Read Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill for Free Online

causes a person to be what he or she is – I dare to do it again.

    Aged seven, with my brother Andrew and little sister Patience
     

THEN
     
     

LESSONS
     
     
    I LONG TO BE a fish, water flowing as easily through lungs as over skin and allowing supple movement or lazy suspension. I lean over the rail of the bridge which spans the weir, and stare into the pool below it. Brown yet transparent, with golden gleams, like clear dark jelly. It makes me lick my lips with thirst.
    The summer of my ninth year was hot, so the lake was low and only a little water spilt over the weir into the pool. After heavy rain it roared over and to prevent a flood the gate in the weir’s bowels was cranked open so that, in addition to the overspill, a flying buttress of water escaped lower down, out of the lake’s depths. Today’s trickle was less exciting, but it allowed the pool to lie at peace. It was hard to decide between violent beauties and tranquil ones because things ought to have an order – good, better, best – and when they didn’t it made me uneasy. But if it was impossible to decide between the tumultuous weir and the still pool, at least it was obvious that each was best when it was ‘most’ – and the pool today could not have been more what a pool on a hot summer day ought to be.
    There were yellow water-lilies – wild ones, which I believed to be rare. The ones up in the garden, big and white with golden centres, were specially planted and originated in the Orient (was I told that, or was it just that they looked like it?), and that was surely usually the truth about water-lilies. We might be the only people in England who had wild ones growing in their pools as though living in India or Persia … one of those places from which precious things came. And my uncle saw a kingfisher here. All I could see now were dragon-flies zigzagging swiftly between hover and hover, and a moorhen stepping through the grass near the bridge, probably a parent of the eggs my brother and I ate that spring. The nest was anchored beyond arm’s reach, so we took the eggs with a spoon tied to a long cane. Luckily they were new-laid – cracking a moorhen’s egg was always an anxious business.
    The contents of an egg which was too far gone echoed other horrors: there was sometimes, for instance, a dead animal hidden in long grass. The gamekeeper’s ‘larders’ in the woods – wire strung with the rotting corpses of weasels, stoats, rats, jays, carrion crows and other threats to his pheasants and partridges – these were bad enough, but I knew where they were and could avoid them, or if I had to pass one because I was with someone who might think me silly, I could steel myself in advance, and look away. But sliding into a ditch to get at a clump of primroses: then, if there was suddenly a dead animal, my very blood recoiled. The worst was last summer, wading through a field of wheat (though trying not to trample it down, which was forbidden) for the pleasure of being in all that gold and smelling its warmth. My foot came down on a dead rabbit. Swerving, I almost landed on another, and realized that all round among the wheatstalks, partly hidden by the undergrowth of weeds, were collapsed skeletons with their loathsome tatters of fur – a sort of rabbit graveyard: how to escape without treading on another? Then panic sent me plunging out of the wheat. I could remember it only in quickly blinked-away glimpses, it was so dreadful. It did not stop me walking again through tall growth, or climbing into ditches, or exploring woods, but I was much more careful which diminished the pleasure.
    It was a puzzle, the way things were rarely exactly what they ought to be. If I had run myself into a sweat, and the grass was so soft and green that it should have been caressing when I flopped down in it, there was usually a thistle or a hidden stone, or after a few seconds my legs would start to itch because of ants crawling over them. And if music