A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip. Alexander Masters

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       10 Ancestors

      Must tell E about how distinguished my family is.

       Aged nineteen

      The first thing every biographer needs when he’s trying to make sense of 148 notebooks is another notebook.

      How do you begin to catalogue five million words of anonymous writing? In the sticky-bits section of W.H. Smith I picked up Post-it notes. Among the computer software packages, I selected a docket for voice-recognition software. It would take only a few years to read in the entire 15,000 pages. In the hardware department, I changed my mind again. Delighted by the £40 photocopiers, I hoisted one to the checkout; I would do my editing on a duplicate of the books – now I’d have thirty thousand pages. Everything I thought of seemed to involve either damaging the books, or producing so much preparatory work that I’d be dead before I began.

      In the end I bought a packet of highlighter pens.

      Back at home, I categorised information into five types, one to each radioactive tint of my new highlighters: blue, for physical descriptions:

      Mother says I look like a sick ostrich.

      Orange, for biographical information:

      I have some sort of inkling that I might have been at the Coliseum in Rome, in a former life.

      Pink, for names: Nizzy; Sweet Swoo’ Boodies; an art student called Wolffsky who never – ‘gnash!’ – becomes her lover; his rival, who goes by the name of only ‘E’; Boots; Humfee; sisters Noon, Woill and Kate, aka ‘that perfectly repulsive child’ …

      Green highlighter was for examples of particularly good writing and quotable text:

      Went out to the library & Backs, sketched St John’s bridge on a Cambridge evening. Homesick for Cambridge even whilst I’m still in it – the leaf-lit path in John’s – a pattern of shade & sun all down the long wide walk, like a fantasy; walked with my head in green leaves & my feet on gold.

      My diary-writing rather like a form of prayer – do not pray, but of that temperament – confide on paper, & get strength from it, it purifies my soul. It is auto-suggestion, like prayer.

      If I die, I will leave countless of these little diaries, full of heartbreak.

      And yellow, for anecdotes:

      March, 1959: Archbishop Ramsey gets into her bed.

      March, 1960: The second knife attack.

      July, 1961: Feeding employer’s best cut of lamb to the dog.

      I imagined this multicoloured approach would be like extracting a body from an Irish bog, using neon highlighter instead of a shovel. I pictured the books laid out in the British Museum, a hundred years from now: Forensic Biography Began Here! Author Excavated Subject Using Staedtler Pens!

      Behind, stretching into the penumbra would be the annotated diaries, glowing like fuel rods …

      Picking out a small memo book, dated 1961, I made immediate progress with blue (physical description) and green (quotable):

      A note on my hair – it is glorious, tremendously thick, shining in rich goldy & reddy-brown & dark lights – prodigality of Nature for my youth, it won’t last forever. ‘Beauty that must die.’

      And on a sheet of blank paper, I began a portrait:

      which looks like the silhouette of an East End boxer glowering out of a wig. There is no further physical description in the 120 pages of that book. She remains a hairpiece for four years.

      Mr Hely this afternoon – in many ways, I enjoy these visits to the dentist! Enjoy chatting with this kind, feeling man. The treatment was uncomfortable – injections in the vein at the back of the jaw [but] I am so eager to give & receive love, like a desperate little girl, that I got something out of this social contact. Liked his body pressed close to mine, as he sat, & working with his hands on my mouth; the beauty, the tenderness of a man’s arms and hands. And feel he likes me, feels the attraction of a girl, with a lot of hair.

      In the next book, dated 1963, she is in London at the Camberwell College of Art, working as an artists’ model:

      One girl had done a nice sketch of me, & more true to me than a camera. A delicate face, interesting up-slant eyebrows …

      The sketch isn’t included in the diary, and it’s impossible to draw delicacy in a face without further information about the nose, so I added just the eyebrows:

      ‘… and light glasses …’ continues the entry:

      ‘… and the very long bones in my arms, giving me a touch of angularity’:

      The diary after that, she’s in a locker СКАЧАТЬ