not at all. We wallow in beginnings, middles and ends: if we grow blas´ we are shocked into response. Once a severed finger was alarming, now volleys of decapitated heads fly about our screens and no one flinches. Our whole existence is threaded through with cheapo TV fiction: it is script editors, trained in counselling techniques, not writers, who dictate the lines the actors say, the tears they weep, the homosexual kisses they exchange. Our children grow up as heroes of their own lives, believing there will always be a happy ending. Even those wear thin. We would rather have reality TV.
Fiction drifts backwards into once upon a time: it is an industry, its raw material dug up where the market dictates, hammered into shape by editorial teams and committee, and each writer these days is perforce his own committee—what will the publisher think, what will my friends think, what do I dare say? The computer sniffs at swear words and underlines them with red. Thus the Stalinist Within triumphs, the free expression of thought is stifled. The Committee Without is there to pick off stragglers: can this be safely published? Will this make a profit? (The Satanic Verses would not stand a snowflake’s chance in hell today.) Since the touchstone is what has done well in the past nothing new can happen, or only by accident. But prudence does not pay off. The readers begin to yawn and close their books.
Best put your faith then in the new reality novel. Reality TV is real life lived out in a fictional context (the House): the reality novel threads the life through the fiction. Have my fiction, have me.
That off my chest, on with the story of my own life. Trisha’s is going to have to wait a bit. As she wept, pained and humiliated, so did her writer.
I cried when I was fourteen turning fifteen and I left my father on the quayside at Wellington, New Zealand, a tall, dark figure getting smaller and smaller as the ship departed, knowing I would never see him again. Nor did I. I was off, unwillingly, to England with my brave and wilful mother. That was 1946.
I cried when I was sixteen turning seventeen and the headmistress told me that I alone of all the Upper Sixth had not been elected prefect. That was South Hampstead School for Girls and only this morning I had a letter from the current headmistress asking me to address the school on any subject of my choosing. If My Friends Could See Me Now. Some could, if they were interested, but too many have died. That was 1948, the year I realised there was no magic to protect me from misfortune.
It was a shock when I realised my school days were five years behind me. The degree of shock, if this is any consolation, remains much the same now the gap amounts to fifty-five years. The terrible realisation that the present is not always with us is a one-time event and not subject, thank God, to perpetual renewal.
Better to be grateful for the time one has, and the time one has had than lament that there is little left. If I look out of the window where I write this early morning I see the sun rising over the pollarded lime trees of what were once the gardens of the most powerful abbey in England. The trees look the same as in the sixteenth-century print someone showed me recently—the old gnarled trunks, the spurt of new, thwarted if determined foliage, like the drawing of an inexpert child. It is autumn, the most colourful autumn for years after a hot, dry summer, and the trees are coming to life with the dawn, in a kind of greeny-pink haze. A woman walks a little dog. It should be on a lead and is not. People, delinquent and otherwise, have walked here for centuries. The monument to the dead of the First World War comes into relief as sunlight breasts the wall of the church and stripes the dark grass withlight. Beyond the trees the ground falls away from the old castle ramparts, and you can see right across a wide landscape to the next ridge of hills and the little airfield which flashes its light as confidently as if it were Canary Wharf.
The Abbey was torn down by Henry VIII, in a fervour of asset-stripping, and the stone parcelled out to nobles in London to build their fine houses. But a lot was stolen in dead of night, and many old houses in these parts have chunks of Abbey stone built into their fabric. And we still have the trees, and the past showing through into the present, if you have a mind to look.
I will put a tree or two in Wilkins Parade and Wilkins Square where the addicts gather, to cheer the place up, to share my good fortune in being able to see what I have seen this morning, the old and the new, the past and the present, all merging into one another. Good fortune must be passed on.
Look thy last on all things lovely, every hour Let no night, Steal thy sense in deathly slumber ‘Til to delight Thou hast paid thy utmost blessing, Since that all things thou would’st praise, Beauty took from those that loved them, In other days.
My mother would quote that at the drop of a hat. She never went to school but she had a head full of poetry, and passed the knowledge on to me. Just before she died, at the age of ninety-five, we remembered together at least two consecutive pages of Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott.
Four grey walls and four grey towers, Overlook a space of flowers…
What else are the Abbey gardens? My grandchildren’s heads are full of pop lyrics, in the same way, but I think we had the best of it.
I cried when I was seventeen turning eighteen and my father died. I had just come home from France, where I had been working in a Youth Aliyah camp for Jewish children on their way to what was then known as the Holy Land, and was staying with my aunt and uncle, Mary and Michael Stewart in Amen Court, in the shadow of St Paul’s. I was to be there for a week before taking the night train to St Andrews University. Home had vanished in my absence. My mother had left London to live in her Wild Meg cottage on the Cornish moors. Once again, I had only my suitcase and memories I preferred to forget—lost landscapes, lost friends.
Michael and Mary were Labour Party activists and were to end up in the House of Lords, he an ex-Foreign Secretary, she a very worthy Baroness. A telegram came. Mary opened it and said ‘Bad news, your father has died’ and put it down on the hall stand. She cried a little, my father being her brother, and I cried too, to keep her company. We did not touch; we were not a touching family.
‘We have grim news,’ say The Sunday Times and others when they ring up to tell you some public figure or friend has died, ‘we have grim news.’ And you reply quickly, ‘who?’ And they give you the name and it either shocks you to the core or you remain oddly and guiltily indifferent. Sometimes it is those apparently closest to you whose death does not seem to impinge much upon your own life, while the death of those you scarcely know and rarely see can strike you to the quick. Grief comes bidden or unbidden, and there is little you can do about it. It is as if the circles of acquaintance given to one in life are flawed: off-key, they overlap but do not coincide. You can spend a lot of time with others, and take very little notice. Or spend a little time, and be devastated.
I had not seen my father for three years and I think I had struck him from my psychic address book. We went to Oklahoma! that night—we did not cancel, and it was my birthday treat. Life, my aunt said, must not be disturbed by death. That was 1949: there had been a war. Amen Court stood alone amidst rubble. The times were drastic, and still out of joint.
I met my mother a few days later in a Lyons Corner House: brief reference only was made to my father’s death. She did say she shouldn’t
