64. A Matter Of Survival

Bad things happened in the basement of that house. It’s taken a long time for me to say that. The pictures of my childhood never made sense, why I was so frightened and unhappy, why I built an armour and ran away and kept running. We had such plenty, enormous wealth, a revolving door of parties, artists, cocktails in the drawing room; These spoilt children, our mother would say, Don’t you know how lucky you are? Yet at its heart was something dark that left us splintered. The woman who escaped the Czech revolution who was given the job of being our nanny was troubled, but her husband, the shadow who lasted three years was worse. He faded into myth, the truth shut up in a black box marked my first love while she took the role as star tormentor, the one we could blame, her psychotic presence, the horror of her in our lives was not forgotten. She was ill and my mother didn’t have the heart to cope. When she screamed about the house, convinced we plotted methods of her torture, my mother would say, Cruel children, these people have nothing. And when she banged the pipes in the basement my mother would crouch beside me and say, We can’t leave the house in case she burns it down, and we would cancel plans to go out. She was arrested eventually, for running the streets in her underwear, I heard she was taken to a nunnery. And I left home and started my own race to outpace the demons in my head, answering the question, How can I live with such pain? by building an armoured heart and taking a lot of drugs; a search to make it my fault was an answer in itself. I married for a second time, had children, my father died, I got divorced; throughout it all, from childhood to changing nappies, I wrote. I published a novel about someone else’s pain; my father, his mother, and it gave me liberation of sorts but still I didn’t know. The pictures of my childhood, these fragments I’d remembered, sliding up the bannisters at night, the day the shadow man promised to take me with him, weren’t enough to create a whole, until one day it happened. I was sitting at my kitchen table researching author websites, flicking through images when I came upon a woman in a bath holding a glass of wine. It was not like the actual I had seen as a child but it didn’t matter to that lock and key in my head. Something clicked and the black box opened and those pictures I had hidden as a matter of survival came tumbling out onto the floor and I saw. “Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is duty.” Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, Baronne de Staël-Holstein (1766-1817) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe