Maggie Gee - My Animal Life

I have to write because I have to speak. Most genuine art is a break for freedom, a run into the light, evading the warders. Then craft comes in, refining, restraining, but the initial impulse is usually rebellion, the will to bring something new into the world. In the home I grew up in, too much was not spoken, or was dangerous to speak, suppressed and diverted. This is normal, of course. There are taboos and customs.

The custom in our house was, defer to the male. My father always had the last word. My brother John, being four years older, and very brilliant, knew more than me, and must have had more say, though that’s simplifying — he also represented more of a challenge to my father, which sometimes made his position precarious. My younger brother arrived when I was nine, so he wasn’t really part of the original family that established my sense of the universe I lived in, and my place in it as the youngest and most fearful. For the taboos in our house were backed up by fear, and once the fear was removed, once I had fled the coop and the old cock could no longer harry his flock, I wrote irrepressibly and joyously. And in social life, I couldn’t bear to be talked down; still can’t, to the cost of many talkative men who assume women only want to sit and listen. I like to listen, very much, I like to ask questions and learn from the answers, but I sometimes like to speak, as well, and sometimes I’m not ready to stop speaking. ‘Leave it,’ was my father’s way of closing subjects where we disagreed with him, or upset him. But he couldn’t tell me to leave my writing. He didn’t know I was doing it. And when he read things I had written, poems or stories, he praised them and encouraged me, not seeing that one day this precocious skill would enable me to write about the family, not seeing that I was acquiring the tools I needed to tunnel my way out into the open.

Though the nature of writing is always two-edged: it frees you, but it makes you work to excess. The novel is far too long, as a form, but still too short and too unyielding to relive your own life and make it right. The book suddenly takes off somewhere else, on its own. It makes a dash for the future as well as the past. It grows bored with the self, and seeks otherness. So I never quite found the infinite terrain where I could reinvent and absolve myself. But I think that’s the impulse, I think that’s why I do it. And yet the ground always falls away, the truth is not quite there, the door’s only half-open.

It is not your own life, though it is your own life. I can’t climb inside, yet so much of me is there.

My books are more me than anything else. That means ‘more of me’ not ‘more to me’; I could never say my work was more to me than Rosa or Nick; in the old conundrum, ‘What do you save from the burning library, the irreplaceable books or the abandoned baby?’, I could not save the books when the baby was crying. Yet the books, my books, matter more to my ego, to the frail-tough wavering stalk of me that holds me to the light where I can live in the world, have a husband, child, friends, ‘normality’. Maybe books allowed me to have my baby, made me stable enough to hold someone else. In that sense, the books I have written are me. They are better than me, less flawed, less impassioned, less swayed by brief feelings of hurt or anger, more able to see other human beings from their own point of view, rather than as the source of personal wounds or blessings which they can turn into in the shock of the moment, the shocking rawness of everyday life. Books are more accurate, more beautiful, less messy. And they waste no time; instead, they save it. I hate wasting time. Time is precious. My twelve books, piled pell mell on the shelf, have made something solid from the time flashing past: and with this one, there will be thirteen.

(For the first time, now my own life is stage centre. Am I straining to turn my best profile to the light?)

I write to reinvent, to impose order. To make the world outside the book bearable. To say there can be more than the violent chaos that sometimes washed about me when I was growing up. To tell the world what I think of it, too, to answer back: this is me, I see you . It was the same thing, really, long, long ago, when around the age of five I tacitly asserted that I could do more than copy the words on the blackboard, adding writing of my own to my first school ‘Writing’ books. I was a law-abiding girl; and yet there I was, writing, working inwards from the back pages of the notebook to meet the ‘official’ pages at the front, mostly rhyming ‘poems’ I thought I invented, as the first poet in the history of my world, pairing fish and dish, cat and mat.

A teacher must have read it and added silver stars, for when I found it as an adult, there they were, not much greyed by the years, on the edge of the pages. I cannot gauge how important that was. Would I have gone on if no one had noticed? Would I have kept writing if I’d never got published? In its origin, there’s only that urge to rebellion, a drive to make things new that pushes everyone away; but soon the young rebel wants someone else to notice. Someone did, thank God, and saw something in me. Something that linked me to all creation, something that allowed me to love myself. I think creativity exists in everyone, but many people never have the luck that I did, to chance upon a smile of acceptance or permission.

For me, rhymes clinched things, comforted, released like a chord on the piano when the elements are right and the pedal lifts, leaving the faintest, most satisfying silvery ring. I did not know what I needed to write: the act itself was what mattered to me.

It was like dancing. Yes, it was joy. I was on my own, I was free, I was dancing. The words were my own, my secret music. I learned what I needed to survive and be happy.

No wonder I was frightened, before Rosa was born. Would it be a transaction, her life for mine? My mother told me later that my father had said, ‘Perhaps Margaret won’t need to write any more.’ In fact, I needed to write more than ever. The miracle was, it was possible. I found a child-minder five houses down the street — her name was Daphne, and she had high standards; ‘her’ mothers boasted that the children came home with a new painting every day. I noticed they were worryingly quiet at table. But Rosa only went there for two and a half hours a day, and because she was tiny, Daphne carried her around in a baby-carrier on her chest, and I expressed milk into a bottle so that if she woke up, Daphne could feed her. Two and a half hours, from ten to twelve-thirty!

It was enough for me to make a start. Because Rosa still slept in a cot by our bed, I could write in the room that would one day be hers, a nice, bright room with a big pile of cushions, a square table with a red tablecloth. The sash-window looked out on the narrow pathway that led from the back door to the garden. A glimpse of green lawn, clematis, lilac, a sunlit space that I worked towards.

Time was short and infinitely precious. The milky, dreamy hormones were ebbing. I read through the slow, unstructured manuscript I had written in a trance while I was pregnant, and rewrote it ruthlessly, straight to typescript, without looking at what I had done before, in lean, quick, cinematic sections that reflected my newly urgent schedule. By the time Rosa was one, I had a novel to sell, and although for two harrowing weeks at the end she turned away from me to her father, her little plump arms pointing to the truth, that he had more to give her than her wild-eyed mother, fingers hammering the keys as I raced to finish, she soon forgave me when life returned to normal. The novel went to auction, and Heinemann bought it for two and a half times what I had earned before.