Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  When Nye was abroad she didn’t have to worry about the dreariness of Gosfield Street. She liked to think of him having a good time, though one of these good times in 1957, just when things were so difficult at home for her, resulted in further stress, which she could have done without. Nye had gone with Dick Crossman and Morgan Phillips to the conference of the Italian Socialist Party in Venice, a trip paid for by what Jennie referred to as ‘the hard-earned money of Party workers including his own people in South Wales’. He went looking very smart indeed, in a beautifully cut new suit, and thoroughly enjoyed himself tasting the Italian wines and discoursing on their merits. He was a great hit at the conference, speaking in support of the left-wing Socialist Party, and an even greater hit socially. But back in England, the Spectator published an article (‘Death in Venice’) in which it was suggested that all three of the British delegates were drunk. Nye was furious and demanded an apology, which was refused, the reporter sticking to the story, so all three men decided to sue for libel.

  Jennie did nothing to restrain Nye from taking legal action, though the words of the reporter were mild enough – ‘Messrs Bevan, Morgan Phillips and Richard Crossman … puzzled the Italians by their capacity to fill themselves up like tanks with whisky and coffee … the Italians were never sure if the British delegation was sober.’ Perhaps another wife would have told her husband not to be so pompous, and that there was nothing very damning or disgusting in the description. But Nye, she reported, was ‘blazingly angry’ and furthermore ‘his pride was hurt’. This appeared to be the clincher: hurt pride. Jennie could identify with that. She approved of pride, it was part of her own character to be proud of her own virtues and she made no attempt to mock Nye out of his pride on this occasion. Nye hated the Tory Spectator and was determined to extract damages from it. He, and the others, accordingly sued, and won their case, receiving £2,500 each (which, in 1957, was a very great deal of money).

  The strain for Jennie was not so much in worrying about clearing Nye’s reputation – she had no worries about that – but in dreading having to pay legal costs if the case went against him. All of what she called ‘our modest savings’ were in her name for precisely this reason, in case Nye ever did get himself sued, or was involved in some legal battle. He was capable of saying the most outrageous things in public and it was always perfectly possible he would slander someone who would react by taking him to court. So Jennie, gifted with a good deal of financial acumen (a blessing in a wife for Nye, who had little), had taken over the management of their joint monies and had everything in her name. Jennie was scared. She didn’t want any risky legal battles, so standing by Nye was brave of her (or foolish). It helped a bit that by then they were better off, not through their pay as MPs (this was still poor, with no allowances for office costs yet) but from their journalism. They also both received presents from wealthy friends, mostly in the form of contributing to election expenses by providing a car for their use, or treating them to holidays, but sometimes in straight cash gifts. With these windfalls, the astute Jennie opened a ‘special’ account, so special that she didn’t declare it for tax purposes. Jennie saw nothing corrupt in this – it was not as though money was given for favours to be received – absolutely not. Neither she nor Nye could be bribed. She saw the special account as the means through which Nye could be pampered as he deserved, in a way which would ease the stress of working so incredibly hard. It paid, on occasion, for first-class accommodation when travelling, for taxis, and for staff. She saw it as her duty as a wife to provide for Nye in this luxurious way. He had had a taste for luxury before ever he met her, long before he had a wife at all, but she managed such indulgences for him once they were married.

  She was a good manager, sometimes too good. Jennie was the one who dealt with tradesmen and, rather shockingly, she was mean. Both at Lane End and Asheridge extensive building work was done, and the tradesmen had to wait months for payment. Sometimes the work had been perfectly done and there was no excuse for delaying payment, and sometimes she would quibble over some detail and attempt to justify the delay. Whether Nye knew this is doubtful – the whole point was that Jennie dealt with such mundane matters so that he didn’t need to be bothered – but he would hardly have been pleased with her. And yet in her own accounts she was meticulous, noting every penny she spent, so that it was never a case of not knowing the value of money and what it meant to people. She knew all right, she just couldn’t bear to think she might be cheated, and she feared that everyone had the wrong idea and thought she and Nye were actually rich, anathema to her. If they were rich, they wouldn’t have been renting a horrible flat in Gosfield Street, a continuing aggravation.

  But she was busy, she had no more time to devote to flat-searching. Not quite as busy as Nye (who in 1956 did become Party Treasurer and then Shadow Foreign Secretary) but nevertheless fully preoccupied once she had allowed herself to be nominated for the Women’s Section of the NEC, the section she had always despised but which, humiliatingly, she had come to see was her only way on to the main council. Her public life demanded more of her than it had ever done and, as ever, it had priority. She was not going to give up being Cannock’s MP, or writing for Tribune, or working for the various committees she was involved with, most of them to do with international affairs. There were speeches to write – on coal, on housing, on colonial policy – and visits to Cannock to make, and these were more important than running a home. It struck her as absurd that not everyone thought so – she was outraged that anyone should imagine that the stress she was under in these years, the mid- to late-1950s, should be relieved by giving up her work. The idea was monstrous. Nothing, not even her very genuine love and concern for both Nye and her mother, would make her do it. Such an act would negate the whole of her life, make a nonsense of everything she had struggled to achieve. It would turn her into that creature she had always despised, a mere wife of the old sort, a martyr, a woman who saw marriage as servitude. She would not do it, however desperate she became, and whatever conclusion she had previously come to in that private note.

  By 1958, she was desperate enough to be on the edge of a complete nervous breakdown. In her diary, she made a list of all the things she had to do one day in February and it was daunting. Her housekeeper at Asheridge was in hospital; her eighty-year-old mother was still battling on, surviving her cancer, but needing more and more help; Nye was very tired and regularly arriving at Gosfield Street to find no food; their farm manager was ill ‘and useless’; and the emergency home help was also ill. Everything was on top of her. She needed support and though she knew Nye loved her, and worried about her as she did about him, she suddenly felt he was letting her down. Why should he get all the sympathy and encouragement? She needed it too. Earlier, the summer before, she had got to the point of writing him a furious letter, alleging that he gave her no self-confidence. He may well have thought this was something she had in abundance, but it was no longer true and if he hadn’t been so wrapped up in his own troubles he would have seen it. She asked him, with marked bitterness and hostility: ‘is it your real and unshakeable conviction that nothing I do matters a damn …?’4 If so, he was saying all she was, and stood for, was totally ineffective. He was leaving her ‘naked and lame’. She was, she wrote, not like him – ‘I have to have something to sustain me.’ But in the midst of her raging there was also a touching humility. She reaffirmed what she had believed for many years by then, that Nye was ‘a thousand times’ more important to their age than she was. He represented all she most passionately believed in. But nevertheless she needed some of his time for herself and she had been afraid to demand it. Even writing this letter felt selfish, when she knew he was under such pressure and had so many people making demands on him, but she had given in to her own need to write it. He had to know how things stood, how near she was to cracking.

  But she never sent the letter. Later, she called it ‘mad’, but it was hardly that – impetuous, yes, but far too coherent to be ma
d. She was at the same point as so many wives in her situation (though there were few of them then) when everything becomes too much and they find in themselves a need they are almost ashamed to confess, the need to lean on someone stronger than themselves who will sort everything out as they believe themselves to have sorted things out for others, in particular their husbands. Jennie knew she had chosen to be what she was, a woman whose ‘public duties’, as she put it, were more important than personal happiness or ease of living, but that did not make the weight of her troubles any lighter. The solution of halving those duties, or reducing them considerably, was never for her an option and that was what she was protesting about. ‘It would have made matters worse, not better, if I had given up my political work.’ So strong was her conviction that this was true, she didn’t bother querying it, and neither, fortunately, did Nye. Her ‘mad’ letter didn’t need to be sent to him. He was well aware of the state his wife was in and wrote to her that summer, when he was in Scotland, that he realised she was depressed and that he was worried about her. He asked her to ‘buck up and remember we have a whole summer together at the farm. We must hug the thought of our secret happiness and not let public duties weigh on you too heavily.’

  There was more, though, weighing on Jennie than public duties and domestic problems. What had contributed to her sense of confusion and her feeling of intolerable strain was a fundamental and vital difference of opinion she had experienced in the months before with Nye. Always, they had agreed on everything that mattered – same socialist ideals, same determination to see them fulfilled. But slowly, throughout the previous year, a rift had opened between them over the H-bomb, and it had frightened her. She wanted to agree with Nye over something so important but she couldn’t. She was all for nuclear disarmament, as was the left wing of the Labour Party, but Nye was not at all convinced that this, even if it could be achieved, would preserve peace. Once, he had urged that Britain should suspend nuclear testing immediately, but now he changed his mind, deciding that unilateral disarmament would be to declare Britain impotent, which would have disastrous consequences on the balance of power. At the Labour Party Conference in 1957, in Brighton, Nye had accordingly defended retaining the possession of the H-bomb. For Jennie, it had been absolute agony to be opposed to her husband at a time when she knew he would be vilified by all their political friends. ‘He did not have even me on his side,’5 she was compelled to state, and she hated having to do so.

  She had tried to change his mind. Always, they’d argued about things but never from such dramatically opposed positions. Usually, arguments were about interpretations, or about how something or other should be done, about the best way to bring about what they both wanted. This was different, and it was dangerous. It was not in Jennie’s character to smile and agree to differ. She saw things in black and white, and never more so than over the H-bomb. But argue though she did, as forcefully as she knew how, Nye would not budge. He was quite happy to listen to her, as he always was, but she could not persuade him that her view was the right one. (So much for those who called Jennie an evil influence.) He was his own man, impervious to his wife’s pleas, and her influence weighed no more heavily with him than that of others. For Jennie, this was torture. She thought he was wrong, but did not want to have to witness what his stand would do to his reputation. She dreaded the speech he proposed to make at the conference where the vociferous advocates of unilateral nuclear disarmament would attack him mercilessly. It was an appalling dilemma for any wife to be in, to be asked to watch the man she loved be abused knowing that, in essence, she was of the same opinion as the abusers. Which should come first, loyalty to husband or loyalty to principles?

  The night before that conference she said that she stopped arguing with Nye, giving him the peace he needed to prepare for the traumatic day ahead (but others staying in the same hotel say they heard Nye and Jennie’s raised voices well into the early hours). She could hardly bear to be in the hall, and the experience was every bit as terrible as she had anticipated. She had always been proud that, as she put it, ‘we rally to the other’s assistance in times of crisis’, but rallying on that day was harder than it had ever been because she did not think he was right. She loathed the thought nevertheless of seeing Nye ‘humbled and tamed’ and passionately hoped he would, by some miracle, manage in his speech to effect some sort of acceptable compromise over the H-bomb. But he didn’t. Twenty years later, she could still hardly bear to remember how he had made a complete and total uncharacteristic mess of his speech. His famous passion and fluency deserted him, and where once he had been expert at dealing with hecklers now, at first, they stopped him in his tracks. It was painful to listen to him as he tried to persuade the delegates to trust him. He was as much against the use of nuclear power as any of them, but at the same time he believed Britain should never be obliged to ‘go naked’ into the conference chamber. International diplomacy demanded that if other major powers had the bomb, so should Britain.

  What Jennie saw that awful day was her husband slipping from being the idol and the hope of the left wing of the Labour Party into being, in their opinion, a traitor. It pained her more than anything ever had done, and the injustice of it made it easier for her to rush to Nye’s defence whatever she thought of his stand. She hated to see him, scarlet in the face, hoarse from shouting to be heard above the din, trying so desperately to defend his point of view. Nobody understood him, nobody appreciated that his attitude arose from comprehending the international situation better than they did. She couldn’t wait to get him off that platform, out of that hall, away from those either yelling in outrage or weeping tears of disappointment. She was afraid for his health, and so were other observers, one of them thinking he might be about to have a stroke, so evident was the strain he was under. Jennie acted then as a good wife should. She took him back to Asheridge as quickly as possible and once there shielded him from all callers. Then she sat down and defended him in an article she wrote for Tribune – though Tribune was furious with him – and in responses she blasted off to his public critics. The fact that she, as a left-wing Labour Party member, had agreed with those critics was now beside the point – she had no difficulty at all in putting being a wife first.

  Nye, she clearly saw in the dismal weeks following that Brighton conference, was a deeply wounded man, and this altered their relationship. She was, she wrote, ‘guarded’ now, and so was he. They were no longer saying exactly what they thought to each other. It was too dangerous. Arguing about the H-bomb had always meant they were on thin ice, but now the ice itself had splintered and it was best to stand absolutely still until it was safe to proceed, with infinite caution, to firm ground. Poison pen letters kept arriving, accusing Nye in melodramatic terms of having ‘ripped the heart out of socialism’, and she did not always succeed in keeping them from him. And on top of everything else, he had a heavy chest cold, which always alarmed her. The best thing to do was get him right away, as far as possible as quickly as possible, so she pushed him to take up an offer to lecture in America. There, he would not see the newspapers labelling him a ‘Tory’, or ‘Gaitskell’s poodle’, nor the caricatures so cruelly lampooning him. And, most important of all, he could gather strength for the coming General Election when, if Labour won, he would become Foreign Secretary.

  Jennie did not go with him. Even more than he did, she needed to be on her own to recover, to build up her own emotional strength without worrying about his. When he returned, she tried hard to make sure they both had more time at Asheridge on their own and in a way the Brighton Conference had made this easier – so many of their former close friends were now cool towards them (though only temporarily as it turned out). She concentrated on trying to do what Nye liked best, which was listening to music and reading and best of all pottering around the farm. There was always something of a practical nature to be attended to, and Nye loved getting his hands dirty. Occasionally, they walked to the Blue Ball, a pub half a mile from the farm, and
had a drink. Nye liked to take a jug down with him and have it filled with draught beer, becoming very cross if Jennie bought bottles. He was not really a beer drinker – he preferred good wine – but it went with being in the country. The friends who did visit at this period noticed that Jennie was much more subdued than usual – quiet, almost wistful, lacking her normal ebullience. She appeared constantly anxious about Nye and her attitude to him was much more maternal. What he ate, what he wore, how he slept caused her great concern and she watched over him as her own mother had once watched over them both.

  But all the time she was waiting not only to see him recover his old fighting spirit but to see the tide turn again in his favour, as she was sure it must. Nye still had within his reach the leadership of the Labour Party – not for one minute did Jennie concede that Gaitskell had it for keeps. He could still become leader of the opposition and when the next election was won, as it surely would be, eventually Prime Minister. She never lost sight of this goal, wanting, as she did, power for Nye not for its own sake but so that he could put into effect those socialist ideals which had guided their whole lives. Nye would come back into favour, he had to. She would have considered herself a failure if she had not believed this, if what had happened at the Brighton Conference had in any way weakened her faith in him. Her confidence was essential to him, and it was still there, even if they were both more ‘guarded’ with each other. She didn’t beg him to spare himself and give up, she didn’t say she couldn’t stand the strain any more, but on the contrary, urged him at every turn to believe in himself and carry on trying to convince others that far from betraying socialism he thought only of bringing it to full fruition. No wife could have been more loyal, and if Jennie’s influence was so often said to have been malign, or at the very least misguided, this was an example of it being exerted overwhelmingly for the good.