(When You Really Don’t Feel Like It)

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Just a little word before we start…

First of all, thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to all those who, three weeks ago, read my Introduction to How To Learn To Love Norwich. Many of you left generous comments I found very moving. I don’t write just for myself, but to share and connect with others, so comments are very precious to me.

At this stage, I think it’s only fair to explain where I am going with this project. My goal is to make How To Learn to Love Norwich into a book. I have been jotting notes on it on and off for three or so years. 

Every writer knows and every creative writing expert will tell you that if you have any hopes of having your work published by a mainstream publisher, you don’t blog it online, because no publisher will touch something that has already appeared somewhere else. I am aware of that and that is why I have waited this long to post my Norwich book here.

Only I’m a literary translator, you see. And since I’ve been a literary translator, I have been all but unable to write, except as someone else: the writer I am translating.

As a teacher, an office worker and an actors’ agent, I managed short stories, plays and half a novel a prestigious literary agent asked me to send her as soon as I’d completed it.  That was fifteen years ago, just before I began translating and all but stopped writing.

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy translating. Only it’s a little like being a ventriloquist who speaks in someone else’s voice all day. By evening, your throat is too sore to speak as yourself. The years go by, and you gradually forget what you sound like, who you are. 

And so here I am, worried about opening the tap of my creativity and wasting its juice in case a mainstream agent and publisher decides to turn it into a book… when I don’t actually know if, once I’ve prised open the rusty tap, anything will flow out at all – or if it will be any good.

All this is to say that How To Learn To Love Norwich (When You Really Don’t Feel Like It) is an attempt at finding my self as a writer in addition to being an Englisher of other people’s writing. I don’t know where this search will lead me, to a cul-de-sac, a labyrinth, a narrow path through a dense oak forest or to a belvedere with a stunning view, or somewhere else, magical and wonderful. But I need to find out, and I need fellow travellers to hold my hand. Which is why your comments will be invaluable to me, so if you can spare a moment to drop me a line or two, I will thank you for it. Moreover, if – and only if – you enjoy what you read, please be generous, and share it. Think of it as telling your friends the address of a bakery you’ve discovered, that sells good bread, or giving them directions to a pleasant place where they can go for a walk.

Thank you for your reading this and, without further ado, here is Chapter 1…

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Chapter 1

When your logic fails you, you take a gamble.

That winter of 2012–2013 I had lost my place in the world and felt I’d fallen off Society’s margins into a dark place where I couldn’t see my way ahead. I did a lot of sitting in coffee shops, eyes wide open to stop tears from flowing out. I watched people carrying packages of Christmas shopping, couples holding hands, mothers bouncing babies on their laps, and when a woman walked past the window, carrying a basket with a cat, a sob finally shook me. My Genie, my darling Genie was dead and all because of an incompetent duty vet. I imagined everyone I saw having a comfortable home of their own, settled in blissfully happy marriages, with successful careers, frequent holidays and, most of all, loving families with children. Children I had never actively decided not to have. The kind of families you see putting all differences aside and gathering by the Christmas tree in a Hallmark production screened on afternoon TV. I was the only human without even one of the above blessings. I was absolutely certain of it. There was no one and nothing for me. I was forty-eight and it was too late to fix my life. My friends, who were all “sorted” in one way or another, grew tired of my company and, after a while, so did I and that’s when my inborn quitting instinct saved me.

My mother used to say that I had tenacity. At the same time, I have always been a ready quitter. When I truly want something, I persevere at it relentlessly, but if I suddenly realise that, for whatever reason, it either is not right for me or the result is probably not worth the effort, then I’m out of there at supersonic speed. I have walked out halfway through films, plays, concerts, jobs and relationships. As long as my quitting does not affect someone else too much, I change course. Here I was, taking stock of my life and listing, with chilling anxiety, all the things I longed for, but didn’t have: a home of my own, a job, a relationship, close friends with a magic wand to help me out of my hole, and an animal. At some point, and I cannot remember how exactly, it suddenly dawned on me that not having these things I wanted so, so much I could barely breathe, was actually what gave me a certain amount of freedom. If there was nothing to keep me where I was, if nobody would miss me, then why stay? To quote Walt Disney’s Pinocchio, I had no strings to hold me down, so why not leave London? 

Only where would I go?

I spread my old Penguin Map of the British Isles on the floor and examined my priorities. I wanted to live no further than a two-hour train journey to London, in a place small enough to get from A to B on foot, with a church or cathedral where a professional choir sang evensong daily (I have loved evensong ever since, while doing my A-levels in Cambridge, I went to hear the choir of Kings College Chapel every evening) and a city, rich in history, with buildings whose stones would tell you at least five centuries’ worth of stories.

I drew up a list:

– Cambridge

– Oxford

– York

– Norwich

– Winchester

I weighed the pros and cons of each place. Cambridge was – and still is – my emotional home. My heart feels light and full of hope there. It’s where I crossed the bridge from adolescence to adulthood, where I first learnt that when you truly want something, sometimes you simply need to forget it’s impossible. But what if Cambridge had already given me what it was supposed to and returning there would not rekindle the magic? I didn’t know Oxford well and had always found it a little eerie, possibly because I’d watched too many episodes of Inspector Morse, but it was a splendid city, with a wide choice of well sung evensong. I’d been to York on a couple of day trips and had felt very comfortable there: it was a beautiful city with very friendly people. I had never been to Winchester. It sounded like a lovely place, although I feared perhaps a little too genteel for my taste. Norwich was somewhere I’d spent a weekend a few years earlier, although, for some reason, I could remember very little about it. I had a vague recollection of the Cathedral cloisters, but my lasting memory of it was one of visceral anxiety. During that weekend, I had gone to visit the Castle and that had turned out to be an unexpectedly and unexplainably frightening experience for me. I had bought my admission ticket when something I glimpsed with the corner of my eye propelled me into red-hot panic, so much so that I rushed out of the door, over the bridge and back into Castle Meadow, hyperventilating and shivering despite the late spring warmth. I couldn’t make any sense of it.  As I gradually calmed myself down, I tried to remember what it was I had seen that had frightened me so much. Faces. Heads. White. Sallow-white. Some kind of busts or statues at any rate. I felt stupid. I was a grown woman and had just wasted an admission ticket because of an idiotic overreaction to something I couldn’t even remember precisely.

The next morning, after a stern self-talk, I marched back to the Castle, purchased another admission ticket and, having spotted the “heads” in question, walked straight at them. White. But a sallow, dirty kind of white. Eyes closed. All hair shaved off. Again, I felt something inside me constrict my breathing. I read the exhibit labels. Death masks. Of men and women, convicted of crimes, hanged in Norwich Castle. There are things you can’t un-see, and these death masks, evidence of the darkness human ignorance and cruelty can sink to, haunted me for a long time afterwards and, even now, I will avoid them when visiting the Castle.

Recalling this episode, I briefly considered ruling Norwich out, but then decided to act as an adult.

Which city should I move to? I compared and contrasted pros and cons until they got so tangled up, I couldn’t pull them apart. No matter where I chose to move, there was a chance I would be making a huge mistake and the uncertain outcome of my decision was smothering me in stress. Enough, I thought. Enough. All my life I had only ever acted through careful mental reasoning and deliberate calculation of causes and effects, and look where it had got me. I forced my brain to shut up, took a sheet of A4 paper, folded it many times and cut out seven equal rectangles with a paper knife. I wrote one word on each little piece:

Cambridge

Oxford

Winchester

Norwich

York

London (just in case I should stay)

Other (just in case I should think of somewhere else)

I folded each piece of paper as many times as I could, threw all seven into a mug, covered it with my hand, shook it, closed my eyes, pulled one out at random and unfolded it.

Norwich.

What did I have to lose?

That night, for the first time in months, I slept soundly, my mind in a new state of peace and the hope of belonging. Somewhere.