My mother had the Townswomen’s Guild, the Mothers’ Union and the church choir every Sunday and the town choir alternate Mondays, but no circle of friends to come to tea, and there was no popping next door or down the street for a gossip. There were no coffee bars to meet in when I was a child, and tea rooms were for holidays or excursions, not to meet your friends or neighbours for a chat. My generation has made more opportunities to gather with other women in book clubs or to meet a few ‘girl friends’ in wine bars. My daughter’s generation is even more convivial, with the dinner parties we used to have perhaps once a month giving way to more frequent informal suppers or family lunches, or coming back with friends after an evening out to play music and drink more wine, once the children are asleep. I suppose my mother could have joined a bridge club – though I doubt if she was ever invited to: so apart from beetle drives in aid of the church roof, her sorority was sadly limited.
‘You don’t have children in order to leave them,’ she would sniff when a neighbour arranged for a local teenager to babysit her children while she accompanied her husband to a Rotary or Masonic dinner. A cinema matinee or the local am-dram society’s annual production of Brigadoon, or Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables were my mother’s only occasional outings away from me. And family holidays were precisely that, no matter that our family was so small.
Above all else and for years, my mother had wanted a fur coat. Finally, some of her shares in the Inveresk Paper Company came good and she bought a second-hand musquash fur coat from Swears & Wells at auction. I still have it. Every spring and autumn as I sort out my winter or summer clothes, I resolve to get rid of it. But I never can. It is a symbol to me of a sad mixture of the aspiration and loneliness that I suspect were the handmaidens of so many women in the 1950s. My mother did not live a fur-coat life. The only time she wore the coat to my knowledge was to a dinner we gave at Stone’s Chop House in Panton Street for my twenty-first birthday in 1964. I wish so much she had not had to buy it for herself, and that my father (who would faithfully give her a bottle of 4711 cologne for every single birthday and Christmas) had had the money or the imagination to buy it for her.
* Women were probably the greatest beneficiaries of the NHS since, not covered by their husbands’ national insurance contributions, many lived for years with chronic conditions such as prolapse of the womb, varicose veins and fibroids, sometimes with inadequate pre- and post-natal care.
Chapter Five
Expectations
In February 1961, aged seventeen, I got married in a bombed-out church in Clifton, Bristol. The city had suffered extensive damage during the Blitz in January 1941, when the weather was so bitterly cold that icicles formed by water from the firemen’s hoses hung several feet long like glistening, needle-sharp stalactites. The church had lost many of its roof tiles, and tarpaulins were still tied firmly round the most solid-looking remnants of the remaining stone structure, to keep it partially dry; it was very cold and not at all windproof, and what stained glass was left in the windows was cracked. My future husband, George, and I (we had bypassed the usual rite of an engagement) had chosen this somewhat unlikely venue since it had a reputation for the quality of its music (the organ miraculously had only suffered a couple of broken and easily repairable pipes) and it was ‘high’ – an Anglo-Catholic house of God where the pungent smell of incense was wafted around as often as possible during services. Even today, I imagine, no one at its services is expected to evangelise, grasping their fellow pew-sharers warmly by the hand and murmuring ‘Jesus be with you’.
I wore a white damask wedding dress hired from Moss Bros in Covent Garden, with a veil inexpertly anchored (by me) with very visible kirby grips, keeping on a wax-flower tiara. Wedding photographs, taken at cut-price rate by the photographer from one of the newspapers in the group whose graduate training scheme the man I was marrying had joined, show me waving (at whom, I wonder?) a trailing bouquet of yellow roses and white freesias as we, the newly-weds, came out of the church. I had promised to love, honour, cherish and obey, for better, for worse, in sickness and in health … forsaking all others until death us do part. Within two decades, I am ashamed to say, I had broken more than one of those solemn vows and my husband had almost certainly reneged on at least a couple too.
We were followed by Janet, my best friend from school, who was rather glumly (or so it looks in the photographs later stuck in a white ‘Wedding Album’ embossed with horseshoe and silver bells) taking the role of adult bridesmaid – hardly a matron of honour since she was also seventeen at the time. Our best man had been a friend of my husband’s at Oxford University. In fact, his first choice had been another close friend, a mature fellow student at Balliol who had been a market gardener before plunging into academic study; but he had declined, saying he abhorred weddings (though he was at the time married to someone who was reputed to look like Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes) since he maintained that he had no idea what ‘I love you’ actually meant. This seemed a respectable position for someone studying PPE – philosophy, politics and economics – where the dominant turn was expounded by Freddie (A. J.) Ayer’s writings on the philosophical formulation of logical positivism, though I suspect that such literalist integrity may have contributed something to the breakdown of his marriage later on.
We were married by Canon Plummer, the new vicar of my mother’s parish church, St Mary’s. Several of my somewhat bemused school friends attended. The reception was held at a hotel perched on the edge of Avon Gorge, in the shadow of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s magnificent suspension bridge spanning the vertiginously steep ravine. My father made a speech saying that at my christening I had looked around in bewilderment, wondering what on earth was happening; he wondered if it was the same on my wedding day. This was a somewhat loaded but in fact insightful remark. As we drove away in my new husband’s red Triumph Spitfire sports car, the obligatory empty paint cans and a kettle clanking from the bumper, the assembled guests (including a number of my husband’s journalist colleagues, invited by him to drop in when they had finished their shift, somewhat to the alarm of my father, who was footing the bill for the reception) waved us off, and one called, ‘Goodbye Mr Gardiner, goodbye Mrs Gardiner.’ I was dumbstruck. It sounded like an entirely different identity, one I was wary of assuming, an adulthood I was not sure that I wanted to embrace despite the fact that I had been desperate to leave childhood. At that moment it felt there had been no transition, no plateau on which to reflect and draw breath.
Since we had failed to raise the wherewithal to go to Paris, we honeymooned in Lyme Regis, walking along the Cobb by the side of the toffee-coloured, troubled-looking sea, scrambling up cliff paths in the sleeting February rain until we were driven by the cold and wet into cafés for tea or to idle away a couple of hours in the local museum of Mary Anning’s fossils. Changing for dinner in the hotel we couldn’t really afford, after a glass of fino sherry, I remember we chose veau marengo and boeuf stroganoff followed by crème caramel, from a leather-covered menu that made no concessions to seasonality.
I An Impasse Resolved
Seventeen was an inauspiciously young age at which to marry – the average age for women marrying in the early 1960s was around twenty-two or twenty-three. Why was there this rush to the altar? I was not about to become that figure of moral panic, ‘a gymslip mother’. Was it a long carry-over from the war, when there were both emotional and pragmatic reasons for haste? Your fiancé or boyfriend might be killed and you wanted your future sorted, your status acknowledged, a clarity of vision when peace came. In addition, a married allowance would be paid to the wives of those serving in the forces, a wife would be eligible for a widow’s pension and a married woman could join the queue for local authority housing for her family. This wartime perception was carried throughout the Fifties by the retention of National Service until 1960, with young men deployed to fight in the Korean War from 1950.
Perhaps it was a continuation of the early-century fear of surplu
s women (though by 1945 that was no longer the case and indeed a shortfall of women was predicted – ‘Girls are getting scarce and the outlook for men is alarming,’ warned the men’s magazine Parade in 1962), a lack of value placed on the prospect of a satisfying career and a financially secure, independent, singlehood? Maybe it was a reflection of low self-esteem? Pessimism that if I didn’t marry young, all the eligible men would be snapped up? ‘Girls believe that if they are not married by the time they are nineteen, they are on the shelf,’ ventured a marriage guidance counsellor in 1960, using a metaphor suggesting a permanent state of spinsterhood: ignored and gathering dust. Or was it a simple case of being in love, the desire for emotional security, the feeling that I had met a soulmate, a partner with whom I wished to form a lifelong bond, and I might as well get on with it? In many ways, it was simply the expected progression – school, college or more likely, work, marriage, children, maybe work again, grandchildren, old age: a woman’s life.
The route had in fact been rather more circuitous: the motive, if not admirable, then at least clear and suffused with a certain logic. I had met my husband-to-be in the summer of 1959 while I was staying with an aunt and uncle in a small village near Stroud in the Cotswolds, where my uncle was the headmaster of a boys’ prep school. I was there as a punishment, excluded from the parental holiday in a boarding house in Minehead. The previous year I had been to France on an exchange with a penfriend, organised by the school. In being allocated a penfriend we’d had to note our fathers’ occupations on a form to ensure there was not too much disparity between the circumstances of schoolgirl visitor and French host. My mother had insisted that I should put ‘local authority worker’ on my form, which landed me with a very nice family and penfriend, the father of whom worked as a baggage handler at Le Bourget airport.
While there I met Nicole’s cousin, Claude, a student at l’École de Droit at the Sorbonne. He was amazingly good-looking in a Jean-Paul Belmondo way, with dark, smudged eyes, ‘bluejeans’ (as they were then called, as one word), and chain-smoked Gitanes. Unsurprisingly I was totally smitten. Infinitely more surprisingly, he was taken with the tartan trews-wearing me, probably because he wanted to improve his English; but whatever the reason, he took me to hear jazz and crooners in Paris cellars, introduced me to Pernod and smoking cigarettes, talked about existentialism – indeed, behaved exactly like everyone’s dream of how a young French intellectual should behave, a real-life nouvelle vague cool, representative of the Juliette Gréco set whose style I fervently aspired to. Moreover, he had the nicest possible parents; his father was a gynaecologist with a passion for freshwater fishing, his mother the kindest of women, who would sit hour after hour on riverbanks, knitting and not talking while her husband cast his line and occasionally pulled in a wriggling fish, most of which she insisted he throw back into the river. When I left to go back to England his mother gave me a headscarf with Paris landmarks printed on it (to be worn, unflatteringly, over the hair and tied tightly under the chin in those days) and invited me to return the following summer. Claude and I parted, promising to write weekly to each other, with me secretly pocketing a discarded empty packet of his Gitanes, which I hid down my knickers next to my skin.
All went well until Claude sent me a copy of a translation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée. I was at school when it arrived, and my mother, suspicious of what passed between this ‘foreign man’ and her daughter, opened the parcel and, as luck would have it, the book fell open at a page which read ‘as I entered the café, I had a feeling of disappointment in my sex organs’. The ‘dirty book’ was sent back by the next post and I was told the correspondence must cease forthwith. It didn’t, of course. I made up some elaborate story to explain to Claude that in future he should address his letters to the home of a school friend of mine, Bronwen, whose mother thought my mother was ‘petit bourgeois’ beyond belief, and turned a blind eye to the arriving letters.
The following summer I returned to France, having convinced my parents that it was a school rule and I would not be allowed to take French GCE unless I had spent two more weeks with my penfriend speaking no English. However, rather than staying with Nicole and her parents and sister, I stayed with Claude’s family and had another exhilarating though entirely chaste two weeks travelling to riverbanks and visiting his family in the south, since in September he was off to Algeria, where the war was still raging, to do his national service. I felt I was living a carefree, sophisticated Bonjour Tristesse life.
My deceit was of course discovered, and after much shouting, hand-wringing and justified anger, a punishment was decided: I must forgo the annual family holiday by the sea and instead spend the fortnight helping at Uncle Sidney’s school, taking the boys blackberrying, keeping guard over them as they swam in the local lake, taking them to see the large trout farm in Nailsworth, and other such diversions.
It was there that I met my future husband. My aunt had been a civil servant prior to her marriage, and, competent in shorthand, she taught a stream of journalist trainees Pitman’s – or tried to. George was the latest of that long and disappointing line, and he came to the house every Wednesday evening with biro and spiral-bound pad. One Wednesday, we talked and he invited me out to dinner. He was eight years older than me, so I was delighted – my aunt and uncle less so. Indeed, my uncle chased him down the garden path with a poker when he brought me back half an hour later than had been agreed.
In early September, I went home and back to school. George wrote and drove to visit me at half-term, earning me the interest and respect of the class sophisticates as he turned up outside the school gates in his sports car, but the opprobrium of my parents, who refused to meet him and forbade me to either.
His appeal was his difference: older – a man, not a boy – and better educated, with an interest in film and books. After completing his finals at Oxford he had dashed to Blackwell’s bookshop where he sold all his books and then used the money to go to Rome for a week. It was there, lying on a hotel bed having a siesta, that he read in the Daily Telegraph that he had been awarded a first, and then two days later that his father Stanley, a regional Gas Board manager from whom he had been largely estranged since his parents’ bitter divorce, had died.
When George paid me that illicit half-term visit, we went to the Academy cinema in Oxford Street to see Ingmar Bergman’s fashionably gloomy The Seventh Seal. He was also actively interested in politics, though I did not realise the full implication of that until later. In retrospect I should have divined a discrepancy in our political outlooks when he showed me a green-covered publication containing horrific photographs intended to show that the rebels in the Algerian War were perpetuating as many (if not more) barbarous attacks on the pieds-noirs as were being inflicted by the ancestral French settlers on them. This was not the narrative, or rather the emphasis, that I had learned from Claude, who had been to the North African colony during his national service.
It was obvious to me that I had reached an impasse in my life: I was desperate to leave home but there was no clear pathway to independence as far as I could see. I wanted to be grown up. On a school trip to the Old Vic to see John Neville and Judi Dench in Hamlet, we had walked back to the coach through Soho, passing couples in cafés drinking and smoking. I ached to be among them, wearing suede moccasins and a duffel coat. I should have reformed, worked harder, persuaded my parents and the school that I could try for university. But that seemed a very long-term strategy and one that hardly beckoned beguilingly, and had no guarantee of success.
My relationship with George was impossible: my parents refused to speak of him, and when he sent me a present of a skirt, my mother told me that men only bought women clothes if they intended to undress them subsequently, and sent it back. So George and I decided that I should leave home, not to live with him but to go to a bedsit in Bristol, where my school friend Sandra (now calling herself Alexandra) was studying at theatre school (she later became a model for Dior and married a man from th
e cadet branch of the Duke of Primo de Rivera’s family). I intended to find a job to pay the rent – and to go to stay with George at weekends in the small flat above the branch office in Stroud where he was living.
Armed with the key to a bedsit, which George had sent me care of Bronwen’s address, and my meagre handful of money, I boarded a train at Paddington station on 1 January 1960. I was sixteen, had never cooked anything, nor shopped for food, washed my own clothes or paid a bill. I was quaking with nervous anticipation when, as directed by George, I caught a bus from Temple Meads station to Beaufort Road in Clifton where the Yale key let me into the hallway of an imposing Georgian house and, after I had climbed an elegant staircase, another key unlocked a spacious first-floor bedsit with floor-to-ceiling windows, a single bed, a Parker Knoll armchair, a large mirror over the fireplace with an unpromisingly small gas fire, a meter which took shillings, a table, and two upright wooden chairs.
II Of Slender Means in Bristol
I expect there was a kettle and maybe a Baby Belling on the landing, but I lived in so many bedsits in Clifton over the next year that I can no longer recall the precise arrangements of each one. Indeed, the Beaufort Road flat did not shelter me for long. On the Monday after a brief interview I had managed to get a job in the kitchen utensils department of Jones’s department store in Broadmead, a singularly ugly and unimaginative reconstruction of the bomb-razed city. Two days later, having bought the required black dress for work, and busy folding tea towels for display, I was summoned to the personnel manager’s office. There, stony-faced, sat my mother, who had come to fetch me home. I refused to go, and a quick phone consultation with George assured me that I could not be compelled to do so.
Joining the Dots Page 8
