Chapter VIII

- 98 -

In the face of such monstrous opposition, my father had
performed heroic acts. When first he noticed our danger of go-
ing naked, he drove us to Marshall & Snellgroves & had us 'fit-
ted out' in the delightful fashion of the period. To the same
imprecations, he sent us to school, committed Ida to her proffes-
sion of music and, later, enrolled me, with the best intentions,
in an art school.

As things got worse, he could take no fresh initiative;
his 'health' which was behaving queerly became his major concern
Haunting Harley Street where specialists repeatedly decided there
the matter
was nothing at all with him, he could not believe they were right

At last when the density of sound vibrations bloomed up
space while disintegrating the compact of my identity, until
I seemed embedded in rock, On the brief occasions when I drew
myself out in my original form, I would find myself closeted
with father, both of us white-faced and shaken, conferring as
to what"could be done".

Despite a domestic chaos steadily precluding us from
any ' mode of life', vital necessities would confront us.
Predominantly my peril of becoming unclothed.

It is often the case that although a problem shared by
two may be obviously insoluble for oneself, one has only to
put oneself in the place of the other one to see it simplify.
So before the problem of how to address my mother on any sub-
ject whatsoever, when to take the initiative in conversing
without bringing
with her inevitably brought down the rain of her abuse upon us,
Father, although he no longer attempted to come to terms with
her himself, would meditate on my behalf, then with a knowing

Chapter VIII

- 99 -

smile:

"Coax her" he advised me. Such inadequacies were native to that older generation which clung on long after the bough of its fixed-idea had broken. But this was not the only reason that, loyally my father's ally throughout my purgatorial apprenticeship I had really no ally of my own. His solicitous confidence, I yet perceived, beneath his need for commiseration, down-right suspicion of me. He shared, with an almost total majority of men at the time, a somehow subtly obscene aversion to any female who used her mind. If he could shut his ears, female #fwho #ould#he#ut#in# his ears & invoque the quiet I guaranteed would heal him, should he cut his marriage in half; the more plainly he heard the opinion which the middle class lived to propitiate, of a ' society ' for whom that class must exist incognito. #ineenough# Never" said my father, static as a fakir, "It would harm you children".

His visions were his own however. My harrowed entreaties for even minor respites he parried, gravely shaking his head, "It wouldn't do; no daughter should ever leave her mother's side" how far his voice receded, measuring the duration of this vision's tenacity with a sob "Its so beautiful ... the bud beside the rose; men like it." he consoled me.

The bud. Patched to distortion, the tight half of my sleeve under the elbow length bell often wearing thin, had been recovered as if by an insane upholsterer with so many layers of miscellaneous stuff it had grown to a shapeless bundle. Discouraged, I let my forearm, like the incomodious appendage of a crustacean, drop to my side.

All the while I had been growing up, becoming a woman

Chapter VIII

- 100 -

" Some day you'll be a mother yourself then you'll understand."
says mine, pushing me violently in the chest. This nevrose
body is developping and for thrift she is making me a dress
from a pattern with a child's flat yoke. " How can I fit you?
You nasty girl. Do you think at your age it is decent to have
a figure. Your vile flesh, you'll get no goods out of it.
Curse you. Curse your father.... I'm going to crush"it"she
screams.

Having seen little except for machine made furniture, the
subjects I found appropriate for art were cupids, peacocks,
cypresses and swans. Ah swans down, swans

Chapter VIII

101

Having seen little except for machine made furniture,
the subjects I found appropriate to art were cupids, peacocks,
cypresses and swans. AH swansdown, swans neck condescension
in curves against sunsets of jam.

To what most sweetly could I make flesh compare? Fondantą.
How idealise foliage? AS emeralds and eyes to be frilly orbed,
would not sockets or lids detract from their astral entirety?

I imagined creation to be an intensification.

Uncultured pilgrims to the shrine of an aesthetic leap at t
the superlative only to slow down to analysis on reaching a seni-
lity of ardour.

The night before I entered the Art ¹, I could not sleep
Visual excitement hung on the dark pictures I longed to paint as
soon as the 'masters' showed me how, a pair.

The one'in the treble' portrayed a cupid having no joints
whatever, his fondant face flat as his brassy curls, Added to
his grace was a swan with nothing under its feathers . Of a white-
ness on which the slightest shadow would be a polution.

The one ' in the bass ' portrayed a 'bronzed' cupid. His
curls and eyes of ebony . He leaned against the outspread fan of
a peacock glowing with unsullied colour straight from the tube.

As I lay there planning the response of the multitude to my
lovely boys, my brain suddenly aware of being lead along by an
intuition dropped tent intention as it was trained to do. The
X effect upon me was of an abstract blow. In a flash of darkness,
the mental scene shifted, filled with a sense of shame I automa-
tically reproached myself for my ambition. ambition

Chapter VIII

102

Expecting the study of Art to be a participation in some-
thing familiarly resembling transformation scene in the Antomime
I was ushered into the Antique room through a leather padded door
whose swing back sounded at once a groan and Hush ! A place was
assigned to me among a line of students along the wall. Rows of
miners in the galleries of ignorance. Scratch go their charcoal
sticks and the black blastings of their emery blocks strew their
voluminous grey pinafores, leave chimney sweep smudges on their
anaemic features as they push the english wisp of hair out of
their plodding eyes.

In Italy, three centuries ago & yesterday, too displace a
block of enormous marble doubly blanched with alabaster dusts, the
haltered oxen with their hooves of slaves, labour the white road
from Carara.

*In select Michaelangelo's*

David's nose hung from aring inserted in it, emits a plas-
ter clink as I set it straight. I am ordered to reproduce it exac-
tly. The rounding out of the wing of his nostril was effected by
rubbing a hard Conté crayon on the sandpaper until it was pointed
as a pin. You came to a pore on the Whalman paper, you jabbed your
Conté into it leaving there, like a fly, your minute speck. The
speck is too black, you pounce upon it with a sharpened erasor...
it plas, bales.

After several weeks of persistence, the area thus covered
may be smoothed to perfection with spikes of coiled blotting paper
& twiddled bread. You are' stippling it up' among the dry & dirty
crumbs fallen into the rack of the easel lay the hallucinatory
white feather of my vanished swan.

Next to me a zealous young woman has detected in David's
mouth a non-Buonnarottian addition. A startling line dividing the

Chapter VIII

103

lips, because for some accident of labial obliquity the dust does n
not settle there. Her determination to reproduce this intrigues the
masters. Approving, they linger to bring a male ingenuity to bear
on a still finer tipping of indiarubber.

As father looked so important, the expression of his top hat
so harmonised with the rest of him, and I being only fifteen was the
baby of the school, to palliate the nostalgia of a first day, I was
invited to tea in the private studio of the elderly monitor. I found
myself among her friends in an atmosphere unaccustomedly kindly

'You must feel rather unhappy' she enquired of me' away from
home'?

'How should I' I answered warmly' among such charming people'
Evidently this put them in a new light, they peered with laughter.

To relieve my bewilderment as to how I should paint beautiful
pictures from soiled casts, they assured me I should find all I
need in the evening life-class.

That was where I came upon the poor bare man with the eyes
of a lizard who had known no sun. Because the studio dust was some-
how similar to the jaded hair on his body, that body seemed fear-
fully deprived of a divine right, while the professor cocked his
eye at a plumb line appraising the proportion of a lamentable being
who hardly seemed able to hold together. I heard him discourse on
sensing the bony structure beneath the masses, noting how the lea-
ning torso sagged into the pelvis. Ali that was clear to me was how
the excressences of the model's unproud knees confounded his symmetry

Not being sufficiently developed intellectually to guess that
knowledge can be applied, requiring Adonis, I repudiated the model

Why draw the head like a square block, why dash a line where
the eyes should be, I would argue with the students. Construction ?

Chapter VIII

104

Where was the beauty in that?

Soon I could lepict to a nicety, detail almost scattered about
as leaves without a tree.

Invited to little teas by the more high-brow pupils, at one
such tea, intimate behind a gigantic cast statue of Hermes, I found
myself listening to the head master - who gnawed his mustache -

"Everything here" he said pointing tonme, to Hermes, to
the tea-tray set on a wooden stool " all matter is composed of
atoms. Nothing is solid, each atom is surrounded by space."

It flashed through my mind that this was an explanation of how the man in the Bible got out of a dungeon. I could feel there was some control, in the brain with which he, knowing how to use it, could pass his atoms through the spaces between the atoms in a wall of stone.

I had never been the least intrigued by this Biblical episode
I barely recalled, yet I welcomed this sudden solution as if it were
one of importance I had long sought.

Although at the studio I was removed from immediate terror, I
found it a haven of disappointment. IN a clap of astonishment rol-
ling its echoes of anxiety along the empty channels of an excite-
ment which for want of original concepts takes the place of a mental
process Art had faded; leaving me to the house-paint.

The sequestered wound of Beauty revealed itself in the colour
of dried blood. On door & wainscot the bases of casts mounting
the stairs along the gallery, even the oil-cloth.

A wandering mind is one so feverishly preoccupied it will seek
a sedative in anything.

Off the marroon obsession spread to the ladies dressing room
floor I picked the fallen printed page, by which that very wound

Chapter VIII

105

was to be healed.

From that moment I began to have a life. I read in a scrap of book review that a Max Norian considered the refrain in poetry to be a symptom of dementia giving as an example one - & it was at this name I passed into a condition of elation - Dante Gabriel Rossetti --- the name! Smelling to the ear as to the nose an orange stuck with cloves to temper dried rose petals in the more sophisticated 'pot-pourris'.

Not seldom an aesthetic springs from the spirit of contradiction that instigates secession and anger which dare not aspire to a physical outlet the substratum for an intellectual pugnacity.

How could a man named more ornately than all other men as far as I could know, be mad.

Being myself to the eternal assailant, the assailed, I was braised as to the relative merits of the critic & the criticised; in the manner in which I had espoused the cause of the inferiorised left hand, I condemned Nordan and all his works.

Why this particular combination of syllables should be more conducive to spontaneous veneration for an empty mind than, for instance, William B. Calwalader, is mysterious as the fixations of allergies.

Father, on my entreaties somewhat against the grain for, observing in his portrait on the frontispiece that Rossetti's trousers bagged, he concluded this must be a poor artist, brought me home the volume of his complete poems, reproductions of his paintings and, for full measure, Christmas Poems bound in red morocco containing his illustrations for Goblin Market.

Chapter VIII

Poor Rossetti cooling your italian nostalgia in an alien
langauge, your passionate brush to tentative british technique.
Of the latin spasm disciplined to retention, a pommegranate mil-
dewed in the mist of the Thames, you concocted in your poesy so
powerful an emeticof the spirit as to relieve a middle-class vi-
sionary of her adolescence and clog the gorgeous rubber crops of
your wide-eyed women stricken with fried hair.

The accoustics of our unlovely sitting room attenuate to the
echo of you. The dye stuff of your luscious gloom has come off on to
the air ---

I was tented in visual arras like a medium emitting the MUMMUM
pneumatic lips of your Sidonaa & Proserpine to float through my
mother's irate pince nez listening only to a silent ventriloquy of
your refrain :

"Oh mother, Mary Mother,
Three days & nights twixt hell & heaven".

The enormous cavern the mind can scoop out of the smallest sod
where man may infinitely haunt himself with any ghostliness he
chooses, this psychic retreat, this area of perfectability hitherto
stored with emptiness, Rossetti filled for me.

Under his influence, I began to 'furnish' England with a small
pattern, an incipient rhythm, a wisp of Folk-lore. A poppy head,
a knight errant, and, later, something from Liberty's in Cymric
silver, with a covetous eye on a ' greenwood tree' or rather a sim-
ple wooden bedstead stained to a violent emerald by Ambrose Heal in
the Tottenham Court Road.

My fancy pottering around this' soul shoppe' with a candle on
a pricket, I beheld that art being ' spiritual', the highest func-

Chapter VIII

tion of a maiden is to yearn, xxx of a young man also if he can
be brought to it.

My outlook having brightened, I wished that others might share
in my relief. I pondered on the maternal face the cause of its sul-
lenness. Then coming to a lightening conclusion, probably stimula-
ted by the gas illuminant burning up the air that always excited
me, I stretched out my hands to my mother:

"Oh, wont you realise that there's nothing the matter with
any of us" I begged her" Imagine how charming you would be if
only you were not forever so angry. Everything is really allright
only somehow or xxxxxx other you've just got into the habit of
thinking all wrong.

"There's no reason why you should not start afresh this very
minute. We can all be hammy MM Now.

"Why shouldn't you smile? Just one little smile, <u>Please</u>,
quick before you have time to reflect. One -- Two -- Three --!"

"Have you" she asked, drawing herself up "No respect for y
our mother. You shall go to bed without your supper & I hope you
will awaken in the morning a sadder & a wiser girl."

It was I who was thinking wrongly. My mother was thinking
'straight'

Tipped off as it were by the poet I preffered, I at last be-
gan to function. Having found something to love - love being the
mechanism of talent - in the English almost nursery medievalism
of the day, I discovered that if my powers of concentration flag-
ged with a model before me, I could draw anything I longed to see

Chapter VIII

108

provided I had nothing to look at. While much that is learned from
the study of models seemed to have registered on some unsuspected
plane of memory.

My first entirely independent work executed in the shade of that
same Hermes stirred the wrath of Brand

" Waisting time " he grumbled on espying me .

" I am joining the 'sketch club' " I clarified.

Brand was about to expostulate when catching sight of what I was
doing he goggled ---

Amid unprecedented astonishment that first drawing won the prize
and established me as one of the outstanding students of the school.

Composition I determined by the fitness of the' expression' indu-
by the relation of parts. My standard for faces consisted in an ego-
less purity brought about by the harmonic contingence of their Celtic
features. Once one of my women was so lovely that a visiting R.A. p
practically licked his chops.

This instantaneous liberation of my self confidence diminished
my subconscious anxieties for a while - until my mother in one of
her accesses of outraged morality tore up my drawing of a bare
Andromeda lashed to a rock.

As" Vile , debased " she rated my mind of a " vicious slut -
marking the division " Trying to make out on following her thick
accusative finger what she whose senses where so rudimentary, might
mean, I at length concluded in a blush of violation, that she had
failed to locate a shadow line as lying on my innocent-eyed Andromeda's
virginal - thigh.

Thereafter the lack of keys, making it impossiible to protect
things from her , allowed for incessant raids on the work which had,
for a time, so comforted me. Drawings & poems became the prey of her

Chapter VIII

109

disoccupation.

Infantile apprehensions revived in me.

'Shocks' having hollowed out pockets along the mental route the mind trained to drop into them did so independently of im- petus from without. These periodical plunges into a depth of shame lining the constructive impulses had in the long run the ly inexplicable effect of forcing me to deliberate ruin a beautiful drawing in some single spot - very much as warriors surrender. At present, the interference in my work took the form of violent depression, and soon of terror, on receiving praise, of never being able to produce anything again that could merit praise.

I do not remember the exact relation in time of my impact with the Preraphaelite & my second sex enlightenment, when my friend Evangeline came from Edimborough to stay with me. My moral leprosy became stagnant was stirred up by my mother.

"Mind you" she whispered as we said'good night' rolling her eyes in her usual savage warning when I came into contact with some other girls" If you breathe a word ---"

The rise in psychic temperature was immeasurably when, as it seemed, immediately, from her pillow on a bed beside mine, Evangeline gurgled in derision

"Confess".

"You can't be so'green'. We went into hysterics over you when you came to Scotland.

"You _dont_ know what people do on their honeymoon? You're jolly well going to find out".

The buzz of inocuous pornographic darkness generates in the young rose in crescendo to --

"--- then the man ---"

Chapter VIII

whose crisis was reached in homes such as mine.

Most of the people I chanced to associate with functioned
contentedly within the boundaries of their domestic interests.
These, being, unlike my mother's, in their case long standardised
by a tradition of social pursuits, composed an adequate programme
for their meagre dynamism. Leaving them however uniformly flat.
What imagination, emotion, apprehension they could generate, they
summoned solely for Birth and Marriage and Death.

The torture of girls to make them fit for marriage became a
chimeric affair in homes so nicely guarded that parents must have
supposed marriage to be something fateful striking unannounced like
death.

The girls were torn with anxiety between the appeal of a sole
liberation and the paralysing certainty that the very torture of
their isolation rendered marriage unattainable.

A family entirely English might never have mentioned this re-
trictive fetish. But in my father a racial fixation, despite
the din of his wife's demonstration, must go about marrying off a
daughter even as a domesticated cat goes hunting after dark' a
streak of fur across furnished apartments flooded with electric
light. He cant make out why this terrorised child in his desolate
home isn't on the way to making a good match.

"Sixteen and as thin as a rail. An old maid all ready"

From the accustomed dual opposition, I gathered that were

## Chapter VIII

I not'dressed' I should resemble ' bad women'. Unless I turned
out to be a genius I would never ' appear. That were I to ex-
press an opinion, I should fail to find a husband.If I as much
as spoke to a man I would become ineligible.

"Can't you fatten yourself up a little" Pappa asked anxiously

The young are seldom aware of their privileges. My unique op-
portunity to experience the eroding discipline to which the off-
spring of the lower classes, together with middle class morality
amid the larger advantages of civilization. I could hardly appre-
ciate at the time.

My parents' eternal exhortations, from their opposite stand-
points :

"What do you think people will think of you?" inspired me to project an incongruous and inquisitive nature into the minds of others an uneasy mental enquiry inquisitive as a probe. So incessantly I endeavoured to read their thoughts that in the end I was able to. However the psychological material thus gathered, under the pressure of my induced complex of culpability, sunk into the subconscious, to accumulate for years before I was free to bring it to the surface.

Meanwhile as the majority do I shoved my observations of actuality aside lest they encroach on the type concepts impressed on me by the mind from birth.

The insidious element in rebellion against parents consists in
your inability to detach yourself completely from the basic
substratum of their ascendency.

Seeing my mother fall by the fender purposely, hearing her sob
at will, served merely to render more complex the initial imposi-
tion of filial duty. Behind her tantrums loomed the collective

Chapter VIII

//3

maternal heart given into the keeping of the doctor of that era he pronounced it so weak the slightest emotional stress must cause a devoted mother's instantaneous death. I lived like my father in breathless apprehension of committing an astral murder. There appeared to be no way of averting it. This feeling lasted the rest of my life'

She had a knack of emitting invertible accusations in lightening sequences of transposed logic which revealed an unparallelled self protective agility in the female running to waste in consequence of her anomolous relationship to Nature.

I never heard anything like it again - except in modified form from Mr Guffy on Eddie Cantor's program in March 1959.

I suspect that collective heart ailment, coddled by countless distracted families, of having taken the doctor for granted as an accomplice.

According to my parents, all spectators of that suspect showpiece, myself, must inevitably receive impressions to my disadvantage. Sometimes this had the effect of my injecting into those ransacked minds the very conclusions I was warned against yet only after so long a siege by my unnatural anxiety that their primary genial acceptance of me wavered.

The extremes which marked my to & fro between world and home were those of a pendulum endowed with consciousness swinging beyond a calculable range.

The reactions I evoked outside the home staggered me more than those within, where the very sight of me stirred up fury. At first I accepted as normal joking the rush occasional acquantances made for me as they twittered

"You're the loveliest thing I have seen in all my life".

## Chapter VIII

Neither of these valuations of my physique assumed significance in my scheme of things where the maiden who lost her eyebrows in 'Love among the Ruins' fixed the standard of beauty which alone I should, at the time, have been proud to attain.

My trouble was the friends I made so easily urged me' to do something about' myself. Unable to explain my situation which didn't make sense, I formed the habit to avoid vain regret of paying no attention to what they were saying. With the strange result that whenever I asked the time or the way I neglected to wait for an answer.

Sculptured by my parents' thought, England agglomerated to an omnipotent adult of dual embodiment - female, endeavoured with a divine right to insult me - male, endowed with a similar right to ruin me.

Nothing has more amazed me than the idiotic apprehensions of t
the moralists that the world during recent decades had lapsed from
the purity of the pre War era.

Preoccupation with that somewhat unformulated concept sex, peo-
mitted expression, has become intermittent. Putting it into words
supplies sufficient egress to allow of average individuals entirely
concentrating on other interests for considerable stretches of time.

At the close of Victoria's reign it formed an incessant obsession
of the respectable. They never ceased to be aware of ' not doing
something' and the necessity for preventing others. The striking
characteristic of the post war era is a pronounced purification
revealed in its concomitant a marked abatement of sadism.

Islands in the Air

85

## Chapter VIII

I realised the arrangement of angles around me had
undergone change on touching a pane of imitation stained
glass; filtering a morning light a monochrome branch of
apple-blossom that looked sticky & felt dry was baked onto
its surface.

My contact with a meaningless decoration brought within
range the whole of a semi-detached residence that was brand
new. Aerial impression of static furniture forced me to enter
a devaluated time-interval coincident with a stretch-on-the-
wreck - of years, to be spent in the sanctity of the home.

On touching that pane of glass I turned into a commonplace
person with average aspirations. Agog with expectancy of normal
life. Of the Cosmos of infancy the Voice alone survived.

In this papered & enamelled container prepared for my
adolescence, the checkered routine of my farcical training
as a social unit would at first seem to consist in my being
flapped in and out of mobile & stagnant air out into Clinton
Gardens & indoors again.

My father handsome & erect trimmed with auburn mustaches
stalked me on stilts of ambition exhorting me to glory. AN
uppish bosom intervened with " over my dead body ". For Father's
consolation my sister was a musical prodigy, while I, in a
spirit of obedience, had bursts of self-expression. Balanced

Chapter VIII

86

on the end of a brown wooden bedstead while the governess brushed Ida's hair I wrote a 'poem'.

## NAT and Daisy

On a warm afternoon
In June
A (G)Nat in the air did fly
Ever so high ... ever so high

I want a sweetheart was all his cry
Ah! all his cry,

I've asked the white Rose
But she's far too proud
To care for a (G)Nat like me

And what do you think
The other day
I asked Miss Lily to tea
But she like the rose did not care for me

When low near the ground I flew
Disconsolately... Disconsolately
Ah! What did I see? Ah! What did I see?

A demure little maiden most pink & white
The loveliest maiden you ever did see

Chapter VIII

And unlike the rest she said she loved me

And then came the wedding, What awful fun!
Our friend the cat
Stole from the kitchen a lovely iced bun
To serve for the wedding cake
And the bees brought much honey
The best they could make

I remember no more, save that the(g)Nat having found his
daisy with all her petals shed, I ended up serenely:

So he lay down & died
At his daisy-stalk's side.

It was shocking to learn on being knocked off my
perch that instead of a laudable poet I was somehow "a sly
minx, trying to get round your father".

Day by day, drifting from room to room seeking for
'something to do' shooed by a blast of 'idle slut' past the
towering gilded mirrors from 'North Hall' I felt put out by
their flitting amorettis' dimples of inascribable delight.

My father was assured these mirrors, had been
now cut down to the height of our present
ceilings, were loot from the palace of Versailles. At the base
of one, in a spacious jardiniere, a few poor artificial plants
fell upon one another. I found it useless to try digging the

Chapter VIII

pointed sticks on which they were mounted into the metal bottom.

The houses in Clinton Gardens were all alike but on the threshold of ours stood a menace as ominous as Chaaron. The creak of doom was at my back as I entered the gate.

Retropectively the sides of that brick box which seemed so vacuous actually creaked. Forced to bursting point by opposite pressures from within. At the time a steady inoperation dullest the interior, bodies moved without aim. Tentacles of waste energy wavered toward inexistant objectives. Like machinery working full blast on the production of nothing, I wore down my own dynamism. The brain for lack of intellectual material exercised its ceaseless automatism upon the biological functions to abnormal extent - one always had some kind of pain, heightened by the spasms of the solar plexus on impact with the Voice.

Gentle Jesus meek & mild, in my babyhood I conceived of as a mouse, would he 'come out?' I had wondered if he knew I wouldn't hurt him.

Now, with a private vow of Atheism, I countered my mother's vicious pinches on our way to church.

Monday morning I fought my firstorzakka moral battle. While rattling my hoopstick along an iron fence I denied God; at the age of nine.

In a mobile pattern of alternating streaks of brightness & blackness, the fleeting palings rippled past my eyes coinciding terrifically with stripes of fiery hell & dark oblivion as I ran. I could not be sure the everlasting flame

Chapter VIII

was bluff. Yet to the Voice I had such antipathy I could not
cede to its precepts. Asserting a tremulant heroism, I decided
to risk eternal torture rather than resemble the people He
approved.

Hardly had I become an atheist when my religious educa-
tion was reinforced with the cooperation of the only governess
my mother never quarrelled with.

Out of a flat - fronted woolen bodice of amber plaid with
velvet collar & reveres, rose the flesh & lashes of a swine.
Beneath the cuff of a sleeve too short appeared a rosy wrist
sown with glinting hairs.

The nearness of this pious governess added to my ills a
perpetual nausea.

"Mamma", Miss Nickson had a habit of saying, her some-
how accusing eye upon me " Never cared if her babies were
pretty. All she asked when we arrived was" Has it got the
correct number of fingers and toes?"

A golden tassle on her watch chain dangling against my
ear, her breath on the nape of my neck, merged in my subcon-
cious with the horror instilled by my first information on
procreation. In the pathological vortex she arroused in me spun
a black Bible cloth boards 2/6.

Hour upon hour we looked up texts, compared references
under the awning of her white eyelashes.

Aversion to her obstructing my senses deafened me to
her lessons. To relieve my tedium I would investigate the old
Testament when Miss Nickson wasn't looking.

My mother's assertion that intercourse "isn't true"
somehow rendering anomalous her condemnation of my hideous

Chapter VIII

knowledge further confused me when I read in the Geneology
- went in unto & begat. For a while I was drawn into the
obscene undertow of religious mania. To vent the up rush of
sadism associated with it I turned( imaginatively ) upon the
physical repulse to which it reduced in the person of the gover-
ness.

Nicky should be mated with a lion and <u>beget</u> cubs, whose
manes inherited her sandiness, to lacerate her with <u>claws</u>.

Frequently I have sampled the emotive <u>ambroglios</u> under-
lying lunacy; that I never got ' stuck' in any one of them @
I owe to my latent preoccupation with beauty. To the fulminating
'wish on' Miss Nickson the level of my consciousness sunk lower
than it ever would again.

Two years our overseer remained with us . From morning
prayers until, having put us to bed at six she sat outside our
open bedroom door still pouring her freckled over the Bible.
She was there to insure a silence in which no original sin could
rise to the surface . What Evil - originated in my ifelt, in my
father, were these women bent on driving forth from the young
in those days of drastic watching & waiting?

This governess, poor thing, had one attraction, enticing
me sometimes to approach her voluntarily . She could sharpen a pen-
cil to a finer point than seemed credible. Then shade the
Narcissi she knew how to draw till they shone like a head.

Her sense of righteousness braced by Miss Nickson's acqui-
esence in purging me of some shameful component, my mother
exhibited a modicum of calm during her residence . When the
governess left the house this calm broke down completely. My
father blasphemously believing in educational subjects, sup-

Chapter VIIIplement

91

plementary to religion. He had us'sent' to school.

The pitch of the maternal sound-track during the ensuing
years could only be given in terms usually signifying wild
exaggeration, the bias of a liar read into them. Not infre-
quently, in the sheltered homes of the nineties, daughters were
bullied to maturity subject to prohibitions unmodified since
babyhood. Their only self-expression: to watch and pray.

I watched the startled groups of new servants listening
in the hall.

Under the metronome running scales, my sister sits on the
piano stool in that kernel from which all sound is centrifugal
herself unrung.

I watched my father 's vitality congeal to a heaviness of
the brow only to be supported in two quivering hands.

All the keys had been taken out of the doors by my mother
except, in regard for decency, those of three lavatories on
the different floors.

One above the other they stood, our ivory. Here I had knelt
to pray for my transformation while an opal vrase left on the
washstand peered at me, a blind eye, through its lovely
cataract of lacteal blue & rose.

One above the other in sanctuary we could hear our baffled
foe shriek for us to come forth. As an atheist I sat on the
heavy mahogony lid, my own eyes held by a mosaic head of
Medusa, as the last limp trails of Virginia creeper waved
their shadows through the narrow window across a polished
paper tile turning me to stone.

Chapter VIII

92

Going to school I anticipated as joining an opposition
club of youth combatting the mother-myth. I had stood up to God
alone. Mother love was beyond me. I had urgent need for that
exchange of confidences in which the helpless asses of misfortune
appraise each other's loads to lighten them at least of bearing
in silence.

"Do you love your mother"? I asked with significant inflec-
tion upon absurdity of the first little girl who wanted ' to
make friends'. We were putting our books away on a lower shelf.
Had I had any opportunity to observe the portents of normal
human relationships I should have been instantly informed in
this bobbing together of top-knots, should have recognised in
the hair ribbon & vane indicating which way the maternal wind
blows. That other child in its cheerful cerise lay carressing
with a pair of orderly loops her formal curls while mine like a
flag vanquished in some unfortunate engagement started ragged
in assymetry from crippled knot in which some random hairs of
my culpable head were caught to an agonising tension among the
overloose mass.

The effigy of vengeance is not sufficiently envisaged
in the ramp of frog-like furies clawing the air. The poignant
effigies on whom vengeance is brought home to us, are stuck
all over with its trophies, in their general appearance of ha-
ving been covered with the final detritus of any social cataclysm.
The shreds & rifts in the clothes of the poor, the tired mud
that cakes upon the patriots who have marched too compliantly,
the indefinable collapse of child bodies whose covering is not
civilized with the detail of affection.

Chapter VIII

- 93 -

Horror leapt to that other child's eyes. Involuntarily
she looked upwards expectant of something to fall upon me.

"But of course" she answered, her voice almost drowned
in the din of her disapproval.

A face expressing emotion from within is a bountiful face
even if pouring out dislike which is also ~~receptable~~ acceptable & of
common traffic but the horror face that like a faulty mirror
distorts its vis-à-vis .... the horror on that small girl's face
is a reflected horror. So even outside the home, I am not a nice
child. And now I percieve her hair ribbon, it is all tied up
with love.

Original sin, where does it lie, in the logical process of
thought? The problem wearied my mind to the exclusion of all
further operation. I spent three years of education washing the
soot from the ivy on the garden wall beyond the class room win-
dows with my wandering eyes.

As it was a moral impossibility to arrive in class without
bringing one's home work, and a physical impossibility to concen-
trate at home, I copied my exercises out of the text book. In
order not to cheat the other girls I wrote in sufficient mistakes
to place me permanently above the defective child with an oyster
eye who sat in unassailable simplicity at the bottom of the class.
Beside her I pondered that eerie hitch in a psychic mechanism
rendering the defective so' differently' incapable of concentra-
tion to myself. Had she had for daughter that imbecile child
would even my mother have spoken in vain?

Chapter VIII

- 94 -

Until we fizzled out like squibs in the damp, we glowed whenever we had company. Visitors aroused in us that over animated gaiety of people who must ram their need for pleasure into brief occasions.

One of my father's step-relations who enameled his outdoor cistern vermillion had a paying guest, or perhaps lodger, he often brought to our house to dinner. A Welsh musician he played us all he composed & Ida would join him in duets. My father relaxed in an arm chair of lurid satin, melting in relief, let a few pure tears trickle to his beard I love music in a minor key he avowed wiping his eyes with a bandanna It makes me feel sentimental."

If I recall his face accurately, Edward German dominated the show of gas on our drawing room with a distinct Celtic beauty.

I stood apart from the initiates gathered round him. Even the ' step' was a music addict. Multiplied by the mirrors they made a crowd among reflected ebony, gilt & alabaster. Moving their laughter round an early gramaphone as they recorded Ida's precocity on cylinders of coffee coloured wax. My mother wearing all her diamonds assumed the smile of a diplomat who assured of attaining his end is not for the moment giving his ~~politic~~ away.

With Ida, my father's unaccountable presentiment of future glory seemed secure. Almost as a baby she moved her fingers on ivory & harmony was the result. AS a girl she opined her mouth & emitted a ' voice'.

Her itinerary I could see so clearly marked. It led her

Chapter VIII

-95-

along a straight route of practising up to a certain musical
soirée at which Hambourg & Blanche Marchesi exchanged confi-
dences on a sofa. Each had a star pupil. " There she is " they
cried simultaneously as Ida entered.

Meanwhile on leaving school one morning, among a group
of pupils, I noticed standing somewhat apart two tiny sisters
waiting to be ' fetched' . One ,a trifle taller than the other,
so stringy their drab striped coats were outstanding as raiment
on puppets , each had a perfect head of Osiris. Intrigued by
the almost invisible moulding of their oval faces , the
idol-flatness of their noses .I lingered to admire them. Their
name was Hesse."Myra, the smaller one played the piano." an
elder girl remarked.She had none of Ida's'advantages'; I was
given to understand.

While for my sister the divine penetrated to her envi-
ronment in mine the walls were hung with pictures from the
royal academy.

Music intangible speaks for the dumb soul, other arts have
too articulate audiences. Ida ~~has~~ if her curls had condensed
to minims & crotchets still moved serenely to constant applause.
I was confused when anyone enquired of me " I hear you draw.
Can you draw a cork?"

Being the elder was also a strain. Paternal benevolen-
ces incident to different stages in a daughter's life natu-
rally fell first to me . Experiments ending in catastrophy.

" You're getting a big girl now" father said, when I
was fourteen, producing at the dinner table a gatelinked
bracelet of plain gold. " I thought you might wear a little
quiet jewelry".

Chapter VIII

- 96 -

His wife turned red, flung away her knife & fork, crying on Heaven to witness the sacrilege, wasting money on an undeserving..... She made a dash for me, my father averted her hand.

Squatting slowly, cautiously to the floor she lay down flat with her head against the fender & screamed ... for the servants to be her witnesses ... "Fine bracelets you'll both get, handcuffs is what you require" ... her husband anxiously explaining he did not knock her down.

"Father, I implored him" How can you go on arguing with her all these years, listen to me, she's putting it on. Pour some cold water over her."

My father who is quaking with nervous shock stiffens

"Now what sort of girl are you turning out to be, have you forgotten she is your mother?"

"If only I could"

"Ah, I'm afraid your mother is right about you...you're heartless"

"Give me my cloak & bonnet" my mother declaimed probably taking her cue from some old melodrama as every now wore hats.

"I leave this house for ever to put myself out of my misery... Murderers both of you."

The servants huddled together in the hall argue with the kitchen maid who is crying.

"It's not for us I'm crying, we're leaving; it's for that wretched kid of a Miss Linda as does no 'arm & can never, never get away."

"Go" said the father I have antagonised, gulping a stiff dose of Brandy. "Go and take care she does herself no harm. I

Chapter VIII

- 98 -

In the face of such monstrous opposition, my father had
performed heroic acts. When first he noticed our danger of goin'
ing naked, he drove us to Marshall & Snellgroves & had us'fit-
ted out' in the delightful fashion of the period. To the same
imprecations, he sent us to school, committed Ida to her proffes-
sion of music and, later, enrolled me, with the best intentions,
in an art school.

As things got worse, he could take no fresh initiative ;
his 'health' which was behaving queerly became his major concern
Haunting Harley Street where specialists repeatedly decided there
the matter
was nothing like with him, he could not believe they were right

At last when the density of sound vibrations petrified
space while disintegrating the compact of my identity, until
I seemed embedded in rock. On the brief occasions when I drew
myself out in my original form, I would find myself closeted
with father, both of us white faced and shaken, conferring as
to what"could be done".

It is often the case that although a problem shared by
two may be obviously insoluble for oneself, one has only to
put oneself in the place of the other one to see it simplify.
So before the problem of how to address my mother on any sub-
ject whatsoever, when to take the initiative in conversing
with her inevitably brought down the rain of her abuse upon us,
Father, although he no longer attempted to come to terms with
her himself, would meditate on my behalf, then with a knowing

Chapter VIII

101

To what most sweetly could I make flesh compare? Fondantą.
How idealise foliage? AS emeralds, and eyes to be fully orbed,
would not sockets or lids detract from their astral entirety?

Uncultured pilgrims to the shrine of an aesthetic leap at t
the superlative only to slow down to analyses on reaching a seni-
lity of ardour.

The night before I entered the Art school, I could not sleep
Visual excitement hung on the dark pictures I longed to paint as
soon as the 'masters' showed me how, a pair.

As I lay there planning the response of the multitude to my
lovely boys, my brain sudienly aware of being lead along by an
intuition dropped taht intention as it was trained to do. The
effect upon me was of an abstract blow. In a flash of darkness,
the mental scene shifted, filled with a sense of shame I automa-
tically reproached myself for my ambition.

Chapter VIII

102

Expecting the study of Art to be a participation in some-
thing familiarly resembling transformation scene in the Paltonime
I was ushered into the Antäque room through a leather padded door
whose swing back sounded at once a groan and Hush ! A place was
assigned to me among a line of students along the wall. Rows of
miners in the galleries of ignorance. Scratch go their charcoal
sticks and the black blastings of their emery blocks strew their
voluminous grey pinafores, leave chimney sweep smudges on their
anaemic features as they push the english wisp of hair out of
their pledding eyes.

In Italy, three centuries ago & yesterday, too displace a
block of enormous marble doubly blanched with plumbaster dusts, too
haltered oxen with their hooves of slaves, labour the white road
from Carara.

David's nose hung from aring inserted in it, emits a plas-
ter clink as I set it straight. I am ordered to reproduce it excep-
tly. The rounding out of the wing of his nostril was effected by
rubbing a hard Conté crayon on the sandpaper until it was pointed
as a pin. You came to a pore in the Whistman paper, you jabbed your
Conté into it tak leaving there like a fly your minute speck. The
speck is too black, you pounce upon it with a sharpened eraser...
it plan pales

After several weeks of persistence, the area thus covered
may be smoothed to perfection with spikes of coiled blotting paper
& twiddled bread. You are stippling it up among the dry & dirty
crumbs fallen into the rack of the easel lay the hallucinatory
white feather of my vanished swan.

Next to me a zealous young woman has detected in David's
mouth a non-Buonnarottian addition. A startling line diviting the

Chapter VIII

103

lips, because for some accident of labial obliquity the dust does not settle there. Her determination to reproduce this intrigues the masters. Approving, they linger to bring a male ingenuity to bear on a still finer tipping of indiarubber.

'How should I' I answered warmly' among such charming people' Evidently this put them in a new light, they peeled with laughter.

That was where I came upon the poor bare man with the eyes of a lizard who had known no sun. Because the studio dust was somehow similar to the jaded hair on his body, that body seemed fearfully deprived of a divine right, while the professor cocked his eye at a plumb line appraising the proportion of a lamentable being who hardly seemed able to hold together. I heard his discourse on sensing the bony structure beneath the masses, noting how the learning torso sagged into the pelvis. All that was clear to me was how the excessences of the model's unproud knees confounded his symmetry

Not being sufficiently developed, intellectually to guess that
*fact can be supplemented*
knowledge can be applied, requiring Adonis, I repudiated the model

Why draw the head like a square block, why dash a line where
the eyes should be, I would argue with the students. Construction?

Chapter VIII

104

Where was the beauty in that?

Soon I could depict to a nicety, detail almost scattered about
as leaves without a tree.

Invited to little teas by the more high-brow pupils, at one
such tea, intimate behind a gigantic statue of Hermes, I found
myself listening to the head master - who gnawed his mustache -

"Everything here" he said pointing tonne, to Hermes, to
the tea-tray set on a wooden stool" all matter is composed of
atoms. Nothing is solid, each atom is surrounded by space??..

It flashed through my mind that this was an explanation of how the man in the Bible got out of a dungeon. I could _feel_ there was some 'control' in the brain with which he, nowing how to use it, could pass his atoms through the spaces between the atoms in a wall of stone.

Although at the studio I was removed from immediate terror, I
found it a haven of disappointment. IN a clap of astonishment rol-
ling its echoes of anxiety along the empty channels of an excite-
ment which for want of *moxia* concepts takes the place of a mental
process Art had faded; leaving me to the house-paint.

Chapter VIII

105

was to be healed.

From that moment I began to have a life. I read in a scrap of book review that a Max Nordan considered the refrain in poetry to be a symptom of dementia giving as an example one - & it was at this name I passed into a condition of elation - Dante Gabriel Rossetti --- the name! Smelling to the ear as to the nose an orange stuck with cloves to temper dried rose petals in the more sophisticated 'pot-pourris'.

How could a man named more ornately than all other men as far as I could know, be mad?

Chapter VIII

Poor Rossetti cooling your Italian nostalgia in an alien language, your passionate brush to tentative British technique. Of the latin spasm disciplined to retention, a pommegranate mil-dewed in the mist of the Thames, you concocted in your poesy so powerful an emetic of the spirit as to relieve a middle-class visionary of her adolescence and clog the gorgeous rubber crops of your wide-eyed women stricken with fried hair.

The accoustics of our unlovely sitting room attenuate to the echo of you. The dye stuff of your luscious gloom has come off on the air ---

I was tented in visual arrays like a medium emitting the XXXXXX pneumatic lips of your Sidonia & Proserpine to float through my mother's irate pince nez listening only to a silent ventriloquy of your refrain :

Under his influence, I began to 'furnish' England with a small pattern, an incipient rhythm, a wisp of Folk-lore. A poppy head, a knight errant, and, later, something from Liberty's in Cymric silver, with a covetous eye on a ' greenwood tree' or rather a simple wooden bedstead stained to a violent emerald by Ambrose Heal in the Tottenham Court Road.

Chapter VIII

tion of a maiden is to yearn, to be brought to it.

of a young man also if he can

"Oh, wont you realise that there's nothing the matter with
any of us" I begged her "Imagine how charming you would be if
only you were not forever so angry. Everything is really allright
only somehow or other you've just got into the habit of
thinking all wrong.

"There's no reason why you should not start afresh this very
minute. We can all be hammy now.

Chapter VIII

" Wasting time " he grumbled on espying me .

Composition I determined by the fitness of the' expression' induced
by the relation of parts. My standard for faces consisted in an ego-
less purity brought about by the harmonic contingence of their Celtic
features. Once one of my women was so lovely that a visiting R.A. p
practically licked his chops.

Thereafter the lack of keys, making it impossible to protect
things from her , allowed for incessant raids on the work which had
for a time, so comforted me. Drawings & poems became the prey of her

Chapter VIII

disoccupation.

I do not remember the exact relation in time of my impact with
the Preraphaelite & my second sex enlightenment, when my friend
Evangeline came from Edimborough to stay with me. My moral leprosy
become stagnant, was stirred up by my mother.

" Mind you " she whispered as we said 'ggod night' rolling her
eyes in her usual savage warning when I came into contact with ot
other girls " If you breathe a word --- "

" Confess " .

" You can't be so 'greenn' . We went into hysterics over you
when you came to Scotland.

" You _dont_ know what people do on their honeymoon ? You're
jolly well going to find out ".

The buzz of inocuous pornography darkness generates in the
young rose in crescendo to --

--" --- then the man ---

Chapter VIII

------ " Suddenly " Evangeline assured me " You are overcome by the
most marvellous sensation. It is just like being in heaven."

The orb of consciousness reversed in my brain. The illuminated
side fallen into contact with my senses on this only intimation
that there is such a thing as " pleasure" in this world, I had
ever received.

" But " Evangeline amended " It can't last more than one second
because the pleasure is so intense that if it lasted any longer it
would kill you "

This unprecedented shock of antithesis knocked me into a coma
of delight - probably what is known as day-dream. At once I under-
stood why literature stops short at marriage, there being no words
sufficing for description.

I shut my eyes but I slide off the track in my day dream. What
I had got hold of is the ascetic trance of illumination. No crisis
of the flesh or is it a mingling of both. Is there perhaps little
difference? Or has my imaginative sensibility , so crucified, in
a psychic haste passed its destination?

Evangeline prattles on of ways and means.

My mind conforming to an almost universal fallacy scraps all
that. I have learned all I need to know . A momentary, a magic
contact. Such is marriage . Un effleurement suffit. Having as a
child devoutly accredited fairies , I retrieve the wand for the
immediate, the immaculate transformation.

Of the millions accepting , in that era, existence as a vacuity
surrounding the Three Events. the majority were by nature so well
adjusted to inhibition they appeared to have exteriorized it to
wear as an armour of agreeable inertia. The rest ill at ease in such
intellectual depravity exhibited every gradation of a domestic fever

## Chapter VIII

The orb of consciousness reversed in my brain. The illuminated side fallen inton contact with my senses on this only intimation that there is such a thing as " pleasure" in this world, I had ever received.

This unprecedented shock of antithesis knocked me into a coma of delight - probably what is known as day dream. At once I understood why literature stops short at marriage, there being no words sufficing for description.

I shut my eyes but I slide off the track in my day dream. What I had got hold of is the ascetic trance of illumination. No crisis of the flesh or is it a mingling of both. Is there perhaps little difference? Or has my imaginative sensibility, so crucified, in a psychic haste passed its destination?

My mind conforming to an almost universal fallacy scraps all that. I have learned all I need to know. A momentary, a magic contact. Such id marriage. Un effleurement suffit. Having as a child devoutly accredited fairies, I retrieve the wand for the immediate, the immaculate transformation.

Of the millions accepting, in that era, existence as a vacuum surrounding the Three Events the majority were by nature so well adjusted to inhibition they appeared to have exteriorized it to wear as an armour of agreeable inertia. The rest ill at ease in such intellectual depravity exhibited every gradation of a domestic fever

Chapter VIII

A family entirely English might never have mentioned this re-
trictive fetish. But in my father a racial fixation, despite
the din of his wife's demonstration, must go about marrying off a
daughter even as an domesticated cat goes hunting after dark' a
streak of fur across furnished apartments flooded with electric
light. He can't make out why this terrorised child in his desolate
home isn't on the way to making a good match.

## Chapter VIII

I not'dressed' I should resemble ' bad women'. Unless I turned
out to be a geniues I would never ' appear . That were I to ex-
press an opinion, I should fail to find a husband.If I as much
as spoke to a man I would become ineligible.

"What do you think people will think of you?" inspired me
to project AM INDIAN into the minds of others an
uneasy mental enquiry, inquisitive as a probe. So incessantly I
endeavoured to read their thoughts that in the end I was able to.
However the psychological material thus gathered, under the pres-
sure of my induced complex of culpability, sunk into the subcon-
cious, to accumulate for years before I was free to bring it to
the surface.

The insidious element in rebellion against parents consists in
your inability to detach yourself completely from the basic mesmeric
substratum of their ascendency.

Chapter VIII

maternal heart given into the keeping of the doctor of that era.
He pronounced it so weak the slightest emotional stress must cause
a devoted mother's instantaneous death. I lived like my father in
breathless apprehension of committing an astral murder. There ap-
peared to be no way of averting it. This feeling lasted the rest of
my life¹

She had a knack of emitting invertible accusations in light-
ning sequences of transposed logic which revealed an unparallelled
self-protective agility in the female running to waste in conse-
quence of her anomolous relationship to Nature.

I never heard anything like it again - except in modified
form from Mr Guffy on Eddie Cantor's program in March 1939.

According to my parents, all spectators of that suspect show-
piece, myself, must inevitably receive impressions to my disadvan-
tage. Sometimes this had the effect of my injecting into those ran-
sacked minds the very conclusions I was warned against yet only
after so long a siege by my unnatural anxiety that their primary
genial acceptance of me wavered.

The reactions I evoked outside the home staggered me more than
those within, where the very sight of me stirred up fury. At first
I accepted as practical joking the rush occasional acquantances
made for me as they twittered

Chapter VIII

My trouble was the friends I made so easily urged me' to do
something about' myself. Unable to explain my situation which didn't
make sense, I formed the habit, to avoid vain regret of paying no
attention to what they were saying. With the strange result that
whenever I asked the question—the way I neglected to wait for an
answer.

Sculptured by my parents' thought, England agitated to an
omnipotent adult of dual embodiment - female, endeavoured with
a divine right to insult me - male, endowed with a similar right
to ruin me.

Nothing has more amazed me than the idiotic apprehensions of t
he moralists that the world during recent decades had lapsed from
the purity of the pre-War era.

Preoccupation with that somewhat unformulated concept, sex, pe-
mitted expression, has become intermittent.' Putting it into words
supplies sufficient egress to allow of average individuals entirely
concentrating on other interests for considerable stretches of time.

At the close of Victoria's reign it formed an incessant obsession
of the respectable. They never ceased to be aware of ' not doing
something' and the necessity for preventing others. The striking
characteristic of the post-war era is a pronounced purification
revealed in its concomitant, a marked abatement of sadism.

Islands in the Air

Chapter IX

"MAN"

Where the 'forbidden' suggests escape from a narrow
misery & that discrepancy,' love', offers the only alter-
native to a rabid inertia the <u>captive</u> <u>prisoner</u> anticipates <u>man</u>, the
scarecrow on the parental landscape in the ingritiating
guise of an Evangelist?

I came to imagine his recuperative gentleness my
crushed mouth filled with the acrid taste of wall-paper when
in the early morning hours my mother at the hight of conjugal
recriminations had burst into my room & bearing me out of bed
dashed me against the wall as she screamed ' you <u>horrible</u>
children I could <u>kill</u> you ' I sensed to a nicety the point at
which , even in the phenomenal force of fury , an ingrained
fear of the law curtails spontaneity.

I was about to enter upon the truly amoral period
of my life, To my lasting disgrace I actually laughed at a d
illy young thing because her swain at the art school trans-
d his attentions, which consisted in a lingering beside
el for the giving of advice , to myself. This period of
less sport in the normal adolescent , when the feelings
one's own being so superficial that a joke appears

the supreme indulgence, are not taken into account, was one of
necessity with me of short duration.

One concrete - if intermediary event could be added to
the Three on a maiden's cursory program; ceding importance
only to the acme of the wedding cake was the experience of
becoming ' engaged'.

My relegation by my father to the status of old maid for
lack of obesity, my mother's prediction I should die in the
gutter because, as a student, I required more than one pencil
added to a terror whose only let-up was total boredom had thrown
me into a panic of yearning for concrete experience before it
should be ' too late'!

With such ease I forget how it happened I got secretly
engaged. As this event took place on the hackneyed plane on
which I outwardly evolved according to programme it was not
long before this led me into a sort of double life.

In the jocular prelude to conscious adolescence one not
unfrequently falls in love with something ' funny' . I picked my
young man because he smoked a curved pipe which hanging over
his long chin made him easy to caricature, having first consul-
ted with my girl chum before clenching my choice.

Above his cherished briar appeared incidentally some
extrmely good facial sculpture, a pair of deep set clearly
lidded eyes long dark eyes overshadowed by an ivory brow. His
oval lips become somewhat constricted from clutching the tubular
decoy of my attention. He was always excellently tailored,
oftenest, at my command, in brown ' to match his hair'.

" MEN "

The nearest I could get to my ideal of ' love in the
mist' was to sit leaning against his arm on a damp bench on
Primrose Hill, when I ought to have been in life-class .
We stared straight before us into an uncompromising fog. There
were no primroses.

Hunched in inhibited ardor, paralysed with 'respect'
he did not say very much. It was not long before I began to
chide him gently bidding him reflect on all that Dante Gabriel
would have been saying under the circumstances.

" I fancy the poor brute would have been just as dumb
as I am when Miss Siddons was actually there " my fiancé coun-
tered .

I must have been, sometime, very fond of him. Once when
we gave a dance ' my mother postponing all arrangements with
daily pretence of calling the whole thing off owing to our
' wickedness' leaving the last minute hectic preparations
entirely to me, I remember the sympathy of his pectoral muscles
under the dress shirt whereon I laid my tired head to be
soothed by his kind fingers.

He had one idiosyncrasy that disturbed me. The ladies
he drew among domes and minarettes of extremely able penman-
ship had each a queer kink under the nose slipping into the
mouth. Some years later he had married & his children was born
hare-lipped.

He read me Lorna Doone in Devonshire where through
arduous plotting our families happened to spend one summer
holiday.

" MEN "

118

Saying so little of note himself, on looking back I
am surprised he did not virtuously jilt me; my random remarks
being for a 'maiden' positively alarming.

Inspired by a light lady wearing plaid bloomers in the
chorus of a travelling company, her face smeared with red, her
frowsy hair jammed into her eyes by the exagerated vizir of a
cloth bicycling cap - we were in the midst of a discussion
as to whether all humans beings had souls " bests most peo-
ple appear to be only 'half there' - do you think" I enquired
of him " they would even want to do ' it ' - if they had not
been told they musn't?"

His smile clenching the briar tighter " I shouldn't wonder
a bit if you're right" he assented.

Yes sometimes on that h l iday I would win free. There were
frequent storms & my mother had to retire to her room & hide
under the bed; so terrified of thunder even propriety must go
by the board.

At the end of our stay she allowed us to go for a row,
taking my younger sister along in the boat as chaperone. I
wore a light cape &, zenith of romance, Lucas had his arm ' round
my waist'.

My sister watched us balefully, then infinitely malign
' let's have a look under that cape' she exclaimed lifting
the hem gingerly , then drawing back in a kind of bland triumph
sneered grimly as one who uncovers a louse.

Percyevi g he was until

" MEN "

Percieving he was unlikely to grow in poetry while
my consideration for others was beginning to evolve, I pondered
some means of breaking off this engagement I had most likely
induced, without 'hurting' him.

Due to the violent primitivism of my parents' ethics
my trend was inevitably towards melodramatic expedients. In
chastest terms I allowed him to infer I was no longer a maiden.

Lucas, an agonising xxxxxxx mule opposed my infallible
panacea " that's no reason for throwing me over" he implored
" the way I see it if you'd <u>loved</u> this fellow you'd have stuck
to him - there's nothing to prevent your marrying me" decided
the precursor of modernity who however circumscribed his self-
expression was surprised, at nothing. From his remarks on some
best-seller he had <u>recommended</u> I gathered his idea of the acme of
sentiment was to have me for his wife & feel terribly nervous
while the baby arrived.

" MEN "

126

Unsuspected an inner self which picks & chooses,
wins or loses, unhampered by that programme of the practical,
began to have its own subconscious reactions to which a pale
stranger broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped lifting his arms
in a white shirt is a lily on the air of spring swaying from
a dark stalk.

"Pull down your skirt chick-a -biddy" said an older
girl as the students grouped round the courtyard took their
tea out of doors watching a game of tennis.

That sensation in my knees of being exposed to Röntgen
rays whenever I sat down was irremediable, however blushingly
I tugged the dress I had outgrown. My mother whose ideal of pro-
priety was a state of living death herself imposed upon me an
indecorous condition harrowing to my modesty in those days of
blue serge bathing suits flopping round ankles.

The head of the stranger under his volleys leaped
forward from a lilac-tree surrounded by bees ahoneying to
drive into mine a pre-impression of that same man in the men
I was (fated) to love.

His - their - eyes were grey diamonds, the form of
irises and lids making them both round and square gave these
eyes a superfluity of expression permitting infinite interpre-
tations. He who operated them, as though they were many face-
ted, may end as I do, reflecting some glow from within, could throw them at
their will into a dither of benevolent amusement.

The stranger of intense eyes from where I crouched on
a stone coping in an effort to telescope my legs.

"MEN"

that inadequate skirt appeared from my shame-faced situation
ethereal in his sight as someone soaring in an inattainable
'beyond' pursuing a planet. Yet in those preliminary years of
youth, as in infancy, nothing was out of reach. In the usual
way all wishes had of coming true for me he soon became my
constant companion.

Irrevocably he drew me as if to a fount of compassion
when sauntering along the road I came upon him, his arm again
upstretched among the branches of a tree in his front garden.

"That damn dog" he explained" my cat is in a delica-
condition" With an inate gentleness he lifted down the feline
body throbbing in its distraught fur.

Holyoak wore a look of mystic dissipation. Ploughed
in his army exams, an ex-actor, he had now, on a threat of an
aunt to cut him off if he did'nt do something, taken up art
photography & ranted a studio house near the school. Across
the threshold of that little house, through a glass door, I
passed into my 'other life' of the intuition whose motivations
one never associates with circumstantial reality.

A girl who had been studying so long at the art school
she had grown old - Anne was thirty! - at last launching
on a career 'did' his retouching - a very good soft, she
brought to the place a good deal of laughter.

I hung around disoccupied. Capacity for creation
steadily drained by the Voice I was in danger of becoming a
chronic onlooker. Over the wall of my rising inhibition, I
observed these privileged to be care-free. Yet Anne had a
cross-eye, Holyoak constantly gave vent to a comic condemn-
natory sniff: his comment on life in its essentials.

" MEN "

125

Tête-à-tête was defiance of her aged depravity. Of course connected with that group of pals who though accidentaly thrown together might have been assorted by fate for the unity of their department, there were men to whom one said with the perspicacity of youth when left to its own devices," I should not be aluded to sit for my portrait without a chaperone " whereupon beauty would lose its allure.

A swerving sail attached to the skimming acuteness of a steel dragonfly flashing back the sun, Holyoak guiding his bicycle around a curve...

Holyoak raising the stoic irony of his face in wonder to a cumulus cloud, the piled anomaly of an illusional massif, its seemingly immovable dominance, the strange conveyance of the eternal in its unlastingness.

Conversely to his descendant softness with the cat a shaft of basic strength ascended from him as he shared with me the half recognition in, supenal phenomena of objective forms unrelated to anything we are familiar with.

Appearing the enormous beauty of the cloud with the tenuous kaleidoscopy of its myriad whiteness, its occasional arcs of gold, grew an apple-tree laden with blossom in comparison bleak as china yet of an odor intangible as its prototype above.

I was exalted by my first intimacy with anyone who ever hooked up at the sky & only less by the lore he displayed in making an unknown definition with the word 'cumulus'.

From the brow of the hill road where we stood side by side, we descended still somewhat awed to a valley of big stone-fronted houses. Holyoak shared his with an actor & his wife.

" MEN "

Without entering the house, we passed under the London
trees through a gate into the back garden at the end he had
built himself a large music room where he played the organ.

On first arriving, as if the apple blossom showered
over a wall, he covered my face with tueful kisses, then dashed
to the organ and began to play music I could not yet interpret
so probably Bach. Later his actor tenant came in & on seeing
my slowly fading blush the arc of his eyebrows became that of
a man whose interests are involved.

Thousands of miles away in a warehouse is stored a cabinet containing a secret drawer. There lies a small snapshot of a lean man on an organ bench. His eyes almost white with a dreamy dilatation, seated the way he was when he veered round to talk to me.

Holyoak appeared to me at the time to emerge from a
Merlin forest of reed pipes far removed from me.

"Queer, the things that happen to one as a child" he
was saying" I used to lie in bed staring across the room at a
speck in the air, after a while it began to rotate, grew
larger, drew nearer & gathering terrific speed dilated to a
whizzing planet of luminous fuzz until on reaching my eyes
it burst"....

The tacit implication of a separative wall became so
embedded in our native unity, we waived all further kisses as
irrellevent. For me unquestioning, untroubled by it the vaguely
intuited barrier was abstact as an Euclidean theorem.

A supreme, an ult mate kiss I only took part in by
proxy. A bunch of us were twittering ' at the photographer's '
youth on a glorious early summer day setting out from the city.

" MEN "

127

Holyoak and I were cycling down to lunch with the actor's wife who had taken a place in the country. Before we left I almost came upon him sitting on the edge of a medieval chair, his feet streched out before him doing an ecstatic little tap dance of their own as, looking like a puppy who fancies he is worrying an angel's wing, he kissed the llning of my jacket.

In this man's presence surroundings resumed their erstwhile aspect of the miraculous. A setting for an absolute contentment happened to be the parlour of a wayside pub where we stopped for refreshment. The confining expanse of marbled yellow wall-paper, the vinegar moat of a glass fly-trap became Empyrian whose sublimated glow gilded an all inclusive precinct of quietude.

The massive hush of the hot sun heightened by the aspirring buzz of metallic blue-bottles passed for the cumulative 'music of the spheres' the very fly-blow on advertisements for ale formed seals on an pact of peace.

House-flies drowning in the acid deception of their ideal did not disturb the equipoise of my serene emotion. I would not fathom their pain. They dropped, struggling illustrations of the words that died on Holyoak's lips.

The Happiness attained in this bizarre harbour I was not to recover until seventeen years later, riding a wooden animal on Coney Island.

Pleasant reception by my hostess, Mrs Peck, was of short duration. Chatting amicably on our arrival she suddenly changed to an alarming replica of my mother when Pappa brought home the bracelets.

" Who gave you that? " she screamed pointing to a blue

" MEN "

128

bead I had laughingly attached to my person when Holyoak
on
had handed it to me; one of a scatter of surplus relics some
professor returned from excavating in Egypt had divided among
a few friends.

Entirely bewildered I recognised the splotch of purple
creeping up her jaw as she turned on Holyoak. His brother,
Ian, a house guest drew me by the sleeve " you & I are going
for a nice little ride" he explained as he shoved me through the
door.

So it turned out, in that era, men also to a certain
degree could be ruined, by getting too inextricably involved
with another man's wife.

This I was learning from Holyoak's brother, fuming on
a stile in view of a meadow of blazing buttercups.

" There's nothing to be done " he raged " we ,all of
us, family ,friends have moved heaven & earth to get him out
of it with no effect. Its his damnable notion of chivalry' the
honorable thing' whatever its called" hissed Ian who famous
in the world of art insured his bachelor-hood with transient
retinues of professional beauties.

Ian calmed himself it seemed by laying one chaste
finger on my throat , which may have been cool to the touch,
& keeping it there . " Of course " he mused " you're divinely
lovely but what can that mean to me Linda , you're one of
those girls strictly reserved for marriage.... poor dear" he
chuckled in commiseration.

The clang of sunshine on the golden weeds ringing in
the brain, he again became restless on Holyoak's account

" The pity of it " he muttered grimly" Do you know
how they get them? " enquiring of me " they nurse them."

" MEN "

129

"Hol fell ill ... ' Oh woman in our hours of.....'
a man's pretty helpless piqued down to a bed ..... and Peck's
so noble : Believes in letting everyone live their own life's
just for the sake of appearances he's got half Hol's home.

M

Mrs Peck does not reappear & how we fed or returned is
a blank. My mother received a letter from her asking if she
was aware of my visit, she being the last person in the world
to encourage her daughter to do things" behind her mother's
back". Amazingly she saw nothing odd in this communication
& delighted with an audience for a 'gesture of dignity' replied
with 'surprise' & the assurance I had had her permission. It
would not occur to her that a Mrs Anything would have male
guests to lunch.

The next time I contacted him, once more at the curve of
the road, Holyoak floating off his bicycle said:

"Linda, I have something to tell you"

His voice was weary with liberation, an unfathomable
gravity took the place of the quizical fatalism that had marked
it hitherto.

"Linda, my dear" he said, looking as if he had by
superhuman ordeal recreated the world " I have left Mrs Peck"

"But Holyoak" I answered, clutenhing, in a surge of jubilant
emotion, at the first words to rise from the subconscious

"That is of no interest to me"

Queerly enough it was true.

I might always have known from that 'talk' which for
self-protection I had formed the habit not to heed, of his
sturdy liaison yet my heart in electing him, somewhat shopworn

" MEN "

130

among other men who were fresher, younger, responded to the
nameless essentials forming the structure of his gracious
spirit; this, the faint bestiality of Mrs Peck's underlip
had never entered, the contents of her corsets dissolved on its
frontiers. It was common in that 'suggestive era' for the lure
of the flesh to be baited with some reminder of its purported
vileness.

So of that nucleus in Holyoak to which my affection was
grafted I was stirred to not an iota of possessiveness, he
existed, for me, bare of entanglements as Truth.

His announcement, drawing her for a moment into relationship with himself, overwhelmed me with a sudden modesty. Holyoak being the man to the latent woman in me never invoked the spontaneous improprieties I had voiced in my neutral association with Lucus, with whom I was free to use the little I had of analytic brain. To Holyoak. I reacted in unedulterated maidenliness, of a maid who flees in confusion from a man about to declare himself.

Only on reaching home did my consciousness develop a fleeing impression of a Holyoak struck by lightning.

Conversantly enfolded in their lining I had been incapable
of apprehending the surface effect of words which common sense
on coming into action reversed to a calous snub, unwarrantable from
a girl who had so obviously to Holyoak attained in his companion-
ship to the sumptious well-being of affinity.

Remorseful as a pugilist who should unwittingly hit below
the belt, I decided in a flash of feministic assertiveness to
make amends. I confided to my girl friend Eva Knight who quite
agreed with me that the only thing left to be done was to march

" MEN "

131

bravely in upon the shattered Holyoak, who must have deduced
from my seeming volte-face, I had unpreparedly discovered
him in the shocking light of a 'fallen man', and explain how,
in spite of verbal discrepancies, loyally I loved him.

Her hair braided in a coronet above a complexion frequent
at that time; it looked as if greasy glass let through the burst
capillaries due to violent soaping; the blues & browns of a
delicate constitution spread like a pale bruise over a really
classic features in the premature decay of a woman whose glands
have not been stimulated; Eva Knight had a fundamental bond
with myself.

"It's fearful" she whispered to me, tense with hatred
"sometimes I become aware of my own voice. It sounds like
'hers' & I want to commit suicide"

Her mother also stickled for the moralities she preven-
ted Eva marrying the man she loved insistently she was forfeited
to another who having been occasionally her partner at tennis
she accused her daughter of 'leading on'. Eva's loved one went
into a decline & died. Eva had 'taken up art' living with the
tiny fluttering woman, alone as do so many echoing their astral
murderer.

An ill-tempered handmaiden from a briefly opening
front door informed us that Mr Holyoak was dangerously ill,
the doctors forbade all visitors.

The Peck tenancy complicated this prevented any friendly
assault on the premises, getting a note to the invalid or
even news of him.

Holyoak's front door closed on that period in which
Nature allows innumerable maidens some inviolable appeal
inspiring men to crown them with a healing devotion.

" MEN "

132

"I am not interested God" one may say to destiny while it is still not too late for Love to antidote the parental poisons & misery appear from the sudden altitudes of liberation a bizarre ephemer a for joy to laugh over ...." Space A hideous instantaneousness has marked the shuttle of my life between light and darkness.

On returning from my frustrated pilgrimage, I immediately found myself imprisoned. My mother who had staged her latest fall under a marital blow from the cold stone of the hall floor, was taken ill. The tradition of filial duty tea a sick bed in spite of the presence of trained nurses, entailed hours of mute reception of violent abuse. Finally breaking down I appealed to the doctor " If you could only get her to exercise a little self control there would be less danger...."

The doctor, taut in the usual reaction to my helpful suggestions pierced me with a frozen eye " you are unable to appreciate your mother" and turning his back on me left me with that exquisitely modulated voice of his patient echoing in his ears. So shy, soft as a distant bird call, sweet as the breath of flowers. That voice of an innocent caught in the talon of a monster wondering what has hurt her.

Although we were forbidden to leave the house, a widowed lady companion was engaged to chaperone us presumably for our social engagements with the walls. She required quite a lot of attention with the smelling salts, subsequent to a remark made by my father to the effect that "no man would want to marry a widow, damaged goods" I noticed during my father's disintegration, the occasional letting through of an unseemly remark reflecting the obsessions of an agonising respectability & an increasing obtu-

" MEN "

133

seness to any sensitivity but his own. This craven neurotic
was almost impossible to relate to the glorious enthusiast I had
glimpsed in my babyhood.

In ' cleaving only unto ' his spouse , he had undergone a
gradual vulgarisation in listening only to her discourse. I
at length
could not reproach him for becoming becoming something, at some-
times rather awkward to have for a father. Piquantly , neither
he nor my sisters bowing to her as a moral preceptor exceptio-
nally dynamic , as they could see, ever suspected her ultimate
significance as a social catastrophe.

So pappa when he bullied me at a ball functioning impar-
tially as ethical mentor did not perceive that Ida was 'beha-
ving unpleasantly' the pleasant having so long been hidden from
him.

This form of ethical regulation of youthful error to which
his wife accustomed him, and he had extremely modified it, was
in as far as he could judge, native to english publicity.

Deeply troubled he had not noticed that meteoric mobals
only struck in the absence of strangers.

My parents subliminal game in regard to a match for me
had come to a crisis . While my father tortured in anxiety over
the unpromising fate of the beautiful daughters of an haluci-
natory marriage , Mother, strategic whenever she found an occa-
sion would make a move . Fearing a possible denouement with
Lucas , she had , he told me flegmatically, sidled up to him
& cooed " you don't want to marry Linda , you should marry a
nice girl." Again, seizing on flowers he had sent me from his
hot-house , with the flair of the sadist for involving the
sentiments of youth in reactions of disgust , she sniffed in

" MEN "

134

mockery over their immaculate scents
" a cat's been on them".

At last his opponent actually prones, he gathered what wits remained to him, in a supreme effort to save me from "those good-for-nothing artists". Having once espied me escorted home by Lucas who compared to us was extremely wealthy, though less so than the Holyoak set, he vented his agony of apprehension with the inspiriting adage " Give a dog a bad name & it will stick".

Subtle as a fox on its last run to cover, he wrote the British Consulate in Munich asking him to recommend a family desiring a paying guest.

The result sublimely resuscitated his initial dreams for us. The list submitted by the consulate was headed by the address of a Baron & Baroness.

My suggestion that any reputable family would insist on knowing who - whatever - I was, my father ignored.

I realise now that the fact of his being in trade & his having been sired by a jew provided his wife with an absolute warranty to martyrise him.

Having no religion save fanatical allegiance to British hospitality, he tentatively pointed out the wisdom of modifying our Jewish name on behalf of offspring reared in so rabid & exclusive a Christianity.

Despising us, that others in despising us accentuate her superiority she quashed my father's proposition. The joy she extracted from even our minor nuisances such as my name on the roll-call of an Protestant bible - class eliciting

" MEN "

135-

such laic giggles & Christ like snubs swelled her until she seemed to be ruminating herb own rightness like a sacred cow To her alone were the mysteries of the universe revealed. She attained to actual magnificence in settlement of our discussion of an inscrutable God.

"Tosh" said she" bod is as easy to understand as this" picking one up & tilting it back & forth on the table cloth "spoon".

There are people who become important through weilding a censorship while cartoons of nagging wives are considered innocuous. Women whose appearance is so neglected it destruggs, at least the digestive system are presented as the protagonist of a little normal fun. Even as these my mother had made a clearance of father's early friends, jew or gentile, their lavish sociability their wedding marquees, their race-horses blushed out like transient fireworks in the chill of her unformulated unguessable, social ideal.

From some of those light-hearted families she spurned, brand new Lords of the British realm have emerged. A demonstration beyond her understanding. Whenever I hear a revival of Fa-ra-ra-boom-de-ay it recalls the shock of return to the abominable bosom of Nemesis, from counting the crystal buttons on the plum cloth encasing the wasp-like waist of a Rebecca Gluckstein. She still leaned toward me out of that tune of elative stampede her gentle oriental eyes under raven kamarak ringlets, a Victorian picture of the 'song of songs' as the solo pogrom leapt upon father from behind our front door. Quivering with a dashed out laughter, sent up to bed, I passed at the turn of the stairs the key at which our good-fortune began to dwindle. The following night all that was left of father - he was due for a conference

" MEN "

on stocking the markets of the world with British cloth, was a
scraped nerve. It impressed as an interrogation mark tied in a
knot.

And at the end of a week, we were let in the room of a
sheeted survivor who had also passed a turning point of what
Doctors diagnosed as peritonitis. There was no predicting in this
system of lashing the emotions to serial crises, where, in congo-
nitally healthy people, the bodily reaction would strike.

That had been a good while ago. Now Father's social outlet
was reduced to entertaining a loyal barber, in the haven of the
bathroom chatting despairingly draped in an enormous turkish towel.

Set adrift from his concrete world of' business with a future'
by his wife's ideal of ignoring it " My husband is connected with
trade" she would reply to enquiry in a clearly regal voice, he
endeavored to evolve, in void, a suitable impressionism of contact,
arguing to himself thus: if Linda arrives with a paid chaperone, the
Baroness will figure these are respectable people--- of means.

The widowed companion became quite cheerful at the prospect
of an unexpected trip abroad.

End of Chapter 136
###

Islands in the Air

Chapter IX

"MAN" "MEN"

Where the 'forbidden' suggests escape from a narrow
misery & that discrepancy,' love ', offers the only alter-
native to a rabid inertia the prisoner anticipates man, the
scarecrow on the parental landscape in the ingratiating
guise of an Evangelist?

I came to imagine his recuperative gentleness my
crushed mouth filled with the acrid taste of wall-paper when
in the early morning hours my mother at the hight of conjugal
recriminations had burst into my room & tearing me out of bed
dashed me against the wall as she screamed ' you horrible
children I could kill you ' I sensed to a nicety the point at
which , even in the phenomenal force of fury , an ingrained
fear of the law curtails spontaneity.

It was about 5pm on a
of my life, To my lasting disgrace I actually laughed at a silly young thing because her swain at the art school transferred his attentions, which consisted in a lingering beside an easel for the giving of advice, to myself. This period of thoughtless sport in the normal adolescent, when the feelings of others, one's own being so superficial that a joke appears

the supreme indulgence, are not taken into account, was XXX of necessity with me of short duration.

One concrete - if intermediary event could be added to the Three on a maiden's cursory program, Ceding importance only to the acme of the wedding cake was the experience of becoming ' engaged'.

My relegation by my father to the status of old maid for lack of obesity, my mother's prediction I should die in the gutter because, as a student, I required more than one pencil at a time added to a terror whose only let-up was total boredom had thrown me into a panic of yearning for concrete experience before it should be ' too late'.

In the jocular prelude to conscious adolescence one not unfrequently falls in love with something ' funny' . I picked my young man because he smoked a curved pipe which hanging over his long chin made him easy to caricature, having first consulted with my girl-chum before clenching my choice.

Above his cherished briar appeared incidentally some extrmely good facial sculpture, a pair of deep-set clearly lidded eyes overshadowed by an ivory brow. His oval lips become somewhat constricted from clutching the tubular decoy of my attention. He was always excellently tailored, oftenest, at my command, in brown ' to match his hair'.

" MEN "

The nearest I could get to my ideal of ' Love Int The
mist' was to sit leaning against his arm on a damp bench on
Primrose Hill, when I ought to have been in life-class .
We stared straight before us into an uncompromising fog. There
were no primroses.

Hunched MM in inhibited ardor, paralysed with 'respect'
he did not say very much. It was not long before I began to
chide him gently bidding him reflect on all that Dante Gabriel
would have been saying under the circumstances,

I must have been, sometime, very fond of him. Once when
we gave a dance ' my mother postponing all arrangements with
daily pretence of calling the whole thing off owing to our
' wickedness' leaving the last minute hectic preparations
entirely to me, I ramember the sympathy of his pectoral muscles
under the dress shirt whereon I laid my tired head to be
sootheſ by his kind fingers.

He had one idiosyncrasy that disturbed me. The ladies
he drew among domes and minarettes of extremely able penman-
ship had such a queer kink under the nose slipping into the
mouth. Some years later he had married & his child was born
hare-lipped.

" MEN "

118

Saying so little of note himself, on looking back I
am surprised he did not virtuously jilt me my random remarks
being for a 'maiden' positively alarming.

Inspired by a light lady wearing plaid bloomers in the
chorus of a travelling company, her face smeared with red, her
frowsy hair jammed into her eyes by the exagerated vizir of a
cloth bicycling cap - we were in the midst of a discussion
as to whether all humans beings had souls " Nosidles most peo-
ple appear to be only 'half there' - do you think" I enquired
of him " they would even want to do ' it ' - if they had not
been told they musn't?"

Yes sometimes on that holiday I would win free. There were
frequent storms & my mother had to retire to her room & hide
under the bed; so terrified of thunder even propriety must go
by the board.

My sister watched us balefully, then infinitely malign
' let's have a look under that cape' she exclaimed lifting
the hem gingerly , then drawing back in a kind of bland triuph
sneered grimly as one who uncovers a louse.

Peroievi-g he was-unli

" MEN "

Due to the violent primitivism of my parents' ethics
my trend was inevitably towards melodramatic expedients. In
chastened terms I allowed him to infer I was no longer a maiden.

Lucas, an agonising xxx mule opposed my infallible
panacea " that's no reason for throwing me over" he implored
" the way I see it if you'd loved this fellow you'd have stuck
to him - there's nothing to prevent your marrying me" decided
the precursor of modernity who however circumscribed his self
expression was surprised at nothing. From his remarks on some
best-seller he had recommended I gathered his idea of the acme of
sentiment was to have me for his wife & feel terribly nervous
while the baby arrived.

" MEN "

" Pull down your skirt chick-a -biddy" said an older
girl as the students grouped round the courtyard took their
tea out of doors watching a game of tennis.

The head of the stranger under his volleys leaped
forward from a lilac tree surrounded by bees ahoneying to
drive into mine a pre-impression of that same man in the men
I was fated to love.

His - their - eyes were grey diamonds, the form of
irises and lids making them both round and square gave these
eyes a superfluity of expression permitting infinite interpre-
tations. He who operated them as though they were many face-
ted reflecting some glow from within could throw them at
their will into a dither of benevolent amusement.

The stranger of intense eyes from where I crouched on
a stone coping in an effort to telescope my legs under

"MEN"

that inadequate skirt appeared from my shame-faced situation ethereal in his height as someone soaring in an inattainable 'beyond' pursuing a planet. Yet in those preliminary years of youth as in infancy nothing was out of reach. In the usual way all wishes had of coming true for me he soon became my constant companion.

Irrevocably he drew me as if to a fount of compassion when sauntering along the road I came upon him his arm again upstretched among the branches of a tree in his front garden.

"That damn dog" he explained "my cat is in a delica-
condition" With an inate gentleness he lifted down the feline
body throbbing in its distraught fur.

Holyoak wore a look of mystic dissipation. Ploughed
in his army exams, an ex-actor, he had now, on a threat of an
aunt to cut him off if he did'nt do something, taken up art
photography & rented a studio house near the school. Across
the threshold of that little house, through a glass door, I
passed into my 'other life' of the intuition whose motivations
one never associates with circumstantial reality.

A girl who had been studying so long at the art school
she had grown old - Anne was thirty! - at last launching
on a career 'did' his retouching - a very good sort, she
brought to the place a good deal of laughter.

I hung around disoccupied. Capacity for creation steadily drained by the Voice I was in danger of becoming a chronic onlooker. Over the wall of my rising inhibition, I observed these privileged to be care-free. Yet Anne had a crossseye, Holyoak constantly gave vent to a comic condemnatory sniff: his comment on life in its essentials.

"MEN "

123

with me in a tacit affection. Except for the blank intervals when he disappeared into his dark-room, his nearness made the light grow lighter.

For this dreamy kind of man-about-town, the shilling celebrities exhibited in stationers' windows came to life. Marie Tempest with lace parasol sailing into the ' photographer's' on the foam of her skirts. Her strict features pearly as her dog collar had an almost superhuman éclat in those days when few but actresses used cosmetics.

Constance Collier eyed with the centres of sunflowers curtained with lashes, weilding her greco-roman curves with slothful graciousness.

He took my photo too - staring at a straight iris. My mother consequently called at the art school staging a scene because my shoulder ' showed' . Brand, a friend of Holyoak's explained it was only a study in drapery.

It was not only in Holyoak's friends I caught glimpses of a world which unlike mine did not exist incognito. There was Lawrence Grossmith who had a mind to study a little art appearing round that same Hermes, with the chic negligence of approach then common to character s in reviews.

" What a pretty dress"

To his voice of flippant sophistication I flushed, raw as a wound to a probe , then I noticed he wasn't looking at my dress . So we made friends . At ap party for his brother George I met a girl of thistle down, probably his wife, whose incomparable name was being celebrated in a current ditty:

" Oh Lydia Flopp ,my darling

All the boys will say then

" MEN "

Tête-à-tête was defiance of her aged depravity. Of course connected with that group of pals who though accidentaly thrown together might have been assorted by fate for the unity of their department, there were men to whom one said with the perspicacity of youth when left to its own devices," I should not be allowed to sit for my portrait without a chaperone", whereupon beauty would lose its allure.

Conversely to his descendant softness with the cat a shaft of basic strength ascended from him as he shared with me a half-recognition in, supenal phenomena of objective forms unrelated to anything we are familiar with, in aerial phenomena.

Aping the enormous beauty of the cloud with the tenuous kaleidoscopy of its myriad whiteness, its occasional arcs of gold, grew an apple-tree laden with blossom in comparison bleak as china yet of an odor intangible as its prototype above.

" MEN "

Without entering the house, we passed under the London
trees through a gate into the back garden at the end he had
built himself a large music-room where he played the organ.

On first arriving, as if the apple blossom showered
over a wall, he covered my face with cuteful kisses, then dashed
to the organ and began to play music I could not yet interpret
so probably Bach. Later his actor tenant came in & on seeing
my slowly fading blush the arc of his eyebrows became that of
a man whose interests are involved.

Thousands of miles away in a warehouse is stored a cabinet containing a secret drawer. There lies a small snapshot of a lean man on an organ bench. His eyes almost white with a dreamy dilation, seated the way he was when he veered round to talk to me.

Holyoak appeared to me at the time to emerge from a far removed
Merlin forest of reed pipes far removed from me, upleaving the ceiling

"Queer, the things that happen to one as a child" he
was saying" I used to lie in my bed staring across the room at a
speck in the air, after a while it began to rotate, grew
larger, drew nearer & gathering terrific speed dilated to a
whizzing planet of luminous fuzz until on reaching my eyes
it burst"....

A supreme, an ultimate kiss I only took part in by
proxy. A bunch of us were twittering ' at the photographer's '
youth on a glorious early summer day setting out from the city.

" MEN "

Holyoak and I were cycling down to lunch with the actor's wife who had taken a place in the country. Before we left I almost came upon him sitting on the edge of a medieval chair, his feet streched out before him doing an ecstatic little tap-dance of their own as, looking like a puppy who fancies he is worrying an angel's wing, he kissed the llning of my jacket.

House-flies drowning in the acid deception of their ideal did not disturb the equipoise of my serene emotion. I would not fathom their pain. They dropped. Struggling illustrations of the words that died on Holyoak's lips.

The happiness attained in this bizarre harbour I was not to recover until seventeen years later riding a wooden animal on Coney Island.

" MEN "

128

Entirely bewildered I recognised the splotch of purple
creeping up her jaw as she turned on Holyoak. His brother,
Ian, a house guest, drew me by the sleeve " you & I are going
for a nice little ride" he explained as he shoved me through the
door.

" There's nothing to be done" he raged " we all of us, family, friends have moved heaven & earth to get him out of it. With no effect. Its his damnable notion of chivalry' the honorable thing' whatever its called" hissed Ian who famous in the world of art insured his bachelor-hood with transient tretinues of professional beauties.

Ian calmed himself it seemed by laying one chaste
finger on my throat, which may have been cool to the touch,
& keeping it there. " Of course " he mused " you're divinely
lovely but what can that mean to me Linda?, You're one of
those gits strictly reserved for marriage.... poor dear" he
chuckled in commiseration.

" The pity of it" he muttered grimly" Do you know
how they get them? " enquiring of me " they nurse them."

" MEN "

" Hol fell ill ... ' Oh woman in our hours of.....'
a man's pretty helpless pinned down to a bed ..... and Peck's
so noble : Believes in letting everyone live their own lives
just for the sake of appearances he's got half Hol's home.

Mrs Peck does not reappear & how we fed or returned is
a blank . My mother received a letter from her asking if she
was aware of my visit, she being the last person in the world
to encourage her daughter to do things" behind her mother's
back" . Amazingly she saw nothing odd in this communication
& delighted with an audience for a 'gesture of dignity' replied
with 'surprise' & the assurance I had had her permission . It
would not occur to her that a Mrs Anything would have male
guests to lunch.

His voice was weary with liberation, an unfathomable
gravity took the place of the quizzical fatalism that had marked
it hitherto.

"Linda, my dear" he said, looking as if he had by
superhuman ordeal recreated the world "I have left Mrs Peck".
"But Holyoak" I answered, clutching, in a surge of jubilant
emotion, at the first words to rise from the subconscious

Queerly enough it was true.

I might always have known from that 'talk' which for
self-protection I had formed the habit not to heed, of his so
sturdy liaison; yet my heart in electing him, somewhat shopworn

" MEN "

130

among other men who were fresher, younger, responded to the
nameless essentials forming the structure of his gracious
spirit; this, the faint bestiality of Mrs Peck's underlip
had never entered, the contents of her corsets dissolved on its
frontiers. It was common in those 'suggestive era' for the lure
of the flesh to be baited with some reminder of its purported
vileness,

Only on reaching home did my consciousness develop a fleeing impression of a Holyoak struck by lightning, apparently minuscule, to your call women.

Renorseful as a pugilist who should unwittingly hit below
the belt, I decided in a flash of feministic assertiveness to
make amends. I confided to my girl friend Eva Knight who quite
agreed with me that the only thing left to be done was to march

" MEN "

132

"I am not interested God" one may say to destiny while it is still not too late for Love to antidote the parental poisons & misery appear from the sudden altitudes of liberation a bizarre ephemera for joy to laugh over ..." *Space A* hideous instantaneousness has marked the shuttle of my life between light and darkness.

On returning from my frustrated pilgrimage, I immediately found myself imprisoned. My mother who had staged her latest fall under a marital blow, from the cold stone of the hall floor, haduscarned her only child to be favoured by fortune. was taken ill. The tradition of filial duty to a sick bed in hiring spite of the presence of trained nurses, entailed hours of mute reception of violent abuse. Finally breaking down I appealed to the doctor "If you could only get her to exercise a little self control there would be less danger...."

The doctor, taut in the usual reaction to my helpful suggestions pierced me with a frozen eye "you are unable to appreciate your mother" and turning his back on me left me with that exquisitely modulated voice of his patient echoing in his ears. So shy, soft as a distant bird call, sweet as the breath of flowers. That voice of an innocent caught in the talon of a monster, wondering what has hurt her.

Although we were forbidden to leave the house, a widowed lady companion was engaged to chaperone us presumably for our social engagements with the walls. She required quite a lot of attention with the smelling salts, subsequent to a remark made by my father to the effect that "no man would want to marry a widow... damaged goods" I noticed during my father's disintegration, the occasional letting through of an unseemly remark reflecting the unexpected affection of his obsessions of an agonising respectability & an increasing obtu-

"MEN"

And at the end of a week, we were let in the room of a
sheeted survivor who had also passed a turning point of what
Doctors diagnosed as peritonitis. There was no predicting in this
system of lashing the emotions to serial crises, where, in conge-
nitally healthy people, the bodily reaction would strike.

Set adrift from his concrete world of 'business with a future'
by his wife's ideal of ignoring it," My husband is connected with
trade" she would reply to enquiry in a clearly regal voice, he
endeavored to evolve, in void, a suitable impressionism of contact,
arguing to himself thus: if Linda arrives with a paid chaperone, the
Baroness will figure these are respectable people--- of means.

Islands in the Air

Chapter IX

"MAN" "MEN"

Where the 'forbidden' suggests escape from a narrow
misery & that discrepancy,' love', offers the only alter-
native to a rabid inertia the prisoner anticipates man, the
scarecrow on the parental landscape in the ingratiating
guise of an Evangellist?

I came to imagine his recuperative gentleness, my
crushed mouth filled with the acrid taste of wall-paper, when
in the early morning hours my mother at the hight of conjugal
recriminations had burst into my room & bearing me out of bed
dashed me against the wall as she screamed ' you <u>horrible</u>-
children I could <u>kill</u> you ' I sensed to a nicety the point at
which , even in the phenomenal force of fury , an ingrained
fear of the law curtails spontaneity.

I was about to enter upon the truly amoral period
of my life; To my lasting disgrace I actually laughed at a &
silly young thing because her swain at the art school trans-
ferred his attentions, which consisted in a lingering beside
an easel for the giving of advice , to myself. This period of
thoughtless sport in the normal adolescent , when the feelings
of others , one's own being so superficial that a joke appears

One concrete - if intermediary event could be added to the Three on a maiden's cursory program, ceding importance only to the acme of the wedding cake was the experience of becoming ' engaged'.

My relegation by my father to the status of old maid for lack of obesity, my mother's prediction I should die in the gutter because, as a student, I required more than one pencil added to a terror whose only let-up was total boredom had thrown me into a panic of yearning for concrete experience before it should be ' Mummified ' too late!

In the jocular prelude to conscious adolesence one not unfrequently falls in love with something ' funny' . I picked my young man because he smoked a curved pipe which hanging over his long chin made him easy to caricature, having first consulted with my girl chum before clenching my choice.

Above his cherished briar appeared incidentally some extrmely good facial sculpture, a pair of deep set clearly lidded eyes overshadowed by an ivory brow. His oval lips become somewhat constricted from clutching the tubular decoy of my attention. He was always excellently tailored, oftenest, at my command, in brown ' to match his hair'.

" MEN "

The nearest I could get to my ideal of ' Love Int The
Mist' was to sit leaning against his arm on a damp bench on
Primrose Hill, when I ought to have been in life-class.
We stared straight before us into an uncompromising fog. There
were no primroses.

Hunched <u>in</u> inhibited ardor, paralysed with 'respect'
he did not say very much. It was not long before I began to
chide him gently bidding him reflect on all that Dante Gabriel
would have been saying under the circumstances,

" MEN "

Saying so little of note himself, on looking back I
am surprised he did not virtuously jilt me, my random remarks
being for a 'maiden' positively alarming.

Inspired by a light lady wearing plaid bloomers in the
chorus of a travelling company, her face smeared with red, her
frowsy hair jammed into her eyes by the exagerated vizir of a
cloth bicycling cap - we were in the midst of a discussion
as to whether all humans beings had souls- " Besides most peo-
ple appear to be only'half there' - do you think" I enquired
of him " they would even want to do ' it ' - if they had not
been told they musn't?"

His smile clenching the briar tighter " I shouldn't wonder
a bit if you're right" he assented,

My sister watched us balefully, then infinitely malign
' let's have a look under that cape' she exclaimed lifting
the hem gingerly , then drawing back in a kind of bland triuph
sneered grimly as one who uncovers a louse,

Percieving he was unli-

" MEN "

Lucas, an agonising xxx mule opposed my infallible
panacea " that's no reason for throwing me over" he implored
" the way I see it if you'd *loved* this fellow you'd have stuck
to him - there's nothing to prevent your marrying me" decided
the precursor of modernity who, however circumscribed his self
expression, was surprised at nothing. From his remarks on some
best-seller he had recommende I gathered his idea of the acme of
sentiment was to have me for his wife & feel terribly nervous
while the baby arrived.

" MEN "

That sensation in my knees of being exposed to Röntgen
rays whenever I sat down was irremediable however blushingly
I tugged the dress I had outgrown. My mother, whose ideal of pro-
priety was a state of living-death, herself imposed upon me an
indecorous condition harrowing to my modesty in those days of
blue serge bathing suits flopping round ankles.

His - their - eyes were grey diamonds, the form of
irises and lids making them both round and square gave those
eyes a superfluity of expression permitting infinite interpre-
tations. He who operated them, as though they were many face-
ted, reflecting some glow from within, could throw them at
their will into a dither of benevolent amusement.

The stranger of intense eyes from where I touched on
a stone coping in an effort to telescope my legs under

"MEN"

that inadequate skirt appeared from my shame-faced situation
ethereal in his might, as someone soaring in an inattainable
'beyond' pursuing a planet. Yet in those preliminary years of
youth as in infancy nothing was out of reach. In the usual
way all wishes had of coming true for me he soon became my
constant companion.

Holyoak wore a look of mystic dissipation. Ploughed
in his army exams, an ex-actor, he had now, on a threat of an
aunt to cut him off if he did'nt do something, taken up art
photography & ranted a studio-house near the school. Across
the threshold of that little house, through a glass door, I
passed into my 'other life' of the intuition, whose motivations
one never associates with circumstantial reality.

I hung around disoccupied. Capacity for creation
steadily drained by the Voice I was in danger of becoming a
chronic onlooker. Over the wall of my rising inhibition, I
observed these privileged to be care-free. Yet Anne had a
crosseye. Holyoak constantly gave vent to a comic condemn-
natory sniff: his comment on life in its essentials.

"MEN"

Not being entirely supine I would try to take council.
It was useless. Even a modified allusion to my quandery struck
as fantastic those who, whatever their preoccupations, had no
conception of what it was to live continually terrified.

"You" Holyoak decided assistingly " seem to be waiting for something to happen; let me assure you, dear, nothing _ever_ happens". My fancy fell to planning government supervision of domestic interiors.

When sympathy did come my way it was for so paltry an
assault it did not seem to call for condolence.

It was at a Royal Academy ball. Her perfect skin of a
fair rose, (Ida, to whom I had introduced all my friends, in the
creamy dress I had bordered with a greek key pattern in gold,
bore herself as a slightly cockey empress, bestowing on any man
she danced with a smugly disdainful silence.

"She _looks_ so magnificent" one confided to me" I could
almost risk another waltz".

I was about to dance with Holyoak. My father, who had
accompanied us, approached me under his educative scowl.

"Now what sort of a girl are you turning out to be?"
He gave me a ' dressing down ' for taking all the partners for my-
self & leaving my sister without any.

Holyoak procured a man for Ida & drew me away. He no longer wanted to dance only to seek some nook of privacy,

"Oh Linda" he said "my heart aches for you. What you
must go through is too horrible, and I mistook you for an unruly
daughter - rather talking through your hat; I offer you my ab-
ject apology.

Rid of his idea of a spoiled child he became associated w

"MEN"

He took my photo too - staring at a straight iris.
My mother consequently called at the art school staging a scene
because my shoulder ' showed', Brand, a friend of Holyoak's
explained it was only a study in drapery.

"What a pretty dress"!

To his voice of flippant sophistication I flushed,
raw as a wound to a probe, then I noticed he wasn't looking
at my dress. So we made friends. At a party for his brother
George I met a girl of thistle down, probably his wife, whose
incomparable name was being celebrated in a current ditty:

"Oh Lydia Flopp, my darllng

All the boys will say then

" MEN "

Dance and Dance away then...

What else remains are the lean lines on the comic-sensitive face of George & Lydia Flopp's squeal of incredulous modesty, a 'study' of the model I had first deplored, his pudendae crammed into a linnen bag.

Men proved to be exactly the antidote of misery I had supposed. Beyond the matrix home whose unease was sensible as an prolongation of the crucial vibrations of parturition, one passed within their stabile aura as through gates ajar on liberty. A little breathless with escape, a girl in their company achieved an illusion of sharing in their liberty. It seemed so clear that life for them entailed no anxieties. I was wistfully stimulated by their glorious irresponsibility.

A swerving sail attached to the skimming acuteness of a steel dragonfly flashing back the sun. Holyoak guiding his bicycle round a curve--

Holyoak raising the stoic irony of his face in wonder to a cumulus cloud, the piled anomoly of an illusional massif, its seemingly immovable dominance, the strange conveyance of the eternal in its unlastingness.

I spent more time alone with men than was compatible for that era. No ruin befell me. In fact the general attitude consisted in an inate assumption of our liliaceous superiority to the soulless Mrs Grundy's base obsession.

" MEN "

Tête-à-tête was defiance of her aged depravity. Of course connected with that group of pals who though accidentaly thrown together might have been assorted by fate for the unity of their department, there were men to whom one said with the perspicacity of youth when left to its own devices," I should not be allowed to sit for my portrait without a chaperone " whereupon beauty would lose its allure.

From the brow of the hill-road where we stood side by side, we descended still somewhat awed to a valley of big stone-fronted houses. Holyoak shared his with an actor & his wife.

" MEN "

Thousands of miles away in a warehouse is stored a ca-
binet containing a secret drawer. There lies a small snapshot
of a lean man on an organ bench. His eyes almost white with
a dreamy dilatation, seated the way he was when he veered round
to talk to me.

" MEN "

Holyoak and I were cycling down to lunch with the actor's wife who had taken a place in the country. Before we left I almost came upon him sitting on the edge of a medieval chair, his feet streched out before him doing an ecstatic little tap dance of their own as, looking like a puppy who fancies he is worrying an angel's wing, he kissed the lining of my jacket.

In this man's presence my surroundings resumed their erstwhile aspect of the miraculous. A setting for an absolute contentment happened to be the parlour of a wayside pub where we stopped for refreshment. The confining expanse of marbled yellow wall-paper, the vinegar moat of a glass fly-trap became Empyrian whose sublimated glow gilded an all inclusive precinct of quietude.

The massive hush of the hot sun heightened by the aspiring buzz of metallic blue-bottles passed for the cumulative 'music of the spheres' the very fly-blown on advertisements for ale formed seals on an act of peace.

House-flies drowning in the acid deception of their ideal did not disturb the equipoise of my serene emotion. I would not fathom their pain. They dropped Struggling illustrations of the words that died on Holyoak's lips.

The Happiness attained in this bizarre harbour I was not to recover until seventeen years later riding a wooden animal on Coney Island.

" MEN "

" There's nothing to be done" he raged " we, all of
us, family, friends have moved heaven & earth to get him out
of it, with no effect. Its his damnable notion of chivalry" the
honorable thing" whatever its called" hissed Ian, who, famous
in the world of art, insured his bachelor-hood with transient
retinues of professional beauties.

Ian calmed himself, it seemed, by laying one chaste
finger on my throat, which may have been cool to the touch,
& keeping it there. " Of course " he mused " you're divinely
lovely but what can that mean to me Linda, you're one of
those girls strictly reserved for marriage..., poor dear" he
chuckled in commiseration.

The rang of sunshine on the golden weeds ringing in
the brain, he again became restless on Holyoak's account

" The pity of it" he muttered grimly" Do you know
how they get them?" enquiring of me " they nurse them."

" MEN "

129

"Hol fell ill ... ' Oh woman in our hours of.....'
a man's pretty helpless pinned down to a bed ..... and Peck's
so noble : Believes in letting everyone live their own lives
just for the sake of appearances he's got half Hol's home.

M

"Linda, my dear" he said, looking as if he had by
superhuman ordeal recreated the world " I have left Mrs Peck."

Queerly enough it was true.

" MEN "

130

His announcement, drawing her for a moment into relationship with himself, overwhelmed me with a sudden modesty. Holyoak being the man to the latent woman in me never invoked the spontaneous improprieties I had voiced in my neutral association with Lucus, with whom I was free to use the little I had of analytic brain. To Holyoak, I reacted in unedulterated maidenliness, of a maid who flees in confusion from a man about to declare himself.

Remorseful as a pugilist who should unwittingly hit below
the belt, I decided in a flash of feministic assertiveness to
make amends. I confided to my girl friend Eva Knight, who quite
agreed with me, that the only thing left to be done was to march

" MEN "

131

Her hair braided in a coronet above a complexion frequent
at that time; it looked as if greasy glass let through the burst
capilliaries due to violent soaping; the blues & browns of a
delicate constitution spread like a pale bruise over a really
classic features in the premature decay of a woman whose glands
have not been stimulated; Eva Knight had a fundamental bond
with myself.

Her mother also stickled for the moralities she preven-
ted Eva marrying the man she loved insisting she was forfeited
to another who having been occasionally her partner at tennis
she accused her daughter of 'leading on'. Eva's loved-one went
into a decline & died. Eva had 'taken up art' living with the
tiny fluttering woman, alone as do so many echoing their astral
murderer.

" MEN "

"I am not interested, God" one may say to destiny while it is still not too late for Love to antidote the parental poisons & misery appear from the sudden altitudes of liberation a bizarre ephemera for joy to laugh over ...." *Space* / a hideous instantaneousness has marked the shuttle of my life between light and darkness.

On returning from my frustrated pilgrimage, I immediately found myself imprisoned. My mother who had staged her latest fall under a marital blow from the cold stone of the hall floor, *See Notes* was taken ill. The tradition of filial duty tea a sick bed in spite of the presence of trained nurses, entailed hours of mute *wing* reception of violent abuse. Finally breaking down I appealed to the doctor "If you could only get her to exercise a little self control there would be less danger...."

The doctor, taut in the usual reaction to my helpful suggestions pierced me with a frozen eye "You are unable to appreciate your mother" and turning his back on me left me with that exquisitely modulated voice of his patient echoing in his ears. So shy, soft as a distant bird call, sweet as the breath of flowers. That voice of an innocent caught in the talon of a monster, wondering what has hurt her.

Although we were forbidden to leave the house, a widowed lady companion was engaged to chaperone us presumably for our social engagements with the walls. She required quite a lot of attention with the smelling salts, subsequent to a remark made by my father to the effect that "no man would want to marry a widow, damaged goods". I noticed during my father's disintegration, the occasional letting through of an unseemly remark reflecting the obsessions of an agonising respectability & an increasing obtu-

" MEN "

In ' cleaving only unto ' his spouse , he had undergone a
gradual vulgarisation in listening only to her discourse. I
at length
could not reproach him for becoming ~~becoming~~ something, at some-
times rather awkward to have for a father. Piquantly , neither
he nor my sisters bowing to her as a moral preceptor exceptio-
nally dynamic , as they could see, ever suspected her ultimate
significance as a social ~~catastrophe.~~ *Blast to careers.*

So pappa when he bullied me at a ball, functionning impar-
tially as ethical ~~mentor~~, did not perceive that Ida was 'beha-
ving unpleasantly' the pleasant having so long been hidden from
him.

This form of ethical regulation of youthful error to which
his wife accustomed him, and he had extremely ~~modified~~ it, was
in as far as he could judge, native to ~~jamilial~~ *her* publicity.

~~Deeply troubled~~ he had not noticed that meteoric motals
only struck in the absence of strangers.

My parents subliminal game in regard to a match for me
had come to a crisis . While my father tortured in anxiety over
the unpromising fate of the beautiful daughters of an haluci-
natory marriage , Mother, strategic whenever she found an occa-
sion would make a move . Fearing a possible denouement with
Lucas , she had , he told me flegmatically, sidled up to him
& cooed " *You* don't want to marry Linda , you should marry a
*nice* girl." Again, seizing on flowers he had sent me from his
hot-house , with the flair of the sadist for involving the
sentiments of youth in reactions of disgust , she sniffed in

" MEN "

mockery over their immaculate scents
"A cat's been on them".

At last, his opponent actually **prone**, ~~he~~ gathered what wits **wits** remained to him, in a supreme effort to save me from "those good-for-nothing artists". Having once espied me escorted home by Lucas who compared to us was extremely wealthy though less so than the Holyoak set, he vented his agony of apprehension with the inspiriting adage " Give a dog a bad name & it will stick".

My suggestion that any reputable family would insist on knowing who - whatever? - I was, my father ignored.

I realise now that the fact of his being in trade ~~& his~~ living been fixed by a jew provided his wife with an absolute warranty to martyrise him.

Despite us, that others in despising us accentuate her superiority she quashed my father's proposition. The joy she extracted from even our minor nuisances such as my name on the roll-call of an protestant *bible - class* eliciting

Chapter X

138

The Baroness had had a Mamma, whom she evoked in brilliant vignettes, perched on four-in-hands being doused with champagne by swanky officers; Reizend - she nodded reminiscently.

With this woman who equated her husband's unnatural excitability with an exophthalmic calm of china-blue eyes, I exchanged confidences. Her poker stare believed all my miseries, while her own communications as to the nullity of conjugal bliss coincided with the outstanding opposition to the cheerful resources of life, I listlessly attributed to adults in general. The story going round Mannich at the time, of a lady who sampled illicit love only to exclaim: "Why its just as dull as marriage ' did not incite me to any heretical speculation; universally, human sentiment clings to implied mysteries in the face of factual report.

Going through the gestures of taking me to her imperturable heart with the gentle sloth of a ruminant - caring for nothing never did she show sign of rebellion - her voiceless putting-up-with-circumstances stilled me as if I had entered the silence after a storm. Adopting me as a daughter she was bent on spoiling to make up for my filial misadvantures " You shall call me Mammalie" she said. There was a certain pancake she would toss for me whenever I demanded. Otherwise, delighted at choosing my own delicacies, I practically lived on bread and leberwurst. Meanwhile my sentimental monotomes on the piano changed from "In the Gloaming" to the "Blue Danube".

Before long I found her recieving the first of her very rare visitors. On entering the room I was eyed by a female with so exact a replica of Mrs Peck's expression when she espied the bead, I retracted in haste not without noticing how the patient gaze of my consolitory foster-mother only slightly modified became hard-boiled