The world our wilderness

And is there honey still for tea?

Carla Carlisle on lacunas and being guilty of assumptions

ILIKE the word ‘lacuna’. It’s one of those words that sounds like one thing—an exotic South American animal, a rare moth—and means another: ‘unfilled gap or space’. This confusion has left the word under-used, but I rely on it each year between Christmas and New Year. ‘Oh, welcome lacuna!’ I say when the Christmas frenzy is over and the aimless peace of leftovers descends.

Nobody in this household admires my linguistic beauty mark, which doesn’t bother me because I like to begin the new year in bed. My idea of bliss is to wander downstairs, let the dog out, make a cup of coffee, feed the dog and go back to bed with my coffee. The writer Rose Macaulay got it right: ‘Only one hour in the normal day is more pleasurable than the hour spent in bed with a book before going to sleep and that is the hour spent in bed with a book after being called in the morning.’

Dear Rose. Whatever happened to her? A Dame of the British Empire and a writer who published 36 books, including a chatty one on Milton and 23 novels, plus poetry and essays, letters and travel pieces, and is now unread.

I discovered her on a pilgrimage to Grantchester in Cambridgeshire. As I gazed at the Old Vicarage, a Margaret Rutherford lookalike next to me snapped: ‘He stole it!’ ‘Stole it?’ ‘Stole the words! “And is there honey still for tea?” was Rose Macaulay’s. It’s in her novel The Valley Captives. Published in 1911. And I bet you’ve never heard of her!’

In fact, I’d come across the name in letters and diaries of other writers—virginia Woolf, V. S. Pritchett, Penelope Fitzgerald—and I told the story of this encounter for years before I made the effort to find out if it was true. I found the novel in an Oxfam bookshop and there it was: a tortured young man who looks back on his country childhood as a haven of bees and honey and wonders: ‘And will there be honey for tea?’

I’m willing to forgive Rupert Brooke, despite the irony that it’s his most famous line and Macaulay has vanished from all but the dustiest of shelves. But who knows? Perhaps she pinched the line from Brooke when they went swimming—they were friends, he was a pupil of her father’s, he introduced her to literary London. If the tumultuous days of 2017, with its Fake News, alternative facts and accusations and convictions without trial have taught us anything, it’s a wariness to believe the first version of anything.

At the heart of our new Orwellian age is something more troubling than doublespeak and false truth: it’s that we all believe only what we want to believe. I plead guilty. I genuinely believe that the recent Republican candidate for senator in Alabama chased underage girls when he was in his thirties, but I don’t believe that Garrison Keillor, a writer on my side of the political divide, is guilty of anything that could merit being sacked from his radio programme, although, in neither case do I have access to the facts (call it evidence).

I believe and disbelieve these things, not to keep believing nimble, but the opposite: to reinforce the concrete structure of my thinking. It’s why I’d never watch Fox News, but am faithful as a nun to the BBC’S Beyond 100 Days with Katty Kay and Christian Fraser, because I detect a mutual scepticism, a similar funny bone, a shared political astonishment.

I may be up and down about Brexit, vacillating about Hard or Soft Exit and wavering about Theresa May, but I have no time for Jean-claude Juncker, Donald Tusk and Michel Barnier, who behave like a confederacy of jilted partners, determined to cause as much misery and extract as much alimony as they can. In the same vein, if I read tomorrow that Boris Johnson dived into the North Sea to save a drowning dog, he wouldn’t get my vote as I’d suspect him of writing the story.

Back to bed with the dog, a mug of coffee and a good book’

‘We are all guilty of making civilisation less civilised every day

I’m not proud of sounding like the 100year old woman ‘who died with all her own prejudices’. It’s a terrible way to live, entrenched under our tribal laws—red states versus Blue states, Israel versus Palestine, Conservative versus Labour, Anglo-catholics versus Evangelicals, climate changers versus climate deniers. We’re now united only in making civilisation less civilised every day.

It’s all the more reason to go back to bed with the dog, mug of coffee and good book. This lacuna will end all too soon. In a few days, we begin pruning the vines, an act of faith. A team of builders will arrive to take down the old grain store built in the 1950s, sided in asbestos. That was another act of faith. The clean pages of the 2018 diary will soon be blurred with appointments, meetings, deadlines.

Bed beckons. In case you’re wondering, the book is Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness. It’s her best known, although the writer Sybille Bedford preferred Crewe Train. She liked the description of the publisher, who ‘felt about books as doctors feel about medicine, or managers about plays— cynical but hopeful’. Cynical but hopeful: three better words to ease one into the new year I know not.