We were flying in the same plane to Chicago, an old rattling Flying Tiger from the Second World War and it was the first time I had flown. We were free to sit wherever we liked so I found a window seat and settled down. I was reading the safety instructions and looked up to see someone sliding into the seat beside me. It was Uwe Kitzinger. He told me he’d done Classics at school, and was now at New College reading PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) and had a sister at Somerville. He struck me as a visionary and someone who was determined to make the world a better place. He also had delightful manners.
The flight took about 20 hours. We stopped in Shannon, then Gander, in Newfoundland, and chased the sunset across the Atlantic, that glowed red right through our journey. The plane seemed to climb upstairs laboriously and then fall down repetitively. I was writing ‘purple prose’ about how marvellous this was in a long letter to my mother. Then Uwe started to feel sick, grabbed a sick bag, and vomited off and on until we reached New York. All the same, he did a pretty good job of relaxed wooing. He was obviously very good at it. He said he particularly admired the way I wrote and how I described the view and the whole adventure. Fortunately he did vomit fairly quietly.
We parted when we reached Chicago. Uwe went to join the Senate Press Gallery and lunched with the notorious Senator Joe McCarthy, the man who thought Communists lurked everywhere, wanted all suspects imprisoned, and who led the American people to spend a lot of time looking for Reds under the beds. Then he was off to New York to stay up the Hudson in the castle of the president of a well-known cosmetics firm. I went on to a very different way of life in Chicago.
Chicago
When I attended a church in the ‘Black Belt’ I was always asked to speak, and each invitation led to another, and often young people’s conventions.
In a letter to my parents I wrote: ‘I met Father Divine, alias George Baker, a black preacher and founder of the Faith Eternal cult who sways a large congregation. He was never born in the normal way, but combusted at the corner of 134th Street and 7th Avenue, New York, around 1900. He provides free chicken dinners (all you can eat, everybody welcome!), set up a communal household and his followers give up everything to him. So he has become fabulously rich and married a white woman.’
I started work at the International Trade Fair alongside another young woman, whom in a letter to my parents I said was ‘rather smug … as so many English women abroad are’. Enquiring where the ladies’ room was at a large hotel, the porteress directed me 11 floors up, adding ‘We have one on this floor but it’s not very nice. The coloured use it, and I have to use it too.’ I said quietly, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t mind a bit.’
Day after day I feel trapped in extreme racial prejudice. I asked the driver of the bus provided by the Fair to drop me off at the Parkway. He said, ‘Oh, you can’t go there. It’s coloured!’ He needed quite a bit of persuading before he allowed me to get off the bus and I was late for my appointment.
3rd September
‘I have discovered this about my self – that I am not interested in the abstract, but in the actual, and that it is necessary for me always to be doing things with my hands if I am to be reasonably contented. You’d never believe how really practical and earth-bound I am, with all my ideals. To think of life’s vast problems in a vacuum frustrates me, but I am tremendously exhilarated when I can work from hand to hand or from heart to heart. I am much happier teaching children than arguing about the world’s educational problems. I like intellectual discussion, but the proof of it is down here on the earth, I think. It is in the home and the church and the community as a whole. And all problems can only be resolved eventually in this context, in a rather unspectacular way.’3
I was staying with a couple who were psychologists at Chicago University and baby-sat several times a week. But I needed cash for day-to-day expenses and Carl, a university student who was also at the community centre, suggested I sell my blood at the hospital, so that is what I did.
The African-American Way Of Death
Carl lived in his uncle’s funeral home and was doing a course in social science while also working part-time as a volunteer at the community centre. He liked the funeral home because it was a peaceful place to study. He invited me back there so I could write up my research report. There is no place more conducive to quiet study than a room in a funeral home when it is not open to viewing. I got quite a lot of work done there. I can recommend it. He also showed me how the morticians worked and I learnt about the ceremonies surrounding death, the laying out, viewing the body, and the mingled sorrow and rejoicing.
I watched his uncle at work draining fluids from the body, packing it with scented stuffing, and rejuvenating it with carefully applied cosmetics. He was very proud of his corpses. They were creations of art.
However poor the deceased had been, there had to be a lavish send-off. The room for the ritual viewing was splendid with great vases of gladioli at the head and foot of the deceased, many coloured flower offerings filling every available space, with written messages from those who knew him, and solemn music played from a mechanical organ. Since then I always associate gladioli with death, and seeing them I can still smell the scent of mortuary unguents: an overpowering odour of violets mixed with lavender, lime and rose, like a strong toilet deodorant. On the wall above the open coffin, which was resplendent with cedar wood, shiny brass and purple velvet cushions, was a thorn-crowned glass statue of Christ with strobe lighting twinkling like the lights on a Christmas tree so that blood appeared to be continuously streaming from his head and wounds.
The moment the doors were flung open and the mourners surged into the funeral home it took on the spirit of a festival. Each member of the crowd, old and young, signed the attendance book. Little children gaped in fascination at the technicoloured spectacle. I was the only white face and at first felt awkward and out of place. But people seemed to accept that my involvement was a mark of respect for the dead. Far from being a voyeur, I became one of the mourners.
This experience fed my interest in the values surrounding the human journey into life and out of it and the ceremonies that give pattern to these major transitions.
The West Indian Society
I think I knew all the West Indians and most of the Africans at Oxford – not very many. I was a member of the West Indian Society, which was great fun. They discussed openly with me how it felt to be ‘marginal men’ in Oxford, and what they did to try to be accepted. These men (for there were no women) were to become politicians, take up appointments in the higher echelons of the administrative and social services, be top administrators and academics and sometimes prime ministers of their islands. They were under social pressure to define their identity as distinct from dark skinned people who manned buses and the underground in London, and when outside Oxford their standard dress included a college tie or scarf and a rolled umbrella. This was a conscious and carefully thought through decision to express their social status.
One of my closest friends was a Trinidadian, Max Ifill, who later married an English woman, and whose son, Richard, was sent to boarding school when they returned to Trinidad. He spent some school holidays with us, got on well with our girls, and became a proxy brother.
Uwe Again
By chance Uwe and I met again in Oxford next term, and he invited me out for dinner at the Taj Mahal in the Turl. Apparently I spoke so enthusiastically about my experiences in Chicago, waving my arms about, that the waiters stopped waiting, and hovered, keen not to miss one bit, and he was hooked! I was hooked, too!
He had the nicest smile I have ever seen. Uwe was that rare person, an intellectual who was inherently sociable, highly political, fascinated by ethical issues and world problems, skilled at speaking and campaigning, charming, and delighting in female company. He is a very different kind of person from me, but we think alike. His ideals about society, especially at that time after the war, were very similar to mine. We were both working with the Council for Education in
World Citizenship, believed in federalism, and in overcoming national and cultural barriers.
Then I bumped into him again outside Marks and Spencers. We strolled along together a bit and he invited me to a debate at the Union at which he was speaking. I felt privileged.
I sat up in the front row of the balcony overlooking crowds of eager undergraduates who had flocked to hear the debate of the year. There was Uwe! He looked very striking and authoritative in the scene below as people crowded round him. I smiled at the woman sitting next to me. She asked, ‘Are you a friend of Uwe’s? He invited me as well.’ I turned to the one on my right and offered a tentative smile, ‘Are you a friend of Uwe’s, too?’ she said. Eventually I discovered that every woman in the front row was a guest of Uwe’s. It looked as if each of this retinue was a girl friend.
We talked about politics, social anthropology, religion and our ideals. He told me about his tutors whom he much admired – Isiah Berlin, Peter Wiles, Alan Bullock and Herbert Hart. He had a wide circle of friends that included other Oxford luminaries – Tony Benn, Ken Tynan, William Rees-Mogg, Godfrey Smith, Robin Day, Jeremy Thorpe, Vera Brittain’s daughter Shirley Williams (though that was before her marriage to Bernard, a philosopher), and just about everybody who was going into politics and the media. Later I learned that you couldn’t walk along the High without meeting the well-known people who greeted him.
Uwe was compassionate, too. When one of the young women who was camping at Mrs Weatherhead’s had nightmares and flashbacks and needed to be able to contact me in the night he came and fixed up a bell so that she knew she could get me quickly if she wanted to.
I invited him to my home for Easter 1951. Mother was startled when he stepped forward, bowed, and blonde hair flopping over his high brow, with great elegance, kissed her hand. He gushed his pleasure at being invited to this beautiful house. His manners were impeccable, but overwhelming. When I went to the kitchen to carry the teatray Mother stared at me with horror and whispered, ‘Sheila, what have you brought home?’
Falling In Love
The months at Oxford after I met Uwe were days of wine and roses. We walked along the Isis and made nests in the long grass. We spent a heavenly summer with butterflies, flowers, delicious scents of hay, puffy little clouds in a blue sky, birds singing, and exploring the finer arts of petting.
Then he invited me to meet his parents. It was important that we got on well. They lived in a small upstairs flat near St Albans. I was a little nervous, but they seemed to take it for granted that he and I should talk in his bedroom. Of course, we did more than talk.
The doorbell rang, and a neighbour called in. We were asked to meet him and drank coffee. As Uwe’s mother went to the kitchen to replenish the cups he muttered an aside. Apparently the floor acted as what he called a ‘baffle board’ and he could hear more or less everything we were doing, saying and exclaiming. He thought we ought to know.
I don’t think I made a good impression on Uwe’s parents. They thought he could do better and counselled him against me. Before lunch, Uwe’s mother described the main meat course she had cooked. I said I was a vegetarian. She said, ‘Never mind, I can give you sausages.’ My response: ‘Mrs Kitzinger, I do not eat mashed up corpses!’
On taking his First Uwe was offered a diplomatic post in Strasbourg and we wrote to each other all winter.
In the spring I met Uwe off the train from London and told him to get straight back on and we went for a weekend in the Cotswolds, to the Old Mill, in Shipston-on-Stour, where we had separate rooms but met, very quietly, in the dead of night. We found a restaurant on the river, the Bull, that had the very latest post-rationing food delicacies – frozen peas and an omelette with ‘real shell eggs’! The menu stated that with pride – six years after the war.
In early summer 1952 we went to a conference on world development and poverty in the Netherlands, a very flat country. It was at Wageningen, about the flattest place there. The trouble was that there was nowhere where we could kiss and caress that wasn’t visible to everyone else attending the conference – except behind the gas works, the largest building in the town. So that was where we slipped away whenever there was a gap in the conference programme.
Years later at another conference we met a lady who said that we have never been introduced before but she felt she knew us because she had seen us in Wageningen. Long pause. She added significantly, ‘I live opposite the gas works’. We hastened to tell her, ‘We are married now!’ ‘Oh, that’s all right then!’ She said with evident relief. End of conversation.
At Wageningen we decided to get married in October that year. I returned to Oxford, notified College, and gave them the details. I was summoned to her study by Miss Proctor, the principal. She was a tall, angular, steel-grey haired lady, a theologian, who didn’t find it easy to talk to students, but who had a keen sense of duty, I entered, sat opposite her at her wide, highly polished mahogany desk, and she addressed me, ‘Miss Webster, do you understand the significance of marriage?’ ‘Oh yes, Miss Proctor, I do’, I replied expecting a conversation to develop. She stood up to shake my hand, ‘Good’, she said, ‘Goodbye’.
A Long Distance Marriage
We married on 4 October 1952 at the Quaker Meeting House in St Giles. I wore a silk broderie anglaise dress the colour of clotted cream with a nipped in waist, which entailed wearing a waist corselet like a wide belt. It had a full, flared skirt and the hem was just above the ankles, like the dresses worn by Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter. It was the Dior New Look, launched way back in 1947 when Dior was the first haute couture Parisian to sell his designs to the retail market. We found the dress in Taunton at Mr Dodd’s boutique, the only high style dress shop in the town. After rationing and clothes coupons there was much criticism of the amount of fabric these New Look clothes involved and they were often denounced as wasteful. It cost more than any other dress I ever had. I used Mother’s Elizabeth Arden clover pink lipstick and powder, and dabbed lily of the valley scent behind my ears, but in those days it was not de rigueur to have a bridal make-up session, and anyway, I preferred to look natural. There were no bridesmaids or pages, and I didn’t even carry a bouquet. There was a bunch of flowers in a pot.
I had researched different methods of contraception and decided that the diaphragm would be best for me. I didn’t want to go on the Pill because it might muck up my hormones by introducing other chemicals into my blood stream, and I didn’t know the long-term effects. So I went to a gynaecologist to discuss this with her and get fitted. On the second visit she showed me how to fit the rubber cap over my cervix. I thought we were all sorted.
But then she said I couldn’t have it yet as I wasn’t married and I was to go to her the morning of the wedding day to collect it. Since meeting for worship was at 11 a.m., I should turn up around 10 a.m. and I could pop it in my handbag and take it. She was a formidable woman – not to be argued with.
I dressed in my wedding finery and Father drove me into Oxford. I walked the length of Holywell, and picked it up, and went straight to the wedding. A busy morning!
Our wedding seemed very special at the time and I did have a new dress, but it was not intended to shock, thrill and amaze, but to be a gathering in which we pledged ourselves to each other and shared our joy with close friends, colleagues and family. The Society of Friends doesn’t stage weddings. A marriage is recorded at the Registry Office after Meeting.
Some of those who attended didn’t have any idea what Quakers were about. The mother of one of Uwe’s girlfriends, in the silence of Meeting, in a loud and ringing voice proclaimed, as she addressed Norman Marrow, Uwe’s Classics teacher at school, ‘I know him, but don’t know anything about her. Is she all right?’
After about half an hour’s silence we stood up and, holding hands, I said, ‘I take this my friend Uwe Kitzinger to be my husband and promise, so long as we both on earth shall live, to be unto him a loving and faithful wife.’ Uwe made the same promise and we were married! We
didn’t exchange wedding rings and I have never worn a ring – I suppose because it holds a hint of bondage, and it seems to me that if you are indissolubly linked with another human being it is not necessary to demonstrate it formally. But today, our eldest daughter, Celia, holds a different view, and believes that when she and her partner Sue wear their rings they make a statement about equal marriage rights. They slipped the rings on in their marriage ceremony in Canada, and took them off whenever they were in a country which did not acknowledge marriage between two women.
After the Meeting for worship we had a small, relaxed and happy lunch at The Feathers in Woodstock when our friends could get to know each other. We spent our first night in Dorchester, and then stayed in Little Thatch, my home in Somerset. A complete absence of ceremony, yet a blossoming of our relationship.
Father’s Family
Shortly after our marriage Uwe and I drove up to Wigtownshire in the South West of Scotland to explore my father’s family history.
The Websters of Wigtownshire lived, worked and married within five miles of each other. They were crofters who leased land in return for work on the landowner’s farm. John (1814–1901) had 12 children and outlived all his siblings. He died at the age of 93 as he walked through Black Loch Plantation one night in a snowstorm, after having a wee dram too many to help him on his way. The Wigtown Free Press reported the discovery of his body three weeks later as the snow melted. The story is that a boy in the woods shouted to his father that he could smell mushrooms. ‘The body was in an advanced state of decomposition and sadly disfigured by vermin.’
A Passion for Birth Page 7