Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  My History teacher had told me a bit about Janet Vaughan. I knew that she was almost the same age as my mother and that she was married and had two daughters a little older than me. She was famous for having done some kind of medical research in Belsen when it was liberated and I was in awe of this. This wasn’t a woman who’d been shut in any kind of ivory tower – she’d seen the world at its worst, she’d witnessed horrific events. My mother, when I’d passed on this meagre information, had said, sadly and enviously, ‘A woman who’s made something of herself then.’ I respected her before I met her and now I was in front of her was thrown by her very ordinariness. But her eyes were sharp, shrewd, when they did settle down and rest on me. She spoke in an odd, rather abrupt fashion. She asked me why I wanted to come to Somerville and I said I wasn’t sure that I did want to. I blurted out some rigmarole about Oxford and Cambridge having been such a goal for so long I hadn’t even thought about what it would be like once I got there – the getting there was everything. I just wanted out of the life I was born into and university was the best exit from it. She asked me what kind of life it was that I wanted to escape and I sketched in my mother’s fate. I didn’t know, of course, that her own mother had been a frustrated woman, for quite different reasons, and that Janet Vaughan’s own ambition had been fuelled as much by her mother’s melancholy as mine had been by my own mother’s. Nor did I know that she was a Socialist determined to help bring about changes in society, structural changes. I was in so many ways exactly the kind of working-class girl she wanted at Somerville. The only other question she asked me was what I thought I might do after university. I said I wanted to write biographies and we had a discussion on the worth and nature of biography in general. She asked me whom I’d most like to write about and I said Christabel Pankhurst. She said, ‘What a good idea,’ and that was that.

  It was hard to know what to say when I returned home. Not the truth, anyway. So I said very little. A full five days went by. It seemed obvious I’d been rejected by both Oxford and Cambridge. My mother was upset for me – I’d tried so hard and in the end my ambition had been for nothing. Pushing my bike up the hill in the dark and rain of the December Friday afternoon I felt like my mother, pessimistic and weary and hopeless. But when I got to the gate, the front door opened at once and my mother stood silhouetted against the hall light holding out two telegrams. It was reminiscent of the wretched Merit exam, only this time I had more control. Somerville offered a History Scholarship, Girton an Exhibition. I found it hard to credit and what was awful was that mixed up with elation there was so much doubt. Did I really want to go to Oxford (for it was Somerville I’d choose) ? If so, why? Just as an escape route? Was that a good enough reason?

  The sudden uncertainty blighted the joy, but I kept it well hidden.

  In March 1957 I left home, as I’d always wanted to do, not to go to Oxford but to Bordeaux as an au pair girl, something forced on me in an effort to make my excruciating French better. I couldn’t see why bad French should be a handicap for a History scholar but Somerville thought otherwise, and anyway going to France would fill in the long months before Oxford.

  The au pair post was fixed up by my French teacher through some university newspaper. My mother was bewildered. What was an au pair? I hardly knew myself. A sort of servant, I said. She didn’t like that at all – servant to servant in one generation. I tried again, not exactly a servant, more a kind of mother’s help, a member of the family looking mostly after the children. ‘But you don’t like helping, you don’t like children,’ my mother protested. Too true. But it wouldn’t have to matter, being an au pair was just a means to an end. The family I was going to join sent a snap of themselves. ‘Five children!’ my mother exclaimed. ‘They’ll be RCs,’ my father said, shaking his head. The mother said she had been a teacher but now ran a bookshop and the father was a university lecturer. Sounded good to me. All that bothered me was getting there.

  It was such a simple journey from Carlisle to Bordeaux – I wasn’t off to the Amazon – but it was daunting. Nobody in my family had ever been abroad. The most daring journey ever made was by my father when he went as a young man to London for the day. He went to King’s Cross station, walked round it, thought nothing of it, and came back, to boast forever he had been to London. I bought a new case. Nan said good luggage was important, it would last a lifetime, and for once I listened to her. I bought a large, real leather case and it became the curse of that trip. It weighed a ton, empty. Full, I could barely lift it and certainly couldn’t carry it more than a yard at a time. It looked splendid though, its tan-coloured leather burnished, its straps and buckles so secure. I looked quite good too in, to my mother’s joy, a new blue suit – she’d been terrified I would set off in my horrible trousers and duffel jacket (which would have been a much better idea). ‘You’re as cool as a cucumber,’ my mother said admiringly as we waited for the taxi to arrive. I wasn’t. Confident I looked, confident I was not, but she would have hated to realize that.

  My inner panic was spotted by a suave Romanian, who talked to me on the boat train. I was in a state of near collapse after a disastrous race across London – I’d gone to Waterloo instead of Victoria Station – and nearly missed the train. This Romanian had probably seen me staggering down the platform hampered by my ‘good luggage’, but he didn’t speak to me until we were nearly at Dover. ‘Going to Paris?’ he asked, and I said no, to Bordeaux via Paris. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘my train too.’ He was very handsome, very un-Carlisle. He took charge of me when we got to Calais. When he whistled, a porter came and included my ‘good luggage’ with the mountains of the stuff belonging to him. In Paris he said that as we had four hours to put in, perhaps I’d allow him to show me a little of the city he knew so well? We whizzed about in a taxi, then walked along the Seine and on to the Ile St-Louis. We had lunch, outside, and then coffee somewhere else, outside. My life had begun, my mother’s was already left behind.

  We got the night train to Spain, which is where he was going. At first we talked, my history, soon told, and his, a long business. His Christian name was Serge and he spoke fourteen languages. He dreamt in French. He was a businessman – no business named – and he was going to Madrid. It grew dark and he pulled the blinds of our carriage down. I was so, so tired. Five hours to London, another five to Paris and then the excitement of sightseeing – I was exhausted. He wasn’t. He watched me yawn and said I needed a shoulder to lean on and crossed over to sit beside me. His arm went round my shoulders, the train rocked, the lights dimmed – and I sprang up and sat where he had been sitting before. There were only the two of us in the carriage, the old-fashioned sort opening on to a corridor. No one had even looked in on us since we left Paris. But I’d had not the slightest awareness of any danger and still hadn’t – I was just irritated. I glared at him and said something about being disappointed in him, that I’d thought he was a friend and now he was being silly. Suddenly he burst out laughing, roared and roared, said I was wonderfully naive, so sweet, but that never, ever, should I travel with strange men again, because they might not be as understanding and amused as he was. Then he told me to lie down and he covered me with his elegant fawn overcoat and lay down on the other seat himself and we both slept until Bordeaux.

  I was still tired, and aching, when we arrived there at six in the morning. The station platform when I got off was bitterly cold and it was quite deserted. M. Blanc was not there to meet me, as promised. There was no porter. I lugged my stupid case, by degrees, to the exit. Still no M. Blanc. I sat on my case – at least it was good for something, it made a very stable seat, room for a family to perch on it – and waited. I thought about home and its warmth and familiarity. I wondered if M. Blanc was perhaps having trouble with his car, but then I saw a thin, a very thin Picasso-type (in his blue period) man walking towards me, a photograph in his hand. He checked me against it and then introduced himself.

  No car. M. Blanc had no car. We got a bus. I couldn’t lift my case on t
o it and neither could he. He coughed, put a hand to his chest, apologized. A workman helped me. Luckily, when we got off the bus, we didn’t have far to go. The Blanc family lived above a shop, their shop. Mme Blanc was at the entrance to it, waiting for us. She looked as emaciated as her husband, but she had a beautiful smile and she embraced me, welcomed me most fulsomely. She took me up several flights of stone stairs to their living quarters (the case remained sulking below). These were a shock. Two rooms at the front, overlooking the street, and two at the back which had no windows except for skylights. My room was one of those at the back. It made my council house bedroom in Carlisle seem a luxury pad. Mme Blanc showed me the lavatory. To think I’d once despised our outside one… This was merely a little compartment, quite windowless and airless, and the system itself was that all the waste dropped down a pipe without any flushing. There was no bath. In the kitchen, there was a sink with a curtain round it. Why had I ever thought we were poor? Why had I ever thought my mother had a hard time? If my mother could only see how this woman lived…

  Lived, and coped magnificently. Everything rested on Marthe Blanc’s fragile shoulders and she never complained. She ran the shop – a stationery shop rather than a real bookshop – and also a laundry, belonging to her father, and looked after her family without any help but mine. I was ‘the Little Gift from Heaven’ sent by the good God to make her days easier. As this Little Gift, I got the five children up, fed and dressed them, and took the two eldest to school, pushing the twins there with us but leaving the baby in his cot. When I returned, the twins had a nap and I got the baby up and took him shopping with me. We had lunch, then I had two hours off before repeating the walk to collect the school pupils. After school it was pandemonium until the children’s very late bedtime. Marthe’s Little Gift found it hell.

  I could have gone home. I should have done. I soon discovered other au pairs had left within days. But what made me stay was not only pride, and admiration for Marthe Blanc, but the realization that I was programmed too well. For all my adolescent fighting talk of not being prepared to endure whatever came my way, I found it hard to act according to my beliefs. I believed women should not allow themselves to be made into drudges yet here I was becoming a drudge myself, putting up with all the hard work for five shillings a week plus my keep. But it was only for six months. Anyone could endure six months. Marthe had to endure her lot for life. Her husband was useless. He had lost his job just before I arrived and now did private coaching, a matter of only three pupils, an hour each, leaving him plenty of time to smoke and look miserable. He was depressed and depressing, whereas Marthe was sunny and singing. She loved her children, her little angels, and was not dismayed that she was once more pregnant. I simply couldn’t understand her good humour and optimism. Never, never could I be like Marthe. The idea of having five children and being committed to caring for them was horrific.

  Halfway through my stay we all went to Salaunes where Marthe’s father owned a cottage in the pine woods. It was a ramshackle, primitive place but the situation was lovely. The cottage had a cherry tree outside the door and when we arrived it was laden with cherries so huge they looked like dark red plums. We ate our meals under this tree, using a rickety, rough wooden table and a bench. Water had to be drawn from the well and the woods were used as a lavatory. I slept with the five children, though I had my own canvas bed. After a couple of days Marthe asked if I’d like to stay on with four of the children. She and her husband had to go back to Bordeaux and would take the baby if I could manage the others. I agreed at once. The weather was glorious and all I had to do was keep an eye on my charges. Easy. Easy but also boring. Mothers must get so bored, I thought, unless having your own children makes the tedium bearable. The feeding and washing of the children was nothing, that kind of organizing and supervising I quite enjoyed, but it was the endless squabbles and demands for attention which drove me frantic. The eldest, a boy of seven, was the most demanding, but he was also his mother’s favourite. Mothers, they were blind.

  When I went back to England the entire family were lavish with their regret. I wished I could reciprocate but I couldn’t – I was just so glad to leave. I had never been cut out to be a Little Gift from Heaven. The whole experience had been like a test run for the worst possible prospect: becoming a mother of five in difficult circumstances with a useless husband. If my own mother’s life had made me think of marriage and motherhood as a waste of opportunity, Marthe Blanc’s made me think of it as an absolute disaster. Marthe had a degree, she’d been a teacher. She ought to have known better in my tough little opinion. It was religion which had surely trapped her most – as a devout Catholic she told me she practised no form of birth control except abstinence and in her case it hadn’t worked very well.

  What a fate, what a life.

  XV

  My room in Somerville was on the ground floor of the library block, a large, square, high-ceilinged room with a mullioned window overlooking a lawn shadowed by a huge cedar tree. It was easily four times the size of any room at home and the sheer space thrilled me. There was a bed, a table, two chairs and a bookcase. The cover on the bed was a washed-out beige, the curtains, limp and long, were a patterned fawn and white. I rushed out and spent the first instalment of my grant on cushions and material to make new curtains and then I sewed furiously and badly in my usual fashion in an effort to transform the colourless room and make it mine. I wanted to impose my own taste and I did. It was just a pity that my taste then was what it was. I’d moved on from black and now thought only in primary colours, especially blue and yellow. I’d brought a Picasso print with me and my idea was to echo the colours in it. Great swathes of startlingly blue cotton now obscured the curtains – far too hard actually to make new ones, so I’d just tacked the new material to the old – and there was more blue stuff draped over my bed with the violently red and yellow cushions lined up along the wall on top of it. Nothing could have been more unsuitable for that mellow old room, but I was deeply satisfied: a room of my own at last, my mark upon it.

  But it was a strange feeling beginning to live in that room. There was something about it which made me restless. It felt good to walk in, close the door, sit at the table and feel alone and private and cut off. It felt good just to walk around, loll on the bed, make myself coffee. I liked the silence, I liked the emptiness, I liked not having to put up with other people. But that was also what felt not quite right, what made me still tense: the other people in their rooms around me. I’d always thought I would love boarding-school, love living in such an institution, but now I discovered I did not. I couldn’t stay in my room all the time and when I came out of it – to eat, to have tutorials, to go into the common room to read newspapers – I didn’t like it. Rapidly I found group-living as bad as family-living – so many strangers to whom I had to be polite, so much awareness of other women laughing and talking and being busy. It was oppressive, I hated it and I wasn’t going to fit in.

  I wasn’t going to fit in as a scholar either. The work bored me to death, though I did it conscientiously. How could women, or men for that matter (but women more so), spend their lives writing essays about medieval history? It was such an unreal task, so removed from my mother’s life or Marthe Blanc’s, and, though it was the very unreality I had craved, now that I’d got it, it seemed unbearably cowardly and sterile, a form of gross self-indulgence. But wasn’t it what I had fantasized about? A life using my brain, of being as far as possible from acting as a slave to men or children. Curious, then, that it felt so wrong, significant surely that I couldn’t work out why. I began to shun college life, either retreating into my room or escaping the building altogether.

  The moment I stepped out of the college doors into the street I felt better. Sometimes I’d just walk around Oxford, but often I went to my friend Theodora Parfit’s house in Northmoor Road. Theo’s mother, a doctor who worked in London during the week (for the LCC), fascinated me even more than Janet Vaughan. Jessie Parfit was cleve
r, quite outstandingly so, and she had a high-powered job, but she was also a mother with three children, and a wife who, though not domesticated in the conventional sense, ran her husband’s life and looked after her home. Janet Vaughan’s children were grown up and I never saw her in a family setting, but Jessie’s were young and I saw into hers with wonder. She was the first woman I ever knew who appeared to have everything – marriage, children, career – and made it work. Her house was chaotic but it functioned. She liked to cook and to sew and was totally involved with the lives of her children (though it did not escape my notice that they had been sent to boarding-school). Jessie gave me hope. Maybe the straight choices I’d envisaged as inescapable need not be made after all, maybe a woman could have a career without marriage and children proving insuperable obstacles. Jessie’s success, as opposed to my mother’s failure, was to do with class but even more was to do with money. Money to pay for help, money to send children away to school, money to smooth the rough path of doing everything at every turn. I began to say to myself that maybe if I earned enough money I, too, could have it all, I could enjoy every aspect of a woman’s life if I found I wanted to.