At her most disarming

Byron Rogers

HALFWAY TO VENUS by Sarah Anderson Umbrella Books, 13a Blenheim Crescent, London W11 2EE, £12.99, pp. 264, ISBN 9780954262426 ✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Imust declare an interest at the outset. Thirty or so years ago I went out, or walked out (or whatever the phrase is), with the author, until, that is, the night when, for reasons I have never been able to establish, she hit me over the head with a stainless-steel electric kettle. You may not have read a book review starting quite like that.

At the time all she said was, ‘You were being even more irritating than usual’, so, reading her memoir, I turned nervously to the chapter entitled ‘Men, Love and Sex’ but found no reference to me or the kettle. As a friend said of his time with an eminent woman writer, ‘Chap before me, he got a short story. I didn’t even get a sonnet.’ Reading Halfway to Venus, an inspired title, I find I now sympathise with the way he said it, part miffed, part relieved.

On reflection, I think the kettling may have had something to do with the fact that I had come on a fascinating little footnote in Macaulay about her ancestors, the Catholic Earls of Perth, who, in their attempts to run Scotland as a police state for James II, in a moment of genius introduced the thumbscrew into the country. This I gleefully passed on, and passed out. If I am right about this, it has a bleak little irony.

For Sarah Anderson has written her memoir in an attempt to come to terms with the amputation, because of cancer, of her left arm above the elbow. She was a very beautiful little girl, and remained so beautiful that in later life a priest in the confessional, instead of granting her absolution, made a date with her, and, after her photograph appeared in Country Life, American soldiers wrote from Vietnam to say they had adopted her as their battalion pin-up. But at the time of the amputation she was just ten years old.

Forget me and the kettle (though as you may have gathered I never will), this is an elegant, honest, funny (on their date the priest turned up, hopefully, with a bottle of bath oil), and remarkable book which, because of the lack of interest from English publishers, she is publishing herself. For me it has been an eye-opener. I had no idea she could write like this.

I think it was Evelyn Waugh who said that in the best writing there should never be what is called a literary style. What he meant by this was nothing showy, no tics of metaphor or punctuation should come between you and what is being said. When sentences have a perfect balance, paragraphs a structure, all you are aware of is someone talking to you.

Listen to these opening lines:

I was born in St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, the eldest of four children, and grew up in Trevor Place in Knightsbridge. Our nanny was rather antisocial, so we kept very much to ourselves, only occasionally meeting other children in Hyde Park for a picnic tea of jam sandwiches and tepid milk. Maybe it was because we didn’t meet many other children that Elisabeth, my next sister down, and I created a world of imaginary friends, all of whom we both knew intimately. But this was very much our own world, and something we didn’t share with anyone else.

It is a neat, effective prose, much like a stainless-steel electric kettle.

The family life she describes will seem extraordinary to most of you. Emotions were bottled up, the children being discouraged from talking about their feelings, and never allowed to criticise anyone. They were left alone with their mother only on a Thursday afternoon, this the half-day off of their nanny, with whom they even went on holiday. It was into this family that news came of Sarah’s cancer.

She writes movingly about her stockbroker father, badly hurt and then a POW in the war, who was to suffer prolonged ill-health for most of his later life, something she blames on her operation:

He had few friends and found it very hard to communicate . . . my heart aches for this thoroughly decent man who was probably never able to express his distress to anyone at what was happening to his child.

Her mother behaved in what you might think a monstrous way. The day before, she took Sarah to buy a new dress, then insisted that the sleeves be made longer. When the shop assistant demurred, she said in her daughter’s hearing, ‘She’s going to have her arm cut off tomorrow, so they will need to be made longer.’ All this, of course, in Harrods. But the woman wasn’t a monster. An earl’s daughter, she had herself been brought up in this odd upper-class way, and it must have just burst out of her, just as, much later, on the way to a dinner party with her husband, she suddenly burst into floods of tears at Hyde Park Corner, and the two went home. God knows how any of us might have coped with it, but it is how this one family, at the end of its tether, did. And it is details like this that make the narrative so vivid — like Sarah, hearing the conversation in Harrods, and feeling such shame that a stranger could be admitted to this family secret that she felt like running away, only it was a December afternoon and already getting dark. These are the reactions of a ten-year-old child.

The only thing is, her book is two books, two thirds of it her own experience, one third quotations from others on their experiences and on the emotional significance of what was done to her. I should have preferred it had she left Horatio Nelson and the others in the research library, so it would have been all Anderson, as she managed to swim, dive, ski (in the course of which she broke her leg very badly), ride bicycles, found and run the bookshop which later figured in the film Notting Hill, oh yes, and go out with the most appalling men.

The oddity is that one of these at least, for most of the time they were together, completely forgot that she only had one arm. She said this was because he was an egomaniac, but it wasn’t so. It was because of the kind of person she is, or became.