Letters From Constance Read online

  A prolonged delay in finishing this, the pattern of the coming months. There won’t be many letters this year.

  Bless you for what you have done for us, and your family for agreeing to part with you.

  Love,

  Constance

  Sussex,

  June, 1957

  My dear Sheila,

  We were delighted to receive your letter telling us that Linnie has been awarded a scholarship (or assisted place, as you refer to it). Fergus says we will have to build an extension to accommodate yet another photograph of the entire school; alternatively, he suggests a frieze around the sitting-room walls. A separate letter is enclosed for Linnie, together with a cheque from her proud godparent. I expect there will be all sorts of extras which she will need. Do they still play lacrosse?

  Dominic takes the 11+ examination next year and if he passes will go to the Catholic grammar school. No amount of assistance would enable us to send him to an independent school. This success of Linnie’s has had a noticeable effect on him. He is a boy who thrives on competition and can hardly forgive Linnie for being born before him.

  Little other news from us. Fergus has provided himself with a small lab. in what was the potting shed. He goes out there to ponder when family life gets too much for him. As well as his scientific toys, he has installed a gramophone on which he plays classical music for the good of his soul and the bane of our neighbours. I hear doors and windows closing all down the road.

  At this moment, I hear the twins yelling.

  Love and rejoicing to you all,

  Constance

  Sussex

  December, 1957

  My dear Sheila,

  We managed it! No, we were not the people who arrived noisily late. We were in our seats - just - as the conductor raised his baton. There was no time to let you know we were coming and no time to see you afterwards because we came by train.

  Fergus’s parents are staying with us and then going on to his brother for Christmas (Fergus and his father are burning the midnight logs as I write). It is their first visit and we weren’t sure how they would feel about our leaving them in charge so soon after their arrival. Fortunately, Fergus’s father still has the appearance of being intimidating and his mother is prepared to be endlessly diverted by Stephen and the twins, so children of all ages were well catered for.

  It was a splendid reception, wasn’t it? We got very excited and squabbled all the way home because I preferred the Tuileries to Conjunctions and Fergus went so far as to say I had no appreciation of musical wit and, furthermore, that my taste is sentimental if not superficial. We were so excited by Miles’s triumph.

  From where I was sitting, I could see you quite clearly in the hoop of the hall. It’s always a surprise to have those whom we take for granted cast off the homely wrappings to which we are accustomed and reveal themselves arrayed in splendour. Of course, if they make a mess of it, mismatched and garish, that presents us only with the duty of a little charity; but when splendour so becomes them as to make us feel we have never fully known them, a daunting generosity is required of us. You will realise I’m speaking of the black velvet dress and rainbow shawl and you so at one with them as to make a stranger believe you were ever thus. It wasn’t so much that these trappings flattered, emphasised, highlighted, as that they proclaimed you. And now that I have made my obeisance, I don’t want to be told that you contrived that glowing dress out of an old curtain or that your mother rescued the shawl from the dressing-up trunk which was our childhood delight.

  I watched you during the interval. You were directing something that needed attention and you looked so assured among all those important people. I thought, the years have gone by and there has come into being a Sheila whom I do not know. It amazes me, this unlikely friendship. I give out so much nervous energy I should carry a warning that it is dangerous to come into contact with me; sparks fly from agitated fingers and tapping toes. You are still and composed, yet one is aware of a force within.

  All in all, a considerable experience. Why only the two pieces? Why should Vaughan Williams and Delius share the evening with us?

  Your admiring,

  Constance

  Sussex

  ]une, 1958

  My dear Sheila,

  Harpo came, a plumped-up carrier pigeon bearing messages. I am envious that she sees more of you than I do.

  I am told that during her stay with you Harpo witnessed Miles tearing up sheet after sheet of early compositions, not in temper, but attending to the matter with a kind of delicacy, fingers arched as if above the keyboard, the paper torn again and again until it was in tiny pieces. Harpo said she could have wept and to make good the omission she shed a few tears while she was telling us about it. I remember that you once said he had these destructive impulses. How could he throw away so much work, even if there were aspects which disappointed him? I, who create with such labour, would need to husband my output, however flawed. I gather that Harpo had the temerity to ask whether freedom from the wretched pupils was not worth some journeyman work and she painted a dramatic picture of you responding, throwing words like knives, ‘He never compromises. I would leave him tomorrow were he to compromise’, with which she was much impressed. To me, that has a theatricality I don’t associate with you, a suggestion of desperation, even. Perhaps Harpo exaggerates.

  I will tell you, since she certainly will when next she sees you, that I’m pregnant again. We had not intended it. A large family, five children perhaps, yes. Then came the twins and now an accident. Comments about football teams will not be welcome.

  What other news? My agnostic vicar has left. I think he owes his preferment to the fact that he is too progressive for a backward rural area where people still believe in the Three Persons of the Trinity. To punish us, we have been sent an austere Evangelical fundamentalist. Fergus is despondent. He and the previous man talked for hours. Each was the kind of Christian who gets on better with people of other faiths or no faith at all.

  Fergus says I expect too much of priests. ‘You demand a messenger from Heaven, not an ordinary human being. You grumble that the Anglican Church is ill at ease with God and then, when you get a man who doesn’t choose a breakfast cereal until he has prayed about it, that doesn’t please you.’

  It is true, I am very hard to please these days. How does one set about sweetening one’s nature? Suggestions may not be well received.

  Love,

  Constance

  Sussex

  March, 1959

  My dear Sheila,

  Our grateful thanks for the presents, all of which much needed. I am particularly touched that Linnie made hers and have written to her separately. Peg is a very contented baby and lies for hours creating her world around her, seeing that it is good.

  I ask myself what I have done to deserve so much good fortune. I love all my children, even Dominic, with whom I row incessantly, and Cuillane, my quiet child, who tends to drop out of sight. Perhaps Kathleen and Stephen are the ones dearest to my heart. They are so unlike me, she so open and fearless, not a devious bone in her body, and he so intermittently connected to planet earth and yet so kindly on the occasions when he does touch down. I love the twins, although to them I am only a provider of food. They are entirely absorbed in each other, two owlish lumps until I turn my back on them, when they proceed to lose themselves in mutual adoration.

  I sometimes think that at heart I am still the only child playing a game in which she is a member of a large family. I remember I had a box full of plaits of different-coloured wool, nut brown, buttercup, orange - which I much preferred - and I tucked these behind my ears to denote which member of the family I was playing, whether Stephanie, Coralie or Marguerite. The boys (a cap stolen from a cousin instead of plaits) were Kit, Oliver and Philip. I hated being an only one. Dominic, Kathleen, Cuillane, Stephen, James, Gillian, Peg, they are not in the least like my childhood family, but I was right about needing them so much, only now they are not
brothers and sisters but my children.

  How I have rambled. A luxury. Fergus’s brother and his wife are staying here. She is a prodigious worker and insisted on doing the washing and ironing this morning. This afternoon they have taken the children out, all except Peg who is busy creating the plants on the window-ledge. The house is so quiet I can hear someone mowing a lawn a field away.

  You asked in your letter how Fergus’s experiments were developing. Slowly, would be a fair assessment. He is working on something to do with soil improvement. Theoretically, he is overturning the Law of Diminishing Returns. The Byrnes should shortly become totally self-supporting and able to supply the entire neighbourhood.

  I must now, with such vegetables as are at my disposal, prepare supper and attend to the needs of the last in the line.

  It would be wonderful if you could get down here for a weekend, or even a day before the summer is over. It is so long since we had a sight of you.

  In hope and with love,

  Constance

  Sussex

  March, 1960

  My dear Sheila,

  I’m sorry my notes have been so scrappy. It’s been a bad year. Mumps, measles and nursing Aunt Ada, who returned home last week. Fortunately, I have my family well trained. ‘As soon as they were on their feet, I gave them their roles,’ I said to my vicar when he asked how I managed. I don’t think he was best pleased. I was supposed to say love.

  There has been one local development which will interest you. New people have moved into the house at the end of our road - the one you christened the Manderley of Sussex because it stands brooding behind tall trees. The people don’t match up to the de Winter image. He is a small, oval man with dark, sleek hair and tragic monkey eyes who reminds me of George Raft. She is a fat, buttery blonde with tiny feet who tiptoes from front door to car. She never appears to be exposed to the fresh air for longer than three minutes at any one time. He is punctilious in his greetings, she apologetic.

  My neighbour, Jenny Crow (Mrs Civil Servant) calls her the Baby Doll of Downland Way. They are the sort of people one thinks of in terms of other people, as they have no imprint of their own. They moved in just before Christmas but so far none of us has set foot inside the house. The Petersons, who live next door to them, say they are quiet as mice.

  I have a theory they are as poor as church mice and desperately anxious that none should see the pictures hung over damp patches on walls, the chairs strategically placed to cover holes in the sitting- room carpet. I visualise them seated huddled in the kitchen because they cannot afford to heat the rest of the house.

  ‘They are living beyond their means,’ I said to Fergus.

  He lost his temper and said we lived beyond our means and the whole of the English middle class did the same, throwing buckets of money around to ensure that the flowers in the border weren’t shamed by the ones next door. Whereupon I became angry and said I was sick of the exiled Irish finding fault with the country that gave them their living. I went on to say that I felt I had earned the right to live in Ireland so that I could daily descant upon its shortcomings and mourn the lost glories of my motherland. He said he would set about our move the very next day, whereupon Stephen and the twins began to cry and Cuillane got upset because Gus, our Labrador, is too elderly to survive such an upheaval even were we allowed to export him. Our guilt was compounded by Dominic saying to Cuillane, ‘They don’t mean it. Surely you know by now they don’t mean anything they say,’ We went to bed wretchedly aware that, as far as children are concerned, we are definitely living beyond our capabilities, to say nothing of our means.

  I leave you in suspense as to the outcome. Will next year see the Byrne family in Sussex or Kilkenny? To be continued, probably for the rest of our lives.

  Love,

  Constance

  P.S. The 11+ letter has arrived. Kathleen, like Toby, is a borderline candidate. Unlike Toby, she is adamant that she does not want to go to grammar school.

  Sussex

  May, 1960

  My dear Sheila,

  Et tu! What are we playing at, you ask, tossing aside so lightly this question of Kathleen’s future schooling? I sit with bowed head while your wrath rains down upon me. Knowledge enabled man to climb out of the primeval sludge. Are you sure it wasn’t a misdirected marine vertebrate? But I take your meaning. Education has been the most important single factor in improving the lives of millions in this century. Were it not for education you would be working the cabbage patch, indistinguishable from your great-grandmother and signing your name with a cross. Education has enabled common people to have some measure of control over their lives and has given them the chance of fulfilling their potential.

  Are you quite done? May I speak?

  Yes, we do appreciate that Kathleen has come to the great crossroads in a child’s life. Before the fateful letter arrived we, too, asked ourselves whether she was to be one of the blessed 25 per cent sheep or the 75 per cent goats consigned to the educational wilderness. In fact, she has now been offered a grammar school place. But what is cause for rejoicing in the Druce household has seen the opening of hostilities here. You say that the fact that Linnie is doing so well influenced the selection panel in Toby’s favour. Toby is obviously less resentful of favours than Kathleen, who informed us she was not going to pass her time at secondary school ‘trying to live down Dominic’.

  We did take our responsibilities seriously, I assure you. Night after night we sat up in bed asking ourselves what we considered to be the main function of education. Did we, like our friends and neighbours, believe that academic success was of paramount importance? Admittedly, our discussion lacked something of your passionate conviction, but then we neither of us see our local secondary school as in any way related to primeval sludge. And we did agree that we would like success for our children, but as a bonus rather than an essential. So what was essential? There, I have to admit, we lacked your clarity of thought. I said I would like Kathleen to be enabled to find herself and you will be pleased to know that Fergus asked what I thought that meant. I could only answer that my own education had tended in the direction of moulding rather than finding with the result that I still have grave doubts as to who I am. Fergus said I reduced all discussion to the personal. I said I would like education to be more concerned with the personal. Fergus considered Kathleen as a person. ‘She is naturally adventurous. I wouldn’t want others to set her sights for her.’ In the early hours, when he was making tea, he said wearily, ‘How are we to persuade her to give it a try when we ourselves are so hopelessly lacking in conviction?’

  Kathleen had all the advantage of absolute certainty. ‘Cuillane is bound to be an under-age candidate and then I’ll have years of her in the same school. I can’t compete with Cuillane. At least with Dominic anyone can see how hard he tries to be clever, but she doesn’t have to try.’

  ‘But suppose the others all go to grammar school?’ Fergus said. ‘In later life you may feel at a great disadvantage.’

  ‘Stephen will probably go into a trance during the tests. As for the twins, they’re as thick as two planks; you’ll have to send them to a special school.’

  ‘But your friends,’ I persisted. ‘Doreen Ellis and . . .’

  ‘Stella Pierce is going to the secondary modern and she’s the only one I care about. As soon as the results came out, the others changed . . .’

  I consulted the Headmistress of Kathleen’s primary school. She has quite a reputation and people, will consider moving house in order to ensure that their children attend her school. I think this is because she manages to uphold the old traditions while giving an appearance of being able to square up to anything the modern world can throw at her. She is the mistress of paradox, a woman in whom virtue is delightfully combined with a certain naughtiness and common sense seems not incompatible with idealism. She is plump and dyes her hair salmon. Her skin is prawn mottled with cinnamon. She wears brightly coloured clothes and looks a bit brassy, but che
erful and sturdy with it, like a Renoir barmaid. She’s not a woman whose geese are all swans, so I was heartened when she said that Kathleen probably had more practical intelligence than Cuillane. ‘Academically, of course, she won’t go so far, but I don’t think you need fear that she will limp along in the C stream of a grammar school. She might well get a university placement, not Oxbridge, of course.’ She folded her fat little hands and contemplated the array of rings which formed two jewelled knuckle¬dusters. ‘But, having said all that, I have to admit to reservations about her suitability. She has a strong personality and she is a natural leader. She might realise her full potential at the top of a good secondary modern school rather than being an also-ran at the grammar school. Much depends on how you and your husband feel about it.’

  I confessed I had been brought up in the belief that grammar schools laid more emphasis on character building. Her eyes popped wide open. ‘That was a very long time ago, Mrs Byrne, back in the days of Miss Beale and Miss Buss.’

  I muttered something about values.

  ‘Ah, now! Values.’ She patted her hands on the table and light sparked from the rings. She was enjoying this vastly; it was as though she recognised in me a rare stone to add to her collection. ‘What values, Mrs Byrne? You assume a society which has common values, do you?’

  I searched round for a few values with which to dazzle her. ‘Caring about the community in which one lives, public service, considering one’s neighbours even if one can’t love them, being a responsible citizen.’

  She clapped her hands. ‘Yes, yes, how well I recall my own headmistress telling us that the purpose of our education was to make us into good citizens of our country.’

  ‘I know it sounds rather lame,’ I said, ‘but if you do away with that kind of concern, society will lose a lot.’