myself. Dolly’s allowance was to be paid by the bank on the first Monday of every month.
‘Dear Etty, you deserve every penny of it,’ said Dolly, with a caressing glance at my mother. ‘So devoted. And Jane too.’This surprised me: my mother had been dutiful but not devoted, whereas I had hardly known my grandmother.
‘As for me,’ said Dolly, ‘I shall just have to be brave, shan’t I?’ She gave a brave laugh. ‘It won’t be easy, but I’ve never been one for indulging in self-pity. Remember what I told you, Jane?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what was that?’
‘Something about singing and dancing.’
‘That’s right. You won’t see me with a frown on my face, despite my difficulties. And I must go to Nice soon, to visit Mother. So many expenses.’ She sighed. ‘Well, this won’t do. Such an out of the way place you live in, Etty. I wonder you don’t move. Jane, are you clever enough to ring for a taxi?’
I considered myself grown-up at the time—I must have been nine or ten—and was therefore discomposed at the suggestion that I might not be up to the task of making a telephone call, I who talked to my friend Marigold Chance for hours.
When I returned to the drawing-room I saw Dolly clasp my mother in a lavish embrace.
‘Dear Etty,’ she said, holding her at arm’s length and contemplating her, head on one side. ‘Funny girl,’ she added. She then took and held her hands for a long and musing moment. There was the merest whisper of paper, so faint as to be barely noticeable, as the cheque was handed over.
4
I grew up English and unafraid. My parents’ world was my world: I inherited the long walks, the afternoons of reading, the almost silent company of Miss Lawlor, without surprise, without rebellion, peaceably and comfortably, with a sense of order which I have never recovered. I was happy with my lot, with our modest existence, which I now realise was far from modest by contemporary standards: my father’s work at the bank was secure, while my mother had her own income. Modesty, to me, signified a certain unostentatious prosperity, never indulged, never advertised, and never, ever, mentioned in conversation. I was not aware of money, or of the need to make money. As far as I was concerned I would go to Cambridge, as my father had done, and then something interesting would come along, some job in publishing, which would surely be suitable for someone with my love of books: I thought I had only to advertise this love for the publishers to come running towards me from all sides, with offers of appreciable salaries and agreeable conditionsof work. It will be seen that I had confidence in a world of full employment, one which no longer existed. We were on the threshold of the 1980s and although we knew nothing of what was in store for us, the best years of our lives were over. But at the time we could detect no change; our world, or rather my world, was fixed, ineluctable, of the same order as the rising and the setting of the sun.
Some of this confidence came from the sun itself. We had had two radiant and prolonged summers, so extravagant, so unexpected, so altogether exceptional that they had done something to alter our perceptions of ourselves, as if we had been granted a more favourable situation on the planet. Suddenly people had sought shade, coolness; expeditions to shops were undertaken in the very early morning, while the afternoons were given over to drawn curtains and an uncharacteristic siesta. In Battersea Park, where I walked in the blissful glory of the sun, bodies lay under trees in violent out-flung attitudes, like the peasants in Brueghel’s
Land of Cockaigne
. ‘Don’t go too far,’ my mother would warn me, as I set off on one of my walks. ‘Keep in the shade.’ But I loved that efflorescence and thought the effort of walking negligeable. Sometimes I walked into town, which was not a great distance. I wanted to look at pictures, either in the National Gallery or
‘Dear Etty, you deserve every penny of it,’ said Dolly, with a caressing glance at my mother. ‘So devoted. And Jane too.’This surprised me: my mother had been dutiful but not devoted, whereas I had hardly known my grandmother.
‘As for me,’ said Dolly, ‘I shall just have to be brave, shan’t I?’ She gave a brave laugh. ‘It won’t be easy, but I’ve never been one for indulging in self-pity. Remember what I told you, Jane?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what was that?’
‘Something about singing and dancing.’
‘That’s right. You won’t see me with a frown on my face, despite my difficulties. And I must go to Nice soon, to visit Mother. So many expenses.’ She sighed. ‘Well, this won’t do. Such an out of the way place you live in, Etty. I wonder you don’t move. Jane, are you clever enough to ring for a taxi?’
I considered myself grown-up at the time—I must have been nine or ten—and was therefore discomposed at the suggestion that I might not be up to the task of making a telephone call, I who talked to my friend Marigold Chance for hours.
When I returned to the drawing-room I saw Dolly clasp my mother in a lavish embrace.
‘Dear Etty,’ she said, holding her at arm’s length and contemplating her, head on one side. ‘Funny girl,’ she added. She then took and held her hands for a long and musing moment. There was the merest whisper of paper, so faint as to be barely noticeable, as the cheque was handed over.
4
I grew up English and unafraid. My parents’ world was my world: I inherited the long walks, the afternoons of reading, the almost silent company of Miss Lawlor, without surprise, without rebellion, peaceably and comfortably, with a sense of order which I have never recovered. I was happy with my lot, with our modest existence, which I now realise was far from modest by contemporary standards: my father’s work at the bank was secure, while my mother had her own income. Modesty, to me, signified a certain unostentatious prosperity, never indulged, never advertised, and never, ever, mentioned in conversation. I was not aware of money, or of the need to make money. As far as I was concerned I would go to Cambridge, as my father had done, and then something interesting would come along, some job in publishing, which would surely be suitable for someone with my love of books: I thought I had only to advertise this love for the publishers to come running towards me from all sides, with offers of appreciable salaries and agreeable conditionsof work. It will be seen that I had confidence in a world of full employment, one which no longer existed. We were on the threshold of the 1980s and although we knew nothing of what was in store for us, the best years of our lives were over. But at the time we could detect no change; our world, or rather my world, was fixed, ineluctable, of the same order as the rising and the setting of the sun.
Some of this confidence came from the sun itself. We had had two radiant and prolonged summers, so extravagant, so unexpected, so altogether exceptional that they had done something to alter our perceptions of ourselves, as if we had been granted a more favourable situation on the planet. Suddenly people had sought shade, coolness; expeditions to shops were undertaken in the very early morning, while the afternoons were given over to drawn curtains and an uncharacteristic siesta. In Battersea Park, where I walked in the blissful glory of the sun, bodies lay under trees in violent out-flung attitudes, like the peasants in Brueghel’s
Land of Cockaigne
. ‘Don’t go too far,’ my mother would warn me, as I set off on one of my walks. ‘Keep in the shade.’ But I loved that efflorescence and thought the effort of walking negligeable. Sometimes I walked into town, which was not a great distance. I wanted to look at pictures, either in the National Gallery or
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