I would like to make one thing absolutely clear. I do not write fiction. People drift up to me quite often and say: ‘Oh yes, you’re that woman everything seems to happen to, aren’t you?’ Then they wink archly and nudge me with an elbow.
‘But I only write the truth!’ I cry.
‘Oh yes, sure,’ they giggle knowingly. Well, maybe I rearrange the truth just enough to avoid giving offence. If you want to quote your ghastly old Uncle Charlie, it’s best to make him somebody else’s ghastly old Uncle Charlie. But close members of my family, who share my daily round, know that we really do drift up to button counters and overhear foreign gentlemen demanding sex. Of course it’s soon established that they are mispronouncing the word ‘six’. Or perhaps they really do need sex … people’s behaviour can be so interesting.
Take that day I popped up to London early one Monday morning for a day’s shopping, hopped on a bus at Paddington and headed eagerly towards Oxford Circus. As the bus slowed down in a traffic jam I was fascinated to see a rather intense looking girl beating with her fist on the door of a sex shop crying: ‘Let me in! Hoy – let me in!’
Now, I don’t know how you would have reacted, but my mind absolutely raced through the various possibilities which could have brought this poor soul to such a pretty pass – and so early in the day, too. But when I told this little story to a friend, she said prosaically: ‘Probably just one of the staff who’d been sent out for coffee before opening-up time.’
And lest you live way beyond the city commuter belt and think I’m making up the very idea of such a thing as a sex shop, let me assure you that they do exist (if not as yet in village high streets). In fact, I bravely strolled into one once and discovered it to be a pale pink place full of Sinatra background music, athletic photographs and little men in raincoats and cycle clips buying jars of cold cream labelled ‘Stud’ and ‘Rampage’.
But then when I’m not sidling into sex shops I’m quite often listening to sad-eyed little ladies telling me that they ‘Don’t go in for that sort of thing’ with their husbands. Nor indeed any sort of thing apparently – right from that day in early married life when presumably they kissed and the poor chap turned back into a frog. So maybe he’s the same fella and he needs his faith in little pots of cold cream.
Turning back the pages of my average days, I find plenty of true life incidents to ponder on and jot down in my notebook … like the little crowd in our local market place awaiting the arrival of the organic vegetable man. There everybody stands, arranged in an orderly rectangle around the spot where he usually sets up his stall, and they are all earnestly staring at the same tiny patch of cobblestone – the exact spot where he normally stands. I can’t help a tiny grin.
Surely they all find the situation funny? I catch a lady’s eye but she quickly looks away. Unseemly merriment is apparently out of place among the organic veg brigade.
Thus my day unfolds … wandering through the town, passing a row of sweet old grey mossy almshouses – and being almost blasted across the street by the rock music pouring out of the end one … strolling down by the river and seeing, inside one of the pleasure boats, a family sitting down to a hearty meal with – plonked right in the middle of the table – a toilet roll … passing two middle-aged ladies and overhearing one of them say: ‘There was this special knee-cap I wanted and they hadn’t got it’ … standing on a country railway platform and catching drifts of honeysuckle and meadowsweet and conversation: ‘Oh, you should have come, Lavinia dear; I won a bottle of parsnip wine.’
‘Well, I’m not much of a winish person myself.’ (Crisply.)
‘… and then I laughed so much I fell into the river and lost my hearing aid!’ … boarding the train and suffering that stunned, alienated feeling you get when the couple sitting opposite you are speaking in a very foreign language and darting glances at you – and laughing … arriving home, switching on the radio and hearing a chap say, earnestly: ‘Just lately we’ve come across some very sophisticated little dinosaurs.’
My world, like Thurber’s – or for that matter your next-door neighbour’s – is bound to be a little bit different. Which is strange really, considering that we all watch the same telly, shop in the same high streets and spend a lot of time pondering dreamily at much the same ironing boards and kitchen sinks.
But, in spite of this, our interpretation of situations will depend largely on what kind of people we are basically. Like that chap who travelled from his native America all round the world. ‘Tell us about it. What was it like?’ clamoured his friends on his return. ‘Well,’ he said thoughtfully, after a long pause. ‘I can tell you this much. The shower didn’t work properly at the Savoy!’ Thus, my husband and I may take a stroll in the country together. But when we return home he quite probably will be remembering the horse manure he accidentally trod in while I’m still going on about the bluebells.
That’s life. Or at any rate it’s My Life, and I hope you enjoy sharing it with me for a little while each month.