Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  But that moment never came. The morphine levels were increased and Nye slipped more and more into a drug-induced sleep. When, at the beginning of July, it was obvious the end was near, Jennie took the surprising decision to ask one of the Bevan family to be there, writing later: ‘We thought it prudent.’ Who she meant by that ‘we’ is not clear, nor why such a decision was ‘prudent’. Perhaps she feared it might look bad afterwards (and she was very concerned about afterwards) if the press represented her as keeping Nye’s relations away from him. At any rate, Arianwen’s husband (not one of his blood family) came to help Jack Buchan and her with their vigil, and it was he and Jack who were sitting with Nye when he died early on the morning of 6 July 1960. They woke Jennie, told her, and took her to his bedside. She said her first emotion was one of thankfulness that ‘There had been no last-minute awareness that we had deceived him.’ Again, that ‘we’, that inability to accept the responsibility she knew was hers. The doctors and Jack had kept the secret because she had made them do so, and the weight of knowing it was her decision burdened her ever after. On the whole, she convinced herself that she had been right, but doubts kept on surfacing, and stifling these exhausted her almost as much as her grief.

  This, when it broke over her, engulfed her completely. She had been with Nye for thirty years, and loved him as he loved her; and she had come to acknowledge that marriage was an institution which had worked to protect her. Now, she had no protection. She was a strong-minded, independent woman, but the utter loneliness of her new situation plunged her into overwhelming depression from which not only did she think she could not recover, but also did not want to. She wanted to die. It would have been easy, or as easy as such an agonising step ever can be. She had plenty of sleeping pills, supplied in abundance for Nye, and a bottle of whisky readily available to wash them down with. It was so tempting finally to obliterate herself. But what stopped her was the thought of her poor mother, so frail now, so near death herself and needing Jennie to help her through her own last days. Selfish though she may have been throughout her life, Jennie was not so selfish as to deny her mother that comfort. But another thing holding her back from suicide had nothing to do with her mother. She wanted to see justice done to Nye’s memory – she had been his wife, she was the only possible keeper of the flame. The moment he was dead the misrepresentations (in her opinion) had begun, and she seethed with rage. They must be corrected. She would have to rebut all the lies, keep constantly vigilant to safeguard his reputation. Michael Foot could be trusted to write Nye’s biography, but he could not be expected to scrutinise every word said and written about him. She would have to do that. Her sense of duty, and the bitterness which underlay it, kept her alive.

  There were certain ordeals which, out of that same sense of duty, she had to go through. On 26 July, there was an official memorial service in Westminster Abbey, organised by the Labour Party. It would have been unthinkable for Nye’s wife not to be present. The presence of so many ordinary people there among the famous mourners helped her through, but this very ordinariness of the assembled throng at the service a week earlier in Wales, when Nye’s ashes were taken to be scattered on a hillside above Tredegar, had almost proved her undoing. Jennie, facing the crowd which had gathered, had the greatest struggle not to break down completely. ‘In all the great battles of his life,’2 she managed to say, ‘Nye came home to you. He never left you. He never will.’ His spirit, she knew, had remained in Wales and, though neither she nor Nye had any religious faith, she felt profoundly moved to know this place, where his ashes lay, somehow also contained his essential self.

  The two services over, Jennie found she could not go on without some sort of rest. At Asheridge, Nye was everywhere and in the first weeks after his death there was more pain than comfort in this. In spite of her mother’s needs, she had to escape, and so she booked herself into a clinic in Edinburgh, leaving Ma Lee in good hands. Coming back from the clinic was hard – at least there she could sleep and be protected from the everyday reminders of Nye. As the months went by, her anguish increased, made worse as it was by her mother forgetting (her memory was severely affected by her illness) that Nye was dead and constantly going from room to room searching for him. Jennie felt she was going mad herself. She couldn’t sleep, even taking sleeping pills and when she did succeed in knocking herself out for brief periods, she had terrifying nightmares. She scrawled on a piece of paper, one of the many upon which she made not always coherent jottings, ‘Don’t know if I can go on here. But if not, where else?’3 Where indeed? Her mother could not be moved, and in any case she hadn’t the energy to uproot herself. There was no one who could take control and do it for her. Her only sibling was Tommy, who was useless, and she had no children. Her in-laws had little time for her, and she had never had any for them. The family could not close ranks and sustain her because to all intents and purposes she had no family. She was on her own.

  Soon, she began to wonder if she had entirely lost sight of who she was in so willingly becoming part of Nye’s life. She had, for ten years at least, sacrificed her own ambitions because she believed in Nye and saw him as being both more able and better placed to achieve what they both wanted to achieve. She felt she had had no real life of her own for so long that she had forgotten what it consisted of. ‘I wander in and out of people’s lives,’4 she wrote, ‘… but what else is there to do when there is next to nothing left of what could be called a life of your own?’ Nye, when Frank died, had roused her from her misery by reminding her of the work she had to do. It had been the antidote to grief, the means of pulling herself out of it. But now she couldn’t identify either what this ‘work’ was, or its value. Yes, she was still Cannock’s MP, but so what? She had never much liked constituency work and, since her majority there was large, she had never had to learn to like it. Sometimes she opened fairs or appeared at some of the other events that an attentive MP found it wise to agree to, but mostly she confined her efforts on Cannock’s behalf to speaking on matters of importance to the constituency (any debate on coal, for example, found her participating vociferously). But once Nye was dead her duties as an MP did not inspire her. Nothing did. She began to drink as much as a bottle of gin a day, just to be able to carry on.

  Even then, she would never have managed it without the help of her cousin, Bettina Stafford. Family did, after all, exist and rallied round. Bettina, alerted to Jennie’s plight by her mother, Ma Lee’s sister, came down to help nurse her aunt, bringing her husband Bill and her ten-year-old son Vincent. She meant to stay just a week, but stayed longer (in fact, stayed for the next thirty years). This stabilised Jennie at a crucial time, and then, after her mother had died (in 1962, not quite two years after Nye), Bettina’s presence, or rather Vincent’s, did more than that. Vincent became the son she had never had and truly gave her something to live for. It was a boy, and not work, which began to make her see there was a life still worth living without Nye – ‘the child kept me from indulging my mood of total despair and desolation.’ But, though Vincent did indeed rescue Jennie, he didn’t send her back into the public life she had once relished, the life she had had with Nye. Some people wondered if she would give up her seat at the next election and it seems to have occurred to Jennie herself to consider doing so. But she didn’t. The 1964 election came, and Labour won. The new Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, offered Jennie a job: she was to be the first ever Minister for the Arts.

  Wilson had been impressed once by what Nye had said to him about Jennie’s ability. Talking of Barbara Castle, Nye had told him, ‘Jennie is just as good as Barbara, but because she’s married to me she doesn’t get any publicity.’5 He had remembered that, and now he made it possible for Jennie to achieve something of her own, the chance to prove to everyone that if she had never been Nye’s wife she could have fulfilled other ambitions, including ministerial office, and put into practice what she believed in. Now she had her chance, and she seized it eagerly.

  During the next decade
, from 1964 when she became the first Minister of the Arts until 1970 when she lost her Cannock seat and was created Baroness Lee of Asheridge, Jennie relished the power she had been given. She was, in fact, a junior minister only, with the title of parliamentary under-secretary, but that was of no concern to her. She was sixty and had no illusions about subsequent preferment – it wasn’t as though 1964 was 1929, when she had hoped for a great political future. It suited her fine not to have to care about party politics but instead to be able to concentrate on what she wanted to achieve: to make the arts more accessible to everyone without in any way cheapening them. She wanted to see theatres and concert halls and art galleries in every town and city, not just clustered in London, and at the same time she wanted to establish permanent centres of excellence in the capital itself.

  Fine ideals, but all ultimately dependent, of course, on money. A National Theatre could not be built without money, nor could the arts be more widely disseminated without financial backing. Jennie’s way of securing the support which would produce the money was to enlist the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, in her cause and to use the invaluable help of the powerful man who had been her own and her husband’s solicitor, Arnold Goodman. Her job she saw as primarily one of managing the right publicity, of making the arts high-profile, and this she achieved triumphantly, rising above attempts to patronise her (from those museum directors and suchlike who considered her ignorant). Just as Nye had overcome supposedly insuperable obstacles in establishing the NHS through his own passionate commitment to it, so Jennie did the same for the arts. The comparison is not ludicrous either even if in scale it seems so – there was just as much hostility around in the arts world as there had been in the medical, together with the additional contempt of those who thought anything to do with the arts was essentially trivial.

  But Jennie didn’t think her job or her aims trivial. She believed in what she was trying to do. She was freed from all the constraints of being a famous man’s wife and it showed – she was back to her old energetic, bossy self, glorying in real work. Her delight in her role showed all too clearly how held back she had been for years and underlined how much she had sacrificed by being (whatever others thought) a good wife, putting her husband’s career first. Both in her achievements as Minister for the Arts and then by her part in the founding of the Open University she demonstrated how able she was, and always had been, and how she could rise to the challenge presented to her. She was, in those years, a success in a way she had never quite been since her marriage.

  She also enjoyed herself. Pleasure came back into her life, and with it another lover, a man younger than herself with whom she had a tremendously physical and satisfying relationship. The question of marriage never arose (like Frank, this man was already married) but there would have been little chance of her becoming a wife again. She loved this new man, but was content with a long-running affair, and when she felt it had run its course she was happy to let it change into a comfortable friendship. Losing her Cannock seat in 1970 she was not quite so content to stop being a minister, but once in the Lords she found ample scope for harrying the Tories. There were plenty of people who were glad, of course, that she had been removed from the Commons and from her post, including the senior civil servants. Their dealings with Jennie as a minister perhaps suggest that she would never have been a success earlier in her life after all – they found her rude, not very clever, not prepared to tolerate the meetings they thought necessary, and quite unable to grasp how the system worked.

  But whatever their opinion, Jennie ended her career on a high and was comforted by what she managed to achieve. Her life, unfortunately, did not end so well. In her seventies, she developed breast cancer, was troubled with arthritis, lost the ability to read clearly and was lonely. Her beloved nephew Vincent left to go to America after his second marriage and she missed him terribly. Only Bettina and Bill endured until her death, aged eighty-four, in 1988. She was cremated, and her ashes scattered where Nye’s had been, on the same Welsh hillside. In death, she was, finally, a wife.

  Reflections

  I SEE MYSELF reflected so clearly, at last, in Jennie Lee’s resistance to being a wife at all and even, though to a lesser extent (because of the different circumstances of our lives) in how she interpreted the role once she had succumbed. Almost everything she wrote about marriage I feel I could have written myself and her general outrage at how women allowed themselves to be trapped into various kinds of servitude, once they became wives, was mine. But, of course, Jennie had dedicated her life to politics, she had a reason to refuse to marry. I didn’t. I had no reason other than a dislike of what I saw as being a wife’s fate. When she did marry Nye, it was for practical reasons, to protect both their careers, and not for personal ones. She apparently felt no need to protect her parents from any stigma associated then with ‘living in sin’, but then perhaps her parents needed no protection. They were not religious and, though Ma Lee was in most respects conventional enough, their own political convictions made them well able to accept unorthodox relationships. How much Jennie told them about her lovers is not recorded – they may never have known she was actually living with Nye or, before that, sleeping with Frank, though since she was in such close contact with them that is unlikely. But they were pleased when she did become what she had said she never would, a wife.

  What she then made of the role, I approve of. I didn’t make the same of it, but I like the way she hardly gave in at all to conventional ideas of wifely behaviour. She tried to stay true to her own ideas, and for the most part she succeeded, not caring in the least that in doing so she turned prevailing judgements on what made a good wife inside out. She delegated all domestic tasks to her mother, who, whatever the rights and wrongs of this, relished them, and she resisted absolutely becoming the little housewife. She was married to Nye, not to a house. If her career suffered because she was his wife, and there is no real proof that it did, she still pursued it with, for a long period at least, no lessening of her ambition. She was one of the women who, towards the middle of the last century, put new meaning into the word ‘wife’.

  But the influence of extraordinary women like Jennie Lee had not yet begun truly to permeate society. Very few wives had access to her knowledge about birth control, even fewer knew how to procure a safe abortion. Women of her own class still relied on hopelessly primitive methods to prevent pregnancy and even more drastically crude and dangerous methods to abort unwanted babies. The first birth control clinic did not open until 1921, and it was in London, making it useless for all except a tiny minority of women. My own maternal grandmother could have done with the information it supplied but instead gave birth to an illegitimate baby she was unable to keep. Illegitimate herself, with her mother dying when she was two, she was one of the thousands of women to whom Jennie Lee’s liberated ideas would have seemed not only shocking but almost beyond their comprehension. What my grandmother wanted to be was a wife. Marriage to her still symbolised security, and when she married my grandfather, six years after her illegitimate baby was born, she felt safe for the first time in her life. She was rescued from the kind of disgrace and shame Jennie Lee never had to suffer.

  ‘Wife’, then, was still a seductive word to the majority of women at the beginning of the twentieth century, however much Jennie Lee held it in contempt, yet remaining single was not quite the miserable fate it had been seen as. The period following the end of the 1914–18 war saw a dramatic change in the morals of the young unmarried woman – it was not thought quite so terrible to ‘go all the way’, so long as one was discreet about it. Many women had slept with men going off to fight in the war without feeling this made them into sluts, and by the 1920s the term ‘fast’ carried overtones of admirable daring with it rather than disgust. Women even looked different, with their shape no longer what was thought ‘womanly’, and this had an effect on the way they behaved. Skirts remained long until the mid-1920s but then by 1927 they had shot up to knee level. Cors
ets all but disappeared, and so did waists, and hair was cropped. Women not only looked more like boys but some considered they had the licence to behave like them if they wished. They wanted to have fun before they married and carried into marriage – still the goal – new notions of their own needs.

  Jennie and Nye shared the same social background which gave them automatically a comfortable, easy feeling about each other when they met at Westminster in an atmosphere and surroundings alien to both of them. They had so little explaining to do about where they came from, how they had grown up and how their political beliefs had been forged. It is a great binding force in a marriage, this shared inheritance, and I felt it myself. To some people, it would be dull – what about the excitement of discovering each other’s roots? – but such effortless knowledge of each other’s formative influences is a huge advantage. It may even make it easier to be a good wife. But I was misled at first. Carlisle is a compact city, and in the 1950s, so far as social class was concerned its demarcation lines were strictly drawn. The posh area was on the north bank of the River Eden, called Stanwix, sometimes Stanwix Bank; the most deprived was west of the castle, a council estate called Raffles. The name of your primary school gave everything away, without any need to know an exact address, even if you were at the girls’ High School or the boys’ Grammar School. I’d gone to Ashley Street where the catchment area was mainly Raffles, and he told me he’d gone to Stanwix School. He never actually said he lived in Stanwix, but I assumed he did. Then there were definite signs of social as well as cultural superiority in casual talk of his violin lessons and his sister’s piano-playing of an evening. In my Raffles experience, no council house had room to accommodate a piano, so his house must be a private one, probably one of those detached jobs I envied so much, situated on the Bank itself above the river. The name of the sister who played the piano was significant too: Annabel. It was a name entirely unknown to me, belonging, I thought, to models in glossy magazines like Vogue. His father, though now an invalid, had been a civil servant, whereas mine was a fitter in a factory. His mother, I was told, read all the time, mostly Dickens novels. She apparently never had a book out of her hand. Immediately, I conjured up the image of an elegant woman lying, book on her lap, on a chaise-longue while in the background her daughter Annabel tinkled delightfully on the pianoforte …