Open Writing

1950 was the year in which I spread my wings and found freedom. I had had a very circumscribed childhood, growing up during the Second World War on the outskirts of London, in an area which was heavily bombed.

I was also the only child of elderly and anxious parents, so going to University and living away from home for the first time in my life was a great shock for my parents as well as for me.

My father had wanted a son (so that he could dress him in sailor suits, he always said!) but he was stuck with a daughter who was not particularly inclined towards sport and always had her head in a book: what a disappoint-ment I remember that if my parents wanted to talk to me when I had reading to do in preparation for some school homework, they would preface their remarks with, "I wouldn't interrupt you if you were doing something really important, but as you're only reading…"

However, I shall never forget my father's tearful eyes and trembling hand when I returned from an interview at Senate House, London University: not only was I the first member of the family ever to go on to University, but also the first to have any real education at all.

The Headmaster of my grammar school had been very disappointed that I had failed to get into Oxford (the Latin paper had been my undoing) so the previous autumn I had been entered for the London University Intercollegiate Scholarship Examination. There was absolutely no guidance or assistance of any kind when filling in application forms and no practice interviews given to sixth formers in those days. So, on a chilly spring aftemoon in 1950, I found myself, dressed in my best jumper and skirt and wearing my first pair of shoes which had slightly raised heels, sitting before a large interviewing panel of senior academics (all men) in a lofty and somewhat intimidating room in Senate House.

They asked me detailed questions on the English Literature papers I had sat months previously and which I could now scarcely remember. I am sure I must have frequently contradicted what I had said in my written answers. They also pointed out, comparing the dates on my applications forms, that I was obviously a young lady who changed her mind very rapidly: in my naivety and thinking, no doubt, that this was the way one made a good impression on a selection committee, I had put Queen Mary College, London, as first choice on one form and University College as first choice on the other! Could I explain this aberration, they wondered? Of course, I could not, at least not without a lot of stumbling and embarrassment.

I returned from that interview in a daze on the Bakerloo Line and walked the mile from the station to home. My mother, to whom I was always very close, was out when I arrived. My father, by then nearly 70, had always been a somewhat distant parent. I had seen very little of him during the war as the engineering firm he worked for was going flat out manufacturing tanks and other armaments. I don't think I really had any idea of what his feelings were for his daughter.

When I reported that I had been offered a Drapers' Company Exhibition at Queen Mary College and the Campbell Clark Scholarship in English Literature at University College, and over the week-end I had to make up my mind which to accept, to my amazement I saw his eyes brimming with tears and his hand shook so much that he had to put down his cup of tea. It was a difficult moment for both of us.

I chose University College and during the first weeks of that autumn term in 1950 I lived at home, travelling by tube to the college in Gower Street. This became increasingly difficult: my parents worried about me constantly and if I stayed for a drama rehearsal in the evening, or for a debate, or some English Department function, I always had the thought at the back of my mind of the hour or more on the Circle and Bakerloo Lines late at night to Stonebridge Park station, an area, even then, with a very dubious reputation. Any kind of social life at college was impossible. I was frustrated by the waste of time spent travelling two hours or more each day, and felt that this was not what I had expected University life to be.

I was on a full grant, because my father had been made redundant from his engineering job some years previously and we were on what was then called "national assistance". As my scholarship, which was a 19th century endowment, was classed as a "state scholarship", it was supplemented by the Ministry of Education, not Middlesex Education Committee, and I therefore wrote to the Ministry and explained my predicament. They very generously raised my grant to cover all my student hall fees.

And so I finally made the break from home. I went to live during term time in College HalI, Malet Street, close to University College. My mother, however, took it very badly. She saw it as a sign of my ingratitude and thoughtlessness. In her eyes it was yet further evidence that I did not appreciate all the sacrifices that had been made for me, an accusation that I am sure many of our generation heard. I think, however, that my father understood the situation rather better.

I know now what opposition they had encountered from family members and friends. "What is the point of educating a girl? It will all be wasted. She will only go and get married. Now for a boy it would be different." So many people felt like this in the 1940s and 1950s and I am eternally grateful that my parents gave me the opportunity to stay at school and go on to University.

I also learned much later that there had been a point when, because of their financial difficulties, they had considered taking me away from the grammar school and sending me straight out to work, but the Head of the English Department at school had intervened and helped them to secure a maintenance grant for me while I was in the Sixth Form. In later life it comes as a shock to realise how many chance decisions and encounters, and sudden changes of mind, have altered the course of one's life irrevocably. The year 1950 was, for me, a door that opened onto a new and exhilarating world.