I read avidly that year, things like The Arabian Nights and the whole of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. Soon after I was eight, I sat up from reading in the middle of one afternoon and knew that I was going to be a writer one day. It was not a decision, or even a revelation. It was more as if my future self had leaned back from the years ahead and quietly informed me what she was. In calm certainty, I went and told my parents.
“You haven’t got it in you,” my mother said. My father bellowed with laughter. He had a patriarch’s view of girls: they were not really meant to do anything. Though he never said so, I think it was a disappointment to him to have three daughters. My mother, as always, was more outspoken. She said if it were not for the war, she would have more children—boys.
I think my mother was very discontented that year. She was, after all, an Oxford graduate who had dragged herself up from a humble background in industrial Yorkshire by winning scholarships—and all she had for it was the life of a suburban mother. I know she encouraged my father to apply for the husband-and-wife job they took in 1943.
The job was in a village called Thaxted in rural Essex. My parents were to run what would nowadays be called a conference center for young adults, a place where teenagers who worked in factories in urban Essex could come for a week or weekend to experience a little culture. It was one of many schemes at that time which looked forward to the widening of horizons at the end of the war, and it had considerable propaganda value, since it was by no means clear then that the Allies were going to win the war. My father believed in it utterly, and it became his life for the next ten years.
I was already wrestling to make sense of the experience of the previous four years—particularly the religion. Now I had a whole new set, three or four new sets, in fact, all going on at once. Thaxted, to take that first, was straight out of a picture postcard, with houses that were either thatched and half-timbered or decoratively plastered, and a medieval guild hall straddled the main street. The church, at once stately and ethereal beside a majestic copper beech, stood at the top of the hill opposite Clarance House (the house my parents ran). Industry was represented by a little sweet factory at one end of the village and a man who made life-sized mechanical elephants at the other. The place was connected to the outside world by sporadic buses and by a branch railway that terminated a mile outside the village (but the train driver would grudgingly wait for anyone he saw panting up the hill to the station). On holidays, people did folk dancing in the streets. There was also much handweaving, pottery making, and madrigal singing.
This idyllic place had the highest illegitimate birth rate in the county. In numerous families, the younger apparent brothers or sisters turned out to be the offspring of the unmarried elder daughters—though there was one young woman who pretended her daughter was her sister without grandparents to help—and there was a fair deal of incest, too. Improbable characters abounded there, including two acknowledged witches and a man who went mad in the church porch at full moon. There was a prostitute not much older than me who was a most refined person, with a face like alabaster, a slight foreign accent, and tweeds. There was another who looked like an artist’s impression of Neanderthal woman; she had a string of pale, thin children, each with huge famine-poster eyes.
I had assumed you had to be married before you had children, so all this was quite a shock. I began to suspect the world had always been mad. In self-defense, my sisters and I assumed our home life was normal, which it certainly was not.
Clarance House was as beautiful as the rest, built in the days of Queen Anne, with graceful wall panels indoors—although the interior was somewhat bare because the Essex Education Committee, which financed the place, could seldom spare much money. Here my father threw himself into life as an educator and entertainer, for he was as gifted in his way as my grandfather and could hold an audience like an actor, whether he was making intellectual conversation at table with my mother, introducing a lecture, or telling ghost stories to rapt teenagers. His main story was about Clarance House. There were the remains of an old stair in a cupboard where, my father claimed, you could hear disembodied feet, climbing, climbing. . . . We knew he was right to call the house haunted, but the really haunted part was the main entrance hall, which I always felt compelled to run through if I had to cross it, shaking with fear. Eventually one of the cleaners saw the ghost. She had been chatting to it while she polished the hall for some minutes, thinking it was the girl she worked with. Then she looked properly and found she could see through it. She had hysterics and left at once for a job in the bacon factory in Great Dunmow.
My mother organized the cleaners, the cooks, and the domestic side, and in her spare time went feverishly into local history and madrigal singing. Not a day passed without some fearful crisis, in which my mother raced about inveighing against the Committee, the war, or my father, while my father stormed through the house in a fury, forgetting to speak English in his rage. His life was wholly public: my mother’s three-quarters so. Neither had time for us. For a short while the three of us children shared a room at the top of the house; but my parents were so dedicated to making a success of the center that they decided that room was needed for additional guests. We were put out into the Cottage. This was a lean-to, two-room shack across the yard from the main house. The mud floor of the lower room was hastily covered with concrete and our beds were crammed into the upper floor. And we were left to our own devices. Looking back on this, we all find it extraordinary; for damp climbed the walls, and almost as soon as we had arrived in Thaxted, I had contracted juvenile rheumatism, which seriously affected my heart, and Ursula also contracted it soon after.
Diana’s mother, Marjorie, at a Clarance House reunion
The only heating was a paraffin stove—and how we failed to set the Cottage on fire I shall never know. The stove was often knocked over during games or fights, or encased in paper when we dried paintings. There was nowhere to wash in the Cottage, so we seldom bothered. Nor did we comb our hair. Ursula, whose hair was long, wild, and curly, tied it in two knots on her forehead to keep it out of her eyes. My mother did not notice for six months. Then I got into trouble for allowing it. But Ursula always did what she wanted. The following year she refused to eat anything but three slices of bread and yeast extract a day, whatever Isobel or I said, and my mother never knew about that at all.
I was supposed to be in charge of my sisters and it weighed on me. I did my best, but at ages nine and ten I was not very good at it. The worst thing happened just after Isobel had been to a pantomime with a school friend, where she had been entranced to find the fairies swooping over the stage in flying harnesses. She wanted to do it too. So Ursula and I obligingly tied skipping ropes together, slung them across a beam above the Cottage stairs, and hauled Isobel up there by a noose under her armpits. She dangled, rotating gently, looking worried. “Look more graceful,” we advised her. She stuck out her arms—and her legs, too, like a starfish—and went on hanging. Absorbed in her experience and knowing that one had to suffer for art’s sake, she failed to say she was suffocating. Luckily, Ursula and I became worried and cut her down with blunt nail scissors just in time.
Around this time, my mother decreed that Isobel should become a ballerina, because of her looks. My mother’s main substitute for attending to us was to assert periodically that Isobel was beautiful and a born dancer, Ursula a potential actress, and me an ugly semidelinquent with a high IQ. Her other substitute for attention was to make our school uniforms herself. She would buy half the required garments, angrily protesting at their cost and the number of clothing coupons they took, and make the rest. Other children jeered, because our uniforms were always the wrong style and material, and it always mystified us that their parents could afford enough coupons for a complete uniform. Other clothing my mother got from the local orphanage. The matron, who was a friend of my parents, used to give us all the clothes donated which she did not think suitable for the orphans. We often looked very pecul
iar. When I protested, my mother would angrily describe her own childhood with a widowed mother in the First World War. “You’re all extremely lucky,” she would conclude. “You have advantages I never dreamed of.” At which I felt acutely guilty.
Even so, I might protest that my mother had had proper clothes. I was prone to spot flaws in any argument, and I had an odd theory that you ought to be truthful about your feelings. This usually sent my mother into a vituperative fury. This was part of the reason why she called me semidelinquent. Another reason was that I had inherited my father’s tendency to fly into towering rages. I also used to shout at my sisters because they seldom listened to mere speech. But I think the main reason was that I was always working at some more or less mad project: some of which were harmless—like dressing as a ghost and pretending to haunt the graveyard, inventing a loom, or directing a play, some of which were liable to cause trouble—like the time I tried to organize a garden fête without asking anyone; some of which were outright dangerous—like walking on the roof, or the time I could have attracted enemy airplanes by signaling Morse code by flashlights to friends outside the village. For some reason I believed it my duty to live a life of adventure, and I used to worry that, for a would-be writer, I had too little imagination.
Clarance House had two gardens, one ordinary one and a second, much bigger, across a lane at the back. This Other Garden was kept locked. I was always begging for the key. It was like paradise, or the extension of life into the imagination. Here were espalier apples, roses, lilies, vegetables, and a green path running under an arcade of creepers to an old octagonal summerhouse in the distance. Near the summerhouse my father kept bees. These were a notoriously fierce strain, and the gardener could often be seen racing down the green path pursued by an angry black cloud of them. But the bees never attacked us. I used to go and talk to them, because I had read that bees were part of your family and you should tell them all your news—although I never spoke to them when the gardener was by. He hated superstition. He was very religious. As a young man, he told people quite frankly, he had attended both church and chapel to be quite sure of heaven; but one day on the Sampford road he had had a vision in which an angel descended and told him always to go to chapel. And he was only one of a crowd of remarkable people who swarmed through the house. There were ham actors, gays, politicians, hirsute artists, hysterical sopranos, a musician who looked like Dr. Dolittle, another who believed in the transmigration of souls, an agriculturalist who looked like Hitler, a teddy girl, local vicars—one long, thin, and gloomy who grew tobacco, another stout and an expert on wine. . . .
The vicar of Thaxted was a communist and people used to come from Great Dunmow in hobnailed boots specially to walk out noisily during his sermons. Actually his politics derived more from William Morris than Marx. The church was hung with light drapery to enhance its considerable elegance, and he taught any child who wished to learn a musical instrument. “Not you,” said my mother. “You’re tone deaf.” Or maybe just deaf, I used to think, on Thursdays when the bell ringers practiced. The Cottage was almost opposite the bell tower, and the sound was deafening. In fact, I had little to do with the church otherwise because I settled my religious muddles by deciding that I had better be an atheist.
School brought more strange experiences—with an uncomfortable tendency to pick up motifs from the past. Isobel and I were sent to the village school, where we came up against the English class system for the first time. As children of intellectuals, we ranked above village kids and below farmers or anybody rich, but sort of sideways. This meant we were fair game for all. The head teacher had only contempt for us. He said I was never likely to pass the exam to enter grammar school (“the scholarship,” everyone called it), and almost refused to enter me. My mother had one of her rows over that (by this time I was dimly aware that my mother truly enjoyed a row). In school, we spent all but one afternoon a week knitting endless scarves and balaclavas for the forces, while one of the teachers told us about tortures, shivering with strange excitement while she spoke. I once nearly fainted at her account of the rack. The other afternoon, the boys were allowed to do drawing and the girls sewing. I protested about this. The head teacher threatened to cane me for impertinence. At which a berserker rage came over me. I seized a shoddy metal ruler and tied it in a knot. I was sent home, but not caned, to my surprise.
Being fair game for all meant that the school bullies chased you home. One winter day, in snow, a bully chased me, pelting me with ice. It cut. Terrified, I raced away down the alley between the blacksmith’s and the barber’s and shot into the glassy white road ahead. Too late, I saw a car driving past. I think I hurtled clean over its bonnet, getting knocked out on the way. I came to, facedown, looking back the way I had come. “Help!” I shouted to the blacksmith in his forge. “I’ve been run over!” Not accurate, but I was upset. The blacksmith’s wife improved on this by racing into the barber’s, where she knew my father was having a haircut, yelling, “Mr. Jones! Come quickly! Your daughter’s under a car!” Even less accurate, because the car was down the hill, slewing about as it braked. My father dived out of the barber’s with his hair short one side and long the other. The driver got there about the same time and his face was truly a light green, poor man. I was quite impressed at the effect I had had.
I passed “the scholarship” later that year. My parents’ connection with the Essex Education Committee enabled them to discover that my marks were spectacularly good. I continued to get spectacular marks most of my school career. This is not a thing I can take much credit for. I just happened to have a near-photographic memory and an inborn instinct about how to do exams—which always struck me as cheating, because whenever I was in doubt about a fact, all I had to do was close my eyes and read the remembered page. But it was the one thing my parents cared about. My mother decided that I was to go to her old Oxford college, and added that to the ugly, semidelinquent, brainy list.
As a semidelinquent I was sent as a boarder to a school in Brentwood; but there was no room in the boardinghouse and I had to live for one endless term with the family I later put in Eight Days of Luke. Then a girl left the boardinghouse and I had her bed. This was an old, overused hospital bed and it broke under me; and the matron made public discovery that my ears were unwashed. As a punishment—and I am still not clear whether it was for the bed or the ears or both—I had to sleep on my own in an old lumber room. Just as before, in Coniston, I could not muster the courage to run away. Nor could I muster the courage to tell my parents; I was too ashamed. But I did tell them, because I enjoyed it so, how the matron marched us in line every Saturday to the cinema to see every film that happened to be showing. This philistine practice horrified them. I was removed and sent by bus to a Quaker school in Saffron Walden as a day pupil instead. I was there from 1946 to 1952. It was mainly a boarding school, which meant that I, and later my sisters, were as usual part of an oddball minority. Quakers do not believe in eccentricity or in academic success. They found me highly eccentric for getting good marks, and for most other things too.
As time went on, my parents had less and less time for us. We never went on holiday with them. When they took their yearly holiday, we were left with the gardener, the minister of the chapel, or the matron of the orphanage—or simply dumped on Granny. Granny was truly marvelous; five feet of Yorkshire common sense, love, and superstition. She was always saying wise things. I remember, among many sayings, when one time she had given me a particularly good present, she said, “No, it’s not generous. Being generous is giving something that’s hard to give.” She was so superstitious that she kept a set of worthless china to break when she happened to break something good, on the grounds that breakages always came in threes and it was as well to get it over. I would have been lost without Granny, that I know.
That was a grim time in the world. The war, which had receded when we left London, came close again through rockets and pilotless planes. They were terrifying. Then there was the a
nxiety of D-Day, followed by the discovery of the concentration camps, which made me realize just how mad the world had been. This was followed by great shortages and the Cold War. Hiroshima horrified me; the Cold War made me expect a Hiroshima bomb in England any day.
Things were grim at home too. When a course was running at Clarance House—which was continuously during summer and two-thirds of the time during winter—we quite often came home from school to find that nobody had remembered to save us anything to eat. If we went into the kitchen to forage, the cook shrieked at us to get out. When no course was running, my father would sit slumped and silent in the only family room, which was also his office. He rarely spoke to any of us unless he was angry, and then he could not remember which one of us he was talking to and had to go through all our names before he got the right one. Almost every night during winter, my mother would shout at him—with some justice—that he kept all his charm for his job and none for her in private; whereupon he would fly into a towering Welsh rage and they would bawl at each other all evening. When it was over, my mother would rush into the kitchen, where we had retreated to do homework, and recount angrily all that had been said, while we waited with pens politely poised, knowing that any comment only made things worse. This routine was occasionally lightened by ludicrous incidents, such as the time the cat locked us all into that office by playing with the bolt on the outside of its door; or when our aged corgi suddenly upped and bit my father on the bottom while he was chasing Isobel to hit her.