An Education (7 page)

Inevitably, we drifted apart, though I always thought of Dick – still think of him – as my first boyfriend, conveniently obliterating Simon. He was certainly my first
love
and I was devastated when, soon afterwards, he started going out with Maria Aitken. But of course there were plenty of other boys for consolation, and in my second year, no longer attached to Dick, I seemed to go out with an awful lot of them. ‘Go out with’ is a bit of euphemism; I mean I slept with them; I was
wildly
promiscuous. I was still pining for Dick and wanting to find another boyfriend quickly so I thought cut to the chase – rather than waste endless evenings going on dates with men, why not go to bed with them
first
and see if I fancy them? This was quite an unusual attitude at Oxford at the time and one that gave me a well-earned reputation as an easy lay – I probably slept with about fifty men in my second year. My fantasy in those days was to meet a stranger, exchange almost no words, jump into bed, and then talk afterwards. But often there was no afterwards, either because the sex was a disaster, or because my pretence of sexual confidence scared them off. I did great, noisy, pretend orgasms with lots of ‘Yes! Yes! More! More!’ but I still hadn't experienced the real thing. (In retrospect it is really odd that I persisted with sex as long as I did. Normally I'm so terrified of being bored I'll go to the ballet once and say, ‘Right, that's it, I tried the ballet and it was boring, won't do
that
again.’ But somehow, with sex, I knew it would come right in the end and eventually it did.)

One of the few good men I found in my promiscuous phase was Howard Marks, the Balliol physics student who later became famous as Mr Nice the drugs dealer. He had the same easy attitude to jumping into bed as I did and awarded me the accolade of Great Shag. He stood out at Oxford in those days, not as a jailbird and drugs dealer, but because he was, or claimed to be, a Welsh miner's son who grew up in a pit village where they all spoke Welsh and kept coal in the bath. Later I learned that both his parents were teachers, but he rightly thought that a miner's son sounded more glamorous. He wore blue suede shoes, did brilliant Elvis impressions, and claimed to have lost his virginity to an aunt when he was eight. He was certainly a very experienced and generous lover, probably the first proper Don Juan I ever met, and I was grateful for the sex education he gave me. I never particularly associated him with drugs, though I suppose he smoked pot all the time. But then everyone did. Or actually I didn't, but I pretended I did. I would always take a joint if offered, but I never bought pot myself and didn't miss it in the holidays when I went home to Twickenham. I always preferred cigarettes.

When, if ever, did I do any academic work? I must have done some, to get a second, but I don't remember ever going to lectures. I'm not sure I even knew where they were given, and I certainly never set foot in the Bodleian library. I quite enjoyed studying the history of grammar and etymology; I could write plausible essays on Shakespeare because I'd done him thoroughly at school; I looked for the poets with the shortest canons – the Metaphysicals, Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins – and avoided those like Tennyson and Spenser who wrote for miles. Ditto novelists – Austen was ‘better’ than Dickens simply because there was less of her, and I worshipped Fanny Burney because she wrote only one novel. I still haven't read all of Dickens to this day. But I had the advantage of being a quick learner and exams suited me fine – I would bone up the week before, regurgitate it on the day, and then forget it. I totally agree with those who say that coursework is the only proper way to judge academic attainment – while thanking my lucky stars that it didn't exist in my day.

My whole three years at Oxford was a schizophrenic switch between endless parties during term time and then grindingly dull work in the vacations. Not academic work, obviously, but temporary office work. My parents had made me do a secretarial course before I went to Oxford (‘something to fall back on’) and I had a certificate saying I could do shorthand at 100 wpm and typing at 40 wpm, though I doubt I ever could. But it meant I could sign on with an office temp agency every vacation and work for a few weeks at shipping firms and insurance offices until I had accumulated enough money to pay for my next term's clothes and taxis. Many of the offices were so Dickensian I find it hard to believe they still existed in the 1960s. There were rows of men called ‘juniors’ in one room and rows of typists called ‘girls’ (even though many of them were middle-aged) in another, and we would be summoned by successive juniors who would say ‘Take a letter, Miss Barber’, and start dictating. They spoke so slowly, and so predictably, I never needed to take shorthand – I could have carved the words in granite while they were droning on. The letters were always on the lines of, ‘Dear Sir, This to acknowledge receipt of your letter of the 29th ult [ult was just a mystifying way of saying last month]. We are investigating the matters raised in your letter and will vouchsafe our conclusions at a future date.’ In other words, piss off. This useless letter would always have to have three copies (which entailed using carbon paper and getting ink all over your fingers), which then had to be put in files and stored in metal cabinets. If you made a mistake in the typing, you would simply start all over again – most offices frowned on Tippex. By the end of the day, my wastepaper bin would always be full of discarded paper and carbon, and on at least three occasions I emptied my ashtray into the bin (of course you could smoke in offices in those days – there was
that
) and started a satisfying bonfire. My normal rate of productivity was about five letters a day – and I was considered an exceptionally efficient worker, highly praised and recommended by my agency. People would work in these offices – the same offices, with the same spider plants –
all their lives
and I believe it was seeing these offices that gave me what little ambition I have. Just as my father was driven by fear of the workhouse that he remembered looming over Bolton in his childhood, I always had this memory of the copy-typing room at the Prudential insurance office, High Holborn, to act as my spur. I panicked as the end of Oxford approached, thinking that I would be swallowed by the Prudential and never seen again. Luckily I met my husband just in time.

David

I met David in the last month of my last term at Oxford and knew immediately that he was The One – the man I must marry. It wasn't just that I fancied him, or wanted to go out with him; I felt I wanted to spend my life with him. I don't know why I was so sure, but I was, and that sureness carried me through more than thirty years of marriage. Even in the bad patches when I thought I might be happier not married at all, I never for one moment thought I could be happier married to someone else. David was the best husband I could ever have or wish for. And I somehow knew that from the moment I met him.

He just appeared in my room one day, with his friend Tim Jeal. I'd met Tim Jeal a few times at parties and maybe he fancied me – at all events it was his idea to bring David to call on me in St Anne's. They had picked up some ticker tape from somewhere and pretended to read it out, they were laughing and shouting, possibly drunk or stoned, and Tim Jeal was talking nineteen to the dozen and running his hands through his sandy blond hair, but I looked at the dark-haired, olive-skinned, blue-eyed man who came with him and thought, He's The One. He made some reference to ‘going back to Mexico’ in the holidays so I assumed he was Mexican. He had slicked-back hair which looked vaguely Mexican – most undergraduates in those days had Beatles haircuts or long flowing locks. He seemed exotic, mysterious, slightly sinister. I resolved to capture him.

But pursuing him was difficult because we were both frantically revising for finals and moreover he was living in a village outside Oxford, and seldom came into town. It meant I had to spend a lot of time studying bus timetables and hanging round the bus station but, even so, I only managed to bump into him a couple of times. I also met him at a party, and bullied him into taking me to a poetry reading at the Albert Hall, but by the time we left Oxford for good a few weeks later I had made very little progress. I knew he liked me and found me amusing but that was all – he hadn't so much as held my hand.

And then he went off to join his parents in Mexico, and I went back to my parents in Twickenham and worked as a temp typist. I didn't even have his address; I despaired. But one day I ran into an Oxford friend, Nic Mudie, and moaned about the miseries of living in Twickenham and he said, ‘Well, actually I've got a house in Stockwell you could live in but it's practically derelict.’ He explained that the lease on his mother's house in South Kensington had run out and she'd bought this shell in Stockwell. He was meant to be doing it up but couldn't get a bank loan to start work so it was standing empty. He said casually, ‘There's one other person living there – David, that artist bloke from New College – do you know him?’ Aaaagh, I sputtered, incapable of speech.

I moved into Groveway, Stockwell, the same day. The house was huge – four floors, at least a dozen big rooms, but many of them uninhabitable with missing windowpanes or broken floorboards. The basement and ground floor were crammed, literally floor to ceiling, with furniture from the South Kensington house. I had to squeeze between wardrobes and clamber over dining tables even to get from the front door to the staircase. But on the top floor I found three empty rooms more or less intact and a working loo and basin. Moreover, one of the bedrooms had a mattress on the floor and some scattered clothes I thought I recognised as David's. Nic found a mattress for me and a chair. Then he went away and I spent my first night in the house alone, too cold, too terrified, too excited to sleep.

Next day I bought an electric fire and managed to scavenge another chair, some blankets and a lamp from the furniture piles downstairs. Then I heard the front door open and the slow noisy progress of someone clambering over the furniture and up the stairs. Would it be a burglar or would it be…? ‘Oh, hi,’ I said, dead casual. ‘Nic said I could stay here for a bit. Hope you don't mind.’ ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘I'll help you find some furniture.’ So we went and heaved furniture about till lunchtime and ended up with quite a good haul – a very grand bateau-lit bed, two button-back Victorian armchairs and a splendid Turkey carpet. David said there was a kitchen somewhere in the basement but it was too jammed with furniture to get into, so we went for lunch at a workers' café and then to the Tate Gallery and on the bus back he kissed my cheek, and that was it really.

We spent the whole of that freezing winter in Grove-way, and it was one of the coldest winters on record. The first present David ever bought me was a mangy fur coat from Oxfam, which was just what I needed – I wore it to go to the loo. But we managed to make our room into a sort of nest, hung and swagged with every curtain, rug, blanket we could find. We took baths at Camberwell Public Baths, cadged meals off friends, gradually excavated the kitchen and learned to cook – or rather David learned to cook while I signally failed to. He was studying
Larousse Gastronomique
and producing perfect soufflés while I was still struggling with corned-beef hash.

Our friends all said we were ‘so brave’ to live in Stockwell. Nowadays SW9 is considered a smart address but in those days it was a grim, rundown area, still with lots of bomb damage from the war and horrible rotting council estates. Brixton, a mile up the road, was entirely West Indian; Stockwell was whiter, mainly Irish, but 100 per cent poor. Most of the houses in Groveway were divided into bedsits and all the cars in the road were wrecks that the O'Hagan brothers on the corner were meant to be repairing but never did.

But Stockwell was changing and one day David came back with a strange purple object and said it was an aubergine and he'd bought it in the local greengrocer's. ‘Don't you see what this means?’ he said, ‘It's like the twig the dove brought back to the Ark.’ ‘No, I don't see,’ I said. ‘I thought you said it was a vegetable.’ So he explained it meant there must be other middle-class people in the area, people who read Elizabeth David, people who knew what to do with an aubergine. It meant the area was ‘coming up’. And indeed no sooner had he said it than our street was full of skips and estate agents' signs, and the Irish house over the road that used to have twenty doorbells and a heap of scrap iron in front suddenly had one tasteful brass knocker and a castor-oil plant. Stockwell – and particularly Groveway – was suddenly as hot as Notting Hill is now (Princess Diana would go to dinner parties there a few years later). Which meant that banks were falling over themselves to lend Nic the money to do up our house, and we had to move. It was fine – by then I'd bagged David and would never let him go.

Why was I so sure David was The One? Well, first and foremost, because he was gorgeously handsome and remained gorgeously handsome all his life. People say you shouldn't marry for looks but I disagree: if I tot up all the pleasure I got from looking at David over the years I'd say it amounted to a very substantial hill of beans. Sometimes we'd just be sitting on the sofa watching television and I'd glance sideways at his profile and think,
Gosh!
Also, of course, having a gorgeous husband meant that we had gorgeous children, which I wouldn't have done if I'd married some toad. So his looks were important. But of course there were other qualities too. He had a lovely singing voice and was always singing, everything from Count John McCormack's Irish ballads to music-hall songs. He was a brilliant cook and was never happier than when preparing a fabulous meal. He had a wonderful ‘eye’ and was always pointing out details – the painting on a pub sign, the brilliant green lichen on a tree stump – that I would not have noticed. I loved going to galleries and museums with him because he taught me so much. He also had the same black sense of humour as me – we both found it hilarious, for instance, that Tommy Cooper dropped dead of a heart attack while performing a television show called
Live from Her Majesty's
. Such bad taste, I know, but it was
our
bad taste and a strong bond precisely because other people disapproved.

Actually we were alike in a million ways – we both hated the theatre, loved opera, hated sport, loved art galleries. We once did a psychometric test for a friend who was training to be a psychiatrist and he said he had never seen two such similar test results. We were both Geminis (though of course we didn't believe in astrology!) and were delighted to be told that Geminis should always marry each other because they made such appalling partners for anyone else – we Twins are the marital lepers of the celestial regions.

On the other hand, we were different in one very important way. David was
good
. He was thoroughly kind, thoroughly truthful, thoroughly decent. Whereas I was somehow morally damaged. I had become a proficient liar in my years with Simon and found it hard to break the habit. I was also apt to do bad things if I thought I could get away with them. But at least I knew I
needed
to marry someone good. I didn't mind having bad hats as boyfriends – in fact I was rather attracted to them – but for a husband I wanted someone 100 per cent decent. Thank God I had the sense to see that.

We came from very different backgrounds. David was not Mexican – that was a misunderstanding – but he grew up mainly abroad because his father worked in different countries as head of the British Council. His father Maurice came from a long line of English gentry – David's middle name, Cloudesley, commemorated one of their ancestors, the admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovel – and had followed his two older brothers to Eton, Oxford and the Guards. He served with distinction as a major in the war and was involved in undercover work in Greece with Paddy Leigh-Fermor (he is mentioned in
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
) and was then appointed head of the British Council in Greece. Later, he was stationed in Italy, Cyprus (where he seems to have played some sort of undercover negotiating role with Makarios), Belgium, Mexico, Thailand and finally Paris. Tall, upright, formal, always immaculately dressed, Maurice was every inch the traditional stiff-upper-lipped English gentleman, but he was not quite as conventional as he appeared. He wrote several rather good travel books and novels under the pseudonym John Lincoln, and he married Leonora, who was an actress and Jewish, i.e. not at all the sort of wife expected in his class. They made a striking couple – he so tall, fair, English, she so petite, dark, Sephardic-looking. David inherited the best of everything – his father's height and china blue eyes, his mother's thick dark hair and olive skin.

As a young boy, David lived with his parents abroad – he remembered idyllic years in Italy and Cyprus – but then, when he was eight, his parents sent him back to prep school in England, and he didn't see them again for over a year. He spent the holidays with his Aunt Anna, Leonora's sister, who was married to a Leeds solicitor and kept a kosher house, so he had to learn the rituals of Judaism at the same time as learning the rituals of boarding school. He hated his prep school so much that he was reluctant ever to talk about it, but he mentioned the cold, the terrible food, the loneliness. Many years later, when our elder daughter Rosie turned eight, David sank into a strange depression and eventually explained it was because he was remembering being sent away to school when he was Rosie's age. Of course it was quite normal then (many expats sent their children ‘home’ to England at five or six), but whenever Leonora went into one of her raptures about what a doting mother she was, I always had to bite my tongue not to say, ‘But you sent David away at
eight
!’

Anyway, he survived prep school, and Eton afterwards, with stoicism but fairly deep unhappiness I think. When, many years later, we used to take a friend's son out from Eton for Sunday lunch, I begged David to at least show me round the chapel, but he never would – he wouldn't even get out of the car. The one saving grace at Eton was that he had a great art teacher, Wilfrid Blunt, who allowed him to stay in the art studio when everyone else was out rowing or playing beastly games. He virtually lived in the art studio and his best friends at Eton were other artists, notably Edmund Fairfax-Lucy, who became an RA, and Nick Gosling, son of the art critic Nigel Gosling, who ran the film society.

David would have liked to have gone to art school but his parents took the conventional line that he must get a proper degree – he could always paint in his spare time. So he went to New College, Oxford, to read PPP – philosophy, physiology and psychology – a singularly useless degree which, according to David, entirely consisted of observing rats in mazes. More enjoyably, he served on the college art committee and spent many happy days in London choosing prints and paintings for the JCR. He also drew beautiful cover illustrations for
Isis
and other student magazines.

So this was the David I met in 1966. He was far more cultured than me. He had spent more time abroad than he had in England; he had been to the opera at La Scala, and to lunch with Harold Acton at La Pietra; he had visited the Grand Canyon and all the great Mayan temples; he could speak good Italian, French and a little Spanish; he had eaten at Michelin three-star restaurants and could talk about truffles; he knew famous writers and artists like Leonora Carrington, Stephen Spender, Lawrence Durrell, as family friends. On the other hand, I was often surprised by what he
didn't
know. He had hardly been anywhere in England and was thrilled when I later took him to Cornwall and the Lake District. He was terrified of bills, of tax forms, of policemen, of doctors, of any kind of authority. He was also weirdly scared of working-class people – it was always left to me to sort out which cleaner, gardener, plumber, electrician we should hire because he was equally alarmed by them all. Later, when he claimed to have become a Marxist, I said he couldn't really be a Marxist and hate the working class. He said he didn't hate them at all – but he worked on the assumption that they all hated him.

When we first lived together in Stockwell, he was painting and drawing but making no effort to sell his work or even show it to anyone. He had just enough money to live on because his parents were still stationed in Mexico and had put him in charge of letting Little Haseley, their house outside Oxford, and had told him to keep whatever rent was left over when he'd paid the maintenance bills. He filled the house with Oxford friends and we used to go down at weekends to have hot baths and collect the rent.