My mother had been sent away from Linkenholt to boarding school – St Monica’s in Buckinghamshire – when she was six years old; two years younger than everybody else at the school.
How had this come about? Had St Monica’s been bribed to take this hapless little girl? How did they, or my grandparents, imagine a child of six – whose education up to that time had been sporadic, presided over by a lazy governess – was going to cope in a class of eight-year-olds?
Jane told us that she couldn’t cope at all. She just sat at the back of the classroom ‘not understanding a thing’. The teachers seemingly couldn’t be bothered, even, to learn her first name, and called her ‘Little Dudley’. She was so homesick and unhappy, she couldn’t eat, but she was made to eat and then she was sick. She was sick almost every day. She got so thin and weak, she was dumped in the school sanatorium for weeks on end. My grandparents never visited.
Surely Charles Dickens in his blacking factory can scarcely have been more miserable than my mother was at this young age? If Jo and I felt like outcasts when we were sent to Crofton Grange, I can’t begin to imagine the pain in six-year-old Jane’s heart at this terrible childhood banishment. And I think it’s true to say that, emotionally and to some extent physically, she never quite recovered from it. I now have a six-year-old beloved grandson, Archie. The idea that any comparable exclusion from the family could be inflicted upon this beautiful, vulnerable child makes my blood turn to ice.
Jane said that the only thing that gave her ‘hope’ was the coat our grandmother had bought for her before she left. She said it was a beautiful little coat, lined in silk, with a short cape sewn into the collar seam and covering the shoulders. Jane reasoned that if her mother cared enough about how she looked to buy her this expensive coat, then that might be proof that she loved her – ‘at least a bit’.
I never saw this precious garment, this supposed emblem of a mother’s affection, but it has always seemed clear to me that Mabel Dudley loved nobody on this earth (including my grandfather) except her two sons. At the time she sent her daughter away, her elder son, Roland (who was soon to die), was at Harrow, and no doubt she missed him. I can only believe that it irked her to give house room to Jane when Roland was forcibly absent; better, in her selfish mind, to get rid of Jane and leave the adorable Michael, then aged four – too young for school of any kind in those days – as the only child, to be spoiled and petted at home.
It was at this time, at St Monica’s, made miserable by being called ‘Little Dudley’, that Jane decided to change her name. She had been christened Viola Mabel: Viola, perhaps, after Shakespeare’s feisty heroine, or more likely – in a philistine household that nevertheless took pride in a beautiful garden – after the sweet pansy flower, and Mabel after her mother.
But she didn’t feel that either of these names belonged to her. Nobody at the school could pronounce Viola properly. Once they’d abandoned ‘Little Dudley’, they began calling her ‘Vi-oh-ler’, which Jane knew was ugly and wrong. And it was difficult for her to live up to ‘Mabel’ – to try to be like the mother who had sent her away. So she made a decision. She explained that ‘All my life I’d been told that I was plain, so I said, right, I’ll be “Plain Jane” from now on and that’s what everyone must call me.’ She kept the V.M.T. initials for legal documents and chequebooks, but she was Jane to her family and friends until the day she died.
I’ve always admired her for this. She got her way. She understood that names are important, that you need to own them and feel that they fit the person you imagine yourself to be. Throughout my childhood, I was always called ‘Rosie’. The name just followed me along, except at school, where I was ‘Rosemary’ (my given name) to most of the teachers, and at Linkenholt, where I was often ‘Rosebud’ to Grandpop. But I never felt comfortable with any of these names, and I can sometimes conceive of my childhood as a long journey towards the one-syllable noun I could properly own: Rose. Just as Jane, from the age of seven or eight, refused to answer to Viola, so I, from the age of twenty, refused to answer to Rosie.fn1
It is from the St Monica’s time that my mother’s struggle with food can be dated. At Linkenholt – as I experienced as a child – the food from the farm and the vegetable garden, beautifully prepared by Florence and her helpers, was nourishing and abundant. Jane knew how good food should be cooked, and when she married Keith, she took herself on cordon bleu courses to learn how to do it. My father mocked these endeavours as the ‘strain-in-champagne-and-throw-away’ school of cookery, but this was unfair. Having been through the war and its aftermath of rationing in England, my mother, though keen to acquire new ‘professional’ skills, hated waste in the kitchen and was always clever at finding ways to use up leftovers. Jo and I grew up with fond memories of her recycled lamb shepherd’s pies, scented with fresh sage.
Jane’s real trouble was that she thought she loved food. She talked about it eagerly, greedily. She certainly loved it in her mind, but her body was almost perpetually in rebellion against it. The sickness she’d endured at St Monica’s followed her throughout her life. Sometimes she vomited in the middle of a meal. Her rush from the room was something we came to dread but had to get used to.
In consequence, she was as thin as Wallis Simpson, and like Wallis, prided herself on this lean body shape, this almost-flat silhouette, and on the exquisite clothes it could slip into like a shadow.fn2 She despised fat people. And she wanted Jo and me to be modest little reeds of girls. At puberty, we were made to wear elastic girdles, ‘because nobody wants to see the cheeks of your bottoms under a skirt. That is a quite disgusting sight.’
There was so much in the world that disgusted her. She once told me that cleaning her teeth made her feel nauseous. How she got on with sex with either of her husbands, I don’t know. At the time of her first marriage, she’d had to go into hospital for an operation to make her vagina wider to accommodate my father. Perhaps this narrow, clenched vagina was quite stimulating and exciting (again, as it was reputed to be in Wallis Simpson’s body), and kept my father by her side until he found somebody he truly loved and who loved him back.
Jane had no schooling in love. She had never been given it – except a little, perhaps, by her easy-going, sweet-natured brother Michael – and so she didn’t know how to feel it or how to show it. This was the tragedy of her existence.
Near the end of her life, she kept desperately repeating that she loved me, and she certainly had a deep affection for three (but only three out of seven) of her grandchildren: Jo’s eldest son, Guy, her elder daughter, Kate, and my only daughter, Eleanor. But these protestations came too late to be believed. Love needs words and deeds to be perceived as love, and Jo and I grew up entirely without the feeling of being loved by our mother. We skirted round her moods and furies like the undernourished cubs of a wild she-wolf. We crept away to Nan’s comforting lair, where the sound of her voice was sweet and calm.
As an antidote to her struggles with food, Jane chain-smoked. She inserted du Maurier cigarettes into a black holder from Dunhill’s of Mayfair, which contained a filter that captured some of the tar. From time to time she would change the filters, and I can remember clearly the sight of the little plastic oblongs, sticky and brown, which she told us saved her lungs from becoming congested by tar.
But the word ‘tar’ always bothered me. In the 1950s, a lot of municipal tarring was going on in London, as cratered roads were repaired and new pavements laid after all the destruction of the Second World War. Jo and I liked to watch the giant steamrollers pressing this pungent, treacly substance into the earth.
I particularly remember one tar engine, moving back and forth at the end of Walton Street, outside a fishmonger who sold live eels, shiny and black as the tar, in white pails. Ever since, black eels and molten tar have always been associated in my mind, as though the tar might have emanated from the eels’ bodies, a lava of petroleum-scented caviar, bringing London back to life.
But the idea that some of this same suffocating, burning roe could end up inside my mother felt strange. This is one of the troubles and the wonders of childhood: you imagine things wrongly. And later, when the truth is known – assuming there is an absolute truth – the unwinding of the imagined thing is tangled, because the first image keeps on obstinately breaking through. You’re adrift in mystery and ambiguity. And yet for a writer’s imagination, the unfixed place is sometimes a promising place to dwell. Black eels and tar; a caviar of tar in my mother’s thin-chested body: these are absorbing images. When Keats presented his enabling concept of ‘negative capability’, he was reaffirming the creative power that ‘uncertainties, mysteries and doubts’ can provide.
Now and then, I experienced the du Maurier tar first hand. There was a game Jane and I occasionally played, when I was eight or nine, in which I would pretend to be her and she would pretend to be me. My essential prop was the black Dunhill cigarette holder. I would stick this between my teeth and taste both the tar residue and the Chanel lipstick that always smeared the end of it. I would sit on a sofa with my legs discreetly crossed, doing pretend smoking, and then pick up the telephone to dial the speaking clock, then known as TIM, talking back to it in ‘Jane language’: ‘Darling. How are you, darling? Are you, darling? Are you really?’
Jane, in her turn, would mime eating sweets and dropping the sweetpapers all over the floor, and I’d order her to pick them up and she’d do pretend crying. Then, with surprising athleticism, she would walk round the floor on her hands (a feat I’d perfected in the Francis Holland gym), and her skirts would sometimes fall down over her body and I’d see her elastic girdle and her suspenders and stockings and her expensive knickers from Harrods. And all of this would always make us laugh.
I remember that I felt closer to her during this game, in which our identities were hilariously swapped, than at any other time in my childhood. We were teasing each other, for once, and this gave us a kind of equality of status. I remember one day when we were both lying on the sitting room carpet, giggling unstoppably, my father walked in and said, ‘What is this? Did Lettice Leefe drop by? Don’t tell me I’ve missed her?’ And he joined in the laughter and the sound of it was beautiful.
Why could there not have been more times like this? Why was Jane so often perched on an abyss of anger with her girls?
One day, when I was six or seven, she took me with her to Liberty’s to buy some dress material. While she was paying for her fabric at the pay desk, housed just outside the department itself, I found myself mesmerised by a free-standing display cabinet, made of wood and glass and resting on spindly legs. The cabinet was full of buckles, and the thing that fascinated me was the idea of a buckle without a belt – as though this object might suddenly have multiple uses of which I’d never dreamed. I think I must have gone into a kind of buckle trance. The next thing I was aware of was an immense shattering sound, as of a bomb being dropped, and then I saw that the whole cabinet had fallen and lay in a thousand shards on the wooden floor.
I stood there in shock. I didn’t, at first, understand that by leaning on the cabinet to gaze at the buckles, I’d knocked it over; I thought something else must have happened: a rocket had come down from the ceiling or a wicked genie had surged out of the floor.
Jane began screaming at me. She told me I was a thoughtless, clumsy ‘idiot child’. She said she would have to pay a ton of money to Liberty’s to compensate them for the broken cabinet and it was all my fault. So then I saw that I’d done something worse than anything I’d done before in my life, worse than breaking the bell on my bicycle, worse than not waiting for Nan at a road junction on my scooter, worse than refusing to wear a hated blue mackintosh to school. I was lost to my own awfulness.
I screamed so hard, I think the customers downstairs in the gifts department must have heard me. I screamed so disturbingly hard I lost the ability to breathe. I imagined that anybody hearing about this crime would hate me as Jane seemed to hate me, so the thing I began to babble was ‘Don’t tell Nan! Don’t tell Nan!’ And this, no doubt, was the last straw for Jane – that I should dread so much the idea that Nan would think me bad. So she hit me, whack! on my ear, and I fell backwards against the Liberty’s panelled wall.
Sales assistants from the fabric department came running. The next thing I was aware of was a kindly-seeming woman kneeling by me and holding out to me little miniature swatches of material. She pointed out the different colours, the different patterns. I can see them still, these swatches. Cotton and silk and chintz and damask. And I can still feel the warmth of this person, her hand on my arm, her voice gentle like Nan’s. Little by little, I stopped screaming, and I remember turning and seeing the staircase going down towards the street, and the carpet on the stairs was green, the exact colour of the hearthrug in the nursery. And I thought only about being back there, with the gas fire flickering blue and Nan sitting in her armchair doing her knitting, and voices on the radio.
Maggie Tulliver, come away.
All through our London years, before the great Casting Away, we spent part of our summers at a house in Cornwall, owned by the Trusted family, on the dunes above Constantine Bay.
Mrs Trusted, or ‘Auntie Eileen’ as we were instructed to call her, was one of Jane’s best friends. She was as broad and jolly as our mother was thin and anxious. She cooked enormous egg-and-mushroom pies for us to take on beach picnics. She called Jane ‘Janet’ and I remember that I liked the sound of this name, as if it would, in time, alter Jane and make her kinder.
The Trusteds inhabited a sprawling stuccoed house on a windy point. They stayed there all summer. When we visited, the house contained only women. There was Auntie Eileen, her daughters Susan and Sarah-Jane, and their nanny, Gladys, known as ‘Glad Eyes’. Then there was Jane and Nan and Jo and me. Neither Mr Trusted – Johnnie – nor our father ever came on these holidays. But there was one male presence: Eileen and Johnnie’s youngest child, their son Timmy.
Timmy Trusted was a pretty blonde boy, the darling of his mother, the apple of Glad Eyes’s beady eye. Everybody loved Timmy except me. He was almost exactly my age, so I was expected to play with him. We played chasing games over the dunes, but he could always outrun me, and this was how I came to regard him: as a boy who would always be ahead of me, in every race and in every game and in the hearts of the grown-ups. He wasn’t like my cousins, Johnny and Robert, who sang beautiful songs and just joined in things and didn’t need to win all the time. Timmy, aged six or seven, already knew his own power, and I suppose I reinforced this by trailing after him.
But I couldn’t find any other companion. I was stuck with Timmy and he was stuck with me. Jo and Susan Trusted were close friends, and Sarah-Jane, two or three years older than me, preferred being with them. Even the nannies, Nan and Glad Eyes, got along well, while Jane and Eileen smoked and drank and laughed and boiled hams and made crumbles in the kitchen. I remember lying in my room feeling sorry for myself, longing for this holiday to be over, longing to be at Linkenholt – an Indian chief once more, not a sulky squaw.
There were moments of strange delight. It was Glad Eyes’s task to collect all the bread crusts and leftover cake that was thrown away in the household and feed this to the seagulls. The ritual went like this: Glad Eyes put all the food in a big enamel tin, walked to the end of the garden, then banged on the tin with a wooden spoon. I used to marvel that even before she had started hurling out the bread, a great screaming, wailing flock of gulls would appear in the sky and then descend – in numbers worthy of Hitchcock’s film of Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds – onto the lawn at her feet. It was like a terrifying magic trick. In minutes, the gulls pecked and gobbled all the bread and cake and took off once more into the air.fn3
Then, of course, there was the sea and its shoreline of deep rock pools. In Treyarnon Pool, we lined up to dive from a slippery flat rock. I can still feel the fear and excitement of these dives, the thrill of the icy water. This was a different universe from Chelsea baths, dangerous and wild, with the screech of seabirds above and the sea crashing in just over the headland.
We learned to surf in Constantine Bay. My surfboard had a picture of a dancing seal on it. We got bolder as time went on, taking our boards further and further out, till Jane and Eileen came and stood at the edge of the water, calling us in, and Eileen’s Pekinese dog joined them, barking at the waves and the wind.
In the wet sand left by the receding tide, Jo led us all in making sand sculptures. Hers were beautiful: mermaids with realistic fish-scale tails and Botticelli hair, seabirds with spread wings. Mine were lumpy, sometimes starting out as known animals and ending up as creatures nobody recognised. And it amused Timmy, who thought sand sculptures girlie and stupid, to jump on mine and break them apart. When the weather was too bad for diving or surfing, we were consigned to a playroom housed in some kind of annexe or garage and almost entirely taken up by a ping-pong table. Timmy was, predictably, good at ping-pong. He used to hit the ball so hard, it bounced away into the jumble of cast-off things: broken deckchairs, golf clubs, hammocks, cardboard boxes, old thermoses and gin bottles. We’d spend as much time looking for the ball as playing. And boredom lay heavy on these days of storm.
One summer, the circus came to St Austell.
Auntie Eileen bought tickets for us all and we counted the days to this moment of thrill and cruelty. None of us had ever been to a circus, but we knew that there were going to be lions, and trapeze artists dressed in spangles, flying through the air. We knew that the lions might escape from their cage and maul the ringmaster. We knew the trapeze performers might fall. In our heartless children’s dreams, we wanted them to fall. It promised to be the most exciting thing any of us had ever seen.
Then on the morning of the St Austell day, I was summoned by Jane. She told me that I wouldn’t be going to the circus after all. I wouldn’t be going because I’d been ‘difficult’. I had to learn to fit in better and be nicer to everybody, including Timmy. If I didn’t learn this lesson, then my life would not really amount to a life. I would be no one.
I slunk away, crying, to the room I shared with Nan. Nan told me she’d go to ‘Mummy’ and plead for me. Telling me I would be ‘no one’ was, in Nan’s vocabulary, ‘rotten’. Yes, I had been cross and sulky. Even the kindly Glad Eyes had complained about me. But Nan understood that staying in this friendless household was difficult for me, so she’d go to Mummy and Mummy would relent.
But Mummy didn’t relent. Everybody went off to see the man-eating lions and the death-defying acrobats, and Nan and I stayed behind. Nan was missing the circus too, but of course she didn’t complain. She was a person who hardly ever complained about anything.
For our supper, we had boiled ham and bread and butter with salad cream. And the following morning I woke up to find a scarlet mess all over my pillow. I thought I’d been weeping blood, but it turned out that a vessel in my nose had burst – a tiny red mark on my face I’d had for years and which, on the night of the circus, had exploded. When Jane saw me the following morning, all she said was ‘Why does Rosie look so pale?’
Although Jane and Auntie Eileen presided over our Cornish holidays, almost all our out-of-school activities in London were done with Nan. The one exception was riding lessons.
These were organised for me and my friend Jane McKenzie by our mothers when we children were eight or nine. They took place in Wimbledon, and I can remember that Jane McKenzie and I travelled there in the back section of the Morris Traveller and annoyed the mothers by staring backwards out of the little lumpy car and making ugly faces at the motorists behind. This behaviour the parents described as ‘dreadfully common’.
At first, I looked forward to the riding lessons. I liked my outfit: yellow polo-neck jersey, trim jodhpurs, little tweed jacket, yellow gloves, a velvet-covered riding hat, a whip. I felt privileged and thrilled.
The hot, sweet smell of horses was alluring to me, and their beauty has always struck me as exceptional. But mastering them takes courage and strength, and the paths we rode on Wimbledon Common were stony and uneven, full of places where the horses might slip or slide. At Linkenholt, when Jo and I and the cousins took it in turns to ride Mr Daubeny’s pony, I’d felt no fear at all, only colossal excitement and joy, but now, in Wimbledon, some agitation about falling off and breaking my neck started to creep into my mind. This increased as we progressed to learning to jump, a feat I felt proud of doing and yet was definitely afraid of.
Jane McKenzie was a neat and competent rider; I was told by my mother that she had ‘a very good seat’, and the memory of her rod-straight little back going up and down on her horse is a tender one. In contrast, I was informed that I looked ‘like a sack of potatoes’, that I lacked spine. This classic put-down, coupled with my increasing fear that riding would somehow end my life, should have been enough to stop me continuing with the lessons. But I wanted to keep up with Jane McKenzie and the other children at the riding school; I refused to admit my fear to anyone, even to Nan.
Over time, this bravado became an increasing agony to me. I would wake on the morning of the riding lessons feeling sick. When we went into the stables to lead our horses out, the sweet scent of them would now be tainted with the smell of terror.
It was, in the end, about five years later that I told my mother I didn’t want to go on with riding lessons any more. Knowing nothing of the fears of her spineless sack of potatoes, she had no sympathy to give. I just remember her complaining that it had all been a colossal waste of money.
Before our lives in London ended, something happened between me and Jane that directly concerned money.
This series of events has always remained a mystery to me, a mystery that makes it harder than ever for me to understand why Jane was the kind of mother she was.
One of our grandmother’s sisters, Marie Michell, a rich eccentric who lived with a female companion in a cavernous house in Norfolk, had agreed to be godmother to me. We hardly ever saw Marie Michell. Jo and I were taken out to tea at the Hyde Park Hotel from time to time by another of the unmarried sisters, Great-Aunt Annie, and the youngest of the siblings, Great-Aunt Violet, once or twice turned up at Linkenholt for Christmas. But Marie had her own woman-centred life at Kenninghall; she wasn’t remotely interested in our family or in godmothering. My birthday was never remembered. At Christmas, sometimes a hated box of handkerchiefs would arrive, With love from Aunt Marie. And I was made to write ‘a proper letter of thanks’ to her. But mostly, she just chose to forget us all.
Then, on my tenth birthday, just before Keith left us, a cheque for £100 was sent to Jane by Marie, to be spent or saved for me, acknowledging that Marie had not been a good godmother and hoping that this would make amends.
This was 1953. A hundred pounds was a large sum of money then, too large – obviously ridiculously too large – to be given directly to a ten-year-old child. So I was summoned by Jane and told that with a little of the money she would buy me a new bicycle (I had now outgrown Jo’s cast-off Raleigh), and the rest would be ‘put somewhere safe’ for me, to have when I was grown up.
We bought the bicycle: another Raleigh, shimmering blue, with a new chrome bell. It was a good machine and I loved it and kept it for years and years. The sum I think this cost was £14 or £15, thus leaving £85 to be put into the promised safe-keeping.
I forgot about this money. Great-Aunt Marie probably forgot about it too. But years later, at a time when I was struggling financially in my twenties, I suddenly remembered it and asked Jane if it had been invested for me – in a Post Office savings account, perhaps? I realised that £85 would have transformed itself into a much larger sum in the twelve or thirteen years that had passed, and that this might conceivably relieve my financial stress. But no. Jane admitted that she had just taken the rest of the money and used it for herself, seemingly without a qualm. ‘I’m sorry, Rosie,’ she said to me, ‘but I’m afraid Aunt Marie’s money coincided with a difficult time for me. You had your bike. I honoured that. The rest just went.’
It went. It was mine, but Jane never seemed to care about what was mine. (In a later house move, she threw away all my teenage letters, all my school reports bar one, and a collection of my early poems.) She cared that Jo and I would be honest and upright in our own dealings, but in so many ways she was dishonest and cavalier, both with the things that belonged to us and with our feelings.
It came to me in later years that she envied us. We hadn’t been sent away from home at the age of six, with nothing but a beautiful coat to keep our hopes of love and affection alive. We hadn’t gone through the war. We hadn’t known what it was like to lose not one but two beloved brothers. And we’d had the luxury of an affectionate nanny – paid for by Jane. We were a thousand times more fortunate than she had been, and it was as if, in her arithmetic, she decided: Jo and Rosie have got quite enough already, thank you very much! I endure Linkenholt for their sakes. I fill their Christmas stockings. They don’t need me to make financial sacrifices for them. They don’t need me to love them.
I think that when we were around her, she didn’t feel as though she was living. We made too many childish demands on her. She had to have hopes and expectations for us, which wearied her. As girls in a man’s world in the 1950s, what could those hopes and expectations possibly be? And if she thought them up, then she’d have to begin worrying that we might not fulfil them.
When we were safely away in our cold dormitories at Crofton Grange, she and her friends could forget all about their children’s future. Instead, they could go to plays, go to films, go to restaurants, get drunk at lunchtime, flirt, shop, swear, take taxis, waste money, go dancing, have sex, and wander through London in the dawn light, laughing, determined to forget the war that had stolen their youth and so many of the people they’d loved. They were making up for lost time. With disintegrating marriages, they knew that life was slipping by for them, but that for us – the bloody children! – it was infinite. We had years in an apparent peacetime wonderland ahead. It wasn’t fair.
A friend of Jo’s, Lois Crane, who later became head girl at Crofton Grange, told me some years ago that her mother had witnessed a distressing send-off scene at Liverpool Street station, where we assembled for the train taking us back to school. My mother and Pam McKenzie dutifully kissed my friend Jane and me goodbye, ignoring any weeping that might be gathering in us, then, before the train had left the station, linked arms and turned away, saying, ‘Good! Now we can get on with life!’fn4 But what was that life? A roll-call of the things I’ve listed above, ending with the London daybreak shedding a harsh light on all of them.
It has always felt to me that my mother’s generation of women, born just before the First World War and suffering painfully through the Second, had been dealt a difficult hand. Those who survived well bucked the constraints imposed on their aspirations and found purpose and sanity through work. But Jane was not one of them. Her greatest human weakness was to care a lot about the way people looked, but to be too emotionally and intellectually lazy to attempt to understand what they felt. Heartbroken as a young child, she cursed, drank and chain-smoked her way through a life that passed in a kind of peculiar, pampered dream, unexamined, never completely understood.