I consider myself lucky, because when I was four years old I lived in a house with a garden, and in the garden was a double rose hedge—two hedges, that is, planted close to each other, but with enough space between them, even now they’d grown thick, for a person of my size to sit there without difficulty. Into this space the briar roses shed pale pink petals and heavy drops of rainwater or dew, so that it never quite dried out. I collected the petals into small heaps, each heap representing one of the dozen or so other regular inhabitants of the rose-hedge space. I knew their names then, but now can remember only a few. (One of them was Fatty Arbuckle, which gives you the date but not the circumstances. I am sure nobody in the village knew anything then about the misfortunes of Arbuckle. It was simply a name for anyone fat, whether male or female.)
Every day, of course, one or more of the piles of rose leaves perished, withered at the top, mouldering underneath. They had no fragrance while they were alive, but a curious smell when they were dead. I buried them where the ground was soft, at the foot of the hedge. Prayers and a hymn had to be said over them, but that was no problem to me; we were churchgoers and I knew plenty of both. After they were decently laid to rest, however, a new anxiety began. No empty spaces must be left by the time I was called back into the house. More fallen petals to collect, more piling up. And so Fatty and his companions rose again from the earth.
All this talk about hedges may suggest that we lived in a big place, but that we certainly didn’t. When my father came back from the First World War, wounded through the shoulder, houses to rent were so scarce in London that he began to think he would have to live, with his family, in a furniture van. His job was on the staff of Punch (of which he eventually became the editor). Making your living by being funny is always hard work, and, in the 1920s, not well paid. So my mother, a quietly spoken woman whom nothing defeated, found a house in the village of Balcombe, in Sussex, an hour by train from London and a walk from the station.
I had a brother, much loved and admired, but three-and-a-half years older, at that time an unbridgeable gap. He was not a rose-heap builder, but, to his credit, not a destroyer of rose heaps either. While I was conducting toy funerals he would have been down at the village carpenter’s, where I wasn’t wanted, or at the blacksmith’s (which by then was a garage, hiring out two Citroëns), or competing with his friends to see who could pee farthest out of the window, disturbing the hens as they pecked about the grass. He was Rawle, a family name on my mother’s side. It seemed to me that in the conversation that went on (quite literally) above my head, in church and at home, his name was mentioned frequently. ‘We thank Thee, Lord, for Rawle Thy mercies,’ ‘after Rawle,’ ‘they’re Rawle as bad as each other…’. And this struck me as quite natural, for he was very important to me.
Twenty years or so later, Rawle came out of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp to become a journalist and a distinguished Far Eastern correspondent, so that in the end we both of us finished up as writers.
The truth is that we came of a writing family, and I suppose some people might think an eccentric one. When I was young I took my father and my three uncles for granted, and it never occurred to me that everyone else wasn’t like them. Later on I found that this was a mistake, but after all these years I’ve never quite managed to adapt myself to it. I suppose they were unusual, but I still think that they were right, and in so far as the world disagrees with them, I disagree with the world.
They were a vicarage family, and vicarages were the intellectual powerhouses of nineteenth-century England. Their father, Edward Knox, left his country parish for industrial Birmingham, crowded and thick with soot, because he thought there was more important work to do there, and the Knoxes grew up in an immensely hard-working Evangelical household where comfort and beauty counted for very little and money for almost nothing—there was always good reason to give it away. They remained faithful to their upbringing—I say this because I count a violent reaction against an upbringing a kind of faithfulness. My Uncle Dillwyn, for example, who came next after my father, was an extreme agnostic, referring to Jesus Christ as ‘that deluded individual, J.C.’. He was a brilliant scholar of ancient Greek texts, and using, I suppose, the same part of his mind, a great cryptographer; in the First World War he broke the German flag code, and his work on the ‘spy’ variation of the Enigma cipher shortened the Second World War by roughly six months. One would expect from him clarity and coldness, but in point of fact nobody could understand his working methods, and although he could be ruthless if you made a foolish remark he was tenderhearted to a fault when anybody was in real trouble. The same was true of my second and third uncles, Wilfred and Ronnie, but they, on the other hand, were two of the most convincing Christians it would be possible to meet, and both became priests. All of them, including of course my father, were distinguished by courage and a frightening honesty. (My Uncle Wilfred never told a lie in his entire life—he never saw the necessity.) But I won’t write more about this, because, as they would have said themselves, what’s the use of courage and honesty if you can’t take them for granted? I should like, however, to mention their wit. Some of it lay in their fond ness for quiet understatement. ‘One gets so little practice at this,’ said my father gently when, in 1971, he lay dying. Indeed all of them (although Ronnie published so many books that he lost all count of the titles) had a horror of talking too much. Wilfred said that no congregation ought to have to listen to a sermon for more than ten minutes, and any priest or minister who went on longer than that ought to have his income cut down proportionately every thirty seconds. I, too, feel drawn to whatever is spare, subtle, and economical.
My mother’s family was called Hicks. She too came from a vicarage, and from a ‘long family,’ so musical that they could give an entire parish concert between them. Both my grandfathers became bishops, and both of them started out with next to nothing. Edward Hicks, in fact, had even less than that—his father was a small tradesman in Oxford who went bankrupt, and Edward had to set himself, in the old way, to free his family from debt. This may have been the reason why, during his ministry, he never refused to see anyone who came to his door for help. He was a great enemy of poverty and injustice, having come, while he was at Oxford, under the influence of John Ruskin. Ruskin he admired, not only for his teaching but also for his delight in even the smallest details of life. Ruskin, he said, would describe ‘with the keenest relish’ the joy of shelling peas—‘the pop which assures one of a successful start, the fresh colour and scent of the juicy row within, and the pleasure of skilfully scooping the bouncing with one’s thumb into the vessel by one’s side.’ I can honestly say that I never shell peas in summer without thinking of Ruskin and of my grandfather.
Well, those were my ancestors, and I can only say once again that I should like to have lived up to them. I should like to have been musical, I should like to be mathematical, and above all I should like never to have told a lie.
We left Sussex, the village, the hens, and the rose hedges, in 1922. Commuting had become impossible, since my father had been asked to act as theatre critic for Punch, as well as deputy assistant editor. We went to No. 34 Well Walk, a small eighteenth-century house in Hampstead, to the northwest of London. The rent at that time was £40 a year. If I may be allowed to quote from what I wrote about it some years ago, Hampstead at that time was a place of ‘high thinking, plain living, and small economies. The steep, charming old streets were full of ham-and-beef shops, old bookstalls, and an amazing number of clothes-repairers, all helpful to shabby refugees and literary men. There was even a jeweller’s where one bead could be bought at a time, for all the Hampstead ladies wore long necklaces.’
Poets, conspicuous in their wide-brimmed black hats, roamed the streets, as indeed they always had done. At one end of Well Walk, under the lime trees, was the wooden seat where John Keats was supposed to have sat down to rest. Certainly he had lived just round the corner. At dusk the lamplighters came round and, one by one, the gas lamps flickered into brightness. Muffin men appeared on the streets in winter, and in summer the lavender sellers. To go down into London was an expedition. I was taken, for example, to the Poetry Bookshop, where you could buy, for sixpence, coloured rhyme sheets illustrated by fine artists—new ones every month or so. We travelled by underground railway, because Hampstead’s hill was too steep for a bus to get up it.
I hadn’t expected to be happy in Hampstead, but I was. Then, partly because of my mother’s illness, I had to be sent away to boarding schools. I got a very good education, leading to an Oxford scholarship, but I learned only too quickly that homesickness is a real illness and that reason has no power against it. I still believe this is true, even though while I’m writing it down I realize what a small thing my wretchedness must sound, in view of the partings that were to come and the haunting faces that television now shows us day by day of the displaced, the rejected, the bewildered and the totally lost. ‘Even before they set out on life’s journey they seem weary already of the way.’ There are children now who are homesick without ever having had a home to remember.
I’ve never been able to write short stories. In my whole life I’ve only written three1, and then only because I was asked to. It took me almost as long to finish one as to write a novel. Biographies and novels are the forms that I feel I can just about manage. They are the outcome of intense curiosity about other people and about oneself. I think that the best way to continue with these notes about my life would he to look back through the novels I have written.
I left Oxford with an honours degree and might perhaps have stayed there, but it was 1938 and it hardly seemed to be the right thing to do at the time. In 1939 I took a job at Broadcasting House, the London headquarters of the wartime BBC. Broadcasting House was designed to look, and does look, like a great ship headed south, and in 1939, ‘with the best engineers in the world, and a crew varying between the intensely respectable and the barely sane, it looked ready to scorn any disaster of less than Titanic scale. At night, with all its blazing portholes blacked out, it towered over a flotilla of taxis, each dropping off a spectator or two.’ Reading that I can see that I was impressed, almost in spite of myself, by the seven-decked building, the sole source of news and wartime instructions for the British public over the next six years. But I myself was only a Recorded Programmes Assistant—almost, I think, the lowest of the low. We were not even junior programme engineers, who were allowed to turn knobs that we were forbidden to touch and had the right to join a union. We were busy all day, and (since the BBC was on twenty-four-hour shifts) often all the night, and yet I have to think hard now to remember exactly what it was we did. To a large extent we were beasts of burden—very young ones. We had to make sure that things were in the right place at the right time by actually carrying them there. There were some tapes in existence, but the enormous everyday traffic in recorded sound was all carried on aluminium 78 discs coated with acetate. The acetate smelled very strong, particularly as the whole building was now sealed off, its entrance packed with sandbags, its windows (so we believed) not to be opened until peace was declared. Quantities of these discs seemed to be needed for every transmission—speeches, interviews, messages, broadcasts from enemy countries patiently transcribed by r efugee scholars who toiled quietly in a department of their own. Some of them were standbys—there had to be an alternative recording ready, for instance, when King George VI was speaking to the nation, because his stammer was unpredictable, and for the chimes of Big Ben, because in very cold weather there was a chance that the mechanism might slow down.
I dream, sometimes, of those many thousands of discs. All of them were perishable. They melted easily—a cup of tea put down on top of them would do that—and in winter the teams on the mobile recording vans found that they also froze. They had a tendency, also, to disappear. There is, I think, a strong human instinct which prompts anyone who sees a neat stack of anything to move it somewhere else, and this (not only at the BBC) defeats all that filing systems and catalogues can do. But even when the discs were in their expected place they were distinguished from each other only by handwritten labels, and these labels were not always filled in correctly, or filled in at all. Or they were illegible—was it ‘Church bells’ (which were to be rung only in case of invasion) or ‘Churchill’? In the basement transmission studios the announcers, whose familiar voices, during the wartime years, brought reassurance to millions, were waiting. As part of a system of finders, fetchers, and carriers in a building where the lifts had been halted, for security reasons, at the third floor, leaving four more flights of stairs to be struggled up and down, I can’t claim to have been the strongest link in the chain, but I can say that I was willing.
The novel that I wrote about my years at Broadcasting House was called Human Voices (1980). The reviewers called it ‘light,’ and I suppose it is, although novelists never like to be called light. All I can say is that I never went far away from the truth. Broadcasting House in wartime was a life within a life. We so often had to sleep, when we were on night shift, in the concert hall, rigged up as a dormitory with a line of grey blankets supposed to separate male from female. It was a fitful sleep, disturbed by the anxious torchlights and muffled alarm clocks of those going on and off duty. Twice in the concert hall I had to help out when someone had an epileptic fit. In my novel I changed this to the birth of a baby, but that wouldn’t have surprised me either. Broadcasting House had become the capacious, all-providing shelter for us all.
I remember, too, that I learned to listen there. From room after room, if the patent self-sealing rooms were open for the moment, bursts of music from replays and editing sessions beguiled the passersby. I had never heard anything by Satie before, or by Fauré, or by Kurt Weill, except for the Dreigro-schenoper. The programme editors considered me a little savage, but they kindly let me stay and listen. I have said that my mother’s family was born, as birds are born, musical. I wasn’t, so I am all the more grateful for the education in hearing which the BBC gave me. I also fell in love, with someone very much older and more important, without the least glimmer of a hope of any return. This was quite common in those days, but I suggested in Human Voices that we were the last generation to behave like this and that after the Second World War the human species no longer found it biologically useful. Certainly, towards the end of the war or just after it we all of us married, had children, and forgot why and even how we’d managed to love without return. In 1943 I married an Irish soldier, and my three children are now respectively a professor of economics, a teacher of Spanish, and a research physiologist enquiring into the nature of pain. With my youngest grandchildren I can gain a little credit by telling them that I can remember a time when there was no television, and I carried recordings about, like Jill and her pail of water.
In the late 1950s we were living in Southwold, which is on the east coast of England, a flat, sandy, Holland-like coast with wide skies and bright clouds, beloved of painters, and a temptation to those who think they can paint but can’t. Southwold at that time was largely cut off from public transport. The branch railway had been closed for thirty years, the river had silted up in the nineteenth century, and the car ferry had collapsed during the great floods of 1953. We had no car, and hardly any money; we lived down by the harbour, which was no longer a harbour since the seawall caved in sometime in 1910. The house we got had once been an oyster warehouse, and had been plastered with sea salt, which meant that it was never quite dry. Underneath the living room there was a flood cellar, where the water slopped about at very high tides. The children lived like aquatic animals, taking no harm.
While they were at the local primary school, just across the marshes, I took a job in what was then the only bookshop in Southwold, and the novel I wrote about those years was called The Bookshop (1978). I still miss, and shall always miss, the wide shining horizons of East Suffolk, and the sight of the rooks and the seabirds balancing themselves on boundless currents of air. The human community of Southwold, however, was divided into friends and enemies. In my story I called the town Hardborough. (In the matter of ‘calling names’ writers have an advantage.) The novel is really the report of a battle, a very minor engagement, of course, but important to the wounded.
My employer, however, Mrs Neame, was kindness itself, and it seemed unjust that the shop (admittedly the building was three hundred years old) should be haunted—haunted, too, by that most mindless form of the supernatural, a poltergeist. It manifested itself, on what you might call its days on, by first tapping, then knocking, then drumming furiously. At first I thought the noise must have come from next door, which was a shoe store, part of a large chain. I didn’t reflect that the assistants in shoe stores don’t, nowadays, spend their time hammering, like goblins in fairy tales, at the cobbler’s last. ‘They’re a noisy lot,’ I said to Mrs Neame, who turned pale, and told me not to talk about it to the customers, or we’d soon lose them all. It was a rapper—that was what they were called in East Suffolk. They were known, too, to ‘bring a chill with them,’ and unquestionably the temperature dropped during the uproar and the shop (although it was summer) became almost cold. But it would have seemed odd to light the paraffin heater in June. As we shut up shop there was a silence, then came a tremendous battering, more like a series of small explosions, not on the wall this time, but on the locked back door—the rapper triumphant. I recognized that afternoon something I had never met with before—malignancy.
This was my first novel—before that I had only published a biography and a mystery story—and not long after it came out the publisher rang up to tell me that it was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize. That raised the problem of evening dress, because the Booker dinner is a formal occasion. Still, it isn’t difficult to make a long skirt, and I was advised to wear earrings and not to take off my shoes under the table, because at some point each writer would have to go up separately and shake hands with the chairman. For the same reason, I ought to make sure that I looked all right from behind. This advice has taken me through three Booker dinners.
At the beginning of the Sixties we had to go back to London, and not being able to find a house that we could afford, we settled for a boat; it was moored on Chelsea Reach, between Battersea Bridge and Albert Bridge, so that we were in one of the very grandest parts of London. On the other hand, we were living on an old wooden barge which for many years had carried cargoes up and down the east coast under sail, but was now a battered, patched, caulked, tar-blackened hulk, heaving up with difficulty on every rising tide. Her name was Grace, and she had never been fitted with an engine, so that there was plenty of room for us in the huge belly of the hold. There was a very old stove, in which we burned driftwood. Driftwood will only light when it has paint or tar on it, and we knew its bitter fragrance well from the foreshore at Southwold, just as we were used to a more or less permanent state of damp and to the voices, at first light, of the seagulls. Now we had to get used to the movement of Grace, rocking on the high tide, and the echoing wail of the hooters from the passing colliers on their way to the Port of London.
Grace was anchored next to the wharf, so that she was the first of a long line of lived-in craft—barges, landing craft, and even one minesweeper. They were connected by a series of gangplanks which were anything but safe, so that the postman and the milkman had, very sensibly, refused to go on delivering. There were other drawbacks, too—the boat owners were only allowed to let out wastewater, and to use the lavatories, on a falling tide. Our great consolation was that a Thames barge, because of the camber of the deck, never sinks completely. On this point I could give evidence, because we went down twice, and on both occasions the deck stayed just above water. We were taken off the first time by a kindly Swede in a dinghy, and the second time by the river police in their patrol launch. Among our drenched and floating possessions I saw a bottle of champagne that had been intended for a party. I was glad to be able to retrieve the champagne so as to have something to give, in gratitude, to the police, who reminded me that they were not allowed to drink on duty but agreed to put it aside for later. Poor Grace, much loved, was towed away to the Essex marshes to be broken up. I dedicated my novel Offshore (1979) to ‘Grace and all who sailed in her.’
It was a pity that the title was translated into various European languages with words meaning ‘far away’ or ‘far from the shore,’ which meant the exact opposite of what I intended. By ‘offshore’ I meant to suggest the boats at anchor, still in touch with the land, and also the emotional restlessness of my characters, halfway between the need for security and the doubtful attraction of danger. Their indecision is a kind of reflection of the rising and falling tide, which the craft at anchor must, of course, follow. This novel did win the Booker Prize, and I knew then that some of the people who read it must have understood it.
Why don’t you teach? people used to ask me, for women are supposed to be able to do this. I did teach while we were on Grace, and one of the places where I taught was a theatrical school, Italia Conti’s. It has moved premises since, but at that time it was in the depths of South London. The large front room was used on Sundays by a Christian community who practised adult baptism, so that there was a large bath on the raised stage. The Conti children (who seemed to be much wilder than ordinary children, as though they were giving a performance of wildness) knew how to unlock the cold tap, and, if they didn’t care for their classes, flooded the hall.
Freddie, the school’s owner in At Freddie’s (1982), was not at all like Italia Conti. I transferred her, or rather she appeared to transfer herself, from another school where I worked later. She was a freakish tyrant, kindhearted by fits and starts, a natural grande dame of a species that, allowed to flourish unchecked, becomes in time uncontrollable. My job at Conti’s, on the other hand, I have described pretty nearly exactly as it was. I had to help give the pupils what was called their ‘education,’ and they did not disguise their lack of interest in it. I don’t mean that they were bored—it was much more positive than that, a fierce electric thrill of rejection that ran from one end of the class to the other. They wanted not education but ‘work.’ Work was largely in TV commercials and small movie roles, but there were those, especially around Christmastime, who actually got a stage part, and this gave them a certain dignity, the almost-vanished magic of belonging to a venerable profession. The authorities allowed them to stay in one show for six months at a time, and to make up for their lost schooling I had to go round backstage and attempt, as they came back to their dressing room in a state of pitiable excitement, to calm them down and give them their lessons. A little arithmetic (we still taught arithmetic then), a little spelling. They were brilliant with confidence. ‘How was I, Miss? Why don’t you go and see it from the front?’ But after a certain age—say ten or eleven—these children, particularly the dancers, were never likely to get another part. That was why I was being paid to teach them to spell. They might, in the future, need a tedious everyday job, such as I had. And under their bravado, they knew this, and even knew that I knew it.
I have tried, in describing these books of mine, to say something about my life. In my last two novels I have taken a journey outside of myself. Innocence takes place in Italy in the late 1950s, The Beginning of Spring in Moscow in 1913. Most writers, including the greatest, feel the need to do something like this sooner or later. The temptation comes to take what seems almost like a vacation in another country and above all in another time. V. S. Pritchett, however, has pointed out that ‘a professional writer who spends his time becoming other people and places, real or imaginary, finds he has written his life away and become almost nothing.’ This is a warning that has to be taken seriously. I can only say that however close I’ve come, by this time, to nothingness, I have remained true to my deepest convictions—I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities which I have done my best to treat as a comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?
Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series,
Gale Research, Detroit, 1989
1PF went on to write 11 stories in total, posthumously collected in the volume The Means of Escape. One story remains uncollected.