Free My Animal Life by Maggie Gee Page A

the river on the left and my family still way behind us. And something happened; we were not going to stop, we were on our second wind, and our third, no longer counting, we had turned into the horses we used to dream of, we were animals, we could run for ever, had slipped back in history, and before history, we were loping, now, across the sun-bright savannah. We had no limit. We became movement. We ran for hours beside the river, through the sunlit country, past rocks and trees.
    Of course I wore a watch, and the hours slipped away, and by the time we got back, my father was cross because my brother and his friend were late; but the memory has stayed with me, unchanging, complete, an image of cloudless physical life.
    As we age, such moments come less often. At its worst, the body becomes something to forget or to carry, something best ignored, something to transcend, a net of competing pain-signals.
    But my body for the most part is still my friend. Bodies must be our friends, or they will turn against us. When I neglect my body, it reminds me, sharply. When I overwork: when I forget to walk.
    I see cyber-life, the virtual, as the enemy. It keeps this generation of young in dark rooms, leaching strength from their arms and suppleness from their shoulders, poking their heads forwards like unshelled tortoises. It sucks out their souls through their eye-sockets. Poor young people, kept from the light.
    Here at St Cuthman’s, Neville said, ‘God did not make you for the dark of death, but to live.’
    To live. In our bodies, in the light, may we live.
    In Vladimir Nabokov’s great novel Ada , the hero, Van Veen, ages from a child to an old man, but Nabokov teasingly tells us that in his eighties Van still dances on his hands — ‘I can do anything, I can tango and tap-dance on my fantastic hands’ — delaying and delaying the final sigh of information that this is ‘only in a recurrent dream’.
    True, the mind can hold what the body has given. I dream of running, fast and free, an easy circuit through sand and silver birches, with the amazed (but delusory) realisation that I am still running as fast as ever.
    But a dream goes cold on waking. I run, for real, on London roads, not far, but enjoying it, listening to my feet, counting magpies and urban blossom, ignoring aches and car-fumes. I hope to go on running till I die. I hope to go on having sex till I die. Not only in dreams, but in the warmth of the flesh. I’m thinking about orgasm, now. What a beautiful expression ‘coming’ is. I’m coming, moving, here in the moment, here in the body, running wild.

My parents change class
not in the way they expected
    Here is one of my questions: in a single lifetime, do you ever, truly, change class?
    In one sense, that of appearances, class changes in a flash, leaping slick as a fish over the weir in a mere two decades. Send a child to public school and Oxbridge, or Harvard, or the Sorbonne, and even if the grandparents’ families have been sons and daughters of the soil for thirty generations, no one will be any the wiser. Will they?
    No one except the child . Each child instinctively knows where they come from, what their earliest memories are, which smells, which comforts, what their uncles and aunts were like, how they speak, how they eat. When they hear those voices again, wherever they are, however many years later, they will prick up their ears; hail, friend. (Though some of course are ashamed.)
    So what class am I? I’m a novelist — middle-class profession — and went to Oxford — middle-class education — and am married to a man who went to public school and Oxford, and knows the names of his family back to the seventeenth century — middle-class man.I like expensive scent, Issey Miyake or Chanel No 5 or 19, or Jo Malone, and good wine; I have flown to Australia, over the curve of the earth where suddenly St Petersburg glittered below on the