Authors: Margaret Drabble
No wonder Bessie Bawtry hid.
Bessie’s earliest memory was of a steep and narrow staircase. Strait was the way. A narrow, steep incline, of steps too high for her short legs, and herself midway, on the seventh step, crouching, unable to climb up, afraid to fall down. The drugget-protected carpet runner was tethered with cruel rods and clamped down with brass teeth. Its abrasive weave attacked her knees and her fingers. She was afraid to let out a whimper. The great sharp edges towered above her, the geometric cliffs plunged down beneath her. How had she got there? It was forbidden. And now she must stay there for ever, trapped, between two perils, in utter terror of wrath or of unbeing. She had been paralysed with fear. How had she got there? She had been unable to move. What had rescued her? She could never remember. Had she been slapped or scolded for climbing the stairs? She did not know. And were the stairs in her birth-home, in Slotton Road, or in some stranger’s house? Again, she did not know. Could that puny little staircase even have seemed so long, so steep, so high? Did the memory belong to her grandmother’s house in Leeds, of which she had no other recollection? She would never know, would never work it out.
But again and again, throughout her life, she would dream of that staircase. A birth trauma, we now might call it. Will Bessie Bawtry ever learn this term? It seems unlikely, as she crouches in her cave. But so much is unlikely. Bessie Bawtry herself is unlikely, and so are her imaginings. (‘Where
did
she get those notions from?’ will be an indignant, often dismissive, but occasionally proud refrain.) Nobody taught Bessie to recoil from stale fish, from over-boiled meat, from suet, from dank lavatory moss on the steps of the outside privy, from the silt that stiffened the curtains. Nobody had taught her that the town’s unmade streets were unsightly, nor that its patches of wasteland were an affront to order and to common sense. She had never seen a handsome building or a well-planned town. Had she constructed for herself some image of the Ideal City from photographs in newspapers and magazines, from paintings, from descriptions in books? And if she had, what gave her the notion that she had a right to inhabit it?
The house in Slotton Road had been built in 1904, not long before Bessie was born, but she was not to remember it as a new house, for the dirt had invaded it so rapidly. But new it had been, and not so long ago. It was a corner house, and of that the Bawtrys were proud, for corner houses were desirable. The street itself straggled along in a haphazard, low, creeping, speculative manner. Fern Villas, a semi-detached double-fronted building, had been built first, and was dated 1902 in crude Art Nouveau script: this was followed in 1903, if the runes spoke true, by Hurst House, marginally detached. Then came the rapid march of unnamed numbers, of two-storey houses in red brick with shallow projecting bays, not quite regular or uniform in design, but showing small signs of not always very happy or confident decorative independence—a fretted eave, a patterned airbrick, a rudimentary floral motif in fired clay over a doorway. The little town had grown from a population of four hundred in 1800 to fourteen thousand in 1900, and was still growing. The streets marched, met a dead end, turned a corner, then groped and wandered blindly on. The streets marched over Gorse Croft and Cat Balk and Chapel Pit and Coally Pond and Longdoles. They marched right up to Gospel Well. They marched over field and fell. People had to be housed. Lot converged on lot, unplanned, undesigned, parcelled out. Small tenants paid small rents to small landlords, and bigger tenants paid slightly bigger rents to bigger landlords. The lucky ones were those that found they owned the coalfields. The unlucky ones were those that worked the coalfields. A thin grassy layer of agriculture continued to cover the wide basin of the valley, but the riches lay below.
Slotton Road was undistinguished, but it was better than some of the other new streets. At least the Bawtry house did not front straight on to the pavement. Each house in Slotton Road had a small area, a yard or so across, beneath its bay, fenced off by a low wall or railings with a wrought-iron gate. Not quite a garden, not quite a yard. ‘A waste of space,’ as Bessie might have described it, in her caustic later vein. But as a child she was proud of it. She despised those whose unprotected houses lined the roadway, whose front-parlour windows were shrouded by grimy Nottingham lace.
Contempt was common currency in Breaseborough. Those with little are trained to despise those with less. Contempt marks off an area, it marks you off from the common street. You are protected from the common by a small, useless, ugly, proud, discriminatory little asphalt patch.
Canal Street, Cemetery Road, Coal Pit Lane, Quarry Bank, Clay Pit Way, Gashouse Lane, Goosebutt Terrace. They didn’t mince words round Breaseborough. At least Slotton didn’t mean anything dirty or rude. Slotton Road was called after a fishmonger, but that wasn’t too obvious. And there wouldn’t have been any point in calling it Belle Vue or Rosemount or Mount Pleasant, would there? People in Breaseborough liked to call a spade a spade.
Bessie Bawtry sat under the table and watched the glowing coals. She watched the coals and the shadow of the firelight as it flickered on the wall and on the sheen of the disproportionately large mahogany sideboard for which her father had paid five pounds and ten shillings. In the red heart of the fire, palaces and castles blossomed, blushed and crumbled, caverns opened and pulsed, and flaming ferns of fossilized forests branched. Bessie’s clean white little bobbin sat safely in its place and nobody but she knew it was there.
Her father read the paper. Her mother pegged a rug. Her sister Dora quietly slept.
Is Bessie to be our heroine? Something of interest must happen to her, or we would not have wasted all this time making her acquaintance. Something must surely single her out from all those other statistics that Dr Hawthorn has fed into his computer. But to her, as yet, the future was unimaginably opaque, although it was more real than the present. Bessie had decided at an early age that Breaseborough was not real. It was a mistake.
She was not alone in this view. The exodus from Breaseborough is part of our plot. Some stayed, some left, and, decades on, some were gathered back into the hall of the Wesleyan chapel to try to retrace these journeys.
Months passed, years passed. Bessie came out from under the table, and forgot her cotton bobbin, and Dora woke up and began to try to make a noise. Ellen and Bessie between them soon put a stop to that. Bessie had decided that she was the most important member of the family, and had already managed to impose her conception and her will on others. Dora must learn to stay in second place. Bessie was determined to occupy the centre of the story, and she did not want a competitor. She had not yet perfected her techniques for subordinating others, but she was working on them.
It would be tedious to follow Bessie through all the stages and stopping places of her infancy, through those interminable Sunday school classes and Whitsuntide processions. Those days are dead and gone, and so is the dullness that went with them, the slow prose that described them. Bessie Bawtry prayed for acceleration, before she even knew what she was praying for, and in the end she got it. Whether she was grateful for what she got remains to be seen. But we can, at this stage in the story, predict that despite her delicate constitution, she may well live to a ripe—or perhaps an unripe?—old age.
There was a month or two in her early life when she looked as though she was not going to make it, for Bessie, like millions of others around the world, nearly died of the Spanish flu in the autumn of 1918. Before this crisis, she had been making what school reports describe as Steady Progress. She had graduated from Morley Mixed Infants (sums, letters, clay and pencils), where the motherly Miss George sometimes let you sit on her knee. She had moved on to Morley Girls (knitting, sums, letters and ink) and had said good-bye with relief to the stout and ailing alpaca-clad headmistress there, whose chief educational principle had consisted of ‘knocking it into them’, and who was forever sending children on pointless errands to look for her pills or her spectacles. Under her regime Bessie had been a failure as a knitter of socks and a turner of seams, but had mastered the names of the Books of the Bible and the rivers of Europe, and was good at reciting by rote.
She had, by the age of ten, exhausted the limited supply of reading matter in the Morley Girls Library, and had read over and over again the small collection of books in Slotton Road, most of which were Sunday school prizes which had been awarded to various Victorian Cudworths and Bawtrys for chapel attendance. Most of these Bessie found as contemptible as Mr Beever’s bathetic sermons. A characteristic example was
The Dairyman’s Daughter; an Authentic Narrative from Real Life
by the late Rev. Legh Richmond, A.M., Rector of Turvey, Bedfordshire, reprinted by William Walker in Otley, which had been given to one of her Cudworth aunts, Selina, by Bessie’s grandmother in 1861. This doll-sized pocket volume, four inches by three, had looked promising when discovered in the bottom of her mother’s sewing drawer. Its yellow endpapers, its tiny print, its gold-engraved title, its vaguely Oriental embossed red-brown cover, and its frontispiece of deathbed and medicine bottles might well have attracted a hypochondriac child. But the text was excessively religious, and Bessie at once saw through its condescending equation of servile rustic poverty with virtue. She could not identify with the abject piety of its heroine Elizabeth, even though they shared a name, and the clergyman-narrator’s profound selfsatisfaction irritated her intensely. His praise of humble cottages seemed compromised by his delight in grand mansions and fair prospects. She could not have provided a Marxist critique of it at the age of nine, but she could and did react with honest indignation. Such stuff! She wondered what Great-Aunt Selina had made of it.
Great-Aunt Selina had qualified as a nurse of insane persons under the auspices of the Medico-Psychological Association of Great Britain and Ireland, and had worked for some years in the asylum at Wakefield, where the legendary misogynist psychologist Henry Maudsley had recently been assistant medical officer. She must have seen some sights there, but Bessie could not ask her about them, because she was dead. Great-Aunt Selina had spent her spare time crocheting lace edges for pillowcases with a finger-punishing small steel hook. The pillowcases survive.
No, Bessie did not care for
The Dairyman’s Daughter,
that once-so-popular tract. In contrast, however, she felt a strange and disquieting affection for Mrs Sherwood’s
Little Henry and His Bearer,
a slightly larger volume in slightly larger print, and with more numerous and more lively illustrations. This had been presented as a Christmas gift to a long-forgotten Samuel Cudworth on 25 December 1859. (What had he been? Butcher, baker, or pattern maker?) Bessie read it many times. It was the story of a neglected little English orphan, brought up in India by his devoted bearer Boosie as a happy heathen Hindoo, then converted to Christianity by a visiting lady of missionary and Methodist leanings. This lady had easily convinced little Henry of the inefficacy of the Hindoo faith by shattering a little Hindoo god of baked earth into a hundred pieces, and pointing out that it could not then get up and move or do anything useful. From this it proved an easy step to turn Henry into a devout Christian, conscious of sin and afraid of hell. (‘They shall look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me; for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched, and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh’, Isaiah 66:24). It was as well that Henry had repented his sins and assured himself of immortal life, for at the age of eight years and seven months he sickened and died, as children did in India. But he did not die before he had converted his bearer Boosie and persuaded him to lose caste by becoming a Christian, with the new name of John.
This little tale intrigued Bessie Bawtry. It was a stimulating study in what would soon be known as comparative religion: the unredeemed Boosie at one point delivered himself of the challenging, albeit incorrect view that ‘There are many brooks and rivers of water, but they all run into the sea at last: there is the Mussulman’s way to heaven, and the Hindoo’s way, and the Christian’s way, and one way is as good as another.’ It also provided an interesting picture of a way of life quite unlike that in Breaseborough, where English ladies smoked hookahs at tiffin, where Indians consulted gooroos and ground mussala, where the Ganges (not a river of Europe, but an important river none the less) wound its way around the curving shore to lose itself behind the Rajmahal Hills.
Satisfying though this fable had proved in its own curious and unintended way (though perhaps we cannot be utterly sure of Mrs Sherwood’s intentions), Bessie, at the age of eleven, felt herself ready for stronger fare. And at Breaseborough Secondary School, before she fell ill of the influenza, she was beginning to find it. She had been introduced to English Language and Literature, Reading and Recitation, History, Geography, French, Arithmetic, Algebra, Science, Scripture, Art, Needlework and Nature Study. Riches of learning spread themselves before her. (The subjects of Music and Laundry, although listed as options upon her terminal report, do not seem to have engaged her scholarly attention. Like her mother, Bessie was tone deaf, and she already knew about laundry. She had learned the subject young, by the side of her mother’s copper and her mother’s oak peggy tub, in the hot steaming fug worked up from yellow bars of Perfection Soap, where she played with her own little doll’s washtub and her own little toy wringer.) Bessie was entranced by this brave new world of adult study. And just as it opened up to her, she fell ill.
Bessie Bawtry fell ill in October 1918. She, who caught every passing germ as punctually and diligently as though her invalid honour depended upon it, could not fail this great opportunity. The avenging virus of influenza settled upon her just as she was attempting to caption and colour in a map showing the pattern of medieval strip farming. It struck her much more rapidly than malaria had settled upon the slowly fading little Henry, or consumption on the virtuous dairymaid. One moment she was feeling fine, but the next moment, even as she dipped her pen into the inkwell, the flu assailed her with peremptory violence. It occupied her nose and throat, it poured hotly through her bloodstream, and speeded up her pulse to fever pitch. She was the first child in the school to surrender: she had that distinction. Others followed rapidly. By the time she got home that afternoon, her temperature was 104, and she was mildly delirious. She was conscious of a pride in her status. But, though proud, she was very, very ill.