Like Hannah, and Anne Wicks, Erica was a year or two older than most of the other students. Her home life had been difficult, and it had taken her a while to get herself to university. She met Hannah fairly early on and ‘attached herself’ to her. Hannah was very organised, and Erica often borrowed her notes.
Bedford College in the late 1950s was still very traditional. Erica lived in halls her first year, and the girls wore gowns for supper and had an evening curfew. Teaching was by lecture, though ‘Hannah sometimes shouted out questions’. Erica also remembers making mischief with Anne and Hannah with the statistics lecturer. He was a good-looking young man, and the three women would sit in the front row of his lectures ‘wearing low-cut tops, showing our cleavage’. He spoke without notes, walking up and down, and would splutter when he saw them.
She often had coffee with Hannah during the day, but she never saw her in the evenings. After her first year, Erica lived out of college and had a boyfriend at the Slade art college, and they would go out to jazz clubs, but Hannah always went home to my father. She sensed that it wasn’t easy for Hannah trying to balance the different pieces of her life.
Despite this, Hannah did ‘a great kindness to her’. In her third year at Bedford she became pregnant, and Hannah helped her with having an abortion. This was still illegal in those days, and Hannah took her to the clinic and had her to stay for a few days while she recovered. ‘Without your mother’s help, I am not sure I would have finished my degree,’ she says.
ERICA AND ANNE seem to have been Hannah’s closest friends at Bedford, but in time I track down more of her contemporaries, and am even invited to a Bedford College reunion lunch. The common consensus is how innocent most of them were. Penelope Horsfall remembers the college putting on a fund-raiser for students in Hungary, and Hannah organising a skit for which the performers wore black trousers: it was the first time Penelope had ever put on trousers.
The teachers could be ‘antediluvian’. One former student remembers O. R. McGregor, the lecturer who saw Hannah when she ‘dropped by’ the college, ‘rocking back and forward on his heels during a lecture and telling the women in front of him, “You are all so mediocre.” ’ McGregor, or ‘Mac’, and another lecturer would play ping-pong in the college, and when they ‘slammed the ball down they would say the name of whichever student was bugging them’.
The women at the reunion lunch talk about how most of them ended up in caring careers of one sort or another — social work, citizen’s advice, lady almoners. When they had children, almost all stopped working. Of the forty or so sociology students in Hannah’s year, only three or four did research, and one of these gave up to get married, while another ‘was kicked out when she got pregnant’.
Older, already married when she arrived, Hannah was ‘different’. She had ‘a film star’s vitality, glamorous, and rather exotic’. And when she got pregnant in the first term of her second year, she had no intention either of getting rid of the baby or giving up her studies. In this she was fortunate in having the backing of Gertrude Williams, her head of department, who allowed her to extend her degree to four years, and wrote letters in support of her extending her grant. Her contemporaries remember Hannah bringing in her new baby in a little yellow romper suit. Hannah, who was twenty-one, was ‘glowing with pride’.
SHE HAD BEEN EXPERIENCING minor gynaecological problems, my father tells me, and was advised that having a baby would cure them. Simon was born in Queen Charlotte’s hospital in Hammersmith, on 23 April 1958, and spent his first months in the flat in Chelsea. Later that year, the new family moved back to north London, to the little modern house, on Hillside Gardens in Highgate, next door to the Kartuns, and close to both sets of grandparents.
The following spring they must have bought a cine camera, for the first family films are of Simon toddling around. With her bouffant hair and wide skirt, a cigarette in one hand while she hugs Simon with the other, Hannah looks like a suburban American housewife from a 1950s educational film.
This impression is repeated in the next reel, which shows her sewing in front of the house in Hillside Gardens, while Simon chases a kitten. In the next film, though, she looks slimmer, more stylish, even younger. In her black fitted shirt and tight dark-blue peddle-pushers, her hair more closely styled, she might now be a pretty young dancer from a Cliff Richard or Elvis Presley movie.
HILLSIDE GARDENS WAS one of a triangle of streets being redeveloped on the plot of an old mansion house that had fallen into disrepair and been knocked down. There was a communal garden in the middle and a communal atmosphere. Neighbours babysat for each other and shared school runs. The legacies of the war were finally being shaken off, the early shoots of the new world that would blossom into the 1960s were beginning to emerge, and these affordable modern houses were attracting a forward-thinking brand of occupant.
Derek Kartun, for example, was a former foreign editor of the Daily Worker turned businessman — his company produced a ‘fusible interlining’ used in suits and uniforms — who would go on to write a series of spy thrillers. Paul Rogers, another resident of the triangle, was a film and stage actor who was the original Max in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming. Peter Jewell was an animal conservationist; his wife, Juliet Clutton-Brock, one of Britain’s first archaeozoologists. Katrin Stroh was a developmental therapist. John Weeks was a modern architect. Cy Grant, a Guyanese musician, was the first black person to appear regularly on British television. Gillian Freeman’s novel The Leather Boys, published in 1961, was the story of a relationship between two young homosexual men. Klaus Hinrichsen, who I knew as the proprietor of the toy shop on the Archway Road, was a champion of émigré German artists who had set up the ‘Hutchison University’ in the Isle of Man internment camp.
My father’s job in the printing industry was rather stolid and old fashioned in comparison, though he was doing his best to liven it up. His success had come from recognising how rapidly the advertising industry was growing in Soho, where his company was by chance located. With his Oxford background — unusual for a printer — my father could relate to and even knew some of the young advertising copywriters and account executives. He bought extra presses, kept the factory running at night, and the business was soon booming.
In November 1959, a year after he and Hannah moved into Hillside Gardens, a trade magazine, the British Printer, published a profile of him under the headline, ‘Espresso Age Printer’. Accompanying it is a photograph of my father sitting rather self-consciously on a windowsill in a stylishly cut suit, holding an African carved letter-opener in his hand. He is twenty-nine.
The way he comes across probably says as much about how he wanted to present himself as how he actually was. ‘Gavron is relaxed in manner, serious and eclectic in his interests, with sociological and literary leanings. He is as critical of his times and as aware of their problems as anyone in his 20s, but his success leaves scant room for frustration and he is quite clearly no “angry young man”.’
What he really wanted to be, he told the interviewer, was ‘a motor racing driver’. He had decided against law because ‘it was necessary to dress formally in black’ and he ‘came to the conclusion that he just wasn’t formal by nature’. Taking up printing instead, ‘he has risen with astonishing rapidity by linking his potential to the fortunes of a new kind of printing business’.
He, too, like his neighbours, was forging his way in the world, and if Hannah, one of the younger wives in the triangle, was still only a student, her husband’s success, the lives unfolding around her, must have given her something to aspire to — a glimpse that her own road, with sociology itself blossoming as a discipline in the post-war era, might also take her somewhere new and exciting.
AMONG OUR NEIGHBOURS in Hillside Gardens, and again when both families moved into slightly larger modern houses, next door to each other, around the corner in Jacksons Lane, were the Weekses — John, the architect
, and his wife, Barbara, and their two children, who were similar ages to Simon and me.
It is a long time since I have seen any of the Weekses, but my stepmother tells me that Barbara is still living in Jacksons Lane, and I cycle over and ring on the door. After a few moments, a window opens on the first floor, and a face I recognise looks out and says, ‘Yes?’
When I tell her who I am, she stares at me as if I am a ghost. When she lets me in, I have a similar feeling about the interior. The houses in the row were all built identically, and walking up the slatted wooden stairs, my childhood fear of the gaps between them comes back to me. When Barbara directs me into the L-shaped sitting room, I feel I am in our old house. I don’t remember Hannah, but I remember the night I woke and came down to find my father sitting under the stairs with the woman who would become my stepmother.
‘We danced hand in hand across the road,’ Barbara says of our two families moving into these houses. As we were now on the wrong side of the road for the communal garden, the parents knocked down the fence between the two back gardens and put up a climbing frame at the bottom, on which I remember playing. I remember, too, taking my first puff of a cigarette with Barbara’s son in the alley beside our house. I can’t have been older than six or seven.
Hannah was ‘rather lovely and very spirited, always active’, Barbara says. When Katrin Stroh locked herself out of her house, it was Hannah who climbed up the drainpipe and squeezed in through a window, though she was pregnant with me. She made Barbara promise not to tell my father.
Barbara reminds me, too, of something I have forgotten — that Hannah had a miscarriage between Simon and me, after seeing the film, Psycho.
When Barbara heard that Hannah was dead, her first thought was that it must have been a car crash. Hannah’s driving had become more reckless in her last months. It wasn’t only that she drove on the pavement; when Hannah did the school run, her children would tell Barbara about the latest incident.
She takes me upstairs to show me the bedrooms — the equivalents of the bunk room I shared with Simon, of Hannah’s and my father’s room, where my father had sat Simon and me down the morning after her suicide to tell us that our mother was dead. My memory of that morning is so clear in my mind — the whiteness of the walls, the bedspread, the carpet, so like a cliché of a scene of rebirth — that I have always slightly distrusted it. But when I walk in to Barbara’s bedroom, it is exactly as I have remembered it.
Later we walk across the road to the communal gardens. Cy Grant, the musician, used to lead the children around here at the summer parties, Barbara says, strumming on his guitar like the pied piper. I have no memory of this, or these gardens, but walking along the paths I feel a strange happiness.
Barbara points at the backs of houses, telling me who lives, or lived, in each one, until we come down a narrow path to the houses at the end of Hillside Gardens. The one we lived in is the very last. There is a little square of back garden and square windows leading into a little square sitting room.
‘I was walking past once, and I saw your parents dancing together,’ Barbara says. ‘It was early evening, and it was still light, and your father was holding your mother, and they were doing some kind of ballroom dance.’ She puts out her arm to show me, and curls her hand if she is holding someone by the waist.
‘HANNAH AND POP [a family nickname for my father],’ my grandfather wrote in his diary. ‘How affectionate and loyal they are.’
Sonia told me how ‘wrapped up’ they were in each other. They had their own names for each other, their own banter. ‘They were always cracking jokes,’ Tasha said. ‘It was as if they were trying to outbid each other.’
Nina Kidron, a friend from the last couple of years of Hannah’s life, says it was ‘an experience to be with them, like being with two contenders in a game. Hannah would say something, and your dad would say no, that’s not right, and she’d challenge him back. It was quite difficult for anyone else to keep up. Having dinner with them could be like watching a tennis match.’
They were ‘two very strong personalities’, according to my father’s schoolfriend Roger Lavelle and his wife, Gunilla, who I meet one morning at a café in Highgate. Hannah spoke with ‘such freedom’, they say, which I take to mean that she didn’t hold back. Gunilla remembers going shopping with Hannah, and how she switched the top and bottom on a swimming costume to get the right sizes for her. ‘Everyone does it nowadays,’ she says, ‘but back then it was very daring — it would have been perceived as shoplifting.’
But they also talk about my parents’ generosity. When Gunilla and Roger moved into their first house, they found a bottle of wine and a chicken casserole waiting for them; after Gunilla’s first son was born, Hannah took her out.
I ask about Hannah’s suicide, and they look at each other. ‘We were busy with our own lives,’ Gunilla says eventually. They hadn’t seen Hannah much in her last year or two, ‘but we felt we should have known there were troubles’.
They have never really discussed Hannah’s death, even with each other. It was obvious that my father didn’t want to talk about it, so they didn’t either, ‘out of loyalty to your father. We took the lead from him.’
All they can suggest is that Hannah was ‘very proud’, that she wouldn’t have wanted to let people see that she was in trouble.
What they prefer to remember are the good times, such as the occasion when they went to a party in London with my father and Hannah, and found themselves somehow, magically, having breakfast the next morning in Brighton.
Date unknown
She was awake — her eyes open gazing at the ceiling which was stark disinfected hospital white. Of course, that’s right, it had all started in the morning when she had been leaning over the fence in the back yard talking to Mrs Hope when suddenly she came over giddy and something inside her jerked rather painfully, and she felt sick, as the baby inside her made its first strong move to enter the world. She remembered Jim had been simply wonderful — it was a real stroke of luck, that just that morning he didn’t have to be at the factory till 10.30am.
It was all going to be fine. That was until they got to the hospital and they told her that the kid wasn’t doing what it should and they would have to operate. It wasn’t as if she minded being cut open. But kids should be born as they were supposed to be.
Suddenly she realised what had happened. She had had a child her first her own child. Wonder whether its a boy or a girl, hope it’s a girl.
‘My baby where oh where is my baby.’ The nurse looked grave but produced an efficient smile — your baby will be coming soon its a girl.
‘Oh’ wonderful relief. ‘But why cant I see it now? Why isn’t it here?’
‘Your husband’ the efficient smile said firmly. ‘Your husband — he’s waiting outside. I’ll tell him to come in I’m sure you’d like to see him straight away.’
‘Bella’ he said taking both her hands. ‘Bella dear.’
‘Jim where’s our baby where is our little girl?’
A look of anxiety was visible in Jims eyes — but was replaced almost immediately by a look of strong determination.
‘Bella darling I want you to be very brave indeed.’
Hold on tight to his hands hold on tight so you cant fall, so you dont scream its dead as loud as you can.
‘No its not dead but our baby is not made quite as it ought to be. You see Bella its bodys all right, fine in fact, its just that, well you see it has two heads.’
Eight
IN NOVEMBER 1959, after several episodes of back pain, my father had an operation to fuse two vertebrae in his spine. He was in hospital for six weeks, and had to learn to walk again, but Hannah, he makes a point of telling me, was at his bedside every day. ‘Hannah rising to the occasion,’ my grandfather wrote in his diary. ‘Calm, efficient, cooperative: all the grumbling, unpleasa
nt, egotistical side of her character has disappeared.’
The following summer, she got her first — ‘one of only two in the whole university out of a total of over 130 students’, my grandfather noted proudly in his diary. A couple of months later, she was back at Bedford College to start work on her PhD. She was soon also reviewing books, first for the Daily Herald, and later for the Economist, New Society, and other publications. On top of this, that autumn she became pregnant with me.
I HAVE BEEN going back regularly to my old house — now my stepmother’s house — looking for Hannah material. I have brought home books, photographs, cine films, the sack of cups and rosettes, letters from my father’s friend. My stepmother has also talked about some papers she saved when she came to live with us, though she has no idea where she put them. She hates to throw anything away, for which I am grateful, but it also means that it is difficult to find anything in the overflowing cupboards and stacks of boxes. I wander the house, looking in places I have already looked. Trying a rusty old filing cabinet again, I tug harder at a drawer and it comes out a little further, and at the back I see a wad of papers.
I take them out and spread them on the carpet, looking for a diary or notebook, though there is nothing like that. Much of the material seems to be returned cheques, receipts, papers to do with moving house, a travel itinerary. But there is also a sheet of paper with doodles of horses — Hannah still, it seems, kept a place in her heart for horses. There is a folder, too, of correspondence with her publishers. And a few letters, notes really, in her own hand, as well as one or two in my father’s. And there is something else in her own hand: a rough draft of a story about a woman giving birth to a baby with two heads.
There is no date on the story, and I don’t have enough of her handwriting to try to date it that way. But it seems likely that she wrote it around the time she was having children herself, perhaps during one of her pregnancies. When she was pregnant with Simon she was living in a flat, whereas with me she was in the house in Hillside Gardens, with a fence over which she could lean to talk to the neighbours, as in the story. By the time she had me she had also had the experience of giving birth in a ‘stark disinfected’ hospital room.
A Woman on the Edge of Time Page 10