We were shepherded throughout by two minders – a middle-aged woman called Tatiana, who was a translator, we were told, and Georgy, head of one of the state publishing houses, specializing in English translation, and both of them, we had been warned back in London, members of the KGB. My experience of Georgy veered from bizarre to chilling, when he accompanied us to the Crimea: “Somewhat odd to hurtle through the Crimea [in the coach from the airport] with Georgy, emitting the vodka fumes of his last three heavy evenings, bellowing an exegesis of the early works of Evelyn Waugh into my ear (apparently he is very popular here). It is really hard to credit that a Siberian public library he recently visited had copies of Vile Bodies and Black Mischief so heavily read as to be physical wrecks, but so he said.” On another occasion, though, walking with him along the Yalta seafront, from which one gazed out over the Black Sea toward an empty horizon, somewhere beyond which, way beyond, lay Turkey, I commented (deliberately, provocatively) on the total absence of sailing boats or power boats off this coast, that would be a usual feature of resort shores: “‘No, here there are not. People are just not interested, you see, Penelope, it is a thing they do not much like to do.’ Shrugging.”
Some of the Soviet delegates did their best to drag politics into the agenda: “an address on the function of the critic was for the most part a diatribe about the arms race, the evil forces of violence and a denunciation of capitalist greed and irresponsibility.” We were aware that all of them were necessarily figures acceptable to the regime, and some of them out-and- out apparatchiks: “People keep vanishing and being replaced by others in the Russian delegation. On the first day a woman scientist was there who appeared to have been drafted in at the last moment to refute our provocative item on the agenda about the paucity of Russian women writers [initially there had been no woman member of their team; we were fielding three]. She appeared from her remarks to be a biochemist but said she also wrote novels and claimed this was a mass phenomenon – ‘the unity of the artists and the scientists.’”
They all disregarded the agreement that none of us, on either side, would speak on any topic for more than four minutes – this, we soon realized, was simply not compatible with Russian style: “I have learned never to take at face value the expression ‘a short comment upon the last speaker’s remarks.’” Simultaneous translation meant that relays of translators staggered exhausted from their booths, and produced some interesting renderings: “We cannot throw away a baby with the water from the basin.” And each evening there were those formal dinners: eat, a Russian rises to make a toast, a Brit rises to respond, eat a bit more, repeat the ritual. London had told us sternly that, while it would be all right for the women to take a token sip of each vodka toast, offense would be taken if the men did not down the glass – they must drink for England. Much mineral water was consumed by the British delegation during the morning sessions.
We arrived at the final session to find that everything was set for it to be televised: “As soon as the cameras were rolling Kuznetzov launched into an account of how our discussions had been of literature and writing but we had of course concerned ourselves with matters of the writer’s commitment to society and especially the overwhelming question of international peace and how to counter the forces of aggression. Consecutive translation, so we had to wait a few minutes to get it, and then all froze with annoyance. Francis King splendidly countered with a sharp piece about how he couldn’t recall that we had discussed any such thing, and we each said something to the same effect (which no doubt they will edit out of the program).”
In the Crimea we stayed at one of the thousand-bedroom hotels built for the recreation of the Soviet masses, sat about on a “skimpy pebbly beach littered with very fat Germans and Russians. Lukewarm completely inactive sea full of small jellyfish in which you loll wondering what to do next. Sat and listened to Georgy (wearing jockey shorts and a scarlet peaked cap) holding forth on his degree dissertation at Moscow University and the relative merits of Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing.” And it was in the Crimea that there was the curious episode of the man who fell into conversation with some of us as we walked on the promenade one evening. Speaking good English, he explained that he was a seaman who had worked on a Russian refrigerated container ship plying the Baltic that had stopped off frequently at Hull, where he had English friends. Next day we were taken by coach to a palace along the coast, a place amidst an immense park with a cliff path along which we walked to admire the view: “And half-way along out from behind a tree appeared, incredibly, the seaman from the refrigerated container ship, clad only in diminutive shorts and dripping with sweat, whom we had met on the promenade in Yalta the night before. We could scarcely believe our eyes. The sense of paranoia and disorientation induced by this country is now complete. Anyway, he ambled along beside us, a very nice fellow, talking of his affection for the English and taste for English books, etc. with Tatiana, distinctly rattled, muttering, ‘I think this is a very boring man, we must get free from him.’”
Coincidence? Or not? Had he wanted something of us? We speculated. We never knew.
Years later, I turned that episode into a short story, one that was to do with quite other things but was prompted by that time and place, an instance of the way in which, for me, short stories have always risen from some real-life moment but have then expanded into something quite detached from that.
And this was the abiding sense of opacity and ambiguity that made that taste of Soviet life so unnerving. You never really knew if things were as you thought they were, or quite other. Some people were genuinely open and friendly; others were opaque. The ten days were demanding, exhausting, intriguing; and occasionally hilarious. One evening, after a reception at the British Embassy, we managed to elude our minders and ended up in a restaurant where a large party of Romanians at a neighboring table were singing national songs: “Melvyn [Bragg] insisted we must counter so we belted out John Brown’s Body, Tipperary, etc. until the Romanians announced themselves defeated and departed with much flashing of teeth and hand-shaking.”
My Soviet diary ends: “Things I never want to see again: a Russian bath towel, which is two feet by one foot and made of sandpaper; the lift at the Yalta hotel, full of large sweating people all pushing each other; the beach at Yalta; Georgy; the grey carcasses of cooked chicken offered for breakfast in the hotel canteen; a microphone; Georgy.”
A diary is an ambivalent reflection of memory. Much that is in mine I no longer remember; the diary is testimony but memory has wiped. And, conversely, stuff lies still in the head that apparently escaped the diary. From the Soviet visit, I have further shreds: our final hours before the plane home, when we spent our remaining roubles (a daily subsistence “fee” which could not be changed into hard currency) on large bowls of caviar for afternoon tea; Tatiana, on the plane to the Crimea, ordering several rows of fellow passengers to their feet with a mere gesture and tilt of her head, in order to have us seated together rather than scattered around the plane and thus not under her eye – how did they know that she was a person you had to obey? And I remember a visit to Chekhov’s house in the Crimea – a rare privilege, apparently, not generally open – small cluttered rooms with photos and personal possessions and I wanted to keep quiet, and had that sudden blinding recognition that the past is true, that Chekhov had indeed existed, had been here, once, where we now were.
*
I have never been back to Russia; the Soviet Union that we fleetingly experienced is now a historical phenomenon. Someone of my age, living there now, will have known an extraordinary social and political upheaval, in an incredibly short space of time. Born into one world, they live now in another – from totalitarianism to democracy, of a kind. Accelerated change, unlike the slow social metamorphosis of this country – indeed, of most politically stable countries in peacetime.
But change there has been, here, and when I squint back at my twenty-year-old self I realize that she woul
d be surprised by two of the major ways in which assumptions and expectations have mutated, and would be startled, probably, to understand that she herself would shortly be a manifestation of a third. I want now to look at this: the three ways in which, to my mind, our society has revised itself during my lifetime – one seismic, one determined and by and large successful, one opaque and generating argument.
Opacity and argument first. The shifting ground of class and social distinctions. Is the twenty-first century any closer to achieving the classless society to which John Major looked forward in 1990? On the face of it – no. That said, the social landscape of the 1950s looks very different from that of today – more predictable, more rigid, you could place a person by how they spoke, how they dressed. There is a flexibility today that is less to do with social mobility than with a more open-minded approach; perhaps we are just less bothered by apparent distinctions. But the polarizations are still there – the violent apposition of those who have and those who have not.
Any comments I make on social change come from a single perspective. Not unusual – most people live out their lives within a particular context of society. Social mobility? Well, yes – there are plenty also who have changed ground, hopped up a rung or three – social mobility is usually talking about improved rather than reduced circumstances. I have a friend my own age who says, “People like you and me have gone down in the world.” What he means is that we live a lot more humbly than our grandparents did, though his were rather more amply situated than mine. But that is to do with a general historical trend rather than families in decline. The middle class does not live like it did in the early twentieth century: the servicing, the expectations. Well, some do, I suppose, but none that I know. And there’s the difference. The middle class in which, and with which, I have lived is not the same as the one my grandmother knew.
So I have lived on ground that was shifting, but it did so rather suddenly, in the midcentury, before I was firmly enough established to notice. I never expected to live like my grandparents had. Just as well. We began married life on Jack’s salary as a university lecturer, and academic salaries have never been other than frugal. But we could manage the mortgage on an Edwardian semi in Swansea with a little garden; that is middle-class living, then or now. And he was in what would be regarded as a profession, if that is a defining feature of the middle class, even if he had arrived there from quite elsewhere.
What I am trying to say is that I have observed rather than experienced. My only swerve was to marry a young man from the northern working class, the two of us meeting up in the fresh air of the midcentury, both liberated into the social neutrality of higher education. But he had, and continued to have, the advantage of a dual perspective; if he were here still he would be looking over my shoulder at this point and making stringent comments.
However, to observe is to experience, in one sense. If those around you are behaving differently, if assumptions and expectations and opinions mutate then you are going to mutate with them, unless you are peculiarly intransigent or holed up in some fortress of religious or political belief. I have been formed in and by late twentieth-century Britain; I reflect my times. I can’t think or see as my grandmother did. She was born when Disraeli was prime minister, died in the age of Harold Wilson. For her, class differences were not only inevitable but desirable; she seemed to be unaware of homosexuality and I never knew if this was genuine ignorance or tacit rejection; her view of gender distinction was that men were a different breed from women, you deferred to them in some respects and recognized that they had special needs – cooked breakfast and somewhere to go and smoke. Sex was unmentionable. And alongside all this ran an ingrained sense of obligation; you were more comfortable than most, it was therefore beholden upon you to help others. She did. A Christian ethic – and she was of course paid-up Church of England – and also a manifestation of the arbitrary system of gift aid inherited from the nineteenth century that the welfare state was to supplant.
I imagine that my own grandchildren when elderly will cast a critical eye upon my own mind-set of today. How I would love to know in what ways it appears – will appear – archaic or perverse. Ours is on the whole a pretty tolerant and liberal-minded age; can tolerance be stretched yet further? Some would say, indeed yes. That there are still areas of ignorance and insensitivity. Or could there be a reversion – could we come to seem unprincipled, licentious, devoid of standards? Somewhere, at some level, the seeds of change will be starting already to sprout. Society does not support stasis.
My grandmother’s house, and the sense in which its contents seemed to have become signifiers for the century, inspired a book for me – A House Unlocked – and I discussed there the shifting pattern of social expectations over her lifetime, and the way in which my perception of the world differed from hers. My own marriage had come to seem to me nicely symbolic of the reforms of the midcentury, which meant that two people who could not otherwise have met came together because of the Butler Education Act of 1946.
There is plenty of informed argument about the degree of social change in the last fifty years: the answers can be opaque, conflicting. But there are two areas of change that seem to me in one case indisputable and in the other seismic: the expectations of women, and attitudes toward homosexuality.
When I was a small girl, there was a teatime ritual. She – it was always a she – who took the last cake, bun, sandwich from the plate was entitled to a wish; you had a choice of wish – a handsome husband or ten thousand a year. Nobody ever chose the ten thousand. There were various related strictures, too: if you don’t sit straight you’ll grow up round-shouldered and no one will ever marry you; if you make faces the wind will change and you’ll get stuck like that and no one will ever marry you. The central female concern was being made clear.
An atavistic concern. Marriage – partnership – is a natural and normal aspiration. Most people would prefer to go through life in alliance with someone they love, and most want children. But the teatime wish husband was about status, not inclinations. Unmarried, you would have reduced social status – the ancient social stigma, the heart of the matter in any Jane Austen novel. And, of course, in the past the spinster’s position was precarious economically. But cash flow can’t have much entered into the teatime wish choice, or more would have plumped for the ten thousand. Indeed, my recollection is that it was seen as ludicrous to do so, if not a touch disgraceful.
A recent television program featured an organization that makes a packet out of running seminars for people who want to become rich enough fast enough to be able to live off their cash without ever working. The accumulation of a property portfolio was the scheme, and it was clear that most of those paying a wad in order to learn how to go about this were already in catastrophic financial debt to the organization. Many were young women, and their attitudes startled me. Not only did they feel they “ought” to be millionaires, but they felt that they ought not to have to work; work was not their aspiration, what they wanted was a certain lifestyle, a nicely well-heeled lifestyle free of obligation.
Dupes, I fear, poor dears, and I hope there weren’t too many of them. But they did make me think about feminism, and what it originally meant, and to wonder what those girls would have thought about that. Feminist aspiration, back in the sixties and seventies, was all about work: equal opportunity in the workplace, equal pay, equality of esteem across the board. The feminist did not want to be a trophy wife, or a millionaire; she wanted respect and recognition for who she was, and what she could do.
Have we got what they were demanding? Today, it seems that two-thirds of low-paid workers are women, and that women in full-time work earn sixteen percent less than men. So the answer would seem to be no, not entirely. And one hears constantly of women bringing claims against employers on the grounds that male colleagues were preferred for promotion, and for unfair dismissal when pregnant. The glass ceiling exists, apparently, and every
woman has to balance career against motherhood.
But I am concerned with assumptions and perceptions, and it is impossible to deny that a young woman today steps out into a very different society from that of fifty years ago. Depending, of course, on what sort of young woman she is. The feminist movement was ever a middle-class movement, and there is a big divide today between the professional woman, who may well be earning the same as a man, and the vastly larger female workforce that is cleaning offices, stacking shelves and sitting at checkouts and mostly does not. Plenty of ground still to be gained, but the seminal matter is that a point has been made, slowly and inexorably, over the last decades: it is no longer possible to treat women differently from men and not be held to account.
There’s more, much more. Women have surged into higher education. At my university, in the 1950s, we were one woman to ten men. This did give us a certain commodity value – ten chaps to pick from – but what I wonder now is why we didn’t question this. Why didn’t we look at that morass of males and think: they can’t all be so much brighter than lots of girls who aren’t here. Today, that university has near parity between men and women, actually tipped slightly in favor of women.
We were the pre-feminist generation. Long post-suffragette, but apparently not awake to the still-prevailing anachronisms. There were exceptions, of course, those already sniffing the air, but on the whole my generation now seems to me to have been somewhat inert. Ten years later the climate would be very different.
One thing above all, though, reminded us that it was hazardous to be a woman. We girls of the midcentury lived with one eye on the calendar. There was far less discussion of sex back then but it was quite as brisk a component of student life as it is today. We just made less fuss about it, kept it under cover, mindful of what was likely to happen to any girl who got pregnant. She would probably be sent down, dismissed from the university, quietly and conclusively. And the man? Oh, no. Those were pre-pill days; contraception was unreliable, and most of us were pretty uninformed about it. So girls brave enough to embark on a relationship lurched from month to month, eyeing the calendar and hoping for the best. And this was going on up and down the land, of course. No difficulties back then for childless couples hoping to adopt; the relevant institutions were well stocked with babies discreetly unloaded.