Reflections (28 page)

The boy who kept talking of the Gestapo was only one of several disturbed children among us. The madness of those times got into the daughter of the sewing lady too. She began systematically pushing the younger children off high places. She told me and swore me to secrecy. I knew this was wrong. My grandfather haunted me in dreams and I kept telling myself that I was feeble not to tell someone—but I had sworn. Even so, when the girl pushed Isobel down a deep cellar I summoned my courage and told my mother. This caused a terrible row, as bad as the row in Wales, and I think that as a result of it my mother decided to leave Lane Head. She went to York to find a teaching job, leaving us in the charge of the other mothers. That night, the daughter of the sewing lady suggested it might be fun if I sneaked into her bedroom to eat aspirins with her. Feeling like an adventure, and also feeling bad at having betrayed this girl's trust, I did so. Aspirins were horrible. I swallowed mine with huge difficulty and asked her what she saw in them. Nothing, she said. It was just that you were forbidden to eat them. And she spat hers out on the carpet.

Here her mother irrupted into the room.

I remember that a Court of Justice was hastily convened. Three mothers. I stood accused of leaving my bed in order to spit aspirins all over another's carpet. I remember I was bemused to find that the other girl was not accused of anything. The sentence was that I and my bed were taken downstairs to a lumber room and I was to sleep there. I rebelled. I got up again and went into the forbidden lounge, where I did what I had always wanted to do and took down one of the heavy, slightly rusty Indian Army swords. I wondered whether to fall on it like a Roman. But since it was clear to me that this would hurt very much, I put it back and went out the open window. It was near sunset. The grass was thick with dew, but still quite warm to my bare feet. The sky was a miraculous clear auburn. I tried to summon courage to run away in my nightclothes. I wanted to. I also had a dim sense that it would be an effective move. But I could not make myself take another step. I went back to the lumber room knowing I was a coward.

In fact, when my mother came back late the next night, she thought I
had
run away—or been taken ill, since nobody had told her. I suspect that the punishment was aimed at her too. There were further rows before we left for York in September 1941.

Despite this, that time in the Lake District is still magical to me. The shape of the mountain across the lake has, like my grandfather, become part of my dreams. Since the mountain is called the Old Man of Coniston, they sometimes seem to be the same thing.

In York, we boarded in a nunnery. The blitz was on and the war was moving into its grimmest phase, which may have been why we never got enough to eat there. Granny—my Yorkshire grandmother—used to send us hoarded tins of baked beans which my mother heated in an old tin box over a gas ring in our bedroom.

 

Diana in Troutbeck Valley, the Lake District, 1985

 

My sister Ursula was now old enough to be a power. She was a white waif child with black, black hair and a commanding personality. While my mother was teaching, Ursula had various nannies, whom she ordered mercilessly about and did imitations of in the evenings. I had long known that Isobel was the best and most interesting of companions. It was marvelous to discover that Ursula, at two and a half, could make us fall about laughing. I knew I was lucky to have sisters.

My mother decided that Ursula was going to be an actress. Isobel, she told us, was beautiful but not otherwise gifted. As for me, she said, I was ugly, semidelinquent, but bright. She had the nuns put me in a class with nine-year-olds. This was the first time I knew that I was supposed to be clever. I did my best, but everything the class did was two years beyond me.

Religion was beyond me, too. The nuns, being an Anglican order, worshipped in York Minster and took us with them. This huge and beautiful cathedral must have been ten times the size of the chapel in Wales. I could not make head nor tail of the mysterious, reverent intonings in the far distance. I fidgeted and shamed my mother until one of the nuns took me instead to a smaller church from then on. There I sat, wrestling with the notions that Heaven Is Within You (not in me, I thought, or I'd know) and of Christ dying for our sins. I stared at the crucifix, thinking how
very
much being crucified must hurt, and was perturbed that, even with this special treatment, religion was not, somehow, taking on me. (I put it this way to myself because I had baptism and vaccination muddled, like germs and Germans.)

Weekdays, I joined a playground game run by the naughty son of another teacher. It was called the Soft Shoe Brigade, in which we all marched in step and pretended we were Nazis. I could not understand why the nuns put a stop to it.

My pleas to be put into a class of younger children were granted near the end of the time we spent there. After a few weeks' bliss, doing work I understood, we went back to Hadley Wood in 1942. By then, the bombing was beginning to seem like the weather, only more frightening. When the siren sounded at night, we went to the ground floor, where we sat and listened to the blunt bang and sharp yammer of gunfire and the bombs whistle as they fell, or watched searchlights rhythmically ruling lines in the sky. Recently I was talking to a woman my own age; we both confessed that any noise that resembles these, or the sound of a low-flying plane, still makes us expect to be dead the next moment.

The world was mad in daytime, too, not only with rationing, blackouts, brown paper stuck to bus windows, and notices saying
CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES
. The radio talked daily of bridgeheads, pincer movements, and sorties, which one knew were terms for people killing people. My father was away most nights fire watching, and at weekends he exercised with the Home Guard.

One Sunday I almost fell over one of our neighbors, who was crawling about in the field behind our house with—inexplicably—a great bunch of greenery on his head.

“Oh, Mr. Cowey!” shouted I, in much surprise. “What are you doing crawling about with a bush on your head?”

He arose wrathfully, causing the greenery to fall into two horns. “Get out of it, you stupid child!” he snapped, the image of an angry nature god. “You've spoiled the whole bloody exercise!”

Considering this madness, it is not surprising that, at the latest of many private schools we went to that year, when the forbidding teacher announced, “All those children for elocution stand up and go into the hall,” I mistook and thought the word was “execution.” I trembled, and was astonished when they all came back unharmed. At that same school, Isobel's teacher used to punish her for writing left-handed. One day she was shut in a bedroom, being punished, when the air-raid siren went. The rest of us were marched into the moderate safety of the hall, but Isobel was forgotten. I wrestled with my cowardice and managed to make myself call out that Isobel was still in the bedroom. The teachers were, I suppose, scared to go up there during a raid. They told me fiercely to hold my tongue, and made me sit for the rest of the week behind the blackboard as a lesson for impudence. There was more disgrace than hardship to this. I used that time for reading.

I read avidly that year, things like
The Arabian Nights
and the whole of Malory's
Le Morte d'Arthur
. Soon after I was eight, I sat up from reading in the middle of one afternoon and knew that I was going to be a writer one day. It was not a decision, or even a revelation. It was more as if my future self had leaned back from the years ahead and quietly informed me what she was. In calm certainty, I went and told my parents.

“You haven't got it in you,” my mother said. My father bellowed with laughter. He had a patriarch's view of girls: they were not really meant to
do
anything. Though he never said so, I think it was a disappointment to him to have three daughters. My mother, as always, was more outspoken. She said if it were not for the war, she would have more children—boys.

I think my mother was very discontented that year. She was, after all, an Oxford graduate who had dragged herself up from a humble background in industrial Yorkshire by winning scholarships—and all she had for it was the life of a suburban mother. I know she encouraged my father to apply for the husband-and-wife job they took in 1943.

The job was in a village called Thaxted in rural Essex. My parents were to run what would nowadays be called a conference center for young adults, a place where teenagers who worked in factories in urban Essex could come for a week or weekend to experience a little culture. It was one of many schemes at that time which looked forward to the widening of horizons at the end of the war, and it had considerable propaganda value, since it was by no means clear then that the Allies were going to win the war. My father believed in it utterly, and it became his life for the next ten years.

I was already wrestling to make sense of the experience of the previous four years—particularly the religion. Now I had a whole new set, three or four new sets, in fact, all going on at once. Thaxted, to take that first, was straight out of a picture postcard, with houses that were either thatched and half-timbered or decoratively plastered, and a medieval guild hall straddled the main street. The church, at once stately and ethereal beside a majestic copper beech, stood at the top of the hill opposite Clarance House (the house my parents ran). Industry was represented by a little sweet factory at one end of the village and a man who made life-sized mechanical elephants at the other. The place was connected to the outside world by sporadic buses and by a branch railway that terminated a mile outside the village (but the train driver would grudgingly wait for anyone he saw panting up the hill to the station). On holidays, people did folk dancing in the streets. There was also much handweaving, pottery making, and madrigal singing.

This idyllic place had the highest illegitimate birth rate in the county. In numerous families, the younger apparent brothers or sisters turned out to be the offspring of the unmarried elder daughters—though there was one young woman who pretended her daughter was her sister without grandparents to help—and there was a fair deal of incest, too. Improbable characters abounded there, including two acknowledged witches and a man who went mad in the church porch at full moon. There was a prostitute not much older than me who was a most refined person, with a face like alabaster, a slight foreign accent, and tweeds. There was another who looked like an artist's impression of Neanderthal woman; she had a string of pale, thin children, each with huge famine-poster eyes.

I had assumed you had to be married before you had children, so all this was quite a shock. I began to suspect the world had always been mad. In self-defense, my sisters and I assumed our home life was normal, which it certainly was not.

Clarance House was as beautiful as the rest, built in the days of Queen Anne, with graceful wall panels indoors—although the interior was somewhat bare because the Essex Education Committee, which financed the place, could seldom spare much money. Here my father threw himself into life as an educator and entertainer, for he was as gifted in his way as my grandfather and could hold an audience like an actor, whether he was making intellectual conversation at table with my mother, introducing a lecture, or telling ghost stories to rapt teenagers. His main story was about Clarance House. There were the remains of an old stair in a cupboard where, my father claimed, you could hear disembodied feet, climbing, climbing. . . . We knew he was right to call the house haunted, but the really haunted part was the main entrance hall, which I always felt compelled to run through if I had to cross it, shaking with fear. Eventually one of the cleaners saw the ghost. She had been chatting to it while she polished the hall for some minutes, thinking it was the girl she worked with. Then she looked properly and found she could see through it. She had hysterics and left at once for a job in the bacon factory in Great Dunmow.

My mother organized the cleaners, the cooks, and the domestic side, and in her spare time went feverishly into local history and madrigal singing. Not a day passed without some fearful crisis, in which my mother raced about inveighing against the Committee, the war, or my father, while my father stormed through the house in a fury, forgetting to speak English in his rage. His life was wholly public: my mother's three-quarters so. Neither had time for us. For a short while the three of us children shared a room at the top of the house; but my parents were so dedicated to making a success of the center that they decided that room was needed for additional guests. We were put out into the Cottage. This was a lean-to, two-room shack across the yard from the main house. The mud floor of the lower room was hastily covered with concrete and our beds were crammed into the upper floor. And we were left to our own devices. Looking back on this, we all find it extraordinary; for damp climbed the walls, and almost as soon as we had arrived in Thaxted, I had contracted juvenile rheumatism, which seriously affected my heart, and Ursula also contracted it soon after.