Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
‘Oh, yes,’ I said weakly. ‘I know him.’
‘I’m sure you do,’ he replied soothingly. Hours later he ran into the ward and said, ‘You
do
know Louis de Bernières! He’s just rung up to ask after
you.’ He was one of those nurses who seemed to have time for everybody. He and another nurse, a woman called Jo, were totally professional and dedicated, but of course they weren’t
always around.
The worst thing about those weeks in the ward was other people’s pain. There were at least two people far more ill than I. Sometimes when they were in agony, they made sounds I’d
never heard before, sounds of a kind I imagined desperately wounded men made, hanging out on the wire during the First World War. And I couldn’t get up and hold their hand or do anything.
Gradually the others began to talk to me; nobody talked much, but there were exchanges. ‘You’ll feel better in a day or two,’ one young girl said to me. She seemed the most
experienced patient in the ward, which was kept intolerably hot. One evening she went and fetched an electric fan and sat it before me. But nobody talked about what was wrong with them, and nobody
asked questions. This was both interesting and a relief. I’d dreaded blow-by-blow accounts of what everybody had been through.
The best thing was that Monkey came to see me every evening. We didn’t talk much – sometimes he just sat and read the paper. But he made the long journey during the rush-hour every
night and the comfort of knowing he’d be there was extreme. Pam, one of my women’s group, took on the task of arranging my visitors, which was wonderful, as well as being a faithful
visitor herself.
The food there was pretty much the sort of awful stuff we’ve all been told about. One of the most bizarre dishes was scrambled eggs made, of course, with dried egg, heavily laced with
sucron. Kind people brought me fruit and, sometimes, delicious sandwiches.
Efforts had clearly been made in the hospital. Each person had a miniature TV set by their bed with headphones for the sound. There was plenty of space in the wards, and
several bathrooms, but only one shower. As hardly anyone could have a bath, this was the wrong way round, and there were no bidets, which would have been a most practical piece of equipment for
most patients. The wards were lit from about seven a.m. until eleven p.m. and it was hard to sleep under the KGB glare, which was hardly necessary – each patient had an Anglepoise lamp that
was perfectly adequate.
The worst problem, which I imagine is the same for all hospitals nowadays, was the dearth of good nurses. The ones that were any good – the more senior ones – spent most of their
time on bureaucracy. On my visits there, five in all, I had to fill in a huge form with the same information.
Monkey came to drive me home after the first operation, and after that, kind nurses came in every day to dress my wound for about three months. I was still on painkillers and felt pretty ropy.
Also, although I know thousands of people have colostomies, I was finding that very difficult. When I went back to hospital for a second ulcer stitching, Professor Nichols asked me how I was
getting on with it. I told him and asked whether, when he’d finished with the ulcers, there’d be any chance of a reversal. He said he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to do that. But
if I was having trouble, why didn’t I have irrigation? I’d no idea what that was until he explained. The stoma nurse would teach me when I went home.
So when I went home the wonderful, kind, warm stoma nurse came for three mornings to teach me how to do the irrigation, which took half an hour, but meant that one was trouble free for
twenty-four hours. She hadn’t taught me before, she said, because she’d thought I’d be certain to have a reversal. Grey thoughts of having to do this when I was eighty and had flu
crossed my mind, but I was learning that if I could confine my anxiety to the present, it was far more controllable.
I continued to work upon
Falling
. To begin with I’d had to spend a good deal of what looked like wasting time while I made the two main protagonists for the story.
Writing was very slow, partly because I didn’t have enough energy, partly because summer was coming on and I wanted to be gardening.
I went back to hospital for one night for an examination with an anaesthetic as things still hurt, but all seemed to be well. People came to stay most weekends, but especially in the summer. For
some years the women’s group had stayed for a three-day residential: there were usually nine or ten of us, and we all felt we got a lot out of living together even for so short a time. Also,
Fran had started her annual painting week, and most of the students stayed with me. They worked all morning, came home for lunch and went back to work until five o’clock. Then we had supper
and lively evenings. The hard core of this group consisted of Ann Clowes, Patricia and Mark Wyndham, a friend of theirs called Elfin Ebury, Jackie Gomme, now called Hume, the old friend who’d
helped me run the Cheltenham Festival, but others came too from year to year.
Also in the summers, I had children to stay. The island on the river, from which you can swim, is ideal for children, and even when they grew too old to want to have a tent and cook their supper
on a bonfire they still came every year. Selina’s nephew and niece came to stay with a friend each. I always asked them to invite a friend, as they enjoyed everything far more than with a
sibling, who was either disastrously
young
or maddeningly
old
. Kate Hopkinson brought her two children every year. Jane Wood’s grandchildren came, and there
was one hilarious year when we had a paddling pool. Four-year-olds tore off their clothes and the garden was full of earthy T-shirts and minute grey socks.
Strange meals were cooked on the island bonfire – apple soup was one: it remained pieces of unripe apple floating in tepid water, and the creator of this dish was in tears because it
wouldn’t turn into soup. A number of faithful friends came all the year round – Jane, now married to Edward, Zach and Alice Leader, Pam and Leisha, two great friends from the
women’s group, sometimes my granddaughters with their progeny, Terry and Jenner, Minky, my cousin Kay, Josie Baird, Selina, Catherine Freeman, my nieces Emily and Louise Young, Dru Heinz with
Inigo, her parrot. But many others came to stay from year to year.
I can’t now remember when arthritis began seriously to impinge. I’d had it mildly for some years, but it hadn’t prevented me doing anything. I really noticed it when I found I
couldn’t garden very much. As any gardener knows, three-quarters of one’s time is spent on one’s knees and that became steadily more difficult even with a kneeler. Although
I’d got quite good at ‘walking through the pain’, as the professor at St Mary’s had told me to do, arthritis was rather putting a stop to that. But I don’t think I
took in the implications of being so lame until I went to Sri Lanka with friends.
I didn’t manage to finish
Falling
before we went, and this worried me because I had a date with Professor Nichols soon after our return, the outcome of which was uncertain. If all
was well, he would do a reversal; if not, not. But either way I felt I
must
finish the novel before hospital, and that was an anxious feeling because I never know how long any piece of
writing will take.
Anyhow, it was in Sri Lanka that I realized how feeble I’d become. I couldn’t go for walks or do many of the things that such a place invited. In the first week, when we were
travelling about,
I
did
see some beautiful places – the enormous statue of the dying Buddha, among the most memorable, but I couldn’t, for instance, climb to
the top of Sigiriya – something I’d wanted to do for years. We saw a lot of marvellous country, and we settled in a house we’d rented on the south coast by the sea with a
swimming-pool. This, I thought, was going to be fine; I’d do a lot of swimming and get more mobile. But after three days I became ill: streamed and streamed and found breathing frighteningly
difficult. It was only when I got home that the doctor told me I had asthma – probably a bug as well, he said, which had brought it on.
I
did
finish the novel before going off to St Mark’s, where to my joy I was able to have a reversal. I came home and had a summer when I didn’t do very much work.
Falling
came out in the autumn of 1999. Usually after a novel, I have a great urge to write a play and I did a certain amount of research to this end, only to decide that the dramatic
structure couldn’t be made to work. As I feel exactly the same desire recurring as I finish this memoir, I think I shall try again, so I won’t say anything more about it.
Earlier that year Verity Lambert had optioned the ‘Cazalet Chronicle’ for a series of plays for television. Joanna Lumley, who’d also wanted the rights, joined her friend
Verity, and they agreed to co-produce. What a combination, I thought, and still think. They came down to stay for a night that was heady with champagne and all the lovely dream-like plans that
occur at this stage of most dramatic enterprises. We had a marvellous time, casting and recasting, discussing what would have to be left out and what was essential.
Originally, they wanted to do six plays for each book, which would have been perfect. But then there was the BBC to reckon with. All TV set-ups are terrified of anything going on for too
long
, visualizing their audience as a crowd of grasshoppers with low IQs. They ignore the fact that the most successful drama series have been those where time had been allowed proportionate
to the size
of the work being adapted:
The Forsyte Saga
,
Brideshead Revisited
,
The Jewel in the Crown
are all obvious examples. The BBC instantly set about
cutting. The first two novels were to be done in six plays, with a bit of the third added in because it had a wedding in it.
Verity and Joanna had commissioned an excellent and experienced adapter in Douglas Livingstone, and it was he who had to deal with the problems that the cutting involved. The Cazalet books,
being a family chronicle, had an enormous cast, and the difficulties of introducing them and moving the story forward as fast the BBC wanted were nearly insurmountable. Douglas did the best he
could, but none the less it was a pity. However, the BBC said that when they did the last two novels we should have twelve plays, and we all felt better about that. I collaborated a bit with
Douglas on the script in an advisory capacity, and he was lovely to work with, indefatigable with his drafts.
Eventually, in the spring of 2000, the scripts were ready and casting began, and Verity and Joanna assembled a strong company. I was invited to the read-through at which sixty-two people sat
round an enormous table to read, with Suri Krishnama, the director, Joanna and Verity and me at one end, and two of the BBC drama heads by our side. Shooting began the following autumn, and by
December it was ready for editing.
There followed an unsuccessful battle with the BBC about when the plays should be broadcast. Verity wanted them to go out in the autumn, when people want to watch plays in the evening. But by
then the head of BBC One had changed, and she was determined to put it out at the beginning of July on a Friday evening. So, apart from competing with the Wimbledon tennis finals, many people saw
only the first three plays as children’s holidays began and ratings dropped off. After endless procrastination and a fairly bitter meeting between Verity, Joanna and the BBC head, the further
twelve plays were abandoned, on the grounds of the ratings. The series got hundreds of letters of appreciation, but this made no difference. I don’t think a series of plays has been
abandoned in the middle before, and we all felt very bitter about it. But Verity has become a real friend: one of the best things that has happened to me in the last twenty years is
how many new and lovely friends I’ve acquired.
Apart from my family and friends, something that has steadily grown throughout my life has been my increasing love of the natural world. I live in a beautiful place with a
meadow and an island on the river that runs beside it, which I have turned into a kind of nature reserve. There has been room to plant many trees and bushes, to naturalize wild flowers, snowdrops,
bluebells, primroses, cowslips, anemones and
Fritillaria meleagris
. The island has a pond on it and is now the home of reed warblers, owls, hedgehogs, a grass snake, herons, mice of many
kinds, rabbits, frogs and newts and sometimes even an otter. I am trying to get hellebore, many kinds of ferns and trillium to flourish. Roses have ramped up the very old apple trees on the island,
and last year a pair of swans built a shaky mansion for their eggs. I grow wych hazel, spindle, camellia, lilac and all kinds of buddleia for butterflies, and having used no pesticide for thirteen
years has paid off. There is food for everyone. The perfect thing about nature is how it’s always on the move. The seasons – at least three of them – give me acute pleasure: the
changing light, the bony winter trees starting to leaf, and the wild plum with its fat green-white beads that open to little fragile white stars. Every day when I walk round something new has
happened and this goes on for months – goes on, of course, for ever.
When I was about eight, I remember lying in bed in Scotland one night and saying to myself, ‘You have ridden on an elephant, you’ve worn puttees, and you’ve been out in a boat
to catch sea trout,’ and being deeply impressed with my wealth of experience. This zenith of sophistication was soon overtaken. If I were to lie in bed now with a more recent list, I would
say, ‘You’ve written twelve novels and as much again in other forms, you’ve travelled to
seventeen countries and you’ve planted nearly a thousand
trees.’ I am less impressed, because now I know I could have done much better and more.
I couldn’t even have done this without the help I have here at Bridge House. Dawn Fairhead looks after my home for me with loving care, with her husband David. David Evans, whose land
management and informed love of nature have turned the island and meadow into a magical place, cares for my meadow as much as I do.