OPENREACH (part one)

Selima Hill: Extraordinary! They flew him in on a helicopter. ‘He’s going to be here in ten minutes,’ they said. Ten minutes from Heathrow, it was so cool. Because it was near Christmas, it felt like a Christmas game. Do you play those? Like being in a pantomime. Everybody was dressed up, wearing costumes from their dress-up box. So, when Charles came in, I said ‘Ah so you’ve come as the king.’ The footmen were dressed unbelievably, in kilts, with big buttons and gold epaulettes. Simon [Armitage] was a very good presence. He’s very cooly undemonstrative. He put everyone at ease. I said ‘it’s a bit much for the poor old king.’ Afterwards, I said [to the King’s guards] ‘Aren’t you rather cold? Could they let you wear flesh-coloured tights?’ So Simon and I looked at each other and at the same time said ‘hairy ones’, and burst out laughing, with actual leg bristles and everything.

SH: It did. It’s so sad that my late husband wasn’t there because he would’ve thought to himself, it was worth having married her after all these years! He loved kings and huge palaces. Somebody came up to me before meeting and said just ‘be yourself’. What rubbish. What does that mean? If we knew that, there would be no problem. In fact, that’s why I write. Why we write. To discover who we are.

SH: Oh, yes! Who told you that? We had a lovely little chat. He must have been briefed a bit, because he knew I’d run creative writing workshops, and he said ‘You’re not really supposed to rhyme.’ But I love to rhyme, all the time. So I gave the limerick to his PA instead. Then afterwards, the lady-in-waiting said, where is it? And I told her, and she said what! He would have loved to have heard that.

When the Poetess met the King
Her knickers’ elastic went ping!
On hearing the noise the king lost his poise –
Then a footman appeared with some string!

SH: Since writing that one, I’ve composed about thirty more limericks!

SH: I suppose I am publishing more. I don’t like looking at screens, so for a long time I was stuck. I just had all this stuff. Then I met Penny, who’s absolutely wonderful. She does the printing for me. She transforms it into beautiful writing, on printed paper. She types it up for me and sends it out. Before I used to write stuff but wouldn’t type it up.

SH: Well…it does my head in. I was tested at the neurological department at the University of Exeter. It’s to do with pixels. And high definition. All the time when I was learning to drive, they would say ‘look in the mirror! Look in the mirror! Look in the mirror!’ and I spent thousands, and I looked and looked and look. But I couldn’t see what I was looking at. And nobody understood that. The neurology department figured it out: I can’t read the image.

SH: Oh good, you haven’t passed the test either! Welcome! A fellow non driver. What a relief.

SH: I disapprove of academia. Academics make you do so much close reading in a special way. Reading and reading and reading, which they think is the way that writers work. But it has nothing to do with what the writer is trying to achieve. It just picks it to bits. And then: devastation. Bits and bits and bits. And they can never put it back together again. And what is the student left with? Yes, ‘there are three g’s in that line.’ So what? Perhaps the writer knows that, but not consciously. And it makes writing sound like something that’s very, very, complicated, like deep sea diving with a special iron lung.

I much prefer teaching in prisons and hospitals and places where nobody really cares how to spell. Of course, I say that from my position, which is, some might say, totally overeducated, and academia has always been my habitat. However, I still think it’s not that important.

SH: Yes, the magic! Imagine going to a dance show and, instead of the performance, you were just hearing about the muscles and picking apart all the processes, rather than watching them pirouette. It’s very sad how we think that kind of approach will make young people want to write. Academics don’t really get that in the same way. I can’t really explain what I’m doing. But it’s definitely not what they think it is.

SH: Oh, really? You would be such a good teacher, and you have such clean hands!

Do you know the French Film Etre et Avoir? It follows a primary school teacher. They’re younger than your students, but I’m interested to hear what you’d think. It’s presented as him being the world’s gift to teaching. The first time I watched it, I thought he was the most wonderful, beautiful man. But I watched it again recently and had a very different reading. He’s quite strict, and he doesn’t want any messing about. The classroom atmosphere is very calm and controlled, sure, but it didn’t look very fun. In the morning, they all had to line up, they had their little chair by the little table, in a nice row. Country children. As a teacher, what’s your reaction to that?

SH: To make them feel safe to begin with. So there’s no right or wrong. And for them to write how they want to write, not how I want them to write, or anybody else wants them to write. To find their voice, but we don’t explicitly say that, of course. What is their voice? It’s like ‘be yourself’. Where is this ‘voice’? Nevertheless, you have to build that self-esteem. To build that confidence. It’s so important.

SH: Get rid of it I wish! Get close to it, perhaps. But yes, I suppose shame does motivate me. I thought it was a girl thing. You feel that too?

SH: Ah, yes. Not about anything in particular, more of an existential dimension.

SH: Going back to the palace – my father wouldn’t have believed I’d ever meet the King. In his eyes, I was such a bad person. I didn’t get on with my father. And I hate gardening and cooking. Which, growing up, seemed to be what women were supposed to do. That’s the kind of woman I can’t be. You had to do everything in a particular way.

I was marvelling at your hands again.

SH: Oh that’s wonderful. We haven’t talked about music! Do you write music?

SH: Well my brother was the accomplished musician in the family, but I’m an admirer. However, I don’t go to parties or concerts or anything anymore. I get a kind of sensory overload. When people are talking and music is playing at the same time, I find it very overwhelming. The processing part becomes very difficult. One thing at a time, in isolation…

My father was much older than he should’ve been. When I was a teenager, he was about eighty. He wasn’t very interested in me, except when his friends came over. I would be summoned into the drawing room, and he would move one object. [Selima mimes moving a bauble on an artificial Christmas tree] and would ask me to find it. Or they would move a book in the bookcase to a different place. And I always discovered it. My hypersensitivity to my surroundings became a kind of party trick.

Again – I feel you understand me – I respond too much to music. Huge waves of emotion. It’s so powerful. I can listen to it on my own with my eyes closed. But not with other people. I’m interested in the technicalities of music. Theories of music. I find it fascinating. But I’m not very good at listening to it in groups.

SH: On the contrary, it’s a kind of doubling of the senses. Take this example. Recently, my landline phone needed sorting out. So a man came over in a yellow high-vis jacket that read OPENREACH on the label. And I looked at him and I said ‘Chaperone!’ because it’s an anagram, of course. And your name ‘Nathan’. I was thinking on the way over here, it’s very nearly a palindrome.

SH: You’re embarrassing me! That’s very sweet. Yes, I’d forgotten that one. And ‘Chihuahua’ is such a great word. Mexican, I think? Well, another reason I live in Dorset is because of the animals and insects.

SH: Well I used to have giant land snails. They are so slow and so still. I currently have a dog. It’s true also that my house is full of spiders, but I feel bad removing their habitats. And it’s amazing how they spin their webs.

SH: I turn people into animals all the time and they never know! I’ve done it with my mother. I feel much freer now … now they’ve passed away. My parents and my husband. It’s another reason why I’m starting to write in a different way, less encoded, rawer and more direct. Less turning people into animals. But then, it’s scarier if it’s more raw. And then I have to worry about oversharing, get off! Now that’s they’re gone … I can come clean and be myself.

SH: (Laughs) You can dedicate your animals to me in the acknowledgements of your next book! What animals are we talking about?

SH: A pine marten, nice! Spelt with an e in the penultimate position… And of course you’ve got ‘pine’ in there: to pine. It’s in the etymology somewhere.

To be continued next Friday…