Promise of a Dream

by Sheila Rowbotham

  The difficulty in writing was also emotional. The constant returns affected me more than I had anticipated. I re-entered buried feelings over and over as draft followed draft and each time around was surprised by their reawakened and continuing power to touch me. Some made me laugh; others saddened me. For two years I was to feel like a time-traveller and not quite at home in the present. Long-forgotten names came out of the shadows of memory and the faces of people who had drifted in and out of my life appeared with clarity.

  Hanging around memories was lonely, but there was also a more convivial side to Promise of a Dream. By checking my versions of events with friends, I found people again. Uncannily, people whom I had not seen for many years popped up out of the blue. I discovered more about people I had whizzed by when I was young. Some I met again and some I read more about, piecing together my personal recollections with written material.

  As I worked consciously over my life as ‘evidence’, I was surprised by what I had kept. Documents I held on myself ranged from half a departure note from my first love and a statement of my first part-time teaching pay in further education. I uncovered letters, a diary, notes and some early articles I had written. I returned to books and magazines which had survived on my shelves from the sixties, reading them with new eyes. From material written subsequently, I not only learned more about the period through which I had lived but found myself able to remember things lurking on the sidelines – a film I had seen, a demonstration I had been at. I patterned and repatterned the returning memories many times, moving between what was written in these external accounts and my own reconstructions of what I had been doing and thinking.

  The process of re-creating was also one of realization. It often felt as if I was mapping out a mosaic of submerged bits and pieces, buried under everything that had happened since. Yet in another sense writing Promise of a Dream left me enmeshed in a deeper level of bewilderment, for it revealed the tangle of coincidences which contribute to the particular fatality of living a life.

  Writing down memories flouts the linear sequence of time; it seems as if you are living a second time around. This of course is illusion, for writing, unlike living, is just pretend. ‘You only live once,’ my mother would assert. The person looking back at their own life is not, of course, exactly the same person who lived it at the time. On the other hand, to cut through a fine point, you do know more about yourself than you know about others, and do have a privileged access to yourself as evidence.

  I did not know how I would write my story when I began. Nor did I know what to expect in rediscovering myself long ago. In my copy of the Evergreen Review for early 1960, I found a quote from Sartre saying that Brecht sought ‘to provoke … the “source of all philosophy”, that is wonder, by making the familiar unfamiliar’. I have pursued this in a double sense, by framing what is familiar to me in a personal narrative and by seeking to subvert some familiar ways of interpreting the sixties.

  CHAPTER 1

  1960–61

  My sixties began far away from any recognizable markers. On New Year’s Eve 1959, I was roaming around remote churches near the edge of the North Yorkshire moors together with my friend from school, Barbara Raines. I was sixteen, but Bar, a few months older, had just passed her driving test. This, our first autonomous expedition in a car, was suffused with excited intimations of freedom.

  We were searching for Saxon crosses, the rough-hewn signposts of forgotten clusters of humanity scattered around what was then still known as the North Riding of Yorkshire. ‘Riding’ echoes an Old Norse word meaning ‘thirding’ and Viking settlers and their descendants, as well as Saxons, had sculpted the stone in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

  As the winter dusk closed in, I peered at the coiled, labyrinthine carvings on the grey stone, trying to reach the hand that had crafted them long ago. Someone who had carved old motifs with an accomplished dexterity and then broken away and laboriously chiselled new designs. Someone as unimaginable as the decade to come.

  Bar and I were ourselves defying all established patterns of behaviour. What kind of normal people would be wandering through chilly graveyards when there were warm mince pies and celebrations at home? We disdained such mundane conventions, convinced that we were going to live the new decade in ways that had never been known.

  Though united in our aspirations, we came from quite different worlds. Bar’s background, a wealthy farming family, deeply rooted in North Yorkshire, was remote from my upbringing in a Leeds Conservative lower-middle-class milieu. Her childhood had been shaped by a rural community which was still stratified, fixed and constant in its assumptions and values. In contrast, social mobility was taken for granted amidst the mill chimneys and blackened civic buildings of the West Riding, where I grew up. ‘It’s not what a man has, but what he’ll make,’ my father would declare, and he had lived out his own axiom. Born the seventh child in a family of fourteen on a small South Yorkshire farm in 1888, he had won a scholarship to grammar school and trained as a mining engineer, leaving his village for ever to work in the Indian mines in the early twenties.

  Grandma Rowbotham had run out of common or garden names such as Charlie and Tommy by the time he arrived and my father was christened rather fancifully as Lancelot. His sisters called him ‘our Lance’, which suited him better, romance not being something he reckoned highly. His travels had left him convinced that the essence of all that was good centred first on Yorkshire and then on Britain. His Yorkshire was peopled by hard workers with moral integrity who treated others fairly. A Tory with a defiant individualism, my father would pronounce on the world from a core of downright certainty with a series of deeply held convictions.

  The gulf between us was extreme. He could express his love for me only as control, which brought us into sustained conflict. This exploded into violence in my early teens when I decided I wanted to be received as a Methodist. In my father’s village Methodists had been lower in status than Anglicans and he remained deaf to my theological arguments. I was to continue pitting myself against his sureties, without being aware how I was turning them around and adapting them.

  The contradictions in his outlook exasperated me in my teens because I esteemed theoretical consistency. Lacking any sense of irony, he would unselfconsciously declare, ‘I’m a very tolerant man but I don’t like the Welsh and I don’t like Methodists.’ In fact these discrepancies in his approach to life were to provide me with the means of escape. For the man who despised Methodists sent me to a Methodist boarding school, Hunmanby Hall, near Filey, in East Yorkshire, where endeavour was valued as service rather than the material accumulation he ostensibly esteemed. Though he discussed women as breeding stock, he was prepared to let me stay on into the sixth form and go to university. Despite his profoundly patriarchal assurance of male control over women, he admired women with ‘spirit’ and loved my mother, Jean, an incurable romantic, a flibbertigibbet with a profound inner strength, who perpetually subverted his pomposity.

  She was a tiny, dark, mischievous woman with the elegance of inter-war femininity and the flapper’s love of pleasure. As a middle-class schoolgirl in Sheffield just before the First World War, she had been forced to write, over and over again, in her copy book, ‘The common round, the daily task, is really all we need to ask’ – a phrase she abhorred. I remember her in well-cut fifties suits, with stockinged legs crossed, holding her cigarette. ‘Allow me, Madam,’ gentlemen would say, leaning across with their lighters, in the posh lounge of the Queen’s Hotel next to Leeds station, where my mother, reliving her ladylike days as an engineer’s wife in India, would occasionally take me for afternoon tea. Resolutely undomestic, she loved Palm Court orchestras, ballroom dancing, romantic novels, shopping and glamour. She exuded a sense of unstated possibilities and deeper meanings – somewhere over the rainbow.

  I was a late child. My mother had become pregnant shortly after an operation for cancer in which her breast had been removed. She tried to abort me by falling down th
e stairs but I had persisted, a mistake, appearing when my brother, Peter, who was to be a remote but revered figure for me as a little girl, was about to leave home for his national service in the RAF.

  Already fifty-nine when the sixties began, my mother seemed much younger, being congenitally irreverent and ever ready to assimilate the new. When I decided to put her on a forced course of Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre and Henry Miller, then only obtainable in the green-backed Grove Press editions smuggled over from Paris, she read them with a characteristic open-mindedness, only demurring at Miller’s ‘bad language’.

  From childhood she would tell me stories of her life, the content shifting subtly as I grew older. She had been close to her father, an early amateur photographer who owned a gun factory and loved reading, but remembered her mother as stern and repressive. Despite family opposition, aged about nineteen she had run away with my much older father to India. They were to return during the Depression to digs and poverty in Leeds, until my father borrowed some money to buy a Morris and found a sales job as an engineer. They prospered in the fifties, moving up in the world from Harehills to middle-class Roundhay. One story, however, she never told me. She was never my father’s wife. Aged sixteen, he had married a village girl, a Catholic, who refused to divorce him when he met my mother. In leaving with him for India, Jean Turner had virtually broken with her own family and found herself completely dependent for survival upon my father. This explained many mysteries: the remoteness of relatives, the absence of wedding photographs and the intensity in her voice when she expressed the hope that education would enable me to earn my own living.

  When I was ten my parents took me in the car through York and Malton and deposited me at Hunmanby. I did not understand why at the time and no explanation was forthcoming, apart from an anecdote about a business acquaintance of my father’s telling him that the sea air would be good for bronchial catarrh. ‘It toughens them up. Teaches them to be independent,’ the adults told one another. My education thus determined, for seven years I coughed and wheezed, with the icy wind whistling across the flat land reclaimed from the North Sea.

  The first few years of my life at Hunmanby were spent contriving to defy the weather and the school timetable. I fended off the cold with hot-water bottles and pink fluffy bed socks at night and, by day, vests, liberty bodices and woolly gloves with the fingers cut off, carefully buttonhole-stitched to prevent fraying. My other enemy, the bell, punctuated time remorselessly. It woke us at 7.10 each morning, marked breakfast at 7.45, signalled assembly, lessons, games and prep, and determined each detail of existence: folding back your counterpane, washing, lights out. I developed elaborate devices to steal time, reading after lights in the lavatory or hiding during games. I stored moments, like the cinder toffee and mint Yo Yo biscuits I learned to hide in the stark wooden dormitory cubicles.

  We were meant to be pure as well as tough. At school assembly tapers would be lit and passed round from a lamp of purity, instituted at the founding of the school, while we sang a special school hymn about unselfish love and wise adventure. I never really sang because I was tone deaf, miming my way through services for seven years. By the late fifties, when I reached the sixth form, the Methodist Church had acquired a liberal intellectual wing that communicated tolerant and inquiring Christianity. One minister with a sense of humour joked about visiting the school during the war when oil was rationed. The then headmistress had proudly displayed the lamp, announcing, ‘This is our lamp of purity. We put it out on Friday night and light it again on Monday morning.’

  Impure freedom at the weekends was never enough, though, for me and I fantasized for seven years about escaping. Early schemes of raft-building or walking over the Yorkshire moors transmogrified into reading and dreaming. From around fourteen I was hobnobbing with interesting historical figures like Mary Wollstonecraft, Lord Byron and Olive Schreiner. By the time I reached the sixth form I had acquired aspirations towards the contemporary avant-garde. I would sit, wrapped in jumpers and blazers, still with the gloves cut off at the fingers, earnestly following Ken Tynan’s theatre reviews or tuning in to Christopher Logue on the Third Programme under the bedclothes after lights out. Imagination being my only form of transport, I would depart in spirit: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins took me to Paris, I travelled to San Francisco with Jack Kerouac and dropped in to Chicago and New York when I listened to blues and jazz.

  My migratory lifestyle disposed me towards an absolute repudiation of the values of home and school, including the lingering warnings about ‘saving’ your virginity for marriage which I decided to be irrational. Nonetheless, my pursuit of impurity and unwise adventure remained annoyingly cerebral. When the young Methodist minister who lived next door recruited me for witnessing sessions in the Christmas holidays, I was so impressed by everybody else’s sins that I began going to his Methodist youth club. After I declared in a debate there that I believed in sex before marriage, a boy who drove a van kindly offered to teach me the cha-cha-cha. When he fondled my breasts and said he wouldn’t kick me out of bed I was amazed. How on earth would we be in bed, I wondered?

  The seclusion of Hunmanby Hall might have left me unschooled in how people actually conducted themselves in 1960, but it was conducive to intensive scrutinizing of the meaning of life with Bar and my other close friend, Lindsay. Lindsay was from Ilkley and from a professional background. Her father was a lawyer and she was the only person I knew with an educated mother. Neither of her parents spoke with Yorkshire accents and though we both bounced through the Gay Gordons partnered by pink-faced young men with clammy hands, I always knew dimly that there was some nuanced distinction between our families.

  By the sixth form of course we disregarded the petty customs of Leeds bourgeois life. But it was not clear how to find an alternative. Lindsay, who was slender and aesthetic, inclined towards a philosophical outlook of ethereal transcendence. It was consequently Bar, dark and unfashionably voluptuous, who helped me to confront the unspoken residue of guilt about the body which had accrued despite my moral iconoclasm. Angst-ridden about most aspects of existence apart from the physical, she possessed a steady acceptance of physicality which I admired. Beneath my overt rejection of conventional morality, I continued to be haunted by the fear of condemnation, a fifties hang-over which remained powerful in 1960. This transmuted into an anxiety that ‘sophistication’ might eat away the capacity to respond with direct spontaneity. The body too evoked ambiguous responses, suggesting freedom knotted with confinement; while sexual passion held out the contradictory promise of transcendent release and masochistic debasement. Whereupon the image of Mitzi Gaynor shampooing her hair in South Pacific and singing ‘I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair’ would flash into my head. Perhaps some compromise could be arranged on the lines of the character in Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real who renewed her virginity with the moon. You could gain the wisdom of a life of all-consuming experience and then wash your hair or check the moon and the world would appear as new. This would avoid having to be ethereal.

  In our last year in the Hunmanby sixth form Bar, Lindsay and I created a self-consciously bohemian enclave, drinking Nescafé, quoting Baudelaire and Shelley, and debating Bertrand Russell and Sartre. Bar introduced the newly fashionable brown make-up, Lindsay acquired a pair of black stockings and I grew my hair, swelling with pride when shopkeepers on Roundhay parade quizzed, ‘You an art student?’

  An ally in rebellion was Vivienne Wellburn. A year ahead of us, Viv had gone off to a glittering life at Leeds University, where she was an assistant producer in a participatory student production of The Merchant of Venice starring Ronald Pickup as Lorenzo. Early in 1960 she wrote to me at Hunmanby enthusing about ‘Ron’, along with Waiting for Godot, and telling me to read Ann Jellicoe’s The Sport of My Mad Mother. Viv was to write several plays herself in the sixties, their themes anticipating women’s liberation.

  Leeds provided rather more scope than Hunmanby for bohemian exp
loration. Other worlds came filtering through into a large provincial city, even if they required some searching out. An art cinema showed a dirty film one week and the New Wave Hiroshima Mon Amour the next; Joe Harriott came to the modern jazz club down by the station; Wolf Mankowitz’s Play Expresso Bongo was performed at the Grand Theatre. I would spend long hours leafing through the shiny record covers of labels like Folkways, Riverside, Prestige Bluesville and Topic which began to arrive in the new Vallance’s shop in the Headrow. As my fingers touched pictures of wooden houses, railway lines and lonesome roads in the Southern states, I entered distant lives. From the rock and skiffle of Fats Domino and Lonnie Donegan during my early teens, by 1960 I had begun listening to the blues of Ma Rainey and Champion Jack Dupree. Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk were the badge of cool and thus de rigueur – though my own preference was really for the warmth and melancholy of the blues.

  Another browsing space, Austick’s, the university bookshop, stocked the Evergreen Review, the Grove Press arts journal from New York. This served as my beat etiquette manual and I would go right through it with the proverbial toothcomb, taking in advertisements as well as articles and reviews, for the whole magazine promised a happening intensity. In my January/February 1960 copy, for example, along with writing by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg there was William Burroughs getting off junk, Antonin Artaud’s ‘Letters from Rodez’ and Philip O’Connor’s account of being a down and out, later published as Steiner’s Tour. Jack Gelber’s play about a junkie, The Connection, was reviewed, as was Norman Mailer’s unashamedly boastful Advertisements for Myself. Though the Evergreen Review campaigned against the US ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover and dipped into left politics with Sartre on Brecht, it mainly prefigured that fascination with extreme inner experiences which was later to characterize the underground press. The mystical nihilism and scorn for external possessions expounded in the Evergreen Review were to be my lode-stones for the new decade.