A Woman on the Edge of Time (10 page)

My father's job in the printing industry was rather stolid and old fashioned in comparison, though he was doing his best to liven it up. His success had come from recognising how rapidly the advertising industry was growing in Soho, where his company was by chance located. With his Oxford background — unusual for a printer — my father could relate to and even knew some of the young advertising copywriters and account executives. He bought extra presses, kept the factory running at night, and the business was soon booming.

In November 1959, a year after he and Hannah moved into Hillside Gardens, a trade magazine, the
British Printer
, published a profile of him under the headline, ‘Espresso Age Printer'. Accompanying it is a photograph of my father sitting rather self-consciously on a windowsill in a stylishly cut suit, holding an African carved letter-opener in his hand. He is twenty-nine.

The way he comes across probably says as much about how he wanted to present himself as how he actually was. ‘Gavron is relaxed in manner, serious and eclectic in his interests, with sociological and literary leanings. He is as critical of his times and as aware of their problems as anyone in his 20s, but his success leaves scant room for frustration and he is quite clearly no “angry young man”.'

What he really wanted to be, he told the interviewer, was ‘a motor racing driver'. He had decided against law because ‘it was necessary to dress formally in black' and he ‘came to the conclusion that he just wasn't formal by nature'. Taking up printing instead, ‘he has risen with astonishing rapidity by linking his potential to the fortunes of a new kind of printing business'.

He, too, like his neighbours, was forging his way in the world, and if Hannah, one of the younger wives in the triangle, was still only a student, her husband's success, the lives unfolding around her, must have given her something to aspire to — a glimpse that her own road, with sociology itself blossoming as a discipline in the post-war era, might also take her somewhere new and exciting.

AMONG OUR NEIGHBOURS
in Hillside Gardens, and again when both families moved into slightly larger modern houses, next door to each other, around the corner in Jacksons Lane, were the Weekses — John, the architect, and his wife, Barbara, and their two children, who were similar ages to Simon and me.

It is a long time since I have seen any of the Weekses, but my stepmother tells me that Barbara is still living in Jacksons Lane, and I cycle over and ring on the door. After a few moments, a window opens on the first floor, and a face I recognise looks out and says, ‘Yes?'

When I tell her who I am, she stares at me as if I am a ghost. When she lets me in, I have a similar feeling about the interior. The houses in the row were all built identically, and walking up the slatted wooden stairs, my childhood fear of the gaps between them comes back to me. When Barbara directs me into the L-shaped sitting room, I feel I am in our old house. I don't remember Hannah, but I remember the night I woke and came down to find my father sitting under the stairs with the woman who would become my stepmother.

‘We danced hand in hand across the road,' Barbara says of our two families moving into these houses. As we were now on the wrong side of the road for the communal garden, the parents knocked down the fence between the two back gardens and put up a climbing frame at the bottom, on which I remember playing. I remember, too, taking my first puff of a cigarette with Barbara's son in the alley beside our house. I can't have been older than six or seven.

Hannah was ‘rather lovely and very spirited, always active', Barbara says. When Katrin Stroh locked herself out of her house, it was Hannah who climbed up the drainpipe and squeezed in through a window, though she was pregnant with me. She made Barbara promise not to tell my father.

Barbara reminds me, too, of something I have forgotten — that Hannah had a miscarriage between Simon and me, after seeing the film,
Psycho
.

When Barbara heard that Hannah was dead, her first thought was that it must have been a car crash. Hannah's driving had become more reckless in her last months. It wasn't only that she drove on the pavement; when Hannah did the school run, her children would tell Barbara about the latest incident.

She takes me upstairs to show me the bedrooms — the equivalents of the bunk room I shared with Simon, of Hannah's and my father's room, where my father had sat Simon and me down the morning after her suicide to tell us that our mother was dead. My memory of that morning is so clear in my mind — the whiteness of the walls, the bedspread, the carpet, so like a cliché of a scene of rebirth — that I have always slightly distrusted it. But when I walk in to Barbara's bedroom, it is exactly as I have remembered it.

Later we walk across the road to the communal gardens. Cy Grant, the musician, used to lead the children around here at the summer parties, Barbara says, strumming on his guitar like the pied piper. I have no memory of this, or these gardens, but walking along the paths I feel a strange happiness.

Barbara points at the backs of houses, telling me who lives, or lived, in each one, until we come down a narrow path to the houses at the end of Hillside Gardens. The one we lived in is the very last. There is a little square of back garden and square windows leading into a little square sitting room.

‘I was walking past once, and I saw your parents dancing together,' Barbara says. ‘It was early evening, and it was still light, and your father was holding your mother, and they were doing some kind of ballroom dance.' She puts out her arm to show me, and curls her hand if she is holding someone by the waist.

‘
HANNAH AND POP
[a family nickname for my father],' my grandfather wrote in his diary. ‘How affectionate and loyal they are.'

Sonia told me how ‘wrapped up' they were in each other. They had their own names for each other, their own banter. ‘They were always cracking jokes,' Tasha said. ‘It was as if they were trying to outbid each other.'

Nina Kidron, a friend from the last couple of years of Hannah's life, says it was ‘an experience to be with them, like being with two contenders in a game. Hannah would say something, and your dad would say no, that's not right, and she'd challenge him back. It was quite difficult for anyone else to keep up. Having dinner with them could be like watching a tennis match.'

They were ‘two very strong personalities', according to my father's schoolfriend Roger Lavelle and his wife, Gunilla, who I meet one morning at a café in Highgate. Hannah spoke with ‘such freedom', they say, which I take to mean that she didn't hold back. Gunilla remembers going shopping with Hannah, and how she switched the top and bottom on a swimming costume to get the right sizes for her. ‘Everyone does it nowadays,' she says, ‘but back then it was very daring — it would have been perceived as shoplifting.'

But they also talk about my parents' generosity. When Gunilla and Roger moved into their first house, they found a bottle of wine and a chicken casserole waiting for them; after Gunilla's first son was born, Hannah took her out.

I ask about Hannah's suicide, and they look at each other. ‘We were busy with our own lives,' Gunilla says eventually. They hadn't seen Hannah much in her last year or two, ‘but we felt we should have known there were troubles'.

They have never really discussed Hannah's death, even with each other. It was obvious that my father didn't want to talk about it, so they didn't either, ‘out of loyalty to your father. We took the lead from him.'

All they can suggest is that Hannah was ‘very proud', that she wouldn't have wanted to let people see that she was in trouble.

What they prefer to remember are the good times, such as the occasion when they went to a party in London with my father and Hannah, and found themselves somehow, magically, having breakfast the next morning in Brighton.

Eight

IN NOVEMBER 1959
, after several episodes of back pain, my father had an operation to fuse two vertebrae in his spine. He was in hospital for six weeks, and had to learn to walk again, but Hannah, he makes a point of telling me, was at his bedside every day. ‘Hannah rising to the occasion,' my grandfather wrote in his diary. ‘Calm, efficient, cooperative: all the grumbling, unpleasant, egotistical side of her character has disappeared.'

The following summer, she got her first — ‘one of only two in the whole university out of a total of over 130 students', my grandfather noted proudly in his diary. A couple of months later, she was back at Bedford College to start work on her PhD. She was soon also reviewing books, first for the
Daily Herald
, and later for the
Economist
,
New Society
, and other publications. On top of this, that autumn she became pregnant with me.

I HAVE BEEN
going back regularly to my old house — now my stepmother's house — looking for Hannah material. I have brought home books, photographs, cine films, the sack of cups and rosettes, letters from my father's friend. My stepmother has also talked about some papers she saved when she came to live with us, though she has no idea where she put them. She hates to throw anything away, for which I am grateful, but it also means that it is difficult to find anything in the overflowing cupboards and stacks of boxes. I wander the house, looking in places I have already looked. Trying a rusty old filing cabinet again, I tug harder at a drawer and it comes out a little further, and at the back I see a wad of papers.

I take them out and spread them on the carpet, looking for a diary or notebook, though there is nothing like that. Much of the material seems to be returned cheques, receipts, papers to do with moving house, a travel itinerary. But there is also a sheet of paper with doodles of horses — Hannah still, it seems, kept a place in her heart for horses. There is a folder, too, of correspondence with her publishers. And a few letters, notes really, in her own hand, as well as one or two in my father's. And there is something else in her own hand: a rough draft of a story about a woman giving birth to a baby with two heads.

There is no date on the story, and I don't have enough of her handwriting to try to date it that way. But it seems likely that she wrote it around the time she was having children herself, perhaps during one of her pregnancies. When she was pregnant with Simon she was living in a flat, whereas with me she was in the house in Hillside Gardens, with a fence over which she could lean to talk to the neighbours, as in the story. By the time she had me she had also had the experience of giving birth in a ‘stark disinfected' hospital room.

Does this story express her worries about having another child at the still young age of twenty-four? She had a full-time nanny, but full-time meant the hours during the week when she was at college, or the library, or conducting the ninety-six interviews with young mothers (she was aiming at one hundred, but ran out of steam) that were the basis of her thesis and the book it would become. In the evenings and at weekends, she was responsible for Simon, as well as running the house, cooking, making sure my father's shirts were ironed. Did the baby with two heads represent the two demanding children she would have, or perhaps her competing selves of mother/wife and working/studying woman?

THE ANTIPATHY THE STORY
expresses towards having a baby in hospital is more easily understood — these were the days when maternity wards were the domain of imperious male doctors and bossily efficient midwives — and was solved by having me at home. The story I have always been told is that I was delivered by an independent midwife who was later struck off, though it is only now that I wonder whether there was an underlying message to this. That Hannah was a careless mother. That she didn't look after me properly from the start. That, as my brother once said to me, we were probably better off without her.

The midwife, I discover, was called Erna Wright. I can't find anything about her being struck off, though by the late 1960s she had given up midwifery to open an Austrian restaurant in Camden Town, and she later trained as an aromatherapist. But she also published a landmark book,
The New Midwifery
, promoting the ‘Lamaze' method of training for childbirth, which encouraged women to take control of the process, and was, according to her obituary in the
Guardian
, ‘a catalyst for the development of natural childbirth' in Britain.

As it was, neither Hannah nor I seem to have been harmed by the experience. ‘An easy birth, weighing 9 lbs and arriving in this world in 20 minutes,' my grandfather wrote in his diary. If I had been born in hospital, Hannah would probably have been kept in bed for a week, but at home she was up and about much sooner. When I was four days old, my grandfather recorded ‘a pleasant supper' with Hannah and my father. A few days after this, her friend Phyllis Willmott wrote of giving a party and Hannah coming ‘practically from her confinement — her second baby was born eight days ago'.

FOR PHYLL
, she tells me when I go to see her, Hannah's rising so quickly from her birth bed was an example of the way she was trying to live, her desire to be in control of her body and fate — if it was also ‘pushing it a bit'.

Hannah and Phyll had met when Hannah sought out Phyll's husband, the sociologist Peter Willmott, for advice about her thesis. Phyll speaks of both admiring Hannah and being ‘immediately a little jealous' of her. Hannah came round to their house, and she and Peter were soon deep in talk. ‘Hannah seemed so much more confident than I was,' she says, and even after they became friends, Phyll ‘always had the feeling that I wasn't quite on the same plane as her'.

There was ‘this growing feeling in the early Sixties that, as women, we should be taking on more responsibility for ourselves', she explains. ‘It was difficult, working mothers were disapproved of, most of us didn't make the most of our lives, but Hannah seemed determined to do so. She was in advance of the pack, she was trying to break down the barriers against women.'

A FEW MONTHS
after I was born, Hannah must have spoken to a reporter from the
Evening Standard
, for a diary item in the newspaper in December 1961 records her own views on the balance between her work and family, or at least how she presented these to a journalist:

Twenty-five-year-old company director's wife Hannah Gavron has solved the career-versus-baby problem very well. She has a three-year-old and a baby of four months. Yet with the aid of a daily nanny from 9.30 to 5.30 each weekday she has managed to take a first in sociology at London University and embark on a thesis. ‘I've compromised as I'd have had an awful guilt neurosis if I'd handed Simon and Jeremy over completely,' she said. ‘I put them to bed every night and do all Saturday and Sunday. I don't mind Simon thinking he has two mothers. He seems quite secure and happy.'

Hannah wanted to be, to be seen to be, in full control of her life, Gunilla Lavelle said. But the story of the two-headed baby isn't the only clue to suggest that this wasn't always entirely the case. A couple of weeks before I was born, my grandfather wrote in his diary of finding Hannah ‘in difficulties re her review. Retyped it for her.' A few months later, he noted his concerns about her attempts to mould the family to her needs. ‘She is chafing at restrictions on her free time. To keep free in the evenings, she tries to force Jeremy into three feeds a day. He cries — this means effort: she is tired, irritable with Simon.'

I also have a chance meeting with a woman who tells me that she was my ‘daytime minder' for a brief period when I was three, between our nanny leaving and our au pair girl starting. She talks about me being naughty and ‘tipping over my breakfast and laughing'. Hannah, she says, ‘was always rushing in and out of the house in a hurry'.

WHAT HANNAH WAS
rushing to in the first couple of years of my life were her studies and research, her ninety-six interviews, for her thesis on ‘the conflicts of housebound mothers', as she would later subtitle her book.

Looking back from our own times, the subject seems an obvious one, still relevant today, but in 1960 it was neither obvious nor easy for her to get past her academic supervisors. For all the advances gained by the suffragette movement, and the opportunities the war had given women to work and experience life beyond the family, the woman's movement was in retreat in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the post-war period, emphasis had been put on the role of motherhood in rebuilding Britain. The Beveridge Report, the basis for social reforms, spoke of how ‘housewives as mothers have vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British race and of British ideals in the world'.

Women's magazines of this period similarly lauded the family. ‘Women were no longer shown, as they had been in the stories published between the wars, as career pioneers, or as the patriotic activist of the Second World War,' Jessica Mann writes in
The Fifties Mystique
. All the post-war ‘fictional heroines ever wanted to have was a husband, children and a pretty house'.

Even social science seemed to support this. Parenting experts like John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott preached the importance of the presence of mothers to their children. In 1958, the year my brother was born, Bowlby produced a pamphlet in which he warned that motherhood is ‘scamped at one's peril'.

When Hannah began her thesis in 1960, Katharine Whitehorn's famous article about ‘sluts' in the
Observer
, which challenged the idea of the perfect mother, was still three years away; as was the publication of Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique
, which would have much less impact in Britain than in America. The resurgence of the women's movement proper was almost a decade away.

Sheila Rowbotham, one of the most eloquent proponents and historians of that movement, writes that, to young women at that time, feminism meant ‘shadowy figures in long old-fashioned clothes who were somehow connected to the headmistresses who said you shouldn't wear high heels and make-up. It was all very prim and stiff and mainly concerned with keeping you away from boys.'

As a sociology student, Hannah might have come across isolated work from the 1950s, such as Viola Klein's papers on working wives. Perhaps she was inspired by the setting up in April 1960 — just as she was finishing her undergraduate degree — of the Housebound Wives Register, whose aim was to put isolated housewives in touch with each other. It may be she was also influenced by her father's strong moral worldview, the books he had written about a shared Palestine and racial equality. But it seems likely that there was also a personal element — that, for all her privileges of class and money, her choice of subject was in part a response to her own experiences, the stresses of balancing her studies with being a wife, a mother, a woman, an individual.

HER BEDFORD FILE
shows it took her time both to find her title and get it approved. Her first proposal was tentative — a study of young mothers ‘to see how far the social and economic changes affecting the status of women are giving rise to new marital and family patterns' — and even this met resistance. A note in her file informed her that her proposal ‘has not been approved in its present form and you should discuss it with your supervisor before submitting another title for consideration on the enclosed form'. But her determination to continue is also recorded: ‘On McGregor's advice she is withdrawing her application for the DSJR [Department for Social Justice and Regeneration] grant, on the grounds that she is unwilling to change the subject of her research which would not be acceptable to the DSJR.'

Once she got past these obstacles and began her interviews, her focus grew clearer. By early 1962, she had a more specific title: ‘The position and opportunities of young mothers — progress or retrogression. (A study of the difficulties confronting young mothers in the contemporary family based on a comparative study of working class and middle class mothers.)'

Her interviewees were provided by a doctor friend's general practice in Kentish Town. Her interviewing technique, she recorded, was fluid, her aims qualitative rather than statistical, the emphasis placed on ‘presenting a critical picture of the lives of these families rather than a rigid piece of scientific construction'. The thesis was soon progressing well. She may have had to give up her application for a DSJR grant, but she was awarded a postgraduate scholarship in her first year, and the choice of two in her second. ‘Interviewing completed, now writing up thesis,' her supervisor, Ronald Fletcher, wrote in a brief report towards the end of 1962. ‘Very good work.'