This Bed Thy Centre

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

Genres: Coming of Age; Humor & Satire; Literary Fiction; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

'Striking first novel . . . qualities of vitality and humour which set it apart.' New York Times Described by the New York Times upon her death as 'one of Britain's best-known novelists', plunge yourself into the wry world of Pamela Hansford Johnson in this story of seduction and marriage, perfect for fans of Elizabeth Jane Howard and Barbara Pym. ****************** Sixteen-year-old Elsie Cotton is curious about sex, but in this 1930s London suburb, there's no one who is willing to talk to her about it. Her widowed mother refuses to engage with the fact she's growing up, her art teacher tells her she'll find out about it soon enough, and Patty Maginnis would probably know, but Elsie can't find a way to ask her. The only person who will happily help is her boyfriend, Roly; but Elsie is all to aware of the risks... but as their relationship intensifies and her curiosity grows, what options are left to her? Banned from Battersea library, blasted by reviewers for being 'lewd' and earning the author abusive notes through the letterbox on its publication in 1935, This Bed Thy Centre is the controversial debut by Pamela Hansford Johnson that marked the start of her distinguished career. ****************** Praise for Pamela Hansford Johnson: 'Witty, satirical and deftly malicious' Anthony Burgess 'A remarkable craftswoman' A.S. Byatt 'Hansford Johnson at her wittiest is Waugh mingled with Malcolm Bradbury Ruth Rendell 'A writer whose memory fully deserves to be kept alive' Jonathan Coe

Release date: October 4, 2018

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 266

Sample

Preface

I was twenty-two when I finished this novel, and I do not know its genesis. The whole idea and structure came to me in one day, and the writing took me a little over two months. I had, I think, realising that I was no poet and that the short story form constrained me, wanted to write a novel; if you want to do something deeply enough, you are likely to do it. But I had not consciously thought the book through before I began to write.

It sprang out of the ambience I knew best, but, luckily for me, not at all out of my own direct experience. Young writers have a tendency to use themselves up at a first try, and then be faced with a long and horrible pause while they struggle to learn about something different. It was not until nearly twenty years later that I wrote a novel of which the early section was more or less autobiographical.

All literature is a continuum, and I must have had my influencers. But I don’t know who they were. Self-educated after the age of sixteen, my reading had been almost entirely classical and totally random. A few modern writers had excited me: Dreiser, Thomas Wolfe, perhaps Joyce, though Joyce was so much the fashion among the young people I knew then that I have never been certain how far my admiration was real and how much induced. I read poetry more than anything else; Shakespeare and all the Elizabethans, Donne, George Herbert, Chaucer, Skelton. I had read Dickens with fascinated distaste (love came ten years later), Jane Austen with uneasy politeness. Some of Lawrence. A great flurry of Conrad, to whom I cannot now return. The short stories of Chehov and Maupassant. The Scarlet Letter – which seems to me as wonderful and as misinterpreted now as it did then.

Yet I was far and away outside of the academic world, or the working literary world. While I was writing This Bed Thy Centre, I had made one literary friend, Dylan Thomas, who supplied the title. The original title was Nursery Rhyme – not good, but better, I think, than Thomas’s suggestion, which gave the book an immediate shine of lubricity very far from my intention.

For I had thought of the novel simply as an attempt to tell the truth about a group of people in a London suburb, whose lives were arbitrarily linked. I began it with the entrance of the sun upon the new day; and when I jumped at Thomas’s idea, I had the unruly sun, rather than the unruly bed, upon my mind.

When the book appeared, it was uncommonly successful. Times have changed since, and it would be quite a feat, today, to provoke such a succes de scandale as I did, without trying, in 1935. Words like ‘outspoken,’ ‘fearless,’ ‘frank’ (dirty words, the lot of them), flashed out of my headlines. I was shocked and terrified. That wasn’t what I had meant, at all. Living in isolation from literary people, I shrank beneath the reactions of some of my kin, and some older acquaintances less than kind. I was given to understand that I had disgraced myself and the entire area of Clapham Common. It was as though a huge white finger had prodded through the clouds to point out, for ever, an indelible pool on the carpet. I was absolutely miserable. My dreams were black with fear of the Public Prosecutor. The happier my publishers, the unhappier I. I did not want another single copy sold.

I was not experienced enough to understand that, among serious critics, the book was commanding a certain degree of attention, that it was being talked about, as Lucky Jim was to be eighteen years later, as a ‘seminal work.’ (For myself, I don’t think it was seminal at all. In any case, just as I don’t see its forerunners, neither do I see its successors.) Only one thing hauled me out of the first traumatic shock: a generous review by Mr Cyril Connolly, who did not appear to regard me in any diabolic light whatsoever.

It has taken me over twenty-five years to look at this first novel at all objectively. Letting it appear again, I have had to resist the temptation to tamper with it. How much less sentimentally I should cope with Mrs Macginnis (my earth goddess, prototype of Helena, in An Avenue of Stone) nowadays! How much less flat-footedly with the schoolmistress’s poetic lover! Yet I doubt if I could improve on Elsie, dank as she is.

Today I should reject so absurdly tidy a form, so close, so circular; but I think that form did much to compensate for my lack of psychological experience, and my green insights. Today I should not look down the slope of Battersea Rise and see the whole neighbourhood bathed in the glow of the Arabian Nights; but that is because the glow would be there for me no more. It was there, when I was twenty-two; and in that, as in other things, I told the truth as I saw it – which is not the seeing I have learned since, but was then the best I could do.

 

PHJ

Locality

The morning, drawing within itself, moved in sun and shadow over the common and through the pond till it came to the houses. In Haig Crescent, Mrs Godshill angrily opened her Bible in search of solace for the coming day. Glancing through the windows of her back room at the stairwayed walls of the Lying-in Hospital, she thought what a poor trade that institution would do were the girls on the cindertrack to attend her more carefully on Sunday afternoons. She looked at the clock. Ten minutes before she need get up. She lay back again in the bed, trying to imagine that her bones were greasing into sleep once more. She heard the rattling of the cups in the kitchen. Soon Ada Mary would bring her a cup of tea, and the day would start properly after all. A stream of sunlight poured through the windows into her eyes, reminding her unpleasantly of Mrs Maginnis, who had golden hair and no God. At this very hour, Mrs Godshill thought, she is sleeping with a man. Closing her eyes to the light, she added aloud, ‘Dirty beast.’

 

Five minutes’ walk away, in Lincoln Street, Mrs Maginnis, sliding from her nightgown into a cotton kimono, shouted to her new lover. He flung his arm out of the sheets across his face and settled down again to another slumber. Mrs Maginnis put a match to the stove. ‘Nice hot tea before you can say knife,’ she called to nobody, as she filled the kettle. Then she sat down before the mirror to comb out her hair. Lucky I see him before he sees me, she thought. I used not to get greasy like this in the morning. She lifted her hands to her face, smoothing the lines of age away. That was you, my girl, ten years ago. Very cautiously, so as not to disturb her lover, she lay down on the floor and noiselessly went through the ritual of her morning exercises. One, up; two, down; one, up; two, down! That’s the way to get the fat off. Maisie could do with a bit of this. She’s putting on weight lately.

The kettle boiled over. Jumping up, Mrs Maginnis turned off the gas and swished out the teapot.

 

Daylight came earlier to The Admiral Drake than to anywhere else in the neighbourhood. By seven Maisie was washed, dressed, and as bright as a button. She went briskly round the bar, peering for signs of wear in the paintwork, or holes in the carpet. She touched the stool in the corner with loving fingers, for that was where Mr Wilkinson sat, he who was so glum to the others and so jolly to herself alone. There he is, she thought regretfully, and here am I. He with his good job, going around all by himself. What he wants is a wife.

 

Wilkinson, as he walked down Morley Road to the candle factory, pondered upon his bad luck with the dogs, and upon the ten shillings he owed to Parsons. Snuffle-nosed Parsons, as he arranged his apples, thought of the ten shillings Wilkinson owed to him.

 

In her small bedroom at the back of the end house in Stanley Street, Elsie Cotton dabbed the cold flannel in her armpits. Ten minutes to breakfast, and she was still in her knickers. She scrambled into her blouse, only to find that she had it on back to front.

I ought to get someone to change it for me; it’s bad luck if I do it myself.

But it was too late now, and she had to wrench her arms out again and pull it round the right way. Dragging her gym-tunic over her head, she sat down before the mirror to do her hair, wondering, as she did every morning, at the strangeness of her own face. She gazed without understanding at her fine, colourless eyes, her long nose, and her small, patient chin. I wish I could have my eyebrows shaped.

Mrs Cotton called up the stairs.

‘All right, I’m coming,’ Elsie answered, fixing a couple of grips in her hair. As she left the bedroom she stopped to look at a watercolour sketch given her by Miss Chavasse.

Drawing lesson today. That’s why I woke up happy. I’ll please her terribly, so much that she’ll pick me out of all the others for praise. I love you, Leda. You have the loveliest face in the world. I love you. Leda, Leda.

She curled the name over her tongue as she went into breakfast.

 

Miss Chavasse was thinking of Elsie. You have definite abnormal tendencies in that direction, my darling Leda, she said. She always used love words to herself, for it was such a long time since anyone else had done so. She craned her neck out of the window, to see, at the end of Belvedere Row, the bright sun flashing upon the river. Mutable as the weathers, the stream changed its appearance every day for the exclusive delight of Miss Chavasse, who was the only person who ever noticed it. Now the light, striking the windows of the factory on the far side, flashed into her eyes. A boat with red sails went by.

She withdrew her head and, tying a scarf over her hair, started to make up her face. I’d like to kiss Elsie, she thought. I’d like to paint her, too. That is, if I could paint.

Her mind went back to her fourteenth birthday, that glorious occasion when one of her sketches had been accepted by a real magazine that paid its contributors. I used to think I’d be a second Angelica Kauffmann. Mother thought so too, but she was the only one who did. They laughed at me in London. Just art school tripe, Leda, my sweet, just art school tripe. Never mind. A lot of worse artists than you would be glad of a chance even to teach children to draw, and be paid four pounds a week for it. With her lipstick, she drew a fine red line around her jawbone, and smoothed it into the flesh. You were a beautiful girl, once, my dear. I must try and teach Elsie the rudiments of design today. If only the little swine would goggle a bit less at me and a bit more at her work, she wouldn’t be too bad.

And Miss Chavasse, pulling down her nightdress, gazed critically at her breastless body.

 

Elsie, as she boggled as usual over her breakfast, resented the maternal blindness that forced eggs upon her at such an early hour. ‘Eggs,’ she had recently remarked, in a flash of inspiration, ‘make you constipated, and I’m rather constipated lately. That’s why,’ But all she got was an ugly dose of something unnecessarily horrible, and the eggs continued as usual. Now she pushed the plate away from her and got up. ‘You haven’t had enough to eat,’ Mrs Cotton said. ‘Young bodies need feeding up.’

Suddenly resentful at the stigma of youth, Elsie slammed out of the room, catching her dress in the lock as she did so. This entailed the humiliation of opening the door again to release herself, and her eyes filled with tears. Snatching up her hat, she ran out of the house. Leda, she whispered to the sun, Leda.

The school gave on to the back of her own house; she generally got up from breakfast at the sound of First Bell so that she could get to her form room before Second Bell was rung. This morning, however, as she was a full twenty minutes early, she started off for a walk down to the edge of the common, up the road of The Stalls, along the High Road, and finally down Mornington Street and round the corner to school. As she stood on the path bordering the cinder track, she saw Mr Parsons hurrying along just a little in front of her, wheeling his barrow. She knew him slightly, because he was one of the men with whom her father had always stopped to joke. She ran to catch up with him.

‘Hullo.’

‘Hullo, Elsie.’

This made her angry. If I were only a bit older, he’d call me Miss. She walked by his side in silence for a while. Parsons snuffled awkwardly.

‘Off to school?’

‘Yes.’

‘Like an apple to take with you?’

Elsie said, ‘No, thank you,’ and was sorry immediately afterwards, for the fruit was a lovely, fair green and as bright as china.

‘How is your wife, Mr Parsons?’

He gave her a sidelong glance, sniffing up the hairs in his nose. Sidey little runt, he thought.

‘Pretty all right,’ he said aloud, ‘but she always gets the ’ay fever in July.’

‘Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. Has she seen a doctor?’

Elsie, the Lady of the Manor, the District Visitor, was properly concerned.

‘No time. No money, either. Them panel swines are no good.’

He sighted Wilkinson coming out of a tobacconist’s. ‘Well, Elsie, I must love you and leave you. Remember me to your mum.’

‘I’m going this way.’

‘Oh,’ said Parsons, adding something under his breath, as Wilkinson, bearing his ten shillings with him, faded like a beautiful dream into a side road.

Miss Chavasse, as she turned into The Stalls, caught sight of Elsie. Self conscious little democrat, she said to herself. Tickle her, Leda dear, make her hop.

Elsie saw Miss Chavasse.

‘Well, goodbye; I think I’m rather late,’ she gabbled to Parsons, and left him before he could reply. She walked back a few yards down the road.

‘Good morning, Miss Chavasse.’

‘Good morning, Elsie. What are you doing round here? I thought you always scrambled into school at the last minute.’

‘Got up too early. Can I walk with you?’

‘The pavement, my child, is as much yours as mine.’

‘Can I carry your bag?’

‘Why should you? I’m not a hundred. I always dread the day when some small girl will give up her seat in the bus to me.’

Elsie looked blank.

You’re too subtle for her, Leda darling. Tone it down.

‘I mean, it makes me feel so old when you offer suggestions like that.’

‘You’re not old!’ Elsie cried, indignantly.

‘A good bit older than you, infant.’ Leda, softened and appeased, smiled into the sky.

‘You’re not so very much older than I am,’ Elsie whispered, very daringly.

‘We won’t argue about that. Look!’ Leda flung out her arm suddenly, to where a young man with a green tie was standing, looking into a shop window, beneath a green sunblind. ‘There’s a painting for you. Look at those colours, just thrown together by accident! Look at the lighting on that boy’s face.’

‘ “A green thought in a green shade,” ’ Elsie said, feeling, directly she had done so, inexplicably childish and silly. I wish I hadn’t said that, she thought. I wish she wasn’t here. I wish I wasn’t here.

‘Is that terribly witty, or terribly intellectual? Do tell me.’

‘It’s a poem. Miss James read it to us in English lesson yesterday. I don’t know why I said it. He would make a lovely picture, wouldn’t he?’ she went on, eagerly. ‘He’s nice looking, too.’

Leda shaded her eyes. ‘Think so? You shouldn’t be able to distinguish one man from another at your age.’ She was suddenly angry, both with Elsie and with herself. A shadow fell over the morning, and the sickly draining of a forgotten hope left her naked. She said, strangely, ‘Do you think about boys, much?’

‘Boys? Of course not. I can’t stand them.’ Elsie flushed.

They walked on in silence, till they turned the corner of Mornington Street. Then she blurted out: ‘Miss Chavasse.’

‘Yes?’

She had started now, so she had to go on. The houses swelled and flattened before her eyes, until the whole row was as unreal as a nightmare.

‘What do men and women – do?’

‘Do? I don’t understand.’

Leda saw the houses as Elsie saw them.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean – oh, you know! I can’t explain. I shouldn’t have asked you.’

‘Go on at once.’

‘When they’re married.’

When at last Leda answered, her voice was as cold as a flute, and as brisk as death.

‘My child, you’d better ask your mother. She’s the proper one to tell you, so for Heaven’s sake, don’t ask me. There’s plenty of time for you to worry about that sort of thing. Let’s see, how old are you?’

‘Nearly sixteen.’

Sixteen. Leda looked back down the years. Just about then I met John. I didn’t have to be told anything.

She remembered his hands, closing like weeds upon her breast, and the searching of his small, dark mouth. I used to pretend I understood his rotten poems. The sick feeling it gave me when I picked his rejected manuscripts off the mat and told him not to worry, as people had no taste. ‘You’ll be recognised, one of these days,’ I told him, ‘and then you can make them crawl in the muck to you.’ But no-one save a slug and herself would ever have crawled in anything to John.

And I wouldn’t do it again. By God, I wouldn’t.

First Bell rang out as they reached the school. ‘You’d better hurry,’ Leda said.

Elsie did not go.

‘What are you waiting for?’

‘I’m sorry I asked you that, Miss Chavasse.’

‘Doesn’t matter. Come on, you’ll be late, and so shall I.’

They went into school together.

 

Mr Parsons, who lived his life by rote, regarded the shop as open when he heard First Bell clanging over the houses. He would give the final pat to his oranges, shuffling a few indifferent ones from the front to the back, quieten with a touch of his finger the swinging bunches of grapes, and step to the front of his stall with his battle-cry: ‘Lemons, lovely, lovely! Three for two, keep away the flu!’ This morning, however, his customary cheerfulness was offset by an inward melancholy. Even Ma Ditch, who kept the cat’s meat stall next to his own, noticed and made a comment.

Parsons looked at her with disfavour, noting the string of beads around her neck, and her new blue earrings. ‘Hullo, Ma,’ he said shortly, turning away from her to straighten a recalcitrant bunch of bananas. ‘All dressed up and nowhere to go?’ he muttered, trusting that she would not hear, half hoping that she would. That’s what she does with the money Joe sends her, he thought. Bloody little the kid gets. If Minnie played games like that with my earnings, she could have things chunking round her ears, too.

His eyes filled with pity at the thought of his wife, all by herself in the back room, running with cold and fretting at her own indisposition. Minnie was only happy at work by his side, exchanging back answers with Ma Ditch and rearranging the fruit to her own individual taste. If I can screw that ten bob out of Wilkinson, Parsons said to himself, I’ll buy her a necklace and earrings and a bracelet too, and then will that old bitch laugh!

The old bitch slapped down a randy cat who was attempting to climb the front of her stall, where the meats hung, red and appetising, for the taking.

‘Seen Wilkinson lately?’ she asked, ‘ ’e owes me seven-and-a-kick.’

‘You’re lucky,’ Parsons answered her fiercely. ‘ ’E must owe a packet to the ’ole neighbourhood. It’s the dogs. Why doesn’t ’e stop mucking about?’

 

Why don’t I stop it? Wilkinson asked himself, as he hung up his cap. He was tired and worried. For the last month he had suffered losses, and his future salary was so heavily mortgaged for the next month or so that he scarcely thought it worth while to draw his pay envelopes. I’d ask Maisie out, if I weren’t so broke. I know she thinks I’m rolling in it, just because I’m in The Admiral every night, pushing the boat out for a lot of the boys. I know what she thinks, all right, all right. Why don’t I stop it? He searched anxiously down the back pages of the morning paper.

 

Maisie gave the glasses a final polish. ‘Morning,’ she said to Harry, the potman, who had just come in.

‘Morning,’ he answered.

‘Nice bright day, isn’t it? Not a cloud in the sky. Like my new frock?’ She pirouetted before him.

‘Oke. All that for Wilkinson?’

‘You get along with your work,’ she retorted, flouncing off into the back parlour. Here she lay down at full length upon the sofa, and lit a cigarette.

I’ll try to get him up to scratch tonight, she thought, choking a little as the smoke went down the wrong way. Maisie did not really like nicotine. I’ll keep his stool for him till he comes in, even if I have to put the cat on it.

For some reason or other, the customers of The Admiral Drake respected the rights of the cat, leaving him, regal in his selfishness, entirely undisturbed, even if every other seat in the bar were occupied.

‘I’ll try being mysterious with him,’ Maisie said aloud, ‘Try and make him feel there’s something different about me.’ She got up, and looked into the overmantel mirror. Drawing the lids of her eyes halfway down, she attempted to achieve the right expression. After a little while, she gave it up. I shouldn’t think he’d care what a girl’s type was, if she happened to please him. Not that he likes them noisy, though. I’ve never noticed him taking much interest in Ma Maginnis. ‘Now there’s a cow for you, if you like!’ she remarked to the cat, who had loafed into the room. ‘Wonder who she’s going with now?’

 

At the moment she spoke, First Bell was arousing Mrs Maginnis’s lover far more effectively than Mrs Maginnis herself could have done. Loudly imputing all sorts and conditions of vice to his God, he sat bolt upright in bed, to knuckle the sleep from his eyes.

‘Awake, are you, ducks?’ commented Mrs Maginnis, ‘I’ve been keeping the kettle boiling for you. Sleep well?’

She sat down on the edge of the bed, drawing the kimono decently across her breasts.

‘All right,’ he answered. As the sleep wore away, he began to take in the details of her large pink face and her golden hair. Stretching out his hand, he laid it on her throat. She smiled at him. He jerked her down and kissed her.

‘Here, none of that, my lad,’ she said, pushing him into the pillows. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you ought, and at this time in the morning, too.’ She gave him a fond shove in the face before she arose.

‘What are you doing with yourself today, Patty?’ he asked her, lazily.

‘Oh, nothing much. Few bits and pieces of shopping this morning and the pictures this afternoon. You know where you’ll find me this evening, don’t. . .