The other valuable thing she did was inspire me about English literature, and especially writers such as Jane Austen. She never managed to teach me the rules of grammar though. I was not interested and got appalling marks in exams.
I was a member of the Peace Pledge Union and wore my badge to school. One day, Miss Lloyd asked me to walk round the hockey field with her. She told me it was quite wrong to wear a PPU badge to school. She was wearing an animal welfare badge so I challenged her: ‘Why do you let other girls wear animal welfare badges?’
She fixed me with a Gorgon-like stare: ‘That’s quite different, because it’s not political. PPU is political and you cannot make political statements at school. We must clip your wings.’
I removed the badge, and my mother agreed that I should compromise by not wearing it at school, but continue to do so out of school. I felt bitter about it. Later, I realised that if you believe something strongly and can produce evidence for it, you need to stand your ground. I was greatly influenced by Miss Lloyd’s attempt to ‘clip my wings’.
Years later my youngest daughter Jenny was asked to leave a voluntary job she was doing with a charity because she was wearing a lesbian badge. She was told it was because in counselling and helping distressed people she would be in a ‘small room’ and in ‘close’ proximity to them.
At Bishop Fox’s we were encouraged to do part-time voluntary work to benefit the community – on Thursday afternoons and in the holidays. I worked as a nursing assistant at Taunton Hospital, at first on a men’s surgical ward. I used to cut their toe-nails, often difficult because they were thick and ridged and they could not reach them themselves, so they grew into tortured, gnarled shapes. I washed them, gave them bed-pans and cleaned these out in the sluice. They were very grateful. Elderly countrymen often knew my father and sent messages back to him about how wonderful I was.
The patients found it difficult to position their penises over the urine bottles. They fumbled and pleaded that they were unable to manage and asked me if I would pop the penis in. I did as they requested. Sister noticed how delighted her patients were with me and I was moved to a women’s ward.
In my teens I explored the churches, chapels and meeting houses in Taunton and was keen to learn about and understand their teachings. I also took over the youngest Sunday School class and, enthused by Herbert Read’s Education through Art, and discovering Jung, gathered in our friend’s children for self-expression on Sunday afternoons. The county psychiatrist, a friend of Mother’s, was my guide, and we had art exhibitions of children’s representations of God, for example, with pictures on huge pieces of paper begged from wallpaper shops. One four-year-old did a splendid scarlet painting of God as a pillar box. You pop in your requests – the prayers – and the answers come – sometimes.
Poetry, plays and comparative religion occupied most of my spare time. Shelley – ‘O wild west wind, thou breath of autumn’s being’ – and the luscious sensuousness of the Ode on Melancholy, together with the Metaphysical poets – Donne, for example – and Traherne’s mystical writings, Shaw, Chekhov and Ibsen.
The beautiful Bristol Old Vic became a centre for my artistic excitement. It is one of the oldest constantly working theatres in England, was designed by a carpenter, and opened in 1766. I knew exactly where to sit and how to pay next to nothing to get a good view round a pillar when I leant slightly sideways!
I discovered that remarkable book The Cloud of Unknowing, the war poets like Wilfred Owen with their searing castigation of a society that had sent them to die like cattle in the Flanders mud, and later Martin Buber, struggled with Simone Weil and Kierkegaard, and revelled in Olive Schreiner and Dostoevsky.
We wanted to build a new world. It was going to have World Government, be federalist, and dedicated to peace and the eradication of poverty. There were exciting meetings in London, including the Peace Pledge Union Assembly at Friends’ House, Euston, where Sybil Thorndike’s voice rang out as rich as cream, yet reached the very back row with clarity in the spirit of her own St Joan.
I went to many Federal Union meetings with Mother and listened to Professor Joad, awkward, argumentative and stimulating. Sir Alfred Salter and Dick Sheppard stayed in our home when they were addressing meetings in Taunton, and other members of Parliament had all graduated from the University of Prison as conscientious objectors, and used to compare their prison experiences as other people talk about their old school. There were other lovely people like Richard St. Barbe Baker, who planted trees in the deserts.
I started to go to Friend’s Meetings and preferred silence and mysticism to the structured services of Unitarianism, though I was still committed to my Unitarian heritage.
I studied voice and drama, as well as doing my school work, through all the exam grades until I got my LGSM, the teaching qualification from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Then I started teaching voice production and drama part-time.
As a teenager I was asked to perform at ceremonies and meetings of which poetry or drama formed a part, often alongside music. I revelled in speaking St Joan’s impassioned speech to the court in Shaw’s St Joan. One day I was invited to recite at a gathering of women on the estate of one of the oldest and most splendid houses in Somerset. It must have been a meeting about peace, because I chose Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth. It is a moving poem. I spoke it solemnly, clearly, with intense meaning.
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattles
Can potter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; nor prayers not bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
I realised that some women in the audience were quietly weeping. When I finished one woman collapsed in unrestrained suffering. I was aghast. Later the titled lady whose house it was tackled us for the failure in etiquette in disturbing this guest of hers. Her lover had died in the last war. It was an unforgivable faux pas. We went to apologise to her and explain why I had chosen this poem. It was because the war was so terrible that we must strive to stop all war.
My First Trip Abroad
The year after the war, when I was 17, I went abroad for the first time with the YWCA to what was then Czechoslovakia. I wanted to meet girls from different countries in constructive activity to benefit society. The rail journey across Europe was long and exhausting, sitting in a carriage with an elderly lady in the far corner and a pleasant looking, balding man in a beige mackintosh who sat down next to me. He at least spoke some English. He told me he was a university lecturer and we talked. But in the dead of night, when at last I had managed to get to sleep, he shoved a hand in my knickers and started to feel me. I screamed. The lady switched the lights on and he fled up the corridor. She roused the guard, but he had disappeared.
The camp was an ordeal. The Czech girls hung together, because they couldn’t speak English and I had no Czech except ‘skupina’ – ‘squad’, and remember only one girl, an Irish Catholic, with whom I could talk.
We had to build a road into a forest through which the Vltava river ran. And it was very hard work, first digging and heaving stones for the foundations, then levelling them up and finally tarmacing them.
Accommodation was in old railway stock, sleeping in bunks. We huddled round the camp fires in the evenings to sing. The culture was still Soviet, and we were controlled by rewards and punishments. The Camp Commander blew a whistle to get us out of bed, to
switch squads from one task to the next, for meals – which were absolutely dreadful, especially for a vegetarian, consisting of potatoes and shredded meat – and even when we had to line up and recite the Lords Prayer.
The experience strengthened my determination to resist institutional tyranny of all kinds.
‘A Matter Of Life Or Death!’
This was my first published article. My pen name was ‘Hannah Torr’.
It is a little strange, when you are still at school, as I am, to be wondering if there is anything before you in life, and whether, when you dream of the future, there is going to be any future at all for you. It is difficult to face up to the possibility of slaughter and blood again, intense suffering, and then blackness and nothingness – and this happening, not in some far corner of the earth, but happening here to me.
We are waiting for something, for some tremendous event which will change peoples’ hearts and minds in a flash. We may think that if we go on quietly, seeking our individual salvation in an unobtrusive way, something is bound to turn up, and everything will be all right in the end. The end – yes, that is what we are confronting, and yet we can hardly imagine it, the stopping for ever, the drop into the void, and then no existence, no breathing, no laughter, not feeling at all; and civilization crashes, and with it all art, all beauty.
Nothing will turn up. The power we are waiting for to change the world does not exist, except in ourselves. We are the people who can give humanity hope. There is no one who will come and take the burden from us, no demigod who will command us to follow him to a sure victory, and no safe haven. The eyes of the starving and fearful, of the dying and the sorrowful, look to us, as individuals who, if we wish it, can join together to struggle for life, against the blackness of war and annihilation which is sinking down upon us.
Have you ever looked into the eyes of a starving man? I did, a few weeks ago, on my way to and from Czechoslovakia. It is something not easy to forget. It is not so much the match-stick thinness of his wrists, nor the great head which seems too heavy for the bowed body, but it is the look in his eyes which turns one sick. It is the look of a hunted animal who has no strength to run further. What image is it, great God, in whose likeness we are made? Is it this tormented, suffering animal? Are You this defeated one? Or are You rather the image of the conqueror, with the blood of the children who are yellow like wax, running along the gutters.
Look into the eyes of those of all nations who have lost hope, the eyes of those who do not dare to see further than the present moment, who are spiritually stifled by their fear of the future. They are hungry too.
See those who are poisoned by their own bitterness, defiled by the cancer of hatred, whose compassion has become swamped by self-interest.
These are the physical and moral invalids of our great hospital, the earth, and we are going to have to do something about it now if it is not to become one vast mortuary.
Up against the possibility of extinction, we desperately need a plan, and the courage to fulfill it. We must not look round to see if others are agreeing with us, and doing their share of the work. We cannot afford to wait for the other nations to abolish their armaments and train the young for peace instead of war, until we do ourselves. If we are going to take as our responsibility the moral leadership of the world, and probably we are the only country which is able to, we must strike out new paths in the wilderness, and that is not done by walking round in circles. We have to decide now, life or death, glory or suicide – and there is no middle way.1
In my gap year before going up to Oxford I studied the Stanislavski acting method with Eileen Hartley-Hodder in her elegant eighteenth-century residence in Bristol. From this I gained a new perspective on birth and antenatal education, and devised a way to prepare for an intense and joyful experience.
There was no question of us sitting around in rows lapping up information – no room for physical jerks, either. Every class was vigorous and expressive. In two groups we used to act the parts of red ants and white ants and had battles on her elaborate Chinese decorated staircase that coiled up several floors. The ornately painted bannisters and supports shook as we charged over and clung to them at full tilt to stop hurtling down. There was no time to stop and think what we were doing. It was about feelings, not intellectualisation, spontaneous physical activity rather than exercises.
Our bodies knew what to do. We imagined events and social situations, interacting with other groups and individuals, drawing memories out of our personal lives, discarding propriety and social mores, and freeing our bodies to respond without question to what they were telling us to do.
I was debating whether to aim for the stage as a career, to study for the Unitarian ministry, or go to university and wait and see. I was drawn to reading psychology or social anthropology. Anthropology won.
CHAPTER TWO
OXFORD
The Conference of the Council for Education in World Citizenship in London in January 1945 was crammed with 3,000 young people. It was thrilling. We were going to change the world. No longer patriots of one nation or another, we represented the youth of a new world that would be at peace, with nations reaching out to co-operate with each other in bold ventures, and war would be no more. One eager young man on the platform inspired me with enthusiasm. I found out that his name was Uwe Kitzinger.
In those days Greek or Latin were essential to get into Oxford and Cambridge. The exam that had to be passed was ‘Little-go’. I was very bad at Latin and disliked more or less anything about Rome: its centralised power, colonisation and discrimination and exploitation of subject peoples. So I switched to Greek. I was offered a place at Girton, chose to do Greek because I thought it was a more beautiful language than Latin, found some private tutoring, and failed the exam! I had no-one to advise me. Because my school, Bishop Fox’s Girls’ Grammar School, Taunton, didn’t reckon on getting any pupils into Oxbridge, and the staff were not interested, I hadn’t a clue about the procedures, and was left high and dry. I only learned that I could have gone up to Cambridge, and taken ‘Little-go’ again next term, after it was too late to sort it out.
Meyer Fortes, anthropology don at Oxford, who subsequently had the Chair at Cambridge, saved me. He interviewed me, waived the rules and accepted me at Oxford. In 1949 Ruskin College generously gave me a nominal place there until, two years later (after I got a distinction in the Diploma in Social Anthropology, which counted as a degree), I was able to do post-graduate research at St Hugh’s.
The Oxford years
I didn’t read Social Anthropology at university because of feminist beliefs, but from sheer curiosity. I wanted to understand human behaviour and cultural diversity. I was hungry for anything that contributed to that – reading, travel, what social scientists call ‘participant observation’, and when doors of opportunity opened I tended to push them wider. There was no master plan. I always asked myself, ‘How can I use this experience?’
Looking For Digs
I thought the big Victorian houses in north Oxford might be the best places to find digs – one of the front rooms looking onto the Banbury or Woodstock road, or a back room with a view of the well-managed garden. So I trailed advertisements and had cards pasted up in small local shops for what would have been the maid’s room. But now there were no maids. The rooms available were in the attic and very pokey. In one grand house there was a large, airy room at the front, with a big window, that seemed ideal, until my elderly and very superior hostess interviewed me in her sitting room.
My eye was caught by a curious display on the grand piano, an array of wax flowers, mostly lilies, under a glass dome like a huge cheese bell, with a bundle of something inside. ‘Was it a doll?’ I asked. No. It was her newborn baby who had died nearly 50 years before, and in her grief she had it mummified and stuffed so that it could be with her always. It was wearing a long, white, lacy christening gown, its cheeks plumped up and facial features delicately coloured in pastel shades. She told me she d
usted it every day. I decided against moving in.
Later, when I was doing post-graduate research at St Hugh’s, and moved out of college, I found a large basement flat in Park Town, near College, the shops, and the Institute of Social Anthropology. My brother David had rented it before and was comfortable there. He was at Ruskin but had now gone to Amsterdam to be Secretary of the World Student Federalists. What appealed to me was the lovely pattern of flourishing ivy across the ceiling, where water was seeping in and providing the right habitat for green, growing things. Not every flat has its own indoor garden!
I started at Oxford in effect without a college and social contacts developed through university organisations. There was Professor Radakrishnan’s Society for the Study of Eastern Religions, the small group that met in his rooms at All Souls. It included a Jain, a Jew, a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Quaker and a few others. We went regularly to All Souls to meet with Professor Radakrishnan, explore holy writings and beliefs, and learn how they related to individual lives and social organisation. There was another society for the study of religious thinking based on Manchester College, the Unitarian College. There were Quaker meetings. There was the Oxford University Labour Club, too, where Michael Summerskill was a leading figure, and, of course, a mixed bag of social anthropologists, including select Sudanese and other students from Africa who had been hand picked by lecturers (some of whom were having hectic affairs with them). One of my closest friends doing the diploma with me was a lovely Ghanaian (though then it was still the Gold Coast) who became chief minister of the Ashanti Kingdom.
A Passion for Birth Page 5