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
