Hidden Lives by Margaret Forster

Introduction

'Over and over again we get told stories by our parents and grandparents, and sometimes, if these stories are treated seriously and checked, that is all they turn out to be - stories, unsubstantiated and often downright contradicted by the actual evidence in records. But sometimes beneath the stories lurks the history of more than an ordinary person. Sometimes, their story is the story of thousands ....' Margaret Forster's grandmother, Margaret Ann, died in 1936, taking many secrets to her grave. Not least was how and where she had spent the first twenty-three years of her life, which remained shrouded in mystery. What had happened then that connected her with the elegant woman in black who had paid her a mysterious and upsetting visit shortly before her death? After the funeral, there was a knock on the door. Outside stood an unknown woman claiming to be her daughter, inquiring whether anything had been left to her in the will.

These stories surrounding Margaret Forster's grandmother attained the status of family myth and in Hidden Lives she looks at where the truth might lie. Why was this daughter never mentioned? How had she lived so long around the corner without acknowledgement? And why? The search for answers took Margaret on a journey into her family's past. She not only examines her grandmother's life but also the lives of her mother, Lilian, and of herself, three generations of women born and brought up in Carlisle but with radically differing circumstances and opportunities.

Margaret Ann was a domestic servant before she married a butcher and settled down to have a family. Their eldest daughter, Lily, was a bright child able to go to the Higher Grade School and get a good job as a clerk but when she married she was obliged to relinquish her career and settle down to family life. When her daughter Margaret's time came, she was able to take advantage of the changing times, to go to High School, to Oxford University and to move away from Carlisle to establish her writing career and family in the south. Three different women, three very different lives.

An enthralling piece of detective work, Hidden Lives is evidence of how ordinary women lead extraordinary lives. A personal document, it also acts as a rich and fascinating commentary on how women's lives have changed over the last century.

Biography

Margaret Forster was born in Carlisle in 1983. Educated at the Country High School, she won an open scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, where she read History. Her many novels include Georgy Girl, The Seduction of Mrs Pendlebury, Private Papers, Mother Can You Hear Me?, Have the Men Had Enough?, Lady's Maid, The Battle for Christabel, Mothers' Boys and Shadow Baby, all of which are published by Penguin. Margaret Forster has written numerous works of non-fiction, including a biography of Bonnie Prince Charlie, entitled The Rash Adventurer; a highly praised 'autobiography' of Thackeray (1978); Significant Sisters (1986), which traces the lives and careers of eight pioneering women; a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Boyd which won the Royal Society of Literature's Award for 1988 under the Heinemann bequest; a selection of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry; her critically acclaimed biography Daphne du Maurier, which was awarded the 1994 Fawcett Book Prize; Hidden Lives, a family memoir, which was nominated nine times in 1995 as Book of the Year and is also published by Penguin, and most recently, Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin.

Margaret Forster lives in London. She is married to writer and broadcaster Hunter Davies and they have three children.

Reviews

'Moving and beautifully written, it had me sitting up all night'
Mary Wesley, Daily Mail

'This is a wonderful book, perhaps the best Margaret Forster has yet given us, crowning her thirty years achievement as a novelist and biographer ... her narrative has the bite and vigour of truth well told ... a slice of history to be recalled whenever people lament the lovely world we have lost'
Claire Tomalin, The Independent

'A moving, evocative account, passionate in its belief in progress, punchy as a detective novel in its story of Forster's search for her grandmother's illegitimate daughter. It also shows how biography can challenge our basic assumptions about which lives have been significant and why'
The Sunday Times

'As I read this painfully honest book, I kept finding myself saying, "yes, yes, yes" For what she does - with all the astringency and yet humane empathy she achieves in her novels - is tackle the basic dilemmas we have found ourselves in since the modern feminist revolution began in the Sixties'
The Sunday Telegraph

'Above all, Forster writes of the rituals of domesticity with intense sensual pleasure ... she has, movingly and lovingly, given shape and meaning to the unsung lives of two past generations in a masterpiece of honesty and elegance' Valerie Grove in
The Times

Extract

Susannah was apparently perfect, as the dead so often become. She was, it seemed, perfectly beautiful, perfectly good, and perfectly happy during her comparatively short life. It was that last bit which made me determined not to have anything to do with her. The idea of anyone being 'perfectly happy' struck me, even as a child, as absurd. How could anyone but a moron be perfectly happy? It made me picture her as someone with a fat smile on her smug face all the time. It made me squirm to imagine this happy-clappy woman, and I did not want to acknowledge her. She would not have liked me. No one was ever going to describe me as a perfect anything (except maybe as a perfect nuisance) and certainly not as being perfectly happy. My face more often has a frown on it than a smile - 'So serious,' people say of me, as if being serious is a crime. And my nature, far from being sunny, is woefully cynical - 'How suspicious you are,' everyone tells me. True. I am suspicious, and lack spontaneity.

Not Susannah. She was apparently a wonderfully spontaneous person. She was said to meet life with open arms, ever buoyant and optimistic. They told me she was happy right up to her death, that everyone marvelled at her serenity. I do not believe a word of this. I think it was an image made up in a misguided attempt to comfort me. How, after all, could she be happy, knowing she was likely to die soon, when she was a mere thirty-one years old and I, her baby, her only and much-longed for child, barely six months old? Prove to me such a woman was happy then, and I will prove to you she was insane....................

(later)

I took the memory box into my sitting room and put it down on the floor in front of the sofa. The sooner I got the opening over, the better. I would need a knife or scissors to cut the cord - the knots looked far too corroded with age to undo easily. Pausing to wash my hands, as though I were about to perform a surgical operation and had to take meticulous care with hygiene, I hacked away at the cord with the bread knife and then cut through the tough waterproof outer covering. Then I got a surprise. I'd assumed that the box itself would be a wooden or strong cardboard crate, of the packing-case variety, but what I found was an old-fashioned hat box. It was large and round, about two feet tall and eighteen inches or so in diameter, and was covered in a vivid fuchsia grosgrain material with purple ricrac round the lid and a purple satin ribbon tied in an ornamental bow on the top. It was the most marvellously vulgar and yet glamorous box. I found myself smiling. My grandmother, Susannah's mother who had looked after me when she died, had had several boxes like this, though none quite so colourful or flamboyant.

For some reason, I still delayed the final act of opening, though I was feeling so much more relaxed about it. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of wine, wondering as I did so why my father had never described the brash appeal of this box. It would, I was sure, have helped me feel more kindly towards Susannah's box and tempted me to want to see it. Slowly, I went back to contemplate it again. Experimentally, I pulled at the purple bow. It did not give. Carefully, I cut across the ribbon underneath the bow and when the lid still would not lift I saw that it was taped all round, and remembered my father had said he had sealed it. More delicate snipping with scissors and I felt the lid move a fraction as the pressure was released. I eased it off slowly, feeling a strange sort of breathlessness as I did so. Under the lid, flattened by years of being pressed down, were several scrunched up layers of coloured tissue paper, white, yellow and green, all arranged to look vaguely like a flower. A pretty effect, and I sat admiring it for a moment before disturbing the paper. When I had lifted it out, placing it inside the upturned lid, I expected somehow to find a note. Instead, there was another layer of covering, a thin disc of corrugated cardboard. It was tightly wedged and took some time to remove.

What met my, by then, eager eye was puzzling.