Читать книгу A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip - Alexander Masters, Alexander Masters - Страница 13

I was born to love and be a woman as well as an artist Really have a very feminine nature, though not all lipsticky and screams.

Aged twenty-one

What man hasn’t wanted to gawp around a woman’s thoughts?

It wasn’t just gloom and convenience that led me back to these books. It was eroticism. I was desperate to look at them again.

‘You want to know what I, a woman, think when I’m pacing around on my own?’ the author of the diaries seemed to be saying. ‘Settle back. Listen close. The answer takes 148 books.’

If I read these pages I would be like Tiresias, the Greek seer who spent seven years as a woman after being bitten by a snake. Asked by Zeus whether women or men enjoyed sex more, Tiresias replied that women got nine times more pleasure, and was promptly blinded by Hera.

Study these diaries, and I would learn secrets for which it was worth being blinded.

I pulled the curtains in my study in Great Snoring, shut the door and locked myself in. Where would ‘I’ take me first? The bedroom?

To my shock she took me to the toilet.

‘I’s curse began when she was fourteen, took over her life when she was twenty, at its worst ruined three weeks out of every four (one lost to fear, one to pain, one to exhaustion), and was not considered bad enough to need medical attention.

Soon the tummy ache came on. It was not as bad as when

it gets me extremely, but did feel awful; it certainly the

worst pain to endure that I have experienced. Took pills,

& knelt on the floor, just living for the pain to go.

I knew I should take all three boxes back to Cambridge police station and, if they remained unclaimed, after a suitable time have them incinerated. I was a pervert to do anything else. I was not a decent human being. The world has no business to gawp at a woman at a moment like this. The writer was already describing things in a way that makes it clear she never expects or wants anyone else to hear about them, let alone put them in a biography.

Thrilled, I lit a fire, backed myself onto an armchair and kept reading. I could hardly believe my luck.

In the early books, ‘I’ talks about her period in the same way that addicts at the homeless hostel where I once worked talked about a hit of heroin. It makes her feel blissful, as you do on a Sunday morning when you open your eyes, see the day has started long ago and slip back into dreams knowing there’s not the slightest need to get up.

Felt very warm & sleepy – a sort of healthy sleepiness of

period. In morning, felt everything very beautiful, & that

I’m beautiful myself. Men seem swerb [delightful].

She likes to see men weeping in the week before her curse. She pictures them sinking to their knees with griefs that are difficult to soothe. Once, on the bus to her sixth-form college during this pre-curse week, she was distracted by a juicy reverie. She imagined an opera in which a young girl ‘is kept under the domination of her possessive jealous guardian, who has arranged for her to marry a man who is young & handsome but whom she does not love’.

All the while she was on the bus, the hormonal diarist hungered over this promising situation. She imagined that perhaps the young girl’s guardian employs a painter to do her portrait, and forbids the painter to touch or talk to her. ‘But the enthusiastic painter cannot work in silence for long …’

Hearing the guardian’s footsteps they spring back to their proper positions. [The painter] stalks off, dripping brushes as he goes.

Yet when ‘I’ finally lets us see what this seducing artist who is about to make off with the girl looks like, it is a startling surprise. Sprawled amid the cascades of brocaded silks and velvet, he squats like a braised toad: ‘middle-aged, rather ugly, a red-head & a Bohemian, perhaps a little plump’.

The next morning, the diarist’s bleeding began.

Feeling generally washed out from period. Heard some Beethoven on wireless as I looked out of kitchen window onto the daffodils and garden beauty – and felt a deep & poignant sorrow which can only be felt by a rather heavy loss of blood. Such a profound effect have bodily states on one – so that I am cheerful even though I have no post or prospects, & utterly depressed.

In 1960, the monthly pattern of her period changed. It lost its euphoric element; the entire process became hateful. The pre-menstrual tension of her impending curse hung against her groin, pressed at her bladder, grew around her stomach – waiting to burst. A ‘congestion of body and soul!’

Her male GP says none of this is worrying – this was just what it was to be a woman. She has, he murmurs revoltingly, ‘ripened’.

The whole human race drives me to a frenzy of irritation, my habitual courtesy a very thin shell over my real passions.

And then the ‘congestion’ broke, sometimes to ‘within half an hour of its due time’; other times it’s days late or early. Once, her period started in the middle of a Mozart sonata she was playing on her employer’s grand piano. Another time, she was on the bus again, watching her reflection in the window and imagining she was in Versailles. Suddenly, she was on the Niagara Falls.

Felt I could hardly bear it today, when the flow came on again. It isn’t necessarily even pain, but a sort of queasiness, or faintness in the tummy or upheaval in the whole body. Don’t think I could keep any post with it like this, it is so incapacitating, but what can one do about it? Have lost a week over it as to doing anything – no work, nothing …

If an exam falls on one of these days, tough. If ‘I’ needs to do something that requires close attention, fine mechanical behaviour or being more than five minutes from the nearest lavatory, hard cheese. It’s a wonder girls get up at all, let alone go to school and beat the socks off the boys at exams.

Between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, as soon as the diarist tries to get started on anything, Nature sticks out a toe, trips her over and spends the next four or five days punching her in the stomach:

How ill it makes you feel; one can do nothing but hug one’s pain.

beating her on the head:

felt dreadfully giddy, felt I couldn’t even focus straight.

poking her ears:

Went down slowly to the Post Office. Was afflicted with hyperaesthesia, could hardly bear the noise of passing cars, couldn’t bear sound today.

yanking out her innards:

the pain & disturbance of a plunging womb.

and stopping her heart:

Rose in morning, but soon had that overwhelming tummyache and consequent faintness. The pain was awful – lay sprawled on my untidy bed, fainting, and sweating all over, my blouse undone. After about an hour or so, the tablets took effect and the pain went; felt cold after that, put back on my jersey, got a hot water bottle. When that awful hour was over, lay back in bed, became very sleepy, and with an unusually low pulse.

In October, she starts to develop ‘ugly feelings’ at her sixth-form college:

Feel curiously criminal desires, not so far from committing them – would like to attack someone, threaten them, hit them, even knife them; burn the coats in the cloakroom; break things.

She loses jobs, friends, including two possible boyfriends; the curse buggers up her holidays, her sleep, her eating – but, astonishingly, she never loses her self-control. She still walks down the street with a calm expression, as though nothing were wrong. ‘Don’t show it, because it isn’t right.’ She is a person of great fortitude.

Think I am rather superstitious over the period, because it is exclusively a female process, & mysterious, not like a cold in the head. Certainly, with the period, have felt iller than anything else had made me feel, worse than measles. Suppose the pain is the burden of womankind; yet it shouldn’t by rights be painful, it is a natural process. I imagine people who live nearer the earth don’t get it so much, people like peasants & savages.

During her lifetime, ‘I’ will have had around 450 curses, losing up to thirty-six litres of fluid and membrane, which is equivalent to pouring away her entire blood content six times over.

I tested it at the petrol station the other day: with the nozzle full on, my hand squeezing the lever tight against the grip, it takes one minute and twelve seconds to pump thirty-six litres into my Honda Civic. It’s enough petrol to blow up the entire forecourt.

Think the whole business of bladder and bowels is disgusting, and that Nature has shown shocking bad taste in creating such functions.