In retrospect all that was missing from our female sociability in the Lane was a book group, now ubiquitous among middle-class women and increasingly men too, but in the 1960s rare, I think, except at seminars in university English departments. Most of us read eagerly. A favourite writer was Margaret Drabble, who seemed to have complete empathy with our situation. Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept was a teary pleaser, and Mary McCarthy’s The Group was popular. Less publicly, we read Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex, eager to glean information in those days of meagre sexual knowledge. In my case, I read while listening to Elvis Presley, Tommy Steele and the Beatles, or to Kathleen Ferrier’s ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’, or haunting melodies from Jacqueline du Pré on the cello.
I realise writing this, that when I say ‘we’, I really mean the women. Most husbands were out at work all day – though mine, by this time a lobby correspondent in the House of Commons, was around during the day but out in the evening (not ideal as far as I was concerned since it made reciprocal babysitting difficult) unless the House was in recess. Trying hard to do the right thing as I was bringing in no money to the family budget, other than the hugely welcome Family Allowance, I found myself at ten o’clock at night when George got home from work cooking recipes from Marguerite Patten’s Cookery in Colour or later Len Deighton’s sparky cartoon Action Cook Book which was intended for bachelors. By the early 1970s, I was using Jocasta Innes’s invaluable Pauper’s Cookbook, which was big on sprats, offal, foraged foods and using leftovers ‘creatively’. When we gave dinner parties George would make a dish from Arabella Boxer’s First Slice Your Cookbook, a fish pie with a splendid pastry seahorse on top, served with petits pois. Or I wrestled with Elizabeth David’s inspiring, evocative but suggestive rather than instructional books of continental cookery. At Christmas my bible was Josceline Dimbleby’s cookbook and the Cradocks’ recipe for Charlotte Russe, snipped out of someone’s Daily Telegraph, which used sponge fingers secured with red ribbon like a stockade.
After the cleaning, the cooking and the caring, some Span women become very adept at needlework – I was not one of them. The only things I ever sewed were a voluminous maternity dress and a pinafore. In those days, maternity clothes were designed to disguise the bump, whereas today most women don’t wear maternity clothes at all, but continue in the stretch-fabric, close-fitting dresses they wore before the pregnancy. They caress their bumps with pride: the very pregnant Demi Moore was photographed by Annie Leibovitz for the cover of Vanity Fair with no clothes at all. Maybe we have come to terms with the fecundity of women, rather than trying to hide our bodily achievements, as was the case in the 1950s.
Most of us also went to the cinema as frequently as we could: down the hill to the Lewisham Odeon to see such entertaining films as Billy Liar, Ben-Hur, Some Like It Hot, North by Northwest, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Room at the Top, Psycho, The Sound of Music, Dr Strangelove, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, Far From the Madding Crowd and Dr Zhivago. Those who enjoyed more complex ‘art house’ films took advantage of the fact that these years saw continental films such as François Truffaut’s The Red Balloon, Jules and Jim, and The 400 Blows; Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year in Marienbad; Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless; Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and so many other riches.
The men of the Lane did have their communality, but it was less than that of the women. A couple of husbands shared an allotment, one played with a local chamber orchestra, others sang with local choirs, or played tennis on nearby courts, and several gathered together in the evenings to play the board game Diplomacy with concentration and thinly veiled competitiveness. There was not, as far as I recall, much in the way of tinkering with, or cleaning, bikes or cars.
Soon after the birth of my first child, I returned to the Marie Stopes clinic. After a not very happy time on the pill, a ‘Copper 7’ – or coil – was inserted into my uterus by my physician, Dr Samuel Hutt (son of the communist typographer and journalist, Allen).
The mid-1960s were the beginning of the much-needed de-medicalisation of gynaecology and obstetrics – the influential text Our Bodies, Ourselves would be published by the Boston Women’s Collective in 1971, and went on to sell over four million copies worldwide. Women were clamouring to be seen by the medical profession not as passive recipients of its expertise (though that attitude still persists sometimes, I fear, in various crevices of the profession), but as beings who have agency and intelligence and instincts worth paying attention to. The most publicised example of this often hostile debate would culminate in 1985 with the Wendy Savage Inquiry into women’s right to choose their method of giving birth and to have their wish to demand vaginal births over a C-section respected, whenever safe to do so.
At the Marie Stopes clinic, Dr Hutt (who no doubt said ‘Call me Sam’) was right in there. His alter ego was the ironic country and western singer-songwriter ‘Hank Wangford’, and he even wore cowboy boots and a bootlace tie as he worked in clinic. I liked and admired Hutt/Wangford, and years later, when I worked in publishing, I commissioned his memoirs at a time when he was the on-off partner of Dillie Keane (of Fascinating Aïda fame). Wangford later came to musical prominence touring with Billy Bragg and others in support of the miners’ strike in 1984. When asked for a medical opinion he was prone to say to me, ‘It’s your body.’ Although I didn’t find this immensely helpful, I hope I recognised the democratic, empowering – indeed feminist – sentiment behind this statement of the obvious.
I did not, however, make much use of contraception in these years. By 1969 I had three children: two sons, Alexander and Sebastian, and a sandwich daughter, Sophie, in the middle. I was then twenty-six years old. What on earth next?
Chapter Seven
Making a Historian
On 14 December 1965, the talented twenty-nine-year-old Hannah Gavron, an actor turned sociologist and a wife and mother of three young children, killed herself in a flat in Primrose Hill, north London, just a few hundred yards from where the poet Sylvia Plath, also a mother of young children, had gassed herself almost three years earlier.
Hannah Gavron’s proposed doctoral thesis was on ‘sad and lonely mothers of the working and middle classes’ – a subject resisted by her department at Bedford College (part of the University of London) on the grounds that it was academically unsuitable and that her methodology was unforgivably qualitative. Yet, a few months after her death, Gavron’s work was published as The Captive Wife, a book that received laudatory reviews.
To a generation of young women who had been brought up to believe that marriage and motherhood were their destiny and the route to lifelong fulfilment and happiness, Gavron’s conclusions were a salutary shock. This was a jolt and a reappraisal accompanied by others, in more wide-ranging works, that questioned what being a woman meant. What was the connection between the biological determination and the social construction of gender? Which characteristics were innate and which were imposed by society’s conventions and expectations? These questions were raised in books, including Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) and Juliet Mitchell’s Women: The Longest Revolution (1984), game-changing books for many women and a wake-up call to action. Such books of course had been preceded by Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958) – works which are now regarded as heralding the second wave of feminism, the first having been the suffragettes’ demands for votes for women.
The concern that marriage and a home might not fulfil every woman’s every need was not entirely new. It had been discussed, for instance, before the Second World War in the medical journal The Lancet in connection with the suburban housewife who, removed from her previous close network of family and friends to a spanking new, easy-to-run house, was described as constituting a new phenomenon, the ‘neurotic housewife’ who, with little to do, sinks into listlessness and depression. The key anal
ysis came in March 1938 from Dr Stephen Taylor of the Royal Free Hospital. ‘Mrs Everywoman’ (Taylor’s composite personification of the problem in an article on ‘The Suburban Neurosis’) was lonely, with not enough to do once her husband had left after an early breakfast for the commuter train – significantly, taking that day’s newspaper in his briefcase – and not returning until early evening. The children were at school until mid-afternoon, so for long hours, the housework finished, such women were in effect ‘married’ to their houses since that is where they spent most of their day, hours of labour and focus.
The very names of most women’s magazines reinforced this symbiosis: Housewife, Good Housekeeping, Woman and Home, Ideal Home, Woman’s Realm. And the articles and problem pages in other magazines – Woman, Woman’s Own – reiterated the message. The home was a woman’s domain; her vocation and avocation; the site of her pride, security and happiness, and that of her family.
Many, my mother included, followed a rigid routine of housework (as recommended by magazines such as Housewife) that involved wash days on Mondays, ironing on Tuesdays, cleaning and polishing the living room (‘lounge’) and making the kitchen gleam on Wednesdays, while Thursdays were devoted to ‘turning out’ the bedrooms and tackling the bathroom. On Fridays there was the shopping to do – though most groceries would have been delivered – and maybe a little light gardening or sewing.
I recall a letter to Peggy Makins, the ‘agony aunt’ of the weekly magazine Woman writing under the eponymous name of Evelyn Home, from a vicar’s wife. Her concern was that Mondays were her husband’s day off and he wanted to make love to her on Monday evenings. Whereas she, worn out by the physical hard labour of Monday wash day, scrubbing, pounding, rinsing, starching, pushing sheets and clothes through the mangle before hanging them out on the washing line in the garden to dry, just wanted to go to sleep. The obvious answer, suggested by Evelyn Home, to change wash day to another day of the week, seemed not to have occurred to her.
‘Mrs Everywoman’ of ‘Everysuburb Estate’ was ‘nervy’, racked with vague aches and pains, and even having another baby only occupied her time for a few years. She could hardly go on having babies to fill all her lonely hours, and it would not be seemly for her to seek company by going to the local pub, as her husband might have done. All Dr Taylor could suggest was that she should listen to the wireless and maybe compile a list of books to read in order to while away the hours until ‘hubby’ returned. However, Dr Taylor was not optimistic about a cure for the ‘neurotic housewife’, and foresaw years of such women haunting doctors’ surgeries.
By the 1960s this problem had not evaporated – though at least the horizon of women’s magazines (among them She and Nova) had widened, in recognition that ‘woman’ and ‘home’ were not necessarily conjoined. I recall that when my three children were very small, I used to look forward to the weekly visits of my cleaning lady to break up the long housebound day. I would make coffee and bring out biscuits and we would sit down to talk, which jollied me up – even though I lived on a Span estate, that paradigm of communality and conviviality.
This is a reminder that one must be wary of idealising such communities. We all know how excluding villages can be to incomers. When we lived in Corner Green, that most Arcadian niche of Spanland, a neighbour who had four children – the youngest profoundly deaf as a result of her mother contracting German measles whilst pregnant – killed herself one sunny afternoon a few weeks after her husband had left her to set up home with another woman a few doors away. None of us suspected her intention, none had even begun to plumb the profound depth of her misery. All we could do was retrospective: invite her bereaved children into our houses for tea and extend a hand of unjudgemental friendship to the ‘other woman’ who could not have envisaged how her connivance in an adulterous liaison would end in tragedy that would blight so many lives – including hers.
On 19 February 1960, the journalist Betty Jerman wrote a piece for the Guardian, which had a women’s page, and was the first national newspaper to do so. The page had been started in 1922, but its most influential period was under the editorship of Mary Stott between 1957 and 1972, giving space to many talented writers such as Polly Toynbee, Fiona MacCarthy, Alison Adburgham (whose daughter Jocelyn was a classmate of mine at Berkhamsted), Suzanne Lowry and, most notably perhaps, Jill Tweedie. The headline to Jerman’s article was ‘Squeezed in Like Sardines in Suburbia’. Based on personal testimony, she described suburbia as ‘an incredibly dull place to live’, and blamed women who ‘stay here all day looking back with regret to the days when they worked in an office’.
This appears a rather unsympathetic judgement, particularly from one who could afford a daily nurse at a rate of twenty-five shillings a day, though this seemed ‘a small payment’ since the nurse (in Jerman’s words) ‘bathed and gave breakfast to my son, bathed the baby, changed the baby throughout the day, washed and ironed all the children’s clothes, shopped and cooked lunch, got my son to rest and took him for a walk while I slept, and returned to make me a cup of tea, prepare tea for the boy, get him to bed and prepare dinner for self and husband’. Jerman also employed a cleaner, and made use of a nappy service.
Nevertheless, her 1960 comments touched a chord with many readers including a Wirral housewife, Maureen Nichol, who wrote to the paper suggesting ‘that perhaps housebound wives with liberal interests and a desire to remain individuals could form a national register so that whenever one moves one can contact like-minded friends’. The result was the National Housewives’ Register, which a decade later would have over 25,000 members.
While working at the TV Times in the 1960s, I had a colleague whose wife displayed the same symptoms as the unfortunate ‘Mrs Everywoman’ of the 1930s. Her GP’s advice was similar: have another baby, he told her. But for me, there was another possibility. Get a job.
I Educating Juliet
This was a period featuring what might be called the ‘graduate wife syndrome’. Educated women – loving and conscientious mothers guided by the liberal but practical ideas of baby and childcare advocated by the American guru Dr Benjamin Spock – were desperate to get back to work for social, intellectual, moral and financial reasons, while not jeopardising their small children’s security and happiness. Some already had had careers that they were able to pick up again, albeit in a somewhat attenuated form. A few had only taken the statutory maternity leave and returned to work as accountants, architects or teachers, hardly missing a beat. They would employ older local women to look after their children, or would share a live-out nanny (no room for live-in); or rely on au pairs who were in the country to learn English and achieve the Cambridge Proficiency qualification, and who, in exchange for living as family and modest pocket money, would help with the children and babysit (and unfortunately sometimes be expected to do a great deal more).
Apart from often having an acute case of cabin fever, I had little in common with the educated women in Spanland, most of whom I liked very much. Conscious that I was profoundly undereducated, I would often go to the Blackheath village bookshop, pushing my older children in their double pushchair, while our current au pair (Monika from Austria, Michèle from Belgium, Daria from France, Liselotte from Norway, Britt from Sweden or Ornella from Italy) followed with the littlest one in that liberating 1960s invention, the Maclaren buggy: lightweight and foldable like a golf caddy that hooked over one’s arm when getting on and off public transport. In the bookshop I would stare at the small selection of classics, poetry, sociology, history, politics and philosophy books, knowing that I needed to unlock at least some of the truths contained within, but not having a clue where to start.
I decided that, having left school with just seven O levels, the first step on my belated path to education had better be to get some A levels, and so enrolled at Walbrook College near Waterloo to study A-level history, English and Latin. My fellow students were a varied bunch. They were mainly women, though there were a few men whose careers in the m
ilitary or civil service allowed them to leave in their fifties with a reasonable pension, among them several colonial servants – most, I recall, were East African policemen. Other students had for some reason missed out on completing their education. There were a number of young women, ‘mature students’ like me, who had finished schooling prematurely and had come to realise how restricting that was: several pupils had been at secondary moderns or other schools with limited ambitions. There were girls who had been expelled, or had dropped out from fee-paying schools, a disproportionate number from convents. This cohort also numbered the eloquent and inky-fingered Judith Williamson, who had fallen out with St Paul’s Girls’ School and would in 1978 write one of the founding texts of cultural studies, Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising.
On the whole, I found further education an exhilarating experience. The teaching was mostly good, sometimes very good, in all three subjects I studied – and above all it was encouraging. I regained my academic confidence, only quickly almost to lose it again when I applied to university. Given my family situation with three small children and a husband by now pursuing unexpected (to me) political ambitions, I had to find a university in London, so I applied to four London colleges. My first interview was at Queen Mary College, QMC, in Mile End, part of the University of London.
I travelled to the East End wearing a plum-coloured Biba maxi-coat, which I hoped could be read as the apparel of an eager, youthful, open-minded, yet committed and hardworking potential student. There I was called into the study of R. F. Leslie, Professor of International Relations. After I had managed to translate a French text (which had thrown me until I realised words like ‘aggrandisement’ and ‘conference’ were the same in English and French) my interview began. Professor Leslie’s opening question was: ‘Have you had a hysterectomy?’ (Trying to hide my shock, I told him I hadn’t.) ‘Have you got a deep freezer?’ he asked next. ‘Yes,’ I was able to say. He nodded and continued, adding presumably by way of explanation: ‘We had a married woman student here last year and it didn’t work out.’
Joining the Dots Page 11
