Read Online Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill by Diana Athill - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Diana Athill
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do, limbering up gradually to mountain-moving strength. As I advanced in the discipline I would become able to do long division, then my painful progress through Latin would become swift and smooth, and then greater rewards would appear – power not only over myself (might I become able to levitate?) but over other people and things. The kind of achievement will-power would make possible blurred in my mind with the rewards of faith, which were also sometimes canvassed, though in church and scripture lessons rather than by my mother. To silence a thunderstorm, for instance, by saying ‘Peace, be still’, as Jesus had done: I had failed when I tried to do that because the muscles of my will were still too feeble: I would have to believe much more strongly if I was going to bring it off. Surely getting out of bed the minute I woke up in the morning, or saying ‘no’ to a peach at dessert would be a small daily price to pay for being able to do that?
Not, however, one single step in this programme did I take: by the next day my mind was occupied with other things. And this was also exactly what happened to my mother who, in spite of her positive manner, was as far as any child from putting her principles into practice. However authoritatively she spoke about will-power, her only conspicuous exercise of it was in getting what she wanted; and although I didn’t consciously compare the image of my mother as austere and puritanical with that of my mother in action, or draw any recognized conclusion from these obviously contradictory images, both images were nevertheless there: it was an evident fact of life that stern resolutions were more often broken than kept.
Luckily this was also true about pocket money. Just as Mum would have liked to have had will-power, so she would have liked to have been sensible about money. If her own upbringing had equipped her badly for this there was all the more reason to see to it that her children’s equipped them well. Her usual slapdash way of handing out pennies or sixpences whenever we wanted to buy sweets or an ice-cream would obviously lead us to suppose money appeared from the blue whenever we wanted: it would be unfair to us and likely to lead to tiresomeness, as she knew from her own experience. So: ‘From today you are each going to get sixpence a week pocket money, and you’ll have to think very carefully how you spend it because you won’t get a penny more.’ Each time she said this we felt alarmed. Her manner was so firm that we couldn’t doubt the reality of the tedious responsibility with which we were now going to have to live. How depressing, simply not being able to buy a pennyworth of acid drops on a Thursday because of Tuesday’s fudge: trotting across the park to make delicious choices in the little post-office-cum-village-shop was one of life’s pleasures. But it would be weak and babyish not to accept the challenge, so we would take our first sixpences and soberly resolve to do our best.
The first sixpences of a pocket money drive were always the last. What with one thing and another she would forget about it.
Once she had an idea about our upbringing which was supposed to be liberating rather than disciplinary. She had met a high-minded and progressive couple, and she must at that time have been in a mood of defiance against her own background. No doubt she thought it odd, at first, that their children called them by their first names, and even odder that none of their doors was ever locked, so that a child could enter the bathroom while its father or mother was naked in the bath, but after the first surprise she took to these ideas, suddenly seeing that the time had come to prove herself a modern mother. She came home from that visit bright-eyed, though a little less decisive than usual: she didn’t say we must call her and Dad by their Christian names, only that we could if we wanted to; and that because it was silly and unhealthy to be embarrassed by
Not, however, one single step in this programme did I take: by the next day my mind was occupied with other things. And this was also exactly what happened to my mother who, in spite of her positive manner, was as far as any child from putting her principles into practice. However authoritatively she spoke about will-power, her only conspicuous exercise of it was in getting what she wanted; and although I didn’t consciously compare the image of my mother as austere and puritanical with that of my mother in action, or draw any recognized conclusion from these obviously contradictory images, both images were nevertheless there: it was an evident fact of life that stern resolutions were more often broken than kept.
Luckily this was also true about pocket money. Just as Mum would have liked to have had will-power, so she would have liked to have been sensible about money. If her own upbringing had equipped her badly for this there was all the more reason to see to it that her children’s equipped them well. Her usual slapdash way of handing out pennies or sixpences whenever we wanted to buy sweets or an ice-cream would obviously lead us to suppose money appeared from the blue whenever we wanted: it would be unfair to us and likely to lead to tiresomeness, as she knew from her own experience. So: ‘From today you are each going to get sixpence a week pocket money, and you’ll have to think very carefully how you spend it because you won’t get a penny more.’ Each time she said this we felt alarmed. Her manner was so firm that we couldn’t doubt the reality of the tedious responsibility with which we were now going to have to live. How depressing, simply not being able to buy a pennyworth of acid drops on a Thursday because of Tuesday’s fudge: trotting across the park to make delicious choices in the little post-office-cum-village-shop was one of life’s pleasures. But it would be weak and babyish not to accept the challenge, so we would take our first sixpences and soberly resolve to do our best.
The first sixpences of a pocket money drive were always the last. What with one thing and another she would forget about it.
Once she had an idea about our upbringing which was supposed to be liberating rather than disciplinary. She had met a high-minded and progressive couple, and she must at that time have been in a mood of defiance against her own background. No doubt she thought it odd, at first, that their children called them by their first names, and even odder that none of their doors was ever locked, so that a child could enter the bathroom while its father or mother was naked in the bath, but after the first surprise she took to these ideas, suddenly seeing that the time had come to prove herself a modern mother. She came home from that visit bright-eyed, though a little less decisive than usual: she didn’t say we must call her and Dad by their Christian names, only that we could if we wanted to; and that because it was silly and unhealthy to be embarrassed by
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