I have been given, have read in my grandfather’s diaries and elsewhere, more particular explanations for Hannah’s suicide. She was depressive. She was narcissistic. She was schizoid. She was ruthless. She burned too brightly to live a whole life. She couldn’t bear rejection, imperfection, compromise.
My grandfather seems to have wanted to believe, in his constant returning in his diaries to her childhood dramas, that the ‘suicide potential’, as Durkheim called it, was inside her all along, though at other times he blamed Anne Wicks, or O. R. McGregor. For a period I was convinced, or tried to convince myself, that the answer lay with the headmaster’s abuse — that he was the smoking gun.
But, of course, no suicide is the product of only one thing. In 2004, a new type of verdict, the narrative verdict, was introduced into coroners’ courts in England and Wales. Narrative verdicts are used in instances where the cause of death, or the responsibility for that death, cannot be easily categorised: such as the shooting of a man mistakenly identified as a terrorist, or when it is not clear whether a person has meant to take his or her own life.
A narrative verdict wasn’t available at Hannah’s inquest — and even if it had been, it couldn’t have been used. As the coroner said, it was clear that Hannah ‘deliberately and efficiently’ took her own life. But then the coroner’s concern was only with how Hannah died — not why she killed herself.
A narrative verdict is available to me, though. It is not a perfectly formed story. It may be partly questions or lists. It may present opposing ideas. It accepts that it doesn’t provide a complete or unchallengeable account. It is as much as is known, as much as can be drawn from the information available.
What follows is my narrative verdict, my attempt to fathom what Hannah’s coroner described as ‘a state of mind we cannot know’.
‘WE WERE TOO YOUNG to get married,’ my father admitted in one of our talks. But he was twenty-four, nearly twenty-five. Since leaving school seven years earlier, he had completed his national service in the army, partly in Berlin during the airlift, a time he talks about fondly. He was twice made corporal, and twice busted down to private. He rode a motorbike, made a parachute jump, had a German girlfriend, was taught to foxtrot and quickstep by the sergeant-major’s wife.
After the army, he went to Oxford, where he performed in comedy sketches, played rugby and cricket for his college, edited the books pages of the university newspaper. He had a serious affair with a girl he thought about marrying. He earned a law degree. He made friends and connections to last a lifetime.
After Oxford, he spent a year teaching at a boarding school, where he had his passionate liaison with the under matron. He passed his bar exams. By the time of his marriage, he had been working at his cousin-in-law’s printing company for a year and a half and been promoted to sales director, on a good salary.
He was young for the job, but he wanted what came with being older, with success, with being established. When, not long after, he was made managing director of the company, he went to a barber and asked for a haircut to make him look older. The barber suggested dying his sideburns grey, and as a result the secretaries ‘treated him more seriously’. He was too embarrassed to do it again, but he took up smoking cigars to give himself gravitas.
‘I was anxious to get on,’ he told an interviewer on a BBC radio Home Service programme in November 1963. He was also happy to be married, settled. He adored Hannah, and wanted children. ‘I never wanted to be anything other than a family man,’ Phyll Willmott remembers him telling her after Hannah’s death.
HANNAH, TOO, had always wanted to be older, was impatient to grow up. She insisted on leaving school before she had completed her A levels. She wanted to be married at seventeen, my grandmother’s story went, and I can believe that, like some of the women she wrote about in The Captive Wife, she was ‘desperate’ to leave home, to escape the constrictions of living with her parents.
But for all her precocity, her veneer of sophistication, her letters show how young she still was. The way she writes of the ‘utter heaven’ of driving my father’s car. Her excitement at telling Tasha about my father sleeping in her bed ‘all night’. Was this the first time she had spent a night in bed with a man?
Her letters also reveal her nervousness at the speed at which things were advancing with my father. In the first letter that mentions him, he is already asking her ‘to come and live with him (I declined)’ and within two months he has given her ‘an open offer of marriage’. She is ‘scared’, she writes.
She was eighteen when she married. Her application for a new passport in her married name for her honeymoon tells its own story. In the first page (the rest is missing) of a letter to Tasha, she writes, ‘we had a simply heavenly honey moon encountering none of the traditional difficulties’.
But a letter in her RADA file from four months later hints at a realisation that married life might not have been all ‘heaven’. ‘The end of the year production,’ she wrote to the RADA office, ‘will be mainly members of my old class and I would love to be able to see them all again on stage, so I wonder if you could possibly let me have two tickets.’ Was she regretting, in some part of her, leaving RADA so hurriedly, swapping its excitement and companionship for ironing shirts, cooking meals, waiting for her husband to come home? ‘I do expect an occasional letter,’ she wrote to Tasha, who was now at Oxford University, ‘if only to describe to me the life I have somehow managed to miss.’
THESE FEELINGS DO NOT SEEM to have been too long lasting or serious at this stage. She was young, life lay ahead of her, nothing was too serious. She was in love with my father, had the excitement of holidays in the south of France and the Alps, weekends at hotels by the sea. She was soon, anyway, taking up a place at university herself, and if any doubts, regrets, rose up in the years ahead — when she found herself a mother at twenty-one and again at twenty-four, in her interviews with her captive wives, at dinners with my father’s middle-aged business associates — her days were too full of her children, her studies, attending to my father, running the household, to dwell on them.
The change came, or began to come, when she went to work at Hornsey College of Art. Her first year seems to have been a time of settling in, learning how to handle a class, give a lecture. She was still working hard on her thesis, and a good deal of her energy was also going into supporting my father in his efforts to buy his own printing company. In one of the notes to my father, I found in my stepmother’s filing cabinet, Hannah wrote how she ‘put myself to one side and threw myself completely into helping you get what you wanted’.
But by the time she started her second year at Hornsey, in September 1964, my father’s business deal had been secured, and he was concentrating on turning around his new company, with fewer demands on Hannah. She had completed her thesis, and was waiting for it to be approved. Simon was at school, and at three I had also now started at full-time nursery. For the first time, perhaps, since Simon was born, every minute of her day was not prescribed.
Hornsey was itself going through a period of rapid change as it embraced, helped to create, the new mood and ideas of the 1960s. ‘Many of the era’s distinctive cultural developments’ sprang from the art colleges, Brian Marwick, a historian of the 1960s, wrote in the Sunday Times. ‘At Salford, Hornsey, Norwich and St Martins,’ they discussed ‘Sartre, played rock’n’roll and designed clothes’.
More younger teachers were being taken on for the expanding general studies course, including, in September 1964, John Hayes. A month later, on 11 October, my grandfather noted in his diary that Hannah had changed: ‘Exotic looking: black hair straightened, red dress, brown skin.’
MOST OF MY PARENTS’ FRIENDS, their neighbours, my father himself, were forward-thinking for their time, were the generation who had laid the groundwork for the 1960s. But they were already in their thirties, even forties, when it came along: the 1960s, as Larki
n famously wrote, were ‘just too late’ for them.
Hannah, though, was those few years younger, still on the right side of thirty. She was spending her days at Hornsey, mixing with younger people, teaching young artists, watching them enjoy the fruits, the sexual intercourse, and ‘unlosable game’, as Larkin put it, of the unfolding new age. She had also spent the last year writing up her interviews with young mothers who lamented that they had given up their youth too soon. ‘I’d like to have had more time for going dancing,’ one told her; ‘I would have liked to have travelled,’ said another.
Among the papers from my stepmother’s filing cabinet is a page torn out of a women’s magazine. Part of a feature on ‘The ’64 Beat’, it shows a young woman with the Mary Quant bob that Hannah adopted that autumn — or the ‘Boop-Boop-a-Do’, as the magazine called it. Dressing up in a new way, Angela Carter wrote in a 1967 essay, ‘Notes for a Theory of Sixties Style’, ‘gives a relaxation from one’s own personality and the discovery of maybe unsuspected new selves’. Clad in her red dress, or her mini skirt, and thigh-length Courrèges boots, with her Boop-Boop-a-Doo hairstyle, Hannah was a new person, newly young. She stood in the corridors at Hornsey, as David Page remembers, smoking her cheroots, eyeing up the male students. And, in time, as young people do, she fell in love.
THE WAY JOHN HAYES describes his relationship with Hannah — the excitable talk, the exploration of sexuality — makes it sound like a university love affair, and perhaps that was what it was like for Hannah, too, at first. More than one person has told me how attractive John was, with his wavy blonde hair and northern charm. There was the thrill of discovering someone new, the illicit assignations. Their school days, Hannah had written to Tasha, had left them with the feeling that ‘if one is not in love with anyone in particular, life is very dreary’.
But if the affair began as a reclamation of her too quickly abandoned youth, a facing down of regrets, it soon seems to have grown, at least for Hannah, into something more serious, more freighted. It was partly that her situation was less carefree than John’s. She had children. She didn’t have an understanding with my father about affairs, as John had with the other John. But being with John also opened Hannah’s eyes to new possibilities, to a new kind of relationship for a new kind of woman in the new world.
My sense is that my father hadn’t changed much in the years of their marriage. He had become more successful, more confident, had grown more into himself. But Hannah at twenty-nine was very different from the clever schoolgirl with dreams of being an actress she had been when she met my father. She had experienced the realities of married life, motherhood. She had spent several years studying the situation of young women in society. Working at Hornsey had exposed her to new ways of thinking. Nina Kidron told me that her husband, Michael, a Marxist thinker and colleague of Hannah’s at Hornsey, had ‘radicalised Hannah, introduced her to left-wing ideas’. Susie, too, remembers a rare conversation in Hannah’s last summer in which she confided that a ‘world was opening up for her because of her job at Hornsey, that she was meeting interesting new people with radical views, and was finding herself in tune with these views, not just in sociology, but in philosophy, politics, design, psychology’.
My father was unusual for a businessman. He was a Labour voter and a voracious reader. But his natural affinity was more for Dickens than Saul Bellow, whose novels Susie says Hannah liked; more for Rossetti than the op-artist Vasarely Susie remembers as Hannah’s favourite; more for classical music than the Beatles songs Hannah sung while straddling the front of the boat in France; more for Darwinian ideas of the survival of the fittest than the psychedelic psychiatry of R. D. Laing, who, I know from Tasha, Hannah ‘greatly admired’.
Hannah was no shrinking housewife, but the difference in my parents’ ages when they met, and the early years of their marriage, when my father was markedly more advanced in life, had laid down an imbalance of power that was reinforced by his success as a pugnacious entrepreneur (‘One has to be aggressive,’ he told the interviewer on the 1963 BBC radio programme. ‘One has to attack.’) and his control of the purse strings. One of Hannah’s contemporaries at Bedford told me a story about Hannah coming into college with lipstick on and explaining that she was wearing it because she had a tan from skiing. Her husband, she said, did not like her to wear make-up unless she had a tan.
It was the way of the times. ‘The idea that in marriage the wife should submerge herself in her husband still persists,’ Hannah wrote in The Captive Wife. Another strong woman, Sheila Rowbotham, wrote of her reasons for breaking up with an older man she loved in the 1960s. ‘In some confused sense I intimated that I could not become myself because I was always in [his] shadow ... I could not find an independent track while remaining connected to him.’
But it was a way that Hannah, in The Captive Wife, in how she was trying to live, was challenging; a way that she felt could be different with John. ‘There will always be a part of me that you made and which belongs to you,’ she wrote in one of her notes to my father in those last weeks. ‘But you need the kind of person I cannot be.’ To my grandfather, she was more dramatic. Hannah ‘fighting for her identity as an individual’, he recorded in his diary.
IN OCTOBER 1965, under pressure to see a psychiatrist, Hannah travelled to Sussex University to talk to her GP friend Tony Ryle. Tony wasn’t a psychiatrist, but he was a doctor with a growing interest in psychotherapy.
Nearly half a century later, I follow Hannah down to Sussex, where Tony Ryle still lives. His memories of Hannah’s visit are still clear in his mind. She came to see him ‘in distress’, he says. She had been ‘under a lot of pressure for a long time’. Connecting ‘femininity, intellectual and family life was not easy’. To find the space to get a first-class degree and a PhD, while having two children, running a household, and looking after my father, had ‘taken a lot out of her’. The title of her book ‘wasn’t an accident’.
His reading of her affair with John Hayes is that she was seeking ‘the other side of the coin’. My father was a ‘strong, determined older male figure who didn’t like being challenged’, while John was her own age, ‘more gentle and sensitive’. John’s homosexuality was part of the attraction to Hannah. She could ‘introduce him to heterosexual sex, be the dominant partner, in charge of the relationship’. Society at that time ‘preprogrammed women to accept a life structure of powerful men and subservient women, but in the end Hannah rebelled against this’. She was ‘discomforted with herself, and her affair with John Hayes was an attempt to find comfort, to find ease in herself.
JOHN HAYES WAS ULTIMATELY ‘a false solution’ for Hannah, Tony Ryle suggests. In affairs, people ‘often go for someone who supplies the parts they don’t get from their marriage, rather than the whole person’. But if Tony said this to Hannah in 1965, she doesn’t seem to have agreed. ‘I do know that there are very very few men who could be married to a person like me,’ she wrote to my father, and John, she appears to have decided, was one of those men.
But as this idea took on more substance in Hannah’s mind and she began talking about marriage, living together, John pulled back with equal force, leading to their argument. Exactly how the last acts played out is not entirely clear, though it happened very fast. John suggested the argument might have been on the morning of her death, though the day before seems more likely, for after Hannah’s visit that last evening my grandfather wrote of my father having ‘a chance’, that ‘there is no other man on the scene’.
If that was what Hannah told her father, John remembers her telling him that she would be at Anne Wick’s flat if he changed his mind. Perhaps this is what Sonia meant by Hannah expecting someone to find her, that it was John she was expecting — though once she had turned on the gas taps, he would have had to arrive within a very narrow window of time to find her still alive. More likely she waited for a while, and when John didn’t appear, went ahead with her plan.
She was ‘cheerful’ the previous evening, my grandfather wrote, and even on her last morning she was in ‘a good mood’, according to Jeanie. If this suggests that the idea wasn’t yet in her mind, the half bottle of vodka is evidence otherwise, and the good mood could have another explanation.
People who have survived serious suicide attempts sometimes speak of a feeling of relief, even euphoria, once the decision is made. A kind of fugue state settles on them, in which nothing matters but the task in hand. The vodka is ordered, the au pair girl is instructed to collect the son. The evidence of Hannah’s note — the small envelope, the sparse message, the wild writing that indicates she was already drunk, or perhaps affected by sleeping pills, when she wrote it — suggests that even saying goodbye was an afterthought. ‘Please tell the boys I did love them terribly!’ she wrote, in the past tense, as if the world had already receded, or she had already receded from the world.
HOW HAD IT come so suddenly to this? Hannah, who was so engaged with the world. Who only a week earlier was planning a new life with John, modern, sexually liberated, equal, uncaptive. The argument with John was the trigger, the sudden bursting of these hopes and plans, but I have come to see that there were other pressures building on her in the last year or two of her life, the last months:
1. HER PARENTS. Though they loved her, wanted the best for her, my grandfather’s diaries suggest that from the moment Hannah told them about her affair, they were overwhelmed by their own fears and anxieties.
‘Where are my hopes?’ my grandfather, ever the Grublergeist, wrote. My grandmother was ‘depressed’. They worried about my brother and me: ‘neglect must begin’. They worried about my father: ‘should have done more for Pop’.
A Woman on the Edge of Time Page 20