friends, Julie’s motives were mixed. To Julie, however, families were meant to help out, and she had certainly helped out at certain crucial points in Michael’s and Jill’s lives.
Just then, Julie was planning a two-week stay at the Villa Dubrovnik, where Michael and Jill had spent so many happy holidays. Jill’s friends were assembling, as were many Croats, who honoured Jill and Michael for making a documentary about the shelling of their city. Two Hours From London marked Jill’s astonishing return in her eighties to filmmaking. Of course, I had to be on hand to meet as many of her friends as I could. “Fun is to be had there,” Julie said. “You’re making it impossible for me to say no,” I replied. “That’s what we like to hear,” Michael chimed in. Michael and his entourage planned the rendezvous for that September. I did not know then that he was paying the way for many of these people, including Julie.
14
After Julie left us at Pilgrim’s Lane, I came back to the question of Michael and women, which he had alluded to when describing his period at Oxford. I pointed out to him that one of Jill’s obituaries referred to him a “man about town” during the war, while another claimed he had been a “womaniser” in the period before he met Jill. “What I want to know,” I said to him, “is how much of a ladies’ man you were.” “Well I wasn’t at all, hardly,” Michael replied. I laughed, “What a disappointment, Michael!” “I wish I could have made the boast,” he added. “I sometimes had eczema so badly I wouldn’t go out of the house. For quite a long time I didn’t think any woman would look at me.” The word womaniser bothered him. “It should be exterminated from history.” Frank Owen, his colleague at the Evening Standard, seemed to attract women effortlessly, but Owen was no womaniser. In Michael’s book, the term implied one-way gratification and in Owen’s case the women received as good as they got. “I was in awe of such men and thought, ‘How do you do that?’” Michael continued: “In the 1930s, I was tremendously inhibited about sex. I was very backward in such matters. I started reading H. G. Wells properly then. He liberated me.” Michael adored novels like Ann Veronica and thought the world would have been a poorer place if H.G. had not had his affair with Rebecca, no matter how many hardships and griefs their liaison caused. Rebecca had attacked H.G.’s feeble characterisations of women such as Margerie in his novel Marriage. But in subsequent novels, Michael pointed out, Wells included much more complex portraits of women—some of them clearly based on Rebecca herself.
I was still trying to piece together what Michael was like when he first met Jill:
[CR] She must have seemed an extraordinary woman. She was doing this film [The Way We Live]. She had been married twice before. She had a child. What was that like for you?
[MF] Yes, oh well ... By the way, I was tremendously admiring of all the time she gave to Julie. Sometimes Julie poorly appreciated that.
I didn’t think he was going to answer my question, but he continued:
It didn’t happen all at once, you know. After the [1945] election we started doing some things together. I was living at sixty two Park Street and she came up and saw there was no music, and she put a radiogram in the corner and played Mozart. Jill was the one who really made me understand what music was—all such things.
[CR] Was it difficult for her to divorce Jeffrey Dell?
[MF] I didn’t know about that at all, really. I don’t think it was difficult. We weren’t pressing to marry, but my father was in favour of it.
Such dialogues were all too brief, with Michael often breaking off to discuss another book, another writer—this time it was V. S. Pritchett, who put him on to Disraeli’s novels. “All the women are different,” Pritchett pointed out, “not a stereotype among them.”
Literature, especially Michael’s favourite works, had a presence so palpable for him that it deflected discussion of his own emotional life. Personal experiences seemed displaced in literature, or rather, the crucial events in his life could only be approached in terms of literary analogies. For example, Michael’s great friend, “Vicky,” a newspaper cartoonist, a Hungarian Jew who had emigrated to England before the war, was quickly merged into a discussion of Heine, whom Michael revered for his melancholy Jewish sensibility. The witty yet often morose Vicky committed suicide—in large part, Michael believed—because of the sorry state of the world. The cheerful Michael was nonetheless drawn to apocalyptic visions and would recite—as he had for Rebecca West—the whole of Byron’s holocaust poem, “Darkness.”
Just then Jenny returned, having sorted out some business for Michael. But a good many items remained to be acted upon in what she called his “procrastination file.” He was about to go out and she said:
[JS] When you come back, I’m going to pounce on you and you’re not going to have lunch until you said yes or no to every single one of them.
[MF] Right.
[JS] I’m going now.
[MF] I’m coming with you to see you’re not arrested.
[JS] No, you better not. Arrested? For what?
[MF] Leaving your bloody car in the middle of the road.
15
Jenny mentioned as she was leaving that Michael might expect a call from Moni. “Who is Moni?” I asked after Jenny left. She had been James Cameron’s wife, an Indian woman who figures in Cameron’s wonderful book, An Indian Summer. Michael considered Cameron the best journalist of his generation. He was dead now and Moni had married Sir Denis Forman, former head of the British Film Institute and the producer of, among other noteworthy projects, The Jewel in the Crown. Forman, I was later to learn, had first met Jill during the war, when, as he put it, she was quite a nightclub hopper and girl about town.
Talk of Moni set Michael off on a trail of funny stories: the time, for example, when a Parisian friend with a weak grasp of English idiom wrote him on the eve of his first election campaign in Ebbw Vale, “I’m crossing my fingers for you.” To which Cameron added: “I’m fingering my crosses.” Michael did not have much to do with crosses or any sort of religion, he wanted me to know. When he spoke of Heine, for example, he described a man who rejected Judaism because of his “humanity.” Heine seemed a greater figure than his friend Karl Marx, Michael added, because the former had a much better sense of humour.
Comedy, in fact, was a huge topic of conversation in the Foot household. Michael often quoted Jill’s assertion that it was much more difficult to write a great comedy than a tragedy. The couple seemed to regard comedy as a capacious way of describing and understanding humanity, even a form of social justice. “If Karl Marx had only brought Heine over to London with him. It might have saved us all.” Michael then paraphrased Heine: “I don’t want a poet’s crown. Say that I was a soldier in the fight for humanity.”
This fight for humanity is the way Michael glorified the Labour landslide of 1945, which became his next topic of conversation. It was much more than a party victory and what drew him to Jill was her confidence—far greater than his—that not only would he win a seat in Devonport, Labour would triumph too. The turning point for her, Michael suggested, was watching Nye Bevan speak on Michael’s behalf in Plymouth.
Michael never mentioned the passes Bevan made at Jill, but this subject did not bother him when others—including me—spoke of it. “You must make a list of the men who made passes at Jill,” I told him. “An appendix,” he suggested.
16
Michael’s praise for Jill seemed extravagant to nearly everyone I spoke with about
