Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (7 page)

It was rare, however, for us to be offensive – perhaps the
ain’t –
is not
incident was the only one of its kind between us and Wilfred. We had few occasions for the open exercise of snobbery: most of the people we knew were of our own class or else of the rural working class which was shaped by economics and custom to fit in with ours. Other people were more likely to be seen at a distance than known. There was, for instance, a girl who came out hunting in a top hat and patent-leather boots – a sort of music-hall parody of the clothes worn for hunting in the shires, which even in its purest form would have been ‘wrong’ in our county, where the pack was an unpretentious one. We were careful not to look at her too pointedly – it was embarrassing that she didn’t know that she was a figure of fun – and were civil if we had to speak to her. But when we were among ourselves she was laughed at and despised, and none of us questioned our own attitude.

There was, however, a counter-weight to class snobbery which was felt particularly by children: humility about abilities evidently superior to their own, and about things outside their own experience. A lot of Londoners were said to be very ‘common’ – but they lived in London! Even when very young these people could find their way about in complex, noisy streets, knew which buses went where, went often to the cinema, ate fish and chips, ice-cream and tinned peaches … However unthinkingly our own class-superiority was accepted in theory, in practice it was possible for some ‘inferior’ person’s gifts or sophistication to be seen as impressive and enviable. The smugness was formidable, but it was not quite leak-proof.

Being country children, we were inclined to despise toys: doing something with real objects was more satisfying than playing with sham ones. Beloved White Rabbit, back almost in my babyhood, was a person not a toy. Andrew’s comforter was a ragged bit of shawl called Shollah Baa; Patience’s was a blanket called Blanket; mine was White Rabbit. He didn’t have much hair, sat up on his hind legs, and held a carrot between his paws: and I wouldn’t know that I’d thought of him as a person if I didn’t remember so clearly what I felt when they took him away.

He had lost one eye and his carrot, his ears had twice come off and been sewn on again by Nanny, he was no longer white. But what decided them – my mother and Nanny – that he must go was that he’d started to leak sawdust into my cot every night. They must have had a discussion about how he could be removed without distressing me too much, and my mother must have been delighted when she hit on a solution: she went back to the shop where she had bought him and found that they still had his twin. So one evening when I went to bed I found, to my horror, a stranger lying on my pillow.

I howled. And the more they kept saying ‘But look – he’s just the same’ the worse it was. How could they not understand that someone looking like someone else didn’t mean that he was that person? They had taken White Rabbit away, and what had they done to him? Where was he now? He was all alone, he was lost – it was dreadful to think what he must be feeling … and Mummy couldn’t understand that this silly white stranger couldn’t possibly make it better. Indeed White Rabbit was not a toy: he gave me my first experience of grief for another’s pain, and my first awareness that grown-ups could be fallible.

Later, I had just two toys worth playing with, the first of which was my farm. The lead animals arrived in flocks at birthdays and Christmases, until they covered a good part of the drawing room floor when properly set out. There were buildings, tractors, wagons and people, too – and fencing, though never enough of that. ‘What do you want for your farm this Christmas?’ – ‘More fencing.’ – ‘Are you sure, darling? Isn’t it rather dull?’ They didn’t see that I needed to enclose more land because it was absurd to have cows, sheep, horses and pigs all in one field, as they never were in real life. What I envisaged was a
proper
farm, with a realistic number of enclosures, even some fields empty of animals because they were down to wheat or sugar-beet …

The Meccano set, too, reproduced real things: cranes which lifted loads, bridges which could be winched up to let ships through. Because I was lazy, and was believed to have little practical sense, everyone was surprised when I commandeered this set which belonged to Johnnie who was away at school. I was clever with it, working patiently on elaborate constructions, and (as I’d been with the farm) anxious to possess more parts so that I could achieve greater verisimilitude. But this addiction was so uncharacteristic that no one trusted it to last, and Meccano was expensive – so ‘my’ set was reclaimed by its owner, and I accepted that my interest in it had been no more than a whim … accepted, but with regret. I had an inkling that unrecognized capabilities were being written off. And I was right. Many years later, first needlepoint, then dress-making, then gardening were to prove that I am indeed much better at doing things with my hands than my elders, followed by myself, had supposed.

Laziness: it was laziness that made one drift in the direction towards which they pushed one. In spite of the energy children put into their activities, it is inertia which most threatens their development into rational beings (‘Why can’t you behave like a rational being?’ an early governess, much despised, used to say to me – so often that the expression became a joke, meaning nothing but this woman’s silliness). Our greatest pleasures were those which were most accessible. Like almost all children we thought jelly the most delicious of foods, and jelly is the food which offers least resistance. Do what is fun, don’t do what is difficult: that was the principle we followed. And the grown-ups, recognizing that this principle is innate in everyone, believed that our upbringing should combat it. They thought it would be hard on us to grow up unaware that people often have to do things they don’t immediately want to do – not only to fit in with other people but also, sometimes, to reach ends desired by themselves.

So you must wash your hands before coming to the table; you must shut – not bang – doors behind you; you must remember to say ‘please’ and ‘thank-you’; given chocolates, you must offer them round before eating one yourself; you mustn’t shove or grab or shout; you must go to bed without fuss when the time comes: ‘manners’, though considered important in themselves, were also insisted on as being character-forming. The rules, laid down clearly, reached back to a time before we could remember, so that following them wasn’t painful. We would not have observed them if we had not been made to, but we didn’t resent them more than any other tiresome but inevitable thing such as thistles in grass or pebbles on beaches. It seemed natural to me that I should be made to conform to certain patterns of social behaviour, just as it seemed natural that I had to sit down to lessons, like it or not (though I should not have believed it if someone had told me that I would end up deeply grateful for having been taught how to parse a sentence).

In theory grown-ups, particularly our mother, would have liked to go further in character-forming. She saw the social viability conferred by these mild disciplines as minimal, and would have liked us to become individuals of exceptional ability and virtue. What we would need for this was ‘will-power’.

She had a decisive, even slightly high-handed manner and bright blue eyes, so she used to appear formidable when she spoke of willpower. We understood it to be something by which the old Adam could be controlled, the lazy could become energetic, the stupid clever. Together with ‘self-control’ it propped an austere ideal: a way of life in which you were indifferent to comfort, ate only for the energy food provides, never thought about yourself, and accomplished great achievements.

It was an attractive idea. When I was about eleven it seemed to me that I only had to get the knack of it and I would be able to move mountains – or at least an oak tree (I was riding through the park as I thought this). I decided then and there that every day I would do one thing I didn’t want to do, limbering up gradually to mountain-moving strength. As I advanced in the discipline I would become able to do long division, then my painful progress through Latin would become swift and smooth, and then greater rewards would appear – power not only over myself (might I become able to levitate?) but over other people and things. The kind of achievement will-power would make possible blurred in my mind with the rewards of faith, which were also sometimes canvassed, though in church and scripture lessons rather than by my mother. To silence a thunderstorm, for instance, by saying ‘Peace, be still’, as Jesus had done: I had failed when I tried to do that because the muscles of my will were still too feeble: I would have to believe
much
more strongly if I was going to bring it off. Surely getting out of bed the minute I woke up in the morning, or saying ‘no’ to a peach at dessert would be a small daily price to pay for being able to do that?

Not, however, one single step in this programme did I take: by the next day my mind was occupied with other things. And this was also exactly what happened to my mother who, in spite of her positive manner, was as far as any child from putting her principles into practice. However authoritatively she spoke about will-power, her only conspicuous exercise of it was in getting what she wanted; and although I didn’t consciously compare the image of my mother as austere and puritanical with that of my mother in action, or draw any recognized conclusion from these obviously contradictory images, both images were nevertheless there: it was an evident fact of life that stern resolutions were more often broken than kept.

Luckily this was also true about pocket money. Just as Mum would have liked to have had will-power, so she would have liked to have been sensible about money. If her own upbringing had equipped her badly for this there was all the more reason to see to it that her children’s equipped them well. Her usual slapdash way of handing out pennies or sixpences whenever we wanted to buy sweets or an ice-cream would obviously lead us to suppose money appeared from the blue whenever we wanted: it would be unfair to us and likely to lead to tiresomeness, as she knew from her own experience. So: ‘From today you are each going to get sixpence a week pocket money, and you’ll have to think very carefully how you spend it because you won’t get a penny more.’ Each time she said this we felt alarmed. Her manner was so firm that we couldn’t doubt the reality of the tedious responsibility with which we were now going to have to live. How depressing, simply
not being able
to buy a pennyworth of acid drops on a Thursday because of Tuesday’s fudge: trotting across the park to make delicious choices in the little post-office-cum-village-shop was one of life’s pleasures. But it would be weak and babyish not to accept the challenge, so we would take our first sixpences and soberly resolve to do our best.

The first sixpences of a pocket money drive were always the last. What with one thing and another she would forget about it.

Once she had an idea about our upbringing which was supposed to be liberating rather than disciplinary. She had met a high-minded and progressive couple, and she must at that time have been in a mood of defiance against her own background. No doubt she thought it odd, at first, that their children called them by their first names, and even odder that none of their doors was ever locked, so that a child could enter the bathroom while its father or mother was naked in the bath, but after the first surprise she took to these ideas, suddenly seeing that the time had come to prove herself a modern mother. She came home from that visit bright-eyed, though a little less decisive than usual: she didn’t say we
must
call her and Dad by their Christian names, only that we could if we wanted to; and that because it was silly and unhealthy to be embarrassed by nakedness, she
wouldn’t mind
if we happened to see her without clothes. Clearly she was half-hoping for these innovations rather than ordaining them. ‘Good heavens!’ was what we thought, staring at her with a mixture of admiration and embarrassment at her daring. We saw at once that she was doing the sort of thing we did ourselves, defying the established order in a fit of ‘over-excitement’. It was generous of her, but it was also foolish. We did try out their Christian names once or twice, for the fun of it, but ‘Mummy’ and ‘Daddy’ meant what they meant, whereas the names were empty, so there was no point in going on with it. And as for seeing my mother and father naked – that was a most uncomfortable idea. Child to child, nakedness was nothing; child to adult, it was outside our experience and ought to stay there. So progressive informality went the way of pocket money. Lines of conduct or systems of any sort, apart from those hallowed by custom, were too much trouble to keep up. Our laziness, although it was often chided by the grown-ups, was sheltered by theirs.

My own lack of will-power worried me in only one way, which fortunately cropped up only when lessons included doing sums. At these I was so bad that I felt it must be blameworthy. The others understood ‘fractions’ and ‘decimals’ quite easily, so surely I too ought to be able to understand them – surely if I tried hard enough I could? I never did, so that must mean that although I felt that I was trying hard enough, I wasn’t. I was never bullied about it – indeed, much kindness and patience went into attempts to help me – but I still felt twinges of guilt from time to time. It wasn’t until many years into adulthood that I learnt something that suggested the incapacity was not my fault.

Five counters of different colours lined up on a table; the three-year-old child, already so good at the alphabet, being taught to count: one, two, three, four, five. I get it right at once and Mummy is delighted: ‘Look, she can count up to five already!’ But by the time an audience has collected the counters have been shuffled, and this time I say ‘Five, two, four, three, one’. ‘No, darling …’ but I insist ‘Yes’. They try again and again, until suddenly someone understands that I had never been counting, I had been naming. The yellow counter at the end of the row is called ‘five’, and it is still called ‘five’ when it comes at the beginning. They have to give up or I would be in tears at their misunderstanding. It was many days before I grasped what they meant by ‘counting’, and I was to remain a namer, not a numberer, for the rest of my life: a trait as innate as colour blindness, for which I could justifiably feel regret, but not guilt.