England to Me: A Memoir Read online

  “Carola’s so funny,” reported Ruth Cooper. “We scream with laughter at her all day. You’ve no idea.”

  I looked at her dubiously, but she is a seasoned schoolkeeper; no word of harsher criticism dropped from her lips. Still, I was dubious. American children are spoiled; I have heard that before; in fact, I know it without being told. On the other side, however, was my conviction that English children are cowed. I looked carefully at Carola when she came home for lunch, wondering if she had been cowed that morning.

  “How was school?” I said as she came into my sitting room.

  “Oh, all right,” said Carola carelessly, balancing across the back of a chair on her stomach. A child seems much older than usual whenever it has encountered a new experience, and Carola seemed superior at that moment; almost arrogant.

  “Are the children nice?” I persisted.

  “Okay, I guess.” She slid gently down into the chair seat, head first. It creaked. None of our chairs is very strong, after all those years in storage.

  “Who was the nicest one?”

  Carola paused in a futile attempt to stand on her head without support. Lying on her back across the chair arms, she gave my question a certain amount of judicious thought.

  “Me, I think,” she said at last.

  The argument about the Queen Mary was typical of Carola for nearly a year, and then her allegiance began to waver, at least to get divided. What will happen in the end, only the future knows. She has “dual nationality,” i.e., she can use either a British or an American passport, and is entitled when she comes of age to decide which country is truly hers, though even then there is no law against her holding both passports. However, she has an American one now, a green one like mine. I don’t know why she entered this country with such a chip on her shoulder. I suppose she felt different; she knew she talked in a special way, and the people she met probably rubbed it in that she was not like the others. Immediately Carola decided that if she was different, she was right and the others were wrong. If she was American, then it was better to be American.…Now an adult, having made up his mind in such a comfortable, bolstering sort of way, would go on and act accordingly, but children’s ears and minds are softer. Soon Carola was rebuking me for saying “dirdy” instead of “dirty,” and “can’t” instead of “cahn’t.”

  Those are inadvertent changes. Face to face with a definite comparison, she still shouts mechanically that everything in New York is good, better than the equivalent in London. She can’t remember New York very well; after all, a four-year-old’s New York is pretty well confined to school, the Park, the house, and an occasional visit to a shop. For a year she talked lovingly about the New York house, and would make me go over it with her in memory, floor by floor, room by room. The nursery, the pictures on the wall, the little oak bed. The big Teddy bear which I said was too large to pack: she remembers him only when she sees him in a certain photograph, and then reminds me bitterly of him.…

  After we had been here a year I wrote and asked my sister to go through the furniture I hadn’t disposed of and dig out the nursery pictures and send them over here. The bear, alas, had gone to some children’s hospital, but then he was only one of a whole family of bears, and we had all the others. I was glad to get the pictures, of course; I rushed upstairs with them and called Carola.

  “Look!” I cried, holding them up.

  She stared. “Whatever are they, Mummy?”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “Have I ever seen them before?”

  “Well—a long time ago.”

  There you are, I said to myself, and now she calls me “Mummy,” too, not “Mommy.”

  When we go back to the States, what will happen? Carola is very sentimental about the past. Since she was two and I could notice it she has always looked back longingly over her shoulder at her vanishing.youth. When we left China she was reluctant, when we left America she was reluctant, and the other day when I said we were going to spend the summer in the States she said she wasn’t sure she wanted to go.

  “Not for good, you know,” I said, for I have learned something. “We’re coming back. This is our own place and we’ll always come back.”

  “Oh.” She looked easier in her mind.

  Nevertheless: “What are those soldiers doing, Mummy?” she asked the other day, craning her neck over the edge of my newspaper.

  “Going home. See how happy they look. They’re German soldiers —prisoners of war in North Africa. They’ve been there for years and years, ever since our soldiers captured them. Now they’re going home to Germany.”

  “What soldiers captured them?”

  “Ours.”

  “I mean, English or American?”

  “English, I believe. Yes, English. You see, it’s the English who are taking them back now to Germany.”

  “Not the Americans?”

  “Not this time, no.”

  “Those are English soldiers there, taking them home?”

  “Yes, Carola. Now leave Mummy—”

  Carola sat back in her chair, silent for a moment, and then I heard her say in soft, thoughtful tones,

  “I expect the American Army was too busy.”

  5. SAILOR’S HOLIDAY

  The Major’s family has a streak of the jackdaw, and our house is full of strange collections. There are Indian fabrics and Austrian carvings, fans from France and coins from Russia, majolica birdbaths and African spears, all cluttering up the place. They attract no attention whatever; Dorset is a famous haven for retired service people, and Conygar is not the only amateur museum in the neighborhood by a long shot. I should say that the one item at our house that ever caused much talk was our Chinese secretary, Louise Liu.

  There were drawbacks for her, living with us. It could not have been nice that some of the local people mistook her nationality and spoke of her as “that Japanese girl over to Conygar,” and it was even worse for her, a Chinese lady, to do housework. Ladies don’t do housework in China, and Louise far preferred her secretarial duties to her domestic ones. She braved it all, though, even the climate, and it went to my heart when I saw her crouched over the fire in her room, a pathetic small figure, shivering and miserably refusing to go out of doors.

  “You’d feel better if you’d run around and start your blood circulating, Louise,” I said to her once.

  “I’d only wear out my shoes,” said Louise through chattering teeth. “I’d never find another pair of size one in this blasted country.”

  Louise usually wore European clothes. She always had, even in Shanghai, and like many other Shanghai girls, she spoke English from choice. She had never been into the interior of China, and, actually, she didn’t speak Chinese very well. It was a further irritation for her that the British were always being surprised when she didn’t talk English like Charlie Chan. A Cockney once congratulated her on having picked up the language so remarkably well. She retorted, quick as a snapping turtle, “To tell you the truth, I’ve never in my life heard such bad English spoken as I’ve heard since I got to England.”

  Still, she didn’t want to go back to Shanghai.

  Just in time to save her nature from becoming hopelessly warped, the long, dreary winter came to an end. Louise, like other hibernating animals, came out of her hole slowly and timidly. For a few days she contented herself with wrapping up snugly and sitting on the lawn, but one sunny afternoon she grew brave and walked with me to the village post office.

  “You’re quite right,” she said when we returned. “It does warm you up taking a long walk like that.”

  “Long walk?” repeated the Major. “You must have tottered all of half a mile, Louise. Here, just look at this in the Times—it’ll interest you.”

  On the “Court Circular” page was a little item from the Admiralty, stating that the captain of H.M.S. Renown, a training ship at Plymouth, was appealing to the British public to make a gesture of international good will. Seven hundred Chinese naval ratings, undergoing
a year’s training on the Renown, were due for ten days’ leave as an Easter holiday. Few of them had friends in Britain. Would public-spirited citizens, therefore, please invite these boys to their homes for the ten days?

  “Oh, do let’s invite one, Charles,” I said.

  “I’ve already written in, asking for two,” said the Major. “So, Louise, you’ll have to study up your Chinese before they get here. Have you a Chinese dress, by any chance?”

  “Oh, I’ve got a Chinese dress. But naval ratings! Really! If they were officers, now …”

  In due time we received a nice avuncular letter from the Renown’s captain, saying that Mr. Lu and Mr. Ching would be arriving on such-and-such a day on such-and-such a train, and that the Navy was ever so grateful. He suggested that we meet the train, as Messrs. Lu and Ching, being strangers to England, might otherwise get lost between the station and the house. They would be equipped with their ration books and a pound apiece to pay for their keep.

  “They can keep their pound,” said the Major. “Come on upstairs and look at the room. I’ve been fixing it up. I thought we might as well help them feel at home while we’re about it.”

  He had gone to a lot of trouble. Our biggest Chinese screen was now in the guest room, and a K’ang Hsi bowl. He had hung scroll paintings on the walls. As a final touch he’d filled the little window- sill bookcases with some of his Chinese books—the classics. I looked at them dubiously.

  “That’ll shake ’em,” I said. “Darling, do you really think they’ll want to spend their time reading Confucius? After all, they’re sailors, not sages. Sailors on holiday, at that.”

  “It’s a very cultured race,” he said airily.

  Mr. Lu and Mr. Ching were supposed to arrive by the three- thirty, but they didn’t. We waited at the station a couple of hours for the next train from Plymouth, but they weren’t on that one either. Gloomily, we went home, wondering whether we should telegraph the Admiralty to report their disappearance, but before we had come to any conclusion, they drove up in a taxi, having arrived on an eastbound instead of a westbound train. They were very neat in their British sailor suits, and very apologetic.

  “I think we must have taken the wrong train, either at first or later on,” said Mr. Lu, in English. “We have been on several trains. We saw a good deal of England.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Ching absently. He was staring with a natural astonishment at Louise, who stood on the doorstep in a Chinese dress, looking as much at home as if she had been born at Conygar.

  Mr. Lu was tall and thin, with an earnest, solemn manner. If he had been one of my students when I was a teacher in China, I decided, he would probably have been the bright boy of the class. Mr. Ching was smaller, and he had a cherubic smile; as a student he would not have been stupid, either, I thought, but one would have had to keep him interested. They were both nineteen and had perfectly lovely manners.

  At dinner the Major tried to find out something about their training, and they answered all his questions but never carried the conversation further in that direction. At first I thought it was because of language difficulty, but I was wrong. Their English was fairly fluent, and they were anxious to practice it. It was indeed because of their English, Mr. Lu explained, that they had been placed high on the list of men to be sent out as private guests.

  “Only forty of us can speak enough English,” he said. “Most of these were sent to homes. All the other Chinese have gone to camps or on organized tours. We are very lucky to find old friends of China. We never expected—” He bowed to me and to the Major and to Louise, all at once. “It is very delightful. I see you have a typewriter. All of this year I have longed to practice on the typewriter. You will permit?”

  We said we would permit.

  “That is wonderful,” said Mr. Lu. “I have been longing, dreaming for a typewriter. I hope, when I have passed my examination, to go into the diplomatic service.”

  “Oh, you don’t intend to make a career of the Navy, then?” asked the Major.

  “No longer than necessary.”

  “And what about Mr. Ching? Does he intend to become a naval officer?”

  Mr. Ching giggled, and allowed Mr. Lu to continue as spokesman. “Time will tell,” said Mr. Lu philosophically, “but what Mr. Ching is most pleased with at your house is that you have a piano. He has seen it just now, in the big room over there. Mr. Ching is a composer.”

  “Is he indeed!” I exclaimed.

  “I am leader of our band,” said Mr. Ching, “and in China I have won the prize for composing. You permit that I practice sometimes on the piano? I brought my own violin.”

  We said we would permit. Louise tried to say something in Chinese; the boys were rather slow on the uptake, but as soon, as they knew what she was doing, they were glad to co-operate. They resolved to give her regular lessons in Chinese every evening by the fireside.

  The next morning we were faced with the problem of entertaining the boys. The English method of dealing with house guests is much nicer for hosts than the American method; it consists largely of letting them severely alone. Even in England, though, one is supposed to do something with guests at the beginning, until they have shaken down into the life of the house a little, and at Conygar there is only one thing to do with guests, after they have been walked around the grounds: we take them for another walk, a nice, long one. When the Major broke the news to the boys, they seemed quite amenable, so we started out at once, without Louise, naturally. We decided to walk on the Downs far enough to give them a view of the sea. I suppose we had forgotten how Chinese people are in the country. Chinese people like to go out and look at Nature, but they have an ambling, leisurely temperament, and as we crossed the second field, Mr. Lu said to me, in polite but despairing tones, “Do all English people walk as fast as this?”

  I called to the Major and we throttled ourselves down a bit. The boys relaxed. There is another thing I had forgotten about Chinese in the country, but Mr. Ching reminded me. Chinese like to sing while they walk. “Would you like to hear one of my songs?” he asked. I said yes, and immediately he opened his mouth and sang.

  The Downs walk is a very lonely one. It is seldom that we meet anybody there. We didn’t meet anyone that day, and perhaps it was as well for our neighbors’ nerves that we didn’t. The Dorset sheep were startled into raising their heads from the grass, and even the cows looked around in a bewildered way. Mr. Ching sang Chinese songs, and then Mr. Lu sang European songs, which, as he sang them, sounded more Chinese than the Chinese ones. They called on us to do some singing in our turn. I obliged, but when they appealed to the Major, he was obdurate in refusing.

  “Oh, do, please, Major,” said Mr. Lu. “Sing us an English Army song.”

  “Come on, Major,” I said.

  “Please, Major,” said Mr. Ching.

  The Major shook his head. “You have to make him drunk first,” I explained.

  They laughed politely, if a bit incredulously, and sang some more in Chinese.

  It had been an enjoyable walk, they said when we got home; it had been truly enjoyable. But we soon discovered that on the whole they preferred to stay indoors, those sailors, and play the piano and the violin, and practice on the typewriter. That is what they did for the rest of their visit. Evenings, they tried to teach Louise Chinese. Mr. Lu said she had an awful accent—a British accent, he said. He implied it was incurable.

  Louise’s attitude toward the boys was not as approving as mine. She seemed to find them strange and foreign.

  “I wonder, looking at them, what sort of China I’ll be going back to,” she said to me in confidence. “I’ve always felt kind of inferior, knowing so little about my own country. I tell myself that knowing these boys ought to help me, but somehow it doesn’t. I don’t get any sort of picture at all from them.”

  “They’re awfully cute,” I said.

  “Y-yes. Of course they’re terribly young,” she said, “but—Oh well, I guess I’ve spent too much time wi
th Englishmen lately. These Chinese seem sort of sissy. Don’t they?”

  “Why, Louise!” I was shocked. “It’s an entirely different school of manners, that’s all. They’re perfectly good examples of educated boys. You ought to be ashamed!”

  “I know it,” she said. “I know it, and I am ashamed, honestly. But that’s the way it strikes me. I can’t help it.”

  A few days in a country house can do a lot toward cementing human relations, even when the people involved have started out as strangers. By the end of a week we felt as if Mr. Lu and Mr. Ching had been with us for years. Everything had settled down to routine. The Major remarked that they both behaved exactly like Fitzroy, our dog, who, when he came in from outdoors, rushed straight to the fire in the sitting room and remained there until he was driven away. This was not quite true of our guests. Mr. Ching was at the piano most of the time, or so it seemed to me, practicing scales. Mr. Lu worked very hard at his typewriting practice. Sometimes he would stop and ask me a question about English grammar; once he wanted to know whether “Dearest So-and-So” or “My very dear So-and-So” was the proper way to start a letter.