My Animal Life(17)

Then there was the dead sheep we found on a walk. It was spring, we were wrapped up warm, but the sheep, which lay sprawled on its side by the path, had a buzzing retinue of flies above it. As usual we children had run on ahead. ‘Mum, Dad, look, it’s a sheep!’ I was off the path, as excited as Tess. Only a few broken strands of barbed wire lay between me and my love object. ‘Get back!’ my dad commanded. ‘Get right away from there, Margaret!’ ‘But I wanter see!’ I whined, thwarted. ‘It’s DEAD, Daddy! I wanter see it!’ Instead we children were hurried away. I suppose they were frightened of whatever killed the sheep, rabies, scrapie, foot and mouth, and besides, my father had his pathological horror of death. But because we were forbidden to look at it, the image of the dead thing burned into my mind.

Animals in the human world often seemed sad. We did get a hamster; naturally, it died. Still living at Bromsgrove, so I must have been around five, my parents took me to the circus for a treat. I only remember the menagerie, which we went to afterwards, in a big, dark tent. Hopeless beasts lay about in the shadows. The smell of urine was fierce and rank. My father and mother were indignant, so I copied them. ‘Maggie Gee, Animal Rights.’

Yet my father, who tended to stock positions which he cleaved to with moralising passion, disapproved of emotional views of animals. ‘Some people like animals more than humans. Some people like animals more than children!’ He was outraged at this lack of humanity. Socialists often feel like this. His position seemed to me unquestionable, and as children do, I adopted it myself. I was very slow to find a way of thinking not wholly centred in my own species. But perhaps I wasn’t as slow as all that, because many people cannot bear to sustain the loss of pride involved in knowing we are ‘just animals’.

When did I start to see it was true? I think I was probably around forty. My body, which I loved, had failed me by beginning on a series of miscarriages. I saw my will and my hope, both unlimited, were tethered to my mortal, animal body. ‘Today’s women want it all,’ crowed the magazines of the ’80s and ’90s, though the claim had already begun to sound hollow, ‘you can have it all, you can have it now.’ This siren song was a lie, of course. Because only a very few, very lucky, women have more than one child after forty.

Biology is unmoved by our rights, unaffected by women’s changing hopes and dreams. My eggs had been ageing like any chimpanzee’s while I followed my glad little human trajectory of ambition, and then came the belated realisation that I longed for something outside myself. We wanted a baby. No, we wanted two babies. But the Fates came in and stared at me, hard, three frightening old women I might one day become, wielding their terrible steel scissors and thread, as the surgeons did who performed the D and Cs that tidied me up each time things went wrong. The Fates were in the gaze of the implacable nurse who came and bent over the bed where I cried silently in hospital after the operation. ‘This is nothing,’ she said, her eyes sharp with dislike. ‘Miscarriage is common. Get over it.’

You can’t have everything, the Parcae hissed, bearing down on me with furious eyes. I had flouted them, and I would be punished. You never understood. You left it too late. You aren’t special, you’re an animal.

I have always been slow to understand the big things. Quick at small things, with a slick grasp of logic, but slow at seeing the things that matter. So I didn’t start to see I had a body at the stage when it might have been expected. At puberty, say. Or when I became sexual.

In any case the latter thing was somewhat delayed by my going to a traditional girls’ grammar school, where you did not have to think about boys — indeed I was puzzled by the minority of girls who queued up to titivate in the cloakroom mirror: what were they so passionate about? I simply did not, at that age, get it, for my body was disconnected from my mind. Which from infants’ school had nurtured bedtime fantasies of being kidnapped by bold boys on horseback, pressed against a wall and then what?

Nothing. I had no idea. The dream petered out and I went to sleep.

Not even when I had my first shy experience, aged sixteen, while acting in a play, Jonson’s The Alchemist. I wore a beautiful pale gold satin dress sewn with paste jewels, which showed my bust, and was told (thank God. I was too naïve to think of it myself) not to wear my winged Edna Everage glasses. Playing against me was eighteen-year-old Frank Lammas, a sturdy farm boy with a soft Sussex burr, dark eyes, glossy thick hair like a blackbird’s wing, and a motorbike. A motorbike! I would never have dared aspire to Frank Lammas, but somehow (perhaps it was the removal of my glasses) Frank Lammas saw something sensual in the woman I played. Frank began stroking and caressing my hands, tender, intimate, sweetest of touches, and his kisses became, not stage kisses, but real. Nothing so good had ever happened to me. When we weren’t acting, only little looks and smiles showed that the impossible was true: beautiful Frank Lammas fancied me. Since he was in the sixth form at my father’s school, nothing more daring was ever going to happen, and my father was already becoming suspicious. After the final performance, Frank Lammas offered me a lift on his motorbike, at twenty miles per hour, just around the school car park, and then this happy chapter of my life was over. But thank you, dear Frank, for seeing the woman in me. Your sunlight touched me. I could grow towards it.