Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. The abandoned place.
    Where are you?
    But what is really your own never does leave you. I could not find words, not directly, for my own state, but every so often I could write, and I did so in lit-up explosions, that for a time showed me that there was still a world – proper and splendid. I could be my own flare to see by. Then the light went out again.
    I had already written two books for children: The King of Capri , a picture book, and a novel for older children called Tanglewreck. Tanglewreck imagines a world where time, like oil or water or any other commodity, is running out.
    I wrote these books for my godchildren, the children and the books giving me uncomplicated delight.
    Arriving back from Holland in December 2007 I had used up all my resources giving an important public lecture and trying to act normal. I was sweating again, and when I got into the house I couldn’t even manage to light the fire. So I sat in my overcoat with a tin of baked beans in my hands, and both cats on my knees.
    I thought of a story – a Christmas story, the Christmas story from the donkey’s point of view called ‘The Lion, the Unicorn and Me’. The donkey gets a golden nose when he lifts up his head to bray and the angel’s foot, dangling from the wormy rafters of the stable, brushes his nose.
    I was the donkey. I needed a golden nose.
    I wrote the story that night – until about five in the morning, then slept and slept, for nearly twenty-four hours.
    The story was published in The Times . On Christmas Eve, a very nice lady sent me an email saying it had made her cry and it had made her little girl laugh and cry, and could her publishing house illustrate it and publish it?
    That is what happened.
    And it wasn’t the end of the books rescuing me. If poetry was a rope, then the books themselves were rafts. At my most precarious I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.
    Feeling. I didn’t want to feel.
    The best reprieve for me at that time was to go to Paris and hide in the bookshop Shakespeare and Company.
    I had become friends with the owner, Sylvia Whitman, a young woman whose enormous energy and enthusiasm carry her through most things. Her father George, who opened the shop on its present site by Notre-Dame in 1951, still lives upstairs, perched like an old eagle.
    Sylvia arranged for me to stay in the unmodernised old-fashioned Hotel Esmeralda next door to the shop. On the top floor, with no phone, no TV, just a bed and a desk, and a view of the church, I found I could sleep and even work.
    I could sit in the antiquarian part of the bookshop all day and much of the night, reading with Sylvia’s dog beside me, and when I needed to walk, the dog, Colette, came too. It was a simple, safe escape.
    At the shop I had no responsibilities and I was looked after. Arriving once with a chest infection, Sylvia wouldn’t let me go home. Instead she made me soup, changed my tickets, bought me pyjamas and kept me in bed.
    There was a feel of the old days in the Accrington Public Library. I was safe. I was surrounded by books. My breathing became deeper and steadier and I was no longer haunted. Those times were temporary but they were precious.
    I wasn’t getting better. I was getting worse.
    I did not go to the doctor because I didn’t want pills. If this was going to kill me then let me be killed by it. If this was the rest of my life I could not live.
    I knew clearly that I could not rebuild my life or put it back together in any way. I had no idea what might lie on the other side of this place. I only knew that the before-world was gone forever.
    I had a sense of myself as a haunted house. I never knew when the invisible thing would strike – and it was like a blow, a kind of winding in the chest or stomach. When I felt it I would cry out at the force of it.
    Sometimes I lay curled up on the floor. Sometimes I kneeled and gripped a piece of furniture.
    This is one moment . . . know that another . . .
    Hold on, hold on, hold on.
    I love the natural world and I never ceased to see it. The beauty of trees and fields, of hills and streams, of the changing colours, of the small creatures so busy and occupied. My long hours walking or sitting in the field with my back against the wall, watching the clouds and the weather, allowed me some steadiness. It was because I knew all this would