Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (11 page)

I cannot remember those months, but I recognize two traces of them. The first is that although the aunt was in some ways an annoying woman, I would always love her with a special warmth; and the second is that until I was about seven I used to have irrational fits of panic:
Mummy has gone away and isn’t going to
come back
. This would happen if she left me in the car and went into a shop to pick something up, or if I woke up soon after going to bed and the house was silent. I think that something inside me was always capable of saying ‘Don’t be ridiculous, people don’t disappear without warning’, but that did not prevent a violently physical certainty of abandonment. In the car (these must have been the panic’s earliest manifestations) I would be crying by the time my mother returned – and oh, the magic in her crossness at this silly fuss I was making at being left for three minutes! In the silent house I would make more determined efforts to reason with myself, but still it would end in my having to get out of bed, creep to the top of the stairs, and listen. Soon a door would open or shut, and I would hear footsteps or a voice … Life downstairs was going on as usual, after all, and I could return to bed in an ecstasy of relief.

And now I think that possibly the way in which places, particularly that one, would always matter to me – at some level, more than people – was a third trace left by those months.

*

We did not live in our grandmother’s house all the time, nor did the families of our two sets of cousins on our mother’s side: our homes were where our fathers happened to be serving. But we were always there for holidays and always stayed there when our parents were unable to take us with them to foreign parts; and Andrew, Patience and I were there far more than any of the others. Our father retired from the Royal Artillery in the late 1920s – reluctantly, because he would have been posted to India if he had not done so, but my mother had refused to go there with him – and got a job in a company that mined mica which meant that he was either working in London or travelling abroad. From then on, except for a couple of years when we had a house in Hertfordshire, we lived at the Hall Farm on the estate and saw my father only at weekends. Hardly a day passed when we were not in and out of the big house.

Before that, for one whole perfect summer, I lived there without the rest of my family.

As a child, I was somewhat given to sore throats, swollen glands, and stomach upsets which were diagnosed as colitis – never enough seriously to interfere with my pleasures for any length of time, but enough to make visits to doctors less rare than they were for others. This time the doctor was a bald one, with very soft hands and half-moon glasses. Like other doctors I had been taken to in London he lived in a dark and magnificent house which conferred importance on me and Mum when we entered it, and like all doctors anywhere, in my experience, he was kind and courteous and tried to amuse me with jokes which, although they were not funny, were pleasing: that such a dignified man should take this trouble was flattering. So was having a young woman in a white coat to help me undress, and the gravity of the ritual was impressive. I never thought of being anything but docile on such occasions, even when I had to swallow a barium meal: it was as though I had been given a part in a play, with Mum (my manager) in the wings to encourage me. It was important that I should not let us down.

The Hall Farm

 

After this examination the white-coated lady took me back to the waiting-room and gave me a solitaire board to play with, while the doctor talked to Mum. I sensed that my part must have been a bigger one than usual, and indeed Mum’s face when she came to collect me was serious. ‘Did he say what I’ve got?’ I asked: and she replied: ‘Yes, darling. He thinks you must stop lessons for a time. It’s not anything to worry about, really – you haven’t actually
got
consumption, but you see some people have a tendency to consumption – that means it’s sort of asleep in your glands and if you were very run down or anything it might start up, so he thinks you ought to have a very long rest.’ – ‘Long? How long?’ – ‘A few months, I think.’ – ‘
In bed?
’ – ‘Oh, no, darling, I don’t think that’s necessary. I expect you’ll go to stay with Gran.’

In stories girls who had consumption died. They became frailer and frailer and more and more interesting – by the time Beth died in
Good Wives
she had become so weak that she said her sewing-needle was heavy, which had impressed me as much as it had astonished me. It was alarming to think of myself as one of this sisterhood, and I was subdued as I got into the taxi. Could I really have something that might make me die? I had not taken in the bit about ‘asleep in my glands’, only the word ‘consumption’. For some minutes it was as though I were preparing myself to be very frightened, but before I reached that stage the impossibility of it had asserted itself – and besides, hadn’t Mum said no lessons, and that I’d go to Gran’s … Was I really going to spend a whole summer there, with no lessons: my idea of perfect bliss?

The taxi took us to Mum’s club, where we were staying, to meet Dad for tea. He was waiting in the library, where several ladies were already grouped round little tables. ‘Hullo,’ he said, as we came through the door, ‘What’s the news?’ – and I, fear dismissed, was suddenly aware of the drama of my situation. In a loud and boastful voice I announced: ‘I’ve got consumption.’

‘Sshh!’ said my mother, blushing scarlet. ‘You must
never
say that. Go upstairs at once and take off your hat and coat.’ I was so dismayed that I was unable to notice how the ladies in the room had reacted, but I feared from my parents’ expressions that they had been disgusted rather than awestruck. If consumption was no more to be talked about than constipation there seemed little point in having it, and from that moment I stopped thinking about it.

So did everyone else. Because the doctor had advised it, I was sent to Gran’s, the windows of my bedroom were nailed open – a symbolic precaution considering that she allowed no shut bedroom windows in her house anyway – and I was given a goat to milk and look after myself, which was unmixed pleasure. Cows’ milk, in those days, was not pasteurized, so did hold a real risk of tuberculosis. In fact TB was still a serious threat: not so long before, all the daughters of a nearby big house had died of it. But in this case it must soon have become apparent to everyone that the specialist’s diagnosis was fantasy. My health that summer was excellent and the special attention soon faded away. My three favourite cousins, Joyce, Anne (the redhead) and Pen (the one nearest me in age) were also there, presumably because their father was in some particularly inhospitable part of the world. They had to do lessons every morning with a lugubrious tutor who came pedalling down the drive on a bicycle so old-fashioned that it made one think of penny-farthings (to his dismay I used to wreathe it in enormous scarlet poppies to express my glee at being exempt). It was a summer of riding, reading, play-writing, dressing-up, and of not even noticing that Andrew, now at his prep-school, was no longer my chief playmate and closest friend.

I had been allotted the bedroom I loved best, the Corner Room, where I slept in a canopied bed and spent minutes on end studying the huge Pre-Raphaelite engraving above the chimney-piece which showed Christian maidens about to be martyred by Roman centurions. One of the centurions was in love with the most beautiful of the maidens and had taken her aside in order to plead with her to deny her faith. He held her hand, almost in tears, but she had her eyes raised to Heaven, stricken (because she loved him in return) but too noble to give way. The question was: did I want to look, when I grew up, like this maiden, or like one of her companions who, although her robe was less becoming, had longer hair. (Though a fair-skinned, mouse-coloured child, I was determined to have, when I grew up, immensely long and seriously black hair.) The maidens were there in the morning, and at night the smell of the honeysuckle on the terrace came in through the wide-open windows, with the occasional squawk of a moorhen down on the lake, or a volley of quacking from the wild ducks, or the harsh cry of the herons which colonized the nearest island.

These noises seemed to be heard by something inside me rather than by my ears. Like the screeching of the owls, some of them could have been frightening. They were eerie noises,
night
noises: if you hadn’t known what made them they would have caused your heart to jump and your scalp to prickle. But I knew them. I had always known them, back through the immemorial length of all my life. They, like the cockling of pheasants before a thunderstorm and the cooing of wood-pigeons and the note of the cuckoo, were the voices of this place. Heard elsewhere, they were only simulacra of themselves; here they were restored to their true nature, as I was to mine.

Once, when I was young enough to share the Corner Room with Andrew, there was an earthquake. That afternoon the sky had gone livid and the grown-ups had said ‘There’s going to be a thunderstorm – and a good thing too, it’ll clear the air.’ But there was no thunderstorm. The yellow sky darkened to brown so that the lights had to be switched on, and everyone said ‘Extraordinary!’ Then bedtime came, I in the canopied bed, he in a little one across its foot. I woke with a jerk because of a roaring noise, and he woke too, saying ‘What is it? What is it?!’ I said, trying to sound calm, ‘It’s the thunderstorm.’ He was still frightened of thunder but I didn’t mind it so much, so I knew I ought to reassure him. ‘It isn’t thunder,’ he said – and I thought ‘A very big wind?’ Then I realized that the bed and everything else was shuddering – it was the shuddering house that was roaring. Almost at once there were running footsteps in the passage and our mother came in wearing her dressing-gown – it must be the middle of the night. ‘You must get up, darlings, it’s a little earthquake, we may have to go out in the garden.’ But as she spoke, the shuddering stopped. And then there was a silence so huge that it was more frightening than the roaring.

And sure enough, the newspaper said next day that there had been an earthquake, though it was described, annoyingly, as being felt more strongly in Wales.

Once I suffered terrible earache in the Corner Room (‘mastoid’, they said, and told me afterwards that I had been lucky not to have had an operation; but to my mind an operation would have made it more dignified). That was the first time in my life that I experienced atrocious pain, pain so bad that I rolled myself into a ball in the middle of the bed with the sheet over me like a tent, and one of the grown-ups cried. And once, in that room, when I was so small that Andrew was not yet born, I was in a cot, Mum and Dad in the big bed, and Mum said in a low voice ‘Use the slop-pail,’ and there was a trickling noise so that I understood that Dad was doing littles – it was amazing that a grown-up should do that. And once Andrew and I invented a game of getting round the same room without touching foot to floor, which involved climbing across the chimney-piece and could only be played secretly because grown-ups would expect us to break things. And over and over again I finished a book which had been interrupted by bedtime, snug under the sheet with a flashlight which had to be hidden quickly if I heard approaching footsteps. Good things were at their best in that room, and bad things were made better by it. Every room I slept in in Gran’s house had some special charm about it (except the night nursery, which had a ghost) but the Corner Room was the most interesting of them all.

I called the thing in the night nursery a ghost for want of a better word: it was not like ghosts were supposed to be – more like a monster. I saw it twice, while still young enough to be sat on a pot after breakfast. Because I always took a long time Nanny would leave me there and go back to the day nursery, saying ‘Call when you’re finished’, and I would sit there, bored, feeling the pot’s rim engraving a circle round my buttocks. The night nursery looked out over what was called the shrubbery but was nearer to being a little wood – yew trees mostly, and one huge beech which almost curtained the windows, making this room the only gloomily dark one in the house. Sitting on my pot, I would stare out at the leaves of the beech tree, and I was doing this when the ‘ghost’ appeared.

It was a grey thing like the tip of an elephant’s trunk, and it seemed to be groping down towards the outside of the window as though the creature it belonged to were squatting on the roof, reaching down over the gutter. Only a little bit of it appeared at first, withdrawing quickly but riveting my eyes to the place where it had been. Then it came again, more of it, and I screamed. The scream had terror in it, so Nanny came running, but she couldn’t understand me when I tried to explain what I’d seen, and ended by telling me that I must have been imagining something; and when I had calmed down I supposed that this was so. Back on my pot next day, I repeated this reassuring explanation to myself: ‘I imagined something’. And then I went on to bolster my courage by telling myself that even if I hadn’t, the thing was not going to hurt me. It was a
kind
thing, and probably all it ever ate was beech leaves. I so much wanted it not to come – not to be able to come – that I imagined it eating so many beech leaves that it had made itself sick – I even said: ‘
Poor
thing, it’s so sick today that it can’t come.’ But it did come. It was a much darker grey this time, but it was obviously the same thing and it was
not
kind. I was frantic with fear, and after that I was no longer left alone on my pot in this room. And other people began to say how they had never really liked the night nursery, and that it had a spooky sort of feeling to it.