England to Me: A Memoir Read online

  It isn’t different, however, for the people who work here. They don’t commit suicide; suicide has never been much of a recourse for people with jobs, and on the whole I am sure that Cordwayne enjoys life. I think it’s something quite different. After listening to various complaints and allegations I have come to the conclusion that country people love to quarrel. It gives them exercise, release, drama, and a purpose in life beyond mere reproduction and death. Even in our busiest days, when the outside world crashed in on us with the mail at breakfast, when the Major at one end of the table and I at the other were burrowing away at our letters and papers like beavers in an intercontinental pond, the sluggish venom of Cordwayne made itself felt. Louise would come in carrying Ian, Mrs. Clifton at the stove would slam a door, and the stresses and strains of domestic life loomed suddenly enormous. Mrs. Clifton was resenting Louise. She had dragged Clifton into resenting Louise. Sooner or later the Cliftons would persuade Mr. Trivett the baker, and Mrs. Trivett the baker’s wife, to resent Louise. It was only the slam of an oven door, possibly accidental though probably not, yet it rang in my ears with the resonance of a Judgment Day trumpet, putting between my eyes and the most interesting letter a vague but vivid picture of the sulking Cliftons, the falsely cheerful Trivetts, all the senselessly unkind souls of humanity. I would stop reading my mail and drink up my coffee, my awful English coffee, eager to get upstairs.

  “Don’t want milk,” Carola said, whining.

  “Oh, stop that whining, Carola,” said the Major, his eyes fixed on his letter.

  “Milk’s good for you,” said Nanny, or Esther, or whatever nurse we had at the time.

  “Mummy, do I have to drink my milk?”

  “What you need, Carola, is a season in Stanley,” said Louise, pouncing on the opportunity. Stanley was her monomania. “Stanley was the place to make you appreciate food. Nobody had preferences in Stanley. Whenever I made pancakes out of a little rice flour I’d saved up, it was a great occasion.”

  “Mmmm, yes,” I said, turning again to my mail, for I had heard it all before. Louise fixed her eyes on Nanny, or Esther, and continued with happy vivacity:

  “There was an old man who had a big jam tin for his plate, and he always scraped it so after he’d finished that everyone in his room got fed up. Well—”

  “My goodness,” said Nanny or Esther. The Major rattled his bookseller’s catalogue with absent-minded impatience: he hates brooding on things.

  “So all of a sudden Steve—you remember Steve, Mickey? He was in the bank.”

  “No, I never knew him.”

  “Oh, you must have known him! In Stanley he was head of his block, but he had to live with this old man and so—”

  “Ian’s spilling his milk,” said Carola. Ian was, but Louise would not be interrupted.

  “—he got so fed up that one day he simply handed his own plate of food to the pest and simply yelled …”

  “Do take care of Ian, Louise,” I said. Ian had poured his mug of milk all over his tray and was now paddling in it.

  “Oh, you naughty boy! You naughty, dirty boy! Whatever is Mummy to do with you? Honestly, Mickey, he’s so quick there’s no way to keep him clean; it’s terrible. Now, then, the other hand. There! Naughty boy. Mummy’s naughty boy. Well, Steve just handed the old fellow his own plate and yelled, ‘Here, for God’s sake, and stop that noise. I’d rather give you my last bite than hear that again.’ It was like that in Stanley. It was—”

  Ian, who had been crying for quite a while, now gave a shriek so terrific that Louise actually stopped talking.

  “I guess maybe he’s hungry,” I suggested. “You haven’t fed him yet.”

  “Oh, Lord.” Louise sighed and started to shovel porridge into his mouth. “Anyway, Carola, you’d have been glad to get that milk in Stanley.”

  “I want cocoa,” said Carola. “I don’t like milk in England. It tastes all milky.”

  From the doorway I caught sight of Mrs. Clifton glowering at Louise, and a cold wind blew on my heart, and I fled.

  When Jan and Nellie first arrived, married only a few months and almost too young even for that, they were a silent couple because they couldn’t talk to each other. Nellie at least didn’t seem to want to talk, even to her husband. She was shy and timid by nature, and Jan was shy because he couldn’t speak English. This timidity stood them in good stead for a while with the Cliftons. But nothing stood intruders in good stead for long, with the Cliftons, and this, too, wore off. For the time being, though, Nellie was meek and allowed herself to be terribly overworked. Out of doors, Jan allowed himself to be overworked because he is Polish and didn’t know any better. They all work hard in Poland, and Jan didn’t realize that they don’t in England. It was Nellie who bore the brunt.

  Had it not been for Louise, who was in and out of the kitchen all day long with Ian’s food and washing, I wouldn’t have known it, of course. I don’t see things. I hear them, though, and already I had heard village gossip about the terrible Mrs. Clifton and her slave-driving. Nellie was being broken in with a vengeance, scrubbing the floor twice over when it didn’t suit Mrs. Clifton, washing the front doorstep even in the wettest, dirtiest weather, dusting and scrubbing everything every single day, with the oldest worn- out brushes and rags—and Nellie had been trained for office work, anyway, rather than housework.

  “How does your wife like Dorset?” asked the Major of Jan, rather fatuously, but then good manners are so often fatuous.

  “She doesn’t say,” replied Jan.

  All of this, though, might have been left to settle itself, either with Mrs. Clifton’s sudden demise from poison or Nellie’s giving notice and leaving her husband. Both alternatives were quite possible, until I found out about the food.

  You would have to understand the strange Grimm’s tale atmosphere of the house under Mrs. Clifton to believe it, but it was true: Mrs. Clifton was starving those poor kids. She used their rations for us. Being new to all that, we only knew that we didn’t seem to be particularly short of food, and when neighbors complained of the eternal scarcity we were scornful.

  “Softies,” we said. “There isn’t plenty, but there’s enough,”

  It was Louise who told us, striking us with horror, that Nellie and Jan were left so destitute of their rightful food that they didn’t even have bread and cheese on their day off. “Her mother sends them things from Glasgow,” said Louise, “but of course the bread gets awfully stale on the way. And another thing, Nellie never dares sneak up of an evening to visit me.” The young couple were living pro tem in our lodge down by the gate. “Mrs. Clifton keeps a watch on the drive, out her front window. She told Nellie you don’t like her coming up in the evening. She told Nellie you said—”

  Of course if Nellie hadn’t been criminally innocent none of this would have meant more than a cat’s scratch. As it was, she began to move like a scared domestic animal through a jungle of anger, terror, hurt feelings, and suspicions, which were worse than all. There was the matter of Jan going to church. Jan and Louise are both Roman Catholics; Nellie had not yet been “instructed” and was still dubious about taking the final step. Going to Catholic church from Conygar depended on our neighbor Ruth Cooper, who drives in to early mass in Dorchester on Sundays and is always ready to take anyone else who needs a lift. When Louise told Jan he could go in the Cooper car, Mrs. Clifton objected sourly. She wasn’t going to cook a special late breakfast for Jan, she said; if he went to mass he would have to go without breakfast, that’s all.

  “Oh, I’ll fix him something,” said Louise, “when we get back.”

  Mrs. Clifton brooded over that check for a day or so, and then struck. She did it at tea, when everyone involved was present, Louise feeding Ian in his high chair.

  “Now, Jan, I want to give you a word of advice,” she said. “I’m a good deal older than you and I look on you as a son. Never let anyone come between your wife and you. Not under the guise of religion or anything else. Never let anyone interfere b
etween you. Trust each other, stand by each other. Isn’t that so, Father?”

  “That’s so,” said Clifton, uneasily but dutifully.

  Jan said that was all right, he wouldn’t.

  But, naturally, after that he didn’t go to mass.

  I shouldn’t have been hearing about all this, I suppose. However, I did hear about it, and after a while I felt something would have to be done. I resolved on a plan which I confided to the Major. He shook his head.

  “And this is what has happened to Emily Hahn the honest! Emily Hahn who never tells a lie. Emily Hahn who—”

  “Never you mind, it’ll work, you’ll see. Luckily I got a letter from Scotland yesterday and Mrs. Clifton brought it up; I saw her eying the postmark the way she does, sideways, like an old parrot. That’s what gave me the idea to begin with, as a matter of fact. Nellie flew off the handle the other day at something Mrs. Clifton says we said about Nellie and Jan—”

  “Wait a minute,” said the Major. “It’s too complicated.”

  “It’s perfectly simple. Nellie wrote her mother and Mrs. Clifton knows it, and is hopefully waiting for fireworks. She thinks Nellie’s mother will insist that she come back to Glasgow, in which case Jan will go too, only, of course, if he does he’ll have to go back into the Polish camp, and he doesn’t want to do that, but Mrs. Clifton would be delighted. Now if I persuade Mrs. Clifton to think it’s all misfired and that we will find out—”

  “See here, wouldn’t it be simpler just to sack Mrs. Clifton?”

  “Of course it would, but you don’t want to really, you’re just blustering.”

  “Yes,” said the Major. “Well …”

  Next morning I called Mrs. Clifton out of the kitchen, as portentously as I could. She turned white and stony.

  “Mrs. Clifton, I’ve had the most extraordinary communication from, uh, the authorities. You know, up in Scotland, the people who manage the Polish camp.”

  Mrs. Clifton swallowed and said, “What about it? Whatever do they say?”

  “Why, it’s all very confusing and I don’t understand it at all, but it seems Nellie’s mother has got in touch with them. She’s made any number of complaints. She says her daughter and Jan are being insulted here. Is that so, Mrs. Clifton? Is anyone making them unhappy—anybody in the village, or anything, calling them those damned Poles, and so forth?”

  “Why—nothing I know of,” said Mrs. Clifton, looking at me wide-eyed, though still stiff and scared. “I’ve never heard a thing, I’m sure.”

  “Then there’s a graver accusation than that, Mrs. Clifton. Nellie’s mother seems to think they’re being starved. Starved, Mrs. Clifton. She says they don’t get any food at all on their days off, no milk or bread or anything. Now, as you know, that’s very serious. They have their rations like anyone else and they’re entitled to every bit. Are you sure they’re getting it all?”

  “I—”

  “These camp authorities are naturally upset, because they’re responsible for Jan. They’ve got in touch with the Government people, and I shouldn’t be surprised if one of these days an inspector came. We’ll have to be very careful, Mrs. Clifton. You can see that.”

  “I’m sure they’ve been getting plenty. We had six loaves on Wednesday and by Monday morning there wasn’t a bit of it left. And the same about the milk. Of course there was one day a week ago Monday—”

  “Well, just so long as we can prove it.”

  Mrs. Clifton was very quiet for a few weeks, and Nellie and Jan got enough to eat. Then she turned the full force of her spleen against Louise. There was such a slamming of pots, such a banging of doors, that it was a great relief one day when she gave notice, even though it happened to be the morning of the Major’s birthday, when the house was full of guests. This notice, I vowed, would last.

  However, it all ended on a comparatively happy note. I had been thinking a lot about Mrs. Clifton’s moods. They were not sudden affairs, quickly arrived and quickly ended after one outburst. They seemed to come on gradually, to reach a pitch of reckless hysterical malice, and to continue, regardless of wreckage, for several days at a time. Careful research in the neighborhood revealed that Sally had always been like that, and that the family couldn’t do a thing with her. On the morning of her own birthday I went down to call on her at the Cottage.

  “You’re looking better, Mrs. Clifton,” I said. “Do you often get bad stomachaches?”

  “Why, yes,” she said, surprised that I knew. “Dreadful they are. Seems like I just don’t know what to do when I’m bad.”

  “Have you always been that way? I ask because you’re so thin, and I remember that time you borrowed the milk of magnesia just before your trip to your sister’s.The time you were so bit—I mean, upset.”

  Mrs. Clifton became animated. “All my life I’ve had ’em,” she said. “Comes on slow like, and then I know I’ll be bad until I can break the waters. I can’t eat a thing until the waters break. That takes three or four days. After that I’m all right until next time.”

  I asked what “Breaking the waters” meant, and she explained that it meant vomiting. She called it the waters because that’s what it was—”nothing solid, green-like.”

  “I believe you don’t like doctors,” I said suggestively. She agreed with firmness; she and Father had no use for doctors. “Well, I think you ought to see one, just the same,” I said. Mrs, Clifton exhibited mirthful scorn at the very idea, so I left her alone with her ulcer and came back to the house. It seemed such a nice, quiet house now. So free.

  7. THE CRUMBLING SOFA

  Once I had a dream which was symbolic and which has been very useful to me since. Every now and then I take it out and brash it off and look it over, and each time it seems more symbolic than ever, being applicable to practically any situation in which I find myself. The essence of the dream is concentrated in the final scene: I am sitting in a rocking chair on a ledge which juts from a sheer cliffside, my back to the edge, which looks over a terrific abyss. The ledge on which I sit in my chair is held precariously to the cliff by one tree root, which is showing signs of strain. At the end of the dream there I am, just rocking in my rocking chair, chewing gum and placidly watching the root as it breaks, fiber by fiber.

  Obviously, this scene is symbolic as all hell. The more I look at it the more it charms me. It is my dream, mine against all comers. It has been mine for years, and is an old friend to me in a new world, where I feel I want friends. I invoked it often at the beginning when we came to Conygar.

  Even after a year I seemed to feel opposition in the house. I don’t mean to say there was any one malevolent spirit which resented me exactly; it was rather that every separate piece of Conygar, the walls and the ceiling of course but also the furniture, was inherently resentful of everything and everybody. Floors tripped you up. Nails stuck out of staircases. Rugs wore out. Things got out of order. You wouldn’t believe the things that can manage to get out of order in an English country house. Take the curtains, for example, which must be drawn in the evening to keep out cold drafts: in our house all the curtain rings stuck on the rods, or when they weren’t on rods they wouldn’t run along the little patent trolley rope which was used instead. Then, after we had got the rings oiled or the ropes adjusted, the curtains tore all along the top, because they were rotten. To get the curtains down to repair them, we had to move chairs or dressing tables out of the way so we could put up the stepladder, and while we were moving them these chairs or dressing tables broke in our hands. That was just one sort of thing which happened, but there were plenty more. My dearest friends have never called me house-proud; I have never even tried to be efficient at keeping house, but this was something bigger than my hisser-faire policy. It got me down.

  “The whole place is jerry-built, that’s all,” I said despairingly to Mr. Longman. Mr. Longman is the village handyman, and he comes up at night to do things we don’t have to get Labour Control permits for. That evening, I remember, he was trying to fix the
flush thing on the toilet. The entire mysterious contraption, metal balloon and all, is encased in a cast-iron box. This, in turn, is shielded from vulgar eyes by a wooden box, and the complicated structure hangs on the wall six feet above a normal man’s head. For a long time we had been managing to make it flush by pulling the chain far to the right. If that didn’t work, we pulled it suddenly to the left, which sometimes did the trick, although oftener the handle came off the chain right in the middle of the proceedings and one barked one’s knuckles on the wall. Now no tugs in any direction were any use, so I called in Mr. Longman. He looked at me in sad surprise.

  “Jerry-built? This house? Not at all. It’s a good, solid piece of work,” he said. “You don’t get houses like this nowadays. These are beautiful walls, beautiful. What’s happened here, the tank has come away from the wall, that’s all; it’s tipped like, and don’t fill up the way it should. Too heavy for the nails, that’s all. It’s a good, solid, heavy tank.” He wagged his head admiringly. “They don’t make ’em like that these days,” he said, and he nailed it up to the wall again. Afterward, the toilet still didn’t flush very well.

  Sometimes things went wrong so slowly and gently that I got accustomed to the new state of affairs before I realized what had happened. For example, there was the door situation. It got more and more awkward, imperceptibly, until we were in a precarious state. Theoretically, we have three doors, back, side, and front, not counting the french windows in the drawing room which we didn’t use much because we didn’t often open the drawing room, and not counting the kitchen, which we are not supposed to use because it upsets the staff to have us popping in and out. In actuality, all of a sudden somehow we had only the side door left. This seems rather silly, but there it was, and I didn’t know what we could do about it. The back door was locked and bolted. We used to unlock and unbolt it, and go out and sit on the lawn, and carry tea out on nice days and all that, but one day when it was locked we couldn’t unlock it, and the Major kept trying to, and the key got twisted, and we couldn’t get the key out. Not even Mr. Longman could get the key out, and if Mr. Longman couldn’t, nobody else in England could.