Memories and roses
Alive, Alive Oh! And Other Things That Matter by Diana Athill
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THIS IS Diana Athill’s eighth book of reminiscences. Nowadays, she says, she often just sits and thinks about events from the past, ‘and when my mind relaxes itself it is those same events which float in and out of it’. So naturally many of her memories and reflections about sex, race, clothes, people, places ‘and other things that matter’, are familiar. Her memories have infiltrated our own, and like our own they are always the same and slightly different.
One of her ‘fondest’ recollections here is of a post-war summer holiday in Corfu. She was all alone with her book in a secluded cove when she heard the crunch, crunch of slow footsteps behind her. It turned out to be ‘a large tortoise labouring his way through the grass towards the water’.
The tortoise, or another and notional tortoise, recurs unexpectedly. Athill became pregnant in her early forties. Busy and unmarried, she had previously had abortions, finding the procedure ‘not particularly disagreeable’. This time she did nothing, although there was every reason to terminate this pregnancy too. She concludes that subconsciously she really wanted a baby. She sees her subconscious mind as ‘a stubborn and pigheaded old tortoise lumbering through the undergrowth’ and, in his determination that she should keep this child, he was ‘showing signs of becoming a porcupine’ – more prickly and pushy, I suppose.
While brooding on her zoological metaphor, there swam into my mind a vivid image of a crocodile in a swamp, its snout and teeth just breaking the surface. (He must be my own subconscious, more malign than hers, but that is by the way.) Her account of miscarrying – losing the baby and very nearly her life – is utterly harrowing. But only the ‘poor old tortoise’ shed tears. The truth was ‘that I loved being alive so much that not having died was more important to me by far than losing the child: more important than anything’. So maybe everything was really the other way around: she wanted the baby, she was certainly thrilled when she got used to the idea, and it was the stubborn tortoise of her subconscious which disallowed it. Who knows?
Her decision to move into a home for old people was ‘certainly the biggest’ in her life. A precipitating factor was the case of her friend Nan. She had a fall, and ‘soon my dearest friend was an immobilised and incontinent wreck’. Nan opted to stay in her own home, with agency nurses. But her friends had to rally round constantly as well, and they did, because they loved her. But it became a heavy burden. ‘I am pretty sure that I was not the only one whose sorrow at her death was mingled with relief.’ Athill determined never to inflict such obligations on her own friends.
She has written before about Mary Feilding House, the home for active and educated old persons which sounds so pleasant that weary Oldie readers may long to throw in the towel prematurely and sign up. Six of the residents decided to do something about a neglected strip of garden behind the house, and Diana Athill ordered six bare-root roses from David Austin. Holes were dug by ablebodied others. But on planting day, only three of the six turned up. (Hospital appointments, memory problems...)
So it was just nearly blind Vera, aged 94, Pamela, also 94 but nimble, and Diana Athill herself, three weeks before her 97th birthday and ‘physically wobbly’. They decided to try to plant one of the roses. Pamela got down on her knees in the mud and spread the roots at the bottom of the hole, Diana sprinkled in the rose food, and Vera tipped in compost out of a bucket:
‘Vera and I then jointly scraped clay back into the hole before hoisting Pamela back onto her feet (no one in this place can get up once down) so that she could tread the plant in. Whereupon Pamela’s shoes came off, and from being merely gallant she became heroic. Shoving her mud-caked feet into her squelchy shoes, she said, “Well, now we’ve done that we might as well do another.” And we ended by doing all six. By the time we tottered back to our rooms we were too exhausted to speak, but we were very pleased with ourselves.’
And come spring, all six rose bushes were putting out buds. Alive, alive oh.