Needing to earn some money, I stuck up a notice in the local post office advertising myself as a babysitter, and this led to caring for three children while their academic parents were lecturing and tutoring. The Wheares were a high-powered couple. One lovely summer day Joan asked me to take the children to the University Parks. I set off with the baby in the pram, the toddler in a seat near the handlebars, the older boy, Tom, with his bat and ball and a supply of play things. Then I saw a large group from the Institute of Social Anthropology sitting on the grass with what turned out to be an impromptu seminar with Professor Lloyd Warner, author of Black Metropolis, the first study of urban Afro-American culture. This was too good to miss! They beckoned me over and I joined them with the little ones, while Tom went off to play. I was engrossed. But suddenly a shout went up! ‘Child in the river!’ I looked round and Tom was nowhere near. He had fallen in. By the time I had raced across the grass someone had fished him out. I piled the babies up in the pram again – it had tipped up – and took a dripping wet child home. No one was there. I washed his clothes, and hung his shoes, shorts and shirt on the line to dry.
Professor Wheare was the first to return. I told him, ‘I’m very sorry – I let Tom fall in the river!’ There was a pause while he considered this carefully. Then, as an afterthought, he asked, ‘Did you get him out again?’ I nodded, and he commented, ‘Good’. Tom later became Headmaster of Bryanston.
At Oxford I discovered sex, too, a mix of philosophy, religion and physical excitement in, of all settings, the Society for the Study of Eastern Religions.
Yatti was a Buddhist from Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and I first met him when he came to stay with Mother as a guest of the Victoria League which arranged international student visits in English homes. We had sex and curry in his digs on the corner of St John’s Street. With stars in my eyes, I never thought about contraception and trusted he would pull out in time. Though there was physical intimacy I don’t think we ever achieved any emotional closeness or understanding. We didn’t really talk – just bounced around together while curry was heating up on the gas ring.
A Jewish member of the Group for the Study of Eastern Religions, Vernon, was aware of the affair and tried to protect me and rein me in. He was very sweet and caring, but I thought he was being stuffy. It was partly because he criticised my clothes, too. I had bought a bright pink skirt and waistcoat in the softest wool and wore it over a dark green jumper. He told me I looked ‘like a shop girl’.
When I discovered I was pregnant I took it for granted that Yatti would stick by me, and that we would marry. He didn’t. His Brahmin high caste family would disapprove and reject me as grossly inferior. His loyalty to the family was paramount, and he cold-shouldered me.
I returned home at the end of term to tell Mother. My fantasy was that I would go off and live in a caravan in the middle of a field with my baby and somehow get my life together. We discussed this realistically and she sorted out an abortion that was performed with skill, tact and understanding in my own bedroom by an obstetrician friend of hers who was the father of one of my close friends at school. It was at that time a criminal offence and I owe a lot to him. Father assisted him, and I shall never forget the look on his face when the doctor introduced the cannula to drain amniotic fluid and I started to bleed. I felt incredibly guilty at what I had done to my parents.
Yatti was very snooty about it all. He took a part-time job with the railway, and every time I bought a ticket to London I confronted him through the booking office hatch. It wasn’t a plate glass thing – more like a hole in a hen coop, and you had to bend down to communicate. We never spoke again, except about tickets. I later learned that he returned to Sri Lanka and married an obstetrician who was part of the island’s elite.
I thought of that child, and what he would have looked like, for years afterwards, especially on his birthday. It felt as if the sperm had wiggled its way into my uterus and stayed there. I carried a burden of guilt and there was no-one I could talk to about it. Years later when Celia was born and I lifted her into my arms I was surprised that she was light-skinned.
Social anthropology sharpened my sense of gender injustice, as I confronted scholarly men who perceived women as marginal, relevant only in terms of kinship, economic and political systems. I wanted to learn more about women’s lives cross-culturally, and Margaret Mead, who came from the United States to run seminars at Oxford, encouraged me to explore the subject of birth, while my B.Litt thesis grew out of research into the experiences of African and Asian students at British universities.
I joined the Society of Friends, found a front room in Fairacres Road near the river, and had a Quaker landlady, Mrs Weatherhead, who took in strays. She was a generous woman. I once found her making cakes with her breastmilk. She was milking her breasts very efficiently straight into the mixing bowl, and told me she had plenty and didn’t want to waste it. They tasted very sweet.
I remember keenly one night in Fairacres Road when something extraordinary happened. It was around 2 or 3 a.m. – and there was activity on the other side of the road, with lights on upstairs and down. I was woken by a car that had stopped opposite, somebody bustled out with a bag, the bell rang, the door opened and shut, and the figure disappeared. Another light was switched on upstairs. I could just hear music. Then everything was still.
Half an hour – perhaps an hour – went by. There was the light steadily burning on the first floor, and now and again human outlines were etched against the curtains – walking, bending, stretching out, leaning over, walking again. The music changed. They put a fresh record on, a Brahms lullaby. Then all was still again.
The night was dark – no moon, a thick, heavy, brooding night. Then suddenly the quiet cracked open and a sound pierced the darkness. It was like a lamb’s bleat, a shrill wail that summoned instant attention – a human cry. A baby greeted life for the first time. I had eavesdropped on the miracle of birth. I shall never forget it.
One of Mrs Weatherhead’s guests was a young woman who had run away from home, and in her turn had befriended some prostitutes. There was a taxi service in Gloucester Green and the drivers acted as pimps for the American service-men in the camps around Oxford. They would get a group of teenage girls and take them out towards the camps, introduce them to the airmen, and sex took place in the taxis. Then they ran them back again. I got to know these girls and became fascinated by the social set-up, finding out why they were doing it, the relationships between them, and the very different relationships between this group and other prostitutes who came regularly from London on pay day. These were the ‘Piccadilly Queens’. They had much more money and swept into Oxford on the train from Paddington. There was great rivalry.
My tutor, John Peristiany, encouraged me to study this, use anthropological concepts and methods of enquiry, and learn how to interview by exploring their lives with these women. It was a great education for me! I became friendly with them and was able to help them a bit. In this way I began to learn how to do qualitative feminist research, which is different from studying people as if you could stand aside and be coolly objective about what you are doing, filling in boxed numbers on questionnaires and adding them up. I tried to understand them as women. Most had deprived lives. Many had been sexually abused by fathers, step-fathers or uncles, and it was not surprising that they had run away from home. It was the pattern of their lives – disadvantage, even if they weren’t financially disadvantaged, the kind of society in which they grew up, interpersonal stresses in the family, and the powerlessness they experienced, that drove them into sex work. Statistics are important, but quantitative studies need to be balanced with in-depth qualitative analysis.
The thesis for my research degree was on race relations in British universities. You can’t discuss Oxford without talking about inside and outside, the people who are accepted and those who are marginal. In those days these were Pakistanis, Indians and Caribbeans. I looked at the social groups they formed to cope with th
is experience of being marginalised, and attitudes and behaviour towards them. A friend at Trinity smuggled out the JCR book for me to see a particular entry after an Indian came up: ‘A black man in Trinity! Gentlemen, what are we coming to?’ It was signed by a member of a well-known brewing family.
St Hugh’s
When I started post-graduate work I moved into College for a few terms. At that time St Hugh’s was stuck between an old fashioned boarding school for girls and an Oxford College which permitted certain freedoms, expected students to have a vigorous social life, and which provided a comfortable background for learning. I think the Fellows did not quite know what to do with us or how to treat us.
Only two of us were vegetarians, Maura and me. The kitchens hadn’t a clue, gave up, and served cold baked beans straight out of the tin meal after meal.
Men were allowed to visit the undergraduate rooms, but only in the afternoons before 7 p.m. So many liaisons were surreptitious, and that added to the thrill. The custom was that if a man was successful in his aims he took a bath tap as a trophy. It was a bit like hunters who display moose heads on the walls. John, who had been at school with my brother David, apparently made it with a woman in a room along my corridor and went off with both bath taps from the nearest bathroom. He subsequently became the distinguished head of an Oxford college. I don’t know what he did with the bath taps.
The rooms were so pokey that it was difficult to know how to decorate them. Mirrors helped. I chose the colour orange and hung orange velvet curtains, and had the same colour bedcovers and rug on the floor. Every day in cold weather the scout would come in to clear and lay the coal fire, and, presumably, to check there was no man there. He was supposed to be the only male on the premises.
My Brother David
The Guardian described him as a ‘BBC producer with a media mogul’s flair. With his knowledge and contacts, he was almost ambassadorial.’2
As a child David was a cub. He didn’t go on to be a boy scout. He liked independence and the chance to think for himself. He was sent to Taunton School, a public school that, like many others, put great emphasis on games, the Officer’s Training Corps and corporal punishment administered by prefects. David had an independent spirit. He dared to go to a film he wanted to see at the Odeon wearing his school uniform. The consequence was that he was summoned for trial by the prefects and subjected to a flogging. The method they used was to make a boy kneel over a stool with his head under a table. Then the prefects took turns at caning him, trying to outdo each other and cause most pain. It not only produced wounds to the buttocks but battered the boys’ heads, too. One of the prefects who caned David later became my husband’s best friend at Oxford. He was a committed Christian. I never could feel close to him.
What the school had not realised was that breaking school rules and going to the local cinema was a vital part of David’s development as an investigative journalist with media flair working with colleagues in high places, including governments on both sides of the Atlantic.
Mother’s protests against violence of all kinds and her work for peace was continued by David, expressed in his refusal to serve in the armed forces when he was called up, after the war, for National Service and his conscientious objection.
It was a simple matter for members of the Society of Friends who produced evidence of religious membership and joined the Friends’ Ambulance Service to justify their conscientious objection. Though the media described him as a Quaker, he was an agnostic and it was harder for him – he faced the threat of being sent to prison. He needed a good lawyer. He was represented at his tribunal by an African barrister who was a close friend. He was excused from military service and directed into alternative work as a porter at Great Ormond Street Hospital. But he really wanted to get to the continent and help set up an organisation that meant that nations would never resort to war again.
David was offered the job of Chair of World Student Federalists in Paris. So he sent a letter to the Minister responsible for National Service, informing him that he felt his alternative services as a CO would be of more value if he went to work in Paris instead of sweeping floors and changing bandages in London. He left without having any answer. There was the risk that if he returned to England he would be put in jail, and we were anxious for him. In the event, he did not come back until conscription had been abolished.
In Paris David shared an apartment with the African-American novelist Richard Wright. Whilst there he became friends with the Abbé Pierre – a revolutionary priest, champion of the homeless and founder of the Emmaus Community, who lived in poverty and slept on David’s desk – which was always a big one! David had very little money himself and with not much food, became very thin.
He worked in Paris for two years, first with WFS and later also as Director of the World Movement for World Federal Government.
Then he moved to Amsterdam as Secretary General of the World Student Federalists, in charge of the Amsterdam office. Lucy Law, National Student Chairman of the United World Federalists, regularly wrote to him as she was fascinated by the photograph of David that was used for publicising World Student Federalists. It was taken in the bathtub of a Count who was a friend of WSF and depicted him at his leanest when he was poor and hungry in Paris. Lucy, who later became his wife, tells me that she was disappointed when she first met him in person, because he was a good deal plumper by then and didn’t look like the publicity photo.
When in Amsterdam David lived in the Red Light district and had loads of friends, famous and infamous. It was exciting to visit him there and feel the sense of community. Amsterdam life was swinging – philosophers, writers, revolutionaries, sex workers, artists – the lot!
It struck me at the time that the women on show behind the windows had better lives than prostitutes in London who roamed the streets. They had their own territory and the drug scene was relaxed. I didn’t examine it more closely and find out who, if anyone, was exploiting them – questions I would certainly ask today.
David had loads of friends among these young women on exhibition. The relationships were free and easy and I think he didn’t analyse this set-up in political terms. Maybe Amsterdam was not the lovely place it set out to be.
He spent a year at Ruskin College, Oxford, and then became a journalist with the BBC, first a Production Assistant with Panorama in 1959, and its Editor in 1967. The Guardian commented on its ‘authoritative journalism and good storytelling’. He was immensely loyal to the BBC and convinced of its importance in national and international affairs. In seeking information and comments from corporations and foreign ministries he always by-passed press officers and went straight to the top.
Lucy wrote to me, ‘I remember very clearly David’s departure for Dallas after President Kennedy was shot. He came racing down our hill on his moped and rushed into the house to pack before a car picked him up to go to the airport. Our son, Daniel asked, ‘Is Daddy going to save Mr Kennedy?’
At Panorama he worked closely with Richard Dimbleby and together they made programmes after the terrible earthquake at Skopje. He also made programmes in Vietnam and visited many overseas countries.
In the 1970s he became the BBC’s Director of Public Affairs and was on the Board of Management, and then BBC Director in the United States. During this time he and Lucy divorced.
Subsequently he created the Transatlantic Dialogues on Broadcasting, an international organisation to train journalists of ex-communist and other countries and show them how they could resist coercion from government and organisations that abused power. He was strongly supported by his son Daniel, who took over as David’s health deteriorated.
David had type 2 diabetes, breast cancer – unusual for a man – and heart failure. All his interests were based in the United States, especially on the political scene in Washington DC. We were pretty much out of touch. He phoned occasionally, but always to ask for Uwe because of their shared interests in developing democratic media in ex-communist coun
tries, and never wanted to talk to me or find out what I was doing. Yet our radical upbringing led us both to taking political action on an international stage and challenging powerful institutions.
David as the BBC’s director of Public Affairs
In the words of the Times obituary after he died in Washington DC in the summer of 2003, ‘In everything he did he sought influence, not power.’
How I Met Uwe
Uwe and I met in July 1950 on a plane going to the United States, a week after the Korean War broke out. It was at the end of my first year at Oxford. He was up at Oxford, too, and had a shining career there, becoming President of the Union. We each had a student research fellowship with a Quaker-based action organisation, International Fellowships for Students Overseas, run by Phil Ruopp, an American at Oxford. Phil and his wife Frankie were friends of Mother’s and often visited Little Thatch. This was one way in which they put their religion into practice. We were to spend the long vac working in the United States, and there were choices between social and community work, teaching and journalism.
Uwe
I had to go to London for my visa and in the hall at the US embassy I noticed that the same young man I had seen on the platform five years before was sitting waiting for his visa, too. He spent the time moving between dozens of people whom he obviously knew, and I watched him. He was eager, outgoing, and very active at getting people involved in the exploits he was planning. I couldn’t hear what they were arranging, but he generated terrific enthusiasm.
Uwe was going to Washington DC, working in politics, and I was going to Chicago to look at race relations in what was then called the ‘Black Belt’ and to work with under-privileged black children in a community centre. The task was to give them an enriching and stimulating break from poverty and race discrimination.
A Passion for Birth Page 6