A Little Love, A Little Learning

Book 47: Virago Modern Classics

by Nina Bawden

Genres: General Fiction; Family Life; Siblings; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

By the author of "Circles of Deceit" and "Tortoise by Candlelight", this novel shows the fragility of a family's equilibrium. Three children live with their mother and are happy in the love of their stepfather. The arrival of an aunt and the adolescent worries of the girls sets up tensions.

Release date: November 3, 2011

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 224

Sample

The year Aunt Hat came to us, my main ambition – apart from rescuing someone from drowning or winning the Victoria Cross –
was to go down to Jock’s Icecream Parlour in the main street of Monks Ford and eat as many Knicker-bocker Glories as I could
pay for. Ellen, our mother, said this was a pretty limited ambition for a girl of twelve and that I ought to have learned
by now that icecreams made me sick. Boyd said that was why I wanted them: it was a clear example of a man’s reach needing
to exceed his grasp, what else is heaven for? Ellen said that if I got on with my school work and didn’t waste so much time,
I would have better things to think about. Boyd said wasting time was the best occupation he knew, for someone my age.


Ellen said he spoiled me. Our mother was always worried that Boyd was spoiling us and that his easy ways were distracting
us from the main purpose of our lives, which was to work hard at school and pass our exams well. Joanna said that worrying
was a symptom of middle age.


Joanna was almost eighteen and worried herself, about getting old. She had a theory that twenty was the beginning of the dull,
dangerous age in life. Young people under twenty were all right, and old people over sixty. In between, if they weren’t careful,
they became faceless and boring, empty envelopes filled with worries and unpaid bills. She didn’t blame them, she just knew
it was the common fate and in-tended to avoid it herself. It wouldn’t be easy, she said: Boyd was the only person she knew who had grown old without losing his sense of proportion.


Boyd was our stepfather. His name was Archibald Arthur Boyd and we called him by his surname because when he and Ellen married,
Joanna who was eleven then, and shy, had called him Mr Boyd. We – Ellen, Joanna, Poll and I – were the only family he had
ever had. His grandparents were dead when his parents married, his mother died when he was born and his father had been killed
in the First War, when Boyd was six years old. He had been brought up by his mother’s uncle, an ex-Army Colonel who had retired
to Monks Ford. Once, when we asked Boyd what his uncle was like, he said, ‘He was the sort of man who would bury nails in
his front lawn to teach the errand boy not to ride his bicycle across it.’


The old man died in 1939. Boyd joined the army as a doctor and served in the Far East until he was invalided out towards the
end of the war. He took a temporary job as house surgeon in a London hospital while he studied for a specialist exam in gynaecology
and met my mother in an Outpatient’s Clinic with Poll, five months old and suffering from colic. She used to scream with pain
every time after her bottle. Boyd told Ellen to stop leaving her in the council nursery and stay at home with her for a while.
Ellen thanked him for his good advice, but said it was impracticable. She worked, teaching in a Junior School, because she
had to.


We were living then, as we had done for a year, in a flat off the Mile End Road. The walls were stained like a map; lying
in bed, we could see the whole of the Americas on the opposite wall. The windows had panes missing that were filled with corrugated
paper, there was no bathroom and we shared a lavatory with an old man on the ground floor who suffered from stomach trouble:
the whole house was filled with his smell which was sour, like cooking cabbage. The street, with its bombed, half-derelict
houses, was a desert that filled Ellen with despair.


‘The end of civilization used to be just a phrase I read in the newspapers,’ she said once when we were walking Poll – pram-pushing was the only thing that soothed her – through a labyrinth of ugly streets and ugly houses to the only green
space for miles, a graveyard at the back of a bombed church. Sometimes, on fine Saturdays, we took sandwiches there and ate
them sitting on the fallen tombstones. The grass was rank but green, and there was a smell of earth.


To some extent, we shared our mother’s misery. We had been country children and found London a terrifying waste. We went to
a school where the other pupils, though they were no worse dressed than we were, sneered at our la-di-da airs: we said ‘Please,
Miss Piggot’ instead of ‘I say, Miss’, and carried clean handkerchiefs every day. Being small, I was treated with a certain
rough kindness, slum children are not cruel to babies, but Joanna had suffered. Apart from the handkerchiefs, she had braces
on her teeth: fancy bridgework at that date, betrayed your bourgeois origin. There was one fat girl with a runny nose who
fell upon her every morning as she entered the playground and pummelled her until the bell went. Though Joanna fought back,
she got the worst of it. She was always in trouble, with her teacher for coming into class dirty-faced, and with Ellen for
coming home with torn clothes. For pride’s sake we never told the truth, but bought needles and thread with our pocket money
and stopped at a bomb site on the way home to cobble up the worst of the damage before Ellen saw it. The bomb site was overgrown
with willow herb. Joanna told me, years later, that she could never see a crop of that pink weed, waving in the breeze on
a railway embankment, without a suffocating tightness in her chest. Joanna was not brave, on the farm where we had lived she
had always refused to go into the field with the bull in it, but that year she was forced to be. One morning she picked up
a broken milk bottle from the gutter, spat on the ground for courage, and went for her tormentor. After that her life was
not easy, but it was better.


Boyd married our mother within a month of meeting her at the Clinic, and took us all to live with him at Monks Ford. When
we asked Ellen about it, she said that he married her to cure Poll of her stomach pains. We found this answer perfectly reasonable: it seemed to us that any man would be glad to
re-organize his life for Poll.


Although he rescued us from circumstances which had been, for a whole year, somewhat disagreeable, our stepfather got no gratitude
from us. Nor, I imagine, did he expect it. He was a sensible man. We liked him because he made no demands. Ellen was always
complaining about our behaviour – she had unnecessarily high standards – but he never did. Indeed, I never heard him complain
about anything except the war wound in his leg, sometimes when the weather was cold.


It was cold the beginning of that year, a long, sharp cold. We ran home from school in the afternoon with the hairs freezing
in our nostrils. Our shoes squeaked on the blue, hard snow.


Joanna and I had to fetch Poll from her school on our way home. Her class was late out and Poll last of all. She was a bustling
but disorganized child whose hat was never on the peg where she knew she had put it. When she finally appeared she was red
with the effort of collecting her possessions and disposing them about her person; her coat was buttoned askew, her open satchel
stuffed with the books she took to school as an insurance against boredom during lessons; she clutched her khaki painting
smock, her rubber shoes, and George, her bear. I re-buttoned her coat and Joanna knelt on the snow to tie her shoe laces while
Poll talked full tilt in her curious, husky voice that cracked sometimes, like an adolescent boy’s.


‘I got a gold star today but Gully got two. It’s not fair but Miss Carter says I’ll get one tomorrow if I try to write nicely
but I can’t because my poor hands get so tired. Miss Carter says we’ve got to be specially good this year because it’s a special
year, the Queen’s going to be crowned in Westminster Abbey and they’re going to roast a whole cow on the floody field down
by the Water Works and we’re all going to get a bit.’


‘Not a cow, an ox,’ Joanna said.


‘Miss Carter says an ox is a sort of cow.’ Joanna grinned and Poll said passionately, ‘Oh, you can laugh if you like, but
Miss Carter knows more than you do, she’s a teacher.’ Her eyes, which were a fierce, deep blue, blazed at us. ‘She says this
is a very important year, one we’ll remember all our lives, so there.’


‘I expect that’s right, if she says so,’ Joanna said soothingly, getting up and dusting the chipped snow from her skirt. She
glanced across the playground. ‘We’d better hurry.’


I saw why. Miss Carter herself had emerged from the door marked ‘Infants’ and was making a bee-line for us. She was a very
tall, very thin woman, with a tortured face; high forehead and beaky nose, white and shiny like bone, and a big, grimacing
mouth that sprayed spit as she talked. She was Poll’s teacher and our neighbour. She was also in love with our stepfather
and a great trouble to us.


It was too late to run: she was upon us. We composed our faces into blank, pleasant smiles.

‘What nice girls to fetch your little sister!’ She spat effusively. ‘I’m sorry if you had to wait, but we were having such
an interesting lesson, weren’t we, Poll, that we couldn’t bear to stop?’


Resigned to her company, her ghastly, ingratiating brightness, we left the playground. Joanna said, ‘Poll says you were telling
them about the coronation.’


‘Yes, dear. I was explaining that they were going to be the New Elizabethians and telling them about this year’s Project.
We are going to put up big sheets of paper all round the Assembly Hall and write down on them the great things that are still
to be done. All the advances we hope to make, in medicine, housing, education. … I want them to look forward. I believe this
year will see the beginning of a great up-surge of energy, as there was in the time of the first Elizabeth. New poets, new
discoveries…. I want to rouse them up, to make them see they can be doctors, teachers, explorers, that there are mountains
to be climbed, great areas of the world to be civilized, diseases to be conquered…’


‘Aren’t they a bit young to be told they’ve got to climb Everest or discover a cure for cancer?’


Miss Carter laughed, as if Joanna had said something clever instead of something rude, and lifted her wild, sad face to the
sky. We were walking along the side of the park; the wind swept across the snow-buried football pitch and made her eyes water.
The light from the street lamp was reflected in the tears on her cheek and glinted on her prominent white teeth.


‘Of course we won’t mention cancer, dear, or anything dreadful like that. My idea was to tell them about the children in Africa who don’t have enough to eat and who have diseases like river-blindness and leprosy. Ah – the misery that still lurks in
the dark places of the world!’


She gave an inappropriate, loud laugh, and glanced sideways at us. ‘I expect your poor Papa is very busy just now, so many
poor people must be ill, in this dreadful weather.’


I looked at Joanna, who fixed her gaze on the ground. We had known she would mention Boyd sooner or later. There had been
other ladies in love with him – he was a sympathetic doctor – and we knew the symptoms of the malady. Miss Carter was still
in the early stage of trying to edge her way into our regard in order to bring the conversation round to him. She had not
yet begun to pester Ellen, calling at the front door on the pretence of having mistaken the hour of the surgery and lingering,
with lamentations about missed buses and cries of false regret, until asked in to wait. The ladies who did this were middle-aged;
they had a record of minor illnesses but what chiefly ailed them, Ellen said, was that their children were grown and their
husbands no longer noticed them. Ellen always asked them in though she knew it would mean weeks of misery ahead, offerings
of home-made jam, cakes, not brought as neighbourly gifts, but as an entrance fee. Often, these ladies sat in the kitchen
and cried, while Ellen poured tea. Our mother was a sharp, easily irritated person, and social occasions bored her, but with
Boyd’s hangers-on she was gentle, even going so far as to shield them by pretending they had really come to see her, or by finding some hidden talent in them and displaying it before us like a talisman to dispel our scorn. ‘Really, she’s very
gifted, she plays the piano beautifully,’ or, ‘She does the most marvellous embroidery.’


We dreaded the time when Ellen would begin to unearth Miss Carter’s special abilities; it tired her so, and when she was tired
she was hard on us. And we could see that Miss Carter was likely to be more of a nuisance than any of the others had been.
Once winter was over, all she would have to do would be to linger in her garden, on fine weekends, and pop up behind the privet
hedge. Her infatuation, therefore, must be nipped in the bud before summer began, and Joanna and I had already settled on
a plan to achieve this. It was a good plan, but we could not put it into action while Poll was with us, so I merely answered
her, politely, that Boyd was no busier than usual, for January.


Joanna said, ‘Of course there’s ’flu about. But not many night calls, not many confinements. We don’t get a rash of babies
till April. Nine months from the August holidays.’


Miss Carter said that she didn’t think Joanna ought to talk that way, in front of her little sister.

I said, ‘Why not? Childbirth’s a natural function. Boyd says children are old enough to know things as soon as they want to
know.’


‘Why do you call your father Boyd? That’s rather unusual, Kate, isn’t it?’ Miss Carter said.

‘Because he isn’t our father.’

Joanna glared at me. This was something she hated to get about. I thought it stupid of her. I was proud we had a stepfather,
it marked us off from other people.


Miss Carter said she hadn’t realized, we looked so much like him.

‘We look like our mother,’ Joanna said.

Both Boyd and Ellen were light-haired and brown-eyed, as we were. Only Poll was different from the rest of our family; her
hair was so dark that it was almost black, and her eyes were a rich, pure blue. I saw Miss Carter look down at her and knew she was guessing who Poll must be like. Embarrassed, I began to skip ahead, dragging Poll with me.


‘Don’t pull me, I want to walk with Miss Carter.’ Poll freed her hand and ran back, smiling up at her teacher in a sycophantic way.


I felt stupid because I had run on ahead, so I ran faster, pretending to be absorbed in jumping the cracked paving stones.
I was too old to behave like that, so perhaps it was reasonable that Miss Carter, when they caught me up at the traffic lights,
should speak to me as if I were a child, Poll’s age.


‘A little bird tells me you’re having a visitor today,’ she said, coyly rolling her large, pale eyes.

Joanna said, bitter because she had had to apologize for me, ‘I told Miss Carter Aunt Hat was coming, that’s why you’re in such a hurry to get home.’


‘She’s not really our Auntie,’ Poll said. ‘She’s an old sick friend. She’s been in hospital having her insides out.’

Miss Carter looked startled. We were passing Boots’. ‘Look, Poll, I began, but there was nothing to draw her attention to
except a display of hot-water bottles in the main window.


‘Her womb,’ Poll said. ‘Ladies have to have that done sometimes when they get old. I know what it’s called but I disremember
the name.’


‘Shut up, Poll, I muttered.


Boyd had explained the functions of the body to us and also, when suitable occasions arose, what could go wrong with it. He
always used exact, medical terms. His theory, and our mother’s, was that this would teach us not to be afraid of disease,
but, like many educational theories, there were disadvantages in practice. People were rarely shocked when we paraded our
learning – that would have been gratifying; they were more often merely uneasily amused, and I hated to be laughed at.


But Miss Carter seemed neither amused nor put out. She only murmured, ‘Oh, the poor thing!’

‘We’ve got to keep quiet and not bother her too much,’ Poll told her, as the lights changed and we crossed the main road.


Passing Woolworth’s, Joanna’s eyes met mine. We both had the same fear, that Poll would go on and spill out the rest of Aunt
Hat’s story, or a garbled version of it, anyway, which was all she could have overheard by chance – a blow by blow account
of Aunt Hat’s hysterectomy might have been thought suitable for Poll’s ears, but the true reason for her visit was not. And,
certainly we did not want Miss Carter to know it. Joanna thought it shameful, but I had a different reason. I was not too
young to know that nothing pleases people like a good disaster, especially if it is still fresh and smelling of blood, so
to speak: I did not like Miss Carter well enough to want to give her that pleasure. Besides, I had been warned not to tell….


Luckily the coffee-roasting machine was working in Cullen’s window and Poll forgot Aunt Hat to look at it. Joanna and I were
glad to stop too. Joanna could see Will Saxon inside the shop, buying his mother’s groceries, and knew that if she waited
until he came out, she could affect surprise at seeing him and linger, talking, until we went on ahead and they could walk
home together. I was prepared to indulge her, and Poll, because I still enjoyed watching the coffee machine too, though I
was too old to admit to it. The rattle of Cullen’s roaster, and the smell of coffee, remains one of the good memories of my
childhood.


There are plenty of others. Monks Ford is twenty-five miles from London. There was once an abbey there, on the River Lance,
and a prosperous community based upon it and upon an earthenware industry. Like the abbey, it no longer exists, but when we
lived there some of the pots were still displayed in the town museum, a dim, close-smelling room above the Council Offices,
along with several cases of stuffed birds and a collection of Zulu weapons dating from the Boer War that had been presented
by General Claud Archer Fantom who had also given the town the stone drinking trough, inscribed with his name, that stood
beside the Market If Cross. The trough was no longer filled with water, only sweet papers and icecream cartons and empty cigarette
packets. The Mental Hospital, the Fire station, the Junior School and the Grammar, had all been built in the years 1901-1906,
during General Fantom’s reign as Chairman of the local Council. That was the time, too, that the old houses in the main street
had been pulled down and the ugly, flat, yellow ones built. The pots in the Museum and the Market Cross remained the only
signs that Monks Ford had a past before General Fantom’s heyday – it was said that he would have pulled down the Market Cross
if the Antiquarian Society had not been active in organizing local resistance.


There was no industry except a timber mill down at the lock, where the Lance flowed into the Thames, and, behind the station,
a dental factory which had a window where sets of false teeth were displayed on small plinths, like archaeological specimens.
All the same, the town was growing, new housing estates spreading slowly across the surrounding fields like a skin disease.
Most of the men and working girls commuted: factory hands to Slough, professional middle-class and typists to London.


Monks Ford was ‘dead’, most people said. We could never understand why. There were seven public houses, three churches ̫ Anglican,
Roman and Methodist – two cinemas, a golf course, a tennis club, a Dramatic Society. What more did they want? Brothels? Casinos?
Whatever the dissatisfactions of our elders, it seemed to us that Monks Ford was a satisfactory place and superior, not only
to the Mile End Road, but also to the country where we had lived before. There was so much more to look at. Boots, Sainsbury’s,
Woolworth’s, Jock’s Icecream Parlour – the shops in the main street were Aladdin’s caves; winter afternoons, before curtains
were drawn, the houses in the residential roads were theatrical shows, put on for our benefit. If we wanted trees and grass
there was the park which was better than a country field: there were no cow pats in it. (Cow pats had no virtue, unlike horse
dung which was a lucky thing to step into.) We could even, if we wished, gather blackberries – slightly dusty and shrivelled, but tasting as good to us as the bilberries we had picked in Shropshire – from the high hedges in the lane
that led from General Fantom’s house, now lived in by his son and daughter, to the lock. Unsurprisingly, the Fantom’s house
was called Lock View: it looked directly down the lane to the river, over a stretch of what was almost country. There were
country smells there, may and dead nettle instead of laurel and privet, and there were no buildings except the Water Works,
a great, high, solemn building, aloof as a cathedral, standing alone in the flat field; Poll’s floody field, where, this summer,
they would roast the ox.


Watching the coffee machine, Poll forgot about Aunt Hat and remembered the ox. Turning to Miss Carter, she said, ‘Will we
have to take what bit we’re given? What if we don’t like fat?’


I expected this question to floor Miss Carter and watched her face for that look of stupidly superior, amused puzzlement with
which adults conceal their lack of mental agility, but she said that though we should have to take Pot Luck, perhaps there
would be separate portions set out for people who liked lean, and people who liked fat. She spoke sensibly, as if she had
given the matter some thought, and I was disappointed: I hated to concede her any good qualities.


Will came out of Cullen’s, blushing at the sight of Joanna. He had thick, sandy hair that fell straight from one point on
his crown, like a wig. I thought he was undistinguished because of his blushes and the bi-focals he wore, and wished Joanna
could have picked on someone better-looking to love. I had decided that her trouble was that she rated herself too low because
she was miserable about her figure: she was only a little plump, but when she looked in the glass she saw, not a pretty girl,
but a grotesque distortion, a comic postcard horror. She went without vests in winter and, however hot the summer day, always
wore her school blazer over her frocks, to conceal her silhouette. Now, as Will approached her, scarlet between his freckles
and nonchalantly swinging his shopping bag, she glanced furtively in the shop window and assumed a curious, unnatural posture, sucking in her stomach and hunching her shoulders forward to . . .