Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  ‘Mum, please, listen. You’ve led a good life, you have… You’ve done so much good in it. You’ve been a wonderful daughter and wife and mother. Nobody could have been better… You’ve had and brought up three children. You’ve always put your family first… Isn’t that making something of your life? Isn’t it?’

  ‘No. It isn’t what I mean. Look at you…’

  ‘Mum! I can’t bear it. You go on as though I’d climbed Everest or discovered penicillin. I haven’t done any more than you have. My life is no more commendable than yours. There’s no real difference in what we’ve achieved. A few skittery books doesn’t amount to much…’

  ‘It’s how I feel. And I’ve had enough anyway.’

  The nurse came and took her pulse. ‘Is your father coming?’ she asked. I said he was. He’d take over from me and spend the evening here as usual. She nodded, said my mother’s pulse was very weak, though this wasn’t necessarily significant. It could mean a sudden collapse was imminent but on the other hand it might not happen tonight or tomorrow, or the next day, there was no real knowing. So I left and my father came. He stayed an hour and then made his sad way home, no words having been spoken by my mother. She died at four o’clock the next morning, 12 August. We rushed in from Caldbeck and went with my father to see my mother’s body – he was insistent we should see it. ‘That’s not her,’ he said, at the sight of her corpse. ‘That’s one thing I know, it’s not her. She’s gone.’ He was right. The dead body was nothing, aroused no emotion except relief. ‘Take her ring off,’ my father instructed, ‘we don’t want them lot having it.’ With difficulty I worked my mother’s wedding ring off her stiff, cold finger, loathing the touching of her. I would give it to my sister (on holiday in France, not even knowing before she went that my mother was so ill).

  Another glorious day for this funeral too. Nan came, not as distressed as she had been at Jean’s, but then this time she had been prepared. There wasn’t the same sense of shock. ‘Oh, it’s awful being old,’ she sighed, ‘awful.’ She said Jack wasn’t well enough to come (‘a likely story’ my father muttered, audibly, but nobody felt like challenging him). Michael was now so paralysed with MS he couldn’t talk, but Nan said tears had rolled down his cheeks when she told him Aunt Lily was dead and she was leaving him for two days to go to her funeral. Standing watching the coffin slide off to be cremated, I could only think of my mother’s last words to me: ‘I’ve had enough… It hasn’t amounted to much, my life.’

  It had amounted to us, standing there, it had amounted to her family. Yet she was a woman who had felt cheated, but of what exactly? Had we failed her as a family? Had the concept of family itself failed her? I knew that whenever I lay dying I would not be feeling the dreadful sense of waste she felt.

  After the funeral I began the attempt to inquire into my grandmother’s past which began this book, wanting not just to satisfy my own curiosity but believing that what I said was true – I can’t understand my own history unless I understand my grandmother’s, my mother’s and that of the women like them, the ordinary working-class women from whom I come. The mission is only half accomplished.

  My curiosity certainly isn’t satisfied. I haven’t found out nearly enough about my grandmother or about her first illegitimate daughter Alice. I hate having to accept that I will never know what happened to Margaret Ann between the ages of two and twenty-three. I will never know the circumstances of Alice’s conception nor what happened to her as a child. It is how my grandmother wanted it. She successfully concealed from her legitimate daughters every scrap of her past before 1893, the perfect crime except there was no crime involved. She was a woman determined to have no past, or at least to decree it should start when she was twenty-three.

  Twenty-three years old… If I suppressed the first twenty-three years of my own life it could never properly be understood by me or anyone else. If I knew nothing of the first twenty-three years of my mother’s life I could not possibly understand her – those years explain her personality and illuminate her problems to a startling degree. We are our past, especially our family past, a truism if ever there was one. But my grandmother could not bear to acknowledge this. Locked up inside her was an unfathomable amount of unhappiness, perhaps even horror, if of a sadly conventional kind, and the only way she could deal with it was by pretending it never existed – so much pretending women like my grandmother had to do. The urge in her to be respectable and above reproach was so strong, and the rules of that respectability so rigid, that it overrode all other desires. In our age, my age, when we are encouraged at every level to be open about our upbringing and whatever happened to us in the course of it, women like Margaret Ann Jordan are virtually incomprehensible in their passion for privacy and secrecy.

  As for women like Alice… Alice died on 2 November 1955, in Garlands, Carlisle’s mental hospital, the old Cumberland and Westmorland Lunatic Asylum opened in 1862. Records there are closed for one hundred years so there is no means of telling how long Alice had been there or how many times she had been admitted, or what precisely was the nature of her mental illness. Did my grandmother’s rejection of her lead Alice to a complete breakdown? Did her half-sisters’ denial that she was who she said she was precipitate nervous collapse eventually?

  I visited Alice’s grave, with vague hopes of finding on her tombstone something beyond the dates I already knew. William Muir, her husband, bought a plot for Alice to be buried in (and for himself, ten years later) but it is not in Carlisle’s main cemetery where her mother and grandmother were buried. It is in Upperby, to the south of Carlisle, the area to which Alice and William moved from Brook Street. I had the number of the grave and a map to locate it. Upperby cemetery lacks both the grandeur and the floral splendour of the main cemetery. It is quite small, with virtually no trees and the only flowers are those laid on the graves. There is a big hedge at the east end of it, hiding a railway line. Alice is buried right up against it. But there is no stone at all to mark the spot. The other graves have headstones but not 12-D3, Alice’s plot. There is nothing to mark that she is there. A blank. A path of smooth grass. It looks odd, as though a mistake has been made… How can I forgive my grandmother for her treatment of Alice?

  To answer that is the stuff of fiction – so tempting to invent a history for Alice, to imagine a plausible explanation for my grandmother’s apparently callous treatment of her and be then able, graciously, to forgive her, but it would not be a satisfactory solution in this case. But it is not my grandmother who needs to be forgiven. It is the times she lived in, those harsh times for women, the times that led to waste of a far more savage kind than my mother ever experienced. It gives me such satisfaction to prove, to myself at least, that what I hoped was true is true – my chances, my lot, my expectations, born as I was into a working-class family in which women had always served rather than led, were always hundreds of times better than my grandmother’s or mother’s. All of us, all three representatives of different generations, always have put family first but in my case, in the case of my generation, it has not been at ruinous cost. I’m not, and haven’t been, crippled by the family. I don’t pay an enormous emotional price for the having of one. I have been able to be myself within its confines.

  Margaret Ann Jordan, Lilian Hind, Jean Wallace, Nan Marshallsay, even poor Alice, all the women whose lives and times I have touched upon, would have been able to fulfil themselves in an entirely different and much more gratifying way if they could have benefited from the radical changes in the last half century from which I have benefited. Let no one say nothing has changed, that women have it as bad as ever.

  They do not. My personal curiosity may not have been satisfied but my larger curiosity, as to whether life has indeed improved for women like my immediate ancestors, is. And I am glad, glad not to have been born a working-class girl in 1869 or 1901. Everything, for a woman, is better now, even if it is still not as good as it could be. To forget or deny that is an insult to the women who have gone b
efore, women like my grandmother and mother.

  1. Lilian, aged five, Thomas Hind, Jane (known as Jean), aged two, and Margaret Ann Hind

  2. Thomas Hind standing on the tram steps with Lilian, aged four, behind the driver (CUMBRIA COUNTY LIBRARY)

  3. Number 4 Paternoster Row (left) where Margaret Ann worked as a domestic servant for the Stephenson family. The family’s business premises adjoin the house (right) (CUMBERLAND NEWS)

  4. The inside view of Carlisle’s covered market showing traders selling flowers, eggs, butter, etcetera, circa 1901. Thomas Hind’s butcher stalls were higher up, beyond this part (CUMBRIA COUNTY LIBRARY)

  5. Jane (Jean), aged eight, Lilian, aged eleven, and Annie (Nan), aged four. Their beautiful dresses were made by Margaret Ann Hind

  6. Lilian, aged twenty-five, when she was working in the Public Health Department

  7. A panoramic view of Caldewgate from the tower of Trinity Church. Margaret Ann was born in St John Street, a turning on the right at the end of this street (CUMBRIA COUNTY LIBRARY)

  8. The wedding photo, 11 April 1931 (left to right): Agnes Forster, George Forster, Arthur, Lilian, Margaret Ann

  9. A holiday photograph of the charabanc leaving Scarborough in 1931. Lilian and Arthur are in the second row from the back

  10. Lilian, me, aged seven, and Pauline, aged four

  11. Jack, looking rakish even on the beach, and Nan, elegant as ever

  12. Jack and Nan, still glamorous in their early forties

  13. Family group on the sea front at Silloth, 1951: (middle row) Michael, Jack, me, Nan, Lilian (behind) Dave and Arthur (front) Pauline

  14. Lilian aged forty-five

  15. Me on the set of Georgy Girl, aged twenty-eight

  Author’s Note

  In one sense there was no real research, or what I would term research, needed for this book, since it relies so heavily on personal memory of one kind or another, but attempting to place these memories, many of them not mine, in some historical context did lead to a great deal of delving into the Cumbria County Council Archives, housed in Carlisle Castle. I am grateful for the help of the efficient and enthusiastic staff there and also for the help of Denis Perriam, Haydn Charles-worth and Rosemary Southey who looked up information when I had returned to London (where I live half the year). Harry Arkle undertook further searches for me at the Newcastle end.

  It was a strange feeling, every time I made my way to the castle, to be walking past the house where my grandmother worked as a servant. I’d day-dream along Paternoster Row and into Castle Street and reach the Records Office convinced there was something in the power of place. A memoir, of whatever kind, is such a living thing, its subject matter so hypnotic, especially when it is rooted in local history, as this one is. The past – my grandmother’s, my mother’s, my aunts’ – did not seem a foreign country to me as I daily walked its streets. I passed over and over again the places where they had lived and worked and shopped until the empathy with them was so strong, and the recollection of my childhood self so sharp, that we all walked together. But that perhaps is the point of any memoir – to walk with the dead and yet see them with our eyes, from our vantage point.