Reading aloud remains important. Publishing has been a way of doing this. I used to read aloud to a friend who for more than forty years ran a tiny bookshop in Notting Hill, more shed than shop, when she was in a care home and we knew from the first few paragraphs whether or not we wanted to carry on. Penelope Fitzgerald flew past that test. A number of the review quotes on her short novels express both deep admiration and bafflement – and that’s another test the writing I like best has to pass: however much I study it, I cannot work out how it’s done. I’ll offer ‘At Hiruharama’ from Fitzgerald’s posthumous collection of stories, The Means of Escape: genealogy, a remote homestead in New Zealand (“Don’t picture a shack, though. There were two rooms, one with a stove and one with a bedstead, and a third one at the back for a vegetable store”), a home birth for which the doctor arrives late but not too late to rescue a twin daughter the father had put in the waste with the afterbirth – “whereas the first daughter never got to be anything in particular, this second little girl grew up to be a lawyer with a firm in Wellington, and she did very well” – and Brinkman, visiting, who is hungry:
Two more women born into the world! It must have seemed to him that if this sort of thing went on there should be a good chance, in the end, for him to acquire one for himself. Meanwhile, they would have to serve dinner sometime.
The receptionist on Sunday afternoons at the care home where I read this story aloud was a Polish woman called Mrs Boyle. I said to her: ‘Maybe we were married, once.’ She gave me long look: ‘I don’t think so.’
First published in New Writing, Minerva/Arts Council, 1992; collected in The Means of Escape, Flamingo, 2000
A Personal Anthology 