Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (9 page)

My mother, by William Strang, 1912

 

Almost ninety years later her nephew Philip, who now owns it, lent it to Norwich museum for an exhibition of Norfolk portraits. When I reached the room devoted to the twentieth century, there was Kitty Carr, dominating it. What an eye-opener! Not till that moment had I been able to see through my mother’s prejudice to the painting itself, and fully recognize its quality. It was easily the best painting in that gallery.

If art was a small and random collection of objects, music was an even smaller thing: scales and ‘The Merry Peasant’ thumped out laboriously under the tuition of Miss Doe, who visited once a week from our local market town, and was kind but not inspiring. Luckily this dispiriting introduction was counter-balanced by three Gilbert and Sullivan records and one of Paul Robeson singing ‘Water Boy’ and ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, all of which we loved and often played, which had been bought by an aunt and lived in a dark corner of the morning room with a small dusty gramophone. And another, even more thrilling glimpse of what music might be like was granted to Andrew and me when we were taken to Norwich to see our first (and for a long time only) movie:
Ben Hur
. Among the incidental music to it (played, I suppose, on a piano in front of the screen) was Schumann’s ‘Träumerei’, by which we were ravished, and which someone unearthed when we got home in a pile of old sheet-music on the morning-room upright piano. I was able to pick out a little of the right hand, and did so over and over again to our delight; though I think we were enjoying the screened images it evoked more than the music itself. This little sprinkling of musical seed would have to lie dormant for a long time.

My parents bought their first wireless (as we called radios then) when I was eleven and we were living for two years in Hertfordshire. We were allowed to listen at tea-time when Henry Hall’s dance band was playing, and soon became addicted to our favourite tunes, but we never imagined seeing the music-makers in the flesh or even buying records. We had no gramophone in that house, and I cannot remember anyone having a wireless in my grandmother’s. Even in my late teens, when I was besotted by tunes I had danced to such as ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ and ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, my only way of submerging myself in them between the times when I heard them at dances was by picking them out on the piano or singing them in the bath.

What you have never had you don’t miss: we did not feel deprived of entertainment, and thought it natural that going to London to see
Peter Pan
should be a unique event. We got our kicks from what was at hand: reading, riding, picnics, swimming in the icy North Sea, dances, acting in our own plays, Bonfire Night, Christmas, Easter, Harvest Festival. Unlike most modern children we knew who Guy Fawkes was and why we burnt him on Bonfire Night (though I am glad to say we were taught that he was a baddie simply because he had tried to blow up parliament, not because he was a Catholic – slightly surprising in a household so prejudiced against Roman Catholicism). Of all the feasts, Christmas was of course the best … but no public entertainment has ever thrilled me more than my first Harvest Festival.

The excitement started the day before, when we went with cousins armed with walking-sticks and thick gloves to a neglected field (I suppose its clay soil was too heavy to be worth cultivating) where the tussocky grass was full of thistles and the surrounding hedges, dense with brambles, were almost tree-high. It was the best place for picking long sprays of bramble loaded with blackberries, some already ripe, some still red or green – and that was what the walking-sticks with their hooked handles and the thick gloves were for. With these sprays, next morning, a leather-gauntleted aunt was going to wreathe the font in the church – and we also had to find bunches of scarlet hips and haws with which she could punctuate her wreath.

Every autumn has one or two days which are perfect, and this was such a day: still, sunlit, the sky’s blue very soft, almost silvery, because of the faintest possible hint of mist in the air. A long vista on such a day resembles a Chinese scroll-painting, the lower parts of trees and hills delicately veiled, their tops clear against the sky; and even a close-up of a hedge is simultaneously softened and enriched by the atmosphere. And there is the smell of autumn, as faint and pervasive as the mist – leaves beginning to decay? The smoke of bonfires? Stillness, light, colour, scent – all combine into a perfection made poignant because soon – so soon! – it will be over.

The sweet sorrow of parting, sadness as luxury – it is odd that young children should be susceptible to such a feeling, but Andrew and I certainly were. We loved having tears brought to our eyes by the cuckoo’s call, which seemed to us in certain moods like the voice of innumerable vanished summers; and the evanescence of autumn’s perfection made our hearts ache in the same delicious way.

And the next day after this lovely one was going to be even better, because we were going to be allowed to stay up for the Harvest Festival service. Our usual bedtime was six-thirty (we were six and four years old, put to bed at the same time for Nanny’s convenience). The service began just when we were normally being tucked in, but we would be there! We were going to be out in the darkness of night, under the huge red harvest moon, and then in the brilliant church, and then, when we got home, we were going to have not ordinary bedtime milk and biscuits, but
real supper
!

And the church truly
was
brilliant. As soon as we were through the door, there was the font under its rich wild wreath, surrounded by pyramids of fruit and vegetables with a vast and glorious golden pumpkin as the centre-piece. All the ends of the pews, the whole way up the aisle, had sheaves of wheat and oats and barley tied to them. The screen and the pulpit were lavishly decorated with dahlias, michaelmas daisies and chrysanthemums mixed with more wheat, oats and barley, and in each window’s wide recess a different still-life had been composed, some of them including loaves of bread and baskets of eggs (custom dictated who decorated which window, and they vied with each other to splendid effect). It would have been gorgeous enough in daylight, and in the glow of lamp and candlelight it was magical.
And
– for us this was an enchanting finishing touch – there were bats flittering about up near the roof;
and
the hymns were the best we had ever heard. We were so much taken with one of them that we went on chanting it for days afterwards:

I still sometimes sing that hymn when I’m driving, safely out of the hearing of anyone with a good ear.

Lessons, though accepted with docility, were not interesting and were always much the same whoever was being our governess because our parents subscribed to a system of home education called P.N.E.U. It supplied the textbooks and even, I think, the timetables, and it set us exams from time to time which it marked – not that anyone, parents, governesses or pupils, ever paid any attention to this ritual. The best thing about P.N.E.U. was that it disapproved of tiring minds, which meant that all the lessons were very short. Perhaps we sometimes did lessons in the afternoon, but if so it was not often: I can’t remember any, and the importance of being out of doors was an article of faith with the whole family, so that the grown-ups would have been against it.

The first two of the seven governesses we had came into the category ‘Nursery Governess’ which meant that they taught Andrew as well as me. When he was sent off to his preparatory school at the age of eight, my schoolroom companions were my cousin Pen, and various daughters of neighbours who shared the cost of the governess with my parents. The nursery governesses were unlucky, because they superseded Nanny, whom we loved – and the first of them was the unluckiest because she was French as well. Her accent, her clothes, the way she used knives and forks, her nervousness of animals, her smell of eau de Cologne and her unhappiness all made her unacceptable. She suffered severely from the cold, hated the food, and must have felt miserably lonely, stuck away so deep in this foreign country in a household where the adults found her presence a bore and were no more than civil to her, and her charges were resentful. This forlornness was a guarantee of failure because, like animals, we responded to assurance in our handlers: lack of it made us uneasy and hostile, quick to take advantage of feeble gestures of propitiation and rebellious against inept attempts to be firm. What we learnt from her was two words of French –
tais
-
toi
– and the simultaneously exciting and shocking fact, hitherto unsuspected, that children can be cruel to adults.

The first of the real governesses frightened us and the single term that she was with us has become a little capsule of oblivion: I no longer have any idea of what she did or how our mother realized that she must get rid of her at once, only a vague memory of the relief I felt when she had gone. Surely if she had done anything dramatically cruel to us it would have stuck in my mind, so I suspect it was nothing worse than irritability and lack of kindness – which, considering that no one had ever been even the least bit nasty to us, would have been enough to dismay us.

After her came the regular governesses. They left quickly, if they were boring because we saw them off, if they were charming because they got married, until we came to dear Ursula who was absorbed into the family and remained with us until I was sent to boarding school at the age of fourteen. She ought to have been a failure because she was plain, but it took her only a few days to win me over, and my mother too. She was kind, sensible, funny, easygoing. She loved animals and she found the P.N.E.U. syllabus as boring as I did, so she varied it with agreeable inventions of her own. Everybody liked having Ursula in the house, and I was to feel deeply indignant on her behalf when I got to school and the headmistress described me as the least well-grounded girl who had ever come her way.

One of Ursula’s strengths was that she fully understood the importance of horses: she was almost as good as Mum at mastering Cinders. She was the daughter of a country parson, and I suppose her family background must have been similar to our own.

By the time she arrived I had long stopped
being
a horse – grazing on green patches of carpet, drinking from blue ones, stamping and pawing the ground, shying when alarmed. That had ended not long after the wedding at which I, a five-year-old bridesmaid, had become a family joke by standing in the aisle whisking my fringed sash behind me and nibbling my posy of flowers. By age ten or so I had reached the stage of daydreaming the perfect horse, an exquisite grey, half Arab for the fine head and fiery eye, half Irish hunter for its ability to soar over huge obstacles. I would settle down to this dream with relish, first establishing the horse’s appearance, then grooming it and harnessing it faultlessly, and the dream would trail off into frustration because the relationship didn’t offer enough complexity. It felt much the same as those I would have a little later about dressing for a dance where I would meet someone to fall in love with, but it didn’t provide enough material for the feelings to feed on.

Our real horses – or rather ponies – were not dreamt about any more than members of the family. There was never a time when I longed for a real pony, because I always had one. To begin with, one was put into a little wicker chair-saddle, sitting sideways on a donkey or the ancient pony who – wearing leather boots strapped over her hooves – pulled the lawnmower. Then, when legs had become long enough to straddle though not yet long enough to reach stirrups, there would be a soft felt saddle on dear old Molly. We never went on walks along roads anyway, and it was easier for a mother, grandmother or nanny to lead an animal across fields than it was to push a pram. ‘Sit up straight’, ‘keep your heels down’, ‘don’t jab at her mouth’, were instructions given not in the form of ‘riding lessons’ but in the same way as ‘don’t talk with your mouth full’ or ‘shut the door after you’. By the time a child was enough in control to be let off the leading-rein she would be at home on a pony, and by the age of about ten she needed no encouragement to become enthusiastic about horse management.

For some six to eight years the books Pen and I most wanted to receive at Christmas and birthdays were horse books. I accumulated a big collection of them: not only stories about girls (it was always girls) and their ponies, but also technical books on horse care and training. After Andrew had gone to school, Pen and I spent hours in the harness-room cleaning bits, soaping saddles and rubbing neat’s-foot oil into reins and stirrup-leathers to keep them supple. At twelve we knew all there is to know about looking after and schooling a pony, and could put our knowledge into practice. The only reason why we were good riders rather than excellent ones, and our ponies adequately schooled rather than faultlessly so, was laziness. Schooling a horse to perfection requires almost as much dedication and self-discipline as training to be a ballet dancer – tedious exercises must be carried out every day and never skimped – and we would go about it only spasmodically because the temptation of riding simply for fun was too strong. Therefore, although I could go well out hunting, I was not exceptional when the finer points of horsemanship were called for. In the show-ring, if I did well in a jumping competition I always knew it was the result of luck: my pony had
happened
to take off the right distance before each fence, whereas the serious horseman is able to contrive that it will do so. I felt guilty about this.