The happiest house, which I remember with love and where the atmosphere of devotion was so strong that one almost dared not spoil it by lazily falling into our bad sniping patterns, was named De Eekhof. This was the home of Christine’s Tante Lida and Oom Nico. They had no children, yet the house was arranged as though for children and the disciplines and routines led to mental ease and stimulation in a way that any family might envy. The maid Helli wore a white kerchief and everything about the kitchen and the dining room and where we played seemed clean but not sterile, and, which is irresistible to a child, even to a very tall one, all our equipment was one size smaller. We played, after our morning swim in the pool that was simply a sandy crater at the end of the garden, with a toy grocer’s shop, its name het Winkeltje (the little shop), that had come from the store of toys at Stokhorst. There were enamel weighing scales, little iron weights, jars of dry goods, small wax paper bags, churns, dippers, ladles, and carved wooden vegetables of every kind. Even when we were too old to play with this toy it was irresistible to us and peace would break out between Nicola and me. There were gravelled walks and flopping buddleia covered with tortoiseshell butterflies. At rest-time, we really did rest, like happy children tired out by play in some ideal of family life. Tante Lida and Oom Nico were cultivated, curious and sophisticated. They left their considerable collection of paintings to the Dutch people. I remember walking dripping after a swim past a picture that I know now was by Monet. There was no fuss. No one ticked me off for my wet footprints. Halfway up the stairs on the way to our bedroom was an automaton we were allowed to play with once a day each. You wound it up and then the real, stuffed, fez-wearing monkey under the glass cloche would begin to do magic tricks, lifting a bowl to reveal a different surprise every time.
The last time I went to De Eekhof I was reluctantly adolescing. Oom Nico took me for a walk. He had read my diary, in which I had written that I was so unhappy I wanted to die.
‘It is a waste of time,’ he said, ‘to be unhappy. And at your age it should be impossible. Believe me, I know. One feels important if one is unhappy. But it could all be so much worse, you know.’ He had the great gentleness to mention no other diary, no other unhappy teenage girl, to be found in Holland no time at all ago.
Oom Nico had hairs growing out of the end of his nose, and large, sad eyes. He wore bifocal spectacles that magnified these eyes. He was bald and was driven to the factory by a chauffeur. The factory made fragrant bales of cotton and printed it gaily. Nicola and I were allowed to choose a bolt each for Christine to sew summer frocks for us. We chose, that last summer, after lunch. Helli had made biftek and afterwards she had drained yoghurt in a cheesecloth and served it with strawberries that had got hot in the sun so that they were between fruit and jam. Nicola chose a white cloth punched with lacy flowers. I chose something pink, feminine and rosaceous, as though for curtains or some large expanse. I chose it for the girl I would have been had I been a better girl. My lukewarm but useful, merely theoretical, crush on Nicola’s cousin Alexander transferred its points completely to devotion and gratitude when Oom Nico said, ‘You will be pretty, you know.’
He had found me out. I had always known that it was lucky I was good at schoolwork because I was so ugly. The odd thing is, why did I not think that this relation, this non-relation, of mine was telling the truth? After all, I couldn’t imagine him telling a lie. During those summers in Holland, I too took a holiday from telling lies.
LENS II: Chapter 3
The first large family in whose cousinhood I tried to affix myself was the great clan of Mitchisons. It was a joke in scientific circles at the time that more than half a ton of human flesh answered to the name Professor Mitchison. Naomi Mitchison, the sister of J.B.S. Haldane, was the matriarch and pivot of the family. She lived to be one hundred and three, the oldest Old Dragon that doughty prep school has yet produced, and one of the first baby Dragons. Doris Lessing has described in her autobiography the atmosphere of intellection at Carradale, the Mitchison house in Argyll. I doubt if I can match her for I recall the passage as absolutely spot on and now of course can’t find it, though maybe I should learn to delegate now I am blind. That would make a drastic and rather late character change.
Naomi was known by her children, her grandchildren and her friends as ‘Nou’. One son, Geoffrey, had died in childhood from meningitis. The death is described by Nou’s friend Aldous Huxley in his novel Point Counter Point. There were five remaining children, Denny, Murdoch, Lois, Avrion, Valentine. Murdoch was Professor of Zoology at Edinburgh, his wife Rosalind Professor of History. Rosalind was known as ‘Rowy’. Rowy had been a close friend of my mother and her daughter Harriet was my friend; each pair of friends was as dissimilar in the same way as the other. That is, where Rowy was effective, certain, dark and convinced, my mother was indecisive, unsure, blonde and ductile; the same was so of Harriet and myself. Harriet’s younger sister Amanda went on to become a journalist who came from the Independent Magazine to interview me. When she was a refinedly pretty little girl, I had, with Harriet, tormented Amanda by telling her long, plotless, essentially theologically based stories about a monster we called the King Devil. I can’t think where we got him from, since the Mitchisons were sternly rationalist and unbelieving. Harriet’s reading tastes ran to The Lord of the Rings, which I could never hack, though I was a sucker for Narnia, so it looks as though I should bear the brunt of the responsibility for the King Devil. When Amanda came to interview me, I felt it only right to give her, in every regard, the upper hand. I was ashamed of my beastly stories in the dark at the commodious Edinburgh house of her childhood. The interview was perfectly nice, though it implied, which may be possible, that my mother’s suicide was the result of incompetence rather than volition. I’ve always comforted myself with the thought that what my mother did was what my mother wanted, but maybe it is good, if sore, to keep an open mind.
Harriet and I both wanted to be doctors. Harriet became one and I still think about it. That’s a difference between us.
The village of Carradale lies in a bay on the eastern edge of the Mull of Kintyre. In recent years, it has been tragically newsworthy because almost every member of its small fishing fleet was drowned. That guts a community for generations.
The big house was harled and painted white, pepperpotted and roofed in slate the colour of lavender when dry, of thunder when wet. There were never, it seemed to me, fewer than twenty adults in the house at a time, always a few babies and then there were middlies and, what we were becoming, teenagers. That I did not fall completely into internal delinquency is almost certainly due to the Mitchisons, Rowy at the core of it, but all those others each of whose names I can remember, with their faces, for ever, at the age they were when I was turning twelve, though most of them now are professors themselves and members of the intelligentsia, whatever it is now called. Certainly not the ‘chattering classes’. They were nothing as trivial as chatterers, rather forceful, indeed irresistible, asserters.
During our teenage years, we were sent to sleep at The Mains, the Scots word for the home farm. This was a sensible decision. Dressing for dinner took me about four hours, though I’ve never met a vain Mitchison, including those who possessed beauty: Clare and Kate, Mary, Valentine and Josh. It was in the bathroom at The Mains that I first saw underwear made for the delectation of men rather than at the behest of spinsters. It had been hand-washed, evidently, and was dependent from the taps of a washbasin in the freezing bathroom. It was at once very small and very emphatic, lacy, red, and belonging to the girlfriend of Francis Huxley.