by Diana Athill
‘I AM ALIVE.’
It was enough.
It was everything. It was filling me to the brim with pure and absolute joy, a feeling more intense than any I had known before. And very soon after that I was wondering why they were bothering to set up a new bottle of plasma, because I could have told them that all I needed now was to rest.
So if I were pinned down to answer the question, ‘What did you feel on losing your child?’ the only honest reply would be, ‘Nothing.’ Nothing at all, while it was going on. What was happening was so bad – so nearly fatal – that it eclipsed its own significance. And during the four days I spent in hospital I felt very little: no more than a detached acknowledgement that it was sad. Hospital routine closed round me gently, isolating me in that odd, childish world where girls in their early twenties are the ‘grown-ups’, and the exciting events are visiting time and being allowed to get up and walk to the lavatory. When it was time to go home I was afraid that I would hate my bedroom, expecting to have a horror of the blackbird’s song and perhaps of some little rusty stain on the blue carpet, but friends took me home to an accompaniment of flowers, delicacies and cheerful talk, and I saw that it was still a pleasant room, my flat still a lovely place to live.
There was even relief: I would not now have to tell my mother anything, and I would not have to worry about money any more than usual. I could spend some on clothes for my holiday as soon as I liked, and I saw that I would enjoy the clothes and the holiday. It was this that was strange and sad, and made me think so often of how happy I had been while I was expecting the child (not of how unhappy I was now, because I wasn’t). This was what sometimes gave me a dull ache, like a stomach ache but not physical: that someone who didn’t yet exist could have the power to create spring, and could then be gone, and that once he was gone (I had always thought of the child as a boy), he became, because he had never existed, so completely gone: that the only tears shed for him were those first, almost unconscious tears shed by my poor old tortoise of a subconscious rather than by me. ‘I don’t want to have a miscarriage.’ Oh, no, no, no, I hadn’t wanted it, it was the thing I didn’t want with all my heart. Yet now it had happened, and I was the same as I had always been . . . except that now I knew – although if I had died during the miscarriage I would hardly, because of my physical state, have noticed it – the truth was that I loved being alive so much that not having died was more important to me by far than losing the child: more important than anything.
This Bit Ought Not to be True
There is a peculiarly English middle-class technique for dealing with awkward facts, about which I know a good deal from personal experience: if something is disagreeable let’s pretend it isn’t there.
I loved my family and my family loved me, but quite early in my life I began to see that loving people didn’t necessarily mean agreeing with them. My family all appeared to believe what we were taught to believe in church. By the age of fifteen I knew that I didn’t. They all voted Conservative. I knew that when I was old enough I was going to vote Labour. They all took it for granted that girls remained chaste until they married. I – although for my first twenty years I fully expected to get married and be faithful to a beloved man for the rest of my days – was perfectly sure that as soon as I got a chance to start making love I would grab it. If they knew all this, particularly that last item, they would almost certainly feel that they ought to cast me out – and I did not want to be cast out, nor were they by nature caster-outers, so the obvious solution to the problem was for me to keep quiet about what I thought and felt, and when those thoughts and feelings became apparent, as some of them did when I stopped going to church and read a lot of left-wing books, for them to pretend not to notice or to treat what they had to notice as a joke.
In my youth I found this hypocrisy shaming. Surely I ought to have stood by my beliefs and argued in their favour, and my family would have ended by respecting me for it. That was probably true as far as religion and politics were concerned, but sex was another matter, probably because my attitude about that was the result not of reasoning, but of my physical nature. Although the way in which it was going to make me live did not shock me, I could see all too clearly why it might shock other people, which meant that I couldn’t be quite sure that it was not in fact shocking: the ground under my feet, in this matter, was not quite firm. Things could be foreseen (and were in fact to occur) which my family would quite certainly find hard to stomach, so, shaming or not, silence was best.
With this conclusion they silently agreed, as became clear on the publication of my first book in the 1960s. Although I failed to understand this until the book was written, it had been a therapeutic exercise. I hadn’t planned the book. Absurd though it sounds to say, ‘It happened to me,’ it really did. I was astonished when it began, and went on being surprised, paragraph by paragraph, as it continued, returning to it every evening when I got home from the office with the utmost eagerness but with no idea of what was coming next. All I knew was that I had got to get it right.
It was the story of having my heart broken: something I had long stopped thinking about but which had been weighing on me as a suppressed sense of failure for years, and there was no point in telling the story unless I could really get to the bottom of it. Which I did, and, sure enough, it changed my life, which was truly marvellous . . . but what on earth would my mother think of this brutal (to her) publication of such a mass of what (to her) ought to remain guilty secrets? It was she who mattered. My father was dead by then, and what the rest of the family was likely to feel was not greatly important to me.
I decided that the best thing to do was let the book be published in the USA, where she knew nobody so needn’t worry about ‘What will the neighbours think?’, and then present it to her as a published book so that she could see that it could be considered acceptable, telling her that if she really couldn’t bear it I would not let it be published here. So I put it in the post to her, and waited. And waited. And waited. Days turned into weeks, and still nothing. And I found myself unable to put my hand to the telephone and ask her, ‘Did you receive my book?’ I knew how silly this was, but I just could not do it. I had known that her decision was important to me, but had no idea, until gripped by this extraordinary inhibition, of how important it was.
Then we were both invited to stay for a weekend with her oldest friend, my godmother, so I said to myself, ‘I’ll ask her when we are at Aunt Phoebe’s.’ But no, I couldn’t. She was to stay the night with me in London before going home to Norfolk, so, ‘I’ll ask her on the drive to London.’ But still I couldn’t. We got to my flat and it became, ‘I’ll ask her after we’ve had supper . . .’ and while I was in the kitchen cooking it, thank God, the phone rang and she called out, ‘It’s Andrew – he wants to talk to you.’ Andrew was my brother, and what did he say? ‘Di, Mum wants you not to publish that book but I’ve told her that’s rubbish. It’s a bloody good book.’ My knees almost gave way under me with the relief of it. I turned to look at her. ‘I know, darling,’ she said. ‘He thinks I oughtn’t to ask you, so I suppose I shouldn’t?’ and I said, ‘Yes, perhaps you really shouldn’t.’ And we spent the rest of the evening talking about what was in that book – two adult women, talking calmly and openly about it, while I rejoiced inwardly at this lovely opening up of our relationship . . . and from that evening on she never once said another word to me about the book or anything in it. I always sent her copies of reviews so that she could see that it had shocked no one, but never once did she refer to them. I knew now that she had always been aware of almost everything in it, but it and its contents no longer existed.
At first I thought this was ridiculous, and so it was: ridiculous and dishonest. Then I thought it was comic. And finally, as the years went by, I came to see it as a very successful way of dealing with a difficult problem. You have a daughter whom you love, she does something you wish very much she hadn’t done, but you want to go on loving her in spite of it
. All right, so let’s forget about it, let’s wipe it out. It works! My mother and I grew closer and closer. There are no memories that I value more than that of the almost flame of love which lit her eyes when she opened them and saw me bending over her deathbed.
The Decision
Few events in my life have been decided by me. How I was educated, where I have lived, why I am not married, how I have earned my living: all these crucial things happened to me rather than were made to happen by me. Of course an individual’s nature determines to some extent what happens, but moments at which a person just says, ‘I shall now do X,’ and does it are rare – or so it has been in my life. Perhaps my decision to move into a home for old people is not quite the only one, but it is certainly the biggest.
This is not to say that outside events contributed nothing to it, because two of them did set the scene. The first was a visit to a friend, Rose Hacker, after I learned that she had made such a move. This shook me, because Rose, though well over ninety, was a lively and independent woman. Rose in an old people’s home? It seemed unthinkable. I decided I must summon up the nerve to visit her: ‘summon up the nerve’ because the image in my mind of such homes was a grim one.
This one, behind a wall in Highgate, north London, was set in a large, well-kept garden surrounded by trees and appeared to be uninhabited. I realize now that most of the residents were in the library, where tea is served to those who don’t prefer to have it in their rooms, and that the staff were having theirs in their office, but wandering about unsupervised felt a bit creepy. Finally I met another wanderer, a visitor, but familiar with the place, and was guided to Rose’s room. I knocked on the door. Silence. So I opened it, and there was Rose, who must by then have been rising a hundred, having a nap in a splendid extending armchair.
She woke at once, unabashed, and no sooner had she greeted me warmly than she said: ‘My dear, you must come and live here. It is the most wonderful place.’ I had no intention of living in any such place, but I was so relieved at finding Rose so happy that I urged her to tell me more, and her glowing report must have lodged in my mind, ready to pop out if need arose.
The second person to set the scene was Nan Taylor, who I had known since our taxis pulled up nose to tail outside Lady Margaret Hall, the Oxford college at which we were both nervously arriving. Nan was three months younger than me, but she weathered less well. By the time she was eighty she became really frail, so a bad fall led to a broken hip and soon my dearest old friend was an immobilized and incontinent wreck. She could afford agency nurses, who came every morning and evening, and had an angelic Irish cleaner who did much for her, but friends too had to rally round, which they did gladly because they loved her. It did, however, become a burden, and after two years I for one was regretting her determination to die in her own home.
I visited her twice a week, which entailed frantic searches for a parking space and an anxious wait at her front door. She would give no one but her carers and her nearest neighbour a key, so was she slowly making her precarious way to the door, or had she fallen? Often it was the latter, so I would have to call the neighbour, praying someone was at home, or, if they weren’t, the police (who responded quickly and kindly, though climbing through her sitting-room window was not easy). And once Nan was safely back in her chair and tea had been made and administered, it became increasingly hard to penetrate her indifference to any subject apart from querulous complaints about her carers. She had been for many years a dear, generous and entertaining friend, so we all went on being fond of her, and wanting to help, but I’m pretty sure I was not the only one whose sorrow at her death was mingled with relief. And in my case vanity (I suppose) filled me with dismay at the thought of ever inflicting such an experience on my friends.
In the winter of 2008 I went down with flu, and was soon reduced to such a state of inertia that I no longer reached for the glass of water beside my bed, which I knew I ought to be drinking, nor could I summon up the energy to telephone anyone. Eventually a dear friend, Xandra Bingley, happened to telephone me, after which she fed and cared for me with the most generous willingness and good humour until I was better. There was no question of Xandra making heavy weather of it, and I felt nothing but the purest gratitude and relief, but later I remembered that post-Nan dismay. Nan’s decline had been gradual, so I had not realized until now that an old person can be reduced to helplessness – can reach the stage of having to be looked after – almost overnight. If I’d had children I suppose I would have accepted, albeit reluctantly, that it could be done by them, but by one’s friends? Very occasionally, and if one were able to reciprocate, perhaps; but if it was likely to become more frequent, if it was possible that one might soon become as dependent on their help as Nan had been? No! And how, having reached my nineties, could I fool myself into thinking that I was not moving into that territory? It was then that I decided to call Rose’s home and ask them to send me their brochure.
As a result I visited their office and ended by saying that I would like to be considered as a resident if a room came free in about a year’s time. I was able to feel that I had made what was probably a sensible decision but was not tied down to it. So for the next twelve months, on the rare occasions when I did think about it, I was able to feel that moving into an old people’s home was a comfortably distant event.
By that time I knew a good deal about the home – the Mary Feilding Guild. I learned that the quality of the care was wonderful, and that their rooms were tiny. Visiting Rose, I had not been particularly struck by her room’s smallness, I suppose because I had not yet envisaged living in such a room myself, but now I had talked to someone who had just moved in and who was still vividly aware of what she had given up in order to be there, and it was alarming.
You were not, of course, a prisoner in your room. You lunched in the dining room, and at teatime had the choice between a tray in your room or having it in the library. There was also a computer room and various utility rooms, including kitchens with ovens for those who wanted to cook. And the garden was large and very pleasant. It would, I saw, be like going back to boarding school. Except that when you went to school you had no accumulation of possessions to be sacrificed.
It was that which made it such a shock when the letter came saying that a room was now available. It was one of their best rooms, with big windows looking out over the garden and a balcony large enough for several flowerpots and a chair. But it would hold a single bed, a desk, two chairs plus a desk chair – and that was that. The built-in storage space for clothes would hold – perhaps – a quarter of those I possessed; there was only one wall about twelve feet long for pictures. And what would I do about my books?
I came home, sat down in my little sitting room, looked round at the magpie’s nest of beloved things accumulated in a long lifetime, and felt: ‘But this is me.’ The extent to which a personality depends on the space it occupies and the objects it possesses appeared to me at that moment overwhelming. How could I perform an act of what amounted to self-destruction? The answer was: I can’t! I can’t and I won’t, I’d rather die.
At that stage it would have taken only one word of encouragement from one person, and I would have called the Guild and told them I had changed my mind. I did not get that word. The two people I relied on most for support, my nephew Philip Athill and Xandra, had agreed that in deciding to move to a home I was doing a sensible thing, and I knew both of them felt relief at that decision, as I would have done in their position. Both, when they saw that now I might panic out of it, were perceptibly disturbed at the possibility, again as I would have been. They were not being selfish or unkind. They were simply aware that over their full and busy lives hung the possibility that affection might plunge them into a very onerous responsibility. Of course they didn’t want this to happen. It was their reaction that made me suppress the panic.
This horrible feeling came in surges, like fits of nausea – just as excruciating and irresistible, so that while it wa
s going on I was entirely possessed by it; and, like fits of nausea, it passed. It was a relief, gradually to realize this: that what one had to do was hold tight and wait it out, whereupon reason would reestablish its hold: a sensible decision did not become less sensible when it finally led to the action decided on. I must accept that fact, calm down and get on with it.
This became less painful when I discovered to my surprise that getting rid of possessions by giving them to friends or members of my family who would, I was sure, enjoy them turned out to be easy – even a positive pleasure; but unfortunately my books were too many to be disposed of in that way. Some could be given, but most had to be dealt with in bulk. I finally managed it, though just before the final move I experienced a physical collapse serious enough to lead to a night in hospital, which I’m now sure was the result of stress.
The first help came from a very close friend, Sally Bagenal, who swooped in from Kenya for three days and carried me off to buy a bed, an easy chair and a desk (none of the things I possessed would fit into my new room), turning what had looked like a heavy task into an exciting shopping spree. The second help came from my nephew Philip, who hoisted me over the seemingly insurmountable book obstacle. I’d had shelving built in my new room which would hold two or three hundred out of the thousand copies or so that I possessed – but which ones? Every time I tried to decide I sank into a state of shaming uselessness. Philip spent the best part of a day holding up, one by one, every book in that daunting mass and saying, ‘In or Out?’, then boxing it as appropriate – something which I truly believe I never could have done on my own.
