Finding a happy ending

Lily resembles my Liverpool grandmother, John Roper resembles my brother and Eddy is someone I love.

Most of all, rough, damaged Bernie is me; no coincidence that she has my initials. My telling of her story is bound up with my experience of having a stillborn baby, the worst trauma of my life.

To begin at the beginning, as all stories must. In November 1975, after a difficult pregnancy and 16 hours of labour, I gave birth to a second son who was to have been called Tom. He was born dead. A few days later I consumed a bottle of wine while writing a long, anguished letter about it all to a close friend in Australia, a letter I copied, presciently, because it became the basis for an article in The Guardian. At the time little was known about the effects of stillbirth on mothers; the article proved to be groundbreaking, with far-reaching effects; for example, the formation of what became the Stillbirth Society (now Sands).

A year later, still miserable as well as cynical, I was dried up. Nothing seemed certain any more. So, for the first time, I went to Australia, to visit that beloved friend. I needed succour and Eva, a social worker, was very good at it. Two things happened. I felt such an affinity for that vast land that it was as if I had lived there in another life. And during my holiday, the punishing heat and dust and challenge of Australia “killed” a young English pilot, whose story became national headlines. “The kamikaze Pom” went off the rails and committed a terrible, vengeful suicide by flying a twin-engine plan into the tower at Alice Springs airport, murdering some innocent Australians, too. What might have driven him? Brooding on death as I was (so much) at this time, I became obsessed by this story and gathered every newspaper cutting I could. Thus began a long quest; it would be years before this would form the basis of a novel, though during that time I studied Aboriginal culture, returned twice, camped in the Outback, and so on. In between, I wrote two other novels, but this one would not go away.

“What ceremony else?” demands Hamlet when Ophelia is given a suicide’s stunted rites,articulating a profound human need for recognition of the dead and for rites to send them on their way, to release the living into their own lives, their future.

The novelist Margaret Atwood has called writing “negotiating with the dead”, explaining that it is “motivated, deep down, by a fear of and fascination with mortality, by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.” How could I have predicted that this would be my purpose, too? Today the parents of stillborn babies are encouraged to hold their dead child, to take photographs, to have a burial or memorial ceremony; formal or informal. This acknowledges the truth that a baby who has never drawn breath in this world still exists, a real person to the mother and father who mourn the end of all their imaginings.

In the mid-Seventies all that was unheard of. Your baby was shovelled off in a green wrapper and that was it. Nothing. A silence in which the only wails are your own. Milk-filled breasts and empty arms, and a great echoing hollowness in your life, with no chance for what they now call “closure”. Since stillbirth is the ultimate contradiction in terms, being birth and death in one, I began to study bereavement. Articles and radio programmes on grief followed, and all the while I (the agnostic) was skulking into churches whenever I could to light candles for my baby’s soul.

But some years later I was afflicted by a nightmare. There was a baby in this dream, a bundle whose face I could not see, and it cried and cried until I wanted to outdo its terrible screaming. The sound burnt reproach into my soul. It had to be stopped. Even now I shudder; it can barely be written but, in the nightmare, I shoved that yelling bundle into the bottom of a big old-fashioned wardrobe, piled clothes on top and locked the door. Oh, the horror. It would stay there in my imagination, rotting, unburied, an unquiet soul until I wrote The Invasion of Sand.

Unintentionally, the novel became a means of putting an end to the haunting, of laying that baby to rest at last. Now the book is published I understand that I was working out how to confront three forms of loss: the one I suffered; the desperation that results from a loss of identity, often through lies; and that gradual desiccation of the spirit, which gave me my title.

What makes writers punish the characters they invented, these hapless people who “do not exist”? I love my heroine — beautiful, ravaged, strong Bernie — and yet I transplanted her from rain-washed Ireland to a burning landscape she hates, inflicted on her humiliation at the hands of schoolmates, gave her a biker boyfriend who dies, and turned her into a promiscuous, drunk and druggy monster to whom the worst thing I could imagine — my own trauma — happens, including that same nightmare. It’s true that Eddy Carpenter tells her: “Some people only become truly lovable when they’re f***ed up” but, despite that, and some moments of comedy, my Bernie suffers. I knew how the story would end, yet when I reached the middle it all became much worse and I couldn’t understand why.

In the past I (a control freak) rejected the notion that books have their own momentum, that characters cease to be puppets of the authorial imagination and begin to forge their independent destinies, yet in The Invasion of Sand it proved true. It turned out that Bernie had to have given birth to a stillborn son called Tom so that, with the help of the miraculous young Australian called Eddy, his ghost could be exorcised. For her — and for me.

It is very hard to explain the guilt I felt when my baby died, yet women for whom the experience of childbearing is bound up with “failure” will understand. At a deep level, much of our gender-confidence is bound up with procreation, which is one reason many men shudder at the thought of vasectomy and for some women having a hysterectomy is a source of grief. Women who cannot conceive, or whose conceptions end in miscarriage, blame themselves, blameless though they may be. When my baby was stillborn I truly thought that I was being punished and told a friend: “I know I’ve been wicked, but not that wicked.” On other occasions it would emerge as “I’m not good at having babies”, lending a moral dimension as well as biological suitability to that word “good”. There is no logic. I expiated my irrational guilt by making Bernie Molloy deserve it.

There are those who think that you should never give away what happens in novels. For me it’s true only of thrillers; give me a modern novel and I will turn to the end so that the reading need not be rushed. Yet most of my friends think this mad. So, in deference to the idea of suspense, I’ll just say that this novel is about redemption, achieved in part through ceremony, and love. It gives little away to quote this, which has become very important to me:

Eddy says: “I was just thinking, some of the (Aboriginal) tribes, they believe a baby who’s born dead goes back somehow . . .”

“Where?” “Where it came from. To the earth, the water, the air — the whole universe. Even in every fire that’s lit, since you say they cremated him. The point is — it’s at peace. And in some places in Africa they believe in a spirit child who wasn’t ready to be born. So it waits for the right time, that’s all. And it feels just fine about that.”

“It’s waiting?” “That’s right.”

“For a different mother to go into?” “Maybe.”

“But I don’t like that.”

“Perhaps it’s not for you to like or not to like,” he said gently, “because it’s only the little spirit that matters, Bernie. Whether it’s going to be happy.”

“But where is it?” she wailed.

“I don’t know. So let’s say — everywhere.”

Through my character Eddy, I found myself devising a creative, organic ceremony, based on certain native Australian ritual yet original, to enable Bernie to release her spirit child. Writing that was almost the most cathartic thing I have ever achieved. Her baby’s spirit “dances” away from her — as I so wished mine to do — to “join the other spirit children” in a profoundly consoling unity with the Universe.

I wasn’t writing this only for the mothers of miscarried or stillborn children, or for those who have held a newborn for a few hours only to witness the tiny life extinguished, but for all people who desperately cling on to their ghosts, which perhaps cry out in their turn, like the spirit in the old English folk ballad: “Why sittest thou all on my grave/ And will not let me sleep?” At some stage you have to accept the paradox that the beloved dead are with you for ever, yet you must let them go.

With the “true” story of Bernie — and Eddy and John — put to bed at last, the original, inspirational tragedy written out, and the book dedicated to Australian Eva, there was one other thing I needed to do. Somehow, writing the novel had released me into needing another, more tangible public sign of the loss enshrined within it. I wanted a memorial. Then, last autumn I realised what it could be. In 2003 I’d become chairwoman of an appeal to build a new, state-of-the-art theatre for children and young people in Bath. I was proud when the magnificent project (called, appropriately, the Egg) was finished within budget and on time and, incidentally, it is shortlisted for a RIBA Award.

One way of raising money was inviting people to pay to dedicate a seat. So last October, not long before what would have been Tom’s 30th birthday, the theatre was ceremonially opened and contained a seat bearing his initials, with the date of his birth and death. I thought it fitting that his brief existence should be marked thus, in a vibrant space that would cradle the creativity of other people’s children and help them to tell stories, imagined and real. Of course, I shall still light my candles, but now it’s “No worries”, as feisty Bernie Molloy might say. We have to allow ourselves, and our characters, happy endings.

For bereaved parents and families, www.uk-sands.org; helpline 020-7436 5881

The Invasion of Sand (Severn House, £9.99) is available at £9.49; 0870 1608080, www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy. Bel Mooney writes a weekly advice column in times2 (bel.mooney@thetimes.co.uk)