A Book of Silence (3 page)

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 unexpected 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.

The entirely unexpected thing was that I loved it. It is quite hard in retrospect to remember which came first – the freedom of solitude or the energy of silence. If you live alone you have particular freedom: when I first moved into the cottage it needed redecorating and I found myself choosing very deep rich colours. Someone commented on how different this was from all the houses I had lived in before, and I was slightly startled to realise how much of my domestic tastes had been a compromise between my preferences and my household’s. (It amuses me still to see how different my house and my husband’s house both are from the houses that we shared.) Food was another freedom; to eat what you want, when you want it, is a significant freedom after years of catering for a busy household with all the managing, compromises, effort and responsibility. These are little daily things, but they add up. Suddenly the amount of time in the day expanded, and there was freedom and space and choice. I became less driven, more reflective and a great deal less frenetic. And into that space flowed silence: I would go out into the garden at night or in the early morning and just look and listen; there were stars, weather, seasons, growth and repetition. For the first time in my life I noticed the gradation of colours before sunrise – from indigo through apricot to a lapidary blueness.

One morning very early I was outside and heard a strange noise, a sort of high-pitched series of squeaky protests. It was not a loud noise; I would not have heard it, even if it had occurred, in anything except the silence of a rural dawn. Suddenly something resembling an oversized bumblebee whirred past barely a metre from my face and crashed into the crab apple tree; then after a pause another one, and another. They were five baby blue-tits leaving their nest in the shed wall for the first time, free and flying, however clumsily, into the early sunshine. It was a privilege of solitude and a gift of silence.

For me, from the beginning, silence and solitude have been very closely linked. I know that this is not true for everyone – there are
people who love solitude, who spend enormous amounts of time alone, without having any sense of themselves as silent – who have, for example, music or even television on a great deal of the time and who go, in happy solitude, to social or public events – to concerts, plays, films, sporting events and to the pub. Equally there are individuals whose silence is happily communal – you sometimes see this with couples, who need and enjoy to have their partner in the house but whose relationship for long periods of time seems to need no speech to flourish. More deliberately there are the silent religious communities, both Buddhist and Christian, for whom the silence of the people around them enriches their own. But for me personally the two are inextricably entwined. I suspect this is because I am a deeply socialised person; when I am with other people I find it nearly impossible not to be aware of them, and that awareness breaks up the silence. I worry occasionally that this may have something to do with the thinness of my sense of self, which can be so easily overwhelmed by others. But for whatever reasons, I cannot properly separate the two and I have noticed that I tend to use the words almost indiscriminately, so that the phrase ‘silence and solitude’ can be almost tautological; they both refer to that space in which both the social self and the ego dissolve into a kind of hyper awareness where sound, and particularly language, gets in the way. This was space that I was coming to love.

It took a little while to realise how much I loved it. It was not a sudden plunge into solitude and silence; it was a gradual shifting of gears, a gentle movement towards a new way of living that gave me an increasing deep satisfaction.

I still wonder what created that profound change in me. I honestly do not think I had been suppressing a deep desire for solitude or a need for silence for a long time; I still feel it was something new.

Change. The change. I think perhaps that it really does have something to do with menopause. I am by no means the first woman to shift her life in her mid forties and create a new sort of space for herself. In 1993, quite soon after I moved to Warkton, Joanna Golds-worthy asked me to contribute an essay to her forthcoming Virago
collection,
A Certain Age
. At first I said I was too young – indeed, I did not finally stop menstruating for another ten years – but when I thought about it I became aware that there were changes going on – not just the ones I have been describing but more physical basic things. I had always enjoyed a textbook twenty-eight-day menstrual cycle; between 5 and 10 a.m. every fourth Friday I would start to bleed; I would bleed for five days and that would be it. Now that was getting bumpier, I could no longer count on the timing and instead I had backaches, bad-tempered fits and mild cramps. I, who had never shaved my legs or underarms on high feminist principle, was having to think about how I felt about the faint but real moustache that adorned my upper lip. I started to get hangovers and the occasional hot flush.