Miss Carter's War (33 page)

‘Listen, it’s not the end of the world, Mags. So a romance has failed. It happens. You should hear my track record. You’ve had some fun, and a lot of sex. Count yourself lucky.’

‘But I thought it was something more than that. Oh Tony, every­thing’s gone so hideously wrong. I keep letting people down. I want the world to be a better place and it gets worse. That sodding war is still affecting everything. Jimmy’s youth was squandered killing people, when he should have been building his life. The damage is never-ending.’

Tony put his arm round her shoulders.

‘Nonsense, Mags, the world’s a much kinder place than it was. Think of these last few years. We’ve stopped hanging people “by the neck until dead”, women don’t have to bleed to death having illegal abortions, people can divorce without reviling one another in public, and Donald and I can have it off in private without being nicked.’

‘I’ll probably never have it off again.’

‘Nonsense, with that hair and your lovely knees they’ll be flocking round you.’

‘But what will happen to Jimmy?’

‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. And neither should you.’

‘I feel weary, Tony. I keep being disappointed.’

‘Cheer up, honey. The future’s bright. We’ve got a man onto the moon. If all else fails we can go and live there. But if, as looks possible, Wilson gets thrown out and even if the dreaded Tories get back we may be all right. Two of my early protégés are emerging on the political scene. Heath and that Thatcher woman. She looks like a “not do nothing” sort of gal. If they were listening to my heckles all those years ago, they won’t be so bad as their predecessors. Anything is possible. Hold on a minute. I can’t believe I’m saying this. That should be your line, surely? I seem to have taken over your role.’

‘Well, you play it well. I almost believe you. Fingers crossed for the future, eh?’

‘That’s better. That’s the Lizzie Dripping I know and love. Fingers crossed, my darling.’

Chapter 33

Tony’s ‘protégés’ were to dominate the next two decades to an extent neither he nor Marguerite could have predicted from seeing the humble start of their political careers in Kent in the 1950s. Margaret Thatcher in particular had changed beyond recognition. As Education Secretary she had evolved miraculously into a bouffant-haired, elegant-suited, slightly old-fashioned Galatea to the Saachi PR agency’s Pygmalion.

While watching her purring on television one night a growling Tony quoted his idol Aneurin Bevan:

‘ “No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.” ’

Heath, who had amazed them both by becoming Prime Minister in 1970, was less adaptive to the new image-making. He remained obdurately gauche and remote, apart from spasms of grumpiness, interspersed with sudden bouts of alarming shoulder-shaking laughter. It was difficult to like this odd man but, because of the continuing sniping at Heath’s single state, Tony did his best. Marguerite, in her turn, felt honour-bound to defend Margaret Thatcher, the first woman, against mammoth odds, to gain a foothold on the political power ladder.

Marguerite had never really been as politically committed as Tony. Now, in her mid-forties, she was even less so. In fact, since Jimmy’s disappearance from her life she had found it difficult to engage in much at all apart from her work. Her severance from him had been painful. She grieved his absence continually. It left a chasm in her life. Sometimes she was tempted to find him and beg to continue their relationship on any terms he wished. Sitting in her room, marking books to the sounds of humanity from the pub below, made her ache for his laughter, his moods, the closeness of his body. She didn’t care if it was all pretence, it was better than this nothingness.

She lies on the narrow bed, listening to the chatter and laughter in the corridor. Why is she not excited like them? This is what she wants. A student at Cambridge. A brilliant future. No. All she wants is Marcel lying beside her, their legs and arms entwined.

Tony, as so often in her life, rode to her rescue.

‘The flat below us has become free, Mags. It’s got a garden and two poofs living above who adore you. Why not leave that grotty pub and make a nest for yourself? It’s the done thing now to have a mortgage and become one of the property-owning class.’

If someone had suggested joining a religious sect, living in tents in the Sahara Desert, she would have probably grabbed their hands off, so needful was she of change, but she opted for a very nice garden flat in Myddelton Square. There was a rowdy knees-up at the Carpenter’s Arms to wish her goodbye. After closing time the customers, under the direction of Bob and Florrie, heaved her possessions onto wheelbarrows and market stalls and trundled them through the streets to her new abode,

Marguerite had never had a real home. She was surprised how much she enjoyed creating a place of her own, where she intended to live for the foreseeable future. With Donald and Tony’s help she stripped off the fading wallpaper and crumbling plaster, revealing the bare brick walls, which they painted white. They peeled back the cracked lino and hired a terrifying electric sander to clean off the old pine floorboards.

The move was the catalyst she needed to get back her joie de vivre. To help pay for the refurbishment of the flat she took on extra work as a tutor for the newly formed Open University – a job she enjoyed; working with mainly older students who were avid for study, sometimes to improve their job prospects, but often for the sheer joy of learning. It was a relief, after struggling with increasingly indifferent youngsters at school, to work with people who slaved away in the privacy of their own homes and listened greedily to the lectures and her advice.

One of her students, a middle-aged vicar’s wife, mentally bullied by her husband for years, was so emboldened by the discovery that she had a good brain that, on her return from a week’s summer school, at a dinner party she was obliged to give for her husband’s stiff-necked colleagues, and after a slighting remark he made about her, she poured a bowl of soup over his head, packed her bag and left him before serving the dessert. Marguerite, delighted, helped her find a job as a social worker, for which, with her life experience and subsequent first-class degree, she was amply qualified.

Aware of the emerging strength of women who had been suppressed by lack of opportunity, she became passionate about improving their lot in society. This attracted her more than party political dogma. When, with the publication of Germaine Greer’s
The Female Eunuch
, there was an upsurge of feminist militancy, she, campaigner that she had always been, was keen to participate. She took part in women’s consciousness-raising groups, formed in workplaces and hideous tower blocks where women were trapped by low expectations and poverty. She supported some striking cleaners.

More fun was an escapade at the Albert Hall, when she joined a few women who interrupted a petulant Bob Hope compèring the annual cattle market of the Miss World Competition. She sat, rigid with fear, in the stalls, listening to the glib comic tell a string of sexist jokes.

‘I don’t want you to think I’m a dirty old man. I never give women a second thought. The first thought covers it all.’

Then, at the signal of a football rattle whirled by a woman in the front row, she joined the others scattered around the auditorium mooing and blowing whistles. The paper bag of flour she threw landed and burst into a white cloud at Bob Hope’s feet, causing him to scuttle off the stage in terror.

As Marguerite ran round the corridors of the hall, dodging irate attendants, she heard him return, doubtless having quickly consulted his gag-writers, and say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is a nice conditioning course for Vietnam,’ which, considering that that appalling war had already cost millions of lives including those of American troops, was perhaps not in the best of taste.

When she poked her head round a door to shout the slogan ‘We’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re angry’, she heard him further demonstrate his lack of judgement by saying solemnly, ‘Anyone who wants to interrupt an event as beautiful as this must be on some kind of dope.’

Running from the police waiting outside the Albert Hall, her heart pounding with fear and excitement, Marguerite hoped that, if nothing else, they had exposed Bob Hope for the berk that he was. Translation learnt at Risinghill that would not have been approved of by her more militant colleagues: Berk: Berkshire Hunt. Cunt.

Marguerite narrowly escaped arrest, whisked, or rather juddered, away by Tony, who was waiting in a side road in the ancient Gladys, now grandly regarded as a vintage car.

The whole country seemed to be campaigning about something. There were sit-ins, standoffs, marches, strikes, and Tony and Marguerite were in the thick of a lot of them. Afterwards she would retreat thankfully to her comfortable home, which she continued to embellish.

She made forays with Tony and Donald to Habitat for stylish furniture, Casa Pupo for highly coloured rugs, Biba for mulberry satin sheets and huge decorative feathers in jars for her bedroom.

‘A proper tart’s parlour,’ said Tony. ‘You can’t fail to pull in this.’

‘No way, Tony, I’ve finished with all that. I’ve decided I’m no good at it. I had the love of my life when I was young. I’ll never match him. And I’m not going to try any more. I’m middle-aged, I’ve got my pupils, I’ve got you two dear friends, all my good causes, and now a lovely home. What more could a girl need?’

‘There you are, my lovely,’ Donald said, hugging her and grinning at Tony. ‘Never mind our bolshie friend there. As the Tories told us, “We’ve never had it so good.” ’

Chapter 34

But what Harold Macmillan had actually said was, ‘Most of our people have never had it so good.’ Marguerite and Tony knew from their school that there was a whole swathe of the population that was not benefiting from this affluence. The people left out were able to see on their new tellies how the other half lived. The underclass that Miss Scott had warned about, coming out of the secondary moderns, disappointed and ill-educated, were now in their thirties and forties. The subsequent chaos brought about by half-heartedly converting to the comprehensive system had produced yet another generation of the inadequately educated. Those who had suffered and fought in a vicious war and then worked for a better more equal world were in their fifties and older, exhausted and disillusioned; whilst some were acquiring houses, cars, holidays abroad, others were left behind. Many of them were angry. This was not how life was meant to be.

Suddenly the era of kaftans and beads and peace and love seemed to have evaporated and in its place was a period of wanting more, and to hell with anyone who stood in the way of getting it. Poor besieged Heath tried to put an end to a succession of strikes by awkward appearances on television where he appealed to the nation’s public spirit to agree to a pay freeze.

Whilst juggling all that, he managed to get Britain in as part of the European Economic Community. Marguerite insisted on them toasting the event in the best champagne, consumed with titbits of English Stilton cheese, German sausage and Italian bread dipped in Spanish olive oil.

‘No more wars, boys. That’s it. We’re united.’

Tony snorted, ‘Well, apart from the odd skirmish in Vietnam, Korea and Israel and troops on the street in Ireland.’

‘I’m talking about with our neighbours across the Channel. There will be no more European wars; and best of all, I’m no longer part French, part English. I’m European and I love it.’

She served Chicken Kiev as a main course. ‘A gesture of peace to our Communist friends.’

Donald and Tony were full of admiration for her cooking as they dug their knives into the chicken and released the garlic butter wrapped inside.

‘Brilliant. You clever little Delia Smith.’

Marguerite went into the kitchen and brought out an empty carton.

‘Tah rah. Frozen!’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘I’m not. It’s a whole new wonderful world. More champagne?’

After a few celebratory glasses Tony went into one of his periodic working-class angsts.

‘Mmm, it’s all right for some. While we are quaffing champagne what about the miners?’

Donald groaned.

‘Oh God, here we go. He’s going to tell us about the Battle of Saltley Gate – again.’

‘You two wouldn’t understand. You have to be working class. It was one of the most moving moments of my life, seeing those Yorkshire miners marching over the hill to join the picket. Twenty-five thousand men, women and children crowding the streets chanting, “We are the people.” We had to close the bloody gate against the blackleg lorry drivers, didn’t we?’

Donald prompted quietly, ‘And Arthur Scargill—’

‘And young Arthur Scargill in his donkey jacket, red scarf and baseball cap climbed up on the urinal and said it was a victory for the working class. Wonderful. I wept with pride.’

‘Well you’ve always been partial to brick shithouses,’ said Donald.

Tony gave him a withering look.

‘This is not funny, Donald. These are my people. Their communities and their whole way of life are threatened.’