A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip. Alexander Masters
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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.
Aged eighteen(?)
After an afternoon of studying the diarist, I put all the volumes back in their boxes exactly as I had found them: the old Cannings diary with its great project – the ‘it’ that MUST BE DONE!! – into the Ribena crate; the lurid modern books with their air of banal murderousness into the thigh box; the seven pads of drawings. I felt it was vital to preserve the order of the books in the boxes – as though even their arrangement captured something living and as yet unknowable about the diarist.
It was as I was about to put the first Max-Val pad of cartoons back into place that I realised who Clarence was. Flicking through the pages one last time, I stopped at a baffling episode in which Flatface (as ‘Clarence’) is out of prison and walking around a monastic courtyard.
One of the other characters is called Brakenbury. Brakenbury and Clarence? Hang on, isn’t that Shakespeare? Malmsey wine? Clarence must be the Duke of Clarence, the butt of Malmsey man. The room Flatface lives in with the Keeper and Worful is therefore the condemned man’s cell in the Tower of London. Yes, look! Here it is: Richard III … Duke of Clarence, brother to the king; Sir Robert Brackenbury [spelled with a ‘c’ in the middle], Lieutenant of the Tower … and there, the last name in the list, right at the end of the splendid round-up of extra parts: Bishops, Aldermen, Citizens, Soldiers, Messengers, Murderers, Keeper – the boy with a jaw like a casserole pot.
(‘Wessar’ is ‘I’s word for (I think) ‘bottom’.)
Shortly after Brakenbury appears in the cartoon strip, the point is absolutely settled, because in comes Richard himself, looking remarkably like Laurence Olivier:
That’s what this is! These strange figures are the actors from the 1955 Olivier film of Richard III. The one with the sparse, angular street scenes and Olivier’s lizardish king. Clarence is played by John Gielgud.
The reason for the baffling shifts in time in the comic strip is because the modern scenes are showing John Gielgud when he’s off set. For example, when he’s waiting to go to his brother Irwin’s lavatory:
Irwin: “Damn it all, John, he’s gone and pinched “Pride and Prejudice”, and he’s !!” John was more amused than sympathetic.
or being chased by eggs (‘I’s word for women):
“I’d love to come out with you Johnnie,” said the egg.
The young diarist is bewitched by John Gielgud. The actor’s face does not vary because it is a perfect denotation: those nine lines and the sprouting of hair are her hieroglyph of love.
Forgot to put in diary, that on Monday night – or rather, Tuesday morning, a swerb dream of Clarence in his brown gown, lying on the ground, weeping, with his head on his sleeve – a vague & c-feel [arousing] & swerb dream. Bother my duties – eugh. Want to have a fling!
Other exercise pads and jotters that I’ve discovered since contain attempts to start a novel about Gielgud. It’s an explosive story. Things constantly happen ‘suddenly’. People are repeatedly unexpected. Several times per page a narrative hand pops out and slaps the reader across the face:
John still felt upset, so accordingly partook of a great deal of Dry Martini, more than was perhaps good for him. His sense of injury and self-disgust began to melt away under the soothing effect of the drink and the stimulation of gay companionship. Irwin was also by now very cheerful, becoming more genial and expansive every minute, and waiting continually on Fleurette Blabbage, who proved herself to be extremely fond of shrimp-olive compote and exceptionally fond of mixed cocktail.