Moon Tiger (2 page)

A history of the world, yes. And in the process, my own. The Life and Times of Claudia H. The bit of the twentieth century to which I’ve been shackled, willy-nilly, like it or not. Let me contemplate myself within my context: everything and nothing. The history of the world as selected by Claudia: fact and fiction, myth and evidence, images and documents.

‘Was she someone?’ enquires the nurse. Her shoes squeak on
the shiny floor; the doctor’s shoes crunch. ‘I mean, the things she comes out with…’ And the doctor glances at his notes and says that yes, she does seem to have been someone, evidently she’s written books and newspaper articles and… um… been in the Middle East at one time… typhoid, malaria… unmarried (one miscarriage, one child he sees but does not say)… yes, the records do suggest she was someone, probably.

There are plenty who would point to it as a typical presumption to align my own life with the history of the world. Let them. I’ve always had my followers, also. My readers know the story, of course. They know the general tendency. They know how it goes. I shall omit the narrative. What I shall do is flesh it out; give it life and colour, add the screams and the rhetoric. Oh, I shan’t spare them a thing. The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history? I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once. The machines of the new technology, I understand, perform in much the same way: all knowledge is stored, to be summoned up at the flick of a key. They sound, in theory, more efficient. Some of my keys don’t work; others demand pass-words, codes, random unlocking sequences. The collective past, curiously, provides these. It is public property, but it is also deeply private. We all look differently at it. My Victorians are not your Victorians. My seventeenth century is not yours. The voice of John Aubrey, of Darwin, of whoever you like, speaks in one tone to me, in another to you. The signals of my own past come from the received past. The lives of others slot into my own life: I, me, Claudia H.

Self-centred? Probably. Aren’t we all? Why is it a term of accusation? That is what it was when I was a child. I was considered difficult. Impossible, indeed, was the word sometimes
used. I didn’t think I was impossible at all; it was mother and nurse who were impossible, with their injunctions and their warnings, their obsessions with milk puddings and curled hair and their terror of all that was inviting about the natural world – high trees and deeper water and the texture of wet grass on bare feet, the allure of mud and snow and fire. I always ached – burned – to go higher and faster and further. They admonished; I disobeyed.

Gordon, too. My brother Gordon. We were birds of a feather.

My beginnings; the universal beginning. From the mud to the stars, I said. So… the primordial soup. Now since I have never been a conventional historian, never the expected archetypal chronicler, never like that dried-up bone of a woman who taught me about the Papacy at Oxford time out of mind ago, since I’m known for my maverick line, since I’ve infuriated more colleagues than you’ve had hot dinners, we’ll set out to shock. Tell it from the point of view of the soup, maybe? Have one of those drifting floating feathery crustaceans narrate. Or an ammonite? Yes, an ammonite, I think. An ammonite with a sense of destiny. A spokesperson for the streaming Jurassic seas, to tell it how it was.

But here the kaleidoscope shakes. The Palaeolithic, for me, is just one shake of the pattern away from the nineteenth century – which first effectively noticed it, noticed upon what they were walking. Who could not be attracted to those majestic figures, striding about beaches and hillsides, overdressed and bewhiskered, pondering immensities? Poor misguided Philip Gosse, Hugh Miller and Lyell and Darwin himself. There seems a natural affinity between frock coats and beards and the resonances of the rocks – Mesozoic and Triassic, oolite and lias, Cornbrash and Greensand.

But Gordon and I, aged eleven and ten, had never heard of Darwin; our concept of time was personal and semantic (tea-time, dinner-time, last time, wasting time…); our interest in
Asteroceras
and
Primocroceras
was acquisitive and competitive. For the sake of beating Gordon to a choice-looking seam
of Jurassic mud I was prepared to bash a hundred and fifty million years to pieces with my shiny new hammer and if necessary break my own arm or leg falling off a vertical section of Blue Lias on Charmouth beach in 1920.

She climbs a little higher, on to another sliding shelving plateau of the cliff, and squats searching furiously the blue grey fragments of rock around her, hunting for those enticing curls and ribbed whorls, pouncing once with a hiss of triumph – an ammonite, almost whole. The beach, now, is quite far below; its shrill cries, its barkings, its calls are clear and loud but from another world, of no account.

And all the time out of the corner of her eye she watches Gordon, who is higher yet, tap-tapping at an outcrop. He ceases to tap; she can see him examining something. What has he got? Suspicion and rivalry burn her up. She scrambles through little bushy plants, hauls herself over a ledge.

‘This is my bit,’ cries Gordon. ‘You can’t come here. I’ve bagged it.’

‘I don’t care,’ yells Claudia. ‘Anyway I’m going up higher – it’s much better further up.’ And she hurls herself upwards over skinny plants and dry stony soil that cascades away downwards under her feet, up towards a wonderfully promising enticing grey expanse she has spotted where surely
Asteroceras
is lurking by the hundred.

Below, on the beach, unnoticed, figures scurry to and fro; faint bird-like cries of alarm waft up.

She must pass Gordon to reach that alluring upper shelf. ‘
Mind
…’ she says. ‘Move your
leg
…’

‘Don’t
shove
,’ he grumbles. ‘Anyway you can’t come here. I said this is my bit, you find your own.’

‘Don’t shove yourself. I don’t want your stupid bit…’

His leg is in her way – it thrashes, she thrusts, and a piece of cliff, of the solid world which evidently is not so solid after all, shifts under her clutching hands… crumbles… and she is falling thwack backwards on her shoulders, her head, her outflung arm, she is skidding rolling thumping downwards.
And comes to rest gasping in a thorn bush, hammered by pain, too affronted even to yell.

He can feel her getting closer, encroaching, she is coming here on to his bit, she will take all the best fossils. He protests. He sticks out a foot to impede. Her hot infuriating limbs are mixed up with his.

‘You’re
pushing
me,’ she shrieks.

‘I’m
not
,’ he snarls. ‘It’s you that’s shoving. Anyway this is my place so go somewhere else.’

‘It’s not your stupid place,’ she says. ‘It’s anyone’s place. Anyway I don’t…’

And suddenly there are awful tearing noises and thumps and she is gone, sliding and hurtling down, and in horror and satisfaction he stares.

‘He pushed me.’

‘I didn’t. Honestly mother, I didn’t. She slipped.’

‘He pushed me.’

And even amid the commotion – the clucking mothers and nurses, the improvised sling, the proffered smelling salts – Edith Hampton can marvel at the furious tenacity of her children.

‘Don’t argue. Keep still, Claudia.’

‘Those are
my
ammonites. Don’t let him get them, mother.’

‘I don’t
want
your ammonites.’

‘Gordon, be quiet!’

Her head aches; she tries to quell the children and respond to advice and sympathy; she blames the perilous world, so unreliable, so malevolent. And the intransigence of her offspring whose emotions seem the loudest sound on the beach.

The voice of history, of course, is composite. Many voices; all the voices that have managed to get themselves heard. Some louder than others, naturally. My story is tangled with the stories of others – Mother, Gordon, Jasper, Lisa, and one other
person above all; their voices must be heard also, thus shall I abide by the conventions of history. I shall respect the laws of evidence. Of truth, whatever that may be. But truth is tied to words, to print, to the testimony of the page. Moments shower away; the days of our lives vanish utterly, more insubstantial than if they had been invented. Fiction can seem more enduring than reality. Pierre on the field of battle, the Bennet girls at their sewing, Tess on the threshing machine – all these are nailed down for ever, on the page and in a million heads. What happened to me on Charmouth beach in 1920, on the other hand, is thistledown. And when you and I talk about history we don’t mean what actually happened, do we? The cosmic chaos of everywhere, all time? We mean the tidying up of this into books, the concentration of the benign historical eye upon years and places and persons. History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled. So, since my story is also theirs, they too must speak – Mother, Gordon, Jasper… Except that of course I have the last word. The historian’s privilege.

Mother. Let us take, for a moment, Mother. Mother retired from history. She withdrew, quite simply. She opted for a world of her own creation in which there was nothing except floribunda roses, ecclesiastical tapestry and some changeable weather. She read only the
West Dorset Gazette, Country Life
and the periodicals of the Royal Horticultural Society. Her greatest anxieties were concentrated on the vagaries of the climate. An unexpected frost could cause mild consternation. A bad summer was matter for gentle complaint. Fortunate Mother. Sensible, expedient Mother. On her dressing-table stood a photograph of Father, trim in his uniform, eternally young, his hair recently clipped, his moustache a neat shadow on his upper lip; no red hole in his stomach, no shit no screams no white singing pain. Mother dusted this photograph every morning; what she thought as she did so I never knew.

History killed Father. I am dying of cancer of the gut,
relatively privately. Father died on the Somme, picked off by history. He lay in the mud, I have learned, all one night, screaming, and when at last they came for him he died on the stretcher, between the crater that had been his last bed and the dressing-station. Thinking, I imagine, of anything but history.

So he is a stranger to me. An historical figure. Except for one misty scene in which a poorly defined male shape stoops to lift me and puts me excitingly on his shoulder from whence I lord it over the world including Gordon down below who has not been thus favoured. Even then, you note, my feelings towards Gordon predominate. But whether this undefined male is Father or not I can’t be certain; it could be an uncle, a neighbour. Father’s course and mine were not long entwined.

So I shall start with the rocks. Appropriately. The rocks from which we spring and to which we’re chained, all of us. Like wretched thingummy, what’s-his-name, him on his rock…

‘Chained to a rock…’ she says. ‘What’s he called?’

And the doctor pauses, his face a foot from hers, his little silver torch poised, his name in gilt letters pinned to his white coat. ‘Sorry? What did you say, Miss Hampton?’

‘An eagle,’ she states. ‘Pecking out his liver. The human condition, d’you see?’

And the doctor smiles, indulgently. ‘Ah,’ he says. And he parts her eyelids, with care, and peers. Into her soul, perhaps.

Prometheus, of course. Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message. I once thought I was a myth. Summoned to the drawing-room, aged six or so, to meet a relative richer and more worldly than Mother, of whom Mother was in awe, I found myself swept up, held at arms’ length by this gorgeous scented woman, exclaimed at: ‘And here she is! The little myth! A real delicious red-haired green-eyed little myth!’ Upstairs, I examined my hair and eyes in the nursery mirror. I am a Myth. I am Delicious. ‘That’ll do,
Claudia,’ says nurse. ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ But I am a Myth; I gaze at myself in satisfaction.

Claudia. An uncharacteristic flight of fancy on Mother’s part; I stood out like a sore thumb amid the Violets and Mauds and Norahs and Beatrices. But I stood out anyway, with my hair and turbulence of mind. Other families’ nurses, on the beach at Charmouth, quailed when we hove in sight, and gathered their charges around them. We were nasty rough children, Gordon and I. A shame, really, with Mrs Hampton such a nice person and a widow too… They tutted and watched us with disfavour, playing too noisily, too dangerously, an unkempt, unruly pair.

A long time ago. And yesterday. I have still a chunk of Blue Lias from Charmouth beach in which hang two grey fossil curls; it has acted as a paperweight on my desk. Two
Asteroceras
, adrift in a timeless ocean.

Perhaps I shall not write my account of the Palaeolithic at all, but make a film of it. A silent film at that, in which I shall show you first the great slumbering rocks of the Cambrian period, and move from those to the mountains of Wales, the Long Mynd, the Wrekin, from Ordovician to Devonian, to Red Sandstone and Millstone Grit, on to the lush glowing Cotswolds, on to the white cliffs of Dover… An impressionistic, dreaming film, in which the folded rocks arise and flower and grow and become Salisbury Cathedral and York Minster and Royal Crescent and gaols and schools and homes and railway stations. Yes, this film blooms before my eyes, wordless and specific, homing in on a Cornish cliff, Stonehenge, Burford church, the Pennines.

I shall use many voices, in this history. Not for me the cool level tone of dispassionate narration. Perhaps I should write like the scribes of
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, saying in the same breath that an archbishop passed away, a synod was held, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. Why not, after all? Beliefs are relative. Our connection with reality is always tenuous. I do not know by what magic a picture appears on my television screen, or how a crystal chip has
apparently infinite capacities. I accept, simply. And yet I am by nature sceptical – a questioner, a doubter, an instinctive agnostic. In the frozen stone of the cathedrals of Europe there co-exist the Apostles, Christ and Mary, lambs, fish, gryphons, dragons, sea-serpents and the faces of men with leaves for hair. I approve of that liberality of mind.