Mantrapped. Fay Weldon
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had no visible means of support, either, at the time. She had run an advertising agency in New Zealand in the war, but had hated every minute of it, and had turned down all suitors out of pride and the determination that she would never, never rely on the support of a man again. So now, since she had to eat, she wove reed baskets on the moors outside St Ives. She’d pluck the reeds, weave the baskets, walk to Penzance, sell the baskets, buy the week’s food with it, and commune with nature to her heart’s content. Larks and sunsets bought her real delight.
Old Meg she was a gypsy, And lived upon the moors: Her bed it was the brown heath turf, And her house was out of doors.
But still we trusted her to look after us when it came to the crunch, and she did. (You thought you could do this to us, mother: but we are your problem not our own! Look after us!) She left the moors and joined us in London, and then moved us all to Saffron Walden, a place chosen because she liked the sound of the name, and we would be amongst strangers, without witnesses to our disgrace, where she hoped our delinquencies would go unnoticed, but of course they were not. On the contrary. To have relied upon the anonymity of London would have been more sensible. My poor mother. She would wake early in a state of anxiety, brood for an hour or two, come to an unnecessarily complex solution to a simple problem by breakfast time, and put it into action by lunchtime. Her solution this time had been that I was to change my name by dead poll to that of the baby’s father, tell my friends and colleagues I had married, and then give up my job, move out of London where I was not known, and start my life afresh. That it was ten times more difficult to earn a living in the country than in the city, that I could have stayed where I was in the Foreign Office and fought my way up to higher grades and better wages (they could only fire you for immorality, I later found, if you were unmarried and had three babies by more than two different fathers), and was far too talkative and indiscreet to start again anywhere with a secret past, and was not likely to forswear my friends, did not occur to her. It did occur to me but she had a powerful personality and I assumed she knew best. I did as she suggested. I was horrified to be then sent a wedding present to my new Saffron Walden address by my Foreign Office colleagues: surely this was taking gifts on false pretences? I ought to return it at once with apologies for misleading them. But my mother was against it. I must stick by the story, she said. Say the marriage had been called off, anything. I imagine w hat I did do was simply put off writing the thank-you note until the time to do so decently had passed and I was so pregnant nothing seemed to matter other than what was going on inside my own body. But I cannot remember. It remains on my conscience. A bad patch. A bad girl. How terrible children can be. Bad behaviour is not a one way street. And certainly, if the mother leaves early, the children linger longer. But we had no such overview at the time, of course not. Those were the pre-Freudian days.
March 1954, and there I was with a baby, the dramas of pregnancy and childbirth over, with the reality of a small child to face. Guido came to claim Jane and her new baby Christopher, and installed them in a cottage in deepest Sussex and brought marrow bones home every weekend. ‘Lots of nourishment in these, my dear. I am going to theological college so must be away most of the time. They don’t know I’m married, so don’t tell them.’’ My friend Belinda, who had come to join Jane and me in our sibling pregnancies, was rescued by the father of her child, who very soon married her. I remained unmarried and unrescued, and, dreams of self-sufficiency over, let alone the hope of running a little cake shop (mother’s idea, but no customers came), commuted to London every day, by train, to Fleet Street, where I answered readers’ questions on Hire Purchase problems for the Daily Mirror. My stepmother had sent me a cheque for £200 from my father’s estate, and I had spent £100 on a typewriter and used it to write job applications. Now I worked and earned in a world still not properly adjusted to the fact that some women did not have men to support them and with a wage structure that echoed that fact. This meant leaving at 6.30 in the morning and coming back at 8.30 at night, to be finally driven out, along with my mother, by a ghost who wept up and down the twisted corridors of our 17th century house, and fleeing to London. But at least at Liverpoool Street station I had been able to afford and buy weekly copies of Amazing magazine. ‘Alienation in time and space,’ as my psychoanalyst Miss Rowlands was later to describe my passion for the science fiction of the time, ‘and no doubt a comfort.’ Those were the great mid-Fifties days of science fiction—Heinlein, Azimov, Frederick Pohl, Philip K. Dick—philosophers and sociologists all. I came across them by accident, in search of a cheap, fast read, tearing off the lurid covers so as not to be observed reading rubbish in the train, and this was my good fortune.
My mother was not happy in London: our tiny rented flat in Chiswick, all I could afford, was too dull to have so much as a ghost. Landladies were reluctant to rent rooms to women with children and no husband or visible means of support. You took what you could get, especially if you had no deposit, no three months’ rent in advance. My mother chafed. Granted I was going out to work, but if she had to stay home and be bored, why did I feel entitled to go to parties in the evenings? Why did I need these friends of mine, with their chattery, frivolous ways? Should I not stay home of an evening and keep her company? Couldn’t I just settle down?
I found another job in London in a tiny ad agency in Dover Street, Scott-Turner, which paid minimally more than the Mirror. ‘Did you know you have 200 bones in your foot? No wonder sometimes they hurt!’ But still the job only barely paid the rent: and all I wanted to do was go to parties and meet men and fall in love like anyone else, but I couldn’t. My mother’s disapproval was too strong. I had made my bed: now it behoved me, she thought, to lie upon it. I ate plentiful cheese rolls bought from the shop next door to the office. There was a brothel above the sandwich shop—the bad girls, dressed up to the nines, came and went through the Mayfair streets around. (The sex industry at that time was booming: provenance of Maltese gangs.) I had to take my shoes to the menders, unable to afford new. There was no television—too early in the world’s history for possession of such a thing to be normal. What could I do in the evenings but cook and eat? I grew fat and then what was the point of parties anyway? I stayed home with my mother and the baby. The commuting days in Saffron Walden, ghost and all, now seemed in retrospect like heaven.
Little Nicolas was robust, energetic and now two years old. Babies are easy enough to deal with when they lie there and smile at you, or at anyone who comes in sight. But then they grow older and cry when you leave them, and wrap their little arms around your legs to make you stay with them, and resolution collapses. He had rosy cheeks and pale blond hair: he was beautiful but exhausting. He cried noisily and bitterly when I set off in the mornings, and my mother’s face was like stone. My best friend Judy Anderson met and married my colleague at Scott-Turner’s, Michael Birmingham, with whom I had had many a depressed if interesting conversation and after that I had to work alone, in silence. ‘Did you know your foot has 200 tiny bones in it and all the sorry things that could happen to them unless you took care. True, the Institute of Contemporary Art had the floor beneath our offices and naked girls bounced upon trampolines in the name of art—‘happenings’, they were called—but it might as well have happened a thousand miles away. None of it seemed to have anything to do with me. I was depressed, and fat. I was being courted by the headmaster of a technical school in Acton, Mr Bateman, a maths graduate, twenty-five years older than myself. He asked me to marry him.
I could see the many advantages. Anything would be better than life as it was. Marriage would make him happy, and my mother too: she could escape, and I could ease over to lie in a respectable bed, free from the disgrace of unmarried motherhood. Not, frankly, that my status bothered me. The disgrace of being married to an elderly headmaster, and having to introduce him to my college friends, seemed worse. ‘What, can she do no better than this?’ But I would have housekeeping money; I would have my soul back, I would no longer be for ever worried that the State would turn up, declare me an unfit mother, and send Nicolas off to Barnardo’s. True, the headmaster had also warned m: ‘No wife of mine works’ and said I could not join the Labour Party. ‘ I must be seen in my position to be above politics’ Though indeed it turned out later that he was writing reports about any untoward political activity observed or communist sentiments uttered on the part of his staff. (But that was par for the cold-war course. The war for hearts and minds was on and if those Fifties writers took