Juliet Gardiner - Joining the Dots - A Woman In Her Time

Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Prologue 1. A War Baby 2. Second-Hand Baby 3. An Education (of Sorts) 4. Old Town Blues 5. Expectations 6. Spanland 7. Making a Historian 8. A Political Wife 9. Putting Asunder 10. A Working Woman Epilogue Acknowledgements Picture Section Also by Juliet Gardiner About the Author About the Publisher

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

Copyright © Juliet Gardiner 2017

Cover photograph by Dave Taylor

Cover design by Jack Smyth

Extract from ‘Having a Baby’ from Collected Poems by Allan Ahlberg (Puffin, 2008). Copyright © Allan Ahlberg, 2008. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Random House UK.

‘Diana’ Words and Music by Paul Anka © 1957, reproduced by permission from Pamco Music Inc/EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London W1F 9LD.

Juliet Gardiner asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007489190

Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780007489183

Version: 2018-05-17

For Rudi and Sammy

Cover

Title Page Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Prologue 1. A War Baby 2. Second-Hand Baby 3. An Education (of Sorts) 4. Old Town Blues 5. Expectations 6. Spanland 7. Making a Historian 8. A Political Wife 9. Putting Asunder 10. A Working Woman Epilogue Acknowledgements Picture Section Also by Juliet Gardiner About the Author About the Publisher

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

1. A War Baby

2. Second-Hand Baby

3. An Education (of Sorts)

4. Old Town Blues

5. Expectations

6. Spanland

7. Making a Historian

8. A Political Wife

9. Putting Asunder

10. A Working Woman

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Picture Section

Also by Juliet Gardiner

About the Author

About the Publisher

A young woman wearing a navy-blue duffel coat and bottle-green stockings stood shivering in the vaulted booking hall of Bristol Temple Meads station looking uncertainly around her. It was 1 January 1960 and the woman was me. I was sixteen years old, and, using the money I had earned from delivering letters for the Post Office during the holidays (£8 5s.) and writing ‘amusing’ anecdotes to the letters page of Woman’s Realm , plus a Christmas present of a £2 postal order, I had run away from home.

It was the start of a decade that was to be momentous in changing Britain’s history, politically, economically, socially and culturally. Although of course I could not have foreseen that, nevertheless it seemed a suitably significant date on which to start a new life; to leave behind the pebble-dashed house in the home counties, turn my back on the minor girls’ public school and be a grown-up at last: independent, poised to achieve the freedom for which I had yearned for so long.

It was not, predictably, that simple. Progress over the next few years would be bumpy, interrupted, contradictory, frustrating. Dependencies transferred rather than jettisoned. But the world changed around me, as it did for most women in Britain – and that is the story I want to tell. It is not only or entirely my story; not a straightforward chronological account of women’s history, nor a history, disquisition, celebration or critique of feminism. Rather it is a series of reflections or meditations on some of the expectations and experiences that I, like many other women in Britain, had, or could have had, during the middle years of the twentieth century.

I am a historian, and I was there, and that is what this book is about. It has no claims to be comprehensive: some important aspects of the period will be left out, or touched on only briefly; others might seem peripheral or wilfully quirky, but to me they are emblematic of various aspects of women’s lives and the perception of these lives both by the women themselves and by society more generally – the education they received, the work they did; the frustrations they felt, cheek by jowl with the knowledge of widening horizons, the legislative, economic, social and intimate transformations of their lives.

It is essentially my story, the optic is mine, but to put it pretentiously, on many occasions my life could hardly fail to grind up against the arc of history, and when it did, I hope recounting that conjunction will ring true.

Chapter One

Although this new era started in 1960, my life began on 24 June 1943, just before the end of the Second World War.

I was a war baby born on Midsummer’s Day. The previous week the RAF had mounted a major bombing raid on Düsseldorf, part of the sustained Allied attack on the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland. Nevertheless, the end of the war in Europe was still almost two years distant, though the tide had begun to turn. At El Alamein, Montgomery’s Eighth Army had secured Britain’s first military victory, defeating Rommel’s Afrika Korps in November 1942. The surrender of all German troops in North Africa followed in May 1943. Alamein had led Churchill, desperate for a morale-raising British success, to venture, ‘This is not the end, it is not the beginning of the end, it is, perhaps the end of the beginning.’ His optimism seemed justified. By the summer of 1943 the Battle of the Atlantic was at last going the Allied way as well, with the ‘killer packs’ of German U-boats succeeding in sinking fewer Allied ships.

For those on the home front in Britain, however, the war remained unrelenting. Although the intense nine-month-long Blitz had ended in May 1941, frequent raids continued. One lunchtime in January 1943 a single 500kg Luftwaffe bomb was dropped on Sandhurst Road School in Catford, southeast London. Thirty-eight children and six teachers were killed in the so-called Terrorangriff (terror raid). There were rumours of deadly new secret weapons being developed by the Nazis. These would materialise the following summer as the lethal V1 ‘pilotless planes’ and V2 rocket bombs. Meanwhile rationing continued, and in many cases bit deeper.