My maternal grandmother was in London during the Blitz. Indeed, the man she was dating before she met my grandfather was killed beside her in a cinema, in 1941, when a bomb came through the roof – a tragedy in which she herself was badly wounded.
I could not stop talking because now I had started my story, it wanted to be finished. We cannot choose where to start and stop. Our stories are the tellers of us.
I write in the novel’s afterword that our recent wars “finish not with victory or defeat but with a calendar draw-down date and a presumption that we shall never be reconciled with the enemy”.
Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English…?
Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.
The reason why I love people, and writing about them, is because they don’t always respond with hate and anger. If they did I wouldn’t have a story to tell. Who wants to know about someone who was brutalised and became brutal? I’m interested in the exceptions.
I planned how I would kill myself in the time of Churchill (stand under bombs), Victoria (throw myself under a horse), and Henry the Eighth (marry Henry the Eighth)- Little Bee
That is how we lived, happily and without hope. I was very young then, and I did not miss having a future because I did not know I was entitled to one.
Even for a girl like me, then, there comes a day when she can stop surviving and start living. To survive, you have to look good or talk good. But to end your story well– here is the truth– you have to talk yourself out of it.
