Walking in the Shade (19 page)

‘Nonsense, darling. What you need is peace and quiet,' said this blond goddess, energetically tidying the room.

‘Peace and quiet are driving me mad,' he said. ‘Felicity, I can't go on.'

‘You've just got a writer's block, darling.'

‘Yes, I know I've got a writer's block. It's because I can't stand this life.'

He would lean out of the window upstairs and wistfully watch the vivacity of the street, or even sneak out of the house when she wasn't looking, for a guilty hour or so in a pub. It could not last. It didn't. He went off to Hong Kong, where he wrote
The World of Suzie Wong
, an instant best-seller, about a girl who was tragically afflicted by Fate, not in one way, but in several—tuberculosis, for one—like the romantic heroines of the past. Felicity sensibly went off to find another writer in need of a Muse. Richard became at least temporarily lost in the world of films. One tale he told was of how he and his director went off to look for a perfect Suzie Wong, in Honolulu or some such romantic island, but found the entire population lined up to welcome the ship, singing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers' and wearing gym slips.

For a couple of years I saw a good deal of a young woman with a child Peter's age. We collected the two boys from school at the same time every day and to fill the hours between then and bedtime went to Kensington Gardens to sail little wooden ships, or walked there while the boys ran about. We both lived in places too small to suit the wild energies of six-, seven-, eight-year-olds. There were sheep then in Hyde Park: country in the town.

She was a quiet, reflective woman, and her child was a tough little redhead, combative, explosive—this was not a match of temperaments. She had some job that enabled her to leave work at four, and was, like me, always tired. Her story was unusual then and commonplace now: She became pregnant by a man who said he would stand by her, but he had gone off. In short, this was a single-parent family. When she got pregnant her parents would not help her. She was given shelter by some nuns, who went in for this kind of philanthropy and who kept her washing and scrubbing twelve hours a day; put her, like a poor girl from Dickens, on a hard pallet in a cold room; fed her badly. She was one of half a dozen pregnant girls. When in labour, she was told her pains were the result of her sin. She and the others were reviled all day: sluts, whores, children of the devil. This was just after the war. She had to stay there because she had nowhere to go. I was full of indignation at her treatment. I think she was amused by me: her attitude was: What can you expect? But if acceptance of social ills is a sign of maturity, what becomes of progress? Four or five years later, and she would have been rescued by the Welfare State. The story has a happy ending. The man came back and accepted responsibility. He was not easy to live with, and she put up with a good deal for the sake of the child. They had two meagre rooms, with few amenities.

This ill treatment of pregnant girls, and unmarried mothers, is the same in every culture, always. We have just seen an outbreak of it in Britain, with these young women who have to struggle so hard in everything ritually insulted and denigrated, this time as cunning thieves determined to get an easy life out of the Welfare State. You'd never think that their children were due anything, worth anything: no, their mothers have done wrong, and they must be punished too.

 

When I visited my Aunt Daisy and her sister, Evelyn, at Richmond, I entered a world so different from the rackety makeshift one most of my friends lived in that for me it was a trip into the past. It was a sizeable house, shabby, needing paint, in a wonderful garden, full of birds. Old houses greet you with reserve, watching you through discreet windows as you go up the path, and when you ring the bell, it is as if inhabitants, some of them ghostly, move into position ready to deal with this intruder. The inhabitants of an old house for someone like me, knowing all about England through the pages of a hundred novels and plays, exchange lines of dialogue from novels they may never have read or even heard of.

I had to brace myself to be a disappointment, because Aunt Daisy was my godmother, and it was she who had sent me books about Jesus and the Apostles all through my childhood, and here I was, an atheist and a communist.

I rang the doorbell—it was very loud. Was Aunt Daisy or Aunt Evelyn deaf? I rang again. Slowly the door opened, and there stood two tiny old women, smiling. Each wore a best black dress with a flowered apron over it. The aprons meant that they did not have a servant, and I had to jettison Patrick Hamilton's novel
Slaves of Solitude
, set in this part of London and in a house like this one. For it was about the middle classes and their servants, and I had intended to use it as a guide. I kissed two papery cheeks that were presented to me, first Daisy, then Evelyn. The little boy put up his arms for an embrace, to Daisy, but she was slow, through age, and so he put out his hand to be shaken instead, but then he was engulfed in embraces from both of them. The two stood admiring the healthy child, and Aunt Evelyn, the missionary from Japan, said, ‘What rosy cheeks little English boys do have.' Peter looked up at me, confused: he thought he was not English, or so he had found out at school.

‘I suppose little Japanese boys don't have pink cheeks,' said Daisy to her sister, and Evelyn said, ‘But that doesn't mean they aren't as healthy as English children.'

It was eleven-thirty, and in the living room stood a tea trolley and on it waited scones and jam and two kinds of tea. The aprons came off, with apologies. ‘I'm afraid we can't afford a proper servant these days. We have a woman who comes in once a week, so everything is neglected.'

Nothing looked neglected. The room was full of Victorian furniture, bought when Aunt Daisy was young, when it would have been only the sort of thing available in the furniture shops. Now they were antiques, though not worth anything because so unfashionable. Peter sat fidgeting, trying to be well behaved, and Aunt Daisy said, ‘Perhaps he would like to go out in the garden? I'm afraid we don't have any porcupines or lions or elephants, though.' Peter went out and could be observed through the windows, wandering about among the shrubs with the look of anxious boredom children get when they know they have to put up with hours of grown-ups talking above their heads.

Meanwhile, while making conversation with Aunt Daisy—Aunt Evelyn had put on her apron again to go to the kitchen—I tried to see in this tiny frail old lady the Daisy Lane I knew so much about. She had been a probationer at the old Royal Free, when my mother was ward sister, a martinet with a heart of gold. When Daisy became ward sister in her turn, and level with my mother in that jealous hierarchy, the two women became close friends, and remained so, and it was to Daisy that my mother wrote her long weekly letters, pages of blue Croxley writing paper, with postscripts and post-postscripts, and sometimes ‘crossed' in the Victorian manner, the lines running perpendicularly as well as down—which then was for thrift but on the farm was because if the writing paper ran out, then you had to wait until you got some more from the store seven miles away. Daisy Lane was for my mother the England she was exiled from, and the letters were a chronicle of exile, to which Daisy, now an Examiner for Nurses, returned regular but shorter letters. ‘I'm sorry my news cannot be as exciting as yours, dear, I can't regale you with tales of snakes and forest fires.' She wrote to me, most conscientiously, when she sent her good books, not only her thoughts about Jesus, but about her sister's life as a missionary in Japan.

‘But I suppose you know more about missionaries than I do,' she would write. ‘I know that our church supports a Mission in Kampala.'

She certainly knew more about my mother's thoughts and feelings than I was ever likely to. When my mother came to England after all those years and the hundreds of letters, she stayed with her old friend here, in this house, for a week. A London house was what she had been dreaming of, but surely not of a too large house, slowly going shabby because of no servants, and two old women, their active lives a long way behind them, spending their days in cooking and housework. How did that visit go? I wondered but did not ask, for surely it could not have gone well. For one thing, my mother and Evelyn did not see eye to eye. ‘Maude was always one to speak her mind,' Daisy said mildly, but with a nervous look at her sister.

And that was all I was to find out about that week, that anticlimactic week, when my mother and her closest friend met at last, in Richmond.

An hour after we arrived, sherry came in on a silver tray, with Bath Oliver biscuits. ‘Do you think Peter would like a glass of milk?' enquired Daisy.

‘Perhaps he would like some sherry?' said Evelyn.

‘Now that really is absurd,' said Daisy. The child was lying on his stomach on the neglected lawn, his head on one arm, while he poked at something with a twig.

‘No,' said Evelyn firmly. ‘Let sleeping dogs and contented children lie.'

We drank sweet, thick sherry, and Aunt Daisy, doing her duty, enquired about Peter's religious health. ‘Then I'll go and dish up the luncheon,' said Evelyn, ‘and leave you two to arrange Peter's spiritual life.'

‘Japan has given Evelyn some quite unorthodox ideas,' said Daisy. ‘I really don't know what our vicar would say if he knew of some of them. But let us discuss the little boy. Maude tells me you did not have him baptised?'

‘She had him baptised.'

She sighed. She was distressed. She made herself face me, this intransigent one, and, supported by her long years of service to me, as my godmother—and for which I am now grateful—said, ‘But that means he has no godparents.'

I said, ‘But you know, Aunt Daisy, people can take on children and be responsible for them, just the same as a godparent; you don't have to be religious for that.'

‘But my dear, where is his duty to God—who will tell him of it?'

The conversation laboured on parallel lines, and then there was lunch.

Roast beef on a vast china dish, with a well in it to hold the good juices, which were spooned over Peter's vegetables, to make a man of him. Roast potatoes, carrots in white sauce. Cauliflower in white sauce. The beef was truly wonderful. And so were the puddings, suet pudding with golden syrup, and jam tart. Cheese, biscuits. The old ladies had tiny appetities, and most of this meal was taken out, presumably to be eaten up during the week. We all longed for sleep, after the sherry, the heavy food, but there had to be coffee, a weak grey coffee, and we sat around in the living room in that particular agony, needing to sleep when it is out of the question. Aunt Evelyn spoke about the Japanese understanding of Jesus, not at all like ours, she said, and sang us ‘Rock of Ages' in Japanese, keeping time with a teaspoon. Just like my missionary Aunt Betty so long ago in Tehran, but she had sung in Mandarin.

Aunt Daisy said that nurses were not as they had been, so she was told by younger colleagues still not retired. ‘No one these days wants to do a job for the sake of it,' she said. ‘And look at these modern girls—they won't do housework any longer.'

‘No,' said Evelyn, ‘they prefer factories. Who in their right mind could possibly prefer a nasty factory to working in a nice house like this?' Here the ghost of Patrick Hamilton hovered for a few seconds.

At four o'clock the tea trolley came in again, the aunts putting on aprons to prepare it, taking them off to consume it. On the top tier were scones, butter, jam, crumpets, honey in a comb, little cakes, biscuits of various kinds, while on the bottom tier were two large cakes, one a sponge with fruit and cream, and the other a fruit cake. And now this was serious eating. Lunch, yes, they had done that, because luncheon, and a Sunday luncheon at that, had to be done properly; but this is what they enjoyed. I could see this was the serious meal of the day, and they ate and ate, and pressed on me and Peter more and more, and they drank many cups of tea, Earl Grey for Daisy and Ceylon for Evelyn, oh do have just one more little piece, and then on went the aprons for the washing up, and then it was five o'clock, and we could leave. And as Peter and I went off to the bus stop and waved goodbye, and waved goodbye again, I heard, from Evelyn, ‘And now, Daisy, you just sit down and take the weight off your legs, and I'll get the supper.'

Peter said, ‘Do we have to go and see them again?'

Taking him to see the aunts was part of my trying to preserve at least a sketch and a scaffolding of family life. But now it was done, and no, he did not have to do it again.

They moved to Salisbury (England), and I went to see them there. Another little old house, and a garden full of bees and birds and butterflies. They occupied themselves with arranging flowers for the cathedral and diligently kept up the fabric of middle-class life, with meals all day, and good works, for they visited the poor, with cheerful words and little gifts of home-cooked cakes and sweets. Then Aunt Daisy said she was coming to London to spend the day with me. She could not be asked to climb those precipitous stairs, so I took her out to lunch, but it was hard now to find the kind of restaurant she was used to, with nice English food. All over Britain in provincial towns, yes; not in London. I took her to Derry & Tom's roof garden. I took her to tea. Then, unexpectedly, Aunt Daisy asked me to help her get into a good old people's home. I was so surprised, so taken aback, that I sat there, numbed and dumb. It is useful, this kind of memory, for when you are older and full of competences and know-how, you forget it wasn't always so. Now, if someone said, Please arrange for me to go into a home, I would know how to go about it, but then it was as bad as if she had asked me to push her on a wheelbarrow from Land's End to John o'Groat's. I was still so much on the edge of life in London, just clinging on with my fingertips—so it felt. An immense dismay seized me, a tiredness, and this tiredness was my enemy, for so much of my life I wasn't doing what I would have liked to do, or enjoyed doing. How was it that Aunt Daisy, who had been in my life since I was born, could not see that she was asking too much of me? Besides, how was it that this woman who all her life had lived in London and for most of it at the heart of what we now call the ‘caring professions' needed this kind of assistance from me? And what about Evelyn? Were they not sharing their old age? For my attitude was still the common one—the lazy one: ‘Here are two old ladies; how nice for them to live together.' (And look after each other, so that I don't have to.) But perhaps they don't get on? Perhaps Daisy and Evelyn, these sisters who had seen so little of each other, for one had been all her adult life in Japan, didn't like each other?