A life less ordinary
A leading historian turns the spotlight on her own experiences growing up. Ysenda Maxtone Graham finds it a moving account
Memoir Joining the Dots Juliet Gardiner (William Collins, £16.99)
JULIET GARDINER is well known for her superbly researched books on slices of British social history, for example, the Blitz and the 1930s. Her instinct as a historian has always been to interview ordinary, unfamous people and to glean from them the small but telling details about what life was really like.
In this short memoir, written with a sense of urgency as she was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2012, she turns the spotlight on her own story. It’s every bit as fascinating as her wider works, bringing out details that say so much: the colour of wallpaper and the gloominess of a bedsit in Bristol in 1960 with co-lodgers queuing for the bathroom with their spongebags.
Born in 1943 and adopted by two kind but dull parents, Juliet (or Gillian, as she then was— she changed her name in adulthood) was brought up at 33, Adeyfield Road, Hemel Hempstead. She sums up the stifling suburban world of her Hertfordshire childhood with a few examples. ‘This lamb’s not as tender as last Sunday’s joint, Dolly,’ her father would say, as the repetitive rota of brown lunches started its new weekly cycle.
At Berkhamsted School for Girls, she made great friends with one girl, Janet Hamilton, but the most exciting thing they could find to do at weekends was joining the local Cactus and Succulent Society.
She fantasised about the glamorous birth-parents she never knew. If she dared to broach the subject, her mother would answer ‘We don’t talk about that’, but then she would say: ‘I’m afraid you are growing up to be like your [birth] mother.’ The young Gillian was glad to be no blood relative of this sad and disapproving couple.
As soon as she could, she left home; by the age of 16, she had met an attractive young journalist called George Gardiner and was living near him in Bristol bedsits and working in department stores. Her mother travelled to Bristol to bring her home, but she refused to go back.
She married George at the age of 19 (Pyrex glass dishes and Denby casseroles were typical wedding presents) and they moved to a Span house in Blackheath, where they had three children in close succession and lived in a middle-class enclave of working husbands and mostly non-working wives. A kind of paradise—except when it wasn’t: one wife killed herself one sunny afternoon after her husband had left her to set up home with another a few doors away.
When the young Gillian had asked her school headmistress for careers advice, she’d said: ‘I understand you have considerable literary ability. I suggest a career in librarianship.’ There was no encouragement to go to university. By 1980, the marriage was falling apart: George was now a Thatcherite Conservative MP, but his wife’s political instincts were left-wing.
She describes the sadness and desolation of divorce. When they broke the news to the children, the youngest, aged eight, said: ‘I think it might be all right if I had a drum kit.’ ‘But it wasn’t, and couldn’t be.’
In her late thirties, the author at last embarked on a degree in history at UCL and became the successful academic and historian that she now is.
In the final chapter, she recounts with clear-eyed honesty the devastating moment of being diagnosed with an incurable brain tumour. With great poignancy, she describes the sound of other people’s purposeful footsteps on the pavement, heard from the hospital bed in the house to which she is confined.
‘Her mother travelled to Bristol to bring her back home, but she refused