RAW MATERIAL
He always told them the same thing, to begin with: “Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don’t invent melodrama for the sake of it. Don’t try to run, let alone fly, before you can walk with ease.” Every year, he glared amiably at them. Every year they wrote melodrama. They clearly needed to write melodrama. He had given up telling them that Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy. In ways both sublime and ridiculous it clearly was, precisely, that.
The class had been going for fifteen years. It had moved from a schoolroom to a disused Victorian church, made over as an Arts and Leisure Centre. The village was called Sufferacre, which was thought to be a corruption of sulfuris aquae. It was a failed Derbyshire spa. It was his home town. In the 1960s he had written a successfully angry, iconoclastic, and shocking novel called Bad Boy. He had left for London and fame, and returned quietly, ten years later. He lived in a caravan in somebody’s paddock. He travelled widely, on a motorbike, teaching Creative Writing in pubs, schoolrooms, and arts centres. His name was Jack Smollett. He was a big, shuffling, smiling, red-faced man, with longish blond hair, who wore cable-knit sweaters in oily colours, and bright scarlet neckerchiefs. Women liked him, as they liked enthusiastic Labrador dogs. They felt, almost all—and his classes were predominantly female—more desire to cook apple pies and Cornish pasties for him, than to make violent love to him. They believed he didn’t eat sensibly. (They were right.) Now and then, someone in one of his classes would point out, as he exhorted them to stick to what they knew, that they themselves were what he “really knew.” Will you write about us, Jack? No, he always said, that would be a betrayal of confidence. You should always respect other people’s privacy. Creative writing teachers had something in common with doctors, even if—yet again—creative writing wasn’t therapy.
In fact, he had tried unsuccessfully to sell two different stories based on the confessions (or inventions) of his class. They offered themselves to him like raw oysters on pristine plates. They told him horror and bathos, daydreams, vituperation and vengeance. They couldn’t write, their inventions were crude, and he couldn’t find a way to perform the necessary operations to spin the muddy straw into silk, or turn the raw bleeding chunks into a savoury dish. So he kept faith with them, not entirely voluntarily. He did care about writing. He cared about writing more than anything, sex, food, beer, fresh air, even warmth. He wrote and rewrote perpetually, in his caravan. He was rewriting his fifth novel. Bad Boy, his first, had been written in a rush just out of the sixth form, and snapped up by the first publisher he’d sent it to. It was what he had expected. (Well, it was one of two scenarios that played in his young brain, immediate recognition, painful, dedicated struggle. When success happened it appeared blindingly clear that it had always been the only possible outcome.) So he didn’t go to university, or learn a trade. He was, as he knew he was, a Writer. His second novel, Smile and Smile, had sold six hundred copies, and was remaindered. His third and his fourth—frequently rewritten—lay in brown paper, stamped and restamped, in a tin chest in the caravan. He didn’t have an agent.
Classes ran from September to March. In the summer he worked in literary festivals, or holiday camps on sunny islands. He was pleased to see the classes again in September. He still thought of himself as wild and unattached, but he was a creature of habit. He liked things to happen at precise, recurring times, in precise, recurring ways. More than half of most of his classes were old faithfuls who came back year after year. Each class had a nucleus of about ten. At the beginning of the year this was often doubled by enthusiastic newcomers. By Christmas many of these would have dropped away, seduced by other courses, or intimidated by the regulars, or overcome by domestic drama or personal lassitude. St. Antony’s Leisure Centre was gloomy because of its high roof, and draughty because of its ancient doors and windows. The class themselves had brought oil heaters, and a circle of standard lamps with imitation stained-glass covers. The old churchy chairs were pushed into a circle, under these pleasant lights.
He liked the lists of their names. He liked words, he was a writer. Sometimes he talked about how much Nabokov had got out of the list of names of Lolita’s classmates, how much of America, how strong an image from how few words. Sometimes he tried to make an imaginary list that would please him as much as the real one. It never worked. He would write allusive equivalents—Vicar, say, for Parson, Gold for Silver, and find his text inexorably resubstituting the precise concatenation that existed. His current class ran:
Abbs, Adam
Archer, Megan
Armytage, Blossom
Forster, Bobby
Fox, Cicely
Hogg, Martin
Parson, Anita
Pearson, Amanda
Pygge, Gilly
Secrett, Lola
Secrett, Tamsin
Silver, Annabel
Wheelwright, Rosy
He consulted this for pointless symmetries. Pygge and Hogg. Pearson and Parson. The prevalence of As and absence of Es and Rs. He had kept a register, for a time, of surnames reflecting ancient, vanished occupations—Archer, Forster, Parson, Wheelwright. Were there more in Derbyshire than in other places?
Then there was the list of the occupations, also a flawed microcosm.
| Abbs | deacon in the C. of E. |
| Archer | estate agent |
| Armytage | vet |
| Forster | redundant bank teller |
| Fox | eighty-two-year-old spinster |
| Hogg | accountant |
| Parson | schoolmistress |
| Pearson | farmer |
| Pygge | nurse |
| Secrett, Lola | intermittent student, daughter of |
| Secrett, Tamsin | living on alimony (her own phrase) |
| Silver | librarian |
| Wheelwright | student (engineering) |
The most recent work they had produced was:
| Adam Abbs | A tale of the martyrdom of nuns in Rwanda |
| Megan Archer | A story of the prolonged rape and abduction of an estate agent |
| Blossom Armytage | A tale of the elaborate torture of two Sealyham dogs |
| Bobby Forster | A tale of the entrapment and vengeful slaughter of an unjust driving examiner |
| Cicely Fox | How we used to black-lead stoves |
| Martin Hogg | Hanging, drawing, and quartering under Henry VIII |
| Anita Parson | A tale of unreported, persistent child abuse and Satanic sacrifice |
| Amanda Pearson | A tale of a cheating husband hacked down by his vengeful wife with an axe |
| Gilly Pygge | Clever murder by a cruel surgeon during an operation |
| Lola Secrett | The nervous breakdown of a menopausal woman with a beautiful and patient daughter |
| Tamsin Secrett | The nervous breakdown of a feckless teenager with a wise but powerless mother |
| Annabel Silver | A sadomasochistic initiation of a girl sold into white slavery in North Africa |
| Rosy Wheelwright | A cycle of very explicit lesbian love poems involving motorbikes. |
He had learned the hard way not to involve himself in any way in their lives. When he first moved into the caravan he had had a conventional enough vision of its warm confinement as a secret place to take women, for romping, for intimacy, for summer nights of nakedness and red wine. He had scanned his new classes, fairly obviously, for hopefuls, measuring breasts, admiring ankles, weighing pink round mouths against wide red ones against unpainted severe ones. He had had one or two really good athletic encounters, one or two tearful failures, one overkill which had left him with a staring, shivering watcher every night at the gate of his paddock, or occasionally peering wildly through the caravan window.
Creative writers are creative writers. Descriptions of his bed linen, his stove, the blasts of wind on his caravan walls, began to appear, ever more elaborated, in the stories that were produced for general criticism. Competitive descriptions of his naked body began to be circulated. Heartless or cowering males (depending on the creative writer) had thickets, or wiry fuzzes, or fur soft as a dog fox, or scratchy-bristly reddish outcrops of hair on their chests. One or two descriptions of fierce thrusting and pubic clamping were followed by anticlimax, both in life and in art. He gave up—ever—taking women from his classes onto his unfolded settee. He gave up, ever, talking to his students one at a time or differentiating between them. The sex-in-a-caravan theme wilted and did not resuscitate. His stalker went to a pottery class, transferred her affections, and made stubby pottery pillars, glazed with flames and white spray. As the folklore of his sex life diminished he became mysterious and authoritative and found he enjoyed it. The barmaid of the Wig and Quill came round on Sundays. He couldn’t find the right words to describe her orgasms—prolonged events with staccato and shivering rhythms alternating oddly—and this teased and pleased him.
He sat alone in the bar of the Wig and Quill the evening before his class, reading the “stories” that were to be returned. Martin Hogg had discovered the torture which consists of winding out the living intestines on a spindle. He couldn’t write, which Jack thought was just as well—he used words like “gruesome” and “horrible” a lot, but was unable, perhaps inevitably, to raise in a reader’s mind any image of an intestine, a spindle, pain, or an executioner. Jack supposed that Martin was enjoying himself, but even that was not very well conveyed to his putative reader. Jack was more impressed by Bobby Forster’s fantasy of the slaughter of a driving examiner. This had some plot to it—involving handcuffs, severed brake cables, the removal of signs indicating quicksands, even an unbreakable alibi for the mild man who had turned on his tormentor. Forster occasionally produced a sharp, etched sentence that was memorable. Jack had found one of these in Patricia Highsmith, and another, by sheer chance, in Wilkie Collins. He had dealt with this plagiarism, rather neatly, he thought, by underlining the sentences and writing in the margin, “I have always said that reading excellent writers, and absorbing them, is essential to good writing. But it should not go quite so far as plagiarism.” Forster was a white-faced, precise person, behind round glasses. (His hero was neat and pale, with glasses which made it hard to see what he was thinking.) He said mildly, on both occasions, that the plagiarism was unconscious, must have been a trick of memory. Unfortunately this led Jack to suspect automatically that any other excrescent elegance was also a plagiarism.
He came to “How We Used to Black-lead Stoves.” Cicely Fox was a new student. Her contribution was handwritten—with pen and ink, not even felt-tip. She had given the work to him with a deprecating note.
“I don’t know if this is the sort of thing you meant when you said, ‘Write what you really know about.’ I was sorry to find that there were so many lacunae in my memory. I do hope you will forgive them. The writing may not be of interest, but the exercise was pleasurable.”
How We Used to Black-lead Stoves
It is strange to think of activities that were once so much part of our lives that they seemed daily inevitable, like waking and sleeping. At my age, these things come back in their contingent quiddity, things we did with quick fingers and backs that bent without precaution. It is today’s difficult slitting of plastic wraps, or brilliantly blinking microwave LED displays, that seem like veils and shadows.
Take black-leading. The kitchen ranges in the kitchens of our childhood and young lives were great, darkly gleaming chests of fierce heat. Their frontage was covered with heavy hasped doors, opening on various ovens, large and small, various flues, the furnace itself, where the fuel went in. Words are needed for extremes of blackness and brightness. Brightness included the gold-glitter of the rail along the front of the range, where the tea towels hung, and the brass knobs on certain of the little doors which had to be burnished with Brasso—a sickly yellowish powdery liquid—every morning. It included also the roaring flame within and under the heavy cast-iron box. If you opened the door, when it was fully burning, you could hear and see it—a flickering transparent sheet of scarlet and yellow, shot with blue, shot with white, flashing purple, roaring and burping and piffing. You could immediately see it dying in the rusty edges of the embers. It was important to close the door quickly, to keep the fire “in.” “In” meant contained, and also meant, alight.
There were so many different blacks around that range. Various fuels were burned in it, unlike modern Agas which take oil, or anthracite. I remember coal. Coal has its own brightness, a gloss, a sheen. You can see the compacted layers of dead wood—millions of years dead—in the strata on the faces of the chunks of good coal. They shine. They give out a black sparkle. The trees ate the sun’s energy and the furnace will release it. Coal is glossy. Coke is matt, and looks (indeed is) twice-burned, like volcano lava; the dust on coal glitters like glass dust, the dust on coke absorbs light, is soft, is inert. Some of it comes in little regular pressed cushions, like pillows for dead dolls, I used to think, or twisted humbugs for small demons. We ourselves were fed on charcoal for stomach upsets which may explain why I considered the edibility of these lumps. Or maybe even as a small child, I saw the open mouth of the furnace as a hell-hole. You were drawn in. You wanted to get closer and closer; you wanted to be able to turn away. And we were taught at school, about our own internal combustion of matter. The ovens behind other doors of the range might conceal the puffed, risen shapes of loaves and teacakes, with that best of all smells, baking yeast dough, or the only slightly less delightful smell of the crust of a hot cake, toasted sugar, milk, and egg. Now and then—the old ranges were temperamental—a batch of buns in frilled paper cups would come out black and smoking and stinking of destruction, ghastly analogies of the cinder-cushions. From there, I thought, came the cinders that fell from the mouths of bad children in fairy tales, or stuffed their Christmas stockings.
The whole range was bathed in an aura of kept-down soot. In front of our own, at one time, was a peg-rug made by my father, by hooking strips of colourful scraps of cloth—old flannel shirts, old trousers—through sacking, and knotting them. Soot infiltrated this dense thicket of flags or streamers. The sacking scalp was stained sooty black. The crimsons and scarlets, the green tartans and mustard blotches all had a grain of fine, fine black specks. I sometimes thought of the peg-rug as a bed of ribbon seaweed. The soot was like the silted sand in which it lay.
Not that we did not brush and brush ceaselessly, to cleanse our firesides of this falling, sifting black dust. It rises lightly, and falls where it was, it whirls briefly, when disturbed, and particles may settle on one’s own hair and scalp, a soot-plug for every pore in the skin of the hands. You can only collect so much; the rest is displaced, volatile, recurring. This must be the reason why we spent so much time—every morning—making the black front of the black stove blacker with black-lead. To disguise and tame the soot.
“Black-lead” was not lead, but a mixture of plumbago, graphite, and iron filings. It came as a stiff paste, and was spread across, and worked into all the black surfaces, avoiding the brassy ones of course, and then buffed and polished and made even with brushes of different densities, and pads of flannel. It was worked into every crevice of every boss on that ornate casting, and then removed again—the job was very badly done if any sludge of polish could be found encrusted around the leaves and petals of the black floral swags along the doors. I remember the phoenix, who must, I think, have been the trademark of that particular furnace. It sat, staring savagely to the left, on a nest of carved crossed branches, surrounded by an elaborate ascending spiral of fat flames with pointed tongues. It was all blackest black, the feathered bird, the burning pyre, the kindled wood, the bright angry eye, the curved beak.
The black-lead gave a most beautiful, subtle, and gentle sheen to the blackness of the stove. It was not like boot-blacking, which produced a mirror-like lacquer. The high content of graphite, the scattering of iron filings, gave a silvery leaden surface—always a black surface, but with these shifting hints of soft metallic lightness. I think of it as representing a kind of decorum, a taming and restraining both of the fierce flame inside and the uncompromising cast iron outside. Like all good polishing—almost none of which persists in modern life, for which on the whole we should be grateful—the sheen was built up layer by infinitesimal layer, applied, and almost entirely wiped away again, only the finest skin of mineral adhering and glimmering.
The time is far away when we put so much human blood and muscle into embellishing our houses with careful layers of mineral deposits. Thinking of black-lead made me think of its opposite, the white stone and ground white-stone powder with which we used, daily, or more often, to emphasise our outer doorsteps and windowsills. I remember distinctly smoothing the thick pale stripe along the doorstep with a block of some stone, but I cannot remember the name of the stone itself. It is possible that we simply called it “the stone.” We were only required to stone the step when we didn’t have a maid to do it. I thought of holystone, blanching stone (perhaps a fabrication) and a run through the Oxford English Dictionary added whetstone and sleekstone, a word I hadn’t known, which appears to refer to something used on wet clothes in the laundry. Finally I found hearthstone, and hearthstone powder, a mixture of pipeclay, carbonate of lime, size, and stoneblue. “Hearthstone” was sold in chunks by pedlars with barrows. I remember the sulphur in the air from the industrial chimneys of Sheffield and Manchester, a vile, yellow, clogging deposit, which smeared windows and lips alike, and stained the brave white doorsteps almost as soon as they were stoned. But we went out, and whitened them again. We lived a gritty, mineral life, with our noses and fingers in it. I have read that the black-lead was toxic. I thought of the white-lead with which Renaissance ladies painted their skins and poisoned their blood. “Let her paint never an inch thick, to this favour shall she come.” I remember the dentists, giving us gobbets of quicksilver in little corked test-tubes, to play with. We spread this on our play-table with naked fingers, watching it shiver into a multitude of droplets, rolling it back together again. It was like a substance from an alien world. It adhered to nothing but itself. Yet we spread it everywhere, losing a silvery liquid bead here, under a splinter of wood, or there, in the fibres of our jumpers. Quicksilver too is toxic. No one told us.
Hearthstone is an ancient and ambiguous idea. In the past, the hearth was a synecdoche for the house, home, or even family or clan. (I cannot bring myself to use that humiliated and patronised word “community.”) The hearth was the centre, where the warmth, the food and the burning were. Our hearth was in front of the black-leaded range. We had a “sitting room,” but its grate (also regularly black-leaded) was always empty, for no one visited formally enough to sit in its chilly formality. Yet the hearthstone was applied to what was in fact the lintel or limen, the threshold. Northerners keep themselves to themselves. The hearthstone stripe on the flagstone step was a limit, a barrier. We were fond of a certain rhetoric. “Never cross my threshold again.” “Don’t darken my door.” The shining silvery dark and the hidden red and gold roar were safely inside. We went out, as my mother used to say, feetfirst, on our final crossing of that bar. Nowadays, of course, we all go into the oven. Then, it was back to the earth out of which all these powders and pomades had been so lovingly extracted.
Jack Smollett realised that this was the first time his imagination had been stirred by the writing (as opposed to the violence, the misery, the animosity, the shamelessness) of one of his students. He went eagerly to his next class, and sat down next to Cicely Fox, whilst they waited for the others to arrive. She was always punctual, and always sat alone in the pews in the shadow out of the multi-coloured light of the lampshades. She had fine white hair, thinning a little, which she gathered in a soft roll at the back of her neck. She was always elegantly dressed, with long, fluid skirts, and high-necked jumpers inside loose shirt-jackets, in blacks, greys, silvers. She wore, invariably, a brooch on her inner collar, an amethyst in a circle of seed pearls. She was a thin woman; the flowing garments concealed bony sharpness, not flesh. Her face was long, her skin fine but paper-thin. She had a wide, taut mouth—not much lip—and a straight, elegant nose. Her eyes were the amazing thing. They were so dark, they were almost uniformly black, and seemed to have retreated into the caverns of their sockets, being held to the outer world by the most fragile, spiderweb cradle of lid, and muscle, all stained umber, violet, indigo as though bruised by the strain of staying in place. You could see, Jack thought fancifully, her narrow skull under its vanishing integument. You could see where her jawbone hung together, under fine vellum. She was beautiful, he thought. She had the knack of keeping very still, with a mild attentive almost-smile on her pale lips. Her sleeves were slightly too long and her thin hands were obscured, most of the time.
He said he thought her writing was marvellous. She turned her face to him with a vague and anxious expression.
“Real writing,” he said. “May I read it to the class?”
“Please,” she said, “do as you wish.”
He thought she might have difficulty in hearing. He said:
“I hope you are writing more?”
“You hope ...?”
“You are writing more?” Louder.
“Oh yes. I am doing wash day. It is therapeutic.”
“Writing isn’t therapy,” said Jack Smollett to Cicely Fox. “Not when it’s good.”
“I expect the motive doesn’t matter,” said Cicely Fox, in her vague voice. “One has to do one’s best.”
He felt rebuffed, and didn’t know why.
He read “How We Used to Black-lead Stoves” aloud to the class. He read contributions aloud, anonymously, himself. He had a fine voice, and often, not always, he did more justice to the writing than its author might have done. He could also, in the right mood, use the reading as a mode of ironic destruction. His practice was not to name the author of the piece. It was usually easy enough to guess.
He enjoyed reading “How We Used to Black-lead Stoves.” He read it con brio, savouring the phrases that pleased him. For this reason, perhaps, the class fell upon it like a pack of hounds, snarling and ripping at it. They plucked merciless adjectives from the air. “Slow.” “Clumsy.” “Cold.” “Pedantic.” “Pompous.” “Show-off.” “Over-ornate.” “Nostalgic.”
They criticised the movement, equally gaily. “No drive.” “No sense of urgency.” “Rambling.” “All over the place.” “No sense of the speaker.” “No real feeling.” “No living human interest.” “No reason for telling us all this stuff.”
Bobby Forster, perhaps the star pupil of the class, was obscurely offended by Cicely Fox’s black-lead. His magnum opus, which was growing thicker, was a very detailed autobiographical account of his own childhood and youth. He had worked his way through measles, mumps, the circus, his school essays, his passions for schoolgirls, recording every fumbling on every sofa, at home, in the girls’ homes, in student lodgings, the point of the breast or the suspender he had struggled to touch. He sneered at rivals, put imperceptive parents and teachers in their place, described his reasons for dropping unattractive girls and acquaintances. He said Cicely Fox substituted things for people. He said detachment wasn’t a virtue, it just covered up inadequacy. Come to the point, said Bobby Forster. Why should I care about a daft toxic cleaning method that’s thankfully obsolete? Why doesn’t the writer give us the feelings of the poor skivvy who had to smear the stuff on?
Tamsin Secrett was equally severe. She herself had written a heartrending description of a mother lovingly preparing a meal for an ingrate who neither turned up to eat it nor telephoned to say she was not coming. “Tender succulent al-dente pasta fragrant with spicy herbs redolent of the South of France with tangy melt-in-the-mouth Parmesan, rich smooth virgin olive oil, delicately perfumed with truffle, mouth-wateringly full of savour ...” Tamsin Secrett said that description for its own sake was simply an exercise, every piece of writing needed an urgent human dimension, something vital at stake. “How We Used to Black-lead Stoves,” said Tamsin Secrett, was just mindless heritage-journalism. No bite, said Tamsin Secrett. No bite, agreed her daughter, Lola. Memory Lane. Yuk.
Cicely Fox sat rigorously upright, and smiled mildly and vaguely at their animation. She looked as though all this was nothing to do with her. Jack Smollett was not clear how much she heard. He himself, unusually, retaliated irritably on her behalf. He said that it was rare to read a piece of writing that worked on more than one level at once. He said that it took skill to make familiar things look strange. He quoted Ezra Pound: “Make It New.” He quoted William Carlos Williams: “No ideas but in things.” He only ever did this when he was fired up. He was fired up, not only on Cicely Fox’s behalf, but more darkly on his own. For the class’s rancour, and the banal words in which it expressed that rancour, blew life into his anxiety over his own words, his own work. He called a coffee break, after which he read out Tamsin Secrett’s cookery-tragedy. The class liked that, on the whole. Lola said it was very touching. Mother and daughter kept up an elaborate charade that their writings had nothing to do with each other. The whole class colluded. There was nothing worse than dried-up overcooked spag, said Lola Secrett.
The classes tended to end with general discussions of the nature of writing. They all took pleasure in describing themselves at work—what it was like to be blocked, what it was like to become unblocked, what it was like to capture a feeling precisely. Jack wanted Cicely Fox to join in. He addressed her directly, raising his voice slightly.
“And why do you write, Miss Fox?”
“Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.”
This answer was, though it should not have been, unusual.
Jack himself found it harder and harder to know where to begin to describe anything. Distaste for the kind of words employed by Tamsin and Lola made him impotent with revulsion and anger. Cliché spread like a stain across the written world, and he didn’t know a technique for expunging it. Nor had he the skill to do what Leonardo said we should do with cracks, or Constable with cloud forms, and make the stains into new, suggested forms.
Cicely Fox did not come to the pub with the rest of the class. Jack could not offer to drive her home, for the idea of her frail bony form on his motorbike was impossible. He realised he was trying to think of ways to get to talk to her, as though she had been a pretty girl.
The best he could do was to sit next to her in the coffee break in the church. This was hard, because everyone wanted his attention. On the other hand, because of her deafness perhaps, she sat slightly separate from the others, so he could move next to her. But then he had to shout.
“I was wondering what you read, Miss Fox?”
“Oh, the old things. They wouldn’t interest you young people. Things I used to like as a girl. Poetry increasingly. I find I don’t seem to want to read novels much anymore.”
“I’d put you down as a reader of Jane Austen.”
“Had you?” she said vaguely. “I suppose you would,” she added, without revealing whether or not she liked Jane Austen. He felt snubbed. He said:
“Which poems, Miss Fox?”
“These days, mostly George Herbert.”
“Are you religious?”
“No. He is the only writer who makes me regret that for a moment. He makes one understand grace. Also, he is good on dust.”
“Dust?” He dredged his memory and came up with “Who sweeps a room as for thy laws / Makes that and the action fine.”
“I like Church Monuments. With death sweeping dust with an incessant motion.
“Flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust
That measures all our time; which also shall
Be crumbled into dust.
“And then I like the poem where he speaks of his God stretching ‘a crumme of dust from Hell to Heaven.’ Or ...
“O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue to cry to thee
And then not heare it crying.
“He knew,” said Cicely Fox, “the proper relation between words and things. Dust is a good word.”
He tried to ask her how this fitted into her writing, but she appeared to have retreated again, after this small burst of speech, into her deafness.
Wash Day
In those days, washing took all the week. We boiled on Monday, starched on Tuesday, dried on Wednesday, ironed on Thursday, and mended on Friday. Besides all the other things there were to do. We washed outside, in the washhouse, which was an outhouse, with its own stone sink, hand pump, copper with a fire beneath it, and flagged floor. Other implements were the monstrous mangle, the great galvanised tubs, and the ponch. Our washhouse was made of stone blocks with a slate roof, and houseleeks growing on the roof. Its chimney smoked, and its windows steamed over. In winter, the steam melted the ice. It was full of extremes of watery climate. As a child, I used to put my face against the stones and find them hot to touch, or anyway warmish, on wash day. I pretended it was the witch’s cottage in fairy tales.
First there was sorting and boiling. You boiled whites in the copper, which was a huge rounded vat with a wooden lid. All the wood in the washhouse was soap-slippery, both flaked apart and held together by melted and congealed soap. You boiled the whites—sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, napkins, tea towels and so on, and then you used the boiled water, let down a bit, in the tubs, to wash the more delicate things, or the coloured things which might run. You had heavy wooden pincers and poles to stir the whites in the boiling water; steam came off in clouds, and a kind of grey scum formed on the surface. When they were boiled they went through various rinses in tubs. There was a hiss and a slopping as the hot cloth hit the freezing water in the tubs. Then you ponched it. The ponch was a kind of copper kettle–like thing on a long pole, full of holes like a vast tea infuser, or closed colander. It soughed and sucked at the cloth in the water, leaving little bosses of pulled damask or cotton where it had impressed itself and clung. Then with pincers—and your bare arms—you hoisted all the weight of the sheets from one tub to another tub to another. And then you folded the streaming stuff and wound it through the wooden jaw-rollers of the mangle. The mangle had red wheels to turn the rollers, and a polished wooden handle to turn the wheel. It sluiced soapy water back into an under-tub, or splashed it on the floor. You were also always pumping more water—yanking the pump-handle, winding the mangle-handle. You froze, you were scalded. You stood in clouds of steam and breathed an air which was always full of a thick sweat—your own sweat, with the effort, and the odour of the dirt from the clothes that was being released into the air and the water.
Then there were the things you had to pull the washed clothes through, or soak them in. There was Reckitt’s Blue. I don’t know what that was made of. Because we lived in Derbyshire I always associated it with blue john, from the Peaks, which I know is quite wrong, but is a verbal association which has lingered. It came in little cylindrical bags, wrapped in white muslin, and produced an intense cobalt colour when the little bags were swirled in the blue rinsing water. What went through the blue water (which was always cold) were the whites. I don’t know by what optical process this blue staining made the whites whiter, but I can clearly remember that it did. It wasn’t bleach. It didn’t remove recalcitrant stains of tea, or urine, or strawberry juice—you had to use real bleach for that, which smelled evil and deathly. The Reckitt’s Blue went out into the water in little clouds and fibrils, and tendrils of colour. Like fine threads of glass in glass marbles. Or blood, if you put a cut finger in a dish of water. You couldn’t see it very well in the galvanised tubs, but on days when there wasn’t too much we used to do the blueing in a white enamel panshon, and then you could see the threading cloud of bright blue going into the clear water, and mingling, until the water was blue. Then you swirled the cloth in the blue water—swirled it, and squashed it, and punched and mashed it, until it was impregnated with blue, until all the white glistened in pale blueness. As a very little girl, I used to think the white cloth and the blue water were like clouds in the sky, but this was silly. Because in fact in the sky, the white watery clouds stain the blue, not the other way round. It was an inversion, a draining. For when you held up the sheets, and took them from the blue water to drain them, you could see the blue run away and the white whiter, blue-white, a different white from cream, or ivory, or scorched-yellow white, a white under blue dripping liquid that had been changed, but not dyed.
Then there was starch. Starch was viscous and gluey, it thickened the washing water like gruel. I suppose it was a kind of gruel, if you think of it. Farinaceous molecules expanding in heat. Starch was slippery and reminded all of us of substances we didn’t like to think of—bodily fluids and products—though in fact, it is an innocent, clean, vegetable thing, unlike soap, which is compressed mutton fat, however perfumed. Cloth slipped into starch, and was coated with it. There were degrees of starching. Very dense, glutinous starch for shirt collars. Light, spun-glass starch for delicate nightdresses and knickers. When you hoisted a garment out of a bath of starch it stiffened and fell into flutes like a carving—or if by mistake you left it lying around, anyhow, and it dried out, it would become solid crumples and lumps, like pleated stones where the earth had folded on itself. Starch had to be ironed damp. The smell of the hot iron on the jelly was like a parody of cooking. Gluten, I suppose. You could smell scorching as you could smell burning cakes. You had a nose for things not as they should be.
Clothes in the process of being cleansed haunted our lives. They were accompanying angels, souls washed white in the blood of the Lamb, surrounding us with their rustle and their pale scent. In the eighteenth century, I imagine, wash days happened once or twice a year, but our time was obsessed with cleansing and had not invented mechanical helpers. We went through an endless cycle of bubble, toil, and trouble, surrounded by an only too visible inanimate host. They danced in the wind, fluttering vain arms, raising full-bellied skirts to reveal vacancy, coiling round each other like white worms. Indoors, they hung in the kitchen on long racks, winched up to the ceiling, from where they then dangled, stiff as boards, like shrouded hanging men. They lay neatly folded, before and after ironing, like dead choirboys in effigy, fluted and frilled. Under the hot iron (on Thursdays) they writhed and winced and shrank. My great-aunt’s huge shapeless rayon petticoats flared all colours of the rainbow, spectral, sizzling russets and air-force blues, shot with copper, shot with peacock blue. They melted easily, gophering into scabs which resolved themselves into pinholes and were unredeemable. The irons were filled with hot coals from the kitchen range. They were heavy; they had to be watched for soot-smears which would condemn a garment to an immediate return to the washpot. Inside them the coals of fire smouldered, spat, and dimmed. The kitchen was full of the smell of singeing, a tawny smell, a parody of the good golden cooking smells of buns and biscuits.
It was hard work, but work was life. Work was coiled and woven into breathing and sleeping and eating, as the shirtsleeves coiled and wove themselves into a tangle with nightdress ribbons and Sunday sashes. In her old age my mother sat beside a twin-tub washing machine, a mechanical reduction of all those archaic containers and hoists and pulleys, and lifted her underwear and pillowcases from wash to rinse to spin with the same wooden pincers. She was arthritic and bird-boned, like a cross seagull. She was offered a new machine with a porthole, which would wash and dry a little every day, and, it was thought, relieve her. She was appalled and distressed. She said she would feel dirty—she would feel bad—if she had no wash day. She needed steam and stirring to convince her that she was alive and virtuous. Towards the end, the increasing number of soiled sheets defeated her, and perhaps even killed her, though I think she died, not from overexertion, but from chagrin when she finally had to admit she could no longer wield her ponch or lift a bucket. She felt unnecessary. She had a new white nightdress which she had washed, starched, ironed, and never worn, ready to shroud her still white flesh in her coffin, its Reckitt’s Blue glinting now livelier than the shrunken, bruised yellow-grey of her eyelids and lips.
The creative writing class liked this slightly sinister study of cleanliness no better than its predecessor. They introduced the word “overwritten” into their remorseless criticisms. Jack Smollett reflected, not for the first time, that there was an element of kindergarten regression in all adult classes. Group behaviour took over, gangs formed, victims were selected. There were intense jealousies over the teacher’s attention, and intense resentments of any show of partiality from the teacher. Cicely Fox was becoming a “teacher’s pet.” Nobody had much spoken to her in the coffee breaks before Jack’s enthusiasm for her work became apparent, but now there was deliberate cutting, and cold-shouldering.
Jack himself knew what he ought to do, or have done. He should have kept his enthusiasm quiet. Or quieter. He was not quite sure why it mattered to him so much to insist that Cicely Fox’s writings were the real thing, the thing itself, to the detriment of good order and goodwill. He felt he was standing up for something, like an ancient Wesleyan bearing witness. The “something” was writing, not Miss Fox herself. She dealt with the criticism of her adjectives, the suggestions for livening things up, by smiling vaguely and benignly, nodding occasionally. But Jack felt that he had been teaching something muddy, an illegitimate therapy, and suddenly here was writing. Miss Fox’s brief essays made Jack want to write. They made him see the world as something to be written. Lola Secrett’s pout was an object of delighted study: the right words would be found to distinguish it from all other pouts. He wanted to describe the taste of the nasty coffee, and the slope of the headstones in the graveyard. He loved the whirling nastiness of the class because—perhaps—he could write it.
He tried to behave equitably. He made a point of not sitting next to Cicely Fox in the coffee break of the “Wash Day” session, but went and talked to Bobby Forster and Rosy Wheelwright. His new remorseless writer’s conscience knew that there was something wrong with all Bobby Forster’s sentences, a limping rhythm, an involuntary echo of other writers, a note like the clunk of a piano key when the string is dead. But he was interested in Bobby Forster, his mixture of jauntiness and fear, his intense interest in every event of his own daily activities, which was, after all, writerly. Bobby Forster said he’d sent away for the entrance forms for a competition for new writers in the literary supplement of a Sunday paper. There was a big prize—£2000—and the promise of publication, with the further promise of interest from publishers.
Bobby Forster said he thought he stood a pretty good chance of getting some attention. “I’ve been thinking I ought to move on from being a literary Learner Driver, you know.” Jack Smollett grinned and agreed.
When he got home, he typed up “How We Used to Black-lead Stoves” and “Wash Day” and sent them to the newspaper. The entries had to be submitted under a pseudonym. He chose Jane Temple for Cicely Fox. Jane for Austen, Temple for Herbert. He waited, and in due course received the letter he had never really expected not to receive—all this was fated. Cicely Fox had won the competition. She should get in touch with the newspaper, in order to arrange printing, prize giving, an interview.
He was not sure how Cicely Fox would react to this. He was by now somewhat obsessed by the idea of her, but did not feel that he knew her, in any way. He dreamed of her, often, sitting in the corner of his caravan with her neat hair, scarfed neck, and fragile, cobweb skin, studying him with her darkly hooded eyes. She was judging him for having abandoned, or not having learned, his craft. He knew that he had called up, created, this unnerving Muse. The real Cicely Fox was an elderly English lady, who wrote to please herself. She might well regard his actions as impermissible. She came to his class, but did not submit herself to his, or its judgment. But she judged. He was sure she judged.
The prize he had so to speak put her in the way of winning was a propitiatory offering. He wanted—desperately—that she should be pleased, be happy, admit him to her confidence.
He got on his motorbike and drove for the first time to Miss Fox’s address, which was in a road called Primrose Lane, in a respectable suburb. The houses there were late Victorian semi-detached, and had a cramped look, partly because they were built of large blocks of pinkish stone, and there was something wrong with the proportions. The windows were heavy sash-windows, in black-painted frames. Cicely Fox’s windows were all veiled in heavy lacy curtains, not blue-white, but creamy white, he noticed. He noticed the pruned rose bushes in the front garden, and the donkey-stoned sill of the front step. The door was also black, and in need of repainting. The bell was set in a brass boss. He rang. No one answered. He rang again. Nothing.
He had worked himself up to this scene, the presentation of the letter, her response, whatever it was. He remembered that she was deaf. The gate to the side alley round the house was open. He walked in, past some dustbins, and came into a back garden, with a diminutive lawn and some ragged buddleia. And a rotary clothes drier, with nothing hanging from it. There was a back door, also standing above white-lined stone steps. He knocked. Nothing. He tried the handle, and the door swung inwards. He stood on the threshold and called.
“Miss Fox! Cicely Fox! Miss Fox, are you there? It’s Jack Smollett.”
There was still no reply. He should have gone home at that point, he thought, over and over, later. But he stood there undecided, and then heard a sound, a sound like a bird trapped in a chimney, or a cushion falling from a sofa. He went in through the back door, and crossed a gaunt kitchen, of which he had afterwards only the haziest recollection—dingy wartime “utility” furniture, a stained sink, hospital-green cupboards, an ancient gas-cooker, one leg propped unsteadily on a broken brick. Beyond the kitchen was a hall, with a linoleum floor, and a curious smell. It was a smell both human and musty, the kind of smell overlaid in hospitals by disinfectant. There was no disinfectant here. The hall was dark. Dark, narrow stairs rose into darkness inside ugly boxed-in banisters. He went on tiptoe, creaking in his biking leathers, and pushed open a door into a dimly lit sitting room. Opposite him, in a chair, was a moaning bundle with huge face, grey-skinned, blotched, furred with down, above which a few white hairs floated on a bald pink dome. The eyes were yellow, vague, and bloodshot and did not seem to see him.
In the opposite corner was an overturned television. Its screen was smeared with something that looked like blood. Next to it he saw a pair of naked feet, at the end of long, stringy, naked legs. The rest of the body was bent round the television. Jack Smollett had to cross the room to see the face, and until he saw it, did not think for a moment that it belonged to Cicely Fox. It was turned into the worn sprigged carpet, under a mass of dishevelled white hair. The whole naked body was covered with scars, scabs, stripes, little round burn marks, fresh wounds. There was a much more substantial wound in the throat. There was fresh blood on the forget-me-nots and primroses in the carpet. It was not nice. Cicely Fox was quite dead.
The old creature in the chair made a series of sounds, a chuckle, a swallowing, a wheeze. Jack Smollett made himself go across and ask her, what has happened, who ... is there a telephone? The lips flapped loosely, and a kind of twittering was all the answer he got. He remembered his mobile phone, and went out, precipitately, into the back garden, where he phoned the police, and was sick.
The police came, and were diligent. The old woman in the chair turned out to be a Miss Flossie Marsh. She and Cicely Fox had lived together in that house since 1949. Miss Marsh had not been seen for many years, and no one could be found who remembered her having spoken. Nor, despite all the efforts of police and doctors, did she speak, then, or ever. Miss Fox had always been briskly pleasant to her neighbours, but had not encouraged contact, or invited anyone in, ever. No one ever found any explanation for the torture that appeared to have been applied to Cicely Fox, clearly over a considerable period of time. Neither lady had any living relatives. The police found no sign of any intruder, other than Jack Smollett. The newspapers reported the affair briefly and ghoulishly. A verdict of murder was brought in, and the case lapsed.
Jack Smollett’s class were temporarily subdued by Miss Fox’s fate. Jack’s miserable face made them uneasy. They fetched him coffee. They were kind to him.
He couldn’t write. Cicely Fox’s death had destroyed his desire to write, as surely as the black-lead and the wash day had kindled it. He dreamed repeatedly, and had waking visions, of her poor tormented skin, her bleeding neck, her agonised jaw. He knew, he had seen, and he couldn’t get down, what had happened. He wondered if Miss Fox’s writing had in fact been a desperate therapy for an appalling life. There were layers and layers of those old scars. Not only on Miss Fox, on the mute Flossie Marsh also. He could not write that.
The class, on the other hand, buzzed and hummed with the anticipated pleasure of writing it up, one day. They were vindicated. Miss Fox belonged after all in the normal world of their writings, the world of domestic violence, torture and shock-horror. They would write what they knew, what had happened to Cicely Fox, and it would be most satisfactorily therapeutic.