My Animal Life(12)

That morning Mum had walked with my father into Poole, by the sea, to pick up an orange roll of stair-carpet for Tatnam Road, because the in-laws were expected. November 2nd: blowing leaves, squalling seagulls. My parents-to-be marched back through the wind carrying the roll of carpet, taking one end each, her bump sticking out from her thinness, stopping every now and again for John, aged three and a half, to catch up. Tea was cucumber sandwiches, and I arrived in a hurry two hours later. That rush birth was good for my mother but left a little mark on me. One of my only two recurrent dreams is of knowing I have to shoot down a long narrow tunnel to save my life and get into the light, and in the dream I can never do it, there is a half-formed dream thought that death would be better, but in a refusal of death, I wake up. Maybe one day when death becomes physically real I will be brave enough to dream my way through this dark tunnel and find whatever life is at the other end.





I was born in 1948


Loving life as I do, I would like to have another one, to go on trying to understand. But my rational mind thinks, with regret, that there must be an infinite variety of souls or selfhoods, as there is an endless serendipity of currents on the sea; why should one soul be reused? (And another voice, holding to belief, says, ‘Nothing in the world disappears. Mass becomes energy, heat becomes light, bones are made from stardust, ash feeds the roses.’ Why should the tiny detailed net of tensile electrical connectivity that is a single consciousness be lost?)

The first voice answers, we have to make room. There has to be space for the not-yet-born, for becoming, or the system would be dead and closed. Our ‘once-ness’ makes us, and the world, and love, more precious.

It will just be hard to say goodbye, one day. Harder than the headlong fearful rush down the dark tunnel that brought me — a six-pound mewling animal, skinny, half-blinded by the light, shining with womb-grease, mother-naked, sucking up air as I woke — into this radiant, temporary room.

I was born in 1948, three years after the end of the war, during which my father Victor (always Vic) had been a meteorologist in the Air Force, posted in India and Iceland. He had said to my mother, as fathers say when they are in love, ‘I want a little girl just like you.’ What he got, in fact, was a reverse image; I was as pale as my mother was dark and vibrant; I had lint-white fine hair and she had thick black waves; her skin was olive, mine, as a child, transparent. (But thirty-eight years later, by the long-distance mathematics of genes, my own daughter would be born, blonde like me but with curls, lips, cheeks, eyes like my mother’s: the ‘little girl just like you’.)

There was still rationing, I think until I was about four or five years old, because I remember red stamps in a grey book, and picking up orange juice from a Nissen hut. And the excitement of Grandpa Church, my mother’s father, producing a pineapple as a present, when I was at infants’ school. I recorded this in my diary, and the teacher unwisely wrote in pencil, ‘Where did he get it?’ I reflected on my grandfather’s life and added, ‘He got it down the pub,’ which made my mother indignant.

That is the age when everything you know, you know without doubt, even when it is completely wrong. ‘Idiot’ was pronounced ‘eye-dot’, because that was the way I first read it to myself. I told my father, with great conviction, that Uncle Stan had come to visit my mother, indeed I still seem to remember seeing dark-haired, skinny, smiling Uncle Stan, husband of my mother’s beautiful sister Alice, coming to the back door of our Victorian semi in Bromsgrove, and being welcomed with a shout of pleasure from my mother. But Uncle Stan had never been to Bromsgrove, and did not look as I described him either, so my story about the ‘uncle’ put my father in a jealous rage. I had ‘too much imagination’, of course, and everything I clearly imagined, I believed to be true.

At night this produced both excitements and horrors. Like many children and few adults, I ‘saw’ things on the darkness, clear and vivid, with my eyes open; to science it’s a known phenomenon, ‘eidetic imagery’. They were real and bright as day; historical pageants, in which I was somehow a part, having lived before (as I believed until I was well into my teens), turreted Disneyesque castles outlined against technicolour cloudscapes, heroic adventures my brother and I marched away on. Sometimes however the visions went wrong. I would see the chain-link fences that were everywhere then, around institutions like schools, grey links of metal in rounded-off diamonds supported by rusting struts, and one night my room was so chokingly full of it, marching down on me from every wall, that I called my mother in a panic.