A Woman on the Edge of Time (9 page)

Other than that, the first mention of Hannah is in March 1955, a few months before her wedding. He has had, he wrote, some ‘exploratory conversations with Hannah about her future', though frustratingly he doesn't say more.

Hannah wrote to RADA that she was leaving to attend the Institut Français. I ask my father what she did there, and he says she took a French A level so she could apply to university. But while she did eventually go to university, that was two years later, and if she took French A level that year before her marriage, she doesn't seem even to have passed, which seems unlikely.

In my old house, where my stepmother still lives, I find a batch of letters from a friend of my father's who was living in Aden. ‘Why has she given up the drama?' he wrote after Hannah came back from her Israel tour. ‘Your influence or Israel's? What is she doing now? You can't be living in sin all the time.'

It is a question I ask, too — and to which I don't have an answer. She was young, in love, had a wedding to think about. But I find it hard to believe that she spent the nine months between giving up RADA and getting married planning her wedding. When you live for only twenty-nine years, each one of those years matters, and it bothers me that I don't know what she was doing during this time — or to think that she was doing not very much, wasting those precious months.

WHAT I DO HAVE
from this period, or topping and tailing this period, are a pair of cine films: one, the wedding of Hannah's cousin Naomi in the summer of 1954; the other, her own wedding, a year later, in July 1955.

The first film begins with flickering scenes of people arriving at the synagogue, smiling and waving at the camera — among them, Susie and Naomi's young sister, Donna, both aged about ten, in pale-blue bridesmaids' dresses. Later, at the reception, the bride and the groom cut the cake and kiss. The camera takes in the guests, men in glasses with thick frames, large-chested women in elaborate hats, until it comes to a young woman in the act of throwing her head back to take a slug from a bottle. When she lowers the bottle she is revealed to be Hannah. Seeing the camera, she pokes her head towards it, closes her eyes, and bares her teeth in a wide, gurning grin.

Outside later for the family portraits, the camera pans over a family line-up: the two sets of parents, the bride, her veil blowing in the wind, and groom, until it comes to Hannah again. She is wearing a pale-blue dress, too, has a white posy in her hand, is also a bridesmaid. So briefly that a less conscientious observer might miss it, her head shoots forward, and she makes the same gurning grin.

IN THE SECOND FILM
, the same old cars pull up in front of the synagogue, the same sort of Jewish people get out — in some cases, actually the same people, though this time when the groom appears it is my father, boyish and toothy, in top hat and morning suit. He smiles at the camera and salutes and walks forward, taking off his hat as he passes the camera.

Other relatives appear: a round-faced Shirley, her sisters, her mother, my father's parents. And here now is Hannah, posing on the steps with my grandfather, her veil blowing in the wind this time, dressed not in black, as she had boasted to Elisabeth Russell Taylor, but in white. She is still only eighteen, but it is her wedding, and instead of gurning she smiles demurely.

Afterwards, on the synagogue steps with my father, she kisses him chastely, and then kisses him again, perhaps at the request of a photographer, and this time they hold their kiss a little longer.

The film moves to the reception in a garden. My father has changed into a suit; Hannah is now in something black. Here, though not sitting together, are my grandmother and my grandfather, the father of the bride. He is young, still in his forties — the age I am now. He has undone the top button of his shirt, and his tie is flung over his shoulder. He holds up his hand to the camera, and smiles.

Seven

THEY DROVE DOWN
to the south of France for their honeymoon — in a Standard Eight, my father says, more at ease talking about his car than about Hannah. Back in London, they rented a flat off the King's Road. It was away from north London, where their families lived, but that was the attraction. My father had passed his Bar exams, but he didn't have the money, or the patience perhaps, to build up a barrister's practice, and the previous autumn he had started working for a printing firm in Soho, owned by the husband of a cousin. I have heard the story of this job before: how on his first day he was handed a broom and told to start sweeping; how within a couple of years he was running the company.

By the time they moved to Chelsea, he had been promoted to sales director and was earning a good salary. At the weekends, he and Hannah would drive out of London to stay at places like the New Inn in Winchelsea, on the East Sussex coast. That first winter they went skiing in Courchevel. There are photographs of them on the slopes, on lifts, with a skier in a bear costume, dancing in a bar.

The following spring, he bought a half-interest in a sailing boat that they kept at Dell Quay in West Sussex — a few miles from where he and my stepmother would later buy our barn. A man who lived in a hut on the foreshore looked after the boat, he remembers, for two and sixpence a week.

What he doesn't remember about these times, any more than in the year before they were married, is how Hannah filled her days. He was working hard to build up the business, he says, so that was where his thoughts were concentrated. But in the archives of Bedford College, the part of London University where she would eventually study, I find a clue. ‘Left school at seventeen and married almost at once,' a note in her file says. ‘Trained as a shorthand typist in order to supplement her husband's earnings. Her husband has had an unexpected promotion and she is now free to enter a university, which she has always wished to do.'

Secretarial school is the last place I would have expected to find Hannah, but when I ask my father, he says it ‘rings a bell', though ‘it certainly wasn't to supplement my income'. He suggests it might have been at my grandmother's suggestion, and points out that I did a typing course myself, though that was for three weeks, and because I wanted to be a journalist.

It is my father's wife who comes up with a suggestion. Hannah was newly married, and in the months after the wedding she would have been learning how to shop, cook, wash, iron, clean. She wouldn't have had the time or energy for anything more than a part-time secretarial course.

This still doesn't sound like the Hannah of my imagining, the author of
The Captive Wife
, until I remember a passport of Hannah's in which she had written her profession as ‘Housewife'. Looking at it again, I check the date it was issued: a couple of weeks before her wedding. Had she applied for a new passport so she could go on honeymoon under her married name?

HER PERIOD AS HOUSEWIFE
and shorthand typist did not, anyway, last long. Her application to Bedford College is dated February 1956, eight months after she was married. It was almost three years since she had left school, and, in comparison to her RADA application, her handwriting is smaller, neater, more grown-up. This time, the signature for her guardian is not her father's but her husband's. Asked to give his ‘Profession or Business', my father wrote ‘Barrister-at-Law', though he was working for a printing company rather than as a lawyer.

Hannah also practised a little untruth on the form — calling herself Hannah rather than Ann, her legal name, which has been written in on top by another hand. More seriously, letters in her file reveal that she altered the name on the copies of the exam certificates she sent in with her application.

She had ‘always been known as Hannah', she wrote when her deceit was discovered, and ‘it is my desire to use the name Hannah, which is why in the copy of the earlier certificates that I sent you, I substituted Hannah for Ann'.

The registrar wrote back that she had ‘committed a serious misdemeanour', adding that he had ‘some excuse for lacking confidence'. Fortunately he did not press the issue, beyond telling her that she would ‘have to go through your University course with the name of Ann, even if you prefer the name of Hannah'.

It was, I am learning, a characteristic of Hannah: a disregard for rules, a sense, as with her driving on the pavement, that the normal codes of behaviour weren't for her. The story she told about my father's promotion freeing her to go to university was an understandable excuse for her lack of direction over the previous couple of years. But her file reveals that she also managed to finesse her way into Bedford. By the time she inquired about entrance, applications had closed, and she was told she would have to wait a year. Instead, the note in her file reveals, ‘she called in to see Lady Williams', head of the sociology department.

Lady — or Professor Gertrude — Williams ‘was not in college', and instead Hannah was seen by a sociology lecturer, O. R. McGregor, to whom she told her story. She had come, she said, on ‘the recommendation of Mr Mark Abrams', a well-known social statistician, who was a friend of my grandfather's and also, it seems, of Professor Williams's. Her name-dropping, along with her charm and intelligence, must have worked, for McGregor wrote that he was ‘well impressed by her sensible outlook', and Hannah was allowed to sit the entrance exam, as long as she acquired a third A Level. (It was now, it seems, that she took and passed her French A level at the Institut Français.)

HANNAH BEGAN HER
sociology degree at Bedford College — then an all-women's college on the edge of Regents Park — the following autumn, shortly after her twentieth birthday. She would study here for the next eight years, almost all the rest of her life, but I know nothing about her time at the college, other than that she got a first and wrote the thesis she would turn into
The Captive Wife
.

My father tells me he enjoyed reading the books Hannah brought home from Bedford, but he seldom went there. Nor can he think of any friends she made there, other than Anne Wicks, who I know, having looked her up early on, died of a cancer a few years ago. He does, though, mention Anne's husband, ‘a rather nice chap' called Tony Wicks. He was an engineer, and my father had got him a job at his printing company. When Tony divorced Anne, he married someone else who worked there, and with this information I track him down.

Tony remembers, he says, Hannah's ‘jet black hair, what I call Jewish hair'. Anne was ‘a scholarship girl, from a poor family in Kent'. She was ‘very bright, intense'. She started out in sociology but ended up in market research, which brought her into contact with ‘media types, airy fairy types'. He was just ‘a dull engineer', and they grew apart. ‘We just dissolved,' he says. ‘No animosity, no settlement, no difficulties, nothing.'

He mentions a couple who lived in Primrose Hill who were close to Anne, but more interesting to me is another Bedford student he says was friendly with both Anne and Hannah. It takes me a while to find Erica, but when I do she tells me, ‘I was remembering Hannah only the other day. She gave me a wooden salad bowl that I still have, and I think of her when I use it.'

Like Hannah, and Anne Wicks, Erica was a year or two older than most of the other students. Her home life had been difficult, and it had taken her a while to get herself to university. She met Hannah fairly early on and ‘attached herself' to her. Hannah was very organised, and Erica often borrowed her notes.

Bedford College in the late 1950s was still very traditional. Erica lived in halls her first year, and the girls wore gowns for supper and had an evening curfew. Teaching was by lecture, though ‘Hannah sometimes shouted out questions'. Erica also remembers making mischief with Anne and Hannah with the statistics lecturer. He was a good-looking young man, and the three women would sit in the front row of his lectures ‘wearing low-cut tops, showing our cleavage'. He spoke without notes, walking up and down, and would splutter when he saw them.

She often had coffee with Hannah during the day, but she never saw her in the evenings. After her first year, Erica lived out of college and had a boyfriend at the Slade art college, and they would go out to jazz clubs, but Hannah always went home to my father. She sensed that it wasn't easy for Hannah trying to balance the different pieces of her life.

Despite this, Hannah did ‘a great kindness to her'. In her third year at Bedford she became pregnant, and Hannah helped her with having an abortion. This was still illegal in those days, and Hannah took her to the clinic and had her to stay for a few days while she recovered. ‘Without your mother's help, I am not sure I would have finished my degree,' she says.

ERICA AND ANNE
seem to have been Hannah's closest friends at Bedford, but in time I track down more of her contemporaries, and am even invited to a Bedford College reunion lunch. The common consensus is how innocent most of them were. Penelope Horsfall remembers the college putting on a fund-raiser for students in Hungary, and Hannah organising a skit for which the performers wore black trousers: it was the first time Penelope had ever put on trousers.

The teachers could be ‘antediluvian'. One former student remembers O. R. McGregor, the lecturer who saw Hannah when she ‘dropped by' the college, ‘rocking back and forward on his heels during a lecture and telling the women in front of him, “You are all so mediocre.” ' McGregor, or ‘Mac', and another lecturer would play ping-pong in the college, and when they ‘slammed the ball down they would say the name of whichever student was bugging them'.

The women at the reunion lunch talk about how most of them ended up in caring careers of one sort or another — social work, citizen's advice, lady almoners. When they had children, almost all stopped working. Of the forty or so sociology students in Hannah's year, only three or four did research, and one of these gave up to get married, while another ‘was kicked out when she got pregnant'.

Older, already married when she arrived, Hannah was ‘different'. She had ‘a film star's vitality, glamorous, and rather exotic'. And when she got pregnant in the first term of her second year, she had no intention either of getting rid of the baby or giving up her studies. In this she was fortunate in having the backing of Gertrude Williams, her head of department, who allowed her to extend her degree to four years, and wrote letters in support of her extending her grant. Her contemporaries remember Hannah bringing in her new baby in a little yellow romper suit. Hannah, who was twenty-one, was ‘glowing with pride'.

SHE HAD BEEN EXPERIENCING
minor gynaecological problems, my father tells me, and was advised that having a baby would cure them. Simon was born in Queen Charlotte's hospital in Hammersmith, on 23 April 1958, and spent his first months in the flat in Chelsea. Later that year, the new family moved back to north London, to the little modern house, on Hillside Gardens in Highgate, next door to the Kartuns, and close to both sets of grandparents.

The following spring they must have bought a cine camera, for the first family films are of Simon toddling around. With her bouffant hair and wide skirt, a cigarette in one hand while she hugs Simon with the other, Hannah looks like a suburban American housewife from a 1950s educational film.

This impression is repeated in the next reel, which shows her sewing in front of the house in Hillside Gardens, while Simon chases a kitten. In the next film, though, she looks slimmer, more stylish, even younger. In her black fitted shirt and tight dark-blue peddle-pushers, her hair more closely styled, she might now be a pretty young dancer from a Cliff Richard or Elvis Presley movie.

HILLSIDE GARDENS WAS
one of a triangle of streets being redeveloped on the plot of an old mansion house that had fallen into disrepair and been knocked down. There was a communal garden in the middle and a communal atmosphere. Neighbours babysat for each other and shared school runs. The legacies of the war were finally being shaken off, the early shoots of the new world that would blossom into the 1960s were beginning to emerge, and these affordable modern houses were attracting a forward-thinking brand of occupant.

Derek Kartun, for example, was a former foreign editor of the
Daily Worker
turned businessman — his company produced a ‘fusible interlining' used in suits and uniforms — who would go on to write a series of spy thrillers. Paul Rogers, another resident of the triangle, was a film and stage actor who was the original Max in Harold Pinter's
The Homecoming
. Peter Jewell was an animal conservationist; his wife, Juliet Clutton-Brock, one of Britain's first archaeozoologists. Katrin Stroh was a developmental therapist. John Weeks was a modern architect. Cy Grant, a Guyanese musician, was the first black person to appear regularly on British television. Gillian Freeman's novel
The Leather Boys
, published in 1961, was the story of a relationship between two young homosexual men. Klaus Hinrichsen, who I knew as the proprietor of the toy shop on the Archway Road, was a champion of émigré German artists who had set up the ‘Hutchison University' in the Isle of Man internment camp.