Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill Page 9

  I called the thing in the night nursery a ghost for want of a better word: it was not like ghosts were supposed to be – more like a monster. I saw it twice, while still young enough to be sat on a pot after breakfast. Because I always took a long time Nanny would leave me there and go back to the day nursery, saying ‘Call when you’re finished’, and I would sit there, bored, feeling the pot’s rim engraving a circle round my buttocks. The night nursery looked out over what was called the shrubbery but was nearer to being a little wood – yew trees mostly, and one huge beech which almost curtained the windows, making this room the only gloomily dark one in the house. Sitting on my pot, I would stare out at the leaves of the beech tree, and I was doing this when the ‘ghost’ appeared.

  It was a grey thing like the tip of an elephant’s trunk, and it seemed to be groping down towards the outside of the window as though the creature it belonged to were squatting on the roof, reaching down over the gutter. Only a little bit of it appeared at first, withdrawing quickly but riveting my eyes to the place where it had been. Then it came again, more of it, and I screamed. The scream had terror in it, so Nanny came running, but she couldn’t understand me when I tried to explain what I’d seen, and ended by telling me that I must have been imagining something; and when I had calmed down I supposed that this was so. Back on my pot next day, I repeated this reassuring explanation to myself: ‘I imagined something’. And then I went on to bolster my courage by telling myself that even if I hadn’t, the thing was not going to hurt me. It was a kind thing, and probably all it ever ate was beech leaves. I so much wanted it not to come – not to be able to come – that I imagined it eating so many beech leaves that it had made itself sick – I even said: ‘Poor thing, it’s so sick today that it can’t come.’ But it did come. It was a much darker grey this time, but it was obviously the same thing and it was not kind. I was frantic with fear, and after that I was no longer left alone on my pot in this room. And other people began to say how they had never really liked the night nursery, and that it had a spooky sort of feeling to it.

  Some seventy years later I woke one morning in a bed beside a window, and without putting on the glasses which I had worn since I was twelve to remedy my short sight, I looked upwards out of the window to see whether the sky was blue or grey – and there was my ‘ghost’. With a tiny tweak of panic, I was back in the night nursery, but only for a split second. This time, though still as short-sighted as ever, I could interpret the grey object: the tail of a pigeon which was perching on the gutter.

  The house provided only two other mysterious experiences – minor ones, but at least they remain unexplained. A long time before I was born, my grandfather was sitting one evening in the library and heard a shattering of glass in the dining room next door. He jumped up and ran to the dining room, supposing either that the footman (who ought to have been in bed by that time anyway) had dropped a tray of glasses, or that a burglar, trying to open a window, had slipped and fallen through it. There was nothing amiss, and no explanation of the sound was ever discovered. Not long afterwards my mother was in the Cedar Walk with her dog when she saw the gamekeeper at a distance, through the trees. She started towards him, wanting to give him a message, when her dog suddenly stopped and began to growl and tremble, his hackles rising, staring at where the man was standing. She looked in surprise at the dog, then towards the gamekeeper for an explanation – and there was no one there. My cousin Pen and I liked this story, and sometimes went out after dark hoping to see the Cedar Walk ghost; we used to put on the hooded loden-cloth cloaks which hung in the back passage for everyone’s use, as they seemed appropriate wear for such an expedition. But once we were out there in the dark, among the looming cedar trees, it would become only too likely that the ghost really would appear, so we would skedaddle back to the house, singing hymns to ward him off.

  The place’s other bogeys were purely imaginary, and thus our fear of them something to be ashamed of: the wolves, for example. One Christmas holiday Andrew and I were sleeping on the attic floor, in the Tank Room, so-called because one of its two large built-in cupboards gave access to the water tanks. It was a pleasant room with a sloping ceiling and a relaxed atmosphere, in spite of a spice of danger coming from the tanks’ gurglings and the presence in the other cupboard of a lion’s head sewn into a dustsheet, which had been left there by some visiting relation and never reclaimed. We liked being up there, but Nanny found it a nuisance, because the room was as far from the nursery as the layout of the house permitted. After nursery tea, when she was getting us washed, brushed and dressed in our prettiest clothes for our hour with the grown-ups in Gran’s drawing room, almost always she would find that she had forgotten to bring down a hairbrush or a pair of shoes, whereupon she would say the words I dreaded: ‘Run up to the Tank Room and fetch it for me, there’s a good girl.’ And I would be ashamed to say that I was frightened of the wolves, so off I had to go.

  Out through the little ‘play-room’, a bare ante-chamber to the nursery containing nothing but the toy-cupboard and a canary in a cage on the windowsill, and along the ‘green passage’: that was all right, because the warmth and sounds of the nursery could still be sensed. Then turn right – tap tap, two steps on bare boards between the humble green carpet and the rich patterned one of the passage which ran like a gallery across the well of the front stairs, onto which the doors of the best bedrooms opened. Here I could have lingered happily, because it was lit by the chandelier hanging over the stairwell and the life of the house rose up like a perfume: a sense of someone writing letters in the library where the fire was dying down (it was allowed to go out when the drawing room fire was lit for the evening); of Gran already in her bright drawing room; of the butler putting away the silver tea things in the pantry; of Mrs Wiseman, the cook, beginning to prepare dinner in the kitchen. And there were precious things to look at: a chest of carved ivory, a cabinet containing small objects of silver and tortoiseshell, a bowl with huntsmen on stiff-legged horses galloping round it, a cut-glass comport on a little table – very beautiful, but you must be careful not to knock against the table. But if I spent too long dawdling by these things Nanny would wonder what I was doing. I had to go on and turn another corner to the right into the corridor.

  The corridor had a high arched ceiling (I thought that all passages with arched ceilings were called corridors), and it was dark. Perhaps I couldn’t yet reach the light switch, and even if I could it would only have mitigated the gloom, not dispelled it, because the house’s electricity came from a pump down by the stables, and was always dim and fluctuating except in the most important rooms. As soon as I was round the corner into the darkness all the house’s sounds were shut off, and the wolves were ahead of me. They lurked in the big best spare-room at the end of the corridor, beyond the point where the stairs sprang up: the ‘golden stairs’ which we loved in daylight because they were golden, of unstained polished oak without a carpet, and spiralled round inside the wall of a tower-like protuberance within an inner angle of the house’s U-shape, bisecting two very tall windows as they did so. Anything in the house that was a little odd seemed to us special, but now the slipperiness of these stairs was a worry, because I had to get up them very fast, before I could hear the rattle of claws behind me. It was a desperate scramble, made more desperate by breathlessness, because as soon as I’d turned into the corridor I’d had to start singing as loudly as I could – hymns, of course, like we did in the Cedar Walk – and I mustn’t stop for a moment. The ones I knew best were ‘While Shepherds Watched’ and ‘Once in Royal David’s City’. I went without pause from the verses I knew of one to those I knew of the other, and back again, and I couldn’t stop even when I reached the top of the stairs and got into the Tank Room. It was a little better up there because I could turn on the light, but there was a possibility that one or two of the wolves had slipped ahead of me into the lion cupboard, and anyway the ones that hadn’t followed me up the stairs were still waiting at the bottom … No
t until I had skidded round the corner out of the corridor could I stop singing, draw a long breath, and hear a grown-up’s voice saying inside me: ‘There you are – there aren’t any wolves at all, you were only imagining them.’

  But all this might never have happened, once we were in the drawing room. It was by no means the only time of day when we saw our parents and grandmother. We were in and out of the household’s adult life all day, only those of us too young to be able to eat tidily being removed to the nursery for meals (it hung over us for a while as a mild and never executed threat: ‘If you can’t eat properly you’ll have to go back to having lunch in the nursery’). Nurses were there to keep us clean – to mop up babies and chivvy the older ones through their baths and into appropriate clothes – and to air and exercise those of us too young to join in adult walks and rides, not to segregate us. But although ‘downstairs’ was never forbidden territory, it was only during the hour or so after tea that it was dedicated to us.

  Then the grown-ups gathered in the drawing room especially for the children’s pleasure, and the children became pretty, neat and good-tempered especially for that of the grown-ups. All that shadowed the occasion was its ending. When the drawing room door half-opened and a discreet head poked round it to summon those of us who still had to be put to bed before dinner, then howls would break out: ritual howls, not unpleasant. The grown-ups would indulge them, saying ‘Just five more minutes, Nanny, I’ll send them up as soon as we’ve finished this chapter – only three more pages’, and there would be mollifying promises of goodnight kisses once we were bathed and in bed. ‘After tea’ was rarely marred by disharmony.

  The drawing room had white walls, pale chintzes, shining furniture of rosewood, walnut and ormolu, ornaments of silver and porcelain, and flowers. Its smell was of freesias, violets, lilies of the valley, chrysanthemums, daphne. Only when we were older did it smell of roses – roses were summer, and in summer we would be out of doors after tea, no one settling in the drawing room until after the younger children were in bed. Roses in the drawing room were to belong to growing-up.

  The daphne was the most delicious of the drawing room smells. There were seasons when we might or might not be in the house, but we were always there at Christmas, when the daphne was brought in from the greenhouse – there had never been a Christmas that didn’t smell of daphne. It was a special kind which flourished only for our grandmother: a miniature tree, its leaves pointed, smooth and yellow-green, its inconspicuous flowers a faded pink. The scent filled the whole large room, delicate, sweet, belonging with exquisite intensity to this place and no other.

  When I came into the drawing room I would usually go first to the flowers. Most of them stood massed on a table with ornate legs and a sheet of glass on its top, while others in smaller vases were on the little ormolu-decorated tables on either side of the chimney-piece – a special silver bowl on the table next to Gran’s chair was almost always full of Parma violets. I would dawdle round the flower table comparing velvety petals with satiny ones, tangy scents with sweet ones, watching the way in which even the stillest flowers seem minutely to vibrate, dipping nose and lips here and there, and saving the daphne till last. When I breathed it I seemed to be breathing the whole room, the whole house, and my grandmother’s love.

  Margaret Carr: ‘Gran’

  We were not allowed to romp in the drawing room – anyone wanting to play rough games could go into the morning room where the furniture was less frail. But we could bring our own toys in if we had become tired of those which lived in the toy-cupboard – those dear, small, battered toys which had served child after child. We could play with those, or at I Spy, or Hunt the Thimble, or spillikins, or dominoes, or cards, or mah-jong, according to age or inclination. But the chief occupation was being read to.

  Our ages spanned about twelve years, so if all the cousins were in the house together, as we often were, suitable reading ranged widely. Sometimes Johnny Crow’s Garden or Squirrel Nutkin would be going on, low-voiced, at one side of the fireplace, and The Thirty-Nine Steps or Little Women on the other; but more often we all listened to the same thing without thought of its being ‘too young’ or ‘too old’ for us. We could drift away from or back to the group as we wished, or do something else and listen with half an ear. Old favourites would be relived as they were newly enjoyed by someone younger, the gist of books above one’s head absorbed as they were discovered by someone older. Ivanhoe, The Jungle Book, the Alice books, The Wind in the Willows, Struwwelpeter, Winnie-the-Pooh, What Katy Did, Jackanapes, Treasure Island, The Prisoner of Zenda, Peter Rabbit, The Princess and the Goblin – all of them and many others were read to every child, our grandmother’s voice weaving its spells back and forth from our babyhood to our adolescence, binding us, without our being aware of it, into a shared experience which extended back from her grandchildren to her children, and sometimes even to her own childhood. Nothing we enjoyed in that house was dearer to us than those evenings, and to this day I can summon up the silky feel of the drawing room carpet as I sat on it contentedly beside Gran’s chair.

  Carpets were a reliable guide to the standing of the house’s inhabitants: precious in the drawing room; handsome in the morning room, library and dining room, and on the front stairs; good in the best bedrooms; becoming plainer and more serviceable as the bedrooms became smaller; changing to linoleum in the nursery, and disappearing altogether on the back stairs and the attic passage onto which the maids’ bedrooms opened. There were two back stairs, one from the kitchen to the landing on the first floor which led to the nurseries and the menservants’ bedrooms (that wing of the house was only two floors high), and one in the main body of the house rising from the ground floor right to the top. Both were unpolished and uncarpeted, with steep, narrow treads, grey and a bit splintery. Maids could use the golden stairs as well, because they offered the only convenient way between the first and attic floors at that end of the house, but none of them ever set foot on the front stairs except to clean them. In the maids’ bedrooms there were squares of old carpet as rugs beside the beds. Getting up on a winter’s morning in those rooms was even colder than in the family’s rooms – no bedroom was ever heated unless its occupant was ill – because the maids’ rooms had only an uninsulated roof above them and draughts whistling up between the floor boards. And the maids had to get up at half-past six, or earlier if there were guests in the house.

  There had been a bathroom on their floor since I could remember, but it had not been installed until after I was born. Before that the maids had washed in basins of cold water, as the menservants continued to do – unless, perhaps, the footman went down and fetched hot water for himself and the butler from the kitchen. The men did have a bathroom, but it must have been considered a mistaken extravagance as soon as it was installed, because the tub had never been connected and the room had become a box-room. There was not even a WC for the men, who had to use an outdoor privy in the shrubbery behind the kitchen, which the night nursery overlooked. (This may not have been seen as a great hardship, because my grandfather himself chose to use it after breakfast every morning: if you caught sight of him on his way there, with The Times under his arm, you had to pretend you hadn’t.) On the other hand, the kitchen, scullery and servants’ hall were all warmer than any of the other rooms in the house. No doubt Gran insisted in theory on open windows there, as she did everywhere else, but she rarely went into the kitchen except for the short time each morning when she discussed the meals for the day with Mrs Wiseman, and never into the servants’ hall (unless she snooped at night as some of the maids believed, but I don’t). We were taught that at least this room and their bedrooms must be private to the servants, and that it was bad manners to intrude; if one of us was sent with a message to the servants’ hall we approached it shyly and hesitated before knocking on its door. The sounds coming from behind the door were often cheerful, and the silence which fell when it had been opened, while not quite hostile, suggested a secret life b
eing suspended. We often invaded the kitchen, where Mrs Wiseman would give us a kind welcome and offer titbits, but we were never invited into the hall.

  To begin with the servants were the butler and his footman; the cook, her kitchen-maid and her scullery-maid; the head housemaid with her two or three under-housemaids; and Gran’s personal attendant – her ‘lady’s maid’. The coachman (still called that because he dated from before cars, but his successor was called the groom), the chauffeur, the head-gardener and his two under-gardeners all lived outside in their own houses, and so did the old woman with hair-sprouting warts who came to do the washing in the steamy laundry, and spread it to dry in the bleach – a grassy space sheltered by yew hedges.

  The work of the junior maids was overseen by their seniors, but they were chosen by my grandmother. Dorothy Morris remembers Gran coming to her family’s cottage in 1936 to assess her potential as a kitchen-maid, and taking her on at fifteen shillings a month. Dorothy thought that she had never seen anyone so beautiful, but she also observed that Gran kept a white-gloved hand between her bottom and their horsehair sofa. ‘She thinks it may not be clean was my supposition, and I felt some indignation on behalf of my mother, who slaved fiercely to keep the tumbledown place spotless.’

  The first butler I can remember was a casting-director’s dream for the role: he was called Mr Rowberry, and was tall, bow-fronted and immensely sedate – though he did once make a joke: looking down his nose at an errant puppy, he said: ‘They say it’s a French poodle, but I call it a French puddle,’ which struck me as witty beyond words. When his successor retired, the then footman was promoted but was given no footman under him and no livery. He wore a plain dark suit and the children didn’t think him a proper butler. That was as far as retrenchment went before the beginning of the Second World War; and it was far enough, in our eyes. Other and much simpler ways of living seemed natural to all of us in other houses, but in this house the way things had always been was the way things ought to be.