Here’s the link to an author page – about me. x
Day 3 of my alphabet – a gift for you, all about looking after ourselves. The letter C – for comfort
How The Wind in the Willows saves your life…..
This is from chapter two of Killing Hapless Annie; a section I am editing at the moment. It concerns how reading can ease unhappiness and loneliness: it’s a cornerstone, I think, for many: I know it was for me. x
Annie had overheard mutterings in the kitchen; she heard phrases such as personality disorder, manic depressive and psychosis. She heard the voice of Uncle John, saying of his keening wife,
‘…And mother, I did think when I married her she might have been a sociopath, but she was cheerful enough then.’
Annie thought, ‘What’s a sociopath? It sounds cheerful anyway. Kind of chatty.’
So a curious but normal Christmas break and Annie went back to school with the customary sense of being just a bit separate. To get away from mad women (who lived in depressing slapdash-mortared bungalows, which after all weren’t interesting in a pointy, Gothic sort of way and where there was no hint of left-behind Caribbean heat on the top floor), she furiously and hungrily read and re-read that bit in The Wind in the Willows -it’s at the end of ‘Dulce Domum’ if you care to look – where Rat manages to make a cheering little feast for Mole and the field mice who have come to sing carols at Mole End. For added reassurance, she read ‘The Wild Wood’ , with particular emphasis on the moment when Badger opens his front door and the two animals tumble in out of the snow. There are hams hanging from the ceiling, a big fire, the plates wink in a kindly, anthropomorphic way and when the famished animals are fed and ready for bed, their sheets are coarse but clean and smell of lavender. To Annie, a hybrid of the two chapters connoted Christmas; the word cosy; a wafting amorphous thing which some might have called happiness. And best of all, no baby-in-the-bucket. Here, Hapless Annie could stay away because her host didn’t need improvement and could just slough her off and relax. It’s ok, baby girl. It’s ok. Because in The Wind in the Willows, the creatures veritably fall upon one another in a riot of being pleased to see you, which felt like an unfamiliar construct beyond the books. Well, with the exception of how Hazel made her feel, but Hazel was gone, with the wedding ring – and possibly the dog – to a grave in December Gateshead, leaving a shelf of books in French to Annie. Oh la la! Annie thumbed the books and missed her so much in a world that made fuck-all sense.
Dedication and disclaimer: Killing Hapless Annie
For Dixie Delicious. Because you loved her when she was Hapless
And you love her now she’s Annie
And for those who struggle with mental illness in its many forms, I am thinking of you x
Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction and, while real authors and musicians are characters in the book, they are in the role of imaginary friends and are the author’s interpretations only. Resemblances to anyone else living, dead or undead but still quite lively, are drawn as literary creations only. I did, however, write regularly to Tony Benn and once sent him some rock cakes.
WARNING: this book contains quite a lot of swearing and also graphic accounts of suicide attempts, self harming,funerals, deaths and brutal culinary episodes.
Killing Hapless Annie was always going to be an unusual book. Do you think this works as the bit before it starts? I can see my editor now, with a big red pen! Dixie Delicious will always be a mystery of course, but he gets the dedication because he saved my life. I was thinking: I’d written before, in my posts ‘Say Boo!’ and ‘Keeping Going’, about how easy it is to be dissuaded. Not just from writing, of course, but from opportunities, friendships, love, intimacy. If your internal narrative runs, ‘I am aberrant. I should never have been’, then it stands to reason that chit chat might be a bit harder for you too, or that, when you try, you over-compensate and know folks are looking at you in a funny way.
But here’s the thing: even if your head is full of ‘not me’ or ‘I suck’ or jangling bereavements and things gone awry, I wonder if you can learn to live with it and to get past the sense of being dislocated from the outside world. You don’t really know what anyone’s reality is, you just know what they show and tell. Also I do believe now that some terrible experience can be transmuted into something altogether less so. I said before that if one person reads Killing Hapless Annie and feels better, less alone, then I am happy. My millstone, as I wrote in the book, has become a star (would that these were my words, but they are from Patrick Kavanagh’s poem ‘Prelude’). This is a work of fiction (yeah, yeah, yeah – I keep saying); its purpose is to entertain – with considerable sauce, fellatio after evensong, in caravans of evil that smelled of bacon fat, at funerals which shouldn’t have been funny but were and at….well, you’ll just have to read it. But there is a serious purpose behind it: take my hand – you are not alone and you never were. I couldn’t have written this book before; I would have been too scared of exposure – worried what others thought.
But things are different now.
For Dixie Delicious. Because you loved her when she was Hapless
And you love her now she’s Annie.
And for those who struggle with mental illness in its many forms, I am thinking of you x
Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction and, while real authors and musicians are characters in the book, they are in the role of imaginary friends and are the author’s interpretations only. Resemblances to anyone else living, dead or undead but still quite lively, are drawn as literary creations only. I did, however, write regularly to Tony Benn and once sent him some rock cakes.
WARNING: this book contains quite a lot of swearing and also graphic accounts of suicide attempts, self harming,funerals, deaths and brutal culinary episodes.
Three belated short non fiction pieces for Fourth of July
Amtrak with my baby
Washington. New baby in arms. The Capitol, Smithsonian; half smoke hot dogs in the park. We caught the New Orleans train and I remember the baby, lying on his back with his arms held up high, as the view liner train went through the night and on into Virgina. I woke early and saw that we were in Georgia and that the earth, just by the track, was red. The baby was still asleep, the train rocking him; my husband beginning to stir on the bunk above mine. He raised his head: ‘We in Georgia yet?’ I had had a restless night; I was full of wonder, as I always am, at being on the move, but we were home, six months after 9/11 and home felt different. The previous afternoon I had seen The Pentagon, under repair; I saw it before on television, back in Britain, in the first footage: I was heavily pregnant and worried what world my first born would enter. I worried during the night, but the train rocked us and lulled us and its sonorous horn was the sound I had heard in dreams or reveries late at night: it was the sound of frontiers, of distance, of aspiration – and hope.
In the dining car early in the morning there was a shower of ma’ams and y’alls and a shower of hands for the baby. We had grits and eggs and crisp bacon, with Crystal hot sauce. There was scalding coffee to further wake us. The creepers and the red earth gave way to the suburbs of Atlanta and we were almost there. I’d always enjoyed the hoardings of the city as we approached it from Hartsfield airport: Free at Last Bail Bonds! Chicken Breast Strips Meal only $2! Here, from the train, I saw just flashes of garden, then creek, then more red earth. Still the kitchen staff dandled the baby while others poured us endless coffee and we were content. I remember that my husband told me to get ready. I hadn’t combed my hair but I put on some lipstick because I wanted my steel magnolia to think well of me when we arrived. Silly, really, what with the baby being the show, not me. I remember that he was dressed in a bright red all in one we called the ‘firework suit.’ We were there. Bright red baby; rich red earth of home. And momma said, ‘Hey.’ And everything had changed but everything had not because the earth was the earth and we were loved and the train bade us goodbye and surged on.
The house in Flatrock, North Carolina
The house was really a wooden cottage; in another setting it might have been made out of gingerbread. It had window boxes full of red impatiens, still a thick fall of leaves on the ground from last autumn and the sound of a creek below it. Inside, the finds and hauls of a family over almost thirty years. A family escaping the city or sheltering from the storm with books and jigsaws and a making things drawer and a small radio. That night they drifted off to the sound of a small North Carolina radio station playing Cousin James (McMurtry) and were proud in half-sleep. It was early summer and there was a storm. Earlier, he had told her the storms in the South come in with a faint whooshing sound, a whisper at first. A shift in the tenor of the air. She woke to it. And felt its warmth before the explosion of thunder and lightning. They were sleeping in the loft of the house and they felt themselves being shaken by the storm outside and she wondered if one of the tall trees all around would fall. The children crawled into bed with them, shaking and sobbing a little: ‘I’m frightened.’
Morning found the house still, intact and the air clear. The children ran in pyjamas to the creek, burying their toes in the mud and slipping over the wet rocks. A small and sleepy snake reared its head from the shallows, gave a half-hearted hiss, showed its fangs briefly and nestled back into the mud. Strangely, no-one said anything. Inside, coffee was brewing and the radio station was on again. Mom was up and doing, immaculate as always, and making bagels with cream cheese to eat on the screened porch. The children’s father was still asleep, a half smile playing at his lips. Their mother would sit on the swing seat to eat breakfast; she would not wake him yet. Simple really, but there it is.
Johnny Cash, in a lift, in Dallas, Texas
“I was told that when Bob Dylan met John – I think it was at the Newport Folk Festival – he circled John, bent slightly forward and smiling up at him with pure admiration.”1
When he was ten, my husband happened to be in an elevator in a hotel in Dallas, Texas. In walked a tall man; the boy looked at the man’s shoes. From there, it was a long way up, but look he did. The boy saw that it was Johnny Cash. No, he must be wrong. But hang on, Johnny Cash must have had to ride in an elevator sometime, so he looked again. He nudged his little brother: ‘Hey Curtis, I think it’s Johnny Cash.’
Maybe the man heard him; maybe not, but he smiled and grinned a broad grin and nodded, ‘Hellllllllo boys.’ A low, slow, warm voice. The youth was starstruck and cannot remember if he said hello back; little brother was possibly unmoved, being too young to understand that, maybe, Johnny Cash was not to be seen riding in an elevator with you any day of the week. Upstairs, or maybe it was on another occasion, he learned that his mother had gone into labour with him (in Georgia) while watching Johnny Cash on a television show. Now, these little links; they kind of went in deep. Plus Cash was, like him, a Southern man. As an adult, he would listen and feel at home.Cash was flawed, both powerful and weak. He had struggled with addiction and insecurity, gone on a journey from the cotton fields of Arkansas to a meeting with a luminary – maybe the the President. He had faith that was both angry and beautiful and music that haunted. So why not share? Well, that’s what our grown up boy from the elevator in Dallas did. Best of all, he shared American Recordings, which was played again and again in the house and, for a quiet moment when no-one knew what to do – while he suspected that Johnny Cash would have shrugged off the fact of their doing this – ‘Down there by the train.’ Now, there was a song that could still a room or a nervy individual with its invocation to meet him if you had, ‘taken the low road’; if you had, ‘done the same.’ ‘There’s a place I know’, sang Cash – a place where he saw ‘Judas Iscariot carrying John Wilkes Booth.’
So, if you dear reader, especially you dear British reader, have not taken a look or a listen, may I suggest you go back and listen again and get to know him a bit? Not that I’m putting him on a pedestal, or nothing.’ *************************************** Notes: American Recordings. Genius. 1. The Man Called Cash by Steve Turner (London, Bloomsbury, 2006). This was the first authorised biography. Quotation from the foreword by Kris Kristofferson, p. ix.
‘Say Boo!’
This is a reworking of an earlier piece; it had been edited for an online magazine. The idea of the voices is an important one. And I’m very familiar with voices, but for the full cast, you’ll have to read Killing Hapless Annie to see what got said and by whom….
Say Boo!
‘You? You write a book. How could you do that? That is for other folk.’
Now this: this is what I learned to say, ‘Boo!’ to.
A year ago, in little gaps I carved out, I began. I’d written as a freelance journalist before and done a couple of self published texts: good practice, I suppose. But this new project was different for it held me in a hot fury. The story was based on my own life and experiences; not that I thought I was a particularly interesting individual, but I did have a notion that the story of how an individual, Annie, manages adversity and mental illness with a host of imaginary friends – including Albert Camus, Dolly Parton and Frieda from Abba – and creates an alter ego whom she later has to squish […] might provide an intriguing tale. I wondered if a number of experiences I could delineate might be unusual; diverting.
So I wrote. In a great big splurge. When everyone had gone to bed: sometimes I hid in the shed, wore earplugs and bribed the kids with refined sugar. After a few months I had 65,000 words. I thought I was writing a memoir at this stage, so I entered it for ‘Mslexia”s memoir competition and wasn’t placed. I cried, telling myself that the book was rubbish; look: here was proof. But then there was fire in this Celt, who sat up straight and re-wrote, beginning to see its flaws more clearly. Online, I read the many words of those who had been repeatedly rejected by agents; of those famous and not so: folks who sat on slush piles for years. I sent my work to three agents. One wrote back; the other two never responded. I cried again.
I heard about Cornerstones Literary Consultancy – a group of publishing, editing and writing professionals who help guide and refine your work; they looked at a sample of the ms and told me there was a lot to like. I approached my time with them as if it were an editing or creative writing course and went for a full ms review. This proved a turning point and my editor was the wonderfully supportive ‘Chick Noir’ novelist and editing specialist, Alison Taft. She was insightful and so kind to me, but she was also being frank about what didn’t work – the bits which were so complex as to be befuddling; where it was not clear who the protagonist was; those sections where there was too much passive and not enough active: she also gave me some ideas about what might work. I combined what I was learning from Alison with the self editing material from Cornerstones, studied my substantial ms report, had a long conversation and got a sense that I was getting somewhere. I did a big re-write and also tweaked it to fiction, because that allowed me to make more of the most intriguing situations in the book and, frankly, gave me a more marketable book: memoirs are extremely hard to sell as an unknown.
I entered the Bath Novel competition and wasn’t placed. First thought was, ‘That’s proof your book is rubbish.’ I was sitting in a car wash at the time. As you often are when you get email or text dumped. But I reflected on how I’d been told so often, growing up, that I was rubbish and that this was part of my internal narrative. It was connected with the periods of illness I’d had from early childhood onwards and, frankly, I’d had enough of it now. I dared, ‘By the time I get out from under the blower, I will change my mood: I’m not going to give up. This is the beginning: if I can’t place this book, I will write another.’ Whoah: with my background, telling myself what I did took everything I had, but now I was laughing, the sky hadn’t fallen in and I’d decided I needed to have another go. The car looked pretty good, though the back wiper had now been torn off by the bristles. This might have been a metaphor. I see metaphor in everything.
At home was Francine’s Prose’s Reading like a Writer. Here, said she, are your teachers. Look in these books – this is how you learn. I rewrote some more. I also got a subscription to ‘Mslexia’ magazine; it was full of ideas, such as ‘Try contacting an Independent press’. So, I wrote to Patrician Press, a vibrant publisher, which produces fine books that are also the most beautiful objects. I had written a black comedy, with some stark, potentially shocking content. I wanted to entertain, but also had a sense of vocation tied up with this book: the protagonist survived; it was unorthodox, but she did it. Could others read this book and feel consoled? Might the book be useful for a health professional, with its accounts of therapy and response? Look, here is an example of how someone has been restored by reading – by words? Patrician Press responded warmly. I knew the book didn’t sit so comfortably in a genre: so it was important, as Alison Taft had counselled me, to find the right person for this one. It felt like I had.
And so here I am. Now, I teach and run a business, I have a lot of other commitments. I’ve three young sons – and I’ve spent chunks of my life scuppered by mental illness. When would I have time? Well, I should like to say this: if you have a story you must, absolutely must tell, start writing and when you feel discouraged, get back up and scribe.
And when the voices come, don’t forget to say, ‘Boo!’
Albert Camus.
For ‘Hazel’. Because you alone said I would be the girl who did.
As a teenager, Albert Camus was, shall we say, significant. to me. I wrote this significance into being in Killing Hapless Annie. There is more than of a shred of truth in the ‘Hazel’ story. I am working on this bit this afternoon. I hated being a teenager mostly, so I’m doing it now, fuck-off unencumbered and healthy. Can’t tell you who JK is, or reveal what happened with Albert. You’ll have to buy the book! But this is hardly a revelation: you need someone – just someone – to believe in you as a kid.
Albert’s cadences were delicious: he was declaiming phrases of profound, shattering erotic power to Annie’s ear. And by God he had enough style to be vulgar, if he wanted. Albert had a history of manly pursuits, too: goalie for Algiers; a fine swimmer and athlete. She had a sense of his being a consummate man. Funny; brave; a demon in the bedroom – if you ever got that far, because what are walls, floors and furniture for? And unlike JK, he could have built a wall or changed a tyre with those strong hands. On the occasions when Annie went to other girls’ bedrooms, she saw they had pictures of The Cure, or Bono, when he was ragged, young and angry. She, meanwhile, had a picture of Albert Camus next to her desk. People said, ‘Who’s that?’ and she said, ‘My godfather. The notion seemed entirely, naughtily fitting, for the Camus books, en Français, that Annie possessed, had been bequeathed to her, as you learned earlier, by her godmother Hazel, studying Camus at The Sorbonne. Perhaps Hazel had been similarly intoxicated, which made the life of Friday pie and Monday spotted dick even more depressing. So the honorific seemed fitting. Plus it felt like Albert watched over Hapless Annie in a proprietary and manly style.
L’Étranger was inscribed with the words “Hazel Griffiths, Paris, le 19 Janviér 1962” and Annie had always hoped that, in leaving France for Terry, his mother’s pie and a new life in Tyneside, Hazel was able to say, like Camus’s protagonist “J’ai senti que j’avais êté heureux.” She hoped it was like this for Hazel especially when the morphine gave her respite from pain and the unexamined life downstairs, punctuated by the sickening puffs of air freshener from the Cyclamen Terrace plug-ins.
Now, all those years it never mattered to Annie that Camus had been dead ten years before she was born: he was there on her wall now.
Godfather. Most louche, brilliant, gorgeous godfather.
Loss (please note this non fiction piece contains some frank descriptions of pregnancy loss)
Today’s post is a little different. I’ve called it simply, ‘Loss’ and its timing was occasioned by the service shown below, the interview I did last week on recurrent miscarriage and the publication of a book. by Rachel McGrath called Finding the Rainbow, which you can buy on Amazon. I think Rachel has been very brave to write so frankly about her experience.
Anyway, it struck me that I had never said goodbye, or said something because, by and large, people encouraged me not to talk about it. Or, they were so full of anecdote – for the best possible reasons – that I thought I couldn’t or shouldn’t. So I’ll write something now. My experience was not, in any way, the worst, but if you have a lump of sadness locked away inside you; if you are going through this experience and working out what to do, know that you are not alone.
. www.themiscarriageassociation.com will provide telephone support for you, but otherwise, in my experience, the best support is other women, dads, partners who have been through it. And you might want to consider earplugs for the multitudinous unsolicited advice……
When you first start trying for a baby, perhaps it doesn’t really occur to you that it might not work out. Pregnancy is a physiological truth; something that is meant to happen, right? Often, yes. But there are many cases when this is not the case – around one in four pregnancies end. I didn’t know this when I was pregnant for the first time and sat, bewildered, unable to comprehend what was going on. It happened again, then again. By this time I was full of others’ advice: I could have told you a thousand horror stories, birth stories, infertility stories; given you plentiful anecdote: here are things not to say:
‘Oh, you’re probably not psychologically ready to have a baby’;
‘Well you are quite an anxious person, so perhaps that’s why you can’t carry a baby’
‘I think women these days are too aware of pregnancy and lots of pregnancies were lost in the past, unknowing, because women didn’t obsess so much.’
‘You could come and babysit for me instead/If you adopt, you’ll probably fall pregnant straight away’/Let me tell you my blood curdling story about a person I knew….’
Or,
‘If you think about it, years ago women just expected this to happen and got on with it.’ To which my riposte would have been, ‘I do see your point, but one of my grandmothers had ten children who survived, but did she talk about the losses she had? Yes: she told me, in her late seventies. She didn’t forget. She willed them into memory by talking about them.’ Looking at the poster for the ‘Saying goodbye’ service, at top, you’ll see they thought about that: ‘…..whether eighty years ago……’
Then there was another thing: for me, family was a flexible constuct. I did not feel – and I’ve not verbalised this publicly before – bonded with my mother. There’s something else that’s a taboo subject: that other mother figures in your life go on to carry more importance than the woman you birthed you or parented you. I won’t elucidate this further now, save to say, that I had other ways I felt I might embrace parenting. But I thought I would try a little longer to have a birth child and then think more if it didn’t work out.
So, after three miscarriages, I was referred for some tests; the results came back with something surprising. I had lupus. And I also had what is called a balanced translocation. A picture of my chromosomes showed that part of my sixth chromosome had swapped places with part of my seventeenth. If you inherit this in its ‘balanced’ form, it won’t affect you. You have all the genetic information you need to make you. But when you conceive, well, you know that the pairs of chromosomes are from each parent? One half of a pair from you; one half from him. In my case – and I am simplifying this here – that could mean a baby inheriting my ‘balanced form’ (and therefore being a carrier themselves, but otherwise healthy), or it could mean too much of chromosome seventeen and too little of six, or too much of six and not enough of seventeen. In other words, a partial ‘trisomy’ (a trisomy is an additional chromosome), or a deletion (a bit missing). One combination showed some recorded cases of extremely life-limited babies; the other combination was thought to be incompatible with life
. I feel bound to say that if you are reading this, as the one in five hundred people diagnosed with a translocation and, by some extraordinary chance are recording the same pattern as me, I urge you to look up details or ask a professional – for example a clinical genetic nurse – to find them for you; there may be newer information of which I am unaware. And also, ‘Hello.’ I have never met anyone else with a translocation, but now you know who I am. You’re not alone. x
This was my lowest point. Lupus, a balanced translocation and the recommendation of genetic testing in any future pregnancy, which carried with it the slight risk of miscarriage. Christmas. My husband and I felt very alone; I didn’t feel like I could tell anyone and, often, when I did, anecdote ensued which tended to make my head more full and make both of us feel under greater stress. Not very festive.
But then in the new year came more news: we met (not her real name) a lady I shall call PQ (P and Q are the letters given to the short and long arms of chromosomes) and she, a clinical genetic nurse, explained that my translocation was even rarer because – as the hospital had not clarified – it was a mosaicism: it wasn’t in all my cells. I had normal cells and those carrying the translocation, which in my understanding meant that it was spontaneous in me – occurring at cell mitosis, when first I began. Inside, I was like a kaleidoscope.
It also turned out I didn’t have lupus. They mixed up my records with someone else’s.
I had two further miscarriages; the fifth was further on, but it was what is termed a ‘missed abortion’. That’s where – I am speaking frankly and I so hope I don’t upset you, dear reader – the foetus dies inside you. I went off and cried, on and off, for a day, but I did not miscarry, so I had to go for a D and C: I’d never had an operation before.
I got pregnant again. I want to tell you this. PQ came round and armed us with a lot of information. And she said – I will always remember it,
‘People with translocations can and do have healthy babies.’ We also learned that, in the operation I had just had, they had identified my quirky cell line. Which way it fell, I did’t ask.
The obstetrician said gently, ‘Do you want to know the sex of the baby?’ We were stunned; I, in particular, had never used the word ‘baby’ because it seemed wrong. Wrong to use it when other women carried babies to term and lost them. I didn’t deserve to use the word. Does that make sense?
But we didn’t find out. I do think about that sometimes and I could ask, I suppose. I’m not sure.
My heart goes out to those who never know why they don’t carry a baby to term. No-one would say to us, ‘Yes – this is definitely the reason why you keep miscarrying’, but PQ did say, ‘This is a likely explanation.’ So you see, for us, it was frightening, but we weren’t so much in the dark now.
I was still pregnant. Nervous, constantly checking to see if I was bleeding; feeling every twinge.
And the obstetrician said,
‘Don’t put additional pressure on yourself. You can’t avoid being nervous after what you’ve been through. This is how it is now.’
That might not be the right advice for everyone, but it was the right information for me.I couldn’t expect pregnancy to be a rosy, romantic time. I never had that experience, but that’s no hardship.
This pregnancy continued. We had amniocentesis. I turned away as hard as a I could from the screen; couldn’t bear the thought of seeing. I fainted outside the room and PQ picked me up. I’d never fainted before in my life. Also, she was tiny: I don’t know how, the size of the prettiest borrower you ever did see, she got me on the gurney.
The wait for the cells to be cultured is excruciating, so you crack on.
PQ rang – and I am weeping, just weeping, writing this, but she said,
‘PQ here; got the results; normal chromosomes; not inherited your balanced form and do you want to know if it’s a boy or a girl?’
Baby.
Baby boy.
I want to say that PQ was the first person to see newborn baby. She said,
‘Oh, oh, oh!’ Then she said, because she was a geneticist, ‘Now do you believe what the books said about positive outcomes?’
‘Oh PQ!’ And came the tears like summer tempests. You know, I was unable to say the word, ‘son’? I tried, but was mute. It felt too precious to say, as if naming would invoke some form of divine nemesis and my blessing would be revoked. I don’t know if anyone else has had this experience. I said, instead, ‘the baby.’ My husband rehearsed me. It was important, he said, to say, ‘This is my son.’ He was right. It was an acknowledgement. We cannot say our children will always be safe; there is no life without risk: it is important to face this, without fear, and embrace what you are given and embrace – and name – that which you love.
Two years later, I was expecting again. I had miscarried three times in the meantime; it had been sad and difficult. I realise, looking back, that I didn’t really talk about it at all. It’s like it never happened. And people, as I wrote above, can be rich in anecdote. Or they are embarrassed because pregnancy loss, for whatever reason, is a taboo subject. But PQ was there again and this time I had CVS, meaning I could testing a little earlier. As with the amnio, there is a risk of miscarriage and, as with the first lot of tests, I went away and my instinct was to stay still and quiet and separate as much as was possible. Keeping still doesn’t stop a miscarriage, but it does help you to feel safe and calm.
This time, my husband wasn’t here on the day we expected the call. My friend Alexi, whom I will name because, as I said to her earlier in the week, she is clearly perfect in every way, was by the phone with me, holding my hand.
‘PQ again. Good news. All clear and no inheritance of the balanced form and do you….’
‘Yes.’
‘Another boy.’
More tempests.
We had another …..son, too. I am actually stuggling to write this word because the sensations surrounded with it do linger. I had three more miscarriages, gave up, but after a few years, we decided to try again. There was a seven year gap between second and third boy, but here was PQ again. This time, however, we found ourselves in an unexpected situation. Lying waiting for CVS, the obstetrician getting ready beside me, she suddenly stopped what she was doing and said,
‘I can’t do this. I know it’s not scientific, but I don’t feel I should perform CVS because everything looks fine to me.’
Lying prone I said,
‘But how can we say that?’
She said,
‘We can’t – I just – I can see that little figure jumping around. I just feel…’
I imagine that this was unexpected. It was a stressful situation to be in. I was crying and we held one another’s gaze and she was upset too – and I understood her dilemma and utterly respected her. So I got up and said,
‘We will go away and think.’
We did think and, knowing the risks, we went back and I had CVS. I think it was because we had two other children to consider. But it was not an easy decision; to have any invasive testing is not an easy or comfortable decision. I fainted again.
And PQ rang. And it was well. She was there again when baby number three was just a couple of hours old.
And that is my story. PQ has a family tree in the hospital where she works; our boys are on it.
********************************************
I hope that wasn’t too much information for you. Writing this is, I realise, my way of saying goodbye. Later today, I am going to plant some flowers in our garden: roses – flowers that will last and foliage that will climb and thrive. I never marked all those times – the eleven elsewheres – that didn’t. Never knew how to think of them – whether as babies, souls, as in any way sentient or feeling pain: I will probably never know or square this. But I hope that, if you have experienced loss, what I have written might make you feel less alone, although my story will be different from yours. It may be that my description of so many miscarriages gives you hope, or it may be that you already know you cannot face further loss: this I understand. I think that being a mother – and by whatever means – is not the only way to have a fulfilled and happy life. I think – and I am worrying about whether I have the wording right here; I am not sure I have the right to say what I am about to – that it is one part of one way. And should you try, yet find that it does not happen for you, then what I feel is this: you are not less woman: you are more because you had the strength and the love to try – and then to bear loss. And you are magnificent.
A synopsis of KILLING HAPLESS ALLY (out March the 3rd, 2016)
Killing Hapless Ally – a synopsis
This is a tale of an individual grappling for sanity and identity; a black comedy in which we discover how Alison, its curious protagonist, conceived in childhood an alter ego called ‘Hapless Ally’ in order to present a different, more palatable version of herself to her family and to the world beyond. She carried on acting this role until very recently, in adulthood, when she was able to slough her off and be plain old ALISON, who had always been trying to break through. Ominously, the alter ego had even begun to develop autonomy: you learn how Alison had to deal with that. It is not very pretty. But perhaps it is ingenious.
‘Hapless’ comes into the world because Alison, from earliest memories, has always been told by her mother, the blessed pillar of the community Santa Maria, that she should have been left in a bucket at birth: this child is a superfluous and unlovely thing. So, Alison creates a bouncy, funny, accident-prone lively little girl who might, she hopes, survive, be loved and thrive. To maintain this act over four decades is painful, confusing and psychologically costly; such a peculiar person, though, takes you on a roller coaster ride of bizarre comedy, unusual observation and journeys in the risible hinterland of socially lauded but cruelly dysfunctional families – all while she tries to keep her head straight. Alison possesses two further troubling things: a little black thought that nuzzles in her palm and then periodically grows exponentially and an embolus of fear – always there, waiting to dissect.
The death of the title does not come quickly in a satisfying epiphany and a great big shove; instead, demise begins gradually: there are adventures with psychologists and psychiatrists, long hard thought and a myriad medication. Process completed, however, you are promised a flourish and a very real stifling. Alison’s goal is, ultimately, to be free. All she had ever wanted was to, ‘go out, other than apologetically, or in disguise, hurry-scurry along the wall.’
The book is about serious matters: fear, confusion, dark days of depression and breakdowns. But it is a book intended to be darkly funny: madness and its environs are. Alison recounts the stories of relatives whose lives and actions are stranger than fiction, such as the eerie folk who live at The Hill, Terry the Fat Controller and morphine-dazzled Helen, love affairs with an impressive range of men and some really terrible strange deaths of a skewering and squishing sort. She takes you on some truly, terrifically horrible holidays with a most odd family, such as sojourns in The Fucking Caravan; offers you trysts with hot, sooty, French blacksmiths, a seat at comical funerals, a spot on a sofa with Pentecostalists, the true horror of boiled cabbage and spotted dick and very dead aunts opining, ‘Thou Shalt Not’ from a wall. Moreover, Alison has always had a great range of imaginary friends with whom to talk, survive, laugh and learn. There’s Frida (the brunette one) from Abba, John Keats, Mary Anning the fossil collector, Sylvia Plath, Shirley Bassey, Dolly Parton, and, for comfort, erotic adventures and a first orgasm, there’s the French writer, philosopher and critic, Albert Camus: her ‘Godfather’. Alison has a busy time and a busy head.
The book is inspired by how an individual copes, imaginatively, with bonkers; in this way it is based on personal experience and its pages populated by people its author has encountered or with whom she has lived. But how does it all end? The protagonist’s approach to survival has been unorthodox, but at the end of the book she is still standing, – now just plain old Alison, laughing and taking a bow for Albert Camus. Ultimately, the tale, while it might make you laugh, wince, shudder or even tut at its inappropriate social comedy, also carries with it a timely message to anyone poleaxed by mental illness and its attendant discomforts – or any reader interested in the windings of such things: you can, like Alison, survive and prevail. Ah: but how would you do it? If you had to, would you kill for it? Now that is an interesting question.
A ten minute write….
A little while ago, I set myself an exercise: with a slot of ten minutes maximum, plan then write the beginning of a novel. Stop writing at ten. This time, I was thinking of a middle grade or YA book. I think I understand the distinction (and I have a notion of what I might recommend to students – as my background is in secondary English teaching), but I can see that this book could go either way. It does have a title, but in case such a funny miniature project goes anywhere, I’d better not say. However, you do meet the protagonist, whose name is ‘Almost.’ Ah – but can you spot straight away which book I had thought of weaving through my story?
That day, I sat under the slowly darkening sky and I thought that no-one knew where I spent my stolen afternoons. I was dragged up, not brought up; when scrubbed or slapped, I would slip out here to the wilds by the river and contemplate what lay there.
What did? First there was the old graveyard; then there was the strange old boat; beyond that was the wide, wide sea, which siren-called me with peculiar voices that somehow I had always known. I’m lonely. I’ve got a stupid name, for a start – and it tends to put people off: Almost. It must have been my mother’s little joke. Maybe she gave it to me so that I would reach for the stars and transcend the limits of the name, but I suspect it was because she wanted to keep me down there: a not quite, just about, moreorless kind of kid. And that’s what I was.
Until that day, when the darkness fell slowly and I stayed out late.
A Tale of Tripe: because The Tripe Marketing Board is the best thing on twitter
A Tale of Tripe (in honour of Elizabeth David)
A TALE OF TRIPE
Waking in the violet early morning, bathed in sweat and troubled by a night both eerie and vivid, Catherine searched her thoughts: ‘What must I have been dreaming about?’
It didn’t take long, of course: it was the tripe – that and the matriarchs who washed it, handled it with such vigour and presented it with an expectant, nasty gleam in their eyes. Such sweet, creative fiends: mother and grandmother. In mother’s case, just dressing the tripe would have exhausted her for the day; sent her desperate to the fainting couch. In grandmother’s, such dressing was simply a prompt to her killing another cow with the large-knuckled hands that terrified the grandchild so much.
Catherine winced: ‘Grandmother and her man hands; downy arms – all wicked with a rolling pin and guarding the old stove with a vicious possessiveness.’ Thus,
‘Let no man come near my domain: I will slaughter them – smother them under the blanket of the beautiful tripe.’
That was it. That was the most disquieting image in the nightmare: grandmother like Moloch waiting for a sacrifice over the fire; mother’s eyes dancing approval.
‘Yes, yes, yes! Feed it to her! Now, now, now!’
‘I’m so ashamed. I want a normal family and not to feel like this – waking, tripe-terrified.’
Mother and grandmother were dead, but they found that no excuse. So they visited Catherine regularly, sleeves rolled up, ready to boil.
To rid herself of the present dreamscape, there was nothing for it: go downstairs and find a better image. Tea in a favourite mug was a good start, but Catherine found that her thoughts were leaping from vivid hue – the reddest of pickled cabbage – to dull, cloudy jars in which might have been preserved the innards of an unwanted relative. In grandmother’s pantry there was a hecatomb of conserves; the fruits of the season, incongruously presented in a chamber of horrors. There were pots of umber sludge, eyeball pickled eggs in heavily sedimented liquor; damp flagstones underfoot: a perturbing smell of sour, crawling mould. There were aprons hanging up, the prettiness of their floral decoration gone to hell in this place of condiments, good housekeeping and no hope. This was a room revisited on other troubled nights for Catherine; she could not let its scents and shapes leave her head and the argot of this poky grey room whispered, ‘Grandmother knows – just as we all know – and she and mother will come for you.’
Here was a place of extinction – of annihilation, the meaning of such things terrifying in a dream but still only faintly, inchoately understood.
‘This must be the worst combination: to know that someone is coming for you, but not to understand why, when or how. Or really what that has to do with pickles. Or tripe!’
Ah: the tripe – huge winding sheets of it. It smelled like death. When Catherine’s nights were not punctuated by morbid pickles, siren-calling her to embrace their victim in death, she had nightmares of being cosseted in its velvet crushing embrace. The silky surface was puckered and hollowed. Somewhere else and in some other time, it might have been pretty; like a creamy-white mosaic you would want to touch. But in the nights, and when grandmother or mother served it up as punishment so triumphantly, the tripe blinked at her and writhed in its nasty pool of white sauce, encircled by effulgent lumps of onion. On its surface – its face or was it its back? – were sucker pads like those on the arms of an octopus or some kind of strange sea plant that would caress and then swallow you whole, whispering of a lifetime of sin to you – just to compound the unpleasantness of this particular way to go.
Matriarchs hovering, the tripe came billowing clouds of vapour; it was cooked in a milky broth, all one at first, before you realised the unpleasantness of the discrete parts and sucky stomach-feet turned your (own) stomach. Between the two women, the silent challenge between mother and grandmother, it was a point of honour to make sure that the flour was never properly cooked off; thus, it lurked congealed in tiny mounds – but you didn’t see it in the unmapped viscosity of the sauce. Didn’t see the horrid little tumescence until you began to ingest it. Powder scattered in your mouth when the lump dissected. In a way, this was the worst horror:
‘And the dust in my mouth as I sat between Scylla and Charybdis. Oh, a fine supper.’
Catherine had always blamed herself for the meals – for why they fed her so. For the spiteful sheets of tripe, served up like victory in chintz.
‘My childhood looked so tidy from the outside; mother and grandmother were pillars of the community: first for cake in the village show; outstanding for a lemon curd; doyennes of the church flower rota. They prayed hard at the altar, shark eyes squeezed shut. I always thought it was me – it had to be me.’
‘Send her out to the pantry, in the semi darkness. Those eggs will frighten her a treat – make her more obedient. The mould on her hands! Ha!’
‘Mother – that’s the way to do it.’
‘But say these homes must have been full of spite, hurt and venom to make mother and grandmother cook like that? Say it was THEM and I didn’t deserve the tripe? Say it was wrong to shut me in there when I gagged on the tripe and onions and spat out the floury lumps without meaning to and they put me in the pantry like Jane Eyre in the Red Room?’
Catherine was not usually so bold: what was happening now that was different?
Something was coming from the bookshelf.
A small, dry but nonetheless beguiling voice: ‘Come here and open me up, Catherine.’
Now, Catherine was used to having a litter of imaginary friends. When your strange landlocked, emptied-out family greedily surrounds you; when your nearest and dearest seem to close in on you with, “Bad, bad, bad – everyone knows about you” then don’t you need to tell someone? You can’t tell real people because no-one else seems to have a family as peculiar as yours.
‘And then how would I ever explain cooking as a way of throttling or suffocating an unwanted child?’
In the bad dreams, Catherine saw her relatives, mother and grandmother predominant, amassed, like the preserves, in a hecatomb. They tumbled out curses at home; were aligned in neat rows and pretty as pie when out in the cold world which welcomed their jam making, their manners and determined smiles. Who would believe Catherine about mother and grandmother? And how would she explain the chamber of soused horrors or the tripe?
But here came a friend now; you might know her? To Catherine, she was ED; to the outside world, Elizabeth David.
ED wasn’t the warmest sort, but her books smelled of spice and sunshine; of lemons and emerald parsley. Catherine took French Provincial Cooking from her shelf; it was from this that ED had been speaking to her. Catherine adored ED and all her books; could tell you about the “pale rose pinks of the langoustines” which their author enjoyed, with a fresh and sparkling appetite, alongside a bottle of Muscadet by the Seine. ED relished good butter, radishes with their leaves left on as God had made them; saw the poetry and potency of a flat plate of Arles sausage and black olives.
‘And the colour, ED: look at the colour of the things you ate and knew how to make! See the lovely creams and greys of shrimp; sunset-glow carrots. For you, even the dark things – the winkles and the cork stuck with pins; things that were muted or pebbly – those things became beautiful. Beautiful – flanking the colour; like a gentle relief. I want to eat like that and I’d like to live like that. Embracing the darkness, yet knowing of its loving, numinous companion.’
ED, not one for a hug, and not particularly fond of metaphor, said,
‘Well, do you have a sharp knife, a hot grill and a will of your own? I’m assuming you have a mandoline, some good bowls – and I will not share my kitchen with a garlic press: I must be firm about that.’
‘Of course not; I know your feelings on garlic presses. I’m not sure I have a mandoline, I do have plenty of bowls, but some of them are chipped.’ Catherine began to cry.
ED prodded her firmly in the back, coughed demonstratively and said, ‘Chipped is fine, as long as we have at least a few white-lined brown dishes.’
‘Why do we need these dishes – why must they be as you describe?’
Silence. A sigh. Then:
‘Fresh contrast. Now, it’s time you stopped thinking about tripe. We are going shopping.’
‘ED, please: I am dog tired.’
‘That is no excuse. Not when we are going to compose hors-d’œuvre.’
Hurrying to dress, Catherine sighed disappointedly at the drawn face and sad clothes; shuddered at the lingering dreams. Still, ED at least knew about the tripe, so they wouldn’t be cooking that. They would grace a table with red tomatoes, yellow mayonnaise, sea salt and olive oil; a beautiful salad of grated carrot. And could it be celeriac that ED meant for the mandoline – all cut into the thinnest strips and highly seasoned with mustard, plenty of vinegar and a voluptuous thick mayonnaise?
Out they went, Catherine chatting silently to ED and now lighter of foot on their way to the wonderful market. But two shadowy figures watched her, curses dribbling from their lips with the last lappings of morning tea and vulgar gulps of toast with ochre marmalade. And inside Catherine’s house, gently, timorously now, was a faint smell of the sea, a distant grating of nutmeg and a fresh twist of black pepper.
‘Sacrilege. I smell no wash day smell! I hear no slap of tripe against the pot!’ cursed drear grandmother and mother.
Afloat, through thought, in Catherine’s house now was the peaceful aroma ofpotage bonne femme: of cream, chervil, softly cooked potatoes and leeks, bathed in sweet butter. The shadowy figures cursed more, spitting unkind crumbs.
‘Pain grillé aux anchois? Salade au chapon? Get the little bitch. Boil up the tripe, mother. And bring out the ammunition from the pantry.’
Catherine and ED, silently communing over their purchases, bought a mandoline and the requisite dishes, great bunches of green things for thesalade de saison, dimpled lemons, celery, celeriac, lumpy tomatoes – things that promised succour. And life.
But on returning to the house, dull wafts of tripe waited for her, as the shadowy figures took their joyful and vindictive hold of the kitchen. Garish red cabbage with a sweet, cloying smell sat with the cruel eggs on the worktop. Amuse-bouches of the sort you serve if you hate your guests; starters gussied up a little with hard bread, sea-foam milky tea and a cucumber cut into behemoth chunks. And the boiling tripe hissed milky sap.
‘No matter’ said ED, walking briskly right through the shadowy figures, rolling up her sleeves and assembling a work station next to the eyeball eggs.
The eggs leered as ED tasked Catherine with slicing the celeriac on the mandoline, concocting a highly seasoned dressing for its matchstick strips; Arles sausage was laid out on a large flat white plate, its fat coin slices overlapping; in the centre, a carefully built mound of black olives. Both glistened and invited. The tripe spat on, onions twisting and squirming round it, as ED and Catherine cut tomatoes and sprinkled them with gently snipped chervil – the dressing to be added ‘absolutely’ said ED ‘only when the diner wants to eat.’
Catherine could feel on her pulse the metallic, penny-tasting lure of a fine misshapen tomato; she tasted a tentative joy as they grated carrots almost, ‘Almost I said!’ to a purée, seasoning them carefully. A pleasing, wobbling heap of mayonnaise with fresh eggs and olive oil from the first pressing flanked the crackling-crust loaf, butter and some best quality anchovies.
‘It is no shame to leave them in their tins if they are high class brands’, barked ED. Catherine hurried to place back those she had already decanted.
The table of hors-d’œuvre, for a twelve o’ clock lunch, was almost set. Almost. ED revealed a surprise. Out from a white plastic bag, secreted in the depths of ED’s basket, came a single slithering sheet of tripe: ‘For you.’
Tears pricked Catherine’s eyes. ‘No, not you too – please not you Elizabeth. Don’t make me cook it!’
From the room and the world all around came the laughter; the delighted hoary shapes of mother and grandmother.
‘Boil up the tripe, there’s a good girl! Choke, choke, choke on the nuggets of flour!’
So ED was one with them, then.
‘It had to be me, didn’t it? I deserved what I got: a lock up in the pantry; a stifling sheet of tripe and the unlovely curlicues of onions; gallons of white sauce and curses.’
The spectres grinned; the jarred eggs hummed, if ever a jarred egg could.
‘Now do be quiet. Our lunch à deux first, then I shall teach you something new. You will have to boil the tripe briefly, but then you will grill it to a sizzling crispness, with a coating of egg and breadcrumbs and serve it with a sauce tartare. A revelation, I think. It is called tablier de sapeur – or fireman’s apron.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You will.’
Lunch. The fierce, seductive rasp of the anchovy, crunch of good bread and the delicacy of finely cut celeriac. There were draughts of wine; ED passed knife and salad servers through the ghouls of matriarchs: it was a furious celebration. Then lost sleep came and took her pupil. On waking, ED had gone, but Catherine obligingly boiled the slice of tripe, eviscerating it with a certain passion to form a neater rectangle. She basted it with egg, coated it with crumbs and grilled it until it was golden and the edges had caught on the flame. She ate the robust little apron with the sauce tartare that ED must have made for her, left with an uncommonly sweet note nearby:
‘See off the spectres; try something new – tablier de sapeur: adieu; adieu.’
Hmmm. She almost liked this novel dish.
‘It’s not my favourite thing, but then neither is it the stuff of nightmares, thrust back to the sound of laughter into the sinister pantry. Ha! “Grill to a sizzling crispness” ED had said. A dynamic phrase; a confident one.’
Catherine threw wide the curtains, welcomed in the vestiges of the day and scattered the grey tripe boilers and pickle hoarders into pieces.
‘Try something new. Mother; grandmother. Keep being dead now. Adieu; adieu!’
That night, Catherine dreamed only of the next chapters in her life: ‘Soups’ and ‘Eggs, Cheese Dishes and Hot Hors-d’œuvre.’
Anna Vaught Writes - Dr Anna Vaught: teacher, mentor, author, campaigner 