Archives: Persephone Forum

‘She had reached the Vauxhall Bridge Road now, and she turned back.’ Mary Heyham’s afternoon walk along Chelsea Embankment ends just across the river from Lambeth Walk where Amber Reeves assisted her mother, Maud Pember Reeves, in a remarkable piece of social investigation, initially published as a Fabian Tract and later expanded by Maud into the wonderful Round About a Pound a Week (Persephone Book No. 79), published in 1913 a year before A Lady and Her Husband.

 

 

Maud Pember Reeves had been a founder member of the Fabian Women’s Group in 1908, two years after her daughter founded the Cambridge University Fabian Society – Amber had been required by her father to choose between Cambridge and being presented at court. If there are elements of Amber Reeves in Mary Heyham’s daughter, the fictional Mary could hardly be more different from Amber’s mother, nor could her husband, James Heyham, be more different from Amber’s father, a radical politican who counted amongst his friends the Webbs , George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells, to whose child Amber gave birth (although she was by then married to fellow Fabian Rivers Blanco White) in 1909. The Lambeth Walk interviews may have laid the seeds, and the author’s Fabian beliefs are never far beneath the surface, however this is not an autobiographical novel.

Amber Reeves complained that her mother was too busy doing important things to look after her, a parenting model that she would follow in her turn, rarely seeing her children, who were cared for by a faithful old nurse (who refused to take a salary). Way ahead of their times, unopposed by their husbands, Maud and her daughter had broken the conventional mould. By contrast, Mary Heyham, the ‘lady’ of the title, engaged at seventeen, married at eighteen, ‘had kept her house and nursed her babies as she might have done a hundred, five hundred years ago’. For nearly thirty years her life has pivoted around her family.  But the nest is emptying, the children are ‘going to other homes where she would be only a visitor who rang their door-bells and asked their servants whether they were in.’

 

 

Born and brought up in a prosperous Victorian household, Mary is facing middle-age in an era of change, under-educated and over-cosseted. Rosemary, her younger daughter, and favourite child, a thoroughly ‘new woman’, soon to be married, well-educated (Mary, interestingly, had seen to that), and an ardent socialist, accurately sums up her mother’s situation. She is ‘like an insect in a coral reef, ignorant of the laws by which she was governed’. Mathematics and economics were closed books, ‘philosophy meant that a great many cultivated people do not believe in God. Biology meant that in some indiscreet manner we are descended from monkeys.’ She had never seen a factory, nor entered the bank that sent her chequebooks; travel was a padded seat in a first class carriage. ‘Public opinion, since she was a rich woman, did not allow Mr Heyham to beat her or to take her money, and she could walk alone in the street without being insulted’, not the case for poor women.  Mrs Heyham knew nothing of the lives of the women who served her, or who worked for the family business – a successful chain of up-market tea-shops.

With a remarkably mature understanding of her mother’s predicament, Rosemary, suggests she take up some sort of work among her father’s waitresses. Her older sister, preoccupied with early married life and pregnancy, agrees with ‘the easy enthusiasm of the irresponsible’ – Amber’s political pen is never far from her hand. Their brother Trent, oldest, least loved, least clever, and deeply conventional, takes a dim view, having had an upsetting encounter with a large waitress in Oxford, and afraid that Rosemary’s ‘confounded ideas’ will spoil his charming mother. James Heyham, who thinks of himself  as ‘a modern husband, and a good one’, ‘a broad-minded man’ (James takes a very favourable view of himself in general), has no objection: ‘there were a lot of little things that might be done for the girls’, little being the operative word. It will be a new lease of life for ‘the old lady’, for ‘little mother’, for the ‘brave little woman’: he is, genuinely, fond of his wife, but there is no end to the condescending ways in which he addresses her, and about which, astonishingly, she does not protest. Mary has rarely protested, about anything, least of all about or to her husband.

Worried that she is not ‘as happy as she ought to be’ (‘ought’ is an interesting word), James encourages her, and Rosemary provides her with educational reading matter on women’s working conditions, and an assistant, the somewhat mysterious, assiduous note-taker, Miss Percival from whom over the months she will learn far more.  Miss Percival has a keen eye for the petty injustices inflicted on the tea-shop girls, who must provide their own aprons, cuffs, caps and collars, and pay for their laundering, out of their paltry wage of 11 shillings a week, based on the unsubstantiated (and comfortable) belief that they were being supported at home, and subject to reduction for unpunctuality, and breakages. James Heyham has not built his fortune by being over-generous to his staff.

Mary’s first suggestions are modest: better shoes, chairs, somewhere for them to eat their meagre lunch, away from the wandering hands of the (male) cooks. James, though ‘he preferred to contemplate their trim waists and their clever manipulation of their hair’, agrees to the shoes: ‘… he would fix up with a firm that supplied ward shoes to nurses and see that the girls each bought a pair.’ Chairs and a safe place to sit meet with more resistance: ‘Do you imagine I pay them to be private and comfortable! I pay them to do my work!’ Mary, who had always thought her husband fair and just, wonders if she had been wrong, blaming herself for not having read the signs.

The scales finally fall from her eyes when she and Miss Percival visit one of the girls at home, a mean room with one bed shared with her dying mother, in Maida Hill, not Lambeth Walk, but with the same torn net curtain at the window and empty tins for decoration. Where Maud Pember Reeves painted the big picture, Amber focuses in on one individual: Florrie Wilson, unfairly sacked from the tea-room, as a consequence of being cruelly treated by a vengeful suitor, which ignites Mary’s social conscience. And it is Miss Percival, having offered immediate comfort to Mrs Wilson, and a refuge for Florrie, who strikes a spark of feminism in her employer with her first outburst, ‘it ought to be as safe for Florrie to have men friends as it is for your daughters. Only men, especially rich men, don’t want it to be.’ To be poor is bad enough but to be a woman and poor is unbearable.

Miss Percival’s rage is not so much with the politics, but with a society that, at every level, privileges men. Voicing Amber Reeves’s feminism she declares:

 ‘I hate them for what they’ve made of us … narrow, uneducated, trivial … If we’ve an instinct for order and organisation we use it to see that the cook keeps the kitchen clean, if we love beauty we embroider tea cosies or hunt in shops for pretty dresses, if we’ve more emotion in use than our man has an appetite for we’re allowed to work it off, sensibly and with moderation, in a religion he doesn’t take seriously.’

Girls, she says, are:

 ‘here in the world to please men, and most men wouldn’t know what to do with a really noble wife. So we lie to them, and tell them to mind their manners, and our clear bright eager little girls learn to chatter at tea parties … as they grow up something seems to go out of them. The pressure is too strong I suppose. They can’t stand up against what’s wanted of them.

James Heyham is one of those men. There is nothing exceptional about him. He considers himself to be both generous and honourable, and Mary recognises that other men would be unlikely to challenge that. He has been a good enough husband. He has been kind in his way, and loved her. Mary is shocked when she realises that after twenty-five years of marriage  ‘James did not care first of all for her. He cared first for his work, for the business’, but he had never pretended otherwise. Charged with deceiving his wife, his angel in the house, he defends himself: ‘you have had your own standards, and you have simply taken it for granted that I should live up to them. … You may say that I deceived you, and that you have a right to know the truth. Well, I did conceal it from you, but my concealment was the price I paid for your immunity from contact with evil.’  Do we sense here a little sympathy for him? While favouring the ‘lady’, Amber Reeves does not shrink from presenting the case for ‘her husband’.  Rosemary has seen his bad side, but finds him ‘much more enlightened and civilised than one has any right to expect from a father’. What damns James is his inability to change.

 

 

Unsurprisingly he is dismayed to find his gentle submissive wife beginning to respond to the world ‘in an individual way’.  Having initially approved of her interest in the welfare of ‘his’ waitresses, he is taken aback when, as half-owner of the business, a fact conveniently overlooked, ‘the old lady’ proves to have views on its future, a development he had not foreseen, and blames on Rosemary, ‘the tyrannous bluestocking’, whose subversive bookshelf Mary had fallen upon ‘with the enthusiasm of a girl of fifteen who is allowed at last to begin learning Greek.’ Having assiduously seen to the education of her daughter, she is able to reap the benefits.

As she sets out on the formative walk that takes her along the Thames to Vauxhall Bridge, Mary reflects on the evolution of women’s role and status through history, mirroring developments in agriculture, in industry, in economics: from the cave woman, holder of practical knowledge, to the head of the medieval household, responsible for apprentices, maids and labourers, and skilled in crafts, ‘spinning, weaving, preserving, baking – all the things that J and his friends were doing in factories.’ How much better, she reflects, for children too to live in such a community.

Mary is a complex and beautifully drawn character, whose belated, uneven, path to self-knowledge, and a sort of independence, is perfectly plotted, interwoven with fascinating minutiae of domestic life at a time of radical change for some, and resolute conservatism for others, and a picture of working life downstairs in the fashionable tea-rooms of the period, so vivid that Amber Reeves, the social researcher,  must surely have observed it, if not actually carried the trays.

 

On the evening of 18th July 1944 André Amar left the Paris flat where he and his wife Jacqueline were living with their 9 year-old daughter Sylvie, for a rendezvous with some fellow members of the Jewish Resistance Movement, and didn’t return. On that day Allied troops who had landed in Normandy on 6th June were fighting for what remained of Caen, moving South and East. They were to reach the capital a month later on 18th August, finally liberating the city on the 25th. Jacqueline’s diary begins with André’s disappearance and ends with the liberation, five weeks during which the Allies are moving towards Paris and her husband, if he is still alive, is most likely to be on his way to Germany.

 

 

Snippets of information as to André’s whereabouts reach Jacqueline, by word of mouth, and are mostly inaccurate. He’s being held at Cherche-Midi, he’s at La Santé, at Fresnes, at Drancy: the Germans had filled the city’s prisons, the last and most dreaded being the final holding camp for Jews awaiting deportation by train from the grim station of Bobigny to ‘Pitchipoi’, the catch-all name given by Jews themselves to the concentration camps. She learns the truth on 19th August – and I can make no apology for spoilers. André and his fellow resistants had been held in Drancy. They had not been released when the prison was liberated and evacuated the previous day, but were already on a train heading for Buchenwald. The train, three carriages commissioned with great difficulty by the governor of Drancy, Alois Brunner, in order to effect his own escape, and containing, as hostages for his protection, just 51 prisoners, a few resistants, a number of high profile Jews, and some of Brunner’s personal enemies, had been the last to leave Bobigny, on 17th August.

 

 

On the evening of 25th August Jacqueline describes powdering her face, putting on some lipstick, changing into a fresh dress, and watching the celebrations in the streets of Paris – the singing and the dancing and the crowds surging around the tanks, the girls in their best and brightest clothes, the banners, and the flags ‘made out of scraps of material, hastily dyed and roughly stitched’. ‘And yet,’ she adds, ‘so many hearts are aching for someone who is not here.’

A few days earlier she had asked herself why she was keeping the journal: ‘Is it my escape, like my mother’s embroidery? … What has been the point? Who have I been doing it for?’ With excessive modesty she sums up the contents, a few scribbles on some days, several pages on others, as a ‘futile attempt to record events and how it has felt to live through them, to describe my various hiding places, my journeys, the dark hours of the dawn, the sleepless nights.’ The notebooks that make up the first section of Maman, What Are We Called Now weave together a daily diary, an anguished love letter to her missing husband, a personal memoir, and a vivid and personal account by a Jewish woman in her thirties of wartime life in occupied France.

 

 

 

Shifting back and forth from the present to the immediate past, and further back to the First World War, the notebooks intersperse moments of private fear and grief with reflections on a gilded childhood and youth; they describe the privations of war, the struggle to find food, to keep warm, to get around when there are no buses and no metro, to put on a good face for the children; the tiredness, common to all women in war, and the little acts of defiance peculiar to those living under an occupying force – the silent protest registered in continuing to wear bright lipstick, colourful skirts and wide hats. And they record the persecution of Jews in France, and the shameful collusion of the Vichy government.

 

 

Jacqueline’s family had been in France for several generations, André’s since the 1920s. Her father was a financier and newspaper owner, his a banker. Both lived in the prosperous 16th arrondissement of Paris and attended the best schools. If Jacqueline was a little envious of her Catholic schoolfriends, with their ancient lineages and old family houses, neither she nor André thought of themselves as any less French. Their Jewishness was not denied but they had never thought to be identified by it. Indeed, they had themselves made the distinction between themselves: Israëlites, from old established families, and Juifs, recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, a distinction that would not be recognised by the Nazis, or the authorities of Vichy France. The path from riches to rags may have been a little longer but the direction was the same: barred from the professions, stripped of their possessions, forced out of their homes, hounded from hiding place to hiding place, desperate to avoid deportation.

The flat in the rue de Seine, from which André had set out on 18th July, was little Sylvie’s ninth home in four years. Marseille, Aix-les-Bains, a village in the Vaucluse, another in Savoie, and more, many requiring a fresh alias: Sylvie’s question, ‘Maman, what are we called now?’ tells the story. André’s arrest meant packing up once again, to be taken in by one of the unsung heroines of wartime France: Nana, a humble shopkeeper,  was one of those women, who took in prisoners, escapees, members of the Resistance, Jewish children, doing it ‘for her country’. Jacqueline’s father was hidden for months by the old family cook; her sister and her father’s secretary were saved from arrest thanks to the warning shouts of the concierge and some brave neighbours ready to shelter them.

Serge Doubrovsky a French Jewish writer, who spent almost a year in hiding as a boy with his parents, wrote later that ‘every Jew who survived in France during 1942-4 owed his or her life to some French man or woman who helped, or at least kept a secret.’ It is equally true that many more might have been saved had it not been for petty, often mercenary, acts of betrayal, unnecessarily zealous adherence to regulations, or the choice of some French man or woman to do nothing: the informer who handed over five children in exchange for 4,700F and two packets of cigarettes, the  magistrate prepared to preside over the commission for denaturalisation of Jews, the members of the Milice eager to exceed their ‘quotas’ in delivering Jews to the Nazis.

The first part of Maman, What Are We Called Now? ends on a joyful, even optimistic note. Paris is free. Life is still hard, but by August 1944 the men in André’s group have set up the Service des Déportés Israélites, establishing their offices in the Hotel Lutétia, which after VE day on 8th May 1945 would become a reception centre for returning deportees.

 

 

 

For a few months people continued to believe that they would see their husbands, parents, children, grandchildren again. Rumours kept their hope alive: the men had been set to work in the mines, the old kept in hospitals, the children sent out to farms. ‘Pitchipoi’ wasn’t so bad after all. In a chilling paragraph Jacqueline sets out the truth, which was that nobody knew anything:

 

Not a single postcard had been received not a single escapee had been sighted. The French Red Cross knew nothing: they had      barely gone beyond their limited remit, the Swiss Red Cross said nothing other than to convey a bizarre optimism based on reports from the sham camp at Theresienstadt, which had a Town Hall, a Casino …. with dances for the inmates, everything, in short, but a post-office, and which was nothing but a ‘puppet’ camp, set up solely to satisfy the curiosity of the Red Cross Representatives, a curiosity which as it turned out they did not have.

 

Her rage is palpable.

Angrily challenging General de Gaulle’s upbeat VE Day pronouncement that not one death should be forgotten, ‘no mourning, not one tear shed in vain’, she would remind him that some were mourning not only their war dead, but elderly parents, young brothers and sisters, who had neither the time nor the strength to do anything, ‘whose deaths served no purpose, who did die in vain, who died for nothing … the dead who could not die like soldiers, but were shovelled like bread into ovens.’ And she would have him, and others remember all the children who ‘went in the lorries, so many children, slaughtered because they were unable to work, thrown into the ovens with their mothers, who refused to leave them.’

Many of the bare facts contained in the articles which make up the second part of the book are, if one can use the word, familiar to us. We have known for a long time where the cattle trucks were going, we know about the ‘showers’, we know the numbers, but reading about them as they were written, as raw news, gives us some sense of the first impact of these horrific revelations. Jacqueline’s writing is stark and unsparing, and never more so than when she is writing about the experiences of the children, those who died in the camps, who returned from the camps, who managed to survive in hiding, sometimes alone, and all the others whose childhoods were stolen by the Occupation.

‘There are no children in an occupied country, only young heroes, too young and too brave … They don’t have time to be children …’ They may be shopping for their mothers, helping their fathers hide shotguns, guiding English parachutists or Resistance workers to new hiding places. And these children were the lucky ones. For little Jewish children, Jaqueline writes, ‘the shadows were twice as dark’: trying to understand an increasingly hostile world, constantly on the look-out for danger, for themselves, for their parents, for their siblings, two year-olds diligently rehearsing their new names. The stories are harrowing: a six year-old found selflessly caring for his three year-old sister, a nine year-old narrowly rescued from suicide, children ‘saved’ by denying knowledge of their parents. Jewish Rescue Organisations did what they could, but for too many it could  never be enough. They had lost homes, and parents, and love. Adolescents returning from the camps had become feral: damaged by repeated bereavement and loss, they like the others were in desperate need of affection, but they were the hardest to help. Jacqueline urged her readers not to give up on them, but to help them grow up, to make sense of their lives, to help them work at forgetting.

I have read these pages many times  –  I must ‘come out’ at this point as the translator of Maman, What Are We Called Now– and I have cried every time. There were moments when I was almost tempted to give up, to spare myself the pain of retelling those stories.  But then I had to berate myself, to recognise the importance of not forgetting. In May 1945 Jacqueline wrote:  ‘We have seen the doors open onto a world of which we knew nothing, a world of horrors, of medieval barbarism, and the doors are heavy and the hands of civilised people may not be able to close them again.’ It is a terrifying thought.