I cannot now imagine why I was prepared to play this frankly deeply dishonest supplementary role, although it should not have come as any surprise to me that I was required to play it. When I had married George in 1961, I had known that he was a Conservative: he had read PPE at Balliol College, Oxford, but was only ever really interested in the second P – politics. Moreover, he had been involved in a conspiracy to secure the presidency of the Oxford University Conservative Association, which involved driving to Aylesbury to secure a printing press on which hundreds of counterfeit ballot papers could be forged. The deception was discovered, and it was only the generous offices of the historian Robert Blake, the don responsible for enquiring into electoral malpractices at the university, that prevented George from being sent down. However, as a mark of disapproval his vacation grant was withdrawn and he had to wait on tables at a hotel in Folkestone to earn enough money for his final year.
My husband was under no illusion that I was of similar political persuasion to him. He knew I was a founder member of the Labour Club at school, and later, as a postgraduate student, that I joined a Das Kapital reading group. I can only imagine that he thought that my socialist leanings constituted a youthful rebellion and I would sooner or later move to the right like most ‘sensible-minded’ people. But I didn’t. As soon as I could vote, from the age of twenty-one, I put a cross on the ballot paper for the Labour candidate at each local and general election, though I never had to vote in a constituency where my husband was standing. In that situation I would have abstained.
I did try to fall into line: I reckoned it came with the territory, though not all the MPs’ wives that I knew did so. A Blackheath neighbour, the admirable Rosalyn Higgins, who was later appointed as the first female judge at the International Court of Justice at The Hague and eventually its president, did not thus get enmeshed and kept her career separate from that of her husband, the Conservative MP for Worthing. But somehow being a homemaker and later a student did not seem to offer the same dignified opt-out possibilities.
All this was distressing and diminishing since I knew – and others suspected – that I was living a lie: a divided soul adrift among groups of people who didn’t really trust me; a constituency who doubted my commitment to their causes or their values. Friends and neighbours wondered what I really thought and considered me to be practising a moral deceit and could hardly be expected to take my political views seriously. This role-play was uncomfortable and queasy-making, yes, but sometimes it was more serious than that. When I was out canvassing one day, a man on the doorstep talked to me about ‘coons’ and ‘coolies’, and when I took exception I found myself being hushed by a fellow canvasser who told me I was ‘overwrought’. I was also present in the audience at the Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham in April 1968 when Enoch Powell made his lurid and infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech, a few days before the Labour government’s Race Relations Bill was to have its second reading in the Commons. George repudiated the speech at once, and was very concerned that Powell’s words might have a seriously adverse effect on the good relations he had established with the Indian and Pakistani communities in Coventry. The Conservative leader, Edward Heath, sacked Powell from the Shadow Cabinet, saying that such sentiments had no place in a modern Conservative Party; yet I knew that a personal Rubicon had at last been definitively crossed and that, on the other side, the terrain would prove difficult.
George – who narrowly failed to win Coventry South in 1970 but became MP for Reigate four years later – acknowledged that my politics were the polar opposite to his but nevertheless could not seem to understand how it was that I wasn’t able to live my life as I wished while accepting the imperatives and pragmatics of his. He supported me both financially and practically through my years as a student, both undergraduate and postgraduate. In 1973, after he had been life-threateningly ill with bacterial endocarditis, he and I took ourselves off for a long weekend to Selborne in Hampshire, where in the early autumn sunshine, sitting in the lee of the hill made famous by the naturalist Gilbert White, we endlessly discussed this intractable problem and concluded that we were inextricably drifting towards divorce, which, with three young children, neither of us particularly wanted.
We sought help from a marriage counsellor who suggested that George had fallen in love with me because I had a rebellious streak which he found stimulating and believed was deficient in his own make-up. But by this time I was in my early thirties, and while a rebellious teenager might be enticing, I felt that he needed to acknowledge the seriousness of my views as I edged towards middle age. Predictably I had been attracted to him as an older man with a wider view of the world and its mores, a stable rock on which to clamber in order to change my life as I had been desperate to do. This was all probably true, but did not address the issue of irresolvable political differences – nor the outlook and values that were endemic in these discrepancies and which would become more pronounced and problematic as the children grew older. (Indeed, after we eventually separated George still insisted that I should take the Daily Mail, which he hoped would counteract my daily reading of the Guardian.)
Moreover, George was moving further to the right as time went on. He called for the death penalty for acts of Irish terrorism, campaigned for the reintroduction of capital punishment and agreed with stringent curbs on immigration to the UK. Though he was critical of the policy of apartheid in South Africa, he did not support Mandela and the ANC, favouring a more transitional move away from apartheid, as advocated by Mangosuthu Buthelezi; he also did not support sanctions because he thought they would be ‘counterproductive’. In 1975 he was proud to be one of the so-called ‘Gang of Four’ who successfully connived to replace Edward Heath with Margaret Thatcher as Conservative leader, the other conspirators being Airey Neave, Norman Tebbit and Thatcher herself. Despite his intense loyalty to Thatcher, she never rewarded George with even minor office, though he was knighted in her resignation honours list in 1990. It is claimed in George’s obituary that he wept himself to sleep when Thatcher lost the leadership to John Major, against whom George would soon lead a virulent Eurosceptic campaign, though two decades earlier he had been an enthusiastic supporter of Britain’s entry under Heath to the European Economic Community. He became the best known of Major’s disloyal ‘bastards’, undermining his prime-ministership and charging him with being a ‘ventriloquist’s dummy’ operated by his pro-European Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke. For his part, Major described George as ‘so convoluted, he could appear in a book of knots’.
George ended his political career ignominiously by resigning from the Conservative Party after being deselected by his constituency party for his vicious attacks on Major in the press. He then joined the tycoon Sir James Goldsmith’s (‘Goldenballs’ to Private Eye) ill-fated Referendum Party, despite the wise advice and heartfelt pleading of his older son, Alexander, a political realist. In the 1997 general election George Gardiner stood in that party’s interest in the same seat, Reigate, where he had served as MP for twenty-three years. After running a ridiculous, populist campaign (including hiring a donkey that paraded round the local shopping centres with a placard bearing the name of the Conservative candidate, Crispin Blunt), he came sixth, polling only seven per cent of the vote.
Chapter Nine
Putting Asunder
A shucked oyster is a mournful sight, its rocky shell forced open to reveal a pale gelatinous puddle, the Dolorosa of the marine world, whether found in Brittany, Orford, Galway Bay or Whitstable. In September 1980, I sat in a restaurant in Chancery Lane, London, having lunch with a former lover, by then a good and supportive friend, picking at a ceramic seaweed-festooned plate of oysters, matching the lachrymose appearance of the salty crustacean with my own dripping tears. I was inconsolable.
An hour or so earlier I had left the Family Division of the Royal Courts of Justice, where my divorce had been granted by a rather bored-looking judge who had leafed through a file of papers, including ‘
the arrangements for the children’, peered over his spectacles and approved the decree absolute. I was smitten with a profound sadness, guilt and regret. Yet it was I who had initiated proceedings to end the marriage. How much more devastating would such an occasion have been had I not wanted a divorce; had I been a deserted wife, the partner of an adulterous husband with whom I was still in love despite the fact that he had come to prefer another, deciding to discard one family in order to have a go at fashioning another?
I D-I-V-O-R-C-E: The History
My experience came eleven years after the passing in 1969 of what came to be known as the ‘no-fault’ Divorce Reform Act, long after the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce had reported in 1956 its survey of changes in divorce in the first half of the twentieth century. The MP who was persuaded to introduce a private members’ bill that triggered that inquiry, the Matrimonial Causes Bill of 1951, was a woman, the newly elected Labour MP, Eirene White, whose proposals echoed the sentiments of the Haldane Society (of socialist lawyers): ‘The law cannot make people love one another, or make them live together if they do not do so of their own free will,’ declared White, describing herself free of direct interest, ‘being myself most happily married’. Therefore, she continued, ‘it should be recognised that all the law can do for couples unable to achieve or maintain a good marriage is … protect a party who does not desire cohabitation against the attentions of one who does … make and enforce orders as to the custody of the children … make and enforce financial arrangements … The function of the law should be mainly declaratory – to give public recognition to an already accomplished change in the private arrangements of the parties.’
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, divorce had been a matter for the ecclesiastical courts and canon law, and since it involved either complicated annulment procedures or a private parliamentary bill, divorce was restricted to the very wealthy. The 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act had removed divorce from church courts to civil jurisdiction and defined matrimony as a contract rather than a sacrament. The number of divorces increased from three to over three hundred in a year. However, the law privileged men over women since a husband could petition for divorce solely on the grounds of his wife’s adultery, whereas a wife was required to prove not only her husband’s adultery but also additional offences such as incest, bigamy, rape, cruelty or desertion. The reason for such gendered discrepancy was intended ‘to guard the woman from the inconstancy of her husband, who, if free to do so, would leave his wife and children whenever he should tire of them’.
This safeguarding of the financial interests of an abandoned wife and children was the guiding principle of divorce legislation throughout the twentieth century. But of course this patriarchal caution could tie a woman into an abusive marriage, and deny her any chance of finding a more compatible life partner. Moreover, financial arrangements for the wife and children could not be discussed before the divorce was granted, since this could count as collusion. So, a wife with no independent income might launch a divorce petition unsure as to whether she would be allowed to remain in the family home with the children or what financial provision for the family would be agreed.
In 1921, three years after the social and domestic disruption of the First World War, divorce rates in Britain shot up to a peak of 3,500. The same happened after the Second World War, with divorces rising to 60,300 in 1947 (ten years earlier the number had been just 4,100). In 1923 the law had been changed to equalise positions, with women now able to petition for divorce on the grounds of a husband’s single act of adultery. The unexpected consequence of this ushered in the ridiculous spectacle of the ‘Mr and Mrs Smith syndrome’, whereby if a couple wished to obtain a divorce, the husband only had to ‘take the train to Brighton’. It didn’t have to be Brighton of course, though it often was: within easy reach of London and, being by the seaside, a plausible destination for an illicit weekend with a woman hired for the purpose of giving the wife grounds for divorce. The two would sign the hotel register as a married couple (‘Mr and Mrs Smith’ being the favoured moniker) and the chambermaid would be asked to swear that she had found them in bed together when she took in their morning tea. However, in all likelihood the man had probably spent the night in an armchair, or the couple had passed the time doing jigsaws or crossword puzzles. No matter. This ‘evidence’ would serve as proof of adultery.
A. P. Herbert’s novel Holy Deadlock (1936) parodied the absurdity of this situation which was entirely contrary to the spirit of the law. If such collusion between couples was suspected, the matter would be referred to the King’s Proctor; and if found proven, a decree absolute would be refused and the unhappy couple would remain married.
This was clearly unsatisfactory to all caught in this net – including the Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson prior to Edward VIII’s abdication in 1936 – and made a mockery of the law. So in 1951 the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce was convened, reporting five years later. It would take the report of yet another royal commission (which was sharply divided on the matter of ‘fault’), another private members’ bill, this time introduced by Labour MP Leo Abse (himself a solicitor), and years of debate and prevarication on the floor of the Commons and Lords, in public meetings and the press, before in 1969 the Divorce Reform Act finally made it onto the statute books. It had been a long haul; and the matter of custody, and particularly the enforcement of financial provision, proved – and still proves – contentious, and frequently impoverishing to divorced mothers.
The extension of legal aid for divorce in the High Court in 1950, and magistrates’ courts a decade later, made petitioning for divorce possible for those on low incomes, but of course did nothing to improve their subsequent standard of living. The notion of a man on a low income being able to maintain two homes made a chimera of the idea that divorce would be a clean break which would enable both parties to establish new families. Moreover, the enforcement of whatever maintenance orders had been made by the courts proved – and continues to prove – difficult, vexed and frequently litigious. In 1971, only thirty per cent of lone mothers received any form of financial support from their children’s father and many lone mothers had to rely on state benefits.
Although easier divorce for women shackled in unhappy unions was one of the rights, or liberations, that many women fought for in the 1960s, and legal aid for divorce petitions made divorce possible for a greater number of couples, perhaps more than any other of women’s demands, easier divorce had its problems – despite the fact that between 1947 and 1986 the number of successful petitions by wives rose from fifty-one per cent to seventy-three per cent of the total number of divorces. During the second reading of the bill, the Labour MP, Dr Shirley Summerskill, had dubbed it a ‘Casanova’s charter’, suggesting many women would bear a heavy burden for their liberation while men skipped free; as indeed it often proved, with ex-wives taking the larger part of the responsibility and care of the children during the week, while ex-husbands were more likely to appear at weekends. ‘I’m the one who has to make sure the children get to school on time, that homework gets done, insists on bedtimes being kept and television-watching time limited,’ complained Jean, a divorced Islington neighbour. ‘Then at weekends … [their father] turns up and takes the boys sailing, or to watch football. He takes them out for a pizza and then delivers them home, all fizzing with excitement at what a great time they have had. No wonder they see me as a dreary nag while he represents fun and spoiling.’
II D-I-V-O-R-C-E: My History
George, anxious that our divorce should not be attributed to the long hours that MPs work (a matter of discussion in the press at the time), issued a statement to the local newspaper blaming irreconcilable differences – which was in fact almost entirely the case.
We were granted joint custody of our three children, with me having care and control. We never had an issue over access. He was a responsible parent without as well as within marriage, and never let them down, always r
emembering birthdays, taking them for holidays on narrow boats on the Grand Union Canal or camping in the south of France, staying in Canvas Holidays pre-erected tents as we had done for several summers when we were all together. My more modest vacations with them included a cycling trip on which we stayed in youth hostels and discovered that Suffolk wasn’t flat at all. Another year we and friends went camping in Dorset, where in a field in Chideock I read the children a chapter from Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm every night by the light of a storm lantern as we huddled together under blankets and sleeping bags under canvas. One memorable night, a voice hollered from a nearby tent, ‘If you don’t stop reading that bloody Shakespeare, I’ll come and knock your fucking tent to the ground, by God I will.’ Which rather put a stop to that companionable activity.
But even though the divorce was as amicable as it could have been, things weren’t easy. In order to allow George time with the children when he didn’t have a home of his own, I volunteered that every other weekend I would move out so that he could move in to be with the children, in the largish house on a main road in Kentish Town that the children and I had moved to after our more extravagant marital home in Islington had been sold.
Joining the Dots Page 13
