Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (35 page)

The engaged ones would take the dinghy and paddle off, leaving an uneven wake of silvered ripples on the smooth, inky water. Hugh, the girl, and I would wash up, sit on the deck to talk in low voices, and the tension would mount. It was painfully beautiful. Reed warblers (Paul would have known if they were really reed warblers) would toss off little beads of song, almost like nightingales, and the uncanny booming of the bitterns – more like some ancient monster bellowing – sent shivers down my spine. After a while the couple’s wish to be alone would force me to my feet. ‘I know what I want to do,’ I would say, my wretched humility brightening my voice. ‘I’m going for a walk to see if I can get nearer to that bittern.’ Hugh would go through the motions of asking the girl whether she wanted to go too, and she would go through the motions of deciding that no, on the whole she thought she was too sleepy.

I did not cry as I wandered by myself through the tufty marsh grass. I tried to be only my senses, soaking outwards into the beauty, savouring night-time, of which one always has too little – and I must have succeeded up to a point because when I remember that week the beauty is still sharply with me. But only a yogi could keep that up, and I had to face the truth. This was before I had heard of Paul’s marriage, but far enough on for my belief in his return to have been reduced to its minimum: less a belief in his return, than a belief that
if
he returned, all might be well. On the night when the moon was full I had to put aside that belief. On that night there was no cloud in the sky, but there was a wind. It came rushing between the moon and the flat land, bending the forest of reeds where earth melted into water with such a steady, even thrust that it hardly made them rustle. With the same relentless flow it seemed to flood through my emptiness. Out on the Broad the engaged couple would be whispering and laughing; in the boat’s cabin Hugh and the girl would be holding each other close and kissing. I stood under that moon, in that wind, and knew myself to be absolutely alone. It was so absolute that for a time I might have been my skeleton lying somewhere, as Paul’s was soon to lie, to be picked clean by the elements.

It was a feeling far too powerful to be evaded; it had to be accepted. ‘This is it,’ I thought. ‘This is how it is,’ and with a sort of dull, weary recognition I saw that it could be endured, and that if
that
could be endured, then anything could be. After about an hour I went back to the boat to find that the others had reassembled as a party and were brewing tea. Hugh reached out and squeezed my hand in the cabin’s almost-darkness, for which I am still grateful to him. And from that time I made better progress in my discipline against self-pity and it was less bad than it had been, or so I thought. But perhaps it was that experience of absolute acceptance which put the seal on my loneliness for so much of my life.

To be in love and engaged at nineteen, and disengaged at twenty-two, is not fatal: you have lost your love, you have lost your job (for that is what it amounts to for a woman, as surely as though she had been training to be a doctor, only to be prevented by circumstances from practising), but you are still very young. ‘You are still very young,’ I used to tell myself. ‘It is absurd to consider your life ruined at this age. However improbable it may seem, someone else will take Paul’s place.’ And that, naturally, happened. What my self-admonishment did not take into account was the change brought about in my nature by my own loss of confidence.

Why should my sense of my own value in relationships with men have collapsed so completely? I have sometimes wondered whether the smallness of the part played by my father in my childhood may have been responsible. Did I once, long before I can remember, want to fall in love with him as little girls are supposed to do, and was I chilled by an indifference that left me with a tendency to expect rejection? It would make sense, it is the sort of explanation offered by convincing textbooks, but it seems a bit too simple to me.

Whatever the reason for it, there was a flaw of some sort in me which split under the impact of my abandonment by Paul and ran through all my subsequent relationships with men until I believed that I had come to the end of them. Love still took up most of my attention, but to describe in any detail my other affairs would be tedious, because they ran to a pattern. I could only be at ease in a relationship which I knew to be trivial. If I fell seriously in love it was with a fatalistic expectation of disaster, and disaster followed. By the time I had reached my thirties I was convinced that I lacked some vital quality necessary to inspire love, and it was not until my forties were approaching that I began to see the possibility that instead of lacking it, I might have been suppressing it; that my profound ‘misfortune’, of being unable to make the men I loved love me in return, might be the result of an attitude of my own which came from a subconscious equating of love with pain.

Twice I fell in love with happily married men – the first time quite soon after Paul’s marriage. It felt like coming back to life with a vengeance, but I recognized from the beginning that it was ‘hopeless’, in that when he said ‘love’ he meant something less than I did, and the more I recognized this, the greater my secret abandon to the situation. It must have been chance that he repeated the pattern of Paul so exactly – going away, writing a few times, then silence – but although this second blow on the same spot was an agony, it was not unexpected: I had been waiting for it from the moment I realized that this was a ‘real’ man, not just a man who was not Paul. And both with that man and with my second married lover, I flattered myself that I was unselfish and fair-minded in not wanting to force them into leaving their wives: indeed, their affection for their wives, underlying their readiness to enjoy themselves with me, was something which I esteemed. I felt with both of them that they would not have been the kind of man I could have loved so much if they had been prepared to wreck long-standing marriages for my sake, and estimable though this attitude may be on the face of it, there now seems to me something fishy about it. I was hungry to be alive, so I was hungry to love – but was I hungry, in fact, for the companionship of those particular men, or of the third one, unmarried but not in love with me, whose reservations about me turned a lively attraction into infatuation so that I did not
fall
in love with him, but might have been
jumping
off a cliff? I have always shrunk from the idea of possessiveness, I have never tried to mould people into my own idea of them, and I have been satisfied with myself because of this; I have considered it a virtue. It may have been in part the virtue I took it to be, but I suspect now that it had other aspects as well: that if I did not grab at people, I grabbed at emotion, and that for many years the most intense emotion I could conceive of was one of pain.

‘O
F COURSE IT’S
different for someone like you, a career woman…’

Good God! I thought, and was about to protest. But what is a woman with a job and no husband, once past thirty, if not a career woman? I remembered a book in a blue binding which, when I was twelve, I shared with my friend Betty: a book with questions in it, and spaces for the answers. Who is your favourite character in fiction? What is your favourite food? What is your ambition? Betty wrote that her ambition was to be a great actress. Mine was: ‘To marry a man I love and who loves me.’ I never went back on that and I do not go back on it now, but I have not made it; so a career woman is what I look like, and what do I think of
that
?

At Oxford and immediately after I left it, I was extremely naive about careers. So was the rest of my family. It is astonishing to remember how few working women we knew – none at all well, except for my mother’s unmarried sister, who had been a hospital almoner until she was arbitrarily summoned home to live with my grandmother on my grandfather’s death. Sometimes a report would come in that so-and-so’s daughter – ‘such a clever girl’ – had got ‘a wonderful job in the Foreign Office’ or was ‘doing so well on the
Manchester Guardian
’. We would admire this, but the mere fact that the girl was in such a job removed her from our sphere and made her seem a different kind of person from oneself. I never had any doubt that the kind of job I would like would be one connected with literature, painting, or the theatre, but that sort of thing seemed far outside my range. I had a humble idea of my own abilities. I lacked the proper arrogance of youth in that respect. Lazy and self-indulgent, I was a lively girl only in my capacity as a female, and once I was wounded in that capacity I became, to face the truth, dull. (Since I believe that any recognition of truth is salutary, this should be a bracing moment, but it does not feel like that: it feels sad.)

So instead of having some wild but inspiriting ambition I thought vaguely that I might like to be a journalist because I enjoyed writing letters and essays, or I might like to be a librarian because I enjoyed reading books. I did not have to read many newspapers before I saw that I was probably off-beam about the first, so the second was what, in a half-hearted way, I was planning to be when the war began.

The war began. I sat on the dining-room floor at the Farm with my sister, filling bags of hessian with fine, prickly chaff to make mattresses for refugees from London, while we listened to Chamberlain’s announcement on the radio and swallowed our tears. (I do not remember that any of the refugees actually slept on those emergency mattresses, but most of them stampeded back to London quite as fast as if they had.)

I was no longer a pacifist in any formal sense. To make gestures against the war once it had come seemed as absurd as to make gestures against an earthquake or a hurricane. The horror had materialized and it must be endured, but to
participate
in it any further than I was compelled to do by
force majeure
did not occur to me. A mute, mulish loathing of the whole monstrous lunacy was what I felt; almost an indifference to how it ended, for no matter who won the war, it had happened; human beings – and I did not recognize much difference between German human beings and English ones – had proved capable of making it happen, and that fact could never be undone. Later, when ‘unconditional surrender’ was the watchword and furtive peace feelers from the Axis were being snubbed, the madness seemed to me to have become so great that my imagination could not even
try
to comprehend it.

To have become a nurse would have made sense to me, but I knew in my bones that I had no gift for nursing. To have joined one of the women’s services was something that I could have done, becoming one of thousands of regimented women, learning to talk military jargon, growing ruddy under a uniform cap and broad-beamed in khaki bloomers. It seemed to me an intensely disagreeable prospect, but what particular right had I to avoid it? I cannot remember even attempting to think of a justification. I was determined that I would not do it unless ‘they’ came and got me, and that was that.

This refusal to take any part not forced on me seems to me now an unmistakable measure of smallness of spirit. To remain detached from the history of one’s time, however insane its course, is fruitless even on the private level, since only by living what is happening (whether by joining it or by actively opposing it) can the individual apprehend its truth. Detestable as the ‘white feather’ mood of the First World War certainly must have been, an expression of all that was most ridiculous in ‘patriotism’ and most hysterical in suffering (‘My man is going to be killed so why shouldn’t you be killed too?’), it had in it a grain of truth: there can be no separateness from the guilt of belonging to the human species – not unless the individual withdraws into a complete vacuum and disclaims participation in the glories as well. There are two honest courses when war strikes: either to make some futile but positive gesture against it and suffer the consequences, or to live it – not in acceptance of its values, but in acceptance of the realities of the human condition. I did neither, and I have no doubt that I was wrong. ‘Living’ the war, for me, would have amounted to no more than putting on uniform and working, most probably, at some kind of clerical job for the purpose of ‘releasing’ a man so that he could kill and be killed. It would have been as stupid a thing to do as I felt it to be at the time, but by handing over my freedom in that way I would have tasted
what was happening
, which is the duty of anyone who wants to understand, to be aware, to touch the truth. It could be argued that the civilian jobs in which I ended up served the same purpose as a job in the services would have done, since I would not have been allowed to remain in those jobs if the officials responsible for directing my labours had not classified them as ‘essential’. The difference was a subjective one. I chose civilian work because it represented the minimum loss of personal freedom possible in the circumstances, and loss of personal freedom was exactly the phenomenon most characteristic of the situation I should have been exploring. It was the people in concentration camps who were drinking most deeply the poison of what was happening; they, and men like the soldiers from West Africa and the Sudan, carried on the tide of madness into a war that could mean even less to them than it did to me. The actual consequences of any choice of mine were, of course, too infinitesimal to be perceptible outside my own skull; but within my skull, the choice I made was of a kind to build a wall between such people and myself.

It follows, naturally, that one should be to some extent ‘engaged’ at all times, not only in times of crisis: that I am no less wrong now than I was then, since I still take no part in any sort of political or social activity; I have never marched against the hydrogen bomb, I have never distributed leaflets urging the boycotting of South African goods. Whether, believing this, I shall some day turn to action, I do not know: given my record, it seems unlikely. Both by conditioning and by instinct I continue to cling to the wrappings of self-indulgence which keep safe my privacy and my female sense of another kind of truth running beside the social one: the body’s truth of birth, coupling, death that can only be touched in personal relationships, and in contemplation.

Determined not to join the services, I answered an advertisement for women to build small boats in a factory at Southampton, supposing that because the boats were small the factory would be small too. I imagined it with a boatyard attached to it in which, though I might not be permitted to build a whole boat single-handed, I would work on recognizable features of boats – shape a tiller, perhaps, or screw cleats into place. The papers I received indicated that I was mistaken. Engagingly, one of them was a form on which I was to state whether I preferred my dungarees to be sky blue, apple green, or rose pink, but the rest of it gave a clear picture of monotonous hours doing something with metal at a factory bench. To anyone as spoilt as I was, the working day seemed atrociously long, and the wages made me sceptical forever of sweeping talk about big money earned by factory hands. Such talk was in the air – ‘Those are the people who have the money, of course’ – but the factory which might have been mine paid a disconcertingly small basic wage and only someone made of steel could have earned overtime. Because I could hardly back down at that stage, I said that I would wear sky blue overalls and waited for instructions, but my relief was great when I received an apologetic letter saying that they had no more vacancies after all.

Then I heard from a friend that the Admiralty, removed from London to Bath, was recruiting women busily. My enquiry was answered by a kind, discouraging letter asking why I wanted an ill-paid office girl’s job when there were surely other things I could do, but I persisted. I did not want my refuge to be comfortable. To be bored, badly paid, but useful seemed to be what the situation required.

Bored I would have been, had it not been for Bath and the friends I made there; badly paid I was, pocketing fifteen shillings and ninepence a week after the money for my billet had been deducted; useful I was not. The permanent civil servants, uncomfortably overworked in requisitioned hotels and schools, had little time to teach undisciplined recruits, however willing. They were burdened not only by me, but by a large number of young men and women from the neighbourhood who saw working for them as a good way of filling in time before they were called up (if men) or could persuade their parents to let them go further afield (if women – labour was still undirected at that time). I was so conscious of my own inefficiency that I would have accepted brusque treatment as just, but the regulars were charmingly kind and patient. They gave me and my like documents marked ‘secret’ to carry from one room to another, they let us make tea (although we made it too weak), and they sat us down to use logarithm tables at which they supposed, mistakenly, no one could go wrong. In the end my harassed master used to give me a sheet of paper and say, ‘Copy this on to that.’ I would copy it carefully, he would say, ‘Good, thank you very much’ – but once I saw him slip my copy into the waste-paper basket.

I felt at first as though I were in an uneasy but not intolerable dream. The close ranks of inky desks in the dining-room of the Pulteney Hotel, the stacks of forms referred to by numbers and initials, the scratching nibs, the tin trays marked ‘
PENDING
’ – all this made sense to the others, obviously, but not to me. I knew that my sub-section of a sub-section of a department was concerned with transferring equipment for mine-sweepers from one naval base to another, but I could not envisage the equipment and no one seemed to know anything about it either before or after its transfer. Gravely and carefully, these rather tired middle-aged men laboured away at their ant-like task, and in the years they had spent on such things they had built up a small, snug office world with its own rites, necessities, taboos, and humours: not by any means a disagreeable world, not a world one could dislike or despise when one saw it at close quarters, but not a world to which I could imagine myself belonging. I would leave it each evening and return to a little box of a bedroom in a council house owned by a plate-layer. His wife would give me a sturdy supper, and then I would lie on my bed and read. After Beckton and Oxford, this was too
odd
to be depressing. I simply felt suspended, waiting dumbly to see if I would ever begin to find my bearings.

Soon my voice was noticed by a snobbish but helpful woman who had volunteered to drive for the Admiralty and ferried people to work from the remote suburb in which I was staying. Would I not like, she asked, to be transferred to more congenial billets? I had not supposed such a move to be possible, tried to suppress a start of hope (because the plate-layer’s wife, though reserved, was a kind landlady), and mumbled that if it could be done … To my surprise she remembered to speak to the billeting office, and I was whisked into the town to be established with a family of Christian Scientists so astonishingly generous and welcoming that I have had a weakness for the sect ever since. In their benevolent, easygoing flat I could wake up.

Every day I walked to the office across the Royal Crescent, through the Circus, down Gay Street – oh, lovely Bath! There is no city in England more beautiful than that one, stepping down into its bowl of mist. There was always something to look at – a fanlight, a wrought-iron cage for a lantern, a magnolia growing out of a basement against the soot-dimmed golden grey of stone – but my chief daily joy was the great arc of the Crescent, with its broad, worn paving stones, its spacious view, and the curious silence it holds within its curve. A man who was walking me home one night said, ‘It’s like going into a church,’ and I was speechless for several minutes in outrage at hearing my own feelings put into such clumsy words.

Before long I had become flippant about the job and had made one of the most charming of all my women friends. She emerged like a dragonfly from the dull envelope of a letter of introduction: ‘Your dear Aunt tells me … We would be so pleased if you would come to tea on Sunday.’ The youngest daughter of a spirited Irish family, polite but unenthusiastic, was sent to fetch me, and within an hour I had tapped a source of amusement and drama on which I can still, today, rely. Where Anne goes, disaster strikes: disaster too extreme for anything but laughter. If we borrowed her father’s car without asking him, it was stolen; if we went to London for a night to meet young men, we lost either our tickets or the keys of our baggage, and our dresses split as we put them on; if we had no money but one penny and one half-crown, it was the half-crown we dropped into the slot on a lavatory door. ‘Imagine what’s happened
now
,’ Anne would say (and still says), and out would come a vivid, exaggerated story of the bizarre, the macabre, or the absurd. I have always liked to watch pretty women and have enjoyed the company of gay ones: she, one of the prettiest and gayest I know, as well as one of the most generous, courageous, and, at times, infuriatingly perverse, became and remained a friend to be thankful for.