Rosie
Page 15
Mother
fn1 Naming is important to many of the characters in my fiction, never more than to Mary Ward, in Sacred Country, who believes, from the age of five, that she’s the wrong gender. The name she chooses for her male persona is Martin, and when someone recognises her new identity and addresses her as ‘lad’ for the first time, she is overwhelmed with joy. ‘It was as if,’ she says, ‘the whole of existence is paid for in some way, except for that one moment, which is free.’
fn2 Wallis Simpson, so vilified in the British press, has always been a figure of fascination to me. Discovering how harsh and punishing both her upbringing and her first marriage were, I wrote a short story, ‘The Darkness of Wallis Simpson’ (2005), revisiting some of this difficult past, which is never considered when moral judgements are passed upon her, because so few people know about it. The story turns on the provoking idea that in old age, a prisoner of her Paris apartment, Wallis can remember the deprivations of her youth and her marriages to Win Spencer and Ernest Simpson, but has forgotten every word about her history-altering marriage to England’s Edward VIII.
fn3 In a very early short story, ‘Wedding Night’ (1983), this image is one of several I use to recall the lost childhood of my twin French protagonists, Jacques and Paul, whose English mother dies when they are fifteen. She came from Cornwall and recalls for them sitting on a wall watching her father banging a tin full of bread, then ‘surrounded by the seagulls, by the chaos he had caused’. Part of what the boys have lost, in their sophisticated life with their French father in Paris, is the wildness of their maternal homeland. I felt that the gull scene illustrated the character of this wildness – and the anarchy that is part of it – strangely well.
fn4 This image has great power in my mind. I didn’t witness it, but I can see it and hear it very clearly. In order, perhaps, to exorcise it a little, to make it less painful to me, I used it, virtually verbatim, in a short story called ‘The Closing Door’, in my collection The American Lover (2014). In the story, I punished the woman who is most like my mother. I took her husband away from her and left her with an unknown future.
Angel
fn1 It took Carolyn a long time to begin to talk openly and publicly about her father’s abuse, but she eventually wrote about it in a vivid memoir, Before the Knife: Memories of an African Childhood.
fn2 In my novel The Gustav Sonata (2016), a pivotal scene takes place on the edge of a forest in the Swiss Alps. My protagonist Gustav and his beloved friend Anton discover an overgrown path leading up through the firs. ‘Wild strawberries were growing at its edge, tiny points of red, like beads of blood among the bandages of green leaves. Gustav and Anton stopped to gather a few of these and eat them. The texture was rough, but the taste was sweet.’
fn3 I was interested to discover, from Michael Holroyd’s amusing and moving memoir Basil Street Blues that in the 1960s he had written his first major biography – of Hugh Kingsmill – in a room in Nell Gwynn House. The tiny flat cost him £3 per week. I have never yet asked him whether other residents of the building disturbed his work with their shouting or crying.
fn4 In The Gustav Sonata, speaking about Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 26, ‘Les Adieux’, my protagonist Gustav criticises the optimistic, upbeat tempo of the last movement, which follows the middle section entitled ‘L’Absence’. He notes that the return of a loved person, after a period of desertion, sometimes generates strong feelings not of instant happiness, but of anger. I know this to be true, in general, but I think that it was not the case here.
The English Room
fn1 My copy of the book, a first edition, is dedicated ‘For Rosemary, on her birthday, from John Masefield’.
fn2 Elsa – under the name Elsa Taylor – is now a very successful professional artist, who has had one-woman shows in Burford, Sherborne, Truro and London. My close friendship with her still brings me amusement and joy. Two of her wonderful pictures hang in my hall, and I have just bought a third. Some of her work can be viewed at www.elsataylor.co.uk.
fn3 Years later, I wrote a short story, ‘Extra Geography’, published in my collection The American Lover, in which two sporty girls, Minna and Flic, experience extreme boredom at school and decide to fall in love with the next person they see. The next person they see is the female geography teacher, a New Zealander called Rosalind Delavigne. Minna and Flic are much more determined than we were to be kissed by Rosalind, and as a result of this, the story moves towards a tragic denouement.
Teen Music
fn1 A version of these events appears in my novel Trespass (2010). Anthony Verey’s adored mother, Lal, ruins Anthony’s birthday by becoming trapped in a lime-green bathing suit and giving everybody hell because of her own discomfort. It’s interesting to me as a writer that I could do no other than make the bathing costume lime green in the Trespass narrative. I think it’s the acidity of the colour that makes it fit so perfectly into the emotional picture.
fn2 The names of this couple have been changed, for reasons that will become clear later in this narrative.
fn3 In Sacred Country, Mary Ward, unloved by her impecunious father and furiously jealous of her younger brother, Timmy, attempts to kill him by spraying Flit into his bedroom.
fn4 This refusal to take seriously my first productions and publications as a writer caused me more grief than I wanted to admit. I got used to it. But when my first BBC radio play, The Wisest Fool, described as a ‘lollapalooza of a play’ by Bill Ash, the assistant head of radio drama, was broadcast in April 1976 as an Afternoon Theatre production, and Jane told me she wouldn’t be able to listen as she was going to a lunch party, ‘which I can’t very well cut short’, I felt the sting of this response. It still strikes me as unimaginative.
Milton’s Oppositions
fn1 I decided to give this perception of Romeo and Juliet to Lewis Little, the fourteen-year-old protagonist of my 1997 novel, The Way I Found Her, and this felt completely right for him. The adolescent sensibility that finds the sadness of the play so alluring is the one drawn so fatally and irrevocably to Valentina Gavril, a passionate Russian writer of 40. When, late in the novel, Lewis and Valentina endure captivity together and begin a sexual relationship, it is primarily their response to affliction and sorrow that binds them.
‘Tits to the Valley’
fn1 Many years later, I used the physical features of Pierrette Monod for the character of Lydia in The Road Home (2007), my novel about immigration and exile. Lydia falls for my protagonist, Lev, on the coach bringing them westwards across Europe, and throughout the novel there is almost no end to the sacrifices she is willing to make for him. But her love remains unrequited. I think there was something slightly tragic about Pierrette that I remembered very vividly when creating Lydia.