Your story in this week’s issue, “Bad Dreams,” is about a girl who dreams a new ending for her favorite book, “Swallows and Amazons”—one in which the deaths of several of her favorite characters are described. You mentioned having had a similar dream as a child. How did yours differ?
I really did have this dream, when I was about eight or nine years old. Of course, now the real dream I once dreamed—almost fifty years ago—and the dream I’ve written about in the story are mixed up together in my memory. I’ll never be able to disentangle them again. I know I had to invent some of the detail when I was writing. But I could remember clearly the tone of the dream epilogue, its complacent blandness and its air of grown-up satisfaction, even, at the idea that everything lovely and hopeful will be spoiled and turn out badly in the end. And I remembered some specific words from the dream I had: “Susan lived to a ripe old age.” I don’t know why that little phrase in particular stuck to my imagination for all that time. I hated it as a child: “a ripe old age.” But what I liked about it, later, when I came to write the story, was that it sounded like a child imitating an adult voice, adult knowingness. Which is, of course, what it was. The child created that adult knowingness in her dream—in other words, the child was the adult, sneering at herself for her hopefulness. And that complicated transaction was exactly what I needed to capture in the story.
Clearly your dream was memorable enough for you to revive it fictionally decades later. Did it have the same effect on you that it has on the child in the story?
Oh, yes. It filled me with horror. It was like opening an innocent door in my dream and finding some bloody mess behind it. I was quite cowardly in those days: I wanted everything to be all right and whole and reassuring. There was a photograph in an animal encyclopedia we had of a caterpillar being devoured by parasites, which had the same effect on me, opening fissures of dismay. I wanted to bury these intimations of ugly mortality, not confront them. Though I didn’t go and throw the chairs around in the “lounge” as a consequence. I did throw the chairs around on a different occasion, in that same flat, when my parents were having a dinner party. It was an odd impulse to take power, to intervene in my parents’ adult world, which I couldn’t penetrate otherwise and wanted to disrupt. They believed for years that one of their guests had had too much to drink and played a trick on them—I didn’t own up to it until much later. I’ve elided these two different episodes from that period of my childhood to make the story. Perhaps in my memory they grew together over time, until they made one story, with one theme. They seem to belong together, imaginatively anyway.
What made you choose “Swallows and Amazons”—which was written by Arthur Ransome in 1930—to play this particular role in your story?
The weak answer is simply that I was following life—it really was “Swallows and Amazons” that I dreamed about. I loved that book. It was more than a book; it was a sort of guide and creed for me. The more interesting answer is that the book fits perfectly into the little knot I’m puzzling over in the story. “Swallows and Amazons” is a classic childhood idyll. It seems to take place in a perpetual summer, a timeless childhood of enchanted freedom—full of adult excitement and depth, and yet immune to adult disillusion. And, of course, that idyll is preserved forever—in words in a book, a book that I still have on the desk in front of me as I write this. (I fished it out when I was working on the story, and haven’t yet got around to putting it back in its place on the shelf.) The Swallows and the Amazons persist in perpetual youth, while their readers grow older and leave childhood behind, one generation after another. The book is also redolent of a particular moment in British cultural history: the Swallows and Amazons are privileged middle-class children, brought up according to a certain code, certain ideals—decency, courage, not showing any weakness, not behaving like a cad, not letting the side down. The children’s mother asks their absent father if they’re allowed to take the boats out on the lake. He replies by telegram: “Better drowned than duffers if not duffers wont drown.” When I read the book in the nineteen-sixties, thirty years after it was written, these ideals of behavior were just beginning to feel old-fashioned. They weren’t really my code, or the code of my family, but they were still around in the air; they were comprehensible to a child reader. So in my story there’s a purposeful contrast between the perpetual summer of “Swallows and Amazons” and the reality of that era’s passing, along with its particular stories and perspectives.
Why is the idea of the characters’ deaths so devastating to the girl in the story? Children’s stories often involve death, and she is very well-read. Does it have to do with the specific language of the dream epilogue, or is it something else?
It’s the realism of the deaths in the dream, I think. You’re quite right that she is a well-read little girl, so she must have come upon some deaths in literature. My hunch is that she doesn’t like folk-tales or fairy stories much, and for this very reason. She has an almost superstitious fear of the Puffin paperback selection of Grimms’ tales on her bookshelf, although some details from those tales—with their superb, bleak cruelty—are stored away in a dark chamber in her imagination, for later. What she has read copiously are Victorian and Edwardian novels, and she even rather luxuriates in the deaths in these—for instance, all those dead parents in “The Secret Garden”(another of her favorites). But these happen offstage, or they’re cushioned by sentimentality, or they’re deliciously poignant (Beth’s in “Little Women”). In a way it’s the style of the deaths in her dream that’s particularly awful. It’s so matter of fact. And it’s the wrong people. Not the Swallows and Amazons! They’re the wrong types to die. It couldn’t happen to them. Could it?
The mother in the story, misinterpreting her discovery of the overturned furniture, has a revelation about her husband and the future of their relationship. Do you think that the revelation is valid, even if the assumptions that led to it aren’t?
The revelation—of her husband’s anger, his resentment of her domestication—doesn’t come to her out of nothing. She unburies it, it’s there inside her, just as the dream comes from inside the little girl. Their future will sometimes be a long tunnel of antagonism. (She doesn’t really need to see the furniture thrown around to know this.) But it will also be her submission to his kisses in the morning, and curling up against him like a nut in its shell at night. Both things. Enduring relationships, I think, are often made up of these opposite apprehensions of the other person. The other is both hateful and beloved. These two aspects, frowning and smiling, co-exist unreconciled—rather than cancelling each other out. A lot of the intimations in the story have a deliberately double-faced aspect. The book consecrating a perpetual childhood conceals a secret afterword. Any present moment must inevitably become the past.
Do you think that this night will be a turning point for both mother and child? Are they changed by it?
That’s double-faced, too. They will be changed and they won’t. Obviously the story chooses those two moments, as turning points. Each character has a new intimation forced upon her—the story makes these moments into something pivotal. But the characters also act like people in real life, oblivious of the mechanisms of story. The next morning, they both refuse to be new people; they return inside the forms they’re used to. No doubt the intimations persist somewhere.
In the first two parts of the story, you are very much inside the characters’ minds. For the short, third part, you pull back, in an almost cinematic way. Why the retreat at that point in the narrative?
I wrote that final section very swiftly; it came to me all at once. I don’t know at what stage I knew there would be a final section—a long shot, as you say, pulling back into impersonality after the intimacy of the first two paired sections, each full of echoes of the other. I don’t think I’d planned it from the beginning. I know I find the effect of this last section almost frightening now. I didn’t notice until after I’d written it that it’s dead silent. If it’s cinematic, it’s a silent film. It’s as if after being there, in the previous two sections, intimately involved in the present of the two characters, we’re suddenly very, very distant from this ordinary, everyday scene. (The girl has a pre-vision of this alteration, when she realizes that the present moment won’t always be present.) We’re looking at archival footage now, as if through a thick lens. Something separates us irrevocably from that vision. It’s very sad to me to read this final section over and feel that absolute separation—even though it’s also a recovery. The wife recovers her intimacy with her husband; the child opens her book and begins at the beginning again, with all her strong, young life. But these restorations are also woven into a long pattern of loss and change.
