There's a wasps' nest outside my window, beautiful and strange. It looks ghostly but is wildly alive, an edifice built of layers of frail white stuff spun out of their bodies and glued by something so strong that it withstands the winds that blow from all quarters. My memories of my daughters are like that. Layer after layer of tough, living alien filaments spun into the fabric of my life. And like the nest, if I probe too closely the memories fly out and sting me: regrets, laughter, anger, joy, rage, guilt, happiness. Things I didn't do; worse - things I did.
Early on I devised a fairly simple method of memorising particular moments. I would look hard at three blonde heads soldered over a book, or a four-year-old Rose in yellow sou'wester and little else running through the rain, Bay in a tutu that didn't fit, Daisy solemn in a lilac negligee, and register the mental snapshot. The next day it would have gone, overlaid by new realities.
Yet now that they have grown up I have only to close my eyes and those images are there, lost children, running away. I know those children. I know all about them. Where are they? And perhaps even more telling, where are the images of them when they were in their teens? That epoch went on for years and was crammed with scenes that would make Quentin Tarantino quail. Didn't I register those? Did I heck. I closed my eyes and looked away but they shoot up unbidden in nightmares.
How did it happen? One minute you are a young woman in New York working for Diana Vreeland on Vogue with few responsibilities, terrific opportunities and a future that belongs only to you and the next minute your future has become irrevocably linked to three solipsistic blobs who have no idea that you exist outside of their needs and who are your hostages to fortune; you can't dump them - something that always appealed to me in affairs of the heart if they got boring - and nothing is so much an affair of the heart as mother love, and nothing is as boring. You can't reason with them and worst of all your love for them is unconditional. From a small apartment on Fifth Avenue next door to the Guggenheim, I found myself translated to deepest Shiredom with a husband and snap snap snap three children without any practice or training.
They had no practice, I had no training. I was lost in a new continent marked Here There Be Tygers. Rose was two years old when Daisy was born and Daisy was just over one when I found Bay was making an unscheduled appearance. It was all touch and go for a good many years and I remember once at the beginning driving into Bath one morning and remembering as I parked, that I had a baby and she was sleeping in an empty house some 20 miles away.
There are faint but warning tremors quite early on, but they all point in the opposite direction; you run away from the epicentre only to find you're in the volcano; that first school, for example, where they must be exactly like the other girls - with the Barbie dolls and the white knee-length ankle socks and right backpack; and I remember Rose plaintively asking me (rather as Prince Charles asked Diana why she couldn't be more like Fergie) why I couldn't be more like Margaret's mum; when I sought out this paragon template to model myself on her I found that she sported an esoteric line in fancy bedroom slippers with red pompoms and could (and did) roll a cigarette from one end of her mouth to the other while singing Roy Orbison songs and frying hamburgers. But this desperate conformity is a bluff; they are planning another route entirely.
Nothing prepares you for the roller coaster ride as you simultaneously become the mother of adolescents, stop being best beloved and enter the dark night of the soul. You become an odious liability who gets it soooo wrong, mutter mutter, whereas before you were always miraculously right.
Do you remember those poor citizens of Pompeii going about their daily business, sucking their teeth and looking at shopping lists while a monster that would engulf grumbled quietly to itself and one day erupted and they were buried in disaster? Having an adolescent is something like that; although most of us walking wounded do crawl out from under the big dump eventually.
Looking back from a place of greater safety, it does seem as though one minute they are dependent, round adorables who think you are God, and the next they are fierce, black-rimmed creatures with smoke and steam rising from their bodies, crouching in the corners of your house and staring out at you like something from Gormenghast, and wishing you were, if not dead, then far, far away in a place where you couldn't shame them by your very existence - an embarrassment compounded by the sheer embarrassment of you knowing so much about them. And rather like Groucho Marx, who wanted to be able to buy back his introduction to someone he didn't like so he need never say he had met them, so they want to jettison all the Stuff that has clogged up between you and them and start out clear, preferably as orphans or as refugees in Kerala.
There are certain epiphanies in the journey when you are at your wit's end and don't know what to do. Don't ever be afraid to ask for help. One such moment was when my eldest daughter was attending an expensive boarding school in Wiltshire. In fact, all three were incarcerated in these atavistic establishments which if I had my time over again I would have absolutely nothing to do with; but, mea culpa, there they were. Termtime, as a consequence, was lullingly quiet and I regained a bit of myself. As I walked across Sloane Square to do something amazing such as buying a colander at Peter Jones, on a Wednesday morning in Michelmas term, when my daughter was in the bosom of Cranborne School, it came as a fair shock to see - lo! - that same daughter, all 5 foot 10 inches of her, masses of flaming pre-Raphaelite hair gummed into spikes, eyes Gothicised, legging it in fishnets across the said Square.
I watched her progress down the King's Road, open-mouthed. I mean I was open-mouthed; hers was clamped around a cigarette. Reader, what would you do? Let me give you a piece of advice. Always avoid confrontation. That Friday when I went to her school, ostensibly to pick her up for the weekend, I took her away for good. She never went back.
That weekend we, both her parents, were in our sitting room when an apparition loomed above us in the doorway. A black wigwam topped by a white and green totemic thingy. It steadied itself in the doorway and through a haze of livid rage I perceived my beloved daughter, her head shaved - the white was her skull, the green was a Mohican - dressed in a black, wool tent. This, as I later discovered, was a hideously expensive garment from a now defunct fashion house called Body Map. A less appropriate name could never be found.
Seeing her, I found myself in uncharted territory, a place where rage knew no bounds, where feral things lived. Hair is a sexy thing. Its importance goes deep into the feminine psyche. You've only to think how much we spend on removing it at one end and growing it at the other to know that it's not just decaying protein.
My rage was beyond rage. I wanted to sink my teeth in her neck, the one I had so often kissed as a baby.
She said, defiant as you like: "I can see you don't like it?" Like it? Like it? Her father knew a fight to the death was about to take place, and, drawing from the great well of mannerly Englishness within himself, said carefully: "Darling, it's very interesting." I was so tickled by this reaction - even in my rage it seemed a metaphor for our national characteristics - that my anger fizzled out, and I only just managed not to let laughter bubble out hysterically. (Ridicule is the easiest and most contemptible thing to use against teenagers and I used it all the time. No Queensberry rules in these battles.)
At my wit's end I turned to the best and asked St Paul's Girls' School to take pity on us both. I practically swung a bell and wore a hood outside their gates; I knew there wasn't the faintest hope but I fossicked on and when Rose turned up for the interview with Mrs Brigstocke and Miss Gough (God bless them) at St Paul's they turned not a hair. Rose of course had none to turn, (And is there a happy ending, I hear you cry? Yes, yes. Straight A's and on to King's College Cambridge and loadsa hair). I could quote many such incidents, so could every parent. It isn't funny when you're going through it; you wonder will you ever all get out intact the other side.
YOU become accustomed to being the subject of anxious scrutiny in case you do the wrong thing; and be warned that no matter what you do, you can't do the right one. When I see young mothers oblivious to the reign of terror that lies ahead of them I want to warn them to get out the armour plating, close their minds, stop up their ears, because those little angels will become big demons, adept at searching out vulnerability, will find any chink and get in there fast and painfully. They have to; they are growing up and you are standing in their way.
You cannot envisage a time when your knowledge of their past will become valuable, their archaeology. You are their enemy, but what's worse you are their rival, and one who already has had the man of their early dreams. Your sexuality troubles, annoys and revolts them; their desire for you to conform progresses far beyond wanting you to be like Margaret's mother; they want you to be like her grandmother. And never forget they play dirty; you must conform in every detail, i.e. you must shop exclusively in Marks & Spencer in the beige department or Soft Furnishings; You must never ever draw attention to yourself; you must apologise profusely even when people are doing you a Great Wrong; they, on the other hand look like a mixture of Coco the Clown and Lola Montez and manners are a plot hatched by the middle-aged to repress creativity and spontaneity.
If you ever suspected they were a switch at birth, this is when you know it was for certain. Quite suddenly their living quarters become like the caves at Lascaux. Ancient things on walls, darkness, heaps of noisome clothes, piles of rubbish. Precious rubbish, you understand. By analysing the magma in two of my daughters' rooms I could get clues about what they had been doing where, like an archaeological dig. Not with Daisy's though; she went about her adolescence in a different way. She just vanished.
In some ways I think the most difficult to come to terms with are those who don't fight, who don't rebel - (the rebels, at least, are still engaging with you) - but who silently slip away, withdraw from encounters and leave their body pods behind. Do you know that poem by Seamus Heaney about the hare? "Choose one set of tracks and track a hare
Until the prints stop just like that, in snow.
End of the line - Smooth drifts, where did she go?
Back on her tracks of course, then took a spring
Yards off to the side; clean break; no scent or sign.
Daisy was like that; all the evidence of her was there. Room like an ice palace; impeccable girl; but the child I knew had gone, vanished. Eerie. She just evaded me; she was almost amiable in her psychic removal. When she came back she was an extraordinary person and grown up. Bay and Rose did their growing up in full view and often locked in mortal combat. That was the other thing I'd had no notion of. The violence that rampages between adolescents. They maul each other and half an hour later are united against the world. You being the world at that moment, although at other times you are an insane speck sent to irritate their world vision.
I'm glad it's over; the journey took a long time and on the way I lost my youth, sod it. The people I have back are amazing individuals. I am no longer the oracle or the nerd, the diviner or the know-nothing, neither the solution nor the problem. Now I'm a person they love; but where once I went ahead and they followed, now I follow in their footsteps an old page-girl to their young St Wenceslas. I have all the time in the world and all the space I could need. I want them back.
Polly Devlin's recent collection of writings, Only Sometimes Looking Sideways, is published by O'Brien Press, price £6.99