Hidden Lives

by Margaret Forster

  It sounds dull enough but it was the highlight of my mother’s week. She had a real feeling of fellowship with the other women, but there was also a spiritual excitement about the meeting and she would come home quite flushed and exhilarated, still singing some chorus. Otherwise, her social life was limited to meeting Ruby Gillespie in Binn’s café. I pointed out to her that there was no reason why she shouldn’t go to stay with her sisters to break the monotony and she did go to each of them occasionally for a week. Nan and Jean were both in Nottingham now. Dave, who’d finally qualified at night school as an optician, was offered a job by Jack and took it. Jean wasn’t exactly happy about this – she had many friends in the old Motherwell Buildings by then and none in Nottingham except Nan with whom she often argued. My mother found her little holidays with these sisters a bit of a strain, with the need always to be keeping the peace. It was also a strain dealing with their opinion of me. They, as well as my father, never let my mother forget how I had disappointed everyone after all my years of fine words. I might now be respectably married, I might now be respectably teaching, but I had just turned out like the others and they tried to make my mother feel I’d somehow failed her.

  XVI

  Soon after we came back from Sardinia, where we had our honeymoon, I had to find a doctor. I’d contracted dysentery, or some kind of food poisoning. How did one find a GP? With memories of Dr Stephenson in Carlisle I was determined to start off in London with someone more sympathetic but I didn’t know how to go about it. In Carlisle doctors, even if they were detested, just got handed on in families. I didn’t know anyone to ask so I staggered to Hampstead Post Office and asked for a list of local doctors and picked the nearest, in Thurlow Road, a Dr Day.

  The waiting-room looked encouraging enough. Nothing funereal about the comfortable chintzy armchairs, or the cushions on the window-seat, or the fresh flowers, or the pile of newish magazines – my mother would have denied this was a waiting-room. The doctor herself was a surprise too. She was young, attractive, friendly, and chatted away with the greatest of ease. (‘But is she a proper doctor?’ I could hear my mother asking suspiciously. Quite proper, cured me rapidly.) Nor was there any need to dread calling her out. I called her at six in the morning after Hunter had spent all night struggling with a violent asthma attack and she not only came at once but said next time to call her immediately, whatever the time of night. I’d finally shaken off fear of doctors, the fear that had dogged my mother throughout her life. Even before I had children I now knew they would not need to grow up watching their mother subservient before any domineering doctor and resentful of his power. It was about class again, and education, but also about times having changed, about my doctor being a young woman, a mother herself, and this not being the rarity it had once been.

  My mother was waiting for these as yet mythical children of mine to arrive. At first she waited nervously, but when nine months were up from when I married and she could be sure I hadn’t had to get married (the worry had lurked in spite of scornful reassurances), she began to wait in a different way. My sister-in-law had had a son, Paul, and this one grandchild had given her own life a point again. Feeding Paul, bathing Paul, taking Paul for walks, putting Paul to bed – she loved it. Shirley, Paul’s mother, didn’t work. She was a proper mother. She knew her place was at home and she was very happy in it. My mother had clearly decided that my easy life as a working wife had not yet been put to the test. What would happen when the babies came? Goodbye equality then, surely. I would yet again become just like every other woman, stopped in my tracks by maternity, forced to concede only surface things had changed for women. But no babies appeared, even after three whole years. I said I didn’t want them yet, but there was doubt in her expression when she heard this. How could she be sure? Maybe I wasn’t going to be able to have children and that would change everything. If a woman didn’t have children not only was she not, in my mother’s opinion, a ‘real’ woman but she had never been seriously challenged. No wonder my life was easy.

  In fact, it wasn’t by then so easy. I’d started another novel, writing in the evenings after teaching. It was exhausting, the teaching. I seemed to be given the most difficult and unruly classes in Barnsbury School (in Islington) and the effort to conquer them wore me out. The girls were all eleven-plus failures with low expectations and I spent my time trying to raise them. I’d crawl home at the end of each day thinking that if my mother could see me it would shatter the image I’d given her when she visited. But I had to keep going, and write only in my spare time, because we needed the money to buy a house. I wanted a house passionately. It seemed incredibly important to own our own place and not to live as our parents had done in council or other rented property. I fantasized about having a whole house, walking every day to the station painting and papering rooms which didn’t exist, choosing furniture, hanging pictures… All my salary went into the House Fund and we lived, perfectly well, on Hunter’s. It never even entered my head to think about having babies until I had a home for them and I didn’t care in the least if anyone thought such an attitude woefully practical and soulless.

  We moved into our house (where we still live) in March 1963, a late Victorian house in Dartmouth Park, close to Hampstead Heath, but on the opposite side to Hampstead proper where we’d had our flat. It cost £5,200, freehold, but it had a sitting tenant on the top floor and was in an appalling condition. We didn’t care about that. The elation of moving in was terrific – so many big rooms, such a long south-facing garden, even if it was a wilderness. We lived for six months in one room and now the exhaustion doubled, the added exhaustion of scraping walls and painting and enduring filth and mess on a grander scale than my mother had ever known. But it was all worth it. It was such a joy to come home eventually to the cool rooms painted in pale colours, to the sanded floorboards and pretty rugs, to the grey-and-white checked kitchen floor, to the big pine table – I loved every yard of the house, every scrap in it. Having my own house fulfilled me in some strange way I’d never quite anticipated. It even meant more to me than Jonathan Cape accepting my novel soon after we moved in.

  It wasn’t a good novel but at least it got me started and it gave me the courage not only to stop teaching and turn to writing as a career but also to have a baby. A curious connection, but a true one. I felt brave and daring just thinking about choosing to have children. All those years spent successfully preventing babies and now this dangerous urge given free rein – dangerous because I’d be wilfully creating another human being and accepting the responsibility that entailed. Children had been wished upon my grandmother and mother, they had little option, but I was deliberately, knowingly choosing. Was it right to have a baby? Why was I doing it? Because I wanted to. But what kind of reason was that for an intelligent, liberated woman in 1963? It wasn’t a reason at all. It was pure self-indulgence. I didn’t even think I’d make a good mother. Oh, I’d do the looking after splendidly, but what about the rest? Knowing myself as I did, how could I dare to have a baby?

  My mother was delighted to hear I was pregnant, the baby due in March 1964. ‘Everything will have to change now,’ she said, ‘no more working.’ She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see that the writing would be the work. Nonsense. Writing was a hobby. Even if I had been paid a £150 advance, it wasn’t serious. She wondered if it was good for the baby I was carrying to be ‘all hunched up scribbling’ and wasn’t impressed that the scribbling produced a second novel before the baby’s arrival (for which I got £250 and rumours of film interest). Once my baby was born she had no doubt this writing would have to stop.

  She seemed right at first. The very moment Caitlin was born writing seemed nothing. I could feel puny ambition drain away and watched it go happily. There my baby lay, a real person, a marvel of another far superior sort of creation, our creation, and so utterly helpless, so heartbreakingly vulnerable. I could hardly bear to have her taken away for a moment, so strong was my protectiveness. How could I be sure anyone else
could be as tender and loving as I was towards her? Once we were home, I spent every moment alert to her needs. My mother, who had come down to see her first granddaughter, smiled triumphantly: it was as she had always known it would be. Babies changed women. Obsessed with my baby, I was reverting to the pattern of ages. Nothing had changed in spite of outward appearances.

  For quite a time I agreed with her. I didn’t want to write or have any kind of career. The baby was so much more important than anything or anyone, even Hunter. He loved Caitlin too – he was a modern father who changed nappies and wheeled the pram with pride – but he was working hard and our partnership wasn’t as equal as it had been. He didn’t do the shopping any more. Why should he, when I was the Wife at Home now? I trotted every day to the shops, just like my mother, and never mind the glory of the fridge-keeping-food-fresh-for-a-week. It was a chicken from the butcher, green beans from the greengrocer, bread from the baker, and this shopping fitting in so neatly with pushing Caitlin around. I had a washing-machine, so no need to patronize the launderette, and at least I didn’t have to be like my mother (still doing everything with the dolly-tub and mangle) in that gruelling respect. I was perfectly happy being a mother and wife that long summer and then the winter came and Caitlin slept longer, and suddenly, to my own surprise, it wasn’t enough to look after a baby and cook and shop. It wasn’t boredom I felt, it was restlessness. Not the restlessness of discontent but of energies not being used, as simple as that. So I started to write again, in the evening at weekends, though one cry from Caitlin and the pen was put down at once. I wrote two novels very quickly, both light affairs but acceptable enough. I was fond of saying it was like knitting, really, just something I did to amuse myself, quite effortless. But, even if the result wasn’t up to much, I knew the writing was important. It made me different from my mother. It made me something other than a wife and mother. I noticed I often started to write feeling tired and yet, strangely, finished feeling refreshed.

  It was unfortunate that I was asked to write the script for my second novel, Georgy Girl, when I was already four months pregnant with my much wanted second baby, but on the other hand pregnancy saved me from more involvement than I could ever have stood. One thing writing for myself, at home, quite another writing to orders, other people’s orders, and having to have meetings. What a disaster I was as a team worker. How clearly this episode showed me the limits of my own energies. Being a novelist fitted in with motherhood, being a scriptwriter didn’t. The film people expected me to put the film first at all times – fools. It made me realize what I’d already suspected: any career taking me out of the house would be unmanageable. It would present impossible choices, impose unacceptable strains. It would show I was, when it came to the crunch, exactly like my mother and grandmother: family first, no argument. Being a wife, mother and writer was a balancing act and, though my balance was good, one push, one demand too much, and I’d fall off the tightrope. It was a lesson learned just in time. The script was handed over to Peter Nichols. The meetings stopped. The relief was great. Lumbering round the film set some months later, just before Jake was born, and meeting the star, James Mason, I had no regrets. Exciting to be involved in the making of a film but disturbing too, making me feel for that short while like a split personality, unsure who I really was.

  Charlotte Rampling, who in the film played a woman who has a baby she doesn’t want and feels nothing for it when it is born, came to see me. She didn’t understand this Meredith character and wanted some insight. There I was, submerged in motherhood, feeding Jake while Caitlin played at my feet, and she didn’t see how I could have imagined a woman with no maternal feelings. I tried to explain that Meredith had motherhood forced on her, that she hadn’t been satisfying any maternal urge, and that it was perfectly possible in those circumstances for women to resent a baby who had caused them so much trouble and pain. Maternal feelings were not automatic after giving birth, I said. Charlotte herself had at the time no liking for babies, whereas Lynn Redgrave, playing Georgy, did, but Charlotte had assumed once a baby was born everything changed in a magical way: I am a mother therefore I feel as a mother. Before she left, she gestured at Jake and Caitlin and said, ‘But you love this, right?’ I said right. ‘So you’re Georgy, right?’ Wrong. For Georgy, children were her all, her very reason for existing. Georgy was my mother in a different time, a different setting, with different looks and personality – but still my mother, trading everything, if necessary, for children.

  *

  I had my second baby, Jake, at home. I thought my mother would approve but she didn’t. She said surely hospitals were safer and what was I doing, putting the clock back. But I hated hospitals and was sure I’d get on much better giving birth at home. It was an easy birth, with Hunter practically delivering his own son, which shocked my mother. It made her feel queasy thinking of husbands even watching a birth. It wasn’t decent somehow. Even less decent was what she thought of as the appalling habit of taking photographs of the birth. A friend who had her baby a few days before I had mine turned up at our house while my mother was with us (down, traditional style, to look after me, though I didn’t want to be looked after) and asked if we would like to see some photographs taken when Jason was born. My mother, expecting shots of a baby in its mother’s arms, all creased from birth and looking adorable, peered eagerly at the snaps and then gasped. The pictures shown of the baby emerging from between its mother’s legs seemed to her pornographic – the legs apart, the bloody vagina gaping, the head a black blot bulging obscenely, and all in glorious Technicolor. She was speechless, couldn’t hide her revulsion. Had women really come to this?

  Some things, she felt, should remain private. Modesty was being lost sight of. Since she’d said often enough that in her day giving birth was shrouded in mystery, and the shock of the reality was profound, I tried to persuade her that surely films and photographs of births were ways of properly informing both men and women. No. She didn’t think so. It was going too far, no need for it. She wasn’t entirely approving of my breast-feeding my babies either. She was never comfortable with the sight of my doing this and thought I should always do it in my bedroom ‘where it’s quiet’. She’d bottle-fed all of us. Breast-feeding was associated in her mind with poverty and she couldn’t understand how any educated woman could do it. It was another backward step, further proof she didn’t understand the modern generation.

  Feeding on demand made no kind of sense to her either. She’d never heard of Truby King, but she had always believed in and followed a rigid routine. She’d watch me breast-feeding for the second time in three hours and say she’d always waited the ‘proper’ four hours between feeds and seen I got the ‘proper’ amount of milk. Only my babies thriving and putting on weight, even if they did cry a lot and Jake hardly slept, consoled her. But there was no growing closer between my mother and me because I now had two children. Becoming a mother myself had forged no new bond. Rather the reverse. How, when I realized the passion with which I cherished my babies, could I ever get to that state of polite affection which my own mother and I enjoyed?

  Motherhood had become more mysterious, not less so.

  When my mother returned to Carlisle after Jake’s birth she said, ‘You’ll have your hands full now, you won’t be able to keep up that writing.’ Almost true. Family first, writing a very poor second. This time, when winter came, there was little respite from sleepless nights and the old trick of sitting down to write exhausted and getting up refreshed didn’t work. How could I be as tired as my mother had been when she had young children, yet my life was so easy? I had no excuse for exhaustion with my central heating and washing-machine and never a worry over money. It was ridiculous to feel so drained and I reminded myself over and over of my mother’s much harder life at the stage I was now until it became like a horror show. Everyone around me had what was called ‘a little help’. This consisted of women to do the cleaning and au pair girls, or nannies, to look after the children. But I d
idn’t want either and not just because I hated having to have people in my house with whom I would have to have relationships – it was also because I liked to do everything myself. I enjoyed the routine housework everyone else seemed to find tedious.

  But something had to be done. It was no use wailing I had no right to be worn out when I so clearly was, silly to berate myself for my own feebleness. So a plan was thought up. On Mondays, Hunter’s day off, he would take charge and I would be free the whole day. On Saturdays and Sundays he would bath and put the children to bed and I’d write from six to nine. This worked, after a fashion, though I soon learned I had actually to leave the house on Mondays to keep it as my day off and to pretend to leave it on Saturday and Sunday evenings. It seemed a miracle that anything I wrote even made grammatical sense, but I was grateful to get words on to paper at least.

  What we needed, by the time Jake was one, with him still waking six times a night, was a holiday. Our hearts sank at the prospect of spending it in Carlisle but there seemed no option. So constant were cries from both mothers that they wished we would come home, it would have been cruel to deny them. Once in Carlisle, we stayed in different houses. There wasn’t room for all of us to stay in either parents’ house and besides there was the jealousy factor. Hunter and Caitlin stayed with his mother, Jake and I with mine. It didn’t make for a happy family holiday. Then the weather, though it was June, was dreadful. Outings to the seaside and the lakes, four of us plus three parents crammed into our car, consisted of trundling around in torrential rain looking for places to eat. The visit didn’t make the mothers content either – ‘Only two weeks?’ they chorused. Carlisle was still full of adult children settled with their own families round the corner, like my brother Gordon was with his. ‘We’ll never get to know your children,’ the mothers said sadly. ‘We’ll be strangers to them.’ We pointed out that they could come to us whenever they wished, but apart from a two-week visit to match our own to them this was never taken up. And, anyway, it wasn’t held to be the same. They wanted their grandchildren near, all the time.