V. Naipaul - Magic Seeds

And then, about nine or ten years ago, when you had just left the ruins of your Africa and were in West Berlin, minutes away from the ruins of the East, about that time I made a literary discovery. I read selections from the journals of a Victorian gentleman called A. J. Munby, and found a fellow.

Munby was born in 1828 and died in 1910. This makes him the exact contemporary of Tolstoy. He was a highly educated man, a fine and vivid writer in the effortless Victorian way, and he was deep in the intellectual and artistic life of his time. He knew many of the great names. Some, like Ruskin and William Morris, he knew by sight. When he was still a very young man he could greet Dickens in the street and then in a few words in his journal he could pin down the physical appearance of the fifty-two-year-old author: a dandy, a bit of an actor, vain of his slender figure, his hat tilted on his head.

But Munby — like Ruskin and like Dickens — had a sexual secret. Munby was passionately interested in working women. He liked women who did heavy work with their hands and literally got their hands dirty. He liked seeing servant women in their dirt, as he said, with their hands and faces black with soot and grime. And it is astonishing to us today how many dirty jobs of the time, cleaning fireplaces and so on, were done by women without tools, only with bare and uncovered hands. When these hands were washed they showed rough and thick and red. Ladies’ hands were white and small. Munby’s preference, away from drawing rooms, was for those red hands which, unless covered by the elbow-length gloves of fashion, could always give a working woman away.

Munby talked to any number of these women in the street. He sketched them. He had them photographed. He was an early amateur of photography. He posed women colliery workers in their coarse, heavily patched trousers, legs crossed sometimes, leaning on their man-sized shovels, looking hard and bemused at the photographer, one or two finding enough vanity for a smile. There is nothing pornographic in Munby’s photographs and drawings, though for Munby the subject would doubtless have had some erotic charge.

For most of his life he had a secret liaison with a servant woman. She was tall and robust, a head above most people in the street. Munby liked women of size and strength. He liked the idea of this woman friend of his continuing to work as a servant in other houses; and though she sometimes complained about the inconsiderateness of her employers, he was not too eager to emancipate her. He liked to see the woman in her working dirt. She understood his fetish and didn’t mind: before meeting Munby she had longed in a dreamy way to have a gentleman as a lover or husband. Sometimes, though rarely in the beginning, they lived together in the same house. Then, when people called, the woman had to get up from her drawing-room chair and pretend to be the maid. In the journal there is no hint of sex in the relationship, though this might only have been Victorian reticence.

For a man of Munby’s tastes Victorian London would have been full of excitement. What pleasure, for instance, in a Bloomsbury square, to see, at six in the evening, every basement window lit up, each with its special treasure displayed as on a stage: a servant woman sitting on a chair, waiting to be called.

And just as in Munby’s journal there is a sense of an encircling London servant life, full of pain and pleasure for him, so for me, with Marian, though I closed my mind to what she did when she wasn’t with me, there came fragments, developing after a time into a full picture, of a frightening and brutal council-estate life I had never really known.

During the week Marian lived in her council house with the “mistakes” Jo had mentioned to me right at the beginning. The mistakes were two: two children by different men. I gathered early on that the first of those men was a “drifter.” It was one of Marian’s words; she made it sound almost technical, almost an occupation that might be entered in social security or other government forms. Occupation: Drifter . The drifter was dark-haired. The hair was important: Marian mentioned it more than once, as if it explained everything.

And Marian herself had been one of four mistakes her mother had made with three different men. After these four mistakes Marian’s mother, still only in her twenties, came upon a man she really fancied. It was what she had been waiting for all her life. Love: it was her destiny. She didn’t hesitate. She left the four mistakes and went off with the man, to another house on the council estate. There was some trouble with the authorities then, because Marian’s mother wanted to keep on claiming the benefits that the four mistakes had brought her. Somehow that matter was smoothed over, and Marian’s mother lived with her man until he got tired of her and ran off somewhere with somebody else. It was the way of life down there.

This kind of thing happens elsewhere as well, but what is interesting to me is that at no stage was Marian’s mother required by anyone in authority to live with the material or financial consequences of her decisions. There was always a council house available, and always a benefit of some sort. You might say that for Marian’s mother every action brought an official reward. The people who paid were the children, the mistakes. And I suppose it can be said that they weren’t being punished in any special way: they were only being trained for council-estate life, the way Marian’s poor mother had been trained in her childhood, by other people and other events.

Marian and the other mistakes were taken into “care.” A terrible technical word, and this was the most terrible part of Marian’s childhood. It was a story of beatings and sexual abuse and repeated hopeless running away. Later Marian realised that other horrors might have befallen a young child on her own in the streets. Somehow the child endured and went through the government mill. She went to various correction schools. At one of them she learned to swim. It became the greatest thing in her life. And all this while there were days when Marian saw her mother driving by, living out her other life.

When that life of her mother’s came to an end, her mother reappeared, and there was then something like a family life again, in another council house. As part of that life Marian and the others sometimes were taken by their mother on shoplifting excursions to supermarkets and local stores. They did very well. Sometimes they were caught, but then Marian and the other mistakes did what they had been told to do: they screamed the store down, and they were always let go. In time these excursions stopped.

Everyone Marian knew on the estate had a life that was like a version of her own.

Learning about this early life of Marian’s, I began to understand her dark and withdrawn bedroom mood: the dead eyes, the shuttered mind. And then I wished I didn’t know what I had got to know. I associated it with an awful and pathetic episode I came upon in Munby. A little paragraph, which I wished I hadn’t read. Munby one day, either in a private house to which he had been admitted, or in a hotel, entered a room and saw a chambermaid standing with her back to him. He spoke to her and she turned. She was young and had a sweet face, with manners to match. She was holding a chamber pot with one hand and stirring the contents with her other uncovered hand: suggesting that there were solids in the chamber pot.

Something of this sorrow and disgust came to me when I thought of Marian’s past. It came upon me at our most intimate moments.

I knew the council estate where the bad drama of her childhood had been played out. To her, at the time, that drama would have seemed unending. I had passed many times the very ordinary place where she had been taken into care and from which she had tried to run away. It was as though, for her, but not for me, who drove by unseeing, unknowing, unthinking, existing almost in a separate age, an exact moral parallel of the Dickens world still existed. That parallel was concealed from the rest of us by the bright paint of the council houses, the parked motorcars, and our too easy ideas of social change.