Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (6 page)

Once a year one of the pigs was slaughtered in the lower yard. It was a good thing to be a girl then, feeling no challenge in this. Andrew, at the age of six, was moved by a mixture of curiosity and bravado to feel that he must watch, but it never occurred to me to do anything but stay as far from the yard as possible. Our cousin John was unable to admit that he felt as I did, so the two little boys went down to the yard together. Johnnie gave way before it was through, which was lucky for my brother, who could bolster his pride by sneering. ‘Johnnie was sick – he ran away and was sick into the beech-hedge – but I didn’t mind it at all.’ His face was still greenish as he spoke, and his eyes were furious and scared. I thought him a fool as well as disgusting.

And in spite of all that bravado over the pig-killing, it was I who had to kill the hedgehog.

Much of what we were taught by our elders we resented or at best endured; a great deal of it we were later to reject; but some things we accepted without question. These things went into our minds as the kind of lore to which additions can be made if experience warrants it, but which is essentially true. Into this category came anything to do with animals, whether tame or wild. This was accepted so readily because our elders’ attitude towards animals resembled our own, and also because it was obvious that on this subject the grown-ups knew what they were talking about. One article of the lore concerned sick or maimed animals: they must be cured if possible, but if it wasn’t they must be killed quickly and efficiently ‘to put them out of their agony’. We had not only been told this, but had seen it in operation. Out with a gentle-hearted aunt, we had come across a rabbit in a trap. We had seen her tempted to believe that it was less badly hurt than it was, but conclude that it could only die a slow death; we had seen her find a heavy stick and, making an obvious effort to overcome pity and revulsion, kill it with a blow to the skull. Hindsight suggests that there was sometimes confusion as to whose agony was being ended, the victim’s or the spectator’s, but there was no sadism in it: we knew that a hated deed had been performed because it had the moral weight of a duty.

My brother and I found the dying hedgehog in the Cedar Walk – the ornamental plantation which girdled the kitchen garden. It could still move feebly, but something terrible had happened to it and there was a ragged wound in its side. Andrew stooped over it, and recoiled. ‘It’s got maggots.’ I overcame my horror to peer. The hedgehog was rotting alive.

We knew we should kill it. We looked at each other, I hoping he would say ‘I’ll find a stick.’ Instead Andrew backed away and said ‘I can’t.’ This collapse put him in my hands. I could have tormented him with it, but instead I felt suddenly aware of my seniority, and protective. I didn’t blame him for dropping his front – he was closer to me for it – and I knew that I must assume responsibility.

A hedgehog has a very small head and a body which, because of its spines, can’t be gripped. I couldn’t touch it, anyway – my revulsion was such that I could look at it only out of the corners of my eyes. Part of the duty is that death should be instantaneous, so it was out of the question to rain random blows on the hedgehog with a stick: I needed to find a weapon large and heavy enough to be sure of crushing its head even if my aim was not exact. We were near the boiler-house built against the outside of the kitchen-garden wall to heat the vinery on the wall’s other side. ‘We could put it in the stove,’ said Andrew sickly. We knew that we couldn’t, but it drew my attention to the building which had recently been repaired. There was a pile of bricks beside it. ‘A brick,’ I said. ‘Suppose you don’t hit hard enough?’, and I imagined striking the blow only to see the hedgehog worse maimed than before but still alive. But if I put the brick on top of the hedgehog and jumped on it with all my weight …

Andrew backed further away. Telling myself, ‘Don’t think, just do, it’s got to be done, don’t think,’ I ran for the brick, put it in place and jumped, all as fast as I could. There was a sensation rather than a sound of crunching, but I was hardly aware of it; it was as though I were running away from horror so fast that it couldn’t catch up. But before I could in fact run I still had to kick the brick away to make sure the hedgehog was finished. I kicked it, and we bolted. Relief that it was over swept away the horror, and pride filled me at having been able to do the impossible. I felt strong, and Andrew was subdued by admiration, but there was no question of triumphing over him because we had shared the experience too closely. Soon we started laughing and pushing each other about. Many years later I was to hear someone arguing that the elation of soldiers coming out of battle after having killed proved the existence of mankind’s murderous impulses. ‘Fool!’ I thought. ‘The murderous impulses exist, no doubt, but
that
’s no proof of them. They’re elated because they’ve
survived
killing.’ I myself, although I didn’t know it then, had used up my whole reservoir of courage for killing. Never again would I be able to put an animal ‘out of its agony’, however extreme that agony was.

In spite of this concern for animals ours was a hunting, shooting family: many pheasants, partridges, ducks and hares were killed every winter for its pleasure. No foxes – but only because it was not fox country; the hounds were harriers. The children and women often sprang traps set to catch the ‘vermin’ which might interfere with sport, but the women also walked out with the guns and most of them rode to hounds as soon as they were old enough to handle a pony. We were proud of the good shots and good horsemen among us, and aspired to a similar expertise. We and our cousins would have thought anyone arguing against blood sports thoroughly pubby.

I didn’t want to shoot or watch shooting, though I didn’t question that shooting was part of adult life; my brother was impatient for his first gun. He had no wish to hunt; I daydreamed about it from the day I was first taken out on a leading-rein. My preference for riding to hounds was determined partly by the fact that the rider does not himself inflict death and needn’t even see it, and partly by the inexactness of my eye which meant that I would never be able to shoot well, whereas I was good at riding. Andrew had a good eye but lacked confidence on a horse. Both of us would have adored a tame fox or hare or pheasant, and liked stories of hunted game being saved from pursuers – we could imagine ourselves tricking hounds onto a false scent and sheltering a panting animal in our arms until it could run safely away. We had no inkling of the inconsistency of our attitudes.

The reason why enjoying blood sports and loving animals didn’t seem contradictory to us was because the two things occupied different areas of experience. The sports were a matter of acquiring skills which were difficult and exciting to practise, of proving yourself able and brave, and of graduating to the status of adult. And not only did they seem as inevitable as the seasons, but they were felt to be particularly
ours
: class came into it, even for the very young. On the whole ‘poor people’ didn’t hunt or shoot. Those who did, and were good at it, had special merit because their ability was surprising; those who did, and were bad at it, were comic. We felt that these activities and the rituals which surrounded them were somehow part of the superiority with which our families were blessed: an attitude so intrinsic to higher-class rural life at the time that you needed to be distanced from that life in some way in order to escape it.

Against this, loving animals was much like loving people: we didn’t think of ourselves as ‘loving dogs’ or ‘loving horses’, but as loving Lola and Kim, Acoushla and Cinders. No one was personally acquainted with the animals which were pursued and killed – they were not unlike those distant Chinese children who, it was said, would be glad to eat up cold rice pudding. It was a pity that Chinese children were hungry, and it was a pity that game animals were frightened and killed, but what could you do about it? Whereas your dog and the pony you rode were your
close friends
, and what was more: they shared your pleasures. It was obvious that gun-dogs loved to play their part in a shoot, and that there was nothing a pony enjoyed more than being ridden to hounds.

Take Cinders, for example. He was not my first pony – that had been Molly, a dear old ambulant bean-bag whose role, played to perfection, had been to inspire trust. Cinders was my first pony for proper riding, with whom I continued until I outgrew him at about twelve; and he was a wicked bully. The theory was that because he had not been gelded until he was three, he still believed himself to be a stallion – and he did, indeed, chivvy the mares into groups and threaten approaching rivals although they were all twice his size. He also, when out to grass, used to bully children, so that trying to catch him was always a drama. He would flatten his ears, roll his eyes and chase us back over the fence, then swivel round and launch a kick in our direction as though mocking us. Often we would have to call our mother, who had mastered him long ago by swearing at him in a loud voice and beating him with a walking-stick. He never tried his tricks on her. It took me a long time to summon up the same authority over him, but I finally succeeded. And the lovable thing about Cinders was that once his opponent managed to get a bridle on him he called it quits not only with a good grace but with generosity: no pony displayed more evident enjoyment in our rides, or was more eager to take on a formidable obstacle when out hunting. Once we came to a place where the way out of a field had been blocked by a sheep-pen – a rectangle of hurdles – so that the jump was an in-and-out. I was on the verge of hesitation, but Cinders would have none of that, and bounced me over this double jump so stylishly that when, a few days later, the Master of Hounds met my father he described it as ‘a splendid sight’. It must in fact have been nearer comic than splendid – pure Thelwell – because Cinders was a tubby little pony and I, at that time, wore round glasses and two short pigtails which assorted oddly with the bowler hat
de rigueur
when out hunting. But luckily for me, I was aware only of the glory of it. Discovering that you were braver than you thought, and the delightful collaboration with your beloved mount: those were the joys of riding to hounds as far as I was concerned, and firmly though I turned against blood sports once I had grown up, I was never able to regret having once known those joys.

On Cinders, when he was very young: ‘pure Thelwell’

 

‘You ’ont never do it
that
way, bor,’ said our best friend, Wilfred, who was the cowman’s son, when my brother was trying to knock a tin of paint off a beam in the loft by lashing at it with a piece of cord. He said ‘bor’ (boy) not because he was much older – he was the same age as I was – but because in Norfolk everyone was ‘bor’, just as everything was ‘little’ and ‘old’ (‘That’s a funny li’l old car’, we might say, hoping to sound like our friend). ‘You ’ont never do it that way, bor, that ain’t the way to go about it.’

Piqued, my brother said snootily: ‘Why do you always say
ain’t
? The proper way to say it is
isn’t
.’

‘You’re wrong there,’ said Wilfred placidly. ‘The proper way to say it is
is not
.’

And snubs to us, I thought, with surprise and pleasure. It was not Wilfred’s scoring over my brother that pleased me, but his scoring over both of us, because for a moment I had identified with the jibe and had simultaneously been made to feel uncomfortable by it. For a flash, we had both belonged to a world superior to Wilfred’s, which had felt wrong. His answer had demolished that superiority and had given him a dignity which I wanted him to possess. I was, after all, in love with him, though not so passionately as I was with the gardener’s boy who was romantically distanced by being in his teens.

If blood sports were as inevitable as the seasons, class differences were as natural as weather; and thus, like the sports, embraced contradictions which we failed to perceive.
Of course
Wilfred was our best friend – we itched every day for the moment when we could scoot across the park to the farm and join him – and a friend not only congenial, but admirable. He went to bed later than we did, for one thing, and ate tinned salmon which we were not allowed, and knew more than we did about farming matters. He was also more sober and responsible than we were, so if he condemned something as silly we expected him to be right. And he was handsome: I often put him in peril in my daydreams so that I could rescue him and perhaps even kiss him before he recovered consciousness. Yet in spite of all this he never came into our house and we never went into his. We might call for him, or he for us, but then the caller would wait shyly by the door while an adult summoned the one called on. And neither side even noticed this.

In spite of taking class too much for granted to question it, we were not unaware of it. We knew it because this whole place belonged to us (to our grandparents, but we made no distinction). The house, the park, the lake, the farm and other farms as far as we ever had occasion to walk or ride: all ours. No other house known to us was so big or appeared on yellowing postcards sold in the village post office. We knew it because when our mother overheard us boasting to a visiting child that the house had twenty bedrooms, she told us afterwards that we must never talk like that: it was ill-bred to boast of what you had to anyone who had less. We knew it because when I had been impertinent to a housemaid I had been sharply scolded: ‘You must
never
be rude to servants because, you see, they can’t answer back’ (they could, and did – but it was true that they couldn’t punish me: I saw that, and granted justice to the dictum). We knew it, too, because we had heard grown-ups ask ‘Is he not a gentleman?’ or describe someone as ‘not quite’, and the tone of voice was rich in meaning. There was nothing wrong in being a gamekeeper or a ploughman, a butler or a cook, a saddler or a tailor, but these people existed on another plane; and if someone who belonged on that plane tried to behave as though he didn’t, he became both deplorable and comic. There was likely to be a strong taint of pubbiness about such a person, and our natural appetite for victims made this idea acceptable. Indeed, we found this little-considered but pervasive sense of class sustaining: one can hardly fail to feel the better for being sure one is the best.