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ofRevelations The Book
WOMEN and THEIR S
from the 1950 s t o t h e present day
ECRETS
the book of revelations
also by juliet nicolson
The Perfect Summer
The Great Silence Abdication
A House Full of Daughters
Frostquake
The Book of Revelations
Women and Their Secrets from the 1950s to the Present Day
Juliet Nicolson
Chatto & Windus
LONDON
Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Vintage, is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies
Vintage, Penguin Random House UK, One Embassy Gardens, 8 Viaduct Gardens, London SW11 7BW
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First published by Chatto & Windus in 2025
Copyright © Juliet Nicolson 2025
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For Clemmie and Flora, Imo and Gigi, and for the voices of daughters and their daughters everywhere.
This book is a work of non-fiction partly based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. In some cases names of people, places, dates, sequences and the detail of events have been changed to protect the privacy of others.
Content warning: this book contains sensitive content related to sexual assault and abuse.
Introduction
Secrecy is one of the most essential, and enigmatic, characteristics of human behaviour. It is embedded in the hard drive of our existence: a leading American psychologist estimates that most of us are holding an average of thirteen secrets at any one time. Secrets bind us together and they tear us apart. Secrets can thrill, but they are equally likely to torment; and those which run deepest travel down the generations wrapped up in betrayal, deceit, shame and fear.
Everyone has their unique experience around secrecy, the keeper and the divulger forever balancing on shifting ground. Choosing whether to conceal or reveal a secret may feel autonomous but more often external influences dictate those decisions. The punitive consequences of rule-breaking may be one deterrent, while another is the judgement of a Greek chorus of family, friends, lovers, colleagues, neighbours,
complete strangers and increasingly the anonymous power wielded by social media. These conditions are constantly evolving as behaviour and beliefs that were once considered unacceptable, unrepeatable or illegal become decriminalised, accepted, celebrated, reassessed or re-condemned.
Secrets shroud the truth about our relationships and about our beliefs and practices around addiction, class, race, religion and sex. An outer persona often hides the private truth of an inner life, keeping to themselves the million unobserved thoughts, actions and pieces of information that no one else knows about, the desires either consummated or unfulfilled, the moments of solitary weeping when that feels like the only option. We keep secrets for fun, and for the thrill of being the chosen one, for that exhilarating and moving sense of being trusted with an exclusive knowledge. We keep secrets to protect ourselves, to protect others and to keep order. We keep secrets because we observe boundaries of dignity, loyalty and our own privacy. We do not always wish to reveal how often we sleep with someone, how we voted in a referendum or election, what we earn or who we have chosen to remember in our will. We tell our therapists and doctors things we would not tell our romantic partners. If we respect the importance of trust, we do not pass on confidences. Above all, we keep secrets that are associated with feelings of guilt, fear, shame, stigma and taboo. These are the secrets that require hiding parts of ourselves from public view. They are possibly the most common kind, and take the longest to reveal.
Echoing the old saying that ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’, the charity Age UK recognises that ‘opening up and sharing thoughts, fears, and experiences can really help – whatever
your age’, which means ‘none of us has to keep things to ourselves and feel alone’. And yet we take care with choosing who might bring us advice or comfort. We try to avoid sharing things with people for whom the niggle to tell might worm its way under the skin like an unscratched itch until the craving has been satisfied and confidences have been betrayed for the sake of gossip or revenge. But that transient relief, a powerful adrenalin hit, is followed by the devil’s punishment – the long-term scarring effect of guilt, and the prospect of our volubility being found out.
Some secrets are never meant to be shared. Others, especially the kind dependent on romance, or the acquisition of a new skill, count on the moment of revelation: the arrival of an unexpected, much loved guest; the evidence of a perfect backstroke after swimming lessons taken in secret; the word-perfect recital of a poem learned as a surprise; the planning of a marriage proposal, a birthday party; a delivery down the chimney on Christmas Eve by a figure whose identity must remain a secret withheld, but only from children, for ever.
My childhood was cobwebbed with secrets, floating invisibly through adult conversations, unexplained but occasionally illuminated by a glancing ray of guesswork. I was an early secret-keeper too. When I was quite small, but old enough to read, I would escape with a book to the beam-ceilinged attic at home, a space that no one else ever bothered to enter. A small table had been left up there many years before, together with a folding chair, positioned in front of a small window under the slope of the eaves. It was the perfect refuge, a place
to be unfindable, unaccountable; a place to read, to hide, to think, to exist in secret.
Women are often the gatekeepers of secrets, their reasons for revelation or concealment under constant vigilance, continual review. This is a multi-generational story about women’s changing relationship with secrecy – how it has evolved, altered and, on occasion, remained unchanged since the end of the Second World War. The subject is immense, the number and type of possible secrets inexhaustible. My starting point is personal, subjective, limited: the ways in which secrecy touched, guided, harmed, inhibited and sometimes liberated women like my mother, my daughters and myself through the different phases of our upbringing and the changes in our social environment. Because of women’s position at the heart of family life, we have often been society’s secret-keepers, so our secrets are particularly telling.
As I heard the stories of more and more women, the wider context and significance of secrecy came into fuller focus. And while I knew that personal stories, despite being gathered from women of different ages and backgrounds, could never hope to give a complete picture, or encompass every experience or type of secret, I began to see common denominators in how secrets can reveal some aspects of the way society functions at large: the secrets we hold inside mirroring the ways of the outside world.
During the course of writing this book, I have learned how women of different generations and cultures, bending, shaping and reacting against the shifting pressures of society and the law, have fought to protect themselves – both by keeping silent and by unsilencing themselves. The secrets that pinioned and delighted
our grandmothers vary from the secrets that have preoccupied their daughters and granddaughters. I began to see how the narrative arc of women and secrecy has run in parallel with the progression of the campaign for gender equality. Changes in the law, often as a result of the work of feminist activists, advances in technology, gradual societal emancipation, growing intolerance of shame and prejudice and a collective facing-down of fear have all contributed to the transformation of women’s relationship with secret-keeping. But what does the future hold? As I reached the end of the first quarter of this century a downwards curve, dipping away from the revealing of truth, became increasingly evident and, in many cases, alarming. I questioned whether a retreat for women back to silence in the face of the incessant glare and judgement of social media is inevitable. And so this is a book not only about the freedom of speech but about the freedom to choose when to speak and when to remain silent – when to keep our secrets secret.
The compulsion and obligation to keep secrets has long inhibited women’s freedom and emphasised their subjugation and position as outsiders, existing for so long on the sidelines of society’s hierarchy. From the end of the sixteenth century and right up until the Victorian age, women who gossiped, slandered, blasphemed or spoke in inappropriate tones to their husbands were known as ‘scolds’ or, as Shakespeare termed them, ‘shrews’. These women were made to wear a mask known as a ‘Scold’s Bridle’, an iron contraption that fitted over the top of the head, stretched over the nose and finished in a metal gag across the mouth. Attached to the mouth shield was a tongue suppressor,
sometimes fitted with spikes, with the whole device held in position by a padlock behind the neck. In the 1950s, when women were returned to a state of pre-war submissiveness, the accompanying suppression of the female voice was more subtle than a metal tongue trap but no less effective. But in the sixties the contraceptive pill, the ultimate game changer, together with women’s growing determination to challenge the status quo (and to be heard doing so), formed the basis for that decade’s activism. By giving women choice and control over their sexual and reproductive decisions, levels of societal tolerance began to increase, preparing the way for the Second Wave of the feminist movement and its campaign for economic and political equality.
In the 1970s the experience of being the second sex, nurtured and passed down for millennia, had also encouraged the instinct to observe. At last the means of expressing those observations was becoming possible. The setting up of physical refuges for victims of hidden abuse, and the launch of publications such as Spare Rib magazine in the UK and Ms magazine in America, eased isolation and offered women the chance to write openly about their ideas and concerns and to know they would be read and listened to, at least by other women. In the 1980s and 1990s therapy started to go mainstream and the changing focus of the popular media provided outlets for confiding previously hidden, puzzling or shameful experiences and thoughts. The gradual relaxing of rules around same-sex partners in 1967 and a new transparency over the details of adoption in governmental acts passed in 1958 and 1960 saw a slow tank roll towards the lifting of legal restraints on aspects of life that had been conducted in
secret for so long. The Third Wave of the feminist movement, led in the 1990s by Gen X – women born in the mid-1960s and 1970s – set out to broaden and diversify the feminist cause. The new century belonged to those born in the 1980s and early ’90s, the Millennials. This latest phase coincided with the dizzying progress of technology, enabling the rapid spread of worldwide secret-sharing and solidarity – as happened with the 2017 #MeToo movement, when outing abusive behaviour by men resulted in an epidemic of truth-telling.
However, the power and freedoms of social media – the very tools that had encouraged such abuse to be brought out of hiding – soon began to curdle. The uncontrollable, largely unmonitored roller coaster of technology brought with it a danger that had not been fully anticipated by consumers. Anonymity licensed a backlash against confessional ‘over-sharing’ and freely expressed opinion, offering few places to hide. Platforms like Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter) and Instagram, as well as CCTV, drones and data theft, removed the boundaries of privacy held sacrosanct by earlier generations, leaving users potentially open to relentless criticism and worse. Trolling introduced an element of fear that saw professional women and those in the public eye choosing to retreat from the vulnerability of fame. Terminology to describe the precarious and punitive consequences of oversharing, over-confiding and daring to speak openly about personal convictions included ‘gaslighting’, ‘cancelling’ and ‘ghosting’ – concepts co-opted from very different arenas. The rise of populism, punitive political regimes and targeted, personal attacks around the world has in some cases discouraged women from speaking out at all, making a return to secrecy
feel like the safer option. In other cases, for example under the gender apartheid in Afghanistan, women have been effectively erased from public life. The long and incomplete campaign for gender equality has become so ruptured with uncertainty that Dr Hannah Dawson of King’s College, London, editor of The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, wonders, ‘Are we waving or drowning?’
In 1977 the poet Audre Lorde expressed the consequences of silence with transcendent eloquence; her recognition of the inbuilt dilemma in speaking out has lost none of its relevance over half a century later. ‘Of course, I am afraid,’ she wrote, ‘because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger.’
As a queer Black woman, Lorde acknowledged the wisdom of the advice given to her by her daughter when Lorde was facing her own mortality: ‘You’re never really a whole person if you remain silent because there’s always that little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out and if you keep ignoring it – it gets madder and hotter and hotter and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.’ Because we know there will be an ultimate ending for us all, it is essential that silence during life is interrupted before the arrival of the final silencing of death.
This story of secrecy has emerged as a kind of mosaic, formed by looking through three interlocking lenses down the decades and generations. The process of unsilencing has taken place at a range of vocal levels – from a roar to a whisper – and the first lens focuses on the women’s movement, and the women
who, with courage, energy and tenacity, have fought for so long for human and gender rights. The second perspective is more intimate, and comes from conversations with private individuals who agreed to speak to me about the personal tyranny of secretkeeping, and the specific acts of courage required to confront family as well as society’s prejudices. Some of these women I had met over the years through work, travel and friendship, others I came across as my research widened from there. These stories and confessions, so generously shared, have often been difficult to hear, and even more often difficult to tell. My family’s many secrets have also changed with the times, so my own experiences form the third and autobiographical viewpoint of the book.
As secrets have emerged, slipped, tumbled from attics, cupboards, shelves, and from the deepest recesses of our minds, the act of exposing vulnerabilities, sharing hidden fears and lancing the corrosive, toxic effect of secrecy has confirmed to me that trust is humanity’s indispensable force field. Some details and identities in this book have been changed for privacy and protection in agreement with several of those who have told their stories to me.
I have had no wish to include tales that disparage or malign but rather to write about some of the emotional, psychological and societal effects of concealment. Why do we keep secrets? And why do we reveal them? This book, partly in the shape of a memoir, covers seventy or so years of a lifetime defined at times by the political and personal challenges of three generations of women caught up in hiding, sharing, betraying and defying the act of secret-keeping.
part i
My Mother’s Generation
1950–1970
chapter 1
Opinions Neither Heard nor Sought
Families safeguard their own secrets, embellishing and validating, protecting the narrative with each passing generation. The writer and potter Edmund de Waal remembered how, when talking to his grandmother Elisabeth, the conversation would be punctuated by ‘hesitancies that trembled into silences, silences that marked places of loss’. In her 2003 memoir Giving Up the Ghost, Hilary Mantel describes how ‘once a family has acquired a habit of secrecy, memories begin to distort because its members confabulate to cover the gaps in the facts’. And then, Mantel cautions, ‘Distortions breed distortion’, until ‘all the memories are laid side by side, at the same depth, like seeds under the soil’.
My husband’s Aunt Pam was born in 1916 during the First World War and she and I often talked about her childhood spent during and in the aftermath of that conflict. Maybe because I was only a niece by marriage she felt less inhibited than talking
to a closer relation. Pam would invite me to tea in her sunny conservatory and we would talk until darkness fell, unravelling the stigmas of both of our past lives. They were conversations that I looked forward to like no other, as Pam responded to my prompting and uncovered those seeds long-buried beneath the surface of her memory, sharing with me their depth and significance.
‘What did you have for lunch on Sundays?’ I once asked her.
‘Roast chicken,’ she replied without hesitation, before adding, ‘I always wore my best red dress on Sundays. I hated that dress. The wool scratched my bare legs. But I never complained.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because I didn’t dare make my father cross,’ the full force of her father’s temper evident in her voice as the memory suddenly returned to her.
The second youngest of five siblings, Pam was only three years old when, in 1919, she and her mother Ethel both caught the Spanish flu that decimated millions across the world. Somehow Ethel nursed herself and her daughter back to health, the sensation of reassurance and maternal devotion moving Pam to tears some ninety-five years later. Oh, how she had loved her mother! A woman with huge eyes ‘like beautiful blackbirds’ eggs, greenish-blue’, abused in word and deed by Basil, who rationed his wife’s household allowance as much as he rationed marital fidelity. Pam and her sister Stella used to tell their elder brother that he ‘must tackle Daddy. He is making Mummy unhappy. You must kill him.’
But the children were all too frightened of their father to confront him and the infidelity as well as the unhappiness continued. After Ethel’s early death at the age of fifty-five, Pam found a
sealed letter from her mother addressed to Basil, asking for a separation. It had never been posted. While the courage to take control into her own hands had failed Ethel, Pam’s own inability to protect her mother had left her with lifelong regret. During our conversations I would watch her strong, handsome profile, her expression registering every passing feeling. Whenever she spoke about her mother she closed her eyes and a smile, transient but transformative, would float across her face. But with the release of the bad memories, the deep secrets, the guilt she felt at betraying her father and in confiding the secret which had been suppressed for so long, her distress was unmissable. What had once seemed like the irrelevant details of a Sunday lunch and a red dress almost lost to memory had triggered the Proustian recall and brought Pam to the point of confession.
The timing of an admission such as Pam’s often coincides with the last years of life, especially for those who had survived two world wars. Pam lived through a time when it was considered indecorous to share private emotions when so many were suffering and secret-keeping became second nature. Unsurprisingly, some women of Pam’s generation became professional secretkeepers during the Second World War, chosen to work in intelligence at Bletchley Park. Pledging their silence for the security of their country, these code-breakers kept their life-long oath never to divulge information even in old age.
Betty Webb MBE became part of the Bletchley team in 1941 aged eighteen. Her parents had no idea what she was doing except that she wore a uniform and an intelligence badge. In her memoir No More Secrets, published in 2023, Webb described
how the signing of the Official Secrets Act took place in an office at Bletchley where the presiding army captain spoke to her with ‘a gun resting on the corner of the desk’. She was advised that discussing her work outside the department would be considered an act of treason, punishable by death. Thirty-four years later that wartime oath of secrecy was lifted, too late for Webb’s deceased parents to learn what their remarkable daughter had done in the war. Released from her vow, twenty more years elapsed before Webb felt able to talk about her experiences. Others chose to remain silent almost for ever. Pippa Latour was the last of the surviving female agents in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the same war. Born in South Africa, the daughter of a French doctor and an English mother, she moved to the UK aged eighteen in 1939. Fluent in French, she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Airforce (WAAF) and in 1944 she was parachuted into Normandy. Working under the disguise of ‘Genevieve’, a French soap seller trading from her bicycle, Latour picked up information from the German soldiers who were her customers. Using Morse code to send her findings back to her HQ in England, she stored the encrypted codes on a piece of silk. Wrapping the silk round a knitting needle, she skewered the information into a flat shoelace, pinning up her hair with the precious but undetected receptacle for her all-important secrets. Forever aware that her information had contributed to the Allied invasion and the resulting death of innocent French civilians, she remained reluctant to talk about her wartime life until a year before her death in 2023. But at the age of 102 Latour decided to tell her story in her memoir The Last Secret Agent, co-written with journalist Jude Dobson and published
posthumously, revealing for the first time the true extent of Latour’s heroism.
Secrecy was endemic in other female members of my family from that wartime generation, too. My first mother-in-law, Elizabeth, and her sister and brother were born in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the children of two British Mosleyites. Diana, Elizabeth’s younger sister, remembered being taken to meetings organised by the fascist leader Oswald Mosley and encouraged by her parents to chalk antisemitic phrases including ‘Perish the Jews’ (sometimes ‘Perish Judah’) on the town walls of Bognor Regis. When Diana was away at her convent boarding school she nearly fainted when the Mother Superior informed her that her mother Alma had been locked up in Holloway Prison for her fascist sympathies.
One day Diana was taken to Holloway to visit Alma. Her mother, suddenly an almost unrecognisable white-haired figure, ‘looked absolutely distraught. She was crying all the time . . . she was not my mother at all. I felt almost repulsion.’ Diana finally admitted on BBC radio in 2010 that by writing those slogans on the walls she felt she had personally participated in the Holocaust. ‘When Richard Dimbleby went into Belsen,’ she said, ‘I felt the guilt of the whole of the world on my shoulders. I felt utterly responsible for what happened in those camps in Europe.’ But the confession all those years later brought her no relief. As she described it, the guilt had ‘dug right into me’ and she could find no route back to self-absolution.
Stella, Aunt Pam’s sister and the mother of my husband Charlie, lived all her married life with the consequences of a
secret. When she got engaged to her boyfriend Philip, she didn’t know he was secretly in love with another woman. That woman was expecting his child. The day before the wedding Philip confessed his secret to his fiancée, and admitted he loved the other woman more. He gave Stella the choice of going ahead with the marriage or of calling the whole thing off. The stigma attached to being jilted in the late 1930s felt unsurvivable. So, without telling anyone in her family what had happened, Stella agreed that the marriage should take place. For the rest of Philip’s life, Stella never mentioned the other woman. But she tormented her husband in other ways and he tolerated her anger because of his guilt. Their children grew up through the 1940s and 1950s powerless to diffuse the tension that sometimes infected the whole household, with neither parent openly addressing the source of the antagonism.
I envy a dear friend who will not let her mother die without recording her life and their relationship in as full, honest and enquiring a way as they both know how. With the help of a sensitive and professional camera director, Helena and Elena have made a film together. Elena, born in 1934, her vivacity evident within five minutes of meeting her, understands the precious significance of this record-making all too well. Mother and daughter are banking memories about things big and small, confiding in one another and discussing everything that matters before it is too late. Laughter gives way to tears in a conversation that radiates tenderness as they address the inevitability that, one day, Helena will watch the film alone.
No such film would have been possible for me and my mother Philippa, who was born in 1928 – the first year of the era
defined in 1951 by the American magazine Time as ‘The Silent Generation’ to describe those born between 1928 and 1945 and who reached adulthood in the 1950s and early 1960s. The parents of these ‘Silent’ children, arriving in the interval that divided the economic dip of the Great Depression from the end of the Second World War, were still reeling from the decimation of so many young men. The memories of those lost boys were cherished, their special significance transferred to the male children who succeeded them.
Philippa didn’t stand a chance. Insignificantly positioned between two brothers, effectively silenced from the word go, she knew her place. As laws rendered married women, however qualified, ineligible from most salaried occupations, education was considered secondary to the housekeeping skills that were necessary for a successful marriage and for motherhood. The only daughter of a businessman and his class-conscious wife, my mother was raised never to object. Countryside life contributed to her isolation. Her brothers were either away at boarding school or up in town. Her parents were often holidaying in their villa in the South of France, satisfying their love of canasta and cocktails, while their daughter remained at home sweeping and dusting the Edwardian house in the New Forest, riding her ponies and avoiding the sharp-edged gorse bushes which pricked up through the surrounding scrub.
Secrecy was my mother’s go-to protection. Even if she had attempted any confession while she was alive, I doubt I would have listened. As part of her mother’s legacy, her stories were repetitive and showy-off name-drops, full of kings and queens, prime ministers and celebrities that she and her parents, and
even her grandparents, had once seen/met/dined with. There were conventions around food – the order in which to eat cheese or pudding, the precise position in which to lay down cutlery on a plate, the use of a fish knife or the temperature of water in a finger bowl, for heaven’s sake. As a child I swallowed this guidance whole but as I grew older I felt these codes and affectations belonged to a previous, class-contained generation and I wanted no part in them. I now feel guilty about treating my mother with such impatience. A woman awarded considerable material privilege but whose confidence, both as a child and as a wife, had been undermined by a suffocating patriarchal contempt and whose opinions were neither heard nor sought, simply moulded, did not deserve such harsh judgement from a daughter. Philippa was fourteen when her school was requisitioned by the army in the middle of the Second World War, bringing her formal education to a sudden end. As this was also the government’s cut-off age for mandatory school attendance, no one considered extending my mother’s academic instruction, which sons would have merited. When the Second World War ended and the soldiers, sailors and airmen returned home, the freedom that some women had become accustomed to during the conflict stalled. The decade following the Great War of 1914–18 had been quite different. A limited suffrage was won for women over the age of thirty in 1918 at the time of the Armistice, bowling its newly empowered voters through the 1920s when the extent of eligibility was widened to cover the over twenty-one-year-olds in 1928. With their hair cropped, and their bosoms flattened, a modish androgyny symbolised the new equality. In contrast, women who grew up in the aftermath of the 1939–1945
conflict found themselves expected to slip back into a state of acceptance, the ‘second sex’ returned to its proper place. My mother’s educational lack was a source of shame throughout her life, and the fact that it was readily explainable did nothing to ease her sense of inadequacy. Her parents considered her handson experience at keeping house for them followed by a stint in the kitchens at the classy Dorchester Hotel in London sufficient to qualify her as good wife material. She knew little of adult relationships growing up. But courted and flattered at a neighbour’s drinks party in 1952 by the attention of the local Conservative MP more than a decade her senior, my twenty-four-year-old mother jumped at the chance to escape. The mismatch in my parents’ relationship was obvious from the start, her youthful, spontaneous gaiety and innocence clashing with her husband’s relentless reminders of the gaps in her education. Sometimes the language in her surviving letters to him indicate how she tried to impress him, using unfamiliar words, experimenting with similes and descriptions with lots of adjectives. I didn’t realise why at the time, but her jealousy of the educational opportunities offered to me became a source of unspoken tension between us, only openly erupting in letters exchanged between my parents where my mother argued that I was not the right ‘material’ to attempt to land a place at university.
Although distressed by her husband’s criticism of her intellectual limitations, it was the physical side of her marriage that upset my mother most. Sexually inexperienced right up until her 1953 wedding night, she discovered she had married a man for whom love-making was, at his own later admission, a source of ‘repugnancy’, his self-reproach manifested in open resentment of my
mother’s evident longing for demonstrative love. Even if she had overcome her shame and embarrassment, she would not have known where to seek advice. So, she kept her confusion to herself, even from, or especially from, her husband. My father was barely more sexually conscious, having been fixed up by a friend just a few years before his marriage with a ‘resting’ actress who had relieved him of his innocence. The ‘event’ was as functional for him as passing his driving test, and he probably remained borderline-competent in both ‘skills’ for the rest of his life.
In 1955, a couple of winters into her marriage, my mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis and admitted for a lengthy stay to St George’s Hospital in London before convalescing for a year at her mother’s house in the New Forest. Total bed rest and incarceration were considered essential for the cure, and to prevent others from catching a disease thought to be spread through speaking, coughing or singing. This serious illness meant a year’s enforced isolation from her still-new husband and her ten-month-old baby. What did she feel about being separated from us during those days she spent back in her old childhood bedroom? I longed for a photographic record to help me find my way back to her again. But the albums which covered those very early years of her marriage and her subsequent motherhood went missing after her death. I could only guess at her loneliness and sadness as marriage and motherhood were put on hold. Since her death many years ago I have made many attempts to understand her. Even though I know ‘things’ should not matter, I am conscious that I have almost nothing tangible to remind me of her. Just as the Russian wedding ring
she was wearing when she died, one of the very few things of hers that I owned, slid off my finger one careless day and fell between the cracks of a pavement, my long-tentative grasp of my mother has slipped over the years to what felt like irretrievable depths.
I would love the chance to begin my relationship with my mother all over again. I have imagined, in an admitted spirit of stagey styling, seeing her walk into my house on a perfect summer morning, a soft breeze blowing rose petals in through the open door. Sitting across from one another at the kitchen table, I would try to persuade her to give herself up to a conversation inhibited in life and truncated by death. Aunt Pam’s late willingness to confide suggested to me that my mother might also eventually have agreed to talk. Would my own understanding of secrecy and a hard-won twenty-first-century ease with the baring of the soul, with asking for help, with admitting ignorance and fear, mean anything to her? When memory is the narrative device we use to make sense of our past, would we ever be able to untangle the edits and arrive at something that felt like the truth?
In my make-believe scene, embellished with teapot and cake, we would travel between her youthful past and the days we shared as mother and daughter. If I could bring her back just one more time, maybe we could dismantle the barbed wire muffled in the memory mist, remove the hazards of mistrust and disappointment that existed between us when she was alive. I would ask her to forgive me for judging her so harshly, for abandoning her after her second unhappy marriage. The years when I was away at university, easing myself into adulthood,
friendship, love affairs, were the ones when I avoided her most, was quickest to judge her, failed to talk to her, failed to listen to her, failed to show her my love. These were the years when she drank so much that she could not remember if she had eaten either lunch or dinner, years when she sat slumped for hours unconscious in front of the horse-racing channel on television, years when she was covered in bruises from falling down stairs, years when she needed help most. But I was too young, too selfish, too free to realise. If I could talk to her now I would tell her how I wish I had done things differently. This time I would listen to her, give her my whole attention, hope to soften her fear of intimacy, try to love her into courage and honesty. I would tell her how I have learned that the exposing of vulnerabilities and the sharing of uncertainties releases fear and shame. The writer Helena Lee talks about the ‘danger in the preservation of silence, in assuming that the experiences of previous generations exist in isolation’. Maybe my mother and I would have found common ground in places we never expected to.
I have discussed this fictional reunion with my own two daughters. ‘Would your mother mind you asking her about why her secret life has puzzled and preoccupied you so much?’ they wanted to know. ‘And then writing about it? Has this whole idea actually come about just because you are still angry with her for being so absent, so elusive?’
The prospect of getting to the truth of my mother’s life all these years later was admittedly daunting, and my daughters’ questions about my motivation were valid. I had three answers for them. First, quite simply, I would love the chance to hear
from someone who grew up almost a century ago about how the need to cling to secrecy trailed her and women like her throughout their lives. Secondly, from the perspective of a daughter’s curiosity, I would like to know some of the truths buried within my parents’ relationship. And thirdly, if I don’t speak up for my mother now, champion her, prevent her from being forever silenced, I will have failed her and those others who also struggled at that time to find their voice. Writing about her doesn’t feel like an act of betrayal but one of nearly-too-late filial responsibility. I am not angry with her. I am angry for her.
chapter 2
Is That Normal?
At the end of the Second World War, the insularity of island life remained as deep-rooted as ever, deepened by a wartime patriotism that had on occasion encouraged xenophobic thinking and behaving. The Conservative Party manifesto in the 1951 general election, when Winston Churchill was returned as prime minister, emphasised that ‘we must guard the British way of life, hallowed by centuries of tradition’. During the Second World War, when men were away defending the nation’s liberty, the recognition of women’s capability for managing all aspects of life in their absence had indicated progress. In 1945 sexual freedom was at the top of the agenda for those who had hoped the relatively liberal wartime codes of behaviour would last. But patriarchal control had returned, consigning many women to the position of understudy and to live once again in the shadow of their fathers, brothers, husbands, fiancés, uncles
and cousins, as the male principals reclaimed their leading roles. The popular series of children’s early reading books starring ‘Janet and John’ symbolised this attitude. Published in 1949, young Janet’s weekends were spent helping her mother with the housework, while her brother John was busy cleaning the car with his father. During weekdays the father went to his office leaving the mother at home to do a bit more cleaning until the father returned to sit down to a wholesome supper cooked by his wife.
Janet’s mother would have been grateful for the assistance of the new shiny machines that freed up time previously spent on washing clothes and dishes so women could, for example, focus on further enhancing their physical appearance for their husbands’ approval. As the practical land-girl army breeches were packed away in attics, the moulding and shaping that went on beneath women’s outer garments, corsetry familiar to their grandmothers, returned with all its buttoning and zipping and hooking and stretching and breath-holding and, above all, obscuring. The Playtex Cross Your Heart bra that ‘lifts and separates’ arrived in America in 1954 and soon crossed the Atlantic. The garment flattered as it held you in, kept you firmly in place, while providing a contouring emphasis on small waists, around which apron strings could be tied and finished with a tidy bow. While most women kept their bodies under wraps, there were provocative exceptions. Movie stars like Lana Turner and Jane Russell brought back the conical bra, which had first been popular in the early 1940s. Worn beneath clingy sweaters, the 1950s movie stars demonstrated its appeal and attracted the renewed attention and admiration of the male