Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  I met the mothers of other Somerville friends and found examples even more reassuring than Jessie’s. Jessie’s juggling act, of career and marriage, wasn’t as successful or happy as I at first thought but other women’s were. Many of these professional middle-class intellectual women I now met were excellent housewives as well as career women and, even if they did employ a small army of cleaners to keep their homes shining, there was plenty of evidence of loving care, of the sort my own mother bestowed on her house, every sign that having a high-powered career did not mean indifference to surroundings. What I’d always lacked and wanted were convincing role models and now I had them. They’d come my way just in time because the lure of love and sex had, to my own alarm and amazement, begun to tempt me.

  The best thing about arriving in Oxford was being in touch with girls who knew about birth control and abortion. Oh dear, how funny it was, how sweet, to have their little north-country friend so ignorant. In no time, once I’d confessed my secret passion, they had me making an appointment with Helena Wright, a gynaecologist in London. I hated going to her consulting-rooms even if half Somerville had already been and made fun of the experience so that it should have held no fears. Dr Wright didn’t seem any less intimidating than old Dr Stephenson back in Carlisle and she was certainly no more friendly. She was brusque and businesslike and a bit hearty, and I was glad to get out of her surgery with a prescription for a Dutch cap which I had to take to a nearby Family Planning Clinic. In my innocence, I hadn’t realized I would have to pay her and I hadn’t enough money. The moment I got back to the flat where I was staying, she rang me up and reminded me to put the fee in the post. But at least the Family Planning Clinic did not charge. The woman asked me when I was getting married and I was triumphant as I replied, the contraceptive now safely handed over, that I wasn’t. I didn’t have to. I had found the secret of preventing babies so why would I get married? It wasn’t necessary any more. I could have as much sex as I wanted and not face the often fearful consequences which had been the lot of the women in my family up to now. No illegitimate babies for me (as there had been for my great-grandmother and my grandmother); no extra babies I didn’t plan (like my mother had); no babies precipitating me into marriage (as my aunt had been hurried into it). Why, I wondered as I went back to Oxford, did everyone stress the importance of the vote for women when control over their own bodies matters so much more?

  In my second year Theo and I moved out of Somerville into two rooms on the first floor of a tiny house in Winchester Road. Below us lived Mrs Brown and her sister Fanny, and up above us, in an attic, was an old man called Reg, the lodger. There was none of the space there had been in my Somerville room – our two rooms would’ve fitted comfortably into it – but the freedom was liberating. Theo and I could come and go at any hour in an era when there was a ten o’clock curfew in Somerville and all men had to be out of the college at seven. My boyfriend, Hunter Davies, came down from Durham University whenever he was able to hitch a lift and we could spend the whole weekend in my minute room in front of the coal fire… My mother would have had a fit. She’d practically had one anyway when, the summer before A-levels, I had started to go out with Hunter thereby smashing the high ideals I’d set myself and in which she’d come to believe herself – maybe I was different, maybe I was so single-minded I could ignore the entire male sex. But no. My father broke the devastating news first. He came home in a rage one day and said, ‘I’ve seen her, that lass of yours, behaving in a disgusting fashion on a public highway and he looks foreign.’ It took my frantic mother ages – since, of course, a straightforward request to know what my father was talking about was too simple – to discover that this disgusting behaviour was no more than hand-holding and embracing, as Hunter and I parted company at the corner, but even that was a blow. I’d let her down, I was going the way of all flesh.

  True, I was, but on my own terms and with no risk, something she wouldn’t have understood even if I’d tried to explain. I could hardly tell her, after all, that just as my Oxford friends knew where to go for contraception, so they knew where to go for an abortion. In 1957 it was illegal but they were quite blasé about it. If, in spite of Dr Wright’s efforts, I became pregnant I’d have an abortion. Oh, it was wonderful being at Somerville, wonderful to be in touch with this vital knowledge, worth enduring any amount of tedium over essays. My new friends, not just Theo, were from such a different world and I loved being pulled into it. They were Socialists and members of the Labour Party. This confused me greatly. I’d thought political allegiances were according to class and money but now I saw they could not be – it was as odd that my working-class mother voted Tory as that my Somerville friends voted Labour. They were all upper middle class, all from wealthy (to me) homes, and yet they all passionately wanted to align themselves with the working class. I was working class and didn’t even belong to the Labour Party. I joined it sharpish. I went to Labour Party meetings and was bored to death and couldn’t share the excitement of my friends. I proved a lazy, lazy member, only good for acting in Labour Party plays and little else.

  My mother didn’t like hearing, in my letters, about this play-acting. I wasn’t supposed to have gone to Oxford to fool about dressing-up – another way I’d let her down – and especially not in any political organization. The play I acted in in my second year was Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle. They wanted an authentic working-class girl to play the peasant Grusha and I was she. The production was a bit of a shambles, lacking the professionalism of OUDS (scorned as establishment), but it was to be seen to have a political point and was acted by committed Socialists which was intended to give it greater glory. Dennis Potter was the judge and his friends were director, producer, everything. We performed in the Town Hall and the Gaitskells came to watch which got us publicity. The play seemed leaden to me – I just stumbled about being the producer’s idea of a peasant girl while Dennis, rantingly magnificent as the judge, upstaged everyone. Afterwards, Dennis and I were presented to the Gaitskells. Mrs Gaitskell looked at me sternly and said, ‘Yours is not Brecht’s interpretation of Grusha, I’m sure. I don’t think he’d approve.’ Never mind Brecht, neither did my father, not that he ever saw the play. Hearing who I was associated with was enough. ‘You want to be careful,’ he warned me, ‘mixing with pinkos. Barmpots, the lot of them. Keep well away.’

  My main object, in this new life, was to keep well away from home even in the vacations, especially in the vacations. Subterfuge, on a complicated scale, was necessary. I had to protect my mother. It wouldn’t be kind to flaunt my love life; it would distress and frighten her to discover I was doing a Nan and living in sin (even without the added horror of the lover being married). She would never agree, either, that sex without marriage was morally permissible. So, as the long vacations came up, I always laid careful plans. I went to live with Hunter, first in Manchester, where he was training as a journalist, and then in London when he took up his first job, but from all over Europe came letters home to my mother describing the wonderful time I was having. My supposed trail took me through France to Spain one year, through Germany to Italy another, depending on where my Somerville friends were going. I got guidebooks out and wrote lyrical descriptions of the places I had never seen and made up anecdotes about the people I was with. It kept my mother happy and saved her from imagined shame. I saw no harm in it, only sadness that such deceit was necessary, that my relationship with my mother dictated these lies.

  Landlords also had to be lied to. Since I didn’t in the least mind telling these people the truth, I’d gone ahead and done so when we looked for a flat in Manchester. The result was disastrous. We were always asked if we were married – we both looked very young at nineteen and twenty-one and when we said no, the door was closed. So in the end it had to be on with the Woolworths ring and the pretence I was Mrs Davies which I detested. I didn’t like the sound of it nor of the words ‘your wife’. And yet, by the time the end of my Oxford days approached, it had
suddenly begun to be not worth the lying. If we were going to live together for ever, as we were, how could we go on pretending we were not, for the sake of our mothers? It was ridiculous. If marriage was nothing to us but everything to our mothers, why not just get married? So we did.

  We got married, on 11 June 1960, the moment I finished my last exam, but we didn’t have a wedding. I cheated my mother out of that without a qualm. The marrying itself was for her sake and I didn’t see why I should also have to subject myself to the sort of occasion I saw not just as an ordeal but the height of hypocrisy. She wanted a church wedding, the white dress, the flowers, the reception with all the family there, and I couldn’t bear the thought of the whole charade. No wedding, then. Just the two of us, with Theo and another friend as witnesses, popping into the register office in St Giles. When I told my mother about this plan she said she’d spend the morning in church on her own praying for me. My father relayed through her the news that he was washing his hands of me. I’d apparently made a fool of him by marrying, by just getting married. It was a betrayal. I’d proved no different from any other girl after vowing I would be. No presents anyway, that was for sure. My hole-in-the-corner marriage didn’t deserve any and people would assume one thing only. The wider family was thrown into consternation: presents or not? Much agonizing went on before tablecloths and pillowcases were sent by the kinder relatives, quite enough in the circumstances – as if I cared. But I cared that my mother was so upset because she had no money of her own (her little legacies from her mother and Aunt Jessie long since used) with which to defy my father and give me a present. She saved out of her housekeeping and six months later bought me a Denbyware dinner service which I never could use without appetite-ruining pangs of guilt.

  The evening of the day I was married it had been arranged that my mother would go to my brother’s house (he was now married) and I’d telephone her there (she had no telephone still). It was a dreadful conversation punctuated by heavy sighs on her part and sudden silences on mine. Had the weather been good? Quite good, sunny but very windy. What sort of dress did you wear? Surely you wore a dress, surely you bought a new one. Yes, I did, a white cotton dress. Not very short? Well, quite short. Not bare legs? Yes, bare legs. And Hunter, did he have a new suit? Not a new one, no. His cheapo-Italian job. It looked fine, but he did have a new shirt and tie. And afterwards, after whatever they do in that office place, what did you do? We had lunch at the Bear in Woodstock and then we walked round Blenheim grounds and sat on the grass. Sat on the grass? In your white dress? No, I’d put a skirt on by then. What time did you get to London? About an hour ago. Well. Well then…

  Well, indeed. She was depressed but at least I had got married. And I had a home, a flat in the Vale of Health, Hampstead. But I didn’t have a job yet, though curiously that didn’t seem to bother her – I was now a married woman and married women didn’t need jobs, remember. I said I was going to get a job in the autumn, when we were settled, but she wasn’t interested. She’d accepted that I’d wasted my splendid education, just as my father had said I would, being a girl. She’d faced up to that. I wasn’t going to tell her I was giving myself three months to try to write a novel. It was too embarrassing. I wasn’t willing to call myself a writer until I’d had something I’d written published and had proved writing could be a job, a way of earning my living and justifying myself. I was determined to show my mother that marriage was not the end of ambition, that it in no way need impede my progress, that I still intended to have a very different life from hers and her mother’s.

  She came to stay that first summer of married life, an uneasy guest in a flat with only one bedroom. The flat was strange to her – a little like Jean’s rooms in the Buildings in Motherwell, but not like them at all, she realized that. Only two other people lived in the house where we had a flat, Mr Elton, the owner, on the top floor and Mrs Woodcock, an elderly widow, in the basement, with another room on the ground floor. We shared a bathroom with Mr Elton which worried my mother at first until she became reassured by his dependable habits. She was more put off by the emptiness of the flat. There was nothing in our sitting-room except two single beds. These were arranged end-to-end along one wall and covered with some purple material, just flung over. My mother didn’t think of these divans even as beds – beds had headboards and footboards and were made of solid wood. We had only a cooker in the kitchen when she arrived but soon got a wooden table and two stools. Then the refrigerator came. My mother was there on the great day itself, the day the shiny Electrolux arrived with its smoothly rounded door and its pale blue interior fittings. I loved it at once. It wasn’t at all an inanimate object, it was loaded with significance. Solemnly I explained to my mother that having a fridge would mean I need not shop every day as she had always done. I would shop once a week and the darling fridge would keep everything fresh. My mother was silent. Finally, she said the bags would be too heavy to carry if they were loaded with a week’s food, and the shops as far away as they seemed to be. I said I wouldn’t be carrying bags. They would go into our car. I’d give Hunter a list and he’d do the shopping. There was an even longer silence. I added that as well as doing the shopping Hunter would take our washing to the launderette at the same time – and then she exploded, said it wasn’t right, a man shouldn’t be shopping and going to launderettes, whatever they were. The world had gone mad.

  In a way, it had. Her world had gone mad. The more my mother saw of my life as a newly married woman, the more amazed she was. It was mainly the ease of it which she marvelled at. What did I have to clean, for a start? I pushed a Hoover over a fitted green carpet, I pushed a squeezy mop over smooth linoleum, I wiped my precious fridge and my equally pristine cooker – there was no labour, no scrubbing and huffing and puffing, desperately waging an eternal war against the filth of open fires. And as for the monstrous burden of washing, it had quite gone. No wash-house for me. I might not have a washing-machine of my own but I didn’t need one with the new launderettes. Playing housewife – because it was like playing – gave me such pleasure, and as she watched me flick switches and squirt cleaning substances my mother’s envy grew.

  But the madness of this new world was more than a matter of mechanical appliances and the having of money to afford cars and launderettes. My mother was most perturbed by the equality of our marriage. By the time she came to stay I’d just begun, in September, to work as a teacher. This pleased her tremendously (she knew nothing of the novel-writing, now finished for the moment and the novel rejected by an agent). She saw that since we were both working, Hunter as a journalist and myself as a teacher, we should both share in the jobs which needed to be done. Monday was Hunter’s day off so he did the shopping and washing, Saturday was mine so I did the cleaning and ironing; Sunday we were both off so I cooked and Hunter washed dishes. My mother observed this and admitted the fairness of the arrangement, but she seemed unable fully to approve. Was her air of faint disapproval really a regret that these changes had come too late for her? It wasn’t talked about. She went back to my father reluctantly, though, back to what she saw as her duties, the making of his meals, the cleaning, the washing and the other jobs still hard for her, with her poor equipment and facilities, and nothing to me.

  But what she really didn’t want to return to was her leisure time. She had plenty these days, with all of us grown up and gone. Pauline, my sister, was now training as a teacher in Liverpool and my mother felt her departure far more than she had done my own. I was always difficult whereas Pauline was affectionate and domesticated and sweet – much harder to accept the absence of that kind of daughter. She wanted interests now which she didn’t have. All she had, really, was the church. This was St James’s now, since she’d moved away from Raffles and St Barnabas’s. St James’s was much more her sort of church. It looked as a church should look, with its spire and stained glass, and, though it had been built in the 1860s to serve the industrial suburb of Denton Holme, it was situated above the industrial part
with a catchment area which included several well-off residential streets. My mother liked attending St James’s in a way she had never liked St Barnabas’s and what she liked best were the Women’s Fellowship meetings.

  This Women’s Fellowship was a devotional meeting, not remotely like any Mother’s Union or Women’s Institute affair. Every Monday between sixty to eighty women gathered in Blencowe Street Mission Hall where they sat in rows, six deep, and sang hymns and choruses. They all had a booklet of these choruses, CSSM Choruses i, 2 and 3. The letters stood for Children’s Special Service Mission, a branch of the Scripture Union, and the booklet was a kind of religious commonplace booklet full of ‘choruses’ which derived from the Psalms and the Bible and well-known prayers. There were 709 of these choruses, helpfully divided in the index into categories ranging from Forgiveness to Strength. My mother’s favourite was number 406, which came into the Assurance and Certainty division.

  Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose

  mind is stayed on Thee

  When the shadows come and darkness falls

  He giveth inward peace;

  Oh, He is the only resting-place,

  He giveth perfect peace;

  Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose

  mind is stayed on Thee.

  A lady worker led the meeting, the only one ever to stand up. First she welcomed everyone, then an opening hymn was sung followed by a prayer – extempore – before they all got cracking on the choruses. A Bible passage was read, another hymn sung, and then the speaker-of-the-day (a visiting missionary perhaps) spoke for forty-five minutes. Tea and biscuits followed.