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Saturday is a disconcertingly beautiful day. The November air is like hot gin. I’m driving down from Newmarket to Hastings in a glorious mood – until I realise with horror that I’ve still not sent the BBC people a release form for the Samuel Johnson Prize interview they filmed last week. I panic all the way to Hastings, where the employees of a local branch of Waterstones come
to my rescue. They and other high-street booksellers have been fantastic champions of H Is for Hawk – my book about the death of my father, training a goshawk and the life of the novelist T H White – but this is way beyond the call. I email them the form from my phone. They print it out for me. I sign it, photograph it and email it to the BBC, feeling half like a spy, half like a complete idiot. Then they give me directions to my destination – the Beacon, a huge Victorian villa perched on an inland cliff. Carefully I write the directions on a piece of paper and promptly leave it behind.
I’m here for the Black Huts Festival, a bewitchingly eclectic event run by the poet and publisher Nicholas Johnson. He publishes my poetry and invited me to give my first public readings decades ago. Eventually, I find the Beacon and haul my case from the car. Distant police sirens, a waxing moon, a sprawl of end-of-season courgettes over winter garden frames – and above, a migrating woodcock flying in from over the sea, uplit in the sodium dusk. Where has it come from? Finland? Russia? Then inside to greet Nick and hear the folk musician Alasdair Roberts rehearse. Astonishingly beautiful, playing to an empty room.
Explosions in the sky
Sunday is lunch with friends and a ride on the Hastings funicular – seaside architecture is so magical – before a reading with Patrick McGuinness. His Other People’s Countries is one of my books of the year. Then I set off back to Newmarket in darkness. It’s Bonfire Night weekend: all the way, sprays of light blossom and fall across the horizon, turning Essex into a scene from Tron. The best moment was sitting in the car park at Birchanger services munching a cold samosa alongside scores of other drivers, all of us transfixed by a huge local display across the road. It was extra thrilling for being unexpected, for not being meant for us at all.
Peas and progress
I’m at the RSA for a Samuel Johnson Prize event. Six white chairs on a spotlit stage under James Barry’s extravagant 18th-century paintings The Progress of Human Culture. No pressure, I tell myself. I stuff my face with wasabi peas from a bowl in the green room and spend the first few minutes onstage necking glass after glass of water, my throat on fire. The diversity of the shortlist is thrilling. There are many memoirs on it this year. I am fascinated by the reasons you might write yourself into a narrative about wider historical and cultural phenomena. Doing so is a good way to explore how your assumptions colour your understanding of the subject, how your view, like everyone’s, is always subjective and inevitably partial.
Too much adrenalin
Tuesday is lunch at the British Museum with a fellow historian of science. We talk about invasive tamarisk, rescue dogs, British empire shipping maps from the 1930s and the ecologist Charles Elton. I rush off to get my hair done for the Samuel Johnson Prize ceremony. I’ve decided on a bloody great beehive. It is a ridiculous creation and I love it. Back at the hotel, hyperventilating and spaced on hairspray fumes, I drag on a frock, stumble into a taxi and zoom off to the awards at Riba. Rosy light, crowds, pilasters, smiles, the whole thing already surreal.
“Did you manage to eat anything?” I was asked afterwards. Well, yes. Only because the dinner was so lovely I kept forgetting what it was in aid of. Then I’d remember, put down my cutlery, all appetite gone.
One by one, the judges take the podium to deliver acute critical assessments of each book. Then the impossible news from the chair, Claire Tomalin, that H Is for Hawk has won. Shock, disbelief, delight, then waves of dizziness. I manage to hug my dear mother, my editor, Dan Franklin, and my publicist, Ruth Waldram, without falling over but trying to make it up to the stage in high heels is very dicey. I promised myself I wouldn’t cry if I won. But I cry anyway, right the way through my acceptance speech.
Then I’m whisked away for interviews, feeling oddly as if I’m made of helium and hay – buoyant, airy, liable to fall apart. All social ability has vanished. When the BBC’s Nick Higham describes the book to the camera as being “three in one”, I blurt out that I like the comparison because it makes the book sound like washing powder. Oh, God. Too much adrenalin. I can’t sleep a wink that night. I spend most of it playing “match three” games on my phone and when the taxi comes to collect me for the Today programme at 6.40am I resemble an extra from Night of the Living Dead.
How to make books fly
Wednesday’s hero is Ruth, my Jonathan Cape publicist, who accompanies me all day, organising things to perfection. We race between the BBC, Four Colman Getty and newspaper offices; a whirl of podcasts and photo shoots. Cranes, denuded plane trees, burnished silver light. There’s one glorious moment of stillness in stationary traffic: I look out of the window and see a pair of peregrines circling over Westminster, high in a cirrus-hatched sky.
By lunchtime, I’m almost hallucinating with tiredness but a quick stop for fish and chips works wonders. Then to the Random House offices for a celebration. I’m reminded once again that, however lonely the writing of a book might be, it’s other people who make books fly: editors, designers, artists, proofreaders, sales people, booksellers and all the others behind the scenes. The prize belongs to them, too. As I stand there, cup of tea in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other, I try to make a less emotional speech. But seeing how happy everyone looks, I burst into tears all over again.