Scandalous Risks

‘All right, all right, I’ll take a secretarial course! At least that’ll be better than arranging bloody flowers!’

‘I can’t stand it when women swear,’ said my father. ‘Kindly curb your language this instant.’

‘You may have spent a lot of your life declaring in the name of your liberal idealism that men and woman should be treated equally,’ I said, ‘but I’ve never met a man who was so reluctant to practise what he preached! If you really believed in sexual equality you’d sit back and let me say “bloody” just as often as you do!’

‘I give up,’ said my mother. ‘I’m off to the conservatory.’

‘And I’m off to the Athenaeum,’ said my father. ‘I simply daren’t stay here and risk a stroke any longer.’

‘How typical!’ I scoffed. ‘The champion of equality once again takes refuge in an all-male club!’

‘Bloody impertinence!’ roared my father.

‘Bloody hypocrite!’ I shouted back, and stormed out, slamming the door.

VIII

If I had been living in the ’sixties I might then have left home and shared a flat with cronies; I might have taken to drink or drugs (or both) and chased after pop singers, or I might have opened a boutique or become a feminist or floated off to Nepal to find a guru. But I was living in the ’fifties, that last gasp of the era which had begun in those lost years before the war, and in those days nice young girls ‘just didn’t do that kind of thing’, as the characters in Hedda Gabler say. (Hedda Gabler was one of Aysgarth’s favourite plays; he adored that clever doomed sizzler of a heroine.)

It was also a fact that in between the acrimonious rows my life at home was much too comfortable to abandon in a fit of pique. My parents, exercising a policy of benign neglect, were usually at pains to avoid breathing down my neck, ordering me about and preaching nauseous sermons about setting an example to the lower orders. I was waited on hand and foot, well fed and well housed. In short, I had sufficient incentives to postpone a great rebellion, and besides, like Hedda Gabler, I shied away from any idea of not conforming to convention. If I flounced around being a rebel I knew I would only earn the comment: ‘Poor old Venetia – pathetic as ever!’ and wind up even worse off than I already was.

So after that row with my parents in 1957 I did not rush immediately upstairs to pack my bags. I gritted my teeth and faced what I saw as the cold hard facts of life: no longer could I sit around sipping gin, smoking cigarettes and soaking up the sexy reminiscences of St Augustine. The day of reckoning for my refusal to go up to Oxford was at hand, and just like any other (usually middle-class) girl who considered that the hobbies of flower-arranging and playing with food were far beneath her, I had to embark on a secretarial training.

However as I reflected that night on my capitulation to parental bullying, I thought I could face my reorganised future without too much grief; a secretarial course could well be my passport to what I thought of as Real Life, the world beyond my mother’s gardens and my father’s clubs, a world in which people actually lived – swilling and swearing, fighting and fornicating – instead of merely existing bloodlessly in charity committee meetings or in cloud-cuckoo-lands such as the Athenaeum and the House of Lords.

I decided to go to Mrs Hester’s Secretarial College because Primrose had attended a course there while I had been fighting off death by boredom in Switzerland and Italy. Like me, Primrose had been encouraged by her school to try for a place at Oxford, but she had convinced me that an Oxford education was the one thing we both had to avoid if we were to have any hope of experiencing Real Life in the future.

‘Christian told me frankly it would reduce my chance of marrying to nil,’ she had confided, ‘and there’s no doubt spinsters are always regarded with contempt. Besides, how on earth could I go up to Oxford and leave poor Father all alone with Dido? He’d go mad if he didn’t have me to talk to whenever she was driving him round the bend.’ Primrose had never been away from home. She had attended St Paul’s Girls School in London while I had been incarcerated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and I had always secretly resented the fact that her father had considered her indispensable while mine had been willing to consign me to an institution.

Although Primrose was anxious to marry eventually, just as a successful woman should, she never seemed to mind having no boyfriends. Instead she channelled her gregarious inclinations towards forming a circle of female friends whom her brothers condescendingly referred to as ‘the Gang’. Some of the Gang had been at school with her, some had been débutantes with us in 1955 and some had been her classmates at Mrs Hoster’s. Aysgarth adored us all. Dido used to refer to us as ‘Stephen’s Little Harem’ and look indulgent. ‘Name your favourite of the day!’ we would tease him as he sat beaming on the sofa and we lounged on the carpet at his feet, but he would sigh: ‘I can’t decide! It’s as if you were asking a chocolate addict to select from a row of equally luscious peppermint creams!’

When the Aysgarths moved to Starbridge in 1957, it was thought the Gang might drift apart, but Starbridge was an easy journey by train from London and the core of the Gang kept in touch. Abandoning all thought of a secretarial career in London, Primrose landed a job at the diocesan office on Eternity Street, and in order to avoid constant clashes with Dido she had her own flatlet in the Deanery’s former stables. Time ticked on. I completed my secretarial training and drifted through a series of jobs in art galleries and antique shops and publishing houses. Then with the dawn of the new decade the Gang at last began to disintegrate. Penny and Sally got married, Belinda joined the Wrens, Tootsie became an actress and was expelled from the Gang for Conduct Unbecoming, Midge dropped out to grow daffodils in the Scilly Isles, and by 1963 only I was left in ‘Stephen’s Little Harem’ – ‘The last peppermint cream left in the box!’ as my chocolate-loving Mr Dean put it so saucily, much to his wife’s annoyance.

‘You really should make more effort to get married, Venetia,’ she said soon afterwards. ‘In the game of life women who don’t marry are inevitably regarded as such amateurs, and you wouldn’t want people to look down on you pityingly, would you, my dear? That’s one thing a clever girl can never endure.’

I could have withstood that woman better if she had been merely mad and bad. But it was her talent for disembowelling her victims with the knife of truth which made her so thoroughly dangerous to know.

It was 1963. The innocent days were almost over, and in the early spring, just after John Robinson, the suffragan bishop of Woolwich, published the book which was to shake the Church of England to its foundations, the foundations of my own world were at last rocked by the earthquake of change. Exasperated by my failure to stay in any job longer than a year, my father went to great trouble to obtain a post for me at the Liberal Party’s headquarters. I handed in my notice a week later.

‘How dare you do this to me!’ shouted my father, who was now seventy-two and even less capable of managing a recalcitrant daughter.

‘My dear Papa, I’m the victim, not you! I was the one who actually had to work at that ghastly place!’

‘Well, if you think you can loaf around under my roof doing nothing for the next six months –’

‘Nothing would induce me to loaf around under your roof a day longer!’ I said, almost twenty-six years old and finally summoning the strength to burst out of my luxurious prison. ‘I’m off to Starbridge to meditate on God and contemplate Eternity – which is exactly what you ought to be doing at your age!’

And having delivered myself of this speech, which could be guaranteed to infuriate any humanist past endurance, I embarked on my journey into adventure.

THREE (#u1a2015f4-5a4f-576d-b3e6-9f4b56d41963)

‘But now “God” is news!’

JOHN A. T. ROBINSON

Suffragan Bishop of Woolwich 1959–1969

Writing about Honest to God in the Sunday Mirror, 7th April 1963

I

At Waterloo Station I encountered Charley Ashworth, the Bishop’s elder son, whom I had occasionally met in Starbridge during my visits to the Aysgarths. He was a year my junior, small, chatty and bumptious. It was generally agreed that the bumptiousness masked an inferiority complex which had arisen because he was plain while his brother Michael was handsome. After completing his National Service Charley had gone up to Cambridge, where he had taken a first in divinity, and in 1961 he had entered a theological college, also in Cambridge, to learn how to be a clergyman. This exercise, which hardly seemed compatible with his pugnacious personality, was still going on.

‘Good heavens – Venetia!’ he exclaimed, speeding towards me with a suitcase in one hand and a copy of Bishop Robinson’s Honest to God in the other. ‘What are you doing here?’ He made it sound as if I were trespassing.

‘Just admiring the view from platform twelve.’ I had set down my bags in order to rest my wrists; I never managed to travel light. Around us throbbed the echoing noise and mouldy smell of a mighty station. I had been gazing at the inert train nearby and trying to decide which end would have the best chance of offering me a solitary journey.

‘But I’d heard you were running the Liberal Party!’ Charley was protesting as I realised my hopes of solitude had been dashed.

‘I decided I wasn’t political.’

‘Good for you! Personally I think women should keep out of politics.’

‘And what do you think they should keep in?’

‘The home, of course.’ He heaved open the door of the nearest carriage and flung out his hand generously towards the interior as if he were offering a child a treat. ‘In you go!’

‘Could you deal with my bags?’ I said. ‘We girls are such delicate little flowers that we have to rely on strong brave boys like you to help us whenever we’re not sitting at home being plastic dolls.’

‘Very funny!’ said Charley good-humouredly, my sarcasm quite lost on him, and without complaint turned his attention to my bulging suitcases.

‘How are you getting on with Honest to God?’ I enquired as he tossed his book on to the seat.

‘Oh, have you heard of it?’

‘I can read, you know. OUR IMAGE OF GOD MUST GO, SAYS BISHOP –’

‘That article in the Observer was a disgrace!’

‘Did you think so? I adored it – such fun when a Church of England bishop declares to all and sundry that he doesn’t believe in God!’

‘But that’s not what Robinson’s saying at all –’

‘That’s what laymen think he’s saying.’

‘And that’s exactly why the book’s a disgrace! It’s so bad for laymen. My father says that Robinson’s being thoroughly irresponsible as well as intellectually slipshod, and I agree with him,’ said Charley, exuding outraged virtue as he heaved my bags up on to the rack. ‘My father and I always agree on everything.’ Closing the carriage door he pulled down the window and began to scan the platform.

‘Tedious for you,’ I said. ‘My father and I are in perpetual disagreement. Life’s just one long glorious row.’ But Charley, leaning out of the window, was too absorbed in some private anxiety to reply.