The Peppered Moth (2 page)

Bessie Bawtry, from her earliest memories, thought of herself as special. And so she was. Most children are special to themselves. But Bessie had an unusual determination, and an unusually strong desire to impose her own view of herself upon others.

She had a precocious intelligence, but she was also a delicate child. She enjoyed ill health. It was her earliest source of pleasure and indulgence. She suffered, as did many of the inhabitants of that small town, from the usual respiratory diseases that plague an industrial population. Each winter they inflamed her throat and constricted her skinny chest and infected her sinuses and bronchioles. Bessie was also endowed with an unusually refined digestive system, and a sense of smell so acute that an unpleasant odour could make her retch and gag and on occasions vomit. Bessie, as her mother complained with forced and grudging pride, was always being sick. These sensitive attributes may have seemed ill-suited to survival in South Yorkshire in the early years of the twentieth century, when pollution was so pervasive that it provoked no comment. Only strangers from the soft south or the rural northern dales noticed its pall. The natives lived in it, coughed in it, spat it out, scrubbed at it, and frequently died of it. They did not much question it. A delicate child like Bessie Bawtry might be expected to die young. Perhaps only the coarser strains had bred and multiplied amongst the slag heaps and the quarries and the pitheads. Bessie may be an evolutionary mistake, a dead end, a throwback to the clear valleys. Natural selection may deselect her. Time will tell. Dr Hawthorn, with his electronic trees and tables, will tell.

Meanwhile, under the tablecloth, Bessie Bawtry sat and rotated her painted cotton bobbin and rehearsed phrases from hymns and from the lessons from the Bible. She could already read, for she was precocious, and had learned several skills at Morley Mixed Infants on the Oxford Road. But the words she now muttered to herself were not the short clean words from the school primer, nor the jingling little verses that accompanied Sunday school collection at chapel—

Hear the pennies dropping
Listen as they fall
Every one for Jesus
He shall have them all.

Already, though yet an infant, she despised such stuff, as she despised Mr Beever’s sermons, which took on the mean colouring of the mean streets. Mr Beever preached docility, acceptance, littleness, the second-rate. But the Bible was different. It was grand, extreme and horrid. It spoke damnation and darkness, it sounded cymbals and trumpets, it flared its nostrils and it sniffed another air. Deserts and mountains, valleys and springs, pits and entombments, cedars of Lebanon and roses of Sharon, fishpools of Heshbon and vineyards of Samaria. Its polysyllables had nourished famished poets and wandering Jews and political prisoners and religious fanatics for centuries, and now they nourished Bessie Bawtry. She would turn against the Bible, in years to come, but now, as an infant, she invoked it. ‘Watchman, what of the night?’ ‘His anger endureth but a moment: weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.’

We must find our sustenance where we may.

The texts of the Hebrews travelled by strange routes to the South Yorkshire coalfields. God’s Sacred Word, though not in the form or language known to Bessie, had been heard in the hamlets of Hammervale since the Dark Ages. It had brought a new strain to the genetic sloth of the valley dwellers. Those who had ears to hear, let them hear. Not many listened, it must be said, and those who did listen came up with some unorthodox interpretations. Nevertheless, the sounds rolled on,
in saecula saeculorum,
intoned from the pulpit, and in times of stress and heresy yelled forth in the market place amidst the rotting stinking inland fish. In ditches and dungeons dwelled the Word of the Lord, with tinkers and cobblers and all manner of dissidents, and now it muttered itself to itself in a cavern beneath a wooden table with fluted legs in a back living room in Slotton Road, Breaseborough, which is on the way out to Bednerby Main.

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

The Jesus pennies dropped into the bottom of a specially adapted ginger-beer bottle. When the bottle was full, it was smashed and the pennies were released for Jesus. What he spent them on, nobody knew or dared to ask. The extortion was resented, especially as it was coyly described in the chapel records as a ‘Glad Offering’, but the moment of smashing did provide a thrill of rebellious, destructive delight, prefiguring the delight that Bawtry descendants may take in hurling their bottles into bottle banks and listening to the purge of their splintering.

The bottle factory was then the second-largest employer in town. Glass predated coal as an industry here. But the bottles produced were not wine bottles. Wine had disappeared with the Romans. It will make a comeback, but not for some decades.

The Rose of Sharon, when Bessie eventually came to identify it as a plant, was to prove a great disappointment to her. ‘I am the Rose of Sharon, and the Lily of the Valley.’ Was this the excellency of Carmel and the glory of Lebanon? Surely not. It was a weedy, untidy, scruffy suburban undershrub, with leaves that curled and turned brown at the edges, with undistinguished yellow flowers, disorganized straggling spotty red anthers, and patchy inadequate gloss. She found it hard to believe that this was the flower that had bloomed in glory in the plains and on the slopes of the Holy Land. It must, she decided, be some inferior, second-rate, Yorkshire variety. She banned it for ever from any of her imagined gardens, along with the privet and the laurel. She banned, by association, the perfume of the lily of the valley, which, she was to maintain, had a vulgar shop-girl smell. Maybe words are always more beautiful than things, and reality but a pale shadow of the Word?

‘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 beneath 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.