However, since neither editor ever seemed to leave the office (except for long lunches), they appeared largely unaware of the seismic shifts that had taken place in the study of history, and the magazine was fast becoming (if it had not already become) outdated and irrelevant. Indeed, before I was invited for an interview, I, as a keen history student and peruser of historical journals, had never come across the magazine, and had to rush to the London Library to skim through several years’ issues. It had, in short, become more of a society than a social and political history magazine. And it had a strong streak of connoisseurship and a penchant for eighteenth-century European royalty, aristocracy, magnificent palaces and grand country retreats.
Meanwhile, since the 1960s, the breadth of historical studies had been expanding exponentially: they had not only a political purpose to document the lives of the rich and powerful, but also an urgent desire to excavate the experiences of the voiceless of history, those who left few traces in the written record other than the registration of their birth, marriage and death – the poor, women, artisans, immigrants. As E. P. Thompson, author of the highly influential 800-page doorstop of a book, The Making of the English Working Class, first published in 1963, famously wrote, his mission was ‘to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity’.
This was ‘history from below’; bottom-up rather than top-down history, with an interest in working men and women, studies of mobs and riots, of popular entertainments, jokes and rituals; in the material conditions of people in the past; in customs and beliefs. And it fitted in with the ‘democratic turn’ that had followed the introduction of the welfare state with its redistributive policies. It was influenced by linguistics, physical geography, sociology and anthropology, as well as by the French Annales school of historiography, which saw historical change as best explained by considering social history as a process of longue durée, of structural change rather than short-term events, in which social circumstances were linked to, and often explained, the changing mentalité of a group or community.
In the early 1980s this approach was exemplified by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s newly translated and best-selling Montaillou (1975), a vivid micro-history which explored in great detail the lives of peasants in a small commune in the Languedoc between 1294 and 1324; or Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, detailing the life and beliefs of Menocchio, a miller from Montereale in Italy, who was burned at the stake in 1599 for his heretical views. Like Montaillou, the forensic examination of Menocchio and his fellow villagers was made possible by transcribing the detailed notes taken by members of the Inquisition seeking to ‘cleanse’ the Roman Catholic Church of apostasy and heresy by torture and incineration.
Material that had often been considered suspect, unreliable or ‘biased’, peripheral and of a purely individualistic nature and interest, such as diaries, letters, pamphlets, scribbled notes, scraps of laundry and shopping lists and perhaps above all oral testimony, interviews and recorded conversations, was increasingly woven into the historical narrative, which would change its focus to bring a greater empathy, vividness and humanity to social history. Now history could reach far beyond the classroom or the seminar space, recounted with such richness, such insights into daily lives and motivations, that the best might read like an enthralling novel.
As editor of History Today, I was determined to pick up on these new developments, which ran parallel to the intentions of the magazine: to make academic history readable and interesting to those with no particular specialist knowledge, but who had maintained a fascination with the past. Perhaps they had read history as students and were now teaching or in the civil service, working as administrators, planners or policy wonks, as indeed our readership surveys showed they were, though one survey also revealed a greyhound trainer who had been a reader since the off. While ever mindful of the need to keep the magazine’s loyal subscribers on board with the sort of articles they enjoyed reading, we needed to reach out further to vivify and extend the contents of the magazine and bring the exciting new horizons of history to a wider audience.
I visited British and Irish universities with interesting-sounding history departments and corresponded with historians from the United States, Australia and other parts of the world. I went to conferences at home and abroad to try to pick up the drift of current scholarship and work out what would translate into articles for the magazine. Almost everywhere I received a warm welcome and found that scholars were anxious to disseminate their work to a wider audience.
In 1982 I attended a conference at the University of London on ‘Blacks in Britain’ and was so absorbed by this shamefully largely ignored rich history that I commissioned articles from a number of those giving papers, leading to a special issue on the subject, with some magnificent illustrations sourced by my art editor colleague, Jacky Guy. This proved a sell-out, as did a thirteenth issue on Elizabeth I, though the staff reasonably complained that it was tough enough producing an issue of the magazine every month and they would down tools if I tried to make it a baker’s dozen again.
As the first female editor of the magazine, I was particularly conscious of my duty to female readers and historians. By this point, the word ‘women’ was ceasing to be an entry in indexes, as women were increasingly considered codeterminants with men in the historical narratives and could not therefore be bunched together as a category. Sexual behaviour and proclivities, the role of emotions and of memory, the history of childhood and ‘affective relationships’, were being interrogated and made vivid for the general reader.
Women themselves, moreover, were becoming more prominent as authors of history. Of course a few, such as Alice Clark, Barbara Drake and Joan Thirsk had, from the late nineteenth century onwards, written history books, while the women’s suffrage movement had produced a series of histories by activists such as Sylvia Pankhurst and Ray Strachey, anxious that the movement’s achievements and its antecedents should not be taken for granted or brushed under the carpet.
Now, however, there was a new momentum. During the ‘second wave’ of feminism in the late 1960s and 70s, women had begun to re-examine the historical record, since standard texts still often hardly made mention of them. Looking at the home and workplace through women’s eyes, they started to reconfigure the way in which questions were asked and history was written, arguing that family structures and dynamics, emotional support and concerns, were every bit as important as waged work and political systems; that perceptions, explanations and chronologies were gendered.
By the time that I was editing the magazine, the voices of women historians had become more prevalent, and I was pleased to give writers such as Linda Colley, Stella Tillyard, Lyndal Roper and Natalie Zemon Davis space in the publication. They in turn had their effect on me. It seems strange now that, until this point, feminism had largely passed me by. During my years at UCL, I had begun to move among the intellectual vanguard, but it still remained largely a male cohort, whose main concerns of global political and military conflicts made socialism more crucial than feminism in their view. Such men believed that they treated women as equals (except when it came to who should serve the tea and make the sandwiches after a meeting), but they were not particularly preoccupied with women’s concerns. However, by the 1970s, I became aware of a band of men, many of them academics working at newer universities, who were sympathetic to women’s views and demands to be taken seriously, and for whom women’s concerns were more central to their work and consciousness. And at the same time, I was increasingly aware of the restrictions still governing my own life as a woman.
As a single working mother I looked for solidarity in the stories of other women who had fought for their freedom and independence, escaping unsatisfactory domestic situations. It was my personal need to think harder about ‘Women’s Lib’ that took me to Sisterwrite bookshop
in Upper Street, Islington, where I attended a series of talks by speakers who exhorted the audience to ameliorate the power of patriarchy whenever and wherever they found it. Some of these talks seemed too removed from my own daily concerns to convince me.
It took me too long to claim to be one, but I now consider myself a committed feminist. My journey to intellectual adulthood had been too chaotic to identify with any position. I was filled with relief that my daughter’s life as she entered adulthood looked so much freer than mine had done. And I gained confidence from the women I met that I had the right to ask for more than my mother had asked for: to seek happiness in work, motherhood and love, sometimes exhausted by their competing demands, but often pleased and amazed that life was offering so much more than I could have expected in those grey postwar years.
Epilogue
It was the clattering of heels going past the window in the early morning that struck me hardest: high heels, sensible lace-ups, steel-tipped boots. All sounded efficient, urgent; above all purposeful. I couldn’t see who was wearing the footwear as the blinds were still down, but I thought of those hurrying to work, nurses on the ward, shop workers anxious to tidy their stock, lawyers gathering their papers, striding into court, teachers making sure their students knew the classroom door would soon swing open and it would be prudent to sit at their desks. Sometimes the clatter would speed up and I would guess that the person was late, hurrying to catch a bus or a train. Then the beat would slow down, as the walker stopped to chat, read a notice, or peruse the contents of a kerbside skip; but soon the clip-clopping would start again, echoing into the distance.
Lying in my living room at home in a hospital bed, the purposive resonance of those clattering shoes, the like of which I knew would never again signal my former busy, active life, seemed emblematic of how I had lost my purpose, and posed the overwhelming question of how would I, could I, find another?
Just over a year earlier, in May 2012, I had been diagnosed with having a glioblastoma multiforme (GBM): the most aggressive malignant primary brain tumour. GBM is a rare disease, with an incidence in Europe and North America of around 2–3 cases per 100,000 people per year. About thirty-five per cent of those diagnosed with GBM die within one year, while five per cent survive five years.
The diagnosis had come as an earth-shattering shock to me – and indeed the neurosurgeon who had performed the surgical biopsy at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London was surprised too.
I had first exhibited symptoms of a neurological problem a few days before the previous Christmas, when I noticed that I kept dropping things from my left hand as I prepared the food for some neighbours expected for a drink and a mince pie. I could not believe this could be anything serious and planned to mention it to my GP in the New Year. However, a doctor friend of my daughter advised me not to delay but go to the local A&E department straight away. The result was that I spent most of Christmas Day that year in the Royal London Hospital with what the doctors thought was probably a TIA (transient ischaemic attack), a short-lived mini-stroke which sometimes precedes a more serious, life-threatening one.
But it wasn’t, and from then until April 2012, between going back to the Royal London Hospital, where the neurologist considered that I probably had a vascular problem, ‘certainly not anything nasty like a brain tumour’, I lived my normal life, largely forgetting about the neural problem, going to stay in my house in France for Easter, where I drove around, visiting friends and pursuing my passion for going to brocantes and vide-greniers, buying French enamelware, street signs and house numbers and keeping a lookout for another blue metal ‘Chocolat Menier’ advertising plaque to replace the one I had rashly given my daughter. In fact, I felt so entirely well that I considered not keeping the neurologist’s appointment on the grounds that it was a waste of time.
But then, when filming a television series in Morecambe (the seaside resort in Lancashire which in the 1930s was a favoured destination for workers during ‘Wakes Week’, when all the factories ceased production), I woke up one morning in Oliver Hill’s magnificent Art Deco Midland Hotel to find that my left hand was completely alien. I couldn’t control it sufficiently to put in my contact lenses, do up my bra or hook in my earrings.
After that, things moved fast. I was given a series of tests back at Barts which ruled out a vascular diagnosis and culminated in a biopsy with a small hole cut in my skull by a skilled neurosurgeon, careful to minimise any damage to my brain tissue. The aperture was stapled together for a couple of weeks while the sample was analysed. The result was slow to arrive, and when it did, I was totally stunned. My daughter Sophie was with me when the brisk old-school oncologist told me: ‘What you have is very serious and people die of it. But luckily your tumour is very small and you are healthy.’ He recommended that I start an immediate and intensive course of radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
As soon as we left Barts, Sophie cancelled the meeting she had planned and came with me to the BBC where I was making a series of programmes for Radio Four on ‘The History of the Future’. It had been intended that I would interview an academic at the University of Aberdeen down the line from the studio. However, we couldn’t make contact (and subsequently learned that he had fallen over in the university car park, hit his head, and was suffering from concussion). Sophie and I went out to lunch. She told me that whatever happened she and her brothers would be ‘with me all the journey’, which indeed they profoundly have been in their various ways.
I tried to let the news sink in. But it wouldn’t. How can you feel perfectly well and active with plans and duties for the future when you wake up in the morning and by coffee time learn that you are likely to have a life expectancy of perhaps a year or fifteen months (I was not told that, but did what everyone surely does, against medical advice, and looked up the prognosis on Google)?
That evening, I went in a daze to the theatre with friends and told myself that I was still the same person, but with an incurable illness (the tumour was inoperable as it was in an ‘eloquent’ part of the brain), and that that was how I would live for as long as I had left.
The next months were a blur of shock: total despair, weeping, lecturing myself, acute anxiety, dependency, fleeting thoughts of suicide while heavy lorries thundered past as I stood on the kerb waiting to cross the road. I had daily radiotherapy for six weeks with what looked like a white fencing mask clamped over my face to keep my head as still as possible while skilled radiologists directed the beam with millimetre precision at the tumour. At the end of the six weeks I was offered the mask to take home, since it was customised to my precise specifications and radiotherapy cannot be given for more than one course. It was a trophy I had no conceivable desire to treasure, though I would come to be very grateful for its efficacy.
Still stunned, I sought a second opinion privately and was told that the combination of radiotherapy and temozolomide (the only chemotherapy drug that can get through the blood–brain barrier) was the ‘gold standard treatment’ for brain tumours, though of course there could be no guarantees as to its effectiveness.
I lost two stone in weight and was frivolously pleased as I slipped into size 12 or even size 10 clothes in changing rooms. I was less pleased when a skirt I hadn’t worn for some time fell to the floor over my newly slender hips as I was paying my bus fare and the man behind me graciously bent down and helped it back on to me. My hair thinned and grew fragile and bushy like a duckling’s arse where the radiotherapy had been administered.
I endured the will-sapping side effects of chemotherapy taken at home in tablet form. I recall watching the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics and vomiting throughout. I needed a couple of blood transfusions when my white and then my red blood cells dipped alarmingly low and my limbs turned blotchy, blue and bruised. I had several short stays in hospital and marvelled at the kindness and efficiency of the desperately overworked, understaffed and underpaid doctors, nurses and assistants, and the terribleness of the food with no fresh
vegetables or fruit. I bought a wig, had it expertly styled and wore it for a few weeks, but though others admired my full and glossy mane, I felt I had lost my identity in those synthetic fibres and preferred to wear a man’s trilby hat over the wispy strands of my own hair.
I sought a ‘new normal’, a way of managing this alien terrain where all the markers were the same yet nothing felt stable anymore. I tried seeing a psychologist but our conversations made me feel worse with every visit. With Sophie I travelled for a surprisingly calm and uplifting week at the Penny Brohn Centre near Bristol, which is devoted to helping people to live with cancer as well as possible.
I tried and failed to practise mindfulness, growing tense every time I tried to acknowledge painful thoughts and then to imagine them on a leaf slipping away down a river. I went to Maggie’s Centre, a project by the architect Charles Jencks inspired by his wife, the artist Maggie Keswick, who had wanted to provide a tranquil and aesthetically uplifting environment for those suffering from (or living with, as the preferred phrase is) cancer. Though I know such refuges and activities are an enormous help and support to many people, they made me feel I was being characterised and defined by my cancer. I wanted to spend time with people with whom I had other bonds – of love, friendship, shared interests, aesthetic taste, humour – rather than the restraining bonds of cancer. I only wanted to hear from friends who knew me, or from expert medical staff who knew the vagaries of the disease.
Joining the Dots Page 15