I found my message in a bottle. I found a birth certificate. On the certificate were the names of my birth parents.
I never told anyone about this.
I never wanted to find my birth parents – if one set of parents felt like a misfortune, two sets would be self-destructive. I had no understanding of family life. I had no idea that you could like your parents, or that they could love you enough to let you be yourself.
I was a loner. I was self-invented. I didn’t believe in biology or biography. I believed in myself. Parents? What for? Except to hurt you.
But when I was thirty and I wrote the TV scripts for Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, I called the main character Jess. She is Jeanette in the book, but TV is so literal, and it was hard enough to fight for ambiguity and playfulness and use your own name, even when the thing was filed under Literature. File it under TV drama and I thought I would find myself tied to a ‘true’ story forever.
That happened anyway . . . but I tried.
So I had to choose a name, and I chose the name on the birth certificate I had found. It seemed that my mother’s name was Jessica, so I would call my character Jess.
Oranges won everything – BAFTAs, RTS awards, a script award for me at Cannes, numerous foreign prizes – and it was a big talking point in 1990, because of the content, and because of the way we handled the content. It was a landmark for gay culture, and I hope it was a cultural landmark too. I think it was. A 2008 poll of Best Ever BBC Dramas put Oranges at number 8.
I reckoned with all the fuss, including and especially in the tabloid press (end of decency as we know it, etc.), that my mother Jess would hear about it, and put two and two together.
No.
Flash forward to 2007 and I have done nothing about finding my past. It isn’t ‘my past’, is it? I have written over it. I have recorded on top of it. I have repainted it. Life is layers, fluid, unfixed, fragments. I never could write a story with a beginning, a middle and an end in the usual way because it felt untrue to me. That is why I write as I do and how I write as I do. It isn’t a method; it’s me.
I was writing a novel called The Stone Gods. It is set in the future, though the second section is set in the past. It imagines our world in its protean state being discovered by an advanced but destructive civilisation whose own planet is dying. A mission is sent to Planet Blue. The mission does not return.
Whenever I write a book, one sentence forms in my mind, like a sandbar above the waterline. They are like the texts written up on the walls when we all lived at 200 Water Street; exhortations, maxims, lighthouse signals flashed out as memory and warning.
The Passion: ‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me.’
Written on the Body: ‘Why is the measure of love loss?’
The PowerBook: ‘To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run.’
Weight: ‘The free man never thinks of escape.’
The Stone Gods: ‘Everything is imprinted forever with what it once was.’
In my previous novel, Lighthousekeeping, I had been working with the idea of a fossil record. Now I was there again – the sense of something written over, yes, but still distinct. The colours and forms revealed under ultraviolet light. The ghost in the machine that breaks through into the new recording.
What was the ‘imprint’?
I was having a hard time. My six-year relationship with director Deborah Warner was rocky and unhappy for us both.
I was trying to write. The book was pushing me. Creative work is a lie detector. I wanted to lie to myself – if lies are the comforts and the cover-ups.
In the spring of 2007, my father’s second wife Lillian died unexpectedly. She was ten years younger than him, and had been lively and merry. A botched hip replacement had led to foot gangrene, foot gangrene had led to no walking, no walking had led to diabetes, diabetes had led to hospital for a three-day stay. Three weeks later she left the hospital in a coffin.
Dad and Lillian had both taken respites in a care home in Accrington run by a wonderful woman called Nesta. She had worked as a comedienne on a cruise ship – and you need a sense of humour to run a care home. She had finally stopped telling jokes for a living and taken over the family care home business. She and I talked about things, and decided Dad should go and live there when there was a vacancy. He would get to church on Sundays and be taken out midweek and there would be plenty of people to visit him. I would make the 350-mile round trip to see him once a month.
I drove up to Accrington and cleared out his bungalow and was busy arranging everything in the preoccupied way that you do – the interminable paperwork of death.
All the photos had definitely gone, taken by the ghastly Uncle Alec (him of the Dobermanns), for what purpose I don’t know. There was nothing really of the old days, but there was a locked chest.
Treasure? I have always believed that the buried treasure is really there . . .
I went to my car, got a screwdriver and a hammer, and drove the screwdriver into the mouth of the padlock. It sprang open.
To my horror the chest was full of Royal Albert, including a three-tier cake stand. Why had Dad hidden the remnants of the Royal Albert in a Long John Silver pirate chest?
There were some other bits of crockery that brought the taste of my childhood back into my mouth. Mrs Winterson’s ‘cottage’ plates, hand-painted with golden edges, and in the centre a little cottage on its own in a wood . . . (rather like where I live now).
There were Dad’s medals from the war and some notes and letters from Mrs W, and some sad personal items, and some horrible things about me, so I threw those away, and a few of her weekly shopping lists and budgets, and saddest of all, her letter to Dad, written in very shaky copperplate handwriting, telling him step by step what to do after she was dead – the insurance policy for the funeral . . . the pension papers . . . the deeds for the house.
Poor Dad – did he ever expect to outlive two wives? Unlike Mrs Winterson, Lillian had left no instructions – but this time it was all right because this time I could be there.
I lifted out the Royal Albert salmon platter. Underneath was a little box. A box hiding in a box . . . Not locked . . . a bit of jewellery, a few envelopes, a few papers carefully folded.
The first bit of paper was a court order dated 1960. It was my formal adoption paper. The second bit of paper was a kind of MOT of Baby: I was not a mental defective. I was well enough to be adopted. I had been breastfed . . .
And I had had a name – violently crossed out. The top of the paper had been torn too, so that I could not read the name of the doctor or the organisation, and the names at the bottom had been ripped away.
I looked at the court order. That too had a name – my other name – crossed out.
Typewriters and yellow paper. So old. Those things look like a hundred years ago. I am a hundred years ago. Time is a gap.
*
It is dark now. I am sitting in my coat on the floor of the empty bungalow. I feel emptied of the familiar furniture. I have opened a door into a room with furniture I don’t recognise. There is a past after all, no matter how much I have written over it.
Like the name on the pieces of the paper – the name written over – my past is there – here – and it is now. The gap has closed around me. I feel trapped.
I don’t know why this matters. Why this feels so bad. Why did they never tell me or show me? Why would they? And a baby is a baby. The baby begins again. No biography, no biology.
Then a string of lines starts replaying in my head – lines from my own books – ‘I keep writing this so that one day she will read it.’ ‘Looking for you, looking for me, I guess I’ve been looking for us both all my life . . .’
I have written love narratives and loss narratives – stories of longing and belonging. It all seems so obvious now – the Wintersonic obsessions of love, loss and longing. It is my mother. It is my mother. It is my mother.
But mother is o
ur first love affair. Her arms. Her eyes. Her breast. Her body.
And if we hate her later, we take that rage with us into other lovers. And if we lose her, where do we find her again?
I tend to work obsessively with texts, and I embed them in my work. The Grail legend is there – one glimpse and the most precious thing in the world is gone forever, and then the quest is to find it again.
The Winter’s Tale. My favourite Shakespeare play: an abandoned baby. A sick world which shall not be righted again if ‘that which is lost be not found’.
Read that line. Not ‘that which was lost’ or ‘has been lost’. Instead, ‘is lost’. The grammar shows us how serious is the loss. Something that happened a long time ago, yes – but not the past. This is the old present, the old loss still wounding each day.
Soon after that time I began to go mad. There is no other way to put it.
Deborah left me. We had a final fearful row, triggered by my insecurities and Deborah’s detachment, and the next day we were over. The End.
Deborah was right to go. What had begun with great hope had become slow torture. I do not blame her for anything. Much about us together was marvellous. But as I was to discover, I have big problems around home, making homes, making homes with someone. Deborah loves being away from home and thrives on it. She is a cuckoo.
I love coming home – and my idea of happiness is to come home to someone I love. We were not able to resolve that difference and what I didn’t know was how something as straightforward as a difference could lead to something as complex as a breakdown. The sudden unexpected abandonment, constellated as it was around the idea of/impossibility of home, lit a fuse that spat and burned its way towards a walled-up opening a long way back inside me. Inside that walled-up opening, smothered in time like an anchorite, was my mother.
Deborah did not intend to detonate the ‘lost loss’, and I didn’t even know it was there – not in any matter of fact way of knowing – though my behaviour patterns were a clue.
My agony over calling Deborah and finding that she would never return my calls, my bewilderment and rage, these emotional states were taking me nearer to the sealed door where I had never wanted to go.
That makes it sound like a conscious choice. The psyche is much smarter than consciousness allows. We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don’t.
I started waking up at night and finding myself on all fours shouting ‘Mummy, Mummy’. I was wet with sweat.
Trains arrived. Train doors opened. I could not board. Humiliated, I cancelled events, arrangements, never able to say why. Sometimes I didn’t go out for days, get dressed for days, sometimes I wandered around the big garden in my pyjamas, sometimes I ate, sometimes not at all, or you could see me on the grass with a tin of cold baked beans. The familiar sights of misery.
If I had lived in London, or any city, I would have killed myself by being careless in traffic – my car, someone else’s car. I was thinking about suicide because it had to be an option. I had to be able to think about it and on good days I did so because it gave me back a sense of control – for one last time I would be in control.
On bad days I just held onto the thinning rope.
The rope was poetry. All that poetry I learned when I had to keep my library inside me now offered a rescue rope.
There is a field in front of my house, high up, sheltered by a drystone wall and opened by a long view of hills. When I could not cope I went and sat in that field against that wall and fixed on that view.
The countryside, the natural world, my cats, and English Literature A–Z were what I could lean on and hold onto.
My friends never failed me and when I could talk I did talk to them.
But often I could not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. The abandoned place.
Where are you?
But what is really your own never does leave you. I could not find words, not directly, for my own state, but every so often I could write, and I did so in lit-up explosions, that for a time showed me that there was still a world – proper and splendid. I could be my own flare to see by. Then the light went out again.
I had already written two books for children: The King of Capri, a picture book, and a novel for older children called Tanglewreck. Tanglewreck imagines a world where time, like oil or water or any other commodity, is running out.
I wrote these books for my godchildren, the children and the books giving me uncomplicated delight.
Arriving back from Holland in December 2007 I had used up all my resources giving an important public lecture and trying to act normal. I was sweating again, and when I got into the house I couldn’t even manage to light the fire. So I sat in my overcoat with a tin of baked beans in my hands, and both cats on my knees.
I thought of a story – a Christmas story, the Christmas story from the donkey’s point of view called ‘The Lion, the Unicorn and Me’. The donkey gets a golden nose when he lifts up his head to bray and the angel’s foot, dangling from the wormy rafters of the stable, brushes his nose.
I was the donkey. I needed a golden nose.
I wrote the story that night – until about five in the morning, then slept and slept, for nearly twenty-four hours.
The story was published in The Times. On Christmas Eve, a very nice lady sent me an email saying it had made her cry and it had made her little girl laugh and cry, and could her publishing house illustrate it and publish it?
That is what happened.
And it wasn’t the end of the books rescuing me. If poetry was a rope, then the books themselves were rafts. At my most precarious I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.
Feeling. I didn’t want to feel.
The best reprieve for me at that time was to go to Paris and hide in the bookshop Shakespeare and Company.
I had become friends with the owner, Sylvia Whitman, a young woman whose enormous energy and enthusiasm carry her through most things. Her father George, who opened the shop on its present site by Notre-Dame in 1951, still lives upstairs, perched like an old eagle.
Sylvia arranged for me to stay in the unmodernised old-fashioned Hotel Esmeralda next door to the shop. On the top floor, with no phone, no TV, just a bed and a desk, and a view of the church, I found I could sleep and even work.
I could sit in the antiquarian part of the bookshop all day and much of the night, reading with Sylvia’s dog beside me, and when I needed to walk, the dog, Colette, came too. It was a simple, safe escape.
At the shop I had no responsibilities and I was looked after. Arriving once with a chest infection, Sylvia wouldn’t let me go home. Instead she made me soup, changed my tickets, bought me pyjamas and kept me in bed.
There was a feel of the old days in the Accrington Public Library. I was safe. I was surrounded by books. My breathing became deeper and steadier and I was no longer haunted. Those times were temporary but they were precious.
I wasn’t getting better. I was getting worse.
I did not go to the doctor because I didn’t want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live.
I knew clearly that I could not rebuild my life or put it back together in any way. I had no idea what might lie on the other side of this place. I only knew that the before-world was gone forever.
I had a sense of myself as a haunted house. I never knew when the invisible thing would strike – and it was like a blow, a kind of winding in the chest or stomach. When I felt it I would cry out at the force of it.
Sometimes I lay curled up on the floor. Sometimes I kneeled and gripped a piece of furniture.
This is one moment . . . know that another . . .
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
I love the natural world and I never ceased to see it. The beauty of trees and fields, of hills
and streams, of the changing colours, of the small creatures so busy and occupied. My long hours walking or sitting in the field with my back against the wall, watching the clouds and the weather, allowed me some steadiness. It was because I knew all this would be there when I was not that I thought I could go. The world was beautiful. I was a speck in it.
There was a dead fox on the path I took. Not a mark on his strong red body. I moved him into the bushes. That would be enough for me too.
And I felt that I had done some good work. I had not wasted my life. I could go.
I wrote letters to my friends and to the children. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t have to complete the end-of-year tax and VAT return. And I thought, ‘I wonder if they fine you if you don’t die of natural causes. Will Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs argue that I chose not to fill in my forms because I chose to kill myself? There is bound to be a penalty for that.’
So I was calm for a while and it seemed as if I had deferred the reckoning by looking it in the face.
Until the 1950s half the suicides in England were gassings. Household gas came from coal gas in those days and coal gas is high in carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide is colourless and odourless and the enemy of oxygen-dependent creatures. It causes hallucinations and depression. It can make you see apparitions – indeed, there is an argument that the haunted house is the house whose vapours are not spectral but chemical. This may well be true. The nineteenth century was the century of frightful spectres and shadowy visitations. It was the century of the supernatural in fiction and in the popular imagination.
Dracula, The Woman in White, The Turn of the Screw, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the visions of M. R. James and Edgar Allan Poe. The rise of the weekly seance.
The century of gas lamps and ghosts. They may have been the same thing. The classic image of a man or woman sitting up late by gaslight and seeing a ghost could have been a case of mild delirium caused by carbon-monoxide poisoning.
When natural gas was introduced in the 1960s, the British suicide rate fell by one-third – so perhaps that’s why there have been fewer ghosts for us to see, or perhaps we are not hallucinating at home any more.