Antonia White, a gold coin and impressionable children

This article was inspired by an incident that I read about in the novelist Antonia White’s account of her early childhood in As Once in May.

It concerns what she called one of the great disappointments of her life. It happened when she was only four years old.

In addition to being a schoolmaster, her father gave private tuition to young men. Antonia got talking to one of these pupils while he was waiting for his lesson. He was so impressed by her knowledge that he gave her a gold coin, a half-sovereign!

When her father arrived and noticed the coin, he forced her to return it. He could not possibly allow her to accept it; it was far too much money for a child of her age. Despite his pupil’s efforts on Antonia’s behalf, her father was adamant. The coin went back into the young man’s pocket.

As she left the room, holding back her tears, she heard her father say:

“It was exceedingly generous of you, but I’m sure that you’ll see my point of view. No, no, she won’t be disappointed. I’m sure she knew all along she couldn’t possibly be allowed to keep it. Don’t worry. By tomorrow she’ll have forgotten all about it.”

This is what Antonia White said decades later:

“He was wrong. After seventy-two years I have not forgotten that breathless moment of possession and the bitter sense of injustice when the treasure was snatched away...”

This is a very good illustration of something that that really stands out in the biographies and autobiographies of many writers: how hard they take some things and how they often never forget and never forgive a childhood injury.

Diana Wynne Jones had this to say, in connection with being permanently affected by not being permitted to read fantasy books as a child:

“And it does bring you hard up against the responsibility adults have, if only because it shows you what a truly lasting impression can be made on a child.”

This is from her book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing, which is full of such insights.

Antonia White's travel nightmare

The novelist Antonia White describes a nightmare journey in her unfinished autobiographical novel Clara IV.

Clara goes on holiday to Austria without her husband; being alone has a bad effect on her. She becomes demoralised and mismanages everything including her money, which helps to make the return journey one long endurance test.

Clara’s travel nightmare 
The long journey home involves taking a train to Linz, a train from Linz to Ostend, a steamboat from Ostend to Dover followed by a train to London and finally a taxi to her house.

On the long train ride to Ostend, it seems to Clara as though her journey will never end and she will never find herself safely back home.

By the time she gets to Ostend she is in a trance of weariness. She has had a sleepless night in a horrible third-class compartment, which was all that she could afford. She has not slept for thirty-six hours and as she has very little money left has eaten almost nothing during the journey. She would happily exchange the beautiful and expensive new handbag that she had unwisely bought in Vienna for just a cup of tea and a couple of aspirins. Half blinded by a bad headache, she has to carry her heavy luggage onto the ferry herself as she cannot afford to pay a porter. 

White magic on the ferry
Clara is horrified to see how awful she looks and how dirty and creased her clothes are when she catches sight of herself in the washroom mirror, but she is too ill and exhausted to do anything about it until after she has rested for a while.

Antonia White, cults and independent thinking

This article was inspired by something very disturbing that I read in As Once in May, a collection of Antonia White’s autobiographical writings.

While taking time out to work on a different article, I had occasion to return to Sheri S. Tepper’s fantasy novel Marianne, the Magus, and the Manticore. A previously overlooked speech there is a very good counterweight to the offending passage. It puts what Antonia White tells us about her Catholic boarding school into context; it suggests that she was treated like a cult member.

Antonia White’s alarming school story
Antonia White said that while the nuns at the convent school she attended did not crush the spirits of the pupils - high spirits and general childish naughtiness were not discouraged - they cracked down hard on any attempts to show independence of mind and tried to stamp it out:

“Through years of training, the nuns had learned to recognise the faintest signs of such an attitude, and it was severely repressed. They could detect it the slightest thing...an inclination to answer back, and, most of all, in the faintest speculation in matters of faith. The world was waiting for us outside, with its Satan-set traps of heresy, free thought and easy morals, and the whole object of our education was to arm us against its snares...Mental pride... the most dangerous of all our temptations.”

Many people will be outraged by this, and for several reasons.