Private Papers Page 2

  Where we actually lived, when we first visited Bedford Square, was in a small cramped flat not far from University College Hospital, where Oliver was a houseman. Our nearest tube was Mornington Crescent but we were close enough to walk to the hospital where I also worked, as a nurse in the Children’s Ward. We had married on April 11th 1934, as soon as Oliver completed his clinical studies at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. We could have afforded somewhere more salubrious, since Oliver had some money of his own, but we were saving to buy our own house as soon as he qualified – we had a three-year plan. Yet, strangely, it was no part of our plan to prevent the birth of children. We chose not to. Other people, in particular Grandmother Butler, might think it folly for us to have a child at that stage, but we did not. We wanted to start our family immediately. We hated that ‘wait-until’ attitude – wait until Oliver is qualified, wait until you have a nice flat or house, wait until you’ve been married a while, wait until you’re older. No wait-untils, thank you. Rosemary, our first child, was born a year to the day after our marriage and nobody could have been happier than I was. We named her Rosemary for remembrance, remembrance for all time of our intense happiness. All was brilliantly radiant around me —

  *

  Jesus Christ. Who wants to be a remembrance of someone else’s happiness? Especially as I cannot remember this so-called divine bliss. I was only nine when the love’s-young-dream act ended. It’s all legend, Mother’s legend. Another saga we were told and re-told, and hurt her by groaning and not wanting to hear yet again. How perfect it had been – The First Meeting. The Engagement, The Wedding, The Honeymoon, etc., etc. A hospital romance, smouldering eyes over gauze masks and heavy breathing under the starched white gowns. Young Doctor Butler and young Nurse Penelope. Oh la. Whirlwind courtship but no slap-and-tickle – wasn’t nice, not part of the package. ‘All was brilliantly radiant around me,’ she boasts. Oh yeah, as Emily used to say when she was little, oh yeah? Who says so? Apart from her? What has she wiped from her memory? One rather important thing for a start. My father was married before. Spoils the scenario a bit, I think. She never told us and of course he never had a chance to. I wonder if he ever would have done and how? Grandmother Butler told me, with malice and definite forethought. What an evil old bitch she was. She told me about six months after my father was killed, when Mother was ill after having Emily, and Celia, Jess and I were packed off to Brighton with Linda, the girl who helped to look after us. We went to stay with Grandmother Butler in this Bedford Square place Mother drools about – horrible dump – for a week. By that time it stank. Grandmother Butler still had plenty of money but she couldn’t keep servants, not even a cleaning lady, so the house was filthy and neglected. How on earth Mother persuaded her to have us, I cannot imagine, because she made it clear from our arrival that she resented our very presence. I remember we all huddled together in one bed and cried. Jess wet the bed in the middle of the night and we cried even harder because we were too frightened to get up and go and find Linda in the dark. We lay awake the rest of the night, Celia and I, worrying about what Grandmother Butler would say if she found out about the sodden sheets. (Ironic, really, when she was probably just into wetting her own sheets and pretending she hadn’t.) Linda washed them next day in the sea and we spread them out in a secluded spot on the beach, anchored with stones, and nobody ever knew. We sat and giggled at how mortified Grandmother Butler would be if she knew where her sheets were on display and why – ‘mortified’ was one of her favourite words.

  The weather was brilliant, surprisingly hot and sunny, and we lived on that beach from seven in the morning until dark. Linda was marvellous. She may have been only sixteen and no intellectual giant (her grammatical errors certainly ‘mortified’ Grandmother Butler when we innocently copied them) but she was loving and she was fun. She knew, of course, that our father was by that time ‘previously reported missing believed killed in action now presumed killed in action’. She knew we hadn’t been told, because Mother went on hoping and never gave away, by the smallest hint, that every sensible person believed him dead. When Grandmother Butler wept and wailed and sighed over us, which she did daily, and when she called us poor fatherless little girls, Linda helped us ignore her. When I asked her what Grandma meant, Linda said, at her most placid and phlegmatic, that she just meant Father wasn’t with us. Beautifully simple. How different from the convoluted answers Mother gave.

  So we had a good week. We swam in the icy water, got sunburned, and quarrelled a great deal less than normal. If it hadn’t been for wanting to see Mother and the new baby again, we wouldn’t have wanted to go home, in spite of being frightened of Grandmother. I think I was more frightened than Celia or Jess but I pretended not to be. It was expected by them, by everyone, that being the eldest I should be the bravest. I tried hard to live up to that expectation. And I must have succeeded, because Grandmother Butler made me her favourite. She said I was exactly like my father (and also, inevitably, what a pity it was I had not been a boy). The former claim at least was totally untrue. I was exactly like my mother to look at and, as for temperament or personality, Grandmother Butler could hardly claim to be an expert on my father, even though he was her son. So far as I can make out, she hardly knew him. He was sent back to England, to prep school, at seven, and even before that he’d been looked after by amahs. But the point was that Grandmother Butler wanted me to be a Butler so she simply decided I was one. Butlers were brave, outspoken, independent, proud, clever, honest and possessed of all the other dreary Victorian virtues. The biggest compliment was to be told one was pure Butler, untainted by whatever genes came through my mother’s side. That, of course, was a source of great trouble. Grandmother Butler never left off, not for a single minute if the subject came up, never stopped muttering darkly about Mother’s ‘doubtful origins’. She despised her for not having a family and made her suffer acutely. Considering Mother herself feels exactly about family as Grandmother did, it was all rather painfully unnecessary. But Grandmother simply had to find a way of letting me know that, not only was my mother tainted by not belonging to a family, she was also a mere substitute for someone who had, in this respect, met with her approval.

  One evening, just before we went back to London, Grandmother Butler took me into what she called her boudoir. This was a foul little over-decorated room leading off her utterly repulsive bedroom. It was difficult to move about anywhere in that house since it was so stuffed with furniture, but in the boudoir it was quite impossible. Everything in that tiny cupboard of a room was purple – carpet, curtains, cloth on the round little table, chair-cover. Dark purple, stifling. Grandmother manoeuvred her bulk round the table and into the chair and patted the arm of the chair for me to perch on (there was no space for another chair, not even a stool). I don’t remember exactly what she said, though I remember the gist, but I do remember most vividly her expressions and the general atmosphere. I knew I was nervous, wary, on my guard. I didn’t want to be there alone with my grandmother. Physically, she was repulsive. She was small and squat with a great shelf-like bosom that seemed to collect foodstains, however carefully she ate. Her hair was a dirty grey, cropped into an ugly square shape round her ears – almost geometric, like a clipped privet hedge. She wore heavy, long earrings made of jade or jet, set in antique silver casings. They were much too large for her fat face and made her look absurd. Her eyes were black and piggy, lost in the podginess above her cheeks. When she smiled, which was never with conviction, they disappeared entirely. But it was her arms and legs I hated most. They appeared to be solid, straight blocks of muscle without any of the normal indents for knees or elbows. One looked in horror at Grandmother Butler’s limbs and wondered if they could bend. Maybe I am being cruel, maybe her arthritis made it difficult to bend them and that was why she held her arms and legs so rigid and stiff, seeming to work them from some swivel at the top. She looked like a badly made, over-stuffed guy on a bonfire, one you knew would burn beautifully with all that straw in i
t.

  On her lap was an album with a slightly soiled, white velvet cover. With her arms hanging over the sides of the chair, the only position in which they ever seemed to be comfortable, she indicated by a nod of her head that I was to open the album. I did so fearfully, wondering what dreadful thing I should see, wondering how soon I could get away from the sour smell that seemed to envelop the entire room. As I opened the album, Grandmother said something about seeing photographs my mother had never seen and it must be my secret, as Mother might be upset and we didn’t want that, did we. Even at nine I swear I sensed the hypocrisy. I knew Grandmother Butler lived for upsetting my mother. But I opened the album and there was nothing in the least nasty in it. On the contrary. I stared at a lovely photograph of a handsome young man. I stared at it for some time, knowing the face seemed familiar but not quite sure why, until Grandmother murmured that it was my father when he was very young, wasn’t he splendid. I turned the page and there was another photograph of a girl I was quite sure I had never known. She was slight, pretty, with frothy blonde curls all round her face. I remember her teeth were slightly prominent. But I still didn’t twig why I was being shown this album, until I turned the next page and there was my father and this girl together and in different clothes. Wedding clothes. My father was in topper and tails, the girl clinging to his arm almost lost in the cascading lace of her white dress and veil. Grandmother Butler said, ‘Aren’t they beautiful, quite perfect, but then it was a perfect day, perfect wedding. She was a Dacre-Dunnett you know, very old family and of course they know how to do these things, terribly grand. Poor child. Poor Oliver.’ I didn’t speak. I didn’t ask any of the questions a normal, inquisitive nine year old would have been expected to. But Grandmother Butler wasn’t put off. She talked and talked in her special pretend-sad way that I hated. I had to keep turning the pages and looking at more and more photographs of wedding cakes and flowers and endless groups of over-dressed people. Grandmother told me who they all were but I didn’t take any of it in. Why should I have done – it meant nothing to me. I was upset, without knowing why, but determined not to let her see. She went on and on about them – the bridal pair – being poor, poor loves and far too young to marry, only twenty and eighteen, but it was what they wanted and who could stand in their way. I still didn’t say a word. When I had got to the end of the book, I got down from the arm of the chair and walked off. I don’t remember Grandmother trying to stop me. Her job was done, I suppose. The amazing thing was that I didn’t tell a soul and I have never to this day told my mother. It sounds ridiculous, all these years later, but it is the truth. At the time, though, I thought about nothing else for weeks and even now, if something triggers my memory, I can spend hours speculating about my father’s first secret marriage – secret from us, I mean, I assume the child bride died. There could not have been any children – my mother would never have allowed any of my father’s children to be excluded from his life. I suppose I could quite easily find out, if I wanted to, but that has always been the trouble – I’m not sure I do want to. I’ve always felt it would be indecent while Mother is still alive. Reading this is indecent, too, I suppose. Mother is in the next door room, chatting to Celia. ‘There are boxes and boxes of photographs, darling,’ she said, ‘you take your pick.’ All I did was to look for them, and found this. Yet I feel furtive. And I feel as if I’m doing something dangerous. Why am I so agitated? Oh, for Christ’s sake – I’ll have to go back to them in a minute anyway.

  *

  — all was brilliantly radiant around me, though in the greater world outside our own happiness everything was becoming very dark and ominous indeed. Oliver read The Times assiduously every day and worried about the future. He was sure there was going to be a war even when The Times thought there would not be. I didn’t like him to talk about it. It annoyed me that he should make himself deliberately unhappy, just when he ought to be the opposite. He had qualified, he loved his work, we had moved to a lovely flat in Primrose Hill, we had a darling baby – why must he fret about things that had nothing to do with us? I am ashamed now.

  The girls say their childhoods were ruined by the war. That is untrue. They do not seem to appreciate how many years of complete happiness they were privileged to have before the war ever happened, and those years cannot be discounted because of what came afterwards. Their childhoods, particularly Rosemary’s, were happy, I insist. Even Emily, born fatherless, had a happy childhood. I know. I was there and saw. My memory stretches back to those years effortlessly and I am quite sure. I don’t want to go into humdrum detail or drag out my old diaries to substantiate my case. I have, in my head, clear and vivid pictures of three laughing, normal, happy children and that is enough to —

  *

  Wrong, as ever. She doesn’t bloody see how she falsifies things. How arrogant; she has this sloppy inner picture show of us ‘happy’ and that is pronounced ‘enough’. QED. If it wasn’t so irritating, it would be funny. Mother doesn’t even realize when she is suppressing things. And she makes what people call Freudian slips. She says ‘three’ laughing, normal, etc. children, but there were four of us. Surely she isn’t going to leave Jess out? I hardly think so, not if this is about putting some kind of record straight so that she can confront us with these choices we made, whatever they were. Jess was her choice and a bad one. Disastrous. But she can’t be forgotten just because she spoils the symmetry of Mother’s mental pictures. I wish she’d get on to Jess. Quickly, before she loses all credibility. I’m tired already of this foolish pretence that she’s addressing some boring old fart of a judge and not me. All this is for me. I know it is, I’m sure of it. So what should I do about it? March out, clutching it, saying what the hell have you been playing at, Mother? Yet all my instincts are to keep quiet, to be as secretive as Mother herself.

  *

  — to make me state with assurance that the war ‘ruined’ their childhood is a lie. It changed it, but it did not ruin it. Celia, Jess and Emily were all war babies and Rosemary was only four when war was declared, but their experience of war, or of suffering the effects of it, was slight. Everything went on in their little lives more or less as it had always done. Even Oliver’s absence was not the traumatic thing it might have been, because they saw so little of him anyway. He worked long hours and spent most of his time at the hospital. I was the major feature in their lives and I was always there. I am not denying that the war affected us. Of course it did. But I think people forget how life for many women and children appeared to go on much the same. Once Oliver had gone off to the war, our lives closed in. It was Rosemary, Celia and me against the world. And Jessica. Quite secure in our home, whether in London or Brighton. Every day the same reassuring routine: Rosemary trotting off to school, Celia playing contentedly in the garden while I got on with the usual jobs mothers do, perhaps more harassed than most because of the state of the house. And because of Jessica, because having Jessica was really too much.

  I cannot accuse my daughters of not facing up to what they have done to their own lives, while bewailing accidents of fate, if I do not acknowledge my own mistakes. Deliberate ones. Times when I made major decisions which had a direct bearing upon their future. But what words will serve to relate something so delicate? Whatever I say will shock – shock me apart from anyone else. I can only tell the truth as it happened and hope it makes its own sense. Oliver came home one night from the hospital very cast down and despondent. It was the spring of 1940 and he had not then joined up, but I know now that he thought of little else. He had become silent and withdrawn, totally obsessed with the progress of the war, constantly debating with himself the moral niceties of doing what he was doing. The hospital had prepared itself for action, sandbags had been installed everywhere and wards cleared for expected casualties. But of course, to some extent, normal hospital life also continued. Babies were born there, even though the maternity unit was officially evacuated. People were operated upon, the usual emergencies took place. Oliver worked hard
er and harder, mostly sleeping in the basement of the hospital at night. I was lucky if I had him at home one night a week.

  Celia had been born on New Year’s Day and we had moved into our house the following month. It was a large, flat-fronted Victorian villa in Primrose Hill, just one street away from the park. We moved in the worst possible conditions and found our house in an appalling state. It was not that we had not known it would be, but the actual extent of the damp, the bulging ceilings, the non-functioning plumbing was so much worse than we remembered. Everything seemed too much. When I wept at the filth everywhere, Oliver would remind me that outside there was a war going on: what were my problems compared to that?