Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  This was a low blow because my mother was a great royalist. She was all for King and Country. Everything the Royal Family did was of great importance and interest to her and she held up Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose as role models for my sister and me. I loved Crawfie’s book, The Little Princesses, bought for my twelfth birthday, even though I was on the edge of rejecting the Royal Family in the same way I was about to reject any belief in God (they were closely connected in my mind as a result of my mother’s reverence for both). The lives of the princesses seemed to me complete bliss. I wished my own mother could live the life of the Queen – it seemed to me she could fill the role perfectly; it would suit her to wear beautiful clothes and ride in carriages and smile graciously. I looked at the photographs – pages and pages of them – and I could quite easily see myself on Lilibet’s pony, cuddling Lilibet’s corgi, playing in Lilibet’s and Margaret’s ‘little’ house which looked bigger than our own. As I read the book (many times), one thing puzzled me. Again and again Crawfie stressed how Lilibet ‘longed to be ordinary’ and did everything possible to seem so, insisting at camp that she washed the dirtiest dishes, asking to wear the drabbest clothes, being thrilled at secretly going on a bus instead of riding in a Rolls-Royce… It was baffling. She could swap with me any time; she could have my ordinary life and I’d be royal instead. When I’d finally drained the book of every ounce of information I realized I didn’t understand what the Royal Family was actually for. ‘What does the King do?’ I asked my mother. She tried to explain that it was the Prime Minister and the elected government who ran the country and that the King on his own didn’t have a great deal of power, but this led on to needing to tell me what a democracy was and where the Crown fitted in, and though she was perfectly capable of outlining this, she said she was sure teachers at the High School would be able to explain, better than she could.

  It so happened that there was a general election soon after this discussion and it was decided that there should be a mock election at school to teach us how real elections worked. I came home full of it. We would all have a vote and there would be four candidates representing the Conservative, Labour, Liberal and Communist Parties. ‘What’s a Conservative? What’s a Communist? Who do you vote for?’ I asked my mother. She said she was a Conservative, a True Tory, but when it came to saying why, she could only do it in a negative way, by saying Conservatives were not troublemakers, they were for the maintenance of law and order, they didn’t want ‘everything upset’. A Conservative was not a firebrand, a Conservative would run a mile from riots and strikes and violence. My father wouldn’t say how he voted. He said it was his business and muttered mysteriously that telling children how you voted was dangerous ‘because that’s how Hitler got at people’.

  But my mother told me that my grandmother, Margaret Ann, used to get very upset with my father’s loudly voiced political opinions back in the 1920s. My father as a young man had been ‘red hot for Labour’ and was for the status quo being upset and established again to his and all workingmen’s advantage. He didn’t join the Labour Party, having a deep suspicion of such organizations, but he went to some political meetings and thought the Labour chaps spoke sense. He’d voted Labour always, she knew he had, but apparently he was now disillusioned and wasn’t going to vote because Labour hadn’t benefited him personally and they were all the same these politicians, out for themselves. My mother wasn’t sure if he was right in this verdict or not. She hoped after our school election I could enlighten her.

  I came home every day with wilder and wilder interpretations of the political wisdom offered to me by the different candidates, who were all sixth-formers. It was obvious from the beginning that the appearance and popularity of these candidates were going to count more with us schoolgirl-voters than anything they said. The Conservative candidate was the most attractive but she wasn’t a good speaker. She was very pretty, with long, blonde hair, beautifully brushed, but her voice was rather squeaky and her manner solemn. She went on about Winston Churchill and how he’d saved us from the Nazis and how ungrateful we’d been not to vote him in after the war. The Liberal candidate wasn’t much better as far as the content of her speech was concerned, but she had a much louder and more forceful voice. She was very sporty too, in all the school teams, and made her party seem very healthy, the party for fit people who were not ‘stuffy’ like the Conservatives. The Labour candidate was just too emotional. She actually wept when she read out some newspaper report on how the poor were living in our big cities. This was, it seemed, the fault of the Conservatives even though they were not at the moment in government – Labour had done what it could but had only made a start and needed many more years in power to carry on the good work. Then there was the Communist candidate – small, ugly, bespectacled, scruffy, but what a brilliant speaker. Our entire system of government, she bellowed, was a farce. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer and nothing would change until outdated democracy was swept aside and replaced by the people as the state and the state as the people, one for all and no more class divisions, no more inequality… I went straight home and announced I had no doubts, I was a Communist.

  It was hard to decide who was more shocked, my mother or my father. Both of them said Communists were evil, wicked people who wanted to take everything away from everybody and make the rich poor and the poor poorer. When I attempted to correct this false summary by relating what the candidate had said I was shouted down by my father – he hadn’t sent me to that school to learn this kind of rubbish. I said he hadn’t sent me anyway and got walloped for cheek. I tried to argue with him, pointing out that as a worker at the bottom of the heap he should be for Communism. But no, he wasn’t. He knew what had happened in Russia and that was enough. So what had happened in Russia? Never you mind. My mother, as ever, was calmer and had a better reason for hating Communism. Communists didn’t believe in God. They made the state into their own God. Since I was almost ready to declare I didn’t believe in God either, this sounded quite attractive but I didn’t yet dare say so.

  I ended up voting for the Labour candidate but not with much conviction and with only the vaguest idea still of what was the difference between Conservative and Labour. The Conservative won with the Liberal a close second and Labour a poor third. The outstanding Communist candidate got only three votes and I was ashamed not to have voted for her. Meanwhile, outside school, the real election was going on. Posters appeared in some windows but not many, and in Raffles they were all for Labour. In Carlisle, the Labour candidate was returned but in the country in general the Conservatives triumphed. My mother was mildly pleased; my father said he didn’t care. I wished aloud we had politics on the timetable as we did History and other subjects and my father said the day ‘they’ started ‘that’ it would be a bad job. Politics were trouble, politics were not for the likes of us and the sooner I learned that the better, ‘or else’. But I went on feeling intrigued and even anxious about my lack of political knowledge. After we’d done a bit about nineteenth-century history at school I’d learned something about the importance of the right to vote. I knew about Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald and I’d heard of Nye Bevan – I’d heard him on the wireless too before my father switched ‘that rubbish’ off. And I’d been influenced by the Gillespies across the road who were staunch and active Labour supporters and not afraid to say so – Mr Gillespie had stood as a Labour councillor which impressed me but not my father, who complained I was ‘getting tarred with their brush’.

  I said he was quite right, I was and I was glad I was.

  XIII

  Pleasure in general didn’t feature very noticeably in my mother’s life. Her sisters would hurt her by alleging she didn’t know how to enjoy herself as they did, but she in turn annoyed them by clearly not rating what they called their pleasures. Jean’s love of a drink and a sing-song mystified her – fancy liking pubs and noisy group outings to Blackpool. It made her shudder, all that (to her) enforced jollity, all t
hat raucous carousing. ‘Let yourself go, Lily,’ Jean would urge, and be treated to an expression of bewildered outrage. My mother saw neither pleasure nor sense in any kind of abandonment. It was alien to her nature. She liked to think quiet pursuits suited her best, walks in the country, that kind of thing. But on such walks she was restless and bored, it seemed to me. ‘We’ve sat here long enough,’ she’d complain, when we’d been perched on a log in Wetheral woods above the river for only a few minutes, and we’d have to move on even though my father was absorbed watching the salmon leap and we children were happily floating bits of wood. She didn’t like getting her shoes wet or dirty, or her clothes caught in brambles and even at Silloth, walking along the pristine concrete sea wall, she’d find the wind too strong while we found it exhilarating. She was hard to please, as my father constantly said, though he always said it admiringly, proud of her high standards, and the difficulties they caused.

  Sometimes, in an effort of my father’s to treat my mother, we’d go to a café on our outings, but that was never a success, never gave her pleasure. There was never a cheap café fit for my mother and of course it had to be cheap or we couldn’t patronize it. ‘Not there!’ my mother would cry, horrified, as my father proposed entering some shack. He’d ask why not, we only wanted a pot of tea and some lemonade. What was wrong with it? ‘Everything,’ my mother would snap. She was always right. I saw, with her, how dirty the tables looked, how sleazy the whole place. So we’d tramp round Keswick or Pooley Bridge, or wherever we’d gone for the day, on the bus, and eventually tempers becoming frayed, café after café rejected, my mother would agree to go into some place that at least looked clean. Then trouble would start in a different way all over again. Sometimes it would be about where we were to sit. My mother would say she didn’t care but then wherever my father plonked us was hopeless – ‘Not right by the door, Arthur.’ More often it was over what to order. My mother would fancy a scone but they’d have no scones, or else the scone produced would be pronounced not fresh. Her critical nature couldn’t let anything go and, while I felt like her, I hated the atmosphere this carping caused. If only she’d been proud of her own trenchant criticisms, if only she’d laughed at how utterly dreadful the scone or anything else was, but no, her disappointment was deep and never, ever, funny.

  I knew what kind of café my mother wanted to eat in. She wanted to be in the Ritz or the Savoy in some palm court place, sitting in a chiffon dress with a white straw hat on, being served with delicious thin sandwiches and exquisite pastries on delicate china plates. Like clothes, surroundings mattered, they told you what you had become, and my mother was never going to be reconciled to a red formica table, thick chipped white pot cups, a smell of used fat and no elegance or artistry anywhere. Our outings could never give her the kind of pleasure she craved. Often, she didn’t come with us at all. She said she was too tired, and she was, but she wasn’t only physically tired, she was tired of disappointment. She enjoyed herself no more left at home, except for listening to Mrs Dale’s Diary in peace. She loved Mrs Dale’s life because it was the life she felt she should have had – the life of a doctor’s wife, perfect. In her mind she leapt the class gulf effortlessly; she was Mrs Dale, the middle-class professional man’s wife. At least she had some imaginative ability and could enter that wireless world easily.

  This was where pleasure did come for her. She loved the theatre, and Her Majesty’s Theatre in Carlisle, not far from where she was born and in the street where she went to school, was a very lively place right up to the end of the fifties. My mother went to see whatever the Salisbury Players were performing on Friday nights. She went with a friend, a neighbour, and sat in the gods and though she would have much preferred the dress circle she for once overcame her longing for better things and never complained about the cheap seat. But as well as going to see plays at the theatre proper she also went to all the performances given by the thriving St Barnabas’s Amateur Dramatic Society. I went with her from a very young age, never for one moment thinking this was a substitute for the real thing, and my mother never suggested it was, whatever she thought. She let me be thrilled and seemed to share my excitement as we walked through Raffles to the church hall. The plays the church society was fond of were J.B. Priestley’s and Terence Rattigan’s, and my mother was as immersed in them as I was. We loved Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here Before – there were lines in that one which my mother seemed to find highly significant, about people repeating their lives over and over with just small but crucial differences. She’d sigh and afterwards I’d ask why but never got a satisfactory answer. I hated the play to be over and so did she – we didn’t want the main overhead hall lights to go on, or the not nearly wide enough curtains to be finally closed.

  There were plays on the wireless to be enjoyed too, but listening to Saturday Night Theatre only led to complications. We had a wireless, a blue Bakelite thing, which could be plugged into a light socket. This was rather grandly referred to as a portable. I’d take it to bed to listen to Saturday Night Theatre, my favourite play of the week, so I could listen in the dark and withdraw all the better into whatever the play was about. Gordon was always out and my mother and sister didn’t object. But I never heard the last ten minutes or so of any play. My father would come back from the pub and he had to have the wireless on. So just before he was due back my mother would come up and unplug the wireless and take it downstairs for him. I never even attempted to protest. That’s how it was. The breadwinner had to have the wireless on while he ate his supper. My mother always said, as she did the unplugging, ‘I’m sorry, but you knew it would be needed,’ and she was right, I had. I had accepted the unwritten but absolutely rigid rule.

  My mother, of course, had accepted many more. She had conformed throughout her life and expected me to have to do the same. When I didn’t she became upset out of all proportion, as she was when I cut off my hair. This was seen as a major act of defiance, an act which would bring about retribution as surely as the shearing of Samson. Girls and women should take a pride in their hair, especially if it was like mine, long and thick and wavy, a great mane of cascading fair hair, braided and ringletted over the years by my mother. It took hours to dry. She’d wash it when I was a child and towel it as dry as possible, and then I’d sit on her knee, facing her, and lean backwards so that my hair hung like a sheet in front of the fire. ‘She has lovely hair, Lily,’ one and all would croon, and my mother was gratified – the cleanliness of my hair, the shine upon it, the state of it, was a credit to her.

  But when I was thirteen I made my mind up. I was sick of my hair. It was a nuisance and I wanted it cut. My brother cut the end of one pigtail off and my mother was furious – ‘Spoiling her lovely hair!’ – but she wouldn’t let me cut the other pigtail too. She said it would soon catch up, I wasn’t to touch my hair. But now I wanted not just a couple of inches off but the whole lot. So I made an appointment at Binn’s and went and had it all cut off – cut really, viciously short, even shaved up the back. It looked terrible, a harsh, brutal chop. I was afraid to go home, especially as I would have to pretend I loved this haircut when what I actually wanted to do was cry over its ugliness. My mother looked stricken when I edged uneasily into the house – her hand went to her mouth and her eyes widened. ‘You’ve ruined yourself,’ she whispered.

  My aunts were in complete agreement. I’d ruined my looks which, in their opinion, were well on the way to ruin by now anyway. Nan in particular was appalled when, some weeks later, she came through and saw me (though by then my hair had grown a little and wasn’t quite so shocking). ‘You shouldn’t have let her, Lily,’ said Nan. ‘I wouldn’t have let any daughter of mine do that, ruining herself.’ I jumped in to say it was nothing to do with my mother whether I cut my own hair or not. It was my hair, my decision and I didn’t care how I looked, as if looks mattered. ‘Of course they matter,’ said Nan sharply. ‘You’ll never attract a man with hair like that.’ And so we were back to the same old
battle and I screamed that the last thing I wanted to do was attract men. There was more to life than that and it was a pity Nan hadn’t learned it… Uproar. My approaching two weeks’ holiday at Nan’s was cancelled. It was no loss. I didn’t like going to Nottingham any more; the Marshallsay set-up had lost its attractions, Stilton cheese and all. It meant I wouldn’t be going anywhere – almost our only holidays were visits to the two aunts, to Motherwell or Nottingham – but I was resolved not to care.

  Holidays were always such a torment: the thought of them, the planning of them, the inevitably unsatisfactory nature of the ones that did happen. It was almost preferable having none, to go back to having ‘days’: a day out at Silloth, a day at Keswick, and so on. But we did twice go away for a whole week, all of us except Gordon who was, as ever, at Scout camp. When I was eight we had had a caravan holiday at Allonby, on the Solway coast a few miles west of Silloth. We went by train to Silloth as we often did on ‘days’, only this time we were important, we had luggage, we were staying. The train was, as usual, crowded and we had to fight to get on. My father barged his way to the front of the three-deep crowd standing on the platform and was one of the first into the carriage which stopped abreast with him, but he could only secure one seat before others jammed themselves into place. My mother had hung back from this unseemly pushing and shoving, but now she took the seat he’d captured – it was all like a war – and my sister sat on her knee while my father and I stood.