Easter 1976, taken by me with a self-timer
I have claimed that I was amazingly calm about being so far away from home. At least, I was calm about being there. Getting there, actually having to travel those eight thousand miles, was different. I dreaded, deeply and viscerally dreaded, the flights to and from Hong Kong, a trip I made twice a year – out and back for Christmas, out and back for Easter. (In summer my parents came to England for their annual leave.) The flights were horrific. In those days – 1972 to 1980 – terrorism was a risk to airlines flying through or over the Middle East, so passengers would often not be allowed to disembark from the plane. It would fly via Rome (or Zurich), Dubai (or Abu Dhabi), Delhi (usually) or Bombay, Singapore (or Kuala Lumpur), and then to Hong Kong. The 747s in those days flew a shorter haul than they do now, and the Vietnam War meant the planes were not allowed to fly on more direct routes over China and South-East Asia. So the total flight time would be twenty-one or twenty-two hours. That’s a lot for anyone; for a ten-year-old travelling on his own, it feels like a lifetime. I spent the flights not so much in a paroxysm of fear as in a suspended state of near panic, waiting for things to go wrong, and jumping half out of my seat at any unexpected move, noise, bump, change of altitude or engine noise or just if the sky looked funny. Because part of the flight would involve crossing the Himalayas, and because weather avoidance systems were less developed in those days, there would often be a patch of frightening, banging turbulence. And all the while spent waiting, waiting, holding my breath for the minutes to pass. I coped well enough at the time, apart from the paralysing sense of dread, and in a way the fear served me well, since it displaced the emotions I felt about being so far away from home on to the business of travelling back and forth, rather than on to the fact of distance itself. But it left me with a fear of flying that is still vividly with me to this day.
My last term at Gresham’s was the Christmas term of 1980. I was staying on a term to take my Oxbridge entrance exams, which I passed to win a place reading English at St John’s College, Oxford. That made my parents very happy. I was head boy, captain of the second fifteen at rugby, second eleven at hockey, and played for the first eleven at cricket; I had a Duke of Edinburgh silver award, a gold badge for swimming and a bronze medallion for lifesaving, a St John’s Ambulance first-aid certificate, three A Levels, two S Levels and eleven O Levels. I had had several crushes and near misses with girls, but hadn’t yet had a proper girlfriend. I had played the Doctor in Macbeth, the Common Man in A Man for All Seasons, and Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest, all very badly. I had edited the school magazine. And I was completely, definitively illiterate about my own emotions. I was about as far out of touch with my emotions as it is humanly possible to be. I was an expert on not feeling things. Nothing at all unusual in that – a great deal of the way boys are, or were, brought up is a training in suppressing their feelings. The process begins by focusing on the manifestations of emotion and then turns inwards so that in the most successful cases it produces men who not only don’t express their feelings, but don’t feel them. This might sound like a fairly radical psychological surgery to perform on yourself, but if you think about it, not feeling is a good solution to the problem of not being allowed to express feeling.
That, I think, is why the flights to and from Hong Kong were such a big deal – they were exercises in not feeling. The storm of emotions I must have felt at leaving home and going away – the mixture of fear and rage and sadness, of longing and distance and grief – was, for twenty-one hours at a time, simply squished down. The flights felt so nightmarish because they were sustained exercises in squashing my emotions and locking them up; I was hiding myself in a trunk, I was dismantling myself and hiding myself under the floorboards. For years I had a nightmare about having committed a murder that involved chopping up a body and hiding it. My main feeling was fear of being caught. Then one day I realised that the dream was a kind of pun: dis-member, re-member. The body was me, and I had cut myself up.
So that was me at eighteen. The good news was that I was lively and curious – curious about everything, burning to know everything, hungry for knowledge and hungry to imagine and keen to the point of desperation for my life, my real life, to begin. The bad news is that I was about as cut off as possible from my own feelings as you can be and still be sane. A letter of my mother’s from the time refers to me seeming ‘more human’ than before. (Not a letter to me, obviously.) That is cruel but fair: the divorce between thought and feeling was so complete that I barely counted as human. In all probability I would not have been much inclined to feel things anyway: by temperament as well as by training, I squash things down rather than blurt them out. My father structured quite a lot of his emotional life around the avoidance of painful feelings; my mother kept many things about her life locked up and out of sight. All these things helped make me this way. And perhaps I sensed that the secrets involved were, to the people who carried them, dangerous. And perhaps there was a failure of imagination involved too. For whatever reason, a cocktail of unconscious wishes and needs set up a limit to my curiosity about my parents, my mother in particular. I just didn’t want to go there. Genetics, family dynamics, education and my own choices had conspired to produce a young man so strongly compartmentalised that I was not conscious of having any feelings at all.
WHO KILLED SHIVAUN CUNNINGHAM?
1
Of all the things I feel I understand better by researching my mother’s life story, and thinking about it, and empathising with it – the triple detective work I wrote of earlier – the one that has most helped me to understand my own childhood is the effect on my mother of emerging from a convent after all those years. Accounts by women who did it are unanimous that the feelings of bewilderment and numbness take many years to wear off. The two best-known accounts, by Monica Baldwin and Karen Armstrong, were written years after they left enclosed orders, and report a general sense of astonishment and sadness on emerging into the world. Armstrong’s first book about life after the convent, Beginning the World, was artificially breezy and made too light of how wrenchingly strange the experience of getting used to life in the world had been. She retold her story in The Spiral Staircase, which is especially moving for me because it is a book my mother might have written if she had been able to express herself fully and honestly. Two of the principal emotions it reports are disorientation and sadness. My mother, who was in the convent twice as long as Karen Armstrong, was, I think, lost and grieving and confused for many years.
Julie’s life on leaving the order was such a blur of events that it may have taken her a great deal of time even to realise what she had done. I suspect that it probably took her about a decade to reconcile herself to the experience of leaving the convent. That’s what other former nuns say they went through, just in terms of leaving the convent, in and of themselves. Then we have to consider the specifics of what Julie experienced: not simply the leaving itself, but the flight, the drama of the clothes, the flat, finding a job, the effort of inventing a new self to take into a secular world, the huge task of learning how to act and talk and walk and dress and be, the hard-to-admit sense of a biological clock running out, the desperate urgency of earning a living, the anxiety over what to tell people about herself, the permanent need to fight off a sense of shame and failure, the experience of getting to know a man and the crushing humiliation of being rejected by him, the unformed and unregulated nature of life in the world, the feeling that she was always on the verge of drowning, the constant anxiety and sense of pressure and rush and lack of back-up or safety net, above all the sheer wrenching strangeness of this new life. And then meeting Bill, and coming to like him, and falling in love and conceiving a baby and getting married and being a wife and going to live in Hamburg and Hong Kong and Rangoon and everywhere else, all now as a wife and mother and person completely different from the person she had been for most of her life. This was a huge psychic load to bear. I think that until, during, and af
ter her marriage, Julie’s main feelings were an overwhelming sense of numbness and bewilderment. I think it took years to wear off. I would not swear that it ever fully went away.
As for how this feeling manifested itself, the first and perhaps simplest answer is to address a question that, when I was growing up, never crossed my mind: what did my mother do all day? It never occurred to me as a child to think about this – she was just being Mum, that was self-evidently a full-time job. Besides, once I was at boarding school I was in an environment where every moment was structured, from first bell at 7.15 in the morning to lights out. Time was the biggest luxury imaginable. Just as I used to look at chocolate and sweets in shops and be utterly mystified that adults, who could afford them and had no one to tell them not to eat them, were not pigging out on them all day, I couldn’t understand why anyone who had any choice would want to do anything, when doing nothing was so much rarer and more precious. Why would Mum do anything when doing nothing was a serious alternative?
Now, though, looking back, I wonder. Julie had been an important person in her world. She had been the principal of a well-known school and had had power and responsibility and recognition and had been, every day of her working life, run ragged with busyness and burdens. She had worked flat out for years; her days were not her own, neither in practice nor in theory. The convent was a closed world but in many respects not a sheltered one, and the life of the community made extra demands on top of those of running a school, which was a full-time job in itself. She had done her degree and her teaching qualification while working full time. Then escape, and London, and the very different English schools, and living in a flat and beginning to come to terms with life in the world, and then men, and Bill, and Hamburg, and me, and then – well, perhaps it makes perfect sense that Julie would want to slow down and look around. She had full-time help with the house, with the cooking, and with me when I was there. It isn’t clear to me what she did with her days, other than that she always managed to seem, and to speak of herself as if she was, busy. This was partly social – having people over for tea, going to see people for tea, planning dinners and cocktail parties. She read a bit; she took an interest in cooking, and was a great one for cutting out recipes. (I still have the scrapbooks.) But that was about it. It seems an extraordinary contrast with her old life. She at one point spoke to Peggie about her intention to get a teaching job in Hong Kong. Nothing came of it, and Peggie always wondered why. Julie would soon have realised that she couldn’t get a job, because she could not use her certificates and references. This in itself must have been a huge psychic strain.
Many former nuns speak of an overwhelming sense of sadness at leaving the convent. I think Julie had that. And there was another, more concrete source of pain and loss. For the years of my early childhood, Julie’s life was dominated by the attempt to have another baby. If she had done that, she would, as if by magic, have managed to square the circle between the version of her life she had given Bill and the truth. It would have meant that, although she had lied to him about her age, she would also have balanced the consequences of that lie by giving him his heart’s wish, another child. He deeply did not want me to be an only child. They hadn’t had anything like as much time together before children as he would have wished, but the silver lining as far as he was concerned was that the mission to populate the world with little Lanchesters had begun. Onward!
So they tried, again and again. They succeeded, too. Julie was pregnant four more times after I was born. Every one of the pregnancies ended in a miscarriage. This was the great sadness of my parents’ life together, and it was something about which I had absolutely no idea until one of my Irish relatives told me about it in the mid-1980s. I believed what I was told, because I had no reason not to; but it still seemed to me hardly credible that all this could have been happening without my knowing about it, at the time or afterwards. Then, late in the process of writing this book, I found a brief handwritten note by my mother, two pages of letter paper under the heading ‘Random Notes (Before I Forget)’. It confirms, in the saddest and flattest way, that Julie did indeed miscarry several times. The first miscarriage was in May 1963, a month after our return to Hong Kong from Burma. The second was in October 1963, on the ship home to England. The third was in Labuan in March 1965. The note Julie left mentions only three miscarriages; there was one more, and it provided the only glimpse of the subject I ever had, when I was about seven or eight. One day at Highclere, walking down the steep-stepped short-cut through the vegetable garden to the bus stop, my mother, without turning round to look at me, said, ‘How would you feel about having a little brother or sister?’
The truthful answer was to say that I had never given the subject a second’s thought, and had no intention of starting now. I could tell that wasn’t what I was supposed to say, though, and so I said, ‘Great!’
‘Well,’ my mother said, stopping on the shallow, precipitous steps and turning to me, ‘you may be going to. But you mustn’t tell Dad.’
‘OK.’ I don’t think I gave the subject any more thought, and it seemed to go away on its own without my having to raise it again. I guessed that my mother had been misinformed. She never brought it up again. That, from the dating, must have been the last of the four miscarriages. The fact that my mother was so bubbling over with happiness and excitement that she could not hold back from telling me, even after the losses she had already suffered, is still freshly sad.
So this river of hope and pain was running through my parents’ lives and occupying far more of their thoughts and feelings than I could ever have guessed. Julie regarded my birth as a kind of miracle – more than once she told me that my name was derived from the word meaning ‘gift’ in Hebrew, and that that was what I was, a gift. She would have regarded a second baby as even more of a gift, as she headed into her middle forties at a time when that was long past the norm for having a child. But the second gift never came, and Julie began to feel that, if she was not exactly being punished by God, then He was withholding from her something that she wanted. Her belief in God was intact, and even survived the experience of going to see a priest in Hong Kong to discuss my religious status – whether there was some way in which I could be brought up secretly Catholic. He responded by making a sexual advance to her. Her shock and outrage over that was such that she didn’t attend mass for about a decade – and she never told my father what had happened, because she had gone behind his back in the first place, and because he ‘would have been too upset’. You have to wonder what the priest was thinking; perhaps he realised that since she was acting in secrecy she wouldn’t feel that she could tell anyone. If that was his calculation he was, depressingly, correct.
The fact that she went to see a priest at all is an indication that her religious feelings had not waned since she left the convent. (If you wonder how I know all this, given how little I know about so many areas of my mother’s life, it is because she told me. Religion was one of the subjects on which we spoke freely in her later life.) Her argument was not with God but with the hierarchical, authoritarian and sexist nature of the Catholic Church, especially in its pre-Vatican II form. She did not begin going to mass again until the mid-1970s, and then not in Hong Kong but only when she was in England in the summer. It was after my father’s retirement in 1979, when my parents settled near Norwich, that she began attending mass on a weekly basis. I don’t think her views changed much over this period; I think she just missed receiving communion. The rituals had changed sufficiently for her not to be overwhelmed by memories of how the Church used to be – she never expressed any nostalgia for the Latin mass, or any of the pre-Vatican II ritual trappings. She never made any attempt to enter into the life of the Church as a community.
Julie still believed in God. He had given – her escape from the convent, Bill, me – and now He was taking away. But why was He taking away? Perhaps the darkest thing about these years, darker even than the miscarriages my mother suffered, was the cost of
her lie, and the way its consequences seemed to grow and ramify. I don’t think she had thought this aspect of her choice through: I believe it seemed to her more like a moment of decisive action, which would free her from her old life and let her begin a new one unencumbered. It was a lie, and lies were wrong; but she deserved a chance at being happy, she loved Bill and was loved by him, and was sure that they could make each other happy. She had been trained in a theological tradition which taught that in certain circumstances the end could justify the means. She had been cheated of one lover, one husband-to-be, by death, and, because of her age, rejected by another man whom she believed loved her. All she had to do to marry this man was tell a lie; so she did. It was a test of her courage and her will to live her own life, just as leaving the convent had been. I think that was the spirit in which she began her new identity.
What gradually happened, though, was that this decision, which seemed clear cut, finite, and limited in scope – a turning of the key, the cutting of a knot – had psychological consequences. ‘Take what you want and pay for it’ is a good maxim, and it was what Julie thought she was doing. But the pain did not happen just once: she kept paying – the impact of her choice on her life kept mounting, and ramifying, and corroding her relationships and her sense of her self. It poisoned what should have been her happiness. The greatest damage done by my mother’s secret was to herself. First, she couldn’t tell the story to anyone else. That cut her off from people. She was never a trusting person; by giving her a sense that there was something she could never talk about, this also gave her a concrete reason not to trust anyone. That, humanly, was about the last thing Julie needed. But the secret did something else. It was impossible for her to talk to anyone else; and I believe that it became impossible for her to talk to herself about her own life. The story she had told about herself for her first forty years was that of a person who had tried hard to be good – that was central to her sense of herself. By lying to the person she loved most, she damaged that sense of herself, in ways that made it hard for her to make coherent sense of her life. She found it difficult to integrate her experiences into a story; she found it difficult to integrate her experiences, full stop.
Family Romance Page 27
