England to Me: A Memoir Read online

  To understand their feelings, I tried to imagine the house as it was in the old days. There were sixty cushions in the drawing room alone. There were far too many little bric-a-brac tables, and standing framed photographs, and plush traveling cases, and paintings in heavy gilt frames, and lacquer chests of card sets and piquet and backgammon, and tables like glass-topped boxes full of ivory fans and snuffboxes, and little statues and busts of Negro boys. Aunt Alice had a special passion for carved Negro heads, whereas Granny rather preferred dogs—ivory dogs, wooden dogs, porcelain dogs, any dogs but living ones, which were anathema. There must have been two large bookcases full of religious literature, collections of sermons, Mrs. Trimmer and all that. Well, and all of a sudden here were the young people turned loose on all the things they had always hated.

  “We had a huge bonfire, and burnt masses of stuff,” said the Major with relish. “We were back and forth for hours, throwing junk on the fire. I thought we had cleared away everything, but it looks now as though we’d never touched it.” He repeated this observation to Clifton one morning while we were investigating the storehouse, and Clifton merely said,

  “Yes, sir,” in restrained tones. Clifton and the dead old people were of one mind about that bonfire.

  “You probably burned lots of valuable things,” I said feebly.

  “No, we didn’t. We had an appraiser down first, and he told us that practically everything here was junk. He’d look at a cabinet, turn up his nose at it, and say, ‘Portuguese.’ All this marquetry and so on is useless. He wouldn’t even make us an offer.”

  “Well, but nowadays when one can’t buy furniture without dockets—”

  “Oh, nowadays.… Still, we’ll have to clear a lot of this out.”

  “Then let’s begin,” I said, suddenly forgetting the old people, “on those washstands and jugs and basins and things. There’s a huge one in our bedroom; let’s move it out.”

  The Major was shocked. “Move it out? Why?”

  “But we don’t use it. We never will use it. We’ve got bathrooms with running water; what do we want with a jug and basin?”

  “One needs a jug and basin in a bedroom. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Why? Have you ever used it since we came? Have I? Has anybody?” The Major was silent. Thinking, quite erroneously, that I was making an impression on him, I continued joyfully, “And we can stop looking out other jugs and tables for the other bedrooms. They’re awfully in the way, really, Charles. There’s no sense to it.”

  “You want a washstand in a bedroom,” he said flatly. “We’ve always had them.”

  That was that. I cast a repentant glance at Granny’s photo, the one in profile and evening dress, and made a silent vow never again to forget my place.

  Mrs. Clifton helped me to keep that vow in mind. Unlike most of the women I see in the village, Mrs. Clifton is not large and pink; she is small and neutral-colored, though her cheeks still show a flush unknown to most American women of seventy. Mrs. Clifton was a housemaid as a girl. I think she came from Somerset thirty-five years ago. She married Clifton when he was chauffeur for the old people, who were very dashing and bought one of the first automobiles made in England. Clifton had already begun to climb up the scale, for he started his career here as stableboy, and when one of the stables was turned into a garage, he was converted too. Together, or more or less together, the Cliftons have gone on with Conygar. Every now and again, I believe, Mrs. Clifton used to be sacked, or she quit. Mrs. Clifton has a peculiar temper. But Clifton just carried on, whether or not she was in service; he learned how to garden, too, and in time became general factotum.

  They lived over the stables until the old people at the house had all died off. They had four children there, and brought them up in the same cramped quarters; now the children are married, with children of their own. The Major’s brother, known to the Cliftons as the Colonel, occupied Conygar with his wife for three years while the Major lived in the Far East. I think Mrs. Colonel sacked and reinstated Mrs. Clifton two or three times a year, until the Army requisitioned the house and the Colonel and his wife went away to war, he to Africa, she to the A.T.S. Mrs. Clifton never enjoyed her periods of inactivity down at the Cottage, because she likes to know what is going on, but she does have a very peculiar temper. As a matter of fact I sacked her myself a few months ago, or she gave notice, or we arrived at an agreement simultaneously, as it were. She is inactive down at the Cottage this minute, but has got a foot in at the house door, and I have to struggle to remain strong-minded. The thing is, nobody but Mrs. Clifton really knows where everything is. Nobody works as hard or as well as Mrs. Clifton. She works so hard that she becomes smaller and thinner than ever, and her temper gets worse, and she grows more and more bitter and jealous of everyone else, and then she gets the sack. After a while she needs us and we need her, and back she comes, and it all begins again. Nature, I suppose you might call it, in her relentless round.

  Mrs. Clifton was in league with the old people to keep me in my place. She did it nicely, with perfect manners and only the most roundabout hints, but she did it. I have always thought that Mrs. Clifton, far more than Clifton, might have come around to the Major’s first rush of democratic feelings when we arrived, because she has a more flexible nature. Together, however, they were scandalized, and they soon put a spoke in that wheel.

  A combination of causes made up the misunderstanding on the Major’s part. He had been ten years away, imbibing an idea now and then, in spite of being in the Army. In his rather lavish way he had decided that most things in England were on the wrong track, and had welcomed the textbook conception of American democracy. He had met me, and various other foreigners, and he liked us. Then he was put into prison camp, where for four years he saw British dignity such as it still was broken into bits, nay, pulverized. He had already begun to talk about the Revolution, and the fall of Capitalism, and so forth, and thought of himself, probably quite rightly, as a doomed rentier.

  To his eyes, when he came out of prison, the election of the Labour party at home meant the beginning of the end for people like him, and with part of his heart he was glad of the change. He was also probably scared, but he made up his mind to greet the brave new world in a manner befitting his principles. He was pleased, I believe, with my household in New York, wherein the man of all work, Willy, called me by my first name and nearly though not quite got around to calling him Charles. Willy ate with us in the kitchen, country style. I am sure all houses in New York are not run in that style, but the Major didn’t see other houses except when we went to cocktail parties or formal dinners, or hotels. We didn’t get a chance to go out to the Middle West to visit my family, because he had to stay in hospital most of the time, undergoing observation of his wounded arm and then an operation. I realize now that he probably got an exaggerated idea of the democratic habits of the States. Probably we would all betthe better in America if we really did live up to his ideal, but most people don’t. The Major assumed they did.

  He talked often about Changing England, and wondered nervously if I would take to the new order of things after having been spoiled by so much cheap labor in China and so much luxury in America. The morning after we arrived at Conygar he looked around with approval at the breakfast scene, though Mrs. Clifton stood in the background blushing at what she considered its squalor. The table was laid in the kitchen, sharing space with the “cooker”—stove in America—a large cream-colored anthracite-burning affair known as the Aga. Most of the preliminaries to cooking don’t go on in our kitchen at all, they are accomplished in the scullery next to it, but anyway it was the kitchen we were eating in, and that suited the Major’s expectations of modern postwar life.

  “I thought Father and me had better eat up here, too, long as I’m cooking,” said Mrs. Clifton. “Our range is out of order.”

  “Certainly,” said the Major briskly. “By all means. We had better eat all together.”

  “All together, sir?” repeated M
rs. Clifton.

  “Yes. Saves trouble, you know, and you won’t want to be cooking and serving twice over for every meal.”

  Mrs. Clifton looked at Clifton, and tittered aloud in an excess of painful embarrassment. But the Major was master, and at lunch the Cliftons ate with us, after their own fashion—at a small table over by the window. They were violently uncomfortable, and didn’t say a word, though now and then the Major, perplexed by this failure of socialist England to live up to itself, tried to bring them into the conversation. After all, in New York it was Willy who had always led the conversation. Willy usually suggested the topics too.

  The Cliftons, however, are too old for Brave New England. Maybe all of Dorset is. The days following our first experiment were full of a silent, grim struggle between the Major and the Cliftons, with me looking on from the side lines. The Major didn’t give in easily. He insisted that we do without tea as a meal, and decreed that we should eat high tea instead at six o’clock, the way working-class people do in England and almost everyone does in America. Mrs. Clifton in communion with the old people considered this idea complete bosh. We weren’t working-class people, and she felt it very bad for us to pretend we were. She and Clifton never forgot their places; why should we? As for America, the less said of that, I felt, the better, and so did Mrs. Clifton, and so did the old people in their photograph frames.

  From the commonsense point of view the Major was right. We simply couldn’t expect Mrs. Clifton to do all the work and the cooking, too, and still to run the house as the old people, dead or alive, expected her to run it. No more could we expect an aging man like Clifton to keep the vegetables going and to clip the hedges and keep all the grass down and the wood cleared away. Yet it had to be done if, as we thought, we were going to be sent off somewhere soon; we had to get the place into shape if we wanted to let it. The answer to the problem was, of course, more domestic help, but it was an answer the Cliftons didn’t like and wouldn’t accept. They had become, with the passing of time, furiously possessive of Conygar and the Boxers, furiously suspicious of all other domestic workers, furiously jealous and difficult. They felt ready and eager to do everything themselves. “Hard work never hurt anyone, madam,” said Clifton. “That’s what ails this country today. Now, in my opinion, in what I call the good old days, madam––”

  “He’s like something out of a book,” said the Major solemnly. “Sir here and sir there.” After a bout with Clifton he always came in quite red in the face, reciting under his breath,

  “I really think that butlers ought

  To know their place, and not to play

  The Old Retainer night and day.”

  With all their respect, the Cliftons ruled us with an iron hand. They put the Major to rights in no time at all. It took only a week for Mrs. Clifton to divorce Father and herself from our meals, and inside a month we were meekly drinking tea at four-thirty, like gentry, and eating at seven or later. However, she did consent to let me help wash the dishes, which I have had to learn to call “washing up.” It gave her a good opportunity to tell me things I ought to know about the old people, and boy, did she tell me!

  Interspersed with these tales of simple horror I heard about the Major as a little boy just Carola’s age, when Mrs. Clifton first saw him and when he fell in love with one of her china ornaments, a pig in a boat. Carola, she assured me, was exactly like him, in all his little ways, though of course her American manner of talking was a drawback. “She’ll soon get in the way of it, though,” said Mrs. Clifton kindly.

  3. THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

  Although in the past I had lived in England and even kept house for a space of time, it wasn’t the same. For one thing I was always planning to leave shortly, or knew I could leave when I wanted: England was one of the countries one visits; it wasn’t home. For another, all of that was before World War II and its aftermath. For a third, I had never before been in Dorset, which is as unlike London and the home counties as Maine is unlike New York and Connecticut.

  Conygar has been lucky in the war. To one side we have fields stretching over the Downs to the seashore; less than an hour’s walk to the top of the hill, the Ridgeway, brings us within view of Weymouth. On the opposite side is the heath, Hardy’s Egdon Heath, and a shorter walk still will put you on it, heather and bracken and all. From the house neither side shows the slightest signs of ravage, with the exception of a hangar or two on the airfield that occupies one part of the heath. Weymouth was savagely bombed, and there is a camp of Nissen huts down near Cordwayne, the village, and a house in Cordwayne was knocked down, but none of this can be seen from Conygar, and when I saw London again I knew how lucky we were, even had we been in sight all day long of the bomb craters.

  The mechanics of living, however, are so complicated that for a few puzzled weeks I wondered how anyone could master them. But Englishwomen have long since learned all about it, and Mrs. Clifton cushioned the first impact by doing all the shopping and planning of meals. Louise Liu, the Chinese girl who came to live with us after we had been here a month—I’ll explain Louise in due course—often told me, half with genuine congratulation and half with irritable envy, that I was very lucky. Louise used to keep house for her sister in a London suburb, and spent long hours of the day standing in queues to get fish, or meat, or an infrequent egg. Housekeeping in the cities of England is still a special hell of waiting around and contriving. It was never easy, even before the war, to clean your house and cook your meals in the average English house; facilities were old-fashioned; people were slow to adopt American- or Swedish-style improvements. Like the Chinese they had a passionate attachment to the old ways. With all its plumbing pride, Conygar has no refrigerator, not even an icebox. We use a larder with stone slabs for cooling, which is all right except for two months of summer, and who cares about two months? Yet for a large country house, Conygar is considered very modern. The electric fittings are fantastically variegated: to reform them we would have to pull out a lot of walls. One can’t buy the right sort of plug these days. Thus we often burn out fuses, and there is only one socket in one room where we can plug in the iron, and one other room where our antique electric heater can be used, and so it goes.

  In spite of all these typical difficulties, Englishwomen are passionately cleanly in their houses, and go to lengths I can’t remember being matched in America, to keep up appearances. They black their fireplaces and their stoves, redden the bricks, and above all polish the brass which glitters from the façades of the furniture and from the dozens of fenders, ornaments, and umbrella stands which fill the houses. In shops here I have seen ornamental brass fenders to go with electric fires—surely the last word in unnecessary labor- making ugliness. Englishwomen get down on their knees and scrub, and scrub, and scrub. It gives me a backache even to think of it, but Mrs. Clifton did all those things with proud fervor, when she wasn’t cooking or washing up in the scullery sink. Incidentally, the sink, like many others I have seen here, was designed for a midget or a ten-year-old girl; it also stops itself up quite often.

  In what Clifton calls the good old days there were two or three maids to do the cleaning. There was adequate “lino” on the kitchen and scullery floors, so that sweeping and mopping were not so difficult. We can’t get lino now. The back stairs were not ragged and jagged with nails and splinters. The walls were painted whenever they needed it: you didn’t have to apply to the proper Ministry for a permit to paint them, and even if you had done so there was no crisis forcing the Ministry to say no. In the good old days, with plenty of good old labor at the good old minuscule wages, the lady of the house had no headache. Maybe the maids did, but the lady of the house didn’t. Spiritually I am afraid I am an anachronism; I should have been the lady of the house in the good old days instead of now. Not that I really get headaches over keeping the house clean; I just don’t keep it clean. I don’t have the Englishwoman’s house pride; anyway, Conygar is cleaner than any New York house, even under my management.

>   Food, however, is another matter and one I cannot ignore. In one way life has been simplified by the Austerity Era, because shopping as it used to be doesn’t exist. You get the meat you get in your own turn with the butcher, and you take it. You get just so much of what is known, distressfully, as “carcass meat,” and the rest as corned beef. You get your eggs if there are any, one, two, or three a week per person, but usually there aren’t any. There is butter or margarine to a certain amount, sugar to a certain amount, chocolate or other candy the same, milk, etc., etc. In addition to the fixed ration you have a number of “points” every month to be expended on such things as tinned salmon, com flakes, tinned fruit—it’s no use trying to put it all down because the whole pattern shifts from month to month, depending on national supplies. That is where Mrs. Clifton’s management and experience were invaluable. So far so good; the Labour Government claims to have evened up the English diet, improving the lot of the submerged third and bringing down the much-too-high level of the luxury classes. The luxury classes storm and rave and deny that anyone is better off, whereas the unfortunate Strachey, Minister of Food, goes on claiming that most people are much better off nowadays. In theory he is correct, but practical matters have gone outside the control of the Government, and theory or no theory, food is tight. It has nothing to do with Socialism; food just is tight all over the world, and consequently it’s tight in England. But it is equally tight for everybody. Unlike any other nation I know, England is honest about rationing.

  The special curse of the British housewife, queueing up, is also spared me and Mrs. Clifton. Of course a lot of women actually like the queue. It’s a social occasion in a way. In a comparatively small town like Dorchester there’s not much need to queue up; the shopman knows everybody, he divides his stuff fairly, and there is no particular hurry to get there first. Our only real trial regarding queues is at the Food Control Office; every change of ration books means a lot of paper work, done by a couple of painstaking women who write fine Spencerian hands and linger lovingly over each stroke, while we stand there first on one leg and then the other.