A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip. Alexander Masters
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than anything else.
and 126 pages and four weeks later shoots out from the bottom of the last possible page, with the words ‘watched her go with foreboding …’
In between, ‘I’ describes a stabbing.
Then,
to my horror, – a sudden burst
of blood rushed from my body
Ran about, & outside the house
calling for Nizzy desperately.
never lost so much [blood] so suddenly before in my life,
felt terribly afraid.
Who has stabbed him? Why? Who is Nizzy? ‘I’ doesn’t say. Where is he outside? Bleeding on the road? In the garden? I picture him leaping about a rockery as he clutches at his wound. What time is it? It might be first thing in the morning, because ‘I’ reports that he’s in his pyjamas. But then he’s a painter, so it could be any time of day.
Nothing about the methodical, evenly-spaced way ‘I’ forms his letters changes during this dramatic episode. If anything, a calm comes over the text. ‘I’ calculates that he will need a ‘blood transfusion’ and thoughtfully returns to the house to call his doctor so the hospital will be prepared for his arrival and have the machinery set up. But the sheet of telephone numbers beside the phone is missing – an absence that’s as good as finding the telephone wires have been cut. Weeping ‘with the added frustration’, ‘I’ scrabbles around for the phone list.
Then, abruptly, the squall ends.
The bleeding stops. Nizzy comes home and turns out to be his mother. ‘Crying in that uncontrollable way I sometimes have’, he tells her about the blood. Nizzy says he ‘is fussing unnecessarily’.
Our mystery diarist hasn’t been stabbed, slashed his wrists or fallen out of a window into a greenhouse. He’s suffering ‘because of my sex’.
The poor man’s got the curse.
He’s a woman.
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