbelief.

  As far as I was concerned, they gave me an extraordinarily undemanding God. It was His love and His understanding that were emphasized, so much so that I found it cheering, not alarming, to remember that He knew everything about me: every thought, every motive, every illegitimate desire. Because He knew every single thing, and understood it, then He knew the strength of temptations and how, considering my frailty, I didn’t do too badly against them. People might misunderstand, He wouldn’t. Whatever tensions there were (and there were some), the bedrock of trust had not been cracked: what I expected from life and from God was love, forgiveness and protection. I was threatened only if naughty or silly, and then, however resentful I might feel at the moment, I knew well enough that it was my own fault, and I needed to call on no great moral energy to accept that fact. This was because most of the sins committed by me and the other children didn’t matter very much to anyone and certainly not to God. The only sin taken really seriously was the one which, if you brought it off successfully
, would make nonsense of adult control: lying.

  The dreadfulness of lying was brought home to me when I was four years old. All the family’s children were at a tea party in a neighbour’s garden, where there was a cherry tree trained against a wall: overwhelmingly tempting because cherries were rare in our county and their smooth redness was so perfect. They were, in fact, the bitter kind grown for jam-making, but I was unaware of that as I gazed longingly, feeling in anticipation the protective net’s fine thread as I pushed fingers through it, the slight harshness of the leaves, the plumpness of the fruit. I didn’t dare, though. This was Cousin Minnie’s garden, not ours, and she was proud of her cherries. But I was hand in hand with my cousin Anne, four years my senior, who was showing me how to play hide-and-seek properly, and who was touched by my expression. ‘We oughtn’t to,’ she said – and then, generously: ‘Look, I mustn’t because I know that it’s wrong, but you can have just one.’ So I took the cherry she picked for me, bit into it, let it drop because of its unexpected sharpness, clutched at it – and squashed it against the front of my frock. There in the middle of my stomach was a large red stain, advertising my theft for all the world to see.