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
