Mantrapped

As it happened I only sent Nicolas to the centre for a single day. The children were so pale and sad, the weather so cold, little stiff arms pushed into winter coats, the weeping when the mothers departed so distressing. I could see that the idea of childcare was fine in theory but appalling in practice: that the interests of children and parent overlapped but as so often did not coincide, and what was good, and indeed necessary, for the mother was not automatically good for the child. Unless of course the parent is so horrible in the first place—and a few are—that being at a distance from them can only be advantageous. I took Nicolas out of his nursery that evening and never took him back. I wanted my freedom: I wanted to live unobserved and uncriticised, I wanted to be free of husbandly and motherly interference and control, but want, I could see, must be my master for a time yet. I wrote to my mother and asked her if she would leave companioning her old lady and help me with Nicolas and she said she would. Of course she did; I knew she would. We might be back to where we’d been before I had been panicked into marriage with the headmaster but at least times were better. The baby was now a child and easier to look after, and I had the promise of a better-paid job, one more fitting my graduate state, found for me by my lover and mentor, the Dane.

I wept and wept when the Dane, a yachtsman copy writer, author of Bridge That Gap With Cadbury’s Snack and other famous sayings, went on holiday with his wife on money I lent him for the purpose. That was in 1957. How could I refuse? He had found me the job, that of a trainee copy writer, at Crawfords, a proper big time agency situated in High Holborn. It had the Milk Marketing Board account—Drinka Pinta Milka Day—amongst others, and I loved him, and was (minimally) guilty because he was married. 1958, and my mother and I found a flat on the top floor of a house in Earls Court. There were five flights of stairs and no lift, no carpets and almost no furniture, but it was somewhere to live. We still had dark grey army surplus blankets on the beds, under which the Dane would join me, secretly, so as not to upset my mother, and his wife. And at least there was now a little surplus money for me to be able to lend it straight back to him. I had become pregnant, miscarried, and he had wept.

1959, and I was at Crawfords and shared an office with Elizabeth Smart, author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. She was a kind and beautiful woman and a fine writer, and I was a great blubbing bulky thing and a panicky one. The Dane had used his influence to get me the job in the first place: now Elizabeth taught me how to write advertising copy. How to forget the verbs and sprinkle adjectives, and try to make them pertinent, and never to use words for the sake of words, that every one has to mean something or you excise it. She taught me the value of exactitude, though I think I had an instinct for it anyway. She loved George Barker the poet, a dysfunctional relationship, in today’s terms, and had four brilliant children by him, and when I miscarried the Dane’s baby she was sympathetic and did not say ‘just as well’, though it was. She became the gardening correspondent for Vogue and wrote remarkable poetry, and when George wrote The Dead Seagull—his answer to Grand Central Station—there was a great literary hoo-hah. Elizabeth won on points, because of her prose and the heart-rending nature of the then emotional subjugation of women to men, which she caught on the tide, just as the tsunami which was women’s liberation began to gather force. This misery, this indignity, really cannot go on any more.

Elizabeth and George’s fourth child was called Rosie. She was fourteen when she first came to a party of ours, in the Sixties, precocious—though not by to-day’s standards—thoroughly charming and astonishingly beautiful. She was to have a baby which was to be born addicted to heroin—now a common enough occurrence, then it made headlines. Elizabeth looked after the baby, but Rosie died soon after from an overdose, to everyone’s distress.

I find I pray for Rosie from time to time: she is on an internal list of the missing and remembered. The grief of parents we know is shared: it is to be borne and faced by all. And Rosie carried with her so focused and vivid a personality—perhaps the shortage of available time to live sharpens the quality of the living—she is not forgotten. No wonder that Shelley gang, with their poetic intensity and their early deaths, are still spoken and written about.

We were all pre-feminists then: it simply did not occur to us that if men misbehaved, the answer was to have nothing more to do with them. That ‘love’ was a trap not worth falling into. The female response at the time was still to feel more love, have more babies, write more poetry, sink yet further into masochism. My problem was, I could see, that unlike Elizabeth I was not doing it with any style. I lost some weight and put on heels, and after work one day, after as I remember choosing a selection of adjectives for Simpson’s store in Piccadilly and naming a women’s department ‘Young and Gay’—what innocent days they were—I sat on a bench in Holborn and reproached my dead father for leaving me. I made contact with his spirit as he whirled around with the autumn leaves that fell amongst the traffic of New Oxford Street that day. I made a pact with him. It was time he looked after me, I said. He had failed to do so in life—other than sending his mistress Ina to tell me he was turning in his grave—let him do so in his death. He had left me no money, no home, he had not protected me from my mother. Let him see to it. I for my part would stop sulking, stop playing games, stop waiting to be protected from my own folly, stop whining ‘Now see what you made me do!’ I acknowledged my part in my own misfortune. I really think my father heard. Whether he was there of course I have no idea: I do know that I spoke to him.

At any rate it was after that my life turned: within days I fell out of love with the Dane, upon his confession of a drunken act of infidelity with a passing Danish tourist, waved goodbye to him as he set out for Ibiza to deliver some rich man’s yacht, without dropping a single tear—the girl from Denmark had somehow lifted my moral responsibility to the wife, the miscarriage seemed a boon from heaven. I met Ron Weldon at a party, left my poor mother behind me, acquired a house and a home and a man of my own, and finally unafraid, grew rich and famous.

I wept in public fifteen years later on the steps of White Centre at BBC TV when Graeme MacDonald told me that Smoke Screen, my just-screened Play for Today—Wednesday nights, an audience of some thirteen or fourteen million—had not been a success with the audience and the BBC weren’t going to commission me to do another. Not for a time. That was in 1969. The first reports into the link between smoking and lung cancer were emerging. The play had been successful enough with the audience, but not with BBC management. Their feeling was that I was causing trouble, stirring up unpleasantness, frightening the audience. I should stick to writing about women, not venture out into the great male world of important matters. Smoke Screen was about an advertising man, working on a cigarette account, who dies of lung cancer. My hero, puffing away, had a family to support, and insurance premiums to meet before he died, and felt that his duty to his family was higher than his duty to the public. And so by and large it is. What can a man, or indeed a woman, do in the face of necessity? What was I doing in advertising myself? The necessity of so doing was fast fading. I could keep myself in other ways.

The ad agency, no doubt irritated by my lack of loyalty, my intransigency, called my bluff after Smoke Screen and asked me to work on the Players account. It was a challenge, and I declined it. My boss Douglas Haines, the handsomest man in advertising and a good friend ever since, told me my duty was to my employers rather than society. Docile though I thought I was, I found this difficult to accept. My employers’ enthusiasm for me dwindled, as well it might, and eventually I was ‘let go’. That, and no doubt my habit of filling in my hourly time sheets as a consultant so that I earned what I thought I deserved, rather than the ceiling limit suggested by an eight-hour a day week, finally drove my employers to action. I was filling in 30 or 50 hours a day, out of the available 24, and they took no notice, or pretended not to, until finally I went too far.

‘Be bold, be bold, but not too bold!’ as the girl who marries Bluebeard in the fairy story is warned. I was too bold. Not only was there trouble at the office, but on the mythical BBC Honours Board my name was now in black, not gold, which meant ‘Don’t use her: trouble’ and I hadn’t even been trying. Disgrace, at the BBC, usually lasted for two years or so; after that time everyone up and down the corridors had been promoted or changed jobs, and had forgotten, and when your name came up again at a meeting there was no one who remembered the awful things you had done to speak against you.

Morality, for all of us, tends to be what we can afford. Nobody wanted to believe what had to be believed. Smoking was nice, and natural, and had a gentle tonic and hygienic effect, and we all went round in a cloud of smoke and since we all smelt like old ashtrays it didn’t bother anyone. The only people who didn’t smoke were those who couldn’t afford to, which for many years had included me.

Graeme MacDonald professed himself very surprised that I should cry. He said I did not seem the crying sort. I think I must have exuded an air of infinite good cheer, infinite resilience.

Television was always only a transitory medium, of course, that was its point. Flickers on a screen in the corner of a room. I shouldn’t have wept, and it was humiliating. But somehow Graeme MacDonald, now dead and gone, still lingers on the steps, palely grey, intense and handsome, gay at a time when no one was meant to be, standing there, grave and confused and embarrassed by me, caught up in time and preserved, like Rosie Smart at the party. It is extremely difficult to believe in mortality while people live on in these acute snapshots of themselves. Graeme MacDonald, Rosie, dead? I don’t believe it. Death is nonexistent: it is just some peculiar and aggravating wrinkle in time, our false perception of the nature of past, present and future, which insists that one has to be over before the next can begin.

And then I didn’t weep for ages, not really weep, other than everyday and unmemorable tears of petulance and anger, of course, until 1991 when I wept for a whole two years because after thirty years my life with my husband Ron was over, and by his doing, not mine. That took me down a peg or two. At that juncture my new husband-in-waiting took me down to the Embankment and made me look at Boadicea with the knives on her chariot wheels and said ‘That’s what your readers think you’re like,’ so I pulled myself together and stopped crying. God knows what fate has in store next: today is all ancient Abbey grounds and morning sunlight, tomorrow it may be Wilkins Parade and Mrs Kovac, and day by day time is running out.

Trisha’s mistakes

Trisha had been playing Polly Peachum at the Lyric Theatre the day she won three million pounds in the lottery. The notices for the show had been good. This had been her big break after years of small parts, temping and bar-maiding. If she had known then what she knew now—the things she would not have done when it came to winning the lottery! She would have remembered to tick the no-publicity box. She would not have consented to a public ceremony when she went to collect her cheque. She would not have replied, when a journalist thrust a microphone in front of her and asked what she was going to do with the rest of her life, ‘Spend, spend, spend.’ And then added, almost as an afterthought, ‘and fuck, fuck, fuck.’ She had thought it was only radio but there were TV cameras there too. The clips were excerpted into the opening credits of a successful girlie TV show, and ran for a month before anyone told her, turning her into a kind of mini-celebrity until the public got bored. She sued and won another £50,000. To them that hath, etc. It also ruined her chances of being taken seriously ever again in the acting profession. When the show transferred to the West End she was not asked to go with it.

Other things Trisha should not have done: she should not have had a baby by a humble stunt man. She should have chosen a bank manager. She had gone for looks, not income, thinking she had more than enough of the latter. But of course she had not. Once pregnant, she should not have married the father. As it happened Rollo had his own stroke of good fortune and soon became the face of a range of men’s toiletries. Now that he could pick and choose amongst women, he thought he could do better than Trisha. Within six weeks of their marriage being written up in Hello and three days after discovering Trisha was eight weeks pregnant, he left her for a Page 3 girl with a degree in economics, famous for having once allegedly slapped Elizabeth Hurley’s face. He divorced Trisha, married her successor the day Spencer was born, and disappeared from her life.

Trisha was brave publicly, and cried privately, and gave birth to Spencer with only her mother in attendance. People came to visit her to drink free drink and eat free food and use her pool but she thought they did not care about the real her. Men would use and abuse her and demand presents. She thought women might be kinder than men and took up with Thomasina Deverill, and gave money away to lesbian causes. Thomasina was a success at the Edinburgh Fringe with a one-woman cabaret show about the awfulness of men, and when she came back had taken against little Spencer, mostly on the grounds that he was male. Thomasina wanted Trisha to have Spencer adopted and have a female test-tube baby by a gay friend instead. Trisha refused, Thomasina left.

A year later, when Spencer was four, Rollo turned up again. He had been converted to born-again Christianity, and wanted to claim custody of his child and bring him up in decent surroundings, by which he meant free from lesbian taint. In vain for Trisha to say that had been just a passing phase. By then Trisha also had a well-documented drink and drugs problem, and though that too was over—drugs now made her dizzy and alcohol made her sick—the court found against her, and Rollo—with his wife the economist now in government—was given care and control of Spencer. And Trisha, though she should have been upset, found that she was not. Spencer was a hyperactive child who yet had a weight problem, and she knew she failed him.

Trisha tried to be angry with Rollo. Her friends thought she should be, and she tried, but when she looked inside she found a rageless hollow. She lost quite a few friends this way. Why didn’t she fight the bastard? What sort of unnatural mother was she? (This from friends who would no more dream of getting pregnant than they would look after their old mothers.) The fact was she was a man’s woman even though the man had left her. She was just instinctively on her enemy’s side.

And Rollo was so very convincing and charming in court, and such a good actor, that she was quite persuaded by him along with everyone else of her own unfitness to rear a child, and clapped when the judgement against her was given. She had to be stopped by her own lawyer. His name was, fetchingly enough, Hardy Acre, but there are more than enough names already for you to focus on.

To wit: Trisha and her six-year-old son Spencer, her husband Rollo, and her lover Thomasina. No doubt there have been more and other transient relationships: Trisha is, after all, a thespian, and thespians have a kind of life fluency, a need to be all things to all people; they are prone to sudden mood swings, fits of irresponsibility and changing fortunes. They are the playthings of writers, and whom the writers love they destroy. In the parallel real life there is Fay, the Dane, two Rons, my mother Margaret, my aunt and uncle Mary and Michael, my father Frank and his ghost, Graeme MacDonald, Elizabeth Smart, George Barker and Rosie. All were prone to self-destruction, without need of writers.

Trisha was reared in the confident days before herpes, AIDS, and fear of secondary smoking swept the Western world; the days when we could drift through our lives, taking what came along on trust. We assumed that politicians were wise, that food was safe, that pension companies paid up and scientists knew what they were doing. But there can be no more drifting: today’s world punishes those who do not take care to look after their future. It is increasingly difficult to know how this is to be done.

Trisha has certainly not looked lively enough. She has met her come-uppance, and the credit has run out. The day the cashpoint refused to give her any more money she put the house on the market. It stayed stubbornly unsold for a year. What she thought was a desirable residence to too many others apparently looked like a supermarket, all false gables and unseasoned wood. The swimming pool grew an unusual sort of mould, which turned the water murky grey within hours of filling. Her creditors moved in and forced a sale. The house filled up with little men with weasel faces who claimed to be bankruptcy advisers.

It was found that in some mysterious way the deeds had Rollo’s name upon them, and not a mention of her own. She had a recollection of promising one evening to look after Rollo for life and he must have taken her seriously and she have signed a document in a fit of drunken sentiment. That was when he had sprained his ankle in a fake car crash and was depressed, thinking he would never be an effective stuntman again, and then became the official face of the sensitive man about town, and had only to worry about his looks, not his survival.

Drinking made Trisha effusive and emotional, given to absurd gestures, giving things away to friends: ‘Take this, and this, darling, and this, because you need it. Take this holiday, this camera, this house. By all means borrow my Valentino suit, it suits you better than me.’

Trisha spends many days in front of the judges of the family court: the house is to be Rollo’s, they decide, though she can keep the contents. It seems fair enough. Rollo has little Spencer to bring up. What with one thing and another the £3 million has simply dissolved away and now Trisha has to live like other people, worse than other people. The papers have lost interest in her. She must interpret herself now from her face in the mirror, not the one in the newspapers, from the words on her lips, not the ones in the headlines. She is an ex-celebrity, and what can be worse?

Also to blame in my opinion are Trisha’s lawyer Hardy Acre—she has told him so often not to pursue her interests through the courts he has come to believe her. There is also Trisha’s accountant Vera Thicket, who, while holding a few hundred thousands of Trisha’s money in her client’s account, ran off to Chile with a conman and all the money. Easy come, easy go: Trisha of course blames no one but herself. Trisha chose both her accountant and her lawyer because their names appealed to her. Some would say in that case she deserves what she gets, but your author is very fond of Trisha.

Trisha is valiant, defiant, and uncomplaining. Drink may make her forgetful and silly but she is never nasty-drunk. Your writer does not have a drink problem, in case you’re wondering. She is far too sober most of the time for her own good. Nor does she smoke, not because she has given up like so many through nobility and strength of purpose, but because she never got the habit in the first place.

On the anger of mothers

Later on in our lives, whenever I could wrench my socialist mother out of the council houses and flats where she was determined to live to be at one with the people, I would house her in what (to me) were more suitable surroundings. Instead of being harassed by the guard dogs of her neighbours, alarmed by the noise of domestic violence through thin walls, and distressed by the backbiting of neighbours, I would deliver her into rose-covered cottages and pretty houses where she would have a garden and neighbours to appreciate her wit and style. She was very wise in everything other than her own life. Here she could enjoy her guilt to the full and feel free to exclaim in horror every time I took a glass of wine (such a waste of money, save it and give it to the poor, if you don’t need it yourself) or served anything other than plain food. (Such a waste of time: you should be reading and writing: nothing nicer than cabbage, fast cooked, with pepper and butter: it only takes five minutes.) I did not doubt my love for her or hers for me.

But there was a time when she was really fed up with me, and my sister Jane too. Mama had tried to escape us; she had put a pin in a map and fled to St Ives: she had given us twenty years of her life and that was enough. Or so she thought. But we would not let it rest at that.

She’d launched us into the world as bright girls with student grants, and then gone off to leave us to our own devices. (My annual grant was £167, over £3 a week, which my mother saw as great wealth. She gasped in admiration at the generosity of governments. The whole family, grandmother included, had managed on far less from time to time.) We were well-brought up, sensible, clever, friendly girls, but not good at thinking for ourselves. Our mother had done that for us. I’d been reared in an all-female household, gone to an all-girls school, and had scarcely talked to a man in my life, let alone ‘dated’. I had no idea how to conduct myself. Soon enough I was pregnant. Jane had at least the grace to marry Guido Morris, a man respectable in the world of the arts—a member of the St Ives set, his work now in the Tate—albeit penniless and irresponsible with several families to his name already and twenty-five years her senior. The father of my child was a penniless orphan, once a boy bandsman in the army, now a singer of folk songs in the Mandrake Club in Soho. I think Jane and I both assumed our mother would save us from disaster, and when she did not we resented this backsliding on her part. Not that I can remember Jane and I ever discussing our mother. She was too much part of us to be seen as a separate entity.

Other girls at least managed to fall in love with possible partners. Jane and I courted disaster. Perhaps we felt the need to fill the space in our mother’s life, to compensate for the exhiliration we had felt in at last leaving home. At any rate we felt obliged to bring her our babies back, for her to look after, to fill the vacuum we had left behind us.

Mama had no visible means of support, either, at the time. She had run an advertising agency in New Zealand in the war, but had hated every minute of it, and had turned down all suitors out of pride and the determination that she would never, never rely on the support of a man again. So now, since she had to eat, she wove reed baskets on the moors outside St Ives. She’d pluck the reeds, weave the baskets, walk to Penzance, sell the baskets, buy the week’s food with it, and commune with nature to her heart’s content. Larks and sunsets bought her real delight.

Old Meg she was a gypsy, And lived upon the moors: Her bed it was the brown heath turf, And her house was out of doors.

But still we trusted her to look after us when it came to the crunch, and she did. (You thought you could do this to us, mother: but we are your problem not our own! Look after us!) She left the moors and joined us in London, and then moved us all to Saffron Walden, a place chosen because she liked the sound of the name, and we would be amongst strangers, without witnesses to our disgrace, where she hoped our delinquencies would go unnoticed, but of course they were not. On the contrary. To have relied upon the anonymity of London would have been more sensible. My poor mother. She would wake early in a state of anxiety, brood for an hour or two, come to an unnecessarily complex solution to a simple problem by breakfast time, and put it into action by lunchtime. Her solution this time had been that I was to change my name by dead poll to that of the baby’s father, tell my friends and colleagues I had married, and then give up my job, move out of London where I was not known, and start my life afresh. That it was ten times more difficult to earn a living in the country than in the city, that I could have stayed where I was in the Foreign Office and fought my way up to higher grades and better wages (they could only fire you for immorality, I later found, if you were unmarried and had three babies by more than two different fathers), and was far too talkative and indiscreet to start again anywhere with a secret past, and was not likely to forswear my friends, did not occur to her. It did occur to me but she had a powerful personality and I assumed she knew best. I did as she suggested. I was horrified to be then sent a wedding present to my new Saffron Walden address by my Foreign Office colleagues: surely this was taking gifts on false pretences? I ought to return it at once with apologies for misleading them. But my mother was against it. I must stick by the story, she said. Say the marriage had been called off, anything. I imagine w hat I did do was simply put off writing the thank-you note until the time to do so decently had passed and I was so pregnant nothing seemed to matter other than what was going on inside my own body. But I cannot remember. It remains on my conscience. A bad patch. A bad girl. How terrible children can be. Bad behaviour is not a one way street. And certainly, if the mother leaves early, the children linger longer. But we had no such overview at the time, of course not. Those were the pre-Freudian days.