Jacob's Room is Full of Books Page 20

  Things have improved greatly. They have had to. And as for the people who hate coffee and cake corners in bookshops … I simply do not understand them.

  AT LAST THE LEAVES have started to twirl down from the trees and it is looking a lot like autumn. Snow is reported by a friend in Sheffield. Mike, the taxi man, who was born and bred and has lived within a mile of Kings Lynn all of his sixty-two years, says that there will be a frost. He was almost right but around three in the morning, a wind got up, clouds blew over and the thermometer rose.

  Whenever the moon and stars are set,

  Whenever the wind is high,

  All night long in the dark and wet,

  A man goes riding by.

  (Who else would that be by but Robert Louis Stevenson? He was the best writer of poems for children until Charles Causley and Ted Hughes came along.) That haunted me in my childhood, along with

  If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet.

  Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street,

  Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie.

  So watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by.

  This poem, by Rudyard Kipling, is about smugglers, and why they are so romantic and fascinating and mysterious and delightful. Around the age of nine, I read as many stories about them as I could lay my hands on. I dreamed of joining them, as I also dreamed of running away to the circus. I had no real idea what smugglers and smuggling had really been like. It was a rough trade. But it seemed then, and still seems, a romantic trade, and one which only hurt the Exchequer.

  Robin Hood was a hero, too, we believed, robbing the rich to give to the poor. Technically that was, and is, immoral, as well as illegal, and possibly the rich suffered more than the Treasury. Possibly. I think we were all secretly on the side of the law-breakers, though, and sided with them as the authors of the stories did.

  There is no modern equivalent. Captain Marryat’s The Children of the New Forest made Cavaliers of us all. What is there now to rival that romantically persuasive book? I am a sort-of monarchist, so I suppose I must have been a Cavalier in another life. But there is a lot to be said for the Roundheads, morally speaking.

  When I started out as a book reviewer, to make enough to pay the rent and the grocery bill while I was writing novels, I was captivated by the story of the Battle of Edgehill and the Verney family. Edgehill was not far from where I lived then. I drove over one November afternoon. It was bitterly cold. I walked from the car to the site of the battle – more or less. I stood there as the sun set and the western sky flushed scarlet and blood red. And I had a terrible, and terrifying, sense of the battle all around me, of the dead and dying men, the terrified, whinnying, rearing horses, the chaos, the smell of death. People say that Edgehill is haunted. Perhaps this is what they mean. Perhaps more. But it was not a good place to be, alone as darkness drew in around me.

  As a writer, my imagination seared forever by the novels of Dickens and Thomas Hardy, I depend upon the sense of place. On weather. On the natural world around me. It is the pathetic fallacy, I suppose, to which I am subscribing, without accepting that it is in any way fallacious.

  I wonder if The Children of the New Forest would be readable now? There is a copy here, among the ‘children’s classics’. I put that in inverted commas because so many of them were written for adults and inexplicably were thought to have become adopted as favourites by the young. Publishers go on reprinting, re-designing, re-jacketing those titles no child ever reads now. How many editions of Robinson Crusoe is it possible to buy? And of Treasure Island. The Robert Louis Stevenson just slips under the net, as I have known a few under-twelves to enjoy it, myself among them. But that was sixty-five years ago. Never hand a child today a ‘classic’ you vaguely assume they will like because you and/or your parents and grandparents did and because it has the word somewhere on the cover.

  SNOW IN YORKSHIRE. Snow forecast nearer here. I hope we are going to get a hard winter. Today the advice of those non-medics employed to nanny us is for the over 65s to keep warm in cold weather, by eating hot meals and drinking hot drinks and wrapping up. I wonder if they ever sit back and ask themselves to whom they are talking? Those of us who lived through the years before central heating, who were not sent out in the morning without having eaten a bowl of porridge, who wore liberty bodices, for Heaven’s sake, and a vest and a school shirt and a cardigan and a coat with a lining and long socks inside boots and … Meanwhile, I sometimes pass school bus stops on bitterly cold mornings and see all the teenagers waiting to be transported to school, without coats and the girls in skirts reaching only to their thighs, hatless, bootless …

  And now, after a bright sunny start to the day, sleet is battering the window panes.

  WRITERS ARE ASKED the same questions over and over again and a regular one is, ‘Do you put real people into your books?’ The answer, of course, varies but most would say, ‘No’ and then, ‘Yes.’ It is the random detail that finds its way into the fiction. I see someone with an oddly shaped nose, someone very pale, someone with a long horse-like face, or hear someone speaking in a particular way, someone who always wears a hat, someone who always carries whatever they need for the day in a plastic shopping bag. Real people. But probably not recognisable by anyone reading my books, and whose names and life stories are unknown to me.

  Otherwise, the usual answer is, ‘No.’ I think some people want to be ‘put into a book’. Certainly, some people are sure that they have been and authors have been sued as a result. But I think it would be very difficult indeed to put a real, living person into a novel, whole and unchanged. There is only so much one knows. The rest is guess work, and how can one know the guesses are correct?

  The exception is the novel which is about real characters in history, but the same applies. If I put, say, Virginia Woolf into a book, as Michael Cunningham did in The Hours, that Virginia Woolf is not the real one, or only partly. What would she have thought about the picture of herself in that novel? She would have found the exercise interesting and I certainly do not think she would have disapproved, because she knew how it all works and she was all for experiment. But she would probably have said that she was not really like that, or that there was far more to it, or …

  The Hours is a clever, carefully designed book. It interested and intrigued me because Virginia Woolf has been my passion and my literary heroine for sixty years. But that Virginia is not altogether my Virginia. Which doesn’t matter a jot.

  And today, I read that a scholar who has written a new biography of Robert Louis Stevenson has discovered the identity of the real man who inspired, or was the model for, Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde. RLS had an Edinburgh drinking companion called Eugene Chantrelle and in some notes he made Stevenson wrote that ‘I should say that … Chantrelle bore upon his brow the most open marks of criminality; or rather, I should say so if I had not met another man who was his exact counterpart in looks, and who was yet, by all that I could learn of him, a model of kindness and good conduct.’

  Chantrelle murdered his wife by giving her an overdose of opium, and was thought to have killed several others, at supper parties for which he prepared a course of toasted cheese and opium.

  The chances are that the identification is correct, and Stevenson was indeed thinking of Chantrelle when he wrote his brilliant novella. But isn’t it ‘so what’? Chantrelle was clearly one of those psychopathic murderers who had a charming and even an intelligent and erudite side. It is a known profile. I once met a woman who had been a patient of Dr Harold Shipman, when she was a young married woman with small children. She said he had been as patient, gentle and thoughtful a doctor as she could have wished to meet and had looked after her through her pregnancies, and her children through all their various ailments, extremely well. And yet at exactly that time he was in the middle of his murdering career, killing dozens of patients. Of course, his victims all had one thing in common – they were older people, mostly in their seventie
s and eighties. He posed no threat whatsoever to young women with children, and so my friend always met Dr Jekyll and never, thank God, his alter ego – even though, ominously to my mind, she and he did live in Hyde.

  IF YOU ARE ASKED the same question often enough you begin to wonder if your usual answer is, in fact, the correct one. Why did I write The Woman in Black? Why have I gone on writing ghost stories? Do I like to frighten readers? Do I believe in ghosts? Have I ever seen a ghost? And so on.

  It is the first two that I need to think about again. I always answer that I had loved ghost stories for many years and that I felt it a pity that it seemed to be, if not a dying, then certainly a ‘fading’ genre. That most ghost stories are short stories, though two of the best ever written, A Christmas Carol and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, are novella length – whatever that is, but under 70,000 words anyway. I wanted to see if I could write one of similar length. All that is true, I think, but at the back of my mind is the thought that there is more. There has to be. I just don’t know what it is.

  Writers are always asked where they ‘get their inspiration from’ and usually there is no answer. It just comes. Ideas are nowhere one minute and in one’s head the next. Occasionally, I can do better than that. I know what inspired me to write about the First World War – it had been an obsession since my childhood, when I visited my grandmother and great aunts. There were seven of them – though I only knew five – and they had one brother, Sidney, who was killed on his nineteenth birthday, at the Battle of the Somme. There was a photograph of him. The aunts talked about him sometimes. I was aware of the air of sadness, like a wraith among these women, all the time. So began my interest, which became an obsession. I went to the first performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem in Coventry Cathedral in 1962, after which my obsession continued and increased. I began to read everything I could about 1914–18, but although I wanted to write about it myself, it took me another eight years to pluck up the courage and feel ready.

  None of that story has ever changed because it is all very straightforward and I remember the whole thing so clearly. But The Woman in Black – written eight or nine years after Strange Meeting – is different. I have always said I just do not know where the story, or Eel Marsh House at the end of the causeway, or the small market town of Crythin Gifford, or the woman herself come from. Yet I have that slight sense of their having come from somewhere and of knowing where. Yet I don’t. The isolated old house is a familiar – some might say essential – ingredient of the ghost story, or indeed any supernatural tale. But the causeway? The death of the child? The young solicitor and his older self, the townspeople who are so strangely silent on the subject of a woman in black who is sometimes seen, with terrible consequences? Where do all these things come from? Out of many novels read and which made an impression, over many years. Out of real places, once visited, not fully recalled and changed into fictional ones. All of those things, I suppose. It is like the ingredients in some recipe, put in and then left to marinade or to steep, until the flavours blend and change and the whole dish becomes more than the sum of its parts. A mysterious business. Best not to delve too deeply into its nature, perhaps. But people go on asking the questions and I go on having to give some sort of answers.

  THERE IS AN OLD HOUSE right out on the Point, which you can see on clear days and which vanishes in any sea fret or summer morning mist. It stands alone, and I thought it was derelict but apparently it is possible to stay in it, though there is no running water or electricity or sanitation or – well, anything. There is just the sea, the marshes, the sky and the sound the wind and the birds make. I wonder if I dare go?

  A FACEBOOK FRIEND asks what his 6-year-old daughter should read next. She has finished The Magic Faraway Tree stories. Is she too old for My Naughty Little Sister? She has turned up her nose at the Moomins. (What kind of a child is that?) I suggest our old favourite, Tales of Polly and the Hungry Wolf. Polly is the Alice in Wonderland of the twentieth century, pert, knowing, and a tiny bit irritating – there are times when one rather wants the wolf to outwit her. It is such an original concept, and so wittily carried out. Lila, at five, loves having the stories read to her, but some of the ironies and word games and general Polly cleverness pass her by just yet. Six will be perfect. Or sixty-six. Anything-six. All the best children’s books are enjoyed just as well by adults. That is not true of all the most popular ones. Mind, I defy any adult to stand more than a page of Diary of a Wimpy Kid – which is not to descry the books, because they do that magic trick, they get children reading, voraciously. So does Jacqueline Wilson, so does David Walliams. So did, and still does, Roald Dahl. But Dahl, especially Fantastic Mr Fox, is to the taste of at least some adults.

  Roald Dahl had a gyspy caravan in which to write. I had a shepherd’s hut, but left it behind in the Cotswolds. A summerhouse went along with this Norfolk house and at first I thought it would be perfect as my new writing shed. It is not. It is the right building in the wrong place – too far from the house when you have to go back for something vital, like a different pen, or the loo, and across some very rough and often boggy ground. It faces south, which sounds lovely but at any time from late April to October it is likely to be in direct sunlight and boiling. So it is little used. I keep planning a different shed, nearer to the house, facing west, but I am really perfectly happy inside – I move from room to room, at whim.

  A GREAT SKEIN of pink-footed geese went over tonight, in a perfect arrow. How do they choose their leader?

  THE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS switch-on. Always fun, always too early. The lights themselves are hideous, as they all are now, because they are the starry bright white halogen sort, and do that insane chasing round and round. What with that and the electric blue ones, it’s enough to give anyone a migraine and epilepsy combined. The churches’ lights are always pretty, though, softer, slightly golden – and theirs stay still.

  THE ANNUAL BOOKS OF THE YEAR choices come in and I forgot to do mine for the Spectator. I never choose fiction. This year it must be Christopher de Hamel’s Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts – such a sumptuous volume but with serious meat on its bones, about medieval ‘books’.

  I am assembling quite a pile to read over Christmas. Some new, or new to me, plenty read before. V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas is slowly becoming my ‘novel of all time’. I need a new copy, the old one is now shedding leaves. How touching that book is, how sad and funny. Mr Biswas is a tragic hero. It is really about pride, I think, in the right sense. Pride and family.

  DECEMBER

  I HAVE PUT OUT the bird feeders again. This long-drawn-out golden autumn meant there were so many berries and seed heads, as well as all the windfalls in the orchard, that they didn’t need peanuts and fat balls. The blackbirds and thrushes still forage happily among the juice apples in the long grass, but tits and finches are less well fed – though the teasel heads are covered in tiny birds. I have discovered that buying three big plastic buckets of fat balls at a time on the internet brings the price down and I get free delivery. I would support local shops if it did not cost the same for just one bucket from them and I have to lug it home.

  The woodburner is lit and the wood pile has been broached. I must be careful with that. Wasps lurk silently inside it and then emerge into the warmth. Yesterday two large hornets flew insolently around the room, getting their bearings. So now a can of Raid, and my emergency EpiPen, are on a sitting room table within reach and I have to wear the fire glove to pick the logs out.

  My last blood test apparently showed much lower levels of the specific Ig antibodies – but having almost died of anaphylaxis, I do not feel inclined to rely on the information.

  NO ONE GAVE ME a copy of last year’s bestseller, Lars Mytting’s Norwegian Wood: Chopping, Stacking, and Drying Wood the Scandinavian Way, so I guess the wood gets stacked the way I like it.

  Strange how people give one another random books they are never actually going to read. Thirty-plus years
ago, a TV advert for Yellow Pages had a man reading Fly Fishing by J. R. Hartley – a book that did not actually exist. It soon did, though, once a publisher clocked that people were asking for it in bookshops. He made a tidy sum out of it for a year. Clever.

  Then came books of answers to dotty questions like How do Armadillos Poo, or some such. They annoy me, these non-books, not because there is anything actually wrong with them per se, so much as because people will spend some of their limited funds on them to the exclusion of real books – good fiction, great children’s books, the best biographies, natural history – anything, really.

  DESERTED BEACH TO WALK POPPY on this morning. Dogs are banned here between April and October, so it was an extra pleasure. Huge swathes of golden flat sand. Sea far out. Lifeboat having some paintwork and repairs done. Cheerful men. Cromer pier is deserted, too. Not cold at all, though blowy, which it should be, beside the seaside. Everywhere is in wraps for the winter – candy floss stalls, tea cup rides, playground. Still plenty of fish and chips and ice cream, though. How we longed for ‘out of season’ when I was growing up in Scarborough. None of these places have ever, or could ever, survive without the summer visitors – and now the weekenders, half-termers, etc., and they are welcome because they keep the towns alive. All the same, to walk on an empty beach on a bright morning – not to mention being able to park close by – is why the rest of us live here all year round.