The Drying Rooms - Chapter Twenty Two
Mind Has Mountains
Audio version of Chapter Twenty Two
Extract from Maudie:
Maudie jerked awake, rigid with fear. The dark shape on the peg opposite was a floppy, headless person.
Even when it morphed back into a gym slip, the fear didn’t leave her.
Here she was, back in the drying rooms. In the middle of the night. Again! All because Axe had caught her creeping to the loo.
Maudie had made up her mind. She was going to do it this time.
She was going to run away.
I never did run away. I fantasised about it. But I never did it. My sister did though. My beloved baby sister ran away from the same school several years later. She was ten or eleven.
My sister didn’t tell anybody about her plan, which was to step out of the school gates and walk the couple of miles along the road to Miseryfield station and catch the train to London. And that’s exactly what she did. She thinks she stole money for the fare from an older girl after the older girl had refused to give it to her.
She knew this was her chance as our mother was on a brief visit home from Tehran.
She has no memory of crossing London on her own – how she navigated getting from Waterloo station to Sydenham Hill. But she did it.
I was already a grown up and living in another country. If I’d been in London, would I — could I — have saved her? Given her what she wanted, which was never to have to go back to that place. But go back she did. Within what she describes as an immediate turn around. Our mother drove her straight back to Waterloo station and put her on the next train back to Miseryfield, where the matron (not Cruel Matron — she was long gone) was waiting to meet her and drive her back to school. The only comfort in this story is that my sister remembers the matron being kind to her.
It was the ‘get back on the horse’ approach to life. If you don’t get back on immediately after a fall, you’ll let the fear take hold, and once that happens, you’re fucked.
Resilience. Endurance. Attributes ‘given’ to us, by our parents, by boarding school. Handy, yes, but only superficially solid; more container than core. The fear seeps through the cracks.
For her the resilience set in aged eight. Once it was clear she wasn’t going to be rescued, a bleak resigned endurance set in; an endurance that sometimes collided with an overwhelming desire to flee. She still gets it now.
Occasionally, she has acted upon it. Probably starting with the attention-seeking razor blade episode when she was fifteen at the senior school. She realises now that this self-harming was just a form of running away — it was a way to get home. And it worked. The senior school matron sent her home to her parents who were in London on leave from New York. And her parents sent her back. The next day, her father drove her back to the school. At least she got to stay overnight.
Reaching the point when running away appears to be the only solution has recurred throughout her life. As has the sense that life still hasn’t begun. Or is it just what some clever person coined as ‘the universal longing for the unlived life’?
At sixty-nine, she knows, logically, she is no longer still waiting for life to start. Yet, she can’t stop daydreaming about it. The habit of a lifetime. She can even remember the specifics of some of her childhood daydreams. One in particular recurs.
She is thirteen, maybe fourteen, kneeling on her bed in the corner of the senior school dorm, after dark, after lights out. The others are asleep. She is leaning out of the window, smoking a cigarette. Between each delicious inhalation, she stretches out her right hand, careful not to let the cigarette between her index and middle finger fall on to the dark lawn two storeys below. She is daydreaming about being free. About the unrolling vistas of freedom that lay ahead of her as a grown up. She is stepping out on to a stage, dazzled by footlights, the eruption of applause roaring in her ears. She is exuberant with success and fulfilment. Her parents are there, in the audience, clapping and beaming with pride. The cold boy she’s madly in love with is there too; in the daydream he’s an adult and he just happens to be in the audience and he’s wishing he had fully recognised her talent when they were at school and had requited her love.
And then, of course, there are the real dreams — over which she has no control. She had one last night. Another urine dream. This time, she was squatting in a public place, unable to get up and conduct herself in the normal, efficient way, because her body was totally controlled by the pissing, by the squatting down, and the pee was neon green. On waking, this strikes her as quite funny, but in the dream there was nothing funny about it. Stuck on her naked haunches in a huge pedestrianised area, looking up from her mid-pissing squat and talking, charmingly, politely to the passers-by.
Is it just after a bad dream, or is the febrile bleakness on waking ramping up as she gets older? It’s beginning to feel quotidian; Larkin’s days They come, they wake us / Time and time over are speeding up. Endurance. It helps, doesn’t it? The prop of an unshakeable sense of endurance. She remembers the comfort of her father’s words, driving her back to the senior school after the razor blade episode, his safe hands on the wheel: “We must endure, darling.” Yes, of course, that’s it. Of course we must. That’s just the way of it. It’s stood her in good stead— hasn’t it? Endure — and relish the joy (and, boy, has she relished the joy! The sex, the drinking, the love, the holidays, always the holidays; the deserts, the mountains).
That Hopkins line, one of the few she remembers from school; she often invokes it. Her children can see the line coming. O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall frightful … Her mother used to do it with Wordsworth; her mother’s mantra on the loss of innocence — we always knew when it was coming: Shades of the prison-house begin to close/Upon the growing Boy. This then segued into how innocence is actually a protector (the old vicar, a family member, who taught her mother the piano with one hand slipped into her blouse, touching her breasts, “I just thought he was keeping his hands warm.” That was said for a laugh. And it always got one. But what did her mother actually feel? Mum, what did you actually feel? Did you know what you actually felt? Do I know?)
… mind has mountains; cliffs of fall frightful ... Hopkins came along just when she was writing poems herself. She remembers sitting on a hummock of grass in the out-of-bounds quarry, smoking and writing poetry. Hopkins served her in adolescence and serves her again now. How does it continue? Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed. Hold them cheap/ May who ne’er ... ne’er what? Stood there? Hung there? ‘Hung there’, she thinks.
A human being dangling from one of those sheer cliffs in the mind.
Old age and adolescence have a lot in common, she notices. They both prompt existential churning.
She’s slipping into a familiar modus: watching herself in a film, seeing herself in a story. Weaving a story around a proxy of herself. A small story. Quiet, lonely, domestic, in which the protagonist is very middle class, a woman who could easily live in a pretty town like Miseryfield (even a signpost to Miseryfield makes her stomach lurch). The kind of story set in a silent humming kitchen with glass jars containing coffee beans and pumpkin seeds and a large table that once hosted the noise of the protagonist’s family. The kind of story in which an old woman masturbating alone has no place. Come on! Pull yourself together! Why’s that more truthful than the humming kitchen?
The truth is more operatic. Freedom. Escape. Taking flight. Trains hurtling through the night. Love-making by a log fire. Gulping draughts of sweet salty air by a rough sea. Deserts, lakes, moorland, mountain ranges, a tent ripped from its pegs, sun-setting skylines, burning horizons. Dancing until … closing time. And it's partner found, it's partner lost/ And it's hell to pay when the fiddler stops … She still craves Cohen’s sublime fiddler but she knows it’s gone. The future is breathing in her face. Is it always like this? Or is this just because she hasn’t bothered to get out of bed — hasn’t yet reassembled herself for the day. A shower, toast and tea usually does it.
She’s definitely going to change that Maudie bit. Radically. Why hasn’t she thought of it before?
Extract from Maudie:
The committee was having a summit meeting behind the pet sheds. Buzz was chair. Maudie was taking notes.
‘Maudie, write this down,’ said Buzz, ‘Action one. Find evidence. Action two. AMG.’
‘What’s AMG?’ said Kay, the new girl. Axe had chopped off her long hair the night before, so they’d let her join the committee.
“It means Axe Must Go,’ said Buzz.
What a powerful raw chapter! Brilliantly written. I love the way the old woman is linked to the adolescent. What strong currents flow through our lives from our adolescent years. The theme of wanting to run away is so well done. As Emma describes, I did actually run away from the same school. I remember most strongly the shock on the faces of my mother and my brother and my sister-in-law when I appeared like a ghost in the garden of our house in South London where they were all having tea. And as Emma describes, my mother drove me straight to Waterloo station and put me on a train back to school. I remember my brother's protests as we left the house "For God's sake Mum, let her at least have a glass of Ribena!" But I don't feel anger towards my mother. She was in anguish. I can remember knowing that as we drove through London to the station. And I remember a strange sense of calm coming over me in the car sitting next to her at the knowledge that the worst had happened--I was being sent back--but I was still there, in the world, with the streets of South London outside the window.
I've just listened to this three times. It's a beautiful interweaving of Maudie & memoir, third & 1st person narrative, and there's a surprising & tender moment when you address your mother, "Mum what did you actually feel?" Because feelings are something that our parents' generation tried to avoid feeling, let alone expressing, hence they were able to put you back on that boarding school horse again. AMG is a great cliff-hanger on which to end the chapter, and I'm hoping that, in the writing of Axe's demise, there'll be a catharsis, not just for us readers, but for you too. You will, in a very real sense be re-writing your own narrative, and experiencing that sense of agency, that has, at some deep level eluded you. I can't wait to hear the dénoument.....