The Woman of Substance

In the novels this is the message about fathers in general. In Everything to Gain, Mallory Keswick says: ‘He was a human being after all, not a God, even if he had seemed like one to me when I was growing up. He had been all golden and shining and beautiful, the most handsome, the most dashing, the most brilliant man in the world. And the most perfect . . . Yes, he had been all those things to me as a child.’

In Act of Will, although Vincent’s family all dote on him, Grandpa Alfred has ‘no illusions about him’. Vincent has ‘temperament, stubbornness and a good measure of vanity’, and is easily sidetracked from his purpose. His daughter gets her strength of purpose from elsewhere, from her mother’s ‘iron will’, like Barbara.

Despite what Barbara said, that ‘when you are an only child you are a unit more’, one can imagine that this difference in character between mother and father was fertile ground for disagreement, and it is not uncommon for Barbara’s fictional heroines to recall a childhood trauma of expecting the father to up and leave the family home. In Everything to Gain, Mallory is suddenly shaken one day ‘not only by the memory but by the sudden knowledge that all the years I was growing up I had been terrified my father would leave us for ever, my mother and I, terrified that one day he would never come back.’

Mal and her mother discuss Edward, her archaeologist father, in this vein. Mal cannot understand ‘why Dad was always away when I was a child growing up. Or why we didn’t go with him.’ Her mother talks about his not wanting either of them along ‘on his digs’. Mallory is no fool, however. She remembers ‘that fourth of July weekend so long ago, when I had been a little girl of five . . . that awful scene in the kitchen . . . their terrible quarrel [which] had stayed with me all these years.’

In the electoral records of Upper Armley, there is a period when Winston is not included as an inhabitant of the family home. Freda is the sole occupant of electoral age when they are living at Greenock Terrace in 1945, the first record available after the war years (when none were kept), and Barbara considers that ‘the trauma [of expecting the father to leave] must spring from the war years. [In Tower Lane] we had an air-raid shelter at the end of the garden. My mother and I would go in with a torch and I’d worry about where my father was.’

‘Your father was very often not there?’

‘No, he was out having a drink. That was Daddy.’

Besides the Traveller’s Rest on a Sunday, his favourite watering holes were ‘the White Horse, and the other was the Commercial in Town Street. He’d have to walk home, and during the war I thought he was going to be killed,’ said Barbara.

‘So the picture I have is of you and your mother sitting in the shelter. Were you there alone or were the neighbours in there too?’

‘No, it was ours. There were three in a row, but they were awful. There were seats to sit on, but no radio because you couldn’t plug it in, could you? Yes, you put bottles of water and some things in there and a Thermos flask Mummy would fill. A woman wrote a very chastising letter about six months ago saying, “I don’t know who did your research for the Anderson shelters, but they weren’t like you made it out in The Women in His Life. I belong to the Society of Anderson Shelters People,” or whatever . . . she will have been all of eighty!’

‘It must have been strange to be in the dark with nothing to look at or do, in a makeshift shelter and in the knowledge that bombs could rain down on you at any time.’

‘Well,’ Barbara remembered, ‘we had candles and my mother always took a book, because she was a reader. She didn’t knit like my Auntie Olive.’

‘Did you take a book as well?’

‘I can’t remember, but I know that I listened for that unique, very particular step. It was like a missed step – because of the artificial leg, his was not an even step. There was a lot of worry about my father. I used to worry about my father, it’s funny, isn’t it?’

‘Children do worry about their parents,’ I say.

‘Why? A fear of losing them?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘I used to worry about him being out when the sirens began to shrill. He always went out, not every night, but some nights a week he’d go down to the local for a pint. Usually he was down at the pub, locked in during the raid, and then later we’d hear his step down the garden. And I’d be so relieved I thought I would cry.’

What we have here is the classic ‘only child’ situation, touching in the extreme. You want to reach back in time and wipe the worry from the busy mind of this girl who took the responsibility for family relations upon herself. In reality, as in Act of Will, the only child was doing a balancing act between mother and father, which can’t have been easy. Barbara would have had to stand alone under the burden of any unhappiness in her parents’ marriage, and it was not done to complain about this. She would have had nobody to understand her worries and grief, and, clearly, the situation between Freda and Winston did become sadly polarised.

One day Barbara said to me about Freda, ‘She neglected my father,’ and, later, that Freda ‘shut the bedroom door’ on Winston. In Everything to Gain, Mal’s parents, like Vincent and Audra in Act of Will, sleep in separate bedrooms, and this is deemed by Mal ‘with a sinking feeling’ to have been the reason why eventually her father must have romanced other women. And it comes out that, yes, her father was having affairs. The hindsight conclusion reached is that the Keswicks were ‘a dysfunctional family’, and the uncertainty of her parents’ marriage made Mal want ‘to have the perfect family when I got married. I wanted to be the perfect wife to Andrew, the perfect mother to Jamie and Lissa. I wanted it all to be . . . to be . . . right . . .’

We see this in Barbara also, when, after her marriage to Robert Bradford in 1963, she wrote a trio of manuals for the American publisher Simon & Schuster about being the perfect wife – How to be the Perfect Wife: Etiquette to Please Him, Entertaining to Please Him and Fashions that Please Him. When a journalist discovered these in the 1980s, the cry went up: Can this be the same woman who created Emma Harte? No journalist had an inkling of the fear out of which Barbara’s desire for an even-keel marriage came.

However, it is also clear in both Act of Will and in reality that Winston, even if he was a bit flighty, was not the crucial factor. What led to separate bedrooms was the mother switching her attention away from the husband to the child – to Barbara – and that happened for reasons that went deeper than sex. One event that conspired to sharpen Freda’s focus on Barbara at the expense of Winston was the tragic death of their firstborn, a boy called Vivian. ‘He died from meningitis six months after he was born and some time before I was born,’ Barbara told me. In a confusing and quite extraordinary and upsetting coincidence, Alfred and Esther Taylor also had a late son called Vivian, who died. ‘She [Esther] would never lock the door at night and her youngest son, Don, who was probably still living at home in those days, said, “Mam, you’ve got to lock your door at night; it’s not safe.” And she’d say, “No, I can’t in case Vivian wants to get in.” He was her last child, I think, and he died as a baby, as a little boy. Then my parents had a son before me, who is Alfie in Act of Will, which is why I had Alfie also die of meningitis. Our Vivian Taylor was six or eight months old when he died, not even a year. It certainly affected my mother’s relationship to me, because she focused every bit of love and attention on me. If there was a purpose in my mother’s life it was me. That’s rather sad actually.’

But there was more to it than Vivian. ‘My mother didn’t want any more children because she wasn’t going to let anything stop her from giving me a better life than she had had,’ Barbara told me. In Act of Will, Audra is fired by her need to redeem her own lost opportunity. No sacrifice is too great to enable her daughter, Christina, to realise the opportunities that were denied her in childhood. There is an obsessive quality about it from the moment Christina is born and her mother announces, ‘I am going to give her the world.’

Barbara remembers well how this was expressed for real in her relationship with Freda: ‘We were very close. I was very close to Mummy. She totally and completely believed in me. There wasn’t a day of her life that if she spoke to me, even after I’d gone to live in London and then America, when she didn’t say, “I love you.” There wasn’t a time when she didn’t tell me that I was the most beautiful and the cleverest and the most talented and the most charming and the most wonderful person and of course that’s not true, we all know that we have faults. But what it did . . . it gave me tremendous self-confidence and a self-assurance that I had even when I was fifteen and sixteen. And she instilled in me a desire to excel. Her message was: “There’s nothing you can’t have if you try hard enough, work hard enough and strive towards a goal. And never, never limit yourself.”’

Barbara took away from their relationship an absolute conviction that she was capable of anything to which she set her mind. Inadequacy was not a concept ever entertained. Her friend Billie Figg noted this as her defining characteristic in her early twenties: ‘What she had was enormously high expectations of herself and a lot of assurance.’

In Act of Will, Vincent fears that Audra’s motivation to do the same for Christina is tinged with obsession. He notes a possessiveness about his wife’s relationship with their daughter, which seems to exclude him, and comes to frighten him. ‘There was a cold implacability in the set of the mouth and the thrust of the jaw, a terrible relentlessness in those extraordinary cornflower-blue eyes . . .’ And Vincent fears, ‘She’s going to make it a crusade.’

Audra announces her intention to give her daughter the world in the hospital, shortly after she is born. Both Audra’s husband, Vincent, and his doctor friend, Mike Lesley, bridle at her naked aggression, not seen before.

When it is all over in the novel, and Audra’s daughter, Christina, is the success she has made her, the girl says: ‘I’ll never be able to thank you enough, or repay you for everything you’ve done for me, Mummy. You’ve been the best, the most wonderful mother in the world.’ But, as Emma’s brother Winston says of his sister towards the end of A Woman of Substance, her success is attributable to ‘Abnormal ambition. Abnormal drive.’

In Act of Will, Vincent, convinced that his wife is victim to irrational forces, shows his mettle in his response to her. He is tender and loving. He masterminds a surprise birthday party for her. There is no hint of violence towards his wife, even when she brings him to his wits’ end with her obsession. Moreover, he gives his wife one hundred per cent support over her sense of loss of status. He could have gained the whip hand in the class turmoil of their relationship – that she always believed she came from a better class than he – but nowhere does he use it as a weapon against her.

Knowing now what happened to Freda in her childhood, and the loss she suffered, knowing what it was that made her so determined that Barbara should have the opportunities that were denied herself, it is safe to say that Winston’s response to Freda (if it is reflected in Vincent’s) was the very best that could have been made. There was in Freda something running deeper even than the loss of her first child, something which possibly no project of success – not even Barbara – could ever quite resolve. Maybe Freda’s mother-in-law, Esther, sensed it was never going to be resolved by her son Winston either – however good he was to her. Reason enough for her unsettled relationship with Freda.

The novels first tipped my research in Freda’s direction, and it was the novels that gave me a sense of the deepest roots of dysfunction I would find. Turning again to Everything to Gain, Mal searches for the reason for her mother’s unhappiness: ‘Perhaps [she] had experienced humiliation and despair and more heartache than I ever realised. But I would never get the real truth from her. She never talked about the past, never confided in me. It was as if she wanted to bury those years, forget them, perhaps even pretend they never happened.’

In Act of Will, Audra’s in-laws are all around her. She loves Vincent, but there is something getting in the way, a feeling of apartness certainly. Is it class, as in the novel? Is the belligerent ‘outsider’ in her really being outed by her better birth? Or is it, as in Everything to Gain, something in her childhood, some loss she suffered?

We never get to the heart of the matter in the fiction (because Barbara didn’t know), but, like Mallory Keswick, we cannot but suspect there is something we are not being told; indeed we only accept Audra’s strangely aggressive love for her daughter in Act of Will because we entertain such a suspicion.

In reality, I was to discover, there was every reason for Freda to behave so. Her story provides the crucial dysfunctional and motivational forces that led to her unique relationship with her daughter and Barbara’s extraordinary will to succeed. Much of it remained hidden during Freda’s lifetime, for Barbara’s childhood ‘was constructed on secrets layered one on top of the other,’ as she wrote in Everything to Gain.

These secrets provided Barbara with many of the narrative possibilities of her best novels, and one reason why they have been so successful is that Barbara is not simply writing good ideas, but ideas that are her inheritance. The novels are the means by which she shares in the experience of her past, her mother’s past, and that of her mother’s own mother. More strangely still, she does so without knowing anything about Freda’s history or that of her maternal grandmother, the extraordinary and beguiling Edith Walker.

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