The Natural Order [antikvár]

Reader, I was born in Kingston Hospital (Alight at Norbiton) and brought up in Worcester Park. It follows that well into adolescence my close friends - equally disadvantaged - and I were never without the bitter taste of not having been one of the Bronte sisters. Our temperaments seemed to dictate it: some terrible failure of astral conjunctions must have occurred to put us down in Kingston in the 1950s rather than Yorkshire in the 1840s. In a recent biography of Charlotte Ms Margot Peters has written, "What twentieth-century city dweller would not like to undergo the torments of solitude in a moorland village?" I knew torment all right - but the torment of giving one's address as 53 Forsythe Gardens, the torment of a complete dearth of real torment. Of the three of us Damaris was the Emily figure, the intellectual giant, so to speak. I think of Emily as wasted with moral intensity, capable alike of breaking glass with the sheer energy of her genius, or tossing off a verse on mortality with one hand and humping wholewheat bread around the kitchen with the other. Damaris is the sort of person who feels pangs of loss when a leaf falls, and who spends long hours seeing the skull beneath the skin. Damaris was musical and had no mother. Reader, I was Charlotte. That is, several inches shorter than Damaris, my body hardly robust enough to support the Gothic passions that frequently wracked it, given to performing sadomasochistic historical dramas in front of the dressing-table mirror, and yet determined from a young age to venture out into the world and take it full on the sensibilities. Picture me trembling with technicolored tragic imaginings in my boxy bedroom with