When I reached home my mother had gone into a coma and was no longer conscious. The nurse who was looking after her said she had thought I had come. But I feared she was saying this to assuage my remorse. My mother was breathing in great laboured gasps. She died the next day, aged sixty-four.
While the Anglican priest at her funeral intoned inappropriate platitudes, I sat remembering her zest and irreverence. A lifetime Conservative voter, yet anarchical in her personal outlook, my mother had been instinctively against the powers-that-be. ‘It’s old men who start wars and young men who die in them’ was one of her many sayings. These proverbs about human existence accompanied the stories about her own life which she would relate as she sipped the brandy and dry ginger she kept in the kitchen cupboard or reclined for her afternoon nap in the double bed from which my father had long been banished. I used to sit listening to them on a stool by the electric fire where she lit the cigarettes she chain-smoked.
Now there was only a coffin in an aloof Anglican church and all I could do was to go over them in my head, gathering up memories. Through her I had heard of my father’s resolute courtship – how he had driven her other suitors away, running after a tram in Sheffield when she stormed off in a rage. I knew about the bungalow in India, my brother’s ayah and my mother’s delight in dancing with young officers at the club. When they returned to England in the depression during the early thirties, my father could find a job only as an electrician in a colliery. I could feel her humiliation, the former memsahib reduced to cadging Woodbines off the young miner in the family where she was living with my brother, Peter. Her voice would lift then with accounts of how my father had secured a sales job and they had settled in Leeds, living in lodgings in Harehills with a family called the Blacks. ‘We’ve had our ups and downs.’
Life at the Blacks was one of her ‘ups’; my undomestic mother clearly enjoyed being part of an extended family of lodgers. She would chuckle as she told me about young Graham Black, off on a date, singing about putting on his tuxedo as he Brylcreemed his hair in front of the mirror. ‘Tuxedo’ was a funny term, like the ‘finishing kibosh’ that an old major, also lodging at the Blacks’, used to make my brother Peter put on all the shoes he polished for the household.
There were bits in these stories I did not understand, discontinuities that I could not piece together and parts I had forgotten. When I faltered in the midst of the narrative to myself, I would turn as if to ask her. Then there would be silence, blankness. She was dead.
I had to sort through her belongings. The clothes could be folded to give away. But her shoes stood in the bottom of the cupboard. As I crouched on the floor looking at them, they assumed a malevolent indestructibility. These objects I had never stopped to consider had outlasted the human being I had loved. I recalled the dreadful emptiness of the piles and piles of shoes I had seen in the Polish concentration camp near Lublin.
Among her papers I discovered a tiny visiting card from an army major. Along with a green army rug, she had kept this all those years, through her travels back and forth. She had told me about the older man who had talked to her about Indian art and music, making her question my father’s assumption of British superiority. He had been a medical doctor but left the army after his wife ran off with another man. Addicted to morphine, he had delivered the rug with his card one day, gone home, taken an overdose and died. And she had kept them both.
I also found letters from my father and tried to imagine the young man whose tone reminded me of those socially mobile characters in H. G. Wells novels, a modern man without any frills, embarking on a brand-new century. He had met my mother towards the end of the First World War, when Jean Turner was eighteen and staying with friends of her family in a farm near his village of Aston. He was already in his early thirties, separated from the wife he had married at sixteen. My father had acquired a bad reputation with women and the village schoolmaster reported their courtship to my mother’s parents in Sheffield. Lance had been banned, which of course greatly boosted his desirability to the defiant young Jean. One of the letters was apologetic, there was the suggestion of passion. I was moved by the ardent, unrespectable, awkward man they revealed – so unlike the father I knew. But feeling as if I were eavesdropping, I bundled them up to give him and never saw them again.
I stayed in Cambridge with Bob for a while after my mother died. The bustle of organizing for the teach-in about Vietnam came as a relief from the grim sadness of the house in Leeds. By chance one day we came across E. M. Forster in the quad of King’s College. He was extremely frail and had been ill for a while. I had an accumulation of questions to ask him. I knew Edward Carpenter’s working-class lover had inspired Forster’s novel Maurice and that Forster had known Charles Ashbee and other unconventional lecturers who had gone to teach in the University Extension Movement. But a glance at the face of this fragile-looking man made me aware that such questions would have been intrusive. I could not even explain how the perceptions of personal relationships in his novels had shaped my own attitudes so profoundly. My mother’s illness had made me sensitive to that delicate threshold of death, a pause in which it seems as if the inner being is already looking down on the physical form, when peacefulness is all-important. I was filled by a contentment at being in the presence of this old man, who strangely seemed to sense the unsaid. He smiled into my eyes and moved on.
Long after, when I had a baby, I re-entered that terrain of nuanced sensibility from the other side and found that I could recognize a vibrating intensity of minute happenings. For weeks after my mother died I wept in abandonment. Some random memory or incident, like reading the account of the death scene in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, would trigger off an uncontrollable grief. Everything became heightened. External events like the teach-in seemed particularly vivid experiences now I knew that consciousness could be snatched away. I was relieved to be caught up in debates which did not return me to personal memories.
That summer I stayed with my father in the house, which now seemed hollowed out and emptied. Leeds reference library became my haven and I found a fellow spirit in a friend of Ken Smith’s called Danny Padmore. Danny, who was training to be a teacher, played modern jazz in a pub. He had been brought up in an orphanage in Whitley Bay, the son of a black seaman and a white working-class mother. Danny had a tacit understanding of loneliness.
Bob and I went for a holiday to Hungary that year, again with Progressive Tours but no work camps this time. I was longing to be carefree in the sun and swim in Lake Balaton. But Progressive Tours were never that simple. In Budapest we found ourselves in an apprentices’ hostel with eight bunks to a room. We middle-class puritans from the Labour Party accepted the privations of state socialism – not so the Young Communist League members who were our leaders. They might be Communists but they were young, mid-sixties London workers who went on holiday for sex and a good time. They deserted us for a man our Hungarian guide archaically depicted as a ‘spiv’. ‘Spivs’ to me belonged to the war years, had moustaches and were dressed in long check jackets. This Hungarian simply had a flat and a good record collection.
Our guide seemed to be the Communist equivalent to a Young Conservative. In contrast to the anarchical Poles, who had been left-wing critics, she blanked out on every question. Bullet holes in buildings? Oh, they were from the Second World War. Bob became increasingly exasperated. We had both become friendly with a seventeen-year-old boy from Castleford who was bewildered by the obvious class divisions in Hungary. He had gone on the holiday through an old Communist in the cycling club in his home town who had told him he was going to a land of working-class milk and honey. Bob said we had to demonstrate that there were critical socialists, otherwise the youthful cyclist would go back to Castleford completely disillusioned. So he bombarded our guide with questions about agricultural policy. She must have thought she had got the Progressive Tour from hell.
We had not been back in London long when, very early one morning, there was a knoc
k on the door downstairs. I descended bleary-eyed to find a boy of fourteen with a bag over his shoulder. This was Brian, the younger brother of Jess, whom I had met at the Oxford bus stop. He had hitched all the way from his home in Chester-le-Street, near Durham, and he had come to stay.
A year before Bob and I had met Brian while visiting Jess in an Earls Court flat belonging to a friend called Felix de Mendelssohn. ‘You could come and live with us,’ Bob had declared upon hearing that Brian wanted to remain at school. Now here he was, without any warning, keen to live with us in Hackney. What could we do but take him in? Neither of us gave much thought to the implications of our new responsibility. Brian’s life had been troubled. His mother had left his father for a lorry driver and lived in Ramsgate. His father, a miner, had married again and, while still a child, Brian had taken £5 from his stepbrothers and run away to stay with his mother. Whereupon his stepbrothers had called the police and Brian had been sent to a remand home, where he had begun to wet the bed. He felt unwanted by both parents and the unreliable Jess was his only ally.
I took him to see the head of Stepney Green comprehensive school, who clearly thought it somewhat odd, but agreed to take him. Bob wrote while I was visiting my father that September to say he thought the science teaching at Stepney Green seemed good and Brian was learning chess. I taught Brian to cook and became accustomed to having a clean school shirt ready for him every day, along with his dinner money. Bob and I had become parents but were doing it backwards by starting with a teenager from a broken home. Our flat suddenly seemed to have grown smaller; Brian clearly couldn’t live in our tiny box room for ever.
My father’s health deteriorated during the winter. That Christmas his favourite sister, Aunty Glad, with her short cropped twenties hair, large bosom and swinging long beads, came to keep him company and we ate a lugubrious dinner. She was in her eighties, my father was seventy-nine. We had little to say to one another. I escaped to Danny Padmore, seeking him out in the smoky Leeds pub where he was playing. His girlfriend was away and we began a low-key affair in his freezing back-to-back heated only by a coal fire.
When the new term began at Chelsea College, all the students and staff had our fingerprints taken. A porter had been given arsenic in his tea and had died on New Year’s Eve. We were asked for our alibis. I looked around. The boys I was teaching were standing by me. I couldn’t say I’d been with a man all night, so I mumbled that I’d been at home in Leeds. It seemed close enough to the truth. I certainly hadn’t been murdering porters.
I had reckoned without Aunty Glad. When the police drew up at Ladywood Road she assumed my brother, Peter, had committed some driving offence. ‘No, we’re looking for Miss Rowbotham,’ the policeman at the door told her. ‘It’s in relation to a murder inquiry.’ Aunty Glad was appalled and when she was appalled, indeed when she was making even a moderately emphatic point, her eyebrows – she had large black bushy eyebrows, flecked with grey – shot right up to her short cropped hair. ‘Our Sheila may be a Communist,’ she told the West Yorkshire constable, ‘but she’s no murderer and we hope she’s going to grow out of it.’ ‘So do we,’ replied the policeman with sympathy. Aunty Glad, who had a good memory, told them I had not been at home on New Year’s Eve.
My brother sent me a telegram. I was to come back to Leeds, my father had had a stroke. The pugnacious, dogmatic man I had contested so often was lying downstairs on a bed in the dining room, which he used as his office. He had lost all the flesh under his jaw and the skin was stretched over his bones. He looked small and skeletal and vulnerable. The bone structure which had been suddenly revealed made him resemble the old yellow photographs of his father – the man who had sired fourteen children. He was dying. The blonde frowzy nurse who had looked after my mother was back. My father had flirted with her, pinching her bottom, before he lost consciousness. She and my brother sat in the lounge drinking whisky. I tried to find some composure in my bedroom, rolling joints and reading Alexander Trocchi.
In these grim circumstances the arrival of the police gave things an edge of farce. This time my sister-in-law came into the lounge to support me. Again I was trapped. I was still not officially living with Bob. A violent row with my brother when I had gone to stay with Bob in Cambridge in 1962 had made me determined to keep my sex life to myself. Desperately, I invented an all-night party with Bar. Poor Bar had just begun teaching in a school in Harehills. Called from a lesson to meet the police, she confessed and sent them to Danny – now back with his girlfriend. Luckily for me he nobly confirmed my alibi.
My father’s death left only a dull numbness; none of that tearing grief which had accompanied my mother’s death. All emotion seemed to have drained out of me. But in the long run it was the troubling non-relationship with my father which was to continue to affect me in unexpected ways. It was as if we had never met and yet I was ineradicably shaped by him, regardless of the force of my rebellion against him. Unity Theatre put on Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in 1966 and I thought I could recognize him in the salesman, cultivating his colliery managers – a bottle at Christmas for the men and chocolates for their wives.
Soon after my father’s death my brother Peter had been disturbed by a telephone caller whose voice closely resembled Lance’s. In his new house in affluent Burn Bridge, a commuter village between Leeds and Harrogate, Peter, obviously discomforted, offered me a double whisky. I hated whisky and declined. He then announced to me that our father and mother had not been married. We had two half brothers and a sister and we were bastards. How absurd, I thought sadly, that our parents had thought it necessary to deceive us. Peter, pushed into engineering instead of art by our father, in contrast felt betrayed.
Dave Godman wrote from Hull to express sympathy at my father’s death. Dave had been treated with antagonism by him on a visit to Ladywood Road, I suspect because his gruff Yorkshire voice made him a recognizable male. Alien Southerners were never convincingly male in my father’s eyes and if he saw anything of himself in another man he suspected danger for his daughter.
Dave, who had started studying at Workers’ Educational Association classes, was experiencing a political isolation I could recognize. He was arguing with all and sundry, and was completely at loggerheads with his brother, a right-wing Labour supporter, over Vietnam. His distressed mother had told him he would end up alone because no woman would put up with all his politics. And to top it all, he was upset because he had clashed with Edward Thompson at a meeting.
Edward had been in Hull to support the journalist Richard Gott, who was standing as an independent radical candidate to raise the issue of Labour’s support for Vietnam. Dave, like many other left-wing trade unionists, was disenchanted with the Labour Party, but believed you must continue to support it as the party of the working class. These arguments were to be wearily repeated over the next few years and I was unsure where I stood. I had, however, learned from reading the history of attempts to create socialist groups that it was easier to criticize the Labour Party than to replace it.
Dave did report some brighter news: the fishermen on the Hull trawlers were in a militant mood. They were to go on strike that March. This forgotten fishermen’s strike signalled the seamen’s dispute in May 1966, which was to be the industrial watershed for the left in relation to the Labour government. The seamen were asking for a forty-hour week and a 12s. 6d. a month increase. Wilson denounced them as ‘a closely knit group of politically motivated men’, immediately making this more than a wage dispute.
Labour had just been re-elected for a second term with a majority of ninety-eight. It could no longer be said that opposition would bring the Tories back. Left support for the seamen’s strike coalesced regardless of sectarianism; about 2,000 of us marched in protest on a demonstration called by the Socialist Labour League. The ad hoc coalition ranged very widely. When the Hull Strike Committee produced a pamphlet, ‘Not Wanted on Voyage’, listing the groups who gave support, they included Dave Godman’s Hull Dockers’
Unofficial Port Workers’ Committee, alongside the Oxford University Liberal Club. (Young Liberals infected by direct action were beginning to transmogrify into Anarcho-Syndicalists.)
Hackney Young Socialists were among the scattered organizations which united in solidarity with the seamen. Our commitment had a personal warmth, for, at last, we had new recruits, seamen whom I called Sailor John and Sailor Bob. We held a public meeting in Hackney Trades Council hall, chaired, rather formally, by an old cabinet-maker. The young seaman who spoke impressed me by his informality and the modest directness of his manner. A new generation of trade unionists was emerging, much closer in style and culture to the left radicalized by CND. But some traditional attitudes persisted. He was bewildered to see so many women at the meeting.
The seamen’s strike was the first time I became conscious of a labour movement as distinct from the Labour Party. The government imposed a wages freeze that July. Pay increases had to be vetted by the new Prices and Incomes Board and a four-month cooling-off period was instituted before a settlement could be reached. The left union leader Frank Cousins resigned from the Cabinet and trade union agitation against Wilson’s policies intensified. On the intellectual left an awareness of the need for alternative socialist structures contributed to a short-lived attempt to set up Centres for Socialist Education, and Bob began going to the discussions of the May Day Manifesto, a New Left grouping which included the Thompsons and Raymond Williams.
The Americans were bombing Hanoi that summer and our anti-Vietnam War demonstration outside the embassy in Grosvenor Square became angry, ending in violence and arrests. I was the delegate from Hackney Young Socialists to a new Trotskyist-inspired organization, the Vietnam Solidarity Committee, formed to campaign for victory to the Vietcong rather than peace. Our first demonstration attracted only a few hundred people, but VSC was to become the main force in the anti-war movement as the mood changed.
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