by Ali Smith
Brought up by her beloved aunt, Ann Maria Jeans, in Redburn, Queen Street, Nairn, on the Moray Firth coast in the Scottish Highlands. Estranged parents leave her there when they emigrate (separately) to Australia, and continue to do so after they come back (still estranged).
A force of energy and adventure, a headlong kind of a girl. That lassie lives in figures of speech. Blue-eyed blonde, so eye-catching that the newly instated Rector of the University of Aberdeen (which is where she goes in 1927 when she’s finished school, to study English), who happens to be driving past in his carriage from his own Instatement Ceremony, turns his head and cranes his neck to catch another glimpse of such a startlingly beautiful girl in the crowd.
A talker. A livewire. She was a beauty, but she gave the men a run for it. Hilariously funny. A poet. Circle of admiring undergraduates at her feet and her lines spilling out of her all Spenserian stanza. Annoying to young men in seminars: she niver thocht that up hersel, far did she get it fae? Beloved of landladies (and simultaneously disapproved of): that Miss Fraser! she keepit awfa ’ours. Bright, glowing like a lightbulb, ideas flickering like power surges. When trying to string fishing line on a rod and reel in her student lodgings, tangles herself up so badly that she has to toss a coin out of a window to a passing boy to get him to send a telegram to her friend Helena, a couple of years younger and a writer herself, enthralled by her exciting older poet friend: imprisoned in digs. Please rescue. Olive. Recalls, much later in life, this friend’s happy family house in Aberdeen, the welcoming shouts and the laughter, the merriness, the warmth. Recalls her friend’s mother’s singing, and the lucky stone with a hole in it that her friend’s mother gives her before her final exams.
Outstanding student. 1933: to Girton College in Cambridge on scholarship money, though a couple of years remain unaccounted for in between Aberdeen and Cambridge – poor health? poverty? mental exhaustion? Intermittently ill. Pale. Fatigued for no reason.
Five days of psychoanalysis in London: he simply took my mind to pieces and built it up again. I really feel as if I had been presented with a new heaven and a new earth, ten thousand cold showers on spring mornings and a Tinglow friction brush (mental).
Gains reputation as talented young poet. Wins Chancellor’s Medal for English Verse in 1935, only the second female student ever. Poem is called The Vikings. Senate unused to presenting anything to women: a kind of quasi academic dress had to be devised. Takes to calling herself Olave. Makes many new friends. Gets on many new people’s nerves: she was a pain in the neck. Strongly dislikes Cambridgeshire, too flat, too dank, too inland. Strongly dislikes Girton (remembers it ten years later, in a poem called On a Distant Prospect of Girton College, like this: Here does heavenly Plato snore, / A cypher, no more. / … / Here sits Dante in the dim / With Freud watching him. / … / Here does blessed Mozart seem / Alas, a sensual dream.). Girton, in turn, strongly dislikes her: she wasted the time of promising young scholars.
Bad headaches. Grey skin. Nosebleeds. Concentration lapses. Unexplained illness. Fatigue.
Drifts from job to job. Back north to help on farm. Trains polo-ponies in Oxfordshire. Assistant to archaeologist in Bedford. Wartime: applies to cypher dept in Royal Navy WRNS in Greenwich. Posted to Liverpool, junior officer on watch, witnesses blitzing of maternity hospital near Liverpool docks. Went out of her mind … thought the enemy were after her, trying to get in touch with her. 1945: Poultry worker. 1946: Bodleian librarian (gets the sack, leaves under a cloud). Solderer. Assistant nurse. Cleric. Shop girl (Fortnum’s, among others). 1949: living in Stockwell Street, Greenwich (now demolished), then Royal Hill, Greenwich. Made most of the furniture myself, being employed by a firm that had its own sawmill and was very generous in a thoughtful kind way to its employees and even to people who lived around. The death of the mother. The death of her aunt. The death of her dog, Quip, an Irish terrier. Drawn to Roman Catholicism; poetry becomes devotional. Poverty. One new outfit in the last twelve years.
1956 in London: onset of severe mental illness. I was walking along and I just blacked out and when I came to, I found myself up a tree. Diagnosed with schizophrenia. Hospitalized. I cannot write any literature. It is as though I had lost a limb. Medication: chlorpromazine. Like she’s been hammered down in a box and dropped below the Bermuda Deep. Unrecognizable, changed from the gallant, yellow-haired, rosy-cheeked girl. Grossly overweight, disfigured. Medication brings on painful sensitivity to sunlight. Puffy eyes. Skin grey, leathery. Stuffs enough hospital teddy bears (paltry sum per bear) nearly to ruin her hands. Buys herself ticket north.
1960s: moves from house to uneasy house, renting in Inverness, Capital of the Highlands, sixteen miles from Nairn. Hospitalized again. Seen in grounds of Craig Dunain, Inverness mental hospital, wandering about holding beaten-up typewriter. Moves back to Aberdeen, this time to Cornhill Hospital. Percipient woman doctor thinks schizophrenia might be misdiagnosis and medicates for hypothyroidism, myxoedema. As if by disenchantment herself again.
Sunlight. Three wonderful years of good health.
Cancer. Two operations. Dies in December 1977. Penniless at time of death. Friends gather in snow for funeral that never takes place: bad weather, mishap, misinformation, accident.
Winner, over the years, of twenty-two literary prizes and two gold medals. Very little work published. When I send a poem to a publisher with ‘Royal Mental Hospital’ at the top …
I have forgotten how to be / A bird upon a dawn-lit tree, / A happy bird that has no care / Beyond the leaf, the golden air. / I have forgotten moon and sun, / And songs concluded and undone, / And hope and ruth and all things save / The broken wit, the waiting grave.
*
In her gold medal-winning early poem, The Vikings, the dead are simultaneously ancient and young, younger than death and life. The poem’s narrator asks them how it’s possible that they’re so very beautiful:
O we are loved among the living still,
We are forgiven among the dead. We plough
In the old narrows of the spirit. We
Have woven our wealth into your mystery.
Here are three of her poems, the first from 1943, the second circa 1954, the third 1971.
THE PILGRIM
I have no heart to give thee, for I
Am only groundmists and a thing of wind,
And the stone echoes under bridges and the kind
Lights of high farms, the weary watchdog’s cry.
I have no desire for thy dreams, for my own
Are no dreams, but realities which are
The blind man’s sight, the sick man’s heavenly star
Fire of the homeless, to no other known.
THE POET (III)
Go to bed, my soul,
When the light is done.
Sleep from enemies
Blanketed in bone.
Let thy blood grow cold
As a mouldering stone
On a martyr’s tomb,
Known to God alone.
On the stair of truth
Down and up are one.
Bless the cobbled street
When the light is gone.
When the light is past
When the flower is shown
Let the poet be
Common earth and stone.
THE UNWANTED CHILD
I was the wrong music
The wrong guest for you
When I came through the tundras
And thro’ the dew.
Summon’d, tho’ unwanted,
Hated, tho’ true
I came by golden mountains
To dwell with you.
I took strange Algol with me
And Betelgeuse, but you
Wanted a purse of gold
And interest to accrue.
You could have had them all,
The dust, the glories too,
But I was the wrong music
And why I never knew.
The story about her finding the music in the
spines of the books is made up by me.
But that 1871 edition of Scott, like many books over the centuries, bound with recycled old paper stock, really is lined and pasted with staved manuscript at the back of the pages, at least, the ones I’ve got on my desk are. And she really could, as a girl, hang from the parapet of a Nairn bridge by her arms, and pretty much everything else here can be found and is sourced in the collections of her poems which her good friend from her university years in Aberdeen and Cambridge, the Medieval and Renaissance academic Helena Mennie Shire, edited after Olive Fraser’s death, The Pure Account (Aberdeen University Press, 1981) and The Wrong Music (Canongate, 1989).
Think of the Waverley collection on the shelves, the full twenty-five novels, their spines sliced back and open and the music inside them visible.
In a poem pamphlet by Sophie Mayer called TV GIRLS, full of poems about contemporary TV heroines, Mayer lists the weapons that Buffy the Vampire Slayer uses throughout the show’s seven TV seasons to keep the vampires, demons and various forces of evil at bay. On her list, in among the stakes and swords and sunlight, is ‘library card’.
I wrote and asked her about the library card as weapon. This is what she replied:
Libraries save the world, a lot, but outside the narrative mode of heroism: through contemplative action, anonymously and collectively. For me, the public library is the ideal model of society, the best possible shared space, a community of consent – an anarcho-syndicalist collective where each person is pursuing their own aim (education, entertainment, affect, rest) with respect to others, through the best possible medium of the transmission of ideas, feelings and knowledge: the book.
I believe that within every library is a door that opens to every other library in time and space: that door is the book. The library is what Michel Foucault called a ‘heterotopia’, an ideal yet real and historically delimited place that allows us to step into ritual time (like the cinema and the garden). It is a site of possibility and connection (and possibility in connection).
Without public libraries, I would not have known there was a world outside the conservative religious community in which I grew up (and of which I would probably still be a part without the heroic librarians in our small suburban library who faced out work by Jane Rule and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and Leslie Feinberg even after the passage of Section 28). I believe libraries are essential for informed and participatory democracy, and that there is therefore an ideological war on them via cuts and closures, depriving individuals and communities of their right to knowledge and becoming on their own terms.
The human claim
I had been planning to write this story about the ashes of DH Lawrence. I hadn’t known what had happened to him after he was dead. Now that I did – at least, if what the biography I’d been reading claimed was true – I couldn’t get it out of my head. On the train home that night, even though it was a couple of months since I’d finished reading it, I’d got my notebook out of my bag and made some notes about it and about some other things too that the biography said had happened to him.
For instance, he’d be walking past a theatre or picturehouse in London in the First World War and the crowd would jeer at his beard, which marked him out, made him a visible slacker, a refuser, not enlisted, maybe even a conscientious objector. Then, the cottage he’d taken for some of the war years had been raided by the Home Office or the military authorities who’d confiscated not just some letters in German (his wife, Frieda, was related to the German military) but also a copy of a Hebridean song, because they thought it was secret code, and some drawings Lawrence had made of the stems of plants which, the biographer said, they’d decided were secret maps.
I’d thought I knew quite a lot about Lawrence’s actual life. I’ve been reading him since I was sixteen, when I chose a dual copy of St Mawr / The Virgin and the Gypsy for a school prize, mostly because I knew it would discomfit the Provost and his wife, who annually gave out the prizes; Lawrence was still reasonably notorious in Inverness in the 1970s. (It makes me laugh even now that the prize sticker inside my paperback says I’m being awarded for Oral French.) Now I was six years older than he’d been when he died. I’d felt for him all through reading this fine and thoughtful biography. Sitting on the train weeks later I was still preoccupied with him, his little red beard jutting in fury at all the patriotic clichés. All these weeks later it still made me laugh with real satisfaction that the authorities had been stupid enough to think Gaelic was some kind of secret code.
Above all, though, it was the story of what may have happened to his body five years after his death that I couldn’t stop thinking about. I was still amazed by it now, cycling my bike home from the station.
But then I got home and opened my mail and I stopped thinking about anything because there was a Barclaycard statement waiting for me which claimed I’d spent a fortune.
I only very rarely use that credit card, or any of my credit cards. I’m quite good credit-wise, honest. In fact, that card had actually been a hundred pounds in credit for months, which is why I’d recently used it to buy some shirts for Christmas in a clothes shop in London called Folk.
I looked at the total again. £1,597.67. Had I really spent that much money on four shirts?
I turned the statement over. Previous balance from last statement £100.37. 11 Dec Folk, London £531.00. 21 Dec Lufthansa, Koeln £1,167.04 1,840.70 U. S. Dollar, USA, Exch Rate 0.6340 Incl Non Sterling Trans Fee of £33.88 03 Jan New Balance £1,597.67.
Lufthansa.
I hadn’t bought anything from Lufthansa ever.
I phoned the Barclaycard number at the top of my statement.
Hi there!
An automaton instructed me that I could answer its questions either by pressing the buttons on my phone or by speaking into the gaps it would leave for me. It had been recorded by someone with a north-of-England voice, friendly, like a not too abrasive stand-up comedian. I gave this matey automaton my card number and it offered me some options. When none of these involved speaking to someone about a fraudulent claim and I didn’t answer quickly enough either with button pushing or by saying something, the automaton asked me to tell it out loud what I wanted.
I’d like to speak to someone, I said.
I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that, the automaton said. Try again.
I’d like to speak to someone, I said again.
I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that, the northern automaton said. Try again. Try saying something like: Pay my bill.
Speak to someone, I said.
I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that, the automaton said.
I stayed silent.
I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that, the automaton said. Hold on. I’ll just put you through to a member of our team who’ll be able to help you. Just so you know, all our calls are recorded for training and legal purposes.
I listened to the muzak for a bit.
Hello, you’re speaking to indecipherable, how can I help you? a real person said to me down the phone from somewhere that had the sound of very far away.
He asked me some security questions, to check it was really me.
There’s a transaction on here, I said, that I didn’t make and I didn’t authorize.
Don’t worry, Ms Smith, he said. Thank you, Ms Smith. I can see that, Ms Smith. Yes, Ms Smith, thank you.
He put me through to some more muzak. Some minutes later a woman answered. She also had the slight delay round her voice which signalled that although she was here in my ear, I was maybe on the phone to somebody on a totally different planet. She asked me the same security questions. Then she told me that this card had been presented for use yesterday for a transaction costing two pounds –
Two pounds! I said and this is what went through my head as I said it: I’d never use a credit card for something so small. It was as if I needed proof that I hadn’t used my credit card even though I knew full well that I hadn’t.
Meanwhile, the woman
was still speaking.
– card was then withdrawn just before the transaction went through, she said.
It wasn’t me, I said. I’d just like to make that really clear.
She told me Barclaycard would be in touch with me, that I’d hear from them over the next three weeks and that I was to be sure to reply within the requested timeframe or they would consider the matter resolved and charge my card accordingly.
For a transaction that I didn’t make? I said.
Be sure to reply within the requested timeframe, Ms Smith, she said.
And look – it’s in dollars, I said. I haven’t been to the States since 2002. I want it noted right now that I made no such transaction and that my card has been defrauded. I want this sum of money, for a ticket I never bought and a transaction I never carried out, wiped off my account. And I want you to stop this card this instant.
Yes, I can do that, Ms Smith, the woman said. There. Just a moment. Now. The card is now stopped. Please now destroy this card, Ms Smith. Barclaycard will send you a new card within the next five days or so.
I don’t want a new card, I said. Someone’ll probably just get its details and defraud it too. And how did Lufthansa get my details? Why did Lufthansa believe that this was me buying a ticket when it wasn’t?
It will now go forward for further investigation so that we can ascertain the facts of this situation, thank you, Ms Smith, the woman said.
It wasn’t me, I said again.
I sounded petulant. I sounded like a child.
Thank you for being in touch with Barclaycard, Ms Smith, she said. Have a lovely evening.
I pressed the hang-up button on my phone and found I was in my front room.
What I mean is, even though I’d been there the whole time, I’d actually just spent the last half hour somewhere which made my own front room irrelevant, even to me.
I stood by the fireplace and it was as if I had been filled with live ants. I went antsily around the house from room to room for about half an hour. Then I stopped, stood by the dark window, sat down on the edge of the couch. I told myself there was nothing to do about it but laugh it off. It happens all the time. People are always getting scammed. That’s life.