2. MY FATHER SAID he met Hannah at a fancy-dress party, and I think of the email I received about Hannah as a ‘ravishing Carmen’ at a fancy-dress party. Could it have been the same party? I contact the woman who wrote it. She doesn’t remember my father being there — though it was a joint party for her sister and a cousin of Shirley’s, so it is quite possible he came. It was September 1953, shortly after Hannah turned seventeen and started at PARADA.
I ask my father, and though he can’t remember whether this was the party, I decide that it must have been. I am pleased to have discovered the night that my parents met, or met again. I know from my daughters that it is one of the stories children like to hear, how their parents met, the moment their own lives began to take shape — and I am happy that I have identified my own beginnings.
IT HAS BECOME a little easier talking with my father, and he continues his story on two or three afternoons. He had studied law at Oxford, but when he came down he needed to earn some money, and the year Hannah was at RADA he taught Latin and history at a boarding school near Reading.
He and Hannah weren’t a ‘proper item’ initially. She had ‘other boys on the radar’, including an Israeli boy called Mike she had met through Shirley, while he was having ‘a passionate affair with the under matron at the school’. But as the year went on he would often drive down to London and pick her up from the RADA cloakroom, as Sue Westerley-Smith had remembered. He had a ‘very nice pre-war sports car, a Wolseley Hornet Special’, he says.
Hannah had signed up to go on a tour of Israel for the summer of 1954, but my father and Hannah were growing more serious. Hannah told my grandparents she didn’t want to go, but they insisted — perhaps because they had paid for the trip, though my father suggests they also wanted her to have a break from him.
By chance, I discover that the novelist Elisabeth Russell Taylor was on the same tour. The party, she remembers, was made up mostly of ‘young, rich, and uninteresting’ girls. Elisabeth was a few years older and ‘politically antagonistic to the privileged’. But Hannah was more interesting. She ‘clearly didn’t want to be on the trip’ and was ‘argumentative, contentious, and self-opinionated’.
She talked about marrying my father ‘in a black dress with red roses’. She was ‘a bit of a pain’. But Elisabeth also uses the word ‘courageous’ to describe her. Hannah wasn’t prepared to behave the way women were supposed to behave, and Elisabeth felt she would ‘do something substantial with her life’.
WHAT HANNAH DID on coming back from Israel was give up her place at RADA and decide to marry my father. An announcement of their engagement appeared in The Times that November. My father was now studying for the Bar and living with his parents in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Hannah was also at home in her parents’ flat near Regents Park, though what she was doing is less clear.
I have put off reading my grandfather’s diaries, but I can’t defer it any longer, and early one morning I fly with an empty suitcase up to Edinburgh, where Susie has been storing the boxes of diaries in her cellar.
In his later years, I remember my grandfather keeping a brief daily journal in the kind of desk diaries that have a page for each week below a reproduction of a painting of flowers. These were often open on his desk, and I saw once that he had written in the same word, ‘weltschmerz’, for every day of the week. I asked what it meant, and he explained it was the German for world-weariness, or ennui, and grinned ruefully. But most of the older diaries, like the one I looked at when sorting through my grandparents’ house, are thick ring-bound notebooks, a hundred sheets in each, filled with his dense scrawl. Susie spends the day teaching me to decipher it, and in the evening I fly home with some of the diaries, Susie bringing the rest later, and begin to work my way through them.
Apart from a volume covering a Fulbright fellowship to America in late 1951 and early 1952, though, the diaries don’t begin until the mid-1950s. The only reference to Hannah before this is in the last page of the American diary, when he describes coming home to find his daughter a ‘bright, self-centred child’.
Other than that, the first mention of Hannah is in March 1955, a few months before her wedding. He has had, he wrote, some ‘exploratory conversations with Hannah about her future’, though frustratingly he doesn’t say more.
Hannah wrote to RADA that she was leaving to attend the Institut Français. I ask my father what she did there, and he says she took a French A level so she could apply to university. But while she did eventually go to university, that was two years later, and if she took French A level that year before her marriage, she doesn’t seem even to have passed, which seems unlikely.
In my old house, where my stepmother still lives, I find a batch of letters from a friend of my father’s who was living in Aden. ‘Why has she given up the drama?’ he wrote after Hannah came back from her Israel tour. ‘Your influence or Israel’s? What is she doing now? You can’t be living in sin all the time.’
It is a question I ask, too — and to which I don’t have an answer. She was young, in love, had a wedding to think about. But I find it hard to believe that she spent the nine months between giving up RADA and getting married planning her wedding. When you live for only twenty-nine years, each one of those years matters, and it bothers me that I don’t know what she was doing during this time — or to think that she was doing not very much, wasting those precious months.
WHAT I DO HAVE from this period, or topping and tailing this period, are a pair of cine films: one, the wedding of Hannah’s cousin Naomi in the summer of 1954; the other, her own wedding, a year later, in July 1955.
The first film begins with flickering scenes of people arriving at the synagogue, smiling and waving at the camera — among them, Susie and Naomi’s young sister, Donna, both aged about ten, in pale-blue bridesmaids’ dresses. Later, at the reception, the bride and the groom cut the cake and kiss. The camera takes in the guests, men in glasses with thick frames, large-chested women in elaborate hats, until it comes to a young woman in the act of throwing her head back to take a slug from a bottle. When she lowers the bottle she is revealed to be Hannah. Seeing the camera, she pokes her head towards it, closes her eyes, and bares her teeth in a wide, gurning grin.
Outside later for the family portraits, the camera pans over a family line-up: the two sets of parents, the bride, her veil blowing in the wind, and groom, until it comes to Hannah again. She is wearing a pale-blue dress, too, has a white posy in her hand, is also a bridesmaid. So briefly that a less conscientious observer might miss it, her head shoots forward, and she makes the same gurning grin.
IN THE SECOND FILM, the same old cars pull up in front of the synagogue, the same sort of Jewish people get out — in some cases, actually the same people, though this time when the groom appears it is my father, boyish and toothy, in top hat and morning suit. He smiles at the camera and salutes and walks forward, taking off his hat as he passes the camera.
Other relatives appear: a round-faced Shirley, her sisters, her mother, my father’s parents. And here now is Hannah, posing on the steps with my grandfather, her veil blowing in the wind this time, dressed not in black, as she had boasted to Elisabeth Russell Taylor, but in white. She is still only eighteen, but it is her wedding, and instead of gurning she smiles demurely.
Afterwards, on the synagogue steps with my father, she kisses him chastely, and then kisses him again, perhaps at the request of a photographer, and this time they hold their kiss a little longer.
The film moves to the reception in a garden. My father has changed into a suit; Hannah is now in something black. Here, though not sitting together, are my grandmother and my grandfather, the father of the bride. He is young, still in his forties — the age I am now. He has undone the top button of his shirt, and his tie is flung over his shoulder. He holds up his hand to the camera, and smiles.
Spring 1954
Dear Tash, Received
a phone call from Pop in the morning. Asked me to go out with him. Said I was going to Camb — he said I should cancel it. Nearly did then thought that I could have the best of both worlds by going out with him another day, he was rather annoyed but arranged to pick me up at RADA at 5pm following Thursday.
Went to Cambridge — felt very nervous. The cocktail party was very frightening at first, but I got invited by a rather nice boy to a Kings May Ball — I accepted it. (I’m not going — reason will be revealed below!)
Pop said he nearly didn’t come as I didn’t go out with him last Saturday. The evening was very nice, I like him more each time I see him. I think its much better to grow to like a person — much more secure. He asked me to come and live with him — (I declined.) I shan’t go to the May Ball as I think he’ll take me to an Oxford Commem! He says I’m the first girl he doesn’t feel absolutely at ease with — because I haven’t fallen head over heels etc. Says he thinks about me when with other girls.
P.S. Thought — difference between me and nice girls like Val — people ask her to marry them — people ask me to live with them.
Dear Tash, I often feel I lead a double life, for the world of the theatre is so complete, and all absorbing, that I find I change as I walk out of RADA to go home, or see Shirley etc.
I have been out with Pop several times since I last wrote. He really is very nice — (horrid word!) On Sunday I’m going down to visit him at the school where he is teaching. We get on together very well, and understand each other completely. He really is terribly sweet to me. We are going to two Commems on consecutive nights next month which ought to be bliss. Every time I see him I like him a little more — so far I hope none of the ‘gang’ (damn them) know. I can’t bear being talked about.
Dear Tash, I had a blissful time on Wed evening we went (you know who the other half of we is) and had a super supper in a Chinese Restaurant and then went to a lovely Jazz Club called the Fauburg. It really is quite Parisienne and has a gorgeous bar I drank glasses of Coca Cola and Rum which is heaven and everything was ----! (I’ve run out of adjectives.)
Dear Tash, He’s such bliss — we went to a wonderful party given by a girlfriend in Cirencester — her father owns a real dream house — tucked in the heart of the hills 7 miles into the country — with Rose gardens and a wonderful yew walk. That was last Saturday on Sunday I drove the car back to Oxford (its utter heaven driving an open car I went up to 70 mph once) and we took a punt on the river and slept for the whole afternoon.
I have told him about K — I had to because he had told me everything and it became a barrier between us — but he was wonderfully understanding & I love him.
Seven
THEY DROVE DOWN to the south of France for their honeymoon — in a Standard Eight, my father says, more at ease talking about his car than about Hannah. Back in London, they rented a flat off the King’s Road. It was away from north London, where their families lived, but that was the attraction. My father had passed his Bar exams, but he didn’t have the money, or the patience perhaps, to build up a barrister’s practice, and the previous autumn he had started working for a printing firm in Soho, owned by the husband of a cousin. I have heard the story of this job before: how on his first day he was handed a broom and told to start sweeping; how within a couple of years he was running the company.
By the time they moved to Chelsea, he had been promoted to sales director and was earning a good salary. At the weekends, he and Hannah would drive out of London to stay at places like the New Inn in Winchelsea, on the East Sussex coast. That first winter they went skiing in Courchevel. There are photographs of them on the slopes, on lifts, with a skier in a bear costume, dancing in a bar.
The following spring, he bought a half-interest in a sailing boat that they kept at Dell Quay in West Sussex — a few miles from where he and my stepmother would later buy our barn. A man who lived in a hut on the foreshore looked after the boat, he remembers, for two and sixpence a week.
What he doesn’t remember about these times, any more than in the year before they were married, is how Hannah filled her days. He was working hard to build up the business, he says, so that was where his thoughts were concentrated. But in the archives of Bedford College, the part of London University where she would eventually study, I find a clue. ‘Left school at seventeen and married almost at once,’ a note in her file says. ‘Trained as a shorthand typist in order to supplement her husband’s earnings. Her husband has had an unexpected promotion and she is now free to enter a university, which she has always wished to do.’
Secretarial school is the last place I would have expected to find Hannah, but when I ask my father, he says it ‘rings a bell’, though ‘it certainly wasn’t to supplement my income’. He suggests it might have been at my grandmother’s suggestion, and points out that I did a typing course myself, though that was for three weeks, and because I wanted to be a journalist.
It is my father’s wife who comes up with a suggestion. Hannah was newly married, and in the months after the wedding she would have been learning how to shop, cook, wash, iron, clean. She wouldn’t have had the time or energy for anything more than a part-time secretarial course.
This still doesn’t sound like the Hannah of my imagining, the author of The Captive Wife, until I remember a passport of Hannah’s in which she had written her profession as ‘Housewife’. Looking at it again, I check the date it was issued: a couple of weeks before her wedding. Had she applied for a new passport so she could go on honeymoon under her married name?
HER PERIOD AS HOUSEWIFE and shorthand typist did not, anyway, last long. Her application to Bedford College is dated February 1956, eight months after she was married. It was almost three years since she had left school, and, in comparison to her RADA application, her handwriting is smaller, neater, more grown-up. This time, the signature for her guardian is not her father’s but her husband’s. Asked to give his ‘Profession or Business’, my father wrote ‘Barrister-at-Law’, though he was working for a printing company rather than as a lawyer.
Hannah also practised a little untruth on the form — calling herself Hannah rather than Ann, her legal name, which has been written in on top by another hand. More seriously, letters in her file reveal that she altered the name on the copies of the exam certificates she sent in with her application.
She had ‘always been known as Hannah’, she wrote when her deceit was discovered, and ‘it is my desire to use the name Hannah, which is why in the copy of the earlier certificates that I sent you, I substituted Hannah for Ann’.
The registrar wrote back that she had ‘committed a serious misdemeanour’, adding that he had ‘some excuse for lacking confidence’. Fortunately he did not press the issue, beyond telling her that she would ‘have to go through your University course with the name of Ann, even if you prefer the name of Hannah’.
It was, I am learning, a characteristic of Hannah: a disregard for rules, a sense, as with her driving on the pavement, that the normal codes of behaviour weren’t for her. The story she told about my father’s promotion freeing her to go to university was an understandable excuse for her lack of direction over the previous couple of years. But her file reveals that she also managed to finesse her way into Bedford. By the time she inquired about entrance, applications had closed, and she was told she would have to wait a year. Instead, the note in her file reveals, ‘she called in to see Lady Williams’, head of the sociology department.
Lady — or Professor Gertrude — Williams ‘was not in college’, and instead Hannah was seen by a sociology lecturer, O. R. McGregor, to whom she told her story. She had come, she said, on ‘the recommendation of Mr Mark Abrams’, a well-known social statistician, who was a friend of my grandfather’s and also, it seems, of Professor Williams’s. Her name-dropping, along with her charm and intelligence, must have worked, for McGregor wrote that he was ‘well impressed by her sensible outlo
ok’, and Hannah was allowed to sit the entrance exam, as long as she acquired a third A Level. (It was now, it seems, that she took and passed her French A level at the Institut Français.)
HANNAH BEGAN HER sociology degree at Bedford College — then an all-women’s college on the edge of Regents Park — the following autumn, shortly after her twentieth birthday. She would study here for the next eight years, almost all the rest of her life, but I know nothing about her time at the college, other than that she got a first and wrote the thesis she would turn into The Captive Wife.
My father tells me he enjoyed reading the books Hannah brought home from Bedford, but he seldom went there. Nor can he think of any friends she made there, other than Anne Wicks, who I know, having looked her up early on, died of a cancer a few years ago. He does, though, mention Anne’s husband, ‘a rather nice chap’ called Tony Wicks. He was an engineer, and my father had got him a job at his printing company. When Tony divorced Anne, he married someone else who worked there, and with this information I track him down.
Tony remembers, he says, Hannah’s ‘jet black hair, what I call Jewish hair’. Anne was ‘a scholarship girl, from a poor family in Kent’. She was ‘very bright, intense’. She started out in sociology but ended up in market research, which brought her into contact with ‘media types, airy fairy types’. He was just ‘a dull engineer’, and they grew apart. ‘We just dissolved,’ he says. ‘No animosity, no settlement, no difficulties, nothing.’
He mentions a couple who lived in Primrose Hill who were close to Anne, but more interesting to me is another Bedford student he says was friendly with both Anne and Hannah. It takes me a while to find Erica, but when I do she tells me, ‘I was remembering Hannah only the other day. She gave me a wooden salad bowl that I still have, and I think of her when I use it.’
A Woman on the Edge of Time Page 9