Mantrapped. Fay Weldon
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lecture halls where our predecessors had gathered for five hundred years, bringing sacks of oats to pay for their tuition, and slept as they did from too much wine and debauchery. There were crosses in the cobbles to mark where prelates had been burned to death for their beliefs. All could have recanted and been saved, but they preferred not to. They would rather be right about the transubstantiation of the Virgin Mary. For lack of a family, I daresay, I regained a sense of ‘we’ which has never left me. ‘We’ students, in defiance of our teachers, ‘we’ workers in defiance of the bosses, ‘we’ writers in defiance of the TV moguls, ‘we’ women in defiance of men. And in the meanwhile I found friends and chattered on.
I cried when I was twenty-five rising twenty-six and had run away from what I saw as a bad husband (I think in retrospect I was a worse wife than he ever was husband) with my little boy tucked under my arm. Now I needed to get him into a nursery school, so I could be free to work. The husband, headmaster of a secondary school, married to provide a roof over our heads, was the ‘no wife of mine works’ kind of man, prevalent in the Fifties. I had flung myself into a hostile world with no means of support, not even from the State. My mother was in a sorry state, living as a companion to an elderly woman with whom she did not get on, and had only a single room to her name. I would be no more welcome in that house than my mother had been before I was born, in the hospital where my father, her husband, had found a live-in job as a single man. Lithe single women can be slotted in anywhere, sneak in and out of institutions at night, but not women with children. (No wonder the birth rate falls as women everywhere learn how to look after their own interests.) Somehow, now, I had to earn. Just another runaway Fifties wife, I wept in front of the woman who ran the school, and didn’t want to admit my child and so encourage immorality. That was in August, 1957. I was really low, so sorry for myself. ‘Somewhere to live’, difficult enough today, was even more difficult then, and the State even more reluctant to help.
I was staying with friends, Laura and Stephen Cohen, in Yeoman’s Row, in Knightsbridge, in the flat Laura’s father, Wells Coates, the Bauhaus architect, had designed. They were good to me in the hour of my need, and took me and Nicolas in without a thought for their own convenience, dreadful cold in the nose and all. It was the kind of cold one gets when relieved from a great pressure and strain, and the body allows itself to give up its defences and descends into welcome illness. It was spectacular.
That day at the nursery school I wept, and sneezed, and sneezed and wept, and the headmistress relented, and Nicolas was allowed in her day care centre. Weep and plead, as a woman, and it shall be given to you. I see I have taught Trisha the same sorry lesson. But sometimes one can’t help it: the tears flow unbidden. The first time at the therapist it is normal for the client to cry and cry. The story of one’s life, told by oneself to a sympathetic listener, induces great self-pity and indeed childishness. Afterwards one is ashamed.
As it happened I only sent Nicolas to the centre for a single day. The children were so pale and sad, the weather so cold, little stiff arms pushed into winter coats, the weeping when the mothers departed so distressing. I could see that the idea of childcare was fine in theory but appalling in practice: that the interests of children and parent overlapped but as so often did not coincide, and what was good, and indeed necessary, for the mother was not automatically good for the child. Unless of course the parent is so horrible in the first place—and a few are—that being at a distance from them can only be advantageous. I took Nicolas out of his nursery that evening and never took him back. I wanted my freedom: I wanted to live unobserved and uncriticised, I wanted to be free of husbandly and motherly interference and control, but want, I could see, must be my master for a time yet. I wrote to my mother and asked her if she would leave companioning her old lady and help me with Nicolas and she said she would. Of course she did; I knew she would. We might be back to where we’d been before I had been panicked into marriage with the headmaster but at least times were better. The baby was now a child and easier to look after, and I had the promise of a better-paid job, one more fitting my graduate state, found for me by my lover and mentor, the Dane.
I wept and wept when the Dane, a yachtsman copy writer, author of Bridge That Gap With Cadbury’s Snack and other famous sayings, went on holiday with his wife on money I lent him for the purpose. That was in 1957. How could I refuse? He had found me the job, that of a trainee copy writer, at Crawfords, a proper big time agency situated in High Holborn. It had the Milk Marketing Board account—Drinka Pinta Milka Day—amongst others, and I loved him, and was (minimally) guilty because he was married. 1958, and my mother and I found a flat on the top floor of a house in Earls Court. There were five flights of stairs and no lift, no carpets and almost no furniture, but it was somewhere to live. We still had dark grey army surplus blankets on the beds, under which the Dane would join me, secretly, so as not to upset my mother, and his wife. And at least there was now a little surplus money for me to be able to lend it straight back to him. I had become pregnant, miscarried, and he had wept.
1959, and I was at Crawfords and shared an office with Elizabeth Smart, author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. She was a kind and beautiful woman and a fine writer, and I was a great blubbing bulky thing and a panicky one. The Dane had used his influence to get me the job in the first place: now Elizabeth taught me how to write advertising copy. How to forget the verbs and sprinkle adjectives, and try to make them pertinent, and never to use words for the sake of words, that every one has to mean something or you excise it. She taught me the value of exactitude, though I think I had an instinct for it anyway. She loved George Barker the poet, a dysfunctional relationship, in today’s terms, and had four brilliant children by him, and when I miscarried the Dane’s baby she was sympathetic and did not say ‘just as well’, though it was. She became the gardening correspondent for Vogue and wrote remarkable poetry, and when George wrote The Dead Seagull—his answer to Grand Central Station—there was a great literary hoo-hah. Elizabeth won on points, because of her prose and the heart-rending nature of the then emotional subjugation of women to men, which she caught on the tide, just as the tsunami which was women’s liberation began to gather force. This misery, this indignity, really cannot go on any more.
Elizabeth and George’s fourth child was called Rosie. She was fourteen when she first came to a party of ours, in the Sixties, precocious—though not by to-day’s standards—thoroughly charming and astonishingly beautiful. She was to have a baby which was to be born addicted to heroin—now a common enough occurrence, then it made headlines. Elizabeth looked after the baby, but Rosie died soon after from an overdose, to everyone’s distress.
I find I pray for Rosie from time to time: she is on an internal list of the missing and remembered. The grief of parents we know is shared: it is to be borne and faced by all. And Rosie carried with her so focused and vivid a personality—perhaps the shortage of available time to live sharpens the quality of the living—she is not forgotten. No wonder that Shelley gang, with their poetic intensity and their early deaths, are still spoken and written about.
We were all pre-feminists then: it simply did not occur to us that if men misbehaved, the answer was to have nothing more to do with them. That ‘love’ was a trap not worth falling into. The female response at the time was still to feel more love, have more babies, write more poetry, sink yet further into masochism. My problem was, I could see, that unlike Elizabeth I was not doing it with any style. I lost some weight and put on heels, and after work one day, after as I remember choosing a selection of adjectives for Simpson’s store in Piccadilly and naming a women’s department ‘Young and Gay’—what innocent days they were—I sat on a bench in Holborn and reproached my dead father for leaving me. I made contact with his spirit as he whirled around with the autumn leaves that fell amongst the traffic of New Oxford Street that day. I made a pact with him. It was time he looked after me, I said. He had failed to do so in life—other than sending his mistress Ina to tell me he was turning in his grave—let him do so in his death. He had left me no money, no home, he had not protected me from my mother. Let him see to it. I for my part would stop sulking, stop playing games, stop waiting to be protected