When the world is full of big frightening events, I tend to zoom in on small pieces of hopeful news and cling to them. One of those recent piece of news was about Hugo, the first child in the UK to be born using a womb transplanted from a dead donor. Hugo’s mother Grace Bell, was born with MRKH syndrome, a syndrome in which you have no womb, no periods but normal ovaries. One in five thousand women in the UK are affected by it.
So they put a dead woman’s womb into a living woman. And a baby gestated inside it and was born as a result of its existence. Miraculous.
My womb has carried two sons. Last night I accompanied the younger one to his room. He sat on the side of his bed, wearing flannel Percy Pig print pyjamas, eating a red pepper in big crunching bites like an apple. He told me that he had made up a story, did I want to hear it? Yes, I replied, and so he began…
A woman is married to a man for many years. She owns a box and she tells him no matter what, he can’t open the box. Then she gets really really sick and she has one month to live. She tells her husband that he can open the box. He brings it to her sick bed and opens it and finds two hundred thousand pounds in cash and two knitted dolls. The woman says, I made a doll every time I was angry with you. He smiles and says wow only two times!? She says no. Not only two times. The two hundred thousand pounds is the money I made selling all the other dolls.
I sat, gob open, trying to process this parable of an unhappy marriage that my son had just so casually created, a sense of rising unease at how he could come up with something so layered and jaded, as if his nine year old brain had been swapped for that of a bent and wrinkly old man, when he bit down on his pepper and asked, merrily,
Is it true that someone married a hamburger?
I think, that when I die, I would like to have my womb removed and donated to someone living. I will be dead. My body an empty home. Unfurnish me. Empty me out. Recycle me. Let me contribute to the making of a baby, who might one day sit on the edge of their bed and regale their mother with a story. Who in one small exchange, might allow her to feel all the mystifying delight of being a parent.
I am finished my book. It is in the hands of the publishers. I will tell you all about it when I can, but what it means is that, just in time for Spring, I feel like I am back in the world again, with time and headspace to engage with culture and people. I brought the same story telling son to the Rose Wylie exhibition at the Royal Academy yesterday. It was joyous.
Her painting has always appealed to me, the big visceral nature of the process, the way you can see the thick splodges of oil painting on the canvas, her renderings of things, sort of childlike in their simplicity. I thought he would enjoy it and he did. Especially the paintings where she eschewed brushes for her own hands, creating big colourful block renderings of animals, on enormous canvases. How fun. Throwing yourself in the mud like that. Making getting your hands dirty the art itself. Anyway it’s a big recommend from me.
Next stop will be A Second Life, the Tracey Emin retrospective at the Tate. If you haven’t managed to get to her interview in the Guardian by Charlotte Higgins, take it from me that it’s really worth your time. After being diagnosed with a ‘vicious squamous cell cancer,’ she had to have her her lymph nodes, half of her vagina, her urethra and her bladder removed. She has a stoma, and a bag beside her at all times to collect her urine.
Now she is back in Margate with what Charlotte describes as a ‘philanthropic property empire’. She bought a former morgue and converted it to a training kitchen for long term unemployed people. She bought a high rise block of flats which allows artists to live at low rent. She has created a whole art school and owns artist studios which she also rents out a low cost. The project in motion is a derelict building on the coast which she intends to convert into a cafe and community bathing club. It is such a lesson for us all. That she could be so gravely ill, but because she lives a life of such purpose, happier than she has ever been. And the way she talks about her process…
“There’s the canvas, there’s me, and there’s this other space between us, and you have to go through it, that space, and you drag in everything behind you with you into it. It’s like going through a weird tunnel. And the painting is whatever you’ve dragged through the tunnel with you,” she says. “There are many ways to be a painter – art has many rooms. But for me it’s like an explosion of sorts. It’s like my heart being ripped open and then throwing it all on to the canvas.”
I love that analogy of dragging everything through a tunnel. I feel like that can also be applied to novel writing. Not fully understanding sometimes what it is you’re trying to say, but always, that sense of pushing slowly forwards towards the light.
Thanks for reading the Rooster as always. I’m looking out the window as I write at the tulips pushing through the soil and the beginnings of green buds on the trees and I feel hope. It’s impossible not to. It’s all we’ve got.
grá mór
A
Beautiful writing, Annie! I love the way you weave the arts into your life and the stories you tell