True Stories (19 page)

I learn every bone and muscle in the body and all the muscle attachments and all the systems of the body. I begin to understand the destruction of disease and the construction of cure. I find I can use phrases suddenly in speech or on paper which give a correct answer. Formulae for digestion or respiration or for the action of drugs. Words and phrases like gaseous interchange and internal combustion roll from my pen and the name at the top of the lists continues to be mine.

‘Don't tell me you'll be top in invalid cookery too!' Ferguson says and she reminds me of the white sauce I made at school which was said to have blocked up the drains for two days. She goes on to remind me how my pastry board, put up at the window to dry, was the one which fell on the headmaster's wife while she was weeding in the garden below, breaking her glasses and altering the shape of her nose forever.

Schoolgirlish? Jolley upends every silly book I ever read as a child about merry boarding school pranks and (later) nurse-and-doctor romances. Her schoolgirls are tight-lipped savages with sliding eyes, measuring and preying on each other. ‘We both shake with simulated mirth, making, at the same time, a pretence of trying to suppress it.' She knows the warped forms that ingenuity can take in lonely children or unpopular girls, and the self-disgust of those who, forced to adopt protective colouring, discover in themselves unexpected depths of cruelty and yet carry on practising the art of survival.

Vera, starved of affection and hopelessly lacking in ‘Sex Appeal', becomes a weird gremlin loose in the hospital, wreaking havoc among prettier and more popular girls, plundering secret food stores for dainty treats with which to woo her oblivious superiors. These splendid, crazy chapters flash between bright and dark moods with a bizarre energy: they dive in and out of surreal horror, the panic of having to learn a job by doing it, the pleasure of order achieved, the longing for revenge and for intimacy.

In a fog of the incomprehensible and the obscure I strive, more stupid than I have ever been in my life, to anticipate the needs of the theatre sister whose small, hard eyes glitter at me above her white cotton mask.

Isolation…is approached by a long, narrow covered way sloping up through a war-troubled shrubbery where all the dust bins are kept… When I go out into the darkness I can smell rotting arms and legs, thrown out of the operating theatre and not put properly into the bins.

Night Sister Bean…is starch-scented, shrouded mysteriously in the daintily severe folds of spotted white gauze. She is a sorceress disguised in the heavenly blue of the Madonna; a shrivelled, rustling, aromatic, knowledgable, Madonna-coloured magician; she is a wardress and a keeper. She is an angel in charge of life and in charge of death. Her fine white cap, balancing, nodding, a grotesque blossom flowering for ever in the dark halls of the night, hovers beneath me. She is said to have powers, an enchantment, beyond the powers of an ordinary human. For one thing, she has been on night duty in this hospital for over thirty years.

Every day, after the operations, I go round the theatre with a pail of hot soapy water cleaning everything. There is an orderly peacefulness in the quiet white tranquillity which seems, every afternoon, to follow the strained, bloodstained mornings.

When the attention of the glamorous doctor is momentarily turned her way, she seizes it with the greed of the deprived, though she knows she is a lesser creature and that these ‘very long and very sweet kisses' can't last. But their effect, what they lead to, is related obliquely in choruses of nurses' gynaecological gossip—ignorant, pitiless and (for the reader) hilarious—which whip the final section into a disorienting coda of distress. This thins out into one piercing line of dialogue. Lois, an erstwhile friend or perhaps even lover, spots the sixpenny wedding ring Vera has bought in an attempt to legitimise her still secret pregnancy. As the nurses are about to go on duty, ‘Lois, in her cloud of smoke, extinguishes her cigarette. “Whoever,” she says leaning low across the table, “whoever would ever have married you?” '

The book's final page, only twenty-five lines, returns in a calmer key to the silent woman on the train, who may or may not be Ramsden. It is
important
that she should be Ramsden, not for sentimental reasons but because Ramsden was the only person in that insane world of the wartime hospital whose behaviour endorsed Vera's knowledge that music can be a channel for grace, that words can be arranged to form poetry, that love can exist and have a meaning. If the woman is Ramsden, then something can be salvaged, the past can be made to yield up something that is pure. Thus the bleak, delicate question, the intake of breath on which the novel ends: ‘
Is it you, Ramsden, after all these years is it?
'

1990

*
My Father's Moon
, Elizabeth Jolley, Viking, 1989.

Germaine Greer and the Menopause

WHAT A STRANGE
secret the menopause is. I would need the fingers of both hands to count the women of my age (forty-nine) and slightly younger who, when I mentioned to them that I was reading
The Change
, dropped their eyes with a shudder and said, ‘Ugh—I don't want to
know
about menopause. I don't even want to
think
about it.
^*

‘No, no!' I'd cry. ‘It's not what you think! It's wonderful! We'll be free!'

Some laughed and turned away. Some hastily changed the subject. Some looked at me with sidelong, sceptical smiles. And one said, ‘Not now. Not yet. I'm in love. I'm getting on a plane next week to go and meet him'—as if she feared that menopause was like a fire-curtain in a theatre: boom, it drops, and overnight you are cut off forever from energy, light, risk-the place where things are burning.

But
The Change
is full of energy, light and risk. The whole work is that rare thing in modern public discourse, a passionate argument for spirit. Its trajectory describes a beautiful curve through indignation, anger and grief, and out the other side to a vantage-point with a high, calm view towards death. One English reviewer I read, a woman, remarked crabbily that she ‘could have done with less talk about “soul” and “spirit”.' In fact this is the central concern of the book, stated early and many times repeated: how a woman can learn ‘to shift the focus of her attention away from her body ego towards her soul'. To wish for less of this is to miss the point entirely.

The word around the traps is that Germaine Greer is against hormone replacement therapy. For many, the core of the book has seemed to be her chapters about HRT and its purveyors, an assault vastly documented and couched in the language of fierce irony that we have come to expect from her; and yet somehow, despite its vigour, this attack I found confusing, almost perfunctory, as if, while she knows her obligation to deal with the chemical question, which the world sees as central, her heart and her real thoughts were focussed elsewhere.

Her critique of HRT has raised hackles, particularly among women who have read only reviews of the book: for as women of my age approach the end of ovulation with its aura of ill-defined dread, and as the first symptoms of the change ‘from the reproductive animal to contemplative animal' begin to manifest, we are now routinely urged, by female and male GPs alike, to start taking replacement oestrogen, even if what we are experiencing is only mildly distracting, and physically not traumatic at all.

The peculiar fear of menopause, which this book has dispelled for me but which many otherwise well-informed women will admit to in private conversation, tends to bathe the proffered HRT in the alluring light of a rescue. A rescue from what? We barely know—and that is why Germaine Greer has written this book.

In her view, the prevailing attitudes towards menopause in our youth-obsessed culture fall into two broad strands: on one side, a brisk denial that women at this stage of their lives go through anything significant at all; on the other, an insistence that menopause is a deficiency disease, that the cessation of ovulation and menstruation hurls a woman into a chasm of mania, suicidal melancholy, foul temper, inappropriate lusts (or lack of any libido at all), malice, ugliness, uselessness and despair. It is hard to know, she says, which picture conceals the cruder misogyny: the no-nonsense materialist approach to the climacteric as nothing in particular (‘the goal of life,' snaps Greer, ‘is not to feel nothing'), or the catastrophe model, where femaleness itself is seen as pathological, and treated accordingly.

This is how menopause appears to men. In vain we ask the older women we know how it appeared to them: they go shy and vague, or claim to have forgotten. Women, Greer argues, know themselves so poorly, have adapted themselves so thoroughly to men's (and children's) requirements of them, and have allowed their own version of their intimate experience to be so muffled and distorted, that the whole phenomenon of menopause has been whisked away from them and defined for their own purposes by men, to women's infinite loss, and cost.

Our reliable knowledge of what menopause actually is and does remains disgracefully slight, Doctors are not yet able to distinguish symptoms of hormonal change from the effects of ageing. And one cannot fail to notice the punitive nature of medical treatments meted out to menopausal women, or the eagerness with which surgery is applied: ‘A man,' says Greer, ‘who demands that his penis and/or testicles be cut off will be immediately understood to be deranged; a woman who for no good reason wishes to extirpate her uterus will be given every assistance.' The only thing more shocking than Greer's catalogue of the carnage visited on the persons of menopausal women over the last two centuries is the connivance of women in this charcuterie, their readiness to endure and request invasive, mutilating procedures for ailments which, according to Greer, might well have derived directly from the unbearableness of their female lot, or which could have been temporary manifestations of hormonal upheaval that in time, given patience and gentle treatment, would have eased gradually, as the natural change completed itself.

Greer unearths certain gruesome and pathetic case studies and applies to them a broader reading, more patient, and more
womanly—
feminist, if you like. She carefully examines the woman's particular social and family situation, her history of loss and grief, details of which were present all along in the file but which the doctor, in his narrow focus on symptoms, had failed to take into account; thus, suddenly, these women in the grip of rages or depressions that looked like insanity become people struggling with bereavement—people whose motives are utterly understandable.

She calls oestrogen ‘the biddability hormone', and suggests that at menopause, when the body ceases to secrete it, women may find themselves back in touch with a rage ‘too vast and bottomless' to have been allowed expression during the thirty-five years of altruistic family life—that long process of ‘censorship by oestrogen'. ‘Many women only realise during the climacteric,' she says, ‘the extent to which their lives have been a matter of capitulation and how little of what has happened to them has actually been in their interest.'

Yes, perhaps it is only at menopause—or towards the age of fifty when age shows in their faces and bodies—that women begin to grasp how deeply their lives have been defined and limited by men: by the physical fear of men's violence, which has circumscribed their freedom of movement (and a daily glance at the newspapers shows us that even extreme old age offers us no immunity from this); but still more thoroughly, if more subtly, by the gaze of men. How can it ever be measured, the shaping, the formative effect on women's lives and intellects and imaginations of being, for more than thirty-five years of their lives, under constant sexual scrutiny?

Around fifty, according to Greer and as many an older woman has observed, this gaze ebbs, and is withdrawn. One becomes, in the outer world of street and work, and often too within the family and the home, all but invisible. It is disconcerting, this gradual removal of a ubiquitous force against which, in order to survive as a social being, a woman has been obliged to learn to define herself. Invisibility is a very humbling thing, no matter how many times during the decades of eyeballing one cursed one's fate and wrestled with it, becoming ‘strident', ‘unfeminine', ‘dikey', ‘badly dressed', ‘hostile', ‘castrating', and so on, in the process. But invisibility, writes Greer, which feels for a while like formlessness, like a non-existence, is the first taste of the freedom that is to come.

She slashes away in a most gratifying and invigorating manner at women's fear of ageing, and more ferociously still at our spineless collaboration with
men's
fear of women's ageing, that pressure which slides many a woman towards an unthinking grab at the proffered hormone replacement therapy. Greer is not ‘against HRT'. She states plainly that if certain symptoms have been identified as menopausal, and if they become intolerable, they should be treated with hormones, and welcome to it. But she urges women not to rush in. She challenges us to examine our motives for taking HRT with more self-respect and scrupulousness than she believes we do. And what she is against is the proposal now being seductively articulated: that menopause is somehow old-fashioned and unnecessary: that menopause should be eliminated.

She insists that it is not a disease, but an essential stage in a woman's journey towards death. Our children, at this time of our lives, grow up and leave; and we shall have no more. The end of motherhood, potential or actual,
is
a little death. The death of the womb brings with it a grief that is, in Iris Murdoch's impressive phrase, ‘an august and terrible pain'. Menopause is
serious.
At the exact point where our external culture loses interest in her, menopause presents a woman with a challenge to respect and define herself in a new way. It may be a sombre way. ‘Calm, grave, quiet women,' says Greer, drive youth-obsessed men ‘to distraction'. When I read this I thought it an amusing exaggeration. A week later I was being interviewed by a male journalist who, learning with surprise that it was a long time since I had gone out dancing in a club, bristled with disapproval, then burst out, ‘You don't
laugh
much any more, Helen, do you!' Yes, I do—but not at the same things; and I don't feel obliged to crack jokes and kick up my heels just to keep a stranger comfortable.