An Education Read online

  My mother came from slightly more genteel stock than my father – rural rather than urban, in service rather than in manufacturing, and with the towering figure of the Swaffham stationmaster in the background. Her father (an extremely handsome man) had an invalid pension from being gassed in the First World War, and took occasional jobs as a postman and gardener; her mother was a qualified swimming instructor. They lived in a two-up, two-down cottage in Sunningdale, which was then a country village, and went to Wentworth golf club at weekends to make a few pennies finding lost golf balls. My mother, despite her beta brain, won a scholarship to grammar school and then to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. She hoped to become an actress but settled for a diploma that qualified her to teach elocution, of which more later.

  My parents had been raised as Methodists but by the time they had me their religion was education, education, education. I was reared from the cradle to pass every possible exam, gain every possible scholarship, and go to university – Cambridge if I was mathematically inclined like my father, or Oxford if I proved to be ‘artistic’ like my mother. My father often quoted Charles Kingsley's line ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever’ but he said it sarcastically – he wanted me to be clever, and let who can be good.

  My mother taught me to read long before I started school so I was amazed on my first day at Ashford Congregationalist Primary to find myself stuck in a class with ninnies who didn't even know the alphabet. Naturally this attitude made me unpopular with my classmates and I was soon unpopular with the teachers as well because I refused to eat the school food. The school had a rule – as did most schools in those days – that you could not leave the table till you had eaten all your lunch, so some poor teacher would have to waste her break sitting with me, telling me to eat up. I never would. In the end my mother went to see the headmistress and arrived at a satisfactory compromise: I could leave most of my lunch provided I ate something and most days I could. But there was one day a week when we had gristle stew which I couldn't eat at all. So on that day I went down the road to the cinema where, in the hushed grandeur of the Odeon restaurant, I ordered soup with roast potatoes and was fussed over by the waitresses. It was my first valuable lesson in the rewards of intransigence.

  That is about all I remember from Ashford; my real memories begin when we moved to Twickenham when I was eight. My parents kept saying they had bought this big old house – they were so excited they talked about it endlessly. My idea of big old houses was entirely derived from books like The Secret Garden so I pictured a rambling pile with attics and battlements and secret staircases. I worried that I might get lost in the cellars, or that my room in the west wing would be haunted by a headless nun. When I finally saw 52 Clifden Road, Twickenham, I laughed incredulously, ‘You said it was big!’ I can now understand that it was big by my parents' standards, a solid Edwardian three-up, three-down terraced house with a porch and a conservatory and longish garden at the back. (Apparently houses in Clifden Road go for almost a million now.) But I persisted in believing my parents had lied to me, and grumbled for years, ‘You said it was big!’

  The house was opposite a girls' school, Twickenham County Grammar, but it only took girls from age eleven, so I had to go to junior school on the other side of town. It was a mixed school, full of rough boys who lurked round the playground lavatories, and jumped up and looked over the door if you went in. Consequently I was terrified of ever going to the loo and developed complicated regimes of what I could eat at what times. For a year – pace Aunt Ruth – I ate almost nothing but scrambled eggs on toast. Another year it was Marmite soldiers. Luckily the term ‘eating disorders’ was unknown then, or my parents might have worried about me – though on second thoughts, they wouldn't have worried about me as long as my school marks were OK, which of course they were. I was paired with the one other bright girl, Margaret M, and we took it in turns to win the class gold star every week – nobody else ever got a look-in. Consequently all the other pupils hated us, and we hated them, but we hated each other more.

  The only good thing I remember from those early Twickenham years was the night sweet rationing ended. My parents had taken me to the cinema – we went at least once, often twice, a week and I saw some wonderfully ‘unsuitable’ films such as The Barefoot Contessa (‘What does it mean he was wounded in the war, Mum? What sort of wound? Why does it mean he can't marry her?’) – but this night I think was a boring one until the lights went up and the manager came onstage and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have heard on the wireless that sweet rationing has ended. We have a full selection of sweets and chocolates in the lobby.’ Everyone stampeded for the doors. My father of course didn't. He ‘didn't see the point’ of sweets, but my mother did and we went and bought packets of toffee and chocolate raisins and ate them till I was sick. Since then, I've never cared much for sweets, but it was an historic occasion.

  When I was ten, my parents took the huge financial gamble of sending me to the junior school of Lady Eleanor Holles, an independent fee-paying school some miles away in Hampton. The idea was that if they paid for me to go to the junior school for a year, I would then win a scholarship to the main school – which is what indeed happened. At Lady Eleanor Holles, for the first time, I was mixing with girls from quite wealthy backgrounds – some of them even had their own ponies. I would listen, ears flapping, to their boastful conversations about Daddy's new Jaguar or Mummy's new refrigerator. The snobbery at LEH was all the more fierce because it was conducted within such a tiny social range: the Oxshott girls despised the Ewell girls who despised the Kingston girls; the Jaguar owners despised the Wolseley owners and we all duly gasped when the parents of a rather quiet girl who nobody took any notice of turned up for prize-giving in a Rolls Royce.

  I could see that there was no way I could win in the snobbery stakes – we didn't have a car, let alone a paddock – so I didn't bother lying but just told everyone I was a pauper and the cleverest girl in the school, which I probably was. (Apparently Lady Eleanor Holles is a highly academic school nowadays but it certainly wasn't then.) And actually it paid off. The pony-owners found it quite amusing to know me – I was a novelty in their world. And they were very generous: they would always lend me clothes for parties and hand over any book tokens they were given for Christmas on the grounds that they had no conceivable use for them and I did. Consequently I have always found it difficult to hate the rich, as good leftie journalists are meant to do, because they've always been so nice to me. The LEH girls liked having a pauper in their midst, and I liked having friends for the first time in my life. It was a great day for me when we moved up to the main school and three girls competed to sit next to me in class. Probably they just hoped to crib my schoolwork, but I basked in my first taste of popularity.

  The only thing wrong with LEH from my point of view was that it was surrounded by miles of playing fields and you had to play games. Worst of all you had to play lax – lacrosse – which relied on the daft notion that it was possible to run while holding a ball in a sort of primitive snowshoe above your head while other girls hit you with their snowshoes and tried to trip you up. Obviously it was dangerous folly even to attempt it. And then we had to take communal showers where the dykey games mistress stared longingly at our nascent boobs and bushes. Eventually I got my parents to write a note saying I had weak ankles and should not play games – which would have been fine except that I then had to go to remedial podiatry sessions and learn to pick up pencils with my toes. Then the podiatrist said I should take up ice skating to strengthen my weak ankles and actually got me a free pass to Saturday sessions at Richmond Ice Rink. God – I'd thought lacrosse was scary, ice skating was terrifying. In theory there was a quiet place in the middle of the rink where you could practise your figures but you had to get to it through this stampeding pack of speed skaters. I once saw someone's finger sliced off when he fell over in the pack and a ring of blood went right round the rink before the stewards could get the
speed skaters to stop.

  The other great curse of these years was my mother's elocution lessons. When we lived at Ashford, she had a part-time job at a department store in Windsor teaching shopgirls to speak posh, but when we moved to Twickenham she set up the front room as her ‘studio’ with her LAMDA certificate on the wall and gave elocution lessons at home. She would have liked to have had a board saying Elocution Lessons on the front gate, but my father and I both vetoed it – my father on the grounds that it might make us liable for business rates; me on the grounds that I would slash my wrists from embarrassment.

  In those days – the Fifties – there were elocution teachers in every town; in Twickenham alone, there were at least three, and another half-dozen across the river in Richmond. They claimed to teach drama, ‘projection’, and the art of public speaking, but what they really taught was how to talk posh, or a particular version thereof. When my mother said of someone ‘She has a bit of an accent’ she meant, not a regional accent, nor even a cockney accent, but the most fearful accent of all, which was Common. Common meant saying sumpfink for something, or dropping your aitches or pronouncing the letter h as haitch. ‘I had to go to Homer-ton High Street, your honour, to acquire a hat’ was a good test of Common. The aim of elocution lessons was to eradicate Common and teach shopgirls to talk like ladies, though what they invariably ended up talking like was shopgirls with pretensions. At Windsor, my mother actually taught shopgirls to say, ‘Would Modom care to try the larger size?’

  A trained speaker, my mother always told me, could recite the London telephone directory and make it interesting. (The corollary of this, I noticed in adulthood, is that many actors say their lines as if reciting the London telephone directory, as if the words have no intrinsic meaning at all.) The aim of elocution was to display a grasp of diction, enunciation, inflection, projection, chiarascuro, cadence, timbre, lightness, colour, vibrato, crescendo, diminuendo, while reciting, say,

  All along the backwater,

  Through the rushes tall,

  Ducks are a-dabbling

  Up tails all!

  Ducks' tails, drakes' tails,

  Yellow feet a-quiver,

  Yellow bills all out of sight,

  Busy in the river!

  (‘Ducks’ Ditty', Kenneth Grahame)

  There was much talk of labials and plosives and breathing from the diaphragm. My mother was most impressive when demonstrating breathing from the diaphragm because she had an enormous bosom, which would rise several inches when she breathed in, and slowly subside while she breathed out, all the while humming ‘Om’ for far longer than seemed possible and finishing with ‘Pah!’ She would urge her pupils to place their hands on her diaphragm while she performed this feat, much to their consternation.

  Each lesson began with breathing – humming Om and shouting Pah – followed by vowel exercises such as ‘Behold he sold the old rolled gold bowl’, which was where the real war against Common was waged. Then there were the tongue twisters – An anemone, my enemy; Unique New York; Red lorry, yellow lorry; Selfish shellfish; The sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick, Six thick thistle sticks, six thick thistles stick; The Leith police dismisseth us, and Three free throws, which I don't think anyone ever said correctly, even my mother. Then there was the dangerous pheasant plucker who could so easily lead one astray:

  I am not the pheasant plucker,

  I am the pheasant plucker's mate.

  I am only plucking pheasants

  'Cos the pheasant plucker's late.

  And finally the exercise in consonant definition which had to be shouted while marching round the room and swinging one's arms:

  Zinty tinty tuppenny bun!

  The fox went out to have some fun!

  He had some fun!

  He banged the drum!

  Zinty tinty tuppenny bun!

  This was the daily Muzak of my life from the age of eight, when we moved to Twickenham, to fourteen, when my mother stopped working from home and became a schoolteacher. My mother would already have a pupil in her studio when I came back from school, and I could pretty well tell the time from whether they were at the Om and Pah stage or beholding their old rolled gold bowls. I would let myself in as quietly as possible, ignoring any pupils who were waiting in the hall, make myself a cup of tea and settle in the breakfast room to do my homework. But through the wall I could always hear the Oms and Pahs and then the ghastly moment when they started on their ‘set pieces’, which they had to learn for exams and competitions. How well I knew them all!

  Dirty British steamer with a salt-caked smoke stack

  Butting through the Channel in a mad March haze

  With a cargo of Tyne coal, road rails, pig lead

  Firewood, ironware and cheap tin trays.

  (John Masefield, ‘Cargoes’)

  Up the airy mountain

  Down the rushy glen

  We daren't go a-hunting

  For fear of little men.

  (William Allingham, ‘The Fairies’)

  Do you remember an Inn, Miranda?

  Do you remember an Inn?

  And the tedding and the spreading

  Of the straw for a bedding

  And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees

  And the wine that tasted of the tar?

  And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers

  (Under the vine of the dark verandah?)

  Do you remember an Inn, Miranda?

  Do you remember an Inn?

  (Hilaire Belloc, ‘Tarantella’)

  Years later, when I read Eng Lit at Oxford, I learned many much better poems by heart – Shakespeare's sonnets, Keats' odes, miles of Yeats – but if you held a gun to my head today and said ‘Recite a poem’, it would almost certainly be ‘Cargoes’ or ‘Do you remember an Inn, Miranda?’ These are still the poems that flash into my mind unbidden – unwanted! – at odd moments of the day. ‘Dirty British steamer with a salt-caked smokestack,’ I mutter, crashing my trolley along the Waitrose aisles. ‘Is there anybody there, said the Traveller’ as I wait for the call centre to answer.

  It occurs to me that most of the poems my mother taught would have seemed ‘modern’ at the time, or modernist, in that they derived more from Browning than Wordsworth. But then, if they were modern, why were they so obsessed with goblins and elves? Where did that come from? Was there some elvish revival, perhaps associated with the Celtic revival, in the early decades of the twentieth century? And of course as soon as I write elvish, I think, Oh yes, Tolkein, and remember that there was also a folk revival, associated with Morris dancing and Cecil Sharp, in the Thirties, which must have played a part. But still, they were bloody irritating, those elves.

  For elocution competitions and exams, it wasn't enough just to recite a poem – all the words had to be accompanied by gestures. Thus, references to moonlight, sunlight, stars or any form of weather involved looking upwards; references to storms, rain, frost, involved pulling an imaginary shawl round one's shoulders and blowing on one's nails. (Does anyone, in real life, ever blow on their nails? I have never seen it.) Weeping or even mild regret meant wiping one's eyes with the back of one's hand; laughing meant much shaking of the shoulders, à la Edward Heath. Elves and fairies always started their speeches in a crouching position and then leapt up, spun round, and dashed madly across the stage with arms outstretched. Skipping was sometimes required. Searching for anything or even just looking necessitated a hand above the eyebrows shielding the eyes, accompanied by a pointing gesture. All this activity was tiring and of course baffling, but as nothing compared to the contortions of duologue. Duologue – as opposed to dialogue, which entailed two players – was a curious invention peculiar, I imagine, to elocution lessons. It involved playing two people (if you were lucky – unfortunately it more often entailed one person plus elf ) which demanded incredible agility because you had to make a half turn every time the speaker changed and if possible a height change too – one speaker would crouch – and
adopt a different accent, or at least timbre, to differentiate the speakers.

  There was a particularly horrible piece called ‘Overheard on a Salmarsh’ (sic – though presumably he meant saltmarsh) by Harold Munro which went as follows:

  Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?

  Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?

  Give them me.

  No.

  Give them me. Give them me.

  No.

  Then I will howl all night in the reeds,

  Lie in the mud and howl for them.

  Goblin, why do you love them so? Etc etc.

  Nymph for some reason always stood on tiptoe, with arms stretched backwards at 45 degrees to suggest wings, while goblin squatted with one arm over his head denoting (I think) ugliness or physical deformity. He had a deep gruff voice whereas nymph spoke in a high flutey voice like our new Queen Elizabeth. The aim was to be able to switch voices and postures at speed, presumably before the audience dropped off with boredom. I was always so keen to get onto the next line I would be spinning, turning, crouching, like a demented acrobat, while muttering to myself and counting the seconds till it would all be over.

  The most dreadful of all the set pieces was a passage from ‘Goblin Market’ by Christina Rossetti which required positively dervish-like movements, viz:

  Laughed every goblin

  When they spied her peeping:

  Came towards her hobbling,

  Flying, running, leaping,