My Animal Life

by Maggie Gee

  Being able to run got me grudging respect, whereas doing well at lessons caused only hatred, in that village school in Billingshurst where out of forty-three children in Mr Upton’s class, only ‘me and Ivor Laker’ passed the eleven plus and got into grammar school. But everyone had bodies. Everyone did sport.

  Both my parents had been athletic, my father a footballer and middle distance runner, my mother a sprinter, hurdler, hockey-player, with the result that they became perhaps too involved in my success as a teenage athlete. But races can only have one winner. Mostly I did win my races at school, and in my fourth year at grammar school, just before I gave up, amassed the most points on Sports Day, as both of them had in the days when this honour was called victor, or victrix, ludorum. I competed as a junior for my county: won some small medals, their silver now grey, with the blue Sussex shield blazoned with small yellow birds. Trained, for a while, with Brighton Ladies Athletic club, in shocking pink tops and streamlined black satin shorts, and won, on one glorious day in London, the hundred metres at a big inter-club meet. (I came back and told Grandpa Gee, the former sprinter, now buckled by a stroke, strapped into black, built-up, surgical boots, and living with us as he struggled back to fitness, only to suffer another stroke. He laughed with joy. Margaret had trounced the Londoners! ‘Well done girl! That showed them.’ That day I was his granddaughter as never before.)

  But the changing-rooms, the jockery, began to repel me, and in retrospect, I never could have been top flight. I wasn’t quite tall or long-limbed enough. Besides, something important was being forgotten, with all the adrenalin and nervousness, the warming up, the weight-training, and my parents asking eagerly if I had won.

  The joy of it. That was what had gone. The thing I had felt on the beach as a toddler, when my stubby little feet and my chubby child legs sped up until they passed the vital line between walking and running, when both feet are off the ground at once. That precious thing, pure movement. Gravity defeated, the lift into flight. The thing that comes to anyone running full-tilt, without pain or pressure, the real joy of the sprint, the all-subsuming sense that you and your body are one, and the unity is weightless, sheer speed, pure flow. You are not lifting or moving anything; nothing is moving or lifting you. You are the movement. You are in flight. Pure animal alchemised into spirit.

  One other time I felt the same joy, something atavistic that pre-dates modern humans, their vegetable state briefly interrupted by panting, sweating sessions down the gym. Now activity is seen as a self-limiting episode, whereas, once, surely, life was motion.

  When John and I were teenagers, and my little brother was ten years younger, our parents took us on camping trips so we could afford to go abroad. We didn’t have a car, which might have stymied some people, but we loaded our camping gear into prams and push-chairs, which somehow or other we heaved on to trains (consider the terror at European stations, as the huge foreign expresses roared in beside the platform and we had to get two prams and a pushchair on board, from the hoods of which the round bottoms of duffel-bags looked out, the small brass studs like a pair of piggy eyes, the body of the prams full of tents, billy-cans, cooking-stoves, wind-breaks, sleeping-bags, provisions. Imagine my father, marshalling his troops! Three prams, his three children, a friend each for John and me, his wife, his precious camera-bag, his briefcase, rucksacks for my father and the two elder boys. Three vehicles, five children, a pile of bags and baggages. Looking back on it all, I salute you, Dad. I forgive the bawlings-out as we panicked on to trains.)

  One fine July day we had gone for a day-trip up high in the Swiss mountains on a crawling funicular train, with slatted wooden seats. Despite my fear, it did not hesitate, groan, and plummet with terrible speed back down the mountain. When we got to the top, Dad set off boldly in the opposite direction from all the other passengers. This stratagem was not always successful, but this time it brought us to a paradisal place, ringed by snow-topped peaks but curiously temperate, a lightly-wooded, green-turfed valley with a river and a grassy path meandering beside it, little patches of silver river-sand and stones.

  My friend Janet and I were perhaps thirteen. We were just beginning to be adolescents, but as childhood friends, we could be children together, which is one definition of happiness. Sometimes Nick and I are children together. Janet was one of the non-bullyers at junior school, one of the people who have shown me that hope is worthwhile, for some people’s hearts are immune to peer pressure, some children have been treated with enough kindness to be kind to others when they’re very young. Janet had decided to be my friend, and she even withstood my astonished lack of trust: ‘Are you REALLY my friend? Promise?’ How many times did I interrogate her? ‘I am your friend. Why do you keep asking?’ And my answer, from the voice of pure misery in my chest — ‘Because no one likes me, since my parents left Bromsgrove and they put me up a class, no one’s ever liked me’ — was stilled in the end. Janet liked me. And so did Anne Simmers. And so did Linda Tucker. Janet also loved running, as I did.

  My parents let the children off the leash, that day, for a few hours. Freedom! We were walking fast, then we started to run. Janet and I were running, easily. We ran by the mountain river in the clear, snow-cooled early afternoon sunlight, passing young silver birches and slender conifers, down the easy path through tasselled grasses, with the river on the left and my family still way behind us. And something happened; we were not going to stop, we were on our second wind, and our third, no longer counting, we had turned into the horses we used to dream of, we were animals, we could run for ever, had slipped back in history, and before history, we were loping, now, across the sun-bright savannah. We had no limit. We became movement. We ran for hours beside the river, through the sunlit country, past rocks and trees.

  Of course I wore a watch, and the hours slipped away, and by the time we got back, my father was cross because my brother and his friend were late; but the memory has stayed with me, unchanging, complete, an image of cloudless physical life.

  As we age, such moments come less often. At its worst, the body becomes something to forget or to carry, something best ignored, something to transcend, a net of competing pain-signals.

  But my body for the most part is still my friend. Bodies must be our friends, or they will turn against us. When I neglect my body, it reminds me, sharply. When I overwork: when I forget to walk.

  I see cyber-life, the virtual, as the enemy. It keeps this generation of young in dark rooms, leaching strength from their arms and suppleness from their shoulders, poking their heads forwards like unshelled tortoises. It sucks out their souls through their eye-sockets. Poor young people, kept from the light.

  Here at St Cuthman’s, Neville said, ‘God did not make you for the dark of death, but to live.’

  To live. In our bodies, in the light, may we live.

  In Vladimir Nabokov’s great novel Ada, the hero, Van Veen, ages from a child to an old man, but Nabokov teasingly tells us that in his eighties Van still dances on his hands — ‘I can do anything, I can tango and tap-dance on my fantastic hands’ — delaying and delaying the final sigh of information that this is ‘only in a recurrent dream’.

  True, the mind can hold what the body has given. I dream of running, fast and free, an easy circuit through sand and silver birches, with the amazed (but delusory) realisation that I am still running as fast as ever.

  But a dream goes cold on waking. I run, for real, on London roads, not far, but enjoying it, listening to my feet, counting magpies and urban blossom, ignoring aches and car-fumes. I hope to go on running till I die. I hope to go on having sex till I die. Not only in dreams, but in the warmth of the flesh. I’m thinking about orgasm, now. What a beautiful expression ‘coming’ is. I’m coming, moving, here in the moment, here in the body, running wild.

  My parents change class

  not in the way they expected

  Here is one of my questions: in a single lifetime, do you ever, truly, change class?

  In one se
nse, that of appearances, class changes in a flash, leaping slick as a fish over the weir in a mere two decades. Send a child to public school and Oxbridge, or Harvard, or the Sorbonne, and even if the grandparents’ families have been sons and daughters of the soil for thirty generations, no one will be any the wiser. Will they?

  No one except the child. Each child instinctively knows where they come from, what their earliest memories are, which smells, which comforts, what their uncles and aunts were like, how they speak, how they eat. When they hear those voices again, wherever they are, however many years later, they will prick up their ears; hail, friend. (Though some of course are ashamed.)

  So what class am I? I’m a novelist — middle-class profession — and went to Oxford — middle-class education — and am married to a man who went to public school and Oxford, and knows the names of his family back to the seventeenth century — middle-class man. I like expensive scent, Issey Miyake or Chanel No 5 or 19, or Jo Malone, and good wine; I have flown to Australia, over the curve of the earth where suddenly St Petersburg glittered below on the night like a hand-spread of stars, and worked in Berlin and Vienna, and trodden the stones of the Roman road to Carthage, at Leptis Magna, Libya. I saw lions in the pink early morning in Uganda; I have wandered through the Prado, and been moved to tears by the tender arches and vaults of a Gaudí building in Barcelona. Middle-class pleasures, middle-class tears; middle-class, I must be. Yet at the deepest level, am I?

  John, Mum, Dad and me, five years before younger brother James was born

  Not if the deepest level is the oldest, the thing-that-you-know-before-knowing-you-are-thinking, no, I am not just that.

  Because I was born into those two families, the Gees and the Churches, both working-class through and through: and a grain of their toughness, an inherited sense of being an outsider looking slightly askance at what the privileged get up to, remains at the core of my adult self. True, my parents, Vic and Aileen, let their brains take them as far as they could from Bucks and outside plumbing and the narrowness of terraces.

  Was it easy to move away? It must have been exciting, striking out on their own, going southwards, sunwards to Hazlemere and then Poole, where they knew nobody, to raise their young family. For my mother at first it was a liberation; in the final year of the war she had had to care for a baby, my brother John, living with the family of her absent husband in Wolverton, afraid that the baby’s crying would wake up her ‘cut above’ in-laws, the Gees. Once Vic was home from India, Aileen became entangled in the web of Gee-family over-sensitivity. She told me that every day she was afraid Dad might find his prone-to-tears mother crying, in which case he would come and find her and ask, ‘What have you been doing to upset Ma?’ The idea of their own place in the south, away from all this, was intoxicating.

  I mustn’t think going so far was simple for them. Most Gees and Churches stayed put, keeping the habits and social links they were born with. It was easier for my parents to move than to arrive. There’s a grain of something concretely real in that unpleasantly snobbish term ‘arriviste’. Because arriving in a new class isn’t something you do and then forget; it can be a never-ending, restless state. You leave once, but always continue to look for a welcome, and follow clues how to behave.

  New houses! That was what they wanted, new beginnings. ‘New build’. The thing that my generation avoids unless they can afford something edgy and architect-built. But Vic and Aileen both wanted to escape the dark and the fustiness. They had come through the war! Young marrieds on the cusp between their twenties and thirties. Both fiercely clever in different ways and recognising that quality in each other, they were eager for the future, but the first few houses they lived in — Hazlemere, Poole, Barnt Green, Bromsgrove, Watersfield, because my father was ambitious for promotions in teaching and they kept on the move — were all compromise, pre-war housing, one Edwardian, one 1940s, and so on.

  How they loved the idea of their first all-new home. The Croft, Oaklands, Billingshurst, Sussex, where they moved in 1956, when I was seven, was a three-bed cross between a house and a bungalow, with two downstairs bedrooms for the children. My parents’ bedroom and loo, side by side with my father’s darkroom for photography, were perched on their own, upstairs. Built new for them! They fell in love (via the pencil drawings, which they proudly showed their children) with the big semi-circular bay window at the front, which took up half the width of the house. Both had their own sense of beauty, and a wish to be different, though my father’s was constrained by a streak of fearful conservatism he denied; between them they chose, to curtain that giant bay, a repeated small 1960s line-drawing of a man driving a donkey-cart, back view, which promised them holidays, relaxation, the country, all things which proved not so easy to find; but they bought it in three different pastel colours, giving a daring rainbow effect when the curtains were closed. In that window, in the blaze of sun, stood also my father’s ‘Stereomaster’, a radio-cum-record-player of monumental dimensions, with late 1950s splayed legs and a cabinet of pale wood (which my mother secretly disliked: ‘It’s like a coffin,’ she whispered to me, once its novelty wore off. No wonder she resented it when no one but Dad was allowed to touch it; he was extending his musical tastes, and liked to have female opera-singers, out of Radio 3, at breakfast; ‘that bloomin’ screaming’, Mum called it.)

  But on the drawing-board this house, for us all, was to be perfect, the final stage in our ascension from Bucks, via Poole (and a small retreat, reculer pour mieux sauter, to the midlands) to Sussex. My own part of the excitement was choosing paint for my bedroom. Remember the rarity of luxury and colour in that austere post-war world of the fifties, the scarcity of ornament and print. So the paint manufacturer’s cards with their tiny neat pools of gloss or matte colour, dozens of shades all subtly different, the smell of the cardboard and the feel to my fingertips of the cool slippery gloss, were artefacts of rare beauty. Each small bright rectangle of paint had a number which led you to a correspondingly wonderful name: Jasmine Yellow, Duck-egg Blue, Apricot Pink. I changed my mind over and over again.

  Yet the room, when finally unveiled, was a bad disappointment. I was sure that my parents had muddled up my choices. One wall was a murky blue-green, one a fleshy, overbearing pinky-orange, two were yellow, and clashed with the pink. And there were acid yellow curtains with a pattern of rickshaw-pulling coolies with pigtails; I definitely hadn’t chosen those. I raged and complained.

  My poor parents. They had wanted me to be pleased, and let me choose. Instead I made everyone unhappy. I insisted, and cried, and screamed, that I had never chosen these horrors. I wanted to be myself. My family was totally unsatisfactory.

  Looking back, what threw me was the difference between real paint and the ideal poetry of names.

  We lived in the Croft for two decades, until the mid-seventies, for my father had got his headship (‘I was one of the youngest heads in the country’), and stayed until retirement, his youth worn away, jaw jutting forward with the strain of the job to which he walked off every morning, a three-minute walk in his long grey-beige gaberdine mack to the big modern school at the bottom of our garden which he steered from a secondary modern to one of the first comprehensives. My brother John and I grew up and became adolescents, though we weren’t modern teenagers at all. John, tall and skinny with very long arms, a vulnerable Adam’s apple, full sensual lips and a brilliant mathematical brain, came effortlessly top of all subjects at his excellent grammar school, Colyers, and was a demon fast bowler in the Billingshurst cricket team, ‘over-bowled’ by the captain, as Dad said, despairingly, thinking of future arthritis as John pounded away summer Saturdays notching up wickets. John was a Manchester United fan like my father, and went out with the girl next door. What better son could be imagined? My father loved him to a painful degree, yet he fought with him; too much testosterone under one roof. I too was a good teenager in many ways, a bad one in others. Like John, I was both a swot and a sports fiend; I was sexually innocent, ne
ither drank nor took drugs (I was saving things up for later, getting up a head of pressure so the eventual explosion would be worthwhile). Yes, I tormented my kind mother with cruel remarks, refused to eat with my family, read half the night, hated my father, started to be weird about food. But in public terms, both John and I were successes. In private we raged and stormed and, in the end, partially curbed ourselves; one by one, as raw seventeen-year-olds, before things could get too bad, we went away. Another brother was born, the baby of the family, Jamey or James, nearly ten years younger than me, a blond-curled, blue-eyed boy of great beauty and perfect eyesight, whereas John and I were both wiry bespectacled children with knobbly joints and big ears, then awkward adolescents who couldn’t wait to be twenty. In time James became a teenager, actually a teenager, unlike his two elder siblings, dancing to T-Rex, being a proto-communist, bringing girlfriends home. And as all these things happened Vic and Aileen aged from their thirties into their fifties, and certain things became set, and others, in the hothouse of our adolescence, burst and broke, and some of the hopes of the big sunny bay were disappointed, and others, for the next generation’s success, were exceeded.

  From the springboard of the local grammar schools, those engines of class mobility which the current Labour government considers undemocratic, both my elder brother John and I won Major Oxford Scholarships, John’s in Physics and mine in English, while my political younger brother James (now Jim, but still unnaturally handsome) went to the best place for politics, LSE. Our parents were so proud, too proud for good sense.

  Easy to understand why, since Vic and Aileen were easily as clever as their children, but were doomed by their class, and in my mother’s case, gender, not to have the education they deserved. (My mother, like her sister Eve, couldn’t continue her education after her ‘Highers’, because what little money the parents had was earmarked for the boys’ apprenticeships, even though the girls were brighter than the boys; only Eve and Aileen ‘passed the scholarship’ at eleven to the grammar school. ‘We thought nothing of it,’ said my mother, of the way the money went to her brothers. ‘It was just the way things were.’) My father had done an external, thus affordable, degree in geography, art, religious knowledge and PE at St Luke’s College, Exeter, which he did not rate highly. On the wall of our dining-room now is a black-and-white watercolour he did of the room where he stayed. ‘CORNER OF ROOM: 4-WASH TONAL EXERCISE, 1935’, the title written in his meticulously pencilled capital letters, underlined with obvious use of a ruler. It is a beautiful thing, because Vic had a real gift for drawing, as did his brother Lloyd who, apprenticed in the Railway Works, eventually rose to become the designer of the Queen’s Train. But the room in my father’s vision is claustrophobic, the bed ultra-narrow, the corner cluttered with bleak furniture, the window barred though the sunlight comes in a flood through one side of the curtain, the shadow in the corner very dark.