Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  Nan started asking me if I had a boyfriend when I was only thirteen and kept up the questioning from then on. It used to worry me at first that I had to say no, I hadn’t. It seemed such a sign of failure, but then I began to get irritated by this harping on boyfriends and would snap at her when asked. It was so insulting to be judged according to whether I had a boyfriend, and the worst thing was not to be believed when I said I didn’t want one. But Nan’s curiosity, and her belief that a boyfriend was vital if a girl was to have any status, was shared by almost everyone. Certainly everyone at school thought as she did. By the time we were all fifteen practically the whole of our class had boyfriends, and what was done by and with these boys was the major topic of conversation. Above us we had a terrifying example of what having a boyfriend could lead to. For weeks nothing else was talked about except the pregnancy of one of the cleverest and prettiest girls in the fifth form – she was going to have to get married and argument raged over the rights and wrongs, the delights and horrors of this. The girl was seen every lunchtime standing at the school gate in a clinch with the boy she was going to have to marry and we’d go and stare, fascinated by her boldness, her lack of shame, until a teacher would come along and order the boy to leave at once.

  I thought this girl was mad, quite crazy. I shivered at the mere thought of being trapped with a baby at sixteen. Why had she done it? Why hadn’t she taken care not to get pregnant? But the minute I’d wondered that, I also wondered how that was done. How was care taken, how was pregnancy prevented? Some knowing sort of girls would claim to have access to methods of prevention, but they were always self-important about it and not prepared to share their mysterious knowledge. I didn’t see how anyone could have sex if they ran the risk of becoming pregnant and even though I had absolutely no need to know about contraception then, I felt an urgent need to find out long before it was in the least necessary. Books were the only way. I looked at medical books in the library – furtively, though I was ashamed of being furtive – but they weren’t much good. I did find one of Marie Stopes’s books which, though not nearly explicit enough, gave me hope. Somewhere there were Family Planning Clinics, somewhere there were devices that could be fitted which would prevent babies. Good. When I needed to I was resolved to find them. No boy, no amount of passion à la Nan, was going to impregnate me and spoil my ambitious plans. My mother, my aunts, they had made the fatal mistake of being trapped by children, and I wasn’t going to.

  The vital thing was to be independent, to be single-minded, to have a goal and allow no distractions.

  XIV

  There was, at last, an actual goal. I wished that this goal was also an actual job, a career. I wished I could say I wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer, something definite and recognizable to stop the background murmurs at home that education was a waste of time for girls. But I couldn’t. All I could say was that my goal was to go to university, Oxford or Cambridge if possible.

  University was naturally not a goal I thought up myself but was put into my head by teachers long before I had any real idea what it was. As far as I was concerned it was an extension of my beloved school, only better because you could be there all the time and in a sense get paid to go there. Miss Wynne, my English teacher, gave me booklets about Oxford and Cambridge and I was spellbound by the photographs – they looked literally like fairy-tale places to me, so beautiful, so utterly desirable, so worth having no boyfriends for. It was tantalizing how near escape from home and my mother’s life suddenly seemed – all I had to do was work hard and do well in examinations and I could go off to this amazing place called university. It could be felt, it was solid, this route out of Carlisle, it wasn’t a vague dream any more. A hop, skip and jump and I’d be there. Again and again I checked that having no money would not bar me, and was always reassured that even without scholarships I would qualify for grants that would cover everything. My mother didn’t believe it, and neither did my father, but I was finally convinced.

  I was saving hard, though, to equip myself to go when the time came. On Saturdays I worked in Marks & Spencer, in the Christmas holidays on the post, and in the other holidays in the Steam Laundry. The work in the laundry showed me there was a life far worse than my mother’s as a hard-pressed housewife, a life I should dread far more. I got up at six-thirty, at the same time as my father had always done. I couldn’t believe how cold the house was. I stood and shivered as I watched him laying the fire and lighting it as he had done ever since my mother’s operation, so that we would all come down after he’d cycled off to work to find it burning cheerfully. He made his own fried breakfast, but I left before the smell of the frying could make me feel sick and got my bike out of the shed and set off across Carlisle to the Steam Laundry. We had to clock in – pay was deducted for every minute late – and then it was straight into the huge, draughty room where the dirty clothes were sorted, which opened off the laundry-room itself. The noise was such a shock, a great, tearing, thumping and hissing and clanging, making all talk impossible (though I could see the women around me talking all the time and somehow being understood). I hated the noise more than the smell: a hot, stuffy, cloying smell of soap and disinfectant which clung to the overalls we had to wear and to our hair, theoretically completely covered with caps. I was put first to sorting the in-coming dirty clothes before I graduated to making up the out-going parcels. The clothes arrived in bags which were tipped on to the ground and then every item was tagged before being sorted for different kinds of wash. I could hardly bear to lift some of the filthier items. My fingers plucked at blood-stained knickers disdainfully and the other women had hysterics at my Lady Muck expression. That was not the way to do it – they did it scornfully, jokingly, day in and day out for meagre wages and were immune to the stains and stench. They seemed immune to their entire surroundings, but then how could they be? How could I tell that they were? The lavatories were disgusting. It was an ordeal using them, slipping on the cracked concrete floor swimming in foul water leaking from the broken basins, and barely able to look at the dark brown scummy lavatory bowls, never mind the overflowing sanitary towel bins. It was even colder in the lavatory area than in the factory but the women huddled against the walls and smoked and tried to extend their tea break.

  Marks & Spencer was like heaven compared with the laundry. The pay in the laundry for a gruelling eight-hour day, six days a week, was ten shillings, whereas at Marks & Spencer it was almost twice that for a job where the only hardship was utter boredom. It was easy standing behind a counter selling socks – a clean, undemanding, even pleasant way to pass the day and get paid for it. For one day, anyway. After that the boredom grew and grew, the endless suppression of yawns, the disbelief that surely against all the evidence only half an hour had gone by. But the perks were good. Cheap meals in a proper canteen, a special discount on clothes, and a hairdressing salon available in lunch-hours. The women working there were lucky and they knew it, but though I had the laundry to measure it by I still couldn’t grasp how this job could be done for life. You could be on autopilot all day since only the smallest amount of brain power was needed to ring up prices and pop goods into a bag. But I knew none of the women could afford that kind of luxury, the luxury of analysing what they did and labelling it boring. Boredom didn’t come into the reckoning. To live, they needed money; to earn money, they had to work; to work, they took what they could get; if they could get work in Marks & Spencer, they were privileged.

  I didn’t want my mother’s life, but I didn’t want life as a working woman in the laundry or even in Marks & Spencer. I didn’t want to be condemned to a routine, dull job. Ambition was still fuelled by what I saw around me and I couldn’t understand why everyone else at school didn’t feel the same. Why weren’t they all, as I was, raging and burning to have lives other than those of the women we knew? Yet most expectations were low. There were plenty of girls who wanted only some kind of pleasant job for a few years until Mr Right came along and claimed them. They saw no
need for the kind of panic to escape that I was in. To want so much, as I did, was to be hard and selfish and strange. It was not normal to be so rampantly restless, to be so demanding. Aiming at Oxford or Cambridge was showing off. I even thought that myself and dreaded public failure. I couldn’t speak about my lack of confidence when I knew that to everyone I seemed so absolutely confident. At home, my father was hostile to the whole idea of any university – daft, I was a girl, I’d just get married. I’d be better off working and contributing to the ever-low family exchequer. My mother was not hostile but my ambition confused her. It was unsettling, disturbing, having a daughter wanting to stay at school (which was all university was) for ever. She was proud of my puny achievements so far, my little academic successes, but where would it lead? Only to her own situation, she thought, to a defeat-by-marriage. What had been good enough for the women in the family so far would in the end have to be good enough for me. If, by some fluke, I moved on to another kind of life it would only be at the cost of separating myself from her – it would be a kind of rejection and the thought of this hurt in advance.

  Nan and Jean asked constantly when I was going to start work and make myself some money. Nan especially, on her quite regular visits, was persistent. ‘Eighteen?’ she’d exclaim, ‘You’re eighteen, and still at school? Good heavens, I had my own business at eighteen.’ I’d say nothing, knowing what was to follow. ‘And I knew how to enjoy myself. What are you doing tonight? Oh, I loved Friday nights. I’d be off to dance all night when I was eighteen. Where are you off to?’ I’d say the Garret Debating Society. She almost choked with contempt. ‘Debating? Debating? A young girl like you? On a Friday night? Whatever is the world coming to?’ My lack of response only spurred her to further efforts. ‘Where’s your fun?’ she’d ask. ‘Where’s your pleasure? What’s the point of being a girl if you spend Friday nights debating, eh?’ I’d feel bound to extol the delights of a vigorous discussion on the H-bomb over her remembered bliss of dancing the Charleston, but the more pompous I sounded the more she shook her head. I never let Nan suspect it but her scorn made me miserable. She painted such an enviable picture of her social life as an eighteen-year-old in the twenties, whirling around in a constant dance, a glittering, beautiful girl who knew only too well what fun was. She made my kind of fun suddenly seem what in fact it was – staid, solemn, too leaden to come under the heading of fun at all. ‘If I’d had a daughter,’ she would always finish, ‘she wouldn’t have been doing any of this debating on Friday nights. She’d have been a real girl.’

  But she didn’t have a daughter, and how she pined for one, and so did Jean. My mother had the daughters. She’d ended up the lucky one, to their dismay and surprise. Attacking me for not being a ‘real’ girl was a crude way of attacking my mother and I vaguely understood that. Nan was somehow jealous. She wanted to recreate in me what she had been at the best stage of her now disappointing life. But I was no good as a substitute daughter any more. She and Jack couldn’t dress me up and take me around as once they had done. Jack was sure I was a Communist. My truculence upset him, all my loud talk of things not being fair. His daughter wouldn’t have turned out like that. She’d have been a clone of Nan but with the advantages Nan had never had, and it would have been fun, fun, fun. Watching me go off to my ludicrous debating society quite distressed him.

  It was fairly ludicrous, too. The Garret was exactly that: a very small attic room at the top of a rickety staircase in one of Carlisle’s medieval lanes. By the late fifties these lanes were in a dilapidated state and the houses crumbling. In this garret there was a Youth Club, set up by the sixth forms of the boys’ Grammar School and the girls’ High School soon after the Second World War. It was also supposed to be a place where students could go to study, but all they did was study each other and plan as many socials as possible. Every now and again there would indeed be a debate, just for the look of the thing, but so much jeering went on that by the time a vote was taken on the evening’s proposal nobody could remember who had said what. I was good at debating, which was how I allowed myself to be persuaded to go to the Garret, but long after I’d discovered what a farce the debating was I went on going. There was something secretive and even hopeful about entering the narrow lane and walking down the cobbled passage to the dark little Garret entry. The whole point of the shabby room was that it was a meeting place, a hanging-about place, and those were otherwise unknown in a Carlisle where, after five o’clock, there were no coffee bars unless the Milk Bar was counted. I liked having somewhere to go and it was wonderfully convenient to pretend the Garret Debating Society was a most worthy, intellectual institution. My mother was impressed, even if Nan wasn’t. Other girls went to dances and parties but I went out to debate and for once she was gratified. I came home and kept the illusion intact, never mentioning the socials. These were held in a larger room across the staircase and consisted merely of records being played (until the arrival of skiffle). I didn’t care about the music. It was all noise to me, and nor did I dance. There would be so many teenagers crammed into the room nobody could tell who was dancing and who was not, and there was no room for anyone to be such an obvious thing as a wallflower. Nan would’ve been wasted in the Garret.

  Some of the boys who went to the Garret were clever but not intimidatingly so. I liked trying to best them in argument but that was as far as my interest went. I wasn’t going to be distracted, I had a purpose in life. I still didn’t care in the least that everyone else had a boyfriend and I didn’t.

  In December 1956 I was summoned for interview at both Oxford and Cambridge. The journey itself was an adventure since I’d never been further south than Nottingham and even then never on my own. My mother worried about – what else? – my clothes. Lately, I’d developed such weird habits. I wouldn’t wear nylon stockings. I said I hated suspender belts. They were like harnesses and I wasn’t a horse. So there I was, eighteen and either bare-legged or wearing socks if it was very cold. My mother thought this shocking. She’d worn a corset, never mind a suspender belt, since she was sixteen and considered this an inseparable part of being a woman – it proved you were a woman when you got to that corset-wearing stage. It appalled her to see me at eighteen wearing my silly socks and flat shoes. That was another thing. I wouldn’t wear proper court shoes or any shoe with a high heel. Other girls couldn’t wait to get into high heels, they were a coming-of-age rite, but I loathed them. Then there was the continuing disgrace of my hair, still cropped short. Socks, flat shoes, butchered hair… and the black clothes to which I was devoted. She was in despair.

  She didn’t know what to say when I set off for these interviews. Good luck, she supposed, but what in this context did it mean? That I would be offered a place at Oxford or Cambridge? Well, she could hope that for my sake, because she knew how much I wanted it, but not for her own. She wished aloud that she could envisage where I was going but she couldn’t, in spite of the photographs she’d seen. She couldn’t imagine Girton or Somerville. She couldn’t imagine what the women dons could possibly be like except that they would not be like her, that was for sure. They’d be spinsters, she supposed, clever, single women dedicated to learning and knowing nothing of wash-houses or cleaning out grates. A cut-off-from-reality life, very nice, very pleasant, and yet she still could not truly imagine it.

  Nor could I. Girton was the first shock. It was so ugly, so vast and chilling and gloomy. Arriving there on a December afternoon in the rain I felt I was entering a prison. The corridors seemed endless, the closed doors forbidding and, though there was a grandeur about the main hall, it repelled me. The interviews themselves were fine, the interviewers quite unterrifying and I had no bother with any of the questions. But back in the dreary room I’d been allocated I wondered how I could successfully pretend to want to come to this place should I be accepted. Oxford was better. It was the next morning I went on to Somerville and the rain had stopped and by the time I was walking up St Giles the sun was out and the place sparkled. Som
erville was not prison-like, it was merely disappointingly modern-looking but at least quite unthreatening. There wasn’t much difference in the interviews but there was in the surroundings and food. Everything here was lighter and brighter. There were flowers and paintings everywhere, the mood was cheerful. If I go anywhere, if I get in to both, I’ll come here, I thought, even if for all the wrong reasons, and that was before the final persuasion, the interview with the Principal, Janet Vaughan.

  By the time I came to be sitting outside Janet Vaughan’s room I was beginning to think there must be something the matter with me. I didn’t seem able to communicate with any of the women who’d so far interviewed me. I could reply to their questions but I didn’t seem able to connect with the questioners. These dons were so remote from the sort of women I knew. Their voices were different – accents, vocabulary, intonation – and so were their clothes and rooms. They weren’t even akin to the teachers at school but an entirely alien breed to me. None of them seemed interested in me but only in what I knew. But Janet Vaughan was interested. I recognized her curiosity at once. She sat at the end of her long room and it seemed a test of deportment to get to the chair opposite her which she indicated, but once there I felt for the first time quite comfortable. She was a slender, fine-boned woman with dark hair parted in the middle and drawn back into a bun. She wasn’t beautiful but she had a vitality, an alertness, about her which was attractive. Her eyes engaged and yet there was something nervous about them, and her smile flickered on and off making her seem shy. She was wearing a brown tweed suit and cream silk blouse with a large cameo brooch at the neck. Elegant, in an understated kind of way, a woman maybe as interested in clothes as my mother.