Archive for category Writing
Sighs Matter
Posted by mirandainnes in Writing on April 4, 2012
‘They jab and sting like swarming hornets, they scar and stab, infecting my skin with weeping sores and suppurating boils. No matter what I do — spew hissing lava to swallow towns, cough tsunamis, roll obliteration across entire coastlands, hammer cities with earthquakes, bury them in mud, incinerate them, smash them — still they take one more, they always want just one more. Busy, mindless of the hell they make, they look away, ignore my warnings.
ENOUGH.
I have helped these creatures grow, I have given them life. I can diminish them. The greedy, reckless, harmful ones. I gave them antibodies, killer-T’s to scavenge free radicals. To protect myself I must create killer-T’s. To miniaturise them, disable them.’
She sighed as she spun again, and released in that sigh:
A minimising molecule, targeting despots and sadists, wife-beaters and bankers.
A magnetic chemical, tracking the metallic smell of avarice and cruelty, discovering every averted eye, every murder by commission or omission, every act of gargantuan greed that left a nation starved.
A grief-seeking drone, that locked onto the blinkered conscience ignoring rapine, genocide, torture.
In ratio to the hurt they caused, she made the perpetrators shrink.
They learned too late that sighs matter.
Overnight it became apparent that the corner offices, the penthouse suites, the executive jets, the lakeside villas were all empty of their owners.
Conscientious cleaners inadvertently vacuumed their employers along with cocaine and dog hair. Anxious ministers, all unwitting, trod on their tiny, naked superiors while searching for them. Pedigree cats ate them, trophy wives sat on them, the children of privilege flattened their fathers and occasionally their mothers beneath skateboards and rollerskates.
Arms factories fell silent, wars ceased, the weak, the poor, the meek no longer lived in fear. There was enough for everyone.
She smiled as she spun.
Calling up the Dead
Posted by mirandainnes in Writing on April 4, 2012
‘It’s too hot to go.’
‘Have you seen a manila envelope? Hell’s bells! There’s something I want to show you.’
‘That one?’ Fastening an earring, she indicated with her elbow the small package lying on his bedside table. ‘The food will be awful. She’s the most wearisome, opinionated woman. She has nothing interesting to say, and she says it ad nauseam. Her friends are terminally stuffy. Remind me, why are we going?’
He pranced up behind her and sought her eyes in the dressing-table mirror. She was busy outlining her full lips with a brush loaded with waxy blood-red lipstick, and he knew better than to interrupt. She blotted her lips carefully, patted her black hair — glossy as molten tar and swept up Betty Grable style — and gathered lipstick, powder and a silver flacon of Mitsouko into an ostrich skin clutch bag. She rose, unfurling from her seat to stand eye to eye with her husband.
‘I don’t know how you do that. Three children, and you still rise like Venus from the waves.’
‘What?’
‘What what?’
‘You wanted to show me something.’
‘I’ll show you some other time. Beatrice may be dull, but she’s had a consignment of Plymouth gin. And Teddy may yet get us out of here.’
They stepped out into the searing dust, the ragged palm trees, the beggars, the smell of donkey shit, the sound of jingling caleches and men shouting hysterically in Arabic that engulfed them beyond the gates of their small ugly house in wartime Cairo.
Boy — who had a name, Mohammed — had polished the chandelier in Beatrice’s courtyard house, had watered the bougainvillea and strewn the garnet rose petals in the murmuring fountain. He stood, undecided, fingering the buttons on his white jacket, dreading another staccato barrage from his employer.
‘Boy? Boy! Come here. Flowers — flowers for the table. The roses. Where have you put them?’
Mutely he indicated the red confetti dancing on the troubled meniscus.
The blonde dumpling was for a moment paralysed. Sweat pearled her upper lip.
‘Are you mad? Oh my God. Why do you always….I told you to put the roses in water.’
She turned, muttering sticky imprecations, and entered the dining room whose double doors were open to the courtyard and whose ceiling fans rotated lazily. A long table was laid for twenty, crowded with calendared napery, prismatic cut glass, gold-rimmed porcelain and buffed cutlery. It was punctuated at precise intervals by Georgian silver candelabra. It did not need flowers.
‘Boy? Boy! Come here. Fetch candles, from the ice-box’. To herself she murmured, ‘don’t think they’ll melt now. Thank God, it’ll cool down soon.’
At this point Teddy joined her, tall and spruce in immaculate ivory linen.
‘Ice!’ he called after Boy. ‘Well, Bea. Time to see if we’ve been sold a pup.’ He opened the clear glass bottle and was reassured by the sharp cathedral smell of juniper that wafted nostrilwards. ‘Smells like the real thing. Lemon!’ he flung after Mohammed as he shook the bottle of Angostura bitters.
‘Ice as per instructions? Boiled water? Good. Don’t want the High Commissioner to come down with dysentery.’
He rarely looked at his wife these days, finding her a disappointment now that her belly quaked and her dimple was lost in fat. There was no shortage of available women in Cairo, but Beatrice ran the house and looked after his interests. He was sorry for her. They’d never managed a baby. Pity. It would have absorbed her fussing, kept her busy.
Instead he looked at the billowing sails of the Mayflower on the familiar gin label. ‘Tonic, Bea? I’m having a pink gin, there’s some Noilly Prat if you’d prefer…. This glass has got a fingerprint on it.’
Following this discovery Beatrice made a minute inspection of the crystal tumblers, handing Mohammed another that did not pass muster. ‘Look!’ She brandished them under his nose, ‘not good enough.’
‘Who did you invite to replace George Cousins?’
‘It was very last minute. I invited that writer, Lawrence Durrell.’
‘Well! I just hope he behaves. I thought he’d gone to Alexandria.’
‘Someone saw him at the club. He goes back and forth.’
‘You’d better be careful, Bea. They say that since his wife left he’s slept with so many women he can’t remember them. A genuine Don Juan. Apparently women can’t resist him. I’ll be keeping my eye on you.’
‘That’s very crude, Teddy. I don’t believe it anyway. I don’t understand why anyone would fall for him. He’s not exactly Errol Flynn. I hope none of the women tonight…. I don’t think so….we know them all. Well, except Paul Innes’s wife, Eileen? It is Eileen isn’t it? I’ve only met her twice — at bridge and at the Williams’s. She seemed a bit racy. Scarlet lipstick…..No, no…. out of the question, they’ve got three children. And Paul is such a good-looking man. She’s very tall. Durrell’s tiny, shorter than me, and well, that pug nose. Not good on a man. No, I don’t think so.’
She noticed that Teddy was still holding an empty glass.
‘Boy? Boy! Where is that creature? Spends his life in a dream.’ Beatrice marched towards the kitchen.
Teddy, with a narrow catlike smile on his face, moved Durrell’s place card to seat him next to Paul Innes’s wife. ‘Randy, meet Racy.’
‘Well, that went well, I thought. They liked the vol-au-vents.’
‘Paul is quite a raconteur. I’d heard the story about the Chinese cook and the whisky bottle before though.’
‘I thought it rather coarse. I have to say, I really don’t like his wife much. I don’t know why Durrell engineered himself a place beside her — I put her next to that military chap, Ashbury. As it happened, she hardly spoke to Durrell. I almost felt sorry for him. Silly chump.’
‘Didn’t seem to worry him — he was his usual ebullient self after a drink or two. He got her to dance with him. They made a pretty ridiculous couple….She’s a good-looking woman.’
He had been disappointed by the failure of his scheme to reveal an illicit passion. He was embarrassed in fact, to find himself rather taken with her, surprised to have been piqued by a sharp little pinprick of jealousy, as he watched them in the courtyard, dancing close. Twice. Sinatra, ‘All or nothing at all’, and Lena Horne. Nothing remarkable there — everyone was dancing, it was the standard finale to a dinner party. Teddy himself was still in a cloud of Mitsouko after they’d danced to ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ under the stars.
Bea shattered his pleasant reverie. ‘Mother would say she’s got ideas above her station — she comes across as so superior, but what is she? What has she done?’
‘I think she’s a bit of a scholar. Someone said she got a double first at Cambridge.’
‘Well, I certainly don’t believe that. And what about him? He’s nothing special. He’s just a glorified salesman, when you come down to it.’
‘Bea, my angel. If I didn’t know you better, I might think you were jaundiced. Paul kept the Shanghai side of Shell in operation, almost singlehandedly. A bit more than a salesman. They both speak Mandarin. There have been hints that he was placed there by the government. MI6. There’s a rumour that she’s in it too. Did you notice, she didn’t drink a drop?’
‘What? Are you saying that they’re spies? Oh, come on! I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, Teddy, but they need their heads examined.’
‘Who’d have thought she came from Argentina?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. For God’s sake, how much did you drink? She’s from Bedford. Or Banbury. One or the other.’
‘Bea — when we played ‘Down Argentina Way’, she burst into tears. She grew up on an estancia, near Cordoba. Both her brothers are fighter pilots — she doesn’t know where they are, whether they’re still alive, even. She was genuinely upset — you must have noticed. Don’t give me that look. You don’t know her — you said it yourself. You’re being very unfair.’
‘Well, you two certainly got chummy. I’m off to bed. Boy? Boy! Get him to clear up, will you? I’m asleep on my feet.’
Teddy poured himself another whisky, turned off the lights, and put Lena Horne’s smoky version of ‘Stormy Weather’ on the record player again, low. Resting his heels on the table, by the muted lightning of sputtering candles, he smoked a cigar.
‘Never again. Never have so many dull people been marooned around a table to eat such indifferent food. Don’t blame me if you get dysentery — I saw you wading through those vol-au-vents as if Escoffier made them. What was in them? It looked like vomit. I couldn’t touch them.’
‘You’re a hard woman. By Jingo, I felt proud to be among staunch compatriots: it sounds like our boys are really getting somewhere. Look, this war’ll be over by Christmas and we can go home.’
‘Home? Where is home? I certainly don’t want to go back to Blighty. You go, I’d rather go back to China….England isn’t home. Durrell calls it Pudding Island. Not affectionately.’
‘So you did talk to him? From where I sat, you didn’t seem to have much to say to him.’
‘No. Nor he to me. ‘
Paul was on the balcony outside their bedroom, smoking a cigar. Somewhere in the maze of streets behind the house a woman was ululating — a marriage. Eileen unpinned her hair in front of her mirror. Slender, languorous body hinted at by a nightdress of oyster silk satin — one of the few things she’d managed to bring from China — she was a voluptuary’s dream. He stubbed out the cigar and ran his hands over her shoulders, with a louche grin.
She removed them.
‘Oh, no. Much too hot. Pass me the Pond’s, will you?’
Paul was nettled.
Smoothing cold cream onto her high cheekbones, she continued: ‘For a writer Durrell was curiously inarticulate, well, until the drink got to him. Then he was moderately entertaining. Not my cup of tea.’
‘You danced with him.’
‘You danced with Therese, Beatrice and that giraffe-like secretary from the embassy.’ She paused. ‘What are these? “Apology Card”?’
‘Have a look.’
She tipped a wad of small cards from the manila envelope. She read:
Mr………..
regrets exceedingly
his deplorable conduct while a
guest at your
Party
and humbly craves your pardon
for the breach of etiquette checked in the
adjoining column.
‘Oh, really, Paul. What nonsense is this?’
‘Turn it over. I thought I’d send Teddy and Bea one. As a thank you. It’ll make them laugh.’
‘“Spanking female guests. Picking nose at table. Indiscriminate goosing.” Do you really think they’ll find this funny? “Failure to button pants. Failure to unbutton pants.” Oh dear.’
She removed the cold cream with cotton wool. ‘“Locating female’s complex” and “Looking for hidden mole” are amusing.’
She pushed them aside wearily. ‘You’re still a child, aren’t you?’
This hurt more than her rejection of him, and he turned away from her in bed.
And she, who had a secret penchant for short, funny, unmanageable men, and could still feel Durrell’s hand, surprisingly clearly, surprisingly strongly, imprinted on the small of her back, turned away from her husband.
Eileen’s friend, Dilys Arbuthnot, invited her for a birthday drink among the palm trees and jasmine of Shepheard’s Terrace. ‘Eileen, I’m taking you out for a proper bash. Cocktails, like it or not. We’re going to gossip, we’re going to ogle chaps in uniform, and you’re going to get squiffy. You’re only 36 once.’ And so, Paul having previously committed himself to a bridge evening at the club, and the children happy to be in the care of bosomy Khadija who made them sugar and cocoa sandwiches, Eileen went on her own.
Her birthday gift from Paul had been an opulent emerald silk shawl. She knew that such expenditure betokened guilt, but defiantly wore the beautiful thing to signal forgiveness of his venial peccadilloes. Whatever they were. It rippled in the evening breeze as the gharry trotted to Shepheard’s, where she found Dilys toying with a plate of olives, an empty glass at her elbow.
‘Hello Dilys. I’m not late, am I?’
‘No. I was ravaged by thirst. They’re terribly habit forming. Gin fizz. That was my second.’
Eileen raised her eyebrows.
‘I did have some water first, but it didn’t do the job. I needed a proper drink.’
Half-way through her fifth, when her top button had undone itself to expose a heaving, sweating cleavage, and her coppery hair was stuck to her forehead, it transpired that the occasion for this drink was not in fact Eileen’s birthday, but the defection of Reggie who had recently announced that their marriage was at an end.
‘No reason. He said that one more evening with me, and he’d….’ Eileen never discovered what Reggie would do, as Dilys slithered from sight beneath the table, landing with a soft flump.
‘Waiter!’ Eileen stood and waved to attract the attention of one of the boys, whose fez bobbed weaving among the chairs and tables. ‘Oh Madame. Madame is on the ground!’ Someone joined them from another table and between them they retrieved Dilys. The waiter ran to fetch coffee.
‘I know you. You’re the diva from Argentina.’
Eileen looked up, startled. ‘Oh, Mr. Durrell, thank God! I’m so glad to see a friendly face. We were celebrating my birthday, and I think Dilys had…’
‘Five drinks to your one. I know. I was sitting just there.’
‘I don’t know how I’ll get her home. She lives in a flat over by the Services Club. It’s not far, but I don’t think she can walk. I certainly can’t carry her.’
‘I’ll give you a hand. Let me just get my stuff.’ He paid the bill with an involuntary groan, and between them they frog-marched Dilys to a gharry. She lived on the third floor. Getting her there took some doing, but eventually she was in her own bed.
‘Whew! That was warming.’ Eileen passed a hand over her damp forehead. ‘Thank you so much. I’ll stay here with her.’
‘Absolutely not. She doesn’t need you. She’ll just sleep it out. I’ve got a much better idea.’
It was not yet ten when they climbed over the fence of the Services Club. There was some kind of party taking place within. There had been rumours that day of some significant allied putsch, and they could hear Vera Lynn predicting an outbreak of bluebirds over the south coast.
‘My husband was born in Dover,’ whispered Eileen.
‘Shh.’ The garden was absolutely still, not a whisper among the palm leaves that made a mysterious Rousseau backdrop, lit by a cold half-moon reflecting placidly in the pool. She sat on the edge, her feet in the water, and Durrell lay back next to her looking up at the sky.
‘You’ve just had a birthday, so what are you? Taurus. Mmm. Don’t know what Taurus looks like. Bullish I suppose. There’s me. Look, over to the right. There — Pisces. That zig-zag.’ He took her hand and guided her fingers towards the cluster of bright stars.
With a little shock of excitement, she retrieved her hand. Leaving her shoes at the pool’s edge, she slipped into the inky shadows of the garden. A moment later her ghost-white body emerged.
‘Oh, God, that’s wonderful,’ Eileen whispered from the cool dark water.
They swam lazily, and then lay naked on the radiant warmth of the stone terrace. The seductive musk of frangipani floated on the warm air.
‘What’s in the notebook, the book you had at Shepheard’s?’
‘Notes for a book I’m writing about Corfu.’
‘Called?’
‘Prospero’s Cell.’
‘Not Caliban’s?’
He turned over and ran his fingers along her upper arm, causing an outbreak of gooseflesh.
‘Not Caliban’s.’
This exchange drifted ineluctably into what Eileen referred to, decades later, as a ‘skirmish in a taxi.’
Pisces had almost slipped from the sky when Durrell asked ‘Another swim?’
‘Larry!’ she hissed, ‘Spawn of the devil. I’m in such trouble already. I must go home right now.’
‘Please don’t go yet. Have a last dip with me. You know you want to. Come on. Carpe diem — we may all be dead tomorrow.’
‘Five minutes. That’s it. Oh! This water’s like silk.’
‘You know, I almost wish you didn’t have to leave. I like your company. In Alexandria I’m awash with languorous, musky women craving my body, but I rarely come across an odalisque with intellect.’
‘You didn’t come across me.’
‘Don’t be smutty. You’re much too grand. It doesn’t suit you.’
They stood, very close, in the water.
‘What is this gorgeous amulet?’
‘Gorgeous amulet? Oh, that. It’s a key-ring. Thoth. The Egyptian god of writing. Writing and wisdom. Here, have it. So you remember me when we’re apart.’
He fastened it round her neck, taking his time. She held his face and kissed him, then climbed out of the pool and dabbed herself dry with Durrell’s trousers.
‘Larry, we’ll never do this again. If we meet again, it’ll be as acquaintances, not lovers. You’ve got your life. I’ve got mine — three children and a loyal husband.’ Her voice was firm, decisive.
‘I’ve got a daughter, a little girl too….. somewhere or other….. Penny.’ Very quiet, very sad.
Eileen allowed a glimmer of doubt to dilute her resolve: ‘If we’d met 20 years ago, it would be different.’
‘Yes. For a start I’d be twelve.’ He snorted. ‘I mean I like older women, but…. Oh, hell. You’re being serious, aren’t you?’
Eileen was looking for her shawl.
‘Yes. And I must go. Now. It’s way past midnight.’
‘How will I manage? I need you now. I didn’t know until tonight. Can we write?’
‘No. And no, we can’t be friends. I’m not going to join the sorry ranks of your rumoured liaisons.’
He was quiet for a couple of minutes.
‘OK. So be it. Let me take you home.’
Unknown to them, this very minor skirmish happened to take place on what was subsequently known as D-Day, June the 6th, 1944. It has been estimated that 4,414 allied soldiers were killed during that operation, which decisively changed the course of history.
Exactly 40 weeks later during a relentless, gritty khamsin, Eileen gave birth to another Piscean, a girl whose snub nose was generally considered to be a legacy from her aunt, Daphne. Eileen christened me Miranda.
Eileen’s brothers were both killed shortly afterwards, within days of each other, in the final throes of the war. Their mother Evelyn left Bedford to join her other daughters, Daphne and Clare, back in Argentina. Eileen brought all her four children to the UK in the polar winter of 1947, when Larry and Eve happened to be there. The following year, Eileen took my brother and me to visit Evelyn, coinciding with Larry and Eve’s time at the British Council in Cordoba, a four hour drive away.
When Eileen, Paul and I returned permanently to Pudding Island, the year of the new queen’s coronation, there was no one and nothing there to welcome us. Eileen was not happy in commuter-belt Essex, and an inexplicable rancour had infected her marriage.
With my three siblings away in boarding school, I was a dreamy, withdrawn creature. Eileen had no truck with just wanting her children to be happy. She wanted intellectual superstars, or boys. She was convinced that I was stupid, and could not look at me but with exasperation. I was not a boy.
My parents and I cohabited each in solitary confinement, sharing nothing but the space we lived in. I had not one memorable conversation with either of my parents. I was fond of Paul who provided the warmth my mother lacked. But we didn’t have a single interest or opinion in common. We had no family life — no trips, no holidays, no talk, no jokes, no card games. We were strangers to each other. This is not a misery memoir. One’s family constitutes reality, from which anything else is a deviation, an oddity. The result of coming, as it seemed, from a different planet, is that I live in my head — a convenient locus for a writer. And negative criticism acts like capsaicin, a bracing condiment that unleashes a scribble of endorphins.
When I was 15, Eileen gave me ‘Mountolive’ to read, an event I still remember, as being a unique sign of interest in my cultural development. With embarrassment I confess that I found it boring. It could not compete with the urgent trivia of adolescence: Brook Benton, Buddy Holly, meringue net petticoats and ballet shoes a la Bardot, stalking boys and the hula hoop — although I did read Freud, and filled notebooks with knotted prose.
There were no more references to Durrell until Eileen was widowed twenty years later. After a year of fierce alcoholic mourning, she started reminiscing about that skirmish, implying that Paul might not have been my father, a notion I dismissed at the time as the wishful thinking of a woman who invented what life failed to supply.
Durrell died in 1990, Eileen in 1997, and I forsook journalism in Pudding Island to live in the hills of Andalucia: writing, drinking, practising yoga and Buddhism.
Thoth, battered and oxidised by age, retrieved from the junk in my mother’s red leather jewel-box, sits before me now.
Google is a boon for writers — beyond being a source of information it supplies a tsunami of diversion for those bleak droughts when nothing flows. One such afternoon, when my husband was swaying on perilous scaffolding, painting the high ceiling of the yoga room, I turned to Images to see what Lawrence Durrell looked like.
I called Dan from his painting to have a look.
‘Christ!’ he said, ‘It’s as plain as the nose on your face.’ We were faced with not just me, but my son Leo as well. A possibility, now, that we could wear our noses with pride.
A circuitous path, unexpected connections and coincidences, and I met Durrell’s surviving legitimate daughter. Just four years older than me, Penny was lost in the cloudy purlieus of Alzheimer’s disease. She embarked on sentences that dissolved as she spoke and left her stranded in a strange place. The only identifiable shape that loomed from the mist was suspicion.
It was a meeting of exquisite poignancy: thick grey rain slicking down the drenched Herefordshire grass, a sudden power cut, Dan and me trying to make sense of Penny’s shreds of memory in the softly seeping darkness of a November afternoon, by the light of dying candles wedged into a clotted iron candle-stick wrought by Durrell himself.
Grudging, Penny consented to show me her photos. As she opened the lid of the cardboard crate, I felt a terrific jolt of affinity for Durrell — writer, drinker, yoga student, Buddhist. There he was, at a Buddhist fair somewhere in France, and again, in a fearless Urdhva Padmasana, an inverted lotus pose, in a garden.
She snapped the lid shut. ‘That’s enough of that.’ she said with startling clarity.
Penny’s husband was convinced of my case, constantly remarking that I was a virtual clone of Margo, Durrell’s sister who had lately died. That I even had the same mannerisms. He repeatedly referred to Durrell as ‘your father’ and Margo as ‘your aunt’.
But he refused to put Penny through the ordeal of giving a dna sample. Shortly afterwards she was dead.
I shall never know.
Carpe Diem.
Books — rating and choosing
Posted by mirandainnes in Book Scruffling on January 23, 2011
There are 15 times as many lingerie shops in Italy as there are book shops — though Italian women have only one and a third babies. (Greek and Spanish women have even fewer). I no longer spend hours rootling in Waterstones — the only thing I miss is the smell of new books. When in the UK I trawl the book shelves of Charity shops, which I prefer anyway - to find the weird, the original, the import and the small run which never appear on the 3 for the price of 2 table. In Italy most of the books I buy come from the more esoteric backwaters of Amazon and its subsidiaries.
The Oxfam book that I was ecstatic to find for 50p is Stephen King ‘On Writing’. Partly I like to buy books for pennies because it means I can deface them with gusto. I’m one of the world’s great underliners, have a woolly cloud down the margin of entire interesting passages, hairy tarantulas for things I must go back to, exclamation marks when I take exception to something, and floating ufos for phrases that I’d love to steal. So, you don’t want to inherit my library.
I say all this because I was unusually respectful of King’s hardback (which has one of the weirdest cover images I’ve ever tried to puzzle out). It was a curious experience, reading it. At first it raced, then about one third through it slowed to a glacial crawl — or maybe I did. Whatever. I never take longer than 2 days to read a book — this one took eleven. I was wading through mud, fascinating and thought-provoking, but hard work. He himself explains this mystery at the end. A man called Bryan Smith ran him over, breaking his leg in 9 places, fracturing his right hip, chipping his spine in 8 places, breaking 4 ribs and causing surface wounds requiring much embroidery. ’ Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.’ There is so much confession, so much good sense, his email address even, which make the book a profligate act of communion.
I like that he doesn’t bang on about plot but just jumps into narrative clad lightly in a couple of ideas. He’s very good on backstory and research. Ruthless with adjectives and adverbs. He quotes his high school teacher’s comment on one of his essays: ‘Not bad, but PUFFY. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft — 10%.’ He advises you to find or imagine an ideal reader, ‘Try to decided whether he or she will be bored by a certain scene’. OK, he’s quotable too. ‘The scariest moment is always just before you start. after that things can only get better.’ Agents — ‘It’s easy to con a writer who’s desperate for representation.’ The book is full of inspiring stuff that makes you long to rush off and write. It is written simply with endearing modesty. What a lovely man to have on your shelf. 9/10
The Amazon book of the week for me was Uzzi Reiss’s ‘The Natural Superwoman’, vehemently recommended by Margosha, an elfin Polish painter whom Anna the Swedish chef met in the public sulphur bath at San Casciano Terme — where they were both auditioning boyfriends. Uzzi Reiss’s book eulogises about bioidentical hormones, as being the solution to sex tedium, stress, depression, anxiety, insomnia, osteoporosis and memory holes. It sounded pretty convincing to me, but I have no idea what to do about it or where to find these things. But if you enjoy that sense of recognition when people describe your very own ailment, you might find this exciting. He also recommends — with scientific evidence — the multiple health benefits of reducing caloric intake by a quarter. I could do something about that, but would rather ignore the promised rejuvenation for heart, brain, bone, muscle, skin, sexual response, kidneys, liver, eyes and homones, and have one more piece of buttered toast and Marmite instead. 6/10
How to Grow a Writer
Posted by mirandainnes in Writing on January 19, 2011
If you want your child to become a writer it is imperative that you treat it to a confounding variety of solitary and strange experiences. It is a good precaution to make sure that the child never gets a chance to form alliances. Also an excess of happiness is very deleterious to the creative juices, so it is wise to subject it to emotional jolts at regular intervals, without ever explaining what happened, what is about to happen or why. Any sense of autonomy might give the child the notion that it can have some influence in the real world, and you may end up with a politician on your hands. Or someone who can fit in, earn money, marry, have well-balanced children and a happy life. Apparently there are people who want that for their offspring.
I was the last, very likely unexpected, child. My sisters Jocasta and Judy are 10 and 7 years older than me respectively, confident, loud, glamorous and best treated with caution. My brother Christopher is just four years my senior.
My parents and I lived in China, Xiamen and then Hongkong. We stayed in Hongkong for 18 months, where my mother taught in the Kennedy Road School. For some reason she refused to allow me to graduate to her class when the time came, with the happy result for me that I briefly became a very clever seven-year-old and scooped all the school prizes. I hardly ever saw my siblings. They were shipped off to boarding school when Christopher was seven, and stayed with Mrs Dabbs in Fowey during most of the holidays. How perverse. Why have children at all?
In the UK I was sent to a convent school, which cured me definitively of religion, not that I was ever deeply afflicted. Experience of nuns left me with an abiding horror of religious hypocrisy, a frisky flight or fight vis-à-vis the gloating self-righteous finger-wag, and the certainty that redemption lay in not getting caught. How could you attach yourself seriously to a religion whose most passionately upheld tenet concerned wearing a hideous brown, yellow and blue striped blazer, and white gloves in public?
Jocasta used to come home on brief raiding sprees during the University holidays. She would borrow my things – clothes, jewellery, a cute little cardboard suitcase given to me by my father – and I might get them back eventually, usually minus some vital part.
When, as a rounded nine-year-old I asked her to write in my autograph book, her response:
‘Miranda may be a fat
Girl, but she’s none the worse for that’ cured me completely of autograph books.
Judy was kinder, but had a conscientious head-prefect’s sense of duty. She was always telling me to do the things that I had hitherto miraculously managed to avoid – washing up, hanging out washing, lay tables. And she would always put you right on dates and what people said. I developed a Fear of Facts so severe that when I was interviewed for a place at Brighton University, I could not remember my name.
When I was a rotund and credulous creature, Christopher fed me chillies telling me they were sweeties. Apparently, when I was still a small but chunky human blob he took me out for a swim heading across the South china Sea in the general direction of Jalisco in Mexico, and it is only due to my mother’s long-sightedness and sprint power that I am still around. I have a suspicion that he also systematically broke every stick of furniture in my doll’s house. His conversational gambit was to say ‘prove it’, to whatever innocent opinion was voiced by anyone younger than himself. Me. So I steered clear of boys, became wary of showing people my treasured possessions and gave up expressing audible opinions. However, a constant witter in the head is a crucial tool for a prospective writer. My highly respected ex-editor at country Living, Deirdre MacSharry, used to describe Ireland as being full of writers talking out their novels. I suspect that most writers keep their words locked within, building up pressure, until they are forced to commit the stuff to paper.
Being part of my parents’ baggage meant that I did not have much optimism where friendship was concerned. There was Carol Aylen and Fiona Macnab, but no sooner had we bonded over centipede dramas and eating condensed milk from the tin than I was snatched away to some new rainy country where I couldn’t speak the language of my fellow-pupils. Out there — Formosa (now Taiwan) — was a lonely and dangerous place. It was far far safer to spend those lonely hours sitting beneath my father’s desk waiting to go home – wherever that was – with my imaginary friend.
I’m sharing this misery memoirette because it was somewhere here in that misfit, solitary childhood that the seeds of writing were sown. Plainly life was nasty and brutish, and the safest place was within my own head. I became a lolly stick nerd. I used to invent stories, and make tiny gardens where miniscule dramas were enacted – which is where the lolly sticks were handy. Diminutive picket fences for a bonsai paradiso.
One good reason to write – no one could take my imagination away from me. I issued no passports for entry into the mad miniature world where I was top despot. My thoughts were my treasure, precious, secret, and very often vindictive. Revenge and anger are high-octane fuel for a would-be writer.
Another fabulous aspect of writing, is that no matter how weird is the thing you absolutely have to get off your chest, you can do it. You can closet yourself with your computer and spew it all out, and no one will interrupt. My history of occasional loud siblings has left me with a conviction that there is no point in trying to tell anyone anything. So many times I would launch into some anecdote only to observe that everyone had left the room, or turned on the tv, or felt a violent need to hoover. It gave me a wispy feeling of unreality – so often I would wonder if I had actually said those fabulously witty things aloud, or had they just remained in a thought bubble floating above my head.
Martin Amis claimed that most writers have at least this in common with Nabokov: ‘I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.’ The obsession to write must so often grow from a small unattended child jumping up and down, pulling parental coat-tails, and shouting ‘me, me, me, listen to me.’
To be listened to, to be heard, to elicit echoes of recognition, to find an interested audience – this is for me the most thrilling aspect of writing. I love getting emails from readers.
Glub’s New Rock
Posted by mirandainnes in Writing on September 2, 2009
Glub’s New Rock
The third day with no food. The young wild things were cold and hungry. Stalactites of viscous green snot streamed from their noses. Most of the time they slept, and when they awoke they howled. When hit hard, they reduced the racket to an irritating whimper. Glub sat on his favourite rock, and beat his head gently and rhythmically on the slimy wall of the cave. From time to time he stopped and stared mournfully at the shining stone in his hand, turning it over and over and hitting it against the wall by way of a change.
He had spent days grimly honing it along the grain, grinding it against a darker rock to expose a sharp edge of quartz. This had been a painful procedure, as burning flicks of light kept stinging his hands. But when it was finished and he finally threw it, instead of arcing neatly to catch the fleeing deer on the neck as his previous rocks had done, it whirled uncontrollably catching the light as it fell and scattered his hoped-for victims.
His woman, Burb, glared at him when she had to pick her way past his huddled body. She badly wanted to attack him with his own precious tool, but was afraid of his anger. One of their children had been crippled as a baby when Glub, enraged by its crying, had thrown it against the wall. Burb had tried to mend the little broken body, wrapping its crooked limbs with leaves and tying them with her hair, but it died eventually when the rains came. Her eyes watered still when she thought of it getting quieter and quieter, its mouth open, its eyes dull. She had been careful to avoid annoying her man after that, and kept the three remaining offspring well to the back of the cave when Glub was there.
In one of the lulls between howling, she ventured out, wrapping the stinking hide closely round her shoulders to keep off the rain and icy wind. She followed the animal track down to the river, and lay motionless on its bank for some time. Goosepimples rippled her back and thighs, but still she did not move. She was rewarded as the day ebbed by a flash of silver, which she snatched as it shimmied past, and landed flapping on the mud beside her.
Carrying her booty, still writhing, under her arm, she stopped to pick some of the leaves she had seen the deer eat, thought they were dry and dead by now. She also collected a handful of the hard brown things that tree animals seemed to thrive on. All the bright sweet fruit was long since gone. Picking her way carefully in the dark past the piles of crap that Glub produced just by the entrance, she paused outside the cave and listened. Glub was snoring, and one of the little things was moaning, but nothing too serious seemed to have happened in her absence.
She put the leaves down, and using them as a sound-deadening cushion, she hit the hard brown things with Glub’s precious rock, over and over again. In her heart she wanted to destroy the rock, to break it into tiny pieces, so that Glub would never spend precious days doing anything so stupid again. She was so angry with it and him. Burning spots of light hurt her hands, but she persevered, and succeeded in cracking three of the nuts.
But then something else happened – as she toiled away, the rock quite hot in her hands, the flashes of light became more frequent, and finally one of the leaves flared up, scarlet and as bright as the sun. Burb was transfixed. She watched as one after another the leaves caught light. She put out her hand to the brightness, and snatched it back with an angry yowl.
The others awoke, complaining, at this interruption of their sleep, and she had to keep the smallest one from putting his hand in the flames just as she had done. The oldest grabbed greedily at the nuts she had managed to shell, and a fight ensued, culminating in Glub hitting both the contestants and giving one a nose bleed. Glub then tried to take a bite out of the fish, failed because of his lack of teeth (lost in the duel for Burb’s hole) and threw the fish into the burning brightness with an enraged growl.
He grabbed Burb’s deer hide, and retired to the pile of dried bracken at the back of the cave where he lay with his face to the wall, thumping the floor from time to time with his fist. Burb hated him. Because he had no teeth to eat the fish, he had made sure that no-one else could eat it either by throwing it on the little sun thing. She stolidly returned to her nut cracking duties, and it was a while before she noticed two things – one that the little sun thing gave out heat and light which improved that cave no end, and the other was that the fish, rather than ruined, was beginning to smell different, a smell that made her dribble.
Burb and her children ate well, and exploited their new discovery cannily.
Glub sulked himself to death, and no-one missed him at all.
© Glub’s New Rock. Author Miranda Innes 2009, all rights reserved
Writing — the pain, the pain.….
Posted by mirandainnes in Writing on August 31, 2009
Somewhere, in this clonking great barn of a house, is a huge box of books all about writing. One of these days I’ll find it.
I expect you’ve met procrastination — one good trick is to read books about writing as one’s courage ebbs.
All my life, I’ve been frightened at the moment I sit down to write. Marquez
It’s really scary just getting to the desk – we’re talking now five hours. My mouth gets dry, my heart beats fast. I react psychologically the way other people react when the plane loses an engine. Fran Lebowitz.
I suffer always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straightening shyness that assails one. John Steinbeck.
Blank pages inspire me with terror. Margaret Atwood.
These quotations are taken from a book that was on the shelves at my last yoga week in the hills north of Rome– I had to copy the entire book overnight on my tiny little Asus which made me feel very like Shrek, with fingers like cricket bats.
The book is called ‘The Courage to Write’ by Ralph Keyes and I really recommend it. He deals with the whole prickly issue of why, knowing that writing is the best thing on earth — cosy insulation against loneliness, meanness, bureaucracy, tragedy; the path of discovery yielding unexpected treasures and horrors; gripping personal archaeology and effective exorcism of demons; a way to poke about in an absorbing hornet’s nest without being interrupted or told off — it is so damned difficult to get on with it.