Antonia White: the author of the Frost in May quartet – a truly wonderful series of novels – suffered all her life from terrible writer’s block. It was only after her death that this short autobiography was discovered – she had spent the last fifteen years of her life working on it. The book is edited by her daughter Susan Chitty. As Once in May deals with just the first six years of the author’s life – and it is quite extraordinary in its recall and its ability to recreate those so long ago childhood feelings.
The opening few chapters – as is usual I think with autobiographies – concerns Antonia’s parents and grandparents and their parents. Her father Cecil Botting: a classics schoolmaster, came from a family of Sussex farmers, carpenters, and blacksmiths. It was from her mother that Antonia (actually born Eirene Adeline) took her surname, hating Botting, and all the childhood teasing that went with it, and who could blame her. Both of her White grandparents had sadly died by the time she was a baby, so she never knew them. The Whites were upper middle class, and Antonia’s mother’s mother who died when she was a baby, had been the second wife of a much older man.
Eirene – or Antonia as I shall continue to call her was born in 1899, the only child of Cecil Botting and Christine White. The family lived in Perham Road in London for many years, from where Cecil Botting was able to easily get to St. Paul’s School where he taught, and from where he often tutored students in the evenings. Here the family had just one servant Lizzie, who adored Antonia and could never bear to see her reprimanded. Despite having been a little disappointed not to have had a son, Cecil Botting believed he could just as easily turn his daughter into a good Classics scholar and set out to do so from the time she was very small.
“I know for certain that I was three when my father decided once again to try and impress something on my memory. This time his effort was not wasted as it had been over Queen Victoria’s funeral. I could not forget the first line of the Iliad if I tried or the circumstances in which I learnt it.
He must have been longing from my birth for the day when he could begin my classical education.”
One thing that really made me sit up in surprise (I don’t know if I disbelieve this or not) was Antonia’s assertion that she had a couple of very clear memories from babyhood. She calls these her first lucid moments – the black rails of her cot above her surrounded by white hangings. Later, questioning her parents it was revealed that she did indeed sleep in such a cot. Antonia herself seems more surprised by those things from very early childhood that she cannot remember that she would have thought would have made more impression on her but clearly didn’t.
However, what she does remember is remarkable. No doubt her memories are fuelled by those conversations about the past that occur in all families, but considering she was writing this book well into her seventies, her recall and feeling for those long ago years is perhaps surprisingly sharp.
Antonia White recounts those first few years of childhood through a series of delightful vignettes. She writes with great affection of the toy dog Mr Dash that her mother presented her with on her parents return from a holiday. There is Antonia’s experience as a bridesmaid and the glorious hat which her mother later appropriated for herself. Then, at four years old in Kensington Gardens Antonia falls in love – the object of her affection a little boy, who at seven years old seems almost grown up to her. The two become almost inseparable visiting one anther frequently for years – but in these early days the game of Mr and Mrs John Barker is invented in the nursery.
Most evocative of all though is Antonia’s description of her summer life at Binesfield, the country home of her father’s family. The cottage in West Sussex gave Antonia a taste of a very different life – the toilet was outside to begin with. Here her grandmother’s sisters Agnes and Clara lived, and Antonia looked forward all year to her summer visit.
“The night was cloudy, though here and there in a rift twinkled a star or two, the first I had ever seen, for I had never been out of doors so late. The excitement of driving at night through the damp, sweet-smelling air almost made up for not being able to see the country I was so longing to see. The light from the fly’s lamp, in whose aureole fluttered moths and tiny insects, showed u hedgerows and now and then a white gate or a cottage. I kept asking eagerly ‘Is that Binesfield?’ every time a dark bulk with a glimmer in some of its windows loomed up ahead of us. But the answer was always ‘Not yet dear.’”
It was also here where religion was first put on the agenda. Up to this point Antonia had received no religious education at all, at Binesfield it was suddenly suggested she say her prayers before bed. Of course, we know that later in childhood Antonia and her father converted to Catholicism (Frost in May was also very autobiographical).
It seems that Antonia White originally intended this to be a longer work of autobiography, and it is tantalising to imagine what she might have written had she be able to go on. Still, what remains in the most beautiful evocation of childhood, which is a must for those of us who loved the Frost in May quartet.
heavenali 