A son’s why-dunnit
A Woman on the Edge of Time: A Son’s Search for his Mother by Jeremy Gavron
Scribe £16.99
Oldie price £14.50 (+p&p). Call 01326 555 762 to order
THIS IS A haunting book. Who was Hannah Gavron, author of The Captive Wife (1966), and why did she commit suicide before her thirtieth birthday? As he pursues the answers, Jeremy Gavron becomes ‘a son possessed’. Jeremy was only four, his brother Simon seven, when Hannah died in 1965, after delivering Jeremy to his nursery school Christmas party. She then went to a friend’s flat, sealed the windows and turned on the gas. Just as Sylvia Plath, Hannah’s near contemporary, had done two years earlier, two streets away.
Hannah’s only book, her doctoral thesis, was published six months after her death, later joining the feminist canon between Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer. The Captive Wife revealed how trapped and depressed mothers could feel, stuck at home with children. Yet at 29, Hannah had everything she could wish: a successful husband, two sweet boys (and a nanny), plenty of money, summers in St Tropez, interesting friends, a doctorate, a good job, a book contract... The Evening Standard Londoner’s Diary column reported in 1965 that Mrs Gavron had ‘solved the career versus baby problem very well’.
The Gavrons were a golden couple, who had met as children. Their toothsome smiles, bright eyes and curly hair were curiously similar. Hannah was an ambitious girl who won every contest (showjumping, poetry, getting into Rada). ‘ Das Kind ist klug’ her grandparents said: the child is clever. And she grew into a vivacious, dynamic, laughing, clowning, charming young woman. ‘She lit lamps when she walked in.’ She and Bob (later Lord) Gavron married when he graduated from Oxford; she was eighteen.
So what happened? Jeremy’s father imposed a no-questions rule about Hannah throughout his childhood. The reticence was characteristic. Their nanny Jeanie stayed on for two years afterwards, and went skiiing with them, yet Gavron never mentioned Hannah’s name in her presence. As he put it to Jeremy: ‘The feeling was that the thing to do was to make a fresh start.’ So he remarried and had two daughters. Only in his teens did Jeremy learn of her suicide. And only after starting his sleuthing was he shown the note she left: ‘Tell the boys I loved them.’ He never shared this with his brother, but it was Simon’s sudden death, while jogging, aged 46, that finally prompted Jeremy’s quest.
It is relatively simple to write about a dead parent you knew. Far more complex to give body to a ghost. A family’s guilts and jealousies are a Pandora’s box. Jeremy Gavron, a first-rate writer and novelist, unfolds the story at the same fragmented, hesitant pace at which he made his discoveries, and it is a gripping formula. Hannah’s mother had warned Bob that her daughter was prone to take up passions and drop them: ‘Horses, acting, my father, then finally life.’ The Fyvels, Hannah’s parents, devotees of psychoanalysis, took her to a Freudian psychiatrist when she was two. At fifteen, Hannah had a kind of affair with ‘K’, the headmaster at her boarding school, Frensham Heights, going to his study after hours for ‘extra German’. Not what most sons want to know about their mothers.
Jeremy Gavron vividly describes an era he never knew, out of which a new Hannah emerged, in high boots and Quant bob, smoking cheroots, as the mid-1960s kicked in. He skewers the male sociologists at the LSE whose view of women’s subjects (e.g. Hannah’s research area) was hostile and dismissive. Rejected by them, she taught at Hornsey College of Art, a hotbed of radical ideas. Eventually, Jeremy is emboldened to approach his mother’s colleague John Hayes, who is still in the same gay relationship with another John, as he was in 1965 (‘the two Johns’ to their friends) when Hannah became his first female lover. It was for Hayes a fleeting intoxication that receded when he spied the boys’ toothbrushes in the Gavrons’ bathroom.
This is a period story, dredged from private papers, memories and unseen letters, from which Jeremy discovers how funny Hannah was, and how much he likes her despite her fallibilities. I have always been curious about her, and find my curiosity richly resolved.