A Book of Silence Read online

  In 1968 I escaped. These were the days before the Gap Year was a well-organised middle-class rite of passage, but if you stayed on at school after A levels to do the then separate Oxbridge entrance exams, you finished school at Christmas and had an inevitable gap until the following October. My father filled this gap by packing us off to any foreign continent of our choice and leaving us to get on with it. It was probably the first time in my life that I had been on my own and responsible for myself; it should have been a time to break out. My skirts were spectacularly shorter than anyone in America had ever seen before – hippies and counterculture and the politics of protest and feminism itself may have been US imports, but the miniskirt was authentically British – and my class accent was less immediately identifiable, but I was not really up to it. It was six months of being the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong moment, just. I left Washington the day before Martin Luther King was shot and arrived in Los Angeles a week after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. In San Francisco I did go to Haight Ashbury, but I went as a tourist. From that perspective it seemed sordid and scary, and I left at once.

  I do remember, though, one bright hot dawn in the Arizona desert when I stared into my first huge nothing: it was the Grand Canyon. It was red and gold and vast and silent. Perhaps I should have sat down on the rim and stayed for a while, but it was too soon. I gawped for a bit and walked down a little way, then I turned round, got back on the Greyhound bus and went on to somewhere else.

  Then, that autumn, I went to Oxford. I became a student at exactly and precisely the right time – for then ‘to be young was very heaven’. What more joyful and lucky thing could happen to a privileged public-school girl than to find herself a student at Oxford between 1968 and 1971? It is fashionable now to decry the astonishing, extraordinary period in the late sixties – to dismiss it, or to blame it. I refuse to go there. I am with Angela Carter:

  There is a tendency to underplay, even to devalue completely, the experience of the 1960s, especially for women, but towards the end of that decade there was a brief period of public philosophical awareness that occurs only very occasionally in human history; when, truly, it felt like Year One, when all that was holy was in the process of being profaned, and we were attempting to grapple with the real relations between human beings … At a very unpretentious level, we were truly asking ourselves questions about the nature of reality. Most of us may not have come up with very startling answers and some of us scared ourselves good and proper and retreated into cul-de-sacs of infantile mysticism … but even so I can date to that time and to that sense of heightened awareness of the society around me in the summer of 1968 my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman.1

  Everything interesting and important that has happened to me since began in Oxford in the three years that I was an undergraduate. There I discovered the things that have shaped my life – the things that shape it still, however unexpectedly, as I sit on my doorstep and listen to the silence: socialism, feminism, friendship and Christianity; myself as writer, as mother and now as silence seeker.

  It was not instant. I arrived in Oxford more virginal in more ways than now seems credible. I felt like a cultural tourist, unable to connect directly with the hippies, with their drugs, mysticism and music; or with the politicos and their Parisian excitements, though I went like a tourist to hear Tariq Ali speak at the Student Union; or with the ‘sexual revolutionaries’ who whizzed off glamorously to London and complained about the repressive college, which expected us to be in bed, alone, by 10.30. I had to cope with the realisation that I was not the cleverest person in the world – a mistaken belief that had sustained me for years. It was culture shock; I had a strange, nagging sense that I was where I wanted to be, but I wasn’t quite getting it: an odd mixture of excitement and frustration. I wanted it. I wanted all of it. I did not know how to have it. My life could have gone horribly wrong at this point.

  Then, just in time and gloriously lucky, I tumbled, by chance, by grace, in with a new group of people. They were a group of American students, most of them Rhodes Scholars and all of them active against the Vietnam War. They hung out in a shambolic house in north Oxford. I am not entirely sure why they took me under their collective wing, but they did and I was saved. What they gave me was a connection point between politics and personal lives, the abundant energy that comes from self-interested righteousness, a sense that there were causes and things that could be done about them, and large dollops of collective affection. This household has become famous for something other than their sweet kindness to me – because one of the people in it was Bill Clinton, who has always, as far as I am concerned, been a loyal friend and an enormous resource; but it was not just him: it was the whole group of them.

  My world was transformed. The sky was bright with colour. I smoked my first joint, lost my virginity and went on my first political demonstration. I stopped attending lectures and my ears unblocked so I started to hear what was going on around me. I realised that a classical education, Whig history and compassionate liberalism were not the only values in the world. I was set suddenly and gloriously free. I made other friends, did other things – and we talked and talked and talked.

  A bit later this household gave me, rather unexpectedly, something every bit as important. One evening Bill asked me if I would go with him to hear Germaine Greer speak at Ruskin College, shortly before The Female Eunuch was published. He had heard she had terrific legs (she did) but very properly thought it was the sort of event that he wanted a woman to go with. Being Bill he quickly rounded up some more people and that night I met Mandy Merck and thus discovered the brand-new Women’s Liberation Movement.

  Once I felt secure enough to cope, it transpired that actually one thing my childhood had provided me with were the skills of collectivity. Groups suited me; quick-fire combative talk was something I had practised around the dining-room table from my earliest years. With well-trained energy I engaged in the very noisy, highly verbal student political life of the time – the noisy articulacy of the socialist left and then the emerging verbal culture of early feminism. In an odd way it was like all the good things and none of the bad ones from my own childhood. To speak out, to tell aloud, to break the silence (and, to be honest, to shout down the opposition) was not only permissible – it was virtuous, if not compulsory.

  In 1972 I had my first short stories published; I got married and I got pregnant. My husband was an American from upstate New York; he came to Oxford on a scholarship and stayed. By the time we got married he was a trainee Anglican vicar of the extreme Catholic persuasion – high church and high camp went together in those happier days. In the early seventies the best of the adherents of Anglo-Catholicism were all so funny, so witty and so quick, self-mocking, heavily ironic and we all loved talking. While he was training my husband invited a new friend to supper one night; the friend, nervous about dining with a heavily pregnant feminist intellectual, asked someone what we were like. ‘Don’t worry,’ said this mutual friend, ‘they all talk at the same time, very loudly; so you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.’

  So then I was an Anglo-Catholic socialist feminist. Perhaps the only thing that holds these two together is that they are both very noisy things to be. I quickly extended the din range, though; I became a vicar’s wife and a mother. A vicarage is the least quiet place imaginable – a house that is never your own and never empty or silent.

  My daughter was born in 1973. Looking back now, I know that my first experiences of positive nourishing silence were her night feeds. My husband’s great-grandfather was a carpenter – he had made furniture and when we got married my parents-in-law had sent from America the most exquisite New England four-poster bed made of bird’s eye maple with golden candy-twist posts. In the soft darkness of the pre-dawn, propped up in this beautiful bed, with my beautiful daughter contentedly dozing, I encountered a new sort of joy. From where I am now this does not surprise me, because that relations
hip between mother and child is one of the oldest and most enduring images of silence in Western culture. In about 2000 BCE one of the psalmists wrote:

  I have set my soul in silence and in peace,

  As the weaned child on its mother’s breast so even is my soul.2

  Four thousand years later Donald Winnicott, the child psychoanalyst, wrote, in a totally different context, almost exactly the same thing: that the capacity to be alone, to enjoy solitude in adult life, originates with the child’s experience of being alone in the presence of the mother. He postulates a state in which the child’s immediate needs – for food, warmth, contact etc. – have been satisfied, so there is no need for the baby to be looking to the mother for anything nor any need for her to be concerned with providing anything; they are together, at peace, in silence. Both the ancient poet and the contemporary analyst focus on the child here – but as a mother I would say there is a full mutuality in the moment.

  I remember it with an almost heartbreaking clarity. Some of it is simply physical – a full and contented baby falling asleep at the empty and contented breast. But even so I now think that those sweet dawns, when it turned from dark to pale night, and we drifted back into our own separate selves without wrench or loss, were the starting point of my journey into silence. I am a bit curious that it is the night feed, rather than any of the other times the ‘weaned child’ lies in the mother’s arms, with its wide eyes somehow joyously unfocused. There is something about the dark itself, and the quiet of the world, even in cities, at that strange time before the dawn, but also I suspect that physical tiredness enhances the sensation. More particularly, you are awake to experience it solely and only because you are experiencing it. If the feeding were not happening you would almost certainly be asleep, be absent from consciousness in a very real way. This is not true during daytime feeds, but here, in the fading night, there is nothing else to do save be present. The dark, the ‘time out of time’ and the quiet of night are fixed in my memory along with the density of that particular silent joy.

  At the time I did not recognise it for what it was, but I now know that it was an encounter with positive silence, in an unexpected place. For the most part the experience of having small children is not silent.

  Meanwhile I was in the process of becoming a writer; more words, more word games. More noise. It is easy to think of writers as living silent lives, but on the whole we don’t; when we are writing we usually work alone and usually with great concentration and intensity – but no one writes all the time. Perhaps as a relief from that intensity there is a tendency, at least among younger writers, to seek out people and activities. Anyway it was the seventies; feminist writers were engaged in demystifying our work, opening it up and talking about it. Everyone was in a Writers’ Group. I was in a wonderful Writers’ Group – with Michelene Wandor, Zoe Fairbairns, Valerie Miner and Michele Roberts. We wrote a collective book and we talked and talked and talked.

  I liked my noisy life. All that talking. All my life I have talked and talked. I love talking. I used to say that if I were ever in Who’s Who I would put down deipnosophy as my hobby. Deipnosophy means the ‘love of, or skill of, dinner-table conversation’ (from the Greek deipnos – dinner). I have always loved this word and I loved the thing itself. I’ve been lucky enough to know some of the great deipnosophists of my times.

  It is hard to think of a less silent life.

  It was – and this is important to me – an extremely happy life. I achieved almost all the personal ambitions I started out with. I am a published writer of the sorts of books I want to write and believe in: I have written five novels, including Daughter of Jerusalem, which, with Michèle Robert’s first novel, Piece of the Night, was credited with being the UK’s first ‘feminist novel’ and which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1979. I have also written a range of non-fiction books and, perhaps most important to me, I have produced a long steady line of short stories. I made a living doing freelance things I liked to do. I had two extraordinary and beautiful children with whom I get on very well. I felt respected and useful and satisfied. I do not regret any of it. This does matter. When things changed and I started not just to be more silent, but also to love silence and want to understand it and hunt it down, both in practice and in theory, I did not feel I was running away from anything. On the contrary, I wanted more. I had it all and it was not enough. Silence is additional to, not a rejection of, sociability and friends and periods of deep emotional and professional satisfaction. I have been lucky, or graced; in a deep sense, as I shall describe, I feel that silence sought me out rather than the other way round.

  For nearly twenty years I had a marvellous life. Then, at the very end of the 1980s, for reasons I have not fully worked out yet, that well ran dry.

  My marriage disintegrated.

  Thatcherism was very ugly. It was not just the defeat of old hopes, but in the impoverished East End of London where my husband had his parish it was visibly creating fragmentation and misery. There was a real retreat from the edge, in personal relationships, in progressive movements of all kinds and in publishing.

  Anglo-Catholicism ceased to be fun; and became instead increasingly bitter, misogynistic and right-wing; we stopped laughing, and a religion where you cannot laugh at yourself is a joyless, destructive thing.

  As a writer I ran out of steam. I lost my simple conviction that stories, narrative itself, could provide a direct way forward in what felt like a cultural impasse.

  I also went through a curious experience – a phase of extremely vivid and florid ‘voice hearing’, or auditory hallucinations. Although such experiences are commonly held to be symptoms of psychosis, and often form a central part of a diagnosis of so-called ‘schizophrenia’, this does not seem to me to describe the experience fully. I continued to carry on with my life. I found the content of these voices more absorbing and engaging than tormenting, and they certainly never urged hideous actions upon me. They were very distinct, however, and belonged to individuals, mainly drawn from fairy stories – a ‘lost little girl’, a dwarf, a sort of cat-monster. The most threatening were a sort of collective voice which I called the Godfathers and who seemed to represent a kind of internalised patriarchy, offering rewards for ‘good’ or punishments for ‘bad’ behaviour. I am still uncertain how much they were connected to the death of my real father in 1982, just a few months after my son was born and named after my father. When they were at their most garrulous there was a genuine conflict between my normal noisy lifestyle and listening to them and attempting to explore and understand what they were saying. There was an additional problem; inasmuch as they gave me any ‘instructions’ at all, these were about not telling anyone about them. This meant the rather novel experience of having something important going on in my life that I did not talk about.

  The worst aspect of all this was the fear, indeed the terror, that I might be going mad. It was the normal cultural response to the voices that was the most disturbing aspect; otherwise and in retrospect they gave me a good deal of fictional material, some interesting things to think about and an awareness that there was something somewhat awry in my life.

  In the early years of the 1990s I began to make changes in how I lived.

  I became a Roman Catholic, escaping from the increasing strains of high Anglicanism without losing the sacraments, the richness of ritual and the core of faith. I bought a house in Warkton, a tiny village just outside Kettering in Northamptonshire. It was the chocolate-box dream of a cottage in the country – very old with low-beamed ceilings and a thatched roof. At that point I did not seriously think that my marriage was ending. We bought the house jointly. It seemed like a sensible thing to do. My husband’s tenure in the Church of England was looking shakier by the day and it seemed reasonable for us to have a house to live in if or when he no longer had a vicarage. Whatever the intention, the reality was very soon that I lived in the house in Kettering and he lived in the vicarage.

  Then something une
xpected happened. My son decided that he wanted to stay at his school in London. (This did not last long, actually – when he had finished his GCSEs, he came to Kettering to do his A levels and we had an extraordinarily happy two years together there. I don’t think he has quite forgiven me yet for selling that sweet house and moving north.) Although he came to Kettering almost every weekend, I was suddenly, and without exactly planning it, living on my own for the first time in my life.

  Sometimes one’s subconscious plays subtle tricks on one. To be honest I went to Warkton in a bit of a sulk. It was supposed to be a noble way of supporting my husband – he needed more space, but he also needed no ‘scandal’. He was part of a group who wanted to become Roman Catholic priests despite being married. A small group of ex-Anglican clergy did in fact pull this off. But while Cardinal Hume was extending the tradition in every way he could manage on their behalf, clearly divorce, or even formal separation, was not going to be taken on board. An agreeable flat in London was not going to pass muster; a charming cottage in the country was much more acceptable. In many ways I felt that this was very thoughtful and kindly of me. I am not sure at that point I would have been up to doing it at all if I had thought how much it would change the trajectory of my life. Too much seemed to be changing too quickly.