Oxford writer Clover Stroud tells story of strength after tragedy

WHEN I first met Clover Stroud, through a professional connection, we instantly found, as women do, a particular area of common ground.

We had both ‘lost’ our mothers in our mid-teens, though they hadn’t actually died – Clover’s to severe brain damage following a riding accident and mine to early-onset dementia. We shared a similar trauma, but as her subsequent series of memoirs demonstrates, nobody inhabits and then finds a way of expressing their feelings more fully than Clover.

Read more: Clover to join stars John Simpson and Jay Rayner at White Hart of Wytham book fest

She does so in this book, about her first year surviving the loss of her beloved sister, Nell, founder of Gifford’s Circus, but without even a moment of self-pity. The reality is that although it’s described as ‘A Death and Life Story’, it is actually a book about human resilience, and about courage. It’s a book about grief but one that is very far from being depressing.

Nell Gifford died on the December 8, 2019 of advanced liver failure from metastasised breast cancer, having been told only a few days earlier that she had between five and 10 years still to live. But this is not a book about illness, or even very much about Nell herself. It is, rather, a book about how Clover learns to navigate her own existence in the month’s following the loss of her very beloved sister.

Clover Stroud. Picture By Dave Cox

“The object of understanding death”, she says, in what might be seen as the book’s mission statement, “is not to look backwards but to understand who you are in relation to the world without the dead person in it”.

But inevitably and ineluctably, Clover does at first look backwards – at childhood photographs, emails and WhatsApp messages... at anything that is proof of who Nell was, of the closeness of their relationship and of their shared experiences. It is as if Nell has taken with her everything they did together and therefore part of Clover’s very existence, so she doesn’t know who to be anymore.

In response, she clings for a while to the possibility that Nell is somehow still present in a different form, as a star, or butterfly or robin.

“There are a LOT of people flying around in robins,” she says, and even imagines she sees her in the crowd on a London street.

Three months after Nell’s death the country is in lockdown, and Clover must attend to the business of mothering her five children and home-schooling the three younger ones, when all she really wants to do is climb up to the Ridgeway or wonder if she could scramble over the screens that line the train track.

The late Nell Gifford, owner of Gifford's Circus

So yes, there are moments in the book that I would describe as a loud, naked, primal, raging roar into the void, but it is a roar that is echoed, in all its visceral messiness, in the roar of childbirth.

The only experience that allows Clover to stop thinking about Nell is when she is having sex – a reminder that birth, death and coitus are versions of the same bodily spasm and are the distillation of life’s essence. There is also an inadvertent nobility to Clover’s grieving process as she envisages herself throughout the book being accompanied on a quest challenge by knights of old, Galahad, Gawain and Lancelot. Though she has to remember to “ride into the darkest part of the forest alone where the frost is undisturbed”. Nobody can do her grieving for her.

But as the first anniversary of Nell’s death approaches, Clover realises that a recalibration of her relationship with her sister is taking place: “I couldn’t lose something that was inside me, and actually was me, since I knew she was there, as bright as the red of my blood,” she says.

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At the exact time Nell died, walking alone in the countryside, she becomes aware of an alchemy that “transformed the pain and darkness of loss into a newer, brighter life force”, and that she has earned “a special kind of strength and courage I hadn’t known I was capable of”.

The Red of my Blood is a raw, honest and uplifting book about surviving grief that confronts in fearless, lyrical and unflinching prose the essence of what it means to be human.

• Clover Stroud appears at the White Hart of Wytham for a dinner, talk and Q&A, on Monday, March 21.
• See whitehartwytham.com

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