Lucy Caldwell: ‘I felt sick with despair at the idea of growing up'

Lucy Caldwell: 'Having children has made me see so much anew through their eyes'

I was born in Belfast in 1981. I’m the eldest of three sisters, all close in age, and we were very close growing up. Like the Brontë siblings, we had complex imaginary worlds that we lived in for years. I didn’t want to grow up and felt sick with despair at the idea that I’d have to. It still seems miraculous now to have come through and have children of my own. My son is 7 and my daughter is 4 — that age when the worlds of their own imaginations are so alive.

I believe I was born to be the person I am. I wanted to write books before I could actually write — I’d fold the paper and do the drawings and tell my mum what words I wanted where. Even before that, I would crawl behind the sofa and pretend to be a radio telling stories. People encouraged me at every step along the way — my mum, taking us to the library twice a week, Wendy Erskine, my English teacher for sixth form, Chris Hannan, the playwright who was my first mentor at university, Jenny Diski, who told me I was a true writer. As a mother, I see how wildly creative all young children are, and as a teacher I see so many adults who had their creative urges belittled or quashed, or simply not encouraged, and who are desperate to get back to that place.

My earliest memory is being buttoned in under the rain cover of a brown-and-orange Maclaren buggy. It’s raining outside and I’m inside, in my own bubble, safe from the world. A little later, a dog stealing a sausage roll outside the bakery in Cherryvalley. I don’t even know if it was from my hand, or my sister’s… 

The greatest challenge I’ve faced in life… I could say those difficult teenage years, the psychic trauma of growing up — or the lost, lonely years of my 20s — or the complex struggles of balancing new motherhood and writing in my 30s heavy with the knowledge that you have the responsibility for a whole other person. But I think more and more that the greatest challenges come to us unheralded, unannounced, catching us off-guard: being kind to someone, and giving them the benefit of the doubt; not snapping at your child; quotidian-seeming moments that hold within them the possibility of transformation.

My son was gravely ill after he was born. Those first few weeks are a blur of cannulas and lumbar punctures and hospital wards and bleeping machines, sleeplessness and sheer terror. When he was three months old, we took him on a trip to Cork, where I’d been invited to read at a book festival. It would have been so much easier not to go, but it felt like a more significant and symbolic decision than that: are we going to live our lives from now on freely, or fearfully? I am so proud that we went.

Having children has made me see so much anew through their eyes: all the inexplicable, unconscionable ways we live, and things we still do. My son, at 5, wrote ‘letters’ to our local supermarkets and cornershop saying, ‘Please stop using palm oil, you’re killing the orang-utans,’ and asks so angrily why people still drive cars that use petrol. I watch nature documentaries with him and see things like the Great Green Wall — a project to grow a belt of trees across the whole width of the African continent — and it makes me want to cry with hope for all that his generation will do. Young people like Greta Thunberg and, closer to home, Dara McAnulty, are shining stars.

My greatest quality is my imagination. But, as in any good fairytale where a blessing can be a curse in disguise, or vice versa, it’s my greatest liability, too.

The greatest advice I have ever been given was from my dad — 'never be the last to buy your round'. From Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, 'Give it, give it all, give it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.' And from the theatre director Ian Rickson, 'even the most minor characters in your play need to have their own integrity and life, as if the story, told from another angle, could be theirs.' What do all three have in common? A generosity, maybe.

I am best at hoping — and despairing.

What surprises me most is that here I am, here, now. When you go back just a couple of generations, and let yourself think of all of the chance encounters that had to happen in order for you to be born, and when you think of all the ways in which your life could have been cut short I am scared of wasting my time.

There’s a Belfast saying I love that goes: 'What’s for you won’t go by you'. One thing about writing fiction is that you get to explore dozens, hundreds of different lives, some following very closely the contours of yours, others outrageously different — only to come back to the fact that the sole life you get is this one. So here we are, now, and that’s the miracle.

• Lucy Caldwell is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and two collections of short stories. Her latest novel These Days is out now.