A Woman on the Edge of Time (19 page)

Hannah was more fortunate in some ways than Phyll, and other women of her age. Her husband's success in his work meant she could afford a full-time nanny, and later an au pair girl, and as long as it didn't interfere with the running of the household, my father encouraged Hannah to study and work.

She was lucky, too, in being naturally strong in will and character. One of Hannah's Bedford contemporaries told me how she went back to the college to do some research on battered babies, but McGregor ‘called me in and told me that no one was interested in the subject, and bullied me into giving up'.

Hannah didn't give up. ‘She had no sense of deferring to authority,' Bernice Martin said. ‘To succeed in those days, women had to give up something — children, work, femininity — whereas Hannah wanted and appeared able to have everything.'

But having everything, as the brave new world of the 1960s seemed perhaps for the first time in history to be offering, wasn't easy. It took a lot of effort, as it does today, to be a mother, a wife, a worker. There was little slack in Hannah's life, Gunilla Lavelle told me. There was no room for spontaneity in how she lived, Erica said. And there was also the not-so-brave old patriarchy waiting to trip up the new woman, belittle her, force her back.

TOWARDS THE END OF 2010
, around the time I was having these conversations, I went with my wife to our local cinema to see
Made in Dagenham
. It is based on the true story of the strike for equal pay by the women workers at the Ford car plant in Dagenham in 1968. I thought it might have some relevance to Hannah's story, but that was not our main reason for going. It had been reviewed well, as a British ‘feelgood film', so it promised to be a relaxing night out.

The film was chirpy, cheeky, and we were soon laughing with the rest of the audience. (‘Chop, chop, or we'll miss the buffet,' one of the young women workers tells her boyfriend as he has sex with her in his car.)

But as the film went on, and though the tone remained mostly light, and the jokes continued to come, my own mood changed. As the women workers — and, in particular, the main character, a young woman who even looked with her dark bob and big smile a little like Hannah — grew in militancy, in determination, they met with increasing condescension, anger, and obstruction from most of the men in the film. Watching the slights the main character received at the hands of a bullying schoolmaster, patronising union leaders and bosses, an initially uncomprehending husband, and even her female friends — let alone having to deal with her own uncertainties — it seemed to me that I was seeing into Hannah's heart, my mother's own struggles, and I watched the last hour with tears running helplessly down my cheeks.

Fourteen

I WAS FIRST CONSCIOUS
of suicide as a companion myself when I came back to London at the age of twenty-nine, Hannah's last age. I had broken up with my girlfriend, and was spending a lot of my time alone as I worked on a book. Things I had witnessed as a journalist mixed in my head with thoughts of Hannah, her death, and at night I would lull myself to sleep with images of bullets barrelling towards me, and knives, sometimes held in my own hand, plunging into my chest.

Since then I have never entirely lost these thoughts; I have carried with me, through bad times and good, the possibility of suicide, its comfort, its siren voice. But in all these years I have never seriously considered, or taken any practical steps towards, killing myself.

In the course of my conversations with Hannah's friends, perhaps because I have encouraged them to break one taboo, I have often found myself in the role of confessor, privy to their secret griefs. I have heard stories of rape, marital violence, struggles with alcohol, depression. One woman told me how she had locked herself in the lavatory and taken valium at her own wedding. Another spoke of her fiancé drowning in the Arctic, his body never found.

But for all their troubles, they are all here to talk about them. So why not Hannah? How did her ‘ordinary life crisis' carry her to her death?

THERE ARE MANY THEORIES
about suicide. For Camus, ‘judging whether life is or is not worth living' is ‘the fundamental question of philosophy'. For Freud,
thanatos
, or the death drive, is the desire to return to the state of quiescence that precedes birth. For Durkheim, suicide is a product of social forces: either the bonds to the community are too weak, or too strong, or the suicide is caught out by abrupt social change.

I have been given, have read in my grandfather's diaries and elsewhere, more particular explanations for Hannah's suicide. She was depressive. She was narcissistic. She was schizoid. She was ruthless. She burned too brightly to live a whole life. She couldn't bear rejection, imperfection, compromise.

My grandfather seems to have wanted to believe, in his constant returning in his diaries to her childhood dramas, that the ‘suicide potential', as Durkheim called it, was inside her all along, though at other times he blamed Anne Wicks, or O. R. McGregor. For a period I was convinced, or tried to convince myself, that the answer lay with the headmaster's abuse — that he was the smoking gun.

But, of course, no suicide is the product of only one thing. In 2004, a new type of verdict, the narrative verdict, was introduced into coroners' courts in England and Wales. Narrative verdicts are used in instances where the cause of death, or the responsibility for that death, cannot be easily categorised: such as the shooting of a man mistakenly identified as a terrorist, or when it is not clear whether a person has meant to take his or her own life.

A narrative verdict wasn't available at Hannah's inquest — and even if it had been, it couldn't have been used. As the coroner said, it was clear that Hannah ‘deliberately and efficiently' took her own life. But then the coroner's concern was only with how Hannah died — not why she killed herself.

A narrative verdict is available to me, though. It is not a perfectly formed story. It may be partly questions or lists. It may present opposing ideas. It accepts that it doesn't provide a complete or unchallengeable account. It is as much as is known, as much as can be drawn from the information available.

What follows is my narrative verdict, my attempt to fathom what Hannah's coroner described as ‘a state of mind we cannot know'.

‘WE WERE TOO YOUNG
to get married,' my father admitted in one of our talks. But he was twenty-four, nearly twenty-five. Since leaving school seven years earlier, he had completed his national service in the army, partly in Berlin during the airlift, a time he talks about fondly. He was twice made corporal, and twice busted down to private. He rode a motorbike, made a parachute jump, had a German girlfriend, was taught to foxtrot and quickstep by the sergeant-major's wife.

After the army, he went to Oxford, where he performed in comedy sketches, played rugby and cricket for his college, edited the books pages of the university newspaper. He had a serious affair with a girl he thought about marrying. He earned a law degree. He made friends and connections to last a lifetime.

After Oxford, he spent a year teaching at a boarding school, where he had his passionate liaison with the under matron. He passed his bar exams. By the time of his marriage, he had been working at his cousin-in-law's printing company for a year and a half and been promoted to sales director, on a good salary.

He was young for the job, but he wanted what came with being older, with success, with being established. When, not long after, he was made managing director of the company, he went to a barber and asked for a haircut to make him look older. The barber suggested dying his sideburns grey, and as a result the secretaries ‘treated him more seriously'. He was too embarrassed to do it again, but he took up smoking cigars to give himself gravitas.

‘I was anxious to get on,' he told an interviewer on a BBC radio Home Service programme in November 1963. He was also happy to be married, settled. He adored Hannah, and wanted children. ‘I never wanted to be anything other than a family man,' Phyll Willmott remembers him telling her after Hannah's death.

HANNAH, TOO
, had always wanted to be older, was impatient to grow up. She insisted on leaving school before she had completed her A levels. She wanted to be married at seventeen, my grandmother's story went, and I can believe that, like some of the women she wrote about in
The Captive Wife
, she was ‘desperate' to leave home, to escape the constrictions of living with her parents.

But for all her precocity, her veneer of sophistication, her letters show how young she still was. The way she writes of the ‘utter heaven' of driving my father's car. Her excitement at telling Tasha about my father sleeping in her bed ‘all night'. Was this the first time she had spent a night in bed with a man?

Her letters also reveal her nervousness at the speed at which things were advancing with my father. In the first letter that mentions him, he is already asking her ‘to come and live with him (I declined)' and within two months he has given her ‘an open offer of marriage'. She is ‘scared', she writes.

She was eighteen when she married. Her application for a new passport in her married name for her honeymoon tells its own story. In the first page (the rest is missing) of a letter to Tasha, she writes, ‘we had a simply heavenly honey moon encountering none of the traditional difficulties'.

But a letter in her RADA file from four months later hints at a realisation that married life might not have been all ‘heaven'. ‘The end of the year production,' she wrote to the RADA office, ‘will be mainly members of my old class and I would love to be able to see them all again on stage, so I wonder if you could possibly let me have two tickets.' Was she regretting, in some part of her, leaving RADA so hurriedly, swapping its excitement and companionship for ironing shirts, cooking meals, waiting for her husband to come home? ‘I do expect an occasional letter,' she wrote to Tasha, who was now at Oxford University, ‘if only to describe to me the life I have somehow managed to miss.'

THESE FEELINGS DO NOT SEEM
to have been too long lasting or serious at this stage. She was young, life lay ahead of her, nothing was too serious. She was in love with my father, had the excitement of holidays in the south of France and the Alps, weekends at hotels by the sea. She was soon, anyway, taking up a place at university herself, and if any doubts, regrets, rose up in the years ahead — when she found herself a mother at twenty-one and again at twenty-four, in her interviews with her captive wives, at dinners with my father's middle-aged business associates — her days were too full of her children, her studies, attending to my father, running the household, to dwell on them.

The change came, or began to come, when she went to work at Hornsey College of Art. Her first year seems to have been a time of settling in, learning how to handle a class, give a lecture. She was still working hard on her thesis, and a good deal of her energy was also going into supporting my father in his efforts to buy his own printing company. In one of the notes to my father, I found in my stepmother's filing cabinet, Hannah wrote how she ‘put myself to one side and threw myself completely into helping you get what you wanted'.

But by the time she started her second year at Hornsey, in September 1964, my father's business deal had been secured, and he was concentrating on turning around his new company, with fewer demands on Hannah. She had completed her thesis, and was waiting for it to be approved. Simon was at school, and at three I had also now started at full-time nursery. For the first time, perhaps, since Simon was born, every minute of her day was not prescribed.

Hornsey was itself going through a period of rapid change as it embraced, helped to create, the new mood and ideas of the 1960s. ‘Many of the era's distinctive cultural developments' sprang from the art colleges, Brian Marwick, a historian of the 1960s, wrote in the
Sunday Times
. ‘At Salford, Hornsey, Norwich and St Martins,' they discussed ‘Sartre, played rock'n'roll and designed clothes'.

More younger teachers were being taken on for the expanding general studies course, including, in September 1964, John Hayes. A month later, on 11 October, my grandfather noted in his diary that Hannah had changed: ‘Exotic looking: black hair straightened, red dress, brown skin.'

MOST OF MY PARENTS' FRIENDS
, their neighbours, my father himself, were forward-thinking for their time, were the generation who had laid the groundwork for the 1960s. But they were already in their thirties, even forties, when it came along: the 1960s, as Larkin famously wrote, were ‘just too late' for them.

Hannah, though, was those few years younger, still on the right side of thirty. She was spending her days at Hornsey, mixing with younger people, teaching young artists, watching them enjoy the fruits, the sexual intercourse, and ‘unlosable game', as Larkin put it, of the unfolding new age. She had also spent the last year writing up her interviews with young mothers who lamented that they had given up their youth too soon. ‘I'd like to have had more time for going dancing,' one told her; ‘I would have liked to have travelled,' said another.

Among the papers from my stepmother's filing cabinet is a page torn out of a women's magazine. Part of a feature on ‘The '64 Beat', it shows a young woman with the Mary Quant bob that Hannah adopted that autumn — or the ‘Boop-Boop-a-Do', as the magazine called it. Dressing up in a new way, Angela Carter wrote in a 1967 essay, ‘Notes for a Theory of Sixties Style', ‘gives a relaxation from one's own personality and the discovery of maybe unsuspected new selves'. Clad in her red dress, or her mini skirt, and thigh-length Courrèges boots, with her Boop-Boop-a-Doo hairstyle, Hannah was a new person, newly young. She stood in the corridors at Hornsey, as David Page remembers, smoking her cheroots, eyeing up the male students. And, in time, as young people do, she fell in love.

THE WAY JOHN HAYES
describes his relationship with Hannah — the excitable talk, the exploration of sexuality — makes it sound like a university love affair, and perhaps that was what it was like for Hannah, too, at first. More than one person has told me how attractive John was, with his wavy blonde hair and northern charm. There was the thrill of discovering someone new, the illicit assignations. Their school days, Hannah had written to Tasha, had left them with the feeling that ‘if one is not in love with anyone in particular, life is very dreary'.

But if the affair began as a reclamation of her too quickly abandoned youth, a facing down of regrets, it soon seems to have grown, at least for Hannah, into something more serious, more freighted. It was partly that her situation was less carefree than John's. She had children. She didn't have an understanding with my father about affairs, as John had with the other John. But being with John also opened Hannah's eyes to new possibilities, to a new kind of relationship for a new kind of woman in the new world.

My sense is that my father hadn't changed much in the years of their marriage. He had become more successful, more confident, had grown more into himself. But Hannah at twenty-nine was very different from the clever schoolgirl with dreams of being an actress she had been when she met my father. She had experienced the realities of married life, motherhood. She had spent several years studying the situation of young women in society. Working at Hornsey had exposed her to new ways of thinking. Nina Kidron told me that her husband, Michael, a Marxist thinker and colleague of Hannah's at Hornsey, had ‘radicalised Hannah, introduced her to left-wing ideas'. Susie, too, remembers a rare conversation in Hannah's last summer in which she confided that a ‘world was opening up for her because of her job at Hornsey, that she was meeting interesting new people with radical views, and was finding herself in tune with these views, not just in sociology, but in philosophy, politics, design, psychology'.