In my View [5]

In the house where I lived as a child there were three main species of inhabitants. There were the cats who lived under the floor, a mysterious fur-mat-smelling tribe, quiet except in the season when they held concerts. Their genealogy was wholly matriarchal – Mother Pussy, a white-chested small grave animal, who clouted her offspring round the ears even when they were fully grown; and Eva, blacker, skinnier, and with longer hair, who tore up my borrowed comics to make a nest under the sofa the first time she had kittens; and further descendants, inevitably by the female line. This matriarchal emphasis was reversed for me in later life, for the three cats who then left the deepest mark on my inner feelings were all toms, battlers and yowlers and wanderers, born to a heavy karma, provoking admiration and protective grief.

Above the ceiling and under the roof the birds lived – obsessively domestic but also given to noisy political brawls. I am reminded of them when I hear other birds making a rumpus from five o’clock in the morning onwards in the house where I live now. I admired them, as I admired the cats, for being so much at home in the world. At first it seemed that the ones who lived in the middle storey, ourselves, were equally at home; but there came soon various hidden indications – from storybooks, from the talk of the elders, from outward and inner events – that we were not made to live at peace in Middle Earth, but had another habit and a nature magnetically drawn towards alienation.

At a very early age, when dreams and outward events are hardly distinguishable, I was aware of another tribe – a family of cloudy serpents who lived in the holes I poked with my fingers in the wallpaper above my bed. One could only make the holes where there were spaces between the boards. I am not interested in the Freudian or Jungian interpretation of this fantasy. It belonged to the area just this side of sleep; and no doubt, since the subconscious mind does not change its structure, the serpent family are with me still. Perhaps they uncoil themselves in my plays and poems.

Nostalgia for a safe world sometimes grips me by the throat – a world where people are as sane as animals and birds, and no one is ever lost. I find it necessary to remember then that such a world never existed. The pressure of possible calamities surrounded that early kingdom – a cat could swallow a page 673 fishing line, a bird could die and become a hard dry feathered corpse – and even at the centre of the kingdom the ground trembled and geysers of the mind erupted. A certain instability in the frame of things had already made itself felt.

1968 (555)