Jenny Diski

A few years ago, someone asked how it came about that I ended up living with Doris Lessing in my teens. I was in the middle of the story of the to-ing and fro-ing between my parents and was finally reaching the psychiatric hospital bit when the man said something extraordinary, something that had never occurred to me or to anyone else to whom I’d told the story. ‘Why didn’t you just do what you were told?’ he asked. I was lost for words.

The treatment​’s over and done with. First from August to October, the three cycles of chemotherapy, then I graduated from the poison infusions to the death rays, with daily radiotherapy throughout November (weekends off). All done: the killing of cells in my body, the ‘good’ along with the ‘bad’, all of them just being, reproducing and doing whatever else...

I don’t remember the exact date when I went to live in Doris Lessing’s house in Charrington Street, north of King’s Cross. I think of it as being just a few weeks after Sylvia Plath killed herself in early February 1963. The suicide was still very raw and much discussed by Doris’s friends. So at the earliest towards the end of February. In any case it was before Easter, which fell in April that year, because at long last, released from my father’s prohibitions, I went on the Aldermaston March. (‘Ignorant, unwashed mob. You can’t go, you’ll be raped, and that’s that.’)

After​ waiting that long week for the results of my post-chemo scan, the answer to the hovering question about the effect it had on the tumour in my lung and the affected lymph nodes was much the same as most eagerly awaited answers to important questions. Inconclusive. As I’m learning to expect, nothing very decisive has resulted from the treatment. After three cycles of...

Tick.​ The final infusion of the three 21-day cycles of chemo is done. I’ve been of a mind to follow Alan Bennett’s excellent observation that he doesn’t wish to be so familiar with the treatment as to call it by its nickname. But adding the ‘therapy’ each time has become peculiarly tedious and needlessly pointed. Back when, I used to pronounce R.D....