The year I turned 8, the thing I wanted most in the world was to be invited to ride with the milkman in his paneled truck as he made his rounds through the English village to which my American family had been transported for my father’s new job.
I worshipped the milkman. I loved his glass milk bottles topped with fingers of heavy cream and sparkling foil lids. I loved the brown eggs I was dispatched to collect before our dog found them (he was a big creature possessed of a surprising delicacy, able to suck an egg dry with his black lips by piercing the shell with a single tooth). I coveted the box of chocolate Crunchie bars the milkman kept wedged up front in his lorry by the tall gear shift; I never knew if they were for him to eat as he made his way through the village (Lucky milkman!) or if he delivered them to customers (Lucky customers!) who had contrived a way to order them with an adult’s mysterious and enviable know-how.
But what I loved most–and what I thought about as I sat waiting for the milkman in the mornings–was how wonderful it would be to ride along beside him on the high, hard, black seat of his van, up and down the streets of the village, surveying the world I had come to love with the full devotion children can realize for the sacred places of their youth.
We would go, I dreamed, the milkman and I, past the mossy church and the cemetery and the rectory, past the doctor’s house with its annexed surgery (shades drawn against the ghastly business inside of stitching up children’s knees), past the butcher’s and the blacksmith’s and the baker’s, over fields stitched together by hedgerows past the dangerous limestone quarry with its brilliant and treacherous cliffs so fearful and white and strange they frightened me into obedience; I did not play there. We would go to every path that led to every door, and I would run up and leave the beautiful milk bottles with their snowcaps of cream. From the high throne of the milkman’s lorry, I imagined, I would see the whole world.
“Although nothing much can be seen through the mist,” said Nabokov of the novelist’s act of recovering the past, “there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.”
I did not set out, in my new novel, “Lamb in Love,” to write about my childhood, nor about the milkman. And yet even characters who arrive at first with the aspect of perfect strangers unavoidably owe something to the writer’s history.
When the protagonist of the novel, Norris Lamb, appeared one day as a character while I was working on a short story, he had about him the air of one who has come a long distance and intends to stay awhile. Fifty-five years old, a bachelor and a philatelist, Norris was the postmaster and church organist in a small English village, a place, I imagined, very like the one in which I grew up. As the months wore on and Norris insinuated himself into the pages of what had become a novel, I occasionally had the feeling that if I were to turn around from my desk, I might see him actually standing there by the window, the light falling on his long face and the longing there beating like a heartbeat beneath his skin. A shy and lonely man, burdened by family responsibilities and a crippling fear of the unknown, Norris arrived at his 55th birthday (coincidentally the night in July 1969 when an American landed on the moon) with no wife, nor lover, nor pet, nor intimate of any kind.
And then he fell in love with his neighbor, a woman he had known all his life, 41-year-old Vida Stephen, caretaker for a mentally retarded young man since his infancy. What happens to Vida and Norris–how these two people who have never left home discover each other and themselves and a new world–is the subject of the novel.
I made up the details of Norris’ life, of course, and I would be very surprised indeed to learn that they bear any resemblance to my friend the milkman’s. But just as I once saw the world through the milkman’s eyes, by imagining myself bouncing along beside him in his lorry, the advantage of that perspective returned when I was creating Norris. The world of childhood–in my case, the one contained within the milkman’s route–is perhaps much like a fictional universe: Each appears to rise magically from nothing at all, and then it lingers on in memory–after the child has grown up, and after the book has closed.
In this way, perhaps, Norris is a rib borrowed from the milkman’s side. Not a likeness, exactly, but a branch of the family tree.
I began my writing career as a journalist, the perfect apprenticeship–for me–for becoming a novelist. I went to work right out of college, shockingly ill-informed about the world, and I acquired my education by asking the stupidest questions imaginable and listening incredulously to the answers. As it was, my experience as a journalist was like that of the shopper who has only 60 seconds to throw whatever she can reach into her shopping cart.
We are all possessed of what writer Tim O’Brien has called the “deep and specific desire for the miraculous: to enter another human soul, to read other minds and hearts, to find access to what is by nature inaccessible.” Being a journalist partly satisfied that desire–ask enough questions and eventually someone will answer you. But becoming a novelist–with the freedom to marry the place of memory with the imagined world of fiction, that alchemy of the owned and the borrowed, the true and equally true–made it come closer to fulfillment.
If Norris Lamb sprang from the side of the milkman, he owed his finishing touches to the habit of the journalist–asking questions. After a few months’ work on the novel, I had learned many things about Norris: He had a small repertoire on the organ, learned mostly from his blind grandmother. He had a secret collection of stamps depicting women breast-feeding. He was punctual, and worried, and kind-hearted, and he saw plague and pestilence and risk and censure at every turn.
“This is all very well, Norris,” I said to him one day, leaning back in my chair. “But what do you do for fun?”
“For fun?” he said, and a note of rare and deep satisfaction sounded in his voice. “For fun, I am a philatelist.”
And that is how I came to learn about stamps.
Over the next year, I became one of those people to be avoided at cocktail parties, the one over by the tired potted palm with a bit of stuffed mushroom cap clinging to her chin and remoulade on her cuff, holding forth in excited tones about the rarest stamp in the world, the British Guiana 1856 one-cent black on magenta. Or the most unusual, one of seven miniature, red, plastic records issued in 1973 by Bhutan and which actually play the British national anthem (in English or Bhutanese), local folk songs, or a short talk about the history of Bhutan.
I learned to appreciate stamps for their individual beauty, for the record they form of world history, for the democratic way they make all things worthy–heroes and queens, aviators and artists, laborers and mothers, children and butterflies.
I came to see that Norris was a deeply passionate man. An admirer of stamps, he accorded value to things that are small; he could see the world on the head of a pin, and imagination was his gift.
In his essay “Notes on the English Character,” E.M. Forster refers to the Englishman’s heart as “undeveloped.” This undeveloped heart, Forster says, is the chief reason why the Englishman may be misunderstood by the more demonstrative world. The Englishman even will earn, as a result of his stoical and complacent attitude, a reputation of aloofness and reserve. But do not be so quick to judge him, Forster urges. For the Englishman has only “an undeveloped heart–not a cold one.”
I came across Forster’s essay after finishing “Lamb in Love,” and I thought of Norris Lamb, the unlikely hero whose heart does indeed develop as the novel progresses.
And then I thought of the milkman.
One day, after months of my surveillance of his route, he leaned down from his lorry and gestured to me where I ambled along the sidewalk behind him. I approached and he extended a Crunchie bar toward me; I colored with embarrassment and pleasure. How did he know?
He never offered to take me with him–out of reticence, perhaps; I was, after all, an American, and a child, and belonged to the loiterers of the world. But he noticed me, trailing along behind his truck, sniffing for chocolate. And after that, whenever he saw me, I imagined that he idled a bit along his route while I kept up at his axle on steady little legs. From him, I recognize, I memorized a path–which is all any novelist requires. First this cottage, and then this one, and then this one . . .
The milkman could not know, any more than I could have known at the time, that one day I would reach back to recover him, the route he drove, and the path I followed.
The milkman never appears in the novel. Yet I have come to think of him as a sort of silent usher, standing in that plastic dimension between memory and imagination, pointing forward and backward at once. Whatever odd consciousness novelists employ to weave their stories, surely they are peopled by similar figures, signposts in a dream that tell us where we’ve been and point toward what we still have left to discover.
