England to Me: A Memoir Read online

  I was pleased to discover that the boys were more than ready to do their share of the housework. “The captain told us to be sure to help,” Mr. Lu explained. They made their beds, cleaned their room (which included dusting off Confucius), and helped with the dishes. Louise one evening surprised me by growing suddenly critical of Mr. Lu’s dishwashing technique. Thinking it over later, I realized that Mr. Lu had irritated Louise that afternoon. We were all taking a gentle little stroll—all except the Major; he had gone on alone, impatient for a bracing five-mile walk—when in a lane we encountered a neighbor, a retired British lieutenant commander, accompanied by a setter puppy. The puppy, no doubt patriotically happy at the sight of Mr. Lu and Mr. Ching in their sailor suits, rushed over to us. Mr. Lu promptly ran in one direction and Mr. Ching in the other, while the puppy tore after first one and then the other, and I stood in the middle of the path yelling in Chinese, “Don’t be afraid! Don’t be afraid!” Louise didn’t say anything. After the commander had captured his puppy and gone on, she was very quiet. I don’t think she said anything all the way home.

  Now, however, at the kitchen sink she suddenly let fly at Mr. Lu. “You don’t have to scrub every single spoon three times over,” she said sharply. “It holds us all up, waiting for you. Neither of you boys can wash dishes worth a damn. My goodness, don’t they teach you anything in the Navy?”

  I was not surprised that Mr. Lu, giving Louise her Chinese lesson later that evening, was unduly severe. Certainly she had it coming to her. “No, no!” he said when she had read him a page. “The tones—you don’t get the tones right. The meaning is changed when you don’t get your tones right. You read Chinese with an English rhythm. It is terrible.”

  “It’s better than talking English with a Ningpo accent,” said Louise. I raised my eyebrows, but she wouldn’t look at me. I then noticed, with a belated sense of its significance, that she was wearing a European dress.

  We had three days left, I thought to myself. Would we weather them without a crisis?

  For some time the boys had talked about going to Weymouth and spending the day there on the beach, on their own, and had finally chosen the next to the last day of their visit for the trip. Knowing by experience that Chinese are not shackled, as are we, by a plodding sense of punctuality, I had warned them several times that the only bus to Weymouth ran on time and would pass our gate at ten-thirty in the morning. I guess I wasn’t firm enough. I should have shooed them out forcibly at ten-fifteen, at the latest, but I am out of practice as a teacher of Chinese pupils, and they took their time. At twenty-five past they started out, saying good-by at length and most courteously. Then Mr. Ching came back for a package of cigarettes, and he said good-by again. Mr. Lu had forgotten his handkerchief, and he came back in his turn, which meant another farewell. What followed was reported to me by all three of the people involved—Mr. Ching, Mr. Lu, and Louise. They agreed on one thing at least, that the boys missed the bus.

  “Mr. Ching made us late,” said Mr. Lu that evening. “He had forgotten his cigarettes, and when we reached the road, the bus had gone. I did not care. I prefer to practice my typewriting in any case. Why should one waste precious time on a holiday merely enjoying oneself? Mr. Ching did not agree with me. He wished to walk to Weymouth. To walk!” Mr. Lu’s limpid brown eyes were filled with horror. “Weymouth is eight English miles away by road,” he continued. “That makes twenty-four Chinese miles. Now, if I must walk twenty-four miles, I will do it. In China, I had to walk that far to get to my school. But that was only twice in a year, and for the rest of the time I stayed at the school. I did not wish to walk to Weymouth. We were discussing the matter when Miss Liu approached, and she advised us to wait at the corner at Warmwell Cross for some kind English person to stop and take us in his car. Somebody did, and so we arrived in Weymouth after all.”

  “Mr. Lu, by insisting upon getting his handkerchief, caused us to miss the bus,” said Mr. Ching, more briefly, in his report. “We were, uh, talking it over when Miss Liu came along. She told us to wait for a private car to pick us up, and that is what we did. We had a very good time at Weymouth. We had our pictures taken.”

  “Those boys were having the most awful row, right in the road,” said Louise in the privacy of my bedroom. “A proper Chinese row— you know, pointing at each others noses and then at their own, and shouting. They sounded like rickshaw coolies. I just can’t tell you how silly it looked out there under the trees, between those green fields. They were yelling so loud they didn’t see me coming, and I almost had to step between them before they noticed me.” She stopped.

  “Well, what did you do?” I asked.

  Louise blushed. “I hate to tell you. I guess it had been boiling up in me for a long time, and all of a sudden it boiled over. They made me so angry. I can’t exactly explain it, but it seemed to me that I could see it all right in front of me—everything I get mad at in China. I—well, as a matter of fact, I lost my temper, and I shouted at them. Can you understand it?”

  “Yes, in a way,” I said.

  “Oh, I was awful,” said Louise. “I said, ‘For heaven’s sake, stop making a show of yourselves! Stop all this talking and do something! If that’s the way you feel about it, then go ahead and fight—take off your coats and go to it! Do anything. But stop talking!’ ”

  “Now, really, Louise, that was naughty of you. You ought to remember—”

  Louise interrupted me. “Don’t you start talking too,” she said, her voice quivering with intensity. “If you start jawing me about ancient civilizations, I’ll blow up again. I know it all, and, honestly, I’m ashamed of myself now. It’s all over, and I’m terribly sorry about it. I was right after I’d done it. They stood there in the road looking like babies that had just been spanked. Oh, the poor kids, and after all they’re only nineteen, and so far from home too. Oh, you can’t make me feel any worse than I do already. Right away I apologized. ‘Now you go and wait at the crossroads,’ I said, ‘and somebody’ll give you a lift. It’s a cinch in those uniforms.’ I was right too.”

  As Louise left the room, I noticed that she was wearing her Chinese dress again. She paused at the door. “What’s more,” she said, “I’ll be back in China before they get there, and I’ve promised I’ll go see their mothers. I hope you’re satisfied.”

  Our farewell dinner was a success, I think, even though the Major flatly refused to stand up at the table, en famille, and make a speech in reply to Mr. Lu’s graceful oration of thanks, which he had delivered standing. We can all bear witness that the boys started out, at any rate, on the right train for Plymouth, and whatever happened en route, they must have got there ultimately, because I had a letter soon afterward from the captain. He wrote:

  I am most grateful to you for your kindness to the two Chinese naval ratings during their leave. They both enjoyed themselves very much, and one says he learnt quite a lot about China!

  Well, maybe he did, at that. But for Louise, it might have been years before he got to know a modern Chinese girl.

  6. POISON IN THE KITCHEN

  Somehow by dint of happy accidents Conygar was swung into line. I should like to say it was done by unremitting toil, but that would not be true. Our foil has been considerable, but most of it was useless. For example, there are the nettles. The Major went out with a billhook and started to hack them down. For several weeks he refused to show me where the other billhook is kept, because he has a firm conviction that I am so clumsy I am apt to cut my own foot off. He doesn’t call it clumsiness, of course; he says I am absent-minded; but the result was the same. I finally got hold of the other billhook, and set to work cutting nettles on my own. Between us we cut down lots of them, yet by the time they had been cut at one end of the path, they were high and flourishing again at the other.

  There is supposed to be something good for nettles—sodium chlorate. We can’t buy it anywhere in England. I think they must be using it for atomic energy, like mothballs and the other chemical things we can
not get. We continue to cut nettles, but really only because it is such good exercise. We are told, but we do not believe, that if you cut a nettle three times in a year it gets discouraged. Maybe a nettle standing all alone in a garden, among roses, might become melancholy enough to give up after such rough treatment, but all our nettles have to do is look around them at their millions of brothers, and they pick up heart and go right ahead, come what may. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like these things in the States. They really sting when you touch them. I have tried the truth of the old proverb about grasping a nettle firmly so it won’t sting you, but it simply stung me twice as hard. They grow thicker than corn, they stand higher, they make walking absolutely impossible, and they string themselves together with some sort of sticky creeper. Our equivalent, I suppose, is poison ivy.

  I also took to picking up pine cones for fuel. We have plenty of pine trees of many sorts; if I were a good countrywoman I would be able to give their Latin names, but as it is all I know is that some are large and heavy and not very much unfolded, others are large but leafy, like artichokes, and many more are small, slim, graceful little things, hardly worth the trouble of burning. Gathering cones gave me a pleasant feeling of being a part of Nature. I would take out a potato sack, make my rounds of the trees, which I have got to know very well, and come staggering home with a heavy load of the things. On one cold day, however, Louise in the first winter burnt up most of them. Louise sometimes stayed indoors for three weeks at a stretch, huddled over her fire and moaning softly.

  There is the lichen on the apple trees too. Lichen, however you pronounce it, is stubborn stuff in England, covering the branches with a blue furry ferny garment that under the microscope would pass for a Jurassic landscape. You can strip it off by hand if you are persistent, but this takes years and years. You must go carefully over the tree, doing a lot of rubbing. Clifton always said blithely that what the trees in the orchard wanted was just one good spraying—if only he could get the liquid you spray with. At last he got some, and he sprayed, and then it rained and washed the spray off. He had to get more. Then he sprayed again, and again it rained. The third time had to be the last, because it was too late in the spring to do it again, and that spraying, too, was washed off by rain, so Carola and I went back to hand work on the trees, but we didn’t really make much difference to them.

  Yet the place is much better now, though this has nothing at all to do with my amateurish attempts. Jan has sometimes taken time off from the vegetables to cut grass and hedges. Hedges are not so virile as nettles and in a year Jan, unlike me, can do a lot of effective trimming. Outside the house by this time Conygar has a much more clean-shaven look. It doesn’t exactly give a first-thing- in-the-morning Barbasol impression even now, but it looks all right, the way the Major does when he is late for breakfast and remembers that he is after all a blond and one day won’t matter.

  Inside the house we have just about kept step. Such as we are we owe it all to the Major’s sister, Beryl. Our marriage has been unfair, from the music-hall point of view. Whereas when he married me the Major took on an appalling list of in-laws—one of the Hahn husbands has been heard to say gloomily that it was like marrying into a God-damned anthill—I married only one nonresident brother-in-law and a volatile sister-in-law. The Colonel has been in Germany most of the time since the end of the war, and Beryl, who married a brigadier, took him out of the Army and over to Canada.

  Getting the Brigadier out of the Army was a lengthy process, and Beryl is an energetic woman without much patience. She went to Canada on her own first, to see the house she had bought at long distance, on the strength of two rather fuzzy photographs she had looked at in India. I shall never forget that visit, incidentally, because she broke it on the way in New York, at our house. She arrived with her small daughter and a Siamese cat, in a cargo boat from India, after a long and eventful war. After staying with us only long enough to eat a few square meals, for rationing in India was evidently drastic, she went up to Canada and acquired a large army truck, using her priority as a veteran to do so. She remodeled this truck to some extent—it looked rather like a covered wagon when it was finished—and loaded her daughter and most of her belongings into it, and drove away to move into the house in British Columbia. I say “most of her belongings,” because Beryl always forgets something, and for days after they had gone I kept finding Clio’s dresses and toys and Beryl’s hairbrushes and books and things all over the house.

  The saga of the house in British Columbia is a matter on which I am not well posted, because Beryl’s letters are always written in intense haste, in a high wind, and usually at several degrees below zero. I gather it is on an island, very difficult to get to; Beryl likes difficulties. One uses first a large boat to a neighboring island, and then a small one to the landing. The house itself, which was not very easy for me to make out on the bargain photograph, has been completely changed by this time, as Beryl and the Brigadier are constantly remodeling it. At least they keep knocking it down and putting it up again, usually for some odd reason under the same weather conditions which she favors for her letter writing. British Columbia is evidently always swept by a high wind, and freezing. I may have got the wrong idea, but that is the idea I’ve got. Beryl is energetic; I shall never forget one of the first letters I ever had from her, after she had been on a trip into Tibet: “Marvelous time,” she wrote. “Up to our hips in snow the whole time. Marvelous.”

  Before they let the Brigadier out of his nice quiet army, Beryl came over to England (by plane) to wait for him to meet her there, or, if necessary, to fly down to India herself and hurry him up. She found that things in the resignation line were proceeding well enough without her, and in five minutes she had done what she came to Conygar to do, i.e., pick up a musical box she had when she was a child, to give to Clio. Kicking her heels, she decided not to waste the three months she had at her disposal. I must say she didn’t. That year Britons going abroad were allowed to change a sum of seventy-five pounds for holidays, but I don’t think Beryl used that much. She had old friends in Austria, and she decided to go over to see them. It was early in 1947, and people were not being allowed to visit Austria, but that meant nothing to Beryl. She had rounded up a lot of old clothes from the trunks in the Conygar storehouse, and of course she meant to take them over to her friends in Austria. Why not?

  A number of civil servants spent two or three days telling Beryl, in many words, why not. With each interview she became more determined to go to Austria. She telephoned friends, investigated legal and illegal wangles, harried the ticket sellers and the consulates, and in the end went to Austria. I could have told the civil servants at the very beginning that it was no use, but they wouldn’t have listened. Beryl went to Austria.

  Afterward, temporarily assuaged and triumphant, she let the Major persuade her to put Conygar to rights. All these months I had remained sunk in a characteristic stupor, satisfied with the way things were. I think it’s a matter of metabolism, but I do hate making a fuss. I even hate stopping the car on a tour, to get gasoline and oil. It disturbs my thoughts; it makes me cross; I had a quarrel once with a girl over it. “We had better change the oil,” she said. “Why?” I said reluctantly. “Because we’ve gone more than five hundred miles,” she said. “Well, let’s go a thousand and change it twice,” I said, and she was angry, and said bitter things, and one thing led to another, and in the end I took the train. To get back to Beryl, working away on the house.

  “These are hall curtains,” she said briskly to Charles. “There ought to be big metal rings; where are they?” They put up the curtains, perilously and at length, while I held one of the stepladders. “That’s it,” said Beryl, coming down the stepladder.

  “Can I let go now?” I asked.

  “Eh? Oh yes—thanks. Now, Charley, what about this bureau?”

  All around me, for several days, this sort of thing went on. At the end of the several days there the house was, all furnished, just exa
ctly the way it was years ago, except for what had been burnt. Also, as a special favor to me, Beryl had tactfully got out of replacing our washstand. What a sister! The rooms had been scrubbed, the lank dangling strips of wallpaper pasted back into place, the tables put up. First the halls, then the bedrooms, then the drawing room, then the dining room. Suddenly there stood Conygar, a little battered, not well painted, a pane of glass out here and there, but definitely a residence.

  “What a woman!” I said, moved out of my lethargy for once. “Wonderful work, Beryl, wonderful. I had no idea the place was so attractive.”

  “Well, I’ve always advised Charley to sell it, but I’m glad now he didn’t,” she said. “Now you’ve got a place to live, and they’re hard to get.”

  About this time the Brigadier arrived, and they set off on a round of visits. They didn’t set off the way I would, in a taxi; no, they decided to walk to Weymouth and catch a bus, and off they went, two very tall, very thin, regrettably restless people with rucksacks on their backs. It made me lazier than ever just to look at them.

  “They’re flying back to Canada in a fortnight,” said the Major. “Beryl doesn’t really like it any more in England. Too many civil servants.”

  There is a poison that works on human beings in solitude and better writers have often described it. We need not quote the better writers. Folk lore has summed it up too: “People get on one another’s nerves.” It goes further than that in the villages of England, and I have often wondered why the soft, dreamy air of our southwest should breed such bitterness as it does. Village folk are dour and suspicious of one another, withal courteous and quick to protect anybody in the community against outside attack. In the big houses among the owners or tenants these feuds do not loom large, because English people as soon as they can afford it wall themselves away from their loving neighbors. Even at that the poison does creep in. A friend of mine once gave me her theory, when I spoke of the suicides in Charles’s family: “It was a well- known phenomenon of English country life, my dear,” she said, “so you needn’t worry about tainted blood or anything of that sort. People simply didn’t see enough of one another. There was the occasional call on some other family, and a dinner once in a while, and for the rest they just stayed at home and stewed. Absolutely Bronte; you can have no idea. It’s different now.”