Black Beech and Honeydew. Ngaio Marsh

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СКАЧАТЬ smiled kindly at her and put Susie down. ‘Run along, old girl,’ he said. ‘Go home to your master.’

      My mother was now laughing uncontrollably.

      ‘Don’t be an ass, Betsy,’ said my father gently and left her.

      It must not be supposed that he was an unintelligent man. He was widely read, particularly in biology and the natural sciences, was an enthusiastic rationalist and a member of the Philosophical Society. He was also an avid reader of fiction. Of the Victorians, he most enjoyed Dickens and Scott. My mother disliked Scott because of his historical inaccuracies and bias. None of his novels was in the house. She deeply admired Hardy and once told me that after reading the end of Tess, she sat up all night, imprisoned in distress and unable to free herself. In later years we all three read and discussed the Georgian novelists. My mother’s favourites were Galsworthy (with reservations: she thought Irene a stuffed dummy) and Conrad. Almayer’s Folly she read over and over again. Somehow her copy of this novel has been lost. I would like to discover why it so held her. My father’s favourite was Aldous Huxley though he often remarked that the chap was revolting for the sake of being revolting and that Point Counter Point gained nothing by its elaborate form. He was more gregarious in his reading than my mother and would sometimes devour a ‘shilling shocker’. His hand trembled and his pipe jigged between his teeth as he approached the climax. ‘Frightful rot!’ he would say. ‘Good Lord! Regular Guy Boothby stuff,’ and greedily press on with it.

      When I was about four years old, I was given a miniature armchair made of wicker and a children’s annual. I remember dragging the chair on to the lawn, seating myself, opening the book and thinking furiously, ‘I will read. I will read.’ After some boring, but I fancy, brief, struggles with The Dog Has Got a Bone and a beastly poem about reindeer, I went forward under my own steam and became an avid bookworm.

      My parents never stopped me reading a book though I believe my mother was at pains to see that nothing grossly ‘unsuitable’ was left in my way. The criterion was style: ‘He could write well,’ my mother said of the forgotten William J. Locke, ‘but he pot-boils. Very second-rate.’ I became something of an infant snob about books, and, like my father, felt a bit below par when I read Chums and Buffalo Bill, but continued, at intervals, to do so.

      My father was English and my mother a New Zealander. She was the one, however, who doggedly determined that I should not acquire the accent. ‘The cat,’ I was obliged interminably to repeat, ‘sat on the mat and the mouse ran across the barn.’ ‘The cart,’ my father would interrupt in a falsetto voice, ‘sart on the mart arnd the moose rarn across the bawn.’ I thought this excruciatingly witty and so did my mother but by these means the accent was held at bay.

      In spite of his anti-religious views my father can have made no objection to my being taken to our parish church or taught to say my prayers. These I found enjoyable. ‘Jesustender. Shepherdhearme.’ ‘Our Fatherchart’ and a monotonous exercise beginning ‘God bless Mummy and Daddy and All Kind Friends and Relations. God bless Gram and Gramp and – ’ It was prolonged for as long as my mother could take it. ‘Susie – and Tip – ’ I would drone, desperate for more objects of beatitude to fend off the moment when I would be left to set out upon the strange journeys of the night. These were formidable and sometimes appalling. There was one uncouth and recurrent dream in which everything Became Too Big. It might start with one’s fingers rubbing gigantically together and with a sickening threepenny piece that swelled horrifically between forefinger and thumb. Then everything swelled to become stifling and I awoke sobbing in my mother’s embrace. With a strangely logical determination, I learned to recognize this nightmare while I was experiencing it and trained my sleeping self to force the strangulated dream-scream that would deliver me.

      ‘I know,’ my father said. ‘I used to have it. Beastly, isn’t it, but only a dream. One grows out of it.’

      My cot with its wooden spindle sides was brought into my parents’ room. In it, on more propitious nights, I sailed and flew immense distances into slowly revolving lights, rainbow chasms and mountainous realms of incomprehensible significance, through which my father’s snores surged and receded. Asleep and yet not asleep, I made these nightly journeys: acquiescent, vulnerable, filled with a kind of wonder.

      There were day dreams, too, some of them of comparable terror and wonder, others cosy and familiar. I cannot remember a time when I was not visited occasionally, and always when I least expected it, by an experience which still recurs with, if anything, increasing poignancy. It is a common experience and for all I know there may be a common scientific explanation of it. It comes suddenly with an air of truth so absolute that one feels all other times must be illusion. It is not a sensation but a confrontation with duality. One moves outside oneself and sees oneself as a complete stranger and this is always a shock and an astonishment although one recognizes the moment and can think: ‘Here we go again. This is it.’ It is not self-hypnotism, because there is no loss of awareness as far as everyday surroundings are concerned: only the removal of oneself from the self who observes them and the overwhelming sensation of strangeness. It seems that if one held on to this moment and extended it one would make an enormous discovery but, for me, at least, this is impossible and I always return. Is this, I wonder, what was meant originally by being ‘beside oneself’. It is an odd phenomenon and as a child I grew quite familiar with it.

      My grandmother considered that my religious observances were inadequate. When she came to stay with us she brought a Victorian manual which had been the basis of my mother’s and aunts’ and uncles’ dogmatic instruction. It was called Line Upon Line and was in the form of dialogue, like the catechism: Q. and A.

      ‘“Who,”’ asked my grandmother, beginning at the beginning, ‘“is God?”’

      I shook my head.

      ‘“God,”’ said my grandmother, taking both parts, ‘“is a Spirit.”’

      Reminded of the little blue methylated flame on the tea tray I asked: ‘Can you boil a kekkle on Him, Gram?’

      She turned without loss of poise to Bible Stories: to Balaam and his ass. I suggested cooperatively that this was probably a circus donkey. My father was enchanted.

      My grandmother told my mother that it was perhaps rather too soon to begin religious instruction and, instead, read me the Peter Pan bits out of The Little White Bird.

      When I was about twelve my father brought home the collected works of Henry Fielding. ‘Jolly good stuff,’ he said. ‘You’d better read it.’

      I began with the plays and was at once nonplussed by many words. ‘What is a “wor"?’ I asked my father who said I knew very well what a war was and mentioned South Africa. ‘This is spelt differently,’ I said, nettled. ‘It seems to be some sort of girl.’ My father quickly said it was a ‘fast’ sort of girl. This was good enough. I had heard girls stigmatized as being ‘fast’ and certainly these ladies of Fielding’s seemed to behave with a certain incomprehensible alacrity. My father suggested that I try Tom Jones. I did so: I read it all and also, since Smollett turned up at this juncture, Roderick Random. It bothered me that I could not greatly enjoy these works since David Copperfield, whom I adored, had at my age or earlier, relished them extremely. I, on the contrary, still doted upon Little Lord Fauntleroy.

      We were, as I now realize, hard up. On both sides I came from what Rose Macaulay called ‘have-not’ families. My father was the eldest of ten. When he was still a schoolboy his own father (the youngest of three) died, leaving his widow in what were called reduced circumstances. He was a tea broker in the days of the clippers. This was considered OK socially for a younger СКАЧАТЬ