Jerusalem the Golden (5 page)

Of hymns, too, she made her own use. She was not alone in this,
for most of the girls at her school managed to infuse a certain erotic passion into their rendering of various appeals to the Creator, and there was one girl, who fancied herself in love with a naval cadet, who could actually produce real tears during the singing of

Eternal Father, strong to save

Whose arm doth bind the restless wave.

She was a truly wondrous sight: her prestige for this feat was enormous. Clara never managed to do anything nearly as impressive, but nevertheless she had her own private favourites; she was not without a vulgar inclination towards

Jesu, lover of my soul,

Let me to thy bosom fly,

an inclination which she shared with every other girl in the school, but her own particular choice was a hymn by J. M. Neale, the first verse of which ran:

Jerusalem the Golden

With milk and honey blest

Beneath thy contemplation

Sink heart and voice oppressed

I know not, oh, I know not

What social joys are there

What radiancy of glory

What light beyond compare.

The combination of the words and the music of this hymn could unfailingly elevate her to a state of rapt and ferocious ambition and desire; she pictured, even at a most tender age, not the pearly gates and crystal walls and golden towers of some heavenly city, but some truly terrestrial paradise, where beautiful people in beautiful houses spoke of beautiful things. It must have been the word ‘social’ that created for her this image, a word judiciously expunged from later
versions of the verse. And it seemed to her that that broken line, ‘I know not, oh, I know not’, expressed a level of passion as high as any the English language could achieve; the interjection and the repetition and the archaic inversion were to her the exhaled breath of yearning.

She also sought, of course, the more usual and natural means of escape and fantasy, such as the watching of advertisements, the reading of fiction, and the spinning of self-indulgent romances, but her experience of life as a child was so narrow that she had no way of telling the possible from the absurd. And even as a child she wanted things to be possible. She read with avidity the endlessly cosy adventures of wealthy children on farms and in smugglers’ caves and country houses, but she found built into them a warning against too much belief. They did not sufficiently approach the reality that she knew, whereas the threat of the straightness of the gate seemed unfailingly significant. Moreover, children’s stories and advertisements never offered any true complication, and it was complication, in the absence of conviction, that she was seeking. She did not believe that the wicked could be caught by ten-year-old children and returned to the police station in exchange for a pony, any more than she believed that constant hot water would make young mothers smile constantly with relief and proud love. Her mother had constant hot water, and she did not smile. She searched in vain in these golden childish worlds for the true brittle glitter of duplicity, for the warm shine of wider, more embracing landscapes; she looked for half-truth, for precious qualification, for choice, for possible rejections, and she could not find them. The advertisement life was better than her own, but it was crude, amoral: it lacked both virtue and vice.

The books about children with ponies were books from the library. The books which were in the house were of another kind and pursued a different and more old-fashioned simplification; some of them were indeed Victorian in fact as well as in tone, relics of her grandmother’s childhood. Nobody read them but Clara, and she read them only because she read everything. They preached the lessons of moderation, cleanliness, simplicity, self-denial and humility with an admirable thoroughness, low-church to the core; not an
angel or a lily disfigured their pages. Their only appeal to Clara lay in their austerity, which sometimes reached a point where it bordered on the dangerously extreme; there was one sad tale, for instance, of a little girl who cared for her cruel stepmother with unfailing devotion, and who died of pneumonia after running out in her nightgown to look for her stepmother’s cat. But her favourite was a book called
The Golden Windows
, a Sunday School prize of her mother’s. This was a book of fables, most of them pointing in the inevitable direction; the title story told, with some charm, of a little boy who saw from a hillside while out walking a house whose windows were all of gold. He searched for this wonderful house, but could not find it, and was returning home disappointed when he realized that the house was his own house, and that the gold was merely the reflection of the sun. The moral of this story, was, she assumed, that one must see the beauty in what one has, and not search for it elsewhere; but it carried with it, inseparably, the real sadness of the fading windows, and the fact that those within the house could never see them shine. There was another story about a blind mother, whose son did not return after the battle; she wept when he did not return, and asked the survivors if they had seen a young and lovely boy lying slain, dressed in delicately embroidered garments of fine silk, and the survivors said, No, they had seen no boy, but they had seen a great bearded man dead, and he had worn tied about his waist strange garments, torn and faded and old, which had once been embroidered with flowers. Clara did not understand this story, but it seemed to her to tell of an emotion a size larger than pathos. The most interesting story of all, however, was called ‘The Two Weeds’. In this tale, two weeds grew on a river bank; one of them conserved its energy, and grew low and small and brown, with its sights set on a long life, while the other put forth all its strength into growing tall and into colouring itself a beautiful green. During the summer, these two weeds reviled each other, as fabulous creatures will; the lowly weed accused its brother of grandiose, spendthrift ambitions, and the tall weed called the low weed mean and miserly. At the end of the summer, a beautiful girl passed, and she saw the tall weed, and plucked it and put it in her dress, where it blushed a glorious red
and died content; the weed on the bank saw it die, and laughed, and reflected that it would live till the next year. And it did.

The curious feature of this tale was its moral ambivalence. By every law of the genre, the death of the tall weed should have vindicated the life of the other, as the death of the grasshopper vindicates the ants, but the story somehow did not end that way. Incredibly enough, it seemed to end with a choice. It would hardly have been possible for it to support beauty and extravagance and pleasure at the expense of mere survival, but it did at least hint that such a view could be held, and its mere admission of this possibility was to Clara profoundly satisfying. Each time she read the story, she experienced a new shock; it was the shock of finding the new contained and expressed in the framework and the terms of the old. In such context, between such gilt-lettered cloth-bound boards, the concession was nothing less than munificent.

When she was eleven, Clara, like her brother Alan before her, acquired a Grammar School place. Her mother, although of the mentality that refuses such places because of the price of the uniform, was luckily not in a social or financial position where she could reasonably do so, and although she was often unreasonable enough, she did not like to appear to be so in the eyes of the whole neighbourhood, so she constrained her parsimony and her innate distrust of education into selecting the less distinguished of the schools available, on the grounds that the bus fare was cheaper. It was a large, rather forbidding and gloomy building, called Battersby Grammar School, and it was on the fringe of that decayed, desolate, once-grand grey fringe that surrounds the centres of most cities; the houses in this area, large and terraced and of some dignity, had been long abandoned by the middle classes, and were now occupied by families who could not afford to live anywhere else. An occasional member of the fugitive genteel stuck it grimly out until death; once Clara was accosted by an old lady, battered and ragged and bent, who said as she walked along, and in accents of refined madness, that once the people that lived there had held their heads up high. Clara, a poor audience with her twisted knee socks, did not know what she meant.

The shabbiness of the district and the dingy gloom of the school itself meant nothing to Clara. To her, the building was endlessly exciting, and she liked it for all the reasons that most people would specify as particular causes for dislike. She liked its huge, barn-like, inhuman bleakness, its corridors shoulder-high in dark green, shoulder-to-ceiling in pale peppermint, its vast lukewarm radiators, its muddy echoing boards, its tall, high, dirty windows. She liked the cloakrooms and the lockers, the sense of institution, the rows and rows of washbowls and lavatories, the accessibility of the drinking fountains. She liked the way it stood, distinct and certain, rising out of the level muddy waste of grass and tarmac that generously surrounded it: a bomb had fallen during the war, on a neighbouring chapel, and the site had been levelled out and was now an unofficial part of the school’s playgrounds. The whole area was of a bleak airiness, and a cold wind seemed to blow incessantly upon it, turning the knees and knuckles of the girls pink and blue, and snatching away their obligatory berets the moment they emerged from the school porch. Clara did not mind the cold, for she liked anything that was not small and cramped and heartlessly cosy; she liked the nameless multitudes that tramped mud on the cloakroom floors and left hairs in the cloakroom basins, and liked them because they were nameless, because they were not her mother and Alan and Arthur. Domesticity appalled her, and she nourished in it, despite a yearning for the comfortlessly grand.

She liked, too, the work. She found it easy: to begin with, she found everything easy, as her memory for facts was remarkable, and it was only as she grew older that she began to notice in herself slight doubts about her ability to pursue higher physics and mathematics. The subject known, broadly, as Science was at first her favourite, because she liked playing with Bunsen burners: at home she was not allowed even to switch on the gas fire. She liked it also because of the power which she most rapidly acquired over Mrs Hill, her science teacher: the first power of her life.

Mrs Hill was a small, plump, middle-aged woman, with fine frizzy hair which she encased in a fine frizzy hair net; she always wore a purple and blue flowered pinny, a garment more in keeping with an
aunt or a cleaner than with a lover of science. She handled her apparatus with the efficient familiarity with which other women handle their baking boards and rolling pins; years of housework had left their mark on her. She had no children, but, unlike most of the staff, she had a husband, and the girls could detect in her manner a faint abstraction, a slight absence from the ingrown matters of school life. She was set apart, by her overall and her laboratory and her marital status, which was lucky for her, as her position otherwise would have been truly grim. For she was one of those born failures as a disciplinarian, one of those teachers whose classes know they can do anything they want. If she had been an ordinary teacher, trying to teach an ordinary sedentary subject like history or Latin, she would have been mercilessly flouted and mocked, but as it was she managed to get by. For one thing, her subject was in itself appealing to most of the girls, or at least intermittently so; they enjoyed watching crystals grow, and weighing small things on small scales, and making little bits of sodium whizz round saucers of water, so they quite voluntarily offered her their attention from time to time. But her great quality was a capacity for being genuinely impervious to inattention. She did not really care whether people listened or not; she was interested herself in what she was saying, and she was quite happy to potter about from bench to bench watching people writing their diaries when they should have been writing up their experiments. Her blackboard technique was also extremely idiosyncratic; she would write up equations, get them wrong, mumble to herself, rub them out, look them up in a book, and all this without any suspicion that she might be forfeiting the confidence of her pupils.

The girls, although they did not know it, found her relaxing. They affected to despise her, but they did not find their contempt a strain, whereas the other really bad disciplinarian in the school, a Geography mistress, one Miss Riley, inflicted on them an intolerable suffering, for they felt themselves compelled to torment her, and she would sit before them, thin and pretty and anguished, making vain attempts to restore order, miserably transparent in her misery, and unable to conceal the depths of her humiliation – depths which frightened them, but which they could not leave unplumbed. Mrs Hill, on the other
hand, with her vague indifference, did not rouse their cruelty, so their behaviour in her classes left them unashamed. Their behaviour was at times appalling; when little they would spend long stretches of each class on the floor behind the benches, playing with bits of mercury, pricking it with needles and pen nibs, watching it slip into the coarse splintery cracks of the dusty floorboards, and forcing it out again, marvelling at the way it shrugged the dirt off its rounded shoulders. When older, bored with such simple pleasures, they sought new diversions, such as burning holes in the benches with the Bunsen burners. On one occasion Clara’s class purchased a pound of sausages, took them in with them, and roasted them on one of the burners, and ate them, in full scent and in fairly good view; Mrs Hill appeared not to notice, and talked quietly on of Boyle’s law. Clara did not enjoy her sausage, for it was burned black on the outside and raw in the middle, and her mother had told her that it was impossible not to get worms from raw sausage meat, but the taste of the damp mince with its bitter crust remained a strong reminder of illicit pleasure.

Mrs Hill took a fancy to Clara. Clara, when she became aware of it, was not displeased, because although the other girls laughed, she knew enough of the world to know that no affection, however oddly won or placed, is laughable or negligible. Other teachers and other girls were forever taking fancies to each other, but there was something strangely eccentric about Mrs Hill’s fancy, just as her whole position in the school was eccentric. It was in no way intense, and indeed coming from such a figure it could not help but appear a little maternal; Mrs Hill did not seem to discover anything odd in her own attitude, and would consult Clara’s opinion without any attempts at subterfuge or bravado; she would defer to Clara’s position in the class by outrageously open remarks such as ‘Now, Clara, you’re the only girl likely to remember what I said last week’, or ‘Well, I suppose I’m wasting my breath on all but Clara Maugham’. This frankness was so unprecedented that the girls could not resent it; they could not, in the context of school behaviour, take it seriously enough to resent it. They giggled about it, and Clara giggled too, and that was that. Clara even grew quite fond of Mrs Hill, and proud of herself for feeling fond of one so odd.