Mother

by Nicholas Royle

  As if these pages were an uncanny jukebox. A jukebook. Out of it lifts in automation the ghostly vinyl beauty of John Lennon singing ‘Across the Universe’ and I am listening with my mother. I can hear in the dead singer ring-ging his voice in the chthonic depths of my mother’s memory that only the thinnest sheet of musical madness separates me from being with her. At once a reassuring fantasy – that in ‘Across the Universe’ I am sharing something with no one alive but sharing nonetheless – and a terrifying thought – that in the simplicity of this music I have passed into madness. It’s not about the past. It’s about a music that overflows. Across the universe. A sisterhood of man. A nursery and nursehood. Of human and other lives.

  Planet

  Along with the garden went my mother’s love of birds. The otherness of them. Away from the corner of the kitchen in which she would sit so long was the picture window at the sink. From there you looked out at a big gnarled willow beside the stream that flowed down the length of the garden. My mother had my father put up a bird-table and a couple of birdfeeders and she kept these replenished as she would her coffee cup or hot-water bottle. The window was at first a fatal menace. We had to dangle some glittering twirls of plastic to ward off birds from flying into it. But over the years the view out was a source of amazing pleasure and intrigue. Woodpeckers robins sparrows blue-tits coal-tits goldfinches greenfinches nuthatches and others. She would gaze out of the window at the birdlife around the willow for long periods. Sometimes it seemed as busy as a rush-hour railway station. Birds of all kinds on the feeders in the branches on the ground and alongside the stream. Then there would be lulls. Bad weather. A sparrowhawk in the neighbourhood. Or for no apparent reason at all. The lesser spotted woodpecker might keek and tap and grub in the top of the willow one morning then go unseen for several days. My mother was the watcher and replenisher. The secret sharer. My fascination with birds is linked to my brother who loved them so. But it is from our mother that everything took wing.

  When I was very young I had a recurring nightmare of a giant. The giant never appeared in person. It was rather the sound of its approach. A deep regular echoing of footsteps growing louder and closer. I would cry out before the giant reached me and my mother would come and lie next to me and calm me back to sleep. It seemed that the giant was the creature of my own heartbeat. If I lay on my right rather than my left side it stayed away. But there were odd moments throughout my boyhood and adolescence when in the midst of a humdrum day the rhythm would pick up again. If I concentrate and let myself go I can still pick it up. The step in the distance. Faint but distinct.

  I lie in bed first thing in the morning with my right hand held up out of the bedcovers very close to my eyes. I remain in night-clouds. Slit-eyed. There’s an altered perspective that recalls Swift’s description of the woman’s ‘monstrous breast’ in Gulliver’s Travels. The hand at this proximity is unfamiliar. I see how I almost don’t or can’t see it at all. I set aside how weak my eyes have grown. Instead I see in this first electric light of day how old my hand has become. How lined and bumpy. Wrinkled and full of folds. Like the skin of a lizard. I move my left hand up out of the bedclothes and rest it on the first hand. I see my mother’s hands.

  Nowadays people film their babies being born. I know very little about my arrival. My mother once told me that a month beforehand she was cycling up the road to Hammersmith Hospital and a large black Bentley slowed down beside her. She received a stern ticking-off from the bigwig inside. A consultant driven by his chauffeur. No offer of a ride either then or in future – just a reprimand for continuing to be on her bicycle when so big with child.

  I was a breech birth. Whenever I asked what that meant my mother just said: You came out bottom-first. She didn’t elaborate. I didn’t seek elaboration. More often than ever I think of the ripping apart of her body of which she told me nothing. The unimaginable pain. The how ever many stitches. Bottom-first? How could that be?

  I loved walking with her. For instance near our house in Cheam in the area of open land we called the Cornfields. Or on Headley Heath. Dreamy place of nightjars. And one time an adder’s skin just sloughed off beside the path. In Devon the innumerable wanderings up the lane from the cottage to what we called the Marshwood. Or down to the postbox by the church. All the rambles up and down West Country footpaths and along beaches with their incongruous signs to ‘beware landslips’. And so many walks in Scotland. Curlews along the sea’s edge early morning and sunset at North Berwick. A golden eagle over the Quiraing on the Isle of Skye. Skylarks over the heather on the Lammermuirs. I remember her windcheater and silk scarf and never-sturdy footwear. The easy rhythm of progressing and pausing. The way we shared our looking and listening. But most of all I remember when she took my arm. Or slipped her hand in mine.

  This hand above the bedclothes. It has to do with a feeling of jamais vu. Something recognised but strange. As if never seen. A wrinkled limb in the electric light in the squinting coming to consciousness never seen till now.

  If my mother indulged in spectral beckonings and reckonings she might blazon out:

  Don’t fix and freeze. See every day and more than ever the openings of memory. Live forwards but also backwards. Don’t end up bitter and twisted. There is hope and love. And the unquenchable desire for justice. Ridicule self-importance and privilege wherever you encounter it. Live in a world without religion. Not governed by the ways in which one God creates the need for murder and destruction in the believers of another. There is a world that is more real. In which every man is also woman. In which a mother unconscious speaks. Quieter than words. Under everything. And birth is not an event in the past.

  But my mother is keeping her trap shut. She refuses to be a ghost. She is too elusive and playful for such posturing.

  In my mind’s eye I see marine iguanas. Black on black. Hard to distinguish from the rocks. Washed over by rough surf. Waiting for nobody. In the west beyond the west.

  David Attenborough recounts how the ancestors of the only sea lizards on the planet were in all probability arboreal iguanas in the rainforests of Central America who lived on leaves from the trees high above the rivers and about eight million years ago a small number were washed out to sea on rafts of reeds and ended up hundreds of miles away on the volcanic black rocks of the Galapagos archipelago. I connect Attenborough with my mother. They were born about the same time. And as a nurse she was called out to the family on one or two occasions. She remembered them as charming people. Nothing snobby about them. No ‘side’. My memory of her connection with the Attenboroughs is as vague but solid as an eight-million-year-old raft of reeds.

  I feel my mother’s hands. In the electric light by the bedside lying on my left side. Through eyes almost closed. Moving into consciousness. A mess of iguanas. With fore-legs like old people’s hands. Distended. Gnarled. At once puffed out and flattened. In the hours of darkness they retreat under boulders or into crevices. In the day they sometimes pile on top of one another. Bundling (sleeping in one’s clothes in the same bed as others): another word my mother loved.

  Imagine Darwin’s jamais vu. Encountering them in 1835 he considered these creatures an affront to his own sense of being. He found them hideous and disgusting. Dirty black. Serpentine. Sluggish. Imps of darkness he called them. He failed to grasp many things about them. He says: ‘I never saw one even ten yards in-shore.’ But females will with- draw inland up to two miles to lay their eggs. The great blue heron in silhouette like Dracula in his cloak is quite partial to snacking on a hatchling. So too is the Galapagos hawk (though mockingbirds can alert a mother to its proximity). In more recent decades their continued existence has become threatened in addition by the rats and feral dogs brought in with the many thousands of people now living on these islands. While the threat of devastating climate change submerges all.

  Darwin also of course never observed marine iguanas underwater. The larger males can hold their breath for fifty minutes or more. As long as a session with
a psychotherapist. Long enough to read a remarkable poem with some care. Or get to the acnestis of a crossword. They swim down as deep as twenty metres to feed off the succulent fast-growing green algae flourishing on the volcanic sea floor. They criss-cross the slumbering green.

  Imagine the jamais vu for the creatures themselves come to shore after the longest shipwreck in history. Here’s to life on the rocks with a more or less non-viable diet of seaweed! Amblyrhynchus cristatus: from the Ancient Greek for ‘blunt snout’ and Latin for ‘crested’. Over millions of years the nose has squashed up so that they can graze better on the rocks and into crevices. To negotiate the seaweed their teeth and claws have become sharper. To deal with the salt they have developed a gland to excrete it. They sneeze a lot. They accumulate crusty white deposits on the tops of their heads like demented coke addicts.

  They are herbivores. Great mockers. Not inclined to violence. When one male confronts another in a bid to mate with a desired female he nods his head. The males may indulge in a little butting and head-wrestling but serious injuries are avoided. They bob and strut. They make as if to move. As if if. Bluff is key.

  They are patience supreme. They bundle and warm up in the baking sun then scooch and scuttle once more into the depths. Off on their virtual suicide missions. Ancient mariners. Till huge waves wash them up again. Small miracles they ever manage to get back to their rock in one piece. They move through the lethal chilling water with the slow whip-like strength of their long tails. With their legs close to their sides they resemble people waddling with their hands tied. Like victims of a home invasion. Upside down. Or: they pulse upward through the water with arms tucked in as if already coffined. They graze as fast as they can before their muscles seize up. Their faces are of old age. Smashed up. Unidentifiable. They batten on and shear green algae like salad leaves off the volcanic underwater rocks. They cling as if in thoughtfulness as they eat. In my mind’s eye I am in this dreamless cold swirling world. Holding my breath. Holding on. Out of my element. Amazed such an alien feeling can last so long. Watching with mother.

  Acknowledgements

  In the first place I would like to thank Jinan, closest and most distant reader, love of my life and constant source of inspiration, fortitude and sustenance in the writing of these pages.

  In addition I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my cousin and lifelong friend, Michael Morgan. From the earliest stages of this book he has been invaluable in recalling and verifying details concerning my mother as well as other family and friends. In addition, he has kindly provided a number of the images that feature in this book. Indeed, he took the photograph that appears on the front cover. Among other archival material, Mike also furnished me with a copy of the genealogical research conducted by my mother’s (and his mother’s) cousin, the late Ian Macadam, regarding their Scottish ancestry.

  Much of this memoir was drafted in Seattle, where I have – for about a month every summer, over a number of years – enjoyed the great hospitality and kindness of Lucy and Saleh Joudeh. In particular, they provided me with a writing-perch in their lovely home and gave me the quietness, space and time in which to piece together this little book. I am immensely grateful to them both.

  In the summer of 2019 Robb and Rachael Hamilton generously allowed me to occupy their cottage on Whidbey Island for several days: it proved a memorably rich and productive phase in the writing process. My hearty thanks to them for this dream-like break.

  This book bears witness, among other things, to the pleasures of having cousins. I feel very fortunate in having had such a bountiful share. I thank Heather Holt, David Royle, Vincent Royle and Caroline Smith for all their warmth, generosity and good humour down the years. It is a great sadness to me that my cousin Vanessa did not live long enough to read this memoir. And I am sorry that three of my other cousins – Graham, Ian and Rosalind (my mother’s elder sister Nettie’s children) – do not show up in person in the foregoing pages. I hope it might be understood that this was no deliberate omission, but rather an effect of the ways in which a book also eludes its author and veers about with determinations of its own. My mother watched them all growing up and remained especially close to her niece, Rosie.

  I could hardly have written this book without the loyalty and commitment of my editor at Myriad, Candida Lacey. Candida championed the project from its inception. After reading the first full draft, she then challenged me to double its length. It is a testament to her singular gifts as an editor that I found myself taking up this challenge with passion. I am enormously grateful for her many critical suggestions regarding this memoir, but also more generally for the ways in which she has stimulated my writing over the past decade.

  I would also like to record my special thanks to Linda McQueen at Myriad. In thirty years or more of writing books, I have known no other copy-editor who combines such a formidable professional efficiency with a warmth and personal engagement that sends me back to my own words and phrases, punctuation and tone, and compels me to ponder them in newly critical and enlightened fashion.

  I am greatly appreciative of the encouragement as well as helpful comments of friends who read this book in draft: Matthew Frost, Hannah Jordan, Gabriel Josipovici, Ute Keller, Rob Penhallurick and Carol Watts. Above all, I am indebted to the perspicacity, enthusiasm and support of my dear friend Peter Boxall – both for the many conversations we have had about this project and for his reading and detailed comments on more than one draft.

  Additional thanks – for details that they might, I hope, readily recognise – to Michael Gasson, Jackie Hall, Heather Holt, Jennifer Kerr, Colin Mackrell, David Royle, Lindsay Smith, Nick Smith and Cristina Ulander.

  For guidance on the photograph of the Burke’s Peerage editorial office, my thanks to Emilie Pine and Richard Pine.

  For guidance on murmurations of starlings around Bass Rock, my thanks to Ann and Tony Elger.

  My thanks to Mary Jacobus for kind permission to quote from Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference (Clarendon Press, 1989), and to Adam Phillips for kind permission to quote from Winnicott (Fontana Modern Masters, 1988).

  For his generous assistance with the digitisation of images for the book I am very grateful to my colleague at the University of Sussex, Stuart Robinson.

  ‘Exam’ was first published anonymously in the Oxford Literary Review (1995), then reprinted in Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester University Press, 2003).

  Finally, although my mother lived long enough only to know four of them, this book is dedicated to all of her wonderful grandchildren.

  About the author

  Nicholas Royle is Professor of English at the University of Sussex, where he established the MA in Creative and Critical Writing in 2002. He is the author of two novels, both published by Myriad – Quilt (2010) and An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017) – and many other books, including studies of Elizabeth Bowen, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida, E. M. Forster and Shakespeare. His books about literature and critical theory are widely influential and have won considerable acclaim. They include The Uncanny (2003), Veering: A Theory of Literature (2011), and An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (fifth edition, 2016, with Andrew Bennett).

  This is his first memoir.

  Copyright

  First published in 2020 by

  Myriad Editions

  www.myriadeditions.com

  Myriad Editions

  An imprint of New Internationalist Publications

  The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Rd, Oxford OX4 1JE

  Copyright © Nicholas Royle (b. 1957) 2020

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Every attempt has been made to obtain the necessary permissions for use of copyright material. If there have been any omissions, we apologise and will be pleased to make appropriate acknowledgement in any future edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN (pbk): 978–1–912408–57–3

  ISBN (ebk): 978–1–912408–58–0

  Designed and typeset in Perpetua

  by WatchWord Editorial Services, London