Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill Read online

  My consternation was so great that I didn’t howl, only stared appalled at my cousin. Hers was even greater. She was a redhead of remarkable untidiness, her socks always wrinkled round her ankles, her bloomers always showing under her skirt, always longing to do right and ending by doing wrong. A clown and a tragedienne, she laughed and cried with abandon, loved to act and to tell stories, rejoiced in ideas of nobility, self-sacrifice and daring. The person she would most have liked to have been was the Boy who Stood on the Burning Deck – a poem which she often declaimed. She was adored by us, the younger ones, because of her loving kindness and her entertainment value; and now I knew at once that she would shoulder the responsibility for my sin.

  And sure enough, ‘Don’t cry,’ she said. ‘It’s all my fault and I know what we’ll do. We’ll run home very quickly and I’ll wash your dress, and by the time they all get back they won’t be able to see any stain and no one will know.’

  It was easy to leave the garden by a back way without anyone seeing, and then we only had to cross a lane to be in the park of my grandparents’ house. ‘Faster, faster!’ cried Anne, becoming the Red Queen, and I was whirled along like Alice in the picture. Anne had an inkling that the disappearance of two members of the tea party, one of them only four, would cause alarm. I didn’t think of this or anything else, having simply become part of a situation compounded of urgency and secrecy out of which I was about to be miraculously delivered. We covered half a mile of park and garden at high speed, pausing sometimes to gasp and clutch at the stitches in our sides, crept up to and into the house, and bolted into a bathroom. ‘Quick, quick, undress – look, I’ll run the bath – if they come I’ll say I’m giving you your bath and it won’t be a lie because you’ll be in it.’

  No sooner was I in the bath and the stained frock in the hand-basin than there came a rattling at the door. ‘Are you in there?’ ‘What are you doing? Open the door at once – what are you doing?’ My mother’s voice was agitated – the adults had had time to suppose that the older child had fled in panic at some disaster overtaking the younger one. The bedraggled frock came out of the basin with the stain still there – it was no good saying ‘I’m giving her her bath’ with the evidence glaring. Anne had one last inspiration: ‘Sh!’ she whispered, ‘I’ll pretend I’m going to the lav,’ and she whipped down her knickers, sat on the pan and began to grunt with conscientious realism. I sat in the chilly water (there had been no time to adjust the temperature), as quiet as a mouse, overcome by the daring of this last device, and still trusting my protector’s ingenuity.

  ‘I know you aren’t just going to the lavatory,’ cried my mother (how? What hope against these guilt-detecting eyes which would see through doors?); ‘Let me in AT ONCE!’ And when the door was opened at last and the tearful confession had been made, it turned out – and this was amazing – that stealing the cherry hadn’t been a sin at all, nor even had staining the dress. It was, explained my mother, the lie that had been so very wrong. But I had never said I hadn’t stolen the cherry – surely lies were words? But no: it appeared that a lie could be something as complex and exhausting as running all the way across the park and sneaking into the house and pretending to have a bath. It was a cheering thought, once absorbed, because it proved that hiding sins was much more trouble than admitting them; and I have never since then been much of a liar. Excepting on those very rare occasions when the absolute necessity for it has been so overwhelming that it didn’t feel like lying at all.

  Which must, I suppose, have been the case with my grandfather – the apparently impeccable source of his household’s wholesome atmosphere – when his only son, while still an undergraduate at Oxford, announced that he wished to become engaged to a young woman who was a Roman Catholic. This comic recurrence of crisis at Oxford, which seems to have become almost a tradition, was something that none of us knew about until recently, when it turned up in another old suitcase crammed with letters kept by my grandmother.

  My grandparents had never met the young woman, who lived in the north of England with her aunt – perhaps she was an orphan. How my uncle met her is not revealed, but they had known each other well for two years: this is stated in the first of the letters, from the young woman’s aunt to my grandfather, which protests in courteous and reasonable terms at his forbidding the engagement without ever having met her niece. She says that the two young people know each other well, that the attachment between them is sincere, and that her niece is a good and sensible girl as well as a charming one, and does not deserve a dismissal so sudden and cruel. She goes on to say that while she agrees with him in theory that it is best if husband and wife are of the same faith, she must point out that she herself is a Protestant who has been married to a Roman Catholic for thirty years without any problems, so she can assure him from her own experience, as well as that of other couples of her acquaintance, that a ‘mixed marriage’ is not by any means necessarily disastrous. She is not asking – she says – that he reverse his decision at once, but she does feel that it would be only fair for him and his wife to meet her niece before finally forbidding the engagement.

  William Greenwood Carr: ‘Gramps’

  The second letter is my grandfather’s answer, in the form of a copy made in my grandmother’s hand. It is brusque. Even, he says, if the young woman is foolish enough to wish to become engaged to an idle and frivolous young man who has so far shown no inclination whatever to earn a living, her aunt must surely see that it is her duty to forbid it, given that his estate happens to be entailed in such a way that his son, if he marries a Roman Catholic, will never inherit a penny. End of letter. And end, obviously, of engagement. And my grandfather was lying: no such entail existed.

  It gives me great satisfaction to report that as soon as my grandfather was dead – he died in his sixties, while his son was still quite young – my uncle, who could always get whatever he wanted from a doting mother, married not only a Roman Catholic, but an Italian Roman Catholic – a veritable emissary from the Scarlet Woman of Rome. For that was what low-church Protestants of my grandparents’ generation felt ‘papists’ to be.

  At first that lie of my grandfather’s made me laugh. On consideration it is not funny. Many an Ulsterman has become a murderer because he did not feel that ridding the world of a Catholic – or a Protestant, as the case might be – counted as murder. To him the act of murder feels righteous: the end has justified the means, as preventing his son from marrying a Catholic seemed to my grandfather to justify his lie. In both cases the humanity of the victim has been obscured by what the murderer and the liar feel to be an overwhelming necessity.

  It is often said of monstrous evils such as genocide that we must not let ourselves forget them because the potential for such crimes lurks in all of us. I have said it myself, thinking that it must be true – but secretly I have never been able to feel that it is true of me. Now, however, having seen the obvious link between my grandfather’s attitude to Catholics and that of Protestants in Northern Ireland, I have to acknowledge that I was led to it by seeing the link between my own few felt-to-be necessary lies and my grandfather’s … There is a connecting thread there, between the almost harmless use of a psychological mechanism which can be brought into play when a need for self-justification is felt, and an evil use of it. Hugely different though the ends may be, the mechanism is the same. This kind of discovery must, I suppose, be the central reason for trying to write the truth, even if indecent, about oneself.

  If you no longer lied, you were left with all those nice little sins than which lying was so much worse. It was wrong to steal grapes from the vinery, peaches from the kitchen-garden wall, lump sugar from the fat white jars in Gran’s store cupboard. It was wrong to slide down haystacks in such a way that the stack was damaged and rain could get into the hay. It was wrong to scatter the grain heaped in the granary by wading through it. It was wrong to leave gates open so that cattle could stray. It was wrong to neglect an animal for whom one was respons
ible. Some of these rules, like the ones about animals and (later) the one about never pointing a gun at anyone even if it wasn’t loaded, we never thought of breaking because that would be improper behaviour in our own eyes. Others we broke constantly because the forbidden pleasures were irresistible. Our awareness of the ‘sinfulness’ of these wrongdoings came from our own need for excitement, rather than from outside.

  There were also, of course, aspects of one’s own behaviour that one knew grown-ups would disapprove of such as our early interest in excretion and (from the age of ten or eleven, in my case) an eagerness to discover everything possible about sex. But those were so private that they didn’t feel like sins – though whether this was because even God couldn’t know about them, or because of His understanding, I can’t now remember.

  Sometimes a sin was discovered unexpectedly: who would have guessed it was sinful to organize a church service in an unoccupied spare bedroom on a Sunday when colds had prevented us from going to church? This was during a short period of religious fervour when I was about ten. It was Anne and her elder sister who thought of it, and who insisted on secrecy in case our service might amount to the mysterious sin of taking God’s name in vain. ‘It will only be all right’ I was told severely, ‘if all of us are absolutely sincere.’ That was fine: I felt tremendously sincere. A glow of virtue flooded me, and I was smugly aware of God’s surprised pleasure at our piety.

  Unfortunately Anne decided to write the numbers of the hymns we would sing on cards and stick them up as though in a real church, and while doing so upset a bottle of Indian ink on a white counterpane … clear proof that we didn’t have God’s approval, even before the frightful moment when Hannah, the head housemaid, came in to see what all the whispering and giggling was about, and discovered the blotch.

  Piety was often connected with our grandfather, because he had died. One morning, when I was six, we had all been made to sit quietly in the morning room while my mother read to us – an unusual event at that time of the day, but agreeable. Suddenly, from upstairs, there came a scream. It was a sound so foreign to our experience that we didn’t quite believe we had heard it. Mum put down the book, stared into space for a few seconds, then got up and went out of the room without saying a word. Later that day Nanny took us out for a walk, and as we passed the front of the house I noticed that all three windows of the room in which Gramps had been lying ill were wide open. I asked why, and Nanny hushed me. Coming back from the walk we met Gran, who was going down to the stable-yard to feed her doves, as she always did. She looked tired. Before Nanny could stop me I ran up to her and asked ‘Why are all Gramps’s windows open?’ – ‘He’s not there any more, my darling,’ Gran said, her face full of sorrow and tenderness. ‘He’s gone away to Heaven to be with God.’ The windows must have been open so that his soul could fly out of them. Later, it was a disappointment to learn I was too young for funerals. I longed to see the team of Suffolk Punches taking him to the church on one of the farm wagons, specially decked out for the occasion, and even more, to see Susan being led along behind. She was the little black hackney he always drove when he went to Norwich, who whizzed him along so fast that they covered the twelve miles in less than an hour.

  Being with God made Gramps – in life a distant figure, presumably benign but never cosy – more approachable. He blended with God, and there was a time during the pious period when I felt that my prayers would be more effective if I said them in the room where he died. It took courage to go into that room (the one where the wolves used to lurk, now reverted to being the very best spare-room, too grand for children to sleep in), and even more courage to kneel down at the foot of the stately four-poster. I said the Our Father, and waited. The holiness in the room and the holiness in my heart seemed to swell, and to be about to merge – the sensation was almost physical – and Gramps’s (or God’s) presence, so earnestly hoped for to begin with, began to loom … Both times I did this my nerve failed, and I crept out of the room knowing I was a coward in giving up before what might have been going to happen actually did so.

  The only time Gramps’s spirit did intervene, it was in a manner both practical and kind. On a summer Sunday, when for some reason Pen and I had not been taken to church, we were left in charge of the dogs. If they were not shut up (which no one could bear to inflict on them) these dogs, not the gun-dogs but the family’s pets, would disappear on hunting expeditions whenever they got a chance. It was a really bad sin to let the dogs go hunting, because they disturbed the game which enraged keepers, fathers and uncles, and they also risked getting stuck down rabbit-holes or caught in traps, which appalled everyone. The worst offender was Lola, Gran’s poodle, a sober little dog of impeccable behaviour except that she was a devil for hunting, took with her any other dog who happened to be there, and would sometimes stay out for several days and nights during which everyone fretted and mourned.

  On this Sunday we took several volumes of old Punches and climbed into the ‘spreading-tree’, an ancient larch trained into the shape of a table and propped on wooden supports. Easy to climb into, fragrant and feathery, it offered places where its twigs interlaced to form hammocks. Much time was spent in it, and much time was spent studying old Punches.

  These – many volumes of them – lived behind the sofa in the morning room. Sometimes I sat on the floor in the cosy narrows between bookshelf and back of sofa, and looked at them there; but they were not the precious kind of book which had to be handled delicately, so could be lugged off wherever you wished. They were not for reading – the narrow columns of tiny type, so small that instead of looking like blackness on whiteness it gave the impression of foggy greyness, were too off-putting. It was the pictures with their rambling captions which fascinated me. I liked best the ones with horses in them – and most nineteenth-century outdoor scenes included horses – and the ones of handsome Edwardian ladies drawn by du Maurier, whose dresses I admired. The earlier ladies, in crinolines sometimes so huge that they got stuck in doorways, were funny but not so appealing (Gran said that she and her sisters used to despise girls who wore huge crinolines and laced their corsets so tightly that they fainted; and indeed, the only crinoline in the dressing-up chest was a modest one). It didn’t occur to me that Punch was better than history books, but it was: it didn’t seem to be about anything as abstract as ‘the Past’, just about how things used to be.

  That day, up in the spreading-tree, the Punches were as absorbing as ever. When the family came back from church … no dogs.

  Lunch would be served in a few minutes, but still neither of us felt it unjust when they rounded on us and said: ‘Go out and find them, and don’t come back until you have.’ In tears, but unresentful, we set off through the park towards the bridge and weir simply because we had been shooed in that direction, our bare legs swished by the long grasses of summer. The dogs wouldn’t still be in the park – Lola was too serious for the mild sport offered there – and it was only too possible that they had crossed the bridge into the woods stretching on either hand on the far side of the lake. When we reached the bridge the proliferation of potential directions overwhelmed us. We stood there, calling feebly ‘Lola! Jeanie! Tarry!’ knowing they were probably out of earshot by now, and wouldn’t answer to being called anyway. Guilt and hopelessness combined, and we wept again.

  ‘We’d better try the sand-field,’ said Pen, two years my senior and, like her sister Anne, more given to virtue and self-sacrifice than I was. The sand-field, so-called for its light soil, adjoined the park and had a large rabbit population. When we scrambled through the hedge we saw that none of the rabbits were about: a hopeful sign – they might have gone to earth because the dogs had passed this way. We agreed that it was worth going on, and started towards the gap in the far hedge where once a gate had hung.

  This gap was now full of a tall green growth, and we could soon see what it was: stinging-nettles. The hedge was impenetrable and the nettles merged at each side with its undergrowth of brambles
. There was no path through, and the nettles stood as tall as us. Any adult would have walked up to the top of the field and round into the next one by another way, but we had become hypnotized by our impossible task and were capable of seeing no solution but going back home or going straight on. It was hot, we were hungry, the nettles smelt rank and were full of midges. ‘We can’t get through,’ I sobbed; but Pen, on whom the situation was working differently, said: ‘We must. We must pray.’

  ‘To God, or to Gramps?’ I asked.

  ‘To both – and you must really mean it.’

  ‘Shall we kneel down?’

  No, said Pen, to kneel down out of doors would be showing-off. It would be enough if we shut our eyes and put our hands together. Even so, I felt uncomfortably exposed in the tense silence of our praying. ‘Please, please God, and please Gramps, don’t let the nettles sting me – us – and let the dogs be on the other side.’

  Pen went first, silent but steady, her hands still together. I had a track to follow, but still the hairy leaves brushed my legs and arms, and sometimes even my neck. They might have been buttercups. So astounded were we when we reached the other side, both unstung, that we were unable to speak, and we were not surprised, only awestruck when we looked out over the field to see two of the dogs circling a clump of brambles, and earth dug by Lola showering out of its centre.

  We took the dogs back by a different route, didn’t talk about our miracle, and never tempted God or Gramps by asking for another. Partly this was because the pious fit was evaporating anyway, partly it was because we were scared. Whatever powers we had touched in Heaven or ourselves, we felt that nettles ought to sting.

  What brought us to heel morally far more effectively than talk of Right and Wrong was the word that had such remarkable potency in our family: silly. It was the word most often used by grown-ups when they were scolding, and it worked so well because while ‘naughty’ or ‘bad’ added drama to a situation, and even hinted at forces which might be beyond your control, ‘silly’ was something you could easily be (very likely had been, in whatever was the case in point); and silliness was, or you felt it ought to be, within your control. It was a maddening, snubbing little word, and you often raged against it, but in the end it contributed a great deal to giving us the idea that people are responsible for their own actions, and ought to be prepared to accept their consequences. Far more than God, up there in His marvellous world of all-embracing love, and of magic, it belonged to the world we understood.