Raw Material

A short story
 
by A. S. Byatt
 
.....
 

e always told them the same thing to begin with: "Try to avoid falseness and strain. Write what you really know about. Make it new. Don't invent melodrama for the sake of it. Don't try to run, let alone fly, before you can walk with ease." Every year he glared amiably at them. Every year they wrote melodrama. They clearly needed to write melodrama. He had given up telling them that creative writing was not a form of psychotherapy. In ways both sublime and ridiculous it clearly was precisely that.

The class had been meeting for fifteen years. It had moved from a schoolroom to a disused Victorian church. The village was called Sufferacre, which was thought to be a corruption of Sulfuris Aquae. It was a failed Derbyshire spa. It was his home town. In the 1960s he had written a successfully angry, iconoclastic, and shocking novel called Bad Boy. He had left for London and fame, and returned quietly ten years later. He lived in a trailer in somebody's paddock. He traveled widely, on a motorbike, teaching creative writing in pubs, schoolrooms, and arts centers. His name was Jack Smollett. He was a big, shuffling, smiling, red-faced man, with longish blond hair, who wore cable-knit sweaters in oily colors and bright scarlet neckerchiefs. Women liked him, as they liked enthusiastic Labrador dogs. They almost all felt—and his classes were predominantly female—more desire to cook apple pies and Cornish pasties for him than to make violent love to him. They believed he didn't eat sensibly. (They were right.) Now and then someone in one of his classes would point out, as he exhorted them to stick to what they knew, that they themselves were what he "really knew." Will you write about us, Jack? No, he always said, that would be a betrayal of confidence. You should always respect other people's privacy.

In fact he had tried unsuccessfully to sell two different stories based on the confessions (or inventions) of his class. The students offered themselves to him like raw oysters on pristine plates. They told him horror and bathos, daydreams, vituperation, and vengeance. They couldn't write; their inventions were crude, and he couldn't find a way to perform the necessary operations to spin the muddy straw into silk, or turn the raw, bleeding chunks into a savory dish. So he kept faith with them, not entirely voluntarily. He did care about writing. He cared about writing more than anything—sex, food, beer, fresh air, even warmth. He wrote and rewrote perpetually in his trailer. He was rewriting his fifth novel. Bad Boy had been written in a rush just out of school and snapped up by the first publisher he'd sent it to. It was what he had expected. His second novel, Smile and Smile, had sold 600 copies, and was remaindered. His third and fourth, frequently rewritten, lay in brown paper, stamped and restamped, in a tin chest in the trailer. He didn't have an agent.

lasses ran from September to March. In the summer he worked at literary festivals, or at holiday camps on sunny islands. He was pleased to see the classes again in September. He still thought of himself as wild and unattached, but he was a creature of habit. He liked things to happen at precise, recurring times, in precise, recurring ways. More than half the students in his classes were old faithfuls who came back year after year. Each class had a nucleus of about ten. At the beginning of the year this was often doubled by enthusiastic newcomers. By Christmas many of these would have dropped away—seduced by other courses, or intimidated by the regulars, or overcome by domestic drama or personal lassitude. St. Antony's Leisure Center was gloomy because of its high ceiling, and drafty because of its ancient doors and windows. The students had brought oil heaters, and standard lamps with imitation stained-glass shades. The old churchy chairs were pushed into a circle under these pleasant lights.

He liked the lists of their names. Sometimes he talked about how much Nabokov had got out of the list of names of Lolita's classmates, how much of America, how strong an image from how few words. His current class ran

Abbs, A	deacon in the C of E
Archer, M	estate agent
Armytage, B	vet
Forster, R	out-of-work bank teller
Fox, C	eighty-two-year-old spinster
Hogg, M	accountant
Parson., A	schoolmistress
Pearson, A	farmer
Pygge, G	nurse
Secrett, L	intermittent student, daughter of
Secrett, T	living on alimony (her own phrase)
Silver, A	librarian
Wheelwright, R	student (engineering)

The most recent work they had produced was

Abbs, Adam	A tale of the martyrdom of nuns in Rwanda
Archer, Megan	A story of the abduction and prolonged rape of an estate agent
Armytage, Blossom	A tale of the elaborate torture of two Sealyham dogs
Forster, Bobby	A tale of the entrapment and vengeful slaughter of an unjust driving examiner
Fox, Cicely	How we used to blacklead the stove
Hogg, Martin	Hanging, drawing, and quartering under Henry VIII
Parson, Anita	A tale of unreported, persistent child abuse and Satanic sacrifice
Pearson, Amanda	A tale of a cheating husband hacked down by his vengeful wife with an axe
Pygge, Gilly	Clever murder by a cruel surgeon during an operation
Secrett, Lola	The nervous breakdown of a menopausal woman with a beautiful and patient daughter
Secrett, Tamsin	The nervous breakdown of a feckless teenager with a wise but powerless mother
Silver, Annabel	A sadomasochistic initiation of a girl sold into white slavery in North Africa
Wheelwright, Rosy	A cycle of very explicit lesbian love poems involving motorbikes

HOW WE USED TO BLACKLEAD THE STOVE

It is strange to think of activities that were once so much a part of our lives that they seemed daily inevitable, like waking and sleeping. At my age these things come back in their contingent quiddity, things we did with quick fingers and backs that bent without precaution. It is today's difficult slitting of plastic wraps, or brilliantly blinking microwave LED displays, that seem like veils and shadows.

Take blackleading. The kitchen ranges in the kitchens of our childhood and young lives were great, darkly gleaming chests of fierce heat. Their frontage was covered with heavy hasped doors, opening on various ovens, large and small, various flues, the furnace itself, where the fuel went in. Words are needed for extremes of blackness and brightness. Brightness included the gold-glitter of the rail along the front of the range, where the tea towels hung, and the brass knobs on certain of the little doors, which had to be burnished with Brasso—a sickly yellowish powdery liquid—every morning. It included also the roaring flame within and under the heavy cast-iron box. If you opened the door when it was fully burning, you could hear and see it—a flickering transparent sheet of scarlet and yellow, shot with blue, shot with white, flashing purple, roaring and burping and piffing. You could immediately see it dying in the rusty edges of the embers. It was important to close the door quickly, to keep the fire "in." "In" meant contained, and also meant alight.

Many different blacks surrounded that range. Various fuels were burned in it, unlike modern Agas, which take oil, or anthracite. I remember coal. Coal has its own brightness, a gloss, a sheen. You can see the compacted layers of dead wood—millions of years dead—in the strata on the faces of the chunks of good coal. They shine. They give out a black sparkle. The trees ate the sun's energy, and the furnace will release it. Coal is glossy. Coke is matte, and looks (indeed is) twice-burned, like volcano lava; the dust on coal glitters like glass dust, the dust on coke absorbs light, is soft, is inert. Some of it comes in little regular pressed cushions, like pillows for dead dolls, I used to think, or twisted humbugs for small demons. We ourselves were fed on charcoal for stomach upsets, which may explain why I considered the edibility of these lumps. Or maybe even as a small child, I saw the open mouth of the furnace as a hellhole. You were drawn in. You wanted to get closer and closer; you wanted to be able to turn away. And we were taught at school about our own internal combustion of matter. The ovens behind other doors of the range might conceal the puffed, risen shapes of loaves and tea cakes, with that best of all smells, baking yeast dough, or the only slightly less delightful smell of the crust of a hot cake—toasted sugar, milk, and egg. Now and then—the old ranges were temperamental—a batch of buns in frilled paper cups would come out black and smoking and stinking of destruction, ghastly analogies of the cinder cushions. From there, I thought, came the cinders that fell from the mouths of bad children in fairy tales, or stuffed their Christmas stockings.

The whole range was bathed in an aura of kept-down soot. In front of our own, at one time, was a peg rug made by my father, by hooking strips of colorful scraps of cloth—old flannel shirts, old trousers—through sacking, and knotting them. Soot infiltrated this dense thicket of flags or streamers. The sacking scalp was stained sooty black. The crimsons and scarlets, the green tartans and mustard blotches, all had a grain of fine, fine black specks. I sometimes thought of the peg rug as a bed of ribbon seaweed. The soot was like the silted sand in which it lay.

Not that we did not brush and brush ceaselessly, to cleanse our firesides of this falling, sifting black dust. It rises lightly, and falls where it was; it whirls briefly when disturbed, and particles may settle on one's own hair and scalp, a soot-plug for every pore in the skin of the hands. You can collect only so much; the rest is displaced, volatile, recurring. This must be the reason why we spent so much time—every morning—making the black front of the black stove blacker with black lead. To disguise and tame the soot.

"Black lead" was not lead but a mixture of plumbago, graphite, and iron filings. It came as a stiff paste, and was spread across and worked into all the black surfaces, avoiding the brassy ones of course, and then buffed and polished and made even with brushes of different densities, and pads of flannel. It was worked into every crevice of every boss on that ornate casting, and then removed again—the job was very badly done if any sludge of polish could be found encrusted around the leaves and petals of the black floral swags along the doors. I remember the phoenix, who must, I think, have been the trademark of that particular furnace. It sat, staring savagely to the left, on a nest of carved crossed branches, surrounded by an elaborate ascending spiral of fat flames with pointed tongues. It was all blackest black, the feathered bird, the burning pyre, the kindled wood, the bright angry eye, the curved beak.

The black lead gave a most beautiful, subtle, and gentle sheen to the blackness of the stove. It was not like boot blacking, which produced a mirrorlike lacquer. The high content of graphite, the scattering of iron filings, gave a silvery leaden surface—always a black surface, but with these shifting hints of soft metallic lightness. I think of it as representing a kind of decorum, a taming and restraining of both the fierce flame inside and the uncompromising cast iron outside. Like all good polishing (almost none of which persists in modern life, for which on the whole we should be grateful), the sheen was built up layer by infinitesimal layer, applied and almost entirely wiped away again, only the finest skin of mineral adhering and glimmering.

The time is far away when we put so much human blood and muscle into embellishing our houses with careful layers of mineral deposits. Thinking of black lead made me think of its opposite, the white stone and the ground white-stone powder with which we used, daily or more often, to emphasize our outer doorsteps and windowsills. I remember distinctly smoothing the thick pale stripe along the doorstep with a block of some stone, but I cannot remember the name of the stone itself. It is possible that we simply called it "the stone." We were required to stone the step only when we didn't have a maid to do it. I thought of holystone, blanching stone (perhaps a fabrication), and a run through the Oxford English Dictionary added whetstone and sleekstone, a word I hadn't known, which appears to refer to something used on wet clothes in the laundry. Finally I found hearthstone, and hearthstone powder, a mixture of pipe clay, carbonate of lime, size, and stone blue. Hearthstone was sold in chunks by peddlers with barrows. I remember the sulphur in the air from the industrial chimneys of Sheffield and Manchester, a vile, yellow, clogging deposit, which smeared windows and lips alike, and stained the brave white doorsteps almost as soon as they were stoned. But we went out and whitened them again. We lived a gritty, mineral life, with our noses and fingers in it. I have read that the black lead was toxic. I thought of the white lead with which Renaissance ladies painted their skins and poisoned their blood. "Let her paint never an inch thick, to this favour shall she come." I remember the dentists, giving us gobbets of quicksilver in little corked test tubes to play with. We spread this on our play table with naked fingers, watching it shiver into a multitude of droplets, rolling it back together again. It was like a substance from an alien world. It adhered to nothing but itself. Yet we spread it everywhere, losing a silvery liquid bead here, under a splinter of wood, or there, in the fibers of our jumpers. Quicksilver, too, is toxic. No one told us.

Hearthstone is an ancient and ambiguous idea. In the past the hearth was a synecdoche for the house, home, or even family or clan. (I cannot bring myself to use that humiliated and patronized word "community.") The hearth was the center, where the warmth, the food, and the burning were. Our hearth was in front of the blackleaded range. We had a "sitting room," but its grate (also regularly blackleaded) was always empty, for no one visited formally enough to sit in its chilly formality. Yet the hearthstone was applied to what was in fact the lintel or limen, the threshold. Northerners keep themselves to themselves. The hearthstone stripe on the flagstone step was a limit, a barrier. We were fond of a certain rhetoric. "Never cross my threshold again." "Don't darken my door." The shining silvery dark and the hidden red-and-gold roar were safely inside. We went out, as my mother used to say, feet first, on our final crossing of that bar. Nowadays, of course, we all go into the oven. Then, it was back to the earth, out of which all these powders and pomades had been so lovingly extracted.

WASHDAY

In those days washing took all the week. We boiled on Monday, starched on Tuesday, dried on Wednesday, ironed on Thursday, and mended on Friday. Besides all the other things there were to do. We washed outside, in the wash-house, which was an outhouse with its own stone sink, hand pump, copper with a fire beneath it, and flagged floor. Other implements were the monstrous mangle, the great galvanized tubs, and the ponch. Our wash-house was made of stone blocks, with a slate roof, and houseleeks growing on the roof. Its chimney smoked, and its windows steamed over. In winter the steam melted the ice. It was full of the extremes of a watery climate. As a child, I used to put my face against the stones and find them hot to touch, or anyway warmish, on washday. I pretended it was the witch's cottage in fairy tales.

The first step was sorting and boiling. You boiled whites in the copper, which was a huge rounded vat with a wooden lid. All the wood in the wash-house was soap-slippery, both flaked apart and held together by melted and congealed soap. You boiled the whites—sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, napkins, tea towels, and so on, and then you used the boiled water, let down a bit, in the tubs, to wash the more delicate things, or the colored things, which might run. You had heavy wooden pincers and poles to stir the whites in the boiling water; steam came off in clouds, and a kind of gray scum formed on the surface. When they were boiled, they went through various rinses in tubs. There would be a hiss and a slopping as the hot cloth hit the freezing water in the tubs. Then you ponched it. The ponch was a kind of copper-kettle-like thing on a long pole, full of holes, like a vast tea infuser or a closed colander. It soughed and sucked at the cloth in the water, leaving little bosses of pulled damask or cotton where it had impressed itself and clung. Then with pincers—and your bare arms—you hoisted all the weight of the sheets from one tub to another tub to another. And then you folded the streaming stuff and wound it through the wooden jaw-rollers of the mangle. The mangle had red wheels to turn the rollers, and a polished wooden handle to turn the wheels. It sluiced soapy water back into an undertub, or splashed it on the floor. You were also always pumping more water—yanking the pump handle, winding the mangle handle. You froze; you were scalded. You stood in clouds of steam and breathed an air that was always full of thick sweat—your own sweat, with the effort —and the odor of the dirt from the clothes that was being released into the air and the water.

You had to pull the washed clothes through, or soak them in, things like Reckitt's Blue. I don't know what that was made of. Because we lived in Derbyshire, I always associated it with Blue John, from the Peaks, which I know is quite wrong, but is a verbal association that has lingered. It came in little cylindrical bags, wrapped in white muslin, and produced an intense cobalt color when the little bags were swirled in the rinsing water. The whites went through the blue water (which was always cold). I don't know by what optical process this blue staining made the whites whiter, but I can clearly remember that it did. It wasn't bleach. It didn't remove recalcitrant stains of tea, or urine, or strawberry juice—you had to use real bleach for that, which smelled evil and deathly. The Reckitt's Blue went out into the water in little clouds, and fibrils, and tendrils of color. Like fine threads of glass in glass marbles. Or blood, if you put a cut finger in a dish of water. You couldn't see Reckitt's Blue very well in the galvanized tubs, but on days when the laundry was light, we did the bluing in a white enamel pancheon, and then you could see the threading cloud of bright blue going into the clear water and mingling, until the water was blue. Then you swirled the cloth in the blue water—swirled it, and squashed it, and punched and mashed it, until it was impregnated with blue, until all the white glistened in pale blueness. As a very little girl, I used to think the white cloth and the blue water were like clouds in the sky, but this was silly. Because in fact in the sky the white watery clouds stain the blue, not the other way round. It was an inversion, a draining. For when you held up the sheets and took them from the blue water to drain them, you could see the blue run away and the white whiter, blue-white, a different white from cream, or ivory, or scorched-yellow white, a white under blue dripping liquid that had been changed, but not dyed.

The starch was viscous and gluey; it thickened the washing water like gruel. I suppose it was a kind of gruel, if you think of it. Farinaceous molecules expanding in heat. Starch was slippery and reminded all of us of substances we didn't like to think of, bodily fluids and products, though in fact it is an innocent, clean, vegetable thing, unlike soap, which is compressed mutton fat, however perfumed. Cloth slipped into starch and was coated with it. There were degrees of starching. Very dense, glutinous starch was used for shirt collars, light, spun-glass starch for delicate nightdresses and knickers. When you hoisted a garment out of a bath of starch, it stiffened and fell into flutes like a carving—or if by mistake you left it lying around, and it dried out, it would become solid crumples and lumps, like pleated stones where the earth had folded on itself. Starched clothes had to be ironed damp. The smell of the hot iron on the jelly was like a parody of cookery. Gluten, I suppose. You could smell scorching as you could smell burning cakes. You had a nose for things not as they should be.

Clothes in the process of being cleansed haunted our lives. They were accompanying angels, souls washed white in the blood of the Lamb, surrounding us with their rustle and their pale scent. In the eighteenth century, I imagine, washdays happened once or twice a year, but our time was obsessed with cleansing and had not invented mechanical helpers. We went through an endless cycle of bubble, toil, and trouble, surrounded by an only too visible inanimate host. Our clothes danced in the wind, fluttering vain arms, raising full-bellied skirts to reveal vacancy, coiling round each other like white worms. Indoors they hung in the kitchen on long racks winched up to the ceiling, from where they dangled, stiff as boards, like shrouded hanging men. They lay neatly folded, before and after ironing, like dead choirboys in effigy, fluted and frilled. Under the hot iron (on Thursdays) they writhed and winced and shrank. My great-aunt's huge, shapeless rayon petticoats flared all colors of the rainbow, spectral, sizzling russets and air-force blues, shot with copper, shot with peacock blue. They melted easily, gophering into scabs that resolved themselves into pinholes and were unredeemable. The irons were filled with hot coals from the kitchen range. They were heavy; they had to be watched for soot-smears, which would condemn a garment to an immediate return to the washpot. Inside them the coals of fire smoldered, spat, and dimmed. The kitchen was full of the smell of singeing, a tawny smell, a parody of the good golden cooking smells of buns and biscuits.

It was hard work, but work was life. Work was coiled and woven into breathing and sleeping and eating, as the shirt sleeves coiled and wove themselves into a tangle with nightdress ribbons and Sunday sashes. In her old age my mother sat beside a twin-tub washing machine, a mechanical reduction of all those archaic containers and hoists and pulleys, and lifted her underwear and pillowcases from wash to rinse to spin with the same wooden pincers. She was arthritic and bird-boned, like a cross seagull. We offered her a new machine with a porthole, which would wash and dry a little every day and, we thought, relieve her. She was appalled and distressed. She said she would feel dirty—she would feel bad—if she had no washday. She needed steam and stirring to convince her that she was alive and virtuous. Toward the end the increasing number of soiled sheets defeated her, and perhaps even killed her, though I think she died not from overexertion but from chagrin when she finally had to admit she could no longer wield her ponch or lift a bucket. She felt unnecessary. She had a new white nightdress which she had washed, starched, and ironed but never worn. It was ready to shroud her still white flesh in her coffin, its Reckitt's Blue glinting now livelier than the shrunken, bruised yellow-gray of her eyelids and lips.