It’s called ‘Exam’:
The exam starts at nine and I’m on the motorway. It’s one of those muggy early June mornings you don’t know if it’s going to be asphyxiating or a gift. I get up extra early to be sure I’m on the road in plenty of time. I decide against breakfast, or my stomach does. I pack a banana in my bag for the car, just in case. But I don’t want to think about the banana. The idea makes me queasy. I drink a cup of coffee to wake up, and then another in the hope it will have me wishing to pay a visit before I set out. But instead I find myself standing in the bathroom picking as clean as possible a hairbrush I haven’t so much as looked at in twelve months. I ought to be checking I’ve memorised all my quotations properly, but there I am standing over the waste-paper basket plucking dead hair and bits of gray fluff from my hairbrush, like some demented harp-player. It’s funny isn’t it, the way you choose to do the most practical of things at the most impractical of times and then the way the most practical of things turns out to be a nightmare and a half. For nightmare and a half read: interminable. I stupidly imagine it’s going to take sixty seconds at most, but the operation sends me into a trance. Ten minutes later I’m still at it. It reminds me of the fairytale about the boy and girl who must set an impossible task for a giant, otherwise he’s going to eat them, and in the end, in desperation, they ask him to straighten out a single curly hair, not a pubic hair needless to say, but a single strand of that kind of curly hair that children have in fairytales. A nightmare and a half, as I say. Somehow I manage to drag myself out of it. I put the brush back on the shelf and get going. I’ve lost valuable time but haven’t we all?
The car starts like a dream, and I’m off. It’s 7.50. As it’s rush-hour I’m allowing myself forty minutes to get into the city and find a space in one of the student car parks, then another five minutes to get across to the main building. Déjà-vu for a moment, just thinking about that. But I’m on the motorway. I’m on the motorway and it’s a beautiful, bright but hazy June morning. The road seems unusually clear, I’m sailing along at such a rate I can feel myself making up time. There’s hardly another car in sight. Keep this up, I tell myself, and I’ll be there with minutes to spare. Perhaps even long enough to grab another cup of coffee. But the thought of that has my innards churning and I realise a third cup would be out of the question. One moment I’m as calm as one of those S.O.S. orange call-boxes that punctuate the hard-shoulder, the next I’m overtaken by nerves. I’m one of those people who take exams really seriously. I can’t help it. I find myself taking exams really seriously, I mean taking the idea of taking exams, really seriously, even when I’m trying my best not to take them seriously at all. Anyway this is the last one, my final finals, and a lot’s at stake. My life, if you really have to know. Or that’s how it feels. I’m sailing along but then I’m overtaken by nerves. I switch on the radio and it’s a classical music station playing something peaceful and sad, but then the voice of the guy in between freaks me out. I don’t even take in what he’s saying but the way he announces the composer’s name and title, it’s as if he were announcing a nuclear accident. Panic stations. I lurch forward and kill it, suddenly feeling quite ready to be sick. I run my hand quickly through my hair. Calm down, I tell myself. But running a hand through my hair reminds me of my neurotic behaviour with the hairbrush and the disgusting tufts of gray. I try to focus my attention on something else. I’m in the middle lane, travelling at the maximum legal speed, but still there are cars regularly overtaking me. For a while I concentrate on timing it so that I turn my head to look at the driver in the outside lane at precisely the moment of overtaking. But it seems that, no matter how many times I do this, the other driver simply ignores me. It’s as if I didn’t exist. I fumble in my bag and eventually extricate my all-important cassette. I stick it in the machine, press play and wait, as I drive, eyes on the road straight ahead. Shut up, Heathcliff! (That’s me, talking to the dog.) The exam starts at nine and I’m on the motorway. (Did I say that? Don’t quote me on it. I listen to the tape, which is a recording of my own voice, recounting all the significant facts and reading out all the key quotations.) And there I am, speeding along at top notch, when suddenly it happens. I come over the brow of a gentle upward incline and spread out before me, dazzling and glittering in the June morning sun, is a great sea of frozen traffic. It’s like being unexpectedly face to face with a shimmering corpse. The way the sound of screeching brakes and smell of burning rubber fill the air is appalling. It’s impossible to tell who’s going to hit who, or up ahead, who’s already hit and already dead. This is the moment, I know, in which the whole of your life supposedly passes in front of you. The whole story, in one fell swoop, a single polaroid snapshot. It’s the split second in which you see the light streaming at the end of the tunnel. It’s the time, it’s said, that a person is most susceptible to having an out-of-body experience. All that happens with me is that I hear a voice. I hear myself saying: What’s an exam if it’s not an out-of-body experience?
Write an essay about this story, giving particular attention to tone, imagery and narrative perspective. Time allowed: forty-five minutes.
I wrote ‘Exam’ with a view to reading it aloud to her. I also imagined her reading it to herself. I hoped she might find it very funny. She alone might share with me the hilarity of the final exam question rubric (Write an essay about this story…). Who says it’s a story? Who would have the gall – that would be her phrase – to assume that ‘tone’ or ‘imagery’ or ‘narrative perspective’ might be appropriate terms or authoritative criteria for responding to it? What on earth would one write in such an exam?
Reading this piece again now I am struck by details I haven’t thought of before. Being face to face with a shimmering corpse is of necessity about my grandfather. My first witnessing of a human cadaver is an ineffaceable memory. Seeing my mother’s father dead without knowing and much later imagining her encountering his body still propped up in his Parker Knoll in Carlisle Road. The fairytale with the single strand of hair is something she once read to me. There is a Scottish hint (via Macduff’s ‘one fell swoop’) of the loss of children. And then it occurs to me that the length of this drive would locate the speaker’s starting-point as Drymen. (Not that there’s a motorway between Glasgow and Drymen.) I see the development of a phantasmagoric photograph. A single Polaroid snapshot: ‘Who’s turned the lights out?’ Concealed associations and buried memories. Come forth in a disinterring writing.
Next time I was down visiting from Scotland I read ‘Exam’ to my mother over morning coffee at the white Formica-top table. First I read it aloud. Then she read or appeared to read over it herself.
What’s it all about then? she asked with a gentleness of yore. Like a mimicking of Jack Warner in Dixon of Dock Green.
It’s an exam Ma… I started to explain. It’s whatever you make of it.
It was beyond her. She hadn’t laughed. Not even chuckled. She was losing her marbles. And I was losing her.
Way-on-High
My mother wrote so few letters. They almost never bear a date. Sometimes the letter got sent without my father’s perusing it. More often it shows signs of having been ‘corrected’ here or there. A missing word inserted with a maxwellian caret. An apostrophe or other item of punctuation added. By courtesy of the Grammaticality Enforcement Agency. There is a letter that must have been written in the autumn of 1987 – soon after I’d begun a one-year lectureship at the University of Tampere in Finland.
I’d been trying to get a university-teaching job but Thatcher’s cuts made it nigh impossible. Over the course of about five years I’d applied for upward of sixty-five positions – temporary lectureships and fellowships – and been shortlisted (without success) just twice. So when out of the blue someone at a university in Finland phoned me early one Monday morning and offered me a one-year post and gave me twenty-four hours to think about it – I knew I had to say yes. It was approaching the first anniversary of my brother’s death. I’d m
oved back from Devon to Oxford. I was about to begin another year in that super-fortified vampire town without any sense of what I was doing or why. I’d been trying to make ends meet with a smattering of English literature A-level students and a bit of undergraduate teaching. This phone call in September 1987 was from a complete stranger in a strange country with which I had no links. Offering me a job I had not even applied for.
The man said he was called Gurney. I had never met anyone with that name. At the time I was trying to make headway writing a book about telepathy and literature. Gurney? It’s a stretcher a support a life-saving form of transport. But Gurney was also the name of one of the founding members of the Society for Psychical Research. A key figure in early writings and experiments on thought-transference. Author of an intriguing book about speech and music called The Power of Sound (1880). Fascinated by hypnosis and ‘deathbed wraiths’ and telepathy (a word invented by his friend F.W.H. Myers). A character mysterious also in the manner of his death in 1888 (aged forty-one): an overdose of chloroform in a room of the Old Ship Hotel in Brighton. I associated him most of all with the phrase ‘phantasms of the living’ (the title of an enormous book he co-authored). The strangeness of first hearing someone’s name over a telephone: Did you say ‘Gurney’?
Having already decided I was going to accept I phoned my parents to talk to them about it. As usual my mother picked up the phone.
I’ve been offered a job.
Where?
Finland.
Oh Christ!
In a mixture of surprise and unease I laughed. I hadn’t expected that tone from her. It sounded like despair. I knew I couldn’t turn the job down. I stressed that it was just a one-year post and Finland wasn’t as far away as some places and I’d come back to Devon in the vacations. But the tone of that ‘Oh Christ!’ still scrapes like something down a blackboard in my mind. I would love to believe that my going to Finland had no impact on my mother’s mental deterioration – but I cannot.
The letter from my mother in November 1987 starts: ‘Darlin’ Nic…’ She liked to syncopate her darlings and spell my name that way. There are just a couple of signs of my father’s proofreading. On one occasion my mother has written ‘Friday’ and he has added in his precise spidery hand just above: ‘(Saturday?)’. And then a little later he crosses out the place-name ‘Ross-on-Haye’ and writes above it: ‘Haye-on-Wye’. The fact that my father has in turn misspelled (a very unusual thing for him to do) is a cause for momentary delight: I hear ‘Haye-on-Wye’ as ‘Way-on-High’ and my mother in ecstasy oblivious as to whether she is alone or not in the house singing at the top of her lungs ‘Over the Rainbow’ way up high. Way up high Haye up Gee up Giddy up Heigh on Why…
In any case this letter is characteristic of everything she wrote to me: it snaps and slips from one topic to another and is written at various times over a couple of days or more. (At one point she comments on the fact that I’d sent a card to my eighteen-month-old nephew Sam and his mother Cris – my brother’s widow – wished to thank me: ‘This, she asked me to add when she noticed that I’d started this drivel.’) The letter has all the features I love in my mother’s writing. At once staccato and flux (threaded along with plentiful dashes). A sharp eye for what others do and ear for what they say. Most of all: no sign of marble loss.
She is just back from a ‘grand tour’ with her dead sister Peggy’s husband Jim: it ‘came very suddenly and passed as quickly and now it seems I never left home!’ He came down from East Lothian to Devon and they drove up north again (Jim at the wheel) in his bottle-green Jaguar to North Berwick and then back down via Blackpool and Ludlow and other towns. I must have told her I was in a flat on the seventh floor of an apartment block in Tampere for she expresses her hope that I’ll be comfortable and trusts there is a lift. She wants to know how I manage with washing my clothes and whether the university provides any meals. She devotes several sentences to recounting her efforts to get my father to sell some of his many books or – if only as an interim measure – build some shelves upstairs along the hall (or ‘passage’):
Your bit about your meagre collection of books made me smile [doubtless I lamented about this in an earlier letter: I had only what I could take with me on the plane to Finland – I must have cut a ponderous figure as I struggled down the aisle with my carry-on bag bulging with books and my Barbour coat heavy with a Chambers Dictionary in one inside-pocket and a French dictionary in the other] – I’ve at last persuaded Dad to transfer the shelves from the bedroom to the passage and he seems to be making rather a long job of it – c/o broken drills and lack of nails & screws – now lack of time with too much proof-reading & an excessive number of ‘competition’s to fill in & send off. I’d half hoped to see all the books in situ on my return [from Scotland] but in fact it was as I’d last seen it. The ever reluctance to ‘do’ anything about books in this household must be unique! Fairly recently there was a mumble about contacting a dealer (with a Wilmington [i.e. local] Tel. No.) to see about selling a few – to help pay for a new oil tank, but the mumble only lasted a day & a half while the urgency of a tank has dwindled since we are finding your fire in the kitchen so useful.
It is so strange – melancholy but also uplifting – to be able to cite her words and linger on the singularity of her handwriting. Her quirky use of ‘c/o’ (for ‘care of’) in ‘c/o broken drills and lack of nails & screws’! And then her use of ‘quotes’ (such as ‘competition’s’ and ‘do’) – as odd as anything in Henry James. I’ve transcribed her ‘and’ as ‘&’ but no keyboard symbol does it justice: it is more a tiny ‘looped’ plus-sign that recalls for me her lifelong love of knitting and the fact that her own mother had been a seamstress. Along with her little knotted ands go her dashes – everything knitted up & cut off at once.
I imagine she intermitted the composition of this letter with knitting. She spent so much time in autumn evenings at work on jumpers for family and friends. That autumn I asked if she would knit me a balaclava. When I came home at Christmas she presented me with a beautiful heavy wool sooty black and grey headpiece – complete with modest slit for mouth and eyes. Perfect gear for any terrorist comedian operating in a cold climate.
The letter then veers off into a touching account of Cris failing her driving test (and remembering that her own sister Marion failed hers four times) before returning to the subject with which the letter had begun:
From here to N. Berwick took us exactly 12 hrs 7 mins last Thursday. Jim suggested taking our time – and we did – stopped at practically every service station for coffee – cream doughnuts & a cigarette. My collection of brown sugar packets is VAST. N.B. [i.e. North Berwick] unchanged – very quiet – most shops closed or up for sale. On the Friday I was taken to visit his friends – they were all very pleasant & generous with booze and on the Friday [^ Saturday?] James was busy all day while I ‘did’ the beaches & searched for buddies – naturally – when I wasn’t birdwatching. There were masses of starlings flying around the Bass and other rocks – which was surprising. I did the museum to find nothing new There – There never has been anything added to it since I first went there 40 odd years ago. On the Sunday we went to visit Nessie in Drymen – had our only real meal of the holiday in the local hotel where Nessie gazed nostalgically on the inglenook fire place seeing Grand Father & grandmother sitting either side of it – Then to Hill-View and listened to Nessie playing a lot of very old Scottish songs on the piano with considerable talent – much to my amazement. She moaned at one time about the cold weather & when I told her you were in Finland she looked astonished – then said ‘Oh dear! that’s BAD – he will have to be very warmly clad there I’m sure.’ Then 5 mins later – ‘I’d nae like to be HIM.’ From Drymen we headed S.W. & ended up in Blackpool just missing the lights festival by one day. My first time in Blackpool – never even imagined seeing it as it always sounded such a ghastly place but, I actually found it quite impressive. From here we went down to Northbridge-Leominster and L
udlow (where we stayed the night – beautiful little town with loads of Elizabethan houses) on to Bradford-on-Avon – [Hay-on-Wye] – Ross-on-Wye & Monmouth (where we stayed another night) then to Bath where we spent the day doing the baths & museums – arriving home the following day. All in all – I quite enjoyed it! But the weather was v. poor – the sun came out once for ½ hr. otherwise gray mist & rain.
She evokes the Scotland we loved together: the buddies and the birdwatching and the little museum at North Berwick that never changed (the stuffed albatross so majestic and incongruous – suffocated and lugubrious – in its glass case never moving a millimetre year after year). She captures the melancholy of this little seaside Scottish town in out-of-season but also the sense in 1987 of more general economic hardship (‘most shops closed or up for sale’). And in a few sentences she brings Nessie to life as I never encountered her. Dreamy in Drymen. Funny about Finland. Musical in Hillview. So much has altered in the forty-odd years since my mother wrote this letter. Including the art of letter writing. In its vitality and charm – as well as in its shifts and solecisms – her writing seems closer to the letters of Keats than to today’s texting and instagramming.
Of course not a word about my brother anywhere in her ‘drivel’. That would never be talked of. Mum ever after.
Painter
My father encouraged his sons in their drawing and painting. This ‘ran in the family’. On the walls at home were numerous framed paintings and drawings by Lola Onslow and Tony Royle. My father also painted with some skill. And in our boyhood he would delight us with black-line sketches of cartoon characters he’d invented – such as Woby Dan and Sebastian Greep. He’d enthuse in unusual fashion as he showed us books with illustrations by Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac and Gustave Doré – as well as by his godfather John Hassall. My mother always claimed that she couldn’t draw or paint at all. But then what was that remark by Malcolm Mackenzie about? My brother and I were always led to believe that the passion for drawing and painting came through our father and our father’s family. Yet it was our mother who seemed to oversee and nurture this. At painting and drawing I was never much good. At any rate I didn’t keep at it. At some moment when I was around thirteen – and my brother just eleven – we made an explicit agreement: he would be the painter and I would be the writer. An unwritten contract – followed all our lives.
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