After my brother died, a friend gave me good advice: “In moments of shattering trauma, Just Do the Next Thing.” Following his example, I boarded a plane. I was carrying an enormous and ancient hardcover, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, by Antony Alpers. I read it solidly, hour after hour, as we left it all behind.
Singapore was under an excessive heat warning. The wet bulb temperature was so high, exertion could cause hyperthermia. We toiled through the gardens and escaped into the air-conditioned mall, where a weather forecast was playing.
The recent Singapore Airlines flight that plunged without warning, causing passengers to hit the roof, had been crossing the inter-tropical convergence zone, where thunderstorms are frequent. Climate change is making storms worse, and episodes of clear air turbulence more severe. India was experiencing its most intense heatwave ever, with temperatures of 50°C, and the air would be very active on our flightpath.
Carrying my hardback, I Did the Next Thing and boarded for the ride over the storm-lashed Bay of Bengal. The pilot was jovial. “We expect a few bumps,” he said. “Nothing to worry about!” Every time he reminded us to buckle up, he added, “Nothing to be concerned about!”
No one wanted to queue in the aisles. Instead, there was a rush when each toilet was vacated, as people fought to be the first one in. Most of the flight was spent in lockdown. There was absolutely nothing to worry about as we bounced and lurched and yawed across the globe.
Thirteen hours went by. Katherine Mansfield grew up in Wellington, left for Britain. She met John Middleton Murry, encountered the Bloomsbury Set, caused Virginia Woolf to be jealous of her writing. She battled TB, lost her brother to the War, influenced Woolf’s style and worked at her own. She grew sicker and was advised to seek a warm climate.
Murry, Mansfield’s earnest literary husband, kept making a mistake I knew all about: he wrote honest book reviews. He just couldn’t be insincere about writing, and inevitably, there was hell to pay. As we flew over valleys and snowy peaks, Murry was working on a sceptical review of Siegfried Sassoon. The result, as Alpers describes it, was “one of those ill-starred demonstrations of his integrity, which cost him so dearly at various moments of his life”.
Bloomsbury was outraged by the review; there was fallout for Murry and Mansfield. The vitriol was extreme, inventively so. The turbulence rocked JMM and KM; their social acceptability plummeted.
The problem is perennial. Utterly sick of the fallout from reviewing, I’ve all but given it up. I’ve had enough of it costing me dearly in our small population. And yet, if no one does it, and does it honestly, how do we adequately discuss, let alone promote, our local literature?
We were flying over a vast expanse of mountains. The view was extraordinarily beautiful, the wild emptiness terrifying. The woman across from me began weeping. On planes, the low air pressure causes mild hypoxia, which makes it harder to regulate emotions. On planes, people cry, and go off, and lose their minds.
I was steely, fully in control until the approach to Heathrow Airport, when I made a crucial mistake. I abandoned Bloomsbury, put on the headphones and scrolled through the music. A series of old UK hits was pure clear-air turbulence. They conjured up memories of my brother in London when we were children. It hit without warning; I plummeted into free fall. I and the woman across from me: a couple of wrecks, weeping our way down into Britain.
