I worked late, and when eventually I crawled into my sleeping-bag, I slept badly. The next morning I returned to the work, letting the decoration stay unfinished. Still my creative energy was undiminished, and page after page slipped through the carriage of the typewriter as if there was nothing that could ever obstruct the flow. As I finished with them I scattered the sheets on the floor around the table, imposing a temporary chaos on the order I was creating.
Inexplicably, I came to a sudden halt.
It was the fourth day, when I had upwards of sixty sheets of completed draft around me. I knew each page intimately, so impassioned was my need to write, so frequently had I re-read my work. What lay unwritten ahead had the same quality, the same need to be produced. I had no doubts as to what would follow, what would be unsaid. Yet I stopped halfway down a page, unable to continue.
It was as if I had exhausted my way of writing. I became acutely self-conscious and started to question what I had done, what I was going to do next. I glanced at a page at random, and all at once it seemed naïve, self-obsessed, trite and uninteresting. I noticed that the sentences were largely unpunctuated, that my spelling was erratic, that I used the same words over and over, and even the judgements and observations, on which I had so prided myself, seemed obvious and irrelevant.
Everything about my hasty typescript was unsatisfactory, and I was stricken by a sense of despair and inadequacy.
I temporarily abandoned my writing, and sought an outlet for my energies in the mundane tasks of domesticity. I completed painting one of the upstairs rooms, and moved my mattress and belongings in there. I decided that from this day my white room would he used solely for writing. A plumber arrived, hired by Edwin, and he started to fix the noisy pipes, and instal an immersion heater. I took the interruption as a chance to rethink what I was doing, and to plan more carefully.
So far, everything I had written relied entirely on memory. Ideally, I should have talked to Felicity, to see what she remembered, perhaps to fill in some of the minor mysteries of childhood. But Felicity and I no longer had much in common; we had argued many times in recent years, most recently, and most bitterly, after our father's death. She would have little sympathy for what I was doing. Anyway, it was _my_ story; I did not want it coloured by her interpretation of events.
Instead, I telephoned her one day and asked her to send me the family photograph albums. She had taken in most of my father's possessions, including these, but as far as I knew she had no use for them. Felicity was undoubtedly puzzled by my sudden interest in this material--after the funeral she had offered the albums to me, and I had said no--but she promised to mail them to me.
The plumber left, and I returned to the typewriter.
This time, after the pause, I approached the work with greater care and a desire to be more organized. I was learning to question my subject matter.
Memory is a flawed medium, and the memories of childhood are frequently distorted by influences that cannot be understood at the time. Children lack a world perspective; their horizons are narrow. Their interests are egocentric.
Much of what they experience is interpreted for them by parents. They are unselective in what they see.
In addition, my first attempt had been not much more than a series of connected fragments. Now I sought to tell a story, and to tell it in such a way that there would be an overall shape, a scheme to the telling of it.
Almost at once I discovered the essence of what I wanted to write.
My subject matter was still inevitably myself: my life, my experiences, my hopes, my disappointments and my loves. Where I had gone wrong before, I reasoned, was in setting out this life chronologically. I had started with my earliest memories and attempted to grow on paper as I had grown in life. Now I saw I had to be more devious.
To deal with myself I had to treat myself with greater objectivity, to examine myself in the way the protagonist is examined in a novel. A described life is not the same as a real one. Living is not an art, but to write of life is. Life is a series of accidents and anticlimaxes, misremembered and misunderstood, with lessons only dimly learned.
Life is disorganized, lacks shape, lacks story.
Throughout childhood, mysteries occur in the world around you. They are mysteries only because they are not properly explained, or because of a lack of experience, but they remain in the memory simply because they are so intriguing. In adulthood, explanations often present themselves, but by then they are far too late: they lack the imaginative appeal of a mystery.
Which, though, is the more true: the memory or the fact?
In the third chapter of my second version I began to write of something that illustrated this perfectly. It concerned Uncle William, my father's older brother.
For most of my childhood I never saw William . . . or Billy, as my father called him. There had always been something of a cloud to his name: my mother clearly disapproved of him, yet to my father he was something of a hero. I remember that from quite early on my father would tell me stories of the scrapes he and Billy had been in as children. Billy was always getting into trouble, and had a genius for practical jokes. My father grew up to become a respectable and successful engineer, but Billy had entered into a number of disreputable enterprises, such as working on ships, selling second-hand cars and trading in governmentsurplus goods. I saw nothing wrong with this at all, but for some reason it was considered dubious by my mother.
One day, Uncle William turned up at our house, and at once my life was vested with excitement. Billy was tall and sunburnt, had a big curly moustache and drove an open-top car with an oldfashioned horn. He spoke with a lazy, exciting drawl, and he picked me up and carried me around the garden upside-down and screeching. His big hands had dark calluses on them, and he smoked a dirty pipe. His eyes saw distance. Later, he took me for a breathtaking drive in his car, whizzing through country lanes at great speed, and honking his horn at a policeman on a bicycle. He bought me a toy machine gun, one which could fire wooden bullets right across the room, and showed me how to build a den in a tree.
Then he was gone, as suddenly as he arrived, and I was sent to bed. I lay in my room, listening to my parents arguing together. I could not hear what they were saying, but my father was shouting and a door slammed. Then my mother started crying.
I never saw Uncle William again, and neither of my parents mentioned him. Once or twice I asked about him, but the subject was changed with the sort of parental adroitness children can never overcome. About a year later my father told me that Billy was now working abroad ("somewhere in the East"), and that I was unlikely to see him again. There was something about the way my father said this that made me doubt him, but I was not a subtle child and infinitely preferred to believe what I was told. For a long time after that, Billy's adventures abroad were a familiar imaginative companion: with a little help from the comics I read, I saw him mountain-climbing and game-hunting and building railroads. It was all in keeping with what I knew of him.
When I grew up, and was thinking for myself, I knew that what I had been told was probably untrue, that Billy's disappearance was almost certainly explicable to the real world, but even so the glamorous image of him remained.
It was only after my father died, and I was having to go through his papers, that I came across the truth. I found a letter from the Governor of Durham Prison, saying that Uncle William had been admitted to the hospital wing; a second letter, dated a few weeks later, reported that he had died. I made some inquiries through the Home Office, and discovered that William had been serving a twelve-year sentence for armed robbery. The crime for which he had been convicted was committed within a few days of that crazy, thrilling afternoon in summer.