The rejection letters were curious. Too long, too insulting or self-justifying, some just inappropriate: one editor remarked that she ‘simply disagreed’, though generally you don’t disagree with a novel. Many of them used the same adjectives; ‘dark’ was a favourite, which should have been amusing. I put them, one by one, in a file under the desk, and after a few, I wrote ‘DISASTER’ on the cover. As with one miscarriage, you become more prone to fearfully anticipate a second. I was more afraid each time the new agent sent it out, but still I took each letter as a blow to the heart, unwilling to believe it, raging, protesting. (Poor Nick. He could not have been more tested. But he took it all. He was my rock.)
And, as I already mentioned, a kindly acquaintance, Di Marcus, to whom I will always be grateful, said, ‘This is when character tells.’ My friends: how much they have taught me and helped me. But I wasn’t so sure that my character would help me. I felt weak, angry, fatally wounded.
What resources did I have that helped me to survive? My husband, Rosa, and the self-belief my parents gave me when I was a child. Nick never faltered; he continued to say, ‘This is your best book. I believe in it.’ In the end I turned on him, furious. ‘You’re deluded. It’s your fault, you should have told me it was hopeless. They can’t all be wrong, surely, can they?’ Stubbornly he kept on insisting they were wrong.
The immediate worries were financial. I had expected a payment of £35,000, the balance owing on my contract, and had run into debt in anticipation, though I hated debt, because of my background. I had a contract; the money must arrive. It didn’t arrive. My overdraft grew. For a year, the agent kept sending the book out. Drip by drip, confidence and hope were eroded.
Some money arrived in dribs and drabs. The first, kind and gentlemanly, agent, the one I should have stayed with, together with Mark Le Fanu of the Society of Authors, leaned on HarperCollins to give me a token pay-off of £5,000. (Later on in the whole protracted saga, the Society of Authors gave me a grant of £3,000 to get me back on my feet again. We authors need our organisations, which line up behind us in hard times; not just the Society of Authors, but Public Lending Right, the stalwart body that collects money from the government whenever people borrow our books from libraries, and ALCS, which protects our copyrights and sends us money we never knew we’d earned. Young writers, join up and support these allies! When you need them, they will be there for you.)
Then an opportune phone call came from Penny Smith, a lecturer at Northumbria University in Newcastle, who liked my work, and taught my novel Grace, inviting me to do a three-month residency up there, two days a week, and despite the travelling, I jumped at it. My friend Barbara lent me £5,000 which at least plugged the hole I had opened up. Neither of us knew it would take me seven or eight years to pay back. And as the year turned, and the rejections kept coming, I began reviewing for my bread and butter. That most painstaking and generous literary editor, John Coldstream at the Daily Telegraph, perhaps getting wind that I was in trouble, started asking me to review regularly: once a month, then twice a month, then almost every week. Without it I couldn’t have paid my share of the mortgage. It kept me alive, and my name in the papers. But my ego was shrivelling, all the same. Everything had changed. Perhaps I was … finished.
Depression overwhelmed me; I felt I was drowning. Instead I made myself get up every day and go swimming at the Willesden Sports Centre just down the road, in the very early morning, so that by the time I came home to the emptiness, something good at least had happened, one good thing a day, however small. There was blood in my cheeks, and breath in my body, and the glow that comes with having exercised. My mind and its ambitions had led me astray; my body, recovering its strength, saved me. I put my trust in it, my animal body. I was swimming more lengths: fifty, eighty. I was my father’s daughter. I would go on.
I asked writers of colour to read the novel. I feared they would hate it, like everyone else, but to them, of course, the racism I wrote about was not unbelievable, nor even remarkable, it was just part of the substance of their days. I was given much-needed encouragement by the novelist Mike Phillips, then writer-in-residence at the South Bank, by Bernardine Evaristo, author of The Emperor’s Babe and Blonde Roots, and by Colin Grant, Marcus Garvey’s biographer. I will never forget their kindness, for their own paths as writers were not entirely easy, but they all took the time to read that long novel, in manuscript, closely and critically, and sent me with advice and a blessing on my way. I needed their critique, but even more, their blessing. It was all I had to keep the show on the road.