Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (25 page)

Mouse droppings, husks of oats quivering in spiders’ webs, piles of old sacks – the musty smell of a loft would make me hesitate now. I would stoop to avoid the wispy grey shreds hanging from rafters which cling to one’s hair, step carefully to avoid the fangs of disused machinery. But when we were children we shinned along beams over which old pieces of stiff, cracked harness had been looped, and jumped off them into the hay at the end of the loft, near the chute down which it slid to the stable, raising a cloud of dust as we landed, so that motes swam for minutes on end. (‘Never jump down into hay: there might be a chopper or a pitchfork buried in it. A little boy once jumped into a pile of hay and was cut
right in half
.’) The picture of the farm buildings I carry in my mind is framed by the loft window – the opening into space with a pulley above it up to which sacks were hauled. When we were small my brother and I would squat there as silent as cats, unobserved, watching the cowman cross the yard with buckets of skimmed milk for the calves, or a horseman bringing in a pair of butter-ball-smooth Suffolk Punches, unharnessing them, then sending them with a slap on the rump to drink endlessly from the tank, burying their nostrils in the scummy water, after which they liked to hang about in the yard taking their ease for a while, until the man shouted at them and they plodded into the stable, each to his own place. They had names like Tory, Prince, Captain, Bess. When Tory died a new Tory took his place, but he had a different character, he should have had another name.

The granary had a dusty smell, too, but not like the loft’s. Wheat, oats, barley, and sometimes beans – they were heaped like sand dunes and each made a different sound when you thrust your hands into the heap, or waded in it – which was forbidden because it scattered the grain. The stables, the cowsheds, the various yards in which animals were kept at different stages of their lives, all of them had their own smells, and none of the smells, however dungy, seemed to us displeasing. An adult watching children scurrying about a farm must see their movements as mysterious, like those of animals. What makes them decide to sit on a certain wall, stare solemnly for perhaps ten minutes at a certain pig, then jump down and run into a barn, clamber to the top of a pile of sugar beet? It is like the flitting of birds from tree to hedge. But I can remember that each building, each activity, each time of day had its own value and meaning – we went from one to another as an adult would decide to drop in at a picture gallery, or go into a shop to buy bread.

‘Going to look at the bull,’ for example, was not a random whim but an accepted pastime. A bull is a spectacle in himself. We hoisted ourselves up the stout timbers of his loose-box, and with our elbows on the top of the partition would stare at him while he stared back. Placid he might be (and our bulls usually were), but not to be trusted, they said: a bulk of violence rested behind that curly forehead and those small eyes, and when he shifted his feet in the straw or blew through his nostrils there was a shadow of threat in it. If, while we were watching him, the bull piddled or let his red penis protrude from its sheath, we counted it an event. He was sex as well as violence, and we were in awe of him.

The men who worked on the farm were patient and kind. The cowmen were too busy to be interesting companions, but the horsemen had time to talk as they took their teams out to the fields, and would let us ride with them either on a broad back or on a loaded wagon (how it would heave and rock, and sometimes the branches of a tree would sweep it so that you had to flatten yourself on the load). The man whose company we most enjoyed was the shepherd. He was alone a lot in outlying pastures, living out in a hut on wheels during the lambing season, and he was glad to talk. He presided over the most interesting ceremonies of the year: lambing, dipping, and shearing. His dogs were watchful and aloof to anything but their master and their job, so that if they wagged their tails when one spoke to them, one felt flattered. Like all shepherds, ours knew his sheep as individuals, and this seemed a magic power.

For a time, when I was about eight, the shepherd had a boy working with him called Jack Grey. Perhaps he was fifteen years old, but to my brother and me he seemed almost grown-up. His father, who was the woodman, came of gypsy stock and Jack had gypsy talents: he could make sounds which rabbits mistook for other rabbits, he poached, he could climb any tree and knew everything about birds and animals. We envied and admired him for living out of doors so much, and at the same time were impressed by his matter-of-fact attitude towards it, his remarks implying that we would not enjoy it as much as we supposed if it were part of a job. We collected birds’ eggs then, under strict injunctions to take nothing unless there were at least four eggs in the nest and never to frighten the parent birds so that they would desert. Jack could climb higher trees than we could and was uninhibited by rules (which were awkward in the cases of birds which laid only two or three eggs). The treasures of our collection – our jay’s, our heron’s, and our sparrow hawk’s eggs – came from him. We were with him whenever we could be, and he treated us as equals, not as children. Later he shot at and wounded his father, who had come home drunk and had threatened him. He pleaded self-defence but was sent to prison. Much later, when I was eighteen or nineteen, I was at a roller-skating rink (roller-skating had become a passion with me and my friends) and the attendant, a man at once sleek and seedy with heavily oiled hair and a flashy checked suit, knelt down in front of me to fasten my skates. He did not look up. I looked down at the hair plastered in straplike segments across the bent head, and I heard my voice – this is quite literal, I was unconscious of recognition or of forming words – I heard my voice saying ‘Jack Grey’. He looked up and said ‘Hullo, Miss Dinah’, and then, after ‘How are you’ and ‘It’s a long time’, we were at a loss. The exact nature of our earlier intimacy, what we had talked about besides birds and animals, I could not remember, but I was sharply aware of the ghost of friendship standing there between me and this shady-looking man. We smiled at each other shyly and I left the rink feeling shaky and unhappy. Perhaps as a boy Jack had welcomed the company of small children so kindly because already there were things in his life of which he needed to avoid thinking. I hope he knew how much we loved and admired him.

The friendships children make with their family’s employees seem to the children friendships between equals. If a cowman, or my grandmother’s head gardener, caught us at some mischief and said ‘I’ll tell your grandma on you’, the words were, to us, no more than a formula: it was not the threat but the wrath of the speaker which had authority. It never occurred to us that even when the gardener caught us stealing his beloved grapes he would never actually clout us, nor did we notice that however intimate we were with Jack Grey, he never invited us to his house, nor we him to ours. A relationship which felt natural was possible because the lines laid down for it were so deeply engraved by time and custom that neither side thought of questioning them, but those lines defined a narrow area. When we went back to the Farm ‘for good’ I was in my early teens, no longer a child. I knew all the men on the farm, of course, but without realizing it I had moved out of the realm of friendship with them.

We were still at our poorest for our first year or so at the Farm, still without servants, though a woman used to come in to do the scrubbing and another to cook lunch. Soon after we settled in, I was sent to the back yard to bring in the cold meat we were going to eat for supper. It was kept in a perforated tin meat-safe hung on the wall in a cool place. I opened the safe, took out the dish – and the shelf was bare. For the first time since my mother had told me about our poverty I felt afraid:
there was nothing in our larder once
that meat was eaten
. At the Manor the larder was an L-shaped room with a brick floor and wide shelves made of slate on which were crocks of preserved eggs, flat pans of milk waiting to have the cream skimmed on them, tins and tins of cakes, biscuits and buns, joints of meat, at least one ham, strings of sausages, pounds of butter, big cheeses, bowls of dripping, bottles of fruit, stone jars of currants – food on which the house could have lived for days if it had suddenly been cut off from the outside world. Whatever the breakfast dish in that house – kidneys on toast, or kedgeree, or bacon and mushrooms – there was always an egg boiled for every person there. A houseful of us could amount to sixteen or so, and sometimes no one ate a boiled egg (what
did
happen to them?). At our house in Hertfordshire the scale had not been so grand, but always beside what we were then eating there had been the remains of what we had eaten recently and something that we were soon going to eat: the larder had continuity. I stood in front of the empty meat-safe telling myself that it was silly to be scared, my mother would be buying more food tomorrow, but for a few moments poverty had become real. And because food did reappear on the shelf (and as soon as my mother had recovered her nerve, accumulated there as merrily as ever), I soon concluded that ours was not real poverty. I remained far away from the real thing, I hardly ever had the chance of glimpsing it, but that moment in the back yard had made me feel what a bare shelf was like, and understand that it could happen. It would be an exaggeration to say that it made me think, but it may have given me the beginnings of a sense of proportion.

My mother resembled my grandmother in her generosity towards her children. I never heard her say it, but she must have resolved that we, at least, should not suffer from the financial muddle into which the family had drifted, and it is only now that I see how much unfamiliar work she did about her house at that time. All she expected from me (my sister was five years younger) was that I should help her make beds and clean the bedrooms in the morning, wash up supper and sometimes cook it. It was almost always eggs, usually scrambled – she did not know any other cooking to teach me. Housekeeping generally became rough and ready – a pleasant state for children – and although even at that it must have weighed on her, it was never a bogy for anyone else. She did not mind things which ought to shine not shining, and she did not mind ‘clean’ dirt (earth, grass seeds, spilt dog biscuit). While there was a carelessly arranged vase of flowers on every surface flat enough to hold a vase, she felt her drawing-room pretty, and so it was. It smelt lovely, too, more like a garden than a room, and since most of its untidiness came from the litter of books on chair arms, footstools, and occasional tables, it was an agreeable room to be in.

That accumulation of books silting up the flower-free surfaces in the house: that, at bottom, I owe to my grandfathers. Both were men who took it for granted that a gentleman should have a good library, and my maternal grandfather’s library was a very good one. In addition to this, my grandmother’s father had been Master of an Oxford college, which meant that however unscholarly his descendants might be, they all esteemed scholarship: they might not read much (most of them, in fact, did), but they considered a house without books in it uncivilized. At the Manor, not only was the library walled with books, but the morning room and my grandfather’s smoking-room as well, while the whole of one upstairs passage was given over to shelves containing more trivial volumes (delightful shelves, badly lit, from which you might fish a handbook on veterinary surgery or
The Scarlet Pimpernel
). There was an angle of bookshelves ceiling-high in the nursery, and although reading in the bath, in the WC, or in bed was forbidden to the younger children, everyone knew why one did it.

Reading ran in two currents. My grandfather’s interest had been history, and most of the family, including my mother, inherited his tastes. Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
was my mother’s bedside reading for a long time, and she knew Horace Walpole, Madame de Sévigné, and Mrs Delaney like old friends. On the other hand, one particularly beloved aunt, and my father, most enjoyed imaginative writing and poetry. My mother had no patience with books which were ‘not true’. She always insisted that she actively detested poetry, finding it a lot of words about nothing, and she would not go to see a play by Shakespeare. My father revelled in Shakespeare and made frequent sorties into one poet or another. During the second world war, when, to his great content, he was back in the Army and serving abroad, he suddenly decided that he must read Dryden and wrote home for his complete works.

In a life where the adults took books so much for granted, it was natural that the children should do so too. About eighty per cent of our birthday and Christmas presents always consisted of books: it would have been impossible not to have become a compulsive reader. I developed the lust early and violently, following my father’s tastes rather than my mother’s, and would smuggle an electric torch to bed almost as early as I can remember so that I could continue to gobble my books under a tent of sheets. I was always puzzled by how
they
knew. Thump, thump, the steps would come along the passage, under the pillow would go book and torch and I would screw my eyes shut, but the minute the light went on and ‘they’ saw my body stretched so rigidly innocent under the blankets, they would say accusingly, ‘You were reading!’

At other times they would say ‘You must be skipping’, or ‘You can’t remember books if you read so many at a time, so fast’, but I never skipped, and any that I understood I did remember. Failing to understand did not prevent my reading. Before I was twelve I had been through most of Meredith in my grandfather’s handsome, vellum-bound edition, undeterred by the fact that the involved prose was too much for me. Those submerged, and it was only years later, when I picked up
The Egotist
for what I thought to be the first time, that I rediscovered those sessions on the window seat in the morning-room. Pages of it seemed new to me, then I would come to a ‘visual’ passage – Clara wearing pink ribbons, finding her young man asleep under the cherry tree, for instance – and I would think, But I have been here before, I have
seen
this, and gradually the whole thing swam up: the slight warmth of the radiator boxed in under the window seat, the green damask on the flat cushion, the smooth binding and the thick, handmade paper with its ragged edges, and my grandmother coming in and saying ‘Darling, are you really
enjoying
all those Merediths? He’s rather grown-up for you.’