Work, it’s clear, has been the driving force of her life, the creative work that helped her recover from serious illness in her thirties and that has enabled her to speak and paint and write, against all the odds, in her own clear voice. Her father’s death was bad enough. We were both, we discovered, the same age when our fathers died, both of cancer, also at the same age.
And then, eleven years after her father died, Frieda got the news that her brother, Nicholas, had hanged himself, at home in Alaska, at the age of forty-seven. He was a year old when their mother gassed herself in the kitchen of that flat in Primrose Hill while he and Frieda slept in the next room. In 1998, shortly before he died, Ted Hughes wrote a letter to his son, describing the mental scars that Plath’s death had left on the family. ‘I tell you all this,’ he said, ‘with a hope that it will let you understand a lot of things . . . Don’t laugh it off. In 1963 you were hit even harder than me. But you will have to deal with it, just as I have had to. And as Frieda has had to.’
‘When my brother died,’ Frieda told me, ‘there were a couple of friends who were really brilliant, and they used to phone all the time. I became very unsociable for a while, obviously. I remember in the early days I used to sit on the sofa on the middle floor landing.’ She had just shown me round the house and I had just seen it. ‘There was a mirror facing the sofa and I used to sit on the sofa on the phone, and I remember looking at my face once. I was weeping myself into a little wreck, and I looked at my face and I didn’t recognize myself. I thought: right, that’s enough now, I have to get on with life.’
There are a number of poems in Alternative Values about Nicholas’s death. ‘There’s a poem in there,’ Frieda told me, ‘that just encapsulates all that pain, because his death was attached to my mother’s death. It just gathers all the deaths together and becomes a big mourning fest.’ The poem is called ‘Transition’ and it talks of ‘this new wasteland where nothing stopped the bitter wind’.
‘This person phones up,’ said Frieda, ‘and said, “I’m so sorry to hear about the loss of your brother,” and she says, “Have you got help?” I said, “What do you mean, what kind of help?” And I’m thinking: she means a psychiatrist. I don’t need a psychiatrist! My brother died. My husband and I have broken up. One thing happened just after the other, and I was very, very sad and that was normal. It turned out that what she actually wanted to know was whether I was getting the right medication. Why would I want to medicate against sorrow? If I can’t feel it, then how can I process it? Address it? Digest it? Understand it? I was simply very sad and it would wear off one day, as a natural process. Part of the process of living.’
Yes, it’s ‘part of the process of living’. It’s normal to be sad. I prefer not to use the word ‘depressed’ because I think depression is an illness, and I have not suffered from the illness called depression. But there have been times in my life when I, like Frieda, have been very, very, very, very sad.
‘I don’t,’ she said, ‘want to feel anything that isn’t natural, because I want to know the size, the shape and how painful the shadows I’m boxing are. I know the one thing that’s calculated to get me off my backside is the passage of time I cannot get back. It’s a real driver. The year my brother died I was seeing someone briefly and he said, “Are you dying?” I said, “Everybody’s dying,” and he said, “No, I mean are you dying now, do you have cancer or something?” And I said, “Why do you ask?” He said, “Because you do everything at a hundred miles an hour, you’ve got to get things done and you’re always so driven.” And I said, “But I’ve been like that all my life and it’s called living.”’
We are all going to die. It doesn’t matter if you’re ready, or if you want it. ‘Because I could not stop for Death,’ as the poet Emily Dickinson put it, ‘He kindly stopped for me.’ You don’t have to have seen Bergman’s The Seventh Seal to know that we are all playing chess with Death.
Most of us don’t think all that much about dying. I have to admit I don’t even have a will. This is partly because I don’t want to face up to the fact that I haven’t got anyone obvious to leave my stuff to. Property, if you have any, usually goes to children, or perhaps to nephews or nieces. It usually goes to blood. Or, of course, to charity, but when you see some of the salaries paid to people who work in charities, it does make you wonder if you really want the sweat of all your book reviews to give those people the kind of pension nobody you know will get.
But when I got cancer the second time, I had a sudden feeling that I needed to sort some things out. I went through my papers. I sat on the floor of my study and gazed at the piles of paper and felt as if I was stuck in Bleak House. I got about halfway through and then thought that if I died at least someone else would sort it all out. Then I thought it would probably have to be my mother and I thought it would be too much for her to have to do that, too.
I decided to sort out my books. I don’t really know why. My flat has always been like a sort of petri dish that breeds books instead of mould. My cousin Robin generously offered to help. He thought the books should be alphabetical and in categories, perhaps because he’s a man. It was so hard to choose which books had to go. I was picking up books, and wondering if I would ever read them again, and wondering if I would ever get the chance. I thought I couldn’t bear to leave some of those books unread. In the end, we made sure that the books on the mezzanine were all poetry, the books in my study were nearly all fiction and the books in my hallway, which is two storeys high, were nonfiction. The books that Robin sorted were in alphabetical order. The books I sorted weren’t, because I felt overwhelmed by all the books and because I was tired.
I sent away for one of those wills you can get for £25 and filled it out the night before my operation. I left half my stuff to my friends and my brother and half to a charity called Kids’ Company. The charity has since gone bust, so it’s just as well I didn’t die, though the will wouldn’t have been legal anyway. The administrator on the ward refused to witness it, so I went down to the operating theatre thinking that if I didn’t come out, what I had would go to HMRC. In fact, it would have gone to my mother, but I don’t think it would have done all that much to cheer her up.
A week before the operation, I went to meet a friend in Trafalgar Square. When I saw the lions and the fountains, and the lights on the fountains, and the buses going past, and the people walking through the square, the feeling that I didn’t want to die hit me so strongly that it was like a spasm running through me. And I don’t. I don’t want to die because I really, really like being alive.
Almost half of us will get cancer. We all know people who have it, and if we don’t now, we soon will. Some of those people will be old, but quite a few of them won’t. Old is bad enough. Old can break your heart. But if they’re not old, you feel cheated. You feel as if someone has torn up the contract that guaranteed your three score and ten. In the West, we all think we’re entitled to our three score and ten. What we forget is that the mortality rate, in East and West, and even in countries like Denmark, is always 100 per cent.
If we don’t die of cancer, we’ll die of something else. ‘Being brave’, said Philip Larkin in his poem ‘Aubade’, ‘Lets no one off the grave.’ Death, he said, ‘is no different whined at than withstood’.
‘I feel,’ says Diana Athill, who is still going strong at ninety-nine, ‘that we all have a duty to try and develop sensible attitudes to . . . death and remind ourselves that it is a part of life.’ She wrote her book about old age, Somewhere Towards the End, when she was ninety. ‘The difference between being and non-being’, she says at the end of it, ‘is both so abrupt and so vast that it remains shocking even though it happens to every living thing that is.’
I don’t know if Diana Athill is prepared for death. I don’t really know how you prepare for death, apart from making sure that the people you love know you love them. Diana Athill doesn’t have children. She does have lots of younger friends, a very nice room in a very nice care hom
e, and generally seems to have a lovely time.
If I make it to old age, and I’m stuck in one of those care homes they film on secret cameras and put on Panorama, and if my friends are too old and frail to visit me, I may come to the point where I’ve had enough of life. In the meantime, I don’t want to waste a minute. In the meantime, count me in.
Stick your face in the sun
Italians know about la dolce vita. They have plenty of practice in doing it well. Perhaps it’s because I was born in Rome that the Italian view of la dolce vita is pretty much mine. Give me sunshine, give me good coffee, give me delicious food, give me delicious wine. Give me all of these things and I, too, will think that life is sweet.
Seven years ago, on a press trip to Seville, I got talking to a journalist from the Corriere della Sera. She talked about the house in the country that she went to when she wasn’t in Rome. I asked her how a journalist could afford a second home, and she told me that she’d bought it for 8000 euros. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I heard the words ‘8000 euros’ and something went off in my head.
When I got back to the hotel that night, I sat by the computer in the foyer, looking at Italian properties on the internet until 3 a.m. Unfortunately, there was nothing for 8000 euros. There were things for 80,000 euros, but I didn’t have 80,000 euros. I started thinking about friends who didn’t earn any more than me, but who were somehow managing to pay for child minders for their children. I remembered something I’d read that said it cost £250,000 to bring up a child. I didn’t know how the sums would work out, but I thought that if they could pay to bring up a child then maybe I could increase my mortgage to get something that cost about the same as a child’s leg.
Within five days of getting back to London, I had found, on the internet, and made an offer on, a tiny flat in a fourteenth-century watchtower in Tuscany. I didn’t tell my friends, or even my mother, what I was doing, because I thought everyone would tell me I was mad. I was on a course for a new computer system at work when someone called from the estate agent to say that my offer had been accepted.
I tried not to panic as I asked my boss if I could take a day off, and booked an early-morning flight from Stansted and an evening flight back. I drove to Stansted, parked the car, got the flight, and arrived at Pisa at 11 a.m. feeling as if I was about to take an exam. A woman from the estate agent met me. She asked if I’d been looking for property in Tuscany for a while and I had to tell her that until two weeks before the thought had never entered my head.
When I saw the watchtower, which was made of bricks that were partly a kind of pink colour and partly grey, I felt my heart jump. It was like when you’re at a party and you suddenly lock eyes with someone very handsome, and you feel your heart beating faster until someone tells you they’ve got a wife. First, we walked out to the little piece of garden in front of the watchtower. The view made me gasp. There was a hill, covered in fields. Some of them were a golden colour, and some were different shades of green. Some of the trees had leaves that looked as if they were floating, like little green clouds, on their trunks. Some, which I thought were probably cypress trees, were tall and pointed. In front of the cypress trees, and the trees that looked like clouds, there were olive groves. In the distance, on another hillside, you could see a village and a church spire. The pool, which was built on a slope, had one of those edges that make it look as though the water is part of the landscape, like an upside-down sky.
My flat, or at least the one I had made an offer on without seeing, had its own front door at the top of a steep flight of stairs. It opened straight into a small room that was completely empty, without even a sink or kitchen cupboards. Off it there was another small room that was completely empty, and off that was a shower room. The floor was made of terracotta tiles that looked hundreds of years old. The ceiling was high, and supported by ancient oak beams. In each room there was a big window. From the main room and the bedroom, you could see the patch of garden and a walnut tree. From the bathroom, you could see the terracotta roofs and stone houses of the next village.
When I looked out of the main window, I remembered a conversation I’d had four years before. It was just after I had the results of my lumpectomy, and been told that there was still some cancer left behind. I had a session with a counsellor. She said she thought it was a good idea to have a picture of something in your head to keep you going through what you had to face. The picture that came to my head was of me in an Italian village, sitting by a window, writing and looking out at terracotta roofs. I had completely forgotten this till now.
The woman from the estate agent drove me to the nearest town, which had a thermal spring and a pretty square, and in the Gran Caffè of the square we met her boss and the architect. We talked about contracts and payments, and we had a Spritz, which is an Italian aperitif made from prosecco and Aperol or Campari, and clinked glasses and said ‘salute!’ After that, she drove me to a furniture shop, where the other people in the watchtower had bought their furniture and their kitchens. By the time I got to Pisa airport, where I ate gnocchi and drank red wine, and chatted to a couple of English guys at the next table, and felt so happy I thought my heart would burst, I had bought, or committed myself to buying, a flat in Tuscany, and a kitchen.
Since then, Italy has been my other world. When I signed the contract, six weeks later, and picked up the keys, I slept on an airbed from Argos, and used a torch from Argos, because there was still no furniture or electricity or gas. Two days later, Winston turned up with the furniture I’d bought in London in a van. It was quite hard to get the sofa up the stairs, and to squeeze the furniture into those two tiny rooms, but when we did, and were finished, it looked like what it was: a tiny, beautiful home.
The first time I was out there, I met Norbert and his wife, Josephine. They live in a nearby village and since then they have kept an eye on my flat when I’m not there. When I am there, I see them, and sometimes their daughters Christine and Jessica, and Christine’s daughter, Lucia. A few months after my big operation, I went over for Lucia’s First Communion. I have spent Easter and Christmas at their home. They have become my second family.
I go to Italy to write, read, look out at a sun-drenched hillside, and dream. I go to sip Vermentino in the local bar, and eat pasta with sweet, ripe tomatoes, flecked with fresh basil. I go to wander around crumbling cities and to practise my Italian, which always makes me feel as if I’m in a country that speaks in song. I go to lie in a pool and gaze up at a blue, blue sky.
In Italy, as the sun sets, you have an aperitivo. This could be a glass of prosecco. It could be a glass of the local wine. It’s often a Spritz, which is the colour of a jewel, either dark orange or dark pink. You usually have it with a bowl of peanuts and a bowl of crisps. In many bars now, even the bar at the local supermarket, they have a whole aperitivo buffet, of crisps, peanuts, little bits of focaccia with ham or pecorino, little squares of pizza, little chunks of cheese. The Italians have, in fact, taken a collection of my favourite things and made it into a daily ritual that feels like a celebration.
The summer after I lost my job, I didn’t go. I was too worried about money and thought I needed every penny from rent I could get. The following summer, I rented out my flat in London for five weeks and spent two and a half of them in Tuscany. I was trying to get a writing project off the ground, but couldn’t do it in London as I seemed to spend all my time sending emails or lurching from one deadline to the next.
When I woke up the first morning, and looked out at the fig tree, and the olive trees, and the cypresses, I thought of Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’. He talks about withdrawing to a garden, a place of quiet and solitude where ‘luscious clusters of the vine’ crush his mouth with their wine, and where the whole world turns into a ‘green thought in a green shade’. Having cast ‘the body’s vest aside’, he says, his ‘soul into the boughs does glide’, where ‘like a bird it sits and sings’.
I wouldn’t put it quite like that, but I
would certainly say that I go to Italy to feed my soul.
We all need to feed the soul. We all need to have those moments when the noise in our head falls away and we can see the beauty in the world and just stop and breathe it in. We need them to get us through what Marvell called the ‘uncessant labours’ and what some of us might be tempted to call the crap.
You don’t need a poet to tell you that it’s a kind of miracle to watch a bud turn into a flower. For Morag and Mike, the flowers they have grown in their gardens have sometimes been like candles in the dark. For my father, I think it was the same. When I saw him kneeling by his roses, I sometimes thought it was as if he was taking Holy Communion.
It was the same when he listened to music. I often saw him wipe away tears when he listened to Handel or Bach. I often wipe away tears when I listen to them, too. ‘Where words fail,’ said Hans Christian Andersen, ‘music speaks.’ And words, as we all know, fail a lot. For my cousin Robin, music has played a big part in keeping what Churchill called the ‘Black Dog’ away. Robin has been in the BBC Symphony Chorus for twenty-two years. ‘The commitment,’ he told me, ‘is as professional as it could be. It’s hard work. You don’t always feel like turning up after a day at the office, but it’s a great privilege. It has been a retreat when work or personal life hasn’t been going so well.’
Stefano also sings in a choir. Singing in a choir, according to the studies, is good for your health and good for your brain. It is also, apparently, one of the best ways of making you feel happy. There’s something about getting together with other people, and drawing in air, and expelling that air to make a harmonious sound, that lifts the spirits and touches the soul. So much better than drawing in air and counting to six.
The purple coffin that might well have saved Winston’s life when he broke that glass ceiling (but not in the way HR managers tell you to if you’re a woman or you’re black) was there to store his drum stands. Winston has been in bands for most of the time I have known him. He has been playing drums since he was five. He is, to use his words, a ‘shit hot’ drummer. He has even played with Michael Jackson. It was because he wanted to play his drums that he was ‘annoyed’ when a doctor told him he might not walk. That, and the fact that he wanted to get back on his bike.
The Art of Not Falling Apart Page 27
