Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (16 page)

Mothers were more important than fathers because fathers were often away, even when not posted overseas: and ours, though kind, was squeamish. He had a phobia about vomiting, so the ease with which babies spill their contents made him wary of us in our infancy. I know how powerful this revulsion can be because I have shared it, and for many years, if I had the misfortune to see or hear someone throwing up I would feel ill all day and for months afterwards whenever I chanced to recall it. I was eventually cured (more or less) by having from time to time to look after someone ill: in those circumstances, I could, by making a tremendous effort, overcome the phobia. But Dad never had to nurse anyone, so he was always afflicted by it, and it is possible that subconsciously he continued to see us, until we were safely grown-up, as creatures who
might
give him a horrible experience. He gave only the most dutiful of goodnight pecks and never hugged or stroked us.

We enjoyed him when he was funny, as he often was – indeed, on the only occasion he read to us he made it so tremendously funny that it was a new kind of experience, and I was disappointed that he never read to us again. We were happy to share jokes with him: for instance the
Who-
is-Captain-
of-
this-
ship-I-AM
that had to be shouted to stop a dithering argument about what we were going to do – the first person to get it out won, and it was usually but not always him. And he was brilliant at remembering comic songs. We – or at least I – knew that he was a very nice man. Nevertheless, we mirrored his lack of physical warmth. And, what is more, I have never in my life been attracted to a man of his physical type: fair-haired, blue-eyed, pink-skinned. And my brother once told me that when he was a boy he found Dad repulsive.

How could a trim man with pleasant features, an unusually agreeable nature and a lively sense of humour have become repulsive? It was a fate laid down for him long before he met her by his wife’s mother, my beloved Gran.

Gran believed that no lady could want to be kissed by a man unless she truly loved him enough to marry him; and that no gentleman would dream of trying to kiss a lady unless he truly loved her enough to propose marriage. And this belief she handed down to her daughters. In most families there are both accepters and rejecters of parental beliefs, but in this one all the daughters turned out to be accepters (one of them found it impossible quite to fit in, but she blamed herself for it and did her gallant best to make up for it). Certainly my mother, the youngest, although spirited and full of
joie
de vivre
, cheerfully accepted what her adored mother had taught her.

When she was nineteen, early in the second year of the First World War, she went to a dance and met a young army officer who had been invalided home from the front. Her friends all liked him, he was easy to talk to, and he loved country things as much as she did. He fell in love with her on sight, and before the evening was out had kissed her in the conservatory – and she had thoroughly enjoyed being kissed. It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her. My father was one of those gentlemen who would not have kissed a lady unless he had truly fallen in love with her, so very soon afterwards he asked her to marry him. Naturally she said yes. She knew she liked him, but more than that: she was sure she couldn’t possibly enjoy being kissed so much if she didn’t love him. It did not occur to her that lively girls enjoy being kissed because being kissed is fun.

Whether my father was a virgin, as my mother certainly was, I do not know, but I am sure that if he was not, it was by only a very narrow margin. He was a clergyman’s son who had gone from his public school straight to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, and who – four years before meeting my mother – had received the following letter from the man about to be his commanding officer in the regiment he was joining straight from the Academy. And – more to the point – he was going to keep that letter all his life as an inspiration.

Mum and Dad’s wedding day, 1916

 

It is clear that any young man to whom D. G. Geddes stood
in
loco parentis
would need to be determinedly dissident if he wanted to ‘loaf about in Town’ – which meant, of course, pursue the company of women, to say nothing of gaining sexual experience of them; and my gentle and honourable father was not even slightly dissident by nature.

My mother had been told nothing about sex, except that she might not at first like the thing men wanted to do, but would get used to it. The only criticism of her mother I ever heard her utter, almost a lifetime later, was that it had been wrong of her not to overcome her embarrassment and say more. My mother’s honeymoon came – as it did to many brides of her generation – as a shock.

Just before the war she had been sent abroad to a ‘finishing school’, as was the custom in her sort of family: it was a way of keeping girls at ‘the awkward age’ (we would say teenagers) occupied. Smart people chose Paris, but Switzerland or Germany seemed less risky to most parents, so my mother’s lot was Dresden and included exposure to a certain amount of Wagner which she described in a letter home as ‘lovely of course, but very long and very noisy’. Another letter, addressed to a sister, is headed NOT TO BE SHOWN TO ANYBODY
NOT EVEN MOTHER
, and starts ‘I say not even Mother because I am going to be vulgar and I don’t want darling little Mother to know how vulgar I can be.’

She then tells how, when she was out with other girls for an evening stroll chaperoned by Mademoiselle, she saw approaching under the lime trees a group of hussars, and soon realized that one of them was gazing at her with alarming intensity. His gaze held her throughout his approach, and as they passed each other his head swivelled as though her face had magnetized his eyes. She blushed scarlet ‘from head to foot’, and as she walked on she prayed that when the hussars reached the end of the promenade they would leave it, not turn round as Mademoiselle and her charges would do, to walk back. But no sooner had the girls started their return than she saw the hussars coming towards her again, and again he was gazing at her. And this time, when they passed each other, she (though still blushing furiously) lifted her eyes to meet his – and smiled! End of vulgarity.

Not much happened to increase her sophistication between then and her marriage. The discovery of what she was expected to do in bed with her husband threw her. She was a healthily passionate girl, but passion collided with ignorance so disastrously that the connection between the deliciousness of being kissed and the sexual act was broken. Full sex was not just disappointing, it was embarrassing and horrid. And my father – inexperienced, shy about physical demonstrations of affection, and probably ashamed of his own sexual impulses – was far from being able to prove her wrong. He was particularly at a disadvantage because it had not been
him
to whom she had responded so eagerly when he kissed her, only the fun of being kissed: he was not, physically, the type of man to whom she was drawn.

She did get used to it, and the first years of their marriage went reasonably well, helped by his being away a good deal, then by her being pregnant with me, and then, immediately after the war’s end, by their sharing the adventure in Abyssinia – though that was rather spoilt by the beginning of her second pregnancy. But soon after my brother’s birth she met a man – one of my father’s fellow-officers – with whom she discovered what being in love and making love were really like, and that was the end of any attempt on her part at married happiness.

It was not, however, the end of the marriage. Her parents found out that she was having an affair: found out through the agency of the same sister to whom she had reported smiling at the hussar. That sister, though asked not to show the letter to anyone, NOT EVEN MOTHER, had promptly done just that, as was proved by my finding it in Gran’s collection of all the letters she had ever received from her daughters. ‘She always was a sneak,’ said my mother, aged eighty-five – and so indeed she was. On a visit to London in about 1922 this sister was waiting for a friend in the hall of the University Women’s Club, of which Mum was a member, when my mother swept in accompanied by an unknown man, looking so radiantly beautiful that for a moment she was not recognizable. What was said I do not know, but when my aunt got home next day she reported to their father: ‘Kitty is having an affair.’