Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (36 page)

Living a new kind of life away from home, where I had been my unhappiest more recently than my happiest, I was often at that time able to dodge my misery over Paul. Laughter, frivolity, even silliness and affectation (and Anne and I must often have been silly and affected) are dependable salves in my experience, besides being strong threads in feminine friendships. I enjoyed much of my time at Bath and was sad when I decided that I had better resign before I was sacked, and go home to think about finding a ‘real’ job.

There was then a dreadful interlude when an aunt persuaded me that it was my duty to teach in the village school, understaffed and overcrowded with children from London to such a pitch that an untrained volunteer would be welcome. I did it for two terms, proving that teaching was not my
métier
but that I could call upon a certain amount of courage at a pinch. It was during that time that I met the first of my ‘hopeless’ loves, felt myself blaze into life again – it was so good while it lasted that even when I think I can see its unreality, I do not regret it – and sank back into even colder ashes. By the time chance had put me on to a ‘real’ job in the BBC, I was far from being alive.

It is strange to remember that when I was at Oxford, the BBC had glamour. When, before going down, we visited the Appointments Board which was supposed to help us find jobs, one after another of us said, ‘Well, I rather thought the BBC …,’ only to be laughed to scorn. (Does anyone ever get a job through a University Appointments Board, I wonder? I have never known anyone who did.) This made me see it as a stronghold of rare and brilliant people, so that to join it, although far down in the submerged seven-eighths which never sees a microphone, struck me as extraordinary. I did it because my Oxford friend Margaret had found a job in its recruitment office and tipped me off when a vacancy for which I might be suitable occurred.

For a time I was still prepared to grant glamour to the greater part of the Corporation, for I never saw it. My section, the part of an information service attached to the part of the BBC which broadcast to ‘the Empire’, had been evacuated to Evesham. ‘The Empire’ included, endearingly, I always thought, the USA, and it was some time before the Corporation got round to noticing this and changed the name of the Service. We worked in an ugly manor house overlooking Housman’s Bredon Hill, and because we were a new development, without which the News Room and so on had managed successfully for many years, few people, to begin with, bothered to consult us. With this job I went into a curious hermit existence so drained of feeling that it seemed even more unreal than it was.

I became shy, a condition unfamiliar to me. We were scattered about Evesham in billets, with a couple of clubs at which we could meet each other. I went twice to one of the clubs and spoke to no one. Still assuming that they were all unusual and exceptionally intelligent people, and observing that they knew each other well, I felt that they would consider me drab and dull, and did not dare to make any claim on their attention. I went back to my billet and after that I never did anything in my spare time but read: not even when I had realized that most of these alarming people were middle-aged journalists of no particular distinction.

The only things that I enjoyed at Evesham were the beginnings of the early shift and the ends of the late one. We covered the hours from six in the morning until midnight, and the first and last person to be on duty worked alone. At half-past five in the dark of a winter morning, the BBC bus would put me down at the Manor’s gates and I would make my way slowly up the drive, picking up firewood as I went. Having lit a fire in the grate of what had been one of the best bedrooms, I would fetch tea and sausages from the canteen and eat them sitting on the floor, watching my fire prosper. It was cold to begin with, and still, since only a skeleton staff was on at that hour, none of them in our part of the house. There was something secret and amusing about those picnic breakfasts, as though I were a tramp squatting in abandoned premises, and that slightly dotty pleasure is the only one I can remember from that time.

When we were transferred back to London and had become an accepted part of the BBC’s machinery, it became an ordinary job and lasted for five years, until after the end of the war. It was never an exciting one but it kept us busy. We were supposed to be able to answer any question at any time, and usually we could: an information service is only a matter of knowing where to look. I liked most of the women with whom I worked, and if there was one I did not like she was usually disliked by all of us; it is not a bad thing in a group, I discovered, to have one unpopular member who will act as catalyst on the others. I came to be head of the section after a time, having first been ‘passed over’ in favour of a more efficient girl, which was supposed to be a drama. I was only slightly pleased when she turned out to be less efficient than had been expected and at last went away to have a baby, while the other women said, ‘It should have been you in the first place.’ I liked their liking me (it was lucky that they did, for it was, in fact, they who kept the section running), but my concem for the work was barely skin-deep. My concern for anything, at that time, was barely skin-deep.

My life became no more closely knit with the war. Paul was killed, but he had already gone away from me. A cousin was killed, but he was younger than I was and I had never been very close to him. Other people I knew were killed, but they did not belong to my daily life. These deaths were as though the poisonous atmosphere had condensed for a moment and a drop had fallen: horrible, but natural. The nearest violence came to my own person was when a room I was to sleep in that night was blown in, and when the curtains of another room suddenly, silently, bellied towards me, sweeping a china bowl off the window sill, and I had time to wonder whether I was having hallucinations before the sound of the explosion followed. I was not even affected by whatever feverish gaiety there may have been about (people speak of it in memoirs); it did not come my way. Years of emptiness. Years leprous with boredom, drained by the war of meaning. Other people’s experience of them was far more painful, more dramatic, more tragic, more terrible than that; but that too, in its small, dim way, was hell.

During that time my soul shrank to the size of a pea. It had never been very large or succulent, or capable of sending out sprouts beyond the limits of self, but now it had almost shrivelled away. I became artful in avoiding pain and in living from one small sensation to another, because what else could one do when one had understood that, as far as one’s personal life was concerned, one was a failure, doomed to be alone because one did not merit anything else, and when every day a part of one’s job was to mark the wartime papers? I remember particularly a cutting about an elderly Pole who had killed himself, leaving a letter to say that he had tried everything to make people see what must be done for Poland but no one would listen. He was killing himself because it was the only gesture left him by which he might be able to draw people’s attention to what was happening. He was a man who chose the other way, the opposite way to mine, and the poor old fanatic got about an inch and a half in a corner of the
Manchester
Guardian
. If one were not to be a walking Francis Bacon picture, a gaping bloody mouth rent open in a perpetual scream, what could one do but go to the cinema and be grateful for an amusing film; go to bed and feel the smoothness of the sheets and the warmth of the blankets; go to the office and laugh because Helen’s lover was at home on leave and she had asked Kathleen to say, if her mother telephoned, that she was staying with her. After the late shift the tiny sequins of the traffic lights, reduced by masks during the blackout, changed from red to amber to green down the whole length of empty, silent Oxford Street. They looked as though they were signalling a whispered conversation, and they were the kind of thing with which I filled my days.

Some people take refuge from emptiness in activity and excesses. They are the ones, I suppose, who cannot sleep for it. Mine was a dormouse escape, a hibernation. Instead of being unable to sleep I slept to excess, thinking lovingly of my bed during the day and getting into it with pleasure. Sleep for me has always been dreamless yet not negative, as though oblivion were a consciously welcomed good, so the only thing to dread about my nights was the slow, heavy emergence from them when an unthinking lack of enthusiasm for the days into which they pitched me made getting up an almost intolerable effort. Sleep at night, and a cautious huddling within limits during the day: walking to work along the same streets, eating the same meals, going back to the same room, then reading. In theory I longed to depart from this pattern and felt sorry for myself when I did not, but although I would have liked to have lived differently, the smallest alteration seemed to be beyond my energies. I had to be feeling unusually
well
before I could go so far as to take a bus to the National Gallery on a day off, instead of sleeping all the morning and reading all the afternoon.

Within these absurd limitations imposed on me by inertia, there were palliatives to be found: the company of the few friends then accessible – and that I do not say more about my friends is because their lives are their own affair, not because they are not precious to me – and the books I read, and the little life spun within the walls of the office, which was often amusing. The intimacy between people working together is an agreeable thing and very real, in spite of the disconcerting way in which it vanishes as soon as the same people meet each other in different circumstances. And always, at any time, I could look at things, whether at leaves unfolding on a plane tree, or at people’s faces in a bus, or at a pigeon strutting after its mate on a roof, or at pictures. Perhaps the nearest I came to being fully alive for months on end was when I was looking at pictures. This joy I owe partly to the natural acuteness of my response to visual images and partly to one of my aunts, the only one of my mother’s sisters to remain unmarried and the only one of them to escape from the family’s way of thinking.

An intelligent and sensitive girl, she was extremely short-sighted and had to wear glasses. It was this, I believe, that caused her, as well as the rest of the family, to think her plain in spite of looks which by present-day standards would be considered striking. As a child she had stammered, and quite early in her life she must have written herself off as a shy and unattractive girl. She went to Oxford and became the family bluestocking, much loved by everyone but little understood. Her greatest friend became an almoner in a hospital, and my aunt followed her example. They shared a flat in London, decorated with hand-woven materials and reproductions of Impressionist paintings, and they worked with dedication and enjoyment.

When my grandfather knew that he was about to die, he told his daughter that she must give up her work and come back to Beckton to look after her mother. No one questioned this. My grandmother must have been about sixty at the time, an extraordinarily healthy, able woman whose house was constantly filled by visiting children and grandchildren. With a little planning she need hardly ever have been alone, and she had a character strong enough to withstand loneliness if it had to. But according to her ideas of what was fitting, it was taken for granted that an unmarried daughter owed a duty to her parents compared to which her duty to her work was frivolous and her duty to herself did not exist. My mother, the other sisters, and their brother shared this belief. Their own children were still young and they had not yet foreseen their own acceptance (in my mother a splendidly generous one) of their daughters’ rights to lives of their own. ‘It horrifies me now,’ my mother has said to me. ‘How
could
we have let her be sacrified like that? But at the time it just seemed natural.’

What my aunt felt about it she never said. She was not only a reserved woman, but the most genuinely unselfish person I have ever met. Silent, a little apart, she threw herself into work. She gardened, she served on committees, she taught Sunday school in the village, she became a Justice of the Peace. The books on her shelves were not quite like the books of the rest of the family, the pictures in her bedroom were not like their pictures, and she was the only one who would slip away for holidays abroad, walking in the Dolomites, or staying in rough inns in Italy or Yugoslavia. She loved small children and they loved her. Gently, diffidently, she dropped crumbs of poetry or romanticism or liberal opinion along their paths for them to pick up if they cared to. One of these crumbs was an occasion when she took me up to London to a great exhibition of French painting given in Burlington House in the early ’thirties.

I have never forgotten that exhibition. To be in London was exciting enough, and to be doing something so grown-up as visiting an exhibition was even better: I was ready to enjoy the pictures, and enjoy them I did. I loved the Watteaus and the Fragonards, which seemed to me glimpses of an exquisitely graceful life in which I longed to join, but the canvases which impressed me as the most beautiful of the lot were
La Source
and
La Belle Zélie
by Ingres. That marmoreal perfection, that polished, heightened realism of texture, conveyed to me Ideal Beauty. Why did my aunt stand for so much longer in front of a
baigneuse
by Renoir? Why did she say, undidactically as usual, that she thought it more lovely than the Ingres? I looked at it attentively and could only see a smudgy painting of a plain girl who was too fat and too red. But my darling aunt, who knew about pictures – she did like it better than
La
Source
, I could see that without being told. So although I did not then
see
the Renoir, nor any of the other Impressionists except Manet’s boy playing the fife, I understood that this was a limitation in myself, not in them: the first, the vital lesson for anyone who wants to enjoy painting. Looking at that Renoir was like meeting someone at a party and getting nowhere with him because one or both of you happen to be distrait. You do not discover until you meet again that he is going to be one of your best friends – but useless though the first meeting may have seemed, without it the second one would not have taken place.