the past ten years. Great Expectations. Is there anything more peculiar, more idiosyncratic, more circumscribed in these expectations than in those of Pip, or of Dickens himself, towards being a gentleman? In the 1950s, one of the surest ways forward for an intellectual young woman from the provinces, for a socially disadvantaged young woman from the provinces, was through Oxford, through Cambridge. Not through Manchester, or Leeds, or Durham, or Bristol: but through Oxford or Cambridge. Dr Alethea Ward had known this, and thus had left her money, some of which eventually Liz Ablewhite had inherited. Rita Ablewhite knew this, though how she knew it remained, to Liz, a mystery which she did not think, did not care to question. As Pip cared not to question too closely the sources of his own endowment. Between them, the deceased Dr Alethea Ward and the surviving Rita Ablewhite directed Liz Ablewhite towards Cambridge, and Liz in her turn handed the same knowledge on to her stepsons and her daughters.
Alix was offered places at both colleges of her choice. In fact, she was offered a better deal (let us not go into too many historic technicalities) in Oxford, but she chose Cambridge because of Flora Piercy’s eye-shadow, and because of Dr Leavis. At Cambridge she met her first husband, Sebastian Manning, who introduced her to a world in which socialism, far from being ridiculous, was natural, chic, colourful, confident, artistic: Sebastian’s parents were artists of some repute, one a painter, the other a potter, and they did not think much of the austerities of Dr Leavis. Bloomsbury and St Ives were more their style. Now Sebastian is dead, long dead, and Alix is married to Brian Bowen, son of a saw polisher, grandson of a furnaceman, and often sits with him on an old settee in her stockinged feet. Brian Bowen admires Dr Leavis, with some respectful reservations.
Esther was also offered places at both universities, and chose Cambridge because it offered her a scholarship, and because her brother had been at King’s, and because she heard an owl hoot thrice in the college garden when she retired to her narrow bed after the glass of wine with Flora Piercy. This last explanation for her choice is the one she most frequently proffered. In Cambridge she quickly established herself as a cult figure of mysterious portent: she claimed to be in love with her brother, whom nobody had ever seen, and went in for gnomic utterances and baroque clutter. Now she lives in a small flat in Ladbroke Grove, with a young woman she says is her niece. She sits in her bed-sitting-room-study reading books. Her walls are painted bright red. Not Pompeian red, as she sometimes points out: it is less blue, slightly more flame, more orange coloured. She is not sure whether it could accurately be described as Venetian red. She is still surrounded by baroque clutter.
These three women, it will readily and perhaps with some irritation be perceived, were amongst the crème de la crème of their generation. Illustrious educational institutions not merely offered them places, but also attempted to entice them. Their initial meeting at dinner in Hall was not quite accidental: the nature of the placement was such that strong scholarship candidates were more likely than not to find themselves sitting together. They did not, of course, know this at the time.
Narratives, in the past, related the adventures of the famous and the wealthy. Kings, queens, emperors, warlords. In The Tale of Genji, which has a claim to be considered the world’s first novel, an emperor weeps for lost love in the opening pages. (Do pages open, in a Japanese novel? Probably not.) In Jane Austen, to come nearer home, the protagonists are not, it is true, titled, but they are privileged. By youth, by wit, by beauty, and sometimes by wealth. The Princesses of their Country Villages.
Liz, Alix and Esther were not princesses. They were not beautiful, they were not rich. But they were young, and they had considerable wit. Their fate should, therefore, be in some sense at least exemplary: opportunity was certainly offered to them, they had choices, at eighteen the world opened for them and displayed its riches, the brave new world of Welfare State and County Scholarships, of equality for women, they were the élite, the chosen, the garlanded of the great social dream. Adventure and possibility lay before them, as they had not lain before Liz’s sister Shirley, who married at nineteen and stayed on in Northam, or before Dora Sutcliffe who left school at fifteen and sold sweets in Woolworth’s until she married Shirley’s husband’s brother Steve.
Brian Bowen’s sister Barbara went to Australia and married a building contractor, but that is another story. Brian himself, had he not done his National Service, would, arguably, still be working at Pitts and Harley and might have continued to work there until 1981 when this ancient, well-established firm closed, with the loss of six hundred jobs. But that is another part of this story, and not to be pursued here, for Brian is not a woman and reflections on his prospects or lack of prospects in 1952 would at this juncture muddy the narrative tendency. Forget I mentioned him. Let us return to Liz, Alix and Esther.
Liz, Alix and Esther were reunited in Cambridge in the autumn of 1953. They had spend their ‘year off’ in highly dissimilar circumstances. Esther paid her first visit to Italy, where she spent three months at the Università per Stranieri in Perugia, learned some Italian, drank a great deal of wine, took up with a middle-aged American art historian and began to look at paintings. Alix spent three months working as an au pair girl – working very hard, for no pay – in a suburb of Paris, bored out of her mind most of the time, but strangely, surprisingly consoled by the youngest member of the large family, a baby, which, unlike its larger siblings, seemed to like her. Alix, then as ever, liked anybody who liked her. She spent her rare afternoons off visiting the sights of Paris, or lying in the Luxembourg Gardens alone, reading Dostoevsky and Sartre and Camus, and sending out contradictory messages to idle young men who wondered if it would be worth trying to pick her up.
Liz stayed at home in Northam, studying. Her mother (she knew without asking, there was never any possibility of her asking) expected her to stay at home. Liz had a calendar and she crossed off the days in black ink. She read Victorian novels and studied textbooks of anatomy. She started to read Freud (The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Totem and Taboo), without understanding, yet without misunderstanding. She tried to learn the Book of Job by heart, but never got safely past the end of the second chapter; the first two chapters were on the dull side, overloaded with yoke of oxen and she-asses, with Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite, Job’s comforters. Liz wanted to get on to the exciting bits, in which Job demanded why light was given to him that was in misery, and life to the bitter in soul: in which Job desired to argue with his God: in which the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: but she knew it would be cheating to miss out the she-asses and skip to the livelier parts, so she plodded dully on with the dull narrative. Obsessional behaviour: she determined that one day she would find an explanation for it, and, meanwhile, pursued it.
Esther sent Liz a postcard, from Perugia. Liz put it on her bedroom mantelpiece, and touched it, every morning on rising, and every night as she went to bed. Esther sent a card to Alix, too, but Alix’s mother forwarded it accidentally-on-purpose to the wrong address possibly because she did not care for a rather elaborate allusion to Lacrima Christi in the text, nor for the brightly coloured shiny modern Madonna which the card portrayed. Alix’s mother, broad-minded though she was, did not approve of Catholicism, and was hardly to know that Esther was Jewish.
It would be wrong to give the impression that Liz, Alix and Esther fell into one another’s arms with cries of delight when they met again that October, or to suggest that they proved thereafter inseparable. But they were, nevertheless, pleased to rediscover one another, and sat up late on their first evening in Esther’s room, which had already begun to put out hints of its later decorative eccentricities. They talked of their summer adventures, of their hopes for the future, but mostly of their own provenance. Liz attempted her first sketch of her mother, her first outline for the outside world of the domestic ghost with which she had lived so long: Alix spoke of her relief at escaping from the small boarding school world in which her parents and her contemporaries all knew one another far too well: Esther conjured up visions of both deprivation and splendour in her own past. They did not know then, were not to know for many years, were never fully to understand what it was that held them together – a sense of being on the margins of English life, perhaps, a sense of being outsiders, looking in from a cold street through a lighted window into a warm lit room that later might prove to be their own? Removed from the mainstream by a mad mother, by a deviant ideology, by refugee status and the war-sickness of Middle Europe? None of this would have meant anything to them, then, as they drank