When the reading was over I
helped Dave Torrans sell a surprising number of Sinead Morrissey books which
were grabbed up the way celebrity cookbooks or the latest Dan Brown would be
grabbed in other cities. I talked to Sinead about the Michael Powell film which was one of my favourites and I walked home through Belfast’s empty streets
reflecting that this was a city where light and dark are always in close
proximity and where, for good and ill, history and the symbolic representation
of history and the written word are treated with such respect that the flying
of a flag or the reading of a book really does seem like a matter of life and
death. I can’t
think of anyone better to unpack and illuminate Belfast’s dualities and contradictions
than its new poet laureate. And here, courtesy of the Atlanta Review, is the poem Sinead read that day:
...
A Matter of Life and Death
Sinead Morrissey
On the aftemoon I'm going into labour so haltingly it's
still easy
to bend and breathe, bend and breathe, each time the erratic
clamp
sets its grip about my pelvis, then releases—
I take a nap, eat lunch, and while you pen a letter to our
impending offspring
explaining who we are, what there is on offer in the house
we don't yet know we'll leave, to be handed over
on his eighteenth birthday like a key to the demesne, sit
front-to-back
on an upright chair in the living-room and switch on the
television.
World War II. David Niven is faltering after a bombing op
in a shot-up plane. Conservative by nature. Labour by
conviction,
he quotes Sir Walter Raleigh: O give me my scallopshell of quiet,
my staff of faith to walk upon, while a terrified American
radio girl
listens in. It's all fire and ravenous engine noise—he can't
land
because the fuselage is damaged and he hasn't a parachute.
Then, because he'd rather fall than fry, he bales out anyway—
a blip on the screen vanishing into cloud cover. The girl
hides her face
in her hands.
The baby drops a fraction of an inch and the next
contraction hurts.
I know I'm at the gentlest end of an attenuated scale
of pain relief: climbing the stairs, a bath, two aspirin,
tapering down as
the hours roll on (and we relocate to hospital) to gas and air,
pethidine,
a needle in the spine, and go out to walk the sunny verges
of our cul-de-sac like a wind-up, fat-man toy, tottering
every five minutes or so
into a bow. Nobody's home. The bins are still out on the
road
after this moming's pick-up. The light is slant and filled
with running gold. Back inside, the film has switched to
Technicolor
monochrome: an anachronistic afterlife in grey in which dead
airmen
sign in under 'name' and 'rank', the Yanks smack gum
and swagger, isn't this swell? and a legion of otherworldly
women
with hair rolled high as dunes hand out enormous plaster
wings
to the just-deceased. The dead are invoiced for,
like battleships or teapots, their names on the list ticked
off
as they swing through each allotted doorway clean and whole
and orderly, the incomprehensible machinery of life and
death
a question of books that balance. And there's this sudden
tug inside,
rigging straining taut and singing, and I cry out for the
first time,
and in you come to coax and soothe as
though I'm doing something—
running a marathon, climbing a mountain—instead of being
forced back down
into my seat by some psychopathic schoolmarm over and over
again:
stay. And I think of my granny and her forty-six hours
of agony, shifting my mother from one world to the next, and
how that birth
cut short her happiness at the Raleigh bicycle factory in
Nottingham
where her youth was spent in secret war work, typing up
invoices.
Back in heaven, there's about as much commotion as there's
been in a million
years (a slight shake of the head by the woman in charge, a
sigh)
because David Niven, who should have arrived but hasn't,
landed on a beach and (how?) survived, met the American
radio operator
as she cycled home after the night-shift, and fell in love.
He must be sent for.
Down below, they're already looking post-coital: picnicking
in civvies
on a homespun Tartan mg in a Technicolor rose garden. I'm
not supposed
to show up at the hospital for hours, or not until the
cervix
has done its slow, industrial cranking-wide enough to be
marked
by a thumb-span, and the problem is I don't know what that
means,
or how to tell how much worse the pain is going to get (answer: a lot)
and so the aftemoon grows hot and narrow and you abandon
your confessions altogether and the botched clock of
paradise with seven hands
across its face ticks on the wall. I've seen it many times,
said my granny,
when a new life comes into a family, an old life goes out—
as though there were checks and balances, birth weighted
against death
like a tidy invoice, and a precise amount of room allotted
the living.
Before we inch upstairs to the bathroom to test what sweet
relief
is granted, after all, by a bath and lavender oil, I catch
sight of a magical marble
escalator, the original stairway to heaven, with David Niven
captive on its steps being hauled away to the sound of a
clanking bell
from his radiant girlfriend, and I imagine my granny, who
died three weeks ago
on a hospital ward in Chesterfield, making room as she
herself predicted,
not dumb and stricken and hollowed out with cancer
but young, glamorous, childless, free, in her 1940s shoes
and sticky lipstick,
clicking about the office of new arrivals as though she owns
it,
flicking open the leather-bound ledger and asking him to
sign.
Longbourn is the story of Pride and Prejudice told from the perspective of the servants. It may seem like a gimmick but it's so well written that I think it was one of the best novels of the year in 2013. If I had written Longbourn it probably would have been an angry, unreadable, pseudo-Marxist screed, but Jo Baker is a much more even tempered character than I am and what she has done is to produce a satire on Pride and Prejudice that I think is almost as delightful as the original. The story of the two servant girls, their new footman, the housekeeper Mrs Hill, Mr Hill and their interactions with all the beloved characters in the book is told with grace and subtlety and eloquence. Baker mirrors the P&P central conceit with a clever one of her own with a few postmodern touches here and there. The nightmarish clothes washing scenes in Longbourn reminded me of Jack London's Martin Eden (a book nobody reads anymore?) and we are continually shown how precarious life must have been for England's poor in the early days of the nineteenth century before the Factory Acts, Child Labour laws and Poor Law Relief. We get the Napoleonic wars, the slave trade (there's a bit of Edward Said in there too) but like I say nothing TOO heavy. Jo Baker wants to tell a good story not to rant and rave about the coming revolution...
