A House Unlocked by Penelope Lively
Jack and I opted for a register office wedding. We were both agnostic, in any case, but also disliked the pomp and circumstance of a religious ceremony, and the faintly threatening overtones of the script: ‘For better, for worse, till death us do part.’ We hoped and assumed that we would stay married, but did not want the magisterial intervention of organized religion. Kensington Register Office was depressing and mundane. We sat in awkward silence in a dark-brown waiting-room, with the two friends brought along as witnesses; at one point a functionary put his head round the door and said sternly: ‘Would you mind making less noise?’ At that moment, I thought a little wistfully of organ music and dear little bridesmaids. But the reception later that day was plumb in the traditional marriage mode, with the stock assemblage of ill-assorted relatives and attendant cast of friends of bride and groom who do not know one another – a curious set-piece occasion that takes place worldwide and throughout the years because two people have met and bring with them their respective freight of others. We escaped to a honeymoon in Brittany and the beginning of a different life.
A commencement, of course, rather than the culmination suggested by all that misleading childhood reading. The setting forth into a future in which ‘I’ had become ‘we’, in which to be alone was to be just the two of you, in which opinions, decisions, moods, every swing and roundabout of life would be shared with someone else, from now on into incalculable distances of time. Forty-one years, as it turned out. Until the autumn night on which I would walk out of a north London hospice, alone once more. But not entirely, because there were now those whose infinitely familiar presences were unimaginable back then: our children, and theirs.
Every marriage is a journey, a negotiation, an accommodation. In a long marriage, both partners will mutate; the people who set out together are not the same two people after ten years, let alone thirty or more. When accommodation is no longer possible it is usually because one or the other has become so much someone else as to be unreachable. Our marriage was like most; it had its calm reaches, its sudden treacherous bends, its episodes of white water to be navigated with caution and a steady nerve. We were poles apart temperamentally. Jack was volatile, confrontational, a natural radical, a man who relished intellectual debate; he was also loving and generous. I was – am, I suppose – more equable, less disputatious, and without his incisive mind. That said, we meshed entirely in tastes and inclinations, could always fire one another with a new interest, and laid down over the years that rich sediment of shared references and mutual recognition familiar to all who have known a long companionship. You are separate people, but there is a third shadowy presence which is an entity, the fusion of you both. It is your corporate experience – a private existence invisible and impenetrable to others. When this is extinguished, you are left with only the ambivalent solace of having once known that mysterious and miraculous creation of shared lives.
Marriage is the most contingent event of any. We marry – or pair off with – the person who appears when the time is ripe, when mood and circumstance coincide with a significant encounter. When we meet the right person at the right time. Had the coin fallen differently – had we not gone to that particular gathering, taken that job, got talking to that stranger – the rest of life would have spun off in other directions. The solid reality of our children would not have been. It is a perennially unsteadying thought that we owe our existence to the fortuitous conjunction of our parents, who might never have come across one another. The marriage scenario is the ultimate garden of forked paths.
Anyone spending the crucial years of their early twenties in an academic setting, as I did, is spoiled for choice, when it comes to pairing off arrangements. St Antony's College in Oxford, where I met Jack, was – and is – a graduate college, cosmopolitan and – back then – a relatively small enclave of diverse and vibrant people. All male, in the 1950s. I was not a member of the college but working as research assistant to one of the fellows. This meant, though, that I was in the thick of college life, which in turn rippled off into the wider world of the university. Abundant opportunities to meet young men: parties, seminars, the libraries in which I researched for my employer. I had an office in one of the college houses in Woodstock Road. Members of the college were in and out of its front door all day, Israeli, American, French, German; there were coffee breaks, sandwich lunches. I stepped out for a while with a wild Welshman and spent summer evenings driving to Oxfordshire pubs with him and John Bayley, who was then at St Antony's, in an old Riley (with running boards), belonging to Iris Murdoch, whom John was courting. It was a heady time, and seems in retrospect to have gone on for years, but in fact lasted barely two. I remember hearing one of the fellows talking about the new Junior Research Fellow coming from Cambridge the following term: ‘Jack Lively – extremely bright’. The name stuck in my mind – I thought he sounded like a character in an eighteenth-century novel. Less than a year later we were married.
This degree of opportunity for choice is a privilege, and one unknown to many young people across time and space. The skirmishing of matchmaking mothers is the stuff of nineteenth-century literature, trying to marry off daughters in pinched social circumstances. Rural life has ever been hard on romance. In west Somerset in the 1950s, it would have been rare for a young man or woman to marry anyone from beyond a radius of five miles or so. A local doctor used to say that he could tell from which Exmoor village a person came by the shape of their heads. In the more distant past, rural inbreeding must have been rampant. And under some conditions choice becomes so narrowed down that contingency barely plays a part. The line-up of those available is so short as to serve up nothing but an inevitability. Looked at in this light, marriage seems more like a grim social and biological necessity than the enriching rite of passage celebrated in fairy tale and mythology. A necessity and, in some instances, a prison.
And now, at the beginning of a new century, marriage in this country seems to be a precarious institution. In the sense not only that over one in three fail, but also that it is now merely an option. And this has as much to do with changed perceptions of gender as with an altered view of the arrangement itself. Something happened around the middle of the century, some incipient awakening which meant that a twenty-three-year-old girl was surprised to be told by her father that she should be thinking of getting married.
Feminism happened, of course, but it hadn't happened by 1956. We hadn't heard of role-playing back then, and gender had more to do with Latin nouns than negotiations between men and women. My own experience of the opposite sex was circumscribed, to say the least. I had been at a girls' boarding school, and when I arrived at Oxford at eighteen, I had never spoken to a boy of my own age. And now here was a sea of them, done up identically in grey flannels and duffel coats, ten to every one of us girls. A culture shock – though the difficulties evaporated after a week or two and were a distant memory by the end of the first term.
Oxford in the 1950s seems a world away from student life fifty years later. That gender imbalance, the segregation of men and women, with its elaborate rules designed to maintain the distance and thus, I suppose, reduce sexual opportunity. Sex being, of course, as rampant as you might expect – but we made less fuss about it. In my college, there was an 11.15 p.m. curfew – back in by then, or see the Principal next morning and explain why not – and a period of licence between two and seven in the afternoon when you might receive male visitors. Tea and crumpets. Et cetera. The assumption made by the college authorities seems to have been that sex would rear its ugly head only after dark; out with temptation at 7 p.m. and all would be well. We went along with this, there being little choice, and the more daring made their own arrangements. One girl in my hostel regularly had her boyfriend to stay overnight, smuggling him out through the window in the morning. The rest of us were well aware of his presence and said nowt, though those in adjoining rooms were irritated by the squeaking of the bed. We did not much discuss our sexual experiences, not, I think,
This was no climate of sexual liberation – it is strange now to think that the sixties were only ten years off. But it was a climate of new expectations and assumptions for women graduates. Towards the end of the third year, students were supposed to go for an interview at the University Appointments Board. You offered your qualifications, such as they were, and stated your preferences for future employment. Women arts undergraduates were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the BBC and publishing. Those heading for a First considered the Civil Service exam. But many were happy to go into teaching, then still a respected and valued profession. The steely eyed staff of the Appointments Board were keen to steer women into the relatively untried areas of industry and commerce, which alarmed most of us because you had to have shorthand and typing, which meant a slog at some secretarial school. Note that this would never have been required of male applicants for similar jobs. We did take note, and were properly indignant – and suspicious of what roles we would be playing if we fell for this discrimination.
But the Appointments Board was, by and large, on our side, and its attitudes were certainly in line with the shape of things to come. One unwary friend of mine confided cheerily to her interviewer that she wanted a job for only a year or so – something interesting that would maybe take her abroad – because after that she planned to marry. She was sent off with a flea in her ear. Why take up an expensive and privileged educational opportunity if that is the height of your ambition?
Neither my mother nor my grandmother ever earned a penny. Their lives were based on entirely different assumptions – and resources – from my own, or my daughter's. Or, indeed, those of my granddaughters, who announce crisp and provocative career intentions at an early age. Oh yes, they will be having children, they say, but alongside that they will be astronauts, astronomers, tornado-chasers. My own vision of the future at their age would have been dominated by that hazy but essential state of marriage; it was not until I was eighteen or so that I acquired the sharpened gaze of the mid century and began to focus on other things. Though on quite what I did not know. For the interviewers of the Appointments Board, I would have been one of their many taxing clients with vague aspirations but no clear sense of direction. As it turned out, I was ambushed early by marriage and maternity. I spent five years looking after children and reading my way through the local public library during every available moment. By the time the youngest child went to primary school, I knew that I wanted somehow to use the ideas and enthusiasms prompted by all this serendipitous reading. I seemed to fall into writing almost by accident, though I see now that the urge had probably always been there. My childhood was spent in a state of continuous internal story-telling. All that reading simply fired the mind.
My generation of middle-class women juggled work and childcare. For subsequent generations this is the norm; for ours it was something of a departure, and fuelled a complex mixture of satisfaction and guilt. The satisfactions were evident – you were refusing to be just an appendage, a wife and mother, and doing what any self-respecting late twentieth-century woman should be doing. The guilt – as rife now as then, I suspect – sprang from the evident impossibility of both having a job and being a textbook mother, the texts in our case being the teachings of John Bowlby and Benjamin Spock, the childcare gurus of the day.
Jack's first permanent academic post was at the University of Swansea. A week or so into the first term, we were bidden to a reception given by the Vice Chancellor to kick off the new academic year. As the faculty and spouses (almost exclusively wives – there were few women faculty members) lined up to enter the room, identifying badges were handed out, on which were inscribed name and department. The colour of the badge indicated rank. Thus, my green badge saying ‘LIVELY MRS, POLITICS’ indicated that I was (Mrs) Lecturer in Politics. I remember that there was a tendency for the women to gather in small groups, eyeing their fellow appendages – (Mrs) Reader in Chemical Engineering or (Mrs) Assistant Lecturer in Sociology. With shared irritation, I hope; certainly I remember feeling affronted.
I had never heard of genetic drive when I was young. But I knew that I would want children, in due course. At some point. In the event, our daughter arrived before I was twenty-five. My generation bred younger than middle-class women of today, who mostly seem to pitch into their thirties before taking that enormous step. We didn't have the Pill, of course, which accounts for much, but also, I think, we were conditioned by the beliefs of the day, which were still much like my father's views – a girl should be married before it began to look odd that she wasn't, and, once married, she should get on with it and have a baby because that was what was expected of her.
At Golsoncott, visiting grandchildren were hived off into the kitchen wing of the house, where were the nursery and night nursery. This arrangement would have reflected that in my grandmother's previous home, where she brought up her own children, an apartheid that symbolizes the difference between Edwardian family life and that of the late twentieth century. It supposes a large house, of course, and plenty of villas and terraced houses up and down the land would not have had the space to function quite like that; nevertheless, the middle-class infrastructure of nursemaids and helpers would have ensured that offspring could be kept apart when required. Children were a crucial aspect of family life, but not the central pivot, which conventionally would have been the father and breadwinner. My grandmother remembered being allowed with her siblings to visit the dining-room on Sunday mornings, where her father was eating his boiled egg, a luxury not issued to the five of them; they took it in turns to have the slice off the top.
All this seems very odd from the viewpoint of the family of the second half of the century, in which the requirements of children dominate household management, and there can be few homes with such a thing as a child-free zone. It seemed odd to me, in the 1950s and '6os, contrasting the manner in which my mother and grandmother had brought up children with the hands-on, no-respite way in which Jack and I were raising ours. I felt a degree of complacent superiority, knowing that we were doing it how it should be done (never mind that there was no alternative) – received opinion of the day was with us to the hilt. On days of unremitting mayhem, and after a night not so much broken as annihilated, the superiority was tinged with furtive envy. My grandmother, who was equally certain that her ways – or the ways of her time – were best, looked on with a sort of resigned perplexity. She couldn't see how I would manage, and the children would undoubtedly suffer.
My mother had operated along the same lines as my grandmother. I grew up apart from my parents, on the whole, in a happy and self-sufficient nursery enclave with Lucy. The effect of this, of course, was that I loved and relied upon Lucy to the exclusion of my parents, with all that that implies. When I had children of my own, I knew that I did not want a repetition of this, but in any case by then the climate was very different. Once again, something had happened in the mid century.
Crucially, my generation could not afford domestic help. But there was more to it than that. Of all dogmas, childcare ones are, perhaps, the most mutable. Strap the baby to a board and hang it on a convenient beam, farm it out to a wet-nurse in some insanitary cottage. Deprive it of fruit and vegetables because these are bad for the digestive system – the ensuing scurvy is attributed to teething problems. Dunk it in an ice-cold bath every day in the interests of healthy development. Some earlier methods of child-rearing sound today more like child abuse. By the twentieth century those involved in childcare, the mother above all, were bombarded with advice and exhortations from successive authorities on the subject. In the early part of the century, Truby King and the Mothercraft movement dominated. Lucy had a copy o
By the 1950s, Truby King was a dead duck, though that obsession with fresh air somehow lingered on. I can remember dutifully parking the baby in a pram in the garden in midwinter. But our mentor was Benjamin Spock. A paperback copy of his Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care was on every thinking mother's shelf, bringing new ideas and reassurance from across the Atlantic. Small children could indeed be pesky and intransigent, you were told. Babies do not lie docile in their cots between feeds; toddlers have temper tantrums. And it isn't necessarily all your fault: look, try this and see if it works. And this, and this. The index briskly targeted areas of concern. You looked up ‘Crying’, and worked down the list of possible reasons, from hunger to an open nappy pin. And even if all strategies had failed, you were still told to have faith in yourself and not despair. If your toddler adamantly resisted toilet training, you were to bear in mind that one does not see many adolescents walking around in nappies. The compliant and passive child of the Truby King area had been replaced by a demanding little individual, who might well be fractious and bewildering, but was also responsive and stimulating. Intelligence was riding high now and I don't remember that the inculcation of good manners was much more than a footnote. Which was just as well; the mid century mother had little time left for such refinements, most of us without the benefit of washing-machines or disposable nappies and anxiously focused upon creative play and early learning.