‘WHY DID OUR PARENTS NEVER LIKE US?’
Novelist Rose Tremain looks back at her childhood
‘LOOKING AFTER MY SISTER AND ME SEEMED TO BORE MY PARENTS TO DEATH’
In an instruction still doled out on some creative writing courses, young novelists are told to write about what they know. This advice was given to me, too, but it always struck me as misguided. For what does a young writer know? Unless you’ve had a truly exceptional early life – which I did not have – you can’t know much at all. However, what you will possess, if you’re serious about becoming a writer, is a hardworking imagination. So why not ditch the autobiographical banalities and set out on a risky but marvellous quest to understand experiences way outside your own?
This was my approach to fiction: to learn about other lives, other worlds, other centuries, allow this learning to settle into something like a coherent idea for a story and then sift it through my imagination, like a fire slowly burning through coals, becoming the hot embers of something that feels lived and true – something that I did not know before, but know now. These quests took me, among other places, to the Court of King Charles II, to Denmark in the early 17th century, to the 19th-century gold rush in New Zealand, to Paris in the 1990s and to a small town in Switzerland in the 1940s.
It therefore follows that there is little autobiographical material in my novels and stories. People who know me will recognise a scene here, an anecdote there, usually things so vibrant that their power on the page seemed to be guaranteed. But this spare usage of the events of my own life meant that even after a 40-year career as a writer, my own biography was largely unexamined. My personal memories were like the family silver, put away in a dusty cupboard, tarnished by time, yet still obstinately there.
Then one day in 2016, after an unexpectedly intense discussion about my childhood with my daughter Eleanor, who is a psychotherapist, I got out the old photograph albums and looked at them for a long time. I followed this by writing down, at agitated speed, all I could remember of my early years. I started at the beginning, with my first memory of lying in my pram and seeing birds alighting on telegraph wires. This recollection was one that my mother had always said I couldn’t possibly have had. She told me nobody can recall anything from early infancy – and yet I knew that I could remember this. So you could say that the writing of Rosie began as it was to go on, with an argument with my mother.
Once started on the memoir, I realised how much, at this late stage in my life, I wanted to understand my early years, to make sense of some of the cruelties I endured, but also to trace back the moments that led me to believe, at a very young age, that I would only have a fully-lived life if I could become a writer.
Primarily – now that I’m a mother and a grandmother and very happy in these important relationships – I wanted to look at the strange absence of parental love in my childhood and see if I could understand why my sister, Jo, and I had been so marginalised by our parents, Jane and Keith Thomson.
I know that it had to do with what they had suffered during the Second World War, with my father fighting in France and all the burden of home-making falling on my mother. But it was as if, once the war was over, they felt that life owed them a time of selfish celebration. They had money and they wanted to spend it on going to theatres, restaurants and nightclubs. Looking after us seemed to bore them to death.
Yet neither of us were difficult children. True, we had what our mother termed ‘hopeless hair’. True, we were frank about preferring our grandparents’ farm in Hampshire to our house in London. True, we were slightly dreamy girls who spent a lot of time talking to our toys and hearing them talk back. But we worked hard at school, made friends, made inventive artwork, played rounders and netball, drank up our milk and generally did as we were told. So why did the parents never seem to like us? And why, when they embarked on a bitter divorce in 1953, to marry other people, were we never told what was happening until the very last minute, by which time everything was rearranged and our lives irrevocably damaged?
The writing of Rosie hasn’t answered these questions, or at least not fully. Jane and Keith died by coincidence in the same year, 2001, so they can no longer speak to us. What it has made clear to me is that Jo and I might have grown up as very disturbed people had it not been for the angel in our lives, our hired nanny, Vera Sturt, always known as Nan. For Nan loved us. She was patient with us, laughed with us, played games with us, sang to us, showed us all the generosity and kindness we might have expected from Jane and Keith and very seldom
‘AT LONG LAST, I HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT WHAT I KNOW’
[continued from previous page] got. Time has not altered my assessment of how my childhood played out between the frozen drawing-room world of two pampered and selfish parents, who couldn’t be bothered to figure out what their daughters needed, and the warm, nursery hearth at the top of the house with beloved Nan.
People ask me if writing the book has made me more forgiving of my mother, in particular, and I tell them truthfully that it hasn’t. What the book has done is to gather in, memory by memory, all the derelictions, all the failures of generosity and understanding I endured at her hands. But the person I find myself most angry with is myself. Why, as a reasonably brave and thoughtful child, didn’t I stand up to Jane? Why, when she trod with such a heavy foot on my dreams of going to Oxford, didn’t I scream and shout at her? A friend and fellow writer (who did go to Oxford) said to me recently, ‘If my mother had done that to me, I would have killed her.’ I felt great rage – a killing kind of rage – and yet I was so schooled in obedience to Jane, so frightened of her temper, that I helplessly submitted to the alternative path she devised for me and only finally arrived – with no help from Jane at all – at university (University of East Anglia, Norwich) in 1964, when I was 21.
What else has Rosie revealed to me? I’m proud that certain friendships have endured throughout my life. I’m pleased, too, that sharing this memoir with my stepbrother, Mark, has brought us close to each other again. Our lives have been lived in very different spheres: mine in the literary world, Mark’s first as a pilot of jet aircraft in the Fleet Air Arm and then in the world of high finance. But mutual affection has always endured. Now, remembering our shared past seems to have erased the years when we didn’t see much of each other, and brought us back to the old jokes and the old hilarious stories. And we both agree that Rosie has helped to make sense of what we lived through as young, heartbroken teenagers, after Mark’s father married my mother.
At long last, then, I have indeed written about what I know. My imagination has sat quietly by Rosie’s modest little fire, watching for the moment when the unreliable flames of recollection started to become the embers of truth. ◆ Rosie: Scenes From A Vanished Life (Chatto & Windus) is published on 12 April