A Woman on the Edge of Time

by Gavron, Jeremy;

  I am conscious that everything I am hearing is looked at through the prism of time, fading memories. So I am excited when Shirley writes to say that she has found her teenage diaries and is typing up any references to Hannah, which she sends a few days later.

  The entries start in January 1949, six months after Hannah started at Frensham. They are still clearly little girls. They go to a ‘super smashing circus’, and afterwards Hannah stays the night at Shirley’s.

  Friendships between girls dominate, and several entries are about a girl I realise is the woman who didn’t want to speak about Hannah. She and Hannah have ‘broken up’, Shirley writes. The girl and another are ‘being vile to Han’, who is ‘coming round with us as she’s no one to go around with’. Shirley doesn’t say what happened, and I can’t imagine it was too serious, though serious enough, it seems, for the woman not to want to speak about Hannah sixty years later.

  By autumn of the next year — the period Hannah gave up riding — the focus had turned to boys. Hannah, now fourteen, has quarreled ‘like hell’ with Chris, and Shirley has had to intervene, or ‘in-between’, as she calls it. ‘They do get so intense about it,’ she writes. ‘During senior supper they are still at it.’

  Another year on, and Hannah is with Robert Landori-Hoffman. She ‘really cannot stop talking about Robert’, and gets ‘frightfully jealous’ if anyone else ‘as much as glances in his direction’. Speaking in the bathroom late one night, Hannah tells Shirley how she and Robert ‘had been making hay apparently in the senior sitting room and K caught them and was fairly icy. Hanny was worried stiff, said that K hated her etc, which is of course balderdash.’

  A few weeks later, Shirley writes of Hannah slapping Robert. ‘He was livid. Silly idiots.’ Soon after, they have broken up. At first, Hannah is ‘very cut up about it’ and ‘frantic and furious’ when she sees Robert with another girl. But a few months later, she comes back from the boating holiday in Sweden ‘brown and attractive’ and ‘apparently madly in love’.

  Shirley had left Frensham by now, and there is only one more entry, from the skiing holiday in Austria that Christmas, which Shirley, like Susan, went on despite no longer being at the school. Perhaps Hannah’s explicit letter to Chris Harrison was not caused by the headmaster but an eye-opener to him, his catching Hannah ‘making hay’ with Robert, too, for he seems now to have taken their place: ‘Gosh but she is getting attractive, far more than I am and when I am with her I cannot control a slight feeling of jealousy. As for Hannah and K, on the journey, whether by coincidence or planning, Hannah was constantly by him and during the night literally slept in his arms, confiding to me afterwards he kissed her four times on the lips in brotherly fashion. I was shocked.’

  I HAVE BEEN in contact with a woman named Rosellen in the Frensham Heights alumni office about visiting the school, and one morning I take the train down with Carole Cutner. When we arrive, Rosellen and Carole show me round the main house, which was originally built for the Charrington brewing family. We walk through the old ballroom, where children are having a dance lesson. ‘Where we had our dances every Saturday night,’ Carole says, ‘the girls lined down one wall, the boys down the other.’ On the other side is the old orangery, apparently the last to be built in Europe. The house stands on the lip of a hill, and there are views across the valley to the fields and tree-lined hills on the other side.

  When Rosellen goes back to work, Carole takes me up the grand central staircase to the dormitories where she and Hannah lived, though they are about to be refurbished and are empty except for a few dusty beds and desks.

  We find the room Carole shared with Hannah. It is smaller than I expected, with space for only three or four beds. We go, too, into the headmaster’s study, and I look around, trying to see ghosts, though it is only another dusty room. When we come back out, I realise we are standing in the corridor Hannah walked along to see the headmaster, though it is shorter, less gothic, than I imagined. On one of the bare walls, a corner peeling away, is a poster for Childline.

  LATER WE GO downstairs to read the material Rosellen has dug up from the late 1940s and early 1950s. I had hoped there might be copies of Hannah’s reports, but Rosellen explains that most of the old records are in unsorted boxes in the cellars. What is here are photographs and old school magazines.

  Leafing through the magazines, I find reviews of school plays Hannah was in. Her first part, when she was thirteen, was as a maid in Tobias and the Angel, by James Brodie, but a year later she had claimed her first lead, as Cleopatra in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. Hannah ‘made Cleopatra precocious without being aggressive and kittenish without affectation’, the review says. Photographs show her in a long black wig, sleek and womanly. ‘At the time of the play,’ the review says, ‘Cleopatra is sixteen years old and Caesar fifty-two.’

  I also find some articles Hannah wrote, about a swimming event, her French exchange trip (‘I saw all the things that one should see and a few that one should not’), and a day spent collecting money for charity — or not collecting money, as she and Tasha had somehow picked a road that didn’t exist.

  They meet a man pushing a cart of logs who ‘burst forth in a torrent of words to the effect that he had lived here for sixty years and never in his life had he heard of Ellerslie Lane’. He goes off ‘muttering in sepulchral tones’ and they try a different road, but other Frensham Heights students have already been here. After meeting a dog that takes ‘an instantaneous aversion to us’, they return to school and hear from a boy about ‘a tussle with a lady who had tried desperately to persuade him to take a feather bed instead of money’.

  IN THE MAGAZINES are also the headmaster’s annual speech day addresses, with their emphasis on the wellbeing of the students. On the train back, I ask Carole what she thinks went on during Hannah’s ‘extra German coaching’, but all she thought at the time, she says, was that Hannah had a crush on him.

  I have heard from Shirley and Bill Wills, the carpentry teacher, that Hannah wasn’t the ‘only one’, and Tasha even named a girl she said had been Hannah’s ‘successor’ in the headmaster’s affections. I haven’t done anything about this; but when I ask Carole now, she says she is still in touch with this woman and offers to contact her, and a few days later the woman sends me an email.

  ‘You must remember that Hannah was not a very special friend of mine and it is now all more than fifty years ago,’ she writes. ‘I would however hope to be able to help a little in your understanding of her suicide.’ She gives me her phone number, and suggests a time to call. It is a few hours away, and as the time passes I become increasingly more nervous, convinced I am about to discover the secrets of the headmaster’s study.

  But when we speak it turns out there has been a misunderstanding. Nothing inappropriate took place between her and the headmaster, she insists. She only has favourable things to say about him.

  What she meant about suicide was that she has had some professional experience of the subject. The problem was the coal gas used in homes in those days, with its high content of carbon monoxide in its natural state, which made it easier for people to kill themselves. When the switch was made to natural gas, the suicide rate dropped by a third.

  Winter – Spring 1954

  Dear Tash, I miss you and feel very lonely especially at RADA. I’ve ceased to be bewildered by all the long corridors and many staircases but the atmosphere is still the same — very impersonal — so unlike Frensham. The woman who is producing our play is very efficient but totally uninspiring. The diction woman is a complete wet rag, and the other staff are better but none of them really make any personal contact with us, I mean outside what they are teaching. I’m afraid I’m too used to K. I still miss him like hell, but I’m jolly well going to get over that.

  Val absolutely adores Richard, & I spent an evening in which she kept telling me how much she wanted to kiss him, but knew she mustnt b
ecause that was cheapening herself — she thought there was nothing between kissing and sleeping with someone. I assured her that there was masses of things in between! I do think a girl of 18 should know a bit more than that.

  My dear Tash, I am hopeless as Lion — I just can’t play comedy. Its my voice thats my main trouble. I have a slight South African accent, and I drop the ends of my phrases my vowels are bad. Oh dear at this rate I shall never make an actress.

  I wrote to K about a week ago and had no answer as yet — I do miss him terribly some times. I feel very bitter, because I know he just doesnt care a whit anymore — but it isn’t fair to him for me to be bitter — Oh I don’t understand if I think about it I feel hellish so try not to think about it.

  I had a very long & miserable letter from Mike! I am absolutely determined to go to Israel in the summer.

  Dear Tash, I had a most alarming experience last Friday, you may or may not know that there was an Old Frenshamian meeting at David’s and Shirley persuaded me to go. Well I hadn’t been there five minutes when in walked K! Shirley said I went quite white and looked as if I was going to faint — I felt as if I was going to I assure you. He has never been to a meeting before and it isn’t conceit if I say that he really only came to see me. Well it took me about an hour to be able to speak to him and then when I did I felt as if I was going to dissolve! Can you imagine he was standing drinking Coca Cola! Most incongruous! We chatted a bit, and then Shirley and I decided to go, and he said he was going too! He gave us a lift to Shirley’s flat, and offered to take me home, but suddenly I decided no!! I said I had to wait for my parents and he laughed and looked hurt, and I jumped out of the Rolls and said goodbye — Oh Tash it’s upset me! Especially as he said he actually called into RADA last Tuesday but I wasn’t there — Godinheaven — its all wrong — still the only thing to do is not to think about it.

  Six

  HANNAH APPLIED TO the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in the autumn of 1952. She was just sixteen, and her application form is filled out in childish block capitals. ‘I have passed 4 subjects at O level and hope to obtain A levels in English Lit and History in July,’ she wrote. The form is signed by my grandfather, as next of kin, and the headmaster, as ‘Referee for Character and Respectability’.

  I read this in the library at RADA, which still holds her file from fifty-five years ago. From this I learn that, because of her age, she was initially admitted to the Preparatory Academy, or PARADA, before being moved up after a term to the main school. I have always assumed that she graduated, but a pair of letters show that she left after a year, rather than the two needed to complete her studies.

  In the first, dated September 1954, she wrote to give notice for the end of term. ‘My English teacher at school always warned me that being the person that I was the stage would never be intellectually satisfying for me. I now am beginning to realise that he was quite right. I am afraid that I have expressed all this very badly. The truth is that the feeling of vocation has completely left me.’

  A week later, she wrote to say that she was leaving right away. She had been for an interview at the Institut Français and been told that she needed to start immediately. She didn’t say what she planned to do there, but ‘the choice is out of my hands’.

  THE STORY I HAD HEARD about Hannah at RADA was that she played the lead in Shakespeare opposite Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole. When I spoke to my father while writing my article, I asked if he remembered which play it was, and he said he thought it was Twelfth Night, with Hannah playing Viola, and either Finney or O’Toole as Sir Toby Belch.

  But on the sheet in Hannah’s file listing the plays in which she performed there is no mention of Twelfth Night. The only Shakespeare is A Midsummer Night’s Dream — or ‘The Dream’ as it is listed — and Hannah played not Titania, the fairy queen, but two minor male parts, Puck, the king’s jester, and Snug, the joiner, who plays the part of the lion in the play within the play.

  The librarian confirms that Finney and O’Toole were at RADA at the same time as Hannah, though they were a year ahead of her. I ask him whether there is any way of finding out if either of them was in ‘The Dream’ with Hannah, or in any of the other plays on her sheet. He goes away into a back room and returns a few minutes later. Neither Finney nor O’Toole was in any of those plays.

  FINNEY AND O’TOOLE are the only fellow students I have ever heard mentioned. The library has a list of Hannah’s contemporaries, but there are hundreds of them, and I have no idea who might have been friendly with or would remember Hannah. The librarian suggests I speak to the alumni office, and a woman there offers to send a notice out with an alumni mailing. The only reply I get is from the actress Sylvia Syms, who writes that she didn’t know Hannah, but that her own mother committed suicide when she was young, so she knows ‘the mark it leaves on those left behind’. ‘We will never know their reasons,’ she adds.

  ALTHOUGH MY FATHER knows what I am doing, he doesn’t ask how my research is going, and the couple of times I try to ask him about Hannah it is uncomfortable for both of us. But one afternoon, when I am round at his house, he starts talking about Hannah — or at least about himself in relation to Hannah.

  I know, from one of my grandmother’s stories, that he and Hannah first met as children. Hannah, so the story goes, climbed a tree and wouldn’t come down. I have always imagined that Hannah was nine or ten and my father fifteen or sixteen when this happened. But he tells me now that they were younger. It was during the war. Shirley’s mother, his favourite aunt, was friends with Hannah’s mother, and took him to Hannah’s house somewhere out in the country. Amersham? I suggest. No, he says, something farm. Scarlett’s Farm? That would have been the summer of 1940, when Hannah was three or four and he was nine. That sounds right, he says — and there is something about the idea of them meeting when they were so young that moves me again, and I sense that my father is moved, too, at the memory, though we do not say anything.

  Instead he talks about the next time they met, at a fancy-dress party, when Hannah was seventeen and he had recently come down from Oxford. He had heard talk from his mother and aunt about the ‘difficult’ Fyvel girl, but as he had always been told by his mother that he was difficult, that didn’t put him off — if anything, it made Hannah more intriguing.

  There was a band, and he asked Hannah to dance. He had learned to dance on his national service in the army, in Berlin, during the airlift. His sergeant-major’s wife had been the south-west England ballroom dancing champion, and because her husband didn’t dance she taught my father the foxtrot and the quickstep, and he was her partner at the dances in the sergeants’ mess.

  He had a girlfriend from Oxford, a very nice girl. Her aunt ran a hotel in Bermuda, and invited her to come out for a year and work there, and she came to my father and asked him whether he thought she should take up the offer. She was asking, he thought, whether they were serious, whether they were going to get married. Before he met Hannah he might have told her to stay, but now he told her he thought she should go — it was an opportunity she shouldn’t pass up.

  Hannah was at RADA, by then, and when I ask him if he can think of anyone who was there with her, he says, or seems to say, Lady Bear; though what he is actually saying, he explains, is Lady, or Diana, Baer, or Diana Robinson as she was at RADA.

  He still sees her socially, he says, saw her just the other day in fact, which disconcerts me, though of course he cannot avoid bumping into people who were friends with Hannah. He has lived with this all these years, this world of ghosts. It is new only for me.

  DIANA BAER STARTED at PARADA at the same time as Hannah, she says, when I go to see her in Kensington. She loved it there. It was her first time out of school.

  She shows me some photographs. They are of young people dressed up in period costumes on stage — though none is Hannah. She talks about movement lessons, voice projection, breathing. I
ask about Hannah. She doesn’t think Hannah ever really wanted to be an actress, she says. She talked incessantly about my father. She can’t tell me any more, but she suggests I speak to another RADA friend, Sue Westerley-Smith, and when I get home I call her.

  Sue was also at PARADA, which was in Highgate — a short walk from the house where we were living when Hannah died. It was very old-fashioned. There was a daily assembly, which Hannah decided was too much like school. Sue remembers Hannah ‘sitting at the back on a window sill playing cards’. ‘I adored her,’ she says. ‘She made me laugh.’

  IT IS NOT MUCH, but I am learning to make do with fragments, to construct a whole out of pieces, like an archaeologist conjuring a jar out of a few shards.

  Though perhaps I have always been doing this, have seen the world in this way since I was a boy imagining my mother out of the little I was allowed to know. My first novel was narrated by a man ‘who spent most of my childhood at the edge of things, listening to my own thoughts, or talk I was not supposed to hear, piecing together the world like a forbidden jigsaw, the pieces stolen one by one’. It was set in Africa, before I was born, and I didn’t think of it as my own story, though I see now see how much of myself I put into it, that it was not coincidence that the final act of the main narrative is the mother’s suicide.

  My subsequent two novels had little in subject to do with Hannah, but both are fragmented narratives, collections of half stories that are left for the reader to piece together, find some greater sense in.

  A COUPLE OF FRAGMENTS:

  1. SUSIE MENTIONS A RECORD Hannah made of herself reciting poems while she was at RADA. She says she listened to it again and again as a child.

  I have some old cine films of our family, of Hannah, which I have put onto DVD and have been watching. But they are silent. I have no tape of her voice, no idea what she sounded like, and for weeks afterwards I think about this record, mourn its disappearance, its loss.