Introducing POND LIFE — A Story of Biographical Extinction — a new book sample
Edith Cull’s life – the main fictional focus of Pond Life -- does not make for an obvious biography because her life thus far has been inconsequential. She once had a sweetheart, but he left her to go to sea. She once had a family in Yorkshire, a sister and a father, her mother died some years after she was born, but her family ties are quietly petering out. Edith’s historical self is frail; she lacks evidence of having lived deeply across space and time; of having lived at all. Certainly, she inhabits a place, the small seaside town she has lived in for most of her adult life, since the age of twenty. Untethered from substantial social contacts – family -- her material is running thin. In a few years from now Edith, the small-town spinster, will be forgotten.
Miss Cull is loosely based upon the music teacher who lived opposite me in my house on Granville Road, Littlehampton, a small end of the line seaside town where – between 1973 and 1987 to be precise -- I was living out a belated Victorian childhood. Some mornings I glimpsed Miss Cull leaving her flat with her ramrod back and tight gait and I thought she looked very odd indeed. A peculiar specimen. She appears briefly in my book, No Boys Play Here, and in a more extended form in its sequel, The Green Lady. In that book, she is a ghost who flits in and out of the story of my grandmother and mother and me, echoing the ghost of another spinster whose life is woven in small cameo parts through all our lives: the historically actual Miss Mary Neal who was born as a middle-class Victorian and became a person of cultural note: an educational reformer, a social worker and a suffragette who brought a holiday home in Littlehampton to house poor working women.
Alongside the story of Mary Neal, I begin to cultivate Miss Cull, a character whose story must turn into fiction because the child would have it so. She notices Miss Cull and finds her interesting because Edith Cull, she suspects, does not quite exist. Not yet. Like the child herself, she is still becoming, emerging from her dream state; still learning forms of social attachment; looking for her place within the world. The odd child and the spinster have much in common: both play the role of ghost, the flitting, unhoused visitor looking for a natural habitat. In the contemporary world this is not easy to find.
I grew Miss Cull during the remote and lonely period of lockdown when the world fell into a social twilight. When all of us locked into our online worlds felt very far from the sea, so to speak, far from the surges of organic life. Miss Cull emerged from those shadows as a ghostly companion, a role I often played in my first family life, and a role I still play in this my second or third cycle of life. Women without children are useful supplements to family life, so often fraught and tipping precariously, quite often near breaking point, particularly during the combustion chamber era of the pandemic when domestic lives were imploding. But family life has always been moody and difficult and full of regret; a few passing extras on the family stage can soothe tensions. It is not a bad role and there is a long tradition.
Pond Life is a fictionalised biography, and my sources, apart from lives observed, are a few wartime films and forms of fiction too many to mention; but I have not forgotten the figure of poet and novelist Stevie Smith who appears in The Green Lady, and whose characters shaped my adolescent imagination. Smith’s literary world is populated with eccentric women; the figure of the maiden aunt, or ‘The Lion Aunt’, as Smith called her aunt Madge Spear, who partly raised Smith and her sister after her mother fell ill. The aunt who knows what it is retain the power of privacy, real love and influence. Fierce and loyal, she occupies a remote suburban kingdom beyond the roar of the city.
The Green Lady celebrates the female eccentric as a memorial to the spectral women I glimpsed on the edges of my childhood: unmarried women who I believed were in charge of the world because of their independent will and life force; their active, often fierce imaginations, their inventiveness, their intellectual courage. I was raised by such women, but their lives went off course because they found no place for themselves in the world – such women do not fill in forms – and so they turned peculiar as my grandmother would say. These women seem to have largely vanished from the world and I have no idea where they have gone. Many were teachers, some of them taught me; I believe the more highly educated ones thrived in the realm of the university. I rarely see such women now because the corporatized world of Higher Education and the exclusive spheres of affluent middleclass life have plucked them out. You have to have money to be included and you have to have a brand: a well-funded corporation, reliable project managers and a lifestyle.
The Miss Culls, a gentler species than the indomitable Lion Aunts, have no obvious place in the modern world of perpetual self-reference and high personal visibility -- a digital culture of histrionic confession and assumptions of specialness. That one is indeed special, very special. Yet somehow, they still hang on to a form of life by a few social threads. A few church services and undesirable gaps in the school timetable. I see them when I go home to my small town in Sussex; they are still there in local suburban spots. Many are folded away into caring for others, as companions and home helps to needy family members. They push wheelchairs, they do the shopping, they organise tea and cake.
Miss Culls continue to exist, but you will not find them much on the internet which takes time and money. Largely speaking, their lives remain unseen, and although the modern world ignores them, they are with us. They are the grey cardigan women Anita Brookner delineated in her needle-sharp pre-internet novella, Hotel du Lac (1984) through the character of another Edith -- Edith Hope -- a moderately successful writer of romances facing a midlife crisis: to turn grey or to add some colour? To be seen or to continue to do the difficult work of seeing?
Years before, Virginia Woolf pointed to such unseen lives in her series of fictionalised biographical stories, her ‘Lives of the Obscure’ (1924). But her subjects were highly cultured women of means, and even in their lifetime these women were known if not sufficiently renowned. One such life was led by Miss Eleanor Anne Ormerod, the agricultural entomologist born into a well-to-do British family. For most of her adult life Eleanor was able to live comfortably with her older sister, Georgiana, and a female amanuensis; to live as a spinster and independent scholar and scientist pursuing her passionate interest in insect life. After the death of her father in 1873, and buoyed up by a family inheritance, Eleanor moved with her sister first to live with an uncle in Torquay, and then to another shared home at Spring Grove, Isleworth, before their final move to Torrington House in St. Albans, Hertfordshire.
Like Woolf’s ‘Miss Ormerod,’ Pond Life is a series of biographical glimpses -- part essay, part biographical story -- because in the end only the art of story can get us close to seeing Miss Ormerod as she observes her copulating beetles underneath the microscope. The character of Edith has grown from the glimpses of women I saw as a child: women living alone, often remotely, and scuttling around like peculiar insects. Beetles, stick insects, snails, ladybirds, butterflies and moths, the insects I associate with a child’s peering, microscopic view of the world as they stare at moving things with tiny wings and legs. Small creatures living on windowsills and ledges. Insect life going about its business, not yet caught or trapped, still buzzing or gliding imperceptibly like a snail -- as Edith does when she borrows her cover teaching role – a role she inherits and disinherits weekly leaving no trail.
All families produce history, and all families biographize. Often these histories and stories are narrow and self-interested, but this is how social life continues: through houses and estates, wills and leases, bricks and mortar, through material life. By archives: documents and photographs, journals, and diaries, pocketbooks, letters and postcards, scribbled notes. Since the tyrannical takeover of the internet, the paper world has been swallowed up by disposable digital forms; but still we photograph and document, we film, project upon the world our cinematic ghosts.