Authors: Margaret Drabble
What have they to say, these learned ladies, to the shade of Ellen Bawtry? They do not speak the same language. They do not inhabit the same realm. A faint dying snigger of recessive laughter hangs in the air. Ellen Bawtry hears it, turns, listens, wounded, suspicious, shakes her head.
The slut scrubs the steps. The damp souls of housemaids sprout despondently in little cupboards and kitchens, in dark corners and cold attics.
Mrs Bawtry shuffles on, in search of her lost daughter. The wide corridors seem infinite, and, like the corridors of a maze, they lead her nowhere. She will never find her daughter here. It is as well that she does not come here to try.
The black beetles scuttle. Surely somebody should sweep them up.
Had Bessie Bawtry, somewhere in these corridors, overheard the phrase They let the scum of the earth in here now’?
So Bessie Bawtry recovered, and bravely faced the possibility of failure, and sat for part one of her Tripos. She sat down, on the afternoon of Monday, 23 May, and confronted her first paper of what was then known as English B. Three hours of it, and a warm day; the sun shone outside, and indoors pens scratched on paper. Three hours of questions on La Tene firedogs, the Beaker people, bronze shields and the Mildenhall burials: to be followed by other papers on other hot days on the Vikings, on Teutonic brooches, on socketed axes, on the Plymstock and Arreton Down hoards, on trade routes and runes and ruins. Was it for this that Miss Heald had encouraged Bessie Bawtry to read J. Alfred Prufrock and Edith Sitwell? What had all this to do with English Literature? What was she doing here?
Bessie was all at sea, and knew it, for it had taken her a year or so of her time at Cambridge to realize that these remote topics were part of her syllabus, not merely interesting background information, which she could take or leave as she chose. It had never occurred to her that she would be examined on them. She had sat with wandering and wondering mind through lectures on trade routes, dutifully taking notes, but taking little in, and mishearing ‘roots’ for ‘routes’—the sense was the same as the sound to her. Tree roots, trade routes, flies trapped in Baltic amber, coral necklaces, skulls in potholes, skulls split by axe heads. What had all these to do with the Word? She had been utterly confused. These subjects seemed as remote from the English literature which she had thought she was studying as the discoveries then being made by Newnham scholar Gertrude Caton-Thompson in the pre-dynastic settlement sites and Neolithic cultures of the Nile. It was the shock of discovering that she had to sit papers on trade routes that had precipitated her collapse. She did not dare to reveal her folly to anyone. She did not want to make herself out to be a slack, stupid, dumb girl from the north, who did not even know what course she was supposed to be studying: Had not Miss Heald insisted that it was of the utmost importance to
READ THE QUESTIONS CAREFULLY
AND AN
SWER THE CORRECT NUMBER IN THE TIME GIVEN
?(It Was Joe Barron’s failure to do this, in Miss Heald’s view, that had cost him his County.) And now she had done far far worse than Joe Barron! She had prepared for the wrong papers. Miss Heald would never forgive her.
No wonder Bessie had taken to her bed.
However, Bessie thought she might manage to scrape by, for during her convalescence she had managed to swot up secretly on some of the areas she had neglected. And now, sitting in front of her first paper, she was able to find, even in this archaeological waste land, a theme or two on which she could discourse intelligently—the conception of Fate amongst the Scandinavian peoples and its influence upon the form of the saga, a short essay on ‘The wo of these women that woneth in cotes’. And she was safe with her
Beowulf,
for she had her
Beowulf
by heart, as she had had her Virgil two years earlier for her Higher Certificate examination. She knew her
Beowulf
through and throughly. What could be conquered late by industry, she had conquered. And so she scraped by, though for the rest of her life those teasing terrible objects and subjects would rise up before her to torment her in her dreams—the Jellinge stone, the Oseberg Viking Ship, the Halton Cross, the funerary rites of the Romans in Britain. She would never be free of them, until death came to free her. They were scorched and scarred into her. They would be incinerated with her upon her funeral pyre.
As soon as Bessie had completed her last paper, she collapsed again, and this time she managed to run a high fever and was briefly admitted to the college sick bay. If she were to fail utterly, would she be eligible for a sick note and an
aegrotat
? She did not want to go home until she had established either failure or success. But she could not languish in the sick bay for ever. She had to go home. She had nowhere else to go. She would have to wait in Slotton Road for the news, good or bad. So home she went, with her box and her railway ticket.
(In fact, she need not have gone straight home. She could have gone to stay for a couple of weeks with Molly in Somerset. Molly’s mother had warmly invited her. But Bessie had declined. She wanted to
feel
as though she had nowhere else to go. She felt safer with fewer options. She preferred a sense of mild grievance over the risk of new scenes and new pleasures. She would have liked to see the farm, but she had not the spirit for it. So she perversely cherished her sense of exclusion.)
And maybe she had other reasons for going home.
She waited, anxiously, in Slotton Road, for her results. Did her parents realize how worried she was? She hoped not. Fortunately for her, they were distracted by an event of larger portent. They had become interested in the forthcoming total eclipse of the sun, predicted for Wednesday, 29 June of that year. You wouldn’t have thought, Bessie said to Ethel Gledhill, that they’d be interested in that kind of thing, would you?
Bert and Ellen’s interest was not astronomical. The eclipse happened to coincide with their wedding anniversary, and it happened to reach totality in their own county of Yorkshire, which made it seem special. The eclipse had been made for the Bawtrys, and they intended to see it at its best. Bert negotiated two days off work, days owed to him from previous unclaimed holidays, and willingly granted in recognition of his public-spirited and voluntary efforts at the cinema. The eclipse was due to occur at 6.23 a.m., well to the northwest of Breaseborough, and Bert and Ellen were off on their motorbike and sidecar to spend a night with cousins in Darlington. The Great North Road would be crowded with eclipse spectators, travelling towards the sensational morning darkness. It would be a spree.
Bessie could not decide what line to take about the eclipse. Was it proper to find it exciting? On balance, she thought it was not. She would ignore it, and think of higher things. She thought of Women’s Suffrage, and almost attended a rally in Barnsley in favour of its extension to all women over twenty-one. (Married women and property-owning women over thirty had won the vote in 1918, when Bessie was still a child.) Bessie was to call herself a feminist for the rest of her life, though it is not clear how she herself contributed to the feminist cause. She was to read, on publication, Shaw’s
The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism,
the first of the Penguin Pelicans, and always claimed that it had affected her profoundly. And maybe it did. The reading of a book can be a contribution to a cause.
The days of waiting seemed long. It was an anxious time. Would the examination results be published in
The Times,
as some but not all Tripos results were? (Women’s were published in a separate column, demarcated from the men’s, indicating that they were not recognized as full members of the university.) Would they be published in the
Breaseborough Times,
which, though chiefly concerned with advertisements and sporting and social fixtures, did, as we have seen, take a sporadic interest in the intellectual successes of the children of its town? Did humiliation await her? Well, we have all been through this. There is nothing special about this. So Bessie told herself, each morning, as she got up to see if there was an envelope for her.
The
Breaseborough Times
published aerial views of collieries and reports of accidents. A seventy-five-year-old man, injured in a fall on a night shift at Bednerby Main, had died in Wardale Hospital. He had fallen into a four-foot-two-inch manhole while walking down Wardale Plain, miles underground. (The hospital, in June, was briefly closed because of an outbreak of smallpox, as the paper reported.) Did Bessie think it odd that a man of seventy-five should be working underground in the middle of the night? Yes, to be fair to her, she did. This life seemed horrible to her. There must be a better world than this. Had she any idea what Wardale Plain might look like? She had read her Virgil, and could guess. The smoky vale of Acheron, the highway of the dead.
Even women died at the pit. On 25 June, a Mrs S. A. Harrison was killed while working at Denvers Main. What was her job there? We do not know. The
Breaseborough Times
does not say. Presumably she was not working underground. By the 1920s the days of Zola’s
Germinal
were over, surely.
The coal fire at college had flickered so cheerily in its little grate. If she failed, would she be allowed back to Cambridge to try again? Or would she be obliged to descend into obscurity? No, she would never descend. She would keep her head above the closing fissures. She would keep a clean house.
Beneath your feet they tramp and dig and hack and choke.
The insulted earth smoulders, heaves and splits. The toxic gases cluster, leak and spill.
The envelope arrived ten days before the sun went out, nine days before her parents set off on their outing. Bessie did not fail. She passed. She did not pass with good grades, with scholarship-justifying grades, as she had earlier hoped and expected, as others had hoped and expected. She, who had always been top of the class, had to be satisfied with what was colloquially known as a ‘Two Two’—a Class Two, Division Two pass. But she had passed, and she was relieved. Her parents were not familiar with the niceties of grades. Bessie made sure they did not take too much interest in them now.
Bert and Ellen Bawtry congratulate their daughter. Is she a graduate yet? It seems she is only halfway there, but so far, so good. They will never understand the Cambridge jargon. They are happy, as they take to the open highway. Ellen puts on her goggles and her weird horned and ear-flapped wool hat, Bert dons his motorbike gear, they wave, and off they go. The Great North Road, with its famous staging posts, its new AA signs, its sprouting of bed and breakfast accommodations, its teas with Hovis, its beauty spots, allures them with its promise of displacement and romance. They rattle along in fine spirits. Cousins Ada and George Cudworth have boldly embraced the new Motoring Age, and have opened a B and B with Homemade Teas just this side of Darlington. They take in travellers from Edinburgh on their way south, from London on their way north. They brew tea and burn toast and fry bacon and bake rock cakes, and they dry sheets in their backyard on a clothesline with a wooden prop. Eggs, boiled, 4d each, poached or scrambled 5d each, with bread and butter for your tea. Dora would have loved to go to Auntie Ada’s for the eclipse, but there is not room for her in the sidecar. She will have to stay in Breaseborough with Bessie. But, as she admires and believes she loves Bessie, she does not feel left out. Well, not much, anyway.
The people of the coalfields love the dales and the moors and the open roads. The people of Yorkshire love the Great North Road, the highway to adventure, and will complain when it is renamed the Al. Dora has done an original school project on the Great North Road, for which she got good marks. She would like to have gone too.
Does a workforce gather on coal, like insects on a wound? Sheep graze the short sweet turf of the dales. Nobody herds them underground.
Back in Breaseborough, Bessie was visited by Joe Barron. Were Joe Barron and Bessie Bawtry courting? Dora, who was deputed to chaperone them as they sat on the couch in the front room, thought that they were, though she was not quite sure what courting involved. This was an age of sexual innocence, and Dora was to remain an innocent all her life. Bessie and Joe sat close to one another, and whispered. Had Bert and Ellen gone to Darlington partly in order to give Joe Barron a sporting chance? They approved of Joe. He was a polite young man, of good family. They would be delighted if Joe made an offer for Bessie. It would be a step up in the world for Bessie. Bert and Ellen didn’t care much about such things, but they were not wholly indifferent to them either.
Bessie and Joe Barron spoke of many matters. They were young, and they were idealistic and hopeful, and they agreed with Bernard Shaw that there must be a better world than this. They went together to a lecture at the Settlement in Sheffield on Anglo-Soviet relations, which took a mildly pro-Soviet line. They went together to see Greta Garbo in a movie at the Rialto, and they went to see a production of
Dr Faustus
by the Northam Players.
Joe Barron, she had been informed by Reggie Oldroyd, would be joining her in Cambridge next October, to read Law at Downing. She now, on home ground, discovered this to be true. Joe had wasted two years of his life selling glass, but his father had relented, and he had been coached, and had worked through long evenings, and had sat his entrance examinations and obtained a place. His mother and his sisters had supported him. His long wait was over, and his real free life was about to begin. So it’s a pity, you might think, to find him still hanging around his hometown sweetheart, just when he could have made a break for it, and got away from it all.
Bessie was very pretty, in those days. She wasn’t as handsome as Garbo, but she was much prettier than the young woman who played Helen in Marlowe’s
Faustus
in Northam. Her extra toe remained well hidden.
Sexual attraction and pity do not mix well. They are a dangerous combination, as granddaughter Faro, whose conception begins to seem more and more unavoidable, will one day discover.