The Peppered Moth Read online

  ‘Joy cometh in the morning.’ Will it ever come?

  Bessie Bawtry rocked a little, with her short arms round her thin knees, and nodded in private ritual to her cotton bobbin. A professional observer from a later age—for one cannot suppose that Freud and his contemporaries would have found this modest, undeveloped case of much interest—might have diagnosed a problem in the making. A withdrawal, perhaps a psychosis. Why was this child not out on the street with her playmates, throwing her bit of slate at the chalked hopscotch grid, or skipping, or winding through the branched arms of in-and-out-the-windows, or creeping up on her friends in a scary game of grandmother’s footsteps? Was she afraid she might always be It? For she was not very strong, nor very agile, though she was not clumsy. (Pelmanism, the memory game, is the only game at which she will excel.) Why did she choose this secondary cavelight, when out there on Slotton Road the sun shone bright, and at night the moon’s brightness glimmered through the smoky air? Other children played on the street. Why was Bessie sitting there intoning verses to a cotton bobbin instead of sitting by her mother’s knee and helping her with the peg rug? Did her parents abuse her? Did they neglect her? Was she jealous of her harmless little sister?

  No, her parents did not abuse her. And they were attentive, in their own ways. But their ways, one might now say, were not very good. Bessie Bawtry’s mother Ellen did not know how to play and did not understand children. She did not like children, as a class. Nobody had played with her when she was a child, for in those days childhood had hardly been invented, and now she did not play with her own children. She sometimes rocked the baby when she woke and cried, but Bessie was now, at the age of five, considered far too big to sit on her knee. Ellen never sang to her children, for once upon a time, or so it was said, her husband had mocked her—once, once only—for singing out of tune. And she had never attempted a lullaby since. She kept an apologetic, a vindictive silence, and never sang again.

  Dora, Bessie’s sister, was sleeping now, in a corner, in the Moses basket which she was fast outgrowing. Ellen Bawtry, born Ellen Cudworth, was happy with this, for Ellen liked her children to be quiet and good. She did not like Bessie to play on the street with the rough ones. She claimed that the street was dirty. And she was right. Anything beyond her own carefully whitened doorstep was dirty. Ellen, like her daughter Bessie, disliked dirt. They were at one on this. Ellen had always been at war with dirt. She lost, but she fought on. Bessie would not respect her for these battles, because she was to observe only the defeat, not the struggle. Therefore she was to despise her mother. That is the way it is with mothers and daughters.

  Dora, unlike Bessie, was a robust and placid baby. She was never much trouble. There was not room in one family for two delicate children. One was quite enough. Dora chose her destiny wisely.

  Mrs Bawtry, if asked, would have said that she loved her daughters. But she would not have expected the question, nor would she have liked it, and indeed in all her life it was never to be put to her. Emotions were not her forte. It was hard to say what her forte was. She is not even very good at pegging that peg rug. One cannot go far wrong with a peg rug made of coarse strips of old trousers and worn-out jackets, in shades of navy and grey and brown. One cannot go far right either. And she went wrong.

  Bert Bawtry—his christened name was George, but for some forgotten reason he was always addressed as Bert—had a talent or two. He was good with the electrics. This was just as well, for he was by trade an electrical engineer. He worked at Bednerby Main, but was on call in many local domestic crises, and achieved popularity by his ability to fix, for free, the power failures at the cinema down the road. He loved his motorbike and sidecar, and belonged to the Automobile Association Motorcycle Club. He also wrote in a good, clear copperplate script which would have put the illegible scribblings of his grandchildren to shame. And, unlike his wife, he could sing. He liked to raise his voice in chapel, and he attended the choral society’s weekly meetings to sing the praises of the Lord. He cared nothing for the Lord, for he was not a religious man, but he liked the sound of the singing. Every Christmas, he sang his way through the bass parts of The Messiah, assuring Breaseborough that the Saviour’s yoke was easy and his burden light, bellowing forth the Hallelujah Chorus, and chanting to the gates to lift up their heads. Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting portals!

  He was not allowed to sing at home.

  He had a mildly sadistic nature, though he would have been astonished had anyone tried to tell him so, for his sadism took the socially acceptable form of pinching his elder daughter’s cheeks until tears came into her eyes, and of burning the back of her hand with a teaspoon hot from his tea. He also described with too much relish the deaths of cats and dogs in the burning fiery furnace of the Destructor at the Electrical Works, and the injuries sustained by miners down the pit. But he never hit anyone. Ellen Bawtry would not have put up with being hit. Mr Bawtry was not a violent or a drinking man, unlike many of the men of the families whose clogs tramped their way each dawn to Bednerby Main. The Bawtrys were a cut above that kind of thing. They were overground, not underground people, and meant to stay that way. Ellen Bawtry considered herself lucky in Bert Bawtry. And, all things considered, she was. She had married late, and cautiously, and she was satisfied with what she had got.

  Ellen and Bert Bawtry were not bad people or bad parents. They tried. They were respectable. They did not hurt their children, but they did not indulge or pet them. Their normal mode was repressive. The normal mode of Breaseborough was repressive, and Ellen and Bert were not innovative. They went along with it. Their children, when small, were afraid of them. Most children, in those days, were afraid of their parents.

  It is not pleasant to use this tone about Bert and Ellen Bawtry. They cannot help their stony lives. But if we were to find another tone, the heart might break. And then where would we be? What good would that do, Ellen Bawtry herself would be the first to ask.

  We might find ourselves obliged to weep. We might not be able to stop weeping. And what would be the point of that?

  Bessie sat under the table, Dora sucked her thumb as she slept in her cradle, Ellen Bawtry hooked and pulled at her length of brown sacking, and Bert Bawtry read the racing results, then a motorcycle magazine. He did not gamble himself, except for an annual flutter on the legendary St Leger, but he liked to know what was what. He liked the names of the horses, and something of spirit in him liked it when one won against the odds. A disagreeable smell of boiled meat issued mournfully from the blackened kitchen range. The Bawtrys, in these prewar years, did not go hungry. They did not eat well, but they ate a lot. Both Bert and Ellen were stout, as people of their age were in those days.

  Prospects for young Bessie, with her refined nature and her great expectations, did not seem too good on that October evening long ago. It seemed that nothing would ever change. It seemed she would never get out of here.

  It was lucky, really, that Mrs Bawtry did not let Bessie play on the street. It was more dangerous out there than any of them knew, than any of them could have known.

  Against known dangers, Ellen Bawtry warned and protected her daughters. The world beyond the wooden cave was full of menace. Steep steps, runaway horses, spiked railings, epidemics of whooping cough and measles and diphtheria. The gormless gaslighter, the loiterer on the corner, the cracks in the pavement, the poisonous coloured icing on those gross Whitsuntide buns. Glucose, germs, splinters. Boiled sweets. The very earth was mined. Beneath the streets, a mile down, toiled the employees of Bednerby Main, in dark tunnels supported by wooden pit props. The ground might give at any moment and let one down into the darkness. The crust was thin. It was easy to fall through. Dawn by dawn the miners tramped their way to the pithead. They were of another race, an underground race. They were the scum of the earth, the dregs of the earth. (This is how Ellen Bawtry spoke of her neighbours.) The streets might at any moment crack and open in terrible fissures, and the menace b
eneath would grab one’s ankle and pull one down, however clean one’s ankle socks. It was not safe to venture far. Between the scum and the dregs one might hope, by keeping still, to survive, in some kind of suspension. Do not rise with the scum, do not sink with the dregs. Stay safe. Stay where you are. Keep your mean place.

  No wonder Bessie Bawtry hid.

  Bessie’s earliest memory was of a steep and narrow staircase. Strait was the way. A narrow, steep incline, of steps too high for her short legs, and herself midway, on the seventh step, crouching, unable to climb up, afraid to fall down. The drugget-protected carpet runner was tethered with cruel rods and clamped down with brass teeth. Its abrasive weave attacked her knees and her fingers. She was afraid to let out a whimper. The great sharp edges towered above her, the geometric cliffs plunged down beneath her. How had she got there? It was forbidden. And now she must stay there for ever, trapped, between two perils, in utter terror of wrath or of unbeing. She had been paralysed with fear. How had she got there? She had been unable to move. What had rescued her? She could never remember. Had she been slapped or scolded for climbing the stairs? She did not know. And were the stairs in her birth-home, in Slotton Road, or in some stranger’s house? Again, she did not know. Could that puny little staircase even have seemed so long, so steep, so high? Did the memory belong to her grandmother’s house in Leeds, of which she had no other recollection? She would never know, would never work it out.

  But again and again, throughout her life, she would dream of that staircase. A birth trauma, we now might call it. Will Bessie Bawtry ever learn this term? It seems unlikely, as she crouches in her cave. But so much is unlikely. Bessie Bawtry herself is unlikely, and so are her imaginings. (‘Where did she get those notions from?’ will be an indignant, often dismissive, but occasionally proud refrain.) Nobody taught Bessie to recoil from stale fish, from over-boiled meat, from suet, from dank lavatory moss on the steps of the outside privy, from the silt that stiffened the curtains. Nobody had taught her that the town’s unmade streets were unsightly, nor that its patches of wasteland were an affront to order and to common sense. She had never seen a handsome building or a well-planned town. Had she constructed for herself some image of the Ideal City from photographs in newspapers and magazines, from paintings, from descriptions in books? And if she had, what gave her the notion that she had a right to inhabit it?

  The house in Slotton Road had been built in 1904, not long before Bessie was born, but she was not to remember it as a new house, for the dirt had invaded it so rapidly. But new it had been, and not so long ago. It was a corner house, and of that the Bawtrys were proud, for corner houses were desirable. The street itself straggled along in a haphazard, low, creeping, speculative manner. Fern Villas, a semi-detached double-fronted building, had been built first, and was dated 1902 in crude Art Nouveau script: this was followed in 1903, if the runes spoke true, by Hurst House, marginally detached. Then came the rapid march of unnamed numbers, of two-storey houses in red brick with shallow projecting bays, not quite regular or uniform in design, but showing small signs of not always very happy or confident decorative independence—a fretted eave, a patterned airbrick, a rudimentary floral motif in fired clay over a doorway. The little town had grown from a population of four hundred in 1800 to fourteen thousand in 1900, and was still growing. The streets marched, met a dead end, turned a corner, then groped and wandered blindly on. The streets marched over Gorse Croft and Cat Balk and Chapel Pit and Coally Pond and Longdoles. They marched right up to Gospel Well. They marched over field and fell. People had to be housed. Lot converged on lot, unplanned, undesigned, parcelled out. Small tenants paid small rents to small landlords, and bigger tenants paid slightly bigger rents to bigger landlords. The lucky ones were those that found they owned the coalfields. The unlucky ones were those that worked the coalfields. A thin grassy layer of agriculture continued to cover the wide basin of the valley, but the riches lay below.

  Slotton Road was undistinguished, but it was better than some of the other new streets. At least the Bawtry house did not front straight on to the pavement. Each house in Slotton Road had a small area, a yard or so across, beneath its bay, fenced off by a low wall or railings with a wrought-iron gate. Not quite a garden, not quite a yard. ‘A waste of space,’ as Bessie might have described it, in her caustic later vein. But as a child she was proud of it. She despised those whose unprotected houses lined the roadway, whose front-parlour windows were shrouded by grimy Nottingham lace.

  Contempt was common currency in Breaseborough. Those with little are trained to despise those with less. Contempt marks off an area, it marks you off from the common street. You are protected from the common by a small, useless, ugly, proud, discriminatory little asphalt patch.

  Canal Street, Cemetery Road, Coal Pit Lane, Quarry Bank, Clay Pit Way, Gashouse Lane, Goosebutt Terrace. They didn’t mince words round Breaseborough. At least Slotton didn’t mean anything dirty or rude. Slotton Road was called after a fishmonger, but that wasn’t too obvious. And there wouldn’t have been any point in calling it Belle Vue or Rosemount or Mount Pleasant, would there? People in Breaseborough liked to call a spade a spade.

  Bessie Bawtry sat under the table and watched the glowing coals. She watched the coals and the shadow of the firelight as it flickered on the wall and on the sheen of the disproportionately large mahogany sideboard for which her father had paid five pounds and ten shillings. In the red heart of the fire, palaces and castles blossomed, blushed and crumbled, caverns opened and pulsed, and flaming ferns of fossilized forests branched. Bessie’s clean white little bobbin sat safely in its place and nobody but she knew it was there.

  Her father read the paper. Her mother pegged a rug. Her sister Dora quietly slept.

  Is Bessie to be our heroine? Something of interest must happen to her, or we would not have wasted all this time making her acquaintance. Something must surely single her out from all those other statistics that Dr Hawthorn has fed into his computer. But to her, as yet, the future was unimaginably opaque, although it was more real than the present. Bessie had decided at an early age that Breaseborough was not real. It was a mistake.

  She was not alone in this view. The exodus from Breaseborough is part of our plot. Some stayed, some left, and, decades on, some were gathered back into the hall of the Wesleyan chapel to try to retrace these journeys.

  Months passed, years passed. Bessie came out from under the table, and forgot her cotton bobbin, and Dora woke up and began to try to make a noise. Ellen and Bessie between them soon put a stop to that. Bessie had decided that she was the most important member of the family, and had already managed to impose her conception and her will on others. Dora must learn to stay in second place. Bessie was determined to occupy the centre of the story, and she did not want a competitor. She had not yet perfected her techniques for subordinating others, but she was working on them.

  It would be tedious to follow Bessie through all the stages and stopping places of her infancy, through those interminable Sunday school classes and Whitsuntide processions. Those days are dead and gone, and so is the dullness that went with them, the slow prose that described them. Bessie Bawtry prayed for acceleration, before she even knew what she was praying for, and in the end she got it. Whether she was grateful for what she got remains to be seen. But we can, at this stage in the story, predict that despite her delicate constitution, she may well live to a ripe—or perhaps an unripe?—old age.

  There was a month or two in her early life when she looked as though she was not going to make it, for Bessie, like millions of others around the world, nearly died of the Spanish flu in the autumn of 1918. Before this crisis, she had been making what school reports describe as Steady Progress. She had graduated from Morley Mixed Infants (sums, letters, clay and pencils), where the motherly Miss George sometimes let you sit on her knee. She had moved on to Morley Girls (knitting, sums, letters and ink) and had said good-bye with relief to the stout and ailing alpaca-clad headmistress th
ere, whose chief educational principle had consisted of ‘knocking it into them’, and who was forever sending children on pointless errands to look for her pills or her spectacles. Under her regime Bessie had been a failure as a knitter of socks and a turner of seams, but had mastered the names of the Books of the Bible and the rivers of Europe, and was good at reciting by rote.

  She had, by the age of ten, exhausted the limited supply of reading matter in the Morley Girls Library, and had read over and over again the small collection of books in Slotton Road, most of which were Sunday school prizes which had been awarded to various Victorian Cudworths and Bawtrys for chapel attendance. Most of these Bessie found as contemptible as Mr Beever’s bathetic sermons. A characteristic example was The Dairyman’s Daughter; an Authentic Narrative from Real Life by the late Rev. Legh Richmond, A.M., Rector of Turvey, Bedfordshire, reprinted by William Walker in Otley, which had been given to one of her Cudworth aunts, Selina, by Bessie’s grandmother in 1861. This doll-sized pocket volume, four inches by three, had looked promising when discovered in the bottom of her mother’s sewing drawer. Its yellow endpapers, its tiny print, its gold-engraved title, its vaguely Oriental embossed red-brown cover, and its frontispiece of deathbed and medicine bottles might well have attracted a hypochondriac child. But the text was excessively religious, and Bessie at once saw through its condescending equation of servile rustic poverty with virtue. She could not identify with the abject piety of its heroine Elizabeth, even though they shared a name, and the clergyman-narrator’s profound selfsatisfaction irritated her intensely. His praise of humble cottages seemed compromised by his delight in grand mansions and fair prospects. She could not have provided a Marxist critique of it at the age of nine, but she could and did react with honest indignation. Such stuff! She wondered what Great-Aunt Selina had made of it.