Slipstream by Elizabeth Jane Howard | eBook

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Slipstream

A Memoir

By Elizabeth Jane Howard

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

CHAPTER 1

PART ONE

The first thing I can remember is a dream. I dreamed I was in St Mary Abbot's church after my brother's christening. There was a tea party in the church with people standing about holding cups of tea. I was given a large plate – I needed both hands to carry it – and told to hand it round to everyone. The plate was covered by small rectangular sponge cakes with white icing, each one decorated with a crystallized violet. I longed for one, but was told I must wait until everyone had been offered the plate. Some people refused and I began to hope that there would be one left for me, but when I approached a large lady with a brown fur round her neck, she smiled kindly and took the last cake. The disappointment still pricked my eyes when I woke up.

I must have been between two and a half and three years old when I dreamed this, and it must have been the time when my parents moved from the first-floor flat in Clanricarde Gardens to a small house in Bedford Gardens, also in Kensington. I have no memory of the flat, but we stayed in Bedford Gardens until I was six or seven so I can remember some small pieces from those years.

The house was part of a terrace at the Church Street end of Bedford Gardens – flat-fronted, built of brick with pretty windows and steps leading up to the front door. There was a very small front garden in which large purple iris grew. The nursery was on the top floor – the day nursery in the front and a smaller night nursery at the back. From that back window there was a sea of chimney-pots, and I used to imagine that they were the funnels of large ships waiting to take me away,

I remember little of the rest of the house; in those days middle-class children lived in their nursery quarters unless sent for at tea-time. The days were filled with long walks in Kensington Gardens when nannies would meet with Thermos flasks of Bovril, and Marie biscuits, while we were enjoined to 'play' not too far from them.

Sometimes we walked to the Round Pond and I was allowed to feed bread to the ducks. I remember clearly watching a horde of little ragged children, with a baby in a pram, fishing for sticklebacks that they put into jam jars. I longed to be with them, to have bare legs and no overcoat, no gaiters with all their buttons, and to fish with them. Once, I managed to elude Nanny and join them, but she dragged me away. 'Those children are not your friends.'

'They are!' I wept, but I remember thinking afterwards that they probably wouldn't have wanted me as a friend.

Nanny Wilshire loomed far larger in my life than either of my parents. She wore crackling aprons, smelt alternately of liquorice or pear drops, and was given to sudden rages. She told me that if I swallowed pieces of wool or cotton they'd join together and, when long enough, wind themselves around my heart and kill me. Her justice, like Portia's mercy, was an indiscriminate affair – it dropped incomprehensively from the skies: it ambushed me like a jaguar, and I endured it dazed with fear and grievance. Once she shut me in the linen cupboard, dark, hot and unbelievably frightening, because my brother Robin had cut himself on a tin motorcar when I was alone in the nursery with him. I remember shrieking with terror and pulling down all the sheets and pillowcases I could reach and stamping on them. When my noise and the damage were apparent to her, she released me and I learned my first lesson. Robin was younger, infinitely more attractive and a boy; in fact, youth, beauty, and his sex were unmistakable advantages, and beside him I felt inferior in each respect.

I don't think scenes of the linen-cupboard nature ever reached my mother's ears. Trying now to remember my parents at that time, I am left with fragments: how they smelt – my mother of China tea and sweet hay, my father of lavender water and the Lebanon cedar with which his clothes chest and wardrobe were lined, and predominating, tobacco. They both smoked, as indeed did practically all their friends. My mother had thick curly hair, but it was mostly grey, which worried me as I'd noticed that grey hair led to white, and white-haired people were so old that they might die at any minute. I'd been taught that when people died they went to Heaven, but I discovered as quickly that there was no possibility of going there alive. So if my mother died, I'd have to die too to be with her. This uncomfortable choice haunted me, at increasing intervals, for years.

We lived in the same street as my maternal grandparents, and by the time I was six, I was allowed on some Sundays to go alone for lunch with them. My grandfather would meet me just as I reached the pillar-box outside his house and, bending down, would present me with his coarse, silky white beard and faint smell that was something like sweetbriar. Then, holding hands, we'd march into the dark drawing room, crowded with a grand piano and little tables and large upholstered chairs. My grandmother, called Grannia, would be cast upon one of these, like a beautiful shipwreck. She spoiled me with a magnificent carelessness that I thoroughly appreciated, allowing me drops of wine in my water at luncheon. She would discuss the life of Christ, Communism, and Japanese flower arrangement with me as though I was any luncheon guest, elevating me to a state of triumphant, honoured ignorance instead of knowledgeable boredom that the old ropes of grown-ups with children induce. For lunch we always had roast chicken and meringues – which my grandmother probably considered my favourite meal.

Afterwards, I was made to lie on the floor with my head on one of the coloured cushions that my grandfather called after any of the students he examined in music whose names were exotic or silly enough. I can now only remember a small, hard, dark purple one called Gertrude Peppercorn. I was given a bull's eye or a piece of chocolate, and a book was read aloud. After a while, I was allowed to sit up and 'play' with some of the curious and interesting objects that were scattered about the room. This usually meant staring at things – not allowed to touch – while my grandmother told me about them. I had no resentment about this, was content simply to gaze – at a complete set of Japanese dolls' furniture lacquered in red and black; at a strand of Mozart's hair, fine and golden like an angel's, which was tied with a piece of pale blue silk and framed in a pinchbeck locket; at a thin, stiff wooden doll that had belonged to my grandfather and was called Mr Hampshire, whose painted face, sad and discreet, stared back at me with an expression a thousand years old.

When, by mutual consent, it was time for my visit to finish, I didn't race back down the street, but walked slowly, crammed with important, tragic thoughts.

'Well,' they said, when I got home, 'was it fun, and what did you have for luncheon?'

They were, in comparison to my grandmother, talking down to me; 'Roast chicken and meringues' was too frivolous a reply, and I searched for the most stern and sophisticated substitute. 'Cold beef,' I said, and many Sundays after they had ceased to believe me, I stuck stubbornly to this formula.

Some time that year, we moved from Bedford Gardens to a larger house in Lansdowne Road, Holland Park. Nanny Wilshire had left and was replaced by a much younger nurse called Violet Dunn. She must have been in her twenties, was enormously fat, and wore navy blue dresses that I think she must have made herself. Robin and I called her Felix. She was very quiet and never got into rages like Nanny Wilshire – even her displeasure was calm. She played card games with us and helped us with painting. I suspect that she was very sensitive about her appearance, which I think now was down to some glandular disorder, since she ate very little and was very active. In the new house we slept in a large bedroom with her and I remember her dressing in the mornings with her back turned to us and enveloped in a very large dressing gown from which she emerged immaculate in her close-fitting navy blue with white Peter Pan collar.

My mother taught me to read, but I was always slightly afraid of her when she taught me things, and didn't learn until I was six and a half. I wanted to read, and used to take one of the fairy books off its shelf, and sit in a chair turning pages at what I thought were suitable intervals. Robin, however, could read when he was five, and when he turned six he wrote a book called Percy Rainsbull Edwards, the Adventures of a Pig. This, I thought, was my chance to prove my superior grasp of life. He was so young that he had to make up his own story; I'd actually write a real book, which meant taking one from the bookshelf and copying it. Percy's life was a dangerous one, and my brother wrote it in a state of abominable fear, while I ploughed away at transcribing the first chapters of Happy Families in block capitals into an exercise book. There was a mixture of boredom and complacency about my task, but in the end, boredom won and I abandoned it. Robin, trembling with uncertainty, reached a happy conclusion to Percy's life – back in a field with his mother – after a journey to Africa, with a suitcase marked PRE, where he was nearly eaten by a 'snack'. He illustrated the adventures with many pencil drawings and my mother – who could bind books – bound it in soft crimson suede. I realized then that he had beaten me again, that his book engendered far more interest than mine.

Before we moved – and afterwards – we used sometimes to be taken to Airlie Gardens at the top of Campden Hill. At the end of this short road were wooden gates that opened on to a courtyard on the left of which was a large rambling house. This belonged to a cousin of my mother's – a bachelor known as Uncle Mont. We hardly ever went into the house in which Uncle Mont never seemed to be, but we were given the freedom of the enormous and wonderful garden – probably about two acres – which was filled with interesting things. For instance, there were beds all round the house that were filled with cockleshells. There was a terrace on the south side that had squares of aromatic plants interspersed with the paving. At one end was a perfectly round pond tiled with azure; at the other a veranda with black and white tiled walls and a Chinese gooseberry and a vine smothering its roof. There were flights of steps made of shaven grass – very soft and charming. They led to a long pergola with roses, and lawns studded with interesting trees. There was a winding path round the edge of this domain and at intervals there were sunken barrels that collected rainwater. Once I fell into one – head first, and had to be hauled out and taken, black with mud, white with terror, into the house where I was bathed by my nurse and the housekeeper. Apart from that single misfortune, the place was magic to me at all times of the year. There were gardeners; the only one I remember was called Dick, but for some time I thought he was Uncle Mont, and it was only when I called him 'darling Uncle Mont' (for having such a lovely garden) that they put me right. He had been Uncle Mont's batman in the war and was badly wounded, they said. A batman. Did he protect Uncle Mont from bats? Had they wounded him? Were bats dangerous? I never asked: I'd reached an age where I hated people's patronizing and laughing response to a serious question. I did ask why we never saw Uncle Mont and my mother said he had a lot of work to do as he was Governor of the Bank of England. This was another hazard of being my age: often, serious answers made things even more mysterious.

My grandfather was a composer. (He was called 'Mo' because he had a beard and was thought to look like Moses.) I don't think I realized this until I was nearly seven when I wrote a poem that seemed to me the most beautiful words I'd heard in my life. In those days I was constantly having sore throats, and one day, lying fevered with my throat like a burning cart track, they brought me an exquisitely written sheet of music. 'Your grandfather has made a song of your poem.' At seven, I couldn't read music, and my grandfather sang in a squeaky, out-of-tune voice, so somebody else had to sing it. 'Lovely,' I whispered hoarsely.

'Very nice words,' they said, 'about a lovebird coming out of a wood. Why did you think of a lovebird?' I wanted a blue bird flying out of a dark wood, that was why. 'But lovebirds are green,' they said. I argued weakly, but the song was ruined for me. I could now see that green bird flying obstinately out of the dark wood – green on green, and the feeling of colour lost. I never wrote another poem.

I was steeped in Andrew Lang fairy books, and the problem of living half by fairy formulae and half by the strict justice demanded between cousins and siblings occupied me for some years. It was a long time before I understood the justice in fairy tales and still longer before I perceived the fairy tales in elements of justice.

One day, my grandfather took me to tea with Henry Ford, the illustrator of fairy books, in his studio. I loved his pictures and admired him deeply. The studio seemed dark and dirty: it was autumn, and the smell was so overwhelming I felt the chairs and tables and curtains were covered with wet paint – even the bread and butter had possibly been varnished. There were small cherry cakes for tea. The cherries kept falling off and bouncing on the floor, and Henry Ford pounced on them like a dirty bird and popped them into his mouth.

My grandfather asked what he was painting. He was painting thirteen princesses being turned into swans, he said, in a practical voice – here – and he pulled the easel round for us to see. He was painting exactly that. I counted the princesses and my heart swelled with pride to be having cherry cakes with somebody who had such magical powers, but I was most carefully polite to him in case his powers extended beyond painting.

Soon after we moved to Lansdowne Road I began to have morning lessons in the dining room with half a dozen other children. A kindly lady called Miss Kettle taught us. She had a gentle voice, eyes like some nervous nocturnal bird and cheeks like a rubber doll. My fellow pupils fascinated me.

One girl called Rosemary told us that her family kept a python at home. 'Of course, she's an only child,' people said of her. This utterly confused me: for some time I toyed with the idea of her mother having given birth to a python by mistake, and went to tea, not so much to see the python as to gaze at its mother.

I was by then so steeped in fairy tales that this seemed perfectly possible – indeed, looking at the terms under which I lived, it's astonishing to me that I was so calm about them. For instance, the maxim of most fairy tales – that beauty was invariably allied to goodness – caused me only passing regret. I wasn't one, therefore there was small chance of my becoming the other. My brother Robin, on the other hand, with his platinum blond hair, brown velvet eyes, and a voice as charming as it was deep and commanding, seemed all set for goodness on a large scale. I remember one winter afternoon when we were discussing what we should most like to be, and I, assuming an expression of what I hoped was irrevocable goodness, said I should like to be kind and brave. My brother looked at me, evidently didn't like what he saw, and gazed dreamily up at the ceiling. 'I should like to be rich and pretty,' he said.

You would, I thought, angrily retreating from my hypocrisy, but what would be the good of my saying that?

Robin and I had by now accumulated a number of imaginary people: some were fairies, but all of them were more or less magic – that is, unaccountable and powerful. It's difficult to say how much we believed in them, but we each 'owned' different people, and thus developed a kind of oblique balance of power. Here again, my brother had the whip hand. He owned the most frightening creature called Ciggi who lived largely in his garden, a piece of cement out of which grew a drainpipe and a Michaelmas daisy. Ciggi was capable of the most terrible rages and nothing ever pleased him: he rumbled with disapproval at everything we – particularly I – did, with frequent eruptions of threatening wrath. Robin eventually married him off to someone called Rose, who had golden hair and a nervous giggle, but this didn't improve his temper and hardly a week passed without my brother announcing that 'Ciggi is very, very angry.'

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Slipstream by Elizabeth Jane Howard. Copyright © 2002 Elizabeth Jane Howard. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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A Memoir

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