Verity Holloway

An article about Verity is due to appear in the Sunday Express magazine on Sunday 11 April 2010. Verity would like to make it clear that, despite its first-person perspective, the article was not written by her. Please see below for examples of Verity's writing, including a new sample of her Life Writing.

Verity gave a radio interview for BBC Radio Cambridgeshire's breakfast show on Tuesday 18 August 2009, in support of the charity Time To Change which seeks to eliminate the stigma surrounding mental illness.

Listen to Verity's BBC interview (MP3 format, 6.1mb)

November 8, 2009 — My first blog post

This is my first blog post, to prove that I exist and that there really is a novel in the works.

Many thanks to everyone who emailed me regarding the article in the Cambridge Evening News. Talking publicly about my mental health has been a daunting step, so your supportive messages have all been very touching. I volunteered for Time To Change in the hope that people in similar situations would read about my experiences and feel less alone. That’s what I needed most when I was ill.

In the near future, UK newspaper The Daily Express are publishing an article about me in their supplement magazine. Again, this is for the mental health charity Time To Change. The article is written in the first person, but not by me, so it’s a slightly peculiar read from my perspective. Rather like speaking through a ventriloquist’s dummy.

The novel is coming along nicely, and I hope to be finished by September 2010. Lately, I’ve been researching East Anglian village signs and heraldry in aid of the scenery. This book has taken me to some unexpected places. Odilon Redon, the French Symbolist painter, is making a ghostly appearance, too. I thoroughly recommend the current exhibition of his lithographs at The Fitzwilliam museum in Cambridge. I’m a fan of The Spider:

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The capitol was burning when I reached the wasteland. Four miles out, at the edge of the forest, I watched the shock of the flames against the night sky, an orange aura enveloping the distant city, from the ruins and the slums in the west to the brothels and the docklands in the east. A sudden plume of flame blossomed up over the skyline - the old distillery, erupting into white fire. There was enough gin in its cellars to burn the entire factory quarter. I thought of the dreadlocked fishermen piling survivors into their boats, turning to the bitter October sea. They have no word for October here. No months, no years.

My name is Feodor. Know me by that name and no other. I came from a place called London – a place you will never see – on a cold island named England. I’m recording these events so that someday someone will know of me, so that some trace of me might survive. And yes, I’m running away. I killed Germain today. I killed Eva yesterday. When the authorities come for me tomorrow, I’ll have to kill again.

I stood beneath the trees for several minutes, wheezing a little from the smoke I’d inhaled. A section of the city wall had collapsed after the fireworks emporium exploded, and I had to clamber over the rubble and slide down the other side on my bony rear while citizens went dashing this way and that with pails of water or armfuls of hastily gathered possessions. By then, a warrant was out for my arrest. No one followed me, not even the looters scrambling in and out of the ruined houses. Little Feodor was the only shadow racing across the wasteland. Even after all I’d taught them, the citizens would still rather burn than leave the capitol.

It would take days for me to fully realise what I’d done.

Do you like fire? I’m twenty-two years old, and I’ve torched more car tyres than I’ve blown out birthday candles. I wouldn’t do the sex thing, not for fun, and I loathed the other boys drinking shots and smoking joints on the squalid estate where I grew up. My thrill was fire. There was an unending supply of abandoned mopeds and piles of garbage scattered around the tower blocks, and it all looked so much lovelier in flames. I brought it to life. All warm and bright. Tyger, tyger.

I blew my Papa’s car into small bits once. That’s another story.

Humans are hardwired to crave fire and to fear it. All humans, even here. Did you ever play with matches as a child? Papa smacked my legs scarlet when he caught me, a clumsy five-year-old, trying to light the candle in front of mama’s icon of The Virgin. I’d singed the Holy Mother’s sad paper lips. That night, I lay under my duvet and cried until my face was sore, not for papa’s shouting or the lovely painted face I’d defiled, but because I wanted to do it again.

A whole city in flames, though - miles upon miles of stone buildings full of men and women and dogs and cats and books - that’s something entirely new.

Everything I’ve done here was for the good of the people. They did not deserve this.

I watched the capitol burn. I laughed.

I was afraid, let’s be clear of that. I’m wild when I’m frightened. It isn’t the same as madness. That night marked the end of my journey. I would never see London again. I could never return to the capitol, to the family who’d trusted me and taken me in, hidden me for twelve months, kept me safe. I was twenty-two that night, and I was terrified. Nowhere left to go. Nothing left to do but run.

I thought of parliament. I thought of its glass spires shattering and I laughed. I thought of my followers, men and women and kids and dogs. I thought of their homes in the slums collapsing into the canals and I laughed at that too. Most of those people had died when the militia were unleashed against the crowd. There was a stampede. Quick little me shinned up a drainpipe and went across the rooftops. Clever, quick, gutless little me.

I laugh when I’m frightened. Sorry.

My tunic was filthy with sweat and splinters of charred timber. The hairs on my arms, I noticed as I hugged myself, were singed clean away. My cheek was bleeding. I felt my pockets. My purse, my compass and the bundle of dried fruit I’d packed that morning were gone.

I turned my back to the capitol and took off into the wilderness. I can remember nothing of the hours after that, but running.

Untitled

Quite awake last night, I felt them toss you at my feet;
Your stiff and lavender weight -
Arms wide, puppety,
As if to clutch.

At my feet, your empty body is a question.

Daughter, what punishments are these?
Has your grief run cold?

Untitled

It has been said too many times before
That grief must strike us dumb,
Else reduce us to an overflow of clichés,
Of staid, unconscious pantomime,
Modernism, neglect.
It is not the way.
Quite often, I come across our buried convents
And ashes, and salt-anointed sackcloth,
And I feel a sudden nudity
The artless, vital language of the ruins,
And I am struck dumb then,
By remembrance
And relief.

Kelmscott

Your final sanctuary invaded.
‘The loveliest haunt of ancient peace’, this
House without time where you borrowed the years.
The ladies and the guidebooks display you:
A gorgeous beast of filthy talents and
Secrets of a most distasteful nature.
The chaffinch speaks about the nightgown still.
These gossiping streams and trite cream teas would
Wound you, though you owned each room you entered.
You had them in dark ink, the stolen, the
Dead, dreams of forgiveness, sobriety,
Of scarlet, of jade and your fading eyes.
In her silent room sleeping eels of blue
Coil on the windowsill. You left so soon.

Life Writing

One, more or less.

The little girl is blonde, white and blue. She is standing knee-deep in the warm water of a Gibraltarian swimming pool. It is high summer, and her parents watch as she stands motionless in the shallows. She holds a red tin watering can to her chest and regards the children of the Spanish families as they splash and thrash and squeal in a language she doesn’t yet understand. They are warm and brown as the chocolates handed to them by their mothers, who lounge, buxom and gregarious, in small groups beside the pool. The women's swimsuits match the clumps of heady bougainvillea cascading over the walls.

The pale girl is watching a small lizard (the Spanish mothers call them 'chit-chats', a word that tumbles over her lips) as it sneaks out from the shade of the purple blooms and disappears beneath a sunbed. Beyond the wall are seagulls, motorcycle horns and brief blasts of thumping bass competing with the continuous roar of the RAF carrier planes on the nearby airstrip. Everything is nearby in Gib. The Rock rises up like a giant crustacean, and, tilting her head to view its craggy summit, the girl is caught on camera. Her face is wondering, upturned, the eyes a shade wary. They say: There is a world beyond this pool, and it smells of aviation fuel.

She does not notice her mother take the photograph. The sun is hot on the back of her head, protected as it is by only a wispy Louise Brooks bob. Her shoulders prickle. Picking a spot in the centre of the pool, a spot free of chattering bodies, she takes ten steady steps, her blonde head bob-bob-bobbing down the slope into the deep end. By the tenth step she is enveloped in chlorinated water. Her head disappears into the cool, silent blue. She keeps her eyes open throughout, looking at the shimmering turquoise floor tiles which will remind her forever inexplicably of Coca Cola bottles. The change in temperature is pleasant, soothing, but the true prize is the water's emptiness; the other children are all confined to the deep end. The water blocks out the noise.

One moment of stillness before hands hoisted her up into the hot, dripping world once again. The Spanish mothers are laughing. The RAF lifeguard grins at her mother, the rescuer. "He loves his water, doesn’t he?" he says. The lifeguard never manages to react accordingly to the little girl's red swimsuit with its frills and white polka dots, and her mother flashes him a smile: "She certainly does."

They take her to England for the first time when she is two years old - the chilly length and breadth of it, Scotland to Portsmouth – for she is the daughter of an officer and daughters of officers go where they are told.

Eighteen. She is back, if only for three days. I. Myself. Gibraltar again. Lisa, mad Lisa, who wears her colourless hair up in a baseball cap and strides like a man, and Rachel, who sunburns easily and then hallucinates, are with me. I have known Rachel since we were four and couldn’t do without her. It is our first holiday together after fourteen years of dreaming and plotting. Lisa, if not clinically paranoid, is notoriously off-centre, and needs me to sit with her at night because a man who smiled at her in the street may discover which hotel we are in.

I am beginning to turn yellow. My eye sockets have a papery feel to them, like old newspaper, and my fingernails are brittle. I like the swimming pool best. The men who sit at the bar all afternoon are visibly alarmed by the bruises on my hipbones where I have slept on my side. The women are worse. They hold their Jilly Cooper novels up to their eyes, but I know they are watching.

In England my mother is dying. Nobody knows yet. My body is preparing itself for grief, turning yellow and bruised and brittle. It is instinct, sympathy; she cannot eat so I will not. I go with Rachel and Lisa to bars, laugh, drink, wear Dior perfume, buy trinkets. But the pool is where I am at ease.

I pick a spot in the far end of the pool, deep and empty, and dive.