My Animal Life (2 page)

The whole thing only took five minutes. Any longer and I don't know what I would have done, but after all, what
could
I have done? By now I was no longer thinking of cancer; I was just thinking, ‘Thank God he's stopped.' Small blessings, like small worries, briefly erase greater ones.

‘You did well,' said the nurse. ‘Don't worry. Lots of people actually fight. I had to hit one bloke quite hard.'

Not long after, the doctor, who without his mask looked young and gentle, came round the ward. I did not entirely take in what he had said, though I nodded and smiled and asked questions.

‘It all looked totally normal. We didn't find anything nasty. No tumours or anything like that. The stomach looked pink and healthy. No sign of a hiatus hernia. We'll look at the samples of course.'

We didn't find anything nasty. No tumours. The stomach looked pink and healthy …

I never got a firm diagnosis. ‘Probably just an infection.' Or something to do with the extra kidney randomly discovered during those five months. How different are we all from the diagrams? What strangenesses lie under the skin?

Life. I was given it back. Not a year, not five years: no shadow. It took me several days to understand, and to shrug off the greatcoat of terror. It's a common enough experience; the mind has been told, but the body can't turn on a sixpence from one mode to another. The chemicals that are triggered by fear can't disperse on the instant. People talk about ‘feeling flat' when the good news comes, of its ‘not sinking in'. The body has depths; it is an ocean. How long does it take for a storm to die down?

But later, how light I felt. How light I feel. How grateful.

Outside the glass, the house-martin swoops, closer, closer, then turns on one wing and is off again, dancing away across the void. Not pinned on its back. Not ash on the ground.

When I first knew my husband, Nick was trying to get a newspaper to send him to the Falklands, where there was a war on. He had lived in Argentina, he knew Spanish. In the end, it didn't happen, and we got married. One of the great pieces of luck in my life. But he used to say then, and has often said since, always to my intense dismay, ‘If I get killed in a foreign country, I want to be buried where I die.' I thought, at first, he didn't understand how sharply I would miss him and need the comfort (however bleak) of a body, or ashes, to visit.

Now I see that perhaps his wish has something to do with a life's trajectory, the distance you can travel from your starting point. Maybe an animal's life is best tracked through movement. The tiger flashing past the shadowing grasses, slipping beyond everything: sleep, death, families.

Why call this book
My Animal Life
?

Not to degrade my life, but to celebrate it. To join it, tiny though it is, to all the life in the universe. To the brown small-headed pheasant running by the lake in Coolham. To my grandparents and parents, and my great-grandparents who like most people in the British Isles of their generation wore big boots, even for the rare occasions of photographs, and lived on the clayey land, and have returned their bones to it, joining the bones of cattle, horses, foxes. To the blind out-of-season bee bombing the glass of this window. To link, in a way I only learned to do in my thirties, my mental life to the body I love and enjoy, to my secret sexual life and my life as a mother.

My animal life joins me, also, to my death. That mysterious thing round a bend in the road which, like every other animal stretching in the breeze and the sunlight, I wish not to know about, not yet.

I am writing this book to ask questions — to which I do not know the answer. How can we be happy? What do men want, what do women want? What do children need from us?

Can I save my belief in the soul from my love of science?

How can we bear to lose those we love most? How do we recover from our mistakes — our many mistakes?

How do we forgive ourselves? And our parents?

Why do we need art? Why are we driven to make it?

And class: can we ever really change it?

If it seems rash to ask such questions, I have always been rash. And I am too old to be afraid.

We all ask questions something like these, silently or aloud, in pain or in hope. It is the process of asking I want to record, as the plane comes bumping down through low cloud.

Underneath, it's still there. Earth. Families. The patterns of being stamped in our nerve-ends. The long stern game of our unknown genes.

Nothing about families is simple. No, wrong: there's a joy about the ‘all of us are here, we are back' which begins a celebration, the joy of meeting and recognising and counting, the sense of completeness falling like balm: we're home.

How I wish they could all be here now, Mum and Dad, Gees and Churches, the uncles and aunts, shrugging off scarves and coats, fussing and laughing and settling down; in both families, hugs and kisses. The dead are with us: Uncle Arthur palms a two-bob bit and smuggles it into my pocket, Aunty Eve takes both my hands in her ring-carbuncled fingers and offers the scented dust of her cheek, little Grandma Gee comes rocking towards me like a full-bosomed sea-legged sailor, dot and carry, dot and carry, all dimples, raising her hat to release a thin froth of curled white hair, but, suddenly fretful, calls, ‘Pa! Pa! will you hang this up?' — her small navy head-hugging straw hat with the long pearl hatpin — but he is too busy crowing at my brother John, his beloved eldest grandson, ‘I'll match you over 100 yards when you're eighteen, boy! I'll walk down the aisle at your wedding!' All back
from the grave, all home. Waves of laughter and tears crossing over.

But before that epiphany, if this was real life, there would be hours or days of preparation, negotiation, tension, not to mention shopping and bed-making and cooking, the rehearsing or erasing of half-forgotten fears and resentments, the burden of hope. Let everything be right, let everything be ready, what shall we tell them and not tell them?
Don't let us down
.

And after the perfect moment of reunion, what then?

I come from two different families, the Gees and the Churches. My parents' given names both tell a story. My father's was Victor Valentine Gee, quite a burdensome, aspirational one, expecting from the child who was born in 1914, the year the Great War broke out, exploits both martial and romantic. Vic was named for Valentine's Day, the day he was born on, a secret softness he tried to keep from the oikish adolescents he taught. His initials were V V G, which meant Very Very Good when teachers put it on homework; his demands on himself and others were high.

The Gees were clever and had standards, an end terrace house in Wolverton, Bucks, which meant they were upper working-class, a giant metal roller for the grass leaning against the garden wall, crimson hollyhocks six foot tall, and upstanding moral convictions. Wolverton was a grid of nearly identical red-brick terraced houses with blue slate roofs, a Victorian ‘New
Town' expressly built by the London and Birmingham Railway Company in 1838 to house the men who built the trains. Vic's father, my grandfather Walt, was a Labour man and trades union leader at ‘The Works', supposedly a hero for turning down a large cash offer from the bosses to go over to management, a figure in the community, as he let me know one day: ‘They'll never let me buy my own drinks, in the club,' he said with a wink. That didn't sound good to me. ‘Why not?'

‘The Club', the railway works pub-come-social club, was almost opposite number 62 Peel Road, and I associated it with happiness. Going up alone at night, since I was the youngest, to the dark first floor of my grandparents' Victorian house, creeping into my soft snow-cold feather-bed with its small warm heart, the stone hot water-bottle put there in advance, I would wait shivering until the music across the way began, and the hum of male voices; then the light from the club, getting brighter as night fell, imprinted through the curtain an intricate, impossibly beautiful, longed-for pattern of lace on the wall.

Why couldn't Grandpa buy his own drinks? ‘There's always someone wants to buy me a drink,' he divulged, and offered me another treacle toffee, a paper bag of which soft dark brown squares he always kept in the pocket of his jacket ‘to keep himself regular', as Grandma explained, for pleasure in this ascetic family always needed justifying, except for my grandfather's fondness for drink. At tea (which was also supper) there was a clear rule, no jelly or fruit cake without bread and butter.

Grandpa was a trim, fit man, with bristling white hair, kept short, and a neat moustache to disguise what might have been a hare lip but was actually damage he
did himself as a young man in Cosgrove, the canal-side village where he grew up, by diving from the bridge into too-shallow water. ‘Pa' (as both my parents called him) wore collarless striped shirts and a buttoned, fitted grey waistcoat, always smart, with a watch and watch-chain, which leads me to his special skill as a watch-maker and mender, with a workshop in the garden which was sacrosanct, next to the outside lavvy with its puzzling neat squares of torn newspaper speared on a hook. He sat in his workshop, visible through the open top of the split ‘stable-door' he had put on, peering down god-like through his monocle-like watch-glass at the tiny gleaming mechanical galaxies of cog and spring he had opened up. No one dared disturb him there, still less go in and touch the minute spread pieces of metal that in my memory would cover the whole of his work-top like hard glittering fallen petals, infinitely interesting but forbidden. Once or twice he let me look in, but always with a firm, ‘Don't touch, my duck.' Did he understand how I longed to, loving as I always did (and still do) the detailed and microscopic? He made three grandfather clocks for his three sons, the wooden cases slightly dull but the faces meticulously scrolled and furled and the hands like the elegant dark outlines of heads of herons.

Pa was also his chairs; where the rest of the family relaxed in armchairs or on the brown cracked leatherette sofa with its worn velvet cushions, Pa was only ever seen to sit perfectly erect in one of two upright wooden carver chairs he had made, one at the head of the table in the kitchen where we ate, one, with a pale blue-green-silver brocade slip-over cushion sewn by Grandma to soften the back, in the little dark sitting-room, semi-obstructing the door to the hall, an
en-garde
throne where no one but Grandpa ever dared to sit.

It was a family of men, one of those families genetically biased towards boys. My father was one of three brothers, three sons, Cecil, Victor and Lloyd, though my grandmother was said to have wanted a girl so much that she kept my father's blond locks long till he was five years old, thus causing him to be known as ‘Mrs Gee's Fairy' — not easy, especially when you secretly know you have a cissy second name, Valentine. Only Lloyd achieved parity between the genders, with a boy and a girl, Martyn and Susan, who (miraculously) always seemed to get on. Cecil had one son, clever Keith, who produced three boys; Vic had me, of course, and I, very late but lucky, gave birth to a girl, but he also had two boys, my brothers John and James, who fathered six boys between them. I grew up very used to men.

Grandma Gee probably suffered from men, and certainly suffered from Pa, who was difficult. A lean, driving, impatient, intelligent man who had been a sprinter, and still walked, in old age, at a furious pace, despite his doctor warning him to slow down. He did so, on his morning walk, for the few yards of pavement that passed the doctor's surgery, then sped up to a military clip again, a little deception of which he often boasted. Grandma and Grandpa Gee's arguments were bad, and my father, who as a boy had always been drawn in on his mother's side, and still did, as an adult, get enmeshed in Oedipal fights against his father which made us children tremble, later decided that Pa had sometimes been right; perhaps because he saw himself in turn becoming Pa, with a manifestly suffering wife, and with children, my brother and me, who'd been
turned against him. The first argument between my parents I remember was when I was six or seven, at Watersfield, when I came home from school for lunch. I think it was about food; why was my father at home? Was Mum's cooking not up to the occasion? I think she had cooked bubble-and-squeak, fried-up potatoes and cabbage, which was something the Church family ate and was actually one of my early childhood favourites; maybe it wasn't good enough for Dad, who had very recently become a headmaster, pulling himself up with pure determination by his own boot-straps; maybe he wanted food that spoke of their new bright future. What was terrible was seeing my mother cry at table, and my father saying, ‘I have no respect for tears, Ma always used tears.'

Ma: Grandma Gee. The frailest of my four grandparents, dying relatively young, in her seventies.