Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (26 page)

Boys, poor creatures, became part-exiles from our world when they were about eight years old and were sent to their preparatory schools. Girls stayed at home, with governesses. I had run through seven of them by the time we settled at the Farm, starting with ‘nursery governesses’ whom I shared with my brother (two years younger than myself), and going on, when he had been exiled, to better-qualified women shared with cousins or the daughters of neighbours. With ponies, goats, dogs, streams, tree houses, fruit stealing, and poetry writing to compete against, lessons could hardly be anything but a chore, and I suppose that it is this which has left me with an ineradicable feeling that work is the opposite of pleasure. I have tried to persuade myself out of this, but in vain. After twenty years of working in jobs usually congenial, I still leave my offce with the sensation of returning to life.

One of the governesses was sacked because she cowed us, to be forgotten quickly and thankfully. The rest were forgotten slowly and naturally, simply because they meant little to us. Fragments of them remain. A very early one had a kind horse face and was a sucker. Once, when I had irritated her beyond endurance and she had gone out of the room to recover her temper, I leant out of the window, picked a fat, creamy-pink rose from the wall, and laid it on her open book. My eyes must surely have been beady with calculation when she came back to the table, but she noticed nothing, she fell for it, her silly heart melted at the charming ways of children, and I felt a delicious sense of power.

More of Mademoiselle remains bccause we were cruel to her, and we had not until then realized that it was possible for children to be cruel to grown-ups. Her poor hands purple with chilblains, she would sit there weakly accepting our assurance that it was the custom in England to eat boiled eggs with honey, mustard, Ovaltine, and a pinch of birdseed stirred into them (we did it for several mornings to prove our point). Then she turned, and forced my sister, the baby of the family and not strictly under her jurisdiction, to eat all the fat on her cutlet. My brother and I did not think much of my sister at the time, but she rose to the occasion so well, being instantly sick on the table, that we rallied to her with cries of ‘Poor little girl, you have been
cruel
to her,’ and bolted into shrubberies and beyond, where we stayed all day, knowing that Mademoiselle would not venture further than lawns and flower gardens. We came in that evening knowing that we had been very naughty, but our mother used other words. ‘You have been unkind,’ she said. ‘How could you have been so cruel to poor Mademoiselle?’ The incident engraved a trace of uneasiness on my conscience which made me slightly less horrible than some to the duller, plainer mistresses once I was at school.

Only one governess remains solidly a person: Ursula, the last of them, who stayed with us for five years. Her broad red face and her thin, cottony hair augured ill for her, but her common sense and her affectionate heart soon prevailed. She loved dogs, she could corner a recalcitrant pony in a paddock almost as efficiently as my mother, she made jokes we thought funny, and she, too, in her heart, felt that real life was better than lessons. She taught me, one of my cousins, and two girls who lived near us, according to a pleasant system (still practised, I believe) by which we never worked for longer than twenty-five minutes at a time on any subject for fear of tiring young intelligences. Lessons often consisted of looking at smudgy reproductions of pictures by Pre-Raphaelites, then describing them. I was good at this and have loved irises and lilies ever since. When part of the syllabus proved dull – ‘citizenship’, for example, contained in a book with a dreary blue cover and crossheads printed in a clumsy bold type face – Ursula let it fade out and gave us essays on ‘My Best Day’s Hunting’ to write instead. She was ruthless about good sense and good manners, though, and she did us good.

When the bank’s lack of sympathy finally drove me to school (can it really have been cheaper than governesses, or had I become so uppish by then that they felt I needed it?), the headmistress told my mother that she had never before encountered a girl so badly grounded. I felt indignant on Ursula’s behalf, but it was probably the truth. She enjoyed the things that we enjoyed too much, and skimped the rest. She must have reported me intelligent, because even in her day it was understood that I would be the one to go to Oxford, but what, apart from my lust for reading and my facility for ‘essays’, led her to that conclusion, I now find it hard to see. I cannot remember employing my mind, at that time, on any subject other than horses and sex.

M
Y PARENTS’ IDEAS
on bringing up children (or rather my mother’s, for my father was not much interested and left it to her), were slightly more progressive than those of the rest of the family. Sex was a distasteful subject to all of them, but I believe my mother would have given us honest answers if we had asked questions. She would have been embarrassed, though, and we knew it, so we did not ask. I cannot remember her telling me of any aspect of it except menstruation, which she did not describe as connected with the tricky subject of childbirth, but only as a boring thing which happened to women and, luckily, did not hurt. She got out of giving us ‘little talks’ or one of those hygienic handbooks for the young by letting us run loose with a lot of animals and forbidding us no book, however ‘grown-up’. With this freedom, she believed, we would soon know all about it and, knowing all, would develop a healthy attitude towards it: which, in her terms, would have meant forgetting it. On the same principle, when I was older, she imposed no chaperonage on me but allowed me to come and go with my young men unchecked, hoping that trust would breed reliability. She was aware of the increasing freedom of the ’twenties, she had come to see her own upbringing as absurdly strait-laced, but she was at that stage of emancipation where it is believed that it can be applied to manners without affecting morals: a touching stage. ‘You know that I trust you,’ she would sometimes say, nervously. I was always grateful for this attitude, partly for its generosity, partly because its consequences were not what she expected.

Animals unaided did not do the trick. At eight or ten years old you can know all about bitches coming on heat, and how a bull mounts a cow, without connecting it with human beings. It was in a book that the odd, almost inconceivable fact that people do what animals do turned up under my hand, as solid as a stone. I think that my mother, in spite of her policy, had
hoped
that we would not chance on Marie Stopes’s
Planned Parenthood
– small and black, it was pushed very far back on one of the lower shelves – but chance on it I did, at the age of eleven. Can I really have pulled it out with a slightly cynical amusement at the idea of our parents reading up on how to rear us methodically, which was what the title suggested to me? That is how I remember it.

The diagrams, and the clear descriptions of sexual intercourse, astonished and thrilled me: I had stumbled on the Answer. At first excitement was mixed with dismay – I had seen those awkward, panting, heaving animals: could human beings be so undignified? – but I got over that in a day or two and was soon borrowing Dr Stopes’s reverent tone as I explained to Betty, then my closest friend, that it only seemed ugly to us because we did not have husbands: done with one’s love it would be beautiful. Lord, but that was a full week! A summer week in the Hertfordshire house, because I remember hurrying through the fence between our paddock and the park round Betty’s house, loaded almost to bursting point with information and impatient even of the moment it took to disengage my cotton frock from the brambles which caught at it. First the immense discovery, the reading and rereading, the digesting of the principle of the thing, and then of the fascinating details (it was a good idea to put a towel under your hips to keep the sheets clean – years later my first lover was much tickled when I got into bed for my deflowering equipped with a towel); then the complicated shift of focus, the act of faith almost, by which I converted what was dismaying into what was desirable.

According to the sort of theory half-held by my mother, that should have settled that: fully informed, Betty and I should have relapsed into thinking only of our animals, our games and our lessons, with sex pigeonholed until the time came for it. Instead, intoxicated by our discovery of what was clearly the most exciting thing in life, we rarely thought or spoke of anything else from the day I first read the book to the time, a couple of years later, when Betty’s mother found one of my letters to her daughter and forbade the continuance of the friendship on the grounds that I was a dirty-minded little girl. This was unfair. I had access to more information than Betty had, but her interest in it was no less avid than mine. It was also humiliating, but one of the reasons that I believe my mother was prevented from helping us about sex more by shyness than by a fundamentally prudish attitude towards it is that she comforted me in my shame by taking the incident in a matter-of-fact way: it did not seem to surprise her that we had discussed such things – she did not consider me a monster, as I had half expected her to.

Marie Stopes taught me the facts; anonymous English ballad writers confirmed my belief that they were pleasures. The spring following my initiation we went, as usual, to stay at Beckton. My grandmother never allowed anyone else to spring-clean my grandfather’s books: each year, with a scarf tied over her hair, she would spend weeks going through the shelves – clap-clap, a flick with a duster, then a quick polish to already gleaming bindings with some unguent prepared from an antiquary’s recipe. She was doing the smoking-room one day, kneeling on the floor among stacks of books while I lolled on the sofa. ‘What are those?’ I asked idly, reaching for the top volume of a pile of six lovely ivory-coloured books with the one word ‘Ballads’ gleaming on their spines. I felt smug at asking. Ballads, I knew, were the kind of poem one ought to like best at my age, but I usually found them dull and preferred Elizabethan conceits or eighteenth-century elegancies (‘Cupid and my Campaspe played/At cards for kisses’ was one of my favourites). ‘You wouldn’t enjoy those,’ said my grandmother too quickly, and added, half to herself, ‘Horrible things, I can’t think how they got here.’ (‘Men!’ she must have been thinking.)

I was on to it at once, put back the volume I had picked up, and talked of something else. That evening I sneaked down, took one of the books at random, and carried it off to my bedroom.

The first poem I read was a long one, and dull, but it was about the gelding of the devil so it had its anatomical passages. Others were far more exciting. The collection was an orgy of rustic bawdy, full of farting and pissing and sex spelt out, embalmed in an atmosphere of guffawing, leering naughtiness. I went through four of the volumes in a fever, hiding them in my underclothes drawer, for in some ways children are as trusting as adults and it did not occur to me that they would be found there. They were, of course. The strange thing, considering how little we did for ourselves in the way of folding up or putting away, was that it did not happen sooner. No one said anything about it – they felt, I suppose, that the incident should be played down rather than up – but when I went to fetch the fifth volume, the whole set had gone. My sense of deprivation was violent; not far, I am sure, from what an alcoholic would feel if his secret stock of whisky was discovered and removed.

Those poems gave me physical sensations of excitement, which
Planned Parenthood
had not done. Flushed and wriggling, searching greedily back and forth for the sexiest passages, I must have been a displeasing sight as I read them. If, now, I found a little girl reading those books in that way, my impulse would be to stop her doing it. But I do not think it did me any harm. ‘Dirty-minded’ Betty’s mother thought me, and dirty-minded I was, doing furtively what I felt to be wrong, but what is the dirty-mindedness of adolescents? Where does it come from, in families where the parents have made no attempt to force their children to think in such terms?

There are always the nuances of behaviour which betray adults’ reactions to things whatever their rational policy may be; nuances picked up by children with infallible accuracy. There is always the sense of taboo which comes from silence. And there are always the effects of experiences connected with excretion – ‘dirty little girl’ over a wetted bed, or merely an adult’s expression of distaste over a smelly chamberpot (or one’s own distaste over it) – to attach an idea of dirtiness to anything belonging to the private parts of the body. But beyond these things there is something else which no attitude, however ‘wholesome’, can be sure of getting round: the fact that sex is an
activity
. To learn about it, then put it in cold storage – it is not so simple as that. Learn about sex, and you want, if it has not been deliberately smeared for you, to
act
it; and while, according to the mores of the society in which you live, you are too young for that, you must inevitably go through a period of tension and frustration. ‘Dirty-mindedness’ is the way – or one of the ways – in which this tension relieves itself, and what is so dreadful about that? ‘Laughter of the wrong sort,’ as a woman I knew called the titters released in classrooms by paintings of the nude, is not a charming sound, but it is a harmless substitute for illegitimate babies bred between teenage children. I dislike the picture of myself reading those ballads, but I do not wish that I had never done so.

Perhaps children who act it out by masturbating spend less time thinking about sex than I did. If I had known of the activity I should certainly have indulged in it, but I did not know of it, and not having a strong practical bent, I did not invent it. I doubt whether it would have made much difference. Physically precocious as I happened to be, I was bound to go through an obsessed stage; and having been spared neurotic extremes in my parents’ attitude I was not likely to be damaged by it. I believe now that the way a person feels about sex, once he has struggled through adolescence, depends largely on other things than his ‘sex education’: on, for example, his imagination, his honesty, his capacity for tenderness, and his ability to comprehend the ‘reality’ of other people. Those are the things to fret about, rather than the little horror’s passion for looking up rude words in the dictionary or peeping through keyholes.

Absorbing though my obsession with sex remained throughout my teens, it stayed in a watertight compartment: it did not leak out, or hardly leaked out, into my relationship with boys. From the age of nine to the age of fifteen, right through the hot early stages of the fever, I was protected by being in love with a boy of my own age, for the reason that he was kind, gentle, brave, honest, and reliable: the most rational love of my life. In my daydreams he and I would rescue each other from appalling perils in order to melt together in an endless kiss; but in real life I should have been astounded if he had so much as pecked my cheek – something unthinkable: the nearest he came to expressing affection was to tell his mother that I was a good sport. Only once did a glimmer of true sexual feeling occur. At the end of a violent afternoon spent sliding down a haystack, he came panting up and flopped beside me. ‘How red and sticky he looks,’ I thought, with what I expected to be distaste – and suddenly, strongly, wanted to feel that hot cheek against mine. I recognized what was happening. ‘So
that
,’ I thought with surprise, ‘is what it is really like!’ and I felt adult for having experienced it – adult and secretive. It was not among the things on which I reported in my ill-fated correspondence with Betty.