I advertised in the local paper, the Ham and High, for a room to rent for Friday and Saturday nights and I learned a lot. One was not to describe oneself as ‘easy-going’ since, while I had meant that to signify tolerant, some seemed to construe it as an easy lay. ‘Informal’, ‘relaxed’ or ‘fun-loving’ families were in reality, I found, chaotic, incredibly messy and none too clean. I ended up for a few months in an academic’s house in Hampstead; and while she couldn’t have been nicer, her full-time lodger deeply resented my presence and what she regarded as the intrusion into her space (a shared kitchen) with a venom so bitter that I was forced to decamp to a rented spare room in the house of a psychoanalyst in St John’s Wood, which fitted the ‘extremely messy’ rubric.
Things got a little better when I was offered use of a spare room at weekends by one of my former Islington neighbours. Nevertheless, it was a dismal time. I missed the children profoundly when they were with George, and would gaze with envy at the families walking on Hampstead Heath, at children playing football or rounders with their fathers, or mothers pushing buggies with a small child walking alongside, imagining they were on their way home for a family tea together of buttered crumpets and a game of snap. I would wonder at what I had destroyed and why – though I knew I couldn’t have gone on living a double, inauthentic life, inhabiting a daily falsehood, presenting the children with such opposing standards and such a fractured view of the world as they grew up.
If it was hard for me, how much worse was it for our children, the innocents, who had no agency in the matter, whose lives had been torn apart? Divorce may be preferable for warring parents, but it is always a hard and damaging road for the children. The mistake in our case was not the divorce, but the marriage. However, that is of no account, offering no comfort for the progeny.
On that terrible Sunday morning when we told the children we were going to get divorced, as we sat round the scrubbed pine kitchen table in the basement of our Islington house, the oldest child said, as he scraped his finger endlessly backwards and forwards along a ridge in the table, ‘I don’t think I want to have parents who don’t love each other’, which was heart-breaking. It took all my restraint not to renege on our resolution, and say, ‘But we do.’ The middle one said very little, but was brought home in tears from school the next day in her English teacher’s car. The youngest one, who was eight at the time, said, ‘I think I might be all right if I had a drum kit.’ But he wasn’t, and couldn’t be.
Families reconfigure when divorce or death or separation rives them and children are juggled into roles they should not have to play – the older ones taking too much on their shoulders and coming to act as a surrogate parent to fill in the gaps, and sometimes even filling the role of surrogate partner.
After a couple of years George remarried. His new wife was a constituent, the chair (or perhaps by then ex-chair) of Blue Link, and he went to live in her house in Dorking, near his constituency, where he covered the bare earth in the back garden with black plastic sheeting to suppress the weeds, and cultivated that most delicate and prolific of flowers, the sweet pea, as he had all his gardening life. He also kept a rented flat in Dolphin Square for when the House sat late. Every month he would send me a timetable indicating which children could go to stay with him for alternate weekends: he would never have all three together after he remarried. So after seeing the departing two off on a train at Victoria, I would take whichever child remained to lunch at the Chalk and Cheese restaurant opposite Camden Lock for a traditional roast: it gave me precious time to talk one-to-one with a child rather than the usual family melange of competing voices.
My children were not alone of course in having divorced parents – after all, this was north London; while across Britain in 1980, the year George and I divorced, 112,000 children under the age of eleven experienced the trauma of parental divorce. However, many more couples stayed together than divorced, and of course my children wished they still had an intact, happy and secure family.
Was there still a social stigma to divorce? It is hard to say. When my ex-father-in-law was promoted to be a regional Gas Board manager in Essex in the late 1940s, he did not send for his wife, but instead set up home with a beautiful half-Indian woman who worked in his new office and whom he would later marry and have twin sons with. George’s mother, Ethel, was not only understandably hurt by the divorce – though the marriage had involved endless bickering, according to their son – and financially disadvantaged, but also mortified that she had lost her status as a wife. She wore her wedding ring for the rest of her life and, I suspect, whenever possible described herself as a widow to those who did not know her story. The Church of England’s Mothers’ Union – to which my mother belonged – refused membership to divorced women, even though they were still mothers and presumably needed more than ever the support of a caring community.
In the 1950s, a school friend whose father’s first wife had died, was deeply embarrassed by the fact that she had a half-sister, the child of that first marriage, lest people thought there was the taint of divorce in her family.
I know that with divorce I felt a sense of loss and a degree of failure alongside the sense of relief at the opportunity to live authentically en plein air, making a new life on my terms. Yet there were intense moments of sadness, regret and loneliness, and places I could not bring myself to visit for several years as they brought back memories of family occasions.
I don’t think I ever felt shunned as a divorcee; friends didn’t seem to find it necessary to take sides, though we had few friends in common anyway, given our different values, approaches to life and activities. I was never aware of not being invited to dinner parties as an unattached woman, yet perhaps this happened. I can remember only one mild slight: I had been invited to a box at the Royal Opera House when, on the morning of the performance of Lulu, I was rung up to have the invitation withdrawn since the friend who had issued it had realised that the box seated four and so she had decided to invite a couple rather than unbalance the numbers. Yet view the box set of Mad Men today, and the 1960s stereotype of the predatory divorced woman in a community of married couples, the potential threat to any marriage, is a consistent theme. Watch out for her.
After my marriage ended, I made new friends, had two serious relationships and several brief affairs, invariably with clever, difficult men. Again this cannot have been easy for the children, who had to contemplate the possibility that their mother was still a sexual being, whereas children with married parents can ignore that shudder-making vision. I imagine that they also worried that a stepfather would involve a move, and the fragile bonds of family would again be ruptured or at least stretched.
Eventually, after resisting the dubious lure of matrimony, I did remarry: significantly, at the moment all three children had left home on gap years or to take up a university place, and the emotional centre of my life became a void, as the house was no longer filled with the clatter, music and general racket of teenagers coming and going, and Sunday evenings ceased to be the precious family occasion when the children and I talked after dinner, joking as we watched television together while I did the week’s ironing.
The marriage was not a wise move. So, as the circle closed, I retained that independence I had sought all my life, no matter the cost.
Chapter Ten
A Working Woman
‘Graduate wives’, the cohort to which I had belonged until my divorce, were often conflicted about the path they should follow: be a stay-at-home mother, pursue a career, or a mixture of the two. This last option, the one that would have best suited most mothers in the postwar years, was not easy. Even so, there were steadily increasing opportunities and some of these offered flexible working hours compatible with motherhood: for instance, there were jobs in light engineering (especially the manufacture of consumer durables, so-called ‘white goods’), while the growth of the welfare state and more power being devolved to local government meant more administrative and clerical job
s for women, and eventually public service jobs such as in social work and higher-grade specialist nursing.
During the 1940s the so-called ‘marriage bar’ – affecting many public sector jobs, including those in the civil service, the BBC and schools – was at last rescinded, meaning that women could no longer be compelled to leave their jobs on marriage. Prevailing attitudes, however, changed even more slowly – to judge by a Treasury memo from 1947 about the department’s own staff: ‘To us, married women have been “a perfect nuisance”,’ what with their childcare responsibilities, the need to care for elderly parents and their apparently greater propensity for sick leave. Even Dame Evelyn Sharp – the first woman in the civil service to be appointed as Permanent Secretary (at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government) – regarded women as ‘unreliable’, on the grounds of their sense of duty to their families, the postwar shortage of domestic help, and their regrettable tendency to get pregnant, not to mention their ‘lesser financial responsibility’ compared to men. They were presumed to spend the ‘pin money’ they earned on frivolities such as clothes, cosmetics, new shoes for their children and paying for outings and school trips. Meanwhile, the idea of equal pay for women was obviously a bridge too far, and it was not until 1970 that the Equal Pay Act came into being – and is still not fully implemented in the twenty-first century, despite many shattered glass ceilings.
When my children were pre-school age and I applied for part-time work at a photographic agency (having dealt in sourcing and commissioning photographs during my fairly menial role at the TV Times), hoping for mornings only, or three days a week, the reply to my application was a flat rejection, explaining that ‘this agency requires full-time commitment and therefore cannot entertain the idea of an employee not prepared to give that’.
Such career dilemmas were mainly middle-class ones. The mother of one of my son’s friends at primary school, who had been rehoused with her family from their Bermondsey slum to a new-build council estate in another borough, had no such choice: her family’s financial circumstances dictated that she had two jobs – an early morning office-cleaning job and a shift at the Peek Frean factory packing biscuits from nine to three. Although she was pleased with her brand-new, modern flat, her life was made harder by the fact that she had left her mother, grandmother, sister and aunties behind, many bus rides away in Bermondsey. The network of female relatives that could be relied on to provide a safety net of childcare when necessary had unravelled.
In Spanland things had been done differently. As far as I remember no one had mothers near enough to help out, except in an emergency. I relied on au pairs, while other mothers employed older women from the neighbouring council estates. They would gamely push our children’s prams and pushchairs to Blackheath village, take them to feed the ducks on the pond, or for long walks to Greenwich Park, spoon mashed bananas or jars of Gerber baby food into our toddlers’ mouths, or serve up macaroni cheese or jacket potatoes for the older ones when they came home from school. The labour of these women (who sometimes cleaned our houses too) allowed us mothers to work, study or tend our gardens – or in the case of my friend Kate and me, our allotments, ready-planted with raspberries, asparagus and runner beans and just a hop over the wire fence at the bottom of the Lane. Or we could take pottery classes, or even have the occasional day out ‘in town’ to go to an exhibition, or shop at Biba, Laura Ashley, Bus Stop, or Liberty.
The answer of most of my Blackheath neighbours to the question of what career I should follow – apart from the few who already had a toehold in professions such as accountancy, architecture, medicine or social work – seemed obvious: teaching. Teaching was a job routinely suggested to girls in the 1950s (and before and after). After marriage, the hours would fit in with their own children’s school day – as they did with half-terms and holidays – so several neighbours and friends either enrolled at the Institute of Education, which was part of London University, or travelled down the hill to Deptford where the socialist educators Margaret McMillan and her older sister Rachel had established the ‘Girls’ Night Camp’ in 1911 – an open-air ‘garden in a slum’ nursery school intended to fit in with the realities of working-class life: the first nursery school in the country to receive local authority funding.
I Climbing Stairs
As soon as my three years of PhD study were over, I applied for three jobs pretty well simultaneously in 1979: a lectureship at the Open University, a job on Radio Four’s Analysis programme and the deputy editorship of the magazine History Today.
I didn’t get the OU job because what was really needed was a specialist in Eastern European history, and my patch was Western Europe. I did rather well in the BBC’s interviews until I got to the final selection board, when I was asked by a silkily spoken suit: ‘If you came into the office one morning and were told that you had been booked on the noon flight to Kosovo, could you be on it?’ ‘No,’ I had to reply, thinking of my three children. Was that a sexist question, since I had explained my domestic situation on my application form? Possibly, but also a realistic one, since it was necessary to employ people who were in a position to wing off to trouble spots at a moment’s notice. Nowadays one would like to think that a man, who was also a father, would be asked the same question and some would have to say that their parental responsibilities made the ‘drop everything and go away at once for an indeterminate period’ impossible.
I nearly didn’t get the job of assistant editor on the magazine History Today either. By this time, George and I were living apart. The personnel officer at Longman, which owned the magazine, initially put my application on the reject pile since she didn’t think that a single mother of three children, the youngest aged ten, would be sufficiently reliable for such a post. However, the recently appointed editor Michael Crowder, a historian of Nigeria, met my academic supervisor at a party and expressed surprise that I wasn’t being interviewed. So I was. And got the job. (Moreover, I was doubly thrilled to hear afterwards that the personnel officer had described me as ‘jumble-sale chic’, which I regarded as a great compliment, though I suspect it was not intended to be.)
I loved the work and was devastated when in 1981 Longman decided that History Today did not fit their stable of titles – specialist medical journals, monographs, educational textbooks – and was to cease publication. The small staff was made redundant. However, serendipitously, a consortium that had been put together to mount a bid (unsuccessful) for the breakfast television franchise decided that History Today was too distinguished a magazine to be wiped off the face of the propagation of history, and offered a nominal sum to buy it. Longman accepted, on condition that the title would continue to be published for a specified time and that if it became profitable the company would recoup some of its investment.
Michael Crowder was not rehired as editor, and the move from our elegant offices in Bentinck Street, Marylebone, a building with a sycamore-wood-lined circular lift, to the top floor of a shabby, unmodernised building in Berwick Street, Soho, was quite a shock. The premises were pretty run down, with rented rooms in which individuals and the occasional family lived, interspersed with rag-trade sweatshops and small shops selling cheap jewellery or fabrics and ‘trimmings’ at street level, and a photographer’s studio on the floor below ours. There were 96 stairs (and no lift) to our attic offices, where the American group the Monkees had reputedly once had their London base. Despite the inconvenience of each month having to carry heavy bundles of advance copies all the way up, the relocation seemed a metaphor for a new start, a ‘roll your sleeves up and get on with it’ approach. As indeed it would be.
A successor to Michael Crowder was appointed, but after a difficult and not very pleasant period, I was promoted to the editorship in the spring of 1982.
‘No, no, my dear,’ said a man at the London Book Fair kindly a few weeks later, ‘I asked who the editor was,’ presumably assuming that I was the editor’s PA. ‘I am,’ I persisted, though I sympathised with his confusion.
The founding editors – in harness until the late 1970s – had been the biographer and belletrist Peter Quennell (always known as PQ) and Alan Hodge, who had been Churchill’s amanuensis when he was writing his History of the English-Speaking Peoples and was credited with coming up with reputedly, if debatably, the shortest sentence in the English language, ‘Time passed.’ I must have seemed to my inquisitor a considerable let-down from those dizzy social and literary male pinnacles.
But for me it was an exciting time. We were a small staff – all women as it turned out – and though our owners took responsibility for the business side of things and took an active interest in the magazine’s content, we dealt with everything else: commissioning and editing; choosing the illustrations; production; distribution; subscriptions; advertising. And we went down the 96 stairs and round the corner to Poland Street to do our photocopying, and then trudged up the 96 stairs again.
We had a party every Christmas in the office, with paper chains round the filing cabinets, and the staff wearing feather boas instead of name badges. We were delighted at how many people were prepared to make the mountainous ascent, but worried about the equally long descent after several glasses of wine with just a handful of crisps or Twiglets to eat, so a member of staff was positioned on each landing as the party came to an end, in order to catch, or at least cushion, anyone who tripped. Thankfully no one ever did.
II Rewriting History
My years at History Today were an education in themselves. Initially, the magazine was run as an old boys’ network. PQ and Alan Hodge had assembled such a distinguished cast of historians in the early days – Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock, Asa Briggs, A. J. P. Taylor among others – that they only had to see what came through the letterbox to be able to assemble an interesting issue of the magazine each month. If that fell short, they could pick up the phone and ask their stalwarts what they were currently writing and if they could please squeeze an article for History Today out of their present preoccupation.
Joining the Dots Page 14
