Read Online Letters to Alice by Fay Weldon - Free Book Online Page A

are different from other people, and in some way special, is powerful. What to some non-writers is seen as easy (‘I’d write a book too myself if only I had the time’) and to others as hard (‘I don’t know how you do it, I really don’t’), to the newly fledged writer is neither easy, nor hard, but simply miraculous. Perhaps it just is that books, novels, loom larger in the lives of writers than they do in the lives of ordinary people, so that to actually be able to write a book seems far, far superior an achievement to the novice writer than, say, making a million pounds or inventing a cure for cancer, or marrying the Prince Regent.
    Be that as it may, I don’t suppose her family allowed her to become conceited about Love and Freindship. They will have cut her down to size with gentle mockery — of the same kind that Jane Austen likewise used, and sometimes not so gentle: safe enough on the page, but devastating in real life.
    Alice, that is enough for today. I am going to the Qantas office here in Cairns to see about my ticket home. Cairns is a pretty place, but it isn’t where I belong. Many of the houses here are built on stilts, incidentally, for reasons as varied as the people who tell me why. Some say it’s because of the crocodiles, or the white ants, or because they’ve always been like that, or for ventilation, or because of the floods, or to raise them above the swamp, or all the better to see the abos from, and some are joking and some are not: hard to tell, so laid back, handsome, sunburned and droll are these Queenslanders. The town itself has wide streets and low wooden buildings, and a branch of David Jones, the department store, made of plywood, with a restaurant where they serve seamen (it’s a port, did you know, do you care, do you have a map?), enormous meals of sausages, beans and steak and fried bread and hot sweet tea. The tribal Aboriginals outside in the desert live on wichetty grubs and a nut or berry or so, and blend better into the background, as thin as the white men in the towns are fleshy. Here rich landowners import Asian girls as wives. The girls are glad enough, they say, to escape the hunger and poverty of their own lands; and I have seen them come into town, on occasion, seeming happy and grateful enough, gliding along just behind their striding, paunchy, well-satisfied husbands. Are we to disapprove? I suppose so. But think back to Pride and Prejudice. Charlotte Lucas found happiness with Mr Collins, in spite of marrying him for all the wrong reasons. It did for her: it would not do for Elizabeth, who was shocked at first, and heartily disapproved, and then re-thought the whole matter.
    I suppose what has happened is that there in Georgian England we had the microcosm of what was to explode into the wide, wild world. Then it was the village girl, whose face was her fortune, obliged to marry the old, rich man from fifty miles away, in order to survive. Now it is the pretty girl from Java who marries the rancher from North Australia.
    The population of the British Isles today is some 60 million. In 1800 it was estimated at 11 million. Would you like a break-down of the population, as a parting educational shot? I daresay you dread my return, you are afraid you will actually have to meet me, but I assure you, you don’t.
Nobility and gentry
5,000
Clergy of the churches of England and Scotland
18,000
Ditto dissenters of every
description
14,000
Army and militia, including half-pay, etc.
240,000
Navy and marines
130,000
Seamen in the merchant service 155,000
Lightermen, watermen, etc.
3,000
Persons employed in collecting the public revenue
6,000
Judges, Counsel, attorneys, etc.
14,000
Merchants, brokers, factors, etc.
25,000
Clerks to ditto, and to commercial companies
40,000
Employed in the different
manufactures
1,680,000
Mechanics not immediately belonging to ditto
50,000
Shopkeepers
160,000
Schoolmasters and mistresses
20,000
Artists
5,000
Players, musicians,