Today my house stands open to the spring, and some cornflowers, blue with that intense cornflower blue, crowd the borders. The brick path is almost hidden. I am immediately reminded of the possibility of corn flowers growing in another part of the world where the seasons are not the same as they are here. I am reminded of another time in my life, a long time ago. At that time, using a wooden spatula of the kind used for pressing down the tongue during an examination of the tonsils, I planted out some cornflower seedlings. I am not sure now whether, at the time, I thought of the vivid mass of colour the anonymous seedlings would produce in their maturity. Perhaps it could be said that during my life I have made remarks and carried out various actions, both simple and complicated, without looking ahead to consequences surprisingly pleasant or otherwise. One of the aspects of both sowing and planting is that it is necessary to remember that the work is done with hope.
It is not hard for me to imagine now how cornflowers would look when seen in the soft light of an English summer evening.
The black-out shutters in the hospital, where I worked during the war, were put up every evening so that light would not show from the large building. Because of its many windows the hospital looked like a great ship forever in harbour. Two porters put up the shutters at night and another two took them down in the mornings. The evening porters started on chests on the fifth floor and worked their way down both wings of the hospital through obstetrics, gynaecology, ear nose and throat, orthopaedics, the private wards and so on. Because it was such an immense thing to get done they had to start at about four-thirty, when the afternoon sunlight was pouring into the wards. So, it was like this, coming off duty at five-thirty for an evening off before my day off; the sudden light evening outside, after being in the darkened ward, was a surprise to say the least. This forgotten, unexpected light – it was something which lifted the spirits – this summer evening queening it still through the city and the suburbs. I could not get enough of it. I always sat upstairs on the bus, on the left, so that as we lumbered through the suburb, scraping the summer-green leafiness, I could be as if right in these green trees for the whole journey.
Other memories follow, out of sequence; the red cabbages on my father’s allotment, the roan horses on the tow paths pulling barges laden with coal, and a gypsy who cursed the veins in my mother’s legs causing her to have phlebitis later on. Perhaps it is the Regency tea party which is uppermost in my mind now, with its promise of Queen Anne cups and saucers, China tea with real cream and yards and yards of chiffon…
‘You must come,’ I told my mother. But she felt too shy to visit my new friends.
About these two people, I thought they were the most perfect people on earth. I admired them. In my eyes they could not make a mistake, could not do a bad thing towards anyone.
‘It’s going to be Regency,’ Felicity said, bunching the chiffon in her large capable hands. ‘I’m going to drape the mantelpiece,’ she said. ‘You’ll see, it will be lovely. Do bring your mother.’
My mother was unable to trust these two, Felicity and Noël. She had these feelings of mistrust without even meeting them. Perhaps it was my enthusiasm for them which worried her and the fact that, as soon as I arrived home for my day off, I went at once on my bicycle to their place. I admired their knowledge of music and literature and their ability to conduct whole conversations within quotation marks, if you like to put it that way. They quoted from Shakespeare, Dante, the Bible, from Eliot and Auden, and they sang as if they were characters in an opera.
Den Adigen steht die Ehrenhaftigheit
im Gesicht geschrieben.
Nun, verlieren wir keine Zeit,
augenblicklich will ich dich heiraten.
‘A nobleman’s honour,’ Felicity explained the meaning, ‘is written in his face. Now, let’s not waste time. I’ll marry you.’ When she laughed she sang tenor through her laugh.
Their voices, pure and able, were sustained as if with deeply felt love, as if nothing could go wrong with either their voices or with them or with me.
They introduced me to the novels of Virginia Woolf. When my father asked me, one time on my day off, ‘Have you got a nice book? What are you reading?’ I showed him the book.
‘To the Lighthouse,’ he said. ‘That’s a good title but I’m afraid it’s too highbrow for me.’
‘No it’s easy,’ I told him, nodding wisely. I read all Virginia Woolf’s books and discovered later that I had never seen any of the faces of the people in any of the novels. One thing I did see was a plush cloth pulled off a table with a flamboyant movement. I never saw, then, the implication behind that simple action which, I think, was in a sea captain’s stateroom. Even the action itself, the reason for it, I realise now, was not clear to me.
‘These people are arty crafty,’ my mother said. How did they earn a living, she wanted to know. And how did they pay rent? Decrepit as the place was they would not have it for nothing. My mother, being unsure of her own place in a society to which she was not accustomed, based her attitudes and opinions on those of a neighbour, a railway man’s widow, Mrs Pugh, who was a dressmaker. Crawling round on the floor with her mouth full of pins while she adjusted a hem, this neighbour, it seemed to my mother, knew all there was to know about human life and how it should be lived.
‘You don’t never get no pleasure,’ the neighbour told my mother. And when the new Odeon Cinema opened on the edge of the housing estate they went to the pictures together, twice a week when the programme changed. They sat in warmth, in the rich golden splendour of mirrors, brass light fittings, brass handrails and voluminous red velvet curtains. In the interval they listened to the theatre organ as it rose from its cave in the floor. And they received from maids, in black dresses with white aprons and caps, afternoon tea on little trays made, it seemed, of hand-beaten silver.
So, when my mother agreed to accepting the invitation to the Regency tea party it was on condition that Mrs Pugh could come too. They would catch the bus and walk from the corner and I would meet them at the field path.
It was true, they, my two new friends, were arty crafty. One of them made a skirt for me from cloth woven by them both. Knowing how long weaving takes, a skirt length was a large gift. They rented the place. It was one of those dilapidated farm houses remaining in a small triangle of green meadow right in the middle of an industrial area. There was a coal mine and the brick works to one side, the bone and glue factory on the other side and, behind the house, there was an enormous slag heap partly overgrown with tufted grass and coltsfoot. The field was low lying and enclosed by hedges of hawthorn and elderberry. To one side of the kitchen door there was a derelict wash house. A potter’s wheel, a mess of clay dug from the wet field and a kiln built by themselves was on the other side. They had a cow and some chickens. The cow was found to have TB and, after a while, it was fetched away.
Even now the strong fragrance of elderberry, should I be in a place where it grows, reminds me of the excitement, as it seemed then, of going ‘to the country’, to be there with them.
As the day for the Regency tea party drew near I began to be anxious about the dirty tumbledown house. They seemed to enjoy writing their names and audacious remarks in the dust. They left dishes and clothes everywhere and never made their bed. I despised myself for wanting to impose my suburban and hospital-trained standards on them. These bits of Black Country farms, left over, brought some prettiness during the seasons; daffodils, the pink and the white mayflowers, buttercups and daisies and, on the slag heap, the yellow coltsfoot. There were dog roses too in the hedges and the flowers heralding blackberries and the shiny fruit itself and, finally, the red hawthorn berries and the rosy wild crab-apples. Theirs was one of those pretty places in the middle of the smoke and dirt, the heave and roar of the iron and steel works and the unforgettable noise of the wheels turning as the miners’ cage was going down or coming up.
‘Don’t they speak nice,’ the railway widow, Mrs Pugh, was not able to hide the approval in the face of her disapproval and distaste. She stood with my mother, both of them balancing in their best shoes, on a tuft of grass at the edge of the mud. My mother, as a rule, admired people who, having been to Oxford, as my new friends had, said barth and parth with that special resonance as the vowel sound is brought down through the nose. Grass and laugh also, as if an ‘n’ lurked somewhere in these words. She felt the short ‘a’ was an unfortunate stigma and was quick to correct people, even strangers in shops. My mother approved of grey flannels and Oxford sandals saying that they were elegant and went well with the haircut which allowed a nice wave to fall across an intellectual forehead.
The only trouble about their clothes was that, when my mother and Mrs Pugh arrived, my two friends were not wearing any.
Nervously I stood with the two visitors listening to the high-pitched little screams which belonged to the way in which my friends talked and laughed. The smoke from the wash-house chimney rewarded us with a sudden shower of sparks and soot. From inside came the sounds of a tin bath being shared.
‘Always the accomplished acrobat. You delightful tormenting creature!’ a laughing well-bred voice said, causing the visitors to look away from each other and to stare stonily at the generous surrounding of mud.
‘Acrobat! Contortionist!’ the two-toned laughter contained in its music the sounds of an exchange of playful slappings, of wet hands on wet bare flesh.
‘And, whose little bottom is this?’ Slap slap. ‘And, whose little bottom is this?’ Two more slaps.
‘Who or what are these so-called friends of yours?’ My mother’s white hat with its small spotted veil was an inadequate protection.
‘Them forrin or what?’ Mrs Pugh said.
‘They’re Bohemians,’ I said.
‘It’s not a question of which country…’ My mother’s lips made a pale thin line. I looked away from her.
‘Bohemians,’ I tried again. ‘You know, A la Boemm,’ I said, ‘as in art, in painting and poetry… that sort of thing… clay modelling, pottery…’ I waved a hand towards the kiln. Another high-pitched scream of laughter interrupted my attempt.
‘Well,’ Mrs Pugh said. ‘I don’t know much about art but I like a nice picture now and again, you know, something pretty.’
One of the inmates of the wash house had started to blow bubbles. The other was singing, then they both sang from Don Giovanni:
Give me thy hand, oh fairest,
I would, and yet I would not…
‘Sounds like there’s two of a kind in there,’ Mrs Pugh pursed her lips.
‘Really!’ my mother’s speech was cut short as the wash-house door was pushed open from within and my two friends, sharing a bath towel, stepped on to the plank which bridged the mud between the wash house and the kitchen. The two of them seemed, at that moment, to fly across in a flurry of pink nakedness.
‘I’m going for the bus even if I have to stand and wait two hours for it out there on the corner,’ my mother began picking her way across the sodden meadow. ‘They’ll wreck your career, those two,’ there were tears in her voice. ‘Believe me,’ she said, ‘between them, those two, they’ll wreck your career.’
Unable to look at my mother’s white hat I took her arm to steady her across to the next little island of turf. I could see myself quite plainly working my way through bladders and stomach ulcers, gallstones and various surgical conditions, through the men’s private wards and the women’s private wards, a never ending path to being a battleaxe of a sister in charge of some God-forsaken place like Radium Therapy or the diet kitchen on the Lower Ground Floor, or, worse, in charge of the ear, nose and throat theatre, with its two humourless and untender surgeons, always at war with each other, and on towards a final triumph – that of being a District Nurse, enormous in navy blue, on a bicycle, visiting patients, admonishing husbands and delivering babies on sheets of newspaper in overcrowded kitchens or bedrooms. I suppose I wanted to be both wrecked and rescued. I saw a tear on my mother’s soft, carefully powdered cheek and noticed again her patent-leather shoes being spoiled.
‘No!’ I said. ‘No, no I won’t let them… I won’t let anything wreck…’
Just then Felicity, dressed, called to us to come indoors. The kettle, she sang, was boiling. She was making tea.
My mother and Mrs Pugh hesitated.
‘I could just do with a nice cup of tea,’ Mrs Pugh said.
My two friends, their wet hair brushed back, waited on my mother and Mrs Pugh with charm.
‘Thank you very much, ta,’ Mrs Pugh held her tea cup and saucer high, level with her proud bosom. ‘Well, thank you very much. I don’t mind if I do,’ she helped herself delicately to a sandwich from Felicity’s offered plate.
There wasn’t any chiffon and the cups were absolutely not Queen Anne. Felicity must have discarded the Regency idea. While the visitors were being looked after I went outside and, crouching in the rain which was beginning to fall, I planted out all the cornflower seedlings I had brought with me. I used the spatula which I kept in my pocket along with my watch and my nursing scissors. These things, together with my pen, were my possessions; I cherished them.
When I come upon the surprise of cornflowers here I know that there will have been the surprise of them in that other place. I never went back to see. My two friends did not write to me and I never wrote to them. The other day I almost read a Virginia Woolf novel again. And then I put it back on the shelf.
I am afraid that this time I would see the faces and be disappointed.