A Life in the Day

by Hunter Davies

  They stayed with us for six months, upstairs in our house, back in her childhood bedroom. I hoped she would apply for a council flat. I wanted to be able to go around boasting ‘Council house to council house in two generations’. Then she got a job as a teacher and found a flat just a few streets away.

  After a year or so teaching, she started doing pieces for the Independent’s Education Supplement, which was quite a large section at the time, writing various columns. They paid badly and slowly, but they did pay. She also started writing books, novels and non-fiction.

  She has now had ten books published, but none of them has made much money. Her books involve a lot of research, and take a long time, such as the history of swimming down the Thames. I think back to myself at her age, when I did a few niche books, meaning a subject which is likely to have only a specialist readership, such as a book I did about adoption, but at that time I got reasonable advances for them, about double what Caitlin gets today. Publishing is in a bad state. I read somewhere that the average professional, published author earns only £5,000 a year. How can they live on that?

  Caitlin has recently been doing two days a week at the University of Westminster, as a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, which pays quite well, enabling her to work the rest of the week full time on her books. As I write, she has just secured a contract for a book about the history of Holloway prison, Europe’s most famous women’s prison, and has secured access to all their archives. This was where the suffragettes were locked up, and lots of other female prisoners, well-known or notorious.

  Ten years ago she went on an internet dating site, which alarmed Margaret and me, not understanding such things, worried where it would lead, but it turned out brilliantly for her. She has been with her partner, Nigel, ever since. He was a photographer and is now in the lay-out department of a well-known online newspaper. They live near the Holloway Road, just within walking distance.

  Her daughter Ruby is now sixteen and has been at the girls’ comprehensive school near us which Flora attended – and is now at a sixth form college. Ronald, Caitlin’s former husband, later became an MP in Botswana.

  Jake, our son, was a right pain as a young child, unlike Caitlin the paragon, never sleeping, doing really stupid things, falling over, injuring himself. You would shout at him not to kick a tin can across the road or run along the pavement with a piece of plastic pipe in his mouth – and he did, falling over, giving himself the most awful injuries. We seemed never to be away from A&E.

  He was also slow at reading and learning generally. He loved football and when I was doing football books I made him do lists for me – totting up the goal scorers, away goals, penalties. He would often fall asleep with a Spurs programme still on his face. I used to maintain to Margaret that it was thanks to me getting him interested in football programmes that he eventually did learn to read.

  As a teenager, unlike Caitlin, he never rebelled or caused us any worries. It was as if he had got all of that bolshie nonsense out of his system in his first seven years of driving us mad. Or perhaps boys don’t generally have such troubled adolescences as girls.

  It was in the sixth form that he seemed to emerge, academically. We always knew he was good at arguing, often just for the sake of it, just like his dear mother, fluent and convincing. He was also very knowledgeable on things like politics, unlike me and Margaret. After a childhood in which he had appeared a slow learner, he got into Cambridge to read History. And then blow me, got a First.

  And then he did, well, nothing in particular for the next six years, so I thought, I am sure unfairly. He went off to Spain and then Italy, teaching English to foreigners in language schools, having lots of girlfriends, playing lots of football, but of course little money.

  Every time he came home I would suggest to him that with his fab degree he should apply to the BBC or the Diplomatic Service, get a professional job, with a career structure. He would sigh and say he was not like me, he did not want to wear a suit, have a career, have a mortgage; he was not ambitious or interested in money.

  Margaret said I had to stop nagging him. She maintained I was just jealous that Jake appeared to be enjoying himself going around Europe, which I never did. After university, I went straight to work. Gap years did not exist in my time. He did though learn Italian and Spanish.

  Eventually, of course he did want to settle down. He then met someone he wanted to live with. So began endless discussions about what he might do. In the end, he decided he quite fancied being a barrister. It seemed to suit his skills and talents. His degree was in History, so he spent a year transferring to a law degree, then another year at Bar school, then another year as a pupil in chambers. So it was another three years before he was earning properly.

  With Caitlin doing books and journalism, it has always been easy and interesting talking to her about her working life. We both understood what she was on about, and could join in discussions about royalties and slagging off bastard agents and stupid editors. The Bar was a totally foreign country, to both me and Margaret. We had no idea, for example, what pupilage was or how it worked.

  His chambers are in the Inner Temple, prime position, ancient buildings, lovely situation beside the river. I love seeing his name, painted on the outside of their entrance. But by starting his career late, he is around eight years behind his contemporaries who went straight into the law, many of whom are now QCs. He specialises in employment law, often representing local councils. Councils have been making endless cuts and barristers generally are having a hard time, with legal aid being reduced. When they hear he is a barrister, people always think that he must be rolling in it. But the law is like football. It is only in the Premiership you make big money. The majority of barristers and lawyers earn fairly modest money, considering all the years it has taken them to qualify.

  Jake is married to Rosa, who is English, but has an Italian-Irish background. She is a set designer who has worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Court and the Tricycle Theatre. They have a daughter, Amelia, seventeen, at a local comprehensive.

  Flora, six years younger than Jake, also went to the local girls’ comprehensive next to his school, which Ruby later attended. While Flora was there, the school experienced a lot of industrial actions, teachers on strike, lessons cancelled. I always thought Flora lost out by this, but she never thought so, and would not consider for a moment the idea of finding another school.

  She did two A-levels and got an A in each – and refused to go to university. I think she saw the example of her older brother and sister, getting good arts degrees, then not knowing what to do. Caitlin seemed to be doing endless research and other degrees. Jake was wandering round Europe.

  Flora decided she would go to London School of Printing, learn something useful, which would lead to a proper job, in this case screen printing. Afterwards, she did various jobs, none of them in screen printing. For a time, she worked as a paralegal, so we were thinking we would have two legal eagles in the family. Eventually she went into TV. She started as a lowly researcher, working her way up and eventually becoming a producer, doing several BBC documentaries.

  She did that for ten years and then got married and had children. Amarisse is now nine and Sienna eight. Amarisse was born on my birthday, 7 January, so at my birthday party for my eightieth she celebrated her eighth at the same time. Flora is married to Richard, who is French-Cameroon.

  Since Caitlin returned from Botswana, all three of them have lived in north London, not too far away, two within walking distance, which has been a delight, with them and their children calling in all the time.

  Our four granddaughters, unlike me and Margaret, have a mixture of foreign blood and culture flowing through their veins. Between them their antecedents come from Botswana, Cameroon, France, Italy, Ireland, plus England and Scotland. Modern life, eh, especially modern London life.

  I used to think, when they were little, and often driving me mad, with fury or worry, that when they got to eigh
teen and left home, off to college or wherever, that would be it, no more worries. They would be on their own, nothing to do with us any more, we can relax, they are grown-ups now, responsible for their own lives. But of course it does not work out like that. As long as you are alive, and they are still alive, you are still the parent, they are still your children, so you still worry about them – if they are happy, if they are well. And I suppose always will.

  This did not happen with our own parents. When we each got to eighteen, we hid everything remotely worrying from our own parents, not wanting to upset them. We never told them about Margaret’s mastectomy. We did not ask for their help financially when trying to buy a house, as of course they had no money. Our intimate, personal connections with them ceased, more or less, when we left home. I feel today I am in touch with all my children’s lives, all the time, more or less. Which is good. Adds an extra dimension to living.

  After several years living in our street, with an army of carers, plus of course my sister Marion and Margaret, my mother went into Friern Barnet Hospital in north London. It was a nightmare of a place, a vast Victorian mansion which looked awfully impressive from outside, with handsome wings, long driveway, extensive gardens, but inside was like a scene from Kafka, long echoing corridors, constant screams and shouts in the distance, inmates crowded like cattle into so-called recreation rooms. My mother slept in a vast open ward, beds all huddled together, a so-called Florence Nightingale ward, which looked unchanged since the Crimea.

  By this time, aged seventy-eight, she had no idea where she was, or who she was. She just wanted to stay under the blankets all day. When awake and vaguely compos mentis, she was often a bit angry and bad tempered, which was not like her, accusing people of stealing things from her, as if she had anything worth stealing.

  I was in Caracas in Venezuela, working on my travel biography about Columbus, when she died on 8 December 1987. I was sitting in my hotel room writing what I thought were awfully amusing postcards back home. At the top of them all I was writing the dateline ‘Christmas, Caracas’.

  The phone rang and it was Margaret to say my mother had died. I am supposed to have said, ‘You’re joking’, which has been held against me ever since. I don’t remember saying it, but I probably did say something like that.

  I missed my mother’s funeral, which Margaret and my sister Marion organised, as the next day I was on a plane to the Orinoco, trying to discover the place where Columbus first set foot on the continent of the Americas.

  My mother was seventy-nine, which was remarkable, considering the hard life she had led and all her years of ill health. It meant that if I got to 7 January 2016, my eightieth birthday, I would have beaten both my mother and my father, who died aged fifty-three.

  My mother left nothing of course, not a bean. I have kept safe quite a few of her letters, a lot of them sent to me in the late fifties and sixties, during my first years in journalism. She would reply to say she had safely received my £2, which I sent in an envelope, every week, in cash. It never got lost, not like today. She would tell me the latest chat about the family, my sisters and brother. Her remarks and descriptions were always amusing, caustic without being cruel or hurtful.

  My brother Johnny, who was an electrician for many years, then later became a social worker, ended up running a department of Carlisle Social Services with about fifteen people. He is long retired, but still living in Carlisle with his wife Marjorie. He has two children and three grandchildren.

  Annabelle, my sister who married Roger, the civil servant, who suffered from MS, is a widow and lives in Leighton Buzzard. She seems to be travelling all the time, making up for all those years spent homebound, caring for Roger.

  Marion, my sister who went to Ruskin College Oxford, then became a social worker in Camden and started writing the column in the Guardian. She never did the column she intended to write about being a lesbian, but she did have success with her play.

  Marion was working on another play when she died in 1995. She had organised in advance her own funeral service and had found a woman minister to conduct it, which was quite hard twenty-two years ago, as there were few women clerics.

  Marion had been suffering from throat cancer for some time. She had had endless awful operations on her throat and nose, though she could still walk and get about at home, living with her partner Frances. She had smoked most of her life, which clearly had not helped. She spent some time at the Marie Curie Hospice in Hampstead, and then came home to die. At the end of her life, she seemed to live on ice cream, about the only thing her poor throat could tolerate.

  A few weeks before she died, she wanted to be interviewed by me about her life. It was partly to pass the time, as by then she was sitting slumped all day in a chair. She hoped it might be a distraction, an amusement.

  I had no plans to do anything with it, but I thought I should buy a proper, modern, professional tape recorder. For three days, I spent some time each day talking to her, taking her through her life, from working in the tyre factory, her marriage, coming out as a lesbian, trying to be a writer. But on the fourth date, she said she had had enough. It was too emotional and also upsetting. She could not remember why she had done things, or wasn’t able to express her feelings the way she had wanted to. We had left it too late. It was distressing not distracting her. So I gave up.

  Marion was only fifty-six when she died, just getting into her stride in her new career, and her new life with a new partner. All my children still remember and talk about her.

  Margaret wrote a well-received non-fiction book in 1998 called Precious Lives, about the life and death of her father Arthur and about my sister Marion, who both died about the same time. A few years earlier, she had done a book called Hidden Lives, about her own family history and its mysteries. Later on she did a book called Good Lives. This was about the wives of eminent men and their marriages, with the running theme being her own marriage.

  Margaret’s novel Have the Men Had Enough? was the one about my mother’s Alzheimer’s.

  Is it unfair, cheating, bad taste, to use the lives and deaths, pains and pleasures, of other people in your own books? Obviously I don’t think so, having written about myself and my own family all these decades. And still doing so.

  In the books about her family and mine, in the way Margaret did it, it was a homage, a celebration of unknown people, such as her father, and their ordinary, unknown lives.

  People often say to writers who cannibalise their own or others’ lives, oh, that must have been easy, you have just lifted that from real life. You’ve pinched that story, stolen that drama, copied that character, and used things that I have said. Very often they get it wrong, assuming someone or something is based on them, when it is not.

  One reaction is to say, go on then, you do it. If it is just a matter of lifting from real life, why don’t you have a go? It has of course to be shaped, filtered, altered, used in a certain way, given a narrative and of course written with insight and style and tension, so that readers will want to read on.

  Where else do writers get their thoughts and material from, except from their own lives and of those around them? But not all directly use the material. And some do it so you can never see the joins.

  It often happens, with all novelists, that something from real life – a character, an incident, a thought, a reflection – sparks off a book, but when they get down to writing it, the original incident disappears, or at least becomes invisible to the reader and often the writer. It is the reaction of a novelist to the world which matters, not the facts.

  Margaret in fact was a proper novelist. Almost every book was out of her head. She made up people, and then made up what they did, what they thought. I was only ever allowed to read her manuscript when it was at the proof stage, had been accepted by the publisher, but I could sometimes see where odd sentences and incidents had come from in her or our life. But most times I could not work out where the original spark had come from.

  S
he always wrote about women. They were her main and often only characters. They almost always had families. The plots concerned ordinary domestic events and relationships. Nothing dramatic happened. She preferred not to tie up loose ends, or create happy endings, which of course don’t always happen in real life anyway. Quite a big canvas, really. Which almost everyone in life can relate to.

  22

  MARGARET’S LAST BOOKS

  Despite the cancer coming back in 2007, and having to take all the dreaded medications and treatment, for most of the next eight years Margaret did get back to a normal writing routine, even if her day-to-day life and pleasures were not quite the same.

  She would go to her room each morning, after she had made me a morning cup of tea, and then run my bath. Correction, she ran her own bath. She had her own bath first, and then I followed her into it. She did not like me telling the neighbours I used her old bath water, but I thought it was so sensible, so ecologically sound, and also saved me time. I hate waiting for a bath to run. And I am mean, so it saved money on hot water.

  Also, slight correction on the tea. She used to in the old days, for over forty years, bring me tea in bed, plus the newspaper, latterly the Independent, nicely ironed. She then switched on the radio for the Today programme. I do find myself awfully tired when I wake up. She stopped doing that after 2007, when she was trying to conserve what strength she still had, so I installed a kettle for my tea in our bedroom. Even managed to switch it on myself. I am not totally incapable. But if she had a bath, I still got into it after her.

  Over the years, many friends and folks were horrified to discover that such a strong, independent, feminist woman should be so craven, waiting hand and foot on a man, but as she always said, we had divvied up the jobs when we got married. She willingly took the domestic, cleaning, catering role, while I did, well whatever I could get away with. Not a lot really. Okay then, I always did the gardening. I looked after all financial affairs, investments and all bills, booked holidays, which of course can be terribly stressful. I also did all the driving and the odd repair jobs, in London and the Lakes. And answered the phone, which she hated doing.