Millions Like Us (69 page)

The later 1940s also offered glimpses into an even more rewarding future: one in which the housewife might cease to be a beast of burden, lay down her load and – with time on her hands – turn, like men, to careers and causes. Social involvement for women meant reading intelligently, attending meetings and lectures, playing as full a part as they could. For women to remain at home was insufficient today.
In his essay ‘Woman’s Place’
William Emrys Williams,
^*
director of the Bureau of Current Affairs, wrote:

Woman’s place is Everywhere.

She has the same responsibilities as men.

The war has precipitated the answer.

The new buzz-phrase was ‘post-war participation’, and it was actually beginning to look achievable.

Was it possible that the long hours spent queuing outside individual shops were numbered? In January 1947 the
Daily Express
ran an enticing piece entitled ‘QUEUES: This may be the answer’. The illustration showed a stylish young woman pushing a wheeled double-decker trolley; the article explained how she would do her shopping in a new form of ‘help-yourself market’, proceeding through a one-way turnstile into aisles full of shelves, from which she would fill her trolley with tins and packages, before submitting the contents to a cashier who would ring them up on a register and pass them for packing to an attendant. The supermarket – American-style – was born. ‘The women there like it – and I think shoppers here would too.’ By the end of that year ten such stores had opened in Britain.

What could be done about the queues? ‘We may have to adopt the American help-yourself idea,’ suggested the
Daily Express
.

And was it possible that the time spent on housework might finally be reduced? Most housewives at this time still spent up to eleven hours a day on their tasks. But labour-saving gadgetry was starting to appear on the market: the twin-tub, the Frigidaire and the electric toaster. Since the 1946 ‘Britain Can Make It’ exhibition Mrs Post-war had had her heart set on such futuristic delights.
Shirley Goodhart was one young wife
who purchased a Hoover vacuum cleaner in 1949: ‘Such a joy to get our bedroom carpet clean without the effort of lying under the bed with a handbrush.’ And, judging by the deluge of requests for
post-war career advice
to women’s magazines, women did indeed have ambitions that extended beyond keeping their homes immaculate:

I shall soon be leaving school and I would like to work in a film studio.

I am terribly anxious to get a job abroad as my divorce has just come through and I want to get right away from all the unhappiness connected with my past life.

But, despite the recommendations of a Royal Commission report, equal pay was still being sidelined. Noisy equal-pay activists were regarded as a sectional minority, and the Labour Party felt able to risk losing their vote. In 1948 the patriarchy still found it too hard to accept that women might have the same skills, intellect and competence as men; nor could they contemplate any erosion of their power base.

The Pram in the Hall

Since the age of sixteen
Phyllis Noble had dreamed of a life different to that of her mother. Education had shown her the way. Books and ideas seemed to promise an abundant harvest, a life of the mind, and, after the war, she had entered a profession where her skills were needed and appreciated. The road lay open. But the claims of love were immediate and pressing.

On 31 July 1948 Phyllis Noble’s hopes of a modern marriage were, to the limits that she could have hoped for, fulfilled. Peter Willmott had been offered a place to study Economics and Politics at Ruskin College, Oxford, and, faced with enforced separation, they decided
to get married straight away. Having agreed, Phyllis was jittery. ‘I suppose if it doesn’t work out we can always get a divorce,’ she said, but Peter soberly discouraged any flippancy on the matter. Her mother panicked at the spectacle of Phyllis throwing herself away on a penniless student. ‘He’s got nothing,’ she wailed. Mrs Noble was made so distraught by her daughter’s plans for a no-frills wedding with no guests and no reception that Phyllis eventually caved in and invited her family to see them being married by Donald Soper, the famous Methodist minister, at Kingsway Hall. To her relief, Peter’s family were dissuaded from making the journey. On the day, she put on her best interview suit – green gaberdine – teamed with a pink felt hat and dainty veil and caught the bus to Holborn. The Nobles were there in force; but Peter, exhausted from doing night duty at the hostel, was late. Their two witnesses arrived shortly afterwards, and without further ado the ceremony was under way. When it was all over the company repaired to the pub for a cursory drink to toast the newly wed pair before they fled for Charing Cross. As they reached the honeymoon pub in a Kentish village their nervous excitement slowly ebbed. Peter could barely speak from tiredness, and on reaching their bedroom dropped instantly into a deep and childlike slumber. ‘This, I thought, is surely an odd and lonely start to a marriage.’ They had known each other barely four months.

Some excerpts from Phyllis’s diary for 1948:

20th August 1948

A new page for Mrs Willmott!

7th September 1948

Such continuous happiness is almost unbearable – certainly contains an element of anguish. After 5 weeks life still really consists only of Peter.

3rd November 1948

Impossible to express the deep excitement which tingles and sings inside on looking around at ‘our home’ … To me it is already all I want a home to be – not too large, not too small, mainly furnished with books, made alive by our love.

Phyllis had found her life’s partner.

But by the end of 1948, when she discovered she was pregnant, their life together took a new turn. Peter was working for the Labour
Party, and having a baby would mean no room in the Canonbury flat. So when Peter’s father offered them accommodation under his roof in Essex the Willmotts, like many other homeless young couples, had no option but to accept. In August 1949 Lewis was born. For Phyllis, freedom, ambition and choice were all deferred, as motherhood brought with it a rush of conflicting emotions. There was intense joy but also, with Peter’s commute and demanding job taking up most of the long day, debilitating loneliness. And, as any new mother knows, intellectual activity went on hold. Books, ideas and ‘post-war participation’ were suspended. After broken nights and mornings spent boiling nappies, Phyllis’s face would be streaming with tears as she pushed her pram between the endless hedgerows of that featureless countryside. Her picture of a marriage that would exclude her from ‘real life’ was materialising in just the way she had always dreaded. What had become of her ‘marriage of minds’? Was she becoming her mother? It was indeed a punishment, a sentence to servitude and hard labour. ‘I’m so tired of my life here in such a weary, weary way,’ she wrote early in 1950:

This year, I shall not find spring singing through me with upsurging hopes. Although each day I am expectant for I know not what, each day I am worn out by waiting – for Peter, for the future, for life to begin again.

But Phyllis had married a man who accepted her for who she was. Outfacing her mother’s disapproval – ‘as a daughter she thought I was odd … abnormal’ – she struggled on and resumed her career at the earliest opportunity.

That was over sixty years ago. Phyllis was widowed in 2000. ‘We were married for forty-two years. I’m a relic. I’m just amazed I could have survived him. Peter was so much more sensible than I was – the guy rope tying me to the ground; he was a wonderful man.’

*

For Joan Wyndham,
being lonely and hard-up had never cramped the bohemian in her; and anyway, what bona fide bohemian had ever had any money?

Joan was the kind of optimistic young woman for whom hope would always triumph over experience. In 1946 she was jobless, and her boyfriend, Kit Latimer, had broken her heart by announcing his
intention of marrying a rival ex-WAAF. Back in Fitzrovia, she took to drinking with the Ceylonese poet Meary Tambimuttu, who had been a wartime sex symbol and was as indigent, romantic and generous as she was. His bed was full of bugs, so she never slept with him, but in a profligate moment at the Hog in the Pound Tambi produced an engagement ring set with three opals. Joan went to wash her hands, and the gems – all imitation – immediately dropped out and disappeared down the waste. Mortified at the thought of hurting Tambi’s feelings, she ran for the back door and never returned.

As the cold winter of 1947 set in, Joan kept warm in bed with the painter Lucian Freud. But Freud quickly replaced her with a new muse, Kitty Garman. Once the weather improved Joan and a girlfriend hitch-hiked to Cornwall and made for the Scilly Isles, where they camped out in a sea-cave with a group of young French proto-hippies who lived on boiled limpets and roasted seagulls. It was a happy time, which lasted until the local police evicted them. Joan then decided to track down her smart but reprobate father, the spendthrift journalist Dick Wyndham, at his mill house in Sussex. The autumn saw Joan in Oxford. At a party she met a tall, blond, clever philosophy undergraduate named Maurice (Mo) Rowdon: ‘We took one look at each other and spent the rest of the night talking and dancing. A few days later I moved in with him.’

In March 1948 Joan too became pregnant. She and Mo Rowdon decided to get married, though their infant daughter was already three weeks old by the time Joan finally got to the altar. In the halcyon early days of her marriage Joan suddenly got the news that Dick Wyndham – who had been reporting the first salvos between the newly formed state of Israel and its Arab neighbours for the
Sunday Times
– had been shot dead by a sniper. There were terrible pangs for a father whom she had barely known – mingled with the overt hope that she and Mo would surely, now, come into a fortune. But by the time the lawyers had paid off Dick’s debts and calculated death duties, there was only enough to buy a small cottage near Sevenoaks, to which they decamped that summer:

Domesticity – how I hated it! Much as I loved my daughter, I wasn’t too keen on the rest of the stuff that goes with motherhood. Those were the days when nappies were soaked in pails, boiled up on top of the stove and hung out to dry in the garden. In spite of rationing I cooked a huge fantastic meal twice a day, and grew fat and ugly.

I had a pleasant house in one of the prettiest villages in Kent, an adoring husband and a lovely daughter – so why was I so bloody miserable?

Rural heaven, the timeless peace of an English valley, couldn’t compete with her formative years spent in the Chelsea Blitz. For Joan, post-war participation meant parties, and not the political kind. At the age of twenty-seven, how could being a housewife measure up to the sheer adrenalin rush of making love as the bombs rained down, dropping amphetamines in an air-raid shelter or dancing, drunk on crème de menthe, to a soundtrack of sirens? Joan tried growing vegetables, acquired a cat and a rabbit and made friends with the only Communists in the village. But it was no good. ‘All the time I was dreaming of Negro nightclubs, young bearded boys in tight black trousers, and smart literary parties full of my father’s old friends.’ The city in wartime had marked her. Nothing would ever quite live up to it again.

‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall,’ wrote Cyril Connolly in
Enemies of Promise
(1938). Exiled to Kent, Joan Wyndham would probably have recalled this famous dictum from her father’s literary drinking companion. Joan had met Connolly in 1945, describing him as ‘fat and piggy with one of those clever-ugly faces like Dylan Thomas had’. Certainly, Connolly saw his notional pram (he had no children at the time) and the responsibilities it represented as more of a threat to male creativity than female. His assumptions, and those of his sex, were that the pram’s occupant would be taken care of by the female parent, whose ‘good art’ was presumably of lesser importance.

Nina Bawden’s creative talents
were shelved when she turned down a £900-a-year job in journalism because of her pregnancy. The newlywed acquired instead a substantial Rolls Royce of a perambulator, immensely heavy and cumbersome. Getting this monster up the steps to the front door left Nina exhausted, but it was ‘light and springy on the flat’. Nicholas, born in summer 1947, lay in it, and was now the focus of her existence:

I would have given my life for him had the need arisen. But I was alone with him all day and longed for someone to talk to who could talk back to me. Eventually, I met another girl in a similar plight. We pushed our prams to the park together on fine afternoons and, when it rained, sat in each other’s houses smoking and drinking gin or whisky while our babies played behind the sofa and pulled each other’s hair. Babies and boredom, boredom and babies – when the whisky ran out, we made up our faces, exchanged clothes, did our hair, and the afternoon still yawned ahead.