The Times Magazine 39Palace. “I’m not a royalist,” she says, “but I am
a Queenist. I was very happy it was her.”
The trauma of hospital is still with her.
She dreams about the pain a lot. “I think my
dreams are managing it for me so I don’t have
to think about it very much.”
The memory of the pain and the nausea
has shaped her decision not to undergo
chemotherapy as initially planned. The type
of chemo used after the operation can cause
numbness in the hands and feet, she explains.
“I wouldn’t have been able to walk or work.
I wouldn’t have been able to cook or garden.
I’d be sick again for six months. I thought,
‘No, I’m not having that. I am taking my
chances.’ When I asked about the percentage
difference on living a longer life, between
doing chemo or not, it was five per cent. I’m
OK with not doing it for that.”
As a result, the cancer is likely to return.
“Between two and five years,” she says. “Five
years would be fine, two not quite so good.
I feel well at the moment. My worst time
is in the mornings when I wake up and
immediately think, ‘How am I feeling?’ But
I keep working. I keep doing things. I keep
talking. I keep loving the people I love. I keep
communicating. There is nothing else to be
done. Larkin said: ‘Death is no different
whined at than withstood.’ I am not whining.”
Tremain talks about the craft of fiction
with ease, helped perhaps by her background
as a teacher in the University of East Anglia’s
creative writing department (1988-95). She
has never mined her own experience in her
novels, what she calls “selling the family
silver”, and she is a passionate voice on the
freedom of the imagination versus the present
trend of criticising novels for “cultural
appropriation”, which she says used to be
simply known as writers exploring life
experiences that weren’t their own.
“Would I feel able to write Sacred Country
now?” she asks of her early extraordinary
novel about a transgender child. “The answer
is no!” A planned television adaptation of her
novel The Road Home, which tells the story of
an immigrant, was dropped by the BBC.
“Are we getting to a point where the only
people and places and experiences we are
allowed to write about are our own? I have to
resist that. If you take that away from a writer
like me, you take away all my material, really.
I can’t see where I would go next.”
Her memoir, Rosie, lays bare her deeply
unhappy childhood, first in London and then
Newbury, Berkshire, with her self-absorbed,
cold mother, herself a victim of her parents.
Tremain’s father, a mildly successful
playwright, abandoned the family when she
was ten, after which she pulled out all her
eyelashes. She was packed off to boarding
school, the family home in London sold, and
the nanny, who had been more of a mother
than anybody else, told to leave. Various
painful details have appeared disguised in her
work over the years, but only very fleetingly
and they are never overworked. Tremain was
also prevented from going to Oxford, based
on her mother’s assumption that there was
nothing worse than a “bluestocking”. She was
sent instead to a Swiss finishing school.
“It took me years to get back on track.
I do ask myself now, ‘Why didn’t I stand up to
her?’ My friend Neel Mukherjee said to me,
‘If my mother had done that to me, I’d have
killed her.’ ”
She finally got a life of her own by shaking
off her fear of her mother and enrolling at the
Sorbonne, then the University of East Anglia,
where she met her first husband and, years
later, would teach literature and then become
its chancellor.She wrote Rosie for her daughter, initially,
to try to honour “Nan”, the angelic nanny
and the ray of light in her life who she thinks
taught her how to love properly. She had no
intention of publishing it.
“I haven’t had at all a traumatic or
exceptional life, but there has been a lot of
difficulty in it, particularly my childhood, and
a lot of sadness,” she says.
“When Nan died when I was about 19,
I had huge difficulty mentioning her name
without crying. I couldn’t talk about her at all.
Writing about how she rescued me from the
derelictions of my parents made me see what
an extraordinary person she was. I made her a
robust person in that book and now I can talk
about her – just.”
One person whom she can still barely talk
about – I worry momentarily that she will
start to cry – is her lifelong editor, the late
Penelope Hoare, who discovered Tremain as
a writer more than 40 years ago. Tremain had
been rejected by six publishers when Hoare
picked up her manuscript and published
her in 1976. She was Tremain’s editor for all
subsequent novels until she died of cancer.
They were, remembers Caroline Michel, like
literary sisters. For the last two novels, the
beautiful, economically written The Gustav
Sonata and the upcoming Islands of Mercy,
Holmes has stepped in as editor.
“People have said to me, ‘Penny would be
so pleased about your damehood,’ ” Tremain
says. “She would sit where I am sitting and I
would sit there, where you are sitting, and we
would go through each novel. I always had to
cook chicken because it was the only thing
Penny would eat – and red wine.
“She would go through everything and she
was wonderfully robust and hard-nosed about
it. ‘Oh, we don’t need that!’ or ‘Oh, I think
you’ve gone on a bit long there!’ or ‘You
haven’t gone on long enough there.’
“We adored each other. She was able to
speak to me in a slightly headmistress-y way,
which was perfect. And then I’d have
everything I needed for a second draft.
“She was very brave about her cancer,
incredibly brave. She had this great phrase
she would use after an operation: ‘I’ll be
tickety-boo!’ I once found it on a little purple
plaque in a gift shop. ‘Tickety-boo’. I sent it
to her before she died. I sometimes think to
myself: ‘That’s OK’. Maybe it is the thing to
say. ‘It will all be all right’.”
McEwan told me that there were only
two women who had disproved to the late
Christopher Hitchens his dodgy theory that
women could not be funny. The first was
Tremain and the second was the writer and
cartoonist Posy Simmonds. “Rose is very
funny and witty,” McEwan says. “Rose and
Richard together are jewel-like companions
and company. They are marvellous together‘I was intimidated
because of how smart and
beautiful she was. She
does not take hostages’
Tremain is made
a dame by the
Queen in MarchWith her partner, Richard Holmes, in 2017