Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir (9 page)

Any comments I make on social change come from a single perspective. Not unusual – most people live out their lives within a particular context of society. Social mobility? Well, yes – there are plenty also who have changed ground, hopped up a rung or three – social mobility is usually talking about improved rather than reduced circumstances. I have a friend my own age who says, “People like you and me have gone down in the world.” What he means is that we live a lot more humbly than our grandparents did, though his were rather more amply situated than mine. But that is to do with a general historical trend rather than families in decline. The middle class does not live like it did in the early twentieth century: the servicing, the expectations. Well, some do, I suppose, but none that I know. And there’s the difference. The middle class in which, and with which, I have lived is not the same as the one my grandmother knew.

So I have lived on ground that was shifting, but it did so rather suddenly, in the midcentury, before I was firmly enough established to notice. I never expected to live like my grandparents had. Just as well. We began married life on Jack’s salary as a university lecturer, and academic salaries have never been other than frugal. But we could manage the mortgage on an Edwardian semi in Swansea with a little garden; that is middle-class living, then or now. And he was in what would be regarded as a profession, if that is a defining feature of the middle class, even if he had arrived there from quite elsewhere.

What I am trying to say is that I have observed rather than experienced. My only swerve was to marry a young man from the northern working class, the two of us meeting up in the fresh air of the midcentury, both liberated into the social neutrality of higher education. But he had, and continued to have, the advantage of a dual perspective; if he were here still he would be looking over my shoulder at this point and making stringent comments.

However, to observe is to experience, in one sense. If those around you are behaving differently, if assumptions and expectations and opinions mutate then you are going to mutate with them, unless you are peculiarly intransigent or holed up in some fortress of religious or political belief. I have been formed in and by late twentieth-century Britain; I reflect my times. I can’t think or see as my grandmother did. She was born when Disraeli was prime minister, died in the age of Harold Wilson. For her, class differences were not only inevitable but desirable; she seemed to be unaware of homosexuality and I never knew if this was genuine ignorance or tacit rejection; her view of gender distinction was that men were a different breed from women, you deferred to them in some respects and recognized that they had special needs – cooked breakfast and somewhere to go and smoke. Sex was unmentionable. And alongside all this ran an ingrained sense of obligation; you were more comfortable than most, it was therefore beholden upon you to help others. She did. A Christian ethic – and she was of course paid-up Church of England – and also a manifestation of the arbitrary system of gift aid inherited from the nineteenth century that the welfare state was to supplant.

I imagine that my own grandchildren when elderly will cast a critical eye upon my own mind-set of today. How I would love to know in what ways it appears – will appear – archaic or perverse. Ours is on the whole a pretty tolerant and liberal-minded age; can tolerance be stretched yet further? Some would say, indeed yes. That there are still areas of ignorance and insensitivity. Or could there be a reversion – could we come to seem unprincipled, licentious, devoid of standards? Somewhere, at some level, the seeds of change will be starting already to sprout. Society does not support stasis.

My grandmother’s house, and the sense in which its contents seemed to have become signifiers for the century, inspired a book for me –
A House Unlocked
– and I discussed there the shifting pattern of social expectations over her lifetime, and the way in which my perception of the world differed from hers. My own marriage had come to seem to me nicely symbolic of the reforms of the midcentury, which meant that two people who could not otherwise have met came together because of the Butler Education Act of 1946.

There is plenty of informed argument about the degree of social change in the last fifty years: the answers can be opaque, conflicting. But there are two areas of change that seem to me in one case indisputable and in the other seismic: the expectations of women, and attitudes toward homosexuality.

When I was a small girl, there was a teatime ritual. She – it was always a she – who took the last cake, bun, sandwich from the plate was entitled to a wish; you had a choice of wish – a handsome husband or ten thousand a year. Nobody ever chose the ten thousand. There were various related strictures, too: if you don’t sit straight you’ll grow up round-shouldered and no one will ever marry you; if you make faces the wind will change and you’ll get stuck like that and no one will ever marry you. The central female concern was being made clear.

An atavistic concern. Marriage – partnership – is a natural and normal aspiration. Most people would prefer to go through life in alliance with someone they love, and most want children. But the teatime wish husband was about status, not inclinations. Unmarried, you would have reduced social status – the ancient social stigma, the heart of the matter in any Jane Austen novel. And, of course, in the past the spinster’s position was precarious economically. But cash flow can’t have much entered into the teatime wish choice, or more would have plumped for the ten thousand. Indeed, my recollection is that it was seen as ludicrous to do so, if not a touch disgraceful.

A recent television program featured an organization that makes a packet out of running seminars for people who want to become rich enough fast enough to be able to live off their cash without ever working. The accumulation of a property portfolio was the scheme, and it was clear that most of those paying a wad in order to learn how to go about this were already in catastrophic financial debt to the organization. Many were young women, and their attitudes startled me. Not only did they feel they “ought” to be millionaires, but they felt that they ought not to have to work; work was not their aspiration, what they wanted was a certain lifestyle, a nicely well-heeled lifestyle free of obligation.

Dupes, I fear, poor dears, and I hope there weren’t too many of them. But they did make me think about feminism, and what it originally meant, and to wonder what those girls would have thought about that. Feminist aspiration, back in the sixties and seventies, was all about work: equal opportunity in the workplace, equal pay, equality of esteem across the board. The feminist did not want to be a trophy wife, or a millionaire; she wanted respect and recognition for who she was, and what she could do.

Have we got what they were demanding? Today, it seems that two-thirds of low-paid workers are women, and that women in full-time work earn sixteen percent less than men. So the answer would seem to be no, not entirely. And one hears constantly of women bringing claims against employers on the grounds that male colleagues were preferred for promotion, and for unfair dismissal when pregnant. The glass ceiling exists, apparently, and every woman has to balance career against motherhood.

But I am concerned with assumptions and perceptions, and it is impossible to deny that a young woman today steps out into a very different society from that of fifty years ago. Depending, of course, on what sort of young woman she is. The feminist movement was ever a middle-class movement, and there is a big divide today between the professional woman, who may well be earning the same as a man, and the vastly larger female workforce that is cleaning offices, stacking shelves and sitting at checkouts and mostly does not. Plenty of ground still to be gained, but the seminal matter is that a point has been made, slowly and inexorably, over the last decades: it is no longer possible to treat women differently from men and not be held to account.

There’s more, much more. Women have surged into higher education. At my university, in the 1950s, we were one woman to ten men. This did give us a certain commodity value – ten chaps to pick from – but what I wonder now is why we didn’t question this. Why didn’t we look at that morass of males and think: they can’t all be so much brighter than lots of girls who aren’t here. Today, that university has near parity between men and women, actually tipped slightly in favor of women.

We were the pre-feminist generation. Long post-suffragette, but apparently not awake to the still-prevailing anachronisms. There were exceptions, of course, those already sniffing the air, but on the whole my generation now seems to me to have been somewhat inert. Ten years later the climate would be very different.

One thing above all, though, reminded us that it was hazardous to be a woman. We girls of the midcentury lived with one eye on the calendar. There was far less discussion of sex back then but it was quite as brisk a component of student life as it is today. We just made less fuss about it, kept it under cover, mindful of what was likely to happen to any girl who got pregnant. She would probably be sent down, dismissed from the university, quietly and conclusively. And the man? Oh, no. Those were pre-pill days; contraception was unreliable, and most of us were pretty uninformed about it. So girls brave enough to embark on a relationship lurched from month to month, eyeing the calendar and hoping for the best. And this was going on up and down the land, of course. No difficulties back then for childless couples hoping to adopt; the relevant institutions were well stocked with babies discreetly unloaded.

Sometime in the early sixties Jack, who taught PPE – politics, philosophy, and economics – was interviewing a candidate for a place at his Oxford college, a bluntly spoken northern lad. He asked the boy which aspect of contemporary society he saw as most in need of reform. The answer bounced back without a moment’s hesitation: “Reform of the abortion laws and legalization of homosexuality.” The boy got a place, needless to say.

We all knew that you could get an abortion. We had all heard of someone who had. We knew that it involved furtive inquiries, a clandestine visit to a closely guarded address, the handing over of an envelope of bank notes – a couple of hundred quid, a fortune in those days, if the address was not in some back street but somewhere you stood a better chance of a medically qualified practitioner and, indeed, of survival. We all knew the myths about self-induced abortion: the glass of gin and a hot bath, the trampolining on the bed. And that they did not work, by and large. The shadow of that fate hung over any burgeoning love affair – just, frankly, as it always had done. We were in exactly the same position as the Victorian domestic servant, or the medieval village girl.

So what a catalyst for change – the pill. And how quickly we have forgotten just what a revolution it heralded. Not just in giving women the power of choice, but in reshaping attitudes toward sex and sexuality. For the first time in human history a young woman – any woman – can enter into a sexual relationship without fretting constantly that she will be landed with an untimely baby. And it is openly acknowledged that sexual activity takes place, everywhere and all the time, which may sound an absurd statement, but set it against the paranoid reticence of much of early twentieth-century society, when someone like my grandmother – far from untypical – went through life avoiding all mention or recognition of that most basic human concern. And she had three children.

She and her like represented, I suppose, the last gasp of Victorian middle-class sublimation, soldiering on into the twentieth century and surrounded by an insidious tide of provocative new behavior. Elsewhere, things were already different. Take that emblematic Bloomsbury drawing-room gathering when Lytton Strachey pointed a finger at a stain on Vanessa Bell’s dress and announced: “Semen?” Sometime in the 1920s. In most drawing rooms the word would have been unfamiliar to many and unmentionable for all. Bloomsbury was ahead of the game, and even today Strachey might seem a touch candid. But the point is that the shift had already begun, the unstoppable slide toward entire permissiveness, to a climate in which nothing is unmentionable and most of it is mentioned all the time. And this has happened over sixty years or so – not unlike the reverse journey from the cheerful profanity of the eighteenth century to the constraint of the Victorian age. Maybe it will switch once more and my descendants will find themselves with pursed lips and averted eyes.

Feminism; the pill; sexual candor. But there is one aspect of change in assumptions and attitudes over my lifetime that seems to me seismic – so rapid, so absolute.

When I was nine, one summer in Alexandria, I fell in love with a young man. He was twenty-eight, and a sort of relative – his sister was married to my uncle, Oliver Low. Hugh Gibb was serving with the Eighth Army in the Libyan campaign, and on his leaves from the desert, he would visit us, often joining my mother at Sidi Bishr, Alexandria’s prime beach, where she held lunch parties from a rented cabin. Hugh was popular, charming, and I was besotted. We surfed together; I was pretty good with a surfboard, and those moments are with me still – the careful choice of wave, and then the glorious slide down its flank, with Hugh a few feet away, head turned sideways, beaming encouragement as the wave broke and we rushed toward the shore.

A few years later, in London now, Hugh turned up for a family lunch at my grandmother’s house in Harley Street. Uncle Oliver was there – various others. And Hugh – still charming, still everyone’s favorite person, still being nice to me (who was by then perhaps fourteen). After he had gone, I remarked to Oliver, complacently, that Hugh was not married (could he be waiting till I was old enough . . .).

Oliver laughed: “My dear girl, Hugh’s queer.”

Queer?
Queer?
In what way?

Did I ask for an explanation? Was one given? I don’t know – and actually Oliver was being quite risqué, talking like that to a fourteen-year-old, but he was the bohemian end of my father’s family, my favorite uncle, and he liked me, as a seemingly bookish sort of girl with whom he enjoyed a chat. Suffice it that, somehow, I knew from then on that there were men who weren’t interested in women, and if Hugh was one of them then that was that. I fell out of love at once, sensibly enough, though I continued to like Hugh and to bask if he noticed me.