Joan Makes History:
extract
P r o l o g u e
In the beginning was nothing much. Vague
things swirled and whirled, impulses grouped and dissolved, light came and
went. It was a fluke, or a leap of faith: but there it was all at once,
the first atom, and everything else was just a matter of time.
Imagine the stars burning their hearts out
in brand-new galaxies! Imagine the time when bundles of hot gas decided to
draw together and be Mars or Earth! Imagine the first rain sizzling down
on the first hot rocks, and starting the business of the land and the sea!
What aeons of racket there were, of magma squirting up and lava gushing
out: what tumult as the globe heated, froze, cracked, drowned: as rock
wore away to sand that ebbed and flowed on the floors of warm seas. What
convulsions there were, as the bottom of the sea became the top of a
surprised mountain steaming in the sun and melting away again, until at
last it formed the shapes of Africa and Iceland and the Great South Land!
Imagine dew forming, sun scorching, winds
whipping: lichen grasping the side of a rock: grass sprouting and dying,
small flowers holding their faces up to the sun. Imagine saplings
thickening, putting forth leaves and dropping them off: imagine them
swelling at last beyond the strength of the roots and crashing back down
to the ground, and from their ruin new trees springing.
Consider the extravagant excess of nature,
providing every different bit of earth with its particular kind of life:
with Pale Prickly Moses, with the Leafless Milkwort, with the Spoonleaf
Sundew: with the Gregarious Stick Insect, with the Sugar Ant, with the
Small Green-Banded Blue Butterfly, with the Pie-Dish Beetle, with the
Yellow Monday Cicada and the Shining Swift Moth: with the Yellow-Bellied
Black Snake, the Sulphur-Crested White Cockatoo, the Frill-Necked Lizard:
with the Crest-Tailed Pouched Mouse as well as the Flat-Headed Pouched
Mouse: what an unnecessary prodigality of supply!
Imagine, too, those formless jellies from
which they say we come: something - what was it? - made them desire
history, clustering together and becoming particular: You be skin, I will
be legs. What a journey it was, from the trilobite, the graptolite, the
pterygotus, to the pterodactyl, the brontosaurus, the tyrannosaurus rex!
Things with teeth where their ears should have been, things with four
mouths and seven feet, things with eggs the size of houses and tongues as
long as tree-trunks!
They trundled and hopped, slithered and
leaped, swam, flapped and waddled, and after them came the humans who left
footprints in the dust. So many births: imagine them, born every second of
every day, year after year: now, and now, and now, and now, just now there
are three, four, five new humans in the world, I cannot speak quickly
enough to outstrip them. They are pink, brown, or yellow, angry or solemn,
arching in a midwife's hands or staring around in a knowing way: bursting
forth with a roar, or being lifted astonished out of cut flesh. They suck
blindly at nipples, they whimper or crow, they lie in possum-skin rugs or
a proud father's arms. Imagine them in their millions, all driven by the
same few urgent promptings: to suck, to grasp, to kick, and at last to
smile, and with that smile to begin their public life.
So many lives! Being explorers or prisoners
of the Crown, hairdressers or tree-choppers, washerwomen or judges, ladies
of leisure or bareback riders, photographers or mothers or mayoresses.
I, Joan, have been all these things. I am
known to my unimaginative friends simply as Joan, born when this century
was new, and now a wife, a mother, and a grandmother: Joan who has cooked
dinners, washed socks and swept floors while history happened elsewhere.
What my friends do not know is that I am also every woman who has ever
drawn breath: there has been a Joan cooking, washing and sweeping through
every event of history, although she has not been mentioned in the books
until now.
Allow me to introduce myself: Joan, a woman
as plain as a plate, and devoid of bust, a grandmother you would pass on
the street without a glance. Allow me also to acquaint you with a small
selection of those other Joans, those who made the history of this land.
I will begin in the beginning, with myself.
J o a n
My conception: It was not night, no, Europeans have no shame and do
not trouble to wait until dark for lust. It was the middle of a hot
afternoon in the first year of the century, with the sun blazing down
outside on planks steaming and adding their salt dampness to air that was
already too thick to breathe. It was afternoon, and the rhythm of a thin
woman and a thick balding man was attuned, after so many months, to the
restless rocking and shifting of the boat under the mattress - oh, that
mattress and its manifold rustlings! - on which they coupled.
This was a ship built for the transport of
many in cheapness rather than of a few in luxury. It was a mean and
cramped ship, a ship of tiny airless cabins with peeling walls, cracked
ceilings, and dripping pipes in the corners that conveyed other people's
plumbing with a rush and rattle late at night.
Those seedy cabins had occasionally heard
the roiling and difficult syllables, the guttural hawkings and strange
sibilances of some of Europe's lesser-known languages, and had echoed even
more to the ingenious obscenities and sly rude wit of many folk from
Lambeth, Bow and Cheapside. They had echoed to the sighs of gentlewomen in
reduced circumstances, weeping into embroidered lawn and hankering for
home: weeping, but knowing that their chance of husband and hearth,
livelihood and life worth living would not be found in the genteel squalor
of some seedy out-of-season Brighton boarding house, but here, in this
savage new land that wanted everyone: carpenters, cooks, governesses,
dentists and hopefuls of no defined skill.
In many languages, the voyagers squeezed
into their cabins had spoken of hope, of futures, of the blank sheet of
new possibilities waiting for them. They had left behind the squalor of
cities so old the very cockroaches were descended from those that had been
crushed beneath the buckled feet of Goethe and Shakespeare: they had come
with a few plates or bits of embroidered garments, leather-bound books
with silverfish in the endpapers, or an engraving or two of Tower Bridge
or the Danube, with a pair of candlesticks or their grandfather's chased
silver double hunter, with their love of dumplings and pale ale, with
their heads full of things in dark forests and wolves on cold plains, or
of the way the Thames looked on a spring morning at Wapping: with all this
useless baggage they had come, bursting with hope, to the Antipodes for a
new life in a new land?
And what a land! Here, they had been told,
the sun rose on the wrong side of the sky, stones lay upside down and the
trees grew so thick together you could walk for miles along their crests.
Now, on this glassy afternoon, their tiresome ship was passing between the
headlands that were the gates to that new life, and all those weary folk
were gesticulating at the foreign gum trees and asking their hearts what
the future held.
My coming into existence was the main thing
that made that day so special, but I am a person of magnanimous turn of
mind, not one to hog the stage of history. Up on deck those muddles of
mixed people gaped at their first sight of their future, but down below in
their cabin, my thin woman and her brown-eyed man celebrated their new
life in the way they loved to celebrate anything at all, or nothing in
particular.
That balding man whispered in an oily
language to that thin woman under him: Darling, he whispered, and caressed
the bit of cheek beside her mouth, that favourite bit of his wife's face.
Darling, we have arrived, he said, and for the last time they heard the
mattress rustle and creak under them, and the pipes in the corner mocking
them. It was an episode appropriate to such a significant moment: while my
father groaned and my mother wept with the storms of pleasure he gave her,
a vigorous questing tadpole was nosing into the skin of a ripe egg waiting
to be courted, and in that moment's electric interchange, I, Joan, had my
beginning.
Those two humans who had come together with
lewd and effortful noises to conceive me, who were they, making history in
a sound of sighs? Well, there was a thin woman, and a man chunky like a
block of chopped wood, and balding so the dome of his cranium was egglike.
The thin woman was thin by nature, not design, was in fact not in any way
a woman of design, her long face, with its tanned-looking skin, having
only its own features for adornment. She was a woman of narrow mobile lips
with fine creases at their corners from years of finding things funny.
When she smiled or laughed, gold glittered in that mouth, for back in the
country they had left behind, that tiny country of werewolves and
vampires, the father of the thin woman spent his days peering at molars,
and loved nothing better than a bit of fine work on a gold inlay.
And the balding man, who was he? Just
another stocky man in a lumpy cheap suit, with his father's signet ring on
his little finger. He had always had a way of clutching at the handle of
his heavy leather briefcase that had made the thin woman love him, there
was such determination, and such innocent hope and purpose in that grip.
In the briefcase, she had learned, was not much: a clean handkerchief, a
notebook for great thoughts as they occurred, and a few bits of paper
relating to enterprises that flickered and smouldered but never caught
fire.
My love for you is hunger, he had whispered
to the thin woman on the dentist's slippery couch, which during the day
was the place where anxious folk squirmed and waited with their
toothaches. My love for you is hope. What is your thinking about a new
life in a new land?
The thin woman loved this man in his suit
that bulged and buckled, had loved him for a year or more, and had long
ago decided that this was the man she wished to spend her life with. She
was impatient with dentists and their cautions, their painstaking days
fiddling with the endless decaying molars of folk stiff with the
apprehension of pain, and was even willing to undergo the rigours of being
foreign, and go to a new land on the bottom of the earth, to be with this
man.
He was a man of wit, a man given in a mild
way to the extravagant gesture, and he was a man of intense brown eyes and
a mouth that made most things plausible, but it was for none of this that
the thin woman loved him. It was for his adoration of her that she loved
him, knowing she would never again meet with a love like his.
My pink-scalped father panted, then, and
groaned with the pain of adoring his wife, that no amount of penetrating
her flesh could assuage, and while he panted and history was being made in
the interior of a thin woman, other kinds of history were also being made.
In the new land they were approaching, men
with frockcoats and small knowing eyes spoke of the birth of a nation, and
thought with satisfaction of their fertile acres and the cash in their
strongboxes. These were starchier folk, not eaters of garlic or wearers of
rustic embroidery, they were folk who had never had to confront jellied
eel, or the bailiff on an empty stomach. They were folk made uneasy by
gesticulation and suspicious of too much hope: they were men in frockcoats
and side-whiskers that hid the shape of their faces, they were women with
heavy cheeks made bland by privilege.
The birth of a nation, the men brayed, from
their mouths concealed under heavy moustaches that smelled of mutton. Our
debt to the mother country, they intoned, and turned up their small eyes
piously. They thought, or said they thought, that this was the moment at
which this barbarous land was entering into its glory after a long and
squalid beginning. In their folly they thought that was history. But the
real history of that moment was known only to myself, where something as
real as a human was being made.
No book has yet recorded that event, though
whole forests have been sacrificed to all those men with their frockcoats
and to princes burdened with frogging. The books are strangely silent on
all that matters, so here I am to put them right: watch, and you will see
history being made in front of your eyes.
(end
of extract)