The whole thing only took five minutes. Any longer and I don’t know what I would have done, but after all, what could I have done? By now I was no longer thinking of cancer; I was just thinking, ‘Thank God he’s stopped.’ Small blessings, like small worries, briefly erase greater ones.
‘You did well,’ said the nurse. ‘Don’t worry. Lots of people actually fight. I had to hit one bloke quite hard.’
Not long after, the doctor, who without his mask looked young and gentle, came round the ward. I did not entirely take in what he had said, though I nodded and smiled and asked questions.
‘It all looked totally normal. We didn’t find anything nasty. No tumours or anything like that. The stomach looked pink and healthy. No sign of a hiatus hernia. We’ll look at the samples of course.’
We didn’t find anything nasty. No tumours. The stomach looked pink and healthy …
I never got a firm diagnosis. ‘Probably just an infection.’ Or something to do with the extra kidney randomly discovered during those five months. How different are we all from the diagrams? What strangenesses lie under the skin?
Life. I was given it back. Not a year, not five years: no shadow. It took me several days to understand, and to shrug off the greatcoat of terror. It’s a common enough experience; the mind has been told, but the body can’t turn on a sixpence from one mode to another. The chemicals that are triggered by fear can’t disperse on the instant. People talk about ‘feeling flat’ when the good news comes, of its ‘not sinking in’. The body has depths; it is an ocean. How long does it take for a storm to die down?
But later, how light I felt. How light I feel. How grateful.
Outside the glass, the house-martin swoops, closer, closer, then turns on one wing and is off again, dancing away across the void. Not pinned on its back. Not ash on the ground.
When I first knew my husband, Nick was trying to get a newspaper to send him to the Falklands, where there was a war on. He had lived in Argentina, he knew Spanish. In the end, it didn’t happen, and we got married. One of the great pieces of luck in my life. But he used to say then, and has often said since, always to my intense dismay, ‘If I get killed in a foreign country, I want to be buried where I die.’ I thought, at first, he didn’t understand how sharply I would miss him and need the comfort (however bleak) of a body, or ashes, to visit.
Now I see that perhaps his wish has something to do with a life’s trajectory, the distance you can travel from your starting point. Maybe an animal’s life is best tracked through movement. The tiger flashing past the shadowing grasses, slipping beyond everything: sleep, death, families.
Why ‘animal life’?
I am an animal
Why call this book My Animal Life?
Not to degrade my life, but to celebrate it. To join it, tiny though it is, to all the life in the universe. To the brown small-headed pheasant running by the lake in Coolham. To my grandparents and parents, and my great-grandparents who like most people in the British Isles of their generation wore big boots, even for the rare occasions of photographs, and lived on the clayey land, and have returned their bones to it, joining the bones of cattle, horses, foxes. To the blind out-of-season bee bombing the glass of this window. To link, in a way I only learned to do in my thirties, my mental life to the body I love and enjoy, to my secret sexual life and my life as a mother.
My animal life joins me, also, to my death. That mysterious thing round a bend in the road which, like every other animal stretching in the breeze and the sunlight, I wish not to know about, not yet.
I am writing this book to ask questions — to which I do not know the answer. How can we be happy? What do men want, what do women want? What do children need from us?
Can I save my belief in the soul from my love of science?
How can we bear to lose those we love most? How do we recover from our mistakes — our many mistakes?
How do we forgive ourselves? And our parents?
Why do we need art? Why are we driven to make it?
And class: can we ever really change it?
If it seems rash to ask such questions, I have always been rash. And I am too old to be afraid.
We all ask questions something like these, silently or aloud, in pain or in hope. It is the process of asking I want to record, as the plane comes bumping down through low cloud.
Underneath, it’s still there. Earth. Families. The patterns of being stamped in our nerve-ends. The long stern game of our unknown genes.
My brother John, Grandma and Grandpa Church, me
Two families
and which one won
Nothing about families is simple. No, wrong: there’s a joy about the ‘all of us are here, we are back’ which begins a celebration, the joy of meeting and recognising and counting, the sense of completeness falling like balm: we’re home.
How I wish they could all be here now, Mum and Dad, Gees and Churches, the uncles and aunts, shrugging off scarves and coats, fussing and laughing and settling down; in both families, hugs and kisses. The dead are with us: Uncle Arthur palms a two-bob bit and smuggles it into my pocket, Aunty Eve takes both my hands in her ring-carbuncled fingers and offers the scented dust of her cheek, little Grandma Gee comes rocking towards me like a full-bosomed sea-legged sailor, dot and carry, dot and carry, all dimples, raising her hat to release a thin froth of curled white hair, but, suddenly fretful, calls, ‘Pa! Pa! will you hang this up?’ — her small navy head-hugging straw hat with the long pearl hatpin — but he is too busy crowing at my brother John, his beloved eldest grandson, ‘I’ll match you over 100 yards when you’re eighteen, boy! I’ll walk down the aisle at your wedding!’ All back from the grave, all home. Waves of laughter and tears crossing over.
But before that epiphany, if this was real life, there would be hours or days of preparation, negotiation, tension, not to mention shopping and bed-making and cooking, the rehearsing or erasing of half-forgotten fears and resentments, the burden of hope. Let everything be right, let everything be ready, what shall we tell them and not tell them? Don’t let us down.
And after the perfect moment of reunion, what then?
I come from two different families, the Gees and the Churches. My parents’ given names both tell a story. My father’s was Victor Valentine Gee, quite a burdensome, aspirational one, expecting from the child who was born in 1914, the year the Great War broke out, exploits both martial and romantic. Vic was named for Valentine’s Day, the day he was born on, a secret softness he tried to keep from the oikish adolescents he taught. His initials were V V G, which meant Very Very Good when teachers put it on homework; his demands on himself and others were high.
The Gees were clever and had standards, an end terrace house in Wolverton, Bucks, which meant they were upper working-class, a giant metal roller for the grass leaning against the garden wall, crimson hollyhocks six foot tall, and upstanding moral convictions. Wolverton was a grid of nearly identical red-brick terraced houses with blue slate roofs, a Victorian ‘New Town’ expressly built by the London and Birmingham Railway Company in 1838 to house the men who built the trains. Vic’s father, my grandfather Walt, was a Labour man and trades union leader at ‘The Works’, supposedly a hero for turning down a large cash offer from the bosses to go over to management, a figure in the community, as he let me know one day: ‘They’ll never let me buy my own drinks, in the club,’ he said with a wink. That didn’t sound good to me. ‘Why not?’