by Jenny Diski
Memoirs of a Survivor was published eleven years after I began to live with Doris. She gave me a copy of the novel, as she did every one she wrote. It was inscribed ‘To Jenny love Doris 25/11/74’. It made familiar and disturbing reading. I could see Emily in me, just as I could see my elderly neighbour’s description of me aged three. It is as accurate a reading of me as Emily’s harsh commentary on others. It is true, but it is, of course, a doubly edited version, a view of me from the narrator’s point of view, which itself has been taken and worked for fiction’s purpose from Doris’s point of view. If there is pity in the narrator’s response to Emily, it is strained for. I discovered after a while that Doris had a habit of describing people in fiction and in life as, for example, ‘heartbreaking’ in her most distant, coolest tone, as if to mitigate her dislike of them. She saw it as being fair, I think.
The other me I recall at that time is the me of my own feelings and behaviour, which seemed always at odds or out of true with Doris’s analysis. The recollection of how I felt and behaved can’t be taken as ‘truer’ than Doris’s fictionalised me, even if I recognised what was missing in Doris’s version of Emily. As she was described, Emily only got to express herself through the narrator’s insights into her psyche. It was as if Doris didn’t want to know, or it wasn’t useful to her story to give Emily a voice or fears of her own. The narrator watches and analyses Emily’s every move and thought, and while I recognised myself in those descriptions, I also remembered being quite opaque to her, simply because my recollection is of an interiority of my own. I put the two views together – fictionalised Emily, remembered Jenny – but they never fitted. Possibly that’s because the bits of me have never fitted together as one is supposed to think they do.
In spite of my self-tutoring and edging towards joining in the conversation around Doris’s table, for most of the time, we were on our own. A month or so after my arrival, I grew increasingly silent as I went about my life in the house. It wasn’t just that early shyness that people assumed I felt or, as I thought of it, my watchfulness as I tried to gain a foothold where I’d landed. At first I was feeling guilt at being an arbitrary recipient of good fortune and at having left my friends behind in the hospital in Hove. Though it was to some extent adolescent dramatising, even sentimentality, I can’t imagine how I could have got myself to think differently about it. But over time, a month or so, this gave way to something else.
I became increasingly silent in a way that was familiar and alarming. My mood plummeted as another thought came to me: a thought that hit me as if it was entirely new but which was perfectly formed as it dropped into place, as if, without my awareness, I had been thinking about it for decades. It was a realisation, and at the same time, a fact that I had resisted being conscious of until it made itself known to me, three months into my stay with Doris, with pinpoint clarity. It was a worry and a fear of such urgency and potential danger that it sealed my lips. I think it must have risen into my consciousness from a kernel of understanding that the strangeness of having been brought to live with a stranger was not just my situation and difficulty, but, if I stopped and thought about it, Doris’s too. Somehow, it broke through my almost overwhelming teenage narcissism, and I did stop and think about it, and what it implied, until the anxiety became obsessive, and over those weeks I thought about it so much that everything else faded away in its shadow. And in that time it took on the form of a question that only I could ask and only Doris could answer.
As a small child I had regular episodes, which my parents called moods, and doctors would now diagnose as depression, in which I became locked away from the world outside my boundaries. I became mute and still. Not eating, not talking, submerged, incarcerated, unable to account for any of this to my baffled and cross parents. The barrier between me and the world, me and my parents shouting down at me, grew thicker and more impenetrable. I fell, was falling, deep in some pit, in darkness and alone, reaching a point of no return, when it would become impossible to claw my way back to normality. I sat in the middle of a catastrophe. I wanted to speak, though I don’t know what it was I wanted to say, probably nothing specific, just anything that would break the tangle I’d tied myself and my parents up in. But I couldn’t get the words out. Nor could I cry, so that he or she would understand at least that I was unhappy rather than wilfully stubborn and disobedient. Each demand to know what the matter was with me sent me falling deeper into the black. Each minute of silence, of ‘refusing’ to answer, made it more impossible to break through the caul I was wrapped in, and increased the fury of my parents. Sometimes the mood started from an event, some anger, theirs with me or with each other, or some resentment of mine. But often enough it wasn’t triggered by anything that I could recall. Which was why I couldn’t answer the questions. I didn’t know. The only words I ever spoke were a mumbled ‘Don’t know’ or ‘Nothing’, which fanned the impatience of my parents. These moods could go on for hours, even days. I can’t recall how they stopped each time or why I couldn’t make them stop at will, knowing that they’d stopped before. My childhood moodiness was no different in form or feeling from the depression I’ve experienced since my teenage years. I still become impenetrable for periods of time. When people ask, ‘What’s the matter?’, the best I can say is ‘Nothing’.
Now, at Doris’s, with the weight of a terrible new question filling my mind, I fell into one of those black holes, and more or less stopped speaking. I managed polite ‘thank you’ or ‘yes’ and ‘no’, but I found it harder and harder to converse or explain. I felt I could hardly breathe for fear of what I was thinking. I was also terrified that my badness was revealing itself, actually creating the danger I was so anxious about.
There was a difference, though, in the origins of this mood. This time it wasn’t because I was stuck with nothing to say: it was because I had just one thing I needed to say, the question I needed to have an answer to, and it couldn’t be spoken. It threatened chaos. Better to keep it to myself. Yet kept to myself, it rendered me morose and silent and eaten alive. It was just a simple series of words but when the last word had been said, I feared it would explode and bring the house down around my and Doris’s ears. It became all I could think about. Only one answer would make the situation safe. Any other would be catastrophic. But I’d realised that to speak the question, to ask for an answer, would open a door that was keeping my new world safely shut off from my old world. If I stayed silent, I was safe from the possibility of bringing the old world here. Then I realised that if I asked, and the door opened, I might not be able to trust the answer even if I was given the right one. It might be a lie and I would never know what the truth actually was. The black hole was the place that sucked me in, away from a world of double binds keeping me in the dark and completely alone. It was terrible, but safe. To ask the question was to pull the trigger.
I stayed mostly in my room and went downstairs only if I had to. I replied to anything Doris said in monosyllables, trying to be polite but failing. It went on like this for several weeks. Eventually, one evening, a Saturday, I think, after another silent supper which I hardly ate, when we were upstairs sitting on cushions on the carpet in Peter’s room where the TV was, Doris told me to turn the sound down and asked me again what the matter was, why was I so silent, what was wrong? Her tone was kind and a bit desperate, and I wanted very much to relieve myself of the burden of my question. I wanted more than anything to dare to say what was on my mind, and to discover that it was all right: that there was nothing terrible about it and the danger was all in my mind. But to say it was to risk hell breaking loose. Hell had broken loose with some frequency in the threesome of my family. This time I was on my own. In a house with a woman who, in an act of charity, had taken me in without even meeting me. Finally, I spoke, and as I did so, I remember the relief I felt, how sure I was that once I’d finished asking the question, Doris’s answer would render the chaos I feared a thing of the past, make my terror a delusion. She would make the questio
n innocuous with a simple answer. It should have been a single sentence, but my memory now, as I try for an accurate recollection, is of excruciating hesitation, bursts of speech, as if the half-sentences layered over each other, a tower of Babel tottering as I tried to get to the right words and failed. Did I look at her as I spoke or did I look down? I don’t know. These words. Something like this.
The thing is you hadn’t met me when you wrote to me. It was incredibly kind of you . . . I’m really grateful . . . But now I’m here and you’ve known me . . . I mean – what if you don’t like me? Now I’m here? What can you do, if . . . what if you don’t want me now I’m here? Where could I go? You know my parents don’t . . . I can’t go to either of them . . . And I came from the hospital. I’m worried that you’re lumbered with me. If you don’t really like me, there’s nowhere you could send me back to, is there?
I got it out in the end, after the rush and babble. The question finally spoke itself into the silence waiting for it.
And the silence remained. It continued for several moments. Long enough to start to frighten me. Then, still without saying a word, her face set and immobile as it had been while I spoke, Doris stood up from the cushion on the floor and walked out of the room. I heard her going downstairs and then after another moment the front door banged shut as she left the house. I stayed where I was for a little while. I had no idea what had happened. And yet in her departure and the uncaring slamming of the door, as I was regularly told not to do, I felt the ripples begin around my solar plexus of something familiar. It seemed impossible here in this place, and she so completely different from what I knew, to find the slightest similarity with anything I’d known before. In any case, I had no idea what had happened. Either familiar or incomprehensible, or both, I was terrified. Had she gone to the pub on the corner to get cigarettes? But she always had packets in the kitchen cupboard. It was dark, around nine o’clock. There were any number of reasons why she might have left the house. And none at all. Nothing that made sense of her silent exit into the night. Only catastrophe. The thing I had feared once I’d said what was worrying me. I turned the TV off, and went down to the kitchen. Her bag had gone. I wandered about for a bit in case she had just gone to get cigarettes and then I went to bed. I heard her return much later.
The next morning I woke and heard the typewriter clacking. I got up and went downstairs, past Doris’s ‘working do not disturb’ closed door, to the kitchen. There was a sheet of paper on the table. A flimsy, like she used under carbon paper to make copies while she typed. It was a typewritten letter, not folded, the sentences more or less fitting the length of the foolscap sheet. At the top was my name, no ‘Dear’, just Jenny scrawled in Doris’s almost indecipherable handwriting, and at the bottom another scribble, Doris. I read it standing up. It began by describing what had happened the previous evening. After weeks of sulking silence during which she had been increasingly worried and angry, I had finally deigned to speak. What I said had made her so angry she had to leave. She knew, she said, that I was used to living with melodrama and the psychological games my parents played. That wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t choose my parents, but if I was going to manage to become a grown-up rather than remain a manipulative infant, I had to learn not to behave as if I were still living in the psychologically poisoned atmosphere of my childhood. If we were to get on together in a reasonable way, like adults, so that I could stay in the house and go back to school to take my exams and make something of myself, I had to stop behaving as if everyone was like my hysterical parents. What I had done last night was unforgivable. She couldn’t remember an instance of anyone trying to blackmail her emotionally as I had done. I was demanding and threatening, using the poor-little-girl-with-nowhere-to-go character to try to control her (Doris), as doubtless my mother had tried to control my father and me. She had never been so angry. She had been shaking with anger and had to get out of the house in order to calm down. She wanted me to think very carefully about last night and what kind of person I wanted to be. She was sorry if I was upset but it was very important to get things straight.
I learned later that she had gone to some friends and exploded with rage about my ‘emotional blackmail’. The phrase wasn’t one I’d heard before, but it was easy enough to work out what she meant. I had no idea that I had been blackmailing her. But Doris knew. I struggled with the gulf between my sense of my innocence and her knowledge of the world. I couldn’t understand how I could have asked the question differently. Or why a question that was so urgent to me should not have been spoken, was wrong and manipulative. I thought that I’d needed an answer to my question. I wanted to know if she liked me, and what on earth could be done if she didn’t. Now I saw clearly that it wasn’t a question she could answer if her answer wasn’t the one I wanted. The situation for both of us if she didn’t like me was frightening, unlike any situation I had ever been in. My parents didn’t like me, but that didn’t matter, they hadn’t chosen me. I should have realised that Doris was in a difficult position if she didn’t like me. There, I supposed, the blackmail lay, in the speaking of the question that couldn’t be answered if the answer was the wrong one. And yet it was still a problem to me; where could I go if she didn’t want me after all? It seemed I was forcing her to say she liked me. But I didn’t feel that was the truth of what had happened. I wondered now whether a positive answer could have satisfied me. Underlying the need to ask the question was my suspicion that she didn’t like me much, and what I had done wrong was to be unable simply to live in silence with that reality.
I read and reread the letter. It was written with the icy calm of someone teaching an unruly pupil, seeming to give me one last chance. I was terrified. Perhaps it had been emotional blackmail. I didn’t know. What I did know was that she hadn’t answered my question. And, though I didn’t care to think about it in the midst of this crisis, what I also knew, and would know for the remaining fifty years during which I knew Doris, was that she had answered it.
After a few months, my father finally agreed with Doris that I could go back to school. I apologised to her for my grasping, embarrassing father. Doris laughed and said he was easy to handle. I had my doubts about settling back into the life of a schoolgirl, but I was ready to go to the local comprehensive after a full year of being out, since it seemed important to Doris. Also, I had to have a future – that was the whole point – and the only one that seemed thinkable in my new surroundings was to go to university, which meant taking my A-levels, which meant taking my O-levels. Doris too was adamant that I needed to take the O-levels I’d missed while expelled, and then the A-levels that would result in my fulfilling my potential. I had been saved to amount to something. I wasn’t so sure I was up to it, but I tried to play along.
Doris said the local comprehensive wouldn’t work, I was already ‘older than the average thirty-year-old’, and I needed somewhere that was more than a ‘certification factory’. Her idea was that I should go to Dartington, another co-ed ‘progressive’ boarding school like St Christopher’s. I apologised again for the money it would cost and which my father clearly wasn’t prepared to pay. Doris, who didn’t seem concerned about money until she was much older, said not to worry about that, she was OK at the moment, and that I might one day help someone else in some way. Her reasoning wasn’t just liberal, it also tried to deal with the gratitude question I was finding it hard to come to terms with. Her suggestion felt like a proper distribution of good fortune that took need and capacity rather than time as its fulcrum. It helped me more or less, by then situated in the dead centre of some new version of the rake’s progress. In Tony Richardson’s movie Tom Jones, which came out in 1963, there were waifs galore, dependent on and resenting the goodwill of strangers. But what could I be resentful about? Being resentful was the wickedest thing I could imagine, though it sometimes felt like a get-out clause for my guilt at being the recipient of charity, just a cobblestone’s throw away from the paved pillows underneath the arches. Doris’s al
most arbitrary intervention in the life of someone who was already proving to be more troublesome than she had expected could also be spun into a useful truth if I could tease out the strands of gratitude and ingratitude and the reasons for them. The gratitude/ingratitude problem was always on my mind – it never really went away.
Dartington replied with a definite ‘no’ to Doris’s long letter introducing me and explaining my situation, while keenly expressing their admiration for Doris’s writings. They were sorry but I was too old and too long out of school to fit into their system and would be disruptive. (Later, when I was in the North Wing of St Pancras, I was sent to an experimental clinic for the young and depressed, but the clinic sent me back with a letter explaining that I was too disturbed and depressed for them to take me on. So my consultant put me on sleep therapy and every time I woke up, a nurse popped another barbiturate into my mouth, which I liked very much until my blood pressure dropped so low they had to stop. But that caused so much displeasure or panic in me that I tried to get out of St Pancras in my nightdress to find some more. The consultant sectioned me as a punishment, as I saw it, for their poisoning me, and several nurses held me down while a large syringe of Largactil was injected into me and I had hideous dreams and nightmares for days.) Doris received more letters like that one, and it was clear that no boarding school would take me, no matter how liberal-minded. Meanwhile, I continued to work at the office of a friend of Doris’s who published newsletters about how to make the most out of the unprecedented boom in property prices.
The does she/doesn’t she like me question (otherwise known as the emotional blackmail drama) was enough to keep me docile. Besides, where would I go if I definitively blew it? Stuck as we were, I knew well enough from my side of the front door that even in the oddest of situations there is a normal, no matter how odd to others, which life reverted to if you sat and waited, and though sitting and waiting has always been the least of my talents, it was the only thing to do, the question having been answered for me. The real events that disrupt the everyday, even sometimes cataclysmically, so that it seems that nothing can ever be the same again, erode, weather, change the underlying landscape, but no matter how transparent the platform you stand on, showing nothing but the void below, it hadn’t yet actually broken and thrown me to the depths. There was a frost in the air. I learned never to ask Doris any question that could be deemed emotional. We continued with the business in hand: the upgrading of my overemotional tendencies, proving myself a good bet in the making something of myself.
