Mantrapped by Fay Weldon

was a fish-and-chip shop for a time, and the smell of poverty and battered fish frying in stale oil still hangs round the old brickwork of the stairs. Before that it was a pawnbroker and perhaps human distress has eaten into its brickwork. Perhaps none of us are as firmly rooted in the here and now as we assume. My son Sam, who has a great sense of fairness, and came into the world, as Wordsworth would have it, ' trailing clouds of glory' , asked me when he was three when it was his turn to be a girl. I told him that didn't happen, but I can see that perhaps in some parallel universe down the road gender swap, soul swap, happens all the time. Perhaps Trisha is the bit-part player in some other greater drama, and the Great Scriptwriter in the Sky - the GSWITS, lord of the new fictional religion which I invented in a novella called The Rules
    of Life , has plans for her, which is why she has had to sell up her house and now lives here, with windows which rattle when a truck passes by and floors which slope so that her mattress keeps sliding down towards the door at night.
    Better anyway that the conservationists had not interfered, and Wilkins' place been torn down and carted away to some landfill complete with dust, cobwebs and history, and something new, bright and concrete put in its place, and then perhaps the whole thing would never have happened. Blame the Gods of misrule, who are everywhere these days, blame everyone, blame anything, but not yourself.

 
    Fading customs
     
     
    I received no official training as a writer: I attended no creative writing courses: I did not study English literature at college. Having been so bad at the subject at school, I took up economics instead. My only tuition, and that was informal, happened when Louis Simpson, a poet, critic and Professor of English Literature at Stony Brook in New York, moved into the house next door. That was in 1968.
    Time folds and crumples. I have leapt years ahead here from the days with the Dane, who retired to live on the coast and run a sailing school and live happily ever after. I would never have made a sailing woman. It feels dangerous enough to be in a car, let alone a boat.
    And I am now living with Ron, and have been for some years. We have a son, the second child for both of us, called Dan. We are still living in Primrose Hill round the corner from the shop, and my life has turned from a disaster area to a bright new development, as has High View Flats in Mantrapped . Or at least a very superior and complete internal conversion, if only the smell of the past didn't keep creeping through to the present.
    These changes happen so fast. One day there's a derelict makeshift factory: then there's High View. One day there's a derelict runaway headmaster's wife, the next there's Fay Weldon, copy consultant, writer of TV plays, and would-be novelist. Just because she fell in love with a man she met at a party and married him. It hardly bears thinking about.
    I had just had my first novel published. Louis was charming, handsome, intense, he knew all there was to know about literature and poetry. He knew how it should be done. I saw his face on the Internet the other day and my heart leapt to my mouth. He was, is, a really good poet. Our conversations were so many years ago he may well have forgotten that he ever knew me. But I have not forgotten him.
    Way back then I showed him the novel I had just had published, The Fat Woman's Joke . I thought to win his good opinion. 1 too, the housewife next door, could write, and here was proof of it. I went off daily to work at Ogilvie and Mather, the big advertising agency, but I hoped that somehow Louis hadn't noticed. Advertising was considered a low occupation for persons of any sensibility, shallow and trashy, and anyway a working woman was earning pin money and should stay home and take better care of the children. I also brought shame on my husband by writing a cookery column, an advertisement for the Metal Box