I doubt if my twenty-two year old mother heard the first handy hints for housewives on the new radio programme ‘Woman’s Hour’. On the afternoon of October 7th 1946 she might even have felt the first twinges and been on the bus to Broadgreen Hospital with her mother-in-law. I was born on October 8th, into the austerity of post-war, bombed-out Liverpool, into rationing - and a whole set of assumptions encapsulated by two facts. Woman’s Hour, on the BBC Light Programme, with its ‘talks by experts on keeping house, on health, on children, furnishings, beauty care - in fact everything concerned with your sort of problems in the home’....was presented by a man. And nobody would have thought it odd that my young father had to discover the gender of his new baby by walking a long way to the phone box with his Dad and ringing the hospital. Birth was women’s business.
The 1946 crop, the baby boom, was a good one. Cher, Susan Sarandon, Hayley Mills, Marina Warner, Marianne Faithful, Joanna Lumley, Jane Birkin, Clare Short, Edwina Currie, Helen Mirren, Felicity Kendall, Sue Lawley, Alison Steadman ...and that’s just some of the women. Malcolm Rifkind, Donovan, Maurice Saachi, William Shawcross, Oliver Stone, Jack Straw, Sylvester Stallone ...all of us have completed half a decade, and some of us realise we have to let go.
But of what? Most fifty year olds I know would deny that you have to let go of anything. We cling to the wreckage, ignoring the sharks, feeling invincible. A friend of mine said to me, ‘Our lot were the ones who “never had it so good”. Then came the sixties - which mean miniskirts and feminism at once! We had education and no worries about jobs. We asked questions and supplied the answers. Actually, we ruled the world. So we aren’t going to give that up easily’.
But letting go does not mean giving up. It just means moving on.
My generation was the last not to grow up punch drunk on television, to remember when public libraries thrived and were stuffed with books, not videos, and when the sexiest thing in newspapers was the Daily Mirror’s ‘Jane’ cartoon. The lovers of film stars were called ‘constant companions’, and people like my grandmother (a dinner lady at Childwall Valley High School where Alison Steadman was a pupil) would follow the doings of the Royal Family with reverence and love. At ten and eleven I could walk to primary school alone, and play on the swings after school without anybody worrying. Baby-boomers at state schools might be in a class of fifty (as I was), yet enjoyed a finer, richer, more rigorous education than most children today, including those in the private sector. Few people had cars, nobody went ‘abroad’. Little girls in the early fifties were dressed up in suits just like their mothers, and the most exciting event of the week was ‘The Ovaltinies’ on the radio, and (later) ‘Journey into Space.’
But there was a sound around the corner that would banish ‘Family Favourites’ forever. I tumbled into rock n’ roll when Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard played Liverpool, and Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers sobbed though my dreams. We stepped from childhood to teenage as the sixties began, in perfect time to live a revolution in style politics and behaviour. In 1963 I bought the Beatles first LP and the Reverend John Robinson’s sensational reappraisal of Christianity, ‘Honest to God’ and decided God did not exist, but that John Lennon was right about divinity. I hitched to a Stones gig, joined the Movement for Colonial Freedom and CND, shortened all my home-made skirts, read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex - and lost my virginity. It all seemed so easy. The handy hints of old Woman’s Hour were not for girls like us. We were enabled; there were plenty of jobs, and those of us who went off to college or university knew we were able to play what Philip Larkin only glimpsed from his bleak high windows: ‘a quite unloseable’ game.
Getting old was not part of the life plan. Last year an older friend asked me what age I thought myself inside. ‘Thirty’, I said, without hesitation. The person who walked around inside my head was forever young, sassy, flirtatious and wicked, certainly rebellious. She could slink around in leathers and do whatever she liked. Then, one bad day, all harrassed, I caught a sudden sideways glimpse of myself in shop mirror. Horrified, I wondered, ‘Who is that hag walking around wearing my clothes?’ In the summer, full of gloom at the impending half-century, I tried on the kind of clinging dress I once wore. But the flat stomach has gone: three pregancies, decades of wine and vodka consumption, and little or no exercise have finally finished it. Miserable, I flung it back on the rail, then flounced into W.H.Smith to buy Rosemary Conley’s Complete Flat Stomach Plan. It has still not been removed from its case. But show me a jar that promises to minimise wrinkles and renew the skin, and I will buy. Although I will never have a face-lift, I pour no scorn on those women who do. We all cling at straws.
If getting old was not part of the life plan, what was? At twenty I’d have said: a couple of degrees, then lecturing and writing and getting famous, with (much later) a perfect marriage and three perfect children - none of which would interfere with the aims of independence and liberation.
But like many women I found that grand plans and personal impulses can clash. In 1968, just twenty one, I married a man I had known for only three months, finishing my degree despite the sudden shock of domesticity. Since then, it seems, juggling has been my chief skill. As a young journalist my great love was reportage: I wanted to ‘tell it like it is’, with the passionate, naive conviction that if you expose evils and inequalities in a society someone will do something about them. But at 27 I had my first child, Daniel, and ended up writing the kind of short ‘think pieces’ that keep you going, whilst the baby bobs in the rocker beside the table. The lowest point came when I covered suntan preparations for the Daily Express, and wondered what had happened to my fantasies of going to Vietnam.
In 1975 I had a second son, who was stillborn at full term, and his death made me feel (in a dark, primitive way) that I was being punished for my mistakes, for not really wanting to be a wife and mother, even though Daniel was the love of my life. I would push him up and down the Kings Road in his pushchair, watching the punks, and chafe at the thought of going home and picking up pieces of Lego. We had a mother’s help, but I had been brought up to think that children should be with their parents or grandparents. The truth was, I believed it too. I wanted liberation, but not to be a lousy mother. The party had moved on, and I wasn’t on the guest list any more.
In 1979, in bed for three months with the third pregnancy I watched my husband conduct an debate on television. When he came home I was in tears. Concerned, he knelt by the bed and asked if I was worried about the baby. ‘It’s not that’, I sobbed in fury, ‘I just wish I could have done your programme’. Our daughter Kitty was born with a rare bowel disease, which has meant sixteen years (on and off) of hospital treatments and operations. We had other crises in the family. Our son had personal problems which led to him dropping out of university. A year later I became involved in a road protest, my husband made made a television film and published a biography of the Prince of Wales and we both came to understand the true meaning of punk journalism. My hoped-for career shift into screenwriting fizzled out. Unwillingly I moved house, last year, and thought I would go mad with exhaustion and frustration and grief for the old home of sixteen years. The point is, I stumbled, stress-out, into my fiftieth year, juggling more frantically than ever, and allowing myself (for the first time) to complain, ‘This isn’t how I wanted it to be’.
Such lows force you to accept the shortfall in ‘perfect’ happiness, and know that no game worth playing is unloseable. What’s more, the end of complacency, the coming to terms, can act like a spark to a powder keg. Most days now I view the world I helped to create (privileged as a baby-boomer) through a mist of red rage. Young, I thought we could do it better. Older, I realise we didn’t - and that perhaps our legacy is not just music and nostalgia, but a series of betrayals that have made this world a nastier place.
Leftist ideology and liberal laziness within local councils, teacher training colleges and schools betrayed millions of working class children by peddling spurious ‘ideas’ of equality, non-competitiveness and so-called self-expression, so that generations leave school illiterate and innumerate, and with no sense of order or respect for anything. It is as good a way as any of keeping the workers in their place. The baby-boom generation learned by rote, and deprived others of the privilege of doing likewise.
Then there is the great betrayal of the idea of ‘freedom’. Over the years I have argued with my peers, the liberal intelligensia, who regard the word ‘censorship’ as a blasphemy (whilst not caring about blasphemy itself, of course), and thus colluded in the degradation of countless women and children in the burgeoning pornography industry. Smart, amoral young film makers revere Tarantino for his undoubted cleverness, and will go to hell declaring over their Chardonnay that there is no proven connexion between violence on screen and violence on the street. And out there, in the dark where they never poke their privileged heads, real people are imprisoned in a savage chaos where the only freedom comes with oblivion.
Television moguls betray their audience by serving them pap like ‘Hollywood Wives’ in the guise of factual programming and pander to the lowest common denominator of grossness. Worse, newspaper editors coarsen their readers with a daily diet of prurience, lies and malice. ‘It’s what people want’, these media folk cry, falsely and insultingly, as they stuff the profits into their Armani pockets and cook up some new justification for a further lowering of standards. The tone of comment is increasingly cruel and cynical, as if La Burchill, A.A.Gill and the rest were weaned on bile not milk, and breathe bitterness instead of air.
The thing is, most of the people with power and influence now belong (give or take a few years) to my ‘G-g-g-generation.’ Looking around, I don’t find that something to be proud of. The betrayal of the electorate by a complacent government too long in power, indifferent to poverty and ignorance and afraid of debate? The betrayal of the countryside itself by the construction of roads and out-of-town superstores and shopping villages with no thought of the future? And so on. The Baby-boomers look back and say ‘we had it all’, but the small voice inside me asks ‘What did we do with it, except live for the present?’ It is no good blaming Thatcher’s Children, for the mess and the misery, because we went before and showed the way. It was us who taught them the riff of Me, Me, Me.
This anger makes me free. In my forties I retreated to an ivory tower, wringing my hands and saying, ‘Isn’t it awful?’ When I joined the protest against the Batheaston By-pass in 1994 all that fell away, and I realised something truly liberating. As I trundled inexorably towards fifty I did not care a fig what people thought about me. I was afraid of nobody - not burly security guards, nor politicians, nor second-rate hacks. I realised that there comes a point when you have to stand up and yell ‘NO!’ , and that I would spend my fifties doing just that - middle-aged with attitude.
ON REACHING FIFTY - Part Two
At the front of my Filofax (old habits die hard) I have written a number of quotations which I look at every day. One from Samuel Becket seems to offer more and more consolation: ‘NO MATTER. TRY AGAIN. FAIL AGAIN. FAIL BETTER.’
Why talk of failure at fifty? Because this is part of that ‘letting go’. It seems wise to move on from the arrogance of the twenties and thirties, and the mingled complacency and cynicism of the forties, into that state of humility which is ( as T.S.Eliot wrote) ‘endless’. To acknowledge your mistakes, to hope that you can ‘fail better’, seems a fitting replacement for the sexual vanity and vainglorious dreams of acclaim, and foolish expectations of perfection which I confess to as the sins of my youth. At thirty I used to admire the in-your-face sentiment of Piaf: Je ne regrette rien, and imagine that in middle-age I ‘d shout it from the rooftops. Now it is not so simple. I do regret things, and the act of regretting allows in a kind of awe at the miracle of survival: My God, aren’t I lucky? Then, dazzled, you are liberated at last to look forward, not backwards. Another of the daily maxims is from Ibsen: ‘Live, work, act. Don’t sit here and brood and grope among insoluble enigmas.’
The chief feeling is one of relief. To acknowledge that you have no answers (now as you tiptoe into the second half-century, knowing that this bit is downhill all the way) is the first step to wondering if you were asking the right questions. It feels like stumbling into a strange room in a power cut, and groping out of habit for the light switch... fumble.. then, snap , the power is on after all, and you step forward, looking around and realising that you knew this place all along. You belong.
Some experiences concentrate the mind most wonderfully. They may be personal, but are so sublime that to hug them to your chest seems selfish. On August 28th, after six months of deteriorating health, our daughter Kitty (16), endured over eight hours of major, difficult surgery on her bowel. For weeks before I walked around in shadow, convinced she would not survive. She shared the terrible dread. Early in the morning of August 29th she opened her eyes in Intensive Care, painfully reached out a punctured hand, and said in a clear, sweet voice, ‘Mummy, I didn’t die. And I’m going to get better’.
All I could say was, ‘Yes’.
It occurred to me then that if it has taken me fifty years to know, finally, what I had always suspected - that nothing else matters - then I am overjoyed to have arrived at last.
The knowledge comes hard. In the summer Kitty and I attended the funeral of a fifteen year old girl who died of cancer on her ward. She has made friends with another teenager who is unlikely to live beyond twenty. At midnight after her operation I spent an hour talking to a young couple whose baby has spent three months at home, and six months in hospital, and who has but a small chance of survival....and I recognised that look of dumb bewilderment on their faces. Sometimes I have felt shrunken, like Alice, and scrabbling desperately to swim in my own tears. Suffer the little children indeed, here and all around the world, and no answer to the painful scream,’ Why?’
Then, on the ward, day after day you are privileged to witness the extraordinary patient love of parents of every age, race and class; the gentle gaiety, understanding and brilliance of the nurses; the acute concern and dedicated skill of the doctors - one in particular, there in Bristol Children’s Hospital, who has the grace and courage to cry when my daughter cries.....
How can you not delight in a world with such people in it? Brave and new indeed. Their countless murmurs of tenderness and encouragement, and little jokes, and family stories, together swell to an Ode to Joy which drowns out the shrieks of fear and pain. So there, for me, was one of the elusive answers. The God-shaped hole in my universe is filled with people, some known to me, some unknown. The indisputable fact of heroism, all over the world, weighs equal in the scales with the horror and the hatred. To the question, ‘What are we here for?’, Ibsen’s ,‘Think, work, act’, is still a fine answer. But it falls short. Thinking, working and acting are nothing unless impelled by the most important imperative: Love.
A close friend, fifty next month, said to me, ‘Getting old physically doesn’t bother me - the spare tyre, double chin, and hairy toes! What’s far more sobering is to know that maybe I’ve had more than two-thirds of my life. I do think more and more about spiritual things’. She is a Christian, but for years has understood my own longing for God and failure to find him. Recently (maybe as a result of being in Bosnia ) I stopped looking, but the spiritual search still goes on, both in churches and in fields close to home. When I pray it is to the Universe, vast and implacable though it is, and if that is God, then this earth itself is my Christ, with the Holy Spirit the air we breathe....a Trinity worth worshipping and crusading for. Interestingly, another fiftieth birthday this year is that of the Soil Association, which goes on patiently beating the drum for organic agriculture. Maybe another sign of my age is that it actually feels more relevant to my life now than Woman’s Hour’s birthday; I passionately believe that unless we step back from the arrogant folly which has led us to abuse this planet in so many ways, we are doomed. This is beyond gender and party politics. I sit on our hillside, gaze at the beauty of the land, and find another answer. ‘Mummy, I didn’t die’, means that she and all children, those as yet unborn, have the right to demand their inheritance intact.
The good thing about the baby-boom generation is that we preached tolerance, and the brotherhood of people, and in that respect our hearts were in the right place - on the sleeve. Mine is still there, a bit battered after all the wear and tear, but full of enthusiasm. That is the way we were, and if you can go on, ‘still crazy after all these years’, despite admissions of failure - then you do know who you are. So - I still believe that the idea of trades unionism is a necessary counter- balance to the lust of the powerful for profit. I still believe in public spending and the National Health Service, and that those who can afford it should stump up high taxes. I believe the needs of children are paramount. I want a fresh start with new Labour, but a return to some of the values and disciplines I grew up with. I wait for the day when the Prince of Wales is recognised for the infinitely gentle, farseeing, hardworking, intelligent, spiritual and utterly civilised force for good that he is. (OK, so he made a mistake; so did I - lots. So, indeed did the likes of Paul Johnson and all the others of easy virtue whose immoral earnings come from ignorant trashing.) It will come. Despite all the proofs coming in, and despite my rage, I carry a torch of optimism. But I won’t buy anybody’s package deal of belief.
Alice grew up. She left wonderland behind, and stepped through the looking glass, into her own kitchen, scene of so many years’ loving domesticity. It’s not that I don’t want to go to the party any more; it’s here in my own home. In May I stayed up all night with my son, drinking and smoking and talking, and at five in the morning we tottered on a long walk in the valley. Then he slumped the rest of the day asleep in bed, and I spent it at the hospital. I said, ‘Don’t think me old, boy, until you can keep up!’ Despite my children’s mirth I’ve booked a first riding lesson for my birthday, because I want to go trekking in the Andes in a year’s time, sleeping under the stars. I walk at midnight with the labrador and collie I bought my husband, amazed by my solitude, the night, and the fact that I used to detest dogs.
As the sunlight fills the kitchen, and I reach fifty, I put on Beethoven’s ‘Spring’ (or maybe Clapton’s ‘Timepieces’ ) and raise a glass to some things changing and some things staying the same. To the family and friends without whom I could not live. To the husband of nearly twentynine years whose silly sayings I love. To the fact that our son is engaged to a girl beautiful in every respect, so that I can finally ‘come out’ and say that my chief ambition is to be a grandmother. To the day when finally our daughter will leave hospital forever. Nothing else matters. Then, to all the writers (dead and alive) whose books line my library, because their insights cannot be destoyed by the grossest anti-culture. To art and music. Even to the people I disagree with because they keep me on my toes. To ‘cakes and ale’. To infinite possibility.
Where to stop? There’s no time to stop.
Thirty? Nah - I don’t want to be thirty again.
Not with the fire in me now.
