Time to Be in Earnest (9 page)

I slept in the afternoon. There were letters unwritten and papers unsorted. Not a productive day, but not an unhappy one, despite the thoughts about death.

Today I left for Cambridge by the 10:30 train from King’s Cross which took less than an hour. The service to Cambridge is now remarkably quick and comfortable. In my childhood the fast trains went always to Liverpool Street and the slower to King’s Cross, but the opposite is now true. The old Liverpool Street station was, for me, the gateway to London, a terminus of excitement and romance. I had arranged for a car to meet me at Cambridge, which took me to Swavesey to visit an elderly sick friend, Doris Wheatley, now chair-bound, and her friend and caretaker, Kay Harper.

After lunch to Clare’s cottage in Orchard Street where I rested during the afternoon for an hour before a car called for me to take me to the BBC studios in Hills Road for the recording of a radio autobiography. The producer, Mandy Morton, had devised a programme in which I should talk about my life and work, interspersing those segments with illustrative readings from the novels. It was a long evening’s work, lasting from a quarter to seven to a quarter past ten, and I was grateful that the air conditioning meant that the studio was very cool.

Mandy had brought with her a ration book and an identity card from the war to refresh my memory. They had been lent to her by a lady over eighty who frequently broadcasts about her life and the war years, and who had also written a note reminding me of the rations during the time of the worst shortages: two ounces of butter a week, six ounces of other
fats—usually four of lard and two of margarine, a quarter of a pound of tea. The system was that we all registered with a butcher and a grocer. This meant, of course, that the registrations and the address on the books had to be changed when people moved. This was one of the jobs I did during my time with a local office of the Ministry of Food in Christ’s College and I can remember a succession of extremely young, pretty girls, the new wives of Air Force fighter and bomber pilots, who came in with their ration books to be changed. I wondered how many of them were very shortly to be widows.

Our lives in war-time, particularly those of us with young children, seemed to be dominated by food; where to get it, how to cook it, how to make the most of what was available. It was possible to register as a vegetarian, and those who did so received an extra weekly allowance of cheese. In large families, I remember, one or more members would register as vegetarians with general advantage to the family diet. There was a points system for tinned and other goods and things came on or off points as they were available. We would queue for fish, or for anything else which was not on the ration and which occasionally would be delivered to a particular shop. The news would soon get round and the queue would lengthen.

From 1943 until the end of the war in Europe, I lived in a beautiful, now demolished, house at Chigwell Row in Essex, called White Hall. The owners, Dr. and Mrs. Price-Watts, had made a flat for their daughter-in-law which she now no longer needed and which I took over. There were tall elms in the garden, noisy with rooks, and the local butcher had the idea of shooting them, then selling the carcases back to Mrs. Price-Watts. Her cook did, indeed, make rook pie on one occasion, which I was invited to share. I can remember a tangle of extremely sharp and small bones and virtually no meat, but the gravy was excellent.

And I can remember—which of my generation can’t?—the particular culinary horrors of war: Woolton pie, composed of vegetables and sausage meat more crumb than sausage, and brown Windsor soup which tasted of gravy browning. And we got very tired of carrots. At one time there was a glut of them and we were showered with a plethora of Ministry of Food leaflets extolling the virtues of carrot soup, carrot casserole and carrot cake. Carrots, we were told, were particularly good for our eyes. It was because of the carrots they ate that our gallant airmen were successful in shooting down so many enemy planes. Woolton pie and brown Windsor soup featured largely on the menu of the British Restaurants
set up under the aegis of the Ministry of Food to provide inexpensive and healthy meals. In this I think they largely succeeded. Despite shortages and occasional real hunger the country was remarkably healthy.

A red-letter day for us was the arrival of a parcel from India, where my husband, by now a qualified doctor, was serving with the Royal Army Medical Corps. It contained tea and some tins of unspecified meat, but the great joy was a round tin of butter. It was very pale, salt-less, and tasted rather like newly made farm butter. I suppose I should have doled it out over the days, but I couldn’t resist one glorious splurge. I would sit Jane in her high chair and we would feast on toast liberally soaked with butter.

It was on one such day when I was feeding fingers of toast into Jane’s buttery mouth that I heard on the radio (which we then called the wireless) the news of the dropping of the atomic bomb. I can still recall the mixture of awe and triumph in the announcer’s voice when he said, “We have unleashed against the enemy the power of the sun itself.” I knew that the dropping of the bomb would almost certainly bring Connor home earlier and probably safely. But it was still, for me, a moment of horror and, looking almost aghast at my two happy, buttery daughters, innocently unconscious of the meaning of what we were hearing, I knew that for all of us the world had changed for ever.

Back from Cambridge to a very heavy weight of post which Joyce and I tackled this afternoon. This is one of the penalties, or at least disadvantages, of fame. I receive numerous requests for photographs, signatures, signed books to sell at auctions in aid of local worthy causes (this is becoming so popular that my stock of hardbacks is now depleted), advice on work in progress or help with a personal problem. There is an expectation that I am an expert on law, real-life murder, civil liberties and the constitution. Then there are requests to present prizes at school speech days, talk to writers’ groups or take part in a proliferation of literary festivals, here and overseas. Bulky packages arrive with depressing frequency, containing the manuscript of a novel with a request that I
should either advise how to get it published, write a foreword or provide a quote for publicity.

Some afternoons, like today, we tackle the dreaded “pending” file to which inevitably we consign the most difficult time-consuming letters in the hope that they will somehow answer themselves. Very occasionally they do. It seems churlish not to reply to kind and enthusiastic letters from readers or to refuse to help people trying to repair the church spire or provide books for their primary school, but it all takes up time I should be devoting to this memoir and I haven’t the ruthlessness—or perhaps I lack the courage—to follow the example of Nancy Mitford, who sent out postcards simply stating “Nancy Mitford is unable to do what you ask.” Meanwhile the fax machine slowly spews out its messages and the telephone rings.

I pondered this evening that I couldn’t have foreseen all this busyness when
Cover Her Face
was published in 1962. But then I remembered that my first appearance in print was much earlier, in 1935 or 1936 when I won a short story prize at the Cambridge High School for Girls and my winning entry was published in the school magazine. I wish I still had a copy. As far as I remember the action took place on a South Sea island where a group of characters were marooned. How? Why? When? Memory is mercifully blank. One of the party was desperately ill and required a rare drug which fortuitously arrived when a small biplane crashed on the island. I suspect that my story was low in credibility but high on drama and atmosphere.

The announcement of the prize was one of the highlights of the five very happy years from eleven to sixteen which I spent at the school. The school uniform was a dark green gym slip, square yoked, with three large box pleats fore and aft to allow for adolescent swellings, a garment in which even the most graceful figure tended to look clumsy. Girls who had achieved a place in the Second XI hockey team wore a pale blue sash, those in the First a green sash with a thin blue line. When I first read Muriel Spark’s
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
I felt an immediate kinship with her characters leaning across their bicycles wearing their hat brims at different angles. Ours were normally worn turned up at the back and down at the front, but there were a few adventurous spirits who wore the brim turned down at the back. We wore the same uniform for games, and for gym took off our tunics and performed our disciplined contortions in our blouses and dark green knickers. There were no showers and no personal lockers; coats and hats and any belongings were hung on
pegs in the cloakroom. Nothing in the whole of my time at the Cambridge High School was ever stolen.

Most of the girls came from the lower-middle or working class; the daughters of university dons and professional men were more likely to go to the Perse School, which was our greatest rival and against whom we played ferocious games of hockey with much clashing of sticks and shouts of encouragement. I wasn’t good at games but I was fleet of foot and achieved a precarious place in the Second XI.

There was no member of staff employed to look after our psychological or moral welfare. I think all teachers at that time saw it as part of their job to instill accepted values of personal morality, social responsibility and good behaviour. It requires an immense effort of imagination to picture what the reaction would have been had a girl ever become pregnant. No doubt she would have suddenly disappeared from school, indeed from Cambridge, with soothing explanations of mysterious illness or the need to stay with distant relations. Sex was never discussed, not even in biology lessons, which formed part of General Science in the syllabus. My memory is of producing evil smells from test-tubes with little understanding of the process, experiments with iron filings and magnets, and being told that the atom was the smallest possible element of matter and as such could be neither split nor destroyed. It is ironic to remember that it was even then being split a mile or less away at the Cavendish Laboratory!

Not only was sex a taboo subject but there was an extraordinary reticence about natural functions, including menstruation. I can remember cycling home—I suppose I was about twelve at the time—with a school friend and suggesting that we should hike up the Gog Magog Hills on Saturday afternoon. She replied in a deeply mysterious voice that she couldn’t because she wouldn’t be well. As she seemed, as usual, in the rudest of health, I was curious as to why she was expecting such a misfortune, but she would only reply: “Ask your mother.” I didn’t ask my mother; parents were the last people to be asked about anything potentially embarrassing. I think my mother did make an attempt when I was younger to prepare me for menstruation, but the explanation must have been incomplete since I somehow got the idea that it occurred once a year; when it did, I complained bitterly that August was a bad month to have started since all future summer holidays would be inconvenienced! I can also remember that my great anxiety was how on earth, if I married, I could conceal this regular event from my husband. I took it for
granted that it was a sacred female mystery and that, by disclosing it, I should be a traitor to the whole of my sex.

I suppose that nothing demonstrates the difference in attitudes more clearly than watching television advertisements for sanitary protection where young women wearing tightly fitting white trousers leap in and out of sports cars with happy cries of liberation. There was no internal protection in the 1930s and the commercial sanitary towels were made of cotton wool, cumbersome, not very absorbent and liable to chafe. There were loops at either end for attachment to a belt, giving them the name “bunnies.” We bought them in Boots the Chemist at a special counter presided over by a grey-haired nurse in full uniform with a great winged cap who handed over the embarrassing package with practised discretion.