LITMIR.BIZ

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      Dido flicked her infusion tube up and down impatiently, as though it were a cloak hem.

      ‘And here’s why,’ I continued. ‘The reason the books in the Ribena box are packed so badly is because the diarist first put them in this plastic bag, then squashed it into the box. So, if it’s not a rat that ruined this bag, it’s sunlight, which suggests a south-facing window, that it must have remained in this position for many years, and that the person is not well organised …’

      Dido dropped the fragment of plastic back into my hand. She had a theory of her own. ‘She came from a village or a town.’

      ‘We don’t know that. She hasn’t said anything about her home yet.’

      ‘We do know it, because she can’t find the sheet of telephone numbers when she wants to ring the hospital to arrange a blood transfusion after her curse. Why did she need a sheet of numbers? Why not just ring 999? The reason is, 999 wasn’t introduced across the country until the mid-seventies, and she was writing in 1960. 999 was only available in cities then.’

      On the train back to Great Snoring I read the rest of the diary from 1960. It is early December. The diarist is ‘tired and nervous’. She is in love with several men. One tells her she is ‘very sexy’; another is ‘a very virile sort’ (although ‘don’t like muscular strength in a man very much, it makes me afraid’), and has the inappropriate name of Mr Weakley.

      One evening, ‘I’ takes herself to see Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera Iolanthe. The fairy Iolanthe has married a human and borne a son who is fairy down to his waist. His legs are human. He is in love with Phyllis, a ward of court, but the Lord Chancellor is in love with her too:

      But there’d be the deuce to pay in the Lords

      If I fell in love with one of my Wards:

      Which rather tries my temper, for

      I’m SUCH a susceptible Chancellor!

      While listening to this song in the winter of 1960, the diarist was struck by a revelation:

      As I gazed at the painted figure singing on the stage to an engrossed audience, wondering so deeply over life that suddenly the man no longer seemed real, nor the theatre, or the audience; and as I watched that visual thing we call life, there came in a flash to my mind a universal truth, a fairly simple & obvious explanation of the purpose of life, & what it is which makes this life transitory, together with all its little simple delights & sorrows …

      I looked up from my train seat with a sob and watched the fens itching in the summer heat. The landscape here is as flat as a page. The trees and tracks through the peaty fields are handwriting. The Isle of Ely and its cathedral spire are where the writer has splodged her pen, got angry and broken up the fibres of earth. The river, where she has found her rhythm again.

      Was this ‘I’s Great Project: the meaning of life? Did she want to be able to answer such questions as why Henry VIII liked boiling heads; why the sanctimonious, self-aggrandising Thomas More wanted to be boiled; why all his bones, except his skull, had been lost; why the diaries had been thrown away; why the diarist had been given so much hope and endured so much failure; why Richard was strapped to a wheelchair, with brain damage; why Dido was dying? Had the diarist detected something during the Lord Chancellor’s ridiculous song that could make sense of this relentless destruction? Had she spent the next four and a half million words explaining it?

      Mastering my emotion, I returned to the book to find out what this ‘flash’ of ‘universal truth’ that she had witnessed could possibly have been:

      but the momentary metaphysical insight passed & was gone.

       10 Ancestors

      Must tell E about how distinguished my family is.

       Aged nineteen

      The first thing every biographer needs when he’s trying to make sense of 148 notebooks is another notebook.

      How do you begin to catalogue five million words of anonymous writing? In the sticky-bits section of W.H. Smith I picked up Post-it notes. Among the computer software packages, I selected a docket for voice-recognition software. It would take only a few years to read in the entire 15,000 pages. In the hardware department, I changed my mind again. Delighted by the £40 photocopiers, I hoisted one to the checkout; I would do my editing on a duplicate of the books – now I’d have thirty thousand pages. Everything I thought of seemed to involve either damaging the books, or producing so much preparatory work that I’d be dead before I began.

      In the end I bought a packet of highlighter pens.

      Back at home, I categorised information into five types, one to each radioactive tint of my new highlighters: blue, for physical descriptions:

      Mother says I look like a sick ostrich.

      Orange, for biographical information:

      I have some sort of inkling that I might have been at the Coliseum in Rome, in a former life.

      Pink, for names: Nizzy; Sweet Swoo’ Boodies; an art student called Wolffsky who never – ‘gnash!’ – becomes her lover; his rival, who goes by the name of only ‘E’; Boots; Humfee; sisters Noon, Woill and Kate, aka ‘that perfectly repulsive child’ …

      Green highlighter was for examples of particularly good writing and quotable text:

      Went out to the library & Backs, sketched St John’s bridge on a Cambridge evening. Homesick for Cambridge even whilst I’m still in it – the leaf-lit path in John’s – a pattern of shade & sun all down the long wide walk, like a fantasy; walked with my head in green leaves & my feet on gold.

      My diary-writing rather like a form of prayer – do not pray, but of that temperament – confide on paper, & get strength from it, it purifies my soul. It is auto-suggestion, like prayer.

      If I die, I will leave countless of these little diaries, full of heartbreak.

      And yellow, for anecdotes:

      March, 1959: Archbishop Ramsey gets into her bed.

      March, 1960: The second knife attack.

      July, 1961: Feeding employer’s best cut of lamb to the dog.

      I imagined this multicoloured approach would be like extracting a body from an Irish bog, using neon highlighter instead of a shovel. I pictured the books laid out in the British Museum, a hundred years from now: Forensic Biography Began Here! Author Excavated Subject Using Staedtler Pens!

      Behind, stretching into the penumbra would be the annotated diaries, glowing like fuel rods …

      Picking out a small memo book, dated 1961, I made immediate progress with blue (physical description) and green (quotable):

      A note on my hair – it is glorious, tremendously thick, shining in rich goldy & reddy-brown & dark lights – prodigality of Nature for my youth, it won’t last forever. ‘Beauty that must die.’

      And on a sheet of blank paper, I began a portrait:

      which looks like the silhouette of an East End boxer glowering out of a wig. There is no further physical description in the 120 pages of that book. She remains a hairpiece for four years.

      Mr Hely this afternoon – in many ways, I enjoy these visits to the dentist! Enjoy chatting with this kind, feeling man. The treatment was uncomfortable – injections in the vein at the back of the jaw [but] I am so eager to give & receive love, like a desperate little girl, that I got something out

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