After a question about the Napoleonic Wars and how they had reconfigured European alliances, and one about the relative roles of Cavour and Garibaldi in the unification of Italy, I was dismissed.
I sloped out onto the Mile End Road shaken and near to tears, convinced that I would be rejected by all the London colleges to which I had applied. I was so unschooled in notions of patriarchy and sexism and had so imbibed the daunting idea that I was expected to carry the soi-disant shortcomings of my sex on my (then) slender shoulders, that it was some time before the full affront of these deeply offensive probings hit me. How many male students had dropped out, failed expectations, hadn’t ‘worked out’ every year, I wondered? Yet the department continued to accept them presumably without questioning them about their domestic arrangements – or their insides. On the opposite side of the road to QMC was an insurance brokers, and for a long moment I considered going in there to ask if they had any vacancies, since it looked as though my future did indeed lie behind an office desk, as I had always suspected it would.
However, to my amazement a letter arrived a week or so later offering me an unconditional place at Queen Mary’s. By that time King’s College and University College had offered me unconditional places too. I chose UCL, that ‘ungodly place in Gower Street’, where to this day the wax model of utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham sits in a glass case in the entrance hall. But it was other features of the college that swayed me: the fact that the (very fine) chapel seemed to be given pride of place at King’s, and that when I went to the ladies’ loo, three doors opened and out of two popped nuns in full habits! At the time I was at the height of my rejection of the Anglican Church of my childhood, which I considered a not inconsiderable part of my ‘repression’. I was firmly plodding along an unwavering path of rational secularisation with occasional digressions to go to listen to the music of High Anglicanism, or to look at the pre-Raphaelite aesthetics of places of worship such as All Saints, Margaret Street, in the West End.
I remember my years at UCL as being supremely happy, though there were incidents I regret. In 1974, Fergus Maclean, son of the Cambridge spy ring member, Donald Maclean, was accepted as an undergraduate in UCL’s history department. Questions were asked in the Commons about a ‘traitor’s son’ taking a place at a British university at the taxpayer’s expense. On being alerted to this, the Daily Express sent photographers round to besiege Fergus as we emerged from the Gustave Tuck lecture theatre. We must all have been well aware why the cameras were there, yet none of the student body, me included, did anything at all to shield the unfortunate and wholly innocent young man from the prurient cameras.
Of the five ‘mature’ students, I was the only one with children. I therefore missed out on the social aspects of ‘uni’ – the parties, the drinking, the inter-student sex – since I had to get home to serve up fish fingers and spend some guilt time, moulding Play-Doh, finger-painting, playing rounders with my children. But intellectually it was revelatory: the opening-up of new ways of thinking, of new ideas, of new possibilities, was extraordinary.
I was taught by some remarkable people: A. J. P. Taylor, whose party trick was to bring his engrossing lectures to a rounded end on the stroke of one hour as we students hung on his every word, wondering if he would manage to do so again this week (he always did); Peter Clarke, the groundbreaking historian of New Liberalism; Jimmy Burns, whose deeply thought through and gently explained history of ideas was the most impactful of all my studies and made me a lifelong (though inactive) Marxist, since Marx’s explanation of power relations and economic systems immediately chimed with me. This would probably have surprised Professor Burns, since he certainly wasn’t one – John Stuart Mill was more in his line.
Then there was the historian of France, Douglas Johnson, for whom I formed a deep attachment and who was a generous opener of doors and pointer to expanded possibilities (which later would include references for jobs, reviewing for the Times Higher Educational Supplement, attending New Society parties and joining the London Library). The summit of this came when, as a postgraduate, I was commissioned to collect the celebrated French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser from Heathrow airport in my car, a battered Citroën 2CV. I had been briefed to bring him to UCL to meet Professor Johnson, with whom he had been a student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, in preparation for a seminar he was to give at Senate House. But Althusser had other ideas: primarily he had set his sights on buying an old English pub piano to take back to France. So I spent the rest of the day driving him round the pubs I knew that had a piano (not many) and those which looked as if they might. Not surprisingly we were unsuccessful, so I drove him to a second-hand dealer in the Caledonian Road, where we did indeed find a fine, battered old joanna for sale, but by this time the French intellectual had lost interest in the quest.
My next assignment was to drive him to Eric Hobsbawm’s house in Hampstead, for dinner. Arriving there, Althusser stalked through the gate to the front door of the house, picking flowers from the front garden as he went. Ringing the bell, he gallantly presented Marlene Hobsbawm with a bunch of flowers culled from her own beds. Clearly he had learned some niceties of social etiquette but had not quite joined up all the dots.
A few years later, at the École Normale Supérieure, Althusser strangled to death his wife Hélène, while massaging her neck. Since there were no witnesses, it was disputed whether he had intended to – though in his posthumously published autobiography, he claimed that his action was indeed murder. He was found not guilty by reason of diminished responsibility and committed to a psychiatric hospital.
I worked hard at UCL: my children were in bed by 7 p.m., so I was able to study late into the night, and the history department was very helpful, giving me permission to use a room allocated to the Bentham Project on a Friday so I could write the required weekly essay in peace. I read and thought a lot, was awarded a departmental prize and got a first – despite an apparently abominable medieval paper in which I quoted a couple of times from works and people who did not exist.
II A Faulty Turn
In those generous days of fees paid, housing benefit and student grants (with part of which I bought a carpet for our Span house, on the logic that time spent cleaning, or in this case, polishing parquet floors, meant less time studying), not to mention housing allowances and vacation loans, the Department of Education and Science offered anyone who achieved a first funding for a doctorate.
Since the people I admired most during this time were academics, I decided that that was what I wanted to be. I was urged to consider Oxford or Cambridge to do my PhD – Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, was said to be particularly welcoming to mature women students. But for various reasons, some pragmatic and sensible, others more fallible and ill-judged, I stayed at UCL. It was suggested that a suitable topic for me, given my domestic situation, would be the application of the Poor Law in north London in the later nineteenth century. I bridled at the sensible, restrictive nature of this. Besides, I was drawn to French political history: this was a time when Léon Blum, Jean Jaurès and above all the tragic Pierre Drieu la Rochelle were favourite subjects for theses and dissertations.
Encouraged by Douglas Johnson, I decided to research the French Communist Party (PCF) in the years of reconstruction following the Second World War, when three of its members served in government. The PCF had been a party of structural opposition before the war, and had gained great political credit for the brave activities of many of its members in the Resistance during the war. Known as le parti des 75,000 fusillés (the ‘party of the 75,000 executed’) in recognition of this, and emerging as the largest single party in France in the October 1945 elections, the PCF was nevertheless rewarded with no front-rank ministries in de Gaulle’s government from 1944 to 46.
This, however, was a ridiculous subject for me to contemplate. My French was little above O-level standard and I would need to live in France to understand the intricacies of French politics a
nd society, in addition to gaining the trust of deeply suspicious and guarded members of the PCF. Yet the best I could manage was to arrange childcare for two or three days at a time in order to read in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, rather than the many months required researching in archives all over France, and interviewing anyone who was prepared to talk to a fairly ignorant English postgraduate about this still raw and sensitive part of their recent history.
Instead I spent several months improving my French and day after day peering at smudged microfilm copies of the PCF newspaper L’Humanité at Colindale, a dreary spot near the top of the Northern Line where the British Library’s newspaper collection was housed. It was an utterly morale-sapping period, relieved only by acting as an occasional teaching assistant at UCL and by filling in as maternity cover teaching modern European history at the Polytechnic of Central London and stints teaching American year-abroad students.
My colleagues and I took these students on cultural expeditions to museums and galleries, and theatres; we appropriated (rather than invented, I suspect) an Iris Murdoch walk round London, culled from references in her novels (which included the now sadly long-gone bar in Sloane Square Underground station). We had a long weekend in Dublin, during which my fellow teachers (including the architectural historian Gavin Stamp and Dickens scholar Andrew Sanders) and I went off to ferret out all sorts of places of historical and cultural interest. We strolled through Phoenix Park, where in 1882 the British government’s Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and Ireland’s most senior civil servant, Thomas Burke, were stabbed to death by men calling themselves the ‘Irish National Invincibles’. We visited the General Post Office in O’Connell Street, the site of the 1916 republican Easter Rising against British rule, and visited Kilmainham Gaol where fifteen of the rising’s leaders were executed by firing squad. We saw paintings by William Orpen, John Lavery and Jack Yeats. We followed in the footsteps of Molly Bloom’s walk round the city. We gazed at ‘the sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea’ as James Joyce, his very self, had done. And at the end of the day, when the students were tucked up in bed, or more likely carousing in the bars round St Stephen’s Green, we sipped Irish whiskey in the Shelbourne Hotel, where all the men looked like poets, or so I thought, since I had fallen headlong in love with this beautiful, quintessentially late-nineteenth-century European city.
I eventually switched my thesis topic to look at the marginally more accessible subject of de Gaulle’s relationship with the Resistance during the war. Yet at the end of three years of study and research, when I should have been what the Americans call an ABD (an ‘All But Done’), I was in fact F[ar] F[rom] D[one]. I was deeply ashamed of my failure to complete my PhD, in terms not only of weakness of resolve and character, but also of wasting state money awarded generously and in all good faith. Subsequently I have taught courses on Eurocommunism and I still read as much as I can of new work on the PCF, the Resistance, collaboration, Vichy and the fate of French Jews – in some way, perhaps, keeping a tenuous tryst of loyalty in recompense for an abandoned relationship.
But my years of formal education were finally over. It had been a mixed bag. And now I was ready to go out into the world.
Chapter Eight
A Political Wife
‘Sterile mirror, sterile mirror,’ chanted rows of Warwick University students in the autumn of 1968. Sitting on the platform in one of the university’s lecture halls, I was pregnant with my third child, who would be born the following February. I clearly wasn’t sterile, nor – though they could not have known it – was I a mirror, certainly not in the sense that the chanting, slow-handclapping students presumably meant it: an authentic, silent reflection, a repeating image with no function other than a continuation of that image ad infinitum. By definition a mirror can reproduce only what is immediately present facing it. And depending on the size of the mirror and its position, it is likely to provide little or no context that might give a different meaning to the image. I was certainly present on that Warwick platform, but what I was not doing was reflecting the intention, indeed the reality of the occasion, though my presence indicated differently.
Going along with the convention that politics was a family enterprise, I was there in support of my husband, who was standing as the Conservative candidate for the potentially winnable seat of Coventry South, a city at the centre of car manufacturing. At such electoral meetings the politician, or would-be politician, was there to proclaim his or her political beliefs and strategies, and seek votes to put these into practice. The accompanying spouse sitting next to him (or, much less often, her) was meant to act as a support, guarantor of integrity, and provide evidence that the speaker was anchored in the everyday, that he would understand – and indeed experience – the quotidian lives of those whose vote he was seeking. The spouse would be an extension of the aspiring MP, relied on to perform the ostensibly non-political ‘soft’ duties of a politician in the constituency. It was in the service of this signification that I frequently left my young children in London for a night, with a rota of grandparents, au pairs and reciprocating other parents, to dash up the M1 to Coventry, where I sat on platforms and, as the 1970 election grew closer, helped with canvassing.
Which is why that evening I sat smiling but silent, venturing no opinion, asking no questions, at the recently established University of Warwick, one of the many electoral platforms in town, village, church and institutional halls in and around Coventry. A new university in the Midlands had been mooted in 1945, yet it would be twenty more years before it was built, as part of the expansion of higher education following the Robbins Report on Higher Education, published in 1963, which found that only six per cent of young people went on to university and three per cent to teacher-training colleges, or other vocational teaching institutional establishments. Though named the University of Warwick it was in fact sited nearer to the industrial city of Coventry than the historic town of Warwick, and had only admitted its first cohort of students three years before my uncomfortable evening. Yet it had already experienced the power of student protest. Because the university had received a considerable amount of funding from industry – its vice-chancellor, Lord Rootes, was a prominent Coventry motor manufacturer, and its council was largely composed of other wealthy local industrialists – there was great debate (most famously articulated by E. P. Thompson in his Warwick University Ltd) about the purpose and independence of higher education institutions and their role in Britain’s economic, social and cultural life.
Were places of learning such as Warwick unduly influenced in the subjects they taught, how they were taught, and by whom, by that close connection with industry and commerce which Conservative voices suggested was essential in order to grow the new university into the ‘top mid-Atlantic business school’? The Warwick students had been the first to offer support to the student sit-in at the London School of Economics, which among other things alleged undercover political surveillance and censorship of students and staff. Yet the Warwick students’ subversion was fairly mild at the time. Their most notable transgression had been to assert their rights by painting the story of Winnie the Pooh on the pavement outside the university council building, Rootes Hall. Nevertheless, the political climate was febrile in 1968. Les événements in France, in which students, academics and political activists joined with industrial workers in common opposition to the government, had brought that country to a virtual standstill. And uniting political activists on the left in ways that merged domestic disquiet with authority and international political protest both in Europe and America, was the US war in Vietnam against Ho Chi Minh’s communist government.
In this context it was hardly surprising that Warwick students were hostile and heckling towards a Conservative politician and his appendage of a wife. But what surprises me again and again as I look back is how insouciantly and wrong-headedly unpolitical in any domestic or global sense I was, and how utterly compliant and unquestioning.
The Tory Party expected an MP’s wife to be a present and visible helpmeet to her husband. This, I was to find, involved my opening constituency garden parties and fetes; walking round, stopping at each stall to buy home-made jam, hand-knitted tea cosies or loo roll covers and embroidered tray cloths, as well as buying raffle tickets and guessing the weight of an oversize fruit cake. I was also required to give talks to women’s groups in the constituency. (The most active of these might have been called ‘Blue Streak’ like the ballistic missile, or ‘Blue Band’ like the margarine? Or possibly ‘Blue Rinse’, a hairstyle sported by many Conservative ladies? In fact, now it comes back – it was Blue Link.) I would talk about how important it was not to be distracted by other good causes, for women to throw their campaigning energy into support for the party. It also involved being instructed by the women’s chair, who I recall was wearing a particularly tight pair of leopard-print pedal pushers at the time, about a suitable wardrobe for an MP’s wife; attending party conferences in seaside resorts such as Llandudno, Blackpool and Brighton; going to ladies’ lunches and constituency dinners; waltzing and foxtrotting with various party officials, and letting off my frustrations with such organised activities as furiously stamping around the dance floor to ‘Simon Says’. I was compliant in this alien land for the sole purpose of supporting my husband George’s escalating ambitions.
So there I was as a political wife with profoundly contrary politics – much like a vicar’s wife who does not believe in God, I imagine. Most of the time I was an unspeaking, smiling presence on platforms, never required to utter a word and by convention only asked the standard single question at initial selection meetings: ‘Are you prepared to support your husband in his role as Member of Parliament?’ Each time I gave the expected answer: ‘Yes, but as the mother of a young family, those responsibilities will naturally limit my participation.’ But looking back, I know there were times I did not play the role well. Once, after I had chatted to a man at a constituency cheese and wine evening, and having been what I considered most circumspect in toeing the political line in the discussion he had embarked on, he turned to my husband and said: ‘Well, your wife has put the Fabian case admirably. Perhaps you would like to let me hear your opinion as our Conservative candidate.’
Joining the Dots Page 12