Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (28 page)

An hour later, back at my flotsam-watching, I heard a new sound: the tap-tap of a rope end against wood. A breeze was coming up. I licked my finger and stuck it in the air: it was coming offshore, off the sandbank. I’ll give it five minutes, I thought, but in less than that time it was with me, a decent, steady breeze blowing in a direction which would sail me off that bank without any manoeuvring being necessary. I knew that I could do nothing single-handed with that horrible boat but sail her in open water with just the right amount of wind; I had rarely done more than crew for Paul and had always had his vigilant eye on me when I took the tiller, and anyway I was not strong enough to handle this awkward bitch. ‘You will probably get in a mess,’ I told myself, but I did not care. I would not have sat there another minute for a hundred pounds. I skinned my hands as I hauled the anchor in – her bows swung across the chain – and I fumbled and cursed and even cried as I struggled to get the sails up, but I managed it, felt them fill, heard the popple start under her bows, and off I went.

The breeze remained steady, so I could probably have succeeded in taking her into the harbour of the Great Cumbrae, where, no doubt, I should have fouled several people’s moorings and brought shame upon myself, but I had in mind nothing so definite as that intention. Just to be under sail in open water was all I wanted. If I had not met the returning dinghy by pure chance, I might be sailing still. I brought the boat about and picked up her owner very neatly, but he, who had found no tow available, whose hands were raw and whose every muscle was aching, was in no state to appreciate it. It was not, in any way, a successful week, since even before that contretemps we had discovered that we had nothing to say to each other, but it was a week which proved the magic of boats. Displeasing though that one was, frustrating though the weather had been, and uncongenial as the boat’s owner and I had found each other, what still lives in my memory (besides the sights and sounds, always a delight) is the sharpening tremor of fear in my nerves and the triumphant discovery that it blew away as soon as I was under sail.

The first time I had stayed with Paul’s family in their seaside cottage I ate almost nothing for three days, chewing and chewing on mouthfuls which, I feared, would make me vomit if I swallowed them. Nor could I sleep – or not for one night, anyway. I lay listening to the sea on the shingle while feverish tiredness made the bed rock, and whatever I did to my hands clenched them, shook them, rubbed them, relaxed them – I could not rid them of a dull ache in the palms. This sensation is one that I have not experienced, now, for many years and will almost certainly never experience again, for what could be exciting enough to send my nerves into such a state? I must have spoken, I suppose, since everyone welcomed me kindly and they always seemed pleased to see me again, but I cannot remember doing anything but listen and watch. Paul at the Farm was familiar and unalarming – I even lectured him, sometimes, with fifteen-year-old solemnity – but Paul with a boat, Paul with his gay, wild, funny, grown-up sister: there was something piratical about them together, they had a careless way of flouting the law under which I still was, they were so sure that their own touchstones made nonsense of the conventions. My complete acceptance of everything they said, my rapt attentiveness to every nuance of their behaviour, flattered them both into adopting me. There was never a cabin boy more eager to stow away on a gallant pirate ship than I was to join those two in whatever they did.

Part of my tension came, of course, from love, but much of it was due to my ignorance of their chief occupation: sailing. Horses were my thing – and horses had taught me all the pitfalls of a sport. I knew well how
damned
was the rider who came to a meet in the wrong clothes, or worse, in clothes too right if his mount or riding was wrong; one shrewed glance at a newcomer and I could size him up,
in
or out. The man whose bridle had a coloured browband or who had shaped his horse’s tail by clipping instead of pulling; the girl who showed curls on her forehead under her bowler, or who had plaited her horse’s mane into more than seven plaits – they got short shrift from me. So thoroughly was I conditioned that I could no more have failed to react to such things than a dog could keep its hackles smooth if a strange dog came in at its front door.

So sailing, I knew, would also have its language, its ritual, its taboos. Like anyone of that age, I greatly minded making a fool of myself, and to do it on Paul’s ground, under his eyes, would have been intolerable. I had to lie low, lurk in the undergrowth, all eyes and twitching whiskers, picking up clues. I had enough flair to avoid obvious mistakes. I knew, for instance, that I could not go far wrong in my clothes if I kept them warm, practical, and not showy. But all the rest I had to learn.

I never did learn enough to sail well myself. I was not there often enough, and when I was, my anxiety not to make mistakes kept me too docile so that I concentrated on doing what I was told rather than on working things out for myself. But I learnt that when a flight of dunlin zigzags against a thundery sky it is almost invisible until the birds turn so that for a moment all their bellies are exposed; then it is as though a faint streak of white lightning ran across the clouds. I learnt the gait of oyster catchers, the arrowy flight of terns, the ways in which water ruffles, goes sullen, or flashes with what were called locally ‘tinkling cymbals’ – those neat points of light reflected from every ripple. I learnt that when you wake up at night on a boat anchored far out from the shore, you sometimes hear people
walking
round it, and that when you tip a bucket of water overboard in the darkness, with luck a plunge of white flame will go showering into the depths. I learnt the creakings and patterings, the strainings and shudderings of boats, the gentle winging of sailing before the wind, the clatter of going about, the hissing and ripping of tacking. And I learnt the comfortable silences of two people sailing together, out of which, in the relaxed moments, you say whatever comes into your head. It was an intermittent apprenticeship in sharing profound pleasure.

Ashore, when I was a little older, we would drink beer and eat oysters or bread and cheese with pickled onions in small, dark pubs. I found that I could play darts fairly well – an agreeable surprise for someone with as little coordination between hand and eye as I have, to whom games were a mortification. There was a technique in getting in on a game of darts, or in getting accepted at all, for that matter. ‘Foreigners’, meaning people who have not been established locally for several years, are distrusted in East Anglia, and the comfortable gossip of watermen and farm labourers over their pints would stop when we came in. Usually when they saw that it was ‘old paul’ (everyone there is old, even a ‘little old baby’), they would greet us with pleasure, for he had been about those parts for some years and was known to be ‘all right’, but even so it would have been a mistake to push in too eagerly, especially for a girl. Pub manners, on which Paul was an expert, demanded quietness, deference to whatever elder, male or female, was installed in ‘his’ or ‘her’ corner, familiarity (but not a
display
of familiarity) with water and country, and an appearance of being at ease without an impertinent assumption of being at home. After a while the presence of the well behaved ‘foreigner’ would be forgotten by the people who were always there, then remembered again, but in a different way: ‘Anyone want a game of darts – what about the young lady?’ – and we were off. If I were playing well – if, as on one triumphant occasion, I opened the game with plunk plunk, a double twenty – then we were off into celebration and festivity as well as acceptance. And nothing gave these times more flavour than the knowledge that I would have them to remember when I got back to school.

F
OR I DID
have to go to school soon after we had ‘lost our money’ and retreated to the Farm. I had been there a term or two by the time Paul came to us. I had not wanted to go, but I had been too ignorant of school life to dread it as I ought. As most adults accept a disagreeable climate, or a dull job, or illness, so children accept the conditions of life wished on them by adults: not willingly, but with fatalism.

As schools go, it was a good school, and I knew as much even at the time. I was also prepared to believe that it would do me good, for at home I had begun to earn accusations of ‘uppishness’, ‘sulks’, and ‘superiority’ which I had not enjoyed. I had only been unable to see what I should do to stop earning them. If school would ‘rub the corners off’ me, as people said it would, if it would ‘teach me to get on with other girls’, then good luck to it. But I was not able, and did not see why I should be expected, to go beyond resigned endurance, and enjoy it.

It was a small school looking out over the North Sea. There must, somewhere, have been some kind of land mass between its playing fields and the North Pole, but it did not feel as though there was: in winter the sweat falling from your brow as you ran after a lacrosse ball (you never caught that ball if you were me) all but turned to icicles before it reached the ground. Irritatingly, the rigorous climate and our constant exposure to it, both outdoors and in, really were very healthy so that no one there ever had an infectious disease and only twice was I able to escape into the civilized privacy of the sickroom.

I was fourteen when I first set foot on the loose gravel made from small beach pebbles and went through the elaborate porch of white woodwork into that smell of polish, ink, and gym shoes; fourteen when I arrived, and almost eighteen when I left. A lifetime, it seemed. Good God, think only of one summer term! No stretch of time has ever looked so endless as those
thirteen weeks
before I had been able to black out one single day on my calendar. Three or four years ago I was walking down Oxford Street when I saw a shop-window display of school uniforms, trunks, and tuck boxes backed by a huge mockery of a schoolchild’s calendar, the days blacked out up to the current date, crowned by the monstrous legend ‘Only Five More Days to the
Beginning
of Term’ … I stared at it in incredulous horror. Whoever designed that display can only have heard of boarding schools, never have been at one, for how could anyone who had experienced it forget the despair under the stolid endurance with which one crept forward, square by tiny square, towards that red-embellished date which meant freedom regained?

Apart from games, the things I had to do at school were not objectionable. Lessons I saw as necessary, often interesting, and sometimes enjoyable; I made friends whose companionship I appreciated. It was the
absence
of things which had to be endured: the absence of freedom, the absence of home, the absence of privacy, the absence of pleasures. When I understood that not for one minute of the day could I be alone, except in the lavatory, and that every minute had its ordained employment, my spirit shrivelled.

During my first term, when it was all strange as well as barbarous, I used to employ talismans. There was a thrush which sang outside my dormitory in the mornings, whose fountain of song, a voice from the outside world, I listened to so avidly that I learnt to recognize the bird’s recurrent phrases. One of them, in particular, seemed like a promise, and I could get up more easily once I had heard it. Our cubicles in the dormitories were surrounded by white curtains hung on rails. At least, I thought, I can keep them pulled round my bed and
imagine
that I am alone. But on the first evening the monitor explained kindly that once we were undressed we must pull the curtains back. I did so, got into bed, and lay staring through tears at the band which held the curtains to a hook in the wall. One of the brass rings on the end of the band was squashed into an oval shape. I invested that ring with friendly powers, gave it a name – Theodore – and would touch it before going to sleep. Nobody else could know about it, nobody could guess at something so absurd, so the ring at least was something privately mine and could transmit little messages of reassurance. All through my schooldays, even when I was established and secure and had won an unusual number of freedoms by a mixture of luck, determination, and suppleness in accepting the role of ‘a character’, I maintained a private stable of symbols to keep me in touch with outside. Chrysanthemums were one. They smelt of the dance my grandmother gave for us every Christmas, always called ‘Diana’s dance’ because my birthday fell at that time. There was a blue bowl in my headmistress’s sitting room the beauty of which I chose to think was noticed by no one else; there were the frogs making slow and shameless love in the lily pond; there was Rufty, the matron’s fat, cross smooth-haired fox terrier. These things would catch my eye as I went from class to class, or came in from the playing fields, and would say, ‘Patience, outside hasn’t stopped existing.’ But no talisman was more comforting than the knowledge that I, anonymous as I might seem in my blue serge gym tunic and my black shoes with straps over the instep, was the girl who had played darts with Paul, Hooky Jimson, and old Gooseberry King in the back bar of the Swan. And after Paul had kissed me for the first time … ‘I am ashamed of you,’ said my headmistress. ‘You are an intelligent girl, you can work when you want to. These marks are the result of feckless idleness.’ I looked back at her serene and unmoved. Arrows of shame were in the air, all right, but all I had to do was to say to myself, ‘Last holidays Paul kissed me,’ and they melted away.

*

It was at school that my secret sin was first brought into the open: laziness. I was considered a clever girl, but lazy. It has been with me ever since, and the guilt I feel about it assures me that it is a sin, not an inability. It takes the form of an immense weight of inertia at the prospect of any activity that does not positively attract me: a weight that can literally paralyse my moral sense. That something
must
be done I know; that I
can
do it I know; but the force which prevents my doing it when it comes to the point, or makes me postpone it and postpone it until almost too late, is not a conscious defiance of the ‘must’ nor a deliberate denial of the ‘can’. It is an atrophy of the part of my mind which can perceive the ‘must’ and ‘can’. I slide off sideways, almost unconsciously, into doing something else, which I like doing. At school, with my algebra to prepare and a half-hour of good resolutions behind me, I would write a poem or would reach furtively behind me for a novel out of the communal study’s bookshelf, by which they were foolish enough to give me a desk. It was a year before they understood that no amount of scolding or appealing to reason would cure me of this habit, and moved me to a desk from which I could not reach the shelf unobserved. I do the same sort of thing today, at the age of forty-two. I may have advertising copy to prepare. The copy date comes nearer – it is on me – it is
past
… and I find myself dictating a letter to an author telling him how much I enjoyed his newly submitted book. So often have I proved that this form of self-indulgence ends by making my life less agreeable rather than more so that my inability to control it almost frightens me; but that I should ever get the better of it now seems, alas, most unlikely.

Once my headmistress had sized me up, she used to deal with it by savaging me once a term, at a well-judged moment about two weeks before the end-of-term examinations. ‘Diana – she wants you in her study.’ With my heart in my boots and my record only too clear in my head I would trail along the dark corridor and tap at her door. She would be standing in front of her fireplace, wearing one of her brown or bottle-green knitted suits, hitching the skirt up a little, perhaps, to warm the backs of her legs. ‘Miss Beggs tells me … Miss Huissendahl tells me …’ and the shameful evidence would be put before me in a voice of such disgust, with such ponderous sarcasm, that I could have hit her. Almost in tears with resentment and humiliation, I would go back to the study and defiantly read a novel or write letters all through the next preparation period – but mysteriously, when the examinations came, my marks would be adequate. After a couple of years of this ritual I should have been dismayed if she had skipped it, for I liked to do well. I remember feeling indignant one term, when she left it until too late so that the only subject in which I came top was English. That I came top in anyway, because I liked it.

Even my headmistress, however, could not inject adequacy in mathematics. At the sight of figures I became, and still become, imbecile; and this is a block so immovable that I do not feel guilt at it – there is nothing I can do about it. What set it up I do not know. My first lessons in arithmetic, given by a beloved aunt, I remember with pleasure. We played with matchsticks and it made sense. But once I had mastered adding, subtracting, and dividing I reached a point beyond which nothing could make me go. So profound is my aversion to the symbols of number that I cannot even trust myself to number the pages of a typescript with any reliability: I will find on looking back over it that I have written ‘82, 83, 84, 76, 77’. Recognizing a hopeless case when they saw one, my teachers recommended that I should drop mathematics and take one of the permitted substitute subjects for the obligatory School Certificate examination of my day – botany, it was. I enjoyed dissecting blackberries and the heads of poppies and then making drawings of them, and was so thankful to be relieved of those nightmare numbers that I did quite well in it.

I do not regret knowing nothing about mathematics, but I am sorry that I had another, slightly less serious block about Latin, and I believe that it could have been undermined. If, after the barest minimum of grammar had been taught me, I had been let loose with a dictionary and, say, Ovid’s
Ars Amatoria
… But oh, how badly Latin used to be taught! Those nameless girls, constantly making presents of goats to that boring queen! I used to hang on to the goats for all I was worth – I liked goats, goats interested me immensely – but they were never allowed to do anything in the least goatlike, so it was no good. I tried hard with Latin. If there was a choice of verbs to learn I would pick the ones which meant something to me, such as ‘to dance’, ‘to ride’, ‘to drink’ – and, of course, ‘to love’ – and I found that the future tense, which could be used as an incantation, stayed with me fairly well. ‘I will dance, you will dance, he will dance’ – pause to dream about ‘he’ – ‘we will dance – I shall be wearing a dress with a huge skirt of shell-pink tulle – no, heavy gold lamé, perhaps – and he will …’ Even more memorable was the form ‘Let him love.’ ‘Let him love!’ – my hair, for that scene, would have had to go raven black … I struggled through the school examinations; with stubborn holiday coaching from an elderly clergyman I survived the entrance examination for Oxford, and once there, with more extra coaching, I got through the first-year examination known as Pass Mods. And then, having spent all those years on it, having learnt what must have amounted to quite a
lot
of it, with one great ‘Huff!’ of relief I blew the whole language out of my mind. The only words of Latin I know today are a few future tenses and
veni, vidi, vici
.

In the Hall of my school, used as a chapel and for all communal occasions, there was, and I suppose still is, a board carrying the names of all the head girls. Mine (and this still seems to me very odd) is on it, which only goes to show how closely biographers should examine evidence. I had been there a long time by then, and had made myself comfortable. By having my appendix removed I had been excused games for all of one term, and the headmistress was tactful enough never to withdraw this blissful dispensation (perhaps the games mistress implored her not to) so that while others were thumping about after balls, I could go for walks. Once in the sixth form, I was free to sit in the little library instead of in the communal study, and attempts to stop me going to bed at eight-thirty, with the little ones, had long been abandoned. The point of that was that the little ones were too much in awe of me to bang on the bathroom door. I could lie alone in hot water for as much as ten minutes at a time (and Blanche Dubois was no more addicted to hot baths than I was while suffering school), and once in bed I might have, if I was lucky, a precious half-hour in an empty room. To begin with, a few girls had been mildly unkind to me for being bad at games and reading so much, but the two things had now become part of my public persona, funny and rather engaging. I was good-tempered and obliging, and had an easily won reputation as a wit: I could feel that people liked me. I expected my last year at school to be almost pleasant, particularly as School Certificate was behind me and I was specializing in English, my best subject, in preparation for Oxford.

It had not occurred to me that
everyone else had left
. Like flotsam stranded by a receding tide, there remained of the senior girls only myself and a large, kind, dull girl called Jennifer. The departing sixth form had to go through an almost parliamentary procedure for electing the new head girl, and after their session an anxious delegation came to me as I peacefully read
Sparkenbrooke
in the library, and said, ‘We are awfully sorry, we know that you will hate it – but Jennifer
can’t
be head girl – you can see that, can’t you? So we
had
to elect you.’

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘I won’t do it. You can’t make me if I don’t want to.’ They pleaded for a little while, then went away to ask the headmistress what they should do. While I waited, I examined my feelings. Horror had been my first reaction, but after that, had I been putting it on a little, was I not faintly pleased, underneath, at the prospect of such eminence? With immense smugness I decided that I was amused, yes, but
not
pleased: I really was a girl who so despised everything to do with school that nothing would persuade her to accept.