appeared. I could be magnanimous.
THE TYRERS: GEORGE, MARJORIE (50), NICOLA (16)1
First George comes bustling out at National Provincial Bank – – – he is the manager. “My wife has been meaning to come to see you.” Oh tell her to come any afternoon after three, I say. Much, much later after no wife – – – “My wife fell downstairs and hurt her leg, that’s why she hasn’t been up before this, I didn’t want you to think she was being rude.” Well I hadn’t thought of it before that; then I did think of it. Almost immediately after 3 one afternoon the front bell rang and a woman – – – narrow, sharp, all in browns I thought, kerchief, coat, boots, came in. Ted joined me for tea in the red front room – – – only it wasn’t red then yet, still had the old green & orange rug and the bare wood window seat. Marjorie Tyrer talked. I couldn’t figure her last name. Was it Taylor? Tah-eyrer? Her anecdotes. Finding rubber poncho or some off bit of value on the roadside & bringing it to the police station. The moustached town constable saying she should bring it to her nearest police stating. “This is my nearest.” He peering, trying to guess, then she revealing her identity, he sweeping a seat clean with a pocket handkerchief – – – “Oh, do come in.” Her wry, sarcastic, critical talk. The Rector came to tea with his wife when he first came to town some 6 years ago. After George saying “Why didn’t you tell me?” (he having been dead silent all through tea). “Tell you what?” “That she was much the ugliest woman?” George could hardly talk, he thought the Rector’s wife so ugly. Marjorie hadn’t mentioned her looks to him, he always called her too critical. Marjorie Irish, born in Athlone (province? town?). George a Devonian, with 4 brothers & a queer sister named Sylvia – – – his father a man of consequence. Marjorie’s father a bank manager in Ireland.
New Year’s Party – – – Saturday night before Sunday New Year’s. Drinks. I still pregnant, within 17 days of Nicholas, immense in Chinese blue satin maternity top. A sense of In. Rang at the side door of the bank. Came up into diningroom – – – a tree hung with lights, plastic ribands, Christmas cards. Warmth, people standing round about. I recognized Doctor Webb, his blond, side-look, weak Cornish chin. His dark wife Joan my target. The Tyrer’s daughter, 16 year-old Nicola home from Headington, the fashionable private school in Oxford Marjorie liked because of the wonderful parquet floor and curving entrance stair. The private school in Plymouth was all wrong – – – the playing field was miles from the school, and think of the girls catching cold on the drafty bus journey after playing out in the rain! Nicola pretty, with short auburn hair, clear skin, pale, fashionable, baby-faced. A striving to be with it sort. Bad at maths. Good at what? Notion of her going to University giving Ted idea of “saving” or educating her. Inviting her round to sample our books. A fine crowd of festivity and merriment. Marjorie’s sister Ruth, a housekeeper in London and humorous grey-haired lady, and Nicola passing miraculously replenished snacks – – – a hump of hollowed bread filled with mustard and stuck with small hot sausages on picks. Pineapple, cheese, creamcheese and prunes, hot pasties. I drank an immense amount of sweet sherry. No lacunas in food or drink. A white-haired Danish architect turned British farmer, talked first to Ted, then, me. We were enchanted with him. I talked to Joan, short, dark, intelligent-seeming, about help, babies, her sister who turned from actress to nurse in London. Marjorie interrupting us, shifting us round. A Welsh mathematician from Dulwich College telling me of his navy days in California, Coos Bay, the girl he let off in a pine forest. When he went to re-find her, found her living in unimaginable squalor in a huge tent with immense family. The friend – – – Dick Wakeford, oddly mechanical pale fellow, who is scientific-farming his 100 acres in Bondleigh. His lively wife Betty (who never makes her beds before noon, Nicola reported to Marjorie, & has washmachine, spindryer, dishwasher, but no fridge!) She’s the blonde one, I said later to Marjorie, trying to place people. Marjorie wrinkled her nose: Mouse, I’d say. A curious desperate sense of being locked in among these people, a cream, longing toward London, the big world. Why are we here? Ted & I very excited. Our first social event in North Tawton. Our last, so far. Also met short, dark Jewy looking Mrs. Young whose husband is head of the Devon Water Board – – – the impression she wears green eyeshadow. Came home almost 3 hours later to a pink, desperate Nancy, left alone with no radio or TV or work to do.
Later Nicola came over, very dressed for the occasion with a dark ribbon binding back her short auburn hair, black stockings, dark dress and rich brown-black scarf knit by grandmother. Her obvious bid for Ted’s interest. He wanted to give her “Orlando”. I groaned and gave her “The Catcher in the Rye”. Ted’s Biblical need to preach. She dutifully read this: thought Salinger’s style “went on too long”. Her absolute uncritical sense – – – recommended “Angelique and the Sultan”. Ted later wrote her a letter at school analyzing “The Windhover”. Her cutely theatrical account of listening to Ted’s play (part of it) on the wireless, the romantic little-girl part “a part I’d love to play myself”. I felt awfully old, wise, entrenched. But very inclined to pull up my stockings. Breathless over “Winnie the Pooh”. I shall be in the future, omnipresent. A young girl’s complete flowerlike involvement in self, beautifying, opening to advantage. This is the need I have, in my 30th year – – – to unclutch the sticky loving fingers of babies & treat myself to myself and my husband alone for a bit. To purge myself of sour milk, urinous nappies, bits of lint and the loving slovenliness of motherhood.
My tea at Tyrers. My stiffness with George vanishing. He came up from the bank for tea. I had wanted to talk & gossip with Marjorie & Nicola. Nicola in Bondleigh at Wakefords. While George was out, I talked with Marjorie about childbirth. She hadn’t wanted children. Married George late. He wanted children. Went to war. Nicola “unexpected”. Marjorie had her in Ireland. Had a nurse. Never woke at night. Fed her on bottle on return to England. During courtship George deluged her with cookbooks. “Have you read the one I gave you last week yet?” Her dislike of babies, cooking, housewifery. What I wondered did she like? She plays a lot of golf, loved living in London. They have accounts at Harrod’s, Fortnum’s. Couldn’t tell what their livingroom had in it. Vague impression of stuffed comfortable sofa and wing chairs. A dun beige quality brooding over everything. I still don’t know. Reproductions of an oriental. Pot ducks flying up wall. Probably very expensive. Must catalogue rugs, upholstery, next time. Talked of choosing private schools. Their tour for Nicola. Didn’t want to turn out a queer person like George’s sister Sylvia – – – she, if she came into the room, wouldn’t say a word to me, had no social graces. A sense of silence about her – – – repressed horrors. I fascinated. She had stood behind Marjorie in a bus queue during the war with a strange man. Marjorie myopic, wondered if it was Sylvia? “Is that you, Sylvia?” Why yes, Marjorie, I was wondering when you’d notice me. The strange man her husband. One of George’s brothers, Marjorie told me later, committed suicide. In bad health, though young. Marjorie afraid of George doing same – – – he has had two heart attacks, lives under the shadow. Won’t drive far. Gets giddy, depressed in bad weather.
Since – – – George has come over a great deal. His tender, nervous concern for Frieda, very sweet & genuine. “She’ll fall.” Waiting for her to climb down from windowseat. My initial awe melting. He calls for Marjorie – – – got Ted onto good radio just in time for play-broadcast of The Wound. George is a Hi-fi fan. His collection of records. Subscribes to The Gramophone. Our local electrician an expert. Everything, it turns out, thrives in North Tawton. We have a great clambering ariel. George’s bright red cheeks. Marjorie brought out Mrs. VonHombeck’s woven skirts and stoles – – – handsome, one rich red with pale silver-beige embroidery. Marjorie’s stories of sharp retorts to the Rector (her refusal to volunteer to mind a local Old People’s recreation room), to a Plymouth landlady who peered out the door every time someone came in (“I don’t think a robber would be interested in anything of yours.”) and so on.
Both came over last week after days in London. Got seats at “Beyond the Fringe” by way of Ruth’s employer who is in ITV – – – raved over Jonathan Miller. Marjorie’s story of getting the Right spring coat for 9 guineas. A drama. Their pub in Mayfair (or Kensington?) that has the thinnest of rare roast beef. They stay at the Ivanhoe. Nicola away at schools since very young. Her emergency appendectomy – – – Marjorie did not visit her (George had been ill). Took her oddly long legged bear Algy, a white-grey creature dressed in period suit I saw at Marjorie’s. Lost Algy in hospital. Eventually he returned, but missing one arm. Even at 16 took Algy out of hotel during fire alarm. Have invited the lot of 3 to dinner this Sunday.
1962 Feb. 22: Knocked, or rather rang, the Tyrers bell after hearing George had a mild heart attack & the Tyrers wouldn’t be coming to dinner. Met by Marjorie, very brisk and handsome – – – nursing seems to bring a fine self out. Brown pleasantly-waved hair, stockings, brown gracefully heeled but sensible shoes, a brown cashmere cardigan over a yellow blouse and brooch. I lingered in the pink and blue gleaming kitchen while she put tea things on a tray. George was in bed. He was to eat nothing but chicken and fish. We went into the parlor, with its big bay over the Square and the white and red of Bloggs garage. The sun poured in. I dragged myself to look round and put colors into words. Yes it was all brown and cream.
Shiney cream-colored wallpaper with a minute white embossed pattern. Brown, medium brown, window curtains. Two chairs in windowbay. A cream radiator under window, with newspaper on it. A great dull blue-eyed television set. The walls crammed with awful reproductions of Devon hills, a country gate, and a big reproduction of an Indonesian girl in muted tans, silvergreys and lilacs I thought looked familiar. George had bought it in London, & that was where I remembered it from. The trouble about my noticing had been that there was so much. The livingroom suite in a brown tone, with a pattern of dull yellow and pink flowers, probably roses. A green – – – unpleasant verdigris green rug with flowers patterned over it. And a bookcase from which the complete Rudyard Kipling leapt out, and all sorts of other dull old books in dated bindings, with the air of a second hand shop. A table with curios laid out, from Marjorie’s mother – – – a Duke of Wellington conserve bowl, a French bud vase of glass, embossed with silver filigree, a smashed and mended oriental vase, all pink cherry blossom and green vines. And an incredible pottery alligator, upright, with green paws holding a purse, in a sunbonnet and long skirt, with brown glass eyes! Awful, but compelling. A primitive drollery. Then the mantel – – – tiny china children or angels on candlesticks, a minute Crown Derby teacup and saucer, lots of big Oriental pitchers. I had more biscuits & lots of tea. We talked of cooking (M. was making G. sweetbreads for supper; the family can’t stand fat; M. had a pork casserole dish she always serves for company), the butcher (M’s complaints about his fillet steak, her bringing back of cuts not tender or thick enough), banking (M’s description of it as a competitive business – – – she has no entertaining because there is no other bank in town; the abusiveness of some customers; a bank manager has to know all sorts of intimate details to give loans etc.; she forgot to sign a cheque to the butcher). My very pleasant sense of warmth, hot tea, and being neatly dressed for a change. George called out from the bedroom to give me some sherry. I asked the name of the sherry it was so good: Harvey’s Bristol Milk. And how to make tea, complaining my tea was so bad. Six o’clock struck twice, the church clock, and then the Square clock. I poked my head in at George – – – he very dear, tousled grey hair, red cheeks, propped up on pillows, like a young boy. Felt refreshed, enlivened, renewed. Very at home.
Feb. 24: N. came for tea. I managed a girdle & stockings & heels and felt a new person. Set up the table in the playroom, with the westering sun, instead of the cold, darkening back kitchen. She in a charcoal gray cashmere twin-set, dark skirt, stockings, flats with gold buckles, furry dark peajacket, newly from hairdressers. A hard, catty, snippety nature. I sat & talked with her for a while. She talked completely of herself – – – what she said to Headmistress, how she got her hair done, how she loved Bridget Bardot, how she wanted to reduce to have a nice shape (What’s wrong with your shape, says Ted). Called Ted down. She talked on & on. The Seven Samurai “bored her”. It was Ted’s favorite film, but it bored him too. She will of course take anything from him & who doesn’t love to have bright young youth listen to pontificatings. “Everybody is always saying I’m bumptious.” The product of finishing school: finished. I took her up to see the baby – – – she couldn’t care less, perfectly natural. Was dying to peer into other rooms with shut doors and upstairs – – – remembered house vaguely from Arundel’s time. Talk of prefects privileges to shop in Oxford, her white mac & blue headscarf, told again how she listened to Ted’s radio program, how an English teacher was a fan of his. Terribly critical of Lady Arundel, the midwife’s poor son who “blushes whenever he meets her.” Small wonder.
Sunday: Feb. 24: I should have known it. My instincts were right. At 10:30 the doorbell rang. I should have answered it. I was in my slippers, without makeup, my hair down on all sides when Nicola came in. “I’m not too early?” Oh no, said Ted. He made her a cup of tea and she stood in the kitchen while I finished my coffee and Frieda her bacon. I had made the mistake of saying I’d be interested in seeing her poetry anthology at school. Ted & I ridiculed it gently. I kept wanting to get to work. Furious that Ted had invited anyone in. The morning gone, 11:30 by the time I gave her her book back and said I didn’t think I needed to keep it – – – which would have involved in dropping it round before 10 tomorrow. Now I have a respite till April 4th in which I may get started on my book. She is shrewd, pushing, absolutely shameless. I shall ask Marjorie when the moment arrives to confine visits to afternoons. I must have my mornings in peace. Her incredible angling last night to get driven to the movies in Exeter (I want to see “Fanny”, how should I get there?) It did not occur to Ted to offer to drive her; he suggested a taxi. I mentioned how we despised Maurice Chevalier, & how Ted in particular disliked musicals. On the assumption that I am as fascinating as T., I shall be ominipotent – – – chauffeur, entertainer, hostess, if the occasion arises. A charming ignorance as to any difference between us. Her models: Bridgette Bardot & Lolita. Telling.
Friday: March 2: Drawn in spite of myself to ring the Tyrers bell, having been to the bank at 5 minutes to 3 with two American checks and imagined the boys would be horrorstruck at having extra work before closing time. Then thought the T’s might think it a snub if I went to town without Frieda & didn’t ask how George was. These dim things in back of it. I rang the bell & Marjorie popped to the door in her brown cashmere, very neat and fine. Went up, feeling ponderous & clumpy in my suede jacket and big green cord coat. “I like your coat,” Marjorie said, in a way that made me feel the opposite behind her words. We sat in the sunfilled front room. I could see, suddenly, that the wallpaper was a glossy embossed cream, and the ceiling an shiny embossed white, very newish. “I hope Nicola didn’t bother you.” I saw immediately that Nicola had retailed the whole of her two visits in a fashion which escapes me, because I consider our life so natural, but which I can construct from her usual critical malices (“Lady Arundell never looked smart when she came into North Tawton”). Talked of the wallpaper – – – they had had the Bank House redecorated at the expense of the bank when they came: a new kitchen and bath, as the former man had been a bachelor with an old mother who had someone do for her. The bank allowed 15s. for the parlor, 12⁄6 for the bedroom and 7⁄6 for the spareroom. “Well, if that’s all they feel the Manager deserves.” This is George’s first managership. (Late?) Then a story about a darling boy in the Navy they knew who ended up marrying a terribly drab American girl with stringy hair to her shoulders. Why? She must have had money. He didn’t have money. Two terribly drab children. I read this as a sort of allegory – – – the usual infuriating assumption American girls have lots and lots of money. Felt terribly sorry for this poor girl. Then the bell, just as Marjorie asked me with no feeling, and perfunctorily, to stay for tea. Betty Wakeford. She came bounding up in a suede jacket with glasses, a long Jewy nose and open grin, and fresh crimped high-fronted hairdo (done in Winkleigh that morning). “So sorry I didn’t come to tea at your place yesterday.” She had a pile of new books for Marjorie. A sense of their close relation. They talked of the Hunt Ball to be held in the Town Hall that night. Betty & Dick were going; and Hugh and Joan Webb; and the Chemist, Mr. Holcombe, and his wife. “Bulgy”. Why? When strapless gowns came in she wore one and bulged all over it; Marjorie’s eyes glinted cattily. Later it occurred to me that “Bulgy”, whom I imagined as a drab fat, was probably the voluptuous blonde I’ve seen off & on in the Chemists: a good excuse for cattiness. Betty would “Twist”, she’d seen how on the telly. I had the strong intuition Marjorie had peered into our life all she needed to make a judgment, had judged, and now our relation would be quite formal. Mine certainly will be. N. shall visit if she visits, not live here as she might. I later sobbed – – – for the poor heard-of American girl, and for the flat malice of people I keep dreaming into friends.
Noticed, for the first time, a set of lustre jugs on top of M’s sideboard. A raw copper lustre. With pink highlights, and a blue enameled band round the middle on which, badly-painted fruits and flowers. What fruits, what flowers? Next time must see. Asked how George was, but M. really said nothing. Turned out Betty had seen him in the morning (“I hope I didn’t tire him out”.) A sly sense of being just by that much shut out.
Friday: March 9: Met M. in Boyd’s. “Do come up just for two minutes.” I had Frieda in her soiled pale blue snowsuit jacket. A completely different atmosphere. Me? She? Carried Frieda up the steep steps. The wall paper in the lower half of the hall (or rather on the lower half of the hall wall up and downstairs) a pleasant pattern of a few wheat stalks in red, brown & black on white. Ruth, down from London, in a rust-colored shantung blouse, to the left of the fire, George, with his iron grey hair down in front looking handsome and raffish, with a silk, red handkerchief looped to counterfeit a bloom in his buttonhole. Very hot and snug. I had a glass of Bristol milk. Frieda stared. They brought out a straight child’s wood chair with a brown-upholstered seat, and two fine antique teddybears – – – one huge, with a naive primitive expression, big glass eyes and fur that had been pale lavender, worn now to smoky grey, and a little purple and black bear. Frieda smiled. M. said Mr. Fursman was an admirer of her (“Have you seen her smile”) Frieda pushed the little bear through the chair back and onto the floor. Threw down the big bear. Laughed charmingly. “Nicola is trying to imitate Ted” – – – a letter from N. with a “poem” brought out, about her trying to study and her brain being vacant.
Last, time, how Marjorie’s glasses kept reflecting the light, in glittering oblongs, into my eyes. She was facing the bright bay window, and I could not look at her mouth, or an ear, but forced myself to try to pierce the glancing shields of light to the eyes behind them. Got a headache, continually deflected.
R. had seen a huge white owl in a toyshop in Gloucester road. Her grey tight hair. An Agatha Christie housefrau. We talked of the fine old toys. M. told of going to a shop down a row of teddybears with a friend. “Now that’s the only one with the right expression.” The saleslady, overhearing, delighted: “That’s just what I said when I was unpacking them – – – that’s the only one with the right expression.”
April 18: There have been many visits, back & forth. Now there is the astounding & relieving fact of imminent departure. George had a heart attack. He is being retired from the bank. They are moving to Richmond, Surrey, bag, baggage. And Nicola. Nicola is home from school on a month’s easter holiday. She came yesterday afternoon. I was on the toilet on the landing in a tangle of my workman’s overalls. Heard the professionally husky voice: Anybody home? Ted went down. I hauled myself together & flew down. She wore a dark peajacket, green blouse & gold heart locket. Very pale pink lips & white complexion. Auburn hair. Can I take Frieda for a walk? I stared, smiled, in my pleasant obtuse way which I so enjoy now that I am a scatty mother of almost 30. Walk? Walk? Isn’t it the right time, she asked. I thought: she has been put up to it. O any day but today, I said. Frieda, as it happens, has been bitten by a crow. She is very upset. I have just been trying to get her to go to sleep. Nicola admitted that the weather – – – suddenly cold, grey & overcast – – – was not very good. I blithered on about the crow bite – – – how Ted had introduced Frieda to this big black baby crow in spite of my motherly forebodings, & how the crow had, indeed, snapped at her & drawn blood. I knew Frieda was pottering around upstairs in her bare bottom. Ted, very harrassed, went up to do his Baskin article2 & put her away. He said later she had shat on the floor in the interval. I held & arranged the baby, nosing him idly like a bunch of white flowers. Saw George at the gate. Nicola was asking me what I was going to do that afternoon: could she help. I saw Marjorie more & more clearly behind this. O I am going to mow the lawn, I said vaguely. I don’t quite see how help, there’s only the one mower. I welcomed George. He looked very ruddy & tyrolean in a green felt hat, walking tweeds & a cane. We talked about the crow. I think he had come to see how Nicola was doing. She was very catty about her 80 year old grandmother whom she was to visit with her father the next day, he having asked for a bunch of daffodils to take. The old woman always talked business (so boring), thought she was older than she was and should therefore be respected, couldn’t cook any more & insisted on serving terrible pastries. I felt very sorry for the old woman. George had never seen the property. So I led the two through the tennis court up onto the back hill of daffodils. Nicola was holding Nicholas, pale & blinking in his white bonnet & knitted blanket. She had no “feeling” for him as a baby, a person. She was doing something, learning to do something, like making a salmon kedgeree. She grew misty-eyed, even wet-eyed. Now she was going to miss North Tawton. O Nicola, I jokingly said, I thought you were very eager to leave this dull town. O no, not now, that it came to the point. George said, somehow deftly fitting it in, that maybe now we would “ask Nicola down.” I was dumbfounded, but only smiled obtusely. What in God’s name, I thought, would she find of interest in staying with us. Then of course, it came: a husband. Or at least an entry ticket into this literary London society. Ted had mentioned John Wain3 was coming down & they’d seen him on television. Then that Marvin Kane4 was down, doing a recording of me for the BBC. So Marjorie emerged behind Nicola’s sudden helpfulness (very clever, too) and advance nostalgia for the town she couldn’t till this moment, stand. Nicola left with George, a little defeated. The weather closed in and became very mean and cold. I got Frieda out, and the lawnmower.
Thurs. Apr. 19: Nicola tripped in, in heels and a white silk scarf with large and fashionable black polka dots, to collect the large bunch of 40 daffodils I had arranged to give george for the trip to the grandmother. I asked if Marjorie would be home that afternoon. Yes. I felt called upon to do something. Nicola had remarked loudly and somehow meaningfully that she only had two more weeks in North Tawton. It occurred to me I was somehow intended to do something. Dinner, as I had once thought, seemed out of the question for 6, with Ted’s family coming. So I stopped, after my shopping, to ask the three ladies, Ruth, Marjorie and Nicola, to tea on Saturday. I rang. Marjorie knocked from the upstairs bay window over the square. She was offish and a bit scatty. As if some thing had not come to pass. Her first remark was about trying to fit the furniture into the rooms of the new flat, hopelessly. I thought that if they had cut the price of their imitation old-fashioned Welsh dresser, refectory table & unsatisfactory wheelback chairs by two thirds, from the preposterous £150, we might have relieved her of some of her baggage. I sat for a minute in the sunny room, noticing the huge, ugly floorlamps, one of giant size, and both with frightful shades, frightful in pattern and color too. Almost immediately the bell rang. It was a Mr. Bateman, from Sampford Courtenay with an aged terrier named Tim, whose muzzle was grey (he was 12 years old) and who shook upsettingly, as if with palsy. Mr. Bateman was very stiff & dapper. A skyey blue chiffon neckerchief, cinnamon-colored check tweeds. We spoke perfunctorily of animals, after my crow account: of mynah birds, talking crows, & the like. I rose to leave just as Ruth melted into the room, stooped a bit effacingly, her grey hair tightly crimped from the hairdresser’s in Exeter. Marjorie accompanied me downstairs. I made much of the coming arrival of Ted’s relatives & the immense work they would involve.
Recollections: Ruth came to tea alone. Talk almost solely of her very fat girlhood in Athlone, and suspicious advances by monks and gay priests. Chucking her under the chin, asking to accompany her to horseraces, playing tennis etcetera. My reply, almost continually: I didn’t know priests would do that. My, my. The incredible fixed reminiscences of a spinster. Her looking out at German bombers, realizing she was in a nightgown, & retreating in blushes from the window, and the ring of young men leaning from neighboring windows. Then the scone & Devon cream tea for Frieda & me at Tyrers: Frieda glowing & beautiful & good at table, everybody, Ruth especially, playing with her. She seizing on a few fuzzy animals that were conspicuously put out. Of a koala bear, Nicola said, it was bumpy & stiff. Marjorie chided: O you musn’t say that of something you are trying to sell. The odd ambiguity – – – they have given us large old bears, old baby pillowslips by the half dozen; then they bring out books at a shilling each, a fusty urine-yellow doll’s tea-set. Their noses sharpen: that’s twenty-five bob.
Recollections: My visit to Marjorie, in bed, with bronchitis. She grey & quenched. I brought back the christening gown of limerick lace from her grandmother’s wedding dress she had loaned me, & showed her a little picture of Nicholas in the gown. I left Frieda in the livingroom with Ruth Pearson. Marjorie was drinking lemonade. She had that queer camouflaged look, of blending into obsequious grey-brown surroundings obsequiously and grey-brownly, so that I would be at an utter loss to describe the furnishings of the room, except to say my impression was of immense and depressed wardrobes, towering. George joined us. They looked at each other. Shall we tell Sylvia our news? I surmised it. Good or bad? Both, George had been “retired”. They were leaving in 6 weeks for a flat that had miraculously & independently turned up in Richmond. I felt uncomfortably like bursting out laughing. I managed tears. My worries of N’s increasing limpetlike cling in the next 3 years appeared. I could be magnanimous.
Almost immediately, they gave me a price list of things they were going to sell. I was astounded. They were letting us have the favor of “first choice”. The prices were very high. Trust a banker, I thought. He must think my grant installments are a life legacy. My first thought: what in God’s name would I want of their stuff. There turned out to be, startlingly, an antique oak dropleaf table I coveted for Ted. We bought it for £25, which I felt wiped out any obligations to buy anything else. But bought also a handsome round, brass tray-table & a coal scuttled in brass like a shining embossed helmet, and a mirror. The brass & the table complete our livingroom. The table is a heavenly find. Then they loaded Frieda with old toys Nicola did not want. Showed others that were for sale. I smiled, admired, but said no more about them.
Ted went to tea after the scone & Devon cream tea. Came home at 7. After the harrowing visit of the Roses, those ghastly two girls. I very tired & faint, heard two voices. Flew down with the baby & materialized in the front door. Nicola & Ted standing at opposite sides of the path under the bare laburnum like kids back from the date, she posed & coy. I came out, sniffing the baby like a restorative. I just brought back some of daddy’s records, she said. May I come over Friday and listen to your German linguaphone records? I have a better idea, I said, and rushed in and took out the records & booklet & thrust them into her hands. “This way you can study them to your heart’s content all the rest of your vacation.” She had asked Ted if the secretary in his “Secretary” poem was a real person. So hopes begin. For some time I seriously considered smashing our old & ridiculous box victrola with an axe. Then this need passed, & I grew a little wiser.
April 21: I had invited the three ladies to tea in George’s absence, over Easter, visiting his mother: Ruth, Marjorie, Nicola. Only Marjorie & Nicola came. Ruth had a heavy cold & was sorry. Hilda and Vicky5 had arrived earlier that morning, surprisingly, and in the heavy rain had helped me clean house. I had baked a big yellow sponge cake. We all sat in the livingroom for a bit, Nicola on the window seat talking to me, and Marjorie almost, but not quite, ignoring Hilda & Vicky. Obviously it was a shock to the Tyrers not to be our only & honored guests. Their self-centredness came out with a violence. Nicola told of the vacuum cleaner episode that morning: Mrs. Crocker had been cleaning under her bed when the vac stopped. They extracted a hairpin, but it still wouldn’t go. They sent it to the Hockings for mending. The Hocking boy Roger came back with the machine and a pair of Nicola’s black bikini pants, underpants, I presume, which had been extracted from it. Her idols: Brigitte Bardot and Lolita. The sun filled the playroom over tea. Hilda & Vicky & Marjorie & Nicola did not mix. I felt very partisan for the former, Marjorie left at quarter to six. Nicola putting on her stylish white makintosh. Marjorie had worn the usual buff or dun colored cashmere sweater with a pleasant buff & black-squared skirt. Nicola in a navyblue sweater. Her very thick legs.
April 24: A new & fearsome strategy on the Tyrers part. Nicola called up while we were embroiled with the curious blond Swedish lady journalist to ask if she could come and “read in our garden”. I was aghast. It is one thing to ask to come around for a cup of tea, but to ask to come and lead a private life in our garden as if it were a public park is appalling. I was so fuming at the Swedish girl after Hilda & Vicky that I had a marvelous time saying how we had more company and were all sprawled out in the garden, so No. It was just as Ted said – – – if we get to know people too well here they will be using our garden as a place to come get a pleasant stroll & free tea. I had an intuitive fear the lot of them will come today & ask if they can have free run of the place as they are just about to leave & it “surely couldn’t inconvenience us for two weeks.” Later, Marjorie called. She wanted to tell Nicola to come home. Nicola is not with us, I said. Oh. This gave a new insight. Marjorie & Nicola had arranged, before Marjorie “took her nap” (as Nicola said she was doing when she phoned) that Nicola should come to our garden & read, and anticipated no refusal. I had a suspicion that Nicola had told her mother we wouldn’t “let her come” in a rage & Marjorie had said: I’ll settle them, I’ll call & pretend I think you’re there & get to the bottom of this. This is what I suspicioned. In any case, I had a beautiful chance to talk on about our fresh set of guests & Marjorie was forced to commiserate on my busyness. Now I can add the excuse of our having a lot of back work to do. To give the illusion of sweet loving charm while refusing. A marvelous art I must develop.
Anyhow, I vaguely said Nicola had called about coming, but we had company again (What, still!) and she had said something about going over to the Bennett’s. She had actually said she would read in the Bennetts field. This new tack I think was accelerated by Ted’s picture & the rave writeup by Toynbee in this Sunday’s Observer.
May 1: Nicola came over to say goodbye, stocky & white & near to tears in a school blazer. She had been yelled at by her mother, about the loss of a button & more or less driven out. Ted sat out a bit, talking, while I cut the long grass of the garden border with scissors. Then Ted went in to his study, saying: Goodbye, be seeing you. Very huffily Nicola said: I don’t know what you mean, I’m going back to school tomorrow, as if she expected us to extend some concrete invitation to back up the words. It’s a manner of speaking, I said gently; we don’t like to say goodbye. She sat with me, leafing through a copy of Vogue she had brought & giving me a little monologue on each page, talked of “almond”-toed shoes, and the new round toe (I said I thought it was the old round toe) and how she had bought a blue beret in Exeter, and how wonderful Brigitte Bardot was, she had started so many styles. The clock struck six, and she left. Ted says he saw them all exiting in best clothes from the Bank House the next morning, to accompany Nicola partway back to school & go on to Weston-super-Mer themselves for a few days.
May 6: Saw George coming up the back way. Took him into the front room, where he jounced Frieda on his lap (Hold daddy, she cried, wriggling to get down and over to Ted) and passed the time of day. Very natty in grey suit, red silk scarf in pocket and red tie, as if a leashed flamboyance could now show itself since he was free of Bank rules & respectability. He seemed lessened, deposed, slightly abashed by all his leisure.
May 7: The final farewell: dinner with Marjorie and Ruth at Burton Hall. I was feeling awful, with this crabby bacterial infection which made me want to rush out in agony to pee every few minutes, & felt I might dash home any minute. Marjorie all dolled up, new hairdo, new vibrant self full of stories about self, cutting Ruth off rudely every time she opened her mouth: obviously trying on a charming new nature in preparation for Richmond. Ruth’s stammer bad. An indifferent dinner of steak & custard-fruit pudding. Marjorie in grey-and-white striped spring suit and lustre beads. Sat in lounge with old deaf woman. New bank manager had been at supper, but M. said not a word. Story of selling their Ireland house, the flautist in the other part, the stain on the mantel, the girl lost her engagement ring there, but later found it in her pocket. We left at 9 with a feeling of immense freedom. North Tawton, with the T’s departure, an easier much more restful place.
THE MIDWIFE: WINIFRED DAVIES.
First met in Doctoer Webb’s office last fall at my first checkup. A short, rotundish but not at all fat, capable grey-haired woman with a wise, moral face, in a blue uniform under a round-brimmed blue hat. I felt she would judge, kindly, but without great mercy. Her fine opportunities to visit me and observe the habits and domestic setup of the new arrivals. Very aware that our being undefined “artists”, with no provable or ostensible or obvious work, plus me being an American (the stereotype of pampered wealth), would prejudice a staid English countrywoman against me. Her first judgment in my favor came the first day in the office, when I told her I nursed the baby, Frieda, for 10 months and that Ted was my “home-help”. There was some hope for us!
Nurse D. is by some odd linking I have yet to discover, the niece of Mrs. Hamilton. They are two pillars. They must know everything, or almost everything. Nurse D.’s visits invariably came when I most intuitively suspected them simply because I had been lax about house-work to get to my study. Nothing Ted could say could stop her – – – she would forge up the stairs, he preceding desperately to warn me, and I would see her smiling white head over his shoulder at the study door. I would be in my pink fluffy bathrobe (over my layers of maternity clothes, for warmth), and she would say “artist’s outfit”, go into the bedroom, find the bed unmade, and I would have hastily thrown a newspaper over the pink plastic pot of violently yellow urine I had not bothered to empty, on the principle that all housework wait till after noon. She obviously relished seeing how far and of what sort our house-decorating was – – – observed our bedroom Indian rug was “very like her own” (the ultimate approval). One morning she seemed all twinkly with news, could hardly wait to say “My son’s schoolfriend is a fan of your husband’s”. By some incredible coincidence, Nurse D’s only son, Garnett (a family name in the North) had a schoolfriend at the Merchant Tailor (Taylor?) School in London who had written Ted about his book and received an answer postmarked “North Tawton”, whereupon he asked Garnett if he knew a Ted Hughes. We were “placed”. I felt very pleased.
Nurse D.’s husband is the mystery. Was he killed in the war? Garnett is roughly 19, hers was a “war marriage”. She has had to bring up the boy on her own. He was not very bright (news courtesy of Marjorie T.) and she had difficulty getting him in a good school. She raises Pekinese pedigree pups. Had one she doted on. She killed it by accidentally stepping on it. It used to go everywhere with her. A horrible story. As the baby approached in time, Nurse D.’s manner grew sweeter, gentler, more amiable. I felt very glad she would be my midwife, and lucky the baby came not on her day-off, and just before she took a “holiday” to tend her sick father at a hotel in South Tawton (a man over 80, with two pneumonia attacks, living with his wife while they had a house built).
Jan. 17: The day of Nicholas’ birth I woke with niggling cramps in the morning. Called Nurse D. as she had asked, but apologetically – – – the cramps seemed a small thing. She appeared early, made an X on my mountainous stomach in the place where she heard the baby’s heart, said she would be home all afternoon. I felt very calm and excited and eager, but surprised the rhythm of the birth and the order of things was so different from my time with Frieda, when the waters woke me by breaking spectacularly at 1 a.m. April 1st and the labor pains were every 5 minutes within an hour, and the baby born at 5:45 at sunup. 4 hours and 45 minutes all told. All day the cramps kept up every half hour or so, fading and returning. I sat on a stool in a blank, limbo-mood, impatient for the real thing to begin. Did some baking. Then, the moment Frieda was in bed, the cramps started in earnest. I waited for about 2 hours till the rhythm was established and the pains really strong enough for me to think I wanted gas & the nurse. She had told me to call “as soon as you feel: I wish Nurse Davies were here”.
Nurse D. arrive about 9 p.m. I heard her little blue car drive into the court, and Ted helped her carry up all the heavy equipment. Immediately she set up the gas cylinder on a chair by my bed – – – a black suitcase-like box with a red cylinder of gas & air set in it, and a tube and mask which she showed me how to use by pressing my index finger in a hole and breathing when the pains came. She put on a white apron and a white head-scarf and sat on the right of the bed, and Ted on the left, and I held the mask, and we started in to gossip. It was wonderfully pleasant. Each time a pain came I breathed into the mask, listening to them talk, Nurse. D. holding my hand till the pain was over. The room was warm, the red-lit Pifco purring, the night still and cold, the pink & white checked curtains drawn against it. I felt Nurse. D. liked us both, and I felt perfectly delighted with her. Instead of the mindless crawling about and beating my head against the wall as with the worst cramps with Frieda, I felt perfectly in possession of myself, able to do something for myself. The cramps surprised me, they were very strong and kept on and on.
Nurse D. came from Lancashire (I think, not Yorkshire), had a wonderful big family (7?), and her mother had lots of help. She had a fine childhood, she said, and a nanny. I forget most of the picture she painted now, alas. She has brothers and sisters scattered about – – – a brother who was headmaster of a wellknown boys’ public school here and who is now head of one in Australia; a sister, I think, in Canada. She has about 10 dogs, 3 of which are allowed to take turns coming into the house. She gardens. She has an acre or two and wants to raise geese, then sell the geese & buy sheep, then sell the sheep & buy a cow.
The time went on, the cramps went on. She advised us about a man to mow the long grass-field. We talked of our hopes of cultivating the gardens and lawns at Court Green. Then she asked if I was ready to push. I wanted to be. But I wasnt. Finally, she looked and said I could, if I felt like it. I started to push, putting down the mask which I didn’t feel to need now I could get to work. My stomach mountained huge ahead of me, and, superstitiously, I shut my eyes, so I would feel and see from the inside – – – a horror of seeing the baby before Ted told me it was normal. I pushed. “My you are a good pusher, the best pusher I’ve seen.” I felt very proud. But after a while the nurse looked and told me I had better stop pushing for a bit – – – the baby’s head had not descended far enough, the waters had not broken. I was dimly eager for the waters to break, grew worried as to why they had not, imagined the baby drowning up there. The minute I stopped pushing, the pains made themselves felt, awful, utterly twisting. At the same moment, I was aware that I seemed to be breathing only air in the mask, which I had taken up. The cylinder of gas had run out. There was no more. No more to be sent for, either, as the next day, Thursday, was the day Nurse. D. collected her next allotment. I felt very upset at this. Ted & Nurse D. held my feet. Then I lost sense of time. Nurse D. told Ted to call Dr. Webb and tell him to come, the waters had not broken, he would give me a shot. I had a tearing pain in my left side that dwarfed the labor pains. Told them, in a dazed slow voice utterly possessed by the pain and the sight, glimpsed between lids opened for a split second, of my still frighteningly huge stomach which did not seem to have altered during all the hours. Nurse D. looked very serious. Her face bent over me. Where? I knew she was worried. Ted called the Doctor. I felt Nurse D. do something, I think she broke the membrane herself. There was a great gush: Oh, oh, oh, I heard myself say, as the awful pressure released itself and water came out and wet my back. Earlier she had got 2 ounces of urine out of me, after I first complained of the pain. I felt a huge black circular weight, like the end of a cannon or crowbar, pressing forward between my legs. I had my eyes squeezed shut and felt this black force blotting out my brain and utterly possessing me. A horrible fear it would split me and burst through me, leaving me in bloody shreds, but I could not help myself, it was too big for me. “It’s too big, too big,” I heard myself say. “Breath easily, as if you were going to sleep,” the nurse said. In a kind of vengeance, I dug my nails in her hand, as if this would save the terrible thing from tearing through me. I tried to breathe and not push, or let the thing push. But it did not diminish its pressure or go away.
Nurse D. gently unloosed my fingers. The black force grew imperceptibly. I felt panic-stricken – – – I had nothing to do with it, It controlled me. “I can’t help it,” I cried, or whispered, and then in three great bursts, the black thing hurtled itself out of me, one, two, three, dragging three shrieks after it: Oh, Oh, Oh. A great wall of water seemed to come with it. “Here he is!” I heard Ted say. It was over. I felt the great weight gone in a moment. I felt thin, like air, as if I would float away, and perfectly awake. I lifted my head and looked up. “Did he tear me to bits?” I felt I must be ripped and bloody from all that power breaking out of me. “Not a scratch,” said Nurse D. I couldn’t believe it. I lifted my head and saw my first son, Nicholas Farrar Hughes, blue and glistening on the bed a foot from me, in a pool of wet, with a cross, black frown and oddly low, angry brow, looking up at me, frown-wrinkles between his eyes and his blue scrotum and penis large and blue, as if carved on a totem. Ted was pulling back the wet sheets and Nurse D. mopping up the great amounts of water that had come with him.
Then the nurse wrapped the baby up and put him in my arms. Doctor Webb arrived. It had happened at 5 minutes to midnight. The clock struck 12. The baby squirmed and cried, warm in the crook of my arm. Doctor Webb put his fingers digging into my stomach and told me to cough. The afterbirth flew out into a pyrex bowl, which crimsoned with blood. It was whole. We had a son. I felt no surge of love. I wasn’t sure I liked him. His head bothered me, the low brow. Later Doctor Webb told me his forehead had probably caught or crowned on my pelvic bone and kept him from coming. The baby weighed 9 pounds 11 ounces – – – that was why he had been so long. Frieda was only 7 pounds 4 ounces. I felt immensely proud. The nurse liked him. She tidied up after the Doctor left, changing the bed, piling up the dirty linen, sorting out the bloody things to be soaked in cold water and salt in the tub. Everything was beautiful and neat and calm. The baby washed and dressed in his carrycot, so silent I had Ted get up and make sure he was breathing. The nurse said goodnight. It felt like Christmas Eve, full of rightness & promise.
Jan. 18: Nurse D appeared. We were touseled, half asleep. I had got up and washed and put on lipstick. I felt wonderful. She thought I had put on “war paint” before washing. I felt very proud of Nicholas, and fond. It had taken a night to be sure I liked him – – – his head shaped up beautifully – – – the skull plates had overlapped to get him through the boney door, and filled out, a handsome male head with a back brain-shelf. Dark, black-blue eyes, a furze of hair like a crewcut. The nurse did not completely bathe him – – – it was too cold. She washed him. Frieda was introduced to the “boy baby”. She squirmed like a curious, agitated little animal. Nurse D’s voice seemed to hypnotize her into obedience. She held the pins for the nurse, sat on the bed & held the baby with great pride. Then the nurse sat the baby in one arm and Frieda in the other. “Mother’s two babies,” she said. I felt her wisdom, her wonderful calm managing. That was the last day she came, & I missed her immensely. A 10 day misery of my milk waiting a week, the baby starving & crying all night, culminating in two nights of 103º milk fever followed, with me at war with the two substitute midwives & Doctor Webb. Then all readjusted, smoothed. The milk came flowing; penicillin cured my fever. Nurse D. returned to stretch the baby’s foreskin – – – which has been a trauma for me, with Doctor Webb making “a surgical operation” of it, the baby howling and bleeding & me, wet with fever, almost fainting with tears on the chair, the nurse and doctor screening the baby from me with their bodies. Nurse D’s return, hair freshly curled, fresh after her two weeks vigil over her sick father (sent to hospital the day before), smoothed things back to normal. Ended the grim parenthesis. Chairs and tables took their places, served once more.
May 16: Our second entering wedge. Is it that Mrs. D. disliked the Tyrers & waited till they were gone? At any rate, she invited us to tea to meet a Mrs. Macnamara on her own day off. We climbed the steep hill off the main street opposite the secondary modern school to where Mrs. D’s new house sat spanking white overlooking the meadows that greenly undulated toward the purple domes of Dartmoor. A flashy blue car parked outside next to the nurse’s discreet pale one. Her house all white walls, full of light, big windows overlooking a plateau of close-cropped green lawn and a rather bald display of flowers – – – heather, tulips, anemones. A great many Pekinese dogs yapping like fur mice from a wire enclosure. Mrs. Macnamara a handsome white-haired woman (descended from Irish farmers), with red lipstick and a feminine blue-figured blouse and silvery suit. Exuded wealth, wellbeing. Had come round originally to buy a Pekinese. Lived at Cadbury House beyond Crediton. Her husband, Mrs. D. said, was something in ITV, and lived in a flat in London till he was to retire, for Mrs. Macnamara couldn’t bear going back to London. She had fallen in love with the house, which had 9 acres and was under repair. She had a lot of cats, one ginger one in shreds, pelt split, eye hanging out, from a fight, which she had to go home to swab. She had a doctor daughter in Washington state, married to a doctor, who was the “highest earning woman” in the state, according to a tax official. The daughter had two daughters of her own and an adopted child. She had three miscarriages before she had a baby, and lost her baby son, born a siamese twin with the other twin an embryo in his bowel. Insisted on knowing why his prognosis was only to live 8 hours, bundled up the dying baby & traveled 200 miles by train to where he could be operated on by a friend. Then nursed him (“he was quite blind, and deaf, and his hands could grip nothing, they just lay flat”) although she knew he could die in three months, which he did. Ever since she has been impossible, behaved badly, her father won’t let her into the house. Ironically, she was a child-specialist, called on all over to diagnose, prescribe. She had an adopted sister, adopted when she was 12 & had polio, and of the same age. Sisters devoted to each other.
We ate tea round a table, a yellow-frosted banana cake with cherries, very good currant buns, dainty tea-service. Kitchen in half walled-off area, red counters, big windows overlooking moors. Photographs of places framed in narrow black & hung on white walls. A silver-embroidered oriental screen in livingroom, an African violet, a little vase of early lilies-of-the-valley, a sunny windowseat, a handsome radio with all the foreign stations. Mrs. Davies in grey, with silver earrings. After Mrs. M. left, she showed us the garden in a high wind, then the upstairs, the stark white rooms, large built-in cupboards, Garnet’s room with a beerbottle lamp & trophies from pubs, a set of literature in matched jackets. Her own room with framed photos of a fat shy boy and a pekinese, a gas ring by the bed, a telephone. Modern lavatory. Her wired kennel of Pekes, jumping, praying, the babies a fat beary grey, toddling endearingly. Saw just-hatched blackbirds in hedge, a luminous Martian green, pulsing like hearts. Arranged for luncheon at Mrs. Macnamara’s in a fortnight.
MRS. HAMILTON AT CRISPENS.
A tall, imposing white-haired woman at the back door early on – – – a sense of her measuring, judging. Invited me to coffee with Frieda. She lives across the street at an angle to the right in a handsome white house with black trim, and a wattle fence protecting her garden beautifully groomed by a retired gardener. With her aged dachshund Pixie. She had dropped in on old Mrs. Arundel every day during her years alone here, and has been living in North Tawton for about 25 years. During the war her daughter Camilla (from where I got the name for Dido in my novel) stayed with her: they had a victory garden at the back. Mrs. Hamilton an eminent woman, admirable. I like her more & more. She “would have been a doctor” if women had been educated in her day. As it is, her granddaughter (Camilla’s daughter, I think) is studying medicine at Edinborough. Virginia (I think) had her 21st birthday this winter – – – Camilla made a sit-down luncheon for over 40 people. Virginia got hundreds of pounds, records, jewels etc. I was pleased to tell Mrs. Hamilton I had gone to Cambridge. That is the sort of thing that she would be pleased at. She seemed very hard of hearing at first, and I dreaded meeting her because I feel very reluctant to raise my voice – – – it makes everything one says seem rather fatuous because of the unnatural emphasis.
Mrs. H’s interior: I came in the fall. The long livingroom with French windows out onto the screened lawn and flower border was jammed with flowers; bunches of huge chrysanthemums and dahlias arranged with no art in clumps of yellow, pink and tawny orange and red. Mrs. H. a marvel with Frieda. Not at all put off or silly as many grownups are. Let her go so far, gave her a box with a sixpence in it to shake. Frieda well behaved. A handsome Staffordshire (I think) pot dog on a side table – – – a wonderful red-orange and white. Pixie, like a patched sausage, dozed at the hearth. A coal fire perfectly banked, burned like something artificial – – – one could not imagine that it left ash or clinkers – – – it was so high & full, glowing rosily. A handsome brick fireplace: copper coal scuttle, a flat, plaited woodbasket, gleaming brass tongs & brush. Mrs. H. has a son too, in Brooke Bond Tea. She lived in India, her husband was a coffee planter. Her tiny immaculate pale blue Morris. The sense of grandeur and expansion behind her. Comfort & the happiness of knowing precisely what she wants and how to achieve it. Very sensible.
Then she came here: sat at tea in the front room and told us of the place before our time – – – the gardener who kept all the gardens going, the austerities of the old lady with her stone kitchen floors, no electricity or phone. Asked about Ted’s writing. Very curious, but benignly so. Brought round a bunch of yellow mimosa when I had Nicholas.
Feb. 6: Brought Nicholas to see Mrs. H. on his first day out. (Mrs. H. is dying to see Nicholas, said the midwife on her morning visit). Waited in cold wintry sun in front alcove, too timid to go in, for Mrs. H. to return from market. She really admired Nicholas. Made me take off his white cap so she could see the shape of his head and remarked at the back brain-bulge of it. Her pleasure at his maleness; asked if Frieda was jealous. When I said Ted seemed to be reluctant it was not another girl, she said: I suspect he’s jealous for Frieda. Her queer, fine “listening” quality. Something N.T. for example does not at all have. I tried to notice colors, fabrics. Everything very very rich – – – deep blue velvet piled curtains, deep blue & white orientals, worn, elegant. A polished board floor. A bookcase containing, surprisingly, the Lord of the Rings, and, not surprisingly, all of Winston Churchills books on the war & the English peoples. A lot of old gardening and travel books. I must look closer some time to get the thin titles. Mrs. H. made good mugs of nescafe. “In the North,” she said “we have a custom on the baby’s first visit.” She went into the kitchen and bustled about getting a paper bag with a match (for a good match), coal (to light the fire), salt for health, a sixpence for wealth, and an egg for I’m not sure what. Said she is flying to the Near East for two weeks with a friend.
Feb. 21: Mrs. H. materialized outside my study this morning: source of a great Fratch between Ted & me – – – my sense of surprise invasion. This is my one symbolic sanctum. Stunned, I asked her in. Ted got a chair, & I & she both realized the awkwardness of it. She had come to say goodbye & see baby before her 2 weeks in Beirut, Rome etc. I took her to see Nicholas, not before her eyes had taken in the study in such detail as offered – – – “this was the boys’ playroom” (which boys?). The sense that Mrs. H. wanted to see how we lived in the back rooms. She looked at my long unbraided hair as if to take it in, drink the last inch, and make a judgment. I very upset, angry. As if we could be observed, examined at any moment simply because we were to shy or polite to say Nay, or She’s working, I’ll get her down. Or please wait here. My anger at Ted being a man, not at Mrs. H., really.
May 12: Had not seen Mrs. Hamilton for three months. Ted met her in town & she suggested I come over this afternoon, Saturday. Stood at the door with the dressed-up baby & Frieda and rang and rang. No sound of Pixie barking. Felt cross and neatened for nothing; then I heard a bumping around upstairs, and knocked very loudly. Mrs. H. finally came to the door. Showed me around the garden first: a blaze of colors, little gravel paths, raised stone walls. One very pink cherry tree over a garden bench. A fire of wallflowers, red, yellow, pumpkin. I began to see the virtue of these common and popular garden creatures. An ornamental pool with a great orange carp. Begonias, peonies, lupins, lots of tulips, giant pansies. Immaculate weedless beds. We had tea. Frieda in a whiney spoilt mood. Carried about a glass ashtray with a provocative naughty look. Ran outside with a little table & put it on the grass. Mrs. H. had caught a chill in Italy. Had seen the pyramids. Loved Rhodes. She was to leave Monday for a fortnight at her daughter’s. Admired Nicholas’ head, no doubt but that he was a boy, she said. Frieda cried at the clock musical bell. Felt her competition with Nicholas for attention. Indoors, great bouquets of cherry blossom and tulips. Where was Pixie? She had died in Mrs. H.’s absence. A tone of muted grief. Advised me to dig up and burn my tulips, as from the symptoms I described they had fire-disease.
MR. & MRS. WATKINS
March 1: Thursday: My first visit to the Watkins, in the Court Green cottage on the corner, adjoining Rose Key’s, and, on the front, the crippled Elsie’s (Elsie Taylor, with the high black boot, humpback and the stuffed fox under glass in her parlor). I wanted to give some return to this crippled couple for their gift of three big, handsome chrysanthemums, one yellow and two mauve, and the pink potted primula they brought after I had Nicholas. So I made and sugared some one-egg cupcakes. Rang, with Frieda. The (I think) blind Mr. Watkins answered the door, and I told him who I was. I could not look into his white eyes. He led me into a fearful, dark parlor with dark brown veneered objects standing about and giving off the depressing smell of old people, varnish and stale upholstery. Led me through a door into a long room with a table and windows looking over (or rather up to) a little garden set on a level halfway up the house, with a well, between it and the house, of paving. “It’s a pity, we’ve just had tea or you could have some.” I sat down, with Frieda on my lap. She looked as if she were going to burst into tears – – – like a little animal frightened by the darkness and sad smells.
Mrs. Watkins came out, took the cakes. I saw she had a handsome fruit cake, with one quarter cut out, on the table, cleared of tea things. Green and red and brown fruit studded the bottom of the yellow slab sides, and it rose to a browned crown. There was also a jar of black currant jelly she had preserved herself. I made conversation.
The Watkins lived in London (Wimbledon) during the bombings. Their windows were out. Mrs. Watkins hugged her neighbor (a publican’s wife) during the raids as they sat under the stairs. “If we had been killed, we would have died with out arms around each other.” They stayed in London because of their son Lawrence who was in the forces. They thought if he was wounded or came home, they would be there for him, holding the home front. I hadn’t the heart to ask where Lawrence was now, for fear he would be dead.
Then they moved to Broadwoodkelly (a few miles from North Tawton). The soil there was poor, nothing like the rich red soil here. They had to work the garden too hard, it was too much for them, ¾ of an acre, so they moved to this cottage. They were waiting for a decorator, a Mr. Delve, to paper their front room, so they did not know when they could come to tea (how are the two related?) Mr. Delve had to fix the wall. Something about a heavy mirror, now in their dining room, that had either been about to fall off the parlor wall, or was shoring up a faulty parlor wall. I couldn’t tell. They go to the library in North Tawton for books, but only seldom. The stairs up to the library room are too much for Mrs. Watkins and Mr. Watkins is blind and couldn’t read the titles if he went himself. “We’re a couple of old crocks.” They are Catholics, too. I left with Frieda, horribly eager to get out into the fresh air. The smell of age and crippling a real pain to me. Can’t stand it.
Mrs. Watkins had taken my cakes carefully off the plate, washed and dried the plate, and handed it back to me. The bushy plants on tall stalks in the garden were, Mr. Watkins told me, “greens”.
THE WEBBS: DOCTOR HUGH WEBB, JOAN WEBB. HOLLY & CLAIRE.
Met Doctor Webb very early after our move last fall in his surgery. A youngish, Cornish Doctor Hindley sort, but one imagines, a conservative. Tall, lean, blondish hair, blue eyes, and a habit of smiling a “shy” Perry Norton sort of smile to one side. The sense his eyes never look at you direct, but flake off to one side also. He has an older brother evidently who is head pediatrician for the whole Taunton area. This next week when I go in for my 7 week checkup and to have Nicholas vaccinated, I must do a notation of his clothes. An impression of rather pale, watery heather-tweeds. His very modern, clean surgery across the street and up from the ugly brick Devon Water Board building, Mrs. Hamilton’s “Crispens”, and adjoining two small cottages. White plaster with a garage. A surgically clean waitingroom with pale green walls, two long benches on either side, a curtained window and a table of magazines. His office filled by a desk, an acre of mangy looking patients’ files, then a little examining room warmed by a wall electric heater, with scales, a cot.
At the Tyrer’s New Year’s party walked into the room and saw Doctor Webb towering above the rest, rather glassy on (I think) whisky, which brought out a weak chin and watery eye. It was his wife I was after. Monopolized her: a short, dark girl with dark, soft eyes. A sister in London being a nurse who had been an actress. This sounded promising. The Webbs had lived in Nigeria, come back to England to send their children to good schools, lived in the lower part of town in an awful house with rats and damp. The old doctor whose partnership Hugh Webb had was to sell them his house subject to reasonable survey, but the place was evidently a wreck. They bought some land on the hill and built a modern house which I am dying to see. It is called “Mistle Mead” – – – Dr. Webb called home one day and named it – – – it has lots of mistle thrushes evidently. Joan has household help all day (according to Nancy she has trouble with help – – – bosses them too much or something and they leave her). But Mrs. Tyrer interrupted our corner talk just as we got started, to circulate the white-haired old Danish farmer Mr. Holm who drank bottles of pure whisky, according to George.
My next relation to Dr. Webb very stormy & angry – – – when I had the milk fever Ted called him up at midnight & asked him what to do. He said he’d be round with penicillin in the morning. Came, and I was very weak but perfectly normal in temperature, having sweated the fever out in one great bath at 4 a.m. Then there was the gruesome business of his stretching the baby’s foreskin which had not been stretched properly by Nurse Davies or Nurse Skinner or the awful Okehampton Nurse whose name escapes me (who flew out of the house to the doctor the next morning after my reporting I’d had a 103 temperature again – – – “What! you take your own temperature!” – – – to report the room was an inferno at 60º, that I still hadn’t put on the controversial bra which was supposed to be the source of all my ills etc.) The baby screaming for twenty minutes; I couldn’t look, but stayed grimly in the room, wet and paper-wobbly holding on a chair. Blood over everything. I hated Dr. Webb for not seeing to the baby’s foreskin before, having been perfectly prepared to accept the custom of not circumcising a baby. He upset in his way. The next day he sent word back via the Okehampton Nurse that I should “get up or go to hospital.” It dawned on me he thought I was malingering. Ted & I readied a barrage for him when he came. “What? Don’t you take you own temperatures here?” and so on. We cornered him so he suddenly snatched up a letter on my bed table and blurted “May I read this?” Incredible. “Surely,” I said. It was a letter to me asking to print some poems in an American paperback anthology. We thought afterwards it must have been a desperate attempt to get out of a corner & change the subject. My grudges vanished. An odd sidelight – – – a man in his surgery had a pain in his stomach. “What do you think you have?” Cancer of the kidney, was the reply. So Dr. Webb will cost the Health Service hundreds of pounds to have the tests to show there is no cancer of the kidney. Very odd. Does he ask patients to give their own diagnosis and have no alternative of his own? What if the man did have cancer of the kidney???
Dr. Webb belongs to a shooting syndicate at 6 pounds a year. They shoot at Ash Ridge Manor. Will they ever invite us socially? I would like to know the wife – – – she seems to give him trouble. Neurotic?
NANCY AXWORTHY & MISCELLANEOUS INTELLIGENCE
April 25: Nancy has not been to clean all this week. Her mother-in-law was sick again last Tuesday. Nancy’s husband Walter had gone to a contest of Devon bellringers the previous weekend. Then his mother was taken. I met Nancy’s friend, the humpbacked Elsie Taylor who lives in a tiny cottage with a stuffed fox at the bottom of our lane, and she said Nancy was sitting up all night and had to wash four of the old lady’s sheets in one day as she was wetting the bed and vomiting. Then, as Ted & I were going in the early dusk to deliver our great weekly bouquet of daffodils to Jim, on Friday, Elsie came stumping out in her high, black orthopedic boot called “Mrs. Hughes, Mr. Hughes.” Nancy’s mother-in-law had died that afternoon, from a heart attack. I felt an immense relief, that I would not lose my invaluably helpful Nancy for her need to nurse a sick & malingering mother-in-law. So selfish am I. But the old lady was evidently a terrible patient, never doing what the doctor said, and Elsie herself said Walter said it was a mercy, if she had to go, that she didn’t linger.
The funeral is to be at 2:30 this afternoon. Elsie stumped up yesterday morning to ask if she could buy four shillings worth of daffodils. Of course we said no, we could bring down a big bunch, we had been meaning to bring her a bunch. So last night we picked about 150 daffodils & I went down in the clear pink twilight & knocked. Elsie was not a home. But this morning the top half of her Dutch door was open & she was waiting. “How much am I in your debt?” Oh nothing, I said. She said she is going in a week to the holiday for the disabled (who come from as far as Oxfordshire) to Westward Ho! They come every year for two weeks. The Rotary Club takes them out for lunch. They are very high up, in this big place, with a ballroom. She can see the Isle of Lundy from her bed. I said to send the daffodils with our love. Nancy, she said, will be up to see me tomorrow.
Nancy’s husband Walter is a big heavy smiling blond man who works for Jim Bennett. He went through a ceiling he was repairing and strained his back. Marjorie Tyrer says when he came to repair their bathtub he broke a scale by stepping on it. He is a bellringer, the number seven bell, a big one. He is head of the North Tawton fire department (which has a drill every Wednesday at 7), and teaches woodworking at the local school. I hope to take woodworking this next fall.
CHARLIE POLLARD & The Beekeepers.
June 7: The midwife stopped up to see Ted at noon to remind him that the Devon beekeepers were having a meeting at 6 at Charlie Pollard’s. We were interested in starting a hive, so dumped the babies in bed and jumped in the car and dashed down the hill past the old factory to Mill Lane, a row of pale orange stucco cottages on the Taw, which gets flooded whenever the river rises. We drove into the dusty, ugly paved parking lot under the grey peaks of the factory buildings, unused since 1928 and now only used for wool storage. We felt very new & shy, I hugging my bare arms in the cool of the evening for I had not thought to bring a sweater. We crossed a little bridge to the yard where a group of miscellaneous Devonians were standing – – – an assortment of shapeless men in brown speckled bulgy tweeds, Mr. Pollard in white shirtsleeves, with his dark, nice brown eyes and oddly Jewy head, tan, balding, dark-haired. I saw two women, one very large, tall, stout, in a glistening aqua-blue raincoat, the other cadaverous as a librarian in a dun raincoat. Mr. Pollard glided toward us & stood for a moment on the bridge-end, talking. He indicated a pile of hives, like white and green blocks of wood with little gables & said we could have one, if we would like to fix it up. A small pale blue car pulled into the yard: the midwife. Her moony beam came at us through the windscreen. Then the rector came pontificating across the bridge & there was a silence that grew round him. He carried a curious contraption – – – a dark felt hat with a screen box built on under it, and cloth for a neckpiece under that. I thought the hat a clerical bee-keeping hat, and that he must have made it for himself. Then I saw, on the grass, and in hands, everybody was holding a bee-hat, some with netting of nylon, most with box screening, some with khaki round hats, I felt barer & barer. People became concerned. Have you no hat? Have you no coat? Then a dry little woman came up, Mrs. Jenkins, the secretary of the society, with tired, short blond hair. “I have a boiler suit.” She went to her car and came back with a small, white silk button-down smock, the sort pharmacist’s assistants use. I put it on and buttoned it & felt more protected. Last year, said the midwife, Charlie’s Pollard’s bees were bad-tempered and made everybody run. Everyone seemed to be waiting for someone. But then we all slowly filed after Charlie Pollard to his beehives. We threaded our way through neatly weeded allotment gardens, one with bits of tinfoil and a fan of black and white feathers on a string, very decorative, to scare the birds, and twiggy leantos over the plants. Black-eyed sweetpea-like blooms: broadbeans, somebody said. The grey ugly backs of the factory. Then we came to a clearing, roughly scythed, with one hive, a double-brood hive, two layers. From this hive Charlie Pollard wanted to make three hives. I understood very little. The men gathered round the hive. Charlie Pollard started squirting smoke from a little funnel with a hand-bellows attached to it round the entry at the bottom of the hive. “Too much smoke,” hissed the large blue-raincoated woman next to me. “What do you do if they sting?” I whispered, as the bees, now Charlie had lifted the top off the hive, were zinging out and dancing round as at the end of long elastics. (Charlie had produced a fashionable white straw Italian hat for me with a black nylon veil that collapsed perilously in to my face in the least wind. The rector had tucked it in to my collar, much to my surprise. “Bees always crawl up, never down,” he said. I had drawn it down loose over my shoulders.) The woman said: “Stand behind me, I’ll protect you.” I did. (I had spoken to her husband earlier, a handsome, rather sarcastic man standing apart, silver-hair, a military blue eye. Plaid tie, checked shirt, plaid vest, all different. Tweedy suit, navy-blue beret. His wife, he had said, kept 12 hives & was the expert. The bees always stung him. His nose & lips, his wife later said.)
The men were lifting out rectangular yellow slides, crusted with bees, crawling, swarming. I felt prickles all over me, & itches. I had one pocket & was advised to keep my hands in this and not move. “See all the bees round the Rectors dark trousers!” whispered the woman. “They don’t seem to like white.” I was grateful for my white smock. The Rector was somehow an odd-man-out, referred to now and then by Charlie jestingly: “Eh, Rector?” “Maybe they want to join his church,” one man, emboldened by the anonymity of the hats, suggested.
Noticed: a surround of tall white cow-parsley, pursy yellow gorse-bloom, an old Christmas tree, white hawthorn, strong-smelling.
The donning of the hats had been an odd ceremony. Their ugliness & anonymity very compelling, as if we were all party to a rite. They were brown or grey or faded green felt, mostly, but there was one white straw boater with a ribbon. All faces, shaded, became alike. Commerce became possible with complete strangers.
The men were lifting slides, Charlie Pollard squirting smoke, into another box. They were looking for queen cells – – – long, pendulous honeycolored cells from which the new queens would come. The blue-coated woman pointed them out. She was from British Guiana, had lived alone in the jungle for 18 years, lost £15 pounds on her first bees there – – – there had been no honey for them to eat. I was aware of bees buzzing and stalling before my face. The veil seemed hallucinatory. I could not see it for moments at a time. Then I became aware I was in a bone-stiff trance, intolerably tense, and shifted round to where I could see better. “Spirit of my dead father, protect me!” I arrogantly prayed. A dark, rather nice “unruly” looking man came up through the cut grasses. Everyone turned, murmured “O Mr. Jenner, we didn’t think you were coming.”
This, then, the awaited expert, the “government man” from Exeter. An hour late. He donned a white boiler suit and a very expert bee-hat – – – a vivid green dome, square black screen box for head, joined with yellow cloth at the corners, and a white neckpiece. The men muttered, told what had been done. They began looking for the old queen. Slide after slide was lifted, examined on both sides. To no avail. Myriads of crawling, creeping bees. As I understood it from my blue bee-lady, the first new queen out would kill the old ones, so the new queencells were moved to different hives. The old queen would be left in hers. But they couldn’t find her. Usually the old queen swarmed before the new queen hatched. This was to prevent swarming. I heard words like “supersede”, “queen excluder” (a slatted screen of metal only workers could crawl through). The rector slipped away unnoticed, then the midwife. “He used too much smoke” was the general criticism of Charlie Pollard. The queen hates smoke. She might have swarmed earlier. She might be hiding. She was not marked. It grew later. Eight. Eight-thirty. The hives were parceled up, queen excluders put on. An old beamy brown man wisely jutted a forefinger as we left: “She’s in that one.” The beekeepers clustered around Mr. Jenner with questions. The secretary sold chances for a bee-festival.
Friday: June 8: Ted & I drove down to Charlie Pollard’s about 9 tonight to collect our hive. He was standing at the door of his cottage in Mill Lane, the corner one, in white shirtsleeves, collar open, showing dark chest-hairs & a white mail-knit undershirt. His pretty blonde wife smiled & waved. We went over the bridge to the shed, with its rotovator, orange, resting at the end. Talked of floods, fish, Ash Ridge: the Taw flooded his place over & over. He was wanting to move up, had an eye on the lodge at Ash Ridge, had hives up there. His father-in-law had been head gardener when they had six gardeners. Told of great heaters to dry hay artificially & turn it to meal: 2 thousand, 4 thousand the machines cost, were lying up there now, hardly used. He hadn’t been able to get any more flood insurance once he had claimed. Had his rugs cleaned, but they were flat: you can live with them, I can’t, he told the inspector. Had to have the upholstered sofa & chairs all redone at the bottom. Walked down the first step from the 2nd floor one night & put his foot in water. A big salmon inhabited his reach of the Taw. “To be honest with you,” he said, over & over. “To be honest with you.” Showed us his big barny black offices. A honey ripener with a beautiful sweet-smelling slow gold slosh of honey at the bottom. Loaned us a bee-book. We loaded with our creaky old wood hive. He said if we cleaned it an painted it over Whitsun, he’d order a swarm of docile bees. Had showed us his beautiful-red-gold Italian queen the day before, with her glossy green mark on the thorax, I think. He had made it. To see her the better. The bees were bad-tempered, though. She would lay a lot of docile bees. We said: Docile, be sure now, & drove home.
MAJOR AND MRS. BILLYEALD (Winkleigh)
Whitsun June 10: Met the Billyealds at Charlie Pollard’s bee-meeting and were invited to tea. We found the house “Small as a postage stamp”, on the Eggesford Road. “Eve Leary”, the name of the compound in British Guiana (I think). A tiny, cramped brick house all on one floor like a holiday camp, with a glass grape arbor built all along the front overlooking a view of rolling green farmland to Dartmoor, and a kitchen built along the back. An impeccably mown lawn back and front. Beehives, painted pink and white, in a nettly enclosure at the bottom of the front lawn, with lots of big blue cornflowers (“they love those”) and red and yellow broom “three and six a cutting”) round about. And a new shed, one of those self-erectable ones with a clean gravel floor, for bee equipment and watching. Infinitely fine vegetable garden – – – rows of thick, bushy strawberry plants, some with white flowers, some with embryonic green berries beginning: sweetpeas climbing sticks, rhubarb, a weed-grown asparagus patch (the only slovenly corner), Velocity cabbages, goosegog, round & lucent green & hairy, celery, broadbeans. The superbly weeded rows. Then a pile of hens in a battery, eggs collected by the Chumleigh man, not the Okehampton man (who was too fussy about washing the eggs). Seedlings set out in myriad tin cans.
Mrs. Bertha Billyeald an amazing & indomitable woman: white short hair, tall, keen blue eyes & pink cheeks. Quite greedy, though fattish, she ate lots of scones & cream & jam for tea. She cans (or bottles) about 200 weight of jam a year. And extracts her own honey. Secretary of the Conservatives in the country. At the end of the afternoon, she brought out her scrapbook of her life in British Guiana. An astounding document. Lots of pictures of waterfalls seen from the air in her three-seater plane; her black silk flying suit, like Amelia Earhart; her handsome pilot; close calls. Pictures of her with short hair, in pants, handsome herself, ordering a cowering black to move some dirt, on horseback, driving a locomotive which she & her engineer built, straightening the 7-mile railway tracks they made to help get the timber to the river. A succession of wood houses, grander & grander, as they made more & more money. They were at first too poor to buy meat; at the end the grant was sold for £180,000. I couldn’t understand whether the Major was her first husband, or second. Or whether she & her father built the timber plantation, or she & her husband. At one point, she said she had no children but attended a Mother’s Union meet as she had cared for a lot. And then, when she was showing me the pictures of children & weddings in the hall, she seemed to say “These are his children”, meaning the Major’s? Her father, George Manly, an amazing man of 89 in white linen jacket with that military blue eye who attributes his health to drinking a quart of rum a day all his life, said that when a jaguar was troubling them, she locked up all the dogs 7 resolved to shoot it. Heard a noise, a scratching, at the house window in the dark. Crept downstairs with rifle & outside: saw a dark shape fall from the window. That’s a dog, she thought, that the jaguar has thrown out. I’ll save it. She ran & embraced the dark object, which turned out to be the jaguar. It dashed off & hid in the chicken shed. She went over & shot into the shed, then did run. In the morning the natives found the jaguar in there, dead, shot through the lung. So she is a big woman. Very opinionated. Said that these women get multiple sclerosis from worrying over their husbands’ bad health and not accepting what God has sent them!
Major Stanley Billyeald curiously the odd-man out. Always making jocular references to his wife’s expertise (on bees) & domination: “She has her finger on my jugular.” A man of action; can’t stand still. His father was a drunkard journalist & pot-boiler. He started in the ranks of the calvalry himself & worked up to head of the C.I.D. in British Guiana. An immense admiration, sardonic, for lawyers: how they can make monkeys of truths & learned men. He writes all winter: reports. Can’t talk standing still: walks round & round the lawn, with a sort of horse-rider’s lurch. His blue eye, also, his clipped silver moustache. The old man, his father-in-law, a sort of elderly double of himself. Three things I’ll tell you, he said: There is no sentiment in business. There is no honesty in politics. And self-interest makes the world go round. All right, I said. I give you those. Gave Ted a box of little Velocity cabbages in tins & a couple of bunches of very odd cylindrical green celery (“for soup”).
George Manly, the old man, was according to his daughter all sorts of wonderful & odd things. He seemed drastically hungry for a listener. Brought out his photograph album with prize-winning photos he had taken: of an old hawker with white hair and wrinkled like Methuselah; a fat little native baby eating dirt; snow on a wire fence (“That’s a bee-comb”, someone guessed, to his delight), hand-colored lily-pads like violent green saucers, and moonlight on the big waterfall (Kaieteur?), the highest in the world, in British Guiana. Bertha B. said something about his being a crack marksman, a world champion, & a trick entertainer on a party with the king & queen (which?)) He brought Ted to his bedroom at the end, to show him little boxes of jewelry he made from loose colored rhinestones & frames which he gave to friends; showed him his watercolors for doing photographs, and his mother and father, an oval black and white portrait of a dark, oppressed little woman & bearded smiling patriarchal man (her parents were killed in the Mutiny; she was married at 14). He prided himself on making the baby smile. Pretended to eat Frieda’s parsley & then gave it back, while she made her queer “shy” face, sliding her eyes to one side under her lids. Promised to tell a story of a cockroach. Gave me a sprig of “rosemary for remembrance” as we left. Brought out a Captain Hornblower book, autographed to him from C.S. Forester, whose picture he had taken atop the big falls.
Elizabeth, a blond, quiet plump faced sweet-looking girl of 13 was home from boardingschool to stay with her grandparents. She brought out her toys, a dog, a doll, to amuse Frieda & played with her; later cuddled and cooed over the baby.
A big tea laid, scones, cream, cherry jelly; a chocolate cake with rich dark frosting; little cut sandwiches. Tea a bit awkward, drafty, in the tiny diningroom crammed with sideboards & tables. Two bedrooms, a bath & a tiny front room with a TV made up the interior of the house.
The old man, on showing his photos: “That’s the girl who has two children in New Zealand, that’s the one with the voice Bertha’s going to visit this week, that’s the boy that’s dead, that’s the mother of the lot … ” and a photo of his wife, dead 25-years, with a paper in her lap showing headlines about Hitler.
MR. ELLIS (86): 16 Fore Street
July 4: Mr. Ellis, said the midwife, had a piano. It looked horrible she said, but was supposed to be in good tone. We walked round in the heat of the afternoon. Asked at a wrong door first. A smiling white-haired woman directed us to the next house in the street on the steep hill. She had a queer old zombie-dog, pink-grey flesh showing through shorn hair, at her door: it is not mine, it is a farmer’s on the hill, it is an ancient sort of sheepdog like they used to use, and it comes to me for scraps. We rang. No answer. She had been listening and came down: I expect he can’t hear, he is listening to the wireless. She pounded, went in: there are some young people to see you. A very old, crabbed white haired man, but somehow lively, met us. He had been sitting in front of a radio, had a tea tray with currant buns on the made-up bed in the sittingroom. Led us out back through a dark scabrous kitchen, did away with a bucket (urine?) and showed us a fusty old piano, the veneer peeling. We lifted, hopelessly, the keyboard cover. It was his wife’s, who had died four years ago at the age of 74 or so. Hadn’t been opened. We tried a few notes. Every other one stuck, motionless, and a substance, matted dust or the decay of the interior, seeped up between the keys.
Then he began to talk. Are those your writings in the window? I asked. I had seen some odd placards with large plain childlike writing about “the scandal of the century” and “would he have left his pram if he did not intend to stay?” and “Water Board” and “National Assistance Board”. A kind of public plaint, indecipherable, written first in pencil, then over again on the same card in ink. One placard was upside down. These, evidently were his grievances. He had been robbed by his brother and sister of seven fields: property had been left to his brother and his heirs (that’s me, isn’t it, his heir?) and sold. A doctor in Wales had given him two injections a day, by nurses, and paralysed his left side, then said he had a stroke. His wife had died – – – they wouldn’t take her into hospital because she was incurable. What had she died of – – – a broken heart? His son-in-law was a Freemason in Okehampton – – – the Freemasons were in power, they were robbing him, cheating him. The National Assistance were robbing him. He had written to the Queen. Somebody in a paper had said pink lustre cups were worth hundreds of pounds. He showed us fours saucers and three cups in pink lustre in his cupboard. The man had said he would be in the district & have a look & value them, but of course never came. His wife had fallen from the bed, it was like a butcher shop, and no one came. Her daughter did not come and broke her heart. He had to leave the door unlocked Thursday night for the nurse, and some one might steal the cups. He had china as well, a dinner set and a lovely teaset. There was a desk, with two polished brass candlesticks & a brass bell. Winston Churchill had fallen, and look at the treatment he had. Mr. Ellis fell, and was an hour picking himself up by himself. The flood of injustice went on, a great apocalyptic melding of perhaps slights or real small grievances. The police man walked down the other side of the street, nose in the air, and did not read his complaints in the window, which were there for all to see. We edged out, in distress, telling him to talk to the nurse, she was nice. Yes, the nurses are all good, he admitted, I have had a lot of them … And we went.
ROSE & PERCY KEY (68)6
Retired Londoners, our nearest neighbors, live in Number 4 Court Green cottages on the steep rocky slant of our driveway, looking into our high side hedge through the small front windows. The cottage joined to the Watkins’ cottage on the corner, joined in turn to the tiny white cottage of humpbacked Elsie fronting the street. A wreck when they bought it: hadn’t been lived in for 2 years, all muck & falling plaster. They worked it to comfort all themselves. A telly (on hire purchase, almost paid off), a small back garden under our thatched cottage and strawberry patch, hidden by a dense screen of holly and bush there, and by a wattle fence & homemade garage on the drive-side. Tiny rooms, bright, modernish. The typical British wallpaper – – – a pale beige embossed with faintly sheened white roses, the effect of cream scum patterns on weak tea. Starchy white curtains, good for peeking from behind. A stuffed, comfortable livingroom suite. A fireplace glowing with coal and wood block. Pictures of the three daughters in wedding dress – – – an album of the model daughter: hard-faced, black hair, a Jewy rapaciousness. In modeling school they stole an expensive sweater her mother bought. Two grandsons, one from each other daughter. All daughters live in London – – – Betty, Yvonne & the third. A side room full of gaudy satin materials the first day I came to visit, and a sewing machine on which Rose runs up mattress coverings for a firm in Okehampton in cerise and fuschia shiny stuff with lurid sprawling patterns. Percy “caretakes” a firm one day a month. Upstairs, a pink bathroom, floors all sealed with new lino, flounces and mirrors and chrome. A new cooker in the kitchen (the other hire purchase item), a cage of pistachio and pale-blue budgies creaking and whistling, up a step from the livingroom.
First encounter: Rose brought a tray of tea for us and the workmen the day we moved in. A lively youngish looking woman, brim full of gabble, seeming to listen not to you, but to another invisible person slightly to one side who is telling her something interesting and a bit similar, but much more compellingly. Her lightish brown hair, smooth face, plumping body. In her middle 50’s? Percy seems 20 years older, very tall, spare, almost cadaverous. Wears a blue peajacket. A weathered, humorous wry face. Was a pub keeper in London. South London. Oddly sensitive about Frieda and the baby. Asks very right questions. Sings to Frieda. Eye running, losing weight, no appetite, depressed after Christmas. Mrs. Key caught Dr. Webb coming down from me one day. Got Percy a checkup. An Xray. He was coming out with others from their Xrays but, unlike them, had no chart. “Where’s your chart, Perce?” Oh, the nurse said, he’s to come back for another after lunch. Now he is in Hawksmoor Chest Hospital in the hills in Bovey Tracy for a fortnight. Rose’s ignorance – – – why a 2-week checkup? Is it a checkup or a treatment. She says she will ask tomorrow when the Crawfords drive her out for a visit. My startlement: these people ask nothing, they just go to be treat’ like mild cows.
Have been to church with Rose & Percy – – – the rector put me on to them. Percy the church-goer. Rose not so much. They go every few weeks, sit in the same pew in the middle on the left. Rose’s series of smart hats. She could be in her late 30’s. Other encounters – – – to tea with them with Ted & Frieda. A smart tea – – – hot herring on toast, a plate of fancy tea cakes, all sugar & frosting. Frieda flushed from the fire, shy enough to be good. Everybody barking at her to stay away from the huge blue-glazed eye and gold buttons of the telly in the corner, the great fancy silent companion, she burying her head in tears in the armchair cushion at the sharp voices, for what reason? Looked through album of all daughters – – – bright, lively, pretty, with half-stewed, handsomeish dark husbands. The model daughter fancily posed before a traditional weddingcake. The sideboard & telly & threepiece suite take up every inch of space. The cramped, steamy cosy place. Then they came to tea with us. Percy much later. Rose dressed up but deprecating “Ooh, look at these stockings Sylvia”, whipping up her skirt to reveal a shabbyish pair of thick stockings. “Percy said my suit had the seam open down the back when it came back from the cleaners, but no matter.”
The last time Rose came to tea I had a big fancy sponge cake made with 6 eggs I had meant for the Tyrers on Sunday, but they didn’t come, George had stayed in bed. I broached it for Rose. She made a praising remark. Gobbled it. Seemed very nervous and flighty. Talked on about pensions – – – Percy had been ill one year and hadn’t paid it, now their pension was forever cut short (she got 29s. a week instead of the full 30s.) and they couldn’t pay up the year (“Oh” said the nasty official “everybody would do that if we let them”. And why not?) Shocking. How to get on on a pension. They rent their London house to one daughter. Can’t buy much – – – not on hire purchase. It’s all right to do that if you’re young. After little more than half an hour, Rose jumped up to a knock at the back door. “That’s Perce.” A garbled excuse about going off with the Crawfords somewhere. The Crawfords (Morris’ parents) very fancy, have, it seems, much money, a house on the hill, a brand-new car from their firm, all brothers and fathers and sons and cousins who make money by selling paper sacks they collect from farmers, god knows how. I resentful. “You didn’t mind my coming?” Her slippery eyes. She repeats everything I say to the Crawfords. My repeating the rector’s “We can see everything that goes on at Court Green” in innocence turning into a bad bedroom joke and getting repeated back to me by Sylvia Crawford.
Met Percy on the street in front of the butcher’s, his watery eyes in the lean face set somewhere in space. Told me he’d have to go into hospital for tests. I dropped in on Rose with a plate of absolutely indigestible “Black Walnut flavored” cupcakes from a Betty Crocker mix Mrs. Tyrer had dug out of her closet in the kitchen (“George and I never eat cakes and pies”) and which seemed suspiciously ancient, but thought the sugary stuff would appeal to Percy, who ate a pound of jelly babies a week. Rang once, twice. A suspicious delay. Rose came to the door still shaking with tears. Frieda ran down from our gate and came in with me. I found myself saying “Take it easy, love”, heartening nothings. “I’m so lonely”, Rose wailed. Percy had gone into hospital Sunday. It was last Tuesday. “I know I’ve got the telly and things to do, look, I’ve just done a big washing, but you get so used to having them around the house.” She burst into fresh tears. I put my arms around her, gave her a hug. “I’ve hardly eaten anything today, look, I’m writing Perce a letter …” She sniffed, showed a scrawled pencil message on the kitchen table. I ordered her to make tea, told her to come up for tea anytime. She wiped her face, peculiarly blanked out by her bare sorrows. Frieda fiddled with small ornaments, climbed the step in the kitchen & exclaimed over the birds. I left, in a hurry, to catch Marjorie Tyrer who was coming to tea after her London weekend.
Thursday: Feb. 15: Dropped by to see Rose and ask her if she could come to dinner this weekend. Had a lamb leg. Wanted to be kind, return the roast beef & gravy dinner she brought up when I had the baby a month ago, & the white knitted suit. Her vagueness. She retold the story of the Doctor & Percy’s eye. Flew on: how Percy had called up on the phone, asked for a sweater – – – he sat out on the balcony, had a nice room with only one other man. She was going to get the sweater in Exeter Friday, the Crawfords were driving her to visit him Saturday. I asked her to dinner Sunday. She paused, looked vague, didn’t know if she was going (“supposed to go”) to dinner at Crawfords Sunday, couldn’t afford to let them down, she depended on them for her rides to Percy (she drives, but not their own present car, it’s too big). I told her a bit dryly that maybe she could find out & let me know. Aware of my impossibility as charitable worker – – take my bloody offer & be grateful. She spoke of Ted’s driving her to Percy Tuesday. I a bit dubious – – – what had he said? How far was the hospital from Exeter? She looked miffed – – – I said Ted had a dentist appointment; when were the hospital hours. Two to four. Well, would that give him time to shop & do errands & go to the dentist? I knew perfectly well Ted planned to go fishing early in the day & had no doubt thought he could drop her in the environs of the hospital for the day. She said she had no way of getting there (it being an intricate route). Her flightiness. Ted said he had told her he would drop her at Newton Abbot where he had understood she could get a bus to the hospital. Her translation of this into his spending the day driving her & waiting for her. I told her to let us know if she could come to dinner, thinking she could well think about letting us down, too. My dislike for the elder Mrs. C. Her great gabby jeweled encrusted tartiness. R. a flighty, fickle gossipy lady with a good enough heart.
Friday, Feb. 16: A flying visit from Rose. Ted let her in and she came to the playroom where we were typing opposite each other in piles of sprawled paper over the dull pewter pot of steaming tea. “My isn’t it lovely and warm.” We urged her to have a cup of tea. She sat in the orange striped deck chair. “My isn’t it hot.” She was expecting a phone call from “the girls” (her daughters)? News: they asked for her permission to operate on Percy – – – her voice quavered. She couldn’t see why, he was in no pain, if you operate like that it throws your system off some way, but “if it’ll prolong his life”. Ted pored hopelessly over maps of Exeter and Bovey Tracy, his day of fishing evaporating in face of the obvious impossibility of meeting Rose halfway. The prospect of Percy in hospital 6 weeks nudging us to sacrifice half a day – – – her kindnesses, our slowness. So he will take her to and from & forget the fishing. What is this “shadow” or “spot”? She visits him Saturday, has promised to find out all. Is it old scars, fresh scars? He is 68. She said she was going to Crawfords on Sunday, but said she’d come to us on Monday for noon dinner. I have utterly forgot to describe what she wore: must train myself better, from head to toe.
Feb. 21: Popped in on Rose, with Frieda, to get my application for Family Allowance witnessed. She & her model daughter (Betty) down from London at dinner at 1. Betty a handsome, lean, hard-faced girl with black short hair, a racing-horse body, a sharp nose & chin. Came in to boss mother, tell her how to sign form. Rose Emma Key, Mrs. in parenthesis. Blue eyeshadow from train trip down. Percy operated on, to be operated on that night. Dropped by the next night, Feb. 22, for news – – – he had had part of his lung taken out, was resting comfortably. What was it? They didn’t know (!), would find out Saturday when they went to visit him. They didn’t want Rose to come visit him the first day. What was it? Betty: “Excuse me, I have a boil on my nose.” The TV set blaring. Frieda cried, startled. Then fascinated. A closeup of a dumptruck emptying rocks. “Ohhh.”
April 17: A terrible thumping on our door about 2 o’clock. Ted and Frieda and I were eating lunch in the kitchen. Do you suppose that’s the mail? I asked, thinking Ted might have won some fabulous prize. My words were cut short by Rose’s hysterical voice “Ted, Ted, come quick, I think Percy’s had a stroke.” We flung the door open, & there was Rose Key, wild-eyed, clutching her open blouse which showed her slip and gabbling. “I’ve called the doctor,” she cried, turning to rush back to her cottage, Ted after her. I thought I would stay and wait, and then something in me said, now, you must see this, you have never seen a stroke or a dead person. So I went. Percy was in his chair in front of the television set, twitching in a fearsome way, utterly gone off, mumbling over what I thought must be his false teeth, his eyes twitching askew, and shaking as if pierced by weak electric shocks. Rose clutched Ted. I stared from the doorway. The doctor’s car drew immediately up by the hedge at the bottom of the lane. He came very slowly and ceremoniuosly, head seriously lowered, to the door. Ready to meet death, I suppose. He said Thank you, and we melted back to the house. I have been waiting for this, I said. And Ted said he had, too. I was seized by dry retching at the thought of that horrible mumbling over false teeth. A disgust. Ted & I hugged each other. Frieda looked on peacefully from her lunch, her big blue eyes untroubled & clear. Later, we knocked. The elder Mrs. Crawford was there, & the shambling blond Morris. Rose said Percy was sleeping, and so he was, back to us on the couch. He had had five strokes that day. One more, the doctor said, and he would be gone. Ted went in later. Percy said Hello Ted, and asked after the babies.
He had been walking in the wind among our narcissi in his peajacket a few days before. He had a double rupture from coughing. The sense his morale, his spirit, had gone. That he had given in with this. Everybody, it seems, is going or dying in this cold mean spring.
April 22 Easter Sunday: Ted and I were picking daffodils in the early evening. Rose had been arguing with Percy, and I had discreetly let my picking lead me to the hedge overlooking the lane in front of their house. I heard Rose saying “You’ve got to take it easy, Perce,” in a cross voice. Then she lowered it. Popped out & stood. Ted had sat Frieda & the baby & me in the daffodils to take pictures. “Sylvia” she yoohooed across. I did not answer immediately because Ted was taking the picture. “Sylvia!” “Just a minute Rose.” Then she asked if she could buy a bunch of daffodils. Ted & I knew she knew we would not ask for money. Disliked her scrounging to get something out of us. We brought by a bunch. Percy was sitting up in the bed made up in the livingroom for him after his stroke like a toothless bird, beaming a cracked smile, his cheeks bright pink like a baby’s. As we went in, a couple in Easter outfit came up, she with a pink hat and a bunch of red, purple and pink anemones, he moustached & serious. She all dovey bosom & coos. They had kept the Fountains pub. Now they lived in The Nest (we’ve come home to roost!), that white cute cottage opposite the Ring O’ Bells. She told me almost immediately that she was a Catholic & set up the altar in the Town Hall after the Saturday night dances. This meant her staying up late. A young girl waiting for a ride home had come up once and said “Pardon me, but I can’t help thinking What a transformation, first it is a dance hall, and then it is all neatened up into a church,” or some such. “Hubby isn’t Catholic, but Hubby waits up and helps me.” How nice, I said, for hubbies to be so broadminded. Percy kept trying to say things in a vowelly mouthing which Rose translated for us. “You can’t raise a nation on fish alone” was one of the sayings.
April 25: Stopped for a second to talk to Rose on my way up from bringing a load of daffodils to Elsie for the funeral of Nancy’s mother-in-law this afternoon. We exchanged baby-information: how Nicholas had been crying the past two days and might be teething (“Babies are so forward nowadays,” says Rose.) and how Percy had dressed himself and walked round to the back. Wasn’t it wonderful. That’s modern medicine, I said.
May 15: Heard a whooshing outside the gate as I came into the house with a load of clean laundry, and dashed to the big kitchen window to see who was trespassing. Old Percy, with fixed, mad blue eye and a rusty scythe, was attacking the “Japanese creeper” bambooey plant which had shot up green in the alley by the drive. I was outraged and scared. He had come over, beckoning in his sinister senile way, a few days ago with a bag of fusty jellybabies for Frieda which I immediately threw away, and warned me that this Japanese creeper was overtaking our field and we better cut it down. I told Ted Percy was cutting down the stalks & we flew out. Hey Percy, leave off that, Ted said. I stood disapproving behind him, wiping my hands on a towel. Percy smiled foolishly, mumbled. Thought I was doing you a favor, he says. The scythe clattered out of his shaking hand onto the gravel. He had left a green mesh of stalks, almost impossible to detach from the roots after his botched cutting. No sign of Rose. Had intuition she was hiding. She had come over a few days before to buy some daffodils for this Hubby-loving Catholic who’d been helping her round the house. I thought I’d let her pay for these in earnest, as it was a gift. Why should I supply free gifts for other people to give? Said a bob a dozen. She looked stunned. Is that too much for you? I asked dryly. It obviously was. She must have expected further largesse. I told her that was what we charged everyone & picked her 3 dozen for her 2 bob while she sat over a cup of tea & minded Frieda. It had been pouring all day & I wore my Wellingtons. Now she has invited me down for a cup of tea today (May 17), and I feel sick about going because Percy makes me sick. I won’t bring Frieda, I think. Rose told Ted yesterday that Percy goes “funny”, has his left arm & side hang loose. Says she hopes the doctor will say something about this when Percy goes for the post-operation checkup.
May 17: Rose had popped out the day before & asked me for tea. I gardened heavily up to the church clock’s striking four. Went down in my brown work-pants. She all dressed up in a blue suit, freshly done dark brown hair (dyed?) and stockings riddled with runs. Raised her eyebrows at my wet knees. Percy not so bad, livelier, but his left hand goes dead and he seems always to be having turns. Saw she had four cups all ready, & herrings on toast, so ran up for Ted. His presence a relief. Rose mouthed about Percy’s condition, very bad, she had to dress him, he took all her time. I had a revulsion at the cold herrings on cold toast, a feeling they took on a corruption from Percy. Discussing the cost of heating, admiring their new gas poker fixed in fireplace, we say Mrs. Crawford, resplendent in black furry cossack cap, dragging the sullen, shaved-bob Rebecca, age 3 in July, & exhibiting a flat silver ring and eating, as always and forever, a cellophane tube of colored sweets. I took this occasion to leave & attend to Nicholas (who was screaming on his back in the pram) and Frieda (crying upstairs). The Crawfords, Jack odd & sidelong & extinguished, came over, ostensibly to see Nicholas. Mrs. C. said she thought I looked like Sylvia C’s baby Paula. I felt flattered. She thinks Ted looks just like her son Morris. Resemblances to loved one’s the height of praise. Discussed Morris’ new milk cow (cost about £75), the future of apples.
June 7: Well, Percy Key is dying. That is the verdict. Poor old Perce, says everybody. Rose comes up almost every day. “Te-ed” she calls in her hysterical, throbbing voice. And Ted comes, from the study, the tennis court, the orchard, wherever, to lift the dying man from his armchair to his bed. He is very quiet afterwards. He is a bag of bones, says Ted. I saw him in one “turn” or “do”, lying back on the bed, toothless, all beakiness of nose and chin, eyes sunken as if they were not, shuddering and blinking in a fearful way. And all about the world is gold and green, dripping with laburnum and buttercups and the sweet stench of June. In the cottage the fire is on and it is a dark twilight. The midwife said Percy would go into a coma this weekend and then “anything could happen”. The sleeping pills the doctor gives him don’t work, says Rose. He is calling all night: Rose, Rose, Rose. It has happened so quickly. First Rose stopped the doctor in January when I had the baby for a look at Percy’s running eye and a check on his weight-loss. Then he was in hospital for lung x-rays. Then in again for a big surgery for “something on the lung”. Did they find him so far gone with cancer they sewed him up again? Then home, walking, improving, but oddly quenched in his brightness & his songs. I found a wrinkled white paper bag of dusty jellybabies in the car yesterday from Rose. Then his five strokes. Now his diminishing.
Everybody has so easily given him up. Rose looks younger & younger. Sylvia Crawford set her hair yesterday. She felt creepy about it, left baby Paula with me & came over in between rinses in her frilly apron, dark-haired, white-skinned, with her high, sweet child-voice. Percy looked terrible since she had seen him last, she said. She thought cancer went wild if it was exposed to the air. The general sentiment of townsfolk: doctors just experiment on you in hospital. One you’re in, if you’re old, you’re a goner.
June 9: Met the Rector coming out of his house-building site across the road. He turned up the lane to Court Green with me. I could feel his professional gravity coming over him. He read the notice on Rose’s door as I went on up, then went round back. “Sylvia!” I heard Rose hiss behind me, and turned. She was pantomiming the rector’s arrival & making lemon-moues & rejecting motions with one hand, very chipper.
July 2: Percy Key is dead. He died just at midnight, Monday, June 25th, and was buried Friday, June 29th, at 2:30. I find this difficult to believe. It all began with his eye watering, and Rose calling in the doctor, just after the birth of Nicholas. I have written a long poem “Berck-Plage” about it. Very moved. Several terrible glimpses.
Ted had for some days stopped lifting Percy in and out of bed. He could not take his sleeping pills, or swallow. The doctor was starting to give him injections. Morphia? He was in pain when he was conscious. The nurse counted 45 seconds between one breath and another. I decided to see him, I must see him, so went with Ted and Frieda. Rose and the smiling Catholic woman were lying on deck chairs in the yard. Rose’s white face crumpled the minute she tried to speak. “The nurse told us to sit out. There’s no more we can do. Isn’t it awful to see him like this?” See him if you like, she told me. I went in through the quiet kitchen with Ted. The livingroom was full, still, hot with some awful translation taking place. Percy lay back on a heap of white pillows in his striped pajamas, his face already passed from humanity, the nose a spiralling fleshless beak in thin air, the chin fallen in a point from it, like an opposite pole, and the mouth like an inverted black heart stamped into the yellow flesh between, a great raucous breath coming and going there with great effort like an awful bird, caught, but about to depart. His eyes showed through partly open lids like dissolved soaps or a clotted pus. I was very sick at this and had a bad migraine over my left eye for the rest of the day. The end, even of so marginal a man, a horror.
When Ted & I drove out to Exeter to catch the London train the following morning, the stone house was still, dewy and peaceful, the curtains stirring in the dawn air. He is dead, I said. Or he will be dead when we get back. He had died that night, mother said over the phone, when I called her up the following evening.
Went down after his death, the next day, the 27th. Ted had been down in the morning, said Percy was still on the bed, very yellow, his jaw bound and a book, a big brown book, propping it till it stiffened properly. When I went down they had just brought the coffin & put him in. The livingroom where he had lain was in an upheaval – – – bed rolled from the wall, mattresses on the lawn, sheets and pillows washed & airing. He lay in the sewing room, or parlor, in a long coffin of orangey soap-colored oak with silver handles, the lid propped against the wall at his head with a silver scroll: Percy Key, Died June 25, 1962. The raw date a shock. A sheet covered the coffin. Rose lifted it. A pale white beaked face, as of paper, rose under the veil that covered the hole cut in the glued white cloth cover. The mouth looked glued, the face powdered. She quickly put down the sheet. I hugged her. She kissed me and burst into tears. The dark, rotund sister from London with purple eye-circles deplored: They have no hearse, they have only a cart.
Friday, the day of the funeral, hot and blue, with theatrical white clouds passing. Ted & I, dressed in hot blacks, passed the church, saw the bowler-hatted men coming out of the gate with a high, spider-wheeled black cart. They are going to call for the corpse, we said; we left a grocery order. The awful feeling of great grins coming onto the face, unstoppable. A relief; this is the hostage for death, we are safe for the time-being. We strolled round the church in the bright heat, the pollarded green limes like green balls, the far hills red, just ploughed, and one stooked with newly glittering wheat. Debated whether to wait out, or go in. Elsie, with her stump-foot was going in. Then Grace, Jim’s wife. We went in. Heard priest meeting corpse at gate, incantating, coming close. Hair-raising. We stood. The flowery casket, nodding and flirting its petals, led up the aisle. The handsome mourners in black down to gloves & handbag, Rose, three daughters including the marble-beautiful model, one husband, Mrs. Crawford & the Catholic, smiling, only not smiling, the smile in abeyance, suspended. I hardly heard a word of the service, Mr. Lane for once quenched by the grandeur of ceremony, a vessel, as it should be.
Then we followed the funeral party after the casket out the side door to the street going up the hill to the cemetary. Behind the high black cart, which had started up with the priest swaying in black and white at a decorous pace, the funeral cars – – – one car, a taxi, then Jack Crawford, looking green and scared, in his big new red car. We got in with him. “Well, old Perce always wanted to be buried in Devon.” You could see he felt he was next. I felt tears come. Ted motioned me to look at the slow uplifted faces of children in the primary school yard, all seated on rest rugs, utterly without grief, only bland curiosity, turning after us. We got out at the cemetary gate, the day blazing. Followed the black backs of the women. Six bowler hats of the bearers left at the first yew bushes in the grass. The coffin on boards, words said, ashses to ashes – – – that is what remained, not glory, not heaven. The amazingly narrow coffin lowered into the narrow red earth opening, left. The women led round, in a kind of goodbye circle, Rose rapt and beautiful and frozen, the Catholic dropping a handfull of earth which clattered. A great impulse welled in me to cast earth also, but it seemed as if it might be indecent, hurrying Percy into oblivion. We left the open grave. An unfinished feeling. Is he to be left up there uncovered, all alone? Walked home over the back hill, gathering immense stalks of fuchsia foxgloves and swinging our jackets in the heat.
July 4: Saw Rose, in a borrowed black velours hat, letting herself into the house. She going to London, but will return in a week. She had been having her hair done, guilltily, a wave of tight curls. “I looked so awful.” She had brought over two old books (one of which I am sure propped Percy’s chin), a pile of buttons, thousands, that they had been going to put on cards & sell, a Court Green stamp, also for home business, and a few notebooks: pitiable relics. I had passed once and seen two women, their hair tied from the dust in kerchiefs, on their knees in the parlor, sorting miscellaneous objects and walled in by upstanding vividly floral mattresses and bedsteads.
Rose said she heard a couple outside our house “Oh, but it has a thatch and is much too big for us”. She came out. Were they wanting a house? Yes, they were retiring from London & wanted a cottage. Had come to North Tawton, instead of South Tawton, by mistake. How strange, says Rose, I am wanting to sell this cottage. O it is just what we want, say the people. Now I wonder, will they come?