England to Me: A Memoir Read online

  Mrs. Clifton was never one for buying luxuries. She kept the bills down. What with our vegetable garden, she didn’t buy green stuff. She never dreamed of lavishing money on fowls. Years of experience had taught her the way, and we followed the great British routine—The Joint hot on Sunday, cold on Monday (if there was any left), fish on Tuesday, minced something on Wednesday, corned beef on Thursday, fish on Friday, and God knows what on Saturday. We always had cabbage (“greens” to the English) with everything. In the evening we had macaroni, which the Major loathes. If I were a good housewife and if we hadn’t had Mrs. Clifton I would have learned immediately (perhaps) to whip up dainty little extras, but I am not a good housewife, and there was Mrs. Clifton. She would have liked me to discuss the day’s meals with her, as former ladies of Conygar had always done every morning. I tried, tentatively and timidly, but it got monotonous. I would ask what we were going to have, and she would say, “Well, there’s the meat left from The Joint, so we’ll ’ave that, and I did a nice steam pudding.” Any suggestions of change would be met with a sarcastic smile and a pitying explanation, quite a good explanation, quite unanswerable. Oh, the hell with it. And the Major could always fill up on bread and cheese, couldn’t he? But I made a vow that if ever I got out from under Mrs. Clifton I would try to do better. At any rate I would be more extravagant. I would find a fleshpot somewhere.

  Still, the Major did like paying the bills. She certainly kept them down, as well as us.

  I must here confess again, regretfully, that I am a bad housewife. Give me a house in China and a lot of servants, and a favorable exchange, and I can evolve a pleasant existence. Give me a house in New York with Willy—there was a good housekeeper for you, though a ruinous one—and I can do the same. But give me a house all by itself and I let it alone. It isn’t that I can’t mop and dust and sweep and cook and wash and iron, I can. I even like some of it, the cooking and ironing. It’s just that there are often so many other things I would rather be doing at that particular moment that I grow first resentful, then furious, and then if things aren’t in a desperate state I finally get absent-minded and slip off into one of my more favored pursuits, such as reading, or just sitting with my eyes fixed on nothing, or if it’s a fine day, wandering about outside with the dog. One day of dusting, making beds, and washing Carola’s clothes leaves me in a state of boiling rage, which is none the less hot because I can’t find a suitable object to vent it on. You can’t square off and kick a house in the pants.

  “The only answer,” I said to the Major, “is to get other people to do the housework. Let’s pretend I’m a man, immune to daily responsibility. I’m perfectly willing to act like you and drop in to the kitchen occasionally in a whimsical way, to help with the dishes; everybody thinks it very sweet of you, and so do I. Well, why shouldn’t I act the same way?”

  “But even if we could get the help, which I doubt, it costs so much,” said the Major.

  “Then let’s not spend money on anything else, except books. You can sit downstairs and read, and I can sit upstairs and read, and we’ll all be happy.”

  He looked unconvinced.

  “You see,” I said for the twentieth time—yet it seemed necessary to make it clear—”I don’t like housework.”

  For the time being I could play the game of equality without being caught up; the Major could not protest that he had his job too. He was on sick leave while the Army decided (a) what to do about his arm, which is paralyzed, and (b) what to do with an officer when his arm is paralyzed. Still, I knew I wasn’t being fair. Never mind, I said to myself, it won’t last long. They will decide soon, and we’ll go away somewhere to new problems, so I can avoid facing these.

  Those accustomed to the ways of the regular Army will understand how we went on from week to week, sometimes worrying that the Major was on full pay and doing nothing, but oftener worrying that the Army would suddenly wake up to the fact and give him something to do. There was one attempt at this, before any of the medical people decreed he should be on sick leave while his hand and arm were treated. Some man at the War Office, just after we arrived, suggested that the Major be put in command of a camp for prisoners of war.

  “If I am,” said the Major, fresh from prison camp himself, “I’ll let them all out the first night I’m in charge. I think it’s disgraceful they’re still here at all.”

  It is no wonder that they put him aside and forgot him. After months of waiting somebody decreed that he should have an operation on the hand, or a series of operations, which meant at least a year immobile in England. This changed matters. We were definitely there for the winter, and we set about taking Conygar more seriously.

  “First, domestic help,” I said, rubbing my hands rapturously.

  “Certainly not. First, help in the garden,” said the Major.

  In the end we compromised and decided on both.

  Domestic difficulties are of no interest except to people who have had the same sort, so I will skip over our earlier attempts, though I’m inclined to linger a bit on the couple who applied for the job soon after we advertised, arriving in an elegant car (we have no car), snooting the house, and after their inspection leaving us, as we thought, forever and without a word. Their little boy gave Carola a penny when they departed. Nevertheless they did continue to want the job, but by that time we had decided against them, and turned our thoughts toward the foreign labor market.

  It is the highly exotic element of Conygar which makes the household worth noticing. Even in America I think the mixture would be noticeable, though any New York public schoolroom offers a pretty galaxy of European names. Here in Dorset they are not so accustomed to different nations as we are. The war brought them the Americans, who made a tremendous impression on Cordwayne, but now the Americans are gone. (Even so, they live in memory. Cordwayne boys still resent the memory of their popularity, and won’t go out with Cordwayne girls. It will take a year or two to efface that jealousy.) They are gone, and Dorset is Dorset, slow to change, Chinese in its inflexibility, though Chinese also in its tolerance.

  By the end of two months we had enlarged the family circle by one Pole, one Scot, one Chinese, and one Eurasian. Considering that we already consisted of two Americans and a Dane as well as the English Major and the very English Cliftons, it is no wonder that Conygar became known in the neighborhood as the League of Nations. The Pole is Jan, a charming boy who escaped from the Germans in Poland, joined the British, and fought in Holland, and was retired to a camp up north after the surrender, to recover from a wound very much like the Major’s, and to learn agriculture in accordance with a government scheme. He was allowed to work for us as Clifton’s assistant under the arrangement of “relocation,” for such Polish soldiers in England as did not want to go home under the present conditions. Later he applied for naturalization.

  The Scot is Nellie, his wife. Nellie is a Glasgow girl, very young and shy. We thought she might do the cooking and let Mrs. Clifton take it easy, just cleaning a bit. Mrs. Clifton, however, was so much distressed at the idea of retiring that we weakly left her there in the kitchen, and Nellie did the cleaning instead.

  The Chinese was Louise Liu, a girl known to me for the past twelve years and to the Major for nearly as long. Louise was with the Chinese Ministry of Information and did secretarial work for us in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Pearl Harbor caught her in the Crown colony, and as she was British by marriage, the Japanese interned her at Stanley. With her small baby she had been “repatriated” to England, which country she had never seen until then, or thought of as home. Until she should get over the effects of four years’ imprisonment, she thought she had better stay in England, and it seemed only natural that she should move in and go right on typing for us, as she had always done before. The Eurasian, of course, was the small Ian, ten months old when they got to Conygar.

  That is the explanation, which I hope clears up a rather complicated situation. Dorset was curious, but after a few weeks Dorset in general decide
d there was nothing really suspicious about the line-up. The Cliftons, however, didn’t like any part of it. They hadn’t asked for those extra hands to help them. Work was not what they feared. They were much more concerned with the old days, the old people, and their own position as the only true defenders of the old faith. Clifton, drinking his pint of an evening at the Compasses in Cordwayne, was loud and bitter about it.

  “We fought the war to protect the Poles and the Chinese and all,” he said, “and what happens afterwards? They come here and eat our food.”

  This was awkward for Jan if he happened to be in the bar, but the Cliftons are old, and not as open to reason as was the Home Office. Incidentally, the evolution of Home Office rules is worth a glance. The situation of labor in 1946 was precarious, and I don’t mean the Labour Government. England was seriously in need of man power during her earlier reorganization. She still is, for that matter, but steps are now being taken though they are sturdily and maddeningly opposed by British workingmen. The difficulty was only to be expected during the sorting out of demobilization. If people are allowed to pick and choose their jobs, as they are in England, man power being scarce, they naturally go for the jobs they like rather than the jobs the Government wants them to take. Only the threat of unemployment would make anyone, you and me as well, take a job he doesn’t like. Would you, for example, go down and mine coal if you could do an office job instead? I wouldn’t. Nor would I work in a textile factory unless the work was made attractive in various ways, or unless I had to, failing other employment. At first very few men and women in postwar England were forced by personal reasons to go into the coal mines or the factories, and so they just didn’t. They slipped away from the other unpopular jobs as well.

  When we arrived the Home Office was able to allow only the Poles like Jan to take jobs on farms or in gardens, to help produce acutely needed food. There was as yet no legal machinery which would permit Swedes, Danes, Dutch, Swiss, D.P.’s, and other Continental people to work in England, though many such were clamoring to come even at the cost of taking those unpopular jobs which the English scorned. The trade unions were set against them as trade unions have always been, fearing competition and a lowering demand for better hours and wages. Even though the Government was tearing ahead with its naturalization program, and minimum wages were fixed for farm labor as well as factories, the trade unions could not discard their ancient, well-founded jealousies and suspicions. They needed much more convincing. They got it, too, but they hadn’t yet been convinced. In the meantime allied Poles like Jan took a hand, and so did German prisoners of war, the Ministry of Agriculture having declared flatly that they couldn’t afford to let the Germans go.

  Part of the local criticism of Conygar probably abated when Margrethe, our Danish nurse, left us to return to the States, but that was just a drop in the bucket. Louise remained, and Louise was by far our most exotic inmate. She wasn’t the first Asiatic they had ever seen. There were Chinese among the American G.I.’s, and there had been a Japanese butler around Dorchester for twenty years. But she was still a novelty, and I never did get accustomed to the way people stared at us whenever we went out together. I was stupid, and often forgot about Louise’s distinctive looks, because I’m used to them. When people in Dorchester nudged each other, or turned around in tearooms to look at us, especially at Ian, I used to wonder fretfully if my petticoat was showing.

  Inevitably, too, word got round that Louise was Major Boxer’s wife, met and married during his long years in the Orient. Tradesmen delivering parcels at the door would ask Carola about her little brother, and quite a few passersby when we went to town commented on their resemblance.

  4. FOUR WINDS

  “Carola will have to go to school,” I said. “She’s been going for two years now, and she mustn’t miss out on a term.”

  “Mmmmm, yes, of course,” said the Major, looking harassed, as British fathers always do at the mention of education. (And they have reason.) “Council school, I suppose; they must be all right now, since this Government came in.”

  “What’s a council school? What other kinds are there?”

  He explained that a council school is the same thing as a public grammar school in the States: Government run, for the benefit of the general public.

  “Well, of course,” I said in surprise. “Where else could she go?”

  He explained again that in the old days of Capitalism Rampant, nobody who could afford it, or who considered himself a member of the middle classes or of higher social standing, would have thought of sending his children to a council school. “They were for the working classes,” he said. “It’s all different now: that nonsense is all finished. They aim to make them the best schools in the country and to squeeze out all the public schools and prep schools and so forth. A good thing, too; the others are ruinously expensive.”

  I set out in good faith, then, to check up on the nearest council school and to enter Carola’s name on the roll. I was much surprised to discover that the good old days still seemed to exist, as far as Cordwayne is concerned.

  “You can’t put Carola into Cordwayne school,” said Mrs. Clifton, horrified. “They’ll never take her. She’s not old enough, for one thing. They’re crowded, for another. Besides …” She broke off, twisting her apron. “Mrs. Cooper, as lives next door, has got a nice little school for young ladies and gentlemen,” she said eagerly. “You’d better ask there, Mrs. Boxer.”

  Of course I didn’t let Mrs. Clifton stop me, and I ignored her advice about next door. But the Cordwayne people, for once, all agreed emphatically with Mrs. Clifton. For another thing, they pointed out, the school was two miles away; how was I to get Carola there and back without a car? “You can’t be thinking of it, madam. She’ll get into such a nasty way of speaking. They’re all so rough, those children.”

  Frustrated, I appealed to the Major, and he rubbed his head and looked uncertain. We inquired among his old friends, most of whom had families of their own. Yes, they said, it was being done here and there: people did use the council schools. One of the fathers, in fact, meant to take the plunge the next term and send his children to their local one. “It’s a good school, though,” he explained. “I made sure first. One must pick and choose. They’re uneven, very. As it happens, that swank school our girls are at now —it’s wildly expensive—is no bloody good, and the council school couldn’t be worse, that’s what I say, and Joan agrees, so we’re having a try. What’s more, there’s that fellow in Dorchester- Lord something or other, the Labour peer, well, he’s a good Socialist, I’m told—damned turncoat—and his kiddies are in the council school near his house. I’ve heard it’s a reasonably adequate one. Cordwayne? I wouldn’t know. You’d better ask the villagers; they’ll tell you. Oh, they don’t recommend it? Then I shouldn’t think of it if I were you.”

  “They sounded scandalized,” I explained. “What’s more, they made me feel I was shoving some worthy working-class child right out of doors and taking over his desk.”

  “Mmm, yes. You get that attitude, of course, in a Conservative stronghold like Dorset. I’d wait a while if I were you. Easy does it.”

  “But what are we to do, then?” demanded the Major. “What am I paying all these taxes for if they don’t even educate my child?”

  His friend shrugged. “Don’t ask me, old boy. I didn’t vote ’em in. With teachers underpaid, and no new equipment, and classes of forty to sixty students––”

  “What?” I asked, horrified.

  “Lord bless you, yes, and now they’re raising the school-leaving age to fifteen. Shortage of textbooks, shortage of teachers, shortage of schools— No, it may be a noble experiment, but you’ve got to pick and choose your council school so far. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea. We happen to be lucky. If there’s no room at Cordwayne, I’d go easy, if I were you, adopting the new democracy. Wait a minute.… Cordwayne.… Isn’t that where the Four Winds school is? The Cooper house, next door to you? Lord, Charley, what a
re you waiting for?”

  So in the end we put Carola into the Four Winds school, just like any Tory couple. Fees, nine guineas a term, three terms a year, unlike our system—autumn term, early spring and summer, interspersed with long holidays, the longest vacation in August and September. At least, I said to myself, Four Winds wasn’t overcrowded. There were seven or eight students that first year, ranging in age from five to nine.

  Dr. Cooper is the county pathologist. His three children, until they went to boarding school, were taught at home by “Nurse,” a young governess. First Zoë, then Janice, then Rupert left the nest. Rupert was only nine when he went away to prep school. “It’s barbarous,” I said warmly to his mother, “just barbarous,” and she laughed at me. But Ruth Cooper, though she is as Spartan as most British women, missed the thunder of little feet around the house after Rupert left, and she also hated to let Nurse go to another job somewhere. Nurse is really a very good governess. They decided to open this little school. Some of the children were day scholars like Carola; others lived at Four Winds as boarders. At five, Carola, the baby of the class, spent the morning learning reading, writing, and what I was taught to call arithmetic, but they call it “tables.”

  All school children in England get free milk, which at Four Winds they drink every morning for their “elevenses.” The Labour Government has improved on the system by increasing the school milk allowance, an important item these days when milk is scarce at home.

  Carola had a row with another little girl her first day at school. This fight should have cleared the air according to all the books, and left her firm friends with her opponent from that time on, and never another cross word. It didn’t. True, Carola and Rose were firm friends all right, but they went on fighting, and are fighting still. That day the argument was over ships. Rose, whose father and brother both lost their lives in the war, as navy men, claimed that the Howe, the Navy’s pride, is the biggest ship in the world. Carola, under the happy illusion that the Queen Mary is American, claimed that honor for the Mary. What started out as a public classroom discussion quickly developed into a private fight, with both little girls talking louder and louder, and paying less and less attention to Nurse’s suggestion that they shut up. In the end, Nurse had to send them in opposite directions, into different rooms, until they cooled off. Afterward, I believe, they stenciled pictures or something together, perfectly amicably.