6. The Black Notebook

My mother's 1960s American notebook explains my most irritating habit...

“I have been married six weeks today,” my mother wrote in her journal, A4 size, lined, black with a smart red spine. “Very very rough and rolly, the sea.”

It was the late summer of 1963, and my mother was mid-Atlantic, on board the Queen Mary en route to New York. This first entry is dated August 29^th. She is 21.

The large notebook was the first thing that I found when I opened her old school trunk this week, the weathered brown receptacle of her archive that is squatting in my kitchen, marked FAWCETT.

It the detailed day-to-day of the first few years of her marriage to my father when she’d interrupted Oxford and her English degree to follow him to America on a Harkness Fellowship . Locations include New York, Iowa City, Iowa, Mexico City, and Washington D.C.

She was the best sort of diarist, and not just because every single word she wrote in her italic scrawl earned its keep.

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She kept track of what happened, what it made her feel, the underlying meaning and sense of the events. Of course, I wonder what she would have thought about little excerpts handwritten in pen and ink in a feint notebook appearing on an online platform 60 years later. In the trunk there was a taped bundle marked fiercely, “to be burnt after my death” which I think I passed to one of my brothers as I couldn’t follow orders. I wouldn’t be here if I thought she would be anything but delighted, if a bit surprised, just as she was when my birthday first appeared in the Times. “Are you sure, darling?” she said, when I told her. “But why?”

After a few pages, she says something that makes me understand something - a mother-daughter connection - that I’ve never written about before which I’ll come to in a sec. The life of an Englishwoman in New York, Washington, and the Mid-West is the main thing here.

Where Meghan scattered shop-bought flower petals to “elevate the everyday” she embellished her notebook with drawings, cartoons, sketches, a collage of bills from supermarkets, tickets, stubs, she pressed leaves and flowers.

On one page there’s even the negative of her ribcage with the caption, “This is a negative of my torso taken by the crackpot American Embassy for my Visa. It was inspected and reflected on a huge screen in front of the public queue by immigration at Pier 90, New York.” (Side note: The US has never messed around when it comes to immigration. Then, or now. No £4m a day on asylum hotels leading to a £15bn bill in ten years there!)

She copied in poems my father had written for her (she always said she thought she’d married a poet, they were en route the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa, then he turned into a politician, environmentalist, traveller and author…). She noted all the books she’d read, she described cooking their first dinner party as a married couple (risotto), she reported what was going on in the US – it was a turbid time, with dead Kennedys, the civil rights revolution, and race riots.

After the Queen Mary docked, they had a week in New York. In my father’s rip-roaring memoir, Stanley I Presume, he reports, “The Harkness people had sent a spanking new Chevrolet Bel Air Automatic down to the quayside to meet us. The man handed me the keys. ‘We’ve booked you in at the Carlisle Hotel for tonight. I gather you’re going on to Iowa in the morning. Don’t forget to drive on the right!’

My mother doesn’t mention the Chevy. And in her diary, they go from the harbour not to the Carlisle but to the Abbey Hotel near Radio City, but anyway, their first night, both agree that the newlyweds ordered room service. Cold platters of huge tasteless prawns and steaks arrived. “We gave up and Stanley wheeled the trolley outside the room,” my mother wrote. She followed to help. The door slammed shut behind them. “Be quick,” she told him as he had to race down 17 floors to get a key. “I haven’t got any clothes on.”

“I was quick but I was not quick enough,” my father remembered. “The man had come for the trolley while Charlotte was still crouching behind it”, and naked.

That was the end of their first day in America.

They watched the Queen Mary sail off back to England, then in the morning, they drive the Chevy the thousand miles to Iowa.

The first entry in the mid-west is September 7. It’s the “check” from a supermarket where she is provisioning their first house together. She buys a Pyrex dish for 49 cents, soap suds, coffee, a cooking knife for 25 cents, two big plates, two little plates, two glasses. The other supermarket in the town is called, she writes, the Me Too.

“The farm country is very attractive, it is all so clean and white, the farm buildings. The maize shines in the sun and there are black-eyed Susans and golden rod everywhere…there are 3 Catholic churches and no beer is sold on Sundays at all and Iowa State only became wet last year.” They drink Welch’s grape juice in the soupy heat at Sugar Bottom lake. “I am on a diet because Stanley bought some scales.”

It’s Oxford beatnik turns Stepford Wife and I eat up every word.

There is a 3D, Technicolour account of almost every day. I can relive her life as a young British student in Iowa in the Sixties with her. I can meet the person she was before I was born and I didn’t know her. It is like being handed a present from beyond the grave of her 21-year-old self.

She registers for class, she reads Death in Venice, (translated by “Grannie” who is Helen Tracy Lowe Porter, her mother’s mother, the official translator of Thomas Mann’s work into English) she writes lists of things to buy and people she must write to. She is a dutiful wife and daughter but she is longing to add to her duties and become a mother.

They’re broke, living on my father’s scholarship, so within a fortnight they scare up a job which means rising at 6am to go outside the city to a block of apartment units, “cleaning windows, unwrapping fridges.” Stanley breaks a storm screen one morning and they were sacked for the crime of leaving “smears on the windows.”

That day she does a crayon sketch of some gourds, a white china mug, and an aubergine.

My mother cannot understand why she isn’t pregnant yet, even though they’ve been married for two months and grieves, especially when on the news she hears that quadruplets have been born in Chicago and quintuplets in California.

There are entries about the South, about Martin Luther King, the Mississippi river, which she describes “a middle-aged lady river with lots of petticoats, bangles and a great deal of personality.”

On October 30 her entry is brief and exultant. “Many hours, and thoughts have passed, I AM PREGNANT.” (This is a picture of my mother and father three years later, with me and Alexander at The Capitol in Washington D.C).

There’s a description of when four little Black schoolgirls had been bombed to bits at a Sunday School in Alabama, and the postscript to that terrible day is: “I am getting better at pulling my hair out.”

I had to stop reading at that moment. The little girls. The pulling. It was, as we say, a lot. As I’ve written before, my mother was a patient zero of OCD, and will be hospitalised for an extreme case of the disorder in 1974.

It also occurs to me in some photographs of her, she is touching her hair at the back. Just like I do. But I’d never put two and two together, honest Injun, until I saw it written down.

The truth is, I can’t watch TV or write or read or even present on the radio without doing a fingertip search of my own luxuriant barnet to find that one, special hair that is destined to be yanked out by the root.

In my case, these are what I call “crinklies,” or as my sister-in-law Caroline says, have “corners”: thick, wiry critters that you could cut cheddar with. I don’t know how many I pull a day, perhaps half a dozen at most, only from the head. I don’t know why I do it, of course it has a label: trichotillomania, and it seems mainly depressed women do it, to the tune of one or two per cent of the population.

Do I do it because I saw my mother do it, or because I have a genetic predisposition to this form of OCD? Maybe both. I’m definitely not depressed - I am one of those annoying people who bounces through life. But I am the only one of her children who does it and here is the written evidence that my mother was pulling as a young suburban wife in Iowa City when she was only 21.

“It’s not genetic,” the psychotherapist Philippa Perry told me when I asked her “It’s learnt behaviour. You noticed how your mother self-soothed when you were an infant, and how she became calmer when she did it. Don’t forget that nature AND nurture can alter your genes.”

My husband (hello Ivo!) occasionally says “hair!” if I start to fiddle, just as I say “chewing!” to him as he is never without a pad of Nicorette between his champing jaws, and his day begins with a new square of the gum and ends with him placing the last Nicorette of the day on his bedside table.

My mother never mentioned what is now called trichotillomania to me but according to Wiki, “Trichotillomania is probably due to a combination of genetic and environmental factors. The disorder may run in families. It occurs more commonly in those with OCD…”

No shit, etc!

Back to her diary. Life comes at her fast. In November she is pregnant and very happy, settled in Iowa City and drawing and painting, making lasagne, and then on November 22, 1963, “President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot dead in two places, throat and head at lunchtime today in Dallas. Lyndon B Johnson is President. I was just going to read this essay in the Times in de Quincey when Stanley arrived in the library and said, “What hope is there for the world.”

She writes pages about the assassination, the new administration, Jackie, the children. She begins to panic about the violence, guns, race riots. “My mind has ceased to register all this I’m afraid,” she writes. “I can’t take it.”

They go to Chicago, to Mexico City – where a rich man called Boris Litvin insists on flying them to New York, and in return she promises she will call the baby Boris in his honour - and back to New York.

On June 5^th 1964 her mother flies out to be there at the birth of my brother Alexander Boris in mid-June. In August 1964, the last entry of that year, ends “we are leaving for Canada at lunchtime today.”

It's the last entry for almost four years. The journal doesn’t resume till March, 1968.

The 1968 entry is brief, and sounds almost dictated. There is a stunned quality that makes it sound not like her.

“Now I have 3 children. I am 25 and S is 27. We are in Washington DC. I paint canvases and clean the house too much…Stanley is a fantastic and close father. Today Nander and Rachel played in the treehouse he made for them in the garden.”

(How we loved that treehouse in Morrison Street, Chevy Chase DC. And “Nander!” I had no idea about the nickname “Nander”.)

In 1965 my mother came back to Oxford and completed her degree at Lady Margaret Hall (the photo is her having taken Finals, heavily pregnant with me, giving my brother some Champagne from a coupe as Nanny Reed looks on indulgently…) In 1967, as per the above entry, she came back to the UK to have Leo.

Those transatlantic trips to have her babies in England rather than America don’t have time for a mention.

In my mind I fill those four years with criss-crossing the Atlantic, more moves, more dinner parties, finishing her degree, having two more babies - and dealing with her own obsessions, which she was always open about in private and in public. She cleaned the house too much. And she pulled, as I do (not in that way, at my age I am wearing the famous invisibility cloak). I have so much hair a few strands a day don’t make a difference. I’d like to stop, which is maybe why I’m talking about it here for the first time. It makes it seem more achievable, like when you go to your first AA meeting and say it, so yes, I am Rachel Johnson and I pull. Which may or may not be a form of OCD. It was a big part of her as it is a small part of me.

Anyway…this gap between 1964 and 1968 is for me the most telling thing of all. She hasn’t been kidnapped by a cult, or anything, or entered a deep state coma.

No. She’d been juiced dry by motherhood. We had sucked the creative energy out of her as we emerged. She had no time to write as well as paint while being a housewife with three (and then four) small unruly children (Jo was born in London in 1971) with what she would always describe as “lots of energy.”

I know what went into this painting that hangs above my bed now, of us on a beach in Connecticut, where we also lived, the indomitable effort of will it took to create it amid so much else (though my husband doesn’t love having his brother in law’s genitals above his head in bed, the painting stays).

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There’s that brief entry in March, 1968, and then the black notebook is blank.