MY ENGLAND
This house was known as 'Darbyes' for it
had belonged to a Darby. It is later than the Doomsday Book, but
older than Tudor, likely built following the Black Death when
Westfield's village moved away from its churchyard traumatically
filled with plague dead. The great yew tree beside the house,
which I see is still standing, marked the Pilgrim Road to
Canterbury. My mother had bought the house before she married my
father. She was in her forties, so I was born, 14 April 1937, in
Devonshire Place, part of Wimpole Street, in Marylebone, so she
could be close to medical care. Then I was brought down from
London to this beautiful house in Westfield, East Sussex, as
soon as she and I could travel.
It was here that I was baptized, in Westfield's Church of St
John the Baptist, in a fourteenth-century font that had first
held Catholic babies, then Protestant ones. The church is part
Saxon, part Norman. I loved going to church here, walking
through the fields in flowered print dress and bonnet made by
the village dressmaker, seeing the real flowers in the
hedgerows, among them wild roses, hearing the Lesson read from
the great brass Eagle, listening to the choir from the
Methodists sing Carols at Christmas in the Anglican church.
Later, I would return to this church and find its vicar, Revd.
Evan France, to be a splendid scholar of Hebrew, Greek and
Arabic, and take one beginning Hebrew lesson from him.
We moved
from Devonshire Place to Strand-on-the-Green and my earliest
memory is of being in my cot there and the Thames rippling
reflections across the ceiling. Then that lovely house was
bombed. Our next London place was at Rivermead Court in Putney,
by Hurlingham Club where I was allowed to play in a child-sized
house, and where again we were beside the Thames, often spending
time in the Putney Underground, our bomb shelter. But mostly we
grew up in the Sussex countryside.
When the war came my parents had had to do war work, my father being Press Secretary to exiled President Benes of Czechoslovakia in London. I can remember Christmas parties at the Czech Embassy and a Czech diplomat carrying me on his shoulders to see a table laden with wobbling jellies, cakes and so much else, more food than one ever saw together in one place during the War. My mother first worked for the BBC listening to enemy broadcasts in Evesham, for she was fluent in French, German and Dutch from her convent schooling in Holland, as well as English. Once, she heard that our village was to be bombed. She was not allowed to say anything about what she knew on pain of death. So, instead she came down to us in Sussex and we spent the night in the cellar together as great land mines were dropped overhead, cracks appearing in the walls of our house from their heavy explosions. They didn't shoot her, as legally they should have, but she lost that job and worked instead for the Red Cross, editing a newsletter with pictures of the prisoners-of-war in German camps to be sent to their families in England. I can remember her crawling on hands and knees positioning the photographs and text on the floor. We children were next taken to be with a carpenter and his wife who lived in a house in Westfield Lane called Rosemount and who were from Scotland. Mr Beattie taught me carpentry so I could make toys for my baby brother. Mr and Mrs Beattie, their Christian names, Alexander and Mary, and my mother, Sybil Margaret Rutherford Bolton, herself half Scots, are buried in Westfield's churchyard, my father and brother in Rome's Protestant Cemetery.
It was while we were at the Beatties that I was first sent to convent school up on the Ridge, Holmhurst Saint Mary, of the Community of the Holy Family. Schooling was difficult because, when I was six and my brother four, a flying bomb had exploded over our house and we were deaf. I describe what that growing up was like in the essay Deaf/Death.
So, after
the War, I came to live with my younger brother amidst my
father's books, shelved in my mother's house, Darbyes, and I
remember my father reading Plato in Greek, teaching me to read
from an eighteenth-century edition of Gibbon's Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire, with its s's like f's, and
telling me about the alphabetised signatures in the gatherings
and bindings of books. He also held me up to look through the
round glass window into the Reading Room of the British Library,
and through the then war-emptied halls of the British Museum,
only the Mildenhall Treasure being on display. Once, he showed
me a hand-written diary written by a British officer on the
island of St Helena, describing Napoleon's presence there and
his fatal illness. My father had worked as a child in the
Bodleian Library, fetching books for Yeats and Bridges and
Underhill, during the First World War. Then, after the Yorkshire
Post, had gone to India in the thirties, working as an
editor for the Times of India. Where he was Gandhi's friend and biographer.
CONVENT SCHOOL
She
is six years old when her long loose hair is tightly plaited
behind her face and she is first taken to the school. Her
mother is not with her. She is in London. War is raging. The
young child and her brother are boarded with a childless
Scots couple who love them dearly. They live in a Sussex
bungalow filled with fumed oak furniture and which has a
sand pit, an orchard, a tool shed and a green house with a
grape vine, thick and gnarled with age, thrusting up against
the paned glass roof.
The
frail Scotswoman rings the convent doorbell. The girl and
her brother lean close against her skirts. The door is
opened. It is the first time the girl has seen a nun. The
garbed figure whose face is framed by a stiff, snowy coif,
smiles sweetly and bids them enter. They walk along a sunny
white corridor to the parlour. There they are greeted by the
headmistress and shown into chairs. Talk. Talk in waves and
rhythms, incomprehensible. The children fidget. They feel
guilty, knowing they should not do so. The nun talks forever
to their foster mother. When they are ready to leave she
swoops down and kisses the girl's forehead. The sharp coif
feels uncomfortable but the kiss is gentle. There are
butterflies in the walled garden beyond the window. A bell
chimes slowly. The interview is broken off and they leave,
the girl and her brother holding hands as they go down the
stairs from the grey stone doorway with the Latin
inscription on the lintel.
PAX INTRANTIBUS
SALUS EXEUNTIBUS
BENEDICTIO HABITANTIBUS
Words in a strange language, left an unsolved mystery until, some years later, the Latin mistress introduces her first year pupils to the ancient tongue by helping them translate the many classic mottoes to be found throughout the school grounds on mossy stone lintels and baroque Italian archways. Then and only then did she decipher:
Peace to those who enter here
Salutation to those who leave us
And blessings upon those who abide here
Elsewhere in the garden of Paradise it said,
SALVE ATQUE VALE
And
Holmhurst.
AMERICAN EXILE
At
16 I was sent away to America,
to live with an aunt in California and to go to college
there. There, when I was 17, I met my husband, published
his short story, The Woman the
Sun, the Flowers and the Courage, in our literary
journal, also my own essay 'Death Valley Incident, I
would use my pitiful earnings to buy his medicines when he
had pneumonia; then, at 20, married
him. He was 28.
I
was still under legal age, still required to obey my
elders and my betters, for instance, we could not drink
champagne at my wedding, but I was afraid of the future
with him. Knew that all was not well. Tried to get away
from my aunt to my mother, sent her the money to get my
ticket, but she drank it. I was trapped. Then the
nightmare began. My husband could not love women, only
their money, did not want children, only cars. I had to
pay every penny our children cost us to be born,
breastfeed them, make their clothes, work, in the end
working four jobs at once. I loved them. He did not allow
me to go back to England, but went himself and told my
grandmother and everyone else in my family that he would
do everything for us and they were not to leave us one
penny. He ordered me to write a best-selling novel to buy
us a house. I tried, finishing it, Mosaic,
after I had bought us a house in Belmont, with my dowry.
He had, during our engagement, killingly disparaged its
beginning. Then destroyed what I had written so I had to
rewrite it all from memory with my screaming youngest baby
at my side, in order to forgive my husband. He killed our
three cats. His psychologist, Dr David Freeman, called me
into his office, after three sons and nine years of
marriage, saying it was too dangerous, that I must
consider myself a widow, that we must leave him or he
would kill us. Or a colleague. Or many people. Dr Freeman
waved in front of me the results of the Personality
Inventory Test. I fumed with rage. How dared they judge my
husband on the basis of a piece of paper run through a
computer?
But
then it did happen. Except we all kept quiet as the dead,
while he rampaged through the house, the garden, axing,
with a great wet-oak axe, everything in sight, everything
that symbolized us. Then trembling, telephoned his mother.
Who praised him. We fled. Then returned. Then he beat me
in front of our screaming children, my back is still
injured and the pain bouts excruciating. The Judge
insisted on a divorce to save our lives. A divorce to
which I never consented. But the Judge overruled me,
insisting that it was the only legal way to obtain the
life-saving restraining order. I saw it was, indeed, the
only way to save my husband's soul. But always wrote
'separated', never 'divorced', on official documents. The Judge insisted on half my husband's
income coming to the children. And the house I had bought
us to be legally ours. But we never did receive child
support. My husband talked my aunt into quit-claiming our
house to him when we were starving in Rome and could not
make its payments. It had been bought with my dowry from
my Great Aunt in Dublin. My husband had not put down one
penny of his own. First virgin, then, during our marriage,
I was always faithful to him. A dowry, where a marriage
fails, is returned to a chaste wife so she can raise their
children. He used my dowry for his Ph.D., first at San
Francisco State, then at Wayne State, Universities, and
also, he told me, for going out with prostitutes;
marrying, he later told me, his second wife in Synagogue,
writing in a letter at the time about spending his
honeymoon in hospital from contracting her sexually
transmitted disease. No one helped me with my Ph.D., nor
with our three sons, apart from my aunt paying Quaker
boarding school tuition. Nor did he leave them our money
(which he told them he had inherited instead from his
unmarried uncle's gold mine, another scam), when he died,
giving it instead to his second wife and finally at her
death, it being shared between her sons and his. My aunt's
money, to have been left to us for our children's
university education, was likewise taken by my uncle for
his adopted children in Ireland on the basis of my
psychopath husband's earlier statements that fully
convinced my grandmother that he was fully supporting us
and that no one else was to leave us anything.
And
so it was that I and my three children, our sons, came to
Berkeley, and where I studied first for the M.A., then, at
Berkeley's invitation, for the Ph.D. I had only wanted the
M.A., to prove to my husband that it was possible for him
to study in graduate school, get his Ph.D., and at the
same time have children, for he had always raged at me,
saying having children had ruined his life, had ruined his
chances of further study. For me it had been the choice of
working in nursery schools and department stores many
hours away from my children in poverty or choosing
graduate school in poverty but with more time with my
sons.
At
Berkeley the most vivid memories are of us being hungry
and scared, but also of silk-screening beautiful posters
against the war in Vietnam, of sitting on the floor in
Professor Thomas Parkinson's house while assembling pirate
copies of Mark Twain's War Prayer, of
Tom Parkinson's speech at People's Park saying 'No more
killing', of Star Trek episodes watched with graduate
students in nuclear physics, I the only woman, the only
non-scientist, where we would de-code their anti-Vietnam
allegories, 'No Kill I', of my children being tear-gassed
and my youngest son's terrible ear infection because of
this, two miles away from the University of California in
our Married Students' Housing in Albany.
Then full time teaching for
the Franciscans in Illinois, while writing the
dissertation, and where I was so ashamed at being a
divorced woman; my brother telling me of course I could
never attend the Queen's birthday parties; then at
Princeton University for seven years, then at the
University of Colorado at Boulder.
ENGLISH CONVENT
HERMIT IN ITALY
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