Jane Austen recommended three or four families in the Country Village as the thing to work on when planning a novel. Esther Breuer might well have been expected to approve this advice, with its implication that depth rather than breadth is of importance, and intimate knowledge of a corner more valuable than a sketchy acquaintance with the globe. In fact, perversely, Esther Breuer disliked the only Jane Austen novel she had ever read (which was, perversely, Sense and Sensibility) and frequently boasts of her inability to tackle the others. ‘Too English for me,’ she will sometimes add, in her impeccably English middle-class intellectual’s voice.
Esther, Liz and Alix, who in Jane Austen’s day would never have met at all, met in Cambridge in 1952. Just before Christmas, when they were up for interview from their respective schools. Alix was applying to read English Literature, Liz to read Natural Sciences (with a view to medicine) and Esther to read Modern Languages. This should have safely prevented any rapport between them, but did not. There were, it is true, many awkwardnesses in their first communications, for none of them was much used to speaking to strangers, but this lack of practice was balanced by a strong desire on the part of all three of them to enter upon a new life in which speaking to strangers was possible. Otherwise, each had separately recognized, the future was circumscribed. Somehow, haltingly, over dinner in Hall (chicken, leeks and tinned spaghetti, a mixture delicious to each after years of post-war whale meat and school meals) they lurched into conversation, having found themselves for no good reason sitting together: Liz and Alix discovered that both came from Yorkshire, and that neither played lacrosse, nor had ever seen it being played, and Esther joined the discussion by volunteering that she had herself managed to avoid playing netball for the past three years on the grounds that she was too small. ‘I said I was unfairly handicapped, and they let me do extra Latin instead,’ she said. The fact that both Liz and Alix seemed to accept that extra Latin might be preferable to netball indicated that further interchange might be possible, and they continued to talk, through the fruit tart and custard, of the nature of intellectual and physical education, of matter and spirit, of Descartes (brought up by Esther), of T. S. Eliot (brought up by Alix) and of schizophrenia (brought up by Liz). The matter was abstract, for none of them knew anything other than abstractions, and the tone lofty. It was what they had expected of University, but had not hoped so soon to find. Esther, at the end of the meal, expressed her satisfaction with her new companions by inviting them to go with her to visit a friend already attending the college, an Old Girl of her school. They accepted with alacrity the prospect of a glimpse of the world inside, and all three of them went along dark portrait-hung corridors and up panelled staircases to the room of one Flora Piercy, a second year History student of considerable sophistication, who offered them a glass of wine. Had they known how rare such a commodity was in a woman’s college at that date, they might have been even more astonished, but in a sense, looking round Flora’s room, with its bright scatter cushions and Picasso prints and posters for plays at the ADC, with its invitations on the mantelpiece, with its gas fire and clutter of old shoes, with its romantic piles of what looked like lecture notes and essays, with its candle in a pewter stick and its wilting rose in a vase, they were beyond astonishment. The glass of wine went quickly to each head, for Alix’s family was teetotal, and Liz’s alcohol consumption to that date comprised perhaps three glasses of brown sherry and one (celebrating her A levels with her teacher) of Liebfraumilch: Esther seemed better connected with drink as with friends, but even she became confiding under the mild influence. They shared their dreams and aspirations, encouraged by the benevolent, admonitory, tutelary spirit of ample broad-faced Flora. ‘I would like,’ said Liz Ablewhite, after midnight, staring into the white flaming chalky cracked pitted flaring columns of the gas fire, ‘to make sense of things. To understand.’ By things, she meant herself. Or she thought she meant herself. ‘I would like,’ said Alix, ‘to change things.’ By things, she did not mean herself. Or thought she did not mean herself. ‘You reach too high,’ said Esther. ‘I wish to acquire interesting information. That is all.’
Liz, at that time, was pale and fair and thin, a colourless creature, unmade-up, drooping and slightly stooping, ill-complexioned, cardiganed, dull, yet glowing with a greenish pallor that compelled attention. Alix was mousy, square faced, healthy of complexion, and, even then, extraordinarily pleasant of expression, with a pleasantness that was at times radiant, and almost always irrefutable: she was wearing, as girls who had them did for their Oxbridge interviews in those days, a two-piece middle-aged suit of an oatmeal mix, with square shoulders and a straight skirt. Esther was small, neat, brown of skin, smooth, tidy, even (almost) elegant, yet somehow at the same time pugnacious of aspect, subversive, aggressive, commanding, Napoleonic of manner. She was wearing a severe school uniform, olive green, from an expensive private school. It looked ironic, satiric, suggestive on her small frame.
Flora Piercy was wearing black velvet trousers, and a large white cable-knit sweater. Her eyelids were painted blue with a blue greasy paste called eye-shadow. Alix bought some the next day, on her free half day in Cambridge before she took the Bletchley route to her Oxford interview (for she was a clever girl, Alix) – but she never dared to apply it, save in the privacy of her own room, until she went to Cambridge herself as a bona fide student the following autumn.
Liz, Alix and Esther all obtained places at the college of their choice, in Cambridge, and there were reunited, to gossip there and elsewhere over subsequent decades of their fortuitous friendship. They lost touch for some time with Flora, their first presiding deity, but even she was to reappear in another context, another life.
Liz Ablewhite was offered, and graciously accepted, the Alethea Ward Scholarship in Natural Sciences (an annual college award specifically designated by Dr Ward, 1853–1935, for female students of medicine from the County of Yorkshire, her own home county), the goal towards which her mother had been directing her for the past ten years. Great Expectations. Is there anything more peculiar, more idiosyncratic, more circumscribed in these expectations than in those of Pip, or of Dickens himself, towards being a gentleman? In the 1950s, one of the surest ways forward for an intellectual young woman from the provinces, for a socially disadvantaged young woman from the provinces, was through Oxford, through Cambridge. Not through Manchester, or Leeds, or Durham, or Bristol: but through Oxford or Cambridge. Dr Alethea Ward had known this, and thus had left her money, some of which eventually Liz Ablewhite had inherited. Rita Ablewhite knew this, though how she knew it remained, to Liz, a mystery which she did not think, did not care to question. As Pip cared not to question too closely the sources of his own endowment. Between them, the deceased Dr Alethea Ward and the surviving Rita Ablewhite directed Liz Ablewhite towards Cambridge, and Liz in her turn handed the same knowledge on to her stepsons and her daughters.
Alix was offered places at both colleges of her choice. In fact, she was offered a better deal (let us not go into too many historic technicalities) in Oxford, but she chose Cambridge because of Flora Piercy’s eye-shadow, and because of Dr Leavis. At Cambridge she met her first husband, Sebastian Manning, who introduced her to a world in which socialism, far from being ridiculous, was natural, chic, colourful, confident, artistic: Sebastian’s parents were artists of some repute, one a painter, the other a potter, and they did not think much of the austerities of Dr Leavis. Bloomsbury and St Ives were more their style. Now Sebastian is dead, long dead, and Alix is married to Brian Bowen, son of a saw polisher, grandson of a furnaceman, and often sits with him on an old settee in her stockinged feet. Brian Bowen admires Dr Leavis, with some respectful reservations.
Esther was also offered places at both universities, and chose Cambridge because it offered her a scholarship, and because her brother had been at King’s, and because she heard an owl hoot thrice in the college garden when she retired to her narrow bed after the glass of wine with Flora Piercy. This last explana
tion for her choice is the one she most frequently proffered. In Cambridge she quickly established herself as a cult figure of mysterious portent: she claimed to be in love with her brother, whom nobody had ever seen, and went in for gnomic utterances and baroque clutter. Now she lives in a small flat in Ladbroke Grove, with a young woman she says is her niece. She sits in her bed-sitting-room-study reading books. Her walls are painted bright red. Not Pompeian red, as she sometimes points out: it is less blue, slightly more flame, more orange coloured. She is not sure whether it could accurately be described as Venetian red. She is still surrounded by baroque clutter.
These three women, it will readily and perhaps with some irritation be perceived, were amongst the crème de la crème of their generation. Illustrious educational institutions not merely offered them places, but also attempted to entice them. Their initial meeting at dinner in Hall was not quite accidental: the nature of the placement was such that strong scholarship candidates were more likely than not to find themselves sitting together. They did not, of course, know this at the time.
Narratives, in the past, related the adventures of the famous and the wealthy. Kings, queens, emperors, warlords. In The Tale of Genji, which has a claim to be considered the world’s first novel, an emperor weeps for lost love in the opening pages. (Do pages open, in a Japanese novel? Probably not.) In Jane Austen, to come nearer home, the protagonists are not, it is true, titled, but they are privileged. By youth, by wit, by beauty, and sometimes by wealth. The Princesses of their Country Villages.
Liz, Alix and Esther were not princesses. They were not beautiful, they were not rich. But they were young, and they had considerable wit. Their fate should, therefore, be in some sense at least exemplary: opportunity was certainly offered to them, they had choices, at eighteen the world opened for them and displayed its riches, the brave new world of Welfare State and County Scholarships, of equality for women, they were the élite, the chosen, the garlanded of the great social dream. Adventure and possibility lay before them, as they had not lain before Liz’s sister Shirley, who married at nineteen and stayed on in Northam, or before Dora Sutcliffe who left school at fifteen and sold sweets in Woolworth’s until she married Shirley’s husband’s brother Steve.
Brian Bowen’s sister Barbara went to Australia and married a building contractor, but that is another story. Brian himself, had he not done his National Service, would, arguably, still be working at Pitts and Harley and might have continued to work there until 1981 when this ancient, well-established firm closed, with the loss of six hundred jobs. But that is another part of this story, and not to be pursued here, for Brian is not a woman and reflections on his prospects or lack of prospects in 1952 would at this juncture muddy the narrative tendency. Forget I mentioned him. Let us return to Liz, Alix and Esther.
Liz, Alix and Esther were reunited in Cambridge in the autumn of 1953. They had spend their ‘year off’ in highly dissimilar circumstances. Esther paid her first visit to Italy, where she spent three months at the Università per Stranieri in Perugia, learned some Italian, drank a great deal of wine, took up with a middle-aged American art historian and began to look at paintings. Alix spent three months working as an au pair girl – working very hard, for no pay – in a suburb of Paris, bored out of her mind most of the time, but strangely, surprisingly consoled by the youngest member of the large family, a baby, which, unlike its larger siblings, seemed to like her. Alix, then as ever, liked anybody who liked her. She spent her rare afternoons off visiting the sights of Paris, or lying in the Luxembourg Gardens alone, reading Dostoevsky and Sartre and Camus, and sending out contradictory messages to idle young men who wondered if it would be worth trying to pick her up.
Liz stayed at home in Northam, studying. Her mother (she knew without asking, there was never any possibility of her asking) expected her to stay at home. Liz had a calendar and she crossed off the days in black ink. She read Victorian novels and studied textbooks of anatomy. She started to read Freud (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Totem and Taboo), without understanding, yet without misunderstanding. She tried to learn the Book of Job by heart, but never got safely past the end of the second chapter; the first two chapters were on the dull side, overloaded with yoke of oxen and she-asses, with Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite, Job’s comforters. Liz wanted to get on to the exciting bits, in which Job demanded why light was given to him that was in misery, and life to the bitter in soul: in which Job desired to argue with his God: in which the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: but she knew it would be cheating to miss out the she-asses and skip to the livelier parts, so she plodded dully on with the dull narrative. Obsessional behaviour: she determined that one day she would find an explanation for it, and, meanwhile, pursued it.
Esther sent Liz a postcard, from Perugia. Liz put it on her bedroom mantelpiece, and touched it, every morning on rising, and every night as she went to bed. Esther sent a card to Alix, too, but Alix’s mother forwarded it accidentally-on-purpose to the wrong address possibly because she did not care for a rather elaborate allusion to Lacrima Christi in the text, nor for the brightly coloured shiny modern Madonna which the card portrayed. Alix’s mother, broad-minded though she was, did not approve of Catholicism, and was hardly to know that Esther was Jewish.
It would be wrong to give the impression that Liz, Alix and Esther fell into one another’s arms with cries of delight when they met again that October, or to suggest that they proved thereafter inseparable. But they were, nevertheless, pleased to rediscover one another, and sat up late on their first evening in Esther’s room, which had already begun to put out hints of its later decorative eccentricities. They talked of their summer adventures, of their hopes for the future, but mostly of their own provenance. Liz attempted her first sketch of her mother, her first outline for the outside world of the domestic ghost with which she had lived so long: Alix spoke of her relief at escaping from the small boarding school world in which her parents and her contemporaries all knew one another far too well: Esther conjured up visions of both deprivation and splendour in her own past. They did not know then, were not to know for many years, were never fully to understand what it was that held them together – a sense of being on the margins of English life, perhaps, a sense of being outsiders, looking in from a cold street through a lighted window into a warm lit room that later might prove to be their own? Removed from the mainstream by a mad mother, by a deviant ideology, by refugee status and the war-sickness of Middle Europe? None of this would have meant anything to them, then, as they drank their Nescafé, which in those days came not in granules in jars but in powder in tins with brown, cream and white labels: tins which cost 2s.6d. each. They thought they found one another interesting. And so they became friends.
They also made other friends, of course, both inside and outside their own college. Liz, like a pale convent girl too long mewed up, went wild in her first year, as she discovered the world of parties she had hitherto known only by reading and by hearsay: in those days, such was the imbalance between the sexes, women were much in demand as status symbols, as sleeping partners, as lovers, as party ballast, and Liz went out a great deal, her appearance improving dramatically as she did so. She had little money for clothes, but that did not matter; it did not even matter, much, to her, though sometimes she wished she had more than two dresses, one pink, one grey. She hung herself around with cheap earrings and necklaces and bangles. Her stockings were always laddered. She was much invited. Men accosted her on bridges, in lectures, in bookshops. She tried them all. But she never disobeyed the rules by spending a night, illicitly, out of college. Like Cinderella, she returned at midnight. In the mornings, in the long vacations, she worked.
In her second year, she met Edgar Lintot. He was a conspicuous high-profiled figure, in those days, a medical student and a man of the theatre, famed for his Footlights appearances and his impromptu wit. Liz also dabbled with acting, and played several roles rather well – an
inventive Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a curiously haunting, poignant Bellario in Philaster, directed by Edgar. Wounded loyalty and dignified pathos were her line on stage, although off-stage she grew increasingly self-assertive. Her social world, in Cambridge, was largely theatrical. After midnight, in college, she would discuss it with Alix and Esther.
Alix’s social world was somewhat different. Having been to a coeducational school, she did not find men a novelty, and in theory ought to have been able to discriminate better than Liz (who endured some fairly dreadful experimental evenings in her search for entertainment), but her natural kindness made it almost impossible for her to refuse any overture, however offensive, however louche. A mixture of gratitude and pity held her captive through many a long, polite, sad, dull declaration of admiration, and kept her smiling through many an impolite drunken assault on her brassière straps. ‘What will become of me?’ she would sometimes ask Liz and Esther, in mock-alarm.
The Radiant Way Page 11