Meanwhile he was in Canada attending to the RAF fliers being trained there. By now he was an officer, and doing well, as his letters made clear; then he came home, an aide to some bigwig, and he was a captain. He was so handsome in his uniform, and she so attractive in hers. In that week they married and Andrew was conceived, and that was the end of her good times, because she was in a room with a baby and was lonely, and frightened, because of the bombing. She had acquired a mother-in-law, the fearsome Julia, who, looking like a society lady in a nineteen-thirties fashion magazine, descended from her house in Hampstead this house to show shock at what Frances was living in, and to offer her space in her house. Frances refused. She may not have been political, but with every fibre she shared her generation's fervent desire for independence. When she left her home, it was for a furnished room. And now, having been reduced to little more than Johnnys wife and a babys mother, she was independent, and could define herself with that thought, holding on to it. Not much, but her own.
And the days and nights dragged by, and she was as far from the glamorous life she had been enjoying as ifshe had never left her parents' home in Kent. The last two years of the war were hard, poor, frightening. The food was bad. Bombs that seemed to have been designed to wreck peoples nerves affected hers. Clothes were hard to find, and ugly. She had no friends, only met other mothers of small children. She was afraid above all that when Johnny came home he would be disappointed in her, an overweight tired young mother, nothing like the smart girl in uniform he had been madly in love with. And that is what happened.
And the days and nights dragged by, and she was as far from the glamorous life she had been enjoying as ifshe had never left her parents' home in Kent. The last two years of the war were hard, poor, frightening. The food was bad. Bombs that seemed to have been designed to wreck peoples nerves affected hers. Clothes were hard to find, and ugly. She had no friends, only met other mothers of small children. She was afraid above all that when Johnny came home he would be disappointed in her, an overweight tired young mother, nothing like the smart girl in uniform he had been madly in love with. And that is what happened.
Johnny had done well in the war, and had been noticed. No one could say he wasn't clever and quick, and his politics were unremarkable for that time. He was offered good jobs in the London reshaping itself after the war. He refused them. He wasn't going to be bought by the capitalist system: not by an iota had he changed his mind, his faith. Comrade Johnny Lennox, back in civvies, was preoccupied only by The Revolution.
Colin was born in 1945. Two small children, in a wretched flat in Notting Hill, then a run-down and poor part of London. Johnny was not often at home. He was working for the Party. By now it is necessary to explain that by the Party was meant the Communist Party, and what was meant to be heard was the party. When two strangers met it might go like this: 'Are you in the Party too?' 'Yes, of course.I thought you must be.' Meaning: You are a good person, I like you, and so you must, like me, be in the Party.
Frances did not join the Party, though Johnny told her to. It was bad for him, he said, to have a wife who would not join.
'But who would know?' enquired Frances, adding to his contempt for her, because she had no feeling for politics and never would.
'The Party knows,' said Johnny.
'Too bad, ' said Frances.
They were definitely not getting on, and the Party was the least of it, though a great irritation for Frances. They were living in real hardship, not to say squalor. He saw this as a sign of inner grace. Returning from a weekend seminar, 'Johnny Lennox on the Threat of American Aggression', he would find her hanging up the children's clothes to dry on rickety arrangements of pulleys and racks screwed precariously to the wall outside the kitchen window, or returning, one child dragging on her hand, the other in a pushchair, from the park. The well of the chair would be full of groceries, and tucked behind the child was a book she had been hoping to read while the children played. You are a real working woman, Fran, ' he would compliment her.
If he was delighted, his mother was not. When she came, always having written first, on thick white paper you could cut yourself with, she sat with distaste on the edge of a chair which probably had residues of smeared biscuit or orange on it. She would announce, 'Johnny, this cannot go on.' And why not, Mutti?' He called her Mutti because she hated it. Your grandchildren, ' he would instruct her, ' will be a credit to the Peoples Britain. '
Frances would not let her eyes meet Julias at such moments, because she was not going to be disloyal. She felt that her life, all of it, and herself in it, was dowdy, ugly, exhausting, and Johnnys nonsense was just a part of it. It would all end, she was sure of it. It would have to.