by Fay Weldon
Better to be grateful for the time one has, and the time one has had than lament that there is little left. If I look out of the window where I write this early morning I see the sun rising over the pollarded lime trees of what were once the gardens of the most powerful abbey in England. The trees look the same as in the sixteenth-century print someone showed me recently - the old gnarled trunks, the spurt of new, thwarted if determined foliage, like the drawing of an inexpert child. It is autumn, the most colourful autumn for years after a hot, dry summer, and the trees are coming to life with the dawn, in a kind of greeny-pink haze. A woman walks a little dog. It should be on a lead and is not. People, delinquent and otherwise, have walked here for centuries. The monument to the dead of the First World War comes into relief as sunlight breasts the wall of the church and stripes the dark grass withlight. Beyond the trees the ground falls away from the old castle ramparts, and you can see right across a wide landscape to the next ridge of hills and the little airfield which flashes its light as confidently as if it were Canary Wharf.
The Abbey was torn down by Henry VIII, in a fervour of asset-stripping, and the stone parcelled out to nobles in London to build their fine houses. But a lot was stolen in dead of night, and many old houses in these parts have chunks of Abbey stone built into their fabric. And we still have the trees, and the past showing through into the present, if you have a mind to look.
I will put a tree or two in Wilkins Parade and Wilkins Square where the addicts gather, to cheer the place up, to share my good fortune in being able to see what I have seen this morning, the old and the new, the past and the present, all merging into one another. Good fortune must be passed on.
Look thy last on all things lovely, every hour
Let no night,
Steal thy sense in deathly slumber
'Til to delight
Thou hast paid thy utmost blessing,
Since that all things thou would'st praise,
Beauty took from those that loved them,
In other days.
My mother would quote that at the drop of a hat. She never went to school but she had a head full of poetry, and passed the knowledge on to me. Just before she died, at the age of ninety-five, we remembered together at least two consecutive pages of Tennyson's Lady of Shalott.
Four grey walls and four grey towers,
Overlook a space of flowers . . .
What else are the Abbey gardens? My grandchildren's heads are full of pop lyrics, in the same way, but I think we had the best of it.
I cried when I was seventeen turning eighteen and my father died. I had just come home from France, where I had been working in a Youth Aliyah camp for Jewish children on their way to what was then known as the Holy Land, and was staying with my aunt and uncle, Mary and Michael Stewart in Amen Court, in the shadow of St Paul's. I was to be there for a week before taking the night train to St Andrews University. Home had vanished in my absence. My mother had left London to live in her Wild Meg cottage on the Cornish moors. Once again, I had only my suitcase and memories I preferred to forget - lost landscapes, lost friends.
Michael and Mary were Labour Party activists and were to end up in the House of Lords, he an ex-Foreign Secretary, she a very worthy Baroness. A telegram came. Mary opened it and said 'Bad news, your father has died' and put it down on the hall stand. She cried a little, my father being her brother, and I cried too, to keep her company. We did not touch; we were not a touching family.
'We have grim news,' say The Sunday Times and others when they ring up to tell you some public figure or friend has died, 'we have grim news.' And you reply quickly, 'who?' And they give you the name and it either shocks you to the core or you remain oddly and guiltily indifferent. Sometimes it is those apparently closest to you whose death does not seem to impinge much upon your own life, while the death of those you scarcely know and rarely see can strike you to the quick. Grief comes bidden or unbidden, and there is little you can do about it. It is as if the circles of acquaintance given to one in life are flawed: off-key, they overlap but do not coincide. You can spend a lot of time with others, and take very little notice. Or spend a little time, and be devastated.
I had not seen my father for three years and I think I had struck him from my psychic address book. We went to Oklahoma! that night - we did not cancel, and it was my birthday treat. Life, my aunt said, must not be disturbed by death. That was 1949: there had been a war. Amen Court stood alone amidst rubble. The times were drastic, and still out of joint.
I met my mother a few days later in a Lyons Corner House: brief reference only was made to my father's death. She did say she shouldn't have left him, and he was the only man she had ever loved. She seemed surprised I was disturbed in any way by his death. But then she never reckoned fathers much. And since she didn't see why I should take his loss personally, I tried not to. I did cry on the way back to Amen Court and a lady on the bus asked me if anything was the matter and I remember saying, 'I have no home and now no father.' Then I cheered up. I had a sense of drama, but could not keep self-pity up for long. On the night train up to St Andrews I took off my black armband and that I thought was that. He shouldn't have gone and died if he wanted my love. Fatherless - so what was new anyway?
Black armbands - strips of black satin bought at the haberdashers - had become fashionable in the war, replacing the wearing of black clothes to signify a family bereavement, and my mother, as a concession to the event, had bought them for Jane and me to take to university. Our new friends would treat us more tenderly, or perhaps find a useful way of striking up a conversation. Jane - having left school at fourteen and finished the correspondence courses which were to earn her a matriculation certificate - that wonderful document which qualified you to get to University - and now living in a bed-sitting room - set off for Exeter as I set out for St Andrews. I don't know whether Jane wore her armband, or not. We did not discuss such things, or indeed, ever talk about my mother as if she were not in the room, which precluded discussion of my father's death. And as Jane went South and I went North, my mother went West, to St Ives in Cornwall, having decided all places under the sun were equal, and St Ives was where the pin struck that she had held over a map of the land, and let it fall. Almost off the map, not quite. Which is why it happened that Jane met her husband Guido the artist in St Ives, and they begat Christopher, Rachel and Benjamin, who begat Alexander, Isobel and Imogen, Nat, Jake and Henrietta - and all of them come to Christmas dinner, long after Guido and Jane are gone. And all live in houses which do not vanish under their noses: we work hard at it and keep the gardens nice.
I remember the armband so vividly. 1949. I stepped aboard the train in England wearing it, and off the train in Scotland without it. I remember the act of will it took to take it off. I felt ungrateful and disobedient, but I meant to be a person without a past, only a future. Of course it is not so easy.
To wear black at all - now the mainstay of most wardrobes, and a symbol of smart practicality - was still seen in the Forties and Fifties as unlucky. (As for white lilies, 'funeral flowers' - they should never be brought into a house. The association with coffins was too strong, not to mention the white waxiness of the blooms themselves, too like the corpse itself to be countenanced.) The armband was a kind of halfway house, between the excesses of Victorian mourning and today's way of achieving 'closure' as soon as possible, by way of Bereavement Support Groups. It was an explanatory statement to strangers. 'Forgive me if I'm not as polite or considerate as I should be. If I cry in the street, on the bus, I am not mad. Someone close to me has died.' It should be revived: I should not have taken it off.
The quad at St Andrews was bleak stone and the green grass formal, and the paths formed like a saltire cross. It was a long way from home but there was no home anyway. Ghosts stalked the town and haunted the long beaches, but we students wore red flannel gowns to keep out the cold, and sat in lecture halls where our predecessors had gathered for five hundred years, bringing sacks of
oats to pay for their tuition, and slept as they did from too much wine and debauchery. There were crosses in the cobbles to mark where prelates had been burned to death for their beliefs. All could have recanted and been saved, but they preferred not to. They would rather be right about the transubstantiation of the Virgin Mary. For lack of a family, I daresay, I regained a sense of 'we' which has never left me. 'We' students, in defiance of our teachers, 'we' workers in defiance of the bosses, 'we' writers in defiance of the TV moguls, 'we' women in defiance of men. And in the meanwhile I found friends and chattered on.
I cried when I was twenty-five rising twenty-six and had run away from what I saw as a bad husband (I think in retrospect I was a worse wife than he ever was husband) with my little boy tucked under my arm. Now I needed to get him into a nursery school, so I could be free to work. The husband, headmaster of a secondary school, married to provide a roof over our heads, was the 'no wife of mine works' kind of man, prevalent in the Fifties. I had flung myself into a hostile world with no means of support, not even from the State. My mother was in a sorry state, living as a companion to an elderly woman with whom she did not get on, and had only a single room to her name. I would be no more welcome in that house than my mother had been before I was born, in the hospital where my father, her husband, had found a live-in job as a single man. Lithe single women can be slotted in anywhere, sneak in and out of institutions at night, but not women with children. (No wonder the birth rate falls as women everywhere learn how to look after their own interests.) Somehow, now, I had to earn. Just another runaway Fifties wife, I wept in front of the woman who ran the school, and didn't want to admit my child and so encourage immorality. That was in August, 1957. I was really low, so sorry for myself. 'Somewhere to live', difficult enough today, was even more difficult then, and the State even more reluctant to help.
I was staying with friends, Laura and Stephen Cohen, in Yeoman's Row, in Knightsbridge, in the flat Laura's father, Wells Coates, the Bauhaus architect, had designed. They were good to me in the hour of my need, and took me and Nicolas in without a thought for their own convenience, dreadful cold in the nose and all. It was the kind of cold one gets when relieved from a great pressure and strain, and the body allows itself to give up its defences and descends into welcome illness. It was spectacular.
That day at the nursery school I wept, and sneezed, and sneezed and wept, and the headmistress relented, and Nicolas was allowed in her day care centre. Weep and plead, as a woman, and it shall be given to you. I see I have taught Trisha the same sorry lesson. But sometimes one can't help it: the tears flow unbidden. The first time at the therapist it is normal for the client to cry and cry.
The story of one's life, told by oneself to a sympathetic listener, induces great self-pity and indeed childishness. Afterwards one is ashamed.
As it happened I only sent Nicolas to the centre for a single day. The children were so pale and sad, the weather so cold, little stiff arms pushed into winter coats, the weeping when the mothers departed so distressing. I could see that the idea of childcare was fine in theory but appalling in practice: that the interests of children and parent overlapped but as so often did not coincide, and what was good, and indeed necessary, for the mother was not automatically good for the child. Unless of course the parent is so horrible in the first place - and a few are - that being at a distance from them can only be advantageous. I took Nicolas out of his nursery that evening and never took him back. I wanted my freedom: I wanted to live unobserved and uncriticised, I wanted to be free of husbandly and motherly interference and control, but want, I could see, must be my master for a time yet. I wrote to my mother and asked her if she would leave companioning her old lady and help me with Nicolas and she said she would. Of course she did; I knew she would. We might be back to where we'd been before I had been panicked into marriage with the headmaster but at least times were better. The baby was now a child and easier to look after, and I had the promise of a better-paid job, one more fitting my graduate state, found for me by my lover and mentor, the Dane.
I wept and wept when the Dane, a yachtsman copy writer, author of Bridge That Gap With Cadbury's Snack and other famous sayings, went on holiday with his wife on money I lent him for the purpose. That was in 1957. How could I refuse? He had found me the job, that of a trainee copy writer, at Crawfords, a proper big time agency situated in High Holborn. It had the Milk Marketing Board account - Drinka Pinta Milka Day - amongst others, and I loved him, and was (minimally) guilty because he was married.
, and my mother and I found a flat on the top floor of a house in Earls Court. There were five flights of stairs and no lift, no carpets and almost no furniture, but it was somewhere to live. We still had dark grey army surplus blankets on the beds, under which the Dane would join me, secretly, so as not to upset my mother, and his wife. And at least there was now a little surplus money for me to be able to lend it straight back to him. I had become pregnant, miscarried, and he had wept.
, and I was at Crawfords and shared an office with Elizabeth Smart, author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. She was a kind and beautiful woman and a fine writer, and I was a great blubbing bulky thing and a panicky one. The Dane had used his influence to get me the job in the first place: now Elizabeth taught me how to write advertising copy. How to forget the verbs and sprinkle adjectives, and try to make them pertinent, and never to use words for the sake of words, that every one has to mean something or you excise it. She taught me the value of exactitude, though I think I had an instinct for it anyway. She loved George Barker the poet, a dysfunctional relationship, in today's terms, and had four brilliant children by him, and when I miscarried the Dane's baby she was sympathetic and did not say 'just as well', though it was. She became the gardening correspondent for Vogue and wrote remarkable poetry, and when George wrote The Dead Seagull - his answer to Grand Central Station - there was a great literary hoo-hah. Elizabeth won on points, because of her prose and the heart-rending nature of the then emotional subjugation of women to men, which she caught on the tide, just as the tsunami which was women's liberation began to gather force. This misery, this indignity, really cannot go on any more.
Elizabeth and George's fourth child was called Rosie. She was fourteen when she first came to a party of ours, in the Sixties, precocious - though not by to-day's standards - thoroughly charming and astonishingly beautiful. She was to have a baby which was to be born addicted to heroin - now a common enough occurrence, then it made headlines. Elizabeth looked after the baby, but Rosie died soon after from an overdose, to everyone's distress.
I find I pray for Rosie from time to time: she is on an internal list of the missing and remembered. The grief of parents we know is shared: it is to be borne and faced by all. And Rosie carried with her so focused and vivid a personality -perhaps the shortage of available time to live sharpens the quality of the living - she is not forgotten. No wonder that Shelley gang, with their poetic intensity and their early deaths, are still spoken and written about.
We were all pre-feminists then: it simply did not occur to us that if men misbehaved, the answer was to have nothing more to do with them. That 'love' was a trap not worth falling into. The female response at the time was still to feel more love, have more babies, write more poetry, sink yet further into masochism. My problem was, I could see, that unlike Elizabeth I was not doing it with any style. I lost some weight and put on heels, and after work one day, after as I remember choosing a selection of adjectives for Simpson's store in Piccadilly and naming a women's department 'Young and Gay' - what innocent days they were - I sat on a bench in Holborn and reproached my dead father for leaving me. I made contact with his spirit as he whirled around with the autumn leaves that fell amongst the traffic of New Oxford Street that day. I made a pact with him. It was time he looked after me, I said. He had failed to do so in life - other than sending his mistress Ina to tell me he was turning in his grave - let him do so in his death. He had left me no money, no
home, he had not protected me from my mother. Let him see to it. I for my part would stop sulking, stop playing games, stop waiting to be protected from my own folly, stop whining 'Now see what you made me do!'' I acknowledged my part in my own misfortune. I really think my father heard. Whether he was there of course I have no idea: I do know that I spoke to him.
At any rate it was after that my life turned: within days I fell out of love with the Dane, upon his confession of a drunken act of infidelity with a passing Danish tourist, waved goodbye to him as he set out for Ibiza to deliver some rich man's yacht, without dropping a single tear - the girl from Denmark had somehow lifted my moral responsibility to the wife, the miscarriage seemed a boon from heaven. I met Ron Weldon at a party, left my poor mother behind me, acquired a house and a home and a man of my own, and finally unafraid, grew rich and famous.
I wept in public fifteen years later on the steps of White Centre at BBC TV when Graeme MacDonald told me that Smoke Screen, my just-screened Flay for Today - Wednesday nights, an audience of some thirteen or fourteen million -had not been a success with the audience and the BBC weren't going to commission me to do another. Not for a time. That was in 1969. The first reports into the link between smoking and lung cancer were emerging. The play had been successful enough with the audience, but not with BBC management. Their feeling was that I was causing trouble, stirring up unpleasantness, frightening the audience. I should stick to writing about women, not venture out into the great male world of important matters. Smoke Screen was about an advertising man, working on a cigarette account, who dies of lung cancer. My hero, puffing away, had a family to support, and insurance premiums to meet before he died, and felt that his duty to his family was higher than his duty to the public. And so by and large it is. What can a man, or indeed a woman, do in the face of necessity? What was I doing in advertising myself? The necessity of so doing was fast fading. I could keep myself in other ways.