My Animal Life

by Maggie Gee

  In 1955 things were different. Books were still valued partly because of the war, ended only a decade ago, when paper was rare and publishers put, apologetically, ‘war economy standard’ in the front of their books, to show that production was under constraint. Typewriters were massive iron things, black-painted upright sisters of sewing-machines, more for offices than private houses. The success of italic writing depended partly on its clarity and its resemblance to type, the way it brought individual writing closer to the public sphere, moving in the opposite direction to the extravagant loops and coils of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century copperplate which had tilted it towards luxury, privacy, eccentricity.

  There was a brief phase, during which I myself grew up, when ordinary names like mine could gain awesome stature and authority by being printed, thanks to machines like my railside crimson mammoth and all the other different kinds of personalised printing that followed — black plastic strips with white raised letters, transparent sheets of fragile ‘Letraset’ transfer letters, machine-embroidered cloth name-tapes, ordered through the post, that magically produced multiple perfect ‘Margaret Gees’.

  With my new metal printed strips from the station, I was almost famous. I was real. I had somehow joined the world of books, or had proved I could join, one day, the world of books. I think the day when I came home with my laboriously stamped-out name on grey metal clutched in the pocket of my duffel-coat, and found, almost unbelieving, that it was still there next day and was not a dream, was even more exciting than the day two or three years later when Mickey Mouse comic’s ‘News’ page carried a medium-sized headline half-way down, ranged left: ‘BUDDING AUTHORESS OF BILLINGSHURST, AGED 10.’

  To my brother’s amazement Mickey Mouse reported that the B A of B, Margaret Gee, had sent in a ‘book’ about a cowboy ranch. It was true. I had written it by hand, in blue ink, twenty pages of Basildon Bond (the small size, also blue), its own glued-pad-formation reinforced with sellotape. The book had changed course half-way through, to my mother’s disappointment; in the first few pages I was writing about ‘eligible bachelors’, which she sensed, rightly, would be funny, but because I knew nothing about eligible bachelors, I stopped. Encouraged to go on, I swerved into the kind of story I was reading from my elder brother’s bookshelves, full of my real love-objects of the time, horses, and with the kind of happy ending that Mickey Mouse turned out to like. Thus was my handwriting for the first time translated into somebody else’s print.

  But grammar school followed, and the Horsham High School Magazine. A succession of poems called things like ‘Autumn Gold’ and ‘Autumn Sunset, Beachy Head’ (seasonal obsession due only to the recurrent winter submission date) were printed year on year, though my English teacher suggested with a grim smile that I remove the simile, ‘like menstrual blood’, from my paean to reddening skies. I replaced it with ‘like fading fireships’, which neither of us realised was worse.

  But I do remember an uneasy sense that I might be already out of date. What with schooldays and adolescent angst, I was too busy to pursue the rather modern fictional enterprise that the Budding Authoress had based on the western, so poetry became my outlet, and my masters were nineteenth-century, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold and even Swinburne. There were other, cooler girls at school, slender, arty Jane Ware, for example, dark eyes in a pale matte heart-shaped face and wiry black, well-cut hair, her wand-like waist caught in by the widest of then-fashionable wide belts; she and her friend Trisha were writing fragmented, symbolist poems of haiku brevity while I was still galumphing unstoppably through my iambic pentameters towards autumn sunsets. But Miss Robinson (strong-jawed editor of the magazine) and the other English staff approved of me. Moreover I was in the L or Latin stream, the top stream, whereas Jane had been misdirected into the G for German, from which she was only later fished up into the Latinate light (unbelievably, thinking of the nervous tactfulness with which streaming is concealed today, there was also a C for Cookery class. And this was a grammar school! Stay in the kitchen, dunces.)

  Swot that I was, and favoured, I chose TS Eliot’s Collected Poems for my English Prize in 4L, and then moved reluctantly, long after beautiful Jane, into the twentieth century, haunted and enchanted by Eliot’s melancholy ironies and half-lit city streets. I have it still, a hardback, blue, with ‘Margaret Gee’ written inside in my still coltish italic, a little stiff and self-conscious, proud, the signature of a self in the process of creation, trying to become a person, an adult writer, by taking possession of the poet. The print on the spine, ‘TS Eliot’, is still, forty-five years later, faintly silver, numinous.

  And Jane — beautiful, gifted Jane — Jane of the haiku, swinging her violin — she died, in her twenties, of cancer.

  When I compute the luck in my life, I do not forget her.

  My animal luck (iii)

  running

  My first coherent memory is of brightness and movement, running on a wide flat beach at Shell Bay. I am singular, and dazzled. I am not quite three. An expanse of white light, my parents behind my brother and me, the sea a low brilliant line, far away. Something catches my eye: full-stop. I crouch to pick up a small oblong shell, even whiter than the sand, chalk-white, crisply detailed, covered with regular indentations, which to me are identical to those on my new summer shoes. I name it with absolute certainty: ‘Look, I’ve found a Tennis White.’ Everyone except my brother is very pleased with me, though I have no idea what I have done, no idea it was a metaphor. I have better things to do. I run on.

  Animal luck — for ninety-five per cent of us at least — is movement. Unlike plants, animals wriggle and slide, ooze and flip, sprint like cheetahs through the Kenyan sunlight, pivot as swallows do, climb like buzzards, dive like otters. To seek out food, track down a sexual partner or parade before them, escape our enemies on a speedy wave of adrenalin. Or just move for the joy of it: dolphins spurting through blue air above the sea, foals racing across a field.

  Dancing on the beach

  Plants, on the other hand, stay put. They can send seeds or spores to blow on the wind or hitch a lift on a passing animal, they can push suckers out through the mud and spread their genes across acres, but the parent plants must sit tight and adapt to the place where evolution has deposited them. And they do adapt, fast: the leaves of African violets grow thicker and smaller in drought, mint coarsens within weeks when evicted from kitchen to garden. Plants grow narrow and tall, or broad and bushy, to suit the light and the space they are given.

  Animals, of course, can also adapt, but not as swiftly as plants. We don’t need to. If things don’t suit animals, we simply move on where life is easier.

  Or the lucky ninety-five per cent of us do. Molluscs, for example, are less lucky. One day, in my thirties, I went to a beach in Wales with my husband and one of his friends, and we walked down a shore-side path that the friend I will call Raymond knew well. The rocks were covered with live limpets, a quiet colony of conical mid-brown shells, clamped fast to the surface. ‘If you stroke them, they come off in your hands,’ Raymond assured us. He stroked them. So did we. Nothing happened. ‘It really works,’ he insisted, still stroking. We gave up. He kept going, but was obviously getting impatient. Suddenly he kicked one, hard. It fell off on the sand. ‘There,’ he said. I was shocked.

  I believed the limpet had feelings. I believe it had consciousness, too.

  When my Aunty Eve was living through her last months, in 1993, and was intermittently confused, she began to think people were out to get me. ‘Be careful,’ she said, when I visited her in hospital. ‘They’re looking out for you. It’s not safe. They’re saying “Maggie Gee, Animal Rights! Maggie Gee, Animal Rights!”’ Hidden beneath these fantastical warnings was the fact that she knew she had changed her will in favour of another branch of the family, and had guilty fears that I would run into them on the ward, and find out. In fact, I had guessed what she’d done, and didn’t care, but poor Eve couldn’t know that. “Animal Rights! Maggie Gee! Maggie Ge
e! Animal Rights!” The voices had hissed their way into her head.

  Perhaps she’d read an early novel of mine, The Burning Book, published nine years before, that turned out, through no conscious conviction of mine, to be about the horrors of factory farming. I meant to write a saga of English working-class life in the twentieth century, broadly, if not literally, inspired by my parents’ families, where ordinary private life and ambitions would be torn apart by two world wars and the threat of a third.

  1982; the Cold War was at its height and American nuclear missiles were set to be stationed in Britain. I meant to use first-person accounts of Hiroshima as an image of a possible future. But what came out, when I sat down and wrote, was not at all what I expected. I thought about blood and bruised flesh, and found I was writing about meat. I thought about burning, pulverising; there was the meat again. I found myself writing about butchers’ shops, factory farms, raw liver. This strand of imagery runs through the whole book, linking Hiroshima to the hidden violence of the high street.

  And yet I had always eaten meat, and do again now. After I read what I had written, I gave it up. (Only to start again three years later, which shows how imperfectly my daylight self listens to the voice of my subconscious. I had just had a baby; I was ravenous for meat.)

  I am clear about some things, though.

  Although I eat animals, I am an animal. I eat animals because I am an animal. I am an animal, though I have a soul. And if I have a soul, all animals have souls. (Later on in this book, maybe last of all, I will try to explain — I will try to understand — what I mean by a soul.)

  Perhaps the whole universe flickers with souls. Stardust skeletons, starlight souls. Perhaps American Indians are right to give thanks to the spirits of the animals they have eaten.

  My father would not allow us to have pets. I longed for a dog, dreamed and pleaded, was ecstatic aged twelve when Sylvia J from next door, two years older and more sophisticated, was given a male puppy called Tufty for Christmas, a tiny, adorable, whimpering thing with tight black curls and a wet black nose. But I wasn’t his mummy; Sylvia was, and she grew bored with me, and later with Tufty, and Tufty grew fatter, and soon became part of the landscape, greying, a rather dull dog who was walked subduedly down the small pebbled road by Sylvia’s mother.

  Though I read about dogs, horses, birds, though my Observer book told me every breed of horse and pony and I spent days discussing with my friend Janet whether we would choose an Arab or a palomino, the actual animals in my childhood were few. When we lived in Bromsgrove, between my third and sixth birthdays, our neighbours, the Wises, kept pigeons. And then Great-aunt Kit, Grandma Gee’s racy, widowed younger sister, got married again, to Uncle Ted, of whom my grandmother darkly said, ‘I told her, “Kit, he won’t just want to hold your hand.”’ In any case, they were too old to have children, and instead they kept a big red setter called Tess, a beautiful, rangy dog with sad eyes and a silken coat. Uncle Ted’s garden led down to the river. The great excitement became fishing with a line (though fish, we were told, had to be put back, and my father said even that was cruel) with Tess in ecstatic, leaping attendance, bounding all over the river bank.

  Then there was the dead sheep we found on a walk. It was spring, we were wrapped up warm, but the sheep, which lay sprawled on its side by the path, had a buzzing retinue of flies above it. As usual we children had run on ahead. ‘Mum, Dad, look, it’s a sheep!’ I was off the path, as excited as Tess. Only a few broken strands of barbed wire lay between me and my love object. ‘Get back!’ my dad commanded. ‘Get right away from there, Margaret!’ ‘But I wanter see!’ I whined, thwarted. ‘It’s DEAD, Daddy! I wanter see it!’ Instead we children were hurried away. I suppose they were frightened of whatever killed the sheep, rabies, scrapie, foot and mouth, and besides, my father had his pathological horror of death. But because we were forbidden to look at it, the image of the dead thing burned into my mind.

  Animals in the human world often seemed sad. We did get a hamster; naturally, it died. Still living at Bromsgrove, so I must have been around five, my parents took me to the circus for a treat. I only remember the menagerie, which we went to afterwards, in a big, dark tent. Hopeless beasts lay about in the shadows. The smell of urine was fierce and rank. My father and mother were indignant, so I copied them. ‘Maggie Gee, Animal Rights.’

  Yet my father, who tended to stock positions which he cleaved to with moralising passion, disapproved of emotional views of animals. ‘Some people like animals more than humans. Some people like animals more than children!’ He was outraged at this lack of humanity. Socialists often feel like this. His position seemed to me unquestionable, and as children do, I adopted it myself. I was very slow to find a way of thinking not wholly centred in my own species. But perhaps I wasn’t as slow as all that, because many people cannot bear to sustain the loss of pride involved in knowing we are ‘just animals’.

  When did I start to see it was true? I think I was probably around forty. My body, which I loved, had failed me by beginning on a series of miscarriages. I saw my will and my hope, both unlimited, were tethered to my mortal, animal body. ‘Today’s women want it all,’ crowed the magazines of the ’80s and ’90s, though the claim had already begun to sound hollow, ‘you can have it all, you can have it now.’ This siren song was a lie, of course. Because only a very few, very lucky, women have more than one child after forty.

  Biology is unmoved by our rights, unaffected by women’s changing hopes and dreams. My eggs had been ageing like any chimpanzee’s while I followed my glad little human trajectory of ambition, and then came the belated realisation that I longed for something outside myself. We wanted a baby. No, we wanted two babies. But the Fates came in and stared at me, hard, three frightening old women I might one day become, wielding their terrible steel scissors and thread, as the surgeons did who performed the D and Cs that tidied me up each time things went wrong. The Fates were in the gaze of the implacable nurse who came and bent over the bed where I cried silently in hospital after the operation. ‘This is nothing,’ she said, her eyes sharp with dislike. ‘Miscarriage is common. Get over it.’

  You can’t have everything, the Parcae hissed, bearing down on me with furious eyes. I had flouted them, and I would be punished. You never understood. You left it too late. You aren’t special, you’re an animal.

  I have always been slow to understand the big things. Quick at small things, with a slick grasp of logic, but slow at seeing the things that matter. So I didn’t start to see I had a body at the stage when it might have been expected. At puberty, say. Or when I became sexual.

  In any case the latter thing was somewhat delayed by my going to a traditional girls’ grammar school, where you did not have to think about boys — indeed I was puzzled by the minority of girls who queued up to titivate in the cloakroom mirror: what were they so passionate about? I simply did not, at that age, get it, for my body was disconnected from my mind. Which from infants’ school had nurtured bedtime fantasies of being kidnapped by bold boys on horseback, pressed against a wall and then what?

  Nothing. I had no idea. The dream petered out and I went to sleep.

  Not even when I had my first shy experience, aged sixteen, while acting in a play, Jonson’s The Alchemist. I wore a beautiful pale gold satin dress sewn with paste jewels, which showed my bust, and was told (thank God. I was too naïve to think of it myself) not to wear my winged Edna Everage glasses. Playing against me was eighteen-year-old Frank Lammas, a sturdy farm boy with a soft Sussex burr, dark eyes, glossy thick hair like a blackbird’s wing, and a motorbike. A motorbike! I would never have dared aspire to Frank Lammas, but somehow (perhaps it was the removal of my glasses) Frank Lammas saw something sensual in the woman I played. Frank began stroking and caressing my hands, tender, intimate, sweetest of touches, and his kisses became, not stage kisses, but real. Nothing so good had ever happened to me. When we weren’t acting, only little looks and smiles showed that the impossible was true: beaut
iful Frank Lammas fancied me. Since he was in the sixth form at my father’s school, nothing more daring was ever going to happen, and my father was already becoming suspicious. After the final performance, Frank Lammas offered me a lift on his motorbike, at twenty miles per hour, just around the school car park, and then this happy chapter of my life was over. But thank you, dear Frank, for seeing the woman in me. Your sunlight touched me. I could grow towards it.

  I have always loved, and enjoyed, my body, though I didn’t listen to what it told me. I liked being able to run and climb. I approved of my body; it did what it should. I had to be a tomboy, to be like my brothers, but I also remember distinctly, aged thirteen, looking in the mirror and seeing new breasts above my ribcage. Yes, I thought smugly, just as I expected, they are coming out perfectly, as they would (later, of course, I would learn, through pain, that the body I loved was imperfect, frangible). I enjoyed, above all, the sensation of speed, for I had always been a good runner, which translated, with age, into being a sprinter, a skill which stood me in good stead at school. The very children who tormented me gave me a half-admiring nickname: ‘MG Fast Car’, said as all one word, because I could get away from them, and I often had to, on the way home, as they pursued me, half-serious, down the church path. I preferred it so much to ‘Gee-gee’, or the worst name of all, ‘Dobbin’s daughter’, which cut me to the quick because it meant my father, Mr Gee the secondary school headmaster, was secretly called ‘Dobbin’ by my classmates’ elder brothers. ‘MG-Fast-Car’ was expensive, racy.