There is a peculiarly English middle-class technique for dealing with awkward facts, about which I know a good deal from personal experience: if something is disagreeable let’s pretend it isn’t there.
I loved my family and my family loved me, but quite early in my life I began to see that loving people didn’t necessarily mean agreeing with them. My family all appeared to believe what we were taught to believe in church. By the age of fifteen I knew that I didn’t. They all voted Conservative. I knew that when I was old enough I was going to vote Labour. They all took it for granted that girls remained chaste until they married. I – although for my first twenty years I fully expected to get married and be faithful to a beloved man for the rest of my days – was perfectly sure that as soon as I got a chance to start making love I would grab it. If they knew all this, particularly that last item, they would almost certainly feel that they ought to cast me out – and I did not want to be cast out, nor were they by nature caster-outers, so the obvious solution to the problem was for me to keep quiet about what I thought and felt, and when those thoughts and feelings became apparent, as some of them did when I stopped going to church and read a lot of left-wing books, for them to pretend not to notice or to treat what they had to notice as a joke.
In my youth I found this hypocrisy shaming. Surely I ought to have stood by my beliefs and argued in their favour, and my family would have ended by respecting me for it. That was probably true as far as religion and politics were concerned, but sex was another matter, probably because my attitude about that was the result not of reasoning, but of my physical nature. Although the way in which it was going to make me live did not shock me, I could see all too clearly why it might shock other people, which meant that I couldn’t be quite sure that it was not in fact shocking: the ground under my feet, in this matter, was not quite firm. Things could be foreseen (and were in fact to occur) which my family would quite certainly find hard to stomach, so, shaming or not, silence was best.
With this conclusion they silently agreed, as became clear on the publication of my first book in the 1960s. Although I failed to understand this until the book was written, it had been a therapeutic exercise. I hadn’t planned the book. Absurd though it sounds to say, ‘It happened to me,’ it really did. I was astonished when it began, and went on being surprised, paragraph by paragraph, as it continued, returning to it every evening when I got home from the office with the utmost eagerness but with no idea of what was coming next. All I knew was that I had got to get it right.
It was the story of having my heart broken: something I had long stopped thinking about but which had been weighing on me as a suppressed sense of failure for years, and there was no point in telling the story unless I could really get to the bottom of it. Which I did, and, sure enough, it changed my life, which was truly marvellous . . . but what on earth would my mother think of this brutal (to her) publication of such a mass of what (to her) ought to remain guilty secrets? It was she who mattered. My father was dead by then, and what the rest of the family was likely to feel was not greatly important to me.
I decided that the best thing to do was let the book be published in the USA, where she knew nobody so needn’t worry about ‘What will the neighbours think?’, and then present it to her as a published book so that she could see that it could be considered acceptable, telling her that if she really couldn’t bear it I would not let it be published here. So I put it in the post to her, and waited. And waited. And waited. Days turned into weeks, and still nothing. And I found myself unable to put my hand to the telephone and ask her, ‘Did you receive my book?’ I knew how silly this was, but I just could not do it. I had known that her decision was important to me, but had no idea, until gripped by this extraordinary inhibition, of how important it was.
Then we were both invited to stay for a weekend with her oldest friend, my godmother, so I said to myself, ‘I’ll ask her when we are at Aunt Phoebe’s.’ But no, I couldn’t. She was to stay the night with me in London before going home to Norfolk, so, ‘I’ll ask her on the drive to London.’ But still I couldn’t. We got to my flat and it became, ‘I’ll ask her after we’ve had supper . . .’ and while I was in the kitchen cooking it, thank God, the phone rang and she called out, ‘It’s Andrew – he wants to talk to you.’ Andrew was my brother, and what did he say? ‘Di, Mum wants you not to publish that book but I’ve told her that’s rubbish. It’s a bloody good book.’ My knees almost gave way under me with the relief of it. I turned to look at her. ‘I know, darling,’ she said. ‘He thinks I oughtn’t to ask you, so I suppose I shouldn’t?’ and I said, ‘Yes, perhaps you really shouldn’t.’ And we spent the rest of the evening talking about what was in that book – two adult women, talking calmly and openly about it, while I rejoiced inwardly at this lovely opening up of our relationship . . . and from that evening on she never once said another word to me about the book or anything in it. I always sent her copies of reviews so that she could see that it had shocked no one, but never once did she refer to them. I knew now that she had always been aware of almost everything in it, but it and its contents no longer existed.
At first I thought this was ridiculous, and so it was: ridiculous and dishonest. Then I thought it was comic. And finally, as the years went by, I came to see it as a very successful way of dealing with a difficult problem. You have a daughter whom you love, she does something you wish very much she hadn’t done, but you want to go on loving her in spite of it. All right, so let’s forget about it, let’s wipe it out. It works! My mother and I grew closer and closer. There are no memories that I value more than that of the almost flame of love which lit her eyes when she opened them and saw me bending over her deathbed.