Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  By the next party conference, at Scarborough in 1958, Jennie saw what she had hoped and believed would happen begin to take place, at least on the surface. Nye made another speech about foreign affairs and at the end was given an ovation – music to her ears. But better than that, in the election for the Shadow Cabinet he topped the poll. Once more he seemed poised to take over the leadership, even though Gaitskell was still in control, and Nye had remained loyal to him. But Jennie knew how hard he found it to be so, believing as he did that Gaitskell was not a true socialist, but also hating factions within the party. Gaitskell needed him, but if Labour lost the next election there would come the time when it would be right to challenge him and then Nye would win. Always, Jennie took the long view. It was a question, by 1958, of Nye biding his time. He couldn’t afford to resign once more. Where once she had encouraged him to be a rebel and stand on his own on matters of principle, if necessary, sure he would effortlessly attract support the moment he did so, now she wanted him to hang in and play the power game. He was sixty-one years old and done with a young man’s strategy – he didn’t have the time for risky moves. No one, now, could accuse Jennie of being a ‘dark angel’, breathing daring revolt into her husband’s ears. She had not helped so magnificently to bring him through the worst political time of his life only to urge him to gamble his recovery away – she wanted him to stay where he was and consolidate his position.

  The 1959 election was called for 8 October, but before it Jennie was expected to go with Nye to the Soviet Union on an official visit with Gaitskell and Denis Healey and their wives. Jennie refused to go. The company could not have been less congenial for her – she did not get on very well with other wives and certainly had little in common with either Dora Gaitskell or Edna Healey. She and Nye had been to the Soviet Union the year before, to meet Krushchev, and Jennie undoubtedly thought of herself as superior because of this previous visit – she and Madame Khrushchev had got on very well indeed and Nye had been a great hit with Khrushchev himself. It was going to be irritating for Nye to have to revert to the dull, formal rules and atmosphere of an official delegation, to have to defer to Gaitskell as leader, and for her it would have been intolerable. Gaitskell himself didn’t seem to realise how bored Nye was and thought him full of enthusiasm and in great form, but Jennie knew better. It was a relief to her when she had him home. She thought he seemed in reasonably good shape and ready to prepare for fighting the election which he was desperate for Labour to win. Another defeat was unthinkable. Jennie, of course, wanted Labour to win just as much as he did, but not so far at the back of her mind was the thought that if they did, Nye, as Foreign Secretary, would be pushed harder than ever. As a politician herself, she wanted that position (which might in due course lead on to becoming Prime Minister at last) for him, but as a wife she feared it. He needed rest, and that was precisely what he was not going to get in a Labour government.

  V

  THE OCTOBER 1959 election was a disaster for Labour, with the Tories increasing their majority to 100 seats. Nye had worked tirelessly throughout the election campaign, so it was to be expected he would be exhausted after it, but Jennie had begun to fear even before it was over that there was something more wrong with him than extreme tiredness. His appearance during one television performance, which she watched in her own constituency, had, she said, ‘panicked her’. The minute the election was over (and herself as well as Nye safely re-elected) she rushed back home, knowing that Nye had been too ill to go to Devonport to speak for Michael Foot (who lost his seat) and worried his illness was not just flu or something equally unthreatening. Once he had rested, he seemed to rally, but Jennie’s fears continued.

  In fact, she had always worried about her husband’s health. He looked so big and strong that people assumed there was nothing fragile about him, but Jennie had always known there was. Her main concern had been for his chest. When he was wheezing and struggling for breath, as sometimes when he had a cold, Jennie would become convinced he had the miner’s disease pneumoconiosis, of which his own father had died, and she would call the doctor, who would reassure her and diagnose bronchitis or, on one occasion, pleurisy. It had been partly for the sake of Nye’s chest that she agreed to move out of London to the farm at Asheridge where it was believed his lungs would benefit.

  When Nye suffered these chest complaints it was noted by his family that Jennie did little of the actual nursing he needed. Arianwen went so far as to state (with contempt) that Jennie was frightened of illness. She was right, Jennie was (as most people are). She was hardly ever ill herself, possessing a constitution far tougher than Nye’s, as well as one never put under the strain his had been. So long as she saw to it that Nye was properly nursed, she felt no shame in keeping her distance till he was better. This, of course, was not how a good wife was meant to react – she was (and is) expected to minister to the sick husband herself and at the same time not want to carry on with her own life. Selfless devotion was the watchword at such times and Jennie was incapable of that.

  She demanded it of others, though, when she was ill. Back in 1932, when she was still with Frank Wise, she had needed her tonsils out and made a great fuss about who was going to look after her. She inspected the King’s Cross Nose and Throat Hospital, which was free, and finding herself ‘profoundly depressed by the violation of privacy in that kind of place’1 she had booked herself into a private nursing-home in Bentinck Street (off Harley Street) where she would get the personal attention she wanted. But once the minor operation was over and she went home to her flat, her mother came down from Scotland at once on the bus to look after her, much to Jennie’s gratification – her mother, at least, knew how to behave in times of need.

  But, though Jennie did not follow the received opinion of how wives should behave when husbands were ill, it was not because she didn’t care. She cared greatly. Her papers and letters are littered with expressions of concern about Nye’s health right from the moment they married and she never tried to minimise his symptoms however much they scared her. Whenever he had been standing for any length of time, giving speeches or addressing conferences, his back would be agony, and she would urge the service of a physiotherapist. It was the same with his neck muscles, and his shoulders – if he tensed them, as he did when he was rousing himself into a passion during some argument, he would suffer acute, debilitating pain afterwards. Jennie knew this, and was forever preaching rest, rest and rest again as a cure.

  She did nothing, though, to make Nye cut down on his drinking, probably because she knew it would do no good trying to persuade him, but also because she didn’t really believe alcohol was damaging him. He was never incapably drunk, or ill after drinking a lot (whereas she was), and his mind was always sharp, so the effect on his liver was hidden. Wine, his preferred drink, helped Nye relax and she was all for that. They ate well too, but again it was good food, cooked by her mother, or eaten in excellent restaurants, and not rubbish. Nye gained weight as he aged but not so much that he looked grossly fat. So Jennie had never worried about his more general health, obsessed as she was with the state of his chest and back. These were specific areas of concern and she could cope with them.

  What she found difficult to cope with in 1959 was a dreadful underlying conviction that something she could not put her finger on was wrong with Nye. She would get sudden little rushes of terror at odd moments, as she did in the spring of that year, when she saw him sitting on a window-sill at Asheridge talking to a guest. He was talking animatedly, his face alive with interest in what he was saying, and yet she thought she saw something ominous in how he looked. She said nothing to him about it. At other times he had begun to say things she was afraid to interpret. There was a wistfulness, even a sadness, about him which had nothing to do with his political fortunes. An apparently innocent remark, such as ‘Not many more springs’ as he looked out on a particularly beautiful scene at Asheridge, could make her heart turn over. Then she’d bought a new double bed for his bed
room at Asheridge; he said why didn’t she add a second bedside lamp, then they could both read and sleep there. They had had their own bedrooms for so long by then that it was a shock to her that he wanted her with him and, again, she wondered if there was some deeper significance in this.

  Still she never suspected there was anything seriously wrong with his stomach. His eyes were troubling him more then. He started to complain he couldn’t see, so she made him have his eyes examined and only then learned that he suffered from nystagmus, an eye condition left over from his days as a miner. Then she had noticed a swelling in his neck and was terrified he had a tumour, but it disappeared once he rested his voice. But even though she was alert to his physical condition, she did not notice any stomach problem until after the election, when he lost interest in food and started losing weight. This was unusual enough in itself to be alarming, and she was alarmed, but not anything like as worried as she had been over other ailments. He was sixty-two, and she knew that men of that age regularly suffered from ulcers. His own doctor suspected he had an ulcer, and wanted to have him examined in hospital and treated for it. Reluctantly, Nye agreed to go into the Royal Free, Hampstead, but not until after Christmas. He always grumbled about Christmas, saying it was just a festival of commercial exploitation, but Jennie’s tradition-loving mother was used to ignoring him and went ahead with the usual celebrations which Nye, in the end, loved. That Christmas, two Yugoslavian friends, with their three children, were staying at Asheridge, and Jennie was glad of their company. Their presence meant a front had to be kept up, a pretence that Nye was not about to have an operation soon.

  On 27 December, Nye went into hospital and Jennie stayed with friends in London so that she could be nearby and visit every day even though she hated hospitals and illness. The operation was a long one, and as the hours passed Jennie concluded correctly that this must be a bad sign. She even imagined the length of the operation must mean Nye’s life was in danger, so when she was told it was safely over her first reaction was one of relief – he had survived, he had not died on the operating table. But seeing him was a great shock. He looked so dreadful, as anyone does after a major operation, and hardly had the strength to turn his head. She was very frightened and emotional, and could only bring herself to say, ‘Darling, be on my side.’ He couldn’t speak, still dazed from the anaesthetic, but she interpreted the look he gave her as proof that he intended to fight to get well. She learned that most of his stomach had been removed, a horrifying piece of information in itself, but neither Mr George Quist, the surgeon who carried out the complicated operation, nor Nye’s doctor and friend, Dan Davies, mentioned the malignant tumour that had been found.

  For six weeks Nye lay in the Royal Free recovering without knowing what he was vainly trying to recover from. Naturally, he wanted to know what had been done to him and what the prognosis was and since he had acquired quite a bit of medical knowledge there was not much chance of hiding everything from him. He knew there would be a laboratory report, which he was quite capable of understanding, and requested to see it. Dan Davies had the laboratory findings typed out and asked Jennie to give it to Nye. She read it first. There was no mention of cancer. Nye studied it and appeared satisfied. But the day before Jennie was due to take him home to Asheridge, Dan Davies invited her to lunch at his house and gently broke the truth to her. Nye not only had cancer but it was terminal. Nobody could say how long he had left, but the informed guess was six months to a year, though since cancer was so unpredictable there was always the hope he would have longer. But the point was, there was no treatment possible. What could be done had been done. All that was left was palliative care.

  When the news of her mother’s inoperable cancer had been broken to her, Jennie had had Nye to cling on to and help her cope, and even then on her own admission she had become hysterical. Now, she could not afford hysterics. The very reason Dan Davies had waited six weeks to tell her the truth was because he had realised that if he told her as soon as the operation was over, Nye would see it in her eyes and would not fight to survive. The six weeks had given him the chance to stabilise and believe he was getting better, so that the implicit lie he had been fed had been worth it. But for Jennie the long delay had made everything harder – she, too, had believed Nye was getting better and now she was bound to begin acting a part much harder to do convincingly than it had been in front of her mother. Yet, at the same time, she agreed that Nye should not be told. She wanted the cancer to be kept secret from him, fearing that to know he was certainly dying would make his last months far more agonising than they need be. So she proposed to tell no one whatsoever, not his family, not his closest friends. Only his doctors and herself would know and they would conspire together to protect him from the awful truth.

  Whatever the moral dilemma in this decision, Jennie was taking upon herself a task of Herculean proportion. Unlike her mother, Nye was not easily content with whatever was told him. He was far more astute and his relationship with his wife was far closer. Jennie was presupposing that he would not be able to sense her own distress and fear and come to the correct conclusion. She was sentencing herself to pretending for twenty-four hours in every single day and never having the relief of seeking comfort from anyone, because no one had to know. The strain was naturally colossal and it quickly told on her. She needed alcohol to help her cope and began drinking heavily. Her temper, never serene, became worse and she snapped at everyone except Nye. But what made everything even more terrible than it already was, was her growing conviction that Nye’s cancer had been caused by those who had subjected him to such abuse during the H-bomb quarrel. Without knowing anything about the causes of cancer, she instinctively felt they were psychological. She began to torment herself with this theory. Those who had opposed Nye were ‘murderers’ and she wanted some sort of revenge. This took the form of keeping away people she accused of having put Nye through hell and it created great resentment. Jennie was in charge, Jennie had the power, Jennie was the wife whose permission was needed to see Nye.

  At first, it seemed she was succeeding in protecting him. The weather was good that spring, and Nye seemed to be recovering not just some strength but his spirits. Every little improvement – the first walk he took, the first interview she allowed him to give – was greeted by her with the words, ‘Going in the right direction,’ which amused him. A journalist from the Guardian, interviewing him at the end of March, wrote that he was smiling and cheerful and seemed eager to get back to work, but that his wife was determined he should not rush things – ‘He ought to have the fullest time in order to get back into fighting form.’ She had almost been taken in by her own pretence and fantasised that this was indeed what Nye would do, get back to fighting form, defy the cancer, triumph over it and confound the doctors. Her mother, after all, had already survived five years since they’d been told her cancer was hopelessly advanced, so why should Nye not do the same?

  In May, he seemed so much better that they went on holiday, only to Brighton, but still it was a start. Jennie was sure the sea air would be a tonic, and looked forward to Nye’s benefiting from it. At first, it seemed the change of venue and air were working but it was all an illusion. Within a few days he was in terrible pain and it was obvious they must go home. On the way back to Asheridge, in a chauffeur-driven car, loaned to them by friends, they stopped briefly in Windsor Great Park. The chauffeur was a man Nye knew, like him a Welshman, and getting out of the car to stretch his legs, Nye said to him that he must go back to Wales to see the mountains ‘before I go’. It was one of several indications that Nye did, in fact, know all along that he was dying and that just as Jennie was pretending so was he. It was a dreadfully sad, complicated game: she pretended to protect him, he pretended he didn’t know she was pretending, to protect her. How long this cruel charade could go on neither of them knew. Nye’s doctors wanted him to go back into the Royal Free, but he refused. He couldn’t say he wanted to die at home, because he wasn’t supposed to kn
ow he was dying, but clearly he had little faith in the reality of any kind of treatment, and Jennie did not carry pretence as far as urging hospital attention on him. But, as she put it, ‘the bad time began’. If Nye was going to die at home, he would need round-the-clock nursing. He developed thrombosis in his right leg soon after the return from Brighton, and that inaugurated the new régime. Their Austrian friend, Trude, and Jack Buchan, a physiotherapist friend trained to give the pain-relieving injections Nye was becoming dependent on, became his daytime nurses. Jennie described herself as his night nurse. Every other day Dan Davies or George Quist came to visit, though there was little they could do. According to Jennie, Nye ‘quizzed’ them sharply about his state of health but they gave nothing away – ‘they kept their promise to me.’

  There was no one in those awful last weeks who was not wary, if not downright afraid, of Jennie. She was hardly sane, struggling as she was to give Nye confidence and yet confronted daily with the evidence that pretending he was going to get better was a sham. The sham didn’t make her relent. On the contrary, it seemed more important than ever to encourage Nye to look forward, to plan ahead. She liked to see him sitting by the window, looking out and talking about what he was going to do when he was better and instead of the pathos of this tearing her apart, knowing as she did that he never would get better, it helped her hold herself together – ‘going in the right direction’ had in effect been their slogan long before Nye was convalescing. Her great terror was that the morphine administered by Jack Buchan would not continue to subdue the pain and that when it failed, Nye would guess he was dying. She couldn’t bear the thought of a sudden last-minute confrontation during which Nye would realise she had lied to him.