A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip. Alexander Masters
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Название: A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip
Автор: Alexander Masters
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780008130794
isbn:
But Worful had the necessar torture, after all …
The only time Clarence is laughing rather than looking sanctimonious is when he’s enjoying Worful’s pain.
The answer comes in the first book of drawings. Written in large letters, in the diarist’s youthful hand, it is at the top of the first page before anything else. But this solution is easy to overlook because immediately after writing it ‘I’ crossed the explanation out, as though the revelation was too painful. It’s cost me considerable fussing with the scanner and Photoshop to get rid of the obscuring lines:
Wor is me.
My diary is now a work of art – am not afraid of people reading it, though it is so intimate.
Aged twenty-one
As soon as I had the idea to write a biography of this anonymous diarist – a biography in which the biographer doesn’t know who his subject is – I was struck by an odd fact. Whenever I fantasised that she was somebody famous I felt immediately, and as decisively as if the books had been dropped on my head, bored.
The great excitement of an anonymous diary is that it might belong to anybody. Even giving ‘I’ a name destroyed a vital thing that made the books interesting – a sense of quiet universality. I wanted to know what the women I passed in the street or sat beside on the train were thinking, and these books, I thought, would tell me. Give the diarist a name and she became just another stranger who didn’t want to accept my gaze. Imagine that she turned out to be some celebrity and the books (and my voyeurism) became almost nauseating.
It says a great deal for the diarist that, for the next four years, she managed to keep me reading without displaying a single moment of coarseness or impropriety. She has remained, throughout the guided tour she has given me of her mind, honest, funny, outlandish … and respectable.
When, beyond the grave, I meet this extraordinary ordinary woman, I will tell her so.
I shall miss me.
Dido
Nothing is certain – that’s the number-one cancer cliché. Less than a year after Dido’s first course of chemotherapy, the tumours on her pancreas and liver began to grow again. On rare occasions, these chemo drugs work. Often they simply toughen the growths up and make it harder for later therapies to have an effect.
‘We return to the soar and the plunge,’ said Dido. ‘You’re not going to die, yes you are, no you’re not. Whoops, sorry, yes you are.’
One morning when I went to visit Dido in hospital, the London consultant, a usually excellent man, had not given her the correct anti-emetics. Her retching in the hospital toilet sounded like three men having an argument.
Scientific ignorance, avoidable errors of judgement, the appalling realisations of hindsight – these are integral to cancer, not separate from it. They are as much a part of the disease as the tumours themselves. I do not discuss this perception with Dido. It is my way of isolating the feeling that she is easing away and that life has, in some sense I cannot understand, already allowed death in.
To avoid thinking about dying, we have increased the amount of work we do on each other’s manuscripts – both of us are writing types of detective story: she, about the hunt for St Thomas More’s bones (she is the only person in the world who knows where they are buried); me, the hunt for ‘I’.
In her chapter on More in prison (coincidentally, the same prison where Flatface/Clarence was locked up), Dido had written: In the Tower kitchens the cook is building a pile of slow-burning hardwood and dry-crackle kindling, with which to stoke his cauldron: More’s head, before being stuck on a pole on London Bridge, must be parboiled to the consistency of pasta.
‘What sort of pasta?’ I wanted to know. ‘Heinz alphabet or al dente?’
From my bag, I plucked out a twisting, wriggling object.
‘Nooo, I don’t think that’s a rat,’ said Dido, taking it between her pinched fingers. It was a fragment of plastic, milky with age, that I’d found in a mound at the bottom of the Ribena box. ‘The second favourite thing for a rat to gnaw is a book spine, and the spines on the diaries are untouched. Their first favourite is an electricity cable.’
A faint, green-tinted segment of the letter ‘G’ filled up one corner of the piece of plastic.
‘But you agree that that’s a piece of disintegrated shopping bag?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then it tells us that our diarist had south-facing windows and is unlikely to be an accountant or a policewoman.’
Dido flicked her infusion tube up and down impatiently, as though it were a cloak hem.
‘And here’s why,’ I continued. ‘The reason the books in the Ribena box are packed so badly is because the diarist first put them in this plastic bag, then squashed it into the box. So, if it’s not a rat that ruined this bag, it’s sunlight, which suggests a south-facing window, that it must have remained in this position for many years, and that the person is not well organised …’
Dido dropped the fragment of plastic back into my hand. She had a theory of her own. ‘She came from a village or a town.’
‘We don’t know that. She hasn’t said anything about her home yet.’
‘We do know it, because she can’t find the sheet of telephone numbers when she wants to ring the hospital to arrange a blood transfusion after her curse. Why did she need a sheet of numbers? Why not just ring 999? The reason is, 999 wasn’t introduced across the country until the mid-seventies, and she was writing in 1960. 999 was only available in cities then.’
On the train back to Great Snoring I read the rest of the diary from 1960. It is early December. The diarist is ‘tired and nervous’. She is in love with several men. One tells her she is ‘very sexy’; another is ‘a very virile sort’ (although ‘don’t like muscular strength in a man very much, it makes me afraid’), and has the inappropriate name of Mr Weakley.
One evening, ‘I’ takes herself to see Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Iolanthe. The fairy Iolanthe has married a human and borne a son who is fairy down to his waist. His legs are human. He is in love with Phyllis, a ward of court, but the Lord Chancellor is in love with her too:
But there’d be the deuce to pay in the Lords
If I fell in love with one of my Wards:
Which rather tries my temper, for
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