‘Did it used to annoy Freda, his going to see his mother every day?’ I asked.
‘Probably. I should imagine it would. Don’t you think it would?’
I thought it would be perfectly natural, particularly given the proximity of the houses. Extended families were supposed to be the great boon of working-class life, and Freda with her small child would surely have warmed to such support. Wortley, Farsley and Armley – Freda was surrounded by the entire Taylor family and she had been otherwise alone, having been brought up in Ripon.
Barbara’s mother was not by nature big on company however, so perhaps she didn’t find it easy to ‘fit in’ to this extended family scene, which at first must have seemed quite overpowering. She was ‘a very sweet, rather retiring, quiet woman’ in Barbara’s words, ‘rather reserved, shy, but with an iron will’. Freda told Barbara little about her past, only that her parents had brought her up in Ripon and that her father had died. ‘Her mother Edith then married a man called Simpson. There were three daughters, Freda, Edith and Mary, and two sons, Frederick and Norman. I don’t know, to tell you the honest truth, but as far as I remember there was only one Simpson, Norman Simpson.’
I would discover that Freda always had a particularly strong desire to return to the tiny city where she was brought up: ‘My mother always wanted to be in Ripon,’ Barbara recalled. ‘All the time.’
‘You mean, some time after you were born, when you were eight, nine or ten?’ I asked.
‘No, much younger, I went back as a baby.’ Freda took Barbara back to Ripon from when she was a baby and constantly throughout her childhood. Was this a kind of escape? I wondered. Was marriage into the Taylor family so difficult an adjustment? It seemed unlikely, given that Barbara made Winston out to be such a catch and Freda as a woman who, in spite of her reserve, could fight her own corner with Esther.
In the novels we are given a number of reasons for a marriage hitting hard times. In Act of Will Audra is criticised by her mother-in-law for failing to see that her desire to go out to work is flouting the working man’s code, which says that if a wife works, her husband loses his dignity. This is odd, as the mills of Armley and Leeds were filled with working wives, and pretty soon we discover that the real problem is that Audra comes from a better class background. She has fallen on hard times, but – she the lady, he the working man – it can never work, the mother-in-law says.
There may have been similar strife for Freda and Winston. There is speculation that Freda had come, or may have had the impression that she had come, from better stock than Winston. We know that mother-in-law Esther Taylor sounded warnings to Freda that giving Barbara ideas above her station would lead only to trouble. Her counterpart in Act of Will does the same. In the North of England there was a nasty word for girls with big ideas – ‘upstart’. Barbara notes in the novel, ‘the lower classes are just as bad as the aristocracy when it comes to that sort of thing. Snobs, too, in their own way.’
In Everything to Gain, on the other hand, the cause of strife is laid firmly at the husband’s door. Mallory Keswick’s father is ‘very much a woman’s man, not a man’s man . . . He adores women, admires them, respects them . . . he has that knack, that ability to make a woman feel her best – attractive, feminine and desirable. [He] can make a woman believe she’s special, wanted, when he’s around her, even if he’s not particularly interested in her for himself.’
In Act of Will we sense the same about Vincent. There are arguments not only about Audra’s highfalutin ideas, but about Vincent’s drinking and a ‘fancy woman’, and fears that he will leave home and never come back. ‘“Go back to your fancy woman,” I heard that,’ said Barbara. ‘That happened when I was little, I remembered it and I did ask Grandma, “What’s a fancy woman?” And I know that my mother rejected Winston constantly. No, she didn’t talk about it, but I knew about it somehow when I was in my teens. How do children know things?’
Recently, as guest on BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs, Barbara admitted that she hadn’t been able to write Act of Will until after her parents had died, ‘because I really wrote in a sense about this very tumultuous marriage that they had. They were either in each other’s arms or at each other’s throats. He was very good-looking and he had an eye for the girls at times.’ Later, she said to me, ‘But that’s life. I think Winston had a bit of an eye for the ladies, but that doesn’t mean that he did much about it. Listen, the more I write, the more I read of other people’s lives, the more I realise how terribly flawed we all are.’
In the novels this is the message about fathers in general. In Everything to Gain, Mallory Keswick says: ‘He was a human being after all, not a God, even if he had seemed like one to me when I was growing up. He had been all golden and shining and beautiful, the most handsome, the most dashing, the most brilliant man in the world. And the most perfect . . . Yes, he had been all those things to me as a child.’
In Act of Will, although Vincent’s family all dote on him, Grandpa Alfred has ‘no illusions about him’. Vincent has ‘temperament, stubbornness and a good measure of vanity’, and is easily sidetracked from his purpose. His daughter gets her strength of purpose from elsewhere, from her mother’s ‘iron will’, like Barbara.
Despite what Barbara said, that ‘when you are an only child you are a unit more’, one can imagine that this difference in character between mother and father was fertile ground for disagreement, and it is not uncommon for Barbara’s fictional heroines to recall a childhood trauma of expecting the father to up and leave the family home. In Everything to Gain, Mallory is suddenly shaken one day ‘not only by the memory but by the sudden knowledge that all the years I was growing up I had been terrified my father would leave us for ever, my mother and I, terrified that one day he would never come back.’
Mal and her mother discuss Edward, her archaeologist father, in this vein. Mal cannot understand ‘why Dad was always away when I was a child growing up. Or why we didn’t go with him.’ Her mother talks about his not wanting either of them along ‘on his digs’. Mallory is no fool, however. She remembers ‘that fourth of July weekend so long ago, when I had been a little girl of five . . . that awful scene in the kitchen . . . their terrible quarrel [which] had stayed with me all these years.’
In the electoral records of Upper Armley, there is a period when Winston is not included as an inhabitant of the family home. Freda is the sole occupant of electoral age when they are living at Greenock Terrace in 1945, the first record available after the war years (when none were kept), and Barbara considers that ‘the trauma [of expecting the father to leave] must spring from the war years. [In Tower Lane] we had an air-raid shelter at the end of the garden. My mother and I would go in with a torch and I’d worry about where my father was.’
‘Your father was very often not there?’
‘No, he was out having a drink. That was Daddy.’
Besides the Traveller’s Rest on a Sunday, his favourite watering holes were ‘the White Horse, and the other was the Commercial in Town Street. He’d have to walk home, and during the war I thought he was going to be killed,’ said Barbara.
‘So the picture I have is of you and your mother sitting in the shelter. Were you there alone or were the neighbours in there too?’
‘No, it was ours. There were three in a row, but they were awful. There were seats to sit on, but no radio because you couldn’t plug it in, could you? Yes, you put bottles of water and some things in there and a Thermos flask Mummy would fill. A woman wrote a very chastising letter about six months ago saying, “I don’t know who did your research for the Anderson shelters, but they weren’t like you made it out in The Women in His Life. I belong to the Society of Anderson Shelters