boarders.
Woodstock School only took about half a dozen boarders at a time but that was quite enough because Mrs de Vries, the headmistress, saw to them herself. We slept in tiny rooms high up under the roof, we had our meals and were left to play in a large, uncomfortable, bare room with a floor of brown linoleum, and each weekday morning at a quarter to nine we simply went to school, but through a green-baize door in the hall, not through the main entrance.
I was lonely and miserable so I was quite glad to be taken over by a slightly older girl whose name was, I think, Laura. She was very shocked to discover that I had not been taught to pray because she knew it was essential to ‘pray for God’, as she put it, every morning and evening. She explained that if I didn’t do this God wouldn’t know I was there and consequently wouldn’t be able to look after me. She showed me how to kneel at the foot of the bed and told me what to say. I remember I felt a bit dubious about the whole procedure but this didn’t interest Laura. Her only purpose was to get me to do what had to be done. What I thought about it was irrelevant.
In fact I didn’t think anything about it. I mean, as far as I know, I had no previous acquaintance with the subject. Ray and Daisy were simply not religious, they didn’t talk about God. Nor, as far as I can remember, did Amy. So Laura had a clear field.
I asked Laura a lot of questions about God and also about Jesus who, she said, was also God but not quite. Her answers weren’t really very clear but I was able to piece together a picture of a white-haired old man, a bit like Grandad, but cross. He was sitting on a white cloud surrounded by glory, which was goldcoloured and shiny. I wondered where He was. Laura said He was everywhere, which didn’t seem very likely, and that He could do anything and see everything, and that He moved in a mysterious way.
I knew about that. I had once seen my parents’ friend, the novelist Naomi Mitchison, ‘move in a mysterious way’. She was playing charades I think, wearing a wide hat and a cloak. It had been very impressive.
I observed the rituals Laura required and also consented to do a ballet dance with her in front of everybody, or, to tell the truth, half a ballet dance, because she had dressed me in a sort of frill, like a vestigial tutu, and after the gramophone ran down in the middle of the dance I refused to go on with it on the grounds that I was making an idiot of myself. After that she gave up her charge of my life and let me be.
But the question of the existence or otherwise of God remained in my mind. As far as I could tell He didn’t seem to be taking a very active part in my life because cause and effect seemed to be proceeding according to what I assumed to be natural laws. However, it was worth while finding out, so, roaming through the empty school one chilly afternoon, I decided to confront my maker and test His mettle.
I looked out of a window and said: ‘All right then, try this. If that bird gets to the telegraph pole before the red bus reaches the pillar-box there is a God. If it doesn’t there isn’t.’
This was a very fair test because the bird and the bus were going at about the same speed and, as far as any human could estimate, were going to pass the pole and the pillar-box at about the same moment; so it would only require a minute twitch of omnipotence to slow the bus down a shade and let the bird win. Nobody else would notice.
In the event the bus and the bird arrived exactly simultaneously. This told me that if God was there He probably wasn’t paying attention. So I repeated the tests a few times. God scored one, Non-existence two, with three draws.
Then it began to snow, which was unusual in April. I watched the big white flakes swing slowly down and melt away on the wet ground. They fell so thickly that I could hardly see the road, let alone the pillar-box. It suddenly occurred to me that God, if He was there, might have decided He’d had more than enough of this carry-on. So I rather quickly turned away and ran back down the empty brown lino corridor to find the others. I was cold and I wanted, more than anything in the world, to go home.
VI. Bloomsbury -on- the-Marsh.
For all its pokiness, our house in Hendon was far more full of life than the bleak impersonal school house. Although John and I didn’t see all that much of our parents, even I could sense that this was because Ray and Daisy were busy people, joining enthusiastically in with, if not an actual ‘movement’, some common social purpose which they shared with their friends.
However, we were sometimes able to take more of a part in their world because Daisy had obtained a car, a second-hand bullnosed Morris, with an open top and grey-green oilcloth seats. Its gearbox sang a different note for each gear and its bulb-hooter didn’t just go ‘HONK’ when you squeezed it, it went ‘SqueeeAHONK’ like an outraged sea lion. Most of the trips we took in it were fairly local but occasionally we took longer journeys, real holiday journeys with luggage, to stay with their friends in the country.
I guess the first time Daisy drove us to Bloomsbury-on-the-Marsh must have been in about 1931. She took us up the Cambridge road, turned into Essex and drove through Toppesfield to Bradfields, which was the country house of Francis and Vera Meynell.
I had never consciously seen a really old house before and I was astonished. It looked as if a giant had sat on it. All the walls were crooked, either leaning in or leaning out, and the roof was bent and dented, like an old hat.
The Meynells’ garden was large and glorious, the grassy side of a hill, rolling down to a stream with a bridge at the bottom. Under some trees at the top of the garden was a large pond. Beside this was a patch of lawn with a wooden diving platform, and it was all surrounded by a modest hedge. But, once I was sure it wasn’t going to fall in on me, it was the house that I found really fascinating. None of the doors was quite door-shaped and they didn’t have handles but latches. The floors were particularly alarming because they sloped in all directions and the boards were odd-shaped, but they smelled most sweetly of beeswax.
Also, while they were there, our parents and their friends seemed to be so full of fun that the house rang with laughter. I hoped we would be able to go there often, which indeed we did, for many years.
Needless to say there is no such place as Bloomsbury-on-the-Marsh. The name was probably invented much later by some wit, but it could be taken to refer to an undefined area covering part of the south of Suffolk and the north of Essex in which some of the better-off, cultured, vaguely left-wing lot seemed to have bought themselves country houses.
Our host and master of ceremonies, Francis Meynell, was a large, loud, exuberant man. Born in 1891 to a family of distinguished poets – his mother was Alice Meynell, his godfather Francis Thompson – he grew up into the world of the literary avant-garde in Bayswater, in a house where well-known poets and authors came and went, where there was much singing and poetry reading and endless literary talk by his mother’s devoted admirers.
Francis’s political life was forged in the same revolutionary fire as that of Ray and Daisy. George Lansbury was his hero and, later, his employer. Like Ray he had been a conscientious objector in the First World War. He worked on the Daily Herald, and later smuggled diamonds into the country in jars of butter for the Soviet trade delegation. Once, to Lansbury’s embarrassment, he brought in a Soviet contribution of several thousand pounds to the funds of the Daily Herald, a gift which, to everybody’s regret, had to be declined.
After that their paths diverged. Ray went on to his life in history and politics, Francis to his lives in poetry, typography and publishing and to his loves, which were cricket, tennis, sociability, games, fun and women. Although Daisy could be a bit sardonic about the last of these, he remained my parents’ close friend throughout their lives.
