A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip

May just look back on a life of struggle, at the age of sixty or so – and feel deeply sad, because in spite of various talents, of great beauty, have come to nothing.

Aged twenty-one

Six of the diaries in the thigh box are ‘Max-Val’ exercise books, stapled along the centre-fold, with paper made out of oat biscuits. The colour of these dreary little volumes is washed-out, Latin-class blue. Printed on the back of each is a set of Arithmetical Tables giving the lengths for cloth measure (2½ inches = 1 nail), the amount of grass needed to make up a ‘Truss’ (56lbs of Old Hay; 60lbs, New Hay; 36lbs of Straw), and, my favourite, ‘Apothecaries’ Weight for mixing medicines’: 20 grains = 1 Scruple.

Inside the books is a rapidly hand-drawn cartoon strip in blue ink. There are between two and eight frames per page. Nowadays it would be called a graphic novel. The scenes are of different sizes and always boxed in. The figures in the story are dressed in cloaks and repeatedly caught in moments of persecution or shock. The faces are distorted. But what’s going on is anybody’s guess.

The narrative does not progress obviously; it is like a set of flash photographs taken of a troupe of melodramatic puppets. The only constant figure is an androgynous and rhinoceros-nosed face:

This face is always viewed from the left, angled down, just off the silhouette. It appears in each frame of the cartoon – a total of well over two thousand times – and always produced in the same way, with nine fundamental lines: one for the forehead, two for the big nose, another to make the priggish upper lip, the chin and jaw are produced by a single wiggle that looks vaguely Arabic, a down stroke for a dimple and three quick movements to make up the eye. Hair (sometimes slicked, sometimes dishevelled) is a rush of slashes or curls on top. Most of the time this wig-wearing flatfish of a face doesn’t reflect much. It appears to be a force of creamy benignity. At its most irritating it represents poetic suffering. Sometimes it has a body coming off it, sometimes not. It is repeated so often that you begin to feel ill at the sight of the thing.

The flatface’s name is (usually) Clarence. It can also be called Rhubarb or Porbarb or John.

Sometimes he’s in prison:

with his two cellmates, the ‘Keeper’, who has a jaw like a casserole pot …

… and a rubber-faced monstrosity called Worful:

‘Clarence’ Flatface lives in the past. Sometimes he’s out of clink and down the tavern, being asked difficult maths questions …

“What’s two and two?”

… that he struggles to answer:

At other times, as ‘John’, Flatface is living at the time the cartoon is being drawn, in the early 1960s. In these contemporary frames ‘John’ might be lying in a fancy deckchair, with a Martini:

“I will have zis deckchair, & none uzzer” raged Irwin.

“Tomorrow, tomorrow!” was the carefree reply.

How did he get into this chair? Why is Irwin (who turns out to be Flatface’s brother) speaking in a German accent? What are those two people up in the air doing – planting carrots? Since when did deckchairs have foot canopies?

Once, as ‘Clarence’, Flatface becomes a king …

… which makes him grumpy.

Another time, Flatface’s days appear to be numbered:

This story never settles down – except for Flatface’s eternal presence. Every fifteen or twenty pages the strip is abruptly cut off and a whole side is given over to this disturbing profile:

Relieved, the writer then picks up the story again and presses on.

This isn’t a cartoon strip, it’s a set of narrative false starts ‘tethered by a face. But whose face? Not ‘I’s own, surely. A person this self-obsessed would want to explore his features, not freeze them. This face is a symbol for someone or something. Give it a few more years and it will evolve into a pictogram and join the Chinese alphabet.

There is only one occasion on which ‘I’ does not limit himself to the nine essential lines and allows Clarence to look at the reader full on. To emphasise the horror of the revelation, it is also the only time ‘I’ uses colour:

5 The Torso box (#ulink_04dafefe-ad43-5d27-ae2f-c33fb87876c0)

Got two obsessions – that I’m going to be an author; and that I’m going to choke.

Aged twenty-one

In 2005, I left Cambridge and rented a shooting lodge in Suffolk, and the diaries became a makeshift boot stand. In 2006, my girlfriend Flora and I went to London to house-sit for a pianist. The torso-sized printer box became a cocktail table; the box the size of a thigh propped up a chair; the Ribena crate, too wonky to be of any use, got kicked under the Steinway.

In 2007, Dido was told she had neuroendocrine cancer of the pancreas. In 2009, that it had spread.

I had known Dido for twenty-five years. When I first met her my father was dying – she saw me through that; I was twenty-one and idiotic. She was twelve years older. She grew me up, taught me how to think, how to write, how to be.

Pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer is the same disease that killed Steve Jobs, and is why he was able to develop the iPad and the iPhone. If he’d had ordinary pancreatic cancer (as almost all newspapers insisted on giving him at the time) he’d have been dead before the MacBook. Neuroendocrine tumours can be very slow-growing. Some people live the rest of their natural life with them, as long as they do not spread.

Dido’s tumour had seeded over her liver. Its spores had crowded into her blood.

The consultant at Dido’s local hospital was contemptible: bullying and scary. I arranged for Dido’s case to be moved to the Royal Free in London, a European Centre of Excellence for neuroendocrine cancer. There was a scan due in six weeks’ time; I had to be on the phone every morning to reduce that to ten days. The NHS is a wonderful organisation as long as you learn how to kick it. There were anti-cancer diets to be researched, exercise programmes to be uncovered, high-absorption liposomal curcumin to be ordered in from California at $95 a 100ml bottle (produced by a man who, I subsequently discovered, was being pursued on a manslaughter charge), electrically-operated pomegranate squeezers to be shipped from Istanbul, a remarkable peer-reviewed but forgotten therapeutic from Sweden to be investigated. In fact, why are we still talking? I had to get on …

During the five years Flora and I stayed in the London house, I’d occasionally catch sight of the boxes and remember their contents with dislike: that terrible face; those tiny scuttling letters; ‘I’s sense of destiny and devotion to an unknown, perhaps unknowable project of vital human importance followed by the catastrophic failure of all his plans. Despite the glistening orange and shocking pea-green covers of some of the books, I thought of them as pallid objects. I had the same feeling towards the diaries in these boxes as I do towards the ghosts in an M.R. James story: thrilling, but forces of absence; not so much evil as empty of good. They marked a time when Dido was well. They emphasised that she might be dying. They were hateful.

Occasionally, I’d creep under the Steinway and peer inside the Ribena crate. But I didn’t study the books. I reversed back out between the legs of the piano with the slightly appalled sensation that I was escaping quicksand.

Flora and I moved again in 2011, to Great Snoring in Norfolk, by which time I had forgotten about the diaries. They were just three more boxes among the thousand or so that I drag about like Marley’s chain every time I change landlords. I shoved them into the back of the van with the rest, yanked them out among the chickens and runner ducks at the other end and dropped them into a storeroom.

At which point the Ribena box burst open and twenty-seven diaries spilled out.

One of them featured a bloodbath.

The Collins ‘Three Day Royal Diary’ is greeny-blue, not much bigger than a jacket potato and caved in halfway up the spine, as if it has been crushed by a spasmodic grip. I tested it, waving it around the chicken yard in Great Snoring with various holds of my own. Only a left hand could make this type of depression. It was a gesture I imagined an outdoor preacher would use as he clutched the Gospels and harangued cowboys.

An inside page printed with useful information calls New Year’s Day ‘the Circumcision’.

Once again, the diarist’s handwriting races into the book many sides before the official diary section starts:

November 19th, Saturday

Spent most of today painting. Perhaps it is the best I’ve

ever done, more like Van Gogh than anything else.

and 126 pages and four weeks later shoots out from the bottom of the last possible page, with the words ‘watched her go with foreboding …’

In between, ‘I’ describes a stabbing.

Then,

to my horror, – a sudden burst

of blood rushed from my body

Ran about, & outside the house