Susan Green

‘Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening,’ wrote George Orwell in 1940.

I will read anything by the American essayist Rebecca Solnit. Her writing is lucid and intelligent and playful; often travelling in unexpected directions to connect previously unseen dots; always political; fiercely intelligent and fiercely human. In examining Orwell’s legacy as a man, a gardener, a writer and an anti-fascist, Solnit meanders not simply into his biography, but into the history of coal, the tragic life of Mexican photographer Tina Modotti, Stalin’s obsession with lemons,  the exploitative rose industry in Colombia and the legacy of colonisation in Western names for Asian and South American flowers.

I knew George Orwell only through 1984 and Animal Farm. I knew he fought in the Spanish Civil War and was wounded; that he died of TB. In photographs, he looks gaunt and serious and high-minded. I didn’t know that he loved cups of tea, old British pubs, English puddings, cosy crime novels, watching toads and hedgehogs and other wildlife, fossicking in junk shops –  and gardening.

In his cottage garden in England and his farm in Scotland, he grew not only utilitarian fruit and vegetables but flowers. He planted roses; he wrote in an article for a left wing magazine about the joy of cheap roses from Woolworths, often wrongly labelled, so you didn’t know what was actually going to bloom and the flowers were a lovely surprise. An enraged lady correspondent complained; flowers were bourgeois. But Orwell thought that they were beautiful and life-affirming. As the song says, give us bread and give us roses.
Give us toads and hedgehogs and pudding.

These seem dark days. I sometimes feel guilty about how much I love living here in the country. My joy in watching wrens in the birdbath or the hare that comes lolloping through the bushes in the back yard. My pleasure in picking basil and making pesto for dinner. Bourgeois? Or a way of pushing back at the capitalist big brother who’s always urging us to be productive so we can consume? Both? There’s probably an essay in that.

Solnit ends the book with this summing up (I have put the last line in bold type):

Orwell’s signal achievement was to name and describe as no one else had the way that totalitarianism was a threat not just to liberty and human rights but to language and consciousness… that achievement is enriched and deepened by the commitments and idealism that fueled it, the things he valued and desired, and his valuation of desire itself, and pleasure and joy, and his recognition that these can be  forces of opposition to the authoritarian state and its soul-destroying intrusions.
The work he did is everyone’s job now. It always was.

I’m a fast reader, and when I get excited I’m probably way too fast. I finished Orwell’s Roses at greedy speed, all the while aware that I needed to slow down, to consider what I’d just read, to think and consider. To smell the roses? A nice little lesson right there; I’m going to read it again.

When I was a young teenager, I just couldn’t get enough Gothic. They were captivating, thrilling; a perfect package of romance, mystery, suspense. I loved Rebecca, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Moonstone and when I ran out of literature I plunged in to the mass market. These paperbacks always had a young woman in a floaty dress fleeing a forbidding mansion on the cover. (I haven’t actually read Hand of the Impostor, but you see what I mean). Some had more sex than others but I mainly liked the mixture of old houses, lurking danger and vaguely supernatural threats. I even wrote one of my own for a school English project in form 3; it was called Burnt House and featured a good orphan and a wicked sexy heiress who got hers in the end.

Which brings me to Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale.

Sold as a mystery in the vein of Rebecca and Jane Eyre, it’s a story about stories.
The famous and best-selling author Vida Winter has spent her life inventing stories, but has kept her tragic past a secret. Old and sick, she contacts a younger woman, writer Margaret Lea, and asks her to be her biographer. Lea agrees. She travels to Vida Winter’s isolated old house…and together they untangle the horrid truth from invention. I remember  a deliciously complicated, literary and decadent modern take on Gothic and I loved it.
It came out in 2006. I seem to have missed her next novel, Bellman and Black – a ghost story – but when a friend offered to lend me Once Upon a River, published in 2018, I knew what to expect.

Which is a rambling way of saying that though it’s good to have expectations of an author –  their new book will be a bit like their previous one – the author may not oblige. Setterfield’s 2018 novel, Once Upon a River is more Dickens than du Maurier, and once I got over it, I was fine with that.

In a Thames-side inn sometime in the later nineteenth century, the locals are assembled on the night of the winter solstice, drinking and listening to stories in the snug warmth. The door opens. A badly injured stranger walks in with a dead girl in his arms. He’s patched up by nurse Rita; the little corpse is put into another room. Where, some time later, it comes to life.
Who is she? For it turns out there are three drowned girls; Amelia, the kidnapped child of a wealthy couple; Alice, the daughter of a local lad gone bad; and Ann, the little sister of the parson’s simple housekeeper.

From that dramatic start, the story meanders, branches, pools and floods, flowing around 500 pages to its end. There’s a large cast of characters and a number of strands to the story; there’s murder, prostitution, infanticide, kidnapping. There’s photography, medicine, Darwinian theories, folklore, early psychology. And there’s the river.
Once Upon a River is full of likeable, admirable characters with a few black-hearted villains, a bucolic chorus of locals, an ingenious, multi-layered plot and – is this a spoiler? – a happy ending. With the awful events unfolding in our world at present, Once Upon a River was a good weekend’s diversion.
And a note about those mass market Gothics. A few years ago I found one of my teenage favourites – Maulever Hall by Jane Aiken Hodge, and tried to re-read it. The book hadn’t changed, but I had and sadly (or not) the thrill had gone. I had thought I might re-read The Thirteenth Tale but perhaps it’s best to leave well alone.

I have a long-standing fascination with Britain during WWII and the decade afterwards. I’m not sure where it began; perhaps with my parents’ memories of post-war expat life in London, or old movies like Mrs Miniver, or the novels of Barbara Pym. A bit of a niche interest for an Australian, but around fifteen years ago I began reading non-fiction for more background information. It turned out I found the social history, such as David Kynaston’s trilogy, Tales of a New Jerusalem just as riveting, dramatic and moving as the fiction.

Virginia Nicholson’s Millions Like Us is all about the women. For me, it was utterly compelling.

She uses diaries, letters, memoirs, interviews and autobiographies to chronicle the many varieties of female experience during the war. There are working class women and debutantes, vaguely bohemian girls and conservative middle class matrons, women who took on their war-time challenge with relish and others who couldn’t wait to get back into the home. Women were office workers, tram conductresses, farm labourers, foresters, factory workers, housewives, drivers, first-aiders, nurses, fire-watchers, messengers, code-breakers… Women as a group were desperately needed for the war effort, but many individual women endured a barrage of sexist prejudice and scorn from men in industry and other occupations, and of course in the military.

A number of specific stories are interwoven through the book, so that we move with a particular woman into, for instance, the navy, through the ups and downs of her career and out the other side into peacetime. Nicholson also follows family and personal lives as well as work roles; she’s interested in romantic relationships, affairs, marriages, friendships. There were some happy endings after the war’s end but for many women – widowed, bereaved, injured, exhausted –  it was not “bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover” but the beginning of a different kind of struggle.

Two of the stories have stayed in my memory. One is the young nurse,  Frances. In 1940, walking home after night of bombing, she was passing rescue workers at a bomb site when one of them called her over.
She now became aware that there was a terrible sound coming from the depths of the cater, seemingly underground; terrible screams could be heard issuing from a crevice among the debris…
The doctor, nurse and fire wardens in attendance were all too big to assist. They measured Frances’ hips and shoulders; she would fit through the gap into the hole. Stripped to her underwear so no clothing could catch on unsafe debris, she was lowered by her legs to see if it was possible to administer morphia. With a torch in her teeth, upside down, holding herself as rigid as possible, she hung in darkness and was able to locate a shockingly injured man, “crushed into a bloody mess.” They pulled her up, gave her chloroform, lowered her back down. She held the pad over what was left of the man’s face. There were other bodies, and body parts, in the cavernous hole. They pulled her out, gagging and retching, close to passing out.
“Thank you nurse. You did very well,” said the doctor. It was enough; she had played her part, and it was time to go home.
The stuff of nightmares.

The other is Frances, whose husband was part of the occupying British force in Berlin. She had a German nanny, Lotte, for her children. One day, Frances asked the young woman about her experiences before the capitulation. She showed the Englishwoman her diary.
It was horrific.
Filled with rage and malevolence against the German race, they found Lotte and repeatedly raped her, ‘not once…but time after time’.
Nicholson writes,
…the onslaught of the victorious nations was accompanied by a wave of unprecedented violence against women. It was as if the war’s calamitous endgame demanded a reassertion by men of their former ascendancy, an implacable conquest by the phallus. Over 130,000 women were raped, but women were discouraged from talking about it.
Nicholson notes that when the anonymous diary of a female journalist,  A Woman in Berlin, was published in 1947, it was controversial and condemned by some as a ‘slur on German womanhood’. But really, the idea was that  men – defeated, emasculated, impotent –  were already shamed enough. The subject of the rapes became virtually taboo.

By coincidence, shortly after I finished this book I read a news item about the Australian Lieutenant Colonel Vivien Bullwinkle, sole survivor of the Bangka Island massacre, where 22 nurses were driven into the sea and shot by Japanese soldiers. Shortly before she died, Vivian Bullwinkel revealed that she and most of the nurses were ‘violated’ – raped –  before being killed. But she was ordered by the authorities – government, military –  not to reveal the rapes. It was not politically expedient.

Resonate. Now, there’s a word. I Didn’t Do the Thing Today: On Letting Go of Productivity Guilt rang so many bells for me I’m still hearing them.

Madeleine Dore begins:
While I don’t know the particular shape your days take, there are things we all stumble over as we try to navigate modern life…each of us is entangled in a culture that measures our value through productivity – how much we do, how well we do it, whom we do it for. For many of us, our days have become containers for internalised capitalism, or the pervading sense that what we do is tied to our worth.

She goes on to talk about the undercurrent of guilt, anxiety and shame many of us live with…because we didn’t do the thing today.

Oh, yes. For most of my adult life, I’ve done a good line in self-bullying. In a culture that’s become more and more about ‘self-optimisation’, I’ve tried and failed to find the the perfect routine, planner, diary, time-management technique, hack, short-cut, seminar, product. Things work a treat…and then they don’t. I’ve tried and failed to exert more willpower, more discipline, more focus and drive. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t.

Dore makes the point that rather than making our lives better, this obsession with ‘doing’ leaves many of us feeling inadequate, stressed and burned out. Being busy doesn’t mean you’re being efficient, and efficient doesn’t always equate with effective. I remember my peak mothering and caring years; I’d ask friends and acquaintances how they were, and the reply was always, “busy” but it was understood that busy was actually a badge of honour. I’d nod, agree, me too. Rarely, I’d confess that I hated being busy. Always have. Humming along is good, but like most of us, I am not at my best when I am overly busy. I’d guess that my many weeks of illness as a small schoolchild – I was an URTI kid, with ‘chesty colds’ turning into pleurisy my speciality – were my body’s way of saying no. Stop. That’s enough.

The book contains a distillation of Dore’s research, reading, observations and insights, many of which have come via conversations with (mainly) creative types for her blog and podcast Extraordinary Routines. She starts with a gentle invitation to explore what works for us. To look into our contradictions, our changing wants, our limitations.

And give yourself permission to change your own mind as your days change, too.

Perhaps really I knew this anyway, but it’s good to have it hammered in to my brain: perfection doesn’t exist. Furthermore, going after it is just self-defeating and harmful.
As Dore reiterates, there are messy days, disorganised days, days when the unexpected (delightful or terrible) happens. A couple of weeks ago, a bronze-wing pigeon flew full-tilt through a large window in our house, killing itself and leaving shards and daggers of smashed glass everywhere. No one was hurt, but a half a day of disruption and effort (ring the insurer, find a glazier, organise a time, confer with the tradesman, etc etc) followed. Some nights, I don’t sleep more than a couple of hours. So the next day is unlikely to be peak writing time.

Just as no two of us are the same, neither are our days and the moments within them. Embrace them as they are, and as you are. After all, the most meaningful lives, I’ve learned, are often not the extraordinary, the perfect or problem-free ones – they’re the ordinary ones lived with creativity, curiosity, kindness and joy. Maybe that’s all we really need to do today, to find something to value within. Something to be curious about, something to love something to learn. That something might just be everything.

Dore has the grace to recognise that she’s not speaking to everyone. She acknowledges the urgent necessity to pick up tasks you cannot just put down, such as working to support a family, or caring for children or aged parents. Like so much of the self-help genre, this is aimed at people lucky enough to be able to take a step back.

January’s been a good month for reading. Hot weather, a holiday…

An Extra Pair of Hands
Kate Mosse
I’ve reviewed in these pages – moving and with our current aged care distasters continuing to unfold, lots to think about.
Gift

The Great Mistake
Mary Roberts Rhinehart
I’d read this before, but hadn’t remembered that it has the silliest and most complicated mystery plot ever, and I’m someone who loves an insanely complex plot. Rich people, big house, secrets from the past, an alarming death rate…
MRR was the queen of American crime writers in the early 20th century, a kind of early Agatha Christie and originator of the “had I but known...” narrative style.
My collection, S/H, re-read

His Name Was Walter
Emily Rodda
It’s not often a book makes me cry, hard-hearted old me, but this one did. I took a while to warm to the fable within the story, but when all was revealed, it was very moving.
Library

How To End A Story
Helen Garner
Gripping, addictive. Hurry up with the next volume of your diaries, please Helen.
Library

Elidor
Alan Garner
I haven’t read this since I was around ten. I don’t remember enjoying it much – if I had, I’ve had re-read it as I did The Weirdstone of Brisengamen. It is taut, sombre, frightening. Ancient otherworldly evil seeping into the urban streets of an English town…
Library, re-read

Monkey Grip
Helen Garner
I last read this in 1980, when I was 22.  Nora’s is a life I recognise, and remember –  share houses, the transient relationships, the drugs and drinking, the parties, the bands, the creativity, the searching, the transcendent highs and the resulting lows. Fiction, autobiography – I don’t care. The acquaintance who gave me this book said she was the same age as Garner, but her life was the polar opposite  – married, homemaker, nice house in the suburbs, three kids, mother’s club. She said she kept wondering what was going to happen. Nothing happens! Nora just churns around and around. Yes.
Gift, re-read

Atlas of the Heart
Brene Brown
I don’t think I really needed the larger format hardcover, but this is another good one from Brown. Alphabetic listing of emotional states; wise counsel backed by her extensive research. Brown’s ‘thing’ is shame and vulnerability.
New, on-line

The Far Side of the Dollar
Ross MacDonald
Ross MacDonald’s detective Lew Archer and his tainted adventures among sad, vicious, rich Californians are a special summer treat. I’ve re-read them to bits, but they still astonish. I have a list for my second-hand searching because there are about half a dozen still unread.
My collection, S/H, re-read

The Jewel Garden
Monty and Sarah Don
I just love Monty Don. He is a beautiful writer; his descriptions of plants and gardens make me swoon. In this short book, he’s also honest about  his battle with depression and his debt of love and gratitude to his amazing wife. Sarah chimes in with her perspective. He and Sarah ran a high-flying jewellery business (Princess Diana was a customer!) which came crashing down in the 1990’s. After they moved beyond the business failure, debts, struggle and despair, the couple decided to plant a symbolic and joyful Jewel Garden. Comfort reading for me.
New, online

Axiomatic
Maria Turmarkin
Skip read, couldn’t get on with it. Wrong book at the wrong time, I guess. That’s what so great about libraries – you can try things.
Library

A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman
Skip read this one too. I do like a light and fluffy read at times, but this isn’t my style. Too heartwarming!
Loan from a friend

Girl, Woman, Other
Bernardine Evaristo
Fantastic!
Book Group

One Day I’ll Remember This
Helen Garner
I would read anything she wrote, I think. I’ve ordered more from the library. My Year of Helen?
Library

My Garden World
Monty Don
A delight to dip into a bedtime if I need soothing. Another world! A world of plants and trees and wild creatures.  Nice and long.
New, online

Under Sea, Over Stone
Susan Cooper
Mmm…Expected to love re-reading this, but found my recently raised consciousness  had me noticing, in an uncomfortable way, the  small elements of racism and sexism. Couldn’t finish.
Library

I Didn’t Do the Thing Today
Madeleine Dore
Subtitled  “On letting go of productivity guilt”. Just what I need to be reading right now. Lots to think about, as I’m writing full time and thrashing around trying to find my rhythm.
New, online

And that’s January in review! 16 books. 8 non-fiction (2 of those diaries), 3 children’s novels and 5 adult novels.
What a busy bee.

I’ve been inspired by Kate Constable’s annual book accounting (with pie charts! heaven!) to be diligent about recording my reading in 2022. I’m off to a good start, but I am wondering if I should add a category; ‘Started, not finished’.

And note why that is.

Lately I’ve been, on and off, in a state of despairing grumpiness about the world in general and about me in particular – so I thought I’d return to some of my childhood books for comfort. Fantasy; English fantasy – that should do the trick. I ordered Susan Cooper’s Over Sea, Under Stone from the library. (I got rid of my own childhood copy years ago in one of my culls.)  The cover image below is the original, the one I brought as a 60c Puffin around 1967.

I only vaguely remembered reading it and I couldn’t actually recall whether I’d enjoyed it or not but I started it with high hopes. The beginning, with the three Drew children arriving in Cornwall to stay at the Grey House with the eccentric, enigmatic Uncle Merry, was promising. I settled in for the ride. My armchair;  a cup of tea; rain lashing on the windows outside. Me, secure in Cooper’s classic storytelling,  anticipating that  immersive mythic fantasy experience.
The rain fell. I read on.
Jane, Barney and Simon started to explore the old house.
Yes! An old house, with hidden rooms, secret passages, attics stuffed with junk and treasure; my favourite things!
Simon started to play at being an explorer. He said that if he’d been one:

“…I should have gone into the interior and the rude natives would have turned me into a god and tried to offer me their wives.”

“Why would the natives be rude?” said Barney.

“Not that sort of rude, you idiot, it means – it means – well it’s the sort of thing natives are. It’s what all the explorers call them.”

There was more banter about native bearers carrying their treasure back; about being turned into a sacrifice and eaten; about keeping the natives at bay.

Problematic? I began to wish I could just hang in there and enjoy the ride, knowing that the book was published more than 50 years ago, acknowledging that it’s an artefact from another time. But when you start to notice this stuff, it really stares you in the face. And having just read Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, it hits you in the guts, too. Imagine if in 1965, I was a little British girl reading this story, and I was black…

Imagine I was a little girl.

“Girls!” said Simon cheerfully.

Girls, we are to understand, are natural vibe-sucks. Poor Jane is so girly, and that’s variously boring, laughable, pitiable, endearing, annoying. She’s anxious and conscientious; squeamish (even having her brother tease her about being sea-sick makes her feel sea-sick); she’s a goody-goody, wanting to play by the rules and anxious when her more adventurous brothers break them; she gets scared; she fusses and worries about dirt.

“Simon!” said Jane, gazing at him in horror. “You’re filthy!”

“Well, isn’t that just like a girl…”

And:

She meant well, after all.

I know Over Sea, Under Stone is a landmark in British children’s fantasy, the first in The Dark is Rising sequence. And I know that like the fantasy novels I most enjoyed as a child, it’s got a real inner seriousness, a moral dimension, letting children know that they too can be part of a great, eternal battle between good and evil in this world. It’s lively and well-written; adventurous and imaginative, a fascinating mixture of a familiar modern world that has a powerful mythic dimension pulsing just beneath, waiting to surface…

I think about little girls, and black kids. I accept that Cooper is a writer of her time. I wonder if I am turning into a prig. I ponder political correctness, and censorship. What if the Empire builder fantasies – well outdated even at the time; what had those boys been reading?  –  were removed?
I don’t have any answers.

I didn’t finish the book.

Book Group, for the past couple of years, has been a bit of a bust. Evening meetings via Zoom instead of in a member’s home, with the hostess providing (it’s the rules) red and white wine, biscuits and cheeses – three kinds – and always cake.  When restrictions loosened, we had some late afternoon gatherings in the Botanical Gardens, with BYO drinks and snacks; pleasant but requiring mosquito repellent. I didn’t even start a few of the books, and bailed out on some of the others as too heavy, too hard, too depressing. My reading habits have often contracted to “comfort setting” during the pandemic.
But it’s a new year. Girl, Woman, Other was our first for 2022 Book Group, and I wonder if I can go on as I started – off the blocks and dashing away in an unprecedented burst of speedy reading. It helped that I loved this book.

I did struggle, initially. I’m boringly conventional when it comes to writing and I was annoyed by the lack of capitals to start sentences, and full stops to end them. The language and tone seemed flat, awkward, full of cliches and jargon.

Amma then spent decades on the fringe, a renegade lobbing hand grenades at the establishment that excluded her
       until the mainstream began to absorb what was once radical and she found herself hopeful of joining it
       which only happened when the first female artistic director assumed the helm of the National three years ago

Until I realised how cleverly she’s using their voices, their thoughts, their speech patterns moulded by birthplace, family, social class, school, culture, polemic, philosophy.
And how often – kindly, even lovingly – Evaristo is  taking the piss!

Then I settled, fascinated, into the way Evaristo shape-shifts into each character’s life. As a white, middle-class (privileged, naturally!) Australian woman, I felt I was reading intimately into other worlds, other lives. Black British lives.
Four chapters, twelve women. Their stories range right across Britain, across social class, education and age, from the late 19th to the 21st century. All are Black or mixed-race.
And what a cast and crew they are.
My favourites? You’re all my favourites…
Here are the characters in the first chapter:
Amma is a high-flying playwright, on the cusp of fame with her new play The Last Amazon of Dahomey. It’s the opening night; she’s nervy. Her past is radical, grungy, anti-establishment; has she sold out? Her gorgeous teenage daughter Yazz, conceived via a friend’s donated sperm (Amma’s a non-monogamous lesbian) is there too, to support her mother along with her ‘squad’, the Unfuckwithables. She’s also flying high in her first year at university. Yazz is smart, beautiful, and ‘woke’ to the point of arrogance; the feminist battles of her mother’s generation are old hat to her and her friends. Dominique, Amma’s old friend and Yazz’s godmother, completes the trio. She’s come from America to support Amma. She’s glamorous, fierce, smart, tough, successful – but in her past, there were lost years in an abusive relationship with a separatist, radical feminist, African-American lesbian in Freedomia, a wimmin’s commune.
These stories –  and there are three more chapters, nine more women/people) are lively, funny (laugh out loud funny – Evaristo does love to have a go at pompous, self-righteousness), moving, tender, provocative, political, gut-wrenching, sexy… Full of messy, intimate, unedifying, unfair, problematic, complicated, confusing life. Or just – maybe – life.
My CAE notes point out the issues. So many!  Rape, sexual abuse, consent, domestic violence, sexism, racism, feminism, patriarchy, ante-natal depression, intersectional exclusion, queerness, non-binary gender, homo- and trans-phobia, the concept of ‘othering’.
Quite an education.
I’m looking forward to wine, cheese and cake, good company and a long and passionate discussion about this first book of 2022.

I have just devoured Helen Garner’s How To End a Story. Read it in a day and a night. Couldn’t put it down. And luckily I didn’t have to; I was on holiday.
Garner’s diaries from 1995-1998 detail the disintegration of her marriage. She’s living in Sydney with her third husband, also a writer. He’s ambitious, obsessed, completely taken up with the completion of his new novel; Garner fits her life and work around his writing.

What his novel cost. No piano. No holidays. No weekends. No outings. We sold my car. No river, no sea, no garden. No dog. No outdoor clothesline. No children. No noise. No fresh air. No sunlight. No wide-open windows.  He has never understood what Peter Craven calls ‘the deep moral value of fun.’

He’s also lying to her about his relationship with an alluring younger painter. When the truth is finally revealed – does he deliberately leave those letters lying around? of course he does! – so is his cowardice and deceit. How to end a story.
These diaries make distressing reading at times.  Love dying and love lost are, simply, sad. But Garner is rightfully angry.  She realises clearly what she wants (see above!) and what she isn’t getting. Her strength, gallows humour and resilience balance the self-doubt and despair. And apart from her riveting observations on relationships and her lacerating self-interrogation, Garner always has a beautiful eye for detail.  Her delight in the sensual world reminds me of the French writer Colette.

Outside my window at St Neot’s white cockatoos are eating berries off the huge tree: big, muscly birds with jaunty postures, crunching the fruits that they thrust into their beaks with a deft movement of one foot. Their activity sounds like the first drops of heavy rain. The air is cool, stirring the curtains.

As many others have written, in these diaries Helen Garner seems to have found the  perfect form for her art.

The NHS gives the official definition of  carer as ‘anyone, including children and adults, who looks after a family member, partner or friend who needs help because of their illness, frailty, disability, a mental health problem or an addiction and cannot cope without their support. The care they give is unpaid.

All the same, it’s a tricky word. It’s a noun freighted with meaning and requiring qualification. It brings with it a hint of transaction, of an inequality, which is all the more uncomfortable if the person you’re caring for is someone you love. By using it, however accurate it might be in terms of the day-to-day realities, there’s a risk that it redefines a partnership, a balanced give-and-take relationship, and turns it into an obligation; carer and patient, carer and client. One is active, the other passive, whereas every carer knows there’s nearly always come kind of reciprocity even in the darkest hours.
You are still you, and they are still they.

An Extra Pair of Hands by Kate Mosse
Profile Books/the Wellcome Collection, London, 1921

My sister-in-law gave me An Extra Pair of Hands by Kate Mosse for Christmas. Subtitled A story of caring, ageing and everyday acts of love, it’s a memoir interspersed with reflections on the ‘invisible army of carers holding families together’.

I think she gave it to me because it echoed my own experience, and because of my recent stint of working in the aged care sector. Mosse, a best-selling novelist (the Languedoc series), non-fiction writer and playwright, describes caring for her parents Richard and Barbara. She helped her mother care for her father as he declined with Parkinson’s Disease, and then supported her when she was widowed.
Mosse and her husband had a large house in Chichester, in Sussex; her parents came to live with them. This is what we did too, though in reverse. My husband and I, with our 18-month-old son, moved in with my parents in 1998. Dad had Parkinson’s, like Mosse’s father, and also cancer. After he died in 2002 (it was the 20th anniversary of his death on the 5th January) we cared for my mother until she died in 2008. Ten years; all of my 40’s.
Not only Mosse’s parents, but also her mother-in-law Rosie joined the family. Rosie sounds like a force of nature; unstoppable, vivacious, life-enhancing. Plenty of Blitz spirit there. Rosie and Barbara, two very different women, even forged an unlikely but close friendship after Barbara was widowed. I enjoyed Mosse’s descriptions of their outings, their travels, their conversations. Importantly, as well as detailing the crises and difficulties of care, she celebrates the joys and pleasures of being with older people.

Mosse talks about guilt, tiredness and boredom, about juggling priorities, about the struggles of navigating the health system and managing in the times of covid. But this is not an incisive or challenging book. It doesn’t set out to be. It’s gentle in scope. Mosse says explicitly that she did not choose to write about anything too personal. The book has a slightly sanitised feel to it; there is no bum-wiping here, but neither could there be. Suffusing her story with love and respect, Mosse preserves their dignity. If I wrote about my parents, I suspect it would be much the same.
She wants the reader to think about ageing not as something that happens to generic old people, but to real people, loved people, with histories and personalities and gifts still to give. It happens to families. As the jacket blurb says,”…most of all, it’s a story about love.”

I had ten years as a carer for my parents.
My experience with strangers, as a home and community carer, was brief. Three months, if you count my placement. I got sick, I had to have some time off, and now I am unsure about going back to it. I might be too old.

It was intense, physically and emotionally. You go into people’s homes and you see, intimately, up close and personal, how they live. They are completely vulnerable – literally. They are naked as you help them to shower and dress.

Bodies. Skin. What a surprise; under the old-lady nighties can be beautiful old bodies, sturdy and strong with gorgeous folds and curves (the clients were mainly women, only a few men). Maybe it’s my early years at art school, my life-drawing class; I thought they’d be wonderful to sketch. “You never saw much sun,” I commented to one lady with perfect skin, but, “Oh no,” she said, and reminisced about her first bikini at fifteen. Her father was outraged but her mother over-ruled him. She came home from the pool lobster-red. “I told you so.”

But ageing is not always pretty. You see tissue-thin skin that’s breaking down, ulcerated, bandaged, inflamed; occasionally you have to try to keep hands, arms or feet dry with plastic bags and tape. You see arthritic deformities, bones sticking out with emaciation, protruding swollen joints, scars and wounds.
Or obesity. Even morbid obesity. Incontinence. Smells. I’m not on some higher plane, I noticed these things, observed them, was moved by them. Does this sound like lack of respect? I don’t mean it to. Before I did my placement, I was worried that I’d feel disgust, that I’d  react, even (beyond my control) retch. But finally, when I was there and performing intimate care for people, it was just so human. It was fine. It felt like a privilege. I mean that.
You see the pain and effort of living in an old body. Moving in and out of baths and showers takes time. There’s courage and endurance and willpower involved. I met with  good humour, no humour, profound grumpiness. No judgement. I think my lecturers taught me well, or perhaps I worked it out for myself. This is who they are, where they are; you do what you can. You do it for lovely, kind, welcoming people who reward you with smiles and thanks, and others who are not lovely, who are withdrawn into pain and despair. You are there also for the carers, the spouses or family members. Sometimes there was a cup of tea or a chat, and sometimes not. You see loneliness, frustration, embarrassment, exhaustion. You see love.
In the end, it’s just so human.

I’m going to pass An Extra Pair of Hands on to a friend my age, a daughter who is caring for her 97-year-old mother. Though there is little on the nitty-gritty of care, Mosse depicts the conflicting emotions of carers so well. The relief and yet the grief and profound sense of loss when the role ends. I think it will help my friend feel validated, and understood.