Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography--1949-1962 Page 15

  ‘Am I really as awful as they say I am? Tell me—no, tell me what you think.’

  ‘Of course you aren’t, Naomi.’

  ‘If I’m only half as bad as they say I am, then I must be the biggest monster in the world.’

  ‘Oh, take no notice. It’s just mother-and-daughter stuff—you know, happy families.’

  ‘Sons are best,’ she would say. But I think she longed for a nice amenable friendly daughter. She treated me like one. She was kind, generous, curious about my doings, hungry for female gossip—which was not my style—and full of good advice, which I listened to with the kind of patience I should have achieved with my mother. Yes, I was indeed aware of the ironies of the situation.

  She relied for support on her sons. But this was a clan, and when it was threatened from outside, they closed ranks. Once, the daughter of an eminent American scientist, who had fallen in love with a Mitchison son, was mournfully and tearfully present: the clan had decided against her. I had not seen such cruel, cold exclusion since I had left school. This all went on unconsciously, I think, like a cuttlefish expelling clouds of ink. The thing was, I had never known a clan before. All these people as individuals were charming. But I was giving thanks that I had not been part of a large family.

  An incident: Naomi asked me to take a certain inarticulate young scientist for a walk. ‘And for goodness’ sake, get him to say something—his tongue will atrophy.’ His name was James Watson. For about three hours we walked about over the hills and through the heather, while I chatted away, my mother’s daughter: one should know how to put people at their ease. At the end of it, exhausted, wanting only to escape, I at last heard human speech. ‘The trouble is, you see, that there is only one other person in the world I can talk to.’ I reported this to Naomi, and we agreed that it was as dandified a remark as we could remember, even from a very young man. Quite soon he and Francis Crick would lay bare the structure of DNA.

  An incident: Staying for a night or two is Freddie Ayer, the philosopher. He is with his American mistress, soon to be his wife. She comes down to breakfast wearing a scarlet flannel nightgown trimmed with white broderie anglaise lace. Her style and dash overwhelm the dowdy scene—the rest of us being snuggled into layers of wool. The United States, in those days, was continually and in a thousand ways inspiring envy and emulation.

  If the talk one overheard about science, or took part in about politics, was irresistible, the same could not be said about literature.

  ‘Oh, silly old Dostoyevsky,’ you’d hear. ‘Boring old Tolstoy.’ There was only one poet, Auden. Yeats? Oh, poor old Yeats. Eliot? Poor old Eliot. Hopkins? Who’s he? I thought this was just another little sample of the British philistinism I was encountering so often, but later I understood that here I was tapping some buried layer of past literary culture, a deposit. Sometime in the twenties or the thirties, in some corner of the literary world, or briefly in all of it, a wave of opinions worked their way across, and they were all saying, Auden is the only poet, poor old Eliot, poor old Yeats.

  Philistinism is endemic in Britain, and most particularly in London. As I write, the favourite pastime at the dinner tables is to recite—with pride—the list of great books you haven’t read and have no intention of reading. A major newspaper, the Independent, has a weekly feature, ‘All You Need to Know About the Books You Meant to Read,’ where the plot of, let’s say, War and Peace is briefly given. (What, can’t you take a joke?) It is all too easy to imagine the triumphant smile of the man writing these little résumés, reducing some masterpiece to the level of an answer in a school examination.

  Sometime in the seventies I wrote a humorous piece for the Spectator where I used quotes from Meredith (The Ordeal of Richard Feverel) and—I think—D. H. Lawrence to show how certain of their purple passages could have come out of any popular romance. This was taken as denigration, and at once in came the letters rubbishing the great. Goethe? How German! Cervantes? What a bore—a favourite epithet. Stendhal? Oh, what tedium! The slightest excuse, and in they rush, these dogs who cannot wait to tear the body of literature to pieces.

  Rebecca West, a clever and cultivated woman, said that all of Goethe’s philosophy amounted to ‘Ain’t Nature grand’. And there it is, the authentic grunt from the swamp.

  What the British—no, the English—like best are small, circumscribed novels, preferably about the nuances of class or social behaviour.

  I said to Naomi that she and her family had an instinctive preference for the second-rate—meaning in literature. It is amazing what rudeness colonials and lesser breeds without the law can get away with: we don’t know any better. There was a sad day when I realised that I could no longer get away with it: I and my tongue had to learn to prefer silence.

  Why did I go to Carradale when I didn’t much enjoy it? Because of the child, of course.

  It was the Mitchisons all together as a clan that I disliked, but met separately, that was a different thing. I used to meet Naomi for lunch at her club in Cavendish Square. What I enjoyed about her was the vitality, the exuberance, of her enjoyment of life, and her lack of hypocrisy as she told me the latest instalment in her love life. Naomi had been sent by her father, the great scientist John Scott Haldane, to the Dragon School in Oxford. It was a boys’ school, and she was the only girl. I think this probably set the course for her love life. Aged sixteen, when, as she said, ‘I was still at school with my hair down my back,’ they affianced her to Dick Mitchison, a handsome young soldier. She hardly knew him. Their marriage, I thought, was the essence of good sense and civilised behaviour. She had her love adventures, and he at least one longlasting love. These two were the best of friends. A good many people watched this marriage, admiring it, and young people particularly saw it as good. I remember a conversation at Carradale between two girls, both resisting marriage. ‘But there has always been this kind of marriage; nothing new about it.’

  ‘Yes, but it is all in the open. No hypocrisy, no lies.’ For, being so young, hypocrisy and lies were the worst of the bad things they saw when surveying the adult world.

  Of the people I went with to the Soviet Union, Naomi was the one I saw most and for longest—over years. I met A. E. Coppard and his wife several times. He was less and less at home in a world increasingly commercial and rushed. He was a countryman, a man for villages, fields, woods, long rambles. A vanished world…I did not see Douglas Young again but heard of him through Naomi. Sometimes I had lunch with Arnold Kettle, but he was never able to sever himself from the Party. Richard Mason I did see. He lived with his wife, Felicity, just down the road in Chelsea. Felicity was a truly beautiful woman, as befits a Muse, for she saw her role as the inspirer of genius. Before Richard there had been one or two, but as soon as she saw him, she knew what would be her destiny, and his, and informed him accordingly. She decided that a little house in Chelsea and a quiet life were what he needed to create. Every morning she made him go upstairs, while she kept from him the telephone, the results of the doorbell, visitors, or any manifestations of ordinary life. This is of course what many writers dream of, not least myself, when much beset by care, but for Richard it certainly was not the recipe. I was present at a painful and very funny evening with several guests, all of whom had been following this drama to its inevitable end with sympathetic curiosity, when Richard told Felicity what it was he needed, and she told him what she was determined he should have. ‘What I want is to go to some exotic place, and there I will fall in love with a coloured girl. She must be poor or ill or something like that. Then I will write my next book.’

  ‘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 upsta
irs 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 lik
e 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.