First Writes

There were eighteen of us around a long arrangement of formica-topped tables. It was October, the sky darkening outside the tall, school-room windows. The teacher was reluctant to have the lights switched on. She said we should buy a small notebook, keep it by us and jot down images, as though we were taking snapshots. Jotting in the notebook was a good thing to do and we should make a habit of it. She asked us to think back to a place from childhood, capture an image and then write about it.

I wrote about a knitted lion. It had an orange and brown woollen mane, two red circles made of felt sewn onto its cheeks and black embroidered eyes. I wrote that the lion appeared to be smiling, that the eyes followed me around the bedroom and that its face shone in the moonlight that streamed through the narrow window above a forest of fir trees. The moon made the lion turn its head and look at me. It's face was also moon-like and looked a little pale behind the red cheeks. It took me in and knew my thoughts, and though it smiled, because this was the expression that had been stitched onto its face, the smile carried menace.

You have a good eye for detail, said the teacher. This is well-remembered and really evokes the inner world of a child.

The lion was not, in fact, from childhood. It sat on a pillow in my bedsit. Someone I knew had made it and generously given it to me as a present because I liked it so much. And it carried no menace in its being, I made that up to lend a sense of drama to the scene. The teacher said she enjoyed the disturbing vision of the apparently innocuous knitted lion as threatening and able to read thoughts. I sensed that the other students were less impressed but they were, in any case, waiting for their turn to read. If each of us took five minutes that would amount to one and a half hours, and several people took much longer than that.

Eventually lights were switched on. They were fluorescent, made our complexions look green and gave me a headache. I understood why the teacher had waited so long. One person after another gripped their notebooks or pieces of lined paper torn from some old school book, and read their piece: the teapot that had belonged to a grandmother, how mother had always used it for special occasions and one day a bit of spout was chipped off; an actual photograph - portrait of the artist as a young Scout, ready to dib dib dib and dob dob dob, and all about the different knots he learned to tie. I didn't mean you to think of an actual photograph, said the teacher - but that's good, that's very good.

I know, said the student, looking crushed, but that was the image that came to mind. He thought she thought he was being stupid.

Yes, she said, and it's very good - I just thought I'd point that out in case others had misunderstood.
 I didn't misunderstand, he said.

He was not the only one to refer to an actual photograph. There was a family holiday snapshot of a beach and another of a woman's father. The father was smiling in the photograph and a young child (the writer of the piece) sat on his knee.

He came into my bedroom most nights and touched me, and told me not to tell my mother. When I was fourteen he used to come and inspect my breasts, he -

You don't have to read it if it's upsetting for you, said the teacher

- tried to have intercourse with me. I will never forget the smell.

Sometimes, said the teacher, an image can hold all kinds of disturbing things. She looked at her watch and noticed that we had run overtime by almost an hour. Could the others perhaps wait until next time?

It was a mistake I would sometimes also make when I began to teach creative writing - holding work that students had written in class until next time. Already I was storing all this up for future use, taking stock of the situation: time-management was important; eighteen in a class was too many; everyone has something to say.

Hearing Voices

They used to come the minute I set pen to paper, flowing into me, running down the length of my arm. Or sometimes they came in medias res, when I was putting the baby in the buggy or standing outside Mrs. Patel's shop on the corner of Chatsworth Road, while my daughter had a turn on the giant duck that moved and said quack for three minutes or so after you put a coin in its slot. The voices whispered, literally, above my head.

They were not mad voices, like the ones that tell you bad things about yourself or instruct you to hire a helicopter and kidnap the queen. They were an effusion of words that wanted to arrange themselves into lines on a page. They wanted to be earthed, to be made incarnate, and they hovered and whispered about and above me, like chattering children gathered by a door before it opens to a birthday party. I had no time to let them in and I was very ill with a condition I had just been told was Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. When people saw me pushing the buggy or standing by the quacking duck they would not have guessed that for much of the day I was lying as though nailed to my bed, with a fatigue I had no vocabulary to describe and symptoms in my body and head that frightened and appalled me. A kind childminder looked after my children for some hours each day. I told myself this would pass. My throat burned. People began to wonder if I might be malingering or reacting to the stress of child-care and its demands, trying to find a way out. I wanted to be with my children. My daughter said, I want to be with you - why should you be here all alone? I hated handing them over, my two babies.

Perhaps, said a doctor - not the one who diagnosed M.E. but an earlier one who was baffled by the intensity of my apparent malaise - perhaps you feel ambivalent about this pregnancy, this second child. 

No, I said, we planned it, we want it.

Perhaps, said the health centre nurse, you are more tired this time round because you have a small child to look after.

No, I said, this isn't tiredness. And so it continued.

The voices took no notice of this or any other state of affairs. They whispered and wanted to come in. They were seeking entrance. I began to write in a notebook, one of those narrow, flip-over ones with a ring-binder at the top. When you came to the end you just turned it around and began again so as not to waste paper. The words I wrote surprised and interested me, but they did not come from the ones that sounded above my head. They came from somewhere lower down. I kept the notebook by my bed for a while, wrote down whatever I could as soon as I woke up, if I could do it before the baby had begun to cry, or after one of my afternoon deeper-than-death sleeps. I dreamed that I swam in a turquoise sea, holding my daughter beside me with one arm. We looked down and saw that the sea bed was flat and sheer, like the floor of a swimming pool. As I swam I realised I was leaving the shore far behind and the sea ahead appeared to have no end. I wrote about my early childhood, remembered people I had almost forgotten. I saw into the past like a crystal-scryer, illuminated moments, like the time I dug into the earth by a beech tree expecting to find gold and found three coins, enough to buy sweets with and still some left over. I understood that I had set foot on the terrain that lies close to dream-time but is not quite in it, nor in the mundane world of the completely awake. Sometimes I wrote stories and poems that connected to this terrain. But they were not connected to the voices that carried on, sporadically, whispering. They wanted more of my time and they wanted my complete attention. Sometimes they came so close to me, so near to my head, that I found myself muttering, echoing their phrases, promising to write them down (which is what they wanted me to do) later, or as soon as I could.

What are you talking about? asked my daughter. What are you saying?

Words, my darling. I pressed on, pushing my son's buggy through the rain.

Hurry up, I said to my daughter who was trying to keep up with me.

I am only three years old, she said. We took shelter in the awning of a fish and chip shop. I bought a bag of chips, shook salt and vinegar on them and we shared them, walking back in the downpour as though it was a stroll through the park.

Chip, said the little one, putting his hand out from under the polythene canopy. Chip!

The words above my head mumbled away. After a while they came less frequently, and then they went somewhere else - found someone, perhaps, who could offer the accommodation they needed. I carried on writing words in the notebook, typing them out on my portable Olivetti. We got our first computer. It was a monster that took up most of the space in our basement room. When I tapped the keys a ghoulish green light shone from the screen and swallowed my sentences whole. That was a long time ago. My children grew up. I am much older and have a laptop now and a printer, and I live by a forest, not in the east end of London.

The voices, though, have recently come back. Now they choose the moments between waking and falling asleep to press together and begin their whispering - just above my head, as before. I make promises it will be difficult for me to keep. I tell them I will give them attention and a room of their own, but not there, not then when I am at the point of falling asleep.

I still have Myalgic Encephalomyelitis.

Choose Me

(to the Muse, who may take any gender it chooses, but I think this one is male)

Choose Me

I am as ready as I’ll ever be,

my door unlocks and opens easily

to any visitor, my walls are thin

and breakable, you may as well come in.

Take me - I’m not particular or proud,

(refined by nature, but you can be loud),

I’d love a swineherd better than a fine

thin-blooded prince who wouldn’t throw a line

to save me. Feel how cold I am, I’ve lit

a fire but lack the stuff to throw on it:

something good to burn, if you’ll be so kind,

a high conceit or bawdy joke – don’t mind.

Come now. My sheets are white and I am free.

I am a poet lost for words. Choose me.


            ***

Vita's place

Last week we visited Sissinghurst Castle, the home of Vita Sackville-West. It was full of people wandering around the gardens, standing on the roof of the castle with binoculars, eating cake in the Granary coffee shop and lunching in the restaurant. We ate exceptionally good poached salmon with dill and mustard sauce, new potatoes and crisp steamed vegetables; gooseberry fool for dessert. Everyone sitting around us spoke French.

In the gardens, I wanted to be astonished because they represent a lifetime's work and dedication. But I am not a gardener and my relationship to the world of flowers is mostly superficial.  You must see the White Garden, someone said to me. Go in early summer. I imagined that everything would be white. I forgot that the gardens of great houses are divided up into this and that - a rose garden, a herb garden, a white garden. I pinched off a small piece of lavender and held it to my face, looking round to see if anyone had noticed this small act of vandalism. People walked about with iphone cameras, clicking. Mr. Signs pointed to the laurel growing on the side of a wall and said the laurel in our garden was in better shape. It was a joke we developed as we looked at what was flowering: our roses were better too, less drooping and distressed, our peonies bolder and more vibrant, our foxgloves looked fresher and our forsythia was not brown at the edges. We were overheard by some people who looked at us oddly, because it was an odd thing to do: to walk around a famous garden and make unfavourable comparison with one's own. In the white garden our joke began to peter out. There were strange, dancer-like flowers I had never seen before and tall stalks with frill, like some delicate material on a hand-sewn petticoat. Everything was open and vulnerable-looking. Here Vita and Harold Nicholson would spend their time, year on year, tending the flowers, while visitors came and left their shilling contribution in a bucket by the wide arch that looked over the Kentish fields.

More than anything, I wanted to see the study where Vita wrote her books and poems. It was in the turret, about half way up the seventy-eight stairs, which I climbed with difficulty. En route were rooms given over to plaques and illustrations which spoke about the history of the place - how it had once been a poor house, and also how it had, for a period, housed French POWs in the eighteenth century.  They were kept in disgraceful conditions.  One of the guards had once shot at a group for no reason and killed a couple. The French visitors were milling around me, talking and pointing. There were delicate markings on some of the walls, drawings of boats that the prisoners longed to return to.

The entrance to Vita's study had iron bars through which we could look but not enter. I was disappointed. I had pictured myself standing by one of her windows, seeing what she might have seen (the terrain still much the same) when she had looked. I wanted to be close to the vital life of the room. I pressed my face against the bars and breathed in the scent of old books, the walls being covered with them. My eyes wanted to take in everything, but I knew I would only retain a few details and all else would be sense impressions. There wasn't time, and French pilgrims behind us were impatient for their turn to look. There was a scent, almost not there, but I have a keen sense of smell and if it had been possible for me to linger I might even have identified the brand; not one that would easily be found now. It was the kind my mother, or more likely one of her older friends, might have worn in the fifties, when I was too young to read or know about these things. It was sweet, with a touch of decay, almost unpleasant - but one would have got used to it. The scent had hung about her, I guessed, as she sat and worked, and the furnishings - the chaise longue, rug, wall hangings, and the books - still held it, this essence, and breathed it out.

Coming back to Signs Cottage, we went into our minimally-tended garden, which I do not appreciate as much as I might.  It looked particularly beautiful. Mr. Signs pointed to an area he was leaving to grow wild - our meadow.  Us aristocrats.

Vita knew her flowers intimately and had a connection to them, gave each their due. One catches this in her poem, The Land - heavy in parts, but it begins to sing when it speaks of flowers, and her relationship to the garden.

She walks among the loveliness she made,

Between the apple-blossom and the water -

She walks among the patterned pied brocade,

Each flower her son, and every tree her daughter.

***

Vicarious

I am reading Laura Hillenbrand's book, Unbroken. It is her second book, the first being Sea Biscuit, which was about a racehorse. Unbroken is about Louis Zamperini, who became famous for being a runner and winning races, and then for surviving terrible years as a POW in Japan. Laura Hillenbrand, who is now 43, has had M.E. since she was 19. She lives in her room and goes out so rarely that when she does, she is confused by changes in the world: things are automated that never used to be - that sort of thing. She says that she writes about people who push themselves to the limit against overwhelming odds because it gives her a vicarious life. People have urged her to write an autobiography (she wrote a splendid piece, published in the New Yorker, about the very beginning of having M.E.). But writing about her own life is the last thing she wants to do. Writing stories is a way of not having to live so completely inside her own diseased body. It has been her escape. I find it hard to imagine how she does it. She says that everything is set up for her. She has a refrigerator in her room. Her husband is a successful university professor and was presumably able to provide for her, before she became financially successful. Even so, there are cognitive challenges she must have had to negotiate.

What she said made me think - that we all, to some extent, live our lives vicariously. We do this when entering into the life of another or just observing a creature or something from the natural world. When we pay attention to the 'otherness' of the other, then we become that: borrow the airborneness of a bird in flight, the astonishment of a baby who sees everything as new; and I remember the look in my daughter's eyes in the morning when she was two months old - I felt proud, almost, to have brought her into the world so that she could discover the remarkable fact (not the word but I can't find the right one) of a pattern made on the wall by sun coming through pink curtains. The first time my cat went outside, looked up and saw birds flying in the sky, something moved in her soul, quickened her senses. Of course, in time, she would want to catch and kill them, but still, it was a moment of wonder, when sudddenly this bit of life was revealed to her, and I felt proud of the world and what lived in it, as though I myself had had something to do with its creation - and at the same time I felt I was her, on the receiving end of all these new manifestations.  Animals have this virtue, that they keep their innocence. Even when they kill and maim, they do not lose it, as people do.

Everything after birth is a falling away from innocence. To keep the soul intact, to retain a sense of wonder - this is great blessing. Sometimes it is lost or damaged, but we can get it back, as Louis Zamperini, after his terrible experiences, managed to do, this being (in my opinion) his greatest achievement.

It is June, but the wind is autumn-like, tearing through the branches of the ash tree outside my window. A child's red teepee has been blown onto my lawn. Nothing is quite as it should be. I am filled with a sense of possibilities.   

Water and Stars

I like poetry. Ever since coming across those lines from A Child's Garden of Verses by R.L. Stevenson (about the pail by the wall being half full of water and stars) it has had a place in my life - been important to me. But I hardly get to any poetry readings these days. Mostly, this is because of restrictions imposed my neurologically-challenged brain that isn't easily able to give the kind of sustained concentrated focus needed. But I have to admit that my preference is also to have a particular kind of one-on-one relationship with a poem that you get when it is just you and the words on a page. I often hear it said that a poem only really comes alive when it is spoken aloud, and it is quite true that to speak it aloud often tests where a poem is or isn't working; and it is true that when a poet has the gift of being able to deliver their words well, then it is a fine thing to hear them. I know one of whom it is said that he could read from a telephone directory or a Tesco's till receipt and make it sound like poetry (and perhaps, for the duration of his performance of such, it might become so). But there are good, even famous poets who don't do this well, and then I would prefer to meet their work on the page.

Perhaps I am making a virtue of a necessity. However good the poem on the page, one doesn't have the buzz of conviviality that comes from a room full of people sharing the experience. I have recently been in rooms full of people because they were occasions which I couldn't bear to miss: the book launch of a dear friend was one and the wedding of my youngest brother was another. The commonplace business of engaging in conversation in a crowded room, especially where there is ambient noise, has become something I can - almost - no longer do. It does something to the wiring in my brain that is hard to describe, but many PeopleWithME will know and recognise. Clearly there was a time when I managed better than I do now. But for now I will (have to) carry on treading the path of acceptance. Does this sound boring?

I am not bored. I have almost never been bored, even as a temp when typing figures all day on a manual typewriter or sitting in a classroom listening to the depressed geography supply teacher drone about where we got our wheat, cocoa and meat from. I took in none of the facts (I seldom did) but I remember everything about the teacher: how carefully he combed the few oily strands across his bald head, the texture of his tweed-like suit that picked up on the colour of his ginger sideburns, the earnest expression, as though there might have been something hidden in the dreary litany of facts that he would have liked to reveal to us. I remember how dust gathered in the corners of the large classroom windows that you could only open by using a long pole with a metal hook at the end, and the blackboard where there was always the ghost of something written in chalk, even once it had been rubbed out. I must have been paying attention - to something or someone. I still do. And the other day I read Billy Collins who said, while the novelist is banging on his typewriter, the poet is watching a fly on the windowpane. I don't think the one activity necessarily excludes the other, and however many flies you watch there is no substitute for writing words on paper (or screen). But it did give me the sense, or remind me, that the act of witnessing and paying attention means something and gives power and substance. The pail is still full of water and stars.

***

Practice

I am recovering from another spring virus, it is late and this is no time to be putting up a blog post. But I'm going to do it anyway because I'm going away in a couple of days and on 12th May it is M.E. Awareness Day, and I am mindful of it.

Either the number of PWME casualties has increased or I am just more attuned. Barely a week goes by that I don't hear about a death or about some outrage perpetrated by the medical profession. A woman with severe M.E. is about to be forcibly removed from her home on the advice of a psychiatrist who has never met her. Someone I have come to know through a Facebook group is denied the essential care she needs in order to live. Another has been told she must submit to an exercise regime that is not only unrealistic but dangerous, or risk losing essential benefits.

Being able to get about a bit, I remain one of the more fortunate ones, though twenty-five years along the road does not do me any favours and I am still sometimes asked if I am "better now."  I reply by giving a short lecture about the nature of M.E., not so much for my sake (if people have some understanding it's nice, but unless they or someone close has it then they probably won't and one must be realistic) but in order to spread the word a little - help raise awareness.

The spirit is still strong (I have yet to meet a PWME for whom this is not true - practice makes perfect) but the disease takes its toll. It is time to take stock again, find new ways of doing things, especially those things I love, that give my life meaning. I carry on doing The Writing, but am having to embrace the idea I may never have the strength for a big project, and that - crucially - this will be ok. Good enough. I have rehabilitated the reading, for which hurrah, because I am as much a reader as a writer and I feared I might be losing the ability to properly focus - M.E. brain can lend one a kind of dyslexia whereby one takes nothing in. I have to be careful not to risk overloading the brain because this can easily cause relapse, and have come to recognise that I can take in much more if brain does not feel it is having to absorb Information.  Kindle has helped to some extent.  I don't know why it should be easier on the eye than a book, but it sometimes is, and you can adjust the font. I continue to meet with writing people, when I can, either to workshop poems or to sit in a kitchen (mine or theirs) with a notebook, to write and then share what we have made. When this kind of activity works, when people are focussed on the work and the process, there is a sense of community and it feels as though one has a hearth. Whether my words find their way into the wider world or not, I am still this writing person, as green as when I first began to do it, when I knew (a late developer) that this is what I was for. I need to put my ear to the ground and listen for what is coming, for what I really want to be speaking about, because unless I am true to that I won't have the strength to do it. Unless I can bring this kindness to bear on my practice, then I won't have the heart for it.

Today I went into the village for bread, yoghurt and a newspaper. I nearly didn't because it was cold and wet and I haven't been outside for a few days. There was a boot sale going on in the community centre car park and all the usual spaces in the village centre were full. I parked my car at a distance from the minimarket where I got my paper. Coming out of the shop, I saw a Big Issue man under an umbrella. As I shook my head at him, he held out his hand and said, "Please." He was ruddy, thick-set with dark wavy hair, and from somewhere else - foreign. I ignored him.  Perhaps it was just the easy habit of common and garden mean-spiritedness - I give now and then, but not often, not much - and also, I didn't want to stand in the wet, rummaging for my purse. But back inside my car, the look of him lit up like after-image and I felt him in me, familiar, there was something in his gesture I knew or recognised, as though he might once have been someone who mattered to me. He wasn't, I had never seen him before. I drove past the shop, left the car hazard lights on and dropped some coins into his hand. He nodded, as though he had been waiting for me. He looked tired.

There is something I need to put together again, something I would like to re-member. This too is work-in-progress.

**