Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill Read online

  The truth is that although there are people who are permanently twisted out of shape as a result of painful childhood experiences, a great many more are not. And my brother is one of them.

  FALLING IN LOVE

  FALLING IN LOVE resembled riding, in that it was always there, even before I was aware of it. I can remember being told that I had wanted to marry a boy called John Sherbroke, but not the wanting: all that remains of that boy is a moment of embarrassment when he had come to tea, and Nanny, about to lift him out of his high chair, asked him ‘Do you want to sit down?’ That was her euphemism for using the chamber-pot, and I knew at once from his puzzled expression that in the Sherbroke nursery it must be called something else. Sure enough, he said ‘I am sitting down,’ and Nanny was slightly flustered. She had been silly, I thought. She should just have offered him the pot. The first infatuation that I can remember is the one with Denis, the gardener’s boy, which happened when I was about four – or so I believe for reasons given when I described the experience in Stet. It took the form of romantic daydreams.

  The only daydream material provided by the world came from fairy stories: no newspapers or magazines crossed the threshold of the nursery (Mum’s Vogue came later), there was no television, grown-ups didn’t talk to us about love. It was from fairy stories that I formed my notion of what glamour was: a princess. The Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, the many princesses who had to be competed for by princes and who were won by the sons of humble men, that tiresome princess who was kept awake by a pea under a huge pile of mattresses (it was not possible quite to believe in that one): all of them ensured that the companions of Hal and Thomas were princesses, and that it was a princess I was trying to turn into when I called on the magic of dressing-up. But when I fell in love I didn’t dream of myself as a princess being courted: that was too far from reality. Instead I used a different scenario, and where I got it from I do not know … Or didn’t, until I reached this very point, when suddenly a name was spoken in my head: Grace Darling.

  Of course it was Grace Darling, the gallant daughter of the lighthouse keeper, rowing her boat through the raging waves to rescue the shipwrecked sailors. She came into the nursery: nannies and nursery-maids loved to tell her story, and in some nurseries (not ours, alas) to sing her song. Jessica Mitford wrote a book about Grace and her myth, and could still sing her song with great spirit when I last met her, not long before her death; but I had forgotten her for years and years, until I first heard Jessica mention her. And now I remember her again, because she it must have been who sent me up cliffs, down pits, into burning houses, across flooding rivers, to rescue imperilled Denis, or Wilfred the cowman’s son.

  Those were deeply satisfying daydreams, because after the excitement of the rescue came the finale, in which my beloved, recovering from his swoon, opened his eyes and saw me bending over him. At that point Grace Darling retired and a princess took over: my princess, the essential me, the one Pen was not allowed to play. The princess with the cloud of night-black hair.

  By the time David, recognized by me as my first real love and even acknowledged as such by other people, came on the scene, both Grace and the princess were beginning to fade out. I was eight when his parents rented the Hall Farm for a year: our house, because we had lived in it for a while when Dad was abroad (and would return to it when he was working in London). We were staying with Gran when this family of strangers moved in, and Andrew and I, all set for hostilities, crossed the back park and the water meadow on a scouting expedition, to size the invaders up.

  David was away at school. It was his younger brother Robin whom we met in the orchard, a small stout figure in a blue coat who turned his back on us to stomp away through the apple trees – shy rather than inimical, as it turned out. We followed him at a distance. When he climbed into one of the very old, half-fallen-down trees, we climbed after him. Whereupon something about him decided us almost at once that he was not a pubby, so we stopped resenting him and he became a friend.

  Robin often referred to his big brother in a way which suggested that when David came home for the holidays we should respect him. He could do things we couldn’t do, knew things we didn’t know. Sometimes it was implied that if we got uppish David would put us in our place, which might have made us wary of him, but didn’t. Robin was so much our kind of person that we were happy to fall in with his attitude, and looked forward eagerly to his brother’s homecoming.

  I don’t remember falling, only having fallen: the hollow shape of love was in existence before we met, and was then gradually filled with this new reality. What I am sure of is that of all the loves in my life this was the most soundly based. I loved him because he was kind, brave, honest and reliable: a boy gentle to those younger than himself, who never seemed tempted to show off and who could check a dangerous game, such as climbing the hay-elevator with its rows of sharp up-curving prongs, without fearing that anyone would think him sissy.

  When we were together, as we often were, in a group of my cousins and his, we were friends. Loving him made me happy if he picked me when choosing a team for a game, and even happier if he danced with me at a party, though he didn’t dance very well; but it did not clutter me with self-consciousness. I did not expect him to know that I loved him, nor did I mind his not knowing. We wrote to each other when he was away at school and I kept his letters tied up with a blue ribbon, going to bed delighted if one of them began ‘My dear Di’ instead of plain ‘Dear Di’, or ended ‘Much love’ instead of ‘Love’. I daydreamed about him as I had about the others, but the dreams were less far-fetched.

  The princess vanished for ever when I was eleven, meeting her end in the bathroom of the Hertfordshire house – an apt setting. There was, of course, only one bathroom in that house, and it was of the utmost austerity. I would be approaching my thirties before I knew anyone who made their bathroom pretty, and was older still before the words ‘en suite’ began to appear in the vocabulary of house agents. In that same dreary little bathroom my mother had recently told me about menstruation, saying that it was a terrible bore but that one got used to it and it didn’t hurt – for which sensible approach I became grateful when a friend told me that her mother tried to make her call it ‘my little friend’. I had started to let my hair grow, hoping for plaits long enough to sit on, and was disappointed because they refused to do more than touch my shoulders. Having wiped the steam from the mirror, I was leaning on the washbasin to study their progress when a chilling thought swam into my mind: however much my appearance changed when I grew up – and surely it would change quite a lot? – it must! … but however much it did, I was never going to have huge dark eyes and a cloud of black hair.

  Never.

  It was not possible.

  Blue eyes and mouse-coloured hair that refused to be more than shoulder-length: that was me, so I had better lump it.

  It was a hard thought to take. And from that day on, if I tried to push a daydream too far into fantasy it stopped working.

  Sometimes I managed to persuade a daydream to climax in a kiss, but in real life the only time David and I made physical contact, beyond hauling each other up a wall or dancing, was when we were at an agricultural show with our parents and had wandered off together. We were enjoying the smell of trodden grass, the music of the brass band, the splendour of the Shire horses with their manes and tails so elaborately braided and cockaded with colour, the brooding serenity of the beef cattle, the gleaming vermilion and sky-blue paint on the wagons and tractors. We were having a good time together … and suddenly I realized with a jolt that we were arm in arm.

  It was the most wonderfully disturbing thing that had ever happened: too much to bear. As though the jolt had been an electric shock, we started apart. I blushed too violently to be able to look at him and see if he was blushing too. I raged at myself inwardly for my lack of control: why, oh why hadn’t I hidden my noticing so that my arm could have stayed in his, and me aware of it? How long had we been walking like that?
Perhaps for a long time, and I had missed it! And which of us had first reached for the other? I wanted desperately for it to have been he, but it was no good: nothing could be fetched up but that we had been close and at ease. And now we were behaving like grown-ups, sparing each other embarrassment by pretending nothing had happened. I loved him the more for the way he did this… but oh God, suppose it was I who had taken his arm and he had thought ‘How silly’ but had been too kind to make a sign … But if that had been so, surely he would not have been walking and talking so naturally at the moment when I noticed: even if I did make the first move he couldn’t have minded. I was to treasure that afternoon for a long time.

  But there were temptations to infidelity even during that first love. He was not a very articulate boy, and what he laughed at most readily was farce. He would thoroughly enjoy it if someone sat down where there wasn’t a chair – indeed, amusing events of a banana-skin type made landmarks for him: ‘the time the wasp got into Uncle Harry’s shirt’, ‘the time Mummy put salt instead of sugar into the fruit salad’: he would refer to such occasions with almost pious regularity. There came a time when boys who found humour in ideas rather than predicaments began to have charm for me.

  The first of these tempted me badly. Tim. He gave an impression of recklessness as well as of wit, he had a gift for words, and grown-up ways which seemed almost awe-inspiringly sophisticated, and he lent much sparkle to our activities. It was he who dubbed dam-building ‘dearie-me building’ after we had been scolded for swearing. I repeated his witticisms constantly; I only had to say ‘We built a dearie-me’ to myself in order to giggle. I thought about him often, and saw the possibility of changing allegiance.

  By then I must have been twelve, the boys in their early teens. A group of parents – ours, some of our cousins’, and those of both boys – had decided to spend part of the summer holidays together in Devonshire, some of them camping, some in a nearby hotel. We were among the campers, organized with military precision by my father in a group of tents clustered round a marquee, two rough fields away from the top of high cliffs. It was a lovely place, across the estuary from Salcombe, to which we were rowed by a ferryman when we went shopping for supplies. Golden, shell-strewn sand in little cliff-bound coves, rock-pools full of limpets and sea anemones, and sparkling blue water – all this was astonishing to us, accustomed as we were to the austere seaside places of East Anglia where the most majestic sight would be – if you were lucky – a stretch of sand-dunes, and the sea washing the shingle was usually nearer to gravy-coloured than blue. The holiday must have been hard work for parents, but for us it was the best we had ever had, and for me it was extra-good because of love. Which boat would I go out in today, David’s, or Tim’s? Had either of them noticed my successful dive from the high rock? Which of them would come with me to the spring to fill the drinking-water bucket? It didn’t really matter which, because the presence of either was enough to fill an occasion with pleasure; but although neither boy was aware of me as anything but one among several playmates, I felt that I ought to make a choice. It would be a private matter, entailing no change in conduct, but to me it seemed necessary.

  But it did not seem simple. I had been loving David for what seemed to me as good as ever, and now that I saw the possibility of loving someone else I was shocked as well as thrilled. I had not known that I was capable of such fickleness.

  One evening when the flaps of my tent had been hitched back because of the heat, I lay in my sleeping bag doing two things at once: watching night fall, and reaching a decision. How could I be comfortable in my skin if I didn’t know who I loved? Nightfall was beautiful and decision-making was important. Again and again my eyes followed the line of a distant, heathery hill, which swept down and then slightly up again to end in a promontory jutting out to sea. I wanted to fix its profile in my mind (I was always storing up nostalgia), and the way its colours slowly blurred into the darkness of a silhouette, and the sky’s cool green deepened to night-colour. And I wanted to catch a star at the moment of its becoming visible, which seemed to be impossible. I stared at an empty piece of sky, glanced away for a moment, looked back – and there was a star as though it had always been present. The air was moist on the exposed part of my face, so I knew the grass was already thick with dew, and a cricket was chirruping, though not under my groundsheet as sometimes happened. Going to sleep out of doors in this wild place was so beautiful that it gave me an ache in my heart. And which of the two boys did I love?

  David, of course. Alas. I felt cool inside, and solid, as though I had dug down to a base of some sort. ‘What a pity’, I thought, because I would so much have enjoyed loving Tim. But it wasn’t David’s fault that he was less amusing. It would be disloyal to abandon him because of that, when he had been a part of my life for so long. And he was so kind, so generous, so good – how could I turn against someone who had done nothing but continue to be himself? When I thought of him, his rival’s very charm seemed a source of unfair advantage of which I could not approve. David was to remain my love for another two years, until I met the man, in my eyes grown-up, to whom I would eventually become engaged.

  There was no – or no conscious – physicality in these early loves, yet while they were going on I was spending a great deal of time thinking about sex. Indeed, from the age of eleven, when revelation occurred, except when my mind was being positively invaded in one way or another, I thought of little else.

  Revelation took the form of a small black book with nothing written on its cover. Why I pulled it out of a bookcase’s bottom shelf where it was tucked away in a corner, I cannot imagine, but when I had read on its title-page the words ‘Wise Parenthood’ I started to turn the pages, supposing I was about to discover some method of raising children properly that my mother had once hoped to follow. As a result, I was never to suffer what she suffered on her honeymoon. From that early age I knew – not approximately but exactly – what men and women do in bed; and I also knew that it was one of life’s best pleasures, and that I was going to start enjoying it the minute I was old enough.

  The revelatrix was Marie Stopes, that absurd – even monstrous – woman who yet did more for her fellow-women than almost anyone else in the twentieth century. She made contraception acceptable, and on the way there she taught everyone who read her what she taught me. And in my case her lessons were supplemented by a posse of bawdy balladeers who had been collected into six volumes bound in white leather which dwelt in my grandfather’s smoking room. Those, too, I fell on by chance.

  Every year, either just before or just after the great Spring Cleaning to which her house was always subjected under Hannah’s generalship, Gran ‘did’ Gramps’s books. His library was extensive and valuable, in her eyes almost sacred, so that no one else was allowed to clean the books, not even Hannah. Gran would put on a cotton overall and one of her sunbonnets to keep the dust out of her beautiful white hair, and every single book she would take out, clap-clap to blow away any dirt settling between the pages, wipe with a soft clean duster, and (if the binding was leather) polish with a special unguent which she kept in a stone jar. She did the library, the morning room and the smoking room, and it took her weeks.

  She was halfway through the smoking room when I went in to loll on the sofa and keep her company. The handsome white volumes, which she had piled on the floor near the desk, caught my eye, and I saw the word ‘Ballads’ on their spines. ‘What are those?’ I asked, with what I thought was virtuous curiosity – ballads were supposed to appeal to children because they were usually hearty, but they bored me. ‘You wouldn’t be interested in those,’ said Gran, much too quickly – and in a flash my secret prowler was on to it. That evening, as soon as the house’s silence assured me that the grown-ups were safely in the drawing room or the servants’ hall, I nipped down and abducted one of the volumes to read under my bedclothes. In those days we didn’t use the expression ‘Wow’ – but ‘WOW’ it was.

  So I was unusually well-
informed for my age, and I found the information wildly exciting – and yet, being in love was one of the things that served to take my mind off sex. I find it surprising now, but then it didn’t enter my head that it should be otherwise. Children – because the word ‘teenagers’ was not yet in use, ‘children’ included people a good deal older than it includes now – children did not do sex. If a child of thirteen or fourteen dressed or behaved in contradiction of this ‘fact’, I saw them much as I saw someone who dressed or behaved in the wrong way when riding to hounds: absurd, and lacking in taste. When, in my mid-teens, I learnt that someone I actually knew had in fact ‘done it’, I was appalled – so much so that for a day or two I believed I would never recover from the shock; which was an odd reaction considering that what had been done was something I myself had been dreaming of eagerly for – by then – at least five years. (Fortunately my recovery from this shock was very much more rapid than I expected it to be.)

  Women much younger than I am, belonging to generations in which lovemaking between teenagers is taken for granted, sometimes say that they embarked on sex when they did chiefly because it was expected of them: they would have looked silly to their contemporaries if they had been unwilling. Which makes me suppose that my own lack of resentment at having to wait so long to be ‘old enough’ was largely due to there being no peer pressure. If everybody you know, young as well as old, is thinking in the same way, you need to be a strongly dissident person to think differently. And it is possible – even probable – that some part of me was glad to be given so much time.