In Gratitude

by Jenny Diski

  In one way she is setting up the reading of the book as a roman-à-clef, or throwing a cloak of visibility over those fictional characters, who we should suppose ghostlike, unnamed, not creatures of flesh and blood. It is not the third volume of her autobiography although I can’t remember anyone ever suggesting it was. But it isn’t a history book either because placing events a decade earlier or later makes the ‘events’ she speaks of things which like bubbles drift along and burst here or there, having no particular moment or effect in their reality, or in ‘Doris’s’ reality, depending on where your shoe falls. Nothing is affected when they burst. The more I read it, the more this author’s note perplexes me with its triviality, like the trail of sweets to the witch who wants to cook and eat the children for supper: witches get hungry too, but are devious in their method.

  Novels, you can do pretty much what you like with them. That’s what they’re for. Who’s going to tell Melville what he has to do in Moby-Dick? But authors’ notes I take very seriously. I imagine, for example, those vulnerable people she speaks of, now more or less my age, those of us who undoubtedly did sit around Doris’s table in the mid-1960s, reading the author’s note and then the book itself. ‘Phew, it’s not about me, then.’ ‘No, that dress was as black as a starless night and she’s ruined it by making it an idiotic green.’ Or: ‘Is that what she really thought of me, back then?’ Or: ‘I’m glad I’m not one of those vulnerable people who isn’t in the book.’ Or: ‘Fuck! That very minor character is me. Me, a very minor character.’ Ceci n’est pas une pipe. It’s not even clear if we can rely on the author of the author’s note being the author of the book. Someone has to take responsibility for this written object I hold in my hand. And with that, Alice and I set about looking for a garden with a tea shop nearby: we’ve been assured a tea party is going on somewhere, and lie down to have a nap.

  And Doris herself, who I take to be the author who has written the book and the note, what to make of her? There’s a bouquet of nuances in those two brief paragraphs. There are some quite threatening tones, written by someone who knows the power of words – words she can choose either to she speak or keep to herself – because of the way they can hurt, distress or disturb others. Watch out, keep your place, or I’ll have the world – or at least a lot of people’s lives – thrown into the flames. But there’s generosity too, because – knowing the hurt she could cause – she has forsworn writing the dreaded third autobiography. And then again, that generosity comes with a reminder and perhaps a warning to some of the ‘vulnerable’ that she has such power over them. After all, the simplest way not to hurt people is not to spread words she might if she wanted to write but won’t be. Or perhaps all this is a form of apology to the vast majority of her readers who must be disappointed if they really were waiting for Volume 3 of her autobiography. She is explaining why. Or she is explaining herself to those who, knowing her those fifty years or so of hearing the gossip around the table, enjoyed the tales and stories as much as anyone. Those who could point out which of her friends the characters were, though they have been developed for the purposes of the story. Nothing was straightforward about Doris, as writer or gossip. It doesn’t make her very different from other writers who take what they need from people and events that suit their needs for their fiction.

  I can remember several vulnerable people in the 1960s, some of whom sat around Doris’s table, friends of Peter and friends of mine. Others were continents away. Some of them I still know. Some of them are still vulnerable. Some of them were Peter and me. Doris knew that writers, some more than others, never keep things to themselves: they take a morsel of her, make his eye colour different, turn a her into a him.

  No, what I really want to write about is a short walk I regularly made from a bus stop in Shoot-Up Hill in Brent, across the road and along a street called Kingscroft Road, to a house, the top flat of which Doris had bought when the Charrington Street house was compulsorily purchased by the local council, and after the flat she had moved to in Maida Vale turned out not to be to her liking. According to Google Maps it is about a three-minute walk, which surprises me. I thought it was longer. I don’t remember what date she moved there, but during that time I was running the free school for intractably difficult children, studying at a teacher training college, and then working full time as a teacher in Hackney. I lived in a small flat of my own in Camden under some joint ownership arrangement, which is now nothing more than an infuriating dream-scheme for young people trying to find somewhere cheap of their own in which to live. My three-minute walk happened over several years that took up most of the 1970s. I often made the trip at the end of the school day in Haggerston, or from my flat in Agar Grove, to see Doris, usually weekly, invited for tea or supper, or for lunch at weekends. Whichever place I started from, it seems that a bus (I always used buses rather than the Tube if I could) took roughly the same time. Between thirty-nine and forty-seven minutes with a clear road. Even in the mid-1970s a clear road was hard to find on Shoot-Up Hill, which ran the dull length from Kilburn to Cricklewood, and upwards to northern places I still haven’t heard of, changing its name as it went along, perhaps just to keep bus passengers on their toes, in the hope that it might eventually transform into something along the lines of a garden paradise for those who stayed the course. It’s really the Edgware Road, and the nearest thing to magic is the Three Wishes pub some way after Brondesbury, where I got off.

  I’ve lived long enough and done enough things to be certain that the first year of teaching and the first months of baby care are the most tiring things a person living a non-extreme-sporting life can do. I was always bone-tired; there was no baby until 1977, but the free school and my probation year at Haggerston had me hankering for my bed at home in Agar Grove rather than tea in Kilburn. But I don’t think that explains what I’m wanting to say. I’m just chipping it in there for those who prefer practical explanations. From a long but not unrestful journey on the bus, I’d press the buzzer or bell or whatever it was to stop the bus, and step down from the platform on to Shoot-Up Hill’s pavement. The very moment my foot made landfall, the anger began as if the pavement and the soles of my shoes had closed a vital circuit. Nothing fierce, just a familiar nudge, an awakening, a quickening, a sleepy stretch making ready.

  A few yards along from the bus stop there was a zebra crossing. Maybe twenty or thirty steps. At each footfall the anger increased. Instead of swelling, it recoiled, contracted, showing its steely strength like a hooded cobra, coiled around itself while arching its head, pulling it back, sucking in all the energy it needed to make a lightning-fast strike. The slow build-up, followed by the equivalent of a hundred-yard dash, using stealth and speed to perfection to kill its prey, or protect itself from the accursed god in the garden of peace and quiet. A little like that, but not good enough. The foot on the pavement, the irritation as both feet felt solid ground. The moments before I jumped off the bus knowing it was going to happen, because it always happened, and things that always happen on cue can never be prevented by trying to stop them. And things you don’t want to think about in order to keep them away always do what they do because the knowing is no more under your control than an infant waking up hungry and crying out for milk. Let’s drop the cobra. Let’s call it a thing without will or the need to protect itself or to feed itself, or with any animosity towards its creator because it is a nothing. Buddhists would call it a ‘sensation’ to make it no more or less significant than an itch on your nose while you are trying to meditate. Being too hot or too cold, feeling hunger, feeling dull, all just sensations. Notice them, name them if you will and let them go while you take the calm, quiet road back to the present moment. I’ve found that can work for quite difficult things like pain. I’ve got a broken wrist at the moment. If I call it a sensation, go towards it, breathe into it, fragment it, breathe it out and away, I can manage to type with nothing more than a different sensation in my right wrist from the one in my left. But the walk from the bus stop to
the zebra crossing never failed to be what it was. Never impressed by my playing mind games with it.

  Rage. A rage that stank like garbage in a wheelie bin on a sweltering summer day. But it started slowly, like the serpent in the garden condemned to move on its belly, to have its head crushed by the human and to strike the human’s heel. By the time I was at the crossing it had curled itself into the tightest of springs. As a rule it lived nice and quiet down in the viscera, somewhere dark-red and moist that thanklessly produces or regulates some hormone or other to keep a body going in a nice homeostatic fashion. The heart beating like the grandfather clock in the kitchen, all the blood and guts, humble organs, keeping time. Controlled and controlling. This three-minute walk – probably a bit longer because I’m a slow walker and I would deliberately constrain my steps in the hope of getting the Spring Thing back under my control.

  That walk, like any repeated event during which one’s mental pathways are etched into the body by the brain, was always the same. I don’t know when I first noticed it as a pairing of mind and body. The moment when you say to yourself, this always happens here. I always have this feeling at this point; it begins here and grows as I step towards Doris’s flat, cross at the crossing, walk along Kingscroft Road, see the grubby pebbledash of the house, walk to the door. Another door. One side and the other. But with an opening device that lets you in, if the inhabitant of the flat wants to see you. Only one side of the door occupied. Not so interesting, but as I walked into the empty corridor a rage so dangerous that I sometimes thought I might have a heart attack from the anger that shot up from its coiled self in Shoot-Up Hill, as it sprang powerful and metallic but always kept inside. Not really dangerous, honestly, an anger that afflicted only me. Another door. This time the right sort. Me on the outside, Doris inside. I knock, although she knows I’m there because she buzzed me in. Doris getting up, probably interrupting a sleeping cat on her lap – Grey Cat dead by now, replaced by another whose name I can’t remember. And the reader seeing both sides of the transparent door, two people, each hesitating and taking a deep breath, who really don’t want to see each other, but were designated by some higher force to stay in contact, to be a family, Doris’s obligation, one of her tribe.

  Everybody leaves home, almost everybody. How you do it depends on the times and one’s own experience. Although I’d lived with plenty of uncertainty by the time I was nineteen, leaving Doris’s after four years was very frightening. I seem to be made more anxious by experience rather than more confident. I wanted, and for a while got, a place of safety. After a dismal, crazy, wrist-cutting time in the bedsitting-room I’d taken over from Olwyn Hughes, Ted’s sister, I began to decline, in spite of my cunning plan to spray everything silver, as the linings were. (My first day there, as we swapped ownership, Henry Williamson told me, just as he was leaving after tea with Olwyn, the ‘big secret’ that T. E. Lawrence was killed because he was riding his bike dangerously fast after a call from London to take over the British Union of Fascists. ‘You are a swallow among the starlings, my dear,’ Williamson said to me – at least I wasn’t an otter among the badgers.) For the next two years or so I was in a variety of psychiatric units, and for me these were all places of safety. Regularity, a schoolgirlish gang of ill-disposed young women, no responsibilities and twice-weekly sessions with methedrine and its friendly syringe, and the shrink telling me I was worthless. It gave me no future, but a safe place to wait and see. Despite the clean sheets, crazy nurses, friends, enemies, dramas, everything an institution can provide along with the expectation that I and the others would act out, the time eventually came when I saw that I couldn’t really spend the rest of my life rattling from bin to bin. I overdosed again and was sent by R. D. Laing’s colleague Aaron Esterson to an experimental group therapy clinic, where we spent all day in differently constituted groups working out our various problems with ourselves, using each other as exemplars. I lived during that time in a druggy flat in Covent Garden (on National Health benefit) and took all the chemicals I was offered, fortunately without dying, as some had. It was all a matter of luck, or some fierce inner determination to survive no matter how much I insisted I had no interest in being alive. I suspect the latter, though I’m loath to admit it. Even now I have a sense of shame at having survived to my late sixties. Everything I did looked like a lurch towards death, yet everything in my life continued. I overdosed with some seriously lethal barbiturates in a solitary room in Great Portland Street only to discover that the methedrine I’d previously been injecting myself with was in fact an antidote to barbiturate poisoning. I took the cure before I took the poison. I felt I shouldn’t be alive, and in common with my headmaster, that I was always ‘falling on my feet’ though it was never my conscious intention.

  So the acting out and the drugs passed me by and I got hooked up again with Doris, who, hearing I’d given up drugs, offered me the one-room flat in the basement of Charrington Street, while I worked as a secretary and made a pitch at becoming the ‘normal’ person Idries Shah said I had to be before I would be accepted as a student of ‘the Work’. All very well, it seemed, but it was hard enough being an impossible teenager, how was I going to manage to act normal – something I’d had no experience with at all? Not since I’d been born. One thing all the comings and goings had achieved, however, was adaptability. I could put on a performance that seemed good enough to convince most people. The problem was that I had no idea what this ‘normal’ was that I was supposed to achieve. A secretary. Take shorthand, type it up, make cups of tea, look busy when there was nothing to do, be treated like a snail in the middle of a wet pathway. Doris seemed to think these were the kinds of thing Shah meant by becoming normal, and perhaps they were. ‘Carry your bags, ma’am?’ he asked as we were walking to a nuclear shelter (an unused underground sewer pipe) we were going to stay in as an experiment set up by the University of Swansea. When I said thank you but I could manage by myself he said: ‘Do you think I’m a male chauvinist pig?’ I was too embarrassed to answer this by-then ancient evasion. Others around me were shocked, and knowing from Doris how these conversations were supposed to work, I imagined that I was being given a chance to think through my attitude to sexual politics. I certainly don’t think Doris would have approved of my allowing the conversation to end with: ‘No, but I’m quite fit enough to carry it myself, thanks.’

  This was Doris, a woman who had played whatever part was necessary to get her where (London) she wanted to be and what (writing) she wanted to do. In Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) she had left two small children, a boy and a girl, with her divorced husband, and married a member of the Communist Party, an exiled German, with whom she had her youngest child, Peter. When she split up with Gottfried, she took Peter, aged two, and the manuscript of The Grass Is Singing on a plane and landed in London, staying with all sorts of hospitable post-war people with sometimes tragically spare rooms, who helped to look after Peter while she wrote and went to meetings. The last of these lodgings was with Joan Rodker, whose son Ernest, about ten years older than Peter, was at St Christopher’s School. Joan was hugely energetic, running the party organisation practically single-handed and keeping Peter out of the way while Doris wrote and had affairs. ‘The trouble with Joan,’ Doris once explained to me, ‘is that she never had very much luck with men.’ Meaning that she, Doris, had. And surely, part of that analysis was that Joan was devoting herself to Peter, whom she was very fond of.

  At seven or eight Peter went to St Christopher’s too, though I don’t understand how either Joan or Doris was earning enough money to pay the considerable fees. Joan worked at the BBC as a drama producer, and Doris was living on advances for her next books. I met Peter when I was eleven and had been sent to St Chris by Camden Council to get me away from my mother. He was known as Fuzzy. He’d just come back from a visit to Germany to see his father, who had had his hair cut in an erect German military crop. We never got on. We argued a lot. It was encouraged in class, but Peter h
ad developed a pretend grown-up style which had come about from trying to keep up with all the political and literary types he was mixing with at home. They just ignored him or laughed generously, not taking him seriously. It made him as I recall pompous and self-important. When he was wrong Doris and her friends never corrected him or explained, so he would make wild pronouncements, and I was not kind or thoughtful enough to leave them alone at school, where he was with his peers not indulgent socialists.

  Peter is the great enigma in the story of Doris. He actually is the story of Doris, both in her youth and in her old age. It’s very hard to know how to present the two of them as the years went by, how to describe the dyad they made and which locked them together more and more grotesquely for the rest of both their lives.