Before I left Salisbury for London, during that long bad time that seemed as if it could never end, I complained to a friend, a doctor, of feeling tired. You might have bilharzia, said he. He was an expert on bilharzia. One of the symptoms is lethargy and tiredness. Let us call him Matthew. When we first knew him, he was just a beginning doctor, but success and his patients had given him a slow, magisterial manner. We teased him about it. He tested me for bilharzia. Negative. Now, you can get bilharzia through the pores of your skin, the slightest contact with infested water can do it, and I had been in and out of water all my childhood. No, I had not swum in a stagnant pool full of the weed where the snails clung, but I might have put hands and feet into it, since in those days it was believed that bilharzia entered only through the urethra. It was the most likely thing in the world that I had bilharzia. A negative test did not mean I didn’t have it, said Matthew. The treatment then was long and nasty: for at least a month, daily injections of antimony. Most of the black population had bilharzia, one of the endemic diseases in Africa. When the long and painful treatment was over, the sufferer was bound to get it again, if he or she lived in the country, as most did, because the rivers and pools where they all washed and drew water were full of bilharzia. These days a couple of pills do it—you’re cured, just like that. I said I couldn’t really face a month of injections, but Matthew said he had just evolved a new treatment, which consisted of giving the entire month’s dose of antimony in three days. It was drastic, but it worked. Would I try? Besides, I would be contributing to science, because the treatment was still being tested. I put myself into a hospital staffed by angelic young nuns in sky-blue robes and veils. There were four injections a day. With each one your heart beat and pumped and shook as if it would explode, you lay gasping, thinking this was death, swearing you would not let them give you another dose, and then just when it was unbearable, the tumult in your body ceased. The young angels stood about, concerned but smiling, while four times a day I thought I would die. One day Matthew strolled in, grave, authoritative. ‘Well, you’re looking fine.’"
‘But, Matthew, I am feeling terrible. Are you sure?’
‘Perfectly in order. The treatment of the future.’
I crawled out of hospital four days later, shaken, shaking, poisoned, sick. But presumably without bilharzia. I was no less tired, however. Then I had my third baby, wrote The Grass Is Singing, came to London.
Soon in London, too, was Matthew, attached to the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, and other specialist hospitals, a world expert on bilharzia. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m fine, apart from feeling tired all the time.’
‘You might have bilharzia.’
‘But you cured me of bilharzia.’
‘Oh yes? Did you have the treatment?’
‘You gave me three days’ treatment. The blitz.’
‘That’s been discontinued. We killed quite a few people with that. Only natives, though. They don’t have the stamina to stand up to it.’
I am afraid I have to report that I allowed myself to be tested again, was proved negative, and was assured that that didn’t necessarily prove anything. It was almost as if I was anxious to agree to anything, anxious to please, unable to say the simple word No. Taking advantage of Peter being at school for a full half-term, I agreed to go into the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, under the famous doctor. I was there for a month. Free, of course. The treatment was now back to a dose a day, and while it was not pleasant, it wasn’t painful or terrifying. I was glad of the rest. I lay in bed, read, thought about The Golden Notebook, and smoked. They assured me no one taking the antimony treatment smoked longer than a day or two. I smoked throughout the course. Matthew would arrive by my bed, tall, and slow, and magisterial, assure me I was doing fine, and then stroll over to the other woman in the room, who was fascinating all the doctors. She was a nun, English, who worked in Nigeria, where she had caught a mysterious disease which caused her legs intermittently to swell and flush pink, scarlet, or raspberry. It was the timings of these colourful visitations that intrigued the doctors. Clearly it was a worm of some kind, still unknown to science. Sister Lucy lay in bed reading women’s magazines and the Bible, with a bell beside her which she was instructed to push the moment her legs began to swell and colour. Several times a day the corridor resounded with thundering feet, while doctors and nurses rushed towards us from all over the hospital. They stood around the blushing legs, took scrapings of skin, samples of blood, said, Fascinating…Incredible…Amazing, and then reluctantly left, for often the legs had already subsided again. Sister Lucy was a woman of about fifty, who had been in Nigeria for decades, working in some remote place, teaching the heathen to love God but also to read and write. Like me, she was having a nice rest. Fellow nuns came to visit, bringing her magazines, novels about love, chocolates, pink-feathered mules, a pink bed jacket. Then she was taken to another, more serious ward for treatment, and instead came Mrs. Ada Dimitrios, a large, calm, plain Englishwoman with smooth pale hair and perfect shining pink nails: she had had her hair and nails done before coming into hospital. She sat up against the chaste white hospital pillows and the flowery cushions she had brought in and read the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express and large numbers of middlebrow novels. She couldn’t get enough of them, she said; she was starved of reading matter.
This was her story: Two lively English girls had gone to Greece by themselves for a holiday. This was the early fifties, and it was unusual then, enterprising. She had been persuaded by her sister Maureen. ‘She always did like foreigners. I never did, much.’ In Athens they sat about at café tables, and they were observed by a Greek merchant, who had taken one look at this pink-and-white, fair-haired English girl and had fallen in love, just like that, crash, a nose-dive. He assaulted the girls with flowers and chocolates, and demanded that Ada should marry him at once. She said, ‘Why don’t you ask Maureen? She likes abroad.’ But Ada married her Aristides. ‘Call me Ari.’ ‘No, I’ll call you Harry.’ Off she went to Nigeria with him, to Kano in the north, a town whose name evokes camels, caravans, the muezzin, and markets full of spices and enticements. It is an ancient trading town, always has been, and its history is pure romance. Ada from Croydon found herself in a large old house with enormous airy rooms shaded from the heat by tall trees in an immense garden, and a flat roof, where she went most nights to sleep.
‘First we make love,’ said she. ‘Then we go up onto the roof. Harry says, “Come on, we can make love on the roof, everyone does.” I tell him no, I know the difference between right and wrong.’
‘Do you love him?’ I enquired, seeing no reason not to go to the point.
‘People talk about love. I never know what they mean. I could never put up with any man but Harry, if that’s love.’
It took her quite a time to see that he was very rich and successful. He was a trader. He worked hard. She did not see much of him in the day.
‘Are you lonely?’
‘Lonely? Don’t understand that word either. I like my own company, I always did.’
Sometimes she went down to the markets, accompanied by a servant, because her Harry said she ought to get out of the house sometimes, but what she really liked was to sit by herself in the enormous room where she kept flowers banked on layered trestles by the windows, so that scents could waft around the room on breezes from the great ceiling fan, and read the Daily Mirror, sent by air from London. She did not have friends. She entertained her husband’s business friends when he asked her to arrange dinners or lunches, but the servants did it all, she was just a nuisance to them when she asked them to cook this or that. She had nothing in common with the wives of her Harry’s white colleagues, nor with the black women married to his black associates. There were doctors and missionaries and teachers, but ‘Anyway, I can’t stand do-gooders,’ she says, buffing the perfect nails, inspecting her perfect pale skin, which has never seen so much as a ray of Nigerian sun.
She liked her life,
but she had caught this bug and was having diarrhoea all the time, and she couldn’t wait for the Hospital for Tropical Diseases to cure her, because she wanted to go home.
Letters from her Harry arrived by every mail. Passionate letters.
‘He misses me,’ she remarked, blushing as she read. ‘He’s oversexed. That’s what I tell him. “You’ve just got too much libido. It’s not good for you, in this heat.”
‘But he wouldn’t listen. He’d have it three times a day, if he could.’ Sometimes he got home at lunchtime, but not to have lunch. He says, “I love you I love you I love you, come to bed.” But the temperature is over a hundred. “Don’t you love me?” he says. He begs me for it, and I give in because I don’t like to see a man begging, like a dog. All that sweat, the sheets soaking wet, and then I have to change them quickly, because I don’t like the servants knowing.’
She said this to him: ‘Look, my dear, no, listen to me, get yourself a girl for sex; I don’t mind.’ He began to cry and said, ‘You don’t love me.’ She said to him, ‘A man like you should have two wives. It’s not your fault. You’ve just got too much.’
‘He was so upset,’ she said, her tranquil blue eyes clouded for once. ‘I could see I should never say that again. But what is wrong with it, I want to know? A girl for sex and me for everything else. Because I do like him, you know; I couldn’t ever be married to anyone else.’
‘Would you mind if he had a Nigerian girl?’
‘A black girl? I’d rather she was white, but I don’t mind. I like the blacks there. I like the food. The only thing I don’t like is all the noise. They’re a noisy lot. But it’s their country.’
‘What do you spend all your money on?’
‘I’ve got lovely clothes. I wear them in the evenings for him. He loves that. I’ve even got a Dior dress. But there’s nothing to spend the money on. He gives most of it to his family in Greece. I like people who look after their families. I can’t have children. I was expecting children, but nothing happened, and I asked him, Don’t you mind? And he said no, all he wanted in this world was me, and if we had children I wouldn’t have time for him.’ She sits applying cold cream to her pretty skin, lifting her mauve satin nightdress to pat cream into her neck and upper breasts. ‘You have to take the rough with the smooth,’ she says gravely, sighing.
Quite a few people visited me in hospital, and Ada lay reading, and listening to our talk.
‘I like conversations,’ she says. ‘You have interesting friends. You’re a real boheem. Did you know that?’
‘So I’ve been told,’ I say, ‘but only in Africa. And how would you define a boheem?’
She considers this, seriously. ‘Well, I’m not one. Harry isn’t one. His family aren’t. My family aren’t. But you are. Your friends are. You just like being different,’ she pronounces. She turns over. ‘And now I’m going to get a bit of sleep. Don’t let the nurses wake me. I never get to have my sleep out at home, because Harry won’t let me. Do you know what? I wake up sometimes and there he is, mooning over me and crying. He says I am so beautiful he has to cry. I say to him, “If you say it often enough, I’ll begin to believe it.”’
Did I ever have bilharzia? There is no way of ever knowing.
These little medical reminiscences are a record of quite pathological passivity under pressure from Authority. I did not write ‘female passivity’, because when it comes to doctors I don’t think there is much difference between the genders. We have all been taught to do as we are told. The first thing a baby, an infant, then a small child, hears is: ‘Here is the doctor…the doctor says…take your medicine, the doctor says so…the doctor says you must stay in bed.’ He, and nowadays she, is the supreme authority in the family right from the start, and in the era of home visits a child would observe how a whole household waits for the doctor to arrive and tell them what to do. But now that the era of home visits is gone, perhaps this will change.
What is astonishing to me now is that although my mother used to tell doctors what to do, or what to prescribe, she nevertheless needed this authority between herself and her patient—my father, my brother, me. This was because of the ferocious discipline nurses were taught then, for they were never allowed to do anything at all unless the doctor had ordered it. On the farm, when my father was very ill because of his diabetes or the illnesses resulting from it, she would put him in the old car and get in beside him to watch his face for signs of coma or collapse, and I drove the car into Salisbury. What is seventy miles? Nothing. But the road was corrugated all the way, big slow waves in the gritty and sandy surface, which you had to drive over fast, causing the car and its occupants to rattle and vibrate, or so slowly you slid down from the top of one ridge and up to the next. It had to be slow, because my father was so ill. The trip might take five or six hours, with stops for him to rest. When the roads were faster because of the strips—instead of tarmac covering the whole road, there were strips for the wheels—it was still a slow business, because the edges of the strips were jagged little cliffs and if you were not careful you could slide off and skid into a drift of sand. My father sat there pale and sweating, one hand gripping the side of the car, the other my mother. And then at the hospital he was admitted for a morning, or a day, for tests that my mother had already done on the farm, and the doctor told my mother what she already knew, because it was what she had told him. My father was put to bed for the night in a hotel, and then the terrible slow drive back to the farm next day. All this to get the stamp of authority from the doctor. Crazy. Yet so it was. So it had to be then.
The Golden Notebook is generally considered my best novel. Perhaps it is, but I have my own ideas. Authors are thought not to be good judges of their own work. Nearly forty years after it was written, it is still selling steadily and is often reprinted, and not only in European countries. Its history illustrates the vicissitudes a novel may experience.
People are always asking, Why did you write this novel, that novel, that story, how did it come about? But the answer is never simple. You may think about a novel for years, because you cannot find the way to do it, and then the solution may be sudden, perhaps in a dream or a series of dreams; at any rate, what has been impossible has become easy. This happened to The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five. The format, ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’, for some reason put an end to the ten years of inability. Marriages is the second of the series and very much the odd one out. As so often, the solution was a simple one: I used the ancient voice of the storyteller, and everything fell into place. A novel may arrive in one’s mind suddenly, like The Good Terrorist. The genesis of The Golden Notebook was not lengthy, but it was complex, not only because of what went into it but because of my state at the time. I really was at a crossroads, a turning point; I was in the melting pot and ready to be remade. I knew I was—nothing unconscious about it. For one thing, I was determined my emotional life would from now on be different. For another, there was politics, the collapse of communism as a moral force. All around me, people’s hearts were breaking, they were having breakdowns, they were suffering religious conversions or—very common, this—formerly hard-line communists were discovering a talent for business and making money, because an obsession with the processes of capitalism was the best of preparations for a career in commerce. The point was, I was seeing people who had put all their eggs in one basket come to grief. What had been shut out of their thinking was rushing in, sometimes in the form of madness. I had been brought up in a society that compartmentalised—white, black—and the results were already evident in the news out of Southern Africa: rigidities were breaking down into violence and war. And further back still came the voices of my parents: my father’s—at least when he was still well, still himself—was nonjudgemental, humane, human, tolerant; my mother’s was always ready to categorise, condemn, judge. I knew that a remarkable time in the world’s affairs was ending. I knew that quite soon it would seem mad. I had learned that atmospheres and climates of opini
on which seem at the time eternal may disappear overnight. My most extreme experience of this was the onset of the Cold War just after the end of World War II, when friendships were destroyed overnight and allies became enemies. For some years I had been thinking that novels I would like to read about the nineteenth century had never been written. There were books of history in plenty, but few novels. Where were the novels about the intellectual debates, the arguments, and the passions and hatreds that are so often the real story behind formal history? Where the life as it was lived in socialist circles?
I wanted to write a novel which people could read later to find out how people saw themselves, those who were communists and dreaming of a golden age—which, I must remind you, we actually believed for a short time was just ahead. How could we have believed anything so stupid? At least these lunacies should be chronicled.
I needed a framework, a form, which would express extreme compartmentalisation and then its breaking down—the experience I had lived through, was living through now. The ideologies were not only strictly political but about the way women saw themselves. It is now a conviction that the women’s movement began in the sixties. Like sex. The fact is, there were many group discussions, meetings, conversations, about women in the 1940s and 1950s, in and near the communist parties, and the socialist parties too. Women were on the agenda. Women have always sat around talking about men, and those voices came out of my earliest childhood too. My memory was full of conversations about men, women, the differences between them, love, sex, marriage. New was the idea that these ancient balances had to change.
For instance, the talk in Joan Rodker’s kitchen, which I mined for Molly and Anna. Joan was Molly, much altered, of course, and I, Ella. It ought not to be necessary to say that this was not a strict use of what happened, or of what was said; but such is the hunger of readers for the autobiographical that one has to repeat: no, it did not happen just like that.
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