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Lavinia Greenlaw on Essex: ‘As a teen, even Siberia had to be better' Lavinia Greenlaw on Essex: ‘As a teen, even Siberia had to be better'
(3 months later)
When I was 11, my family moved from London to an Essex village. I was bereft. My plan for my teenage years involved going to see David Bowie and T Rex at the Roundhouse, not sitting about in bus shelters. We arrived in winter at a time of power cuts. People spoke of the lacerating easterly wind as blowing in “straight from Siberia”. Even Siberia had to be better than this. When I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the tedium of the gulag made me sigh knowingly.When I was 11, my family moved from London to an Essex village. I was bereft. My plan for my teenage years involved going to see David Bowie and T Rex at the Roundhouse, not sitting about in bus shelters. We arrived in winter at a time of power cuts. People spoke of the lacerating easterly wind as blowing in “straight from Siberia”. Even Siberia had to be better than this. When I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the tedium of the gulag made me sigh knowingly.
I read compulsively and without discrimination as a way of being anywhere but there. Books protected me from my loneliness, too. I read trashy apocalyptic novels, decrepit romances, the small ads in the local paper, the parish council noticeboard and the back of the cornflakes packet. A library van appeared once a week and I remember the librarian as being kindly if a little exhausted by my demands.I read compulsively and without discrimination as a way of being anywhere but there. Books protected me from my loneliness, too. I read trashy apocalyptic novels, decrepit romances, the small ads in the local paper, the parish council noticeboard and the back of the cornflakes packet. A library van appeared once a week and I remember the librarian as being kindly if a little exhausted by my demands.
I was lucky enough to live in a house full of books and worked my way through the shelves, choosing largely by cover image. Picasso’s Guernica prompted me to open Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason. I had no idea who he was but I had an appetite for strangeness and was still childish enough to accept such experiments without blinking. Jasper Johns’s Flag Above White drew me into Donald Hall’s Contemporary American Poetry where I found Denise Levertov and her poem “A Map of the Western Part of the County of Essex in England”. Her childhood involved “multitudes” in Ilford High Road while “in Hainault only a haze of thin trees / stood between the red double-decker buses and the boar-hunt”. I needed to look at Essex again. I realised that I was seeing deep-rooted rural life with all its harshness, absolutes and surprising tolerance collide with accelerating change.I was lucky enough to live in a house full of books and worked my way through the shelves, choosing largely by cover image. Picasso’s Guernica prompted me to open Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason. I had no idea who he was but I had an appetite for strangeness and was still childish enough to accept such experiments without blinking. Jasper Johns’s Flag Above White drew me into Donald Hall’s Contemporary American Poetry where I found Denise Levertov and her poem “A Map of the Western Part of the County of Essex in England”. Her childhood involved “multitudes” in Ilford High Road while “in Hainault only a haze of thin trees / stood between the red double-decker buses and the boar-hunt”. I needed to look at Essex again. I realised that I was seeing deep-rooted rural life with all its harshness, absolutes and surprising tolerance collide with accelerating change.
Within a year of moving, I abruptly became short-sighted as if I didn’t want to see where I was. Yet my poems are full of the East Anglian landscape and light, and my first novel, Mary George of Allnorthover, is about the coming of punk to Essex. I treated it as a foreign country, heightened and mythical as places become in memory. The bus shelter years involved a lot of waiting – for something to happen, for time to pass. I moved on from covers to imprints and read anything from Virago or Picador.Within a year of moving, I abruptly became short-sighted as if I didn’t want to see where I was. Yet my poems are full of the East Anglian landscape and light, and my first novel, Mary George of Allnorthover, is about the coming of punk to Essex. I treated it as a foreign country, heightened and mythical as places become in memory. The bus shelter years involved a lot of waiting – for something to happen, for time to pass. I moved on from covers to imprints and read anything from Virago or Picador.
Again and again, I came up against stories of village life and women trying to break out of small worlds or out of themselves: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tillie Olsen’s stories, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.Again and again, I came up against stories of village life and women trying to break out of small worlds or out of themselves: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tillie Olsen’s stories, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior.
While I claimed to find the village boring, I somehow absorbed the similar narratives that were being played out in my own small world and they continue to surface in what I write. Some are too wild and strange to pass as anything other than fact.While I claimed to find the village boring, I somehow absorbed the similar narratives that were being played out in my own small world and they continue to surface in what I write. Some are too wild and strange to pass as anything other than fact.
• In the City of Love’s Sleep by Lavinia Greenlaw is published by Faber.• In the City of Love’s Sleep by Lavinia Greenlaw is published by Faber.
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