Mantrapped

March 1954, and there I was with a baby, the dramas of pregnancy and childbirth over, with the reality of a small child to face. Guido came to claim Jane and her new baby Christopher, and installed them in a cottage in deepest Sussex and brought marrow bones home every weekend. ‘Lots of nourishment in these, my dear. I am going to theological college so must be away most of the time. They don’t know I’m married, so don’t tell them.’’ My friend Belinda, who had come to join Jane and me in our sibling pregnancies, was rescued by the father of her child, who very soon married her. I remained unmarried and unrescued, and, dreams of self-sufficiency over, let alone the hope of running a little cake shop (mother’s idea, but no customers came), commuted to London every day, by train, to Fleet Street, where I answered readers’ questions on Hire Purchase problems for the Daily Mirror. My stepmother had sent me a cheque for £200 from my father’s estate, and I had spent £100 on a typewriter and used it to write job applications. Now I worked and earned in a world still not properly adjusted to the fact that some women did not have men to support them and with a wage structure that echoed that fact. This meant leaving at 6.30 in the morning and coming back at 8.30 at night, to be finally driven out, along with my mother, by a ghost who wept up and down the twisted corridors of our 17th century house, and fleeing to London. But at least at Liverpoool Street station I had been able to afford and buy weekly copies of Amazing magazine. ‘Alienation in time and space,’ as my psychoanalyst Miss Rowlands was later to describe my passion for the science fiction of the time, ‘and no doubt a comfort.’ Those were the great mid-Fifties days of science fiction—Heinlein, Azimov, Frederick Pohl, Philip K. Dick—philosophers and sociologists all. I came across them by accident, in search of a cheap, fast read, tearing off the lurid covers so as not to be observed reading rubbish in the train, and this was my good fortune.

My mother was not happy in London: our tiny rented flat in Chiswick, all I could afford, was too dull to have so much as a ghost. Landladies were reluctant to rent rooms to women with children and no husband or visible means of support. You took what you could get, especially if you had no deposit, no three months’ rent in advance. My mother chafed. Granted I was going out to work, but if she had to stay home and be bored, why did I feel entitled to go to parties in the evenings? Why did I need these friends of mine, with their chattery, frivolous ways? Should I not stay home of an evening and keep her company? Couldn’t I just settle down?

I found another job in London in a tiny ad agency in Dover Street, Scott-Turner, which paid minimally more than the Mirror. ‘Did you know you have 200 bones in your foot? No wonder sometimes they hurt!’ But still the job only barely paid the rent: and all I wanted to do was go to parties and meet men and fall in love like anyone else, but I couldn’t. My mother’s disapproval was too strong. I had made my bed: now it behoved me, she thought, to lie upon it. I ate plentiful cheese rolls bought from the shop next door to the office. There was a brothel above the sandwich shop—the bad girls, dressed up to the nines, came and went through the Mayfair streets around. (The sex industry at that time was booming: provenance of Maltese gangs.) I had to take my shoes to the menders, unable to afford new. There was no television—too early in the world’s history for possession of such a thing to be normal. What could I do in the evenings but cook and eat? I grew fat and then what was the point of parties anyway? I stayed home with my mother and the baby. The commuting days in Saffron Walden, ghost and all, now seemed in retrospect like heaven.

Little Nicolas was robust, energetic and now two years old. Babies are easy enough to deal with when they lie there and smile at you, or at anyone who comes in sight. But then they grow older and cry when you leave them, and wrap their little arms around your legs to make you stay with them, and resolution collapses. He had rosy cheeks and pale blond hair: he was beautiful but exhausting. He cried noisily and bitterly when I set off in the mornings, and my mother’s face was like stone. My best friend Judy Anderson met and married my colleague at Scott-Turner’s, Michael Birmingham, with whom I had had many a depressed if interesting conversation and after that I had to work alone, in silence. ‘Did you know your foot has 200 tiny bones in it and all the sorry things that could happen to them unless you took care. True, the Institute of Contemporary Art had the floor beneath our offices and naked girls bounced upon trampolines in the name of art—‘happenings’, they were called—but it might as well have happened a thousand miles away. None of it seemed to have anything to do with me. I was depressed, and fat. I was being courted by the headmaster of a technical school in Acton, Mr Bateman, a maths graduate, twenty-five years older than myself. He asked me to marry him.

I could see the many advantages. Anything would be better than life as it was. Marriage would make him happy, and my mother too: she could escape, and I could ease over to lie in a respectable bed, free from the disgrace of unmarried motherhood. Not, frankly, that my status bothered me. The disgrace of being married to an elderly headmaster, and having to introduce him to my college friends, seemed worse. ‘What, can she do no better than this?’ But I would have housekeeping money; I would have my soul back, I would no longer be for ever worried that the State would turn up, declare me an unfit mother, and send Nicolas off to Barnardo’s. True, the headmaster had also warned m: ‘No wife of mine works’ and said I could not join the Labour Party. ‘ I must be seen in my position to be above politics’ Though indeed it turned out later that he was writing reports about any untoward political activity observed or communist sentiments uttered on the part of his staff. (But that was par for the cold-war course. The war for hearts and minds was on and if those Fifties writers took to science fiction it was because, after the McCarthy witch-hunts, they were nervous of making political statements which related to the present, or so I have heard it said.) In 1968 Nicolas was to be thrown out of his grammar school for staging a political protest. His headmaster of the time had been discovered doing much the same thing as Mr Bateman a decade earlier—only writing reports on students, not staff, warning admission secretaries not to take certain pupils, whom he saw as troublemakers and activists. Whatever changes?

I said yes to the headmaster and waited for my mother to say ‘But you can’t possibly!’ She said nothing, so I married him, in Ealing Registry Office, in a too-tight blue dress, to the barely disguised winces of my friends. And I was as unsuitable a wife for him as he was a husband for me.

It was during the time of my marriage to Mr Bateman in the late Fifties that I met my mother by chance on my way up to town. It was on the platform of South Kensington Underground Station. I was travelling north from Acton, the sorry suburb where I now lived with my new husband and my child, having exchanged one small flat for another—albeit owned not rented—and a restless mother for a grizzled husband. But I was full of resolutions; I distinctly remember my determination that not a month of my life would go by in which I was entirely celibate. Oh, I was a monster! It would not be my husband: he had voyeuristic tendencies but no interest in actual sex. This kind of thing one found out in those days only after the wedding ceremony.

On South Kensington Station my mother Margaret looked me in the eye, and turned away, expressionless. She cut me dead. My cry of greeting died away. I was devastated. Margaret wore a navy greatcoat, staff issue, London Underground. It drowned her. She was a little thing to contain so much intelligence, fanaticism and fierce morality. They ate her away, that was the trouble. I clouded my body with fat: she was thin, bare to the winds of tragedy. Had I reduced her to this? Surely it was the other way round, and it was all her doing? I always did what she said, didn’t I? She had encouraged me to marry the headmaster, and that puzzled me. It was such a stupid, desperate, death-welcoming thing for a daughter to do, and just a word from her and I would not have done it, but she would not say the word. She wanted her life back too badly.

Until that moment at South Kensington Station I had not realised that I existed in any kind of reality at all, or any that impinged on others. I had thought I was a figment of my own imagination, at the very best my parents’ bright idea, gone sour. Most realise this at about twelve: I took rather longer.

Margaret had celebrated her new freedom by getting a job on the London Underground, saying in effect, ‘Now see what you’ve made me do!’ Jane and I had let her down. I was turning into a lower middle-class housewife, a kind of Jerry Springer case, and her elder child, Jane, the poet, had taken up with a penniless artist, and had two small children and nowhere to live. Was this what the sacrifice of Mama’s youth had come to? She could have been a writer, should have been a writer, had been a writer—and then she’d had two daughters and they had ruined her life. And for what?

The job wasn’t all bad. She even liked it. There are advantages to being a public servant: at least you are doing something useful. The posters of the time, luring people into the tunnels, advised, ‘ Warmer Underground,’ and they were right. It was. At least underground, my mother said, she was never cold. She was a good and conscientious employee, the one to approach the snarling dog, pick up the fluttering bird, face the mugger, step forward and brave danger when others drew back. I think she rather fancied the foreman, one of the West Indian immigrants the London Transport Executive shipped over from Jamaica to solve the staffing problems of the day, though nothing came of it. Men always fancied my mother, so witty and bright and kind, but she would have nothing to do with them: principle got in the way, or perhaps it was that she could not endure too much emotional pain.

We will not see her like again. We have learned prudence, and what is right behaviour and proper thinking, and what is not: we understand the mechanisms of our own behaviour: we are cursed by therapy even as we are saved by it: it de-natures us. We can’t be forgiven because we know only too well what we do, and forgive ourselves in advance. My mother, born 1907, seeing her century out, thought and felt from first principles. Cut dead by her, in 1957, I stumbled back home to my peculiar husband and my crowded home and rethought my life. ‘Tough love’ they would call it nowadays, and it is not nice to be on the sharp end of it.

But see how the very existence of the phrase ‘tough love’ cheapens and weakens the very concept it stands for? We know how to explain ourselves to ourselves well enough, but with every handy phrase, every useful shorthand, we lessen the complexity and interest of our lives. If every young woman in every bank looks alike, every TV presenter seems to have the same face, one young man at a party is indistinguishable from the next, if as we think alike, so we look alike, who can be surprised. Our everyday language has become too skilled, too dismissive of complexity, for our own good. We like things nailed and certain. The cleverer we get, the more stupid.

I see the platform in my head: South Kensington, open air, not my mother’s base station, Gloucester Road. She must have been transferred for the day. Jane’s husband Guido was to get a job announcing at Victoria—he had a beautiful, plangent, actor’s voice. He enunciated beautifully, in the fashion of his parson forebears. Jobs were easier to come by then: in the days of high employment no one wanted GCSE certificates, proof of residence or bank references, wages came in a brown envelope, no questions asked: just a ridiculously high proportion taken away by the tax man to pay for pensions which were never to materialise except in benefit form, and doff your cap while asking.

The event stays sealed in my memory. I had always liked South Kensington Station where the train emerges from the tunnel before burrowing into it again. Now I see my mother in her uniform on the platform, doing whatever platform staff do, and I hop off the train in excitement, and she sees me, quite clearly she sees me, and whatever she sees she does not like, and she turns her face away, in calculated indifference. We were never to mention the episode again, either of us.

At the time of this maternal rebuff I was sharing my marital home with Jane and her two small children. They crowded into the living room, leaving us the rest of the house. It was in fact only half a small terrace house in Acton, the ground floor having already been let off to Doreen, a very fussy woman who wore her curlers until five each evening, complained about the noise of stomping children above her, and who regarded me as no better than I should be. She was accustomed to tall, thin, quiet, lonely, stooping, respectable Mr Bateman upstairs, and he had suddenly acquired, and was allegedly married to, a vigorous, poshlyspoken young woman with a small child of uncertain origins, and now her sister and two more children under five had come along too. Doreen complained with perfect reason, and if she was without sympathy what was she to know of the complexities of my life? What were we all up to? Sometimes I would leave the house in the evenings—driven by my husband in his souped-up little pale blue Ford Popular—dressed up to the nines, low-cut dress, very high heels, net stockings and tightly belted waist. (The difference between bad girls and good girls, so far as their dress went, was in those days clearly delineated. Good girls dressed so as not to be noticed: bad girls drew attention to their assets.) And Doreen must have noticed when I went out dressed for Ladies’ Night at the local posh hotel. My husband that year was Grand Master of his Masonic Lodge. I was Lady of the Lodge. I hired a kind of evening dress in mauve tulle for the occasion and the masons and the wives looked at me oddly. (Was it that the marriage itself seemed strange to others, or was it the dress? I will never know.) Sometimes I went out as wife to the Musical Director of the local Operatic Society, wearing some scruffy skirt and laddered tights. And all the while, by day, the thump, thump, thump of little children racing across floors. Doreen was confused, but no more confused than I. How had I come to this pretty pass?

I tried to engage Doreen in a scheme by which all the households down the road would serve dinner from a central cooking pot—it pained me that every day twenty housewives prepared meat and two veg from the same butcher and the same greengrocer, it seemed such a waste of time. We could make enough for everyone and they would run down the road to us for their portion, and we would share costs. She looked at me as if I was mad and I daresay I was. I had yet to learn that other people do not necessarily want to do what is in their best interests. I was properly chastened.

Twenty years later, on holiday with the children in the Gambia, visiting a Muslim household where there were four wives and four cooking pots over four separate fires, one in each corner of the same cooking hut, all cooking rice in a room temperature well over 100 degrees, I suggested to the husband that they could surely take turns to cook the rice, and do it over one fire in one big pot. He said, ‘But each wife competes to please the husband.’ I daresay those women felt the same way as the women of Acton. It is all just a matter of degree.

We were oddly happy, Jane and I, living together with the children for those few months, and it was good of the headmaster to give her shelter—Jane and Guido never had the money to pay for any fixed abode: he loved her but was not a good provider. There was no doubt however but that we were crowded, even by 1957 standards. Guido made it a condition of his joining Jane that we shelved the living room (we would pay) so that he had room for his books. I at that stage owned one book: Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God, of which I had bought a first edition for two-and-six, stolen from the housekeeping money, a book I kept under the bed. I still have it—the only possession left from my young womanhood I did manage to keep.

Fed up with my chaste first marriage as I was, I had taken to sleeping on the sofa in the living room, where I was racked by a bronchitic cough (‘Cough it up, girl, cough it up, what ails you?’), but now with Jane’s arrival I had to return to the marital bedroom and get up to cough in the loo. I wrote a television play in that loo, I remember (those were pencil and paper days, not computer), about a prostitute, in which I explained to an uninterested and easily shocked world how easy it was for a girl to come to such a pass. It was returned from the BBC with a note saying they could not contemplate dramas on such a subject, ‘no matter how well written’. I treasured that phrase but wrote no more: I did not want to ‘be’ a writer; I just wanted to earn enough money so I could live other than by the kindness of men. Men were frequently kind, but they could also be very odd.

It was shortly after this that I determined to run away from home. I was not five but twenty-five, or more, but you would not have thought it. I would leave my sister to fill my place. She could look after my husband, cook his boiled beef and carrots, iron his shirts. I felt my father egging me on. Had he not just sent Ina to trace Jane and me to Acton, and declare herself horrified in his name? ‘If your father could see you now, he’d turn in his grave?’ And she didn’t know the half of it. I was moved to take action. I resolved to leave secretly in the middle of the night, telling no one, not even my sister. In retrospect there was no need at all for secrecy, but women who feel they are behaving badly often fear the violence of men. Mr Bateman had shown absolutely no signs of violent behaviour heretofore. And later he was to sound genuinely confused, rather than angry, at my leaving him thus. ‘But why didn’t you tell me you were unhappy. I would have helped you leave.’

Be all that as it may, I tucked my child under my arm and ran away in the middle of the night, stealing four pounds from his wallet, and took grateful refuge in Laura and Stephen’s snazzy flat in South Kensington. If your mother fails you, and your father is dead enough to turn in his grave, you have no option but to look after yourself.

There were, of course, other reasons for my feeling justified in leaving home. As so much that happens in this life is, it was a matter of convergent dynamics, rather than a simple answer as required in murder cases. ‘But why did you do this?’ ‘Because, your honour, because…’ The because is never single-stranded, it is a whole tassel of factors: you have to extract the brightly-coloured one and offer that as explanation. My becauses in this case included it seeming wrong to me to live with one man while being in love with another—the Dane, that is to say, the sailor ad-man. My father sending a messenger from the grave. My husband’s averring that after we were dead we would live together in the hereafter, just him and me, in a little cottage on a mossy bank by a river. Forever. ‘ I saw it in a vision, darling.’ You could play grandmother’s footsteps with fate as much as you liked, but when the music stops and you are playing pass the parcel you must on no account be caught with the wrong man. Or they might be with you for eternity. That too was a very bright thread in what I would refer to as the knotted tassel of reasoning that leads to action.

Young women are beyond belief. I wish I could report less superstitious nonsense on my part but I can’t—not and still speak the truth of my experience.

Trisha starts a new life

The stairs which led up from the dry-cleaners to Trisha’s new living quarters were very narrow. It is unlucky to pass another person on the stairs, for fear that in brushing up against them your souls will be exchanged, and you will reach the top of the stairs, or the bottom, a different person. That day Trisha Perle crossed on the stairs with a stranger to her, Peter Watson, whom you have yet to meet. Both, at the time, were in a bad, ungenial mood.

Well-behaved, handsome, de-natured Peter Watson, thirty-six, lived as it so happened with Doralee Thicket, journalist. They had been together for six years. ‘This is Peter Watson, you know, Doralee’s feller?’ Not that Doralee was particularly famous, or rich, or in any way unusual, just that somehow she seemed more vivid than he. Once upon a time women were indignant to be introduced as someone’s wife, daughter or sister, as if they had no identity of their own—these days the insult is more likely to be offered to men. Women are so vivid and mettlesome these days, so vigorous in their being, even when like Trisha down on their luck, I am surprised they do not subsume the whole male race.

If I describe Peter Watson as de-natured, as one describes a piece of much-laundered fabric, it is because one has the sense that once there was more stuffing to him. Yet he has a handsome enough, thinking, empathic, executive face, is over six foot and goes to the gym religiously, as does Doralee. He does not look unlike Russell Crowe but wears glasses. He seems to have a promising future before him and one feels life has gone comfortably enough so far, but that perhaps his mother, or someone, has made him anxious and a little jumpy in childhood, and over anxious to please. But you would be glad enough if he had the window seat in the aircraft, the one given to an able-bodied man so he can open the door in case of an emergency and a chute landing. The barber uses a number two clipper on his hair, so it is short-cropped in the modern style, and his clothes are smart and clean. His hands, unlike Trisha’s, are not nicotine stained.

Peter Watson works for a daily newspaper: indeed he is deputy head of its research department, and sees himself as being ‘in the loop’. He goes to senior editorial meetings. It is not as exciting as being in features or on the news desk, but the whole place so pounds with energy the job is more than good enough for him for the time being. He is the one who knows the facts behind the facts, and the detail behind the sweeping statements newspapers love to make: he is consulted on international affairs, the mood in the Congo, the state of the Albanian Air Force, whither Europe, and why Gibraltar. If he does not know he will find out. He is relied upon and trusted, and the Editor does not shout at him.

Peter’s partner Doralee is pretty and smart, and more ambitious than he. You could accuse both of smugness, but that would be unkind. They have both had parents who loved them, and no reason to believe the world won’t go in the way they have experienced it to date: they love the nanny state and feel that nanny is perfectly well suited to looking after them, and that so long as they behave like everyone else all will be well. They talk out any emotional problems that might arise, and look after their health. They drink bottled water, and choose flat not fizzy: bubbles seeming to the young couple to be somehow chemical, trivial and false. Tap water was to be avoided: it had been recycled through other people’s bodies too many times for comfort, and was full of their hormones.

It is true that Doralee sometimes swigged a glass of tap water in secret, in desperation, having read that over-chlorinated water contributes to the current rise in infertility. It wasn’t that she didn’t want a baby, she did, indeed, she was ‘trying’, like so many of her colleagues at Oracle, the woman’s magazine for which she worked. It was just that sometimes courage failed her, and she would like to put motherhood off for a year or so, while seeing herself as the kind of person who never goes back on a decision, and not wanting her partner to see her as a ditherer. The occasional glass of tap water seemed to take the responsibility of choice away. Anyone is entitled to an off day, and to have doubts about the wisdom of procreation, let alone its expense, and act upon these doubts. And sometimes when the water from the shower was blue from excess chlorine, she’d wonder what kind of unhealthy chemical world was this to bring children into, anyway? She did not tell Peter of these concerns: he wanted a baby even more than she did, and would only quote statistics at her to demonstrate that this was an ever-improving world, and not even overcrowded. Indeed, the latest demographic trends showed a falling population rather than a rising one – except in China – and they had a duty to spread their genes as plentifully as possible. Then Doralee would think, ‘but we aren’t living in China’ and mutinously swig some more tap water. She would leave it to chance.