An Autobiography

Dislike him! How little anyone knew. When I think of it now, how supremely satisfying early love can be. It demands nothing–not a look nor a word. It is pure adoration. Sustained by it, one walks on air, creating in one’s own mind heroic occasions on which one will be of service to the beloved one. Going into a plague camp to nurse him. Saving him from fire. Shielding him from a fatal bullet. Anything, indeed, that has caught the imagination in a story. In these imaginings there is never a happy ending. You yourself are burnt to death, shot, or succumb to the plague. The hero does not even know of the supreme sacrifice you have made.

‘Never let me hear you speak like that to a servant. Servants must be treated with the utmost courtesy. They are doing skilled work which you could not possibly do yourself without long training. And remember they cannot answer back. You must always be polite to people whose position forbids them to be rude to you. If you are impolite, they will despise you, and rightly, because you have not acted like a lady.’ [...] In spite of these arduous duties, servants were, I think, actively happy, mainly because they knew they were appreciated–as experts, doing expert work. As such, they had that mysterious thing, prestige; they looked down with scorn on shop assistants and their like. [...] One of the things I think I should miss most, if I were a child nowadays, would be the absence of servants. To a child they were the most colourful part of daily life.

You’ve got to hand it to Victorian women; they got their menfolk where they wanted them. They established their fraility, delicacy, sensibility–their constant need of being protected and cherished. Did they lead miserable, servile lives, downtrodden and oppressed? Such is not my recollection of them. All my grandmothers’ friends seem to me in retrospect singularly resilient and almost invariably successful in getting their own way. They were tough, self-willed, and remarkably well-read and well-informed.

Often, when I was eighteen, one of my swains would say anxiously to me, ‘Are you sure you won’t catch a chill? Your grandmother told me how delicate you are!’ Indignantly I would protest the rude health I had always enjoyed, and the anxious face would clear. ‘But why does your grandmother say you’re delicate?’ I had to explain that Grannie was doing her loyal best to make me sound interesting. When she herself was young, Grannie told me, young ladies were never able to manage more than a morsel of food at the dinner-table if gentlemen were present. Substantial trays were taken up to bedrooms later.

Only a year or two ago, standing on the mound at Nimrud, I watched the local bird-scarer, an old Arab with his handful of stones and his sling, defending the crops from the hordes of predatory birds. Seeing his accuracy of aim and the deadliness of his weapon, I suddenly realised for the first time that it was Goliath against whom the dice were loaded. David was in a superior position from the start–the man with a long-distance weapon against the man who had none. Not so much the little fellow against the big one, as brains versus brawn.

The Gentlemen’s Bathing-Cove was situated further along the coast. There the gentlemen, in their scanty triangles, could disport themselves as much as they pleased, with no female eye able to observe them from any point whatever. However, times were changing: mixed bathing was being introduced all over England. The first thing mixed bathing entailed was wearing far more clothing than before.

It was sad that my bosom was still unco-operative, so that I had to have a lot of ruffles of crêpe de Chine hurriedly tucked into the bodice, but I was still hopeful that one day a couple of truly womanly bosoms, firm, round and large, would be mine. How lucky that vision into the future is spared to us. Otherwise I should have seen myself at thirty-five, with a round womanly bosom well-developed, but, alas, everybody else going about with chests as flat as boards, and if they were so unfortunate as to have bosoms, tightening them out of existence.

It was impossible to use the morning-room because that room was sacred to Miss Grant, the present holder of the post of sewing-woman. ‘My dear, such a sad case,’ Grannie would murmur to her friends. ‘Such a poor little creature, deformed, only one passage, like a fowl.’

We were very delicate about lavatories in those days. It was unthinkable to be seen entering or leaving one except by an intimate member of the family; difficult in our house, since the lavatory was halfway up the stairs and in full view from the hall. The worst, of course, was to be inside and then hear voices below. Impossible to come out. One had to stay immured there until the coast was clear.

I don’t know exactly what brings about a friendship between man and woman–men do not by nature ever want a woman as a friend. It comes about by accident–often because the man is already sensually attracted by some other woman and quite wants to talk about her. Women do often crave after friendship with men–and are willing to come to it by taking an interest in someone else’s love affair. Then there comes about a very stable and enduring relationship–you become interested in each other as people. There is a flavour of sex, of course, the touch of salt as a condiment.

One of the first things that happens when you are attracted to a man and he is to you is that extraordinary illusion that you think exactly alike about everything, that you each say the things the other had been thinking. How wonderful it is that you like the same books, and the same music. The fact that one of you hardly ever goes to a concert or listens to music doesn’t at that moment matter. He always really liked music, but he didn’t know he did! In the same way, the books he likes you have never actually wished to read, but now you feel that really you do want to read them. There it is; one of Nature’s great illusions. We both like dogs and hate cats. How wonderful! We both like cats and hate dogs, also wonderful. So life went.

the object of my affections later became an Air Vice-Marshal. He was young then–at the beginning of his career. I had the revolting habit of singing to a teddy bear in a coy fashion the song of the moment: I wish I had a Teddy Bear To sit upon my knee I’d take it with me everywhere To cuddle up to me. All I can offer in excuse is that all the girls did that sort of thing–and it went down very well. Several times in later life I came near meeting him again–since he was a cousin of friends–but I always managed to avoid it. I have my vanity. I have always believed that he has a memory of me as a lovely girl at a moonlight picnic on Anstey’s Cove on the last day of his leave. We sat apart from the rest on a rock sticking out to sea. We didn’t speak–just sat there holding hands. After he left he sent me a little gold Teddy Bear brooch. I cared enough to want him still to remember me like that–and not to sustain the shock of meeting thirteen stone of solid flesh and what could only be described as ‘a kind face’. ‘Amyas always asks after you,’ my friends would say. ‘He would so like to meet you again.’ Meet me at a ripe sixty? No fear. I would like to be an illusion still to somebody.

We were a party of four or six, I think, and every time I danced with him and we sat out afterwards he was completely silent. When I spoke to him he answered almost at random, in a way that did not make sense. I was puzzled, looking at him once or twice, wondering what was the matter with him, what he was thinking of. He seemed no longer interested in me. I was rather stupid, really. I should have known by now that when a man looks like a sick sheep, completely bemused, stupid and unable to listen to what you say to him, he has, vulgarly, got it badly.

I realised, as I suppose many women realise sooner or later, that the only person who can really hurt you in life is a husband. Nobody else is close enough.

Every day I had to learn how to spell pages of words. I suppose the exercise did me some good, but I was still an extraordinarily bad speller and have remained so until the present day.

There are people who can pass exams, often high up, after being almost bottom in class; there are people who can perform in public much better than they perform in private; and there are people who are just the opposite. I was one of the latter. It is obvious that I chose the right career. The most blessed thing about being an author is that you do it in private and in your own time.

I had formed a habit of writing stories by this time. It took the place, shall we say, of embroidering cushion-covers or pictures taken from Dresden china flower-painting. If anyone thinks this is putting creative writing too low in the scale, I cannot agree. The creative urge can come out in any form: in embroidery, in the cooking of interesting dishes, in painting, drawing and sculpture, in composing music, as well as in writing books and stories. The only difference is that you can be a great deal more grand about some of these things than others.

You start into it, inflamed by an idea, full of hope, full indeed of confidence (about the only times in my life when I have been full of confidence). If you are properly modest, you will never write at all, so there had to be one delicious moment when you have thought of something, know just how you are going to write it, rush for a pencil, and start in an exercise book buoyed up with exaltation. You then get into difficulties, don’t see your way out, and finally manage to accomplish more or less what you first meant to accomplish, though losing confidence all the time. Having finished it, you know that it is absolutely rotten. A couple of months later you wonder whether it may not be all right after all.

there always has to be a lapse of time after the accomplishment of a piece of creative work before you can in any way evaluate it.

I was excited by my new effort. Up to a point I enjoyed it. But I got very tired, and I also got cross. Writing has that effect, I find.

It could be much better, I saw that, but I didn’t see just how I could make it better, so I had to leave it as it was.

I never had a definite place which was my room or where I retired specially to write. This has caused much trouble for me in the ensuing years, since whenever I had to receive an interviewer their first wish would always be to take a photograph of me at my work. ‘Show me where you write your books.’ ‘Oh, anywhere.’ ‘But surely you have a place where you always work?’ But I hadn’t. All I needed was a steady table and a typewriter.

There is nothing more thrilling in this world, I think, than having a child that is yours, and yet is mysteriously a stranger. You are the gate through which it came into the world, and you will be allowed to have charge of it for a period: after that it will leave you and blossom out into its own free life–and there it is, for you to watch, living its life in freedom. It is like a strange plant which you have brought home, planted, and can hardly wait to see how it will turn out.

So time went on, now not so much like a nightmare as something that had been always going on, had always been there. It had become, in fact, natural to expect that you yourself might be killed soon, that the people you loved best might be killed, that you would hear of deaths of friends. Broken windows, bombs, land-mines, and in due course flying-bombs and rockets–all these things would go on, not as something extraordinary, but as perfectly natural. After three years of war, they were an everyday happening. You could not really envisage a time when there would not be a war any more.

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly find–at the age of fifty, say–that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about.

I needed, urgently, to be alone and come to terms with this incredible happiness.

We were also taught the Swedish Country Dance,

There are few things more desirable than to be an acceptor and an enjoyer. You can like and enjoy almost any kind of food or way of life. You can enjoy country life, dogs, muddy walks; towns, noise, people, clatter. In the one there is repose, ease for nerves, time for reading, knitting, embroidery, and the pleasure of growing things. In the other theatres, art galleries, good concerts, and seeing friends you would otherwise seldom see. I am happy to say that I can enjoy almost everything.

I was always prepared to like the next thing that came along.

There is no gap in the world as complete as that between one who is sea-sick and one who is not.

Nowhere in the world is there such a good breakfast as tinned sausages cooked on a primus stove in the desert in the early morning.

I don’t like crowds, being jammed up against people, loud voices, noise, protracted talking, parties, and especially cocktail parties, cigarette smoke and smoking generally, any kind of drink except in cooking, marmalade, oysters, lukewarm food, grey skies, the feet of birds, or indeed the feel of a bird altogether. Final and fiercest dislike: the taste and smell of hot milk. I like sunshine, apples, almost any kind of music, railway trains, numerical puzzles and anything to do with numbers, going to the sea, bathing and swimming, silence, sleeping, dreaming, eating, the smell of coffee, lilies of the valley, most dogs, and going to the theatre.

The minority of what I call ‘the haters’ is quite small, but, like all minorities, it makes itself felt far more than the majority does.

He read quickly, and seemed to have no preference whatsoever as to what he read: biographies, fiction, love stories, thrillers, scientific works, almost anything. He was like a starving man who would say that any kind of food is the same: you don’t mind what it is, you just want food. He wanted food for his mind.

would have not exactly to make a speech, but to say a few words–a thing I had never done before. I cannot make speeches, I never make speeches, and I won’t make speeches, and it is a very good thing that I don’t make speeches because I should be so bad at them.