My Animal Life(63)

Alfred’s park was modelled on beautiful Roundwood Park, my local park, founded in 1900, with its stone sundial and drinking fountain, aviary and flower-beds, its little café, its plane-trees, its roses, its shady lawns where conversation murmured, its gentle hill overlooking the graveyard. But it was also a metaphor for Britain, the country where Stephen Lawrence had been killed. And slowly the book started to come together.

Alfred White had three children (as did my father). Like us, there were two brothers and a sister: Darren, Shirley, and poor little Dirk. Though there the resemblances really did end, for there was not a jot of likeness to my brothers; neither of them is ignorant, a racist, or cheesily in love with America, like Darren, and though I’d love to look sexy and creamy like Shirley—maybe I am sexy and creamy inside?—I am thin and wiry and always in a hurry. Yet in some way that afterwards I couldn’t deny, Alfred was my father, and May my mother, and the book was my way of forgiving my father, for in the end Alfred would be tested, and my father was never short of moral courage.

A brief sketch of the plot: there’s a row in the park. A black family has walked on the grass, Alfred remonstrates and is accused of racism, becomes enraged and falls down with a stroke. The family gather round his bedside. Rich, shallow Darren, a journalist, comes back from the States to join Shirley and Dirk. Shirley is the widow of a Ghanaian academic, Kojo. Dirk, the youngest and dimmest child, hates black people partly because he has grown up bathed in his father’s mild, old-fashioned racism, but more actively and jealously because his sister married Kojo. Dirk works in the failing local paper-shop, and when an Indian businessman takes it over, his hatred and frustration boil over into murder. And the parents find out. What is to be done?

It was the question the whole country was trying to answer. The police investigation into Stephen Lawrence’s death was scandalously poor. Though an inquest would eventually give a verdict of unlawful killing by five named youths, no one was ever convicted or punished. Something had gone terribly wrong in Britain, not just the murder but the way we dealt with it. When the report of the McPherson Inquiry came out, in 1999, the police were found guilty of something new, ‘institutional racism’, and everyone was forced to look at themselves and their own institutions, and ask hard questions. We began to see racism everywhere.

But I was too early for that changed climate. Many things in my novel must have been shocking. Dirk’s racism was explicit and detailed, and I told it from inside his consciousness, a technique I also used for his father’s more mundane racism. (I did distance the novel’s moral viewpoint from Dirk’s by making him ignorant, in many ways an idiot. His impoverished vocabulary and imagination make his account of the world comic and pathetic. The comedy may have been the hardest thing; some people were too shocked to laugh at him, although my black friends did find him funny.) Black people’s experience of white racism was also shown at length on the page. The book made uncomfortable reading for anyone, but maybe especially for those white liberals who thought that racism was in the past.

I submitted my manuscript in 1995. After a long pause, HarperCollins turned it down.

They turned it down! I could not believe it. I was Maggie Gee, on my sixth novel, my career could surely only go upwards. I would choose my agent and my publisher … but no, the publisher had turned me down. Nick took me to Wales. A deep, terrible pain only slowly ebbed as we sat on the sand. By the fourth day I was human again. But an accident had happened, a brutal car-crash. Obviously someone else would jump at the book, but still, HarperCollins had turned me down. (Could I be plucked out of my new glossy world of literary success so easily? I had heard of other well-known authors being rejected, and had always thought, ‘They must have written a bad book.’ But now the same thing had happened to me.)

If you had told me then what I slowly learned, over the next twelve months of grim education—that my book would be turned down by almost every mainstream literary publisher in London—I do not believe I could have taken it in. It would have been unthinkable.

I have already confessed I was not careful enough. The book was a little windy and baggy. It needed a good hard edit, another three months of thought and work. Yes, I was also unwise in my tactics, expecting to change agents and publishers at random. I am trying to give weight to the many factors that contributed to my book becoming homeless, for I do believe that, as with homeless people, the problem was too many factors colliding. But I still come to this conclusion: the novel was turned down partly, perhaps mainly, because the subject was unacceptable. Britain didn’t want to think about racism. It wasn’t ready, though one day it would be. In 1995, publishers turned their backs.