A Life in the Day

by Hunter Davies

  Mrs Rooney, on the day I went to see her at home, appeared in her uniform, having just finished her shift as a dinner lady at the comprehensive Wayne used to attend. She had laid out for me two piles, in order, in neat plastic folders. One contained all Wayne’s school reports from the age of four at nursery onwards. Even more interesting, she had carefully kept every letter from Everton from the age of eight.

  All top clubs are very secretive about their Academies and Centres of Excellence, so to get all his reports, instructions, timetables, personal assessments from eight to sixteen was most revealing. Well, it was to me. Even though the book failed, I like to think some of the memorabilia was fascinating for all football fans. Which I still am.

  Football has given me such pleasure in life, playing it for so long, till I was fifty, which was silly, and watching it even longer, but also being able to write about it so often, getting away with turning my personal interests into professional work.

  My hope for the future is that I will always have the strength to be able to turn the TV on every night of the week and watch a live game, while drinking Beaujolais.

  13

  MARGARET

  It was while I was editing the Sunday Times Magazine in 1975 that life suddenly stopped still.

  I was being driven to work each day in a chauffeur-driven car, and then to the West End for lunch, dealing with all these famous photographers, such as Donald McCullin and Tony Snowdon. The well-known features writers included Bruce Chatwin and Jeffrey Bernard. Both of whom I let go. One because I didn’t want any more purple prose and the other because he never handed in any sodding copy.

  I had a big budget, a brilliant staff, we were the brand leader in our field, and even though I never got to grips with the art department, I was feeling quite a hell of a feller, rushing around, being busy. And then Margaret got cancer.

  I can’t now remember which day it was she first told me. Or what she said. Or what I said in reply. I do tend to shove bad things quickly out of my mind, put my head in the sand, hope it will not be true and will all go away.

  It emerged that she had found a lump in her left breast. She did not admit it at first, until I discovered she had made an appointment to see our GP, Micky Day. She had been our friend now for fifteen years, always invited us to her election evening party, a northern lass we felt we had grown up with.

  I then forced Margaret to reveal what she had found, and of course she was sure it was nothing, she had probably just imagined the lump.

  Micky said at once that she had to go to the Royal Free to have it checked. The results came back quickly, too quickly, that it was malignant. The recommendation was a total mastectomy of her left breast.

  Margaret was strangely, quietly, worryingly resigned. She had always felt something awful like this would happen one day. We had been too lucky in life. Three lovely children, a whole house and a nice garden to ourselves, country cottage, successful writing careers.

  I had always been irrationally optimistic about almost everything. I saw only good things ahead. Even when logic suggested the opposite might well happen, or even was happening, I was ever hopeful. A state of irrational optimism is vital for a football fan, especially a fan of the England team, but in real, personal life it is probably best to be more realistic.

  Margaret always saw the worst ahead, could imagine herself into a state when something awful had happened. She had always been able to put herself in that position, so when it did happen, it was as if she had been there already. This, she argued, put herself in a better position to cope, if and when it did. Unlike those with their silly, empty heads in the sand.

  When it was decided surgery was the only way to treat it, I wanted to fight it, to argue the toss, get another opinion. It seemed so sudden and dramatic. Surely there must be other treatments. Just slice off a little bit, the offending bit, then wait and see what happens. Wouldn’t that be best?

  Margaret trusted the opinion and advice of the Royal Free medics. They knew best, it was their considered professional judgement, even though we had both instantly disliked the surgeon who was to do the operation. She seemed to me cold and brutal, a bit like that woman doctor who had thrown me around on our honeymoon when I had a boil.

  In the hospital, this surgeon strode around with her team behind her like a drill sergeant major. In front of a group of her cowed students, she explained loudly, so the whole ward could hear, that Margaret was an unlikely candidate for breast cancer. She was only thirty-six, had breastfed three children for nine months each, had never smoked, and was otherwise fit and well and healthy. Yes, most unusual.

  Which was not exactly reassuring. In fact it was like being damned and doomed. It suggested that Margaret was right; her good luck in life had run out.

  Margaret was insistent that I carried on working. She would not be in hospital long. From having been deeply pessimistic when the news first broke, she was now being organised and realistic. She had already thought it all through, long before it happened. Which proved her theories worked. She would be back at home soon, running the house, looking after the children again, as she had always done.

  Margaret had never had help in the house, of any sort, not even a cleaner. She hated the idea of telling some woman, who might be the age of her mother, to clean or dust. She preferred to do it on her own, despite having a big house, three children, and a writing life which many would have considered a full-time occupation, turning out a novel almost every year. Margaret, of course, did not regard her writing as a job. She was just playing. Her children came first.

  Caitlin was by now eleven, Jake nine and Flora three. I normally took the older two to school each morning, before I went to work, leaving Flora with Margaret, but when she went into the Royal Free for the operation, we hired a nanny. Not a proper, trained one, but Janet, the daughter of the man who was now our builder, George Wilson, who had become our family friend. Janet was calm and sensible and agreed to come for a few weeks, look after Flora, pick the older ones up from school, do some gentle housework, till I got home from work. Margaret would return soon and be able to take on the full domestic and maternal load once again.

  Just before Margaret was due to go under the knife, we heard the good news that Caitlin had got into Camden School for Girls. In 1975, there was still the eleven-plus in our borough, Camden, even though comprehensives had come in elsewhere in London, such as in Haringey. We knew it was coming soon to Camden, but in 1975 the dreaded eleven-plus hung over all local children in their last year at primary school. I had suffered from it, not getting into Carlisle Grammar School till I was sixteen.

  After the operation, the surgeon declared that it was in fact not such a high-grade tumour. Having one breast off should now do the trick. Margaret probably would not need radiotherapy or chemotherapy. Whatever they were. All these were new terms to me. While in the Royal Free, by a piece of luck, without asking, Margaret was put into a room on her own after her operation. Nobody else had wanted it. She was able to make it as cheerful and homely as possible, with the children’s drawings on the wall, her books, pen and ink and paper beside her. As soon as she had the strength, she started writing letters and notes.

  When a nurse discovered she was writing in pen and ink, Margaret was told off, warned that ink would get onto the sheets. So Margaret was reduced to a biro. It was the first time she had ever written with a biro. She had always been snobbish about them, dismissing them as ugly, unattractive and messy.

  As Janet helped out only during the day, I was responsible for our evening meals. Did I moan, never having cooked a thing in my life, not since I was about ten and cooked for my young brothers and sisters when my mother was in hospital. This was in 1946 and my speciality was potatoes and mince and lots of toast. In 1975 I moved on to the Hunter’s Special, which all three of my children grew to hate. It consisted of ham and cheese on toast, with a poached egg on top. Yum, yum. Well I thought so.

  When Margaret eventually came out, after three
or so weeks, she was offered a breast reconstruction. Everyone had it, she was told. There were modern prostheses which were excellent, so they said. Margaret refused. The most she agreed to was some slight extra padding of her left bra, so that she did not feel unbalanced while dressing or walking.

  She never discussed all these options or her decisions with me. But of course I observed her slightly padded bra and knew what she had done.

  We had never anyway discussed personal things, especially of an intimate sexual nature. I would have done, given half a chance. I love going over my problems and ailments of any sort, from funny spots on my willy to backache.

  It was part of her pride, her strength, not wanting to reveal weaknesses or worries. She preferred to keep private and personal things to herself. She had never believed the old cliché that a problem shared was a problem halved. She felt a problem was doubled, by sharing it. Other people would now know and one of them was bound to go on about it, ask about it, when she did not want to talk about it any more. What she really wanted, above all, was privacy.

  Our love-making had always been in the dark, so truly, honestly, her lack of one breast did not put me off, did not distract me, or revolt me. But of course it did to her. She was convinced I would find her revolting and ugly and repellent. So it took a few months before she agreed. I told her I loved her just the same, and in the same way, as I had always done.

  When I said this to her, hesitant and stumbling, scared to use the wrong words and upset her, her reaction was to snort, dismissing my protestations. I was lying, she said. She maintained she was now a horror show, how could anyone want to make love to her. She could not bear her own body any more, so how could anyone else?

  But gradually, slowly, delicately, tenderly, we did return to a sort of normal married life.

  Margaret started another book, a biography of Thackeray, and got a modest advance out of her publisher, Tom Rosenthal at Secker. With novels, she never took an advance, but with non-fiction, it entails a lot of time and research, so best to get some money up front.

  I also did a biography, of George Stephenson the Railway King, and then a sequence of walking books – walking Hadrian’s Wall, walking the Lake District.

  Because of this we decided to buy a cottage in Cumbria. We had quickly sold our Oxfordshire weekend cottage when Margaret fell ill. We had enough to think about. But now after two or three years, she appeared fit and well again, back to normal, worrying more about her own parents and their health than her own. We started going up and down to Carlisle to see Margaret’s parents, and also my mother. Taking our three children with us wasn’t much fun, and a dreadful squash when staying with Margaret’s mother or at my mother’s house.

  A few year earlier, they had moved out of their respective council houses when we bought them each a bungalow – next door to each other, which was pure chance. They happened to come up for sale, one after the other. We thought it would be handy when we were visiting them – handy for us, rather than them. I don’t think they actually liked living next door to each other, being such different characters. Margaret’s father Arthur was very abrupt and organised, neat and tidy, and he kept his garden immaculate, whereas my mother was the opposite, preferring to sit in her summer house reading Dickens with endless cups of tea rather than worry about the weeds.

  We bought a small cottage at Park End near Caldbeck in 1977, just twenty minutes from Carlisle, within easy reach of going to see them. It was an eighteenth-century cottage, once part of the family home of John Peel, very small, two up and two down, rather dark, rather damp, but awfully atmospheric. It felt like being out in the wilds, surrounded by open fells. We went up there during all half terms and school holidays.

  Halfway through Margaret’s Thackeray biography, she happened to tell Tom, her publisher, that she had decided to do it in an unusual way. She was writing it in the first person. She would pretend that Thackeray himself was writing it, writing his own autobiography, but she would stick to the facts, stick to his language, his jokes and style and mannerisms, and use period drawings from his various books. A reader, not knowing, might well suppose Thackeray had really written it himself.

  For over a year, Margaret had read every word Thackeray had ever written, books as well as letters and journalism. Before we had left Wardington, in Oxfordshire, she had bought a whole set of Thackeray’s books from Lord Wardington, who was a neighbour. I had also bought some railway books from him for my George Stephenson book. (Lord Wardington was a Pease, a member of the Quaker family who had backed Stephenson and the early railways.)

  When Margaret told Tom how she doing the Thackeray biog, Tom was very upset. This was not what he had commissioned. He wanted a normal, third-person biography. How would the trade describe it? How would the bookshops file it? As fact or fiction? I thought Tom was being silly, petty, and short-sighted. Seemed a brilliant idea, awfully avant garde. She should ignore him.

  But Margaret did not even pause to argue. The moment Tom raised his first objections, and started moaning, she immediately said don’t worry, I will give you back your advance, just forget it, sorry I spoke.

  Which she did. Paying back the money she had already taken, sending off a cheque at once, without telling me or her agent, which naturally did not please him, as the paperwork got complicated.

  I told her she was silly. But she was even sillier when a year later she had finally finished the book, doing it her way – and then offered it first to Tom. He of course jumped at it. I thought he had shown a total lack of confidence and support for his author, so she should have gone elsewhere.

  It got good reviews. The critics understood and admired what she had done. Lit critics do tend to have degrees in English Lit, or similar, and are always reading the same biogs of the same old figures, so doing a biog in a different way appealed to them. It was not, however, a particularly good seller. So Tom’s fears on that score proved correct.

  In 1976, as a break from my northern-based books, I decided I would like to do something about comprehensive schools. Caitlin had started at Camden, which soon became comprehensive. In 1977, Jake started at William Ellis, formerly a grammar school, in the first year of their comprehensive intake. I had gone to lots of local meetings and was a supporter of the campaign for comprehensives – and even chaired one. I had a struggle to contain Fay Weldon, the author, and mother of three boys at local schools. She was on the speaking panel, and went on and on talking, all very amusing, but not quite relevant and I had a long agenda to work through.

  I had at the time been looking for another Year in the Life of project, having done The Glory Game, which was the year in the life of a football team. The walking books had been essentially year-in-the-lives, walking for example Hadrian’s Wall over the span of a year. What subject or place could I use as the setting for another year in a life?

  I was a qualified teacher, oh yes, having got a postgraduate Diploma of Education at Durham, mainly to get out of national service. I was legally qualified to teach, but had only done a few weeks of teaching practice – and was useless. Unlike Margaret, who was an excellent teacher. No one messed with her.

  I decided to find a true comprehensive, i.e. one which had been comprehensive for seven years, so all the pupils knew only the comprehensive system. Camden had only just begun, but Haringey, the next borough, was fully comprehensive.

  I approached Creighton School in Muswell Hill, without knowing any of the staff. It turned out they had just acquired a new head teacher, but it was agreed I could follow the life of the school for a year, and also do some teaching.

  The new head was Molly Hattersley, whom I had never met, the wife of Roy Hattersley, the Labour Cabinet Minister. It was pretty brave of her to allow me in, when she was still getting to grips with the school herself.

  I enjoyed the year, found it all fascinating, liked the staff and the pupils, following their lives through a school year. I only did a few history lessons, which confirmed how useless I was. The big p
roblem in all such books is how to shape it. You start off with the idea of covering a whole year, which sounds easy, as if it will write itself, but you end up with a mass of material, interviews, assorted and disconnected research notes. You have to form it into a narrative, so readers will read on, which of course academics don’t have to bother about. So some people I had interviewed got dumped, some events were built up, as I tried to work up the running stories of the year.

  I secured a very impressive introduction to the book written by a real academic educationalist, Maurice Peston, a London University professor – later Lord Peston, and father of the TV presenter, Robert Peston. He happened to be a close friend of Roy Hattersley’s, which helped.

  I was so impressed by the school, and the comprehensive system, that I decided to give away all proceeds from the book to the school itself. The copyright of the book is therefore the Creighton School Association.

  Today, forty years later, the school is no more; at least it has changed its name and structure. It is now called Fortismere School. As Creighton has gone, it means that technically Haringey Council inherited the rights to the book. So if Hollywood comes along and wants to make a film of it, and stranger things have happened, then Haringey Council will get the money, not the school.

  Margaret was soon as fit and well as she had always been, going on long walks, climbing high fells. With so many distractions, what with her books and my books, buying a Cumbrian cottage, the two older children starting secondary school, life had got busy and buoyant and beautiful again and the subject of cancer was never mentioned.

  It never came up, in the house or with the children, for the simple reason that we had not told them. Margaret had not revealed it either to her parents, nor told my mother. When she had been in the Royal Free for those few weeks in 1975, we had simply told the children and our parents that Margaret was having an appendix out.