A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip. Alexander Masters
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he will play to us. Isn’t that charming of him?”
John took up a volume of Beethoven’s sonatas. The place fell open, as if by itself.
“What a messy page,” remarked Fleurette Blabbage.
“That’s fingering,” Val [John’s other brother, both in this story and in real life] informed her. “He’s practised this one a lot.”
John smiled at them, and put the book up to the rack. His hands stretched hungrily over the keys. Then he began to play.
A simple, delicate, singing melody, touched with magic, passed from the piano to the listening room. Fleurette Blabbage’s cynical grin faded. Clunes [Alec Clunes, who played Hastings in the Richard III film] leant forward intently. Suddenly Baker listened too. Irwin made a face. And as for John he forgot them all, and his troubles, caught in a spell of sound, in the world of black and white, and undescribed colours, and the infinite. His playing was soft and dreamy; all of a sudden it changed. It grew wild and impassioned. John too. They all started up, with a certain sense of shock. Irwin stopped making faces. After all, John wasn’t a bad player – almost good.
Then the first theme returned again. It was like a legend, remote, sounding through distant years. It was magic, mystical. John’s playing gave it that quality.
No one paid any attention to Fleurette Blabbage. The egg was gazing at John Gielgud with all her heart. Her large eyes rolled over his face. With them she traced his curling hair, large nose, firm mouth, and stern Gielgud lines.
“Mr Gielgud!” the egg suddenly yelled leaping to her feet. “Stop that at once! What a row! My poor ears! All the notes are wrong!”
‘I’ is a better artist than a novelist. The drawings can seem clumsy, as though she drew them in a deliberately primitive and rushed style, but they didn’t end up in a skip because of her lack of talent. She has an excellent feel for movement and a good sense of weight and balance. There are plenty of professional artists in Cambridge who don’t have half her unexpectedness and verve but still make a living with their flaccid still-lives and sculptures with holes in the middle.
The reason for ‘I’s failure as an artist is in the drawings; but it’s not the drawings.
It’s the figure of Worful.
Who is Worful?
He doesn’t appear in Richard III. There’s no character in the dramatis personae who sounds anything like that, or in Olivier’s film. But he’s the essential foil in the diarist’s strip: the hideous, rubber-faced, cowardly, sycophantic creature who jumps after Flatface across all the pages of the cartoon, belching, vomiting, pulling repulsive faces and betraying everybody.
But Worful had the necessar torture, after all …
The only time Clarence is laughing rather than looking sanctimonious is when he’s enjoying Worful’s pain.
The answer comes in the first book of drawings. Written in large letters, in the diarist’s youthful hand, it is at the top of the first page before anything else. But this solution is easy to overlook because immediately after writing it ‘I’ crossed the explanation out, as though the revelation was too painful. It’s cost me considerable fussing with the scanner and Photoshop to get rid of the obscuring lines:
Wor is me.
My diary is now a work of art – am not afraid of people reading it, though it is so intimate.
Aged twenty-one
As soon as I had the idea to write a biography of this anonymous diarist – a biography in which the biographer doesn’t know who his subject is – I was struck by an odd fact. Whenever I fantasised that she was somebody famous I felt immediately, and as decisively as if the books had been dropped on my head, bored.
The great excitement of an anonymous diary is that it might belong to anybody. Even giving ‘I’ a name destroyed a vital thing that made the books interesting – a sense of quiet universality. I wanted to know what the women I passed in the street or sat beside on the train were thinking, and these books, I thought, would tell me. Give the diarist a name and she became just another stranger who didn’t want to accept my gaze. Imagine that she turned out to be some celebrity and the books (and my voyeurism) became almost nauseating.
It says a great deal for the diarist that, for the next four years, she managed to keep me reading without displaying a single moment of coarseness or impropriety. She has remained, throughout the guided tour she has given me of her mind, honest, funny, outlandish … and respectable.
When, beyond the grave, I meet this extraordinary ordinary woman, I will tell her so.
I shall miss me.
Dido
Nothing is certain – that’s the number-one cancer cliché. Less than a year after Dido’s first course of chemotherapy, the tumours on her pancreas and liver began to grow again. On rare occasions, these chemo drugs work. Often they simply toughen the growths up and make it harder for later therapies to have an effect.
‘We return to the soar and the plunge,’ said Dido. ‘You’re not going to die, yes you are, no you’re not. Whoops, sorry, yes you are.’
One morning when I went to visit Dido in hospital, the London consultant, a usually excellent man, had not given her the correct anti-emetics. Her retching in the hospital toilet sounded like three men having an argument.
Scientific ignorance, avoidable errors of judgement, the appalling realisations of hindsight – these are integral to cancer, not separate from it. They are as much a part of the disease as the tumours themselves. I do not discuss this perception with Dido. It is my way of isolating the feeling that she is easing away and that life has, in some sense I cannot understand, already allowed death in.
To avoid thinking about dying, we have increased the amount of work we do on each other’s manuscripts – both of us are writing types of detective story: she, about the hunt for St Thomas More’s bones (she is the only person in the world who knows where they are buried); me, the hunt for ‘I’.
In her chapter on More in prison (coincidentally, the same prison where Flatface/Clarence was locked up), Dido had written: In the Tower kitchens the cook is building a pile of slow-burning hardwood and dry-crackle kindling, with which to stoke his cauldron: More’s head, before being stuck on a pole on London Bridge, must be parboiled to the consistency of pasta.
‘What sort of pasta?’ I wanted to know. ‘Heinz alphabet or al dente?’
From my bag, I plucked out a twisting, wriggling object.
‘Nooo, I don’t think that’s a rat,’ said Dido, taking it between her pinched fingers. It was a fragment of plastic, milky with age, that I’d found in a mound at the bottom of the Ribena box. ‘The second favourite thing for a rat to gnaw is a book spine, and the spines on the diaries are untouched. Their first favourite is an electricity cable.’
A faint, green-tinted segment of the letter ‘G’ filled up one corner of the piece of plastic.
‘But you agree that that’s a piece of disintegrated shopping bag?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then