My Animal Life Read online

  It is not your own life, though it is your own life. I can’t climb inside, yet so much of me is there.

  My books are more me than anything else. That means ‘more of me’ not ‘more to me’; I could never say my work was more to me than Rosa or Nick; in the old conundrum, ‘What do you save from the burning library, the irreplaceable books or the abandoned baby?’, I could not save the books when the baby was crying. Yet the books, my books, matter more to my ego, to the frail-tough wavering stalk of me that holds me to the light where I can live in the world, have a husband, child, friends, ‘normality’. Maybe books allowed me to have my baby, made me stable enough to hold someone else. In that sense, the books I have written are me. They are better than me, less flawed, less impassioned, less swayed by brief feelings of hurt or anger, more able to see other human beings from their own point of view, rather than as the source of personal wounds or blessings which they can turn into in the shock of the moment, the shocking rawness of everyday life. Books are more accurate, more beautiful, less messy. And they waste no time; instead, they save it. I hate wasting time. Time is precious. My twelve books, piled pell mell on the shelf, have made something solid from the time flashing past: and with this one, there will be thirteen.

  (For the first time, now my own life is stage centre. Am I straining to turn my best profile to the light?)

  I write to reinvent, to impose order. To make the world outside the book bearable. To say there can be more than the violent chaos that sometimes washed about me when I was growing up. To tell the world what I think of it, too, to answer back: this is me, I see you. It was the same thing, really, long, long ago, when around the age of five I tacitly asserted that I could do more than copy the words on the blackboard, adding writing of my own to my first school ‘Writing’ books. I was a law-abiding girl; and yet there I was, writing, working inwards from the back pages of the notebook to meet the ‘official’ pages at the front, mostly rhyming ‘poems’ I thought I invented, as the first poet in the history of my world, pairing fish and dish, cat and mat.

  A teacher must have read it and added silver stars, for when I found it as an adult, there they were, not much greyed by the years, on the edge of the pages. I cannot gauge how important that was. Would I have gone on if no one had noticed? Would I have kept writing if I’d never got published? In its origin, there’s only that urge to rebellion, a drive to make things new that pushes everyone away; but soon the young rebel wants someone else to notice. Someone did, thank God, and saw something in me. Something that linked me to all creation, something that allowed me to love myself. I think creativity exists in everyone, but many people never have the luck that I did, to chance upon a smile of acceptance or permission.

  For me, rhymes clinched things, comforted, released like a chord on the piano when the elements are right and the pedal lifts, leaving the faintest, most satisfying silvery ring. I did not know what I needed to write: the act itself was what mattered to me.

  It was like dancing. Yes, it was joy. I was on my own, I was free, I was dancing. The words were my own, my secret music. I learned what I needed to survive and be happy.

  No wonder I was frightened, before Rosa was born. Would it be a transaction, her life for mine? My mother told me later that my father had said, ‘Perhaps Margaret won’t need to write any more.’ In fact, I needed to write more than ever. The miracle was, it was possible. I found a child-minder five houses down the street—her name was Daphne, and she had high standards; ‘her’ mothers boasted that the children came home with a new painting every day. I noticed they were worryingly quiet at table. But Rosa only went there for two and a half hours a day, and because she was tiny, Daphne carried her around in a baby-carrier on her chest, and I expressed milk into a bottle so that if she woke up, Daphne could feed her. Two and a half hours, from ten to twelve-thirty!

  It was enough for me to make a start. Because Rosa still slept in a cot by our bed, I could write in the room that would one day be hers, a nice, bright room with a big pile of cushions, a square table with a red tablecloth. The sash-window looked out on the narrow pathway that led from the back door to the garden. A glimpse of green lawn, clematis, lilac, a sunlit space that I worked towards.

  Time was short and infinitely precious. The milky, dreamy hormones were ebbing. I read through the slow, unstructured manuscript I had written in a trance while I was pregnant, and rewrote it ruthlessly, straight to typescript, without looking at what I had done before, in lean, quick, cinematic sections that reflected my newly urgent schedule. By the time Rosa was one, I had a novel to sell, and although for two harrowing weeks at the end she turned away from me to her father, her little plump arms pointing to the truth, that he had more to give her than her wild-eyed mother, fingers hammering the keys as I raced to finish, she soon forgave me when life returned to normal. The novel went to auction, and Heinemann bought it for two and a half times what I had earned before.

  Rosa, solid and warm in my hands

  The money mattered, but the book mattered more. I was still a writer, but I had a daughter. I was still a writer, and I had a daughter. She was plump and healthy, with a high round forehead, wide-spaced blue eyes that grew green later, a cheery, chattering way with people and a desire for perpetual motion. Rosa: Rosa. A new person. We fell in love with her as soon as we saw her. The flat was held together by a sunny corridor that ran from our bedroom to the high front room. As Nick or I carried Rosa up and down it, we kissed her big scantily-curled head so often I am surprised there was any hair left.

  We pass it still, that first flat where we lived for the first five years of Rosa’s life. I feel versions of us must still live there, somehow, ghostly avatars of happiness. As soon as we started to want her, she came, between two hot wing-beats of time, in Portugal, and then she was with us, and we were three. Shadows came later to teach us better, but we knew even then her first year was miraculous, that we had never been happier, that we could never be happier, as we held her, solid and warm, in our hands. This was the space of bodily bliss.

  Above my head, though, there was still the high wire, glittering in its own cold light. I left Rosa with Daphne, and hurried to climb it, two hours left, then an hour and a half, and in the last half-hour, the world fell away, I forgot to worry, I became the writing, I was on my own, and I danced along it, I cut away the dullness, I found my nerve.

  My animal luck (vi)

  Rosa is young

  and we grow older

  The poet EJ Scovell, who I knew as Joy, and her husband CS Elton, who was Charles to me, author of The Patterns of Animal Behaviour and the founder of British ecology, became friends of mine in my very early twenties when their niece Liza married my elder brother John. (And this was the alchemy that occurred when the State invested in its working classes by giving bright children a top-flight education: untapped talent was brought up into the light. My brother and I were translated to Oxford, and married into the educated middle classes.) Joy and Charles were nearly half a century older than me, but it was so interesting, their tall Park Town house covered in red and green creeper; the books, the ideas; the endless murmur of conversation about voles or daisies, odes and dactyls. Charles influenced my thinking about the web of life; he helped me to see human beings as one species in a vast and complex net of animals and plants, and I saw, in his relationship with Joy, that art could marry science, that both were forms of restless curiosity, feeding the same attempt to understand the world. They remained two of my dearest friends until they died, in their nineties, near the end of the century. How kind they were to me when I was young and raw.

  I learned that the old could remain youthful. They had brought up two children, Rob and Katy, and had a vivid love for their grandchildren, some of whom lived on Montserrat, and were half-Caribbean. All children touched Joy’s imagination as a poet. Some of her best and most anthologised poems are about children and the passage of time (she is also the poet of old age, one of the best in our language). In a p
oem called ‘At the school gate’, she muses on the young parents she sees picking up their children at the end of the day. They are:

  Still beautiful, but not in that first way—their used and hardy beauty is in fruit today.

  As the mother of a baby, you can’t be a child; nor can you and your husband be children together (though that comes back later, when the babies are older and need less to be done for them just to stay alive, so you can sometimes, briefly, all be children together). But at first, parents are servants. There are a lot of dull things to be done. Large plastic objects must be brought into the house. You can’t travel light, walking swiftly through the streets enjoying the feel of air on your face. You are struggling with the child, pushchair, nappies, bottles, toys, changing-mat. You are bulkier and slower; you start to look older. You think less about your looks, and become ‘used and hardy’.

  I thought about beauty in the world outside, even more than before, perhaps, as I tried to show it to Rosa, her wide pale eyes looking up at me, and beyond me, the clouds (I didn’t realise she could see it for herself)—but after the beginning, when I was relieved to be slim again after pregnancy, I had less time and energy than ever in my life to think about my own appearance. The photos of me at the time attest it. I didn’t care, I knew Nick loved me. But I aged five years, perhaps, in two. And when Rosa was three, illness struck.

  First-generation RSI or Repetitive Strain Injury, the occupational hazard that came upon the users, or over-users, of the first basic computers. Two giant boxes had arrived at Christmas: an Amstrad computer, a digital printer, presents from Nick to help me write. Perched on a rackety upright chair at a too-high desk, typing on tip-toe in our bedroom, ignoring the strange creeping pins and needles in my arms and legs and the gathering heaviness in my neck and shoulders, I had worked like a madwoman, 4,000 words a day, 7,000 words a day, 10,000 words a day, on the final day I wrote 10,000 words, for the new machine encouraged madness, my hands burning eagerly over the keyboard, eyes dry, cheeks hot, powering on to the end of my novel, Where are the Snows. The day after I finished, my limbs started swelling, my joints seized up. In a terrifying whole-body manifestation of distress I could no longer write, nor brush my teeth, nor walk. I thought I was dying, but I was diagnosed with a strange new syndrome that was puzzling doctors: RSI. No one knew what to do. I tried doctors, NHS and private, physiotherapists, acupuncturists. All that helped was rest, as one doctor had told me, but it went against my nature to accept it. Every nerve in my body felt angrily electric, so acupuncture was a torment. Physiotherapy at least gave me something I could do for myself; a little group of exercises, but oh, so very little; the movements I could make without pain were so few. Would it ever get better? No one knew. I had done this to myself, by neglecting my body, by forgetting I had an animal life, by thinking I could chain myself to a machine. The forgotten body had grown hurt and angry. Now I would have to be afraid of it. I was slow, and careful, and hoped it would forgive me.

  The worst of it passed within six months, but I could not run or even walk as I used to, and my outline softened, and my head was too heavy, bending forward to avoid pain. For a year or so, I couldn’t even carry a handbag; it hurt us both that I could not carry Rosa; my muscles must have weakened, and I suppose my bones.

  I did not mind too much, because I had my family, my little unit that had to survive, and much more to think about than my body. And there was so much happiness when Rosa was young.

  I can’t write a ‘miserable mum memoir’. Yes, I was tired, and I got things wrong, and sometimes I must have hated her because she would not go to sleep—you can’t negotiate, or bribe, or order; she was herself, intransigent, and I ran against the rock face in myself; our needs were opposed; and hers had to win, but still, it made me furious. Or I hated myself for leaving her with the child-minder so I could work; and sometimes I got behind with the writing even though I knew I had short-changed my daughter, and felt ‘I’m no good as a mother, and no good as a writer.’ Once when Rosa was two and a bit I picked her up from her nursery late, and when she got home she cried with rage and went under the table in her room, stopped crying but would not come out, and said, ‘I don’t want you to work any more, Mummy. Don’t work any more.’ The words that I most dreaded to hear, but the next day she seemed to have forgotten it, she went to nursery school, I was not late.

  On good days, I felt the most radiant gratitude: something amazing had been given me, and I didn’t seem to have paid the price. One winter afternoon when she was still quite small, I vividly remember hurrying to get her from her child-minder, after an afternoon when work had gone well: she was happy to see me: big gap-toothed smile; I hurried back home with her in her pushchair, eager to get her home and cuddle her, but a moon appeared in the cool blue sky, very thin and frail, growing clearer, whiter. ‘Oh look, Rosa, there’s the moon.’ Of course she was staring at it already. ‘Moon,’ she said, ‘Moon, Mummy,’ and every so often, as we sprinted through the twilight, past terraced houses and ugly cars, a pale thin mother with her pale round daughter, gazing at each other, and up at the moon, though I also had to think about the cars and the people, she said, ‘Moon, Mummy’, or ‘Mummy, moon’, and I felt I was part of an enormous happiness.

  Rosa had made me part of the world. I was allowed to work and have a baby.

  I talk about the hard bits because I feel I ought to; I don’t want to give an unreal picture; but my overriding feeling was that life had begun. A rich new life; we had started again.

  Rosa was fiercely individual from the start. Lifted out of the bath, at around twenty months, and planted beside it on her own two feet, with a towel around her, she said, triumphant, ‘I’m a person!’—that essential knowledge some people never find. And again, I suppose at around the same age, when she was at the other end of a room where her father and I were complaining about her, half-humorously, half-seriously, for at a very early stage of toilet training she started hiding faeces round the room, and I had just found them, three little dried corms (it was like a joke she was playing on us)—she remarked, loudly indignant, to the wall, ‘But I’m a wonderful child.’ Maybe we had told her that too often, but she was a wonder, and we wondered at her, this child who came to us so late. Yet her dazzling youth certainly made us older (for some reason, I think men feel this more. I have heard two men—though not my husband—explain that alongside the love they felt for their first child was the sense that they had been evicted from Eden; it’s the child’s turn now; they are displaced.)

  But Nick and I were closer than ever. I remember the absurd thought that came, the night we came home from the hospital. Nick’s face was beside me on the pillow again, and Rosa was at the foot of the bed, briefly asleep, in a Moses basket. ‘I love him because he is so like Rosa,’ I thought as I gazed, amazed, at his face. It was a back-to-front thought; of course she was like him, so like that their young photos could easily be confused; but I was stunned by the way in which my world had come together, for Nick, to me, was the infinitely lovable image of the baby, my new love-object.

  All her life Rosa has been fun, and funny. Left to have supper, aged five or six, with our friend Fatima and her family, she did not eat all her food. ‘Why aren’t you eating your meat?’ said Fatima. ‘I don’t want to be a fat bastard,’ said Rosa. And the ‘stranger danger’ lessons at school bore fruit the teacher may not have intended. Rosa told us what they had been learning that day. Nick asked her, ‘So what would you do if a man stopped his car and offered you sweeties?’ ‘I would say “Bugger off!”‘ she said firmly.

  She was thoughtful, as well, with her own point of view. Sometimes she helped me see how to be a mother. One day I picked her up from her nursery school—a Montessori school she loved. (Bizarrely, for the most part, and despite frank criticisms of their foibles, she ended up loving all her schools, which made me feel shifty when I discussed school with mothers who were discontented. They obviously thought I was in denial, or simply failing to play the game
, the great mother-game of criticising. The bottom line was, I was grateful to the schools. Without them, I would be home educating.) In any case, that day I picked Rosa up with a pushchair, so she must have been small, not much more than three, for as soon as we could, I dispensed with it. That day I had not managed to switch off my worries about my work before I went to meet her. I was chattering away to her, on automatic pilot, about the dilemmas of my day. We were pushing down The Avenue, a long straight road. I suppose I might have wittered on for ever.

  Suddenly a little voice piped up. At first I could not believe my ears.

  ‘Big people can’t be friends with little people.’

  ‘What did you say?’ I looked at her suspiciously, her round clever head, her golden curls, her wide-set green eyes like an alien’s. Her cushiony lips had definitely moved.

  ‘BIG PEOPLE CAN’T BE FRIENDS WITH LITTLE PEOPLE.’

  She was looking at me, not unkindly, but as if she had made a definite statement. Yes, she had said it. I had been told. I was ashamed, yet also delighted with her. Of course it was true, and I took note. Children don’t need to know adults’ worries.

  I have already said that I lap up advice. One of the most useful things about motherhood was said to me by someone I didn’t know well. She had a daughter, too, rather older than mine, and we were worrying aloud about their happiness. ‘One problem is over-identifying,’ she said. ‘My daughter just got fed up with me worrying and said to me, “Mum, I’m fine, honestly, I’m not like you, remember that!”‘