Good Wives Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Margaret Forster

  List of Illustrations

  Title Page

  Prologue

  PART ONE: MARY LIVINGSTONE 1821–62

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Reflections

  PART TWO: FANNY STEVENSON 1840–1914

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Reflections

  PART THREE: JENNIE LEE 1904–88

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Reflections

  Epilogue

  Picture Section

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  In 1848 Mary Moffatt became the devoted wife of the missionary and explorer David Livingstone in Africa – and it eventually killed her. A hundred and twelve years later, in 1960, Margaret Forster married her school sweetheart Hunter Davies in a London Registry Office – and forty years later they are still married. Between those two marriages and their experience is a huge gulf during which time women’s lives changed immeasurably, and the notion of marriage evolved – through the other two marriages under the spotlight here, that of the unconventional Fanny Stevenson (wife of Robert Louis Stevenson) in the late 19th century and across continents and of our own charismatic 20th century Jennie Lee (wife of Aneurin Bevan), a politician in her own right. But curiously some aspects and attitudes remained fixed and immutable and found an echo in Forster’s own life. Have these fixed points finally shifted now, with the coming of the 21st century? What was and is now a ‘good wife’? Why do couples still marry in church in an age of unbelief? Taking up where Hidden Lives left off, these are some of the questions Forster asks as she weaves personal experience, and the experiences of her own mother and grandmother, through the stories of three women who have long fascinated her. The emphasis is on aspects of these women’s lives never focused on before, on the kind of personal and intimate and everyday detail which has intrigued and gripped readers of Forster’s memoirs, biographies and fiction.

  About the Author

  Margaret Forster is the acclaimed author of best-selling novels, most recently The Memory Box, as well as biographies, of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Daphne du Maurier, and two memoirs, Hidden Lives and Precious Lives. She lives in London and the Lake District.

  Also by Margaret Forster

  Fiction

  Dame’s Delight

  Georgy Girl

  The Bogeyman

  The Travels of Maudie Tipstaff

  The Park

  Miss Owen-Owen is At Home

  Fenella Phizackerley

  Mr Bone’s Retreat

  The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury

  Mother Can You Hear Me?

  The Bride of Lowther Fell

  Marital Rites

  Private Papers

  Have the Men Had Enough?

  Lady’s Maid

  The Battle for Christabel

  Mothers’ Boys

  Shadow Baby

  The Memory Box

  Over

  Non-fiction

  The Rash Adventurer:

  The Rise and Fall of Charles Edward Stuart

  William Makepeace Thackeray:

  Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman

  Significant Sisters:

  The Grassroots of Active Feminism 1838–1939

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Daphne du Maurier

  Hidden Lives

  Rich Desserts & Captain’s Thin:

  A Family & Their Times 1831–1931

  Precious Lives

  Poetry

  Selected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Editor)

  List of Illustrations

  Facing Prologue

  1. Margaret Forster, front right, as bridesmaid, aged 11.

  2. Margaret Forster and Hunter Davies on their wedding day.

  3. David Livingstone, aged 39. (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  4. Mary Livingstone, in her thirties. (David Livingstone Centre, Blantyre)

  5. Map showing how far Livingstone travelled between 1841 and 1852. (from Livingstone by Tim Jeal/ Pimlico Press)

  6. The Livingstone family in 1857. (David Livingstone Centre, Blantyre)

  7. Fanny Osbourne, aged thirty-six. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

  8. Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson, c. 1880, by Alice Boughton. (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  9. The Stevenson family in 1891, on the veranda at Vailima, Samoa. (National Portrait Gallery, London, from Camera Portraits: 150 Portraits from the National Portrait Gallery 1839–1989, photo J. Davis)

  10. The Stevensons photographed on a trip to Sydney in 1893. (Writers’ Museum, Edinburgh/City of Edinburgh Council)

  11. Jennie Lee, newly elected MP for North Lanark. (Sport & General Press Agency, London/Alpha)

  12. Jennie Lee and Aneuran Bevin on their wedding day. (Hulton Deutsch Collection Ltd, London)

  13. Jennie Lee addressing a rally in Trafalgar Square in 1937. (NMPFT/Science & Society Picture Library)

  14. Jennie and Aneuran Bevin, married for over 25 years. (PA Reuters Photos Ltd)

  15. Margaret and Hunter Davies, silver wedding anniversary.

  16. Margaret and Hunter Davies, June 2001.

  Margaret Forster

  GOOD WIVES?

  Mary, Fanny, Jennie and Me

  1845–2001

  Prologue

  In July 1949, when I was eleven years old, I was a bridesmaid. I was just young enough still to be thrilled with the rose-pink satin dress and with the coronet of tiny rosebuds, which sat so perfectly on my long, wavy fair hair. At last I was that creature I’d always yearned to be, a princess. I could hardly wait for the wedding, when I would have the honour of carrying the bride’s white chiffon train all the way down the aisle. But my deeply religious mother disapproved of my wild excitement. Weddings were serious. A man and a woman were to be married in the sight of God – this was not a party, not an excuse for the sort of preening in which I gloried. She didn’t want me being ‘silly’. There were to be no giggles, no tossing of my hair, no calling of attention to myself. Instead, in church I was to listen. I was to listen very carefully indeed to the words.

  So I listened, as my mother undoubtedly knew I would. For a child, I was a good listener (too good, it was often said, because my listening inevitably resulted in irritating questions of the sort difficult to answer). I stood behind the bride, glad to have the posy of white and pink roses back in my eager hands once I’d relinquished the train, and I listened intently to what the vicar said. It was simple enough when it came to the vows, merely a question-and-answer routine. But I spotted the difference in the questions easily. ‘Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife?’ the bridegroom was asked, and then, a little later on, ‘Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honour, and keep her in sickness and in health? …’ But to the bride, the vicar said, ‘Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband … wilt thou obey him, and serve him, love, honour, and keep him, in sickness and in health? …’ I remember looking around to see if anyone else had noticed something odd, and catching the eye of my mother, who frowned and gestured that I should pay attention. But I was paying attention. And I’d heard that word obey only when the bride was being questioned. Why did she have to promise to obey and he did not?
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br />   It was only 1949. It was only an ordinary parish church in Caldewgate, a poor area of Carlisle. It was only a marriage service which had been used for hundreds of years without anyone apparently finding one word in it unfair. I doubt if there was a single woman, never mind a man, in that congregation who objected to the bride’s making that promise. But I objected. The moment the photographs had been taken, I was pulling at my mother’s sleeve. ‘Why did Jean have to say she’d obey Ian, and Ian didn’t say he’d obey her? Why?’ ‘Because that’s the order of service in the prayer-book,’ my mother said. ‘Who said it had to say that? Who? Why?’ My mother sighed. She knew it was no good just telling me to be quiet, or saying I should just accept that this was how things were, because that, in her experience, would only result in exhaustion – her exhaustion – as she valiantly tried to satisfy my curiosity. So she said what she was quite often obliged to say – ‘Later, we’ll go into it later, not now.’

  She wasn’t hoping I’d forget. Alas, she knew I wouldn’t, and I didn’t. Wedding over, the inquisition began. She didn’t know who had designed the marriage service, how those words had got into the prayer-book, but she thought the ‘obey’ word must have been put into the bride’s vow because men earned the money, they were the bosses in that respect, and so the woman had to be prepared to acknowledge this. Before I could ask why, or attempt to tear holes in this flimsy explanation, she said it was useless to pester her any more, and if I was going to want to know more I would have to ask the vicar, but not that vicar, our own vicar. ‘I will, then,’ I said, but I guessed that I wouldn’t – it was quite daunting, even for cheeky girls such as myself, to go up to our vicar and put such questions to him. But I had one question I knew my mother herself could answer. ‘Did you do it?’ I said. ‘Did you promise to obey Dad?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Well, I won’t,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t promise to obey the man if he won’t promise to obey me.’ ‘Then you won’t be able to get married,’ my mother, my dutiful church-going mother said. ‘You won’t ever be a wife.’ She said it smiling, not trying to dismay me, and if pressed I’m sure she would have mentioned register office marriages where there was no need to promise to obey, but for once I didn’t press her. In a way I felt quite satisfied. Something had been decided.

  I never wanted to be a wife, that feeble creature who obeyed.

  It was a conviction that only hardened during adolescence. I spent those years watching as well as listening and I hated what I saw. The lot of a wife seemed terrible to me. Wives, in 1950s Carlisle, on our council estate anyway, cooked and cleaned and shopped and looked after children, and never went anywhere or did anything else. They had no money of their own. Every Friday, my father came home from the Metal Box factory, where he worked as a fitter, a maintenance engineer, and opened his wage packet. Out of it he extracted an undisclosed amount (precious little) and gave my mother the rest (precious little) for housekeeping. It was always a struggle for her to make it last the week, no matter how carefully she budgeted, and that was very carefully indeed – she was a genius at managing. There was nothing to spare for herself. The money was my father’s, the reward for his labours. Her labours got no monetary reward (and not much of any other kind either). This was the bargain she accepted when she got married, and I thought it a poor one. More than ever, I knew it was one to which I would never, never agree.

  The puzzle to me was not only that my mother had entered into this one-sided contract in the first place, but that she still, in spite of everything, seemed to think it inevitable. When she was referred to as ‘a good wife’ she was gratified – she didn’t seem to appreciate that it was like being called ‘a good beast of burden’. There was one Christmas when, at the end of the traditional dinner, my father’s elderly aunt, who was with us for the day, suddenly said, ‘Arthur, you’re a lucky man, you’ve got such a good wife in Lily. Such a good wife.’ My father, mellowed by the vast amounts of turkey he’d consumed and the two port wines he’d had before it (only allowed, together with sweet sherry, at Christmas, and otherwise no alcohol in the house), said, ‘And I’ll tell you something, Jessie, I’ve never regretted making her my wife either.’ What? I was beside myself with fury. I don’t think I’d yet made the acquaintance of the term ‘patronising’, but I understood the concept, that he was patronising my mother, implying that by marrying her he’d been conferring an honour and that she ought to be pleased he had never regretted it. To my astonishment, my mother appeared flattered – that was quite the worst and most inexplicable part of this little scene. She blushed. She even smiled. She got up to clear the dishes self-consciously, as though she had just won a prize and the spotlight was on her. She had been paid what was for my father the most extravagant of compliments, and in public too. She was a good wife. What more could she want than such a tribute?

  A very great deal, in my youthful opinion.

  Some years later, aged nineteen, I stood on a doorstep in Manchester and said no, I was not his wife. That’s what the woman who had opened the door had asked – ‘Are you his wife, then?’ We, Hunter and I, had come in answer to an advertisement, for a bed-sitting-room to be rented. He had just started working as a journalist on the Manchester Evening Chronicle and I was in my first year at Oxford. We wanted to live together in my vacations, so we’d both gone looking for a suitable bed-sit for him to rent full time and for me to join him there. It was 1958.

  The landlady gave a little smirk. ‘Thought not,’ she said, and then, ‘you’ll have to look elsewhere. I don’t take unmarrieds.’ She looked so proud of herself as she closed the door, as though her own virtue had been put to some sort of test and proved incontestable. Her attitude was ridiculous, but also common – this was the fourth advert we’d replied to; the fourth time we’d been turned down, though never in such a straightforward fashion. No pets, no children, no coloureds, no unmarrieds, and no one in the least worried about saying so. What were we to do? The obvious thing. Let him rent the room, then smuggle me in when I came. Either that, or pretend to be married. But I wouldn’t pretend to be his wife. Why should I? (Answer easy, of course: so that nobody would mind renting a room to us.)

  The bed-sitting-room we ended up in was in Cheetham, next to a raincoat factory. It was horrible. One not very large room on the ground floor of a dark and neglected house. The furniture was battered and ugly – a settee which opened up into a bed, a gate-legged table with four heavy chairs round it, and a large mahogany wardrobe. I got to know the wardrobe rather well, because I stepped into it every time the landlord paid an unexpectedly late visit to collect the rent. Sometimes we’d be eating and there’d be two plates, two unfinished meals, on the table when I leapt into the wardrobe, but the landlord never seemed to think this strange. This was during the Easter vacation, a matter of a few weeks, but the thought of months in the summer, popping in and out of my hiding place like a figure on a weather-house was too much. For the long vacation we would have to find somewhere better.

  Reader, I compromised my principles. No, I didn’t marry him, not then, but I did pretend to be his wife. We bought a ring in Woolworths – where else? – and I jammed it on to my protesting finger (it was a curtain ring and too small, one of those tiny little things which get attached to bigger ones, sold then in packets of twenty). Immediately, we were respectable. We rented a two-room flat in Daisy Bank Road in a much nicer area of Manchester. I was the wife who ‘worked away’. Either that, or I paid regular visits to sick relatives – such a caring soul, I was. The other people in the house were only mildly inquisitive and the landlady was seen only once, when we paid the rent three months in advance. I was known as Mrs Davies but I managed to bear it. Wearing the wretched ring was the most maddening part of this trivial deception, even after I bought a cheap but proper one. I felt I was branded and made a fuss about it, pulling it off as soon as we were in the flat and there was no one to see.

  I was a mistress, I supposed, though I didn’t like that label either. For three years, while I was
at Oxford, I pretended, when necessary, to be a wife, and grew quite used to it. We went on holiday once or twice and stayed in pubs or small hotels where we were signed in as Mr and Mrs Davies. It felt quite daring as well as a good joke. But my finals at Oxford loomed and a much more momentous decision would have to be made. Was I going to go on pretending? For ever? By then, we were in London, in a flat in Kilburn, and nobody gave a damn about whether we were really married – that was no longer a difficulty. The difficulty was our parents. They hadn’t known about our living together – I was always going off on long, adventurous trips with girlfriends, so far as my parents were concerned, and since these friends obligingly helped me make this convincing I’d never been ‘found out’. They’d have to find out, though, if this state of affairs became permanent, if I was going to live in sin – as it was quaintly called – for ever. And I couldn’t do it to them, simply couldn’t cause my mother in particular such distress. I wasn’t brave (or cruel?) enough to tell her the truth. It was easier to give in and get married, wasn’t it?

  It was. Marriage I decided was only a piece of paper (because I certainly wouldn’t marry in a church and say the ‘O’ word). On 11 June 1960, I got married, the words of the register office service perfectly acceptable. I can’t actually remember what they were, but I’d inspected them in advance and they were simple, obvious and harmless. It was surprising how little had to be promised, how little was asked. I’d done it. I’d betrayed my principles and become a wife. I became Mrs Davies. I even wore a ring (silver, prettily engraved with ivy leaves, bought at an antique shop in Hampstead’s Heath Street). But I squirmed every time I was referred to as ‘Mrs’. In retrospect, I cannot believe how easily I accepted the trappings, the ‘Mrs’ bit and the ring – surely I could have got married for the same reasons, but without accepting that title and the badge of office? Looking back at my twenty-two-year-old self it occurs to me now that I was not being entirely honest: maybe there was a tiny bit of me that liked the title, was proud of the ring? Such a strong-minded young woman, did she really condescend to wear a ring when she didn’t have to? Surely not.