A Woman on the Edge of Time

by Gavron, Jeremy;

  IN OCTOBER 1964, a year after Hannah started working at Hornsey, my grandfather wrote in his diary: ‘Hannah changing. Exotic looking: black hair straightened, red dress, brown skin. Has come up with a title for her book, The Captive Wife.’

  From the outside, life could scarcely have been better. My father’s business was an exciting opportunity. Hannah was employed at Hornsey, with not one but two books commissioned. Simon was at school and I would soon be following, with the freedoms this gave my parents. We no longer needed a full-time nanny, and at the beginning of 1965 we got an au pair girl instead. Hannah and my father were still only twenty-eight and thirty-four respectively.

  The cheques they wrote in the spring and summer of 1965 — returned, as cancelled cheques were in those days by the bank, and saved by my stepmother — give a vivid picture of the prosperous life they were rising into: Royal Opera House, Box Office Royal Court, Harrods, Heals, Selfridges, Deans Place Hotel, J. F. Lambie Savile Row tailor, as well as Peter Coxon Typing Services, Marie Stopes Memorial Clinic, and the Hornsey Labour Party

  That summer we holidayed again in the south of France, this time for the whole of August, though my father returned to London a couple of times for work. The itinerary from the travel agent reveals that we took my father’s car, a convertible Aston Martin DB4, and a thirteen-foot motor boat he had bought — a returned cheque records — for £639 13s. At Southend, car and boat were driven into the bulbous nose of a British United Air Ferries Carvair aeroplane, and we flew to Calais, where we spent the night in a hotel before catching a car train the following evening from Boulogne to St Raphael.

  We were renting the upper floor of a villa in the Quartier Bellevue in La Croix Valmer. ‘The flat is gorgeous, we have a marvellous view of the sea and it is very quiet,’ Hannah wrote in the one letter to my grandparents that has survived. ‘We are leading a nice feckless life, not tying ourselves down to any routine which is lovely! We are already quite brown and the kids look very well.’

  Friends came to stay, including a friend of my father’s and his male partner, and Anne Wicks, now separated from Tony, with her new boyfriend, Ghriam.

  In contrast to three years earlier, there is only a minute or so of cine film, and a single roll of photographs from our month in France. Perhaps this was simply camera fatigue, though perhaps it hints at something else: a loosening of ties, at least in Hannah’s mind, to the family portrayed here.

  The cine film shows my brother and me leaping happily in the waves, our skin nut-brown, the water sparkling with sunlight. Later we are building a castle on the beach with my father, who kneels on the sand, fit and muscled.

  Hannah must have been behind the camera for these scenes, but at the end there are a few seconds of her walking down the beach in a flimsy bikini. She is thinner than before. Her new haircut is hidden under a flowery bathing cap.

  Pausing at the edge of the water, she starts to wave away the camera, but thinks better of it and turns the motion of her hand into a wave. She says something the silent film does not catch, and steps gingerly into the sea.

  January 1965

  We have a great many friends in their forties — I don’t feel they have a great advantage in knowledge or experience. It’s hard to say why — I suppose it springs from confidence in my ability to get any information if needed.

  No one spends a lifetime any more working on a single subject.

  It’s of course hard to know what to tell my son about what happened in Germany during the war.

  Our generation knows nothing of the period when Communist parties played an important part in Europe and were full of intellectuals — when I read that crummy book, The Mandarins, about how Sartre was angry with Camus and so on — it means nothing.

  Do you notice how at the University unions they’re constantly putting up provocative motions — that this house wants more contraception, or something — to attract notice and they’re usually defeated. The young technicians are too busy acquiring their little car.

  Early marriage also militates against rebelliousness.

  Less class distinction, less race distinction, less conformism, less bad art — we’re all for the right things if for the wrong motives often.

  When I saw Look Back in Anger — we wandered into the second night by accident — I felt Osborne stood for us, he said all the things we had been saying.

  The affirmative thing about the Victorians was that if they felt badly about a thing, they got up and said ‘change it’. They still could make a fuss and change things the way we can’t any more, from the lunacy laws to women’s rights — just think of all the women pioneers; they had a sense of mission, of power, and used it.

  Too much notice is taken of the opinion of artists.

  Intellectuals are no use to anybody today: you’ve got to have something, to be a scientist, a physicist. Just ideas are no good any more: you need the machinery to carry them into effect.

  Nine

  I HAVE BEEN MEANING to get in touch with Jeanie, our au pair girl from Hannah’s time, but have put it off for some reason, and when I call her in Sussex her husband says she is out and they are leaving for France for a month tomorrow. A month seems an unbearably long time, now that I have finally made contact, and I start to say that I could drive down this afternoon, but he stops me. Jeanie is in London, seeing their granddaughter. He gives me her mobile number, and when I call it turns out she is about to drop her granddaughter at nursery school a couple of miles from where I live, and we agree to meet at a café.

  Jeanie stayed on with us for a couple of years after Hannah’s death, and kept in touch with us through my childhood, but the only time we have met in the last twenty-five or more years was at Simon’s funeral — though I recognised her immediately then, and felt an instinctive warmth towards her.

  When I cycle up now to the café and see her sitting outside, I feel that same warmth, though something sadder and more yearnful rises in me, too. Perhaps these feelings, the association of Jeanie with those lost times, with my original family, are what has held me back me from contacting her until now.

  We hug a little awkwardly — she does not look much different to me, but I have to remind myself that I am no longer the small boy she looked after.

  She was, she says, scarcely more than a child herself when she came to us: she turned seventeen the day she started with us, on 4 February 1965.

  She had answered an advertisement in the Lady, for a mother’s help rather than an au pair girl. She can still remember her interview. I was playing with a plastic sword and I hit Hannah, and Jeanie was surprised by how patient Hannah was with me, scolding me gently. Her father was a colour sergeant in the Welsh Guards, and in her house ‘you would have been given a clout for doing that’.

  I was a ‘little bundle of emotions’, she says, while Simon was easier to handle, and she admits that she was more drawn to him at first. ‘I wouldn’t say this if Simon was still alive,’ she says, ‘but a few weeks after I arrived, Hannah told me she’d picked up that I felt closer to Simon. She said she was really glad that I had that closeness with him, because she felt closer to you.’

  It is the story I have heard before, that I haven’t believed, but I have no reason to doubt Jeanie’s words. Though when I say it would explain why Simon always seemed so angry with me, she is surprised. Simon wasn’t always angry with me, she says; he loved me, was protective of me.

  She points to the little scar on my lip, asks if I remember how I got it, and when I say I don’t, she tells me that it was in the playground in Highgate Wood, not long after she started with us. We were there with some friends and their au pair girl, Jeanie’s friend, Sheila. I was sitting on a seesaw and Simon was rocking it, and I bounced forward too sharply and split my lip on the handle.

  There was a lot of blood, and in her worry Jeanie told Simon off for rocking me too h
ard, and he burst into tears. He was ‘mortified’, she says, and he kept saying that he would never hurt me on purpose.

  I am pleased to have learned the scar’s origin, though I feel something more poignant, too. These are the kind of stories one usually hears from a parent — the kind that my daughters love hearing about their younger years. It is part of what binds us as a family, this shared past, these remembered experiences.

  I think of a recent conversation at my father’s table. We were talking about the nicknames we give our children, and my father was explaining the name his mother gave him. It occurred to me with a little flutter of excitement that perhaps Hannah had a name for me. But when I asked, the table grew quiet. My father looked flustered. He didn’t remember, he said.

  I suppose, I say to Jeanie, that it was after Hannah’s death that the troubles between Simon and me started, but Jeanie denies this, too. Even after Hannah died, Simon was kind to me, she says, would help me pack my bag if he were going somewhere, would calm me down when I got upset.

  She talks, too, about how she grew to be ‘really so fond’ of me, how she always gave me ‘lots of kisses and cuddles’, and I think of my instinctive warmth for her.

  Later, memories of Simon will come back to me: of the time he lent me his patched jeans and platform boots to go to my first teenage party, of other acts of generosity when we were older that I found hard to reciprocate; though, also, the threat in his powerful arms, his fists, his gritted teeth.

  Could it have been after Jeanie left that things deteriorated between us?

  ‘HANNAH WAS DIFFERENT from anyone I had met before,’ Jeanie says. The days Hannah worked at home, she would come downstairs at mid-morning and make coffee in a percolator on the stove and stir a spoonful of cream into two cups, which they would drink at the kitchen counter. Hannah would ask Jeanie about her life, or talk to her about the world, ‘trying to bring me on a bit’.

  Jeanie was amazed by the ‘risqué things’ Hannah would say. ‘Smacks of bondage,’ Hannah said of the title of her book — The Captive Wife. When my father’s mother died, in May 1965, and Jeanie tried to offer her condolences, Hannah told her, ‘It’s alright, you don’t have to express sympathy to me. In all honesty, I didn’t like the woman, and she didn’t like me.’

  She remembers a song Hannah used to sing to me — ‘Jeremy Jo has a mouth like an O and a wheelbarrow full of surprises’ — and I get excited, I know this song, I must remember Hannah singing it to me, until I realise why I know it. It is an A. A. Milne poem, ‘Jonathan Jo’. I have read it to my daughters.

  She talks about our holiday to France that last summer. She remembers us finding a dead eel on the beach, and how Hannah and my father joked about who was going to give it ‘bouche à bouche’.

  She remembers how we would ‘motor’ on the boat to different bays for lunch and to swim on the beaches, singing the Beatles’ ‘Ticket to Ride’. Hannah would sit astride the bow in her bikini to keep the nose down and help the boat plane. One day we started back late, and the wind picked up, and my father had to bring the boat home through choppy waves and failing light. It was an anxious trip, but by the time we were safely home, the experience had become another adventure.

  She remembers Hannah taking her shopping in the market in St Tropez. This was where to find the latest fashions before they hit Carnaby Street, Hannah told her. They each bought T-shirts and hipster trousers, and Hannah bought a little denim peaked cap I have seen her wearing in photographs.

  She remembers Hannah sunbathing on the balcony and my father standing in front of her, and Hannah saying, ‘When you block my sun it’s lucky I love you.’

  She didn’t know about Hannah’s affair then, but looking back she can see there were tensions in the air, especially when Anne Wicks came to stay. She thought at the time that this was because my father didn’t like Anne, though later she wondered if things might have been said, or hinted at.

  EARLIER THAT YEAR, shortly before Jeanie arrived, my grandfather had interviewed Hannah for a book he was writing on intellectuals, and though there is no record of his questions, among his papers is the typescript of her answers.

  Her comments show her to be articulate and opinionated. But what to make of the confident assertions about Sartre or the Victorians, the sweeping dismissals of artists, students, technicians? She was talking to her father, of course, wasn’t taking the consideration she might have done with someone else, was perhaps even playing up to him. But her words remind me how young she was, how sure of themselves the young can be, how quick to make decisions about things.

  Her dismissal of intellectuals is surprising, as an academic herself, with an intellectual book of her own in the making. Though perhaps she was expressing an anxiety that her ideas wouldn’t be heard, that she wouldn’t be able to change things like the Victorian women pioneers she spoke about.

  Since the excitement of the previous summer, when Routledge & Kegan Paul had given her a contract for one book, and agreed to publish her thesis as another, her academic progress had stalled in several ways. She had finished her thesis by mid-1964, but in early 1965 she was still waiting to discover if it had been approved — and until it was, the publishers were holding back on the contract for The Captive Wife. On top of this, she had also applied for two academic posts at the London School of Economics, and had failed to get either.

  The delay in awarding her doctorate seems to have been more cock-up than conspiracy. ‘To Hannah’s distress,’ my grandfather would write later, her supervisor, Ronald Fletcher, ‘kept the thesis lying about with masculine sloth for half a year in 1964–5.’ Susie also remembers Hannah sending Fletcher a telegram saying, ‘Worried you are using my thesis for lavatory paper.’

  But a couple of enigmatic entries in my grandfather’s diaries hint that there might have been something more freighted in her rejections from the LSE. ‘ “Lightweight.” I was angry,’ my grandfather noted after the second rejection. And a few weeks later, he wrote of O. R. McGregor, a lecturer when Hannah started at Bedford, but by 1964 a professor and head of the sociology department, and therefore likely to have written Hannah’s references: ‘definitely the enemy’.

  What exactly he meant by this is unclear, but the suggestion that Hannah, in her work on the situation of women, was perhaps running up against male opposition, is supported by a story I have heard from Susan Downes’s husband, David Downes, who was a young lecturer at the LSE when Hannah applied.

  David had met Hannah through Susan, and was ‘chuffed’ when he heard she might be coming to the LSE. After her interview, he asked Professor Richard Titmuss, the doyen of social policy at the LSE, who had chaired her interview board, how it had gone, and was told only that Hannah had ‘worn too much green eye make-up’.

  IN APRIL 1965, though, Hannah was finally awarded her doctorate. ‘We are all naturally delighted,’ my grandmother wrote to her sister Zelda in Israel. ‘It is a great relief to her.’ This must have been shortly after I cut open my lip, for she went on, ‘Jeremy is fine. The accident has left him with only a small scar on his lip and his teeth haven’t fallen out.’ A couple of weeks later my grandfather wrote in his diary that Hannah had signed her contract for The Captive Wife.

  As far as my grandfather was concerned, Hannah’s troubles were resolved. She was ‘writing her Intro to Sociology’. My father had recently made some money by selling shares. ‘Their success,’ my grandfather concluded with satisfaction.

  In mid-June, he wrote of attending a party given by Hannah and my father, perhaps to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary. ‘How many people they know. Everybody!’ My father, he wrote, was ‘calm and confident’. Hannah was ‘v friendly: sense she is now central figure in family’.

  It was his other daughter, Susie, who was causing him worry. In January, Susie had announced her engagement to her boyfriend, a young Cambridge don. But in March, Susie
told my grandparents ‘she does not want to marry him. Not yet. Cold feet.’ And in April, she had run off with another man. When she came back, there was an ‘evening of emotion’.

  Towards the end of June, Susie was causing worry again, and my grandfather turned to Hannah for advice: ‘Hannah’s reassurance: Susie is tough.’

  A few weeks later, we left for our month in France. In mid-August, my grandfather wrote of seeing my father on one of his flying trips back to London for work: ‘brown, fit, confident’. In early September, with all of us back, he recorded a ‘pleasant’ walk on Primrose Hill with Simon and me. Later that month, Hannah helped him with his book. ‘Enjoyed it!’ he noted.

  And then, a few days later:

  October 4: ‘bombshell — H, other man. Cold feeling in belly.’

  October 6: My father ‘cannot bear it passively. Threatens to cut off Hannah, wants to keep her, his self-esteem. I try to calm him, say: play for time.’

  October 7: ‘They to see a psychiatrist. M [my grandmother]: ring now. She does! Fix appointment!’

  October 8: ‘Highgate. Find the Gavrons much more cheerful. For moment — all held back.’

  October 14: ‘Hannah telephones. Ominous, again. Hannah has seen lawyer. The children neglected. I feel — disaster.’

  October 19: ‘M from call box’. My father ‘has left’.

  JEANIE REMEMBERS my father coming downstairs that morning with a couple of suitcases, and Hannah saying something about him going on a business trip, though later, over their morning coffee, she told Jeanie that things had been difficult between them and that they needed a bit of space.

  My father stayed at first at the Ritz. Later, he moved into a muse house behind Harley Street owned by a doctor friend. Jeanie remembers him coming to see Simon and me in the evenings.