A Woman on the Edge of Time
Page 11
Does this story express her worries about having another child at the still young age of twenty-four? She had a full-time nanny, but full-time meant the hours during the week when she was at college, or the library, or conducting the ninety-six interviews with young mothers (she was aiming at one hundred, but ran out of steam) that were the basis of her thesis and the book it would become. In the evenings and at weekends, she was responsible for Simon, as well as running the house, cooking, making sure my father’s shirts were ironed. Did the baby with two heads represent the two demanding children she would have, or perhaps her competing selves of mother/wife and working/studying woman?
THE ANTIPATHY THE STORY expresses towards having a baby in hospital is more easily understood — these were the days when maternity wards were the domain of imperious male doctors and bossily efficient midwives — and was solved by having me at home. The story I have always been told is that I was delivered by an independent midwife who was later struck off, though it is only now that I wonder whether there was an underlying message to this. That Hannah was a careless mother. That she didn’t look after me properly from the start. That, as my brother once said to me, we were probably better off without her.
The midwife, I discover, was called Erna Wright. I can’t find anything about her being struck off, though by the late 1960s she had given up midwifery to open an Austrian restaurant in Camden Town, and she later trained as an aromatherapist. But she also published a landmark book, The New Midwifery, promoting the ‘Lamaze’ method of training for childbirth, which encouraged women to take control of the process, and was, according to her obituary in the Guardian, ‘a catalyst for the development of natural childbirth’ in Britain.
As it was, neither Hannah nor I seem to have been harmed by the experience. ‘An easy birth, weighing 9 lbs and arriving in this world in 20 minutes,’ my grandfather wrote in his diary. If I had been born in hospital, Hannah would probably have been kept in bed for a week, but at home she was up and about much sooner. When I was four days old, my grandfather recorded ‘a pleasant supper’ with Hannah and my father. A few days after this, her friend Phyllis Willmott wrote of giving a party and Hannah coming ‘practically from her confinement — her second baby was born eight days ago’.
FOR PHYLL, she tells me when I go to see her, Hannah’s rising so quickly from her birth bed was an example of the way she was trying to live, her desire to be in control of her body and fate — if it was also ‘pushing it a bit’.
Hannah and Phyll had met when Hannah sought out Phyll’s husband, the sociologist Peter Willmott, for advice about her thesis. Phyll speaks of both admiring Hannah and being ‘immediately a little jealous’ of her. Hannah came round to their house, and she and Peter were soon deep in talk. ‘Hannah seemed so much more confident than I was,’ she says, and even after they became friends, Phyll ‘always had the feeling that I wasn’t quite on the same plane as her’.
There was ‘this growing feeling in the early Sixties that, as women, we should be taking on more responsibility for ourselves’, she explains. ‘It was difficult, working mothers were disapproved of, most of us didn’t make the most of our lives, but Hannah seemed determined to do so. She was in advance of the pack, she was trying to break down the barriers against women.’
A FEW MONTHS after I was born, Hannah must have spoken to a reporter from the Evening Standard, for a diary item in the newspaper in December 1961 records her own views on the balance between her work and family, or at least how she presented these to a journalist:
Twenty-five-year-old company director’s wife Hannah Gavron has solved the career-versus-baby problem very well. She has a three-year-old and a baby of four months. Yet with the aid of a daily nanny from 9.30 to 5.30 each weekday she has managed to take a first in sociology at London University and embark on a thesis. ‘I’ve compromised as I’d have had an awful guilt neurosis if I’d handed Simon and Jeremy over completely,’ she said. ‘I put them to bed every night and do all Saturday and Sunday. I don’t mind Simon thinking he has two mothers. He seems quite secure and happy.’
Hannah wanted to be, to be seen to be, in full control of her life, Gunilla Lavelle said. But the story of the two-headed baby isn’t the only clue to suggest that this wasn’t always entirely the case. A couple of weeks before I was born, my grandfather wrote in his diary of finding Hannah ‘in difficulties re her review. Retyped it for her.’ A few months later, he noted his concerns about her attempts to mould the family to her needs. ‘She is chafing at restrictions on her free time. To keep free in the evenings, she tries to force Jeremy into three feeds a day. He cries — this means effort: she is tired, irritable with Simon.’
I also have a chance meeting with a woman who tells me that she was my ‘daytime minder’ for a brief period when I was three, between our nanny leaving and our au pair girl starting. She talks about me being naughty and ‘tipping over my breakfast and laughing’. Hannah, she says, ‘was always rushing in and out of the house in a hurry’.
WHAT HANNAH WAS rushing to in the first couple of years of my life were her studies and research, her ninety-six interviews, for her thesis on ‘the conflicts of housebound mothers’, as she would later subtitle her book.
Looking back from our own times, the subject seems an obvious one, still relevant today, but in 1960 it was neither obvious nor easy for her to get past her academic supervisors. For all the advances gained by the suffragette movement, and the opportunities the war had given women to work and experience life beyond the family, the woman’s movement was in retreat in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the post-war period, emphasis had been put on the role of motherhood in rebuilding Britain. The Beveridge Report, the basis for social reforms, spoke of how ‘housewives as mothers have vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British race and of British ideals in the world’.
Women’s magazines of this period similarly lauded the family. ‘Women were no longer shown, as they had been in the stories published between the wars, as career pioneers, or as the patriotic activist of the Second World War,’ Jessica Mann writes in The Fifties Mystique. All the post-war ‘fictional heroines ever wanted to have was a husband, children and a pretty house’.
Even social science seemed to support this. Parenting experts like John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott preached the importance of the presence of mothers to their children. In 1958, the year my brother was born, Bowlby produced a pamphlet in which he warned that motherhood is ‘scamped at one’s peril’.
When Hannah began her thesis in 1960, Katharine Whitehorn’s famous article about ‘sluts’ in the Observer, which challenged the idea of the perfect mother, was still three years away; as was the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which would have much less impact in Britain than in America. The resurgence of the women’s movement proper was almost a decade away.
Sheila Rowbotham, one of the most eloquent proponents and historians of that movement, writes that, to young women at that time, feminism meant ‘shadowy figures in long old-fashioned clothes who were somehow connected to the headmistresses who said you shouldn’t wear high heels and make-up. It was all very prim and stiff and mainly concerned with keeping you away from boys.’
As a sociology student, Hannah might have come across isolated work from the 1950s, such as Viola Klein’s papers on working wives. Perhaps she was inspired by the setting up in April 1960 — just as she was finishing her undergraduate degree — of the Housebound Wives Register, whose aim was to put isolated housewives in touch with each other. It may be she was also influenced by her father’s strong moral worldview, the books he had written about a shared Palestine and racial equality. But it seems likely that there was also a personal element — that, for all her privileges of class and money, her choice of subject was in part a response to her own experiences, the stresses of balancing her studies with being a wife, a mother, a woman, an individual.
Once she got past these obstacles and began her interviews, her focus grew clearer. By early 1962, she had a more specific title: ‘The position and opportunities of young mothers — progress or retrogression. (A study of the difficulties confronting young mothers in the contemporary family based on a comparative study of working class and middle class mothers.)’
Her interviewees were provided by a doctor friend’s general practice in Kentish Town. Her interviewing technique, she recorded, was fluid, her aims qualitative rather than statistical, the emphasis placed on ‘presenting a critical picture of the lives of these families rather than a rigid piece of scientific construction’. The thesis was soon progressing well. She may have had to give up her application for a DSJR grant, but she was awarded a postgraduate scholarship in her first year, and the choice of two in her second. ‘Interviewing completed, now writing up thesis,’ her supervisor, Ronald Fletcher, wrote in a brief report towards the end of 1962. ‘Very good work.’
THE STRAINS IN HANNAH’S domestic life after I was born also seem to have soon receded. In my first appearance in the family cine films, when I was a few weeks old, a smiling Hannah tickles me and then picks me up and pats my bottom. The camera, presumably in my father’s hands, pans slowly up her body, admiring her slender legs in shorts, her stomach showing no sign of having given birth, as if taking pleasure in how quickly she has regained her figure.
In the next film, the following spring, I am larger, fatter, sitting in a high chair in the garden in a coat. A few months later, we are on a summer holiday in the south of France. Simon is swimming in a pair of yellow armbands. My father carries me into the sea in his arms. Later, Hannah appears, in a bathing suit in a garden, and sticks out her tongue at the camera.
AMONG THE ITEMS Susie brought down from Edinburgh is a copy of an American magazine, Business Week, dated summer 1962, which has a series of photographs of us from what I realise are this same holiday. The pictures illustrate an article about European businesses providing holiday villas for their executives. I don’t know how the magazine came to choose my family, but the black-and-white photographs and quaint captions speak, as must have been the intention, of a young, happy, successful family, at a good time in the century.
Here are my father and Hannah being served lunch by the maid in the villa, with French cheese, a baguette, and a bottle of wine on the table in front of them. Here are the four of us in an open-top sports car — I am sitting on Hannah’s lap in the front seat — ‘off for sights of smart St Tropez’. Here are my parents dancing rather self-consciously in what looks like a cellar — ‘Night life at St Tropez means twisting in one of the record night clubs.’
IN OCTOBER 1962, my grandfather wrote that Hannah had ‘written four book reviews and one article’. Her writing must have improved, as his complaint was no longer that he had to help her but that she was doing her reviews ‘without telling me’. She had also made her first appearance as a pundit on television. ‘Still inexperienced, talking too fast,’ my grandfather, an experienced broadcaster, noted in his diary. ‘But when she smiles she lights up the screen.’
As a family, too, we were going up in the world. Towards the end of 1963 we moved round the corner from Hillside Gardens into a larger house on Jacksons Lane. My father had been working for a couple of years on a business deal, and in September 1964 he quit his cousin-in-law’s firm and, with a loan from the city, bought a printing company. My father ‘has pulled it off’, my grandfather wrote in his diary. ‘Hannah helped in introductions, helped in deal.’
HANNAH WAS ALSO now working. In August 1963, my grandfather noted, ‘H gains position as lecturer in sociology at Hornsey College. £1600 a year!’
The only people I know about from Hannah’s Hornsey days are the man with whom she had her affair, whose name I have learned is John Hayes, and David Page, who wrote the letter I so liked. I have come a long way since I last wrote to David Page, and I try him again, and this time he invites me to visit him in his Norfolk farmhouse. He meets me at his local train station, and on the drive he explains that Hannah taught not sociology at Hornsey but general studies, on a course he partly ran. He talks about the Coldstream Report of 1960, which established that art colleges had to give their students a liberal arts as well as a fine arts education: he and Hannah were both employed under this new policy.
While he makes tea, he lets me look at his appointments diary from Hannah’s first year at Hornsey. Leafing through, I see records of classes she gave on Freud and psychology, the American civil war, the sociology/psychology of violence.
Like other art colleges, he tells me, when he comes back, Hornsey was expanding rapidly in the 1960s. The building where he and Hannah taught was shared with a primary school — during classes, children would fling pellets through the windows from the playground. The new Hornsey was a mix of the conservative and the more radical. One teacher, an Austrian-Jewish refugee, was famous for shouting at anyone who espoused left-wing views, ‘If zat is what you sink, go and live in Moscow.’ But there were also younger, more progressive, teachers — among them, Jonathan Miller, Michael Kidron, and Tom Nairn.
I ask about John Hayes, but David didn’t know him well. He prefers to talk about Hannah, how popular with her students she was — with him, too. She was ‘very much the new woman. In your face, a lot of cursing, smoking her cheroots. Anything a man could do she could, too.’
‘To me, she was the epitome of a certain kind of life force,’ he says. ‘She lit the lamps when she walked in.’ He shakes his head. ‘I can’t see how you can suppress that enough to do what she did.’ He had felt angry with her afterwards, he says. He was her friend. Why hadn’t she come and talked to him?
HE SUGGESTS I CONTACT two Hornsey students who married each other. John Rickets and Norma Jacobs haven’t moved far from Hornsey, and in their house in Muswell Hill they talk wistfully about their years at the college. John grew up on a council estate in Chingford, and going to Hornsey was ‘a complete eye-opener’. The world of his childhood had been ‘claustrophobic and tame and held down, and suddenly at Hornsey there was this freedom to think and be creative’.
Hannah seemed ‘very sophisticated’, but they could ‘talk to her about anything’. Her classes were relaxed, students and teacher sitting in a circle. Norma remembers Hannah getting them to discuss how each of them was dressed, the images they were projecting. ‘Nowadays that doesn’t sound much,’ she says, ‘but at the time, thinking that way was a revelation to me.’
Hannah was on the advisory board of the student magazine, Horn, which they also both worked on, and John goes off to find some copies. These could not be more different from the staid college magazines I leafed through in the Bedford College archives. The artwork is 1960s psychedelic. There is a photograph of David Page wearing only a bowler hat and a fig leaf, and a cartoon drawing of the ‘Horn machine’, a multi-storied tractor-like vehicle, carrying everyone who worked on the magazine, including Hannah, clearly identifiable in miniskirt, thigh-length boots, and Mary Quant hairstyle.
Hornsey was the place to be in the 1960s, they say. The Rolling Stones and Cream played in the college bar. Ray Davies of the Ki
nks was a fellow student, and Rod Stewart was often found around the college, though he wasn’t a student. Dave Clark of the Dave Clark Five had an uncle who was a caretaker at South Grove, and he used to hang around in the playground. ‘The world was so conventional that it was easy to be revolutionary, but that didn’t make it any less exciting,’ they both seem to say at the same time. ‘Anything was possible, there was everything to live for, and we were right in the middle of it.’
IT WAS ALSO THROUGH HORNSEY, I discover from her file of correspondence with her editor, that Hannah was introduced to her publishers, Routledge & Kegan Paul. The editor, Brian Southam, wrote to the college seeking someone to write an introduction to sociology for art students, and Hannah was suggested.
After a meeting in June 1964, Southam wrote to Hannah asking her for a proposal for the book. Stapled to his letter is a handwritten draft of Hannah’s reply, edited in my father’s hand. In front of her rather blunt beginning — ‘Here is my proposal’ — he has added, ‘I also enjoyed our discussion and confirm that we have very much the same ideas about this book.’
Her proposal was forthright about her potential readers: ‘My experience of teaching sociology to art students has revealed that they do not possess a wide vocabulary, that their general knowledge is limited, and that their interest has to be wooed.’ But Southam replied that ‘the Board was extremely impressed’. She was offered an advance of £100, and the contract was signed on 29 July.
There must also have been some discussion about Hannah’s doctoral thesis, which she had by now completed, for three weeks later Southam wrote to say that he had received ‘very favourable reports’ on her typescript, and that Routledge would like to publish this as well.