Authors: Margaret Drabble
It was 1945 when Joe Barron came back with his gifts, and he had been promoted to the rank of major. He had been mentioned in dispatches and had met the Pope. He was eager to stand for Parliament as a Labour candidate. Radical already, he had been further radicalized by the war. He found himself swept along on the tide of left-wing reforming enthusiasm that took some of the nation, though not much of Yorkshire, so much by surprise. He was adopted by the West Yorkshire constituency of Holderfield Hartley, in the old industrial textile city of Holderfield. It was thought to have a safe Tory majority, but to everyone’s astonishment, including his own, Joe won the seat. He found himself, in his thirties, a young lawyer with a Cambridge degree and a respectable war record, and an elected Member of Parliament. The world was all before him. He had won through.
Bessie promptly, or fairly promptly, went to bed. It would be more dramatic to say that she went to bed as soon as Joe Barron came home alive and in minor triumph, but it wasn’t quite as simple as that. She seemed, at first, pleased to see him, and to hear his soldier’s tales. She assured him that she would stand by his high-risk decision to stand for Parliament. She too was a Labour voter, and she agreed with his political position. They had been through all of this together, in earlier days. She did not feel she could go canvassing with or for him—the prospect of knocking on the doors of potentially hostile strangers filled her with understandable alarm—but she composed a ‘Message to Women’ for the Hartley Divisional Labour Party, in which, as the Labour candidate’s wife, she declared that she would like to be with her husband in his election campaign, but that the cares of a young family kept her at home. ‘This election,’ she wrote, ‘gives us women a great opportunity of realizing some of our dreams of a better way of living. Many women fail to see the connection between politics and everyday life, and they have paid dearly for their blindness in the last few years. There is no aspect of everyday life which is not influenced for good or ill by the nature of the government in power. The topics on which women are particularly interested—home, family, freedom from worry, hatred of war—are all affected by party politics. Every woman must decide which party serves those interests best. Good homes need good houses, and the housing policy of the Labour Party is the most far-reaching and the most practical. Happy family life requires steady employment, good wages, healthy and well-educated children. The industrial and financial policy of the Labour Party ensures employment and security at work...’ And so on. It ended
USE YOUR VOTE AND ENSURE THE SUCCESS OF MAJOR J. BARRON
...
This leaflet, printed by Woollons & Sons at 42, Cemetery Road, Holderfield, showed a softly smiling head-and-shoulders oval studio photograph of Mrs J. Barron. She is wearing a V-necked paisley-patterned dress. Bessie was fond of paisley.
Bessie went to bed straight after the celebrations of the election. What was it to be this time? Shingles, neuralgia, lumbago, neuritis, peritonitis, a hiatus hernia? Whatever it was, she kept to her bed long enough for Joe to feel he had wronged her. He had hoped and expected that she would be proud of him and his survival and his success. And so, in a sense, she was, and so, in a very reduced sense, she was to remain. But she was also bitter with him. He had left her, all those years, to cope on hard rations, to dig for victory, to bring up two young children with the help of only one ill-trained teenage maid (and the maid had been called up, towards the end of the war)—and now he came home, just like that, and expected her to rejoice. He had been having a fine time of it overseas, in North Africa, in Greece, and Italy, and now he thought he could come home like a hero. Whereas she had been given the sack.
Women up and down the country were responding like this, though nobody was allowed to admit it.
She had not wanted to leave Pennington, and her council house, and her newts, and the King’s School, and the biology teacher, and the boys of 5B, who had been coming on so well under her expert tuition. But of course she could not admit that, even to herself. She knew she had to rejoice. She knew it was beneath her dignity to dig her own garden and sit down to macaroni cheese or fried Spam with the maid while they both listened to the wireless. She knew she had to prefer the prospect of being an MP’s wife.
Joe was not surprised by Bessie’s withdrawal. He understood that she had been through trying times without him, and he was sorry to see her take to her bed. But he was not surprised. He had seen Bessie’s retreats before now. He had hoped she would grow out of them. Now, he began to wonder what the future held. Where would they go from here?
Was it at this period that Bessie’s voice began to take on that bitter, caustic, nagging tone that was to be hers until death? This was the tone that rang in Chrissie’s ears throughout her girlhood and her adult life. She was never able to remember what Bessie sounded like before Joe came back from the wars. Maybe a sweeter, more affectionate, more maternal voice had spoken then? Maybe, in those early postwar years, Bessie was exacting some indirect and protracted revenge for the disappointments of her own life. Maybe she meant to call hostilities to an end when she had made her point, but forgot to do so. Chrissie could never unwind the scroll of time to the point where Bessie had been sweet. Though sweet she must surely, once, have been, or Joe would not have married her. Would he?
Chrissie was brought up against a background of warfare. The alarums of domestic warfare succeeded the distant bombardments of World War Two. Like Neville Chamberlain, Joe Barron went in for appeasement. He had had pacifist tendencies, as a young man, which had been fortified by a brief membership of the Peace Pledge Union, and although he had, like many others, abandoned them at the time of Munich, he had had enough of war by 1946. He wanted peace in his time. And anyway, much of what Bessie said he acknowledged to be true. She had indeed had a hard war, on the domestic front. A single mother, alone, in a strange town. An educated woman, with a Cambridge degree, living lonely in a council house, teaching three days a week, turning the mangle two days a week, and reading Victorian novels and country-house detective stories and Arthur Ransome tales by night, night after night after night, in the long blackout. Bessie had reason to feel she had been neglected and abandoned, though she cannot have thought it was his fault.
Joe did his best to make amends for this hard time. He suppressed his suspicion that she had enjoyed her teaching, because she so bitterly resisted any interpretation that allowed her past pleasure—or any pleasure ever. She wanted the martyr’s crown of gold. And anyway, there was no way back to the classroom and the common room. It was better, now, to believe, with her, that she had been a wartime martyr. He tried to improve her lot as fast as he could. He moved her out of the cosy little council house, where little Chrissie had been mysteriously happy, and into a fair-sized, comfortable, semidetached home in a good leafy quarter of the Hartley district of Holderfield, a district which remained Tory at heart, despite Joe’s freak electoral return. He bought her one of the earliest electrical washing machines, so that she would not have to turn the mangle. He bought her a refrigerator, and a vast and heavy ironing machine, and an electrical airing cabinet with heated rails, and a Kenwood mixer, and an electrical dishwasher of primitive design which never really worked very well. He paid for a full-time daily help and a gardener, and he never even thought of querying the grocery bills. He tried, poor chap, he tried. And the harder he tried, the angrier she became.
Pretty Bessie Bawtry had lost her figure during the war. Who had stolen it, where had it gone? She was heard to blame macaroni cheese. Macaroni cheese was the villain. Her muscles had become unnaturally and weirdly slack, and her breasts and belly sagged, shapelessly. She was not yet as fat as Ellen, but she was getting on that way. The Cudworth gene had linked up with macaroni cheese to disastrous effect. Her face remained youthful and unlined, but her body was the body of an old woman. Dora had a tendency to stoutness too, but Dora at this period was still energetic and walked miles with her dog, and ran around Breaseborough busily. Dora learned to drive a car, but it did not make her lazy. She would drive out to the moors with her girlfriends, for picnics, and they would go for long rambles at weekends. Spinster Dora’s body thickened, but it did not droop and sag. It was childbirth that ruined Bessie. Robert and Chrissie were responsible for Bessie’s deformed and dangling bosom, for the folds of white tripe flesh above her thighs.
Joe was faithful to her, as far as we can tell. People were faithful to their wives in those days. He was away a good deal, in London, in the constituency, in chambers. He had plenty of time off.
Robert and Chrissie, those small criminals, those suckling succubi, were brought up in an atmosphere of low-key tension and low-key dissatisfaction, which would occasionally heighten into arias of loud and angry distress. Bessie would complain daily about ‘all the flopping housework’ that burdened her, and for years Robert and Chrissie did not even notice that in practice she did hardly any housework at all. The housework was done by Mrs Macaulay, or Mrs Todd, or Mrs Stephens, or their various successors. Bessie, they were later to agree, was an agoraphobic as well as a hypochondriac: she hated going out. No wonder she grew slack. She felt safe only in her own nice thirties suburban home, with its pale polished wood, its cream paint, its nice broad shallow stairs and its polished banisters. When invited out, she would respond with irrational panic. After her initial spasm of loyalty, she could not have been described as a supportive constituency wife. She felt out of place amongst the lower and lower-middle classes from which she had risen, and frightened by the middle classes into which she had moved, and appalled by the working classes with whom she had sympathized, and whose cause she had espoused. So she had nowhere to go. She sat at home, and polished the silver, and listened to
Woman’s Hour
on the wireless, and read books. She was full of opinions. She knew it all. She knew it better than anyone. She criticized, sourly, the government, the opposition, the Americans, the communists, the Catholics, the Church of England. She criticized men. It was men who had ruined the world. The wo of these women that woneth in cotes’. She knew that woe.
You would not have guessed, from the attitudes of bleak Bessie Barron, that there were those in Britain in the late 1940s who felt a mood of optimism—a cramped, ill-nourished optimism, but an optimism, nevertheless.
Robert and Chrissie reacted differently to this pervasive and corrosive family spirit. Both, naturally, were expected to be hardworking, achieving, upwardly mobile little brats, for they had taken in ambition with their mother’s breast-destroying milk. But they had also imbibed despair.
Robert, being a boy, decided early in his career, at about the age of four, that the best thing to do was to grit one’s teeth, bite the tit or bite the bullet. Slog away, learn one’s letters, get on with it, and get out of it. He was the son of both his parents, after all. Chrissie too saw the advantages of the hard-work escape route, but she did not take it. There was a perverse, wicked, rebellious streak in Chrissie, which was to lead her to a kind of liberation. She was a shrewd little thing, and she had seen what was happening. What good did it do you to work so hard, to pass your exams, to go to university like a good girl? You ended up miserable, cooped up, trapped, just the same. With all your education, you ended up washing dishes, baking tarts, moaning on about the mangle or the airing cupboard or the butcher’s bill or the laziness of Mrs Todd. You might as well have some fun now, as you were going to pay later anyway. And there was fun to be had, in Holderfield, in the 1950s, when Chrissie was a girl.
Did Chrissie take after her Barron aunts? Was she more Barron than Bawtry? Joe, watching her progress with admiration and concerned alarm, could see something of his sisters in her. She had the Barron red hair, and she would toss it from time to time with flamboyant and passionate fury. She was a passionate child, bold, reckless, restless and the reverse of agoraphobic. As a small child, she was forever rushing and leaping and falling and racing. She fell out of trees and slid down rocks and crashed her tricycle. She broke off her two front teeth diving from the top board into the swimming pool. She was a tomboy. She had none of Bessie’s physical timidity. She was combative, rebellious. She would lose her temper with her mother, and shout, and be scolded, and be banished to her bedroom in fits of noisy weeping. Once she was so rude to Bessie that Joe felt compelled to beat her bottom with the back of a hairbrush, an act which he regretted until his death, and indeed he apologized for it upon his deathbed. For Chrissie had responded with such howls of anguish and despair, had wept so bitterly for so many hours, had tormented him with such gazes of resentful hatred, that he had never dared lift a finger to her again. She was a wild and stubborn little creature, with a strong will. He did not want to break it or to see it broken.
Nor did he want to see her go the way of his sisters. The Barron girls had fled far from Cotterhall, but their flight had partaken of desperation, and in Rowena’s case had ended in tragedy. He did not speak of them much to Robert and Chrissie, who had to piece the story together for themselves, as best they could.
Rowena Barron had at last gone on her cruise. She had saved her pennies, not for Jesus, but for herself, working for her father and her brother in that little wooden cubbyhole that was called her ‘office’. After years of plans and dreams she had booked herself and her friend Gertie Thomson on to their voyage to the Orient. But it had not worked out quite as expected. Somehow, mysteriously, the moment for departure to Cythera was already past. Rowena had been good-looking, in her early and late teens, but she had been endowed with that healthy, sudden passing beauty which blossoms and dies before it has time to mature. Rowena had grown thin and beaky, and her spirits and bounce had flattened. She had always, according to Ivy, been ‘man-mad’, and she proved this by embarking on a shipboard romance with a rotter from Cape Town, whom she was obliged to marry. She settled in Cape Town, bore a child and died of some illness or other—nobody could quite say what. None of the Barrons ever met the rotter. The rotter had thought Rowena had money, and Rowena had hoped the rotter had money, and as neither of them had much they ended up in a short marriage of mutual recrimination, culminating in early death. Rowena had not set a good example for Chrissie to follow.