The Innocents Read online

  Ours was also, until the war, a very static society, unenlivened by any influx of summer yachtsmen as at Aldeburgh or Yarmouth or Felixstowe. It wasn’t the sea our village neighboured but the mere branch of an estuary, by which no more than a dinghy-sailing club had established itself, with no more for clubhouse than a derelict bungalow. It struck me very much—(here again I look ahead)—how swiftly and efficiently our American allies of the U.S. Air Force took it over and put life into it. Suddenly scraped down, made weatherproof, fresh-painted, the bungalow looked like new even before a bar was installed; also within a matter of hours, or so it seemed to us slower-paced natives, inside the shingle-ridge they bulldozed out a quite sizable swimming pool. For the American commanding officer (one of the most charming men I ever met), had the sense to take local opinion on the danger of our estuary’s swiftly turning and as swiftly running tide, and as he said (we thought rather wittily), would prefer to see his crews drowned off the French coast rather than the East Anglian. He also, with especial kindness, on Saturdays and Sundays, when any child had the pool’s liberty, always put one of his men in charge—not only a great boon to all our small fry’s parents, but an added attraction to the small fry themselves.

  They had a wonderful time, at the American swimming pool. The only reason I never took Antoinette there was because I cannot swim—at the deep end it would have been I in danger of drowning—and I knew it but a child’s-scramble across the shingle-ridge to the estuary itself. Perhaps I was overcautious; but a son of one of Mrs. Brewer’s cousins, quite a strong swimmer, caught by the turning tide, had eventually been fished up unrecognizable save for the UP BOBBERS tattooed across his chest—the Bobbers being a local football club of which he was a great follower.

  I have never cared for crabs, which is a pity, since they are so cheap. In general Antoinette and I subsisted on an almost vegetarian diet. It was also a rather monotonous diet, since above all she disliked any sort of change, resisting even tapioca instead of rice pudding—(blancmange, as I have said, positively frightened her, possibly because its quivering suggested it was alive?)—or chocolate in place of cocoa: as though instinctively recognizing how narrow a path she needed to keep her balance. Thus for breakfast Antoinette never wanted anything but a boiled egg, and for supper bread and honey, and at midday chicken and salad, or when the weather grew colder chicken broth. Since I couldn’t be bothered to cook separately for myself, it made, as I say, for monotony, but luckily I am no more a connoisseur of food than I am of wine.

  Indoors what Antoinette liked best was a huge old leather steamer trunk, once the property of my Uncle James in the Indian Civil Service. I was far from imagining it was the impasto of exotic labels—Delhi, Simla, Ootacamund—that attracted her; she couldn’t read; to my mind she regarded it as some large benevolent animal, mute as herself, like an elephant. She liked to climb into and curl up in it. With some vague recollection of The Mistletoe Bough I had the big domed lid taken off its hinges—which Antoinette then employed to push herself about the floor in, like a coracle, and we kept it for convenience in the embrasure behind my dressing-table.

  2

  After the first bombs began to drop our little society however increased, as elderly and retired Suffolk-born homed to their native soil. Some found hospitality with relations, others rented cottages; Woolmers boasted quite a star resident-guest in the person of a retired Admiral, Sir David Thorpe, whose son and daughter-in-law I remember depositing him there and then casting off with true naval celerity. As young Mrs. Thorpe nevertheless found time to explain, they felt he’d be happier by the sea. I have already described our situation as on no more than an estuary, but I didn’t blame her. However expert in naval matters, Sir David was an uncommon old bore. But he was still almost handsome, in a traditionally beaky sort of way, and undoubtedly made as good an impression in Woolmers’ dining-room as did his name on its register; moreover Mrs. Brewer’s niece Jessie, who was housemaid there, reported him a very fair tipper.

  So our little society increased, and not by addition of the elderly alone: several pregnant young wives, their husbands overseas, came to nest amongst us, and after vanishing into Ipswich Maternity for a week returned to push prams. I cannot say how much I admired the courage and prettiness of these young women. My own mother, as I was all too often reminded, after bearing my own skinny six-and-a-half pounds had to lie on her back for a month and be fed from a cup with a spout.

  There also arrived a Cocker daughter-in-law with young family—her husband a Colonel, but who came on leave not from overseas but from the War Office; it was probably this circumstance that made her attempts to patronize our other young wives such a failure. In any case East Anglia’s is a very democratic, libertarian climate. She improved however on acquaintance, and all three children took riding lessons, which was a great boon to Honoria Packett, and incidentally to Antoinette.

  The center of Antoinette’s personal world was still my garden, where she appeared to find inexhaustible interest. She appeared able to contemplate—she whose powers of attention had once so brief a span!—a nettle or a broken twig for half an hour at a time. Nothing in nature was worthless, or undelighting to her.—I must confess that this trait, however much I approved it, sometimes disconcerted me; as when she once produced for my admiration, unwrapped from a bit of newspaper, the huge, glaucous, redly striated jelly of a bullock’s eye—gift of Kevin. But why should I feel such repulsion, when Antoinette obviously didn’t? To her it was perhaps as beautiful as a Turner sunset. I did my best to regard it as such, mentally transferring it, flat, onto canvas. But alas my imagination failed, and I caused her to bury it under the artichokes without delay, on the pretext that it would spoil. I also, rather meanly, had a word with the butcher; but there were occasions when Antoinette’s stomach was stronger than mine.

  She had in fact almost stopped being sick at all. It was only when frightened that she threw up, and there was little now to alarm—I always careful to speak to her in a low, slow voice, and Mrs. Brewer having learned to do the same. I still kept a supply of paper napkins handy, in my shopping-bag and under cushions and so on, but came to need them less and less, as Antoinette slowly but surely developed from a small animal into a small child.

  She not only learned to eat food without spilling it, and hold an egg without dropping it; given even a cup and saucer to carry, she became quite sure-handed. She was also accepting to be cleaner. Most children enjoy splashing in a bath: Antoinette, as though the accumulated smells of toad and turd and old Mrs. Bragg afforded her a sort of physical cushioning against a world still strange, and possibly inimical, at first needed to be put into a bath by (my own) superior force. But after some months she accepted to be bathed because it was something that happened to her every day. Anything that happened every day became in time familiar, and therefore acceptable, to Antoinette; and that she was no longer so smelly I must admit came as a relief, I having a rather sensitive nose.

  Mrs. Brewer too appreciated the change. “Clean as a Christian!” declared Mrs. Brewer approvingly—which brings me to the matter of religion, with which as a Vicar’s daughter I may have been expected to show more concern already. Mrs. Gibson undoubtedly thought me lax, and more than once promised that Antoinette, in toddlers’ Sunday School, would never be asked questions. I refused the kind offer nonetheless, my child being so inapt to sit still anywhere indoors for more than five minutes. However I taught her the Lord’s Prayer—that is, repeated it to her every night after she was in bed, and regularly to my own “Amen” Antoinette chimed in with “Vermin.”

  Obviously the syllables are much alike. “Amen,” said I; “Vermin,” said Antoinette; but I sometimes feared only from affectionateness.

  3

  The day before she left for London Doctor Alice came and almost humorously ran her stethoscope over me. Between deep breaths—

  “And Antoinette?” said I, looking her in the eye.

  “Just the usual treatment,” said Doctor
Alice blandly.

  At which moment—as almost precisely a year earlier—in came Antoinette. Only now she didn’t so much wander as stump. She joined us, that is, quite purposefully, and to Doctor Alice’s pleasant “Hello” answered with an equally pleasant “Tureen.” I confess I hoped she might have added “vermin”—but even tureen was such an advance on being sick, I was glad Doctor Alice heard it.

  “She is, isn’t she, making progress?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Doctor Alice.

  It was from a bottle of grocer’s sherry that I poured her a stirrup-cup. I have never ceased to regret, however foolishly, not opening the last of my father’s Pedro Domecq.

  5

  1

  We were now medically under the overextended aegis of an elderly doctor who had retired to Walberswick to devote himself to fishing, and whose return to practice was no light contribution on his part to the war effort. Fortunately we are a very healthy community, with a good chemist and a fund of homely experience in the way of feeding colds and starving fevers. In fact I never saw the old boy but once, at the funeral of one of his patients who happened to be my cousin. Antoinette had measles when all the other children did, and kept in bed for a fortnight, like all the other children, like all the other children recovered.

  Physically at least there was no doubt of her thriving. She outgrew her cot within a couple of years. (The Women’s Institute offered a replacement, but Antoinette was so attached to her cot, the sight of its being dismantled was too distressing, so I simply let down the foot and made an extension from a nicely padded piano-seat.) In the big trunk, instead of being wadded with cushions, she soon fitted as snugly as an apple in its dumpling, lapped by no more than a blanket; and pushed herself about so vigorously in her coracle its lid, Mrs. Brewer more than once remarked we might as well be having the sweep in. I never attempted to make sense of Mrs. Brewer’s observations. They were so to speak gnomic, in their reference to long but uncoordinated experience.

  I cannot say Antoinette grew any prettier or more animated. Her smooth round face had normally only two expressions: of bland, catlike content when happy, and when put out, a lion-cubbish scowl. All she essentially needed, in the way of speech, was purr and snarl. So I took it for great encouragement when she said tureen to me.

  It was a slow process, educating a little animal into humanity, but fortunately patience is my strong suit; and what was heartening was that every now and then, after weeks and months without any seeming progress at all, there would come sudden breakthroughs as when a plant almost given up for good suddenly puts forth a leaf. To anyone except myself I suppose they would have seemed minuscule indeed: one was when at the end of the Lord’s Prayer Antoinette spontaneously said “Vermin” of her own accord, before prompted by my “Amen”; another when, left in the kitchen with a basket of peas, she of her own accord began shelling them. But on one point I had to admit complete failure. Of all things, I would wish to teach a child the love of reading, not to be exchanged, as Lord Macaulay so rightly observes, for all the wealth of India, and which must begin with ABC; but against any sort of literacy Antoinette’s mind appeared completely closed.

  The set of alphabet blocks I bought her, when she was five, she employed chiefly to set up shelters for hedgehogs—or so I judged the sort of laagers neatly arranged both under the artichokes and on the terrace above. I never actually observed Antoinette making these dispositions—like a little animal she could be very secret—but that was where I found her alphabet blocks, before weather decayed them into illiteracy.

  In some ways she was also cunning as a little animal. She discovered all sorts of ways, for example, of getting back into the house, after I’d closed the sitting-room windows behind her; by back or front door, of course, but also through the shaft to my long-disused coal cellar, whence she suddenly emerged in the kitchen like a cheerful mole to give me a surprise. It was a variant of hide-and-seek I was only too glad to promote, since another thing I wanted Antoinette to learn (second only to reading) was to play games. Especially with other children. Playing with its co-evals is a child’s natural introduction to social life; it learns in the first place to keep rules. Our village infantry would have accepted Antoinette willingly, if slightly de haut en bas, she being an innocent; the stumbling-block was her extreme antipathy to any sort of violence. Violence is implicit in children’s games, from “Who shall we send to fetch him away?” to “Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.” Even Ring-o’-roses, with its “All fall down,” frightened Antoinette. Yet I felt it important that she should at least consort with other children, and felt riding lessons quite an inspiration.

  2

  Even before these started, however, there was another and quite important breakthrough. One morning when I returned from a solitary shopping round, what was my surprise to see Antoinette, whom any unfamiliar face had hitherto so alarmed, squatting peaceably in the garden with a total stranger.

  Mrs. Brewer caught me at the gate to explain it was a Miss Guthrie, which was why. (I am used to Mrs. Brewer’s shorthand way of speech: why the young woman had been allowed in to wait for me.) But what was a patronymic to Antoinette? I quite rejoiced that it meant nothing, and that of her own accord, and even in my absence, she had accepted a stranger as not necessarily menacing …

  Janet Guthrie was of course not a complete stranger to myself. She was the young woman I’d sat beside at Tam’s funeral, and I recognized her at once. Now she was taking a holiday in Suffolk, on foot, with a rucksack, rubbing brasses. It didn’t surprise me. Obviously all Guthries—as indeed all Scots—were gluttons for education, so that even a holiday had to have its cultural aspect: a rucksack equating the traditional bag of oatmeal. However when I warned that our own church had no brasses of interest at all, she pleased me very much by saying she knew it, but had thought she’d pay me a call.

  “I looked for you after the funeral,” said I, “but you’d vanished.”

  “I saw you talking to the Rab Guthries,” said Janet. “They’re the rich Guthries, like Tam; we’re the poor ones.”

  Since she seemed to regard this as sufficient and total explanation I didn’t press the point—but what a complicated clannishness the words revealed! From her tone they might have fought on opposite sides at Flodden. I remembered also there’d been no mention of a Janet Guthrie in Tam’s Will; still he’d put her through Veterinary College; so she came to his funeral …

  All this time Antoinette sat cheerful and placid, actually upon, and digging her heels into, the rucksack; and as it suddenly occurred to me that she and our visitor were, however tenuously, blood-related, I identified her to Miss Guthrie as Rab and Cecilia’s daughter Antoinette, and explained how it came about she was living with me in Suffolk.

  “I hope I’m not making her shy?” said Janet. “So far she hasn’t said a word.”

  Quite with an air of putting her oar in, “Vermin, tureen,” pronounced Antoinette.

  “Now you’ve heard her whole vocabulary,” said I.

  Janet took this with such calm, I wondered whether she’d perhaps known another child like Antoinette; but if she had she didn’t say so, and with good manners I appreciated let the matter rest.

  Over the table—for of course I kept her to lunch—we had a most interesting conversation about her work as a vet, and the small house she’d found to live in just as independently as I did in mine, though even more quietly; for her practice was in the wilds of Caithness, where it was well to have bees to tell any news to, said Janet, if you wanted to keep the use of your tongue! But she was obviously flourishing there; admittedly with so many men away it had been comparatively easy to set up; and at first there’d been some slight anti-female prejudice. “But I wore it down!” said Janet cheerfully. “It took me a year or so, but I wore it down!”—and now she felt quite established.

  I liked Janet Guthrie very much, and told her that whenever she was in Suffolk again she must come and have another meal with me. At tha
t she suddenly cocked a sandy eyebrow and grinned.

  “To be truthful, a meal was what I had in mind!” said she.

  I didn’t blame her, even, or because, she’d accounted for the best part of a boiling-fowl. I was still sorry when she went.—I particularly appreciated her behaviour over the incident of the rucksack. We had left it in the garden; Antoinette, allowed to get down before coffee, over which Janet and I chatted on a little, had emptied everything out and got inside herself. Janet Guthrie gently yet firmly (as she might have handled a young beast) hauled her out by the scruff and then patiently repacked a pair of pajamas, three or four pairs of socks, a textbook on diseases in cattle, a sponge-bag, a light mackintosh, a writing-pad and a first aid kit.

  I was sorry to see her go, and even sorrier that she didn’t come back; but let me proceed to Antoinette’s riding lessons.

  3

  Our local riding stable is run by Honoria Packett, of whom personally I shall say little. I have never liked horsey women, and Honoria is moreover jocular—her loud Ha-ha! all too accurately imitating the sound of trumpets. But she managed her riding school very well, and even though it was now, owing to wartime restrictions, reduced to a string of children’s ponies, they were reassuringly sturdy and well-shod. A further advantage was that with no adults’ hacks at hire, she would now collect a child at its door, to be paced sedately on a leading-rein before gaining the open moorland or heath, and so came each Tuesday and Friday to collect Antoinette along with the three Cocker children.