Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (13 page)

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 being 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.

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.

E
VEN 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.