Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (29 page)

Then the old woman stumped in and said, ‘Come into the garden.’ She put her arm through mine and walked me briskly up and down among the roses, chuckling and saying flattering things like ‘Look, you’ve got enough sense to see that all this is quite unimportant, but it would make life easier for me if you accepted.’ I was fond of her by then. She had once nearly expelled me and had shouted, ‘Have you no moral sense at all?’ to which I had shouted back ‘None, if that’s what you call moral sense,’ so we had battle scars to share. Soon I was arguing to myself ‘Ah, why make so much fuss, it’s not worth it,’ but a secret feeling of importance was swelling in me. I made my own terms. I would have nothing to do, I said, with the head girl’s traditional responsibility towards games (making up teams and so on); Jennifer must do that. All right, she said, and I accepted. And I did not feel ashamed. I still felt amused, and I did not feel very pleased, but I did, alas, feel a
little
pleased. I had shown that I did not want it, and now I had got it; I had made my little omelette, and it was not ungratifying to find the eggs still there.

I can truthfully say, however, that by the end of that short spell as queen of a tiny castle I came back to my first frame of mind. The very fact that I could from time to time feel myself becoming slightly corrupted by an apparent eminence – feeling self-satisfied, when no one knew better than I did how little reason there was for self-satisfaction – ended by confirming in me a native indifference to matters of status. It was all a lot of nonsense, I concluded, and whenever since then I have been in situations where official status was held to be important, I have continued to find that true.

On my last day of school, Packing Day, the day of joy, the day when we stayed up late after fruit salad for supper and sang, heaven knows why, the Eton Boating Song and Harrow’s ‘Forty-Years On’, I looked down from my heights at the cheerfully bellowing crowd of girls and thought, ‘Now perhaps – yes, surely – you will feel a moment of regret that it is ending?’ But I did not. I knew that I had learnt a lot there, had made some good friends and had some amusing times. I remembered lying flat on my back on the big table in the middle of the study, so overcome by laughter that I thought they would have to carry me up to bed. I remembered drawing lessons in the summer garden, and playing the part of Mr Badger in
Toad of Toad Hall
. I remembered standing for Labour in the mock election we had run at the time of a real one (my grandmother sent my opponent a bundle of Conservative literature as ammunition). I had not, after my first two terms, been unhappy except when in trouble through my own fault – I had even enjoyed a lot of it. But never, for, a single day, had I been doing anything but wait for it to end and now it had ended. Thank God.

T
HAT I STOOD
as Labour candidate in the school’s mock election when all my family were unquestioning Conservatives was partly the result of Paul’s influence, partly of my headmistress’s. Paul was more or less apolitical, but he had jolted me out of conformity with my family’s mores, He was anti-Them. Particularly he was, as an undergraduate disgusted by standards of material success which threatened to involve him in the kind of career he would detest. His father hoped that he would settle down as a Man in a Grey Flannel Suit, and of that, by temperament, he was the antithesis. He talked of most conservative conventions as tedious or funny and of some of them as immoral, and since, at that stage, whatever he said was Revealed Truth to me, rebellion rather than conformity inevitably became my line. It went with the modern poetry to which he had introduced me. His first present to me, some time in my fifteenth year, had been the complete works of Oscar Wilde and T. S. Eliot’s collected poems, and while the Wilde had been just my cup of tea, the Eliot had been champagne. It was a brilliant present, coming from someone not himself a great reader of poetry (‘I don’t understand much of this,’ he wrote in it, ‘but I expect you will. Love, Paul’), but he had a flair for present-giving. Nonchalantly but neatly he pushed me into a kind of reading of which I knew nothing but for which I was ripe.

Whether my headmistress voted Liberal or Labour I do not know, but she and her sisters, one felt, had spent their distant youth in earnest concern for women’s rights or the reform of education and the prison system: she came of a family with a good old-fashioned radical tradition, she was a pacifist, and she saw to it that the school library was salted with pacifist and Left Wing reading. She made no overt attempts to influence her pupils politically, seeing her task as that of teaching us to think for ourselves (not to mention that of retaining the confidence of our parents), but one of the reasons why she liked me in spite of my shortcomings was that in so far as I thought at all, my thinking went in what seemed to her the right direction. The national newspapers and the weeklies were always spread on a long table in the school’s entrance hall; we were not forced to read them, but we were encouraged to. In the ’thirties anyone who had had her shell cracked for her and was not a moron could hardly read the papers without veering to the left. By the time I finished school I was an imperfectly informed but convinced socialist, pacifist, and agnostic.

My agnosticism did not have my headmistress’s blessing, though, true to her principles of non-intervention in matters of conscience, she took no action when I stopped taking Communion. I had been brought up as a member of the Church of England, liking God. He knew everything about me but he was Love and he was Understanding, so it would be hard to do anything for which he would not forgive me. In the book of Bible stories from which my grandmother read to us on Sundays, he was a figure of benevolence manifesting himself in a landscape remarkable for its beautiful sunsets, and later, in the Bible itself and in Beckton Church (as familiar and beloved as the morning-room), he was a less material, more complex development of the same spirit. I have friends who turned their backs on the churches in which they were brought up because of the churches’ irrational rigours; I was able to drift out of mine so easily because of its mildness.

The early vision of meaningless chaos beyond the rim of human experience with which I had confronted my dismayed grandmother had come to me, as far as I can recall, unprompted. It is echoed in the sensations given me by cloud landscapes, and was crystallized in an experience I had when going under an old-fashioned anaesthetic at the age of sixteen, when I had my appendix out. As a small child I had known the usual terror, no worse than anyone else’s, of
things
under my bed. I had readily accepted that these monsters were imaginary and was not troubled by them for long, but while I was going under the anaesthetic, one of them came out and killed me. I had lost consciousness, then regained it, perhaps because the anaesthetist had reduced the flow too soon. Opening my eyes in a strange white room, I
had
not the least idea where I was, why I was there – the strong white light seemed to be that of terror at my helpless ignorance of my situation. Then something came down over my face and I knew in a flare of horror that it was a claw – the claw of the monster who had been under the bed all the time, in spite of what they had said. Now it had come out and got me, and in a moment I would be dead. I pitched over the edge of a cliff and began to roll down into blackness, gasping to myself, ‘They were lying, they were lying!’ I got a fingerhold on the cliff and clung to it frantically, knowing that once I could hold on no longer I would be gone – gone into what I expected to be nothingness. But as I peered into the blackness I saw that it was worse than that, it was not nothingness. In cold, absolute horror I saw that the endless night was full of moving shapes, galaxies of dim light circling and interweaving
according to laws of their own
which I,
by my very nature
, could never understand. I thought that I was screaming aloud ‘At least let me change!’ but I could feel conclusively that I was not going to change. I would have to let go of that cliff and plunge into this new order of being, equipped with nothing but my usual, totally inadequate self. It occurred to me that I might start believing in God, and that if I did it might work – it might give me whatever faculties were needed – but at the same moment I felt it so shameful to clutch at belief simply because I was
in extremis
that I could not bring myself to do it. So in desolation and despair I let go, and down I went.

I did not draw any conclusions from these experiences, nor did I consciously relate them to my religious belief, or lack of it, but I suppose they were symptoms of an innate sense that God was not so simple as man invented him; that if there was a God, he did not necessarily exist to answer man’s questions and smooth his way, as did the kindly God of whom I had been taught. The older I grew and the more I read of what was happening in the world, the less likely that seemed, but when I started to attend confirmation classes I was still assuming that in this matter ‘they’ were more likely to be right than I was, still expecting that with further instruction my doubts would vanish.

The clergyman who came to the school twice a week to prepare us was a gentle, ascetic-looking man of obvious goodness and subtle intelligence. He was better at talking to us about Plato than about Christ, which made me admire him, but at the same time his burnt-out face was that of a man moved more by the spirit than by intelligence: he clearly felt the real object of his classes to be more important than the interesting ideas with which he adorned them. I liked him and admired him, and was impressed by the picture he gave of the Protestant Christian faith. It was beautiful, I could see. It was something to which, if you believed in it, you would have to dedicate your whole life as this man had done – indeed, to believe in it and
not
to dedicate your whole life,
not
to give all you had to the poor,
not
to go out among the unenlightened as a guide, would surely be to make a nonsense of it. I was confirmed, and took Communion for the first time. ‘You will find it such a
great
help and comfort in times of trouble,’ wrote my godmother, but I was ready for more than that. It would not have surprised me if this mystery had tipped the balance of my doubt for good. It would not have surprised me, but it would most definitely have dismayed me: for if I did turn out to believe with all my heart, if as a logical consequence of belief I did have to give all I had to the poor and so on – just think what I would be giving up!

So how can I be sure what was the real cause of the complete lack of meaning which the sacrament had for me? I only know that I took it reverently, thought with concentration of Christ’s crucifixion, and came out feeling just the same as I had felt when I went in. I was well enough instructed to know that to expect ‘a sign’ was absurd, but still I felt let down. Having gone through this I
ought
not, any longer, to be saying to myself things like ‘But if it is not really the body and blood of Christ that I have tasted, why all this fuss about it? It is not – of that I am sure. It is a piece of symbolism to remind us, and how can a piece of symbolism be so
holy
as they make this out to be?’ It looked as though God had not made up my mind for me, so I would have to make it up for myself.

Time telescopes, so whether it was for weeks or for months that I considered the matter I do not know. I came to the topsy-turvy conclusion that whether I believed or not depended on what I was prepared to do about it. The Ten Commandments, for example, of which confirmation classes had refreshed my memory: would I be prepared – would I be
able
– to keep them? I was having one of my happy interludes in the sickroom while I pondered them, lying there in comfortable solitude with a mild attack of tonsilitis and nothing to distract me. Most of them were easy, but when it came to ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ – I did not need to examine my heart, it was self-evident: the fact must be faced that I was absolutely sure to commit adultery just as soon as I got the chance. So, I thought, slightly awestruck but also relieved, I do not believe in God.

‘Adultery’ and ‘God’ were both, of course, shorthand terms. I knew the technical meaning of adultery, but I meant something different by it: I meant making love, whether married or not – but marriage would not come for years and love I was going to make
soon
. The obsession with sex in the abstract had faded out and been superseded by a wholehearted concentration on love, usually directed upon one man, but if Paul failed me it would be someone else, and too bad for Paul. We never discussed such things at my school, where the standard of purity was so high that we did not even understand the purpose of the rules which maintained it – the curtains drawn back at night, the ban on less than three girls being alone together. I felt that I knew more about sex and men than most of my companions, and thought about them more, but I would have felt it irresponsible and lacking in taste to spread my knowledge. On one thundery afternoon, during dancing class when we were practising stage falls, I lay sprawled on the parquet in my sage-green art-silk tunic and bloomers and my salmon-pink lisle stockings, thinking, ‘If a stevedore’ – why a stevedore? I am sure I had never met one – ‘if a stevedore would come and rape me at this minute, I would let him.’ It was an incongruous idea to have in that setting and I enjoyed it as such, feeling sorry for my companions, whom I supposed to be innocent of such emotions. As for me, I knew that I was made for love, and love meant lovemaking, and I was going to bring this two-things-in-one to a blazing consummation (no, not with a stevedore, that was a joke) as soon as possible. God forbade me to do so and I did not – I could not – feel that he was right.

For just as ‘adultery’ was shorthand, so was ‘God’. I meant by the word that God I had been brought up on, the God of the Church of England as revealed to me by my family and teachers. It was his laws that I was going to break, and because of his convenient, English mildness, I was not afraid of breaking them. And because I was not afraid of breaking them, they were not laws. Anything which could be dismissed with such surprising easiness could not be the whole answer.

I have thought of more logical arguments for non-belief since then, and I have still felt no need to replace that God by another one, but I am not so sure that I ever really stopped ‘believing’. I suppose I shall have to come back to this later, if I am to understand why I did not shiver after my dying grandmother asked me why she had lived.