I did not do well at Berkhamsted School for Girls. Though I had arrived on a wave of high expectations and was put in the top division for all subjects, I soon slid down, in maths for example, to the ignominy of division three. I don’t know why this decline happened. It was not an interest in boys, or pop stars or film stars, that distracted me. I read a lot – mainly ‘the Russians’, Chekhov, Gogol, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment. I penned short stories in what I imagined was the style of Dostoyevsky and composed what I hoped was poetry, though all I had published was an article in the school magazine, The Berkhamstedian, on campanology. (I had taken up bell-ringing practice on a Thursday evening at the local church, though I was terrified most of the time, as the rope whipped out of my hands as we pealed ‘Bob Minor’, lashing my legs and leaving painful red weals.)
In the evenings at home I listened on the Bakelite wireless in the ‘lounge’ to Lost in Space, Paul Temple, The Archers, Mrs Dale’s Diary, music from the Albert Hall, Wigmore Hall – and of course Radio Luxemburg. Nevertheless, my academic status was inexorably lost for several years. I didn’t understand why and I minded very much.
I had left behind a world of Shirleys, Wendys, Joans, Dianes, Sandras, Cheryls, Patricias and Paulines when I went to Berkhamsted, and moved into one of Carolines, Pippas, Susannahs, Oriels, Priscillas, Hermiones, Annabels, Dinahs and Joannas – even a Zenobia and a Minerva (Smith), many of whom were boarders. Several had parents abroad working in the fast-diminishing Empire, others’ parents worked full time; one girl’s parents lived in a Marylebone flat which was ‘unsuitable for children’ (why did they buy it?); a couple of girls in my class had widowed mothers who had had to take residential jobs to support their families. Saddest of all (if you consider the idea of sending young children away to school sad) were girls whose parents lived less than a mile from the school, one of whose house we walked past twice a week on the way to the school playing field for lacrosse, sometimes glimpsing her mother and little sister in the garden.
III A Glimpse Beyond
The divide was wide but I found a soulmate in Janet Hamilton, another eleven-plus ‘success’, who when I first met her lived across the field from our house in a development on the edge of Hemel Hempstead new town, where her father worked in the architects’ department of the Development Corporation. She caught the double-decker 301C, as I did, to and from school every day, but came from a very different background. Her parents were professionals, recently returned from Australia. Her father, Humphrey, later became a government planning inspector; her mother, Mollie, the daughter of one of Scotland’s first female graduates, was a part-time teacher who hosted coffee mornings. At my house we had elevenses – Camp coffee and a Rich Tea biscuit or a custard cream – but no one was ever invited.
The Hamiltons had interesting friends: one a chiropodist, another a GP who played the piano to near-professional standard, several immigrants from Nazi Germany and Austria. The group were supporters of progressive education and patrons of Steiner and Montessori schools; they listened to classical or folk music on their radiograms and subscribed to the efficacy of herbal remedies and left-wing politics; they were regular stalwarts of CND, joining if not the first then certainly the second of the Aldermaston protest marches. Janet’s brother went to a prep school and later was a fee-paying pupil at the local boys’ school. Had Janet not won a scholarship from her progressive plate-glass primary school, would she, a girl, have had her fees paid so she could attend the girls’ school, or would she have taken up a place at the local grammar school, I wonder? When the family moved from their Hemel Hempstead Development Corporation house to the outskirts of Berkhamsted, their new home was modern, with plate-glass windows, David Whitehead fabric curtains, spindly chairs, cacti on the windowsills and a rabbit in a hutch in the back garden. I loved going there: the family was so welcoming and I knew that this was how I would like to live. When my school report complained that I had little respect for authority, Mollie Hamilton chuckled and said that was no bad thing: look at Winston Churchill.
Janet and I had our own language, a mixture of what we fondly imagined was Shakespearean English and a sort of backchat, which we kept up much longer than we should have. In a town where there was nothing much to do, she joined the local branch of the Cactus & Succulent Society of Great Britain, and I went along for the company. I also spent an inordinate amount of time in church, bell-ringing, or doing other church-related activities, excusing myself to Janet by saying that the choirboys were very dishy – which they certainly were not. But what else was there to do after Two-Way Family Favourites and Educating Archie were over on a Sunday?
I went to Sunday school from a young age, taken by a kind local grande dame, Mrs Hart, and spent many hours carefully colouring in pictures of Jesus as a baby in a manger or as a man triumphantly entering Jerusalem surrounded by the crowds waving palm leaves. I don’t think we got much further in Christ’s chronology than that: it might have been considered a bit sensationalist to colour in Jesus on the Cross, red blood dripping from his stigmata.
When I was a little older, I went to Bible-reading classes in the home of one of the young curates, where he played us sacred music on his wind-up gramophone and we discussed why sex before marriage was a sin. At about this time, I was confirmed by the Bishop of St Albans. At one of the final classes held by the vicar in preparation for our confirmation, we were asked whether we thought we were ready to take this step. This brought my anxieties to a head. We had never discussed theology or divinity or faith either in church or at school. All I knew about Christianity, apart from Bible stories, was a sketchy narrative of its history. I had been on a pilgrimage to St Albans Cathedral at Easter, where I’d become acquainted with the exemplary stories of the noble martyrs who died for their faith, admired the tomb of the eponymous St Alban and then had a hearty breakfast prepared by the good women parishioners in the abbey hall.
But did I believe in God? What did that mean? What was faith? Where, or rather how, did it fit in with scientific explanations of the beginning of creation? How would I know if I had faith? How would I behave if I did? Or, conversely, if I didn’t?
I treated going to church as something you did on a Sunday, much like going to the church youth club on a Tuesday evening and shopping at the local market on a Saturday morning. Sometimes I was deeply moved by the ceremonies of religious practice: the hymns, the psalms, the organ music, the church overflowing with black- or scarlet-robed solemn men of God when our curate was ordained. After I had been confirmed (my doubts never expressed) I found taking communion – the deep rich Marmitey taste of the wine, the delicate dissolve of the wafer on the tongue, ‘the body and blood of Christ which is given for you …’ – a deeply sensual experience. Perhaps if I’d had the opportunity to read Bishop John Robinson’s hugely controversial book Honest to God at that time, it would have resolved some of my anxieties, since Robinson explored the tricky idea of belief in God in a secular age. This was not so much God above us, but God amongst us. But it wasn’t published until 1963, and by that time my focus had shifted.
Whatever I might have thought of Christianity’s doctrinal aspects, I was not so sure about its lived manifestations. Once when a curate’s wife was taken into hospital, the women in the congregation pitched in to help with the domestic chores, and as payback were able to gossip far and wide about how grey her children’s vests and the bed linen were, how the oven didn’t look as if it had been cleaned for years.
The vicar at our parish church of St Mary’s was an urbane, handsome man with a snub-nosed wife – and four adorable snub-nosed children whose heads he used to pause to pat as he made his slow and stately way to the altar, the crucifix on a chain around his waist jangling slightly. But then it emerged that he had been keeping company with an elegant gimlet-eyed parishioner; they would go off riding far into the hills together, she in a fetching hacking jacket and riding hat with an eye-level net veil, until one of the parishioners refused to lend the reveren
d and his lady her horses any longer, so the hanky-panky, if that is what it was, stopped – or maybe relocated.
Janet and I, and our school friends Ann and Penny, were occasionally allowed to take the Green Line bus which connected us to the metropolis. Green Line buses figured large in my life in the outer London suburbs, as they did for the historian Tony Judt, bestowing what felt like the first stamp in a non-existent passport to a wider world. We would usually go to the Natural History Museum or, at Mollie’s suggestion, to an exhibition at the V&A, or the Royal Academy. And we shopped in C&A Modes, buying a houndstooth-check pencil skirt each for 19s. 11d., and trying on dresses in one of the many little ‘Madam’ shops that existed then in Oxford Street, where the sales assistants were largely paid on commission and so were obliged to push their wares to a sometimes off-putting extent.
Janet was good at art, though this was not regarded as an important subject in the school curriculum, and she went on eventually to train and practise as a landscape architect. My bent lay in debating – endlessly arguing in competitions at school, in youth clubs and junior road safety forums for, say, the end of the death penalty, of school uniform, of apartheid, of compulsory religious education, and for more zebra crossings and the lowering of the voting age. In a school that pronounced itself apolitical (which meant in effect unquestioningly on the side of the status quo), Janet and I were the only members of the rather ineffectual Labour Club, which I think we started. (‘You can’t vote Labour,’ a fellow pupil exploded. ‘Only miners vote Labour.’) But long before we could vote, Janet and I joined her mother in pushing leaflets through letterboxes to counteract the posters that were being pasted up all over town in 1959: ‘Save us from Floud’, the Labour candidate for the Hemel Hempstead constituency. We were unsuccessful. Bernard Floud was soundly beaten by the Conservative, James Allason, who polled a majority of 8,365 votes. Allason was the successor to Viscountess Frances Davidson, who had taken over her husband’s seat when he was elevated to the peerage in 1937 and retired from the Commons at the 1959 election. In the early days of women MPs most – including Irene Adams, Margaret Wintringham, Agnes Hardie, the sister-in-law of Keir Hardie, and later Lena Jeger and Ann Cryer – were either there as a result of ‘widow’s succession’, or like Viscountess Astor and Lady Davidson had succeeded to their husbands’ seats when they went to the Lords. However, all proved to be admirable MPs, regardless of their nepotistic route to a seat in the Commons.
By the time I reached the fifth form, GCE time, I was called to the headmistress’s study, as were my fellow pupils one by one, for ‘careers advice’. ‘I understand you have considerable literary ability,’ she said (presumably thinking of the very appreciative report of a composition I had written on ‘colour’, which in fact was largely a mash-up of a Revlon advertisement for a ‘sun-kissed, peach’ lipstick; a short extract from Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ – ‘that little patch of blue which prisoners call the sky’ – and another from the Song of Solomon). ‘I suggest a career in librarianship.’ I slunk away.
In 1960 there was still the presumption that even if a girl went to university or teacher-training college, her ultimate ambition was to marry a successful man, have a family and develop cultivated pursuits or philanthropic voluntary work as her mother probably had. This was three years before the Robbins Report that confirmed the expansion of the higher education sector, when new ‘plate-glass’ universities such as Sussex, Essex, York, Lancaster, the University of East Anglia and Heriot-Watt in Edinburgh offered places for more students – male or female – to study a broader range of subjects if they so chose. In the meantime, I was not regarded as university material, though admittedly only six girls in my year were: among them Lydia, the daughter of the Director of Education for Hertfordshire, went to the Royal Free Hospital Medical School; Ann, who had a rather enviable family background in fairground operations and was pony-mad, won a place to read philosophy and English at Nottingham. The privileged six were alone within a cohort of some thirty girls, though others would go on to achieve successful careers in professions such as nursing, social work and teaching.
Out of the 22,426 students who took first degrees in 1960, 16,851 were men and just 5,575 were women. When it came to MAs, MScs, PhDs or similar, only 279 women managed that hurdle, compared to 2,994 men. This was a failure of ambition rather than a lack of talent; a failure that pervaded so many schools and families. There is a striking number of my contemporaries who left school with no path into higher education or further training mapped out for them, yet who subsequently with no help or guidance from the school found their own way to university, art school or other gateways to the professions.
At home there was no encouragement to think about university. My mother was clear that marriage was my destiny, reminding me that everyone knew that men didn’t like clever women. When I expressed an interest in reading law, her scorn knew no bounds. ‘I suppose you see yourself as Hancock, Hancock & Wells,’ she mocked, instancing the brass plate outside the local solicitors in the high street as an example of unimaginable and inappropriate ambition. Interviews were arranged for me at various secretarial colleges. I declined to attend. I might not know what I wanted to do, but it certainly wasn’t that – though as a writer now who still laboriously types with one finger I wish I had learned touch-typing skills, while bypassing shorthand and avoiding learning how to keep your boss’s diary up to date and his dry-cleaning collected.
Unlike Sylvia Plath, sitting in the metaphorical crotch of a fig tree, no tempting figs representing the choice between a glittering career or a brilliant marriage glistened just out of reach for me. All I knew was that I wanted out.
Chapter Four
Old Town Blues
Most summer evenings, after a tea comprising slices of rather stale white bread spread thinly with butter and jam or Heinz sandwich spread, a slice of sponge cake, and on Sundays tinned peaches or a Chivers jelly served from a cut-glass bowl, I would take a book, or probably more often a comic, to sit in the field next to our house. It might have been School Friend, or more likely Girl. This was the sister publication in the Reverends Chad Varah/Marcus Morris stable to Eagle for boys and the older sibling to Swift and Robin for younger children – though it was not clear why the bird nomenclature wasn’t sustained and Girl called ‘Starling’ or, more predictably, ‘House Martin’. Like most of my friends, I lapped up the adventures of the tomboyish school friends Wendy and Jinx, the fragile-looking Belle of the Ballet, the cartoon figure of the naïve Lettice Leefe (‘the Greenest Girl in the School’ – where green meant naïve rather than environmentally minded), and read of career opportunities to ‘cook in the sky’ (become an air hostess) or work as a hospital almoner. I would sit for hours in the long grass by the side of an overgrown, defunct railway branch line – axed long before Beeching wielded his in the mid-1960s, closing more than 2,000 stations and 4,000 miles of rail lines in an attempt to stop the haemorrhage of money from the railways.
Sometimes I would take a copy of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Newspaper. Or very occasionally a borrowed copy of the Young Elizabethan, a glossy magazine, priced at an unaffordable (to me) 2s. 6d. a month. Aimed at grammar school children, it contained articles on literature, art and music. The magazine had been called Collins Magazine for Boys and Girls until two weeks before the coronation of Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953. The change of name was to honour the new queen, and also to underline the fresh energy it was hoped that this young female monarch would bring to a postwar-weary Britain, still in the only gradually loosening grip of austerity. As an adjective ‘Elizabethan’ had considerable traction in the early years of her reign, but it never came to define the period as Georges I, II and III, Victoria or Edward VII had. The subsequent century would be counted in and out by decades.
One of the Young Elizabethan’s editors was Kaye Webb, whose husband Ronald Searle illustrated many of the issues, and would later become famous for his St Trinian’s books about an inve
nted gothic girls’ boarding school with anarchic, messy pupils. Webb went on to run the children’s list at Penguin, Allen Lane’s paperback phenomenon of the 1930s. The Puffin imprint included books by Roald Dahl, C. S. Lewis, Rosemary Sutcliff and Clive King, whose Stig of the Dump I would read to my children over and over again (at their request) in the 1970s.
My own childhood reading had been rather less imaginative, with the possible exception of Arthur Ransome. The books that were read to me, or later I read myself, included Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers and her Famous Five adventures, the series of Flower Fairies books, and Milly-Molly-Mandy and her tiresome ‘little friend Susan’, by Joyce Lankester Brisley. My favourite reading as a child was a series of books by the Welsh writer Gwynedd Rae about Mary Plain, a small orphaned bear who lives with her relatives in the bear pits of Berne Zoo, though she is anthropomorphic and can talk. Mary is befriended by two visitors, the Fur-Coat Lady and the Owl Man, so named because he wears horn-rimmed spectacles. Another absolute favourite was The Family from One End Street, written and illustrated by Eve Garnett, first published in 1937, about Mr and Mrs Ruggles, he a dustman, she a washerwoman, and their numerous children. It was an unusual book since it portrayed a happily chaotic working-class family, whereas most children’s books at the time were about the middle classes having fun at boarding school, playing japes and riding their ponies.
However, such books were long behind me as I made my way to read in the field in the early 1950s. Lying in the grass, sucking the sweetness out of dusty clover flowers as I turned the pages, I occasionally glanced up at the skyline where banks of new houses appeared to be advancing down the hill, stopping like an avalanche just short of our pebble-dashed house. It looked as if the rows of new homes were aiming to join up with the old town of Hemel Hempstead, nestling in the valley below.
Joining the Dots Page 6