A Woman on the Edge of Time

by Gavron, Jeremy;

  When my grandfather came home to the cottage on London Road in 1945, after my grandparents had both had ‘good wars’ apart, my grandmother, Susie says, made him sleep on the sofa, and they never shared a bed again. He was soon working in London, and I imagine that he often stayed in the city overnight.

  My grandfather’s gloominess and brooding cannot have been a good combination with my grandmother’s unreadiness to be pushed beyond her limits. They stayed together, but it is not hard to understand why Hannah was so eager to escape to boarding school. My grandparents were also keen to get away from the family home when they could. When Hannah was fifteen, my grandfather spent several months in America on his Fulbright fellowship; and shortly after he came back, my grandmother went to South Africa, also for a period of months. Hannah was away at boarding school, but it is perhaps not surprising that these parental absences coincided with the period when she had her ‘affair’ with the headmaster.

  I KNOW MYSELF how challenging it can be to have strong-minded teenage girls. My daughters have gone through adolescence in turn as I have been working on Hannah’s story, have helped me to understand her, as learning about her has perhaps helped me to understand them. In Hannah’s time, teenagers were less well understood. (It is perhaps no coincidence that after Hannah grew up, my grandfather wrote one of the first books about adolescents in Britain — The Insecure Offenders, about Teddy Boys.) They weren’t allowed to be themselves to the extent they are now, either, though Hannah was never too worried about what was or wasn’t allowed, and it is easy to imagine her pushing both her parents beyond their limits.

  My grandfather’s diaries don’t cover this period, but among his papers is a collection of unpublished short stories, including one that is clearly based on Hannah and my grandmother. The girl in the story is called Ann, Hannah’s official name. She is fourteen on the day the story is set, the day they are moving house, as Hannah was fourteen when the family moved back into London. The words the story uses to describe Ann — precocious, egotistical, difficult, melodramatic, beautiful — are words used by my grandfather, and others, to describe Hannah.

  The story is fiction, rather than memoir, and I don’t think my grandmother would ever have been as mean as Lucille is in the story. I can’t imagine her calling Hannah a ‘blot’ on her life, or pulling the trick about the shoes that Lucille does at the end. But I can see her patiently trying to explain to Hannah how her egotism is harming both her and the family.

  It is a potent mix — high expectations, as there were from the start with Hannah, and a steady drip of criticism. Did it undermine Hannah’s confidence? Leave her, for all her positive nature, vulnerable to failure, rejection?

  Stir in, too, her parents’ often unhappy relationship, an unhappy household. Did this leave her short of faith in marriage, family life?

  Spring 1954 – Autumn 1956

  Dear Tash, I am really and truely in love (oh how corny that sounds!) but I really am for the first time in my life — and let me assure you Tash its utter heaven. Pop has given me an open proposal of marriage which I can accept whenever I like and honestly Tash if I feel this way about him this time next year I think I will. I shall be almost nineteen then, and I think if it lasts a year with me it’ll be for ever. I really have never felt like this before. The only fly in the ointment is that I’m scared — because he is 23 has had millions of girl friends and while I feel sure that I love him completely now — what will I think in a year?

  Last weekend was the happiest time I have ever spent in my life. Pop slept in my bed all night — without either Shirley or Neville knowing. In the evening we went to the Ball. I wish Tash I could convey to you what heaven it was. It was a warm night very clear, the dance was outside, the gardens were all illuminated, Pop danced divinely, it was as tho’ we had walked straight out of a woman’s own story.

  The most blissful moment of the whole weekend was when the landlady in the pub told me not to let my hubby forget to sign the bill!

  Dear Tash, By now you must feel as if you have been at Oxford all your life and will always be there. I certainly feel that way about shorthand and secretarial college (vile name) I get progressively worse at typing every day and see my chances of ever getting a job fading very fast. My teacher is a lesbian who bills and coos at us in a mood of flirtatious whimsy (I have absolutely no idea of what I mean by that — probably I feel that I must live up to you in my use of the English language.) Anyway the moral of this sad tale is never be a secretary.

  Dear Tash, I am sure Anglo Saxon is pure undiluted heaven compared to the joys of shorthand! I have never found something so diffucult before (you see what it does to my spelling) its completely soulless.

  Dear Tash, I do expect an occasional letter — if only to describe to me the life I have somehow managed to miss. I am in bed with flu & Pop is suffering from an attack of sciatica which has rendered him virtually immobile so we have been sitting rather pathetically in our double bed while various doctors mothers & mothers in law bring vast baskets of food and provide pills vile tasting medicines and hot water bottles.

  My future as a secretary is I am happy to say becoming less likely every day. I really am quite hopeless at typing. I only wish you were doing it too because as I said before I’m sure you’d be even worse.

  Dear Tash, I am thinking very seriously of going to University after all. I think if I do not I shall regret it all my life, and I feel very bad that my academic education ceased at the early age of not quite seventeen. The kind of job I could get at the moment with my limited qualifications that would interest me is very difficult to obtain and the fact that I am married and would have to look at the clock pointedly from 5.30pm onwards would not help matters at all.

  Dear Tash, You always refrain from telling me anything but I have heard via the usual grape vine that you have given up M. I do hope you are not too unhappy as I am certain you will find someone much nicer. One of the awful things Frensham has left us with is the feeling that if one is not in love with anyone in particular, life is very dreary, I dont think it need be but it is very hard for me to talk.

  Nothing very exciting has been happening lately. We are having our doctor and his wife to supper tonight, he is very nice except he looks exactly like one of the seven dwarfs. We went to the opening night of Hamlet with Alan Badel. It was quite terrible Badel is very short and plump and was dressed in ski trousers so that did not improve matters.

  Dear Tash, Actually now that I am a fellow stoodent I can view everything from a different angle (my vision is slightly obscured by my college scarf, and my head is aching from my college beret, luckily I am lovely and warm by virtue of my college blazer, and my exquisite black gown.)

  The work however is proving fascinating. For the first time I am able to understand what is going on in the world. Our lectures must be very different from those given at Oxford: they seem to be more like classes, and one can interrupt at any time.

  Dear Tash, Why do I never see or hear from you? Is it because Pop is a businessman? Or that I don’t like Universities and Left Review? Or because I’ll only get a fourth?

  Twelve

  WHAT IS MISSING in all this is a contribution from Hannah herself — her voice, her own words. I have been thinking more and more about her letters to Tasha, and I talk to Susie, and we come up with a plan. We will go to see Tasha together and persuade her to let us look for the letters. But two days before we are due in Oxford, Susie calls. Tasha has had another stroke, and is dead.

  A week later, we go instead to Tasha’s funeral. Tasha’s estranged children do not come, but I meet Esther, her daughter from her second marriage.

  It is not the time to ask about the letters, and I store away my thoughts of them. But a couple of months later, Susie mentions she is seeing Sonia, and I ask her to inquire about the letters, and a few days later I receive an email from Esther. She has the letters, b
ut is not sure what to do. There are personal things in them — nothing particularly revealing, but private things about her mother, her aunt.

  I understand her hesitation, the draw of secrecy. But now that the letters have been found, I can think of nothing else. I write to Esther, explaining how important they are to me, that my interest is in Hannah, not in Tasha’s or Sonia’s secrets. She replies that she is going away, and suggests we speak when she returns. The days pass slowly, but eventually she calls to say I can have the letters.

  When I arrive at her flat, she has them spread out on the floor. There are about thirty, mostly handwritten, a few typed, on different kinds of paper. I pick one up and try to read it, but I can’t concentrate. I am like a man who has never seen a whole book and is let into a library. I am too dizzy to read.

  Esther found the letters, she tells me, not hidden away in the attic, but under ‘H’ in Tasha’s filing cabinet. I would have walked past this cabinet when I went to see Tasha.

  She wants to make copies of the parts about Tasha and her family, so we go out to a copy shop. When this is done, in the white envelope in which Tasha stored them, Hannah’s name circled in black ink on the front, some ten years after I first heard of their existence, I take possession of them. I walk back to the underground station in a daze, and begin reading them on the train. They stretch from when Hannah was fifteen until she was twenty. The loopy handwriting, by now not unfamiliar to me, becomes neater, smaller, as the years pass. The spelling and punctuation and grammar improve a little, though not much.

  I am still reading when I reach my station. I get out and sit on a bench while more trains come and go.

  IN THE DAYS AFTERWARDS, I do not know what to feel or think. I have dreamed for so long of these letters, what they might tell me, the roads they might open into Hannah’s mind. As long as they eluded me, they could be anything. But now that I have them, they are what they are — a teenage girl’s letters. They are the nearest to Hannah, the most of her, I will ever get, and it does not seem very much.

  I put them on a shelf, and for a couple of weeks I cannot bring myself to look at them again. But eventually I go back to them, read them again more slowly. There might be no great intimations here, nothing beyond the ordinary, but isn’t that what I wanted — the ordinary Hannah, the real Hannah?

  The Hannah who makes me smile now when I read that ‘Sonia only had one line — but she was excellent and showed great signs of talent’; makes me laugh when she writes that ‘I dont want to go out much as I have a lot of work to do — lying on the ground breathing in and out’. My mother, I discover, was funny.

  I discover, too, that I like her. She could be solipsistic, bossy, dismissive of others, but there is also an openness, a naturalness, in these letters that warms me to her. I have heard about how ‘dramatic’ she was, her need to be the centre of attention, but while she clearly felt things strongly, said what she thought, she is calmer and softer here than I expected — more wry and self-deprecating than melodramatic (‘apart from the fact that I am dead tired and horribly fat life is quite pleasant’.) Her default mode may have been irony and irreverence, which I appreciate, but I am also touched by her youthful earnestness about her acting, the headmaster, my father, university, her advice to Tasha (‘you seem in a bad way, but Tash, if he hasn’t answered don’t for heaven sake write again’.)

  It is pleasing to read in her own words about things I have heard from elsewhere, such as secretarial school, which makes more sense now that I see in these letters how young she was, unformed, or RADA, which comes alive to me now for the first time.

  There is also disappointment. The fancy-dress party she writes about in one of the letters must have been, from the date, the one where I decided she met my father, but she does not mention him, and he does not appear in the letters for several more months. I reluctantly have to accept that this party was not the occasion when my parents met, or met again.

  When she does write about my father, I find her gushing about him, her references to their nights, a little embarrassing. Though that in itself is a new sensation for me — to be getting too much information about my mother, from my mother.

  SHE WAS CLEARLY more sexually advanced than the average middle-class girl in the pre-pill era, if that was hardly difficult. Jessica Mann, who was born in the same year as Hannah, writes in The Fifties Mystique of conducting a poll among women with whom she had been at Cambridge and finding that the average age of first sexual intercourse was 23.6 years. But the letters suggest Hannah spent more time fending off boys than doing anything with them.

  They also seem to confirm what I suspected — that she saw her ‘pashes’ for boys and her relationship with the headmaster as somehow separate things that could exist alongside each other. ‘Look after K,’ she writes to Tasha. ‘He is much nicer than one imagines in the hols. I had a nice letter from Mike.’

  The letters corroborate, in her own words, that something definitely went on with the headmaster. As Shirley had told me, he wrote to her, chased her up to London. He even called in unannounced to her home. Though the letters leave me scarcely the wiser as to what it all meant. He is a ‘darling’, she writes in one mood. It is comforting to have him ‘believing so utterly’ in her. She misses him ‘like hell’. But when he turns up at the old Frenshamian evening, she ‘felt as if I was going to dissolve’, and when he tries to get her alone in his Rolls: ‘Oh Tash it’s upset me ... Godinheaven — its all wrong.’

  I search for clues. What does it mean that she uses the word ‘affair’ to describe what was clearly no more than a flirtation on the airplane to Paris? I look up the Macmurray she writes about as a favourite of the headmaster. John Macmurray was a Scottish philosopher whose central philosophy was that it is in ‘community with others that we discover who we really are’. Is this what the headmaster was doing with Hannah? Being in community with her?

  I need help, and I give the letters to a neighbour who is a psychologist and psychoanalyst. Her initial impression, she responds, is ‘of a lively and excitable young woman in search of a convincing part for herself in relation to men — femme fatale or vulnerable ingénue, woman of the world or giddy adolescent. It seems impossible from these letters alone to tell whether they actually did or didn’t have sexual intercourse because Hannah seems to exaggerate some aspects of what she got up to and to minimise others.’

  Though when I tell her about the other evidence I have gathered — Shirley’s diary, Bill Will’s comments, the headmaster’s dismissal, his wife being a schoolgirl and he a teacher when they met — she explains how a young person can be ‘inducted’ by a powerful older figure. The victim’s view of what is right or wrong gets subverted so that she does not realise that ‘what is happening is wrong, is taught to talk about abuse as love’.

  She talks, and I read up too, about common patterns of abuse. How the person in power tells his victims that they are special, as Hannah wrote of the headmaster idealising her; singles them out for private lessons, as the headmaster invited Hannah to his study for her ‘extra German’; inculcates them with his ideas, as he did with Macmurray. It can be difficult, the literature suggests, to distinguish between inspirational teachers and abusive ones: sexual abusers can also be inspirational, which can be specially confusing for the children.

  My neighbour explains also about the correlation between sexual abuse and later psychological troubles, including suicide — how these often emerge in the victim’s twenties, the childhood experiences leaving the victim ‘brittle’. The fact that Hannah was a strong personality wouldn’t necessarily have helped, she says; ‘the whole of that terrific force gets turned against herself’.

  IS THAT HOW it was with Hannah? Her letters don’t say, don’t reveal any such darkness, take me only anyway to the age of twenty. This is all I have of her voice, that ‘husky voice’, as my grandfather wrote in his diary. With its ‘slight South Afr
ican accent’, Hannah wrote to Tasha. ‘Such a pleasant, well-modulated voice,’ Phyll Willmott wrote in her diary. ‘A singularly expressive part of her whole personality. She could “pun” with it when pleased, chuckle with it or grin when amused, and use it as a hammer when arguing fiercely about this or that.’

  But there are still a few other voices to hear — including the two witnesses to her last months, last days, who my grandfather sought out after her death. I can no more speak to Anne Wicks than I can Hannah, but after reading Hannah’s letters it occurs to me that Anne might have left letters or diaries that could throw light on Hannah’s story. An obituary mentions a close friend in the advertising world. I call her, and she offers to pass on a message to Anne’s children.

  While I am waiting, I go through the entries about Anne in my grandfather’s diaries. After his talk with her, he wrote that she was ‘not as much a villain’ as my father suggested; but as time passes, his references grow more critical again. At first, he writes only that she was a ‘hypnotic influence’, but in April 1966, four months after Hannah’s death, he says something more specific: Anne told Hannah that publishing The Captive Wife would do ‘irreparable harm’ to her career. In December 1967, the second anniversary of Hannah’s death, he expands this to Anne having ‘depressed Hannah about her book, her marriage, her prospects’. And in 1969 he elaborates a little further: ‘Anne Wicks saying a) leave your husband b) John’ll never marry you c) your work is preposterous.’

  Armed with these allegations, I go back to my father. He was angry with Anne, he says, because she ‘encouraged’ Hannah to have an affair. Anne had left her husband, ‘was enjoying her newfound freedom, and made Hannah feel that she was missing out on life’. But Anne’s marriage to Tony wasn’t ‘serious’ like his and Hannah’s; it only lasted a few years, and there weren’t any children.