Quite so. Hunting by that point was a crucial part of the social fabric. You could just about get away with not riding to hounds yourself and retain social credibility, but any demonstration of disapproval would have been unthinkable, and for the socially aspirant it was expedient to cut a dash on the hunting field. A situation that no doubt continues to this day, in some quarters, and certainly did in west Somerset in the late 1940s. I had not read Jane Austen by then and so could not appreciate the resonances in the situation of a neighbour, a genteel lady in reduced circumstances, possessed of two fine daughters in their late teens, neither of them qualified in any way either for employment or for higher education. Early marriage was imperative. There was nothing for it but to get them on horseback and in the hunting field where they could best be displayed to the eligible bachelors of the area. The spa and the ballroom being no longer much around, this was the most practical substitute. The wretched girls, who disliked riding, spent a miserable season smiling bravely in the rain and the wind and doing their best to avoid having to take any jumps or proceed at more than a cautious trot. Their mother's strategy paid off and both achieved what in Austen terms would be seen as highly satisfactory alliances – the local pack had served its purpose as social catalyst.
Those for whom fox-hunting was an accustomed element of rural life had neither time nor taste for the moral debate. But the rise of hunting in the eighteenth century took place against a changing climate of enlightened opinion about the treatment of animals. The casual cruelty of early periods stemmed essentially from a perception of animals as being of a different order and thus not susceptible to suffering in the same way as people. It was the cruelty of indifference, rather than that of the witting infliction of pain. The sight of an animal in distress did not affect the onlooker. Indeed, the early arguments against activities which involved cruelty to animals focused not upon the feelings of the animal but upon the corrupting effect on the person involved – those accustomed to tormenting animals might go on to do the same to fellow humans. But by the eighteenth century there was growing support for the idea that the unnecessary infliction of suffering on animals should be avoided on purely humanitarian grounds – it was wrong because the animal suffered, regardless of the implications for any people involved. Such convictions paved the way for the establishment of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824 and the passage of various Acts of Parliament in the early part of the century against cruelty to horses, cattle and dogs and the abolition of baiting and cock-fighting.
Hunting, shooting and fishing now stood alone, as they still do, the last two bolstered against criticism by their association with legitimate slaughter in pursuit of a meal. Hunting was always more problematic, involving as it did the element of class interest along with such factors as the inedibility of foxes and the perceived charm of deer and hares. The arguments both for its defence and its abolition got caught up in issues subsidiary to the central debate over whether or not it is cruel to hunt an animal with dogs. Today, the activity has somehow achieved its current anachronistic role as the focus of disagreement between town and country.
England in 1945 bewildered me, a refugee in this place that was apparently the homeland. Its most perplexing aspects were these appositions: the confusing contrasts of class, with codes that I could not appreciate, the opposing worlds of town and country. London and west Somerset seemed hardly to occupy the same planet, and felt much that way about one another. Egypt had been a place of violent contrasts, a cultural cauldron, polyglot and cosmopolitan, but its discords were unstructured, disorganized and unpredictable. In England it was clear that there was structure, there was a system and there were complex arrangements of mutual exclusion. By far the most baffling and treacherous was that of social hierarchy, but the town-and-country thing ran it a close second. Fifty years later, the divide remains, but is now blurred by familiarity and by universal mobility. The two nations know all about each other, or think that they do, and certainly quite enough to foster argument and misunderstanding.
When I used to go by train to Somerset from London for the school holidays, each compartment held framed photographs of selected glories of the West Country: Land's End, Dunkery Beacon, Clovelly, Tintagel. You knew that you were going to another place. At Taunton I changed on to the branch line to Minehead, replicating the journey made by my grandmother and her siblings in the 1890s. The city fell away as I stepped onto that second train; now the country had taken over, with all that implied – different voices, different assumptions, another set of values. By the time I reached Washford station, London was not just a couple of hundred miles away, but a world apart. I had crossed a frontier. Today, I still make that journey, a Great Western train is still following Brunel's foray west. But the train journey ends at Taunton, and its climate is very different. People do not cross a frontier, but merely slip from one environment to another. There are those who live down west but work in London, their lives expanded by new technology. A fellow passenger tells me that he spends his weekends at home in a village near Exeter and commutes up to town for the week, where he works as an executive limousine chauffeur. The rise of the Quantocks on the skyline still announces that we are nearly there, but there is no longer that tacit ritual of departure and arrival.
The Dressing-Room, the Nursery and the Grand Piano
For a dozen years, until I was married, my room at Golsoncott was the one then still known as the dressing-room. My grandfather's dressing-room. Next door to my grandmother's large bedroom, it overlooked the canal garden, the windows wreathed in wisteria. The bed had a horsehair mattress, considered healthy and desirable in the 1920s and '30s; I thought its unrelenting hardness normal and acceptable until I came across springs. I imagine that the bed had been his. Whether or not he and my grandmother shared her bedroom I do not know, but the very existence of the dressing-room, integral to domestic arrangements, is an indication of the gulf in assumptions about marriage and about the place of men and women then and now. Maybe there are still households in which a dressing-room is taken for granted, but, for me, it has become an interesting symbol of change and contrast.
I know that my marriage was qualitatively different from my grandmother's. Not in the obvious sense that every marriage is a unique transaction, but in its expectations and its practices, which were dictated by the times, in both cases. My grandmother's was also a long marriage, curtailed only by death, but it was without the intimacy, the edge, the eyeball-to-eyeball quality of late twentieth-century marriage. My grandparents gave each other space, in the phraseology of a later age, but that was owed more to the fact that they occupied different spaces. In one sense this was literal – that dressing-room, my grandfather's sacrosanct study in which he spent much of the day – but it was a division that was concerned also with hard-and-fast rules about who did what around the place. My grandmother supervised domestic matters and ruled supreme in the garden; my grandfather's involvement was with the upkeep and running of the stables. He had trained as an architect but seems not to have practised for long and by the time the family moved to Somerset he was in retirement, his main occupation riding and hunting. I never really knew him. He died in 1941, and my only memory slide in which he features is one from the summer before the war. I am on the veranda. I feel something on my leg and look down: there on my calf is a black slug. I shriek. The adults admonish in dismay. And sure enough, my grandfather emerges from his study, The Times in one hand, looking like thunder. I am whisked away, still keening about the slug. Grandchildren should be seen but not heard.
Looking back – making comparisons – the gender divide in the first half of the century seems not a distinction but a chasm. My grandmother's late Victorian youth was typical of her class and set an inexorable pattern – boys were raised entirely by women in the nursery but then packed off to boarding school and the company solely of other males. Girls stayed at home, for the most part. From then on the gulf was bridged formally only by marriage;
the unspoken assumption was that men and women were profoundly different in their needs, tastes, attitudes. And up to a point this is of course true, but it has long since ceased to be institutionalized in quite that way, except in the arcane worlds of men's clubs or on the football terraces. In 1950 I was aware of a potent whiff of these beliefs at Golsoncott where, without my grandfather, things had settled to a comfortably female-oriented household. Male visitors caused a flurry of disquiet: could the domestic arrangements rise to the occasion? A man would expect a cooked breakfast (not on offer to women guests). He would need his shoes cleaned and must be supplied with alcohol and cigarettes.
My grandmother – a forceful and strong-minded woman – saw men simply as another species. Their inclinations and appetites were not those of women, their capacities were other and I think, by implication, superior. Financial matters were best left to men. Women of her kind chose to remain in considerable ignorance of their economic circumstances, as though it were in some way unbecoming to cast a sharp eye over the accounts – a stance only possible, of course, for the affluent, but surely an uncomfortable legacy of the financial status of the Victorian wife or daughter.
Trying to think my way into her perception of the gender divide it seems to me to have been based on a profound lack of intimacy with men, which itself stemmed from deep social assumptions about the respective roles of men and women. Her own marriage was not a close one; her Victorian father would have been a distant figure. Those turn-of-the-century photographs of Exmoor summer gatherings propose a jolly family of siblings, but even there the apartness sneaks out: my grandmother and her sister always together, the brothers as that uniformed brigade – the Men. And if women saw men as sui generis, the view must have been equivalent from the other side. There is a kind of defiant nervousness about my uncles' versifying, when it comes to a vision of women, which meshes with more sophisticated literary attitudes. A confused mixture of gallantry, protectiveness, patronage, incomprehension and alarm.
My uncles were unusual in their bachelordom. Marriage was the norm. Pairing off and procreation – the rituals of all time and every place. The photograph albums in the hall chest recorded many family weddings in the twenties and thirties; the brides looking very young and flanked by a line of grown-up bridesmaids, whose turn would come next, mothers and aunts done up in fox furs and adventurous hats, the men in ceremonial tailcoats. There is an atmosphere of occasion, of formality, but also of completion. There stand bride and groom, prinked, polished and presented to the camera with complacent pride. What ought to be done has been done.
My aunt Rachel sometimes featured in the bridesmaid line-ups, tricked out in ankle-length satin, a wreath on her head, clutching a posy and wearing an expression of rebellious resignation. She would have hated the whole business. Dressing-up was anathema to her, and large-scale events something of an ordeal. She was energetic and independent, but also oddly shy and diffident, as well as impatient with the ritual exchanges of social life. She needed to be in her studio working, or out there with horse and dogs in the hills and on the moor. She never married. I cannot think that this was for lack of suitors. She is appealingly pretty in those early photos, but the soft English-rose looks were deceptive. Rachel was briskly unconventional beneath the veneer of her circumstances. Perhaps the suitors sensed this; perhaps she herself had some instinctive urge towards solitude. She was intensely involved in her work, always experimenting, switching to some new medium or method. And as she moved through the century she became interestingly in tune with it. When she was a young woman, that pejorative word spinster was still around, and must have hung about her, unspoken. By the time she was in her seventies, still richly creative, the very concept was extinguished. As one of the few women working with metal as an artist-blacksmith, she became something of a feminist icon, which both amused and pleased her. And she flourished in a more flexible and expansive social climate. On her own patch, down there in west Somerset, she was a hallowed figure, known far and wide, still bucketing through the lanes in a beat-up old Land-Rover when in her eighties.
One weekend in 1956 I visited my father in London. I was then living and working in Oxford. On the Sunday evening he drove me to Paddington to catch the train back. He was rather silent, as though something were on his mind. As we waited at a traffic light on Kensington Gore (I know which one, to this day), he spoke, abruptly: ‘There's something I've been meaning to say to you. Isn't it about time you were thinking of getting married?’
I was twenty-three. I had a job, so was financially independent. I remember being startled – this seemed an injunction from another time. I would have thought it more appropriate if he had been concerned about my career prospects, which were not sparkling in view of my somewhat dead-end occupation. I think I protested that I had nobody in mind at that moment, nor did it seem that anybody had me in mind. The subject was dropped, and as it happened someone did hove on the scene very shortly. I was married within the year, so my father had no need to pursue the matter. I sometimes wonder how he would have proceeded if things had not turned out thus.
My father was also, I think, conditioned by the assumptions of an earlier age. Perhaps we all are, by the time we get to middle life – still jumping to the tune of our own salad days. He saw marriage as an essential rite of passage for a young woman. His sisters had been married in their early twenties; it was his paternal duty to make some cautionary noises.
And I would not have been entirely unresponsive. My childhood was not so distant, with its own tenacious subliminal conditioning. A concept of marriage was central to that conditioning. It was a concept derived quite as much from literature as from observation. I grew up surrounded by the married friends of my parents, and at a time when divorce was unusual, but my vision of marriage was not so much that of real life as the one fostered by childhood reading. Marriage as a goal and culmination. Marriage as in fairy stories: ‘And so they were married and lived happily ever after.’ Marriage as the essential arrival at maturity, for girls above all. Moreover, this mythology permeated nursery rituals. I was growing up in the expatriate British community in Cairo before and during the war, a society in which mothers on the whole did not look after their own children. I was cared for by Lucy, a figure far more central to me than my own mother. Our joint social life consisted of teatime get-togethers with other families. At such gatherings Lucy and her fellow nannies would conduct fortune-telling sessions with the tea leaves left in their cups. A twig-like fragment was a tall dark stranger; a circular arrangement was a wedding ring. There was competition for the last sandwich on the plate, which allowed for a choice between a handsome husband or 10,000 a year. No one ever opted for the 10,000. If I stuck my tongue out or pulled faces, Lucy would tell me crisply that the wind would change and I'd be stuck like that, ‘and then nobody will want to marry you’. The fact that she herself was unmarried remained unspoken.
There was a programme, it seemed, and marriage was its crucial and central plank. Marriage was an end in itself, and you did not look beyond it. There would be children, of course, which were inevitable, unimaginable and not particularly interesting. Sex hardly came into it. I was passionately addicted to Greek mythology as a child, which was full of pairings and alliances – not always straight marriages, making them a touch confusing – and the erotic overtones seeped through to me, but not in any specific way, simply as some elusive atmospheric that lent spice and flavour.
Marriage was the essential goal, apparently, and the implication was that it was permanent. Divorce was, of course, around but it was uncommon and uneasy – a shifty word, mentioned only in an undertone. I had heard it, just, but as one of those mysterious adult references, which one must not pursue. Something dark and not quite nice. Later, after my parents' divorce, when my mother had remarried and dropped out of my life for a couple of years and I was living with my father, it homed in with a vengeance. I was now branded myself – a child of divorce, which was not a good thing to be, and I must
not refer to the matter unless absolutely necessary. Grown-ups would murmur amongst themselves and eye me sympathetically. The sympathy made me feel important but the status was clearly undesirable.
Very different fifty years later, thanks be. Divorce remains a grim experience for all concerned, but the many children affected no longer feel unique, stigmatized, in some puzzling way disreputable. They will all know others in the same position. The word itself is defused. It has implications, but is no longer loaded, no longer carries a freight of unmentionable things. A status now, and that is that. Equally, the single parent is simply a social category. My father, single-parenting in the late 1940s, was an object of pity and a certain prurient interest. Fashionable women friends took me shopping for clothes and came back with garments he considered unsuitable and too expensive. More crucially, he had to cope with a difficult adolescent traumatized by the combination of family break-up and removal from the childhood home in Egypt to this chill and alien place, England. No solicitous counselling available back then. The ethos of the times was that, in the face of misfortune, you buckled to and got on with things. And if the misfortune was divorce, the less said the better.