Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill Read online

  Andrew and I, although no one we knew had been divorced, were aware of it as a possibility. From time to time we said to each other: ‘Why don’t they get divorced? It would be better than all this quarrelling.’ It was years before it dawned on me that, given the law as it was then, if they had, we would have lost her. An aunt would presumably have been recruited to look after us: one of my father’s two unmarried sisters, both of whom we liked well enough as aunts but who were unthinkable as mother-substitutes. Once I was grown-up, the thought of how much had been preserved for us by their decision to stay together made me profoundly grateful, though it was always painful to know of their pain.

  It was institutionalized romanticism that did the damage: the fatal glorification of sexual excitement into Falling In Love, the dangerous concept of marriage as being In Love For Life. My mother had accepted those notions wholeheartedly, so when she found herself offending against them she thought herself nothing less than wicked. I am sure that she believed no one else among ‘our sort of people’ (people in books and so on didn’t count) had ever done what she had done: a fearful burden to carry, but at that time unquestioned.

  And even now I hesitate to say plainly what I myself believe about marital infidelity, because I know how cold-blooded it will seem to many people, among them some whom I love.

  I believe that when the first flush of delight at being together has passed, infidelity is certainly not inevitable, but is and always has been very likely to take place if occasion offers. In most people’s lives occasion offers only rarely unless pursued, and some people choose not to pursue, but not many will reject it if it turns up, as became perfectly clear during the war. I also believe that if infidelity does not cause heartbreak in a spouse or deprive children of a parent, and if it cheers up the two rule-breakers, thereby adding to the pleasure abroad in the world, it does no harm. I have never, therefore, seen any reason for all the mopping and mowing which goes on about it.

  I do think, however, that even in the best-managed cases a couple ought to be very sure indeed that they understand each other before they indulge in mutual confession. For those who dislike dishonesty this is quite hard to accept – but think of what Tolstoy put poor Sonia through by his gross self-indulgence in honesty! It is up to the unfaithful to recognize the damage that might result from their conduct, and to avoid it if possible. Though of course they may, in their turn, start romanticizing what they are doing; and that, only too often, will cause mayhem. Falling In Love! I can still remember the ravishing sensation, the surge of vitality which gave brightness to the eyes and shine to the hair, the intoxication of it, as against the warm nourishing glow of plain loving. But ‘intoxication’ is what it is: it is as seductive and dangerous as alcohol, and should be handled as cautiously. How generations of romanticizing Romance can be counter-balanced is hard to see, but it ought to be done.

  It is sad to think of my parents condemned to go through all their adult lives without any loving sex, harnessed together as mutual sources of unhappiness and guilt. It does, however, become less sad if I look at their marriage as a whole, because that reveals that they did somehow manage to develop the muscle to bear their burden. After he came home from Ethiopia it appears that both became less vulnerable, and when his job gave him the chance to live for six years in Southern Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was then called), not only did she agree to accompany him, but she also enjoyed the experience. They had first to travel across Africa, sharing the driving of a truck, then build a house, living in a pair of rondavels until it was finished, and once he started managing the factory he had been sent to set up, she found much interest and entertainment in running their establishment and made many friends. They came back to England with a working companionship in place, and when he died in 1968, twenty years before she did, it was his generosity and gentleness that lived on in her mind. And she, in her long widowhood, was far from showing any sign of being embittered by past sadness. Instead she became calmer, kinder, wiser and more practically creative than most old women: someone who, rather than nurturing her sorrows, had preserved and worked on all the elements in her life – and there were many – that were worth having. Neither of them, in fact, allowed their less than happy marriage to become, in the end, as tragic as it might have been.

  As children we, of course, had no idea of any reason why it might be tragic. All we knew was that there were rows, which we hated. I think Andrew knew more clearly than I did how much he hated them – he was younger than I was, and more vulnerable. I often managed to make myself think that I was irritated rather than frightened: ‘How can they be so silly?’ I used to say to myself; or, more often, ‘How can he be so silly, always doing just the thing to make her lose her temper?’ Because although it was clear to me that it was usually my mother who started the row, it was always my father I blamed for it. I ‘sided’ – we all three did, strongly – with her. Somehow – God knows how, because she certainly never said anything to indicate it – the fact that he had become repulsive to her conveyed itself to us, and as her nerves twanged, so did ours. What we desperately wanted when they were rowing was not that she would pull herself together and stop it, but that he would go away.

  My grandmother was to say to me one day, when I was grown-up, ‘Poor little girl, those quarrels used to make you so ill,’ and I was astonished. Later still, when I had observed my own reactions to the stress of living in London during the bombing raids, I understood that she was right. I used to be surprised by the extent to which I was not frightened by the raids – but for the first time since I was a little girl I began to suffer again from colitis. So that was why I used to get those tummy-aches and sick-attacks when I was a child! I had been able to feel that I didn’t so very much mind the rows because I wasn’t minding them, I was stomaching them. And on consideration, I think I was lucky. It was a less painful way of getting through something bad than being fully aware of how bad it was, as my brother was.

  But for us, quarrelling parents were not nearly – not anything like – so bad as they would have been if we had been less lucky in our circumstances. For one thing, there was always a buffer state of relations, nannies, governesses, housemaids, grooms, gardeners, farm friends around us, going on in its usual way, continuing to be the same, whatever was happening between our parents. It was one of those people who provided us with a useful formula: ‘Your mummy and your daddy are both very nice people: it’s just that perhaps they oughtn’t to have got married to each other.’ Andrew and I often used to repeat this formula and found it efficacious: it was the sort of thing grown-ups said, so it gave a feeling of detachment and superiority. And in addition to all these helpful people we had something even more valuable. We had space.

  We came nearest to not having it when we lived for a couple of years in a five-bedroomed house in Hertfordshire with no land of its own except an orchard and a paddock. By then we had graduated from nursery to schoolroom, so we were eating all our meals with the grown-ups. Neither parent wished to shut us away (we were never shut away at any time, it was only that the layout of the larger house allowed much more spreading-out). So in ‘the cottage’ our family mingled closely all day except during lesson-time, and tensions had to be experienced by us all. Ursula’s benign presence prevented it from being hell, but it was certainly a great deal worse than it ever was in Gran’s house or the Farm, where we could simply disappear into our own world, forget the grown-ups, and enjoy life as much as ever. It chills my blood to think what it must be like for the children – the many, many children – of quarrelling parents who have to live without the space in which to create a world of their own.

  The other source of pain was our own behaviour, and the pain was inflicted on the two cousins younger than ourselves.

  Although we were the recipients of affectionate attention from older cousins, we did not transmit it onwards. Even Patience, before she became old enough to be a friend, received little from Andrew and me but teasing and irritable tolerance. I ha
ve sometimes watched with surprise and admiration the unselfconscious way a group of working-class children will accept responsibility for a baby, if their mother has sent it out in their care. If anyone had suggested such a task to us we would have gone on strike. One reason for this was, I think, the nursery/schoolroom split: when you moved out of the nursery you began to live a life quite different from that of the children still in it – even to see a good deal less of them. But Joyce and Anne had continued to be kind to us across that divide, so I fear that Andrew and I simply had less generous natures. And he, after having felt the stress of our parents’ misery more acutely than I did, had then been forced to endure intense unhappiness by being sent away, at the age of eight, to boarding school: an unhappiness which naturally affected his behaviour.

  To be sent away from home was the most frightful thing either of us could possibly imagine. I didn’t have to imagine it until much later, when I was old enough to understand the reasons for it. Andrew knew that it was going to happen because it happened to all boys, but at the age of eight there is a big gap between the theoretical knowledge of something and the thing itself. When they actually put him in a car, drove him off and handed him over he had no alternative to bearing what felt unbearable.

  He has never said that he was bullied at school, and he was quite a tough little boy so probably he wasn’t. He was just exiled from all that he most passionately loved, in a place where nothing spoke to him. For a long time I kept two poems he sent me, one from his preparatory school, the other from Wellington, his public school: pathetic, clumsy little poems, one headed BURN THIS AT ONCE and the other NOT TO BE SHOWN TO ANYONE, ‘anyone’ underlined three times. Both were about being in a cold, dark place, dreaming of spring and birdsong and a dewy morning, then waking up and there, still, was the coldness and darkness.

  Andrew (with catapult) and John on the terrace

  So I knew he was unhappy. But I cannot remember thinking much about it – or feeling much about it, for that matter. Certainly I never questioned his fate: boys had to go to boarding schools, it was what always happened to them, poor things, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Meanwhile I had my friendships with Pen and with other girls who did lessons with me, I had my ponies, I had my books, I had falling in love … I had moved out of the world I used to share with Andrew, when we busied ourselves together like squirrels or moles in the branches or the roots of adult life. The world I was now inhabiting was quite different. Only years later, when I was in my thirties, did I have a dream which told me how much I had known.

  I dreamt that he and I, in high spirits, were running across grass together – and suddenly he was gone. I turned to see what had become of him and there were two men in uniform crouched over something stretched on the ground. Curious, and still happy, I ran back towards them, calling out ‘What have you got there?’ – and it was Andrew. One of the men half-rose and turned towards me, his eyes glaring; the other crouched lower over Andrew, one hand on his throat, the other clamped over his mouth. A scream of horror jolted out of me, waking me, and I lay there hearing my own voice moaning: ‘Poor little boy – oh poor, poor little boy.’

  It is easy to see how it worked on him. Having been exiled by the people he had thought to be his infallible protectors, when he was allowed back for limited periods he slid into rejecting them: an exile they had made him so an exile he would be. What had not rejected him was the place. He had been sent away from it, but it was still there, waiting for him. So what he did when he came back was burrow as deeply into the place, and stay as far from the family, as he could. It was not an instant or complete process, but gradually it became apparent that his preferred friends were boys from the village, his preferred dress was a smelly old many-pocketed gamekeeper’s waistcoat, his preferred speech was broad Norfolk. At school he did as badly as he could (he would have to spend a year at a crammer before he could get into an agricultural college), and at home he behaved as badly as he dared. Which was sometimes so shamefully badly that it included tormenting a little boy eight years younger than himself.

  Our two youngest cousins, Barbara and Colin, never felt as the rest of us did that they belonged to our beloved place. Barbara, with her brother Jimmy, had come for short visits when she was very young indeed, and had then been carried away to India by her parents; and in India the family was tragically stricken: Jimmy fell ill, and died. While we as little children had been wrapped snugly in the fabric of country life in Norfolk, she as a little child had been exposed to a blast of pain beyond our imagining. Her father’s posting as Commander-in-Chief of a district centring on Bangalore still had two years to run, so her parents could not return at once to England. Feeling that they must not risk keeping Barbara and her little brother Colin in India, they first sent Colin and his nanny home to Gran’s house, and about a year later her mother brought Barbara back too, and left her there. It would be for only a year, and where could the children be better cared for?

  To a child of seven, ‘only a year’ might as well have been five or ten years; and my grandmother and her resident daughter, an aunt very dear to me, must have suffered some kind of blackout to their imaginations. They were not, of course, positively unkind, but to Barbara they did not seem loving. Perhaps no one could have seemed adequately loving, now that she was so far away from her very loving parents; but I do faintly remember comments about ‘a rather sulky little girl’ which suggest that they failed to understand how deeply unhappy she was – how traumatic Jimmy’s death had been, and how it was possible for ‘home’ to be utterly unlike home to someone very young, lonely and unhappy, to whom it had never been anything of the sort.

  When her parents came back they found a house in Dorset which worked a happy spell on Barbara and which she would later remember rather as we remembered Gran’s house. But the latter had acquired unhappy associations. While she and Colin had been parentless there she had known not only loneliness, but anxiety: she had had to protect Colin – or so she felt – from Andrew. No doubt my brother would have protested ‘I was only teasing him’; but teasing is always ambiguous and often masks cruelty (to which that protest can add a nasty little twist), and my sister confirms that at that time Andrew was often ‘really horrid’ to his juniors. I think that ‘tormenting’ was what the ‘teasing’ felt like to the victim and looked like to Barbara.

  It was a shock to me when she told me about it, because I never had the least inkling of it. There were eight years between Barbara and me, and only two between me and Andrew, yet I had somehow contrived to ignore his unhappiness, and had been oblivious to the resulting ‘horridness’. The picture it brings to my mind is of chickens pottering contentedly about their run as though nothing were wrong, while in a corner a group of them is pecking all the feathers out of one of their number.

  My own theory about the boarding school phenomenon is that it was a reaction by the leisured classes to infantile sexuality. When a young Victorian mother (and my own mother was still Victorian in this respect) gazed fondly at her sweet, innocent baby boy in his nakedness, and suddenly his tiny penis stood up, I think she was horrified. Surely this little being, right at the start of life, couldn’t have anything to do with what men liked to do in bed … but look at it! It clearly had. There, in the male creature, was the old Adam, even now.

  So with boys you had to be very careful: however adorable they were, it was not wise to hug or kiss them too much. Some mothers even tried to turn them into girls, but that was obviously wrong – you wanted your little boy to grow up into a manly man, of course you did. But God forbid that the manliness should start before it had to, or that it should get out of hand. So the best thing to do was to isolate boys from the feminine, the sensuous, even before they could fully perceive it – to give them to trainers who would teach them to consume all their energy by running about a great deal …

  It was not a problem that exercised the working classes, because their sons had to get out there and work as soon as they were
out of short pants (or sooner – an old man in our village had been hired out to a farmer by his dad to pick stones off fields when he was eight years old). It arose from having time, as well as space. Of course boarding schools soon became muffled in blah about forming character and training boys to be leaders of men; and of course some families simply found it boring to have unfinished young people underfoot. But ours liked having us there, they wept genuine tears as they sent their little boys away. The imperative at work was a primitive one.

  It is extraordinary that the men assented to it even more eagerly than the women. One can only assume that most men, being able to recognize their own sexiness, could easily, if caught young enough, be made to see it as bad; and then found it hard to understand the various kinds of damage done to them by this crude way of suppressing it. Or rather, of trying to suppress it, because naturally it did not succeed. My brother, for one, was to spend a good deal of his youth being far from seemly in his sexual behaviour.

  But he did grow up to be a likeable man. He was to become the fond and understanding father of four sons, none of whom he sent to boarding school; and at Christmas lunch in his eightieth year he could look round the table at which sat all those sons, their wives and their children, and make the following pronouncement: ‘At the risk of embarrassing you all horribly, and making my wife very cross, I want to say something. I want to say that I have never been happier in all my life than I am today when I look round this table and see you all here, still wanting to come back to us.’ And when I said to him after lunch: ‘And not only do they all still want to come back, but they’re such an interesting lot, as well as being so nice,’ he looked very sheepish and mumbled: ‘I suppose you could say that Mary and I must have done something right’ – which had, indeed, been evident for many years.