Indeed, I didn’t tell many people of my diagnosis. This was partly for professional reasons. As a freelance writer, I didn’t want people to stop asking me to write articles or appear on radio and television programmes. I needed the money and craved the stimulus, the deadlines, the fleeting company of others intent on the same objective.
A few people have occasionally charged that I was in denial, but I reject that label as I rejected the soubriquet ‘battling with cancer’. I have had no option but to accept that I am terminally ill. Being in denial means simply refusing to think about something which no amount of thinking or talking about will make go away. All I can do, all anyone can do, in the case of serious illness or bereavement, is deal with it. There is no other side to come out of for me. But while I am here I can watch the leaves turn golden, drop, and then return fresh green, urgent and full of life; watch my children change jobs, move house, travel abroad; be moved, often to tears, by the sheer sweetness of my six grandchildren as they learn to crawl, walk, talk, question, imagine. I hang on in there.
I feel like throwing something at the radio every time anyone says confidently, ‘We are all living so much longer now.’ Who is that ‘we’, I wonder, as I obsessively read obituary pages and envy those who survive into their nineties and mourn those who die after a lesser lifespan than I am enjoying. I feel a gut-wrenching sadness for those I know who travelled part of the way with me, and then fell by the wayside leaving a terrible hole in their young children’s and their partner’s lives.
I decluttered my house – up to a point, with the help of friends – one of whom was persuaded to let me keep my yellow Dr Martens which we both knew I would never wear again. No one could call to see me without being asked to edit my cutlery drawer, itemise my brogues, cull my collection of eighteen mascaras. I tried to boost my immune system by eating healthily most of the time – kale and blueberries, porridge and nuts and seeds, lentils and beans. I took mild antidepressants, talked to those I love and delighted in their visits, and I walked and walked and walked as though if I walked far and fast enough I could outpace my tumour, win the race.
Until, that is, I had a violent epileptic seizure in France, and was hospitalised there. When I got back to London, I was in hospital for a fortnight, so weak that I couldn’t stand up and had to be taught how to walk again, to remember where my left foot was. While I was away, rails were installed in my house so that I could go up and down stairs, the seats of my armchair and toilet were raised, a rising seat was installed so I could bath and shower, outdoor steps were turned into ramps where possible. I was issued with a panic button which would summon paramedics if I fell. Carers came twice or three times a day for six weeks to help me wash, and make me lunch and cups of tea. All this at no cost to me but provided by the statutory generosity of Hackney Social Services, who must have enormous calls on their resources.
A good friend from university days became a between (his) marriages lodger. He shopped, arranged theatre outings and picked me up when I fell over during another seizure, when my arms were too weak to haul myself up again. Still I maintained the charade: that I had hurt my leg falling off a wall while showing off to my grandchildren. True, but subsequent to an epileptic fit.
An adjustable hospital bed was provided and moved to the downstairs living room so that I had no need to attempt the stairs. It was here, on the frequent occasions that I woke in the night and could not get back to sleep, that I read the finest book about cancer imaginable: the Pulitzer prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee, ‘a chronicle of an ancient disease that has metamorphosed into a lethal shape-shifting entity imbued with such metaphorical, medical, scientific and political potency that cancer is often described as the defining plague of our generation’. And I realised that the jacket carried a drawing of a crab: my birth sign, Cancer. Hardly a portent, but oddly troubling. It was here, in a hospital bed in my living room, that I noted the clicking and clattering of the feet of passing pedestrians. Here that I contemplated my future.
I am a historian. I earn my living writing history or teaching and lecturing about history or editing others’ writing about history, and I have for most of my adult life. To do that I need sources: archives, record offices, libraries.
Since I write social and cultural history about twentieth-century Britain I have travelled the country from the Orkneys (the most heavily defended part of Britain during the Second World War) to Cornwall (the least defended), to the abandoned USAAF airfields of East Anglia, built when the US entered the war in 1942. I have trawled archives from Glasgow Central Library to the South Wales Miners’ Museum in Port Talbot and the university libraries of Birmingham, East Anglia, Essex, Exeter and Warwick; from the Museum of London and the London Metropolitan Archives to the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex; from the Oxfordshire Local History Centre to the Bodleian; from Churchill College, Cambridge, to the BBC Archives at Caversham. To the home in East Finchley of a then ninety-eight-year-old woman who worked for the Ministry of Food during the Second World War, and, while her husband was fighting in the Western Desert, had an affair with her brother-in-law, ‘since everyone had affairs in the Blitz. It had nothing to do with my marriage. I still loved Jack [her husband] and longed every day for his safe return.’
I would spend hours in the British Library and the London Library. I visited galleries and exhibitions of surrealism, modernism, the paintings of war by members of the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, orchestrated by Sir Kenneth Clark, the youngest-ever director of the National Gallery. I travelled to Chichester to see the work of William Roberts – ‘Britain’s only Cubist painter’ – and to the New Forest to catch that of Evelyn Dunbar whose speciality was painting members of the Women’s Land Army. I travelled to Cambridgeshire to find out about the ‘Bevin Boys’ from a man who had been one; I spoke to people who had been active in the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1930s and several who had joined the International Brigades to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. I went to visit firemen and those who had worked in Civil Defence or the WVS during the Second World War, who had witnessed sights they could never forget and were reluctant to talk about. All in search of letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs, newspapers, privately published local history booklets, cartoons and photographs, to fashion as authentic, persuasive and vivid a picture as possible of the years I was writing about.
I would stay with friends and sometimes with friends of friends, in the dormitories of YHA hostels, in scuzzy B&Bs. During the mainly grey and damp summer of 2010, I bought a red-and-white tent with a cross of St George on one side, which was going cheap after the England football team had been knocked out of the World Cup, and pitched it on the nicest campsites I could find near to whatever archive I needed to visit. In the evenings, weather permitting, I would sit under pine trees or spreading oaks with a glass of wine organising the material I had gathered during the day, planning my next assault on printed and handwritten sources. Often, realising that the England tent was mine, I was offered a can of lager and a packet of crisps by fellow campers – football fans who thought I was one of them, applauding my loyalty to a defeated side.
But those foraging expeditions were now no longer possible. I had limited mobility, was somewhat unsteady on my feet and liable to stumble and fall. I tired more easily and had much less energy than ever before. I was unable to complete the book I had been commissioned to write about the home front in the First World War, which had to be done at speed if it was to be published in 2014, on the centenary of the war’s outbreak. Nonetheless, I very much wanted to write another book: I couldn’t think how I would want to live without a writing project, and my agent and publisher generously agreed to wait.
I decided that I had to be my own source and resource. I would use material in filed-away diaries, letters, cuttings and writings, and conversations with friends who had been there, and of course my own recollections of those years.
I did not feel I could write an autobiography: my life was too minor, too uneventful for that. Rather, I wanted to entwine my experiences with events, movements and changes in the wider world. My intention was to write a memoir – of necessity a fragmentary memoir – of the trajectory of my life from the end of the Second World War to the 1980s, years which I consider transformed the landscape of women’s lives in unprecedented ways.
How can historicising individual lives (in this case mine) enable a historian to make general statements about a period? Everyone has her or his own story and at the same time is part of history. Lives consist of public concerns and personal issues and the interconnection between the two. How can these be disentangled or alternatively fused to make any general statements about the past? Are historians condemned to run on parallel lines between the documented factual and a collage of individual experiences and perceptions that may only rarely coincide – or collide? In any case, individual experience is exactly that: contradictory, conditioned by past experiences, by individual circumstance, by prejudice and disposition. In effect everyone comes to an understanding of the past burdened by the baggage of the past. It cannot be other.
We know we are observers of events but we are also participants in them to the extent that we appropriate them within our own narratives, which then inform and condition our understanding and telling of past, present – and future – events. We historicise our own lives and cannot fail to make ourselves the centre of our narrative, even when that is not explicit, since the optic is ours no matter how we try to site – and cite – our perspectives in a larger historical understanding.
As a historian of the twentieth century, I have reflected on people and events that affected me, as they appear archetypical, or at least exemplary, of a perception I have of the historical moment. My taxonomy could not be other than an account of what has impacted on me, embedded and supplemented by what I have researched, read, heard, discussed and argued both in writing history and in simply living.
Of course this does not in any way privilege my historical account over any other memoirs or the hundreds of diaries, letters and interviews deposited in archives that I have read as the primary sources for my writing in an attempt to capture the historical moment and what mattered to those living it. History is not a jigsaw, waiting for missing pieces to be dropped in to one day complete the picture, since the shape of the absence as well as the presence may well have changed. Nor is it a kaleidoscope, since it is the viewer who shifts, not the past.
Now that the book is written, I am struck by the episodic nature of my life. This is partly the result of memory: you do not remember sequentially, and so many memories are memories of memories, misleading us as we look down the darkening tunnel into the past. But I think that my life has been more fragmentary than most, because the world I grew up in seemed so far away from the world I married into, which itself became distant when I embarked on my university education and began a career of my own. In all of these worlds I felt an outsider, though it may not have been apparent to those around me. Perhaps this all goes back to being adopted: to my childhood fantasy that somewhere there was an intellectual, confidently middle-class home where I might have thrived. Certainly as the wife of a Tory MP I continued to think that the real world – the one where I’d fit in – awaited me elsewhere. If I found this at all, then it was through my studies at UCL and the jobs that followed. But even here, though I might have looked to those around me like a successful professional, and though I found real intimacy with family, friends and lovers, I could never have identified a cohort where I easily belonged.
I think now that this was what made me well suited to the work of a historian, making me a natural observer of the lives of others. As a social historian, I’ve been endlessly curious about the detail of how different people lived in the century of my birth, and I’ve wanted to defamiliarise the lives of my subjects as I seek to understand the structures determining them.
Before I started this book, I hadn’t thought much about my childhood for some time. After my parents had died and I’d created a more congenial family of my own, I preferred to forget about the boredom and claustrophobia of that house where I sat lining up my postcard collection, waiting to escape. I think now that it may have been the sound of the heels clattering outside my window that reminded me of those years when life seemed to be taking place elsewhere; when other people appeared to have the excited expectation of wishes acted upon and fulfilled, while I had merely the repetitive progression from lunch to tea, with only the field beside the house to escape to.
Yet this isn’t the whole story, because I can in fact escape, even on the days when I’m unable to leave my room. I can escape now as I could then into books, and into the excitement of imagining and reconstructing other people’s lives. Now when I lie listening to the heels clip-clopping outside the house, I remind myself that there’s more space left to move around in than I sometimes fear. Writing this book has made me appreciate that my life has taken me to so many places, none of which I could have predicted as I lay daydreaming in that field by the old railway line in adolescence. Then I had no idea what the world looked like. Now I can roam freely across decades and continents in my head. I’m grateful that I’ve had the chance to return to all those moments and places as I trace the pattern formed by the dots of my fractured memories. The picture that emerges is a messy one, but as a historian I’d expect nothing less.
Acknowledgements
It is usual for an author to say that he or she could not have written their book without the help and support from a number of people. In my case this is particularly true: without the help, support and encouragement of the people mentioned below I could not have written this book.
I start with my late and much-missed agent, Deborah Rogers, who suggested that as I had written several books with the voices of others spatchcocked together, perhaps now was the time to find my own voice; and fortunately Georgia Garrett, Deborah’s successor, encouraged me to do so, as did Arabella Pike, the Publishing Director at HarperCollins.
Kate Johnson has proved to be a meticulous and knowledgeable copyeditor. I am very pleased to be working again with Helen Ellis in publicising this book, and with all those in the marketing department of HarperCollins.
David Kynaston and Lara Feigel encouraged me from the outset. After they had read the full manuscript twice they both came up with some extremely helpful and encouraging suggestions, which I took up with gratitude. Lara is a long-term writing companion, and the fact that she thought it was a worthwhile enterprise as we wrote together in Suffolk was a great encouragement to me. David has been a source of help and inspiration since The Thirties: An Intimate History, Wartime: Britain 1939–1945, and The Blitz: The British Under Attack, and he has done the same noble task with this book.
Stella Tillyard made helpful suggestions while Lucy Kynaston came up with a suggestion just at the right time.
I also owe thanks to Jan Crowhurst and Ann Dawney for refreshing my memory about our school days. Thanks too to Jacky Turner, Rebecca Swift and Neil Vickers. Sadly, Henry Horwitz was too unwell to play an active part but encouraged me from across the Atlantic.
Natasha Periyan and Ellie Bass were assiduous researchers. Suki Kaur and Justyna Lizak typed when I couldn’t and showed me very many acts of kindness as I worked.
I have learned a great deal from many of the moving autobiographies I have read recently, particularly Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood, Ferdinand Mount’s Cold Cream, Jeremy Harding’s Mother Country, John Lanchester’s Family Romance, Janet Street-Porter’s Baggage and Vesna Goldsworthy’s Chernobyl Strawberries.
I would also like to thank my three children, who have been very supportive throughout a difficult time and never once said: ‘Isn’t there rather too much about you in this book, Mum?’
Hackney,
March 2017
Picture Section
This photograph of me was taken in 1963 by Peter Bolton when we both worked
at TV Times. (Courtesy of the author)
A studio photograph of me as a young child, taken in the mid-1940s. (Courtesy of the author)
Bomb damage in Balham, London, during the Second World War. (© William Vandivert/Contributor/Getty Images)
Children at a VE Day street party in Wimbledon, London, 1945. (© Bert Kneller/Getty Images)
Woman pushing a pram in front of council houses in Hemel Hempstead, a new town in Hertfordshire, 1954. (© Haywood Magee/Stringer/Getty Images)
My mother and me on holiday in Swanage, Dorset, in 1952. (Courtesy of the author)
At Berkhamsted School for Girls with my friend Janet (right), late 1950s. (Courtesy of the author)
Me in 1954 as Gillian Wells, at school in a contemplative mood. (Courtesy of the author)
Cover of Picture Post magazine, 1952. The magazine was liberal and anti-fascist – it ceased publication in 1957. (© IPC Magazines/Picture Post/Contributor/Getty Images)
Debutantes and their mothers queuing outside Buckingham Palace, 1957. (© Reg Burkett/Stringer/Getty Images)
My wedding on 18th February 1961. George’s best man, Clive Bate, is on the far left next to George’s mother. My parents are on the right with Janet as our bridesmaid on the far right. (Courtesy of the author)
George and me with the children in our garden in Dorking, Surrey, where we moved from Blackheath and lived briefly before George was elected as an MP, as it was near his constituency of Reigate. Sophie (centre), Alexander (to the right) and Sebastian (foreground) in a photograph taken for George’s election pamphlet. (Courtesy of the author)
Joining the Dots Page 16
