The deed done, we were free to do what we’d been longing to do for years: make the ground floor into one big through room. J.P. Brown was not available to do this job (the wind had got him by then) so we hired a new builder, who worked only with his two sons. It was quite challenging work, involving a RSJ, a giant concrete girder, being put across the centre of the new space, so there was a lot of dirt and dust again while the dividing wall came down and the RSJ went up. The marble fireplace was taken out, and the bookshelves we had built into the two alcoves now joined into one. Light came flooding in from both ends and all feeling of being cramped had gone. Meanwhile, on the top floor we had Mrs Hall’s kitchen converted into a bedroom, and a bathroom put in on the landing. The children, now almost seven and five, moved upstairs and had a bedroom each, with a spare room ready for all our many visiting Carlisle relations.
We hadn’t yet had either my parents, or my widowed mother-in-law to stay, though our brothers and sisters had all visited while the house was still in a poor state. Our parents, we knew, found our house a disappointment. A Victorian house was not their idea of what a house should be: too many stairs, rooms that were too big, ceilings that were too high, etc. My brother’s smart semi-detached house in Stanwix, Carlisle, was their ideal house. At least the garden met with approval, though my father was scandalised that so much ground was given to grass when it could’ve been used to grow potatoes. My mother-in-law’s only comment was that there was plenty of room for lodgers.
So there we were, the house transformed and now truly ours. The sense of freedom, with Mrs Hall gone, was terrific. We were settled.
There I was, in the early seventies, serene in my house, serene enough to want another baby. Flora was born in October 1972, soon after I’d finished my first attempt at a biography (of Bonnie Prince Charlie). Our house was full, and busy.
Once Flora was born there was little time for writing. I still managed an hour in the mornings, my preferred time, while she slept, but after that, I was walking on the Heath with her then collecting Caitlin and Jake from school, often bringing their friends home too. From then on it was all hectic activity, and then time to feed everyone. Write later on, after Hunter was home? Impossible. I was too tired to even think of lifting a pen. Sometimes I read of other women writers, in my situation, who had gone to hotels, or rented rooms, to write in, and I couldn’t believe it – without being in my own house I knew I wouldn’t be able to write at all. The surroundings were everything. I managed, though, with scraps of time. I was happy doing it.
But the house, in three years’ time, was about to change its meaning for me, to become a refuge in a manner I’d never imagined.
It is too dreary to catalogue all the details of the cancer (I refuse to personalise the disease, though it is a very personal one, by calling it ‘my’ cancer) which began, or showed itself, in 1975. I remember them all, of course, all too clearly, but everyone by now is surely familiar with the breast cancer scenario: the finding of a lump, the diagnosis, the biopsy, the operation, etc. The cancer I was discovered to have resulted in a mastectomy in April 1975, at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. It was a very small lump, of low grade, and no radiotherapy was thought necessary. The consultant I was treated by, a Miss George, was abrupt and impatient in manner. She wheeled in her team in a military manner, and gave them an on-the-spot lecture, going through all the reasons why I was an unlikely candidate for breast cancer – age (thirty-six), breast-fed three children for nine months each, fit, non-smoker – saying that this was probably a ‘one off’, just ‘bad luck’.
Probably. What a sinister word. I analysed its meaning over and over again, coming up with a new interpretation each time. I was still thinking about my own invented law of probability when the surgical appliance woman came to talk about a prosthesis to replace the missing breast, assuring me that once I had it I would be ‘as good as new’ and in no time at all I’d probably get so used to it I’d hardly notice the difference. Laughing hurt, what with the drains still in and the dressing still on the wound, so I had to restrain myself. Then I lay there thinking about how curious it was that the whole emphasis was on how I would look, not how I would feel or how I would cope with knowing I had the disease. I was lucky to be able to ruminate in peace, because through a fluke I had a room of my own (it wasn’t needed at the time and nobody else wanted it). I tried to treat this room as a room in my house. I was allowed to tape the children’s drawings to the walls, and on the shelf running under the window I had some of my books, and small items brought in from home. The nurses weren’t too keen on my beloved fountain pen in case it leaked ink, so I switched to biro, and tried to make my bed like my desk.
All these attempts failed to create the atmosphere of my house. I tried to tell myself that a hospital is just a house, if a big one, a house with many rooms and corridors. It has a roof over it, and walls, lots of walls, protecting the inmates from rain and cold, a good place to be in. But for me, it wasn’t. I wanted to be in my own house, where I knew I would heal quicker. Arriving home was in itself a healing process. Once I was inside my house the relief washed over me like a tide going out – I was on dry land again, secure within its familiar walls. And that’s how the house changed its significance for me. It took on a magical quality: if I stayed in my house, I’d be safe. I knew perfectly well that this was fanciful nonsense, but it was how I felt. Sometimes, in the weeks that followed, I’d be out on the Heath enjoying a walk when I’d be overwhelmed with an urgent need to be inside my house. I’d start walking more quickly, then almost run, and when I reached our front door my hand would fumble with the key in my haste to get into the house. Once inside, I’d stand for a moment with my back against the door, and the ordinary sight of the staircase ahead of me, a toy dropped halfway up, a basket of clean clothes lying on the bottom stair waiting to be taken up – all this would calm me. I was fine again, cocooned by the familiarity of the house.
I’d been told to ‘forget’ about the cancer and ‘get on with your life’. I didn’t forget, ever, but I certainly got on with my life. Part of this getting on was embarking on a biography of W.M. Thackeray (which later turned into a pretend autobiography). I was well, had readjusted to life with one breast. The only exception was when I had to leave the house for check-ups. The clinic was always crowded, the wait long, some of those waiting clearly in pain. It was impossible not to hear what people were saying to their companions (nearly everyone took someone with them for support, though I never did) and much of this overheard conversation was frightening. Women would reminisce about what they’d been told – ‘the doctor told me it was only a Grade 1, you don’t need radiotherapy’ – and then launch into ‘and now it’s in my bones, and that Miss George, she says to the other doctor, it’s an adverse prognosis, she thinks I’m thick and don’t know what it means.’ Mostly, the women attending these clinics were patient and resigned, but others were loudly bitter and resentful, claiming none of the questions they had were ever answered, that is if they were even given an opportunity to ask them. They’d mention, too, articles they’d read in newspapers or magazines, some of which maintained that nobody knew what they were doing in the breast cancer field and then would follow lots of depressing statistics. Clinic days in the seventies were bad days, even when I emerged unscathed.
It struck me that if, as many claim, the body is merely a house for the spirit and the mind, then its owner has to keep up constant surveillance. Before I found that minuscule lump, and I only found it because I was following widely publicised instructions for women to do a regular checking of their breasts, I had had no symptoms of cancer, therefore why believe that feeling fine meant there was no need to worry? Of course there was. My own vigilance had found that lump so it was up to me to be vigilant all the time. This proved exhausting, enough to turn anyone into a nervous wreck. ‘Forgetting’ was ridiculous, especially with the visible reminder of what had happened. Nor was it helpful for people to talk about ‘fighting’ cancer, an
d being ‘positive’ in attitude. There is no fighting that can be done, and being positive not only has no proven effect but it creates another psychological burden for the patient. Better to accept that, if indeed the body is a kind of house, then this house has a touch of woodworm, or dry rot, or similar, which may be treated to a certain degree but it won’t ever be certain that it has all been eradicated. Maybe, in those rafters at the top of this house, or in one of those floorboards at the bottom, there is just a tiny, tiny bit left which, given the encouragement of the right conditions, will start travelling again through the rest of the house which had seemed up to that point perfectly clear of damage. So, that was my reading of the situation I was in.
We had at the time, while all this was happening, a weekend cottage in Upper Wardington, Northamptonshire. The Heath was lovely, but it was no substitute for the real countryside, and at weekends it gets busy, so we thought we’d escape London every Friday–Monday and enjoy the delights of living among fields and having long walks. It wasn’t what could be termed a yummy Cotswolds-type cottage, but it was situated at the end of a lane, on the fringe of the village, and it had a large garden with nothing overlooking it.
We had it four years, long enough to find out that weekending was not for us, and especially not for me. I loved being there, but I didn’t love the coming and going, and once cancer entered the equation this became too much. Every Friday, picking Caitlin and Jake, aged eight and six, up from school and zooming off up the M1, to beat the rush, I’d be thinking how tiring all this was, all the preparation that went into it, and then every Sunday evening, or very early Monday morning, I’d be thinking why on earth are we leaving just as we’ve got settled and it’s so quiet and lovely here. I felt, too, faithless to both houses. Which did I prefer? Or which situation did I prefer? And if the answer to that one was ‘the country’ why didn’t we move there and find a house as roomy as Boscastle Road? Such a luxury, having that option. But one of them, one of these houses, had to go.
My state of health hastened the decision to give the cottage up, but a burglary at Boscastle Road helped too. This wasn’t like the burglary while I was living in Richardson Street, but a much more thorough job. We’d made it very easy for the burglars. All they’d had to do was break down a thin temporary plywood door at the back of the house, where yet more alterations were being made to extend the kitchen during the Easter holidays. Once inside, the burglars stayed there cosily for (it was reckoned by the police) two days, sleeping and eating there while they did their work in a leisurely fashion. At one point, the au pair girl across the road had seen someone drawing the curtains. Thinking it was a friend of ours, she gave a cheerful wave, and this person waved happily back.
It was the sight of the mess, of course, which was shocking, rather than what turned out to be missing. The burglars’ method of searching had been to turn out every drawer and cupboard and then kick their way through the resulting heaps of stuff to see if anything of value turned up. There was no cash in the house, which probably didn’t improve their temper, and though we by then had a television it was only a small black and white one. Once we’d sorted through the chaos, it emerged very little had been taken – a carriage clock, a radio, a silver box. I had no jewellery of value, other than a coral necklace, which had been tipped out of its box and left. But it was strange that two vividly coloured crocheted blankets, made by my mother-in-law for the children’s beds, had also gone. They’d been used, the police reckoned, to wrap something in. That ‘something’ turned out to be every one of Hunter’s Beatles LPs, including Sergeant Pepper, the sleeve signed by all four Beatles. (I do hope the burglars hung on to them. That Sergeant Pepper one would today be worth £57,000.)
No house in our street had, at that time (1976) a burglar alarm, though quite soon afterwards they started appearing. Ours was a nuisance, endlessly going off for no reason, making us unpopular with neighbours. But though we no longer went away every weekend, once the cottage was sold, we were out of London all the school holidays. Most of these, apart from a month in the Algarve, were spent in Carlisle, visiting our parents. Neither my parents, nor my mother-in-law, could put all five of us up, so we had to split ourselves between their two bungalows. We thought that if we had a small cottage somewhere on the fells, near enough to go backwards and forwards to Carlisle in half an hour or so, then it would make spending the holidays up there a lot easier. It wouldn’t be like weekending, because we’d be there for mostly two-week periods.
We bought a tiny, one-up, one-down cottage outside Caldbeck, twelve miles from Carlisle. It was a wreck, far more of a wreck than Boscastle Road had been. Built in the eighteenth century, it was said to have been lived in by the famous huntsman, John Peel. It was out on the fells, in wild countryside, off an unfenced road and up a track which, in rain, turned into a bog. The term ‘in need of modernisation’ was this time literally true, with no kitchen, no bathroom, a dirt floor, and a hole in the roof. Beside this cottage was a broken down barn, one half of a wall missing. Thirteen acres of land went with it, and a stream ran through the edge of this area.
It was exactly what we wanted.
But the timing was wrong. We bought the cottage in 1977. The renovations were going to take six months, but before they were completed, and the cottage was ready to inhabit, I was once more in hospital. This time, the cancer was more serious, and I was in the Royal Marsden, not the Royal Free (my GP, who had been on holiday the first time, was adamant: at that time, the Marsden was the best). Nobody, after this second mastectomy, in January 1978, was any longer talking about this being a ‘one-off’ thing. The tumour was small, but the cancer had spread to two of the twenty lymph nodes, and after a second mastectomy I was to be given chemotherapy for six months. I would be part of a random trial, in which a computer would decide whether the drug would be delivered intravenously, in which case my hair would fall out, or by tablets, in which case I’d be sick. The computer drew the tablet-form for me, which was a relief, though not because of anything to do with losing my hair but because it meant I could be in my own house.
The Marsden experience was grim. It was undergoing refurbishment at the time, so some wards were closed, meaning that others, including the one I was in, were overcrowded. Patients who were dying were mixed in with the rest of us who were not in such a dire state. There was no question of having a room on my own – I was lucky to have a bed to myself – and it was ludicrous to try to pretend that the hospital was a house I could adapt to my needs. It was an institution, struggling magnificently to do the best it could, and it felt like one. But on the plus side, I had a friendly, sympathetic and humane surgeon, Mr McKinna, who seemed to work twenty-four hours a day, every day, but always had time to chat. He had a lively registrar, too, an American on a six-month placement from a New York hospital, who appeared shocked by the aftercare for breast cancer patients, though he could see no difference between the two countries in the surgical treatment.
It was harder, much harder, to adjust this time, and not only because of the implications of the looming chemotherapy. There was a patient in our ward dying of brain cancer. She was in a screened-off part of the ward but, of course, it wasn’t soundproof, and so all night long we heard the poor woman calling out ‘the pain, the pain, the pain’, and then ‘move me, turn me, turn me, help me, help me’, and then the screaming began. There was nothing any of us could do, but one night we were all appalled to hear a nurse shout, ‘Shut up! Turn yourself, if you want.’ This same nurse then came round the ward, telling each of us not to upset ourselves, and that this woman needed ‘disciplining’. When she’d finished her round, she went back to the moaning patient and said, ‘Now be quiet, you’re upsetting the other patients and behaving like a spoiled baby.’ No one slept after that. I struggled to calm myself, knowing it would be a mistake to appear ‘overwrought’, and so not trustworthy, and asked to see the Sister, to report what we’d all heard. She listened carefully and said she would deal with it. We never sa
w the nurse in question again, so presumably it was an agency nurse.
The day I started the chemotherapy, I was still in the Marsden. In the next cubicle, the green and blue curtains drawn, a priest was reciting the last rites over one patient; further down the ward, another priest was reciting them over the brain tumour patient, now quiet; across the ward, a much younger priest was talking to an Irish girl as six of her relatives listened with her, all in tears. None of the priests acknowledged each other. It was a suitably solemn atmosphere in which to pop the little white pill in my mouth, wondering whether in a hundred years’ time this drug would be looked back on as poison, or useless, or as a great life saver. My ignorance was total. I couldn’t have any part in the decision to have chemotherapy, because I had no medical knowledge at all. I couldn’t have weighed the pros and cons. There had to be trust in the doctor with no chance of being in any kind of control. Fortunately, Mr McKinna inspired trust. He explained that he simply had no way of knowing, not just if the chemo would work, but whether it was actually necessary, though he thought it was. ‘Two tumours in three years and other areas found to be active plus a spread, if a small one, to the lymph glands, means I can’t take the chance. If I’m wrong, I’ll have put you through an unpleasant experience for nothing, but I don’t think I am wrong.’
My Life in Houses Page 11
