A Book of Silence (2 page)

It worked best when we were all quite small. In 1968, when every newspaper in the country was bemoaning the outrageous behaviour of teenagers, my parents had five of them. I think retrospectively
that they lost their nerve a bit. I am not sure what they imagined would happen. If you encourage your children to hold authority lightly, eventually they will work out that you are ‘authority’ and hold you lightly too. They were better with smaller children – we had fairly traumatic and very noisy teens.

There were good moments. One thing that is hard to insert into this account is just how sophisticated and politically engaged my parents were. I remember the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, for example, with great vividness because one of my parents’ closest friends was an admiral in the US navy. He was staying with us, we went on a lovely sunny day trip to Cambridge and as we walked along the Backs, a very young man from the US Embassy appeared. He had been searching for Uncle Harry personally; he had to fly home immediately to Defend His Country against Communism. The following year I knew about the Profumo affair too, though rather lopsidedly. It was the cause of a rare fight between my parents, who usually managed to maintain perfect solidarity against their children’s activities. My father taught me a bitter little limerick about it, which he encouraged me to recite at a cocktail party of his Butlerite Conservative friends (several of them eminent) and which rather accurately reflected his own politics.

The fight between my parents was not, interestingly, about the content of these lines, but about my father encouraging me to ‘show off’. A bit of me still wonders what on earth they thought would come of it, especially for their girls. You bring them up free and flamboyant, and are then totally surprised and even angry with them when they don’t magically turn into ‘ladies’. It was, for me at least, a strange mixture of upper-class convention and intellectual
aspiration. There was a good, and noisy, example of my father’s confused vision a few years later. I was expelled, fairly forcibly, from the House of Commons in 1973 for disrupting a debate on the Equal Opportunities Act, then a Private Members’ Bill. I was pregnant at the time.
The Times
(my parents’ daily, obviously) made this a front-page item including my name. I was rather anxious about how my parents would react. My mother was appalled that I should do this
while I was pregnant
, but my father was entirely delighted. Not because he favoured such actions or had any particular enthusiasm for Equal Opportunities, but because the person responsible for ‘Order in the House’ was an old friend of his, whom nonetheless he found both prissy and pompous – he was much amused by the embarrassment that I would have caused this friend, having to deal with ‘one of us’, with someone he actually knew. He may also, of course, have admired my boldness, without admiring the way I had chosen to exercise it.

We were inevitably sent off to boarding schools, the boys disgracefully at seven or eight and my sisters and I a little later. I am just about prepared to acknowledge that there might conceivably be children whom public school, under the old boarding system, positively suits and that there are homes so dire that boarding is a relief or even a joy, but it remains for me one of the very few institutions that is bad for both the individuals it ‘privileges’ and our society as a whole. In this context, however, all I want to do is point out that the entire ethos depended on no one ever being allowed any silence or privacy except as a punishment; and where the constant din inevitably created by over two hundred young women was amplified by bare corridors and over-large rooms. I found it a damaging, brutal experience, made worse by the fact that in my parents’ world not to enjoy your schooldays was proof that you were an inferior human being – you were supposed to be a ‘good mixer’, to ‘take the rough with the smooth’ and enjoy the team spirit. If you are feeling miserable and inferior the last thing you are going to do is
tell
parents who think that the way you feel is proof that you are miserable and inferior.

Perhaps the stakes were too high; perhaps they were too proud of us. At home we were supposed to get into Cambridge,
and
wear long white gloves, a tartan silk sash and our deceased grandmother’s pearls, and dance at Highland Balls. I was expected to have my own political opinions,
and
have them turn out the same as my parents’. We were expected to be sociable, active and witty,
and
hard-working, industrious and calm. We were meant to be sociable and popular and bizarrely chaste. At school we were meant to be educated, independent, self-assured,
and
totally innocent. On Saturday mornings we all had to kneel down in the assembly hall so that the mistresses could walk along the rows and make sure everyone’s skirt exactly touched the ground. I am still not sure what the terror of the miniskirt was about, really. It all got pretty intolerable and very noisy.

In 1968 I escaped. These were the days before the Gap Year was a well-organised middle-class rite of passage, but if you stayed on at school after A levels to do the then separate Oxbridge entrance exams, you finished school at Christmas and had an inevitable gap until the following October. My father filled this gap by packing us off to any foreign continent of our choice and leaving us to get on with it. It was probably the first time in my life that I had been on my own and responsible for myself; it should have been a time to break out. My skirts were spectacularly shorter than anyone in America had ever seen before – hippies and counterculture and the politics of protest and feminism itself may have been US imports, but the miniskirt was authentically British – and my class accent was less immediately identifiable, but I was not really up to it. It was six months of being the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong moment, just. I left Washington the day before Martin Luther King was shot and arrived in Los Angeles a week after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. In San Francisco I did go to Haight Ashbury, but I went as a tourist. From that perspective it seemed sordid and scary, and I left at once.

I do remember, though, one bright hot dawn in the Arizona desert when I stared into my first huge nothing: it was the Grand
Canyon. It was red and gold and vast and silent. Perhaps I should have sat down on the rim and stayed for a while, but it was too soon. I gawped for a bit and walked down a little way, then I turned round, got back on the Greyhound bus and went on to somewhere else.

Then, that autumn, I went to Oxford. I became a student at exactly and precisely the right time – for then ‘to be young was very heaven’. What more joyful and lucky thing could happen to a privileged public-school girl than to find herself a student at Oxford between 1968 and 1971? It is fashionable now to decry the astonishing, extraordinary period in the late sixties – to dismiss it, or to blame it. I refuse to go there. I am with Angela Carter:

Everything interesting and important that has happened to me since began in Oxford in the three years that I was an undergraduate. There I discovered the things that have shaped my life – the things that shape it still, however unexpectedly, as I sit on my doorstep and listen to the silence: socialism, feminism, friendship and Christianity; myself as writer, as mother and now as silence seeker.

It was not instant. I arrived in Oxford more virginal in more ways than now seems credible. I felt like a cultural tourist, unable to connect directly with the hippies, with their drugs, mysticism and music; or with the politicos and their Parisian excitements, though I went like a tourist to hear Tariq Ali speak at the Student Union; or with the ‘sexual revolutionaries’ who whizzed off glamorously to London and complained about the repressive college, which expected us to be in bed, alone, by 10.30. I had to cope with the realisation that I was not the cleverest person in the world – a mistaken belief that had sustained me for years. It was culture shock; I had a strange, nagging sense that I was where I wanted to be, but I wasn’t quite getting it: an odd mixture of excitement and frustration. I wanted it. I wanted all of it. I did not know how to have it. My life could have gone horribly wrong at this point.

Then, just in time and gloriously lucky, I tumbled, by chance, by grace, in with a new group of people. They were a group of American students, most of them Rhodes Scholars and all of them active against the Vietnam War. They hung out in a shambolic house in north Oxford. I am not entirely sure why they took me under their collective wing, but they did and I was saved. What they gave me was a connection point between politics and personal lives, the abundant energy that comes from self-interested righteousness, a sense that there were causes and things that could be done about them, and large dollops of collective affection. This household has become famous for something other than their sweet kindness to me – because one of the people in it was Bill Clinton, who has always, as far as I am concerned, been a loyal friend and an enormous resource; but it was not just him: it was the whole group of them.

My world was transformed. The sky was bright with colour. I smoked my first joint, lost my virginity and went on my first political demonstration. I stopped attending lectures and my ears unblocked so I started to hear what was going on around me. I realised that a classical education, Whig history and compassionate liberalism were not the only values in the world. I was set suddenly
and gloriously free. I made other friends, did other things – and we talked and talked and talked.

A bit later this household gave me, rather unexpectedly, something every bit as important. One evening Bill asked me if I would go with him to hear Germaine Greer speak at Ruskin College, shortly before
The Female Eunuch
was published. He had heard she had terrific legs (she did) but very properly thought it was the sort of event that he wanted a woman to go with. Being Bill he quickly rounded up some more people and that night I met Mandy Merck and thus discovered the brand-new Women’s Liberation Movement.

Once I felt secure enough to cope, it transpired that actually one thing my childhood had provided me with were the skills of collectivity. Groups suited me; quick-fire combative talk was something I had practised around the dining-room table from my earliest years. With well-trained energy I engaged in the very noisy, highly verbal student political life of the time – the noisy articulacy of the socialist left and then the emerging verbal culture of early feminism. In an odd way it was like all the good things and none of the bad ones from my own childhood. To speak out, to tell aloud, to break the silence (and, to be honest, to shout down the opposition) was not only permissible – it was virtuous, if not compulsory.

In 1972 I had my first short stories published; I got married and I got pregnant. My husband was an American from upstate New York; he came to Oxford on a scholarship and stayed. By the time we got married he was a trainee Anglican vicar of the extreme Catholic persuasion – high church and high camp went together in those happier days. In the early seventies the best of the adherents of Anglo-Catholicism were all so funny, so witty and so quick, self-mocking, heavily ironic and we all loved talking. While he was training my husband invited a new friend to supper one night; the friend, nervous about dining with a heavily pregnant feminist intellectual, asked someone what we were like. ‘Don’t worry,’ said this mutual friend, ‘they all talk at the same time, very loudly; so you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.’

So then I was an Anglo-Catholic socialist feminist. Perhaps the only thing that holds these two together is that they are both very noisy things to be. I quickly extended the din range, though; I became a vicar’s wife and a mother. A vicarage is the least quiet place imaginable – a house that is never your own and never empty or silent.

My daughter was born in 1973. Looking back now, I know that my first experiences of positive nourishing silence were her night feeds. My husband’s great-grandfather was a carpenter – he had made furniture and when we got married my parents-in-law had sent from America the most exquisite New England four-poster bed made of bird’s eye maple with golden candy-twist posts. In the soft darkness of the pre-dawn, propped up in this beautiful bed, with my beautiful daughter contentedly dozing, I encountered a new sort of joy. From where I am now this does not surprise me, because that relationship between mother and child is one of the oldest and most enduring images of silence in Western culture. In about 2000
BCE
one of the psalmists wrote: