I was supposed to be in charge of my sisters and it weighed on me. I did my best, but at nine and ten I was not very good at it. The worst thing happened just after Isobel had been to a pantomime with a school friend, where she had been entranced to find the fairies swooping over the stage in flying-harness. She wanted to do it too. So Ursula and I obligingly tied skipping ropes together, slung them across a beam above The Cottage stairs, and hauled Isobel up there by a noose under her armpits. She dangled, rotating gently, looking worried. "Look more graceful," we advised her. She stuck out her arms – and her legs, too, like a starfish-and went on hanging. Absorbed in her experience and knowing that one had to suffer for art’s sake, she failed to say she was suffocating. Luckily, Ursula and I became worried and cut her down with blunt nail scissors just in time.
Around this time, my mother decreed that Isobel should become a ballerina, because of her looks. My mother’s main substitute for attending to us was to assert periodically that Isobel was beautiful and a born dancer, Ursula a potential actress, and me an ugly semi-delinquent with a high IQ. Her other substitute for attention was to make our school uniforms herself. She would buy half the required garments, angrily protesting at their cost and the number of clothing coupons they took, and make the rest. Other children jeered, because our uniforms were always the wrong style and material, and it mystified us that their parents could afford enough coupons for a complete uniform. Other clothing my mother got from the local orphanage. The matron, who was a friend of my parents’, used to give us all the clothes donated which she did not think suitable for the orphans. We often looked very peculiar. When I protested, my mother would angrily describe her own childhood with a widowed mother in World War I. "You’re all extremely lucky," she would conclude. "You have advantages I never dreamed of." At which I felt acutely guilty.
Even so, I might protest that my mother had had proper clothes. I was prone to spot flaws in any argument and I had an odd theory that you ought to be truthful about your feelings. This usually sent my mother into a vituperative fury. This was part of the reason why she called me semi-delinquent. Another reason was that I had inherited my father’s tendency to fly into towering rages. I also used to shout at my sisters because they seldom listened to mere speech. But I think the main reason was that I was always at some more or less mad project: some of which were harmless – like dressing as a ghost and pretending to haunt the graveyard, inventing a loom, or directing a play; some of which were liable to cause trouble – like the time I tried to organise a Garden Fete without asking anyone; some of which were outright dangerous – like walking on the roof, or the time I could have attracted enemy aeroplanes by signalling Morse code by flashlight to friends outside the village. For some reason I believed it my duty to live a life of adventure and I used to worry that, for a would-be writer, I had too little imagination.
Clarance House had two gardens, one ordinary one and a second, much bigger, across a lane at the back. This other garden was kept locked. I was always begging for the key. It was like paradise, or the extension of life into the imagination. Here were espalier apples, roses, lilies, vegetables, and a green path running under an arcade of creepers to an old octagonal summer house in the distance. Near the summer house my father kept bees. These were a notoriously fierce strain, and the gardener could often be seen racing down the green path pursued by an angry black cloud of them. But the bees never attacked us. I used to go and talk to them, because I had read that bees were part of your family and you should tell them all your news – although I never spoke to them when the gardener was by. He hated superstition. He was very religious. As a young man, he told people quite frankly, he had attended both church and chapel to be quite sure of heaven; but one day on the Sampford road he had had a vision in which an angel descended and told him always to go always to chapel. And he was only one of a crowd of remarkable people who swarmed through the house. There were ham actors, gays, politicians, hirsute artists, hysterical sopranos, a musician who looked like Dr. Dolittle, another who believed in the transmigration of souls, an agriculturalist who looked like Hitler, a teddy girl, local vicars, one long thin and gloomy who grew tobacco, another stout and an expert on wine ...
The vicar of Thaxted was a communist and people used to come from Great Dunmow in hob nailed boots specially to walk cut noisily during his sermons. Actually his politics derived more from to William Morris than Marx. The church was hung with light drapery to enhance its considerable elegance and he taught any child who wished to learn a musical instrument. "Not you," said my mother. "You’re tone deaf." Or maybe just deaf, I used to think, on Thursdays when the bell ringers practiced. The Cottage was almost opposite the bell tower and the sound was deafening. In fact I had little to do with the church otherwise because I settled my religious muddles by deciding that I had better be an atheist.
School brought more strange experiences – with an uncomfortable tendency to pick up motifs from the past. Isobel and I were sent to the village school, where we came up against the English class system for the first time. As children of intellectuals, we ranked above village kids and below farmers or anybody rich, but sort of sideways. This meant we were fair game for all. The headmaster had only contempt for us. He said I was never likely to pass the exam to enter grammar school ("the Scholarship," everyone called it) and almost refused to enter me. My mother had one of her rows over that (by this time I was dimly aware that my mother truly enjoyed a row). In school, we spent all but one afternoon a week knitting endless scarves and balaclavas for the forces, while one of the teachers told us about tortures, shivering with strange excitement while she spoke. I once nearly fainted at her account of the rack. The a other afternoon, the boys were allowed to do drawing and the girls sewing. I protested about this. The headmaster threatened to cane me for impertinence. At which a berserker rage came over me. I seized a shoddy metal ruler and tied it in a knot. I was sent home, but not caned, to my surprise.
Being fair game for all meant that the school bullies chased you home. One winter day, in snow, a bully chased me, pelting me with ice. It cut. Terrified, I raced away down the alley between the blacksmith and the barber and shot into the glassy white road ahead. Too late, I saw a car driving past. I think I hurtled clean over its bonnet, getting knocked out on the way. I came to, face down, looking back the way I had come. "Help!" I shouted to the blacksmith in his forge. "I’ve been run over!" Not accurate, but I was upset. The blacksmith’s wife improved on this by racing into the barber’s, where she knew my father was having a haircut, yelling, "Mr. Jones! Come quickly! Your daughter’s under a car!" Even less accurate, because the car was down the hill, slewing about as it braked. My father dived out of the barber’s with his hair short one side and long the other. The driver got there about the same time and his face was truly a light green, poor man. I was quite impressed at the effect I had had.
I passed "the Scholarship" later that year. My parents’ connection with the Essex Education Committee enabled them to discover that my marks were spectacularly good. I continued to get spectacular marks most of my school career. This is not a thing I can take much credit for. I just happened to have near photographic memory and an inborn instinct about how to do exams – which always struck me as cheating, because whenever I was in doubt about a fact, all I had to do was close my eyes and read the remembered page. But it was the one thing my parents cared about. My mother decided that I was to go to her old Oxford college, and added that to the ugly, semi-delinquent, brainy list.
As a semi-delinquent I was sent as a boarder to a school in Brentwood; but there was no room in the boarding house and I had to live for one endless term with the family I later put inEight Days of Luke . Then a girl left the boarding house and I had her bed. This was an old overused hospital bed and it broke under me; and the matron made public discovery that my ears were unwashed. As a punishment – and I am still not clear whether it was for the bed or the ears or both – I had to sleep on my own in an old lumber room. Just as before, in Coniston, I could not muster courage to run away. Nor could I muster courage to tell my parents: I was too ashamed. But I did tell them, because I enjoyed it so, how the matron marched us in line every Saturday to the cinema to see every film that happened to be showing. This philistine practice horrified them. I was removed and sent by bus to a Quaker school in Saffron Walden as day pupil instead. I was there from 1946 to 1952. It was mainly a boarding school, which meant that I, and later my sisters, were as usual part of an oddball minority. Quakers do not believe in eccentricity or in academic success. They found me highly eccentric for getting good marks and for most other things too.
As time went on, my parents had less and less time for us. We never went on holiday with them. When they took their yearly holiday, we were left with the gardener, the minister of the chapel, or the matron of the orphanage – or simply dumped on Granny. Granny was truly marvelous, five feet of Yorkshire common sense, love, and superstition. She was always saying wise things. I remember, among many sayings, when one time she had given me a particularly good present, she said, "No, it’s not generous. Being generous is giving something that’s entire hard to give." She was so superstitious that she kept a set of worthless china to break when she happened to break something good, on the grounds that breakages always came in threes and it was as well to get it over. I would have been lost without Granny, that I know.
That was a grim time in the world. The war, which had receded when we left London, came close again as rockets and pilotless planes. They were terrifying. Then there was the anxiety of D Day, followed by the discovery of the concentration camps, which made me realise just how mad the world had been. This was followed by great shortages and the cold war. Hiroshima horrified me: the cold war made me expect a Hiroshima bomb in England any day.
Things were grim at home too. When a course did was running at Clarance House – which was continuously during summer and two-thirds of the time during winter – we quite often came home from school to find that nobody had remembered to save us anything to eat. If we went into the kitchen to forage, the cook shrieked at us to get out. When no course was running, my father would sit slumped and silent in the only family room, which was also his office. He rarely spoke to any of us unless he was angry, and then he could not remember which one of us he was talking to and had to go through all our names before he got the right one. Almost every night, during winter, my mother would shout at him – with some justice – that he kept all his charm for his job and none for her in private; whereupon he would fly into a towering Welsh rage and they would bawl at one another all evening. When it was over, my mother would rush into the kitchen, where we had retreated to do homework, and recount angrily all that had been said, while we waited with pens politely poised, knowing that any comment only made things worse. This routine was occasionally lightened by ludicrous incidents, such as the time the cat locked us all into that office by playing with the bolt on the outside of its door; or when our aged corgi suddenly upped and bit my father in the butt while he was chasing Isobel to hit her.
My parents did remember birthdays and Christmas, but only at the last minute. That is how I remember that day peace was declared with Japan. It was the day before my eleventh birthday and all the shops were shut in celebration, so I got no presents that year. This left a void, for birthdays were the one occasion when my father could be persuaded to buy books. By begging very hard, I got Puck of Pook’s Hill when I was ten and Greenmantle when I was twelve. But my father was inordinately mean about money. He solved the Christmas book-giving by buying an set of Arthur Ransome books, which he kept locked in a high cupboard and dispensed one between the three of us each year. Clarance House had books, he said. True: it had been stocked mostly from auctions and, from this stock, before I was fourteen, I had read all of Conrad, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Bertrand Russell on relativity, besides a job lot of history and historic novels – and all thirty books from the public library in the guildhall. Isobel and I suffered from perpetual book starvation. We begged, saved, and cycled for miles to borrow books, but there were still never enough. When I was thirteen, I began writing narratives in old exercise books to fill this gap, and read them aloud to my sisters at night. I finished two, both of epic length and quite terrible. But in case someone is tempted to say my father me a favour, I must say this is not the case at all. I always would have been a writer. I still had this calm certainty. All these epics did for me was to prove that I could finish a story. My mother was always telling me that I was much too incompetent to finish anything. During her ugly, semi-delinquent litanies she frequently said, "When you do the Oxford exams, you’ll get a place, but you won’t do better than that. You haven’t got what it takes."
In his stinginess, my father allowed us one penny a week pocket money. Money for anything else you had to ask him for. Looking back, I see I accepted this, partly because I thought it was normal and knew I wasn’t worth more, but also because asking for money at least meant he spoke to me while he was enquiring suspiciously into the use of every penny. He also allowed me to darn his socks for sixpence a pair (by this stage I was sewing clothes for myself and my sisters and doing the family wash in spare moments). My sisters, however, rebelled at their poverty and bearded my father in his office. Groaning with dismay, my father upped our allowance to a shilling a week when I was fifteen, on condition that we bought our own soap and toothpaste. A tube of toothpaste cost most of two weeks’ allowance. Isobel and I were by then civilised enough to save for it. Ursula squandered her money.
Ursula always took the eccentric way, particularly over illness. The cardinal sin we could commit was to be ill. It meant that someone had grudgingly to cross the yard with meals for us. My mother usually made a special trip to our bedsides to point out what a nuisance we were being. Her immediate response to any symptom of sickness was to deny it. "It’s only psychological," she would say. On these grounds I was sent to school with chicken pox, scarlet fever, German measles and, for half a year, with appendicitis. Luckily the appendix never quite became acute. The local doctor, somewhat puzzled by my mother’s assertion that there was nothing wrong with me, eventually took it out. He was an old military character and, in keeping with the rest of life, he had only three fingers in his right hand. I still have a monster scar. I had the appendix in a bottle for years, partly to show my mother the boils on it and partly to live up to the title of semi-delinquent. But Ursula, having concluded that "only psychological" meant the same as "purely imaginary", deduced that it was therefore no more wrong to pretend to be ill than to be really ill. She drew on her strong acting talent, contrived to seem at death’s door whenever she was tired of school, and spent many happy hours in bed.
I put some of the foregoing facts in The Time of the Ghost, but what I think I failed to get over in that book was how close we three sisters were. We spent not many hours delightedly discussing one another’s ideas and looked after one another strenuously. For example, when I was fourteen, Isobel was told by the Royal Ballet School that she could never, ever make it as a ballet dancer. Her life fell to pieces. She had been told so firmly that she was a ballerina born that she did not know what she was any longer. She cried one entire night. After five hours, when we still could not calm her, I crossed the yard in my pyjamas – it was raining – to get parental help. A mistake. My mother jumped violently and clutched her heart when I appeared. My father ordered me back to bed, despite my explanation and despite the fact that we had been ringing our recently installed emergency bell before I went over. I trudged back through the rain, belatedly remembering that my mother hated giving sympathy. "It damages me," she had explained over my appendix. Ursula and I sat up the rest of the night convincing Isobel that she had a brain as well as a body. We were close because we had to be.
This solidarity did not hold so well when our parents laughed at us. I became very clumsy in my teens and they laughed at anything I did that was not academic. Perhaps they needed the amusement, because, for the next year, my father sickened mysteriously. When I was fifteen, he was diagnosed as having intestinal cancer. To my misfortune, something painful went wrong with my left hip at the same time, so that I could only walk with a sailor-like roll, causing much mirth. It was the beginning of multiple back trouble which has plagued me the rest of my life, but no one knew about such things then. The natural assumption was that I was trying to be interesting because my father was ill. It is hard to express the guilt I felt.
My father, full of puritanical distaste, weathered that operation. He developed secondary cancer almost at once, but that was not apparent for the next three years or so. Once he had recovered, it occurred to him that I would need special tuition if I were to go to Oxford as planned. The Friends’ School was not geared to university entrance. Academic ambition vied in him with stinginess. Eventually, he approached a professor of philosophy who had just come to live in Thaxted with his wife and small children and asked him to teach me Greek. In exchange, my father offered the philosopher a hand-made dollhouse that someone had given my sisters. My sisters loved the thing and had kept it in beautiful condition. But the philosopher accepted the deal, so no matter what their feelings, the dollhouse was given away. In return, the philosopher gave me three lessons in Greek. Then he ran off with someone else’s wife. I must surely be the only person in the world to have had three Greek lessons for a dollhouse.
After that, pressure mounted on me to succeed academically. In my anxiety to oblige, I overworked. I did nothing like as well as was expected. I did scrape an interview at my mother’s old college. There a majestic lady don said, "Miss Jones," shuddering at my plebeian name, "you are the candidate who uses a lot of slang." She so demoralised me that, when she went on to ask me what I usually read, I looked wildly round her shelves and answered, "Books." I failed. At the eleventh hour, I applied for and got a place at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where I went in 1953.
It was not a happy time. When I got there, I found that John Ruskin had taken belated revenge for the rubbed-out drawings: I had to share his vast, cold studio with a girl who required me to wait on her hand and foot. And my father died after my first term there. I had to stay at home to see to his funeral, and spent the rest of my time at Oxford in nagging anxiety for my sisters, who were not finding my mother easy to live with. However, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were both lecturing then, Lewis booming to crowded halls and Tolkien mumbling to me and three others. Looking back, I see both of them had enormous influence on me, but it is hard to say how, except that they must have been equally influential to others too. I later discovered that almost everyone who went on to write children’s books – Penelope Lively, Jill Paton Walsh, to name only two – was at Oxford at the same time as me, but I barely met them and we never at any time discussed fantasy. Oxford was very scornful of fantasy then. Everyone raised eyebrows at Lewis and Tolkien and said hastily, "But they’re excellent scholars as well."
Let’s go back now to the empty swatch of time before I went up to Oxford, when my father was a periodically at home between times of being guinea pig at an early and unsuccessful form of chemotherapy. I have not said much about the young people who came to Thaxted on courses, because most of them were mere transients; but there were some who came often, some my own age, with whom we became firm friends. One was in love with Isobel (many people were) and he was coming to the house with ten friends to relax after doing finals at Oxford. Now this is an occasion comparable to the time when I was eight and knew that I would be a writer. As soon as I heard they were coming, I was seized with unaccountable excitement. I raced round helping get ready for them and made the tea far too early. They arrived while I made it. In the small hall outside my father’s office I ran into a cluster of them talking with my father. One of them said, "Diana, you know John Burrow, do you?"
I sort of looked. Not properly. All I got was a long beige streak of a man standing with them in front of the old Arthur Ransome cupboard. And instantly I knew I was going to marry this man. It was the same calm and absolute certainty that I had had when I was eight. And it rather irked me, because I hadn’t even looked at him properly and I didn’t know whether Iliked him, let alone loved him.
Luckily both proved to be the case. The relationship survived two years at Oxford when John was graduate student, and a third year when he was a lecturer at King’s College, London. It also survived my mother’s impulsive purchase, after my father died, of a private school in Beeston outside Nottingham, in a very haunted house. We moved there in the summer of 1956. I had been ill all that year, but after four months of listening to invisible footsteps pacing the end of my bedroom, I went to Granny, who was living in Sampford (near where the angel appeared to the gardener) in order to be married to John in Saffron Walden, in a thick fog, three days before Christmas 1956. There are no photographs of the wedding because, as my mother explained, her own wedding was more important. She married Arthur Hughes, a Cambridge scientist, the following summer.
John and I lived in London until September 1957, where I seemed unemployable. I used the time to read Dante, Gibbon, and Norse sagas. Then we moved back to Oxford to a flat in a large house in the Iffley Road, with another family downstairs who became our lifelong friends. Meanwhile, Ursula failed all her exams in protest against academic pressure and made it to drama school. She is now an actress. Isobel was at university in Leicester, working grimly for a good degree, when my stepfather turned her out of his house. She arrived on our doorstep, shattered, around the time I discovered I was pregnant, and was living with us when my son Richard was born in 1958.
She stayed with us until my next son, Michael, was born in 1961, and was married from our flat. Her husband is an identical twin. John, who gave Isobel away, was mightily afraid of handing her to the wrong twin. She is now one of the few women professors in England. Ursula and I always think we did a good job of persuading her she had a brain.
My third son, Colin, was born in 1963. My aim, from this time forward, was to live a quiet life – not an easy ambition in a house full of small children, dogs, and puppies. During this time, to my undying gratitude, John and my children taught me more about ordinary human nature than I had learned up to then. I still had no idea what was normal, you see. After that I found the experiences of my childhood easier to assimilate and could start trying to write. To my dismay, I had to learn how – so I taught myself, doggedly. At first I assumed I would be writing for adults, but my children took a hand there. First Michael threatened to miscarry. I had to stay in bed and, while I did, I read Lord of the Rings. It was suddenly clear to me after that that it was possible to write a long book that was fantasy. Then as the children grew older, they gave me the opportunity to read all the children’s books which I had never had as a child and, what was more, I could watch their reactions while we read them. Very vigorous those were too. They liked exactly the kind of books – full of humour and fantasy, but firmly referred to real life – which I had craved for in Thaxted. Somewhere here it dawned on me that I was going to have write to fantasy anyway, because I was not able to believe in most people’s version of normal life. I started trying. What I wrote was rejected by publishers and agents with shock and puzzlement.
In 1966 we moved briefly to a cold, cold farmhouse in Eynsham while we waited for my husband’s college, Jesus College, to have a house built that we could rent. There Colin started having febrile convulsions and almost everything else went wrong too. I wrote Changeover, my only published adult novel, to counteract the general awfulness.
In 1967, the new house was ready. It had a roof soluble in water, toilets that boiled periodically, rising damp, a south-facing window in the food cupboard, and any number of other peculiarities. So much for my wish for a quiet life. We lived there, contending with electric fountains in the living room, cardboard doors, and so forth, until 1976, except for 1968-9, which year we spent in America, at Yale. Yale, like Oxford, was full of people who thought far too well of themselves, lived very formally, and regarded the wives of academics as second class citizens; but America, round the edges of it, I loved. I try to go back as often as I can. We went for a glorious time to Maine, and also visited the West Indian island of Nevis, where, to my astonishment, a number of people greeted me warmly, saying, "I’m so glad you’ve come back!" I still don’t know who they thought I was. But an old man on a donkey thought John was a ghost.
On our return, now all the children were at school, I started writing in earnest. A former pupil of John’s introduced me to Laura Cecil, who was just starting as a literary agent for children’s books. She became an instant firm friend. With her encouragement, I wrote Wilkins’ Tooth in 1972, Eight Days of Luke in 1973, and The Ogre Downstairs the same year. I laughed so much writing that one that the boys kept putting their heads round the door to ask if I was all right. Power of Three came after that, then Cart and Cwidder, followed by Dogsbody, though they were not published in that order. Charmed Life and Drowned Ammet were both written in 1975.
Also on our return, we acquired a cottage in West Ilsley, Berkshire, as a refuge from the defects of the Oxford house. The chalk hills there, full of racehorses, filled my head with new things to write. It was at this cottage that John was formally asked to apply for the English professorship at Bristol University. He did so, and got the job. We moved here in 1976 and were involved in a nightmare car crash the following month. Despite this, I love Bristol. I love its hills, its gorge and harbours, its mad mixture of old and new, its friendly people, and even its constant rain. We have lived here ever since. All my other books have been written here; for although the car crash, followed by my astonishment at winning the 1977 Guardian Award for Children’s Books, almost stopped me dead between them, I get unhappy if I don’t write. Each book is an experiment, an attempt to write the ideal book, the book my children would like, the book I didn’t have as a child myself. I have still not, after twenty-odd books, written that book. But I keep trying. Nor do I manage to live a quiet life. I keep undertaking things, like visiting schools and teaching courses as a writer, or learning the cello, or doing amateur theatricals, or rashly agreeing to do all the cooking for Richard’s wedding in 1984. Every one of those things has led to comic disasters-except the wedding: that was perfect. My aunt Muriel came to it just before she died, wearing a mink headdress like a Cardinal’s hat, and gave the couple her blessing. My mother also came. She was widowed again in 1975 and keeps on cordial terms with the rest of her family. She thinks John is marvellous.
Another thing that stops me living a quiet life is my travel jinx. This is hereditary: my mother has it and so does my son Colin. Mine works mostly on trains. Usually the engine breaks, but once an old man jumped off a moving train I was on and sent every train schedule in the country haywire for that day. And my books have developed an uncanny way of coming true. The most startling example of this was last year, when I was writing the end of A Tale of Time City. At the very moment when I was writing about all the buildings in Time City falling down, the roof of my study fell in, leaving most of it open to the sky.
Perhaps I don’t need a quiet life as much as I think I do.
Copyright © Diana Wynne Jones