At home in Tachbrook Street, life was dominated by the arrival of Siobhán, born in St Thomas’s hospital on 4 November, five days after Julia’s arrival from Madras. Julia loved babies and was immediately devoted to her niece. In the mornings, Peggie would sometimes come downstairs and pop Siobhán into bed with her half-awake aunt. ‘Julia said she liked the noises she made, she liked the noises babies made in the morning.’ It was a happy experience for Julia, but one that made her sharply aware of how late she was leaving things if she was ever to have children herself. Her thirty-eighth birthday came when Siobhán was a month old.
Because the Westminster job was part-time, Julia felt she needed to keep looking for another to supplement it. Within a few weeks, beginning in the January term, she found a job teaching English at Pimlico School, a secondary modern in what was then a fairly rough working-class area. Her sole knowledge of the area was derived from the Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico, which she had seen in Madras, subtitled in Hindi. (Anthony Burgess claimed to have seen Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet dubbed into Hindi and then subtitled back into English. The subtitled version of ‘To be or not to be’ began: ‘Shall I live on? Or do myself in? I do not know.’) The intake was not big on social graces – much less so than at Church Park – but it was, to this Irishwoman in a city she had never visited before, unexpectedly warm and friendly. It probably helped that the area had a significant population of Irish, who at this point still had a trace of disreputability – they were assumed to be navvies or the children of navvies, drunken and dirty and quick-breeding. That was not an assumption Julia shared. The boys queuing to hand over their lunch money would sometimes pause at the head of the line and demand: ‘Fulham or Chelsea, Mam?’ – these being the two local football teams. The wrong answer would get a scowl and sneer; the right answer would be met with ‘Buy ya dinner.’ It was the closest thing to flirting Julia had experienced in many years.
London is, I think, a cold city, one that turns a face of inhospitable indifference to outsiders – but I first fetched up there in 1987. My mother arrived in 1958, and she did not find it so. The atmosphere of the school was rough but friendly. She was astonished by how education did not seem to be perceived as crucial. In rural Ireland and in Madras, everyone knew that education was the all-important means of escape and life transformation. In England it was, on the contrary, important not to get above yourself. No one would ever admit it, but people were happy where they were. They were especially happy with the level of complaint and grumbling, which often seemed one of life’s most important pleasures. A few of her brightest pupils had passed the eleven-plus and been offered a place at grammar school, but their parents had not allowed them to take it up. She raised the question with one of the parents and they shuffled and looked shifty and embarrassed and eventually admitted to her – as they perhaps wouldn’t have if she hadn’t been Irish – ‘We didn’t want him to think he was better than us.’ Education had become fused with class, and in this world people did not necessarily want their children to have more opportunities than they had had. It was the opposite of everywhere else my mother had taught, where providing your children with more chances than you had had was seen as education’s primary purpose.
The corollary of this was a great feeling of warmth and solidarity and everyone being in things together. It was exactly what my mother needed, coming from the closed, competitive, authoritarian world of the convent: warm, friendly, rough, democratic, and indifferent to qualities of status and protocol. My mother felt that she had spent a decade holding her tongue; here nobody seemed to do that. In the convent, all impulses were repressed, and then the pain of that repression was ‘offered up to God’. Here it was much simpler: nothing was repressed. If you felt anger or envy or greed, you shouted or jibed or gorged. Pimlico School was a liberation.
Outside the school, Julia’s main friends were in the London Labour Party. The Tachbrook Street flat was owned by a young couple, the Garsides, who were active in local Labour politics. (Mair Garside went on to be Deputy Leader of the GLC, just before it was taken over by Ken Livingstone.) Julia joined the party; her new friends in it were kind to her, at a point in her life when she needed kindness. Julia’s life had been all about roles, and her identity had been provided by the institution she lived in; outside it, she was acutely aware of the need to make herself up; she felt as if she were nobody. These new friends didn’t care who she had been, they just took her as she was now – and that, again, was a liberation and a release. She also had to learn how to behave – to interact with people directly, rather than as mediated through all the hierarchies of authority and the Church. She had to learn how to go for a drink after work, how to act at a dinner party, how to pay bills, how to cook, and perhaps more than anything else, how to behave with men – how to flirt, how to keep them at a distance. It wasn’t that this new, habitless way of being with men did not have rules; it had just as many as the convent had, but they were entirely different. A nun’s smile is not the same thing as a pretty girl’s smile, even if the nun is a pretty girl. For the first time in her life she felt free. For the first time in her life she wore trousers. She felt that she had left the convent just in time to feel young.
Julia was, as photos show, pretty, and looked much younger than her age. She was lively, funny, clever, and very good company. She soon got the hang of how to talk to men and began to get on especially well with a teacher at Westminster College called Tom Allen. He was a colleague of Peggie and a sort of friend to Vincent and her. Peggie says:
He was a person I half-liked but didn’t altogether like. He was an only son and his mother and father absolutely adored him. They were always telling you how wonderful Tom was, et cetera. Tom was good fun, I liked him. He afterward occasionally wrote columns for the Guardian. But when he had too much to drink, which was quite frequently, he got very aggressive and foul-mouthed. And I’m terribly suspicious of men like that. I feel that I can’t altogether trust them.
At the end of the spring term, Julia found a job as head of English at Avondale, a secondary modern school in west London. There she met and quickly made friends with Dora Lanchester, who was teaching part-time. Julia continued to teach evening classes at Westminster and continued to get on well with Tom Allen. ‘They got closer and closer and closer,’ is how Peggie remembers it. And then one day in the summer, no more than nine months after Julia had left the convent, they came upstairs to Peggie and Vincent’s flat and announced that they had some news: they were going to marry. Peggie felt a touch of apprehension about this, based on her reservations about Tom and the relatively short period of time Julia had had to locate herself in the world outside the convent. But the happy couple, and especially Tom, were bursting with their news. ‘He in particular was ecstatic and went around telling everybody.’
About a week later, Peggie was in her kitchen, standing at the sink, when she saw her sister come in looking ashen.
Julia came up looking absolutely shaken. She said, ‘The most terrible thing has happened. Tom’s mother rang me and she was absolutely furious and railed at me to leave her son alone. She didn’t want her son to marry anyone like me. She went on and on.’ I said, ‘What are you going to do, Julia?’ She said she didn’t know. Almost as she was saying this Tom rang the doorbell. So the two of them went down to Julia’s flat. Tom was there for quite a while and when he left Julia came up. She was so happy. Tom was absolutely furious with his mother. He was going to go home, he was going to move out, he was going to move into her flat. He was having no more to do with his mother until she apologised to Julia, and to him, et cetera. I was so pleased. But poor Julia. She never saw Tom again. He just disappeared off the planet.
Tom stopped going into work, moved from his flat, and left no forwarding address. He broke off all contact with Julia. In a life that had already had one devastating rejection, and one horribly cruel and abrupt termination of an engagement, this combined rejection and broken engagement left Julia spinning. And sh
e was already spinning anyway, with the shock of leaving the convent. It left her feeling that every good thing would always go wrong and that she could rely on no one. Her first experience, since leaving the order, of extending her trust, had ended in catastrophic failure and public humiliation. Three months after this, she met my father. Peggie, Vincent, and Siobhán had moved to Norwich by then, Peggie having taken a job in a school there, so Julia was in Tachbrook Street on her own when she met Bill over dinner at Lannie’s.
I find that I don’t want to write too much about my parents’ courtship. There is often a point in memoirs where someone finds a ‘cache’ of letters and droolingly recounts the secrets therein. I’m not going to do that; but I will quote a few examples suggesting how my parents fell in love. The attraction was based, I think, on the fact that Bill and Julia found each other easier to talk to than anyone else either had ever met. Perhaps that’s one of the most common reasons for falling in love; it certainly seems to me one of the better ones.
Bill’s first letter to Julia is a short note, giving the title of the Graves book – The Common Asphodel – and complaining about the difficulty he was having importing his new record player into Calcutta: ‘bureaucrats are having Bengali field-day’. She wrote, he wrote, and they got into the swing of things. I won’t quote the correspondence at length, but I will give a flavour of it with the second letter each of them sent to the other. Bill describes his life in Calcutta.
Your very welcome letter has been lying invitingly on my desk since 10 o’clock, but I had no chance to open it (is ‘had no chance’ a Bengali-ism? I read so much of it that my command of English English, or Irish English if you’re going to be stubborn, is sensibly weakening) till now, 20 past 10 pm. I am still very busy – busier – working till 7–8 every night just keeping abreast of daily necessities, and it has not been made easier by the confident arrival on Friday of two Inspectors from HEAD OFFICE, one of whose jobs has been to sit at my desk and ask me questions (sly, delivered with a frank open expression and only slight hesitation, and straightforward – ‘when you commit a felony do you prefer a pen, or an axe?’) for two or three hours a day. I think I passed, A with a few smudges, but these gentlemen are so smooth that I shall not know for sure till judgement is delivered, in the prosaic form of a report from Head Office written when they are again, in safety, there.
Seriously I am very busy. If I am not interrupted, and have nothing that needs looking into, I can be away by 5 or 5.30, but the Accountant, whom I like very much – ‘feel very fond of’ is more accurate as he is rather like a small boy, I should hate to hurt his feelings at all – loves to talk, particularly about Banking, and his brilliant solutions of the profound and difficult (‘It’s the simple things that are the most difficult’) problems which can be found therein. I go into his office to ask if he agrees to my paying a bill for say £10, and come out, an hour later, with no answer but having had a long discussion (monologue, rather, and a monologue is not a conversation) on what we are really doing, as bankers. His need for somebody intelligent (somebody?) to talk to is rather pathetic – a clever man who is bored to death by doing dull work and who is driving himself, and us, round the bend by trying to convince himself that the work is difficult enough to be worth tremendous pains. A very nice – eccentric – to other people – man. He is, I think, aware of being in the grip of an obsession, and needs the solace of human contact (contact means ‘a listener’) and finds in me, I think, a person who listens sympathetically – does he feel that I am listening to the person and not to the words perhaps? A small, thin, dark man, married to an intellectually smart woman.
That letter was addressed to someone Bill called ‘Julie’. Julia by now was turning into someone else. Julie was Irish, but less Irish than Julia or Sister Eucharia. She was educated. She was funny and, on her own turf, could be overbearing, though shy in some public spheres. She didn’t stress her own Irishness as much as Julia had done. I have sometimes thought of telling my mother’s story divided into the different people she was at various times in her life: Julia, Sister Eucharia, and Julie. The last two of these were, in their own ways, constructed or chosen identities. Sister Eucharia was a person who was partly created, and propped up by, the Church, and whose experiences were structured by it. She saw the world through an institutional prism. But Julia had a self that didn’t entirely fit that grid: her own feelings, her own wants, eventually made institutional life impossible. Sister Eucharia couldn’t stand being herself any more. She became Julia Gunnigan, who was then to become Julie Gunnigan, and then Julie Lanchester: free, married, British, a mother, an escapee.
Julie found it easy to confide in Bill. She wrote a long letter that was startlingly candid about her recent mishaps in love.
Tell me, Bill, how would you feel if you were likely to meet Jean [an old girlfriend] here and there more or less unexpectedly? I ask because I met Tom again last week at a teacher’s meeting. I didn’t speak to him – couldn’t; but seeing him brought a lot of the old heartache back. I hoped no one else noticed anything so you can imagine how I felt when the girl who was sitting beside me asked me afterwards if I was nervous at the meeting because my hands were shaking so much – I could scarcely hold a cigarette. I don’t know what to make of myself – I don’t want to marry Tom – that is quite definite, I know now that it wouldn’t work. I have no wish to start meeting him again but he still attracts me – even though I don’t really like him. Do you know what I mean, Bill? Or does this sound like raving? And can you tell me why? I thought years of silence had taught me enough about myself never to be surprised by my own behaviour. I am bewildered and I don’t like it.
That she felt easy in being honest with Bill didn’t mean she was any sort of pushover, as her letter went on to prove.
Your description of the Accountant made him so real that I think I’d recognise him if we met. I call him Mr Hastings – don’t know why. But what, please, is an ‘intellectually smart’ woman? I haven’t any picture whatsoever of his wife. You like Hastings, I know, but what about Mrs H.? Have you ever noticed that very few men can really describe a woman as she is? – I mean in writing (same applies to women writing of men). Even Durrell himself slips up with his women folk. Justine [a character in Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet] is a little bit phoney to me and I am afraid that he is going to make Clea too good to be true. The milk of human kindness must turn sour at some time for every daughter of Eve. It’s just as well for me that we are not talking now as I know you’d pull every bit of this to pieces and probably try to make me eat my words. But I have so many other things to write about that I don’t want to go on for pages making a case here. And all because I cannot imagine what intellectually smart Mrs Hastings looks like or is like, I should say.
So Bill rapidly learned that he wasn’t going to be allowed to get away with anything. But he wasn’t put off. A key point in the correspondence was when he read, and showed that he understood, Katherine Hulme’s novel The Nun’s Story, which Julie had sent him by way of explaining life in the convent.
You will probably be surprised to get a letter from me while you still owe me one (HINT), but I picked up last night – I think I have been avoiding it – The Nun’s Story, and I want to thank you for it. I found it very moving. It also made me feel very angry. What a waste. There must be very few people indeed who are born to that life, and can it ever be anything but a triumph of the will in those not born to it? When I say this I mean that no, or few, triumphs of the will are much good. – Why exalt one part over the other? It does seem such a pity that one should have to shut out so much; is The World so powerful? It is very distracting, certainly, but the life of the cloister is such an extreme one, it must make as many difficulties as it does away with. I felt so glad for that nun, when she describes herself sitting in the cafe at the end of the book – how she must have enjoyed the sensations of being in a world of colour once again! For there is no colour at all in the rest of the book you know – all black and
white light. Perhaps that’s why she loved the Congo so much.
The World may be extreme, but so’s a nunnery!
You know – it only really struck me the other day – you are perhaps the only person I know that I can really talk to! This will perhaps explain, and excuse, my having talked such a lot! You may remember that I apologised for talking your head off!
The same letter then moves into a much more intimate mode, as Bill describes an unpleasant experience he had with a flatmate who went off with a French girl Bill had been pursuing. It was a painful thing to talk about, an admission of difficult feelings, but, again, Julie did not let him get away with anything.
You say the whole episode would have hurt more if you were jealous. But, weren’t you? And who wouldn’t be in the circumstances? Perhaps only your pride was hurt. I wonder, though, if you could, by any stretch of the imagination, have brought the whole thing on yourself? You say your French girl may or may not have a brain. Very likely she had. She had to contend with a certain amount of language difficulty. And it is quite possible that she was aware of your quest for a brain and maybe scared or put off at the idea. I don’t think any woman likes being dissected. We haven’t got your brain to face the ordeal with, Mr Lanchester! Can’t you manage to achieve a synthesis between your brain and your ‘solar plexus’ (what on earth is your, or anyone else’s, solar plexus anyhow) and like them with both?
Family Romance Page 22