the times | Saturday December 4 2021 saturday review 9After her father left, her mother never
showed any love to Rose or her sister, Jo. “I
think we felt totally neglected. As a mother
and a grandmother, I like to manifest my
love to my daughter and my grandchildren
in all kinds of ways. That manifestation —
whether through kindness, through
understanding, through listening, through
encouraging — was not really there.”
After her mother told her over elevenses
in the nursery that she was remarrying,
Rose pulled out all her eyelashes. “My sis-
ter started pulling the skin off her lips. I
think we developed these little physical
tics. It was a mild form of self-harm.” It was
her nanny who saved her. “In some mirac-
ulous way, maybe because I was shown
love by Nan, I was all right and knew how
to be loving. I had a template for how one
might love.”
Tremain was also prevented from
going to Oxford University. Based on hermother’s assumption that there was noth-
ing worse than a “bluestocking”, she was
sent to a Swiss finishing school instead.
She wrote to escape and thinks that an
unhappy early life probably made her a
better novelist. There has always been a
“kernel” of resolve deep inside her, she
says. “I think perhaps difficulty is a good
sort of base or spur from which to try and
create something.”
There have been more recent traumas.
Two years ago she was diagnosed with
pancreatic cancer and underwent gruel-
ling surgery in which a third of her stom-
ach, a third of her pancreas and a large
section of her small bowel was cut away. “It
was quite severe,” she admits. “There was a
time in hospital when I couldn’t even write
my name. I couldn’t operate the keys onmy phone, I lost nearly three stone of
weight... I didn’t know whether I was
going to pull out of it, but I did.” It made her
want to speed up, to make the most of
every day. “There was a sense of urgency,”
she says. “I didn’t know how long I was
going to survive. I still don’t know.”
Tremain refused chemotherapy even
though that meant the cancer was more
likely to return. The doctors told her the
course might damage the feeling in her
hands and feet. “I thought, ‘I won’t be able
to walk and I won’t be able to write. No, let
me have a little bit more time.’ I’ve had two
years now almost to the day and at the
moment I’m feeling OK. It [the cancer] will
come back, but who knows when?”
Getting through the illness has made
her want to try new things. “I’ve written a
children’s book, which is not in my comfort
zone. It was inspired by reading to my
grandchildren.” However, she is struggling
with her next adult novel. “I feel a bit stuck
as to what I can be allowed to write. What
pathway can I take? How can writers like
me, who have always gone elsewhere, find
the next subject? I keep searching in my
mind; usually it’s rather late at night and
thinking, ‘No that won’t do, that won’t do.’
So whether I’ll find anything to write
about is, I think, now a moot point, which
is very frustrating.”
Yet she can’t imagine retiring. Every
morning she and Holmes go to their stud-
ies. Every evening they meet for dinner
and he lights the candles as they sit down
to eat. “It creates a huge panic in me if I’m
not working,” Tremain says. “This is a ter-
rible neurosis, isn’t it? At my age, a lot of
people are very content to potter around
and see friends and do the garden, but
my natural gravitation is next door to my
office in the mornings, and not to be able
to go in there any more would be just
devastating.”
To listen to the full interview with
Rose Tremain on the Past Imperfect
podcast go to thetimes.co.uk/podcasts/
past-imperfectHow can writers like
me who have always
gone elsewhere find
the next subject?
the guise of a man — in Restoration I’m this
totally out-of-order guy who cracks lots of
jokes. Would I be allowed to do that even?
I don’t know.”
Tremain’s novels are never written
from a position of ignorance. She has beenmore. We need the real thing’
rereading Sacred Country recently. “And I
reminded myself how many interviews I
did with transgender people, how much
research I did into what was known at the
time. So, as well as my own imagination, I
was actually doing a lot of legwork on this.
I didn’t just assume that I could project my
own imagination into this dilemma.”
Her fellow novelist JK Rowling has been
vilified for entering the gender debate. “It’s
very frustrating,” Tremain says. “Tom
Stoppard... is on record saying that he’s
treading through treacle now, doesn’t
know where to go. I think it’s just made the
pathway very difficult for us. And it’s not
just what we write, it’s also what we say
about what we write or about what other
people write. So, it’s like we’re walking
through a forest with mantraps. You could
fall into them at any time. And I think
nobody is more conscious of this than
the publishers because they don’t want to
have to dig you out of the mantrap, or
person trap.”
Tremain worries that publishing has lost
its way. “It does seem to me that publishers
have become less discerning about what
they decide to publish. I was very shocked
in recent times when I was talking to a
quite senior editor about this. And he said,
‘Oh, I just throw things at the wall and see
what sticks.’ And I thought, ‘Well, that is
how publishing seems to me to be at the
moment.’ There’s some excellent stuff, but
there’s a lot of mediocre stuff.”
She thinks the output is bound to suffer
if writers cannot use their imaginations.
“It’s not just me, it’s thousands of us all
round the world,” she says. “My [husband]
Richard is rather more optimistic than me.
He’s a biographer and I think it’s affected
the fiction writers much more. People are
saying, ‘Don’t make it up any more. We
need the real thing.’ His view is that it may
or may not pass, but I’m getting so old now
that I think, ‘Will it pass in time for me?’ ”
There is something “hideously narcis-
sistic” about the present trend, she be-
lieves. “I always say to my students, ‘Don’t
write about yourself because you’ll run out
of material... You won’t have learnt any-
thing about the world, you won’t have
looked outside.’ So much of the learning
that I have done has been done through re-
search into the subjects that I’ve chosen.”
It feels to Tremain as if the literary world
is stuck in a rut. “This is where fiction has
paused, isn’t it? The most accepted fiction
is in the hands of people who’ve had rather
exceptional, usually traumatic early lives,
and that give an authenticity... There is a
story to tell.”
Tremain did not write about her unhap-
py childhood until she was in her seventies
when she published a memoir called Rosie:
Scenes from a Vanished Life. Rosie was the
name she was given by her family, but she
hated it and changed it to Rose as soon as
she turned 18. “Rosie seemed to me a
slightly flippant candyfloss sort of name. I
felt even as a little girl that this wasn’t quite
right and I thought the name Rose was
rather beautiful and severe.”
Born in 1943, Tremain grew up in an
upper-middle-class family. She lived in
Chelsea and spent her holidays at her
grandparents’ large country house. There
was a butler who brought drinks to the tree
house and an adored nanny, but she was
as emotionally neglected as she was mate-
rially privileged.DAN KENNEDY FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINEadaptation Robert
Downey Jr, Sam Neill
and Polly Walker in the
1995 film of Tremain’s
novel Restoration