Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (20 page)

Diana Athill, 2000

L
OOKING BACK, I
see that I moved away from childhood expecting the answer ‘Yes!’ And to begin with it was a return to Eden – to the house, the horses, the dances, the freedom to read what I liked – and an Eden with wider horizons than formerly. There was a year between school and university which I spent at home as a grown-up, which might have become claustrophobic if I had thought it would last longer than that, but Oxford was coming and after Oxford real life, so I felt free to luxuriate in that year rather than to chafe at its restrictions.

It is extraordinary that in 1935–36 anyone could have felt so sure that the future was going to be happy. At school we had access to all the serious newspapers and weeklies, and were encouraged to think about what we read. Considering myself a serious-minded girl, I had also read a certain amount of left-wing and pacifist literature: I knew that Britain was a scandalous mess and that the Versailles Treaty had sown the seeds of a second world war, and I had responded by glibly declaring myself a socialist and a pacifist. But my guts were not listening to my head.

I was not alone in this. The Sunday
Observer
, more than any other newspaper, was alert to what was going on in Germany and prescient as to where it was heading: every weekend its Cassandra-like leaders wailed their warning. And my father cancelled his subscription. This was not because he disbelieved the message, but because he found it all too easy to believe. He knew what he was going to do when the worst happened: he was on the reserve, so he would be back in the Army straight away without a moment’s hesitation; but he was damned if he was going to waste good time brooding on it in advance. And I suppose I, in a less reasoned way, felt the same. But how I managed to make this work – to go on actually
feeling
as though my future was a happy one – I can’t explain.

Perhaps it was being in love, and knowing at last that the man I called Paul in
Instead of a Letter
, for whose response I had been waiting trustfully since I was fifteen, was now in love with me. We were going to be married (he was in the RAF, flying bombers: why was I not terrified for him?). So perhaps the gut-expectation of the answer ‘Yes!’ came from my certainty of that, as much as it did from conditioning. I ought to have been able to feel the reality of the ‘No!’ which was soon to come to the world’s peace, but I had no way of foreseeing the ‘No!’ ahead of me within my own life.

Both came. The gates of Eden clanged shut. I have told the story of unhappy love and my recovery from it in
Instead of a Letter
, so I will say no more here than that first his letters stopped coming, then one came asking me to release him from our engagement because he was about to marry someone else, and soon after that he was killed. I have also, in
Stet
, told the story of the good life I had in publishing in spite of this unhappiness – some of it even while the unhappiness was still there. And now I can see more clearly than I used to, how the roots of this life-saving career can be traced back to the childhood I have been describing in this book.

Someone from a family in which everyone obviously found books one of life’s main sources of pleasure could hardly fail to grab at a chance to work in publishing if offered. I had been brought up in the knowledge that books were fun, as well as important. My father’s passion for P. G. Wodehouse, which I shared, almost amounted to an addiction, so that when he came home with the latest Wodehouse which he, naturally, had to finish before anyone else could so much as touch it, I was so frantic at having to wait for it that I would have darted in and snatched it if he had given me the smallest chance. And at the same time the greatness of great writers was seen as greatness of the most solemn kind. Books were up there with nature and love as the things which mattered most.

And so, in my old age, they still are. To me the radio always meant music, so when my hearing began to go I listened less and less, and now not at all; and television, which never seemed as enjoyable as I hoped it would be, has become something for which I can rarely be bothered to walk into the next room (I wouldn’t dream of having it in my own). So books are impossible to do without.

Some of this dependence is a matter of habit: lacking a book which I actually want to read, I will munch away on one which means little to me, though never on one which annoys me – I would rather clean the silver or patch a sheet than do that. And when this happens, I will forget the book within a week. Most often it will be a novel because fiction, these days, has to be more than just well-written (as most of it is) to hold me. Like most of the old people I know, what I am looking for is material for my own imagination to work on, rather than experience predigested by someone else into a story.

The fiction-writers I am still able fully to enjoy are those like Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Pat Barker or Hilary Mantel who pay such close attention to their subject that one almost forgets their intervention between oneself and whatever it is. ‘Look-at-me!’ writing of the Martin Amis kind, much as it attracts many people, has always left me cold, as do fanciful capers however inventive. To me they seem to intrude between the reader and the raw material of life, rather than to illuminate it, and never having had much patience with them, now I have none. Although eccentricity does not necessarily put me off. A recent discovery, David Foster Wallace, who seems to be obsessional almost to the point of madness so that too often he threatens to smother the reader, has nevertheless done some of the best writing I have ever read, for which I am very grateful.

As well as turning more often to non-fiction, I indulge in another habit common among old people: rereading old favourites, some of them so old as to come from my earliest days. In the little Norfolk house where I spend many weekends there are shelves still full of books from my cousin’s childhood, many of which also figured in mine, and it is amusing to pull out, say,
The
Count of Monte Cristo
and find that it is, indeed, an excellent story; or one of Daphne du Maurier’s lesser works and think ‘Oh my God, how could I
ever
…!’ A few books which I read greedily, not in childhood but as a very young woman, I avoid reading again because I suspect they would fill me with shame: the novels of Charles Morgan, for instance, best sellers in their day, well reviewed and eagerly consumed by many, including me – and now I’m pretty sure they were pretentious garbage. And some of my most beloved books – those of Tolstoy and Jane Austen, for example – I have deliberately left aside for a long time because I want to come back to them once more before I die with a fresh eye.

Two other occupations which I love, and which came to me late in life as though they were discoveries, grew in fact from long-buried roots: gardening and needlework.

My mother and my aunts were enthusiastic and knowledgeable gardeners and I always enjoyed what their enthusiasm produced, but I never felt the smallest tingle of interest in the actual occupation of gardening – never pulled a weed or sowed a seed, or imagined myself doing so in the future, until I was in my sixties, when Barbara, leaving London to do a six-year stint for her paper in Washington, said to me rather apologetically: ‘Do you think you could just sort of keep an eye on the garden so that it doesn’t go
quite
wild?’ The garden was a neglected London lawn with a rose-bed at one side of it, full of valiant roses which had been old when we moved into the house. It had one crab-apple tree planted when Barbara’s son was born, a vast laurel and even vaster and fiendishly thorny pyracantha which combined to shade most of the space, and very little charm. It had served a happy purpose as a playground for children and habitat for guinea-pigs, but had never been much loved for itself. The day after Barbara left I leant out of my bedroom window, gave the garden a long look, and found myself thinking ‘There’s nothing for it: I’ll have to re-seed the lawn and do the whole thing over from scratch’. Which I did, at considerable expense of money and work, and as soon as one plant put into the earth by my own inexpert hands performed the miracle of actually
growing
, I was hooked.

Now, alas, I can no longer do more than a very little gardening with my own hands, and have had greatly to simplify the London garden; but in the much larger and more complicated Norfolk garden I have luckily been able to call on the help of a neighbour who is as full of ideas as she is of energy, and – as we tell each other constantly – ‘we are getting there’. And pottering about in it, doing the small things that I am still able to do, is a deep and peaceful pleasure.

That I also followed my mother into doing needlepoint embroidery is even odder, because I used to watch her at it with amazement – almost with horror – at the slowness of it, at the patience it required. If she decided that something had gone wrong, so that she must unpick what she had done and start again… no, I couldn’t see how anyone could bear such a task, and as for finding it enjoyable …! What tempted me into it was a book we published –
A Pageant of Pattern for Needlepoint Canvas
by a brilliant American amateur called Sherlee Lantz – which showed me that I could work to my own designs instead of following patterns painted on the canvas, as my mother had always done. Stitching your own design is far more exciting, because you are never quite sure how it’s going to turn out. I had always wanted to paint and had even gone through a spell as a Sunday painter, abandoned when I realized that I was not going to be able to give enough time to it to become any good. Now I discovered that if I didn’t think of myself as ‘drawing’, but simply as marking out what I wanted to put on the canvas – then I could in fact draw! And away I went, having a lovely time and not hesitating for a minute if it became apparent that something needed to be unpicked and done over again. It is true that there comes a time when one can’t think of anyone else for whom to make a cushion or a chair-seat or a fire-screen or a hanging … but all the same, I expect I shall go back to it when I have finished writing. There is something astonishingly satisfying about holding in your hands a physical object that didn’t exist until you made it.

If you took a group of octogenarians – let’s say a hundred old reservoirs of experience – my guess is that about a quarter of them would
look
as though their contents were mostly disagreeable: as though, if they were turned inside out, you would see disappointment, disapproval, pain. None of my family has looked like that, and neither do I. And my reluctant conclusion is that this is because of the privileges we all enjoyed as a result of being born into the upper reaches of the middle class, and in the country.

To take the simplest things first: we were fed on ample amounts of healthy food, all of it fresh, and we had access to up-to-date medical care and sanitation and were taught the basic rules of hygiene such as enough sleep, plenty of fresh air and exercise, and don’t drink too much. On top of that we were given good educations so that we could keep our minds occupied and find interest in a wide range of subjects, and enough leisure to indulge in enjoyable hobbies. And the standards of behaviour set by our forebears were reasonable, because they had not been
over
-privileged to the point of becoming arrogant or self-indulgent (that balance, I believe, has been important). In my generation, anyway, our childhood was directed with common sense as well as with love, and our surroundings were so secure and pleasant that we could be free of constant surveillance. And above all we lived in a place which we felt was ours and which we loved: we were rooted.

Of course I don’t mean that people with other backgrounds cannot flourish. It is self-evident that they do – and remarkably, so do some people with backgrounds insalubrious enough to cripple, proof that innate qualities can withstand lack of nurture in a marvellous way. Those are the people who most deserve celebration: the ones who challenge easy pessimism about humanity, and who have warmed me, when I have met them, with currents of hope. Two of them, Morris Stock and Daphne Anderson, I remembered in
Stet
; and a third, to my great good fortune has become a friend in my old age: Andrea Ashworth, whose
Once in a House on Fire
never fails to leave a sort of amazed happiness in those who read it. The opposite can also be true: people born in fortunate circumstances can prove to have natures which warp in spite of it. So it would be absurd to claim too much on the grounds of any individual’s experience, and all I mean to say is that it seems likely to be
easier
to reach a contented and sturdy old age if you have had my kind of luck, and I can’t imagine myself having done so without it. Apart from anything else, there is that ingrained self-confidence which comes from the indecent sense of superiority which we were allowed to have as children. My own surface self-confidence was smashed when Paul jilted me, and I am not sure that I would have survived without the support of the secret – the inadmissible – self-confidence which underlay it.

But chiefly it is the place for which I am grateful, not as it now is, but as it was. It is that which constantly makes its way to the top of the rag-bag of memories that I have become. Suddenly I will see the chaffinch’s nest which Pen and I found on a winter’s morning when, under a hard blue sky, every single twig and thread was coated with sparkling hoarfrost. Chaffinches make the neatest, prettiest nest of all, and that one had been turned into an exquisite miracle of silver and diamonds. Or the stream above the weir which marks the lake’s beginning, where it runs shallow under alders and we had decided to bathe naked – it seemed like a wild thing to do. We rode out to it bareback in nothing but cotton frocks, turned the ponies loose to graze, scrambled down the bank, stripped off our frocks – and found that the water didn’t even reach our knees. Having got so far we felt we had to lie down in it, which was cold and uncomfortable because the bottom was gravel, not mud, which was why the water running limpid over gold had looked so tempting. And no sooner had we pulled on our frocks and vaulted onto our ponies (bare pony under wet bare bottoms felt very odd) than Aunt Joyce appeared, walking her dog. Why, she asked, were we wet? So we had to tell her – would she think our nakedness wicked? But when she said it would have made more sense to choose a deeper place and wear swimsuits she was laughing, so that was all right. Or the huge old hollow oak at the bottom of the farm orchard, with flames roaring out of it as though it was a giant’s torch, when Andrew, then seven, had thought he could smoke out a wasps’ nest (or was it a hornets’?) by lighting a fire inside it – the tree went on burning all night. Or the two trees in the orchard which bore little yellow apples, delicious if eaten off the branch but useless otherwise, on the day when my mother and I took our watercolour boxes and sat down to paint them in blossom – oh, the smell of apple-blossom on a sunny day! …