A Woman on the Edge of Time (7 page)

I think about the Clarks. Susie says they stayed on at London Road after the Fyvels left, and though she doesn't know where they went, it is not unlikely that they remained in the area. Clarkie would surely be dead by now, but what about her son, Roger, Hannah's friend in my grandmother's stories?

Clark is a common name, and I am not sure it wasn't Clarke or even Clerk, but searching online I discover a Roger Clark from Amersham, of about the right age, who belongs to a vintage-car club, and through this I get his phone number.

When I call, Roger seems almost as delighted to hear from me as I am to have found him. Evescot was the third cottage from the left, he says. The Clarks's was the end cottage. They lived there until 1961. Hannah came with my grandmother to visit when he was about fourteen or fifteen, he remembers, but he stayed in his room and refused to come downstairs.

HIS WIFE IS
about to have an operation, but he would be happy to see me after that. Less impatient now that I have found him, I suggest a day when Susie will be in London, and a couple of weeks later, Susie and I drive out to Amersham.

On the way, Susie reminds me of my grandmother's stories, some of which I have forgotten. The incident with the chicken shed was apparently part of a broader campaign Hannah waged against Clarkie. On another occasion, she helped Roger escape when Clarkie locked him in his room by instructing him to tie sheets together and climb out of his window. She also orchestrated the local children to hide in the brambles when Clarkie went blackberrying and to jump out at her. These stories carry me so readily back to the images in my childhood mind that I am almost surprised when we knock on Roger's door and it is answered by a smiling grey-haired man and not the boy of my imagination.

In his sitting room, Roger shows us a picture of himself as exactly the gap-toothed boy I pictured. Though when we tell him about my grandmother's stories, he corrects us. His mother may have helped my grandmother out with eggs — it was her chicken shed — but she wasn't anyone's housekeeper. Nor was she ever cruel to him.

He and Hannah, he tells us, were part of a gang of children living in the cottages who went around stealing apples and walnuts from people's gardens, picking mushrooms, hunting squirrels with homemade catapults. The men were mostly gone to war, and the fields and woods and roads were empty. In those days, you could wait for an hour for a car to come along London Road.

There was a rubbish dump a little further along, and they would search through it for anything they might be able to use — old toys, bicycle parts. They found a bathtub once, and dragged it down to the river, and plugged up the hole and used it as a boat. At night they would sit on the dump, smoking cigarettes.

All this is new to me — Hannah the tomboy, as Roger describes her, running wild with her countryside gang. Though I wonder how much these are Roger's stories, how much Hannah was actually present in them, whether she wouldn't often have been at Chesham Bois or gymkhanas with Sonia and Tasha.

He had seen Hannah coming up the drive, Roger says, the time she and my grandmother came to visit when he was fourteen or fifteen, and had shouted down to his mother to say he wasn't there. Why? I ask. ‘Because she looked so beautiful and sophisticated' and he was ‘a teenage boy with acne'. He stayed in his room until they left. That glimpse out of the window was the last time he saw her.

AFTERWARDS SUSIE
and I stop at the cottages. We know which one was Evescot now, but it refuses to look any different from the others. She asks if I want to ring the bell, and I shake my head. I don't need to see inside any more; it is enough to have met Roger, heard his memories.

On the way home, Susie tells me more about those times. I knew my grandmother as she was in her older years, fastidious about dirt on her carpets in her Primrose Hill house, at war with the cats that defecated in her garden, but Susie says she enjoyed her years in the country. She didn't have a car, but she could cycle or take the bus to get around. Her cousin, Lila, often stayed with her and ‘taught her to drink': they would go to the pub in the evening and ‘drink gin, brandy, rum, whatever they could get'. Together, Susie says, the two women ‘discovered that life could be pleasant without men'.

Hannah, too, seems to have thrived in a female household. When Lila's dog had to be taken to the vet to be put down, the three of them took her together, and Hannah had the idea of singing hymns to cheer them all up, and soon the whole of the upper deck of the Green Line bus was singing along.

Among my grandparents' papers are a handful of letters my grandmother sent to my grandfather during the war. In one, dated October 1943, she wrote of a visit from an army friend. Hannah, then seven, was ‘very sweet and anxious to hear all about her Daddy. She came down in her night-gown and a lovely red velvet cloak. She looked very charming and behaved in a delightful way.'

Most of the references to Hannah are about her achievements: reading
Oliver Twist
at seven, writing four poems in an evening — though one mention, while complimentary, hints at a more challenging girl. She is ‘on top of her form. She is so helpful and so very easy. I can't remember when I last had a scene.'

The poems in the folder Susie brought are all from this period. They include several that were published in a children's periodical and one broadcast on the BBC, presumably the competition of my grandmother's story. They are precocious for a seven- or eight-year-old. ‘Like water from the ocean great,' reads one, ‘Women weep about the gate. /The canary up on the wall /Has watched us sobbing in the hall.' But they are all imitative like this, don't say much about her other than that she was clever, good at fulfilling adult expectations.

Her precocity did lead to her being pushed ahead a year in school. In her first school report from St Mary's School in Gerrards Cross, she was just five while the average age of the class was six and a half. ‘Hannah has settled in and made good progress this term,' her early reports read. ‘Hannah has a very good memory, quite a wide vocabulary.' But comments about her intelligence and abilities were soon being tempered by concerns about her attitude. ‘Hannah's enthusiasm is delightful but she needs to learn not to be assertive and to realise that other people are equally important.' ‘Hannah is inclined to demand too much attention.' ‘She is still too noisy, and must learn both to speak and to move more quietly.'

These reports seem to me more revealing of Hannah's personality than her poems, if not always perhaps in the way that the teachers intended. I don't doubt that she was assertive, boisterous, noisy, but I wonder if there would have been so much concern about these characteristics if she had been a boy.

Among the papers Susie brought are also some photographs from the Amersham days. One is a school photograph in which Hannah stands at the end of a row, half the size of the other children, her hair in pigtails, a proud smile on her face.

Several are of Hannah riding in a pair of oversized jodhpurs. In one, she is galloping, bent forward over the horse's mane, a fierce expression on her face. In another, she is standing on the saddle of the horse.

Most moving to me are a couple of contact sheets taken several years apart, presumably at a portrait studio. Each consists of forty-eight shots, and looking from one shot to the next is almost like watching a clip of film.

In the first, she is five or six, wearing a coat with a hood. She is clearly being asked to smile, but she keeps forgetting and starts looking around, and then is told to smile again and does so, more and less genuinely.

In the second, she is perhaps nine or ten. She is wearing a polka-dot blouse and a little white bow in her hair. She is a bit more toothy and gawky, more self-conscious. In some of the shots she grins broadly, but in others she purses her mouth as an older girl might do, or is caught looking sideways at the camera, and it seems to me that I see on her face a sense of expectation, a readiness, impatience, for the adventure of life to come.

Five

AT THE END
of the war, my grandfather came home to meet Susie for the first time and to find Hannah ‘grown into a slim athlete in jodhpurs'. I had always assumed that the family had moved straight into London, but in fact they stayed in the cottage, and after that another nearby house, for a further six years.

With London easily accessible on the Metropolitan line, my grandfather soon had a job as literary editor of
Tribune
, and there is no further mention in his writings of his home life. My main source of information about Hannah's years in Buckinghamshire after the war are the cups and rosettes she won at pony club meetings, which tell of weekends at places like Hyde Heath and Cherry Dell, or High Wycombe and Beaconsfield, and even as far away as the East Sussex Riding Club in Crowhurst, on the other side of London.

Among my grandparents' papers is a programme from one of these meetings. For younger children there was ‘bending' — a kind of slalom on horseback — and simple dressage and ‘saddling up', but as the girls got older the jumping grew more serious. My grandmother told of Hannah competing against Olympic riders, and my grandfather wrote of Hannah and Alan Oliver, who rode for England, if not at the Olympics, ‘winning everything'. Photographs also show an older Hannah, grown into her jodhpurs, riding over some serious jumps.

One of the rosettes was for winning the Juvenile Open Jumping Competition at the British Show Jumping Association. Another, when Hannah was eleven, was for ‘Best child rider under 21'. There is also a grand ‘Turf and Travel Cup', with a sterling silver hallmark. Most of the prizes, though, are from local meetings, and as many are for second or third as first place, suggesting that there were other riders as good or better than she was — that though she must have been a talented rider, her abilities as a horsewoman seem to have grown after her death.

The cups and rosettes suggest she peaked in the summer of 1948, when she turned twelve, the autumn before she started at Frensham Heights. She didn't throw over riding as abruptly as my grandmother told my father; she continued to win prizes for the next couple of summers, though less each season, and by the time she turned fourteen her interests had moved on.

THERE WERE PLENTY
of good day schools within reach of Amersham; Sonia was already at nearby Berkhamsted. But Susie remembers my grandparents telling her how eager Hannah was to go away to boarding school, and sensing that they had not been unhappy to see her leave.

Frensham Heights, with its emphasis on self-expression and the arts, including drama, was certainly a more natural home for Hannah than St Mary's in Gerrards Cross. The one report from Frensham that has survived among my grandparents' papers, from her first term, shows an immediately more sympathetic appreciation of her character: ‘Alert and critical, Hannah very soon learnt the way of things. She has made friends and was generally the first to make contact. We are pleased with the way she has settled down to living in a dormitory. In managing her own routine affairs she is quick and capable.'

I have continued to be passed from one old Frenshamian to another, and most use similar words to describe Hannah: ‘exuberant', ‘fascinating', ‘a character', ‘always smiling, always happy', ‘dynamic but also highly emotional'. ‘Dramatic was the word we used,' Carole Cutner told me.

Time and age make more specific memories harder to elicit. Tasha remembered Hannah deciding that the girls were all too fat, and getting a group of them to meet in the locker rooms in the morning to exercise while she chanted Shakespeare at them: ‘Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt.'

Bill Wills, the carpentry teacher, recalled some girls who had signed up for carpentry to ‘get out of sewing' pushing the clock hand forward in his workshop so they could leave early. ‘I think Hannah was one of them,' he said, with a wink.

She was ‘several teachers' pet', according to Carole Cutner, though another old Frenshamian remembered her getting into trouble with a teacher for referring to local people as ‘yokels'; and Susan Downes remembered a disagreement with another teacher that ended with Hannah ‘turning a whitish green and shaking', as she had on the ski slopes with the headmaster.

One or two former classmates are more critical. Stephen Frank, who Susan perhaps meant by the boy who had been in Belsen, though it was actually Teresienstadt, talks of Hannah's need to ‘rule the roost'. And I have an email exchange with a woman Susie remembers as Hannah's friend who eventually writes to say she would rather not speak about Hannah.

More surprising to me is that Hannah was an athlete. I know about her riding and that she was a good water skier and skier. But it is still unexpected to hear that she was ‘good at the long jump, the high jump, sprinting, and fast on the wing at hockey'. There is something particularly poignant in the thought of a teenage Hannah running eagerly down the wing in her hockey kit.

PERHAPS WHAT I
find moving is the contrast between the innocence of that image and the one of her walking down the corridor at night to the headmaster's study. Other than Shirley, Susan, and Tasha, Hannah's other contemporaries don't seem to have known about Hannah and the headmaster at the time, though they heard about it later. But all noticed her interest in boys, and boys' interest in her.

I know about Chris Harrison, and have been told about another Frensham boyfriend. Then there was the ‘Robert something foreign' Shirley mentioned, who I learn was Robert Landori Hoffman, a name it is easy to track down to Canada, where he lives. He remembers Hannah ‘as a slight, pretty black-haired girl', he writes back when I email him. ‘Of course we were all so very young then.' He gives me his number in Montreal, and I call him. He was a couple of years older than Hannah, but they had a ‘pash' for each other. ‘Everyone was always having pashes,' he says. ‘An innocent word but they were not always so innocent, there was a lot of fumbling in the bushes.'

I can't bring myself to ask Robert about his fumblings with my mother, but I do start keeping a list of her inamoratos. There was the boy on the Sweden trip, and Susie also mentions that at Simon's funeral an old friend of my father's, Hamish MacGibbon, told her that Hannah had been his first love.

I call Hamish, and go round to see him. He was sixteen when he met Hannah, he says. His parents and my grandparents were friends, and his mother, who was always trying to fix him up, kept nagging him about this attractive girl. He was reluctant at first, but once he met Hannah he was ‘crazy about her'. He took her sailing on the Thames and to watch the fireworks at the Festival of Britain.

He remembers riding home with her in a taxi one evening and telling the driver to keep driving round the outer circle in Regents Park so he could kiss her. She had this ‘lovely sense of humour and a combination of good looks and a sharp mind'. He is in his eighth decade now, on his second wife, but his eyes grow misty at the memory. ‘I think I was probably in love with her,' he says.

Hannah was fifteen at the time, he thinks, but when I get home I look up the date of the Festival of Britain and see that she was still fourteen — young, back then, to be kissing in the back of taxis.

I ALSO GO
to see Jill Steinberg, another person I always thought was my father's friend, but who, Sonia told me, knew Hannah from Amersham days. Jill says that for a time in their teens, when they were about fourteen, she and Hannah were close in the way girls can be. She was flattered by Hannah's attentions, she says, but was also wary. ‘When Hannah focused on you it was very intense, but you were aware that at any time the focus might move on somewhere else.'

They were the same age, but Hannah was more mature, more ‘knowing'. Jill remembers them writing, ‘or really Hannah writing', to
Woman's Own
magazine for information about birth control. Hannah insisted that they give Jill's address — Jill's parents were less likely to notice a letter arriving for her than my grandparents. The letter duly came, and Jill remembers reading the material with Hannah on a bus going down Regent Street. To Jill, birth control, the whole idea of sex, was something to giggle over, but ‘looking back now' she thinks that Hannah had really wanted to know about it.

TYPING UP MY
notes from these conversations, I imagine my own teenage daughters looking over my shoulder and telling me to leave the poor girl alone, to get myself a life. I am learning more about my mother's adolescent romances than most sons would know, or would want to know. This obsession with her love life is partly, I realise, about the headmaster again. How do her ‘pashes' with boys relate to what she was doing with him? But it is more than that. She killed herself, after all, over a man, over a failed love affair — or so the story goes.

I am conscious that everything I am hearing is looked at through the prism of time, fading memories. So I am excited when Shirley writes to say that she has found her teenage diaries and is typing up any references to Hannah, which she sends a few days later.

The entries start in January 1949, six months after Hannah started at Frensham. They are still clearly little girls. They go to a ‘super smashing circus', and afterwards Hannah stays the night at Shirley's.

Friendships between girls dominate, and several entries are about a girl I realise is the woman who didn't want to speak about Hannah. She and Hannah have ‘broken up', Shirley writes. The girl and another are ‘being vile to Han', who is ‘coming round with us as she's no one to go around with'. Shirley doesn't say what happened, and I can't imagine it was too serious, though serious enough, it seems, for the woman not to want to speak about Hannah sixty years later.

By autumn of the next year — the period Hannah gave up riding — the focus had turned to boys. Hannah, now fourteen, has quarreled ‘like hell' with Chris, and Shirley has had to intervene, or ‘in-between', as she calls it. ‘They do get so intense about it,' she writes. ‘During senior supper they are still at it.'

Another year on, and Hannah is with Robert Landori-Hoffman. She ‘really cannot stop talking about Robert', and gets ‘frightfully jealous' if anyone else ‘as much as glances in his direction'. Speaking in the bathroom late one night, Hannah tells Shirley how she and Robert ‘had been making hay apparently in the senior sitting room and K caught them and was fairly icy. Hanny was worried stiff, said that K hated her etc, which is of course balderdash.'

A few weeks later, Shirley writes of Hannah slapping Robert. ‘He was livid. Silly idiots.' Soon after, they have broken up. At first, Hannah is ‘very cut up about it' and ‘frantic and furious' when she sees Robert with another girl. But a few months later, she comes back from the boating holiday in Sweden ‘brown and attractive' and ‘apparently madly in love'.

Shirley had left Frensham by now, and there is only one more entry, from the skiing holiday in Austria that Christmas, which Shirley, like Susan, went on despite no longer being at the school. Perhaps Hannah's explicit letter to Chris Harrison was not caused by the headmaster but an eye-opener to him, his catching Hannah ‘making hay' with Robert, too, for he seems now to have taken their place: ‘Gosh but she is getting attractive, far more than I am and when I am with her I cannot control a slight feeling of jealousy. As for Hannah and K, on the journey, whether by coincidence or planning, Hannah was constantly by him and during the night literally slept in his arms, confiding to me afterwards he kissed her four times on the lips in brotherly fashion. I was shocked.'

I HAVE BEEN
in contact with a woman named Rosellen in the Frensham Heights alumni office about visiting the school, and one morning I take the train down with Carole Cutner. When we arrive, Rosellen and Carole show me round the main house, which was originally built for the Charrington brewing family. We walk through the old ballroom, where children are having a dance lesson. ‘Where we had our dances every Saturday night,' Carole says, ‘the girls lined down one wall, the boys down the other.' On the other side is the old orangery, apparently the last to be built in Europe. The house stands on the lip of a hill, and there are views across the valley to the fields and tree-lined hills on the other side.

When Rosellen goes back to work, Carole takes me up the grand central staircase to the dormitories where she and Hannah lived, though they are about to be refurbished and are empty except for a few dusty beds and desks.