Private Papers

by Margaret Forster

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Forster

  Dedication

  Title Page

  What is this?

  January 1st 1984

  February 15th

  March 5th

  April 2nd

  May 7th

  May 16th

  May 21st

  June 1st

  June 4th

  June 17th

  June 26th

  Copyright

  About the Book

  To Penelope Butler the family was all, the sole ambition of her adult life. Three of her four daughters, however, had different ideas. Rosemary rejected it; Jess was destroyed by it; Celia found it eluded her. Only Emily pursued her mother’s ideal, with disastrous results. Penelope begins to record their family story as it unfolds. But when Rosemary discovers these private papers she is enraged by her mother’s distortions of the truth and proceeds to tell the story from her perspective. From D-Day on into the turbulent post-war years, a picture emerges not only of a single family in all its complexities, but also of the changing world that shaped their lives.

  About the Author

  Margaret Forster is the author of many successful novels, including Lady’s Maid, The Memory Box, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, two memoirs, Hidden Lives and Precious Lives, and several acclaimed biographies, including Good Wives.

  ALSO BY MARGARET FORSTER

  Fiction

  Dame’s Delight

  Georgy Girl

  The Bogeyman

  The Travels of Maudie Tipstaff

  The Park

  Miss Owen-Owen is At Home

  Fenella Phizackerley

  Mr Bone’s Retreat

  The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury

  The Battle for Christabel

  The Bride of Lowther Fell

  Marital Rites

  Have the Men Had Enough?

  Lady’s Maid

  Mothers’ Boys

  Shadow Baby

  The Memory Box

  Mother Can You Hear Me?

  Diary of an Ordinary Woman

  Non-Fiction

  The Rash Adventurer:

  The Rise and Fall of Charles Edward Stuart

  William Makepeace Thackeray:

  Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman

  Significant Sisters:

  The Grassroots of Active Feminism 1838–1939

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Daphne du Maurier

  Hidden Lives

  Rich Deserts & Captain’s Thin:

  A Family & Their Times 1831–1931

  Precious Lives

  Good Wives:

  Mary, Fanny, Jennie & Me 1845–2001

  Poetry

  Selected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Editor)

  for my mother-in-law

  MARION BRECHIN DAVIES

  to whom family

  has always been all

  Private Papers

  Margaret Forster

  What is this?

  *

  — AND LIES ABOUT the past are so safe, so very unlikely to be exposed. I have been frightened by their distortions. Listening to them, all three of them, I have found it impossible to believe that they can believe what they are saying about their own lives. None of them seems to have any recollection of choices being made, decisions taken, paths chosen. I am given to understand that either everything that happened was in some way my fault or that it was random. How extraordinarily convenient. I have three daughters who have apparently wiped from their memories the part they played in their own lives. They need me, it seems, to bear witness. And I shall, I shall tell you, and if —

  *

  Who is she talking to, writing for? Is this a diary or a letter?

  *

  — and if what I write seems confusing you must be tolerant. Life does seem confusing and those who seek to impose a pattern upon it cannot expect to find it easy. I have to imagine a stranger as I write, I have to create a stern, judge-like figure to whom I must address myself, or, otherwise, this will disintegrate into a rambling, incoherent sequence of memories. Memories there will be, I have no evidence without them, but this is not a memoir, not in any way an autobiography, though it will be inevitable that, in the process of setting the record straight, a great deal of my own life must be gone over. It is relevant, for a start, to say something about my own birth. I was born —

  *

  Oh, Christ. Now I begin to see it. If I don’t stop now, put this pencil down – and how very conveniently placed it happens to be, sitting so provocatively on top of this neat pile of virgin paper – she’ll have me hooked. I should walk out, now.

  *

  — born on, or around, December 26th 1915. I was found on the morning of December 31st on the steps of a Children’s Home, near Oxford, on the Abingdon road. I was securely and warmly wrapped against the intense cold in four shawls and lay in a small wickerwork basket of the type commonly used for putting wood in. To the top shawl was pinned a note saying my name was Penelope and would someone please take care of me. Nothing else. No other evidence of maternal care or tenderness. I weighed only five and a half pounds but was in good health. It was quickly established that I was no more than four or five days old and that I was probably born prematurely (there were little flecks of a creamy-like substance in the folds of my skin, a sure sign). The cord was still attached to my navel, two inches of that rapidly withering tissue which had held me to my mother, but it had been expertly cut and tied, suggesting that the services of a midwife or other medical person had been employed.

  In those days, it was difficult to trace the mother of an abandoned baby. Nobody took my photograph and printed it in a newspaper. The local hospitals were not subjected to close scrutiny nor were doctors and district nurses closely questioned about recent confinements in the area. Some forty years later, when I set about trying to trace my birth, I found no written record of any inquiries at all, and, naturally, neither the shawls nor the basket nor, more importantly, the note survived. I had been told about those but nobody had thought fit to keep them. The shawls, I expect, were washed and used many times until they were torn up to provide rags with which to wash the floors. The basket would be filled and emptied until the straw split and frayed. But the note should have been filed away, surely. Probably it is as well that it was not. I would have become obsessed with it. The handwriting, the very composition of the words, the colour of the ink (was it ink or pencil?) and the texture of the paper would have had a terrible fascination for me. I would have fingered that note, held it against my cheek, smelled it, even. I would have examined it more ferociously than the most zealous of forensic scientists. It was, I believe, kept for some years and then ‘lost’ when the Home closed down. No one could ever appreciate what it would have meant to me.

  But I had a name. The note may have been consigned to bureaucratic oblivion, if not actually torn up and destroyed (the thought of this vandalism causes me pain), but the name written upon it was at once transcribed on to several documents. I was Penelope, the name my mother had chosen and cared enough about to pass on to those to whom she was surrendering me. This was of tremendous importance to me – not only that my mysterious mother had bothered to name me, but also the name itself. Shakespeare cannot have been an abandoned baby to wonder what was in a name. Everything, I could tell him. For me my name was invested with a holy significance. It seemed, among other things, a clear message. Why call me Penelope if the legend was not meant to be meaningful? I learned at school about the wife of Ulysses, who had waited ten long years for his return, resisting all those suitors who tried to persuade her he was dead. I thrilled to the triumphant end of the story
, when Ulysses returned safe and well to the faithful Penelope. I, too, would be faithful. I would believe that somewhere my mother, like Ulysses, was fighting some war, was undertaking her own personal Odyssey, and would one day return to claim me. I would be there, as patient and enduring as the wife of Ulysses.

  Well, I was ten years old before I read the story in Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece. By the time I was fifteen I had faced what seemed to be the facts: my mother, unlike Ulysses, was not going to return nor, in our modem world, was she going to avail herself of the opportunity to telephone or write. But my name still seemed significant. I began to think about it in a different but equally romantic way. Nobody else in the Home was called Penelope, nor was anyone in the school I attended. When people in authority, meeting me for the first time, asked me for my Christian name, they were always surprised. They would raise their eyebrows, and sometimes smile and look at me again more sharply. Penelope was a rather grand, even pretentious, name for a child from a Home to have. I saw it gained me some small consideration, some status, which I would not otherwise have immediately rated. And so I began to think my mother must have been an educated person. This was a great relief to me at that stage, as I was becoming aware of the kind of woman or girl who usually abandoned babies. My great fear that this mother of mine had been ‘a loose woman’, a term I hardly understood but certainly heard, was soothed by the thought of my name. Later, I fantasized further. My mother, I decided, might have been at the University (of my father I never then thought). My birth would have wrecked her career and she would have had no option but to abandon me. This theory gave me such comfort that, even as an adult, I was reluctant to admit its inherent absurdity, although I had by then certainly appreciated how very few women could go to University at the time I was born.

  At one stage in my young life I used to walk the streets of Oxford with pounding heart, waiting to be recognized. I had spent many, many hours, as adolescents do, examining my face and body in mirrors, wondering about all those ancestors of mine whose genes were my inheritance. My complexion, I felt, must be a very strong family trait. When I was young I had wonderful colouring, brown (but not olive skinned) in all weathers and bright pink cheeks. Somewhere there were grandparents and great aunts and second cousins once removed, who would take one look at me and declare how Penelope has the family look! Then there was my hair, extremely black, extremely thick. It gave me, with my complexion, a gypsy look (that, of course, was another fantasy, for I also learned that according to old Welsh tales gypsies used the name Penelope, in the form Peneli, for fairies). I was sure my mother must look the same, that she too walked around with the same startling colouring. The connection between us would be unmistakable. Our eyes would meet as we passed in the High Street and her heart would thump too. She would cry out my name and we would embrace and then she would take me home, to my family . . . I wanted that family as much as I wanted a mother. No child in a Home ever underestimates the overriding importance of having a family. It meant more than simply having brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles. It was so much more extensive, stretching wide and deep, a complicated network of hidden strength. Family meant support, it meant belonging, it meant confidence, it meant claims. Even when the pull of family was cursed it was acknowledged as undeniable. My idea of happiness was to have a family, with all its onerous ties and responsibilities, to which to belong. Even an adoptive or foster family would have sufficed. Throughout those years children from the Home were regularly adopted or fostered out and my longing to be one of the chosen was desperate. But I never was. I remember once —

  *

  Oh shit – it’s obvious I’m going to carry on reading this, I can’t control my own curiosity. And this pencil is doing a St Vitus Dance in my hand with the need to put my own comments down. But I can’t stand reading it all, so I’ll just have to skip when it gets too much. I’m not going to read this next bit, for example. I know it all, I was reared on it, I know exactly what is coming. It always made me furious, her tale of being inspected by a couple who came looking for a ‘nice little girl’ and being rejected and crying for a week and thinking she must be ugly or that she stank and all that tedious rubbish. Furious with her, not the couple. Furious that she told the pathetic story at all, furious at the expression on her face – tremulous, solemn, sickly. She wanted us to fling our arms around her and cry and say poor, poor Mummy. All I ever wanted to do was shout at her. This evidence of how vulnerable she was as a child disgusted me. The point of regaling us with this stuff was always so apparent. We had not been abandoned, we were wanted and loved, we had a family. We, in short, were much, much better off than she had been and she wasn’t going to let us forget it. Everything was meant to flow from this wonderfully privileged start. As if it mattered, basically: as if whether you’ve got a secure family background really makes a shred of difference in the end. Well, that’s silly. There are millions of reports saying it does. But Mother didn’t have to make it into a religion, thrusting our advantage down our throats all the time. She might have known we would sick it up in the end. Look what a fool she made of herself over my father’s family – we’ll be on to that in a page or so, doubtless.

  *

  — would even have welcomed what Florence Nightingale called ‘the tyranny of a good English family’. I do not want to describe my life in the Home nor touch upon my circumstances more than I have already done. It will be obvious, to all but the most unaware and insensitive, that I suffered severe emotional deprivation quite apart from the sort of hardship common to children brought up in Homes in the inter-war years. It does not bear going into, not here. By the time I was eighteen and free of the Home’s guardianship, I had stopped looking back and was instead looking forward, greedily, for my missing family. I was in training to be a nurse. Again, I lived in a Home, straight from one into the other, and it was hardly more congenial than the first. Again, life was hard and, again, I lacked affection and emotional security. There were rules and regulations governing our entire lives, most of them relics from the nineteenth century. I stood the discipline better than any of the other student nurses – it was nothing to me to have to work hard, to be vigilantly supervised or to lack privacy. I was used to such a regime. In fact, life without dragooning of one sort or another might have been difficult for me to accept. So I thrived where others wilted. It was an asset not to have Mummy or Daddy to whom to return home. When my training was complete I still lived, by choice, in the Nurses’ Home, having neither the courage nor the money to set up on my own. Yet I dreamed of my own place all the time. Yes, it was a cottage and, yes, there were roses round the door. And inside was a husband with his slippers by the fire, and upstairs babies, my babies, in their beds. One day my prince would come and, when he did, he would not only create a family with me, but he would take me home to his family and I would be absorbed into the fabric of their corporate existence. It was a terrible, crushing disappointment to me that when I did fall in love, and was married, it was to a man with virtually no family.

  Oliver was always fond of telling people that I had almost turned him down because he only had a mother. He said my eyes filled with tears when he told me and my arms dropped from round his neck to hang despondently at my sides. All he had was a mother for whom he had little feeling, someone to whom he rarely wrote and whom he saw perhaps twice a year. She, Mrs Butler, was a widow, and (as Oliver was) an only child of only children. Moreover she had been born in India and had few connections with England even though she chose, unwisely, to return here after the death of her husband. Oliver’s father had been the last of his own particular family. Somewhere in Scotland and, it was rumoured, Australia, there may have been some extremely distant cousins but, if so, Oliver had never known them – they were vague names, perhaps mentioned once or twice in his hearing as living in Fife, or Melbourne, but never established as real people. No, there was no getting away from it: I, who had craved multitudes of in-laws, had married into the smallest family uni
t possible. Nor could I for very long cling to the comforting thought that at least I was to have a mother-in-law. Once I had met Mrs Butler (she never allowed me to call her by her Christian name and was appalled at my timid suggestion that I might refer to her as Mother) it was clear that there would be little joy in that relationship.

  Once the children were born, I gave Mrs Butler, or Grandmother Butler as she insisted on being addressed, a position of great reverence in our lives. To Oliver’s bewilderment, since he was the least filial of sons, I inaugurated a regime of dutiful visits which must have puzzled her. Since Oliver was her only child I don’t think even in her most suspicious moments that she thought I was after her money (she was quite wealthy). She knew I knew Oliver would get everything, no question of that. But considering we never got on, and that she was quite openly contemptuous of me as a wife for her son, I should imagine she was rather startled at my refusal to be put off visiting. We went to Brighton, where she lived, at least every two weeks. Sometimes we drove down for the day — oh what a lovely drive it was in those days – but more often we stayed at The Old Ship for the weekend. In the early years we stayed only once with Grandmother Butler, just before Rosemary was born: she made it plain that visitors were ‘not convenient’. She did not like us actually to sleep in her house, extraordinary though that is to believe. Oliver did not care. For his part, he hated staying there. He only went along with my desire to visit, because he happened to be fond of Brighton itself. If his mother had lived in Macclesfield or Manchester, I doubt very much whether I would have been able to get him to agree.

  I loved Grandmother Butler’s house. It was in Bedford Square, one of those beautiful Regency squares of which Brighton is full, just across the road from the West Pier. It was four storeyed, with an elegant balcony on the first floor curving round a long bow window. Later, when we lived there, we had the two top floors, and our sitting room was the one above the balcony. It was an enormous room, also with a bow window facing south west, with the pier dominating the view. I used to lie for hours on the window seat looking out over the Channel, quite hypnotized by the tides. From the attics above, where we slept, our view over the rooftops was superb, more of the sea and, to the left, a glimpse of the Downs. I never grew tired of this view. Nor did I mind the endless toiling up and down the many narrow stairs. The kitchen of course was in a rather dark, narrow basement. There was no garden, but with the beach literally a hundred yards away we had no need of one. It seemed to me the perfect family house. Several rooms were big enough to hold a large number of people in comfort and it was so arranged that, if necessary, everyone could get away from everyone else. I thought, when first I went there, of children playing violins at the top of the house and of Oliver studying at the back, while I sewed in the quiet rooms below: all of us separate but together. I thought of family meals round the great oak table in the dining room and family parties spilling on to the gracious balcony. I thought of all those stairs pounded by hundreds of busy feet and the basement area full of prams and bikes. I thought of babies being born there and the perfection of having that healthy sea air to hand. Every Sunday, as we sat in state with Grandmother Butler and her companion, four people lost in the brocaded sofas and rich carpets (brought from India), I thought of the same room filled with family life. I longed to live there.