Maeve's Times

by Binchy, Maeve

  She says that isolation is the real killer and that many old people just turn their faces to the wall and die in the winter from no disease, from no hypothermia; just from no will to go on.

  Her priority is to keep them warm this winter, to explain that gas and electricity will NOT be cut off, that there are always funds from some public purse to meet a heating bill. It’s hard to get that into the heads of people who have been brought up thrifty and in fear of authority which will punish them if they use two bars of the fire.

  She thinks that the social services in England are basically very good and mean well; they have to cope with great cuts in funding, and every year there seems to be more to do and less resources to do it with. It’s no use trying to explain this to Thatcher’s government, it doesn’t listen. Not to reasoned appeals, not to strikes, not to emotional demonstration.

  She thinks it’s better to get on with it; you keep more people warm by wrapping them up in shawls and giving them soup than you do by signing petitions and marching to Westminster. A lot of her colleagues disagree. They say she comes from a background where charity was acceptable, where people EXPECTED the Little Sisters, the Vincent de Paul and a dozen others to help. In the Welfare State, people don’t have that system. They pay taxes all their working lives so that they can be looked after when the time comes.

  So more and more she has to disguise her kindness in case it be defined by anyone as charity. She thinks that if she ruled the world she wouldn’t give them a pension at all, she would give them free heating, get a certain amount of food delivered to their doors each day with a newspaper.

  They should have vouchers for clothes, and there should be a law saying they all had to go out and eat lunch in a centre each day. That way they would meet other people. And all the pet-food manufacturers should be forced to give those tins they advertise totally free to pensioners, so that there would be no question of spending everything on the tortoiseshell cat called Margaret Rose and forgetting to buy any food for the cat’s owner.

  But then she sighs and says that’s only ludicrous, you can’t play God. And she’s off again with a dozen small umbrellas. She bought them at £1 each from a man, without asking him which lorry they fell off. She will give them here and there, with some tale about having ordered too many in the office and the company refusing to take them back.

  She thinks that a lot of the elderly get drenched when they go out and the damp goes into their bones. She’ll probably never get the money through for 12 black-economy umbrellas, but it’s not a fortune. She shrugs, the Tipperary Robin Hood who is the very acceptable face of the Welfare and the human side of bureaucracy, in a city which fears that its old people will die of cold this winter but hasn’t the machinery to prevent it.

  Maeve on Margaret Thatcher

  19 June 1986

  In February 1975, all kinds of women rubbed hands with glee that our girl or indeed any girl had become leader of the Conservative Party. Four years later when she made it to 10 Downing Street there was still an almost tribal pleasure amongst women to think that one of the sex had finally got there.

  Now as she sails towards her 61st birthday in the autumn with the firm intention of trying for a third term of office, the gosh-imagine-a-woman-Prime-Minister excitement has worn off.

  What has replaced it? Most women think that Margaret Thatcher is a mixed blessing. She has done one great thing, which is to take the giggle out of female political leaders. It is impossible to remember that newsreaders could hardly keep a straight face seven years ago when referring to ‘The Prime Minister and her husband’. The very phrase ‘Madam Prime Minister’ was always said with such heavy inverted commas at that time that nobody believed it could ever be anything except a laboured joke. In the House of Commons the irony with which friend and foe larded their voices when saying ‘The Right Honourable Lady’ was like very bad stand-up comedy.

  Now there is no irony. Madam Prime Minister has gone into the vocabulary with much greater ease than say the word ‘chairperson’. In fact, there are some who feel that there had never been anything except a Madam Prime Minister in charge of the country. She has done that, but she is not a woman’s folk hero, she is not a role model for her sex. When people praise Thatcher, and many, many do every day, they praise her not at all for anything to do with being a woman. And perhaps that is her greatest achievement. She has almost single-handedly banished the notion that it is somehow unusual or special for a woman to be able to do anything. For that, if for nothing else, women in the future may thank her.

  A woman barrister who knew her at Lincoln’s Inn in the early fifties says, ‘I cannot take her seriously as leader of the country because I remember her so well 30 years ago. She was fearfully impatient, quick yes, and bright but if everyone else doesn’t understand every single thing immediately she goes spare. I can’t think how she manages the Cabinet meetings. Just to discuss a case with her in the old days had us all in a frazzle. She was very hard-working, and you would never know that she had twin toddlers at home. She always said she had a good nanny and, unlike any other mother, literally never seemed to give the children a thought during the day. Perhaps I’m just being a bit bitchy saying that about her. But it seemed to us then a little unnatural. I’m not just saying it because she’s Prime Minister.’

  A woman social worker says that Thatcher has a genuine and utterly sincere crusading attitude towards equal rights for women at work and that she will pursue this very vigorously but in exactly the same way and at the same time as she will pursue policies against work shirking which she imagines she sees everywhere and regulations preventing local councils giving support to those they consider needy.

  The trouble about Thatcher is that she gives with one hand to women and she takes away with the other. She’s fine for the hardworking single-minded woman who wants to be an entrepreneur and who is somehow in some magic way able to get her children satisfactorily looked after all day. She is not so fine for the woman with three children who goes to the post office each week to collect her benefits. That woman is going to find the hospital giving her less under Thatcher and the schools giving less to her children.

  If you are a woman like Thatcher yourself, you do well. But times don’t move as speedily as she does, and most of the people who are like her are actually men. She is disciplined in a way that most busy people, men and women, would love to be disciplined even if they would abhor the manner and the message. A woman television executive who has seen her on several television programmes speaks of her with something like awe. ‘She comes in here, her make-up is perfect, I mean it’s not just good make-up, she has had a proper professional television make-up at home or in the office or in the car. I don’t know where. Nor do I know how she gets the time. So it means that she doesn’t have to spend any time at all being made up here and that gives her a certain importance. All the men are being powdered and toned down and she is sitting there calm as anything pretending to be interested in how we run a television station.

  ‘She may be dying for a drink, but she won’t have one, nor a sandwich or anything and we bring out nice ones when she’s on. She says, “No, thank you,” she doesn’t eat between meals, and you know that in her whole life she never has, any more than she ever went to bed with her make-up on.

  ‘She will just smile at you coldly if you praise her and you realise that she has little time for anyone, like 99 per cent of the world, who are human enough to have a Scotch and a sandwich either before or after an important television programme.’

  She just doesn’t rate people who aren’t as strong as she is. A woman publisher who has refused several books on the Thatcher enigma, on the grounds that no one knows yet what it is, says that she thinks the Prime Minister’s much-vaunted courage within her own party is a distinct disservice to the cause of women rather than giving women something to crow about.

  ‘Look here, we get a woman Prime Minister, who got in by turning on the guy who gave her all the honours and
preferments. Sure I know that’s politics, but it’s also a characteristic that is often attributed to women, disloyalty, spitefulness.

  ‘Then when she’s in, what does she do? It’s like the mad queen in Alice in Wonderland, Off With Their Heads. Stevas, Ian Gilmour, Jim Prior, Francis Pym, Cecil Parkinson, anyone who looks crooked at her or who has a bit on the side. Now if a man did that, we’d be up in arms and so we should about her too. She’s making it harder and harder for any party to elect a woman again, they’ll have their worst fears about bossy women confirmed in this administration. She may have the distinct achievement of being the first and the last woman Prime Minister of this country.’

  A buyer in one of the big London stores says that Mrs Thatcher must have sat down carefully with a stylist and chosen her clothes with exactly the same care that she chose her War Cabinet. ‘There’s never anything really smart but there’s rarely anything quite terrible either. She’s dressing as Mrs Middle England. Do you remember that time during an election broadcast when David Dimbleby got so excited he called her Mrs Finchley and the name stuck, well that’s the way she dresses, middle-aged businesswoman from Finchley. Spot on. And you do know that she’s got four of every outfit, so that she always looks spanking clean but not too extravagant. She must have 10 of that blue houndstooth suit she wears with the blouse and floppy bow tie neck. I must have seen it on her a hundred times and it always looks as if it comes straight from the dry cleaners which it possibly has. And they did a great job on her hair and make-up as well as her voice. She looked quite mad at her wedding and in the early days. I wish all the 60-year-old women who come in here could get the same kind of right-on-the-button advice as she’s got.’

  She does not appear to have close women friends, but she has very little time for any friends. And she does seem to get on very well with her husband. She said in a revealing remark that it was great to have one person who would stand by you and understand what you were trying to do, even when nobody else seemed to. That was a touching reference to the much-mocked Denis Thatcher, who is now legendary for his hopes that the wife will give up the job and that they can retire to snifters and golf. But the wife hasn’t given any indication of doing anything of the sort. In fact when she was going through a bad patch 15 years ago and had the nickname Milk Snatcher on account of proposals about taking away junior school free milk, her husband advised her to get shut of the lot of it and leave public life. She is said to have told him that she’d see them in hell first, before she would quit. It would be the same now.

  A woman who worked with her in the Ministry of Education and always spoke highly of her said that she thought the remark about ‘at least one person who will stand by you’ was a very sad one indeed. She didn’t find it human and showing the tender side of Margaret Thatcher. She thought it showed the hard and empty side. ‘Most women have a friend or many friends who will be loyal to them, believe the best and put the most optimistic slant on what you do. It’s a sad comment on Margaret, that after all her years and doing what she believes is right, that she only has her husband. She makes no mention of her children. And her children are not close to her and now they realise she was never close to them. It’s a frightful object lesson of the loneliness of power-seeking. I hope she doesn’t put all women off trying to succeed in any field.’

  There’s a shop not far from where I live where the daughter of the family is extremely bright and has ambitions to do law. She gets little help from the family, who want her to get behind the counter as quick as she can, marry a bloke who’ll bring a few quid into the place and drop these notions about being a barrister. ‘We aren’t people like that, we’re greengrocers,’ they tell her, as if this was the last word on the subject.

  ‘But look at Mrs Thatcher,’ the girl was unwise enough to say. ‘Her father was a grocer in Lincolnshire, and look at her.’

  ‘Yeah, look at her,’ they all say, and heads shake and somehow she feels that no real battle has been won for her by the woman Prime Minister.

  No Fags, No Food – It’s No Fun Being Fergie

  21 July 1986

  When Sarah Ferguson wakes up this morning in the house of her fiancé’s grandmother, she won’t just stretch, reach for a cigarette, have a cup of coffee and toast and wonder what to do with her day, like many another horsey Sloane will do. Heavens no!

  Sarah was put off the fags long ago when royal nuptials seemed likely and she wasn’t allowed to have the normal pound of sweets a day that every reformed smoker needs for three months, because they said she was already a bit pudgy for a princess. Look at Diana, please, and learn. One newspaper set a cameraman on her at Ascot just to count the chocs she ate; then the paper delivered a diatribe against her greed. Another paper sent a spy to Madame Tussaud’s to measure the hips of the wax model of Sarah and came up with a guess of 42 inches. No, there will be no breakfast today.

  And she won’t need to wonder what she will do when she gets up. Her timetable, hour by hour, has been handed out to press people the world over. She will read with everyone else that she has already packed for the honeymoon and that she has taken all the telephone calls that she is going to have time to take from friends wishing her well.

  This morning there is yet another rehearsal at Westminster Abbey. So far these have been less than glorious. The adults have all been rooted to the ground with nerves and the children quite wild with excitement. There has been face-pulling and even punch-ups about carrying the train. This morning is the last try. The Archbishop and staff of Westminster Abbey are not the kind of showbiz folk who believe that a disastrous dress rehearsal makes a stunning first night.

  Then it’s back to Clarence House and a lunch party. Among the guests will be Sarah’s mother, who will go into history for having asked innocently where else could one meet one’s husband except at polo. Considering that she herself met two husbands at polo and that one of them is an Argentine, it might have been wiser to sing very low of the sport. Sarah’s stepmother will also be there. The two ladies get on very well in public and all niceties are observed, but the crack is not judged to be mighty.

  Then there’s a rest of an hour – hardly to ingest lunch, since Sarah Ferguson hasn’t been let near a plate of food in weeks, but to calm her down and dress her up for the next outings: a champagne reception at the Guards’ Polo Club and dinner at Windsor Castle. Her future mother-in-law and father-in-law will be at both dos and so will Charles and Diana. Andrew will probably be allowed to have a drink and might even be given something to eat. The public hasn’t developed any dangerous anxiety about the width of his waist yet.

  The full guest list for both these glittering functions has not been made available yet to the press, but perhaps Sarah Ferguson knows whether the question mark over Nancy Reagan’s name has been removed and whether she will have another delight ahead of her … earnest conversation with America’s first lady.

  The timetable suggests that it will be early to bed tonight for the future princess. Which indeed is to be devoutly hoped for. With a glass of nice, warm, fat-free milk, two super-strength Mogadons which would fell an ox, and a very few minutes’ last-minute wonderings, could it all possibly be ever worthwhile?

  It Was One of Those Custard Heart Days

  22 November 1986

  ‘In five weeks’ time it will be all over,’ said the woman with the neatly zipped tartan shopping bag on wheels. She was full of triumph at having worked it out. ‘All over and done with,’ she said, in case any of us thought that Christmas might linger on a bit this year and trickle through until February. Her mouth was a thin line of satisfaction at having tamed the prospect of any festivity. She cast a gloom over everyone shopping in the late-night grocery.

  It was one of my custard heart days. Sometimes I’m like a weasel with these killjoy people. But maybe she had a sad life. It could be that her husband had died during the year, or that her daughter had got married to someone they didn’t like and there had been a row.

  Perh
aps she had come from a home where they didn’t ever celebrate Christmas much, or even something horrible could have happened at Christmas time and every year it came back to her. In one of my rare fits of kindness I smiled and said that it was true that there was a lot of fuss made about Christmas all right.

  The Lord punishes the insincere. I didn’t mean it at all. I was only saying it to please her. It was the wrong thing to do. I had misread her signs totally.

  ‘Well that’s as may be,’ she sniffed at me disapprovingly. ‘And I’m the first to say live and let live. But I think it’s a pity when folk can’t have one short season of the year when they spread a little goodwill.’ She looked me up and down sadly. ‘I daresay that you have your own reasons for hating Christmas and I wouldn’t presume to intrude and ask what they are. But perhaps I might say this, if you and the other people who hate Christmas were to think of the innocent little children who enjoy it, and the old people who have parties in the centre, and comedians and personalities giving their time free to dress up as Santa Claus in hospitals, then you might think a bit more warmly about it.’

  Well, what would you have done? Tell her that you were lying in the first place, pretend to be converted to her bossy, cliché-ridden view of the world? Go deaf and wander off in the other direction? Abandon the wire shopping basket and run out of the late-night grocery? Wave at a mythical friend? Nod sagely with the all-purpose and meaningless cockney response, ‘Well this is it. Isn’t it?’

  I was rescued. A man with the most bad-tempered face I have ever seen outside a cartoon came pounding in to the late-night grocery. He headed straight for the woman with the unctuous views and the tartan shopper on wheels.