In Search of Mary Read online

  The Romantics sought justice, freedom, a new reality. Their “bright silver dream” was “to seek strange truths in undiscovered lands”. And in the quest they trampled children and women underfoot.

  All my reading life I’ve been in love with the Romantics. They are poetry. They span and encircle the English language all the way from revolutions to daffodils. They have possessed my word-bound existence, my idea of myself. But seeing the rotten, dark underbelly of the Romantic life, I’m appalled. Mary Shelley is living among the collapsing ruination of her mother’s life’s work. The more I read, the further it unravels. With each small death the light is further betrayed.

  During the chapter about Mary Shelley’s near-fatal miscarriage, we’re in a café near Saint-Germain. Will is asleep, and I’m making one coffee last a very long time. Tears start up in my eyes and I have to tip my head back, slowly blinking so they don’t plop out onto the pages. I look straight across into the eyes of a man with a grey moustache who’s sitting two tables away drinking a tiny cup of coffee. He doesn’t look away: he is neither friendly nor hostile. This moment breaks the spell sufficiently for me to carry on reading without making a spectacle of myself.

  Percy is a singular poet – but oh, the selfishness! Maybe not as brutal as his Lordship Byron, but even so… This implacable self-centredness, is it a necessary component of Revolutionary Man? Mary Shelley too has credentials of solid gold, having already written Frankenstein. But selfishness doesn’t appear to be an option for her, coming of age via a series of lost babies, and forever standing by her faithless, reckless genius hubby. Is it any wonder she gets depressed?

  The day this young woman “looked Death in the face” is a horror. Shelley’s in her early twenties and already grieving three lost children, when she has a miscarriage. It happens at the dreaded Casa Magni. Percy’s account of the event places himself centre stage, trumpeting his own cleverness in having her sit in ice. This does indeed save her. She later writes:

  On the 8th of June (I think it was) I was threatened with a miscarriage, and after a week of ill-health on Sunday 16th this took place at eight in the morning. I was so ill that for seven hours I lay nearly lifeless – kept from fainting by brandy, vinegar, eau de Cologne, etc. – at length ice was brought to our solitude – it came before the doctor, so Claire and Jane were afraid of using it, but Shelley overruled them and by an unsparing application of it I was restored. They all thought and so did I that I was about to die.

  The word “miscarriage” is strangely oblique. It sounds like some kind of minor hitch – a technical fault on a train. It doesn’t carry enough weight, enough fear, pain and death for the way you feel when blood starts streaming from between your legs and you know it’s a life pouring away and there’s nothing, nothing at all you can do to make it stop. To compound the fear, Shelley knows very well that her own mother’s life ended similarly. Wollstonecraft bled slowly away as Shelley came into the world, destroying her own creator.

  Coming up from Holmes’s pages for another breather, I find that all the fresh streaming hot blood of the Revolution suddenly collects into this one scene. The terror of Mary Shelley, bleeding and weeping on a heap of ice. On top of the immediate danger to her life is the madness of losing yet another child. Two days later Percy complains in a letter to the effect that “the wife just doesn’t understand me”. This disturbs even the devoted Holmes. While Shelley lies in bed, too depressed to move, there goes Percy, writing poems to someone’s wife, fretting about the duality of his soul and larking around in boats.

  It’s those Romantics. Pioneering and self-regarding, they are the prototype for the 1970s hippy male. Free love and self-expression defines the great poets, even as their children are abandoned or die, and their brilliant but long-suffering women are at best overshadowed. Why do I care? Because they of all people should have known better. Echoes of Professor Belissa come to mind, his scathing disappointment in the English: “They should have been sympathetic. But they were the worst enemies of all, because they betrayed us.”

  At least with the likes of Edmund Burke MP you know what you’re in for. Oak-solid authenticity, like it or not. I can handle that, and respect it in its own way. But no, not this pattern among revolutionary men. Fast forward to hippy kids and communes, and I really start to lose patience. Give me a revolutionary line off some lightweight scrawny-arse long-haired space-cowboy radical who gets his lovin’ on the run – and I will spew on his beard and sprint over the nearest brick wall and never look back.

  If you really want to be a revolutionary then try not being a dick. A small example, but one that stuck: a friend of my mum’s once told me how everyone agreed the contraceptive pill was this amazing new freedom for women. But she saw it also liberated hippy men to pressure her into having sex. If you didn’t, you must be an uptight square. Yeah, baby. Freedom isn’t just your freedom: it’s everyone else’s too.

  Wollstonecraft knew this. She could’ve selected anyone from roughly half the population of the world to vent on in her Vindication, but it’s the radical Jean-Jacques Rousseau who gets the heat. There was no end of fusty old wig-wearers to choose from, calling women whores and bitches for aspiring to be educated or independent. But she picks the fight with freestylin’ wonderboy J-J.

  Why? Again: he should have known better.

  I pull in a shuddering breath and stare defiantly back over at Moustache Man. He’s looking at his coffee. I can’t calm down – can’t stop pulling angry thoughts out of the book, like toxic handkerchiefs from a magician’s sleeve. There is indeed a straight line from Percy and his groovy free love to a string of financially struggling single mothers. Like Wordsworth’s French girl, Annette. Like Mary Shelley’s mum. Like mine.

  I’m now clenching the book. Paris is awful, and revolutions are awful. Wollstonecraft is betrayed – and look what happens to her daughter, hanging around with flouncy protohippy dads. Moustache Man’s still sitting at his table: he gazes around innocently and I want to punch him. What’s wrong with me? Put the book down. Drink some water. And finally admit it: there’s more than a shred of personal indignation here.

  My own father was something of a hippy dad. He looked the part (think off-duty Che) and was big on apocalyptic hippy banter. He was a superb cartoonist. He left when I was small and I will absolutely never not ever admit to not getting over this. He went away and rode motorbikes and ran a pub full of Hell’s Angels with names like Tumbleweed and Zombie. Easy riders don’t pay child maintenance, man, and to this day I don’t know how my mum made it through. But at least I was an early prodigy in Freak Brothers cartoons.

  It took a while to understand my mum’s reaction when she found me reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. So do I have a problem with counter-culture hippy dads? Just maybe. Will is starting to wake up, and I’m relieved by the prospect of some distracting company. It’s now raining outside. Will stretches, then makes a grunting sound escalating into full-throttle crying. “My baby,” I murmur, lifting him out for a hug. Yes, I need a hug pretty badly right now. But Will definitely does not want a hug. I quickly ask for the bill before he decides to head-butt me and trash the joint.

  Mr Moustache is long gone, and I don’t blame him. Who wants to sit opposite a tooth-grinding madwoman silently arguing with a book? I stand up, and like a many-armed deity I simultaneously scoop the angry boy onto my hip, put Richard Holmes into my bag, pay the bill and steer the buggy out the door.

  Will and I embark on a meandering afternoon of rain-avoidance, and it’s surprisingly good. Especially the Jardin des Plantes. The monkeys in the small zoo jump about shouting, and Will laughs his head off. But I can’t shake the stubborn darkness. I feel sick, sick of everything. One of the monkeys catches my eye and I look back. It’s one of those worrisome zoo moments when you realize they can actually see and probably judge you. Little do you know, I silently warn it: you do all that evolving and there’s still no bloody point. You’ll have an iPhone but you’ll feel dead
inside.

  Heading back, we share several Nutella crêpes and I have a beer. “If this isn’t happiness, then what is?” I ask Will, and he grins back at me with chocolaty teeth. But all the while I’m treading shallow water, just waiting to get back down to the depths again. Later that night, in the onion-fragranced room that we call home, I take a heavy breath and return to the books.

  Who betrayed the light? Where does the hope go, in these furious backlashes? Holmes says Wollstonecraft remains loyal to France. But her own writing on France’s Revolution compares it frequently and unfavourably to another, earlier one. One that didn’t drown in blood or usher in a dictatorial warmonger. Just her voice gives me the lift that I’ve needed all day – perhaps all week – and I can’t help but smile as I read that

  It has been a common remark of moralists that we are the least acquainted with our own characters. This has been literally the case with the French: for certainly no people stand in such great need of a check.

  And who better to give them one? Stand by for a vintage shot of Wollstonecraft Special Blend Overproof Scorn:

  The occasions of remarking that Frenchmen are the vainest men living often occur, and here it must be insisted on, for no sooner had they taken possession of certain philosophical truths … [than they persuaded] themselves that the world was indebted to them for the discovery…

  When in actual fact,

  they had the example of the Thirteen States of America before them, from which they had drawn what little practical knowledge of liberty they possessed.

  Wollstonecraft sees Anglo-Americans as “another race of beings” – and perhaps it’s this that helps her to remain positive. Despite the fact that she has more reason than most to indulge bitterness and despair, she resists. And even though she reckons Europe will remain, “for some years to come, in a state of anarchy” she still believes that “every poison has its antidote” – and that “people are essentially good”.

  Her book is read and quoted by none other than the future president of the United States, John Adams. He observes: “She seems to have half a mind to be an English woman – yet more inclined to be an American.” And he’s spot on: Wollstonecraft does in fact nurture plans to live in America. She writes to her sisters, when things are still on the cards with Imlay, of their future life there. And America is ready and waiting for her. Adams responds warmly to her admiration with the lines: “I thank you, Miss W, may we long enjoy your esteem”.

  Wollstonecraft never makes it to the States, but this is the dream. So while I can’t follow “Miss W” herself, perhaps I can pursue this esteem of hers – her plans, her lost future? The same is true of the Romantics – they also gazed westwards. The beginning of a new trail is emerging. This is not the silver trail: it’s the trail of where Wollstonecraft’s legacy ends up. With the children of the Revolution. I look at the sleeping shape of Will and hear his quiet breath. Go west, young man.

  The next stop has to be the sweet land of liberty, the birthplace of Holmes’s flower-power radicals. I may have been born into it, and have the small matter of that father-shaped axe to grind, but I’ve got questions for the rest of the hippy movement too. This is where Second Wave Feminism began. Why did the Seventies’ feminists like Germaine Greer trash motherhood – was that completely necessary?

  How did feminism become a toxic label?

  Who betrayed that light?

  Will, pack your tie-dye cloth nappies, sonny. We’re goin’ to San Francisco.

  Chapter Twelve

  Enter the Dragon of the Crock

  I’d love to allow the impression that Will and I constantly bump into extraordinary people by accident. But it takes months of setting up – in between, of course, the rest of normal life. This time around it’s gone something like this. I ask everyone I know if they know any 1970s activisty people in California. My email (“Wollstonecraft fan exploring her legacy while travelling with a baby”) gets forwarded around, and I get lots of replies from women I don’t know. They recommend other women. And I keep on explaining and chasing up, and so it goes on.

  Many of the responses are supportive; one is a shining beacon. Jean Hegland is an author – her books even get made into films (all creative genres secretly envy each other’s lives). We met a few years ago in London, and kept bumping into each other on Hampstead Heath. Once, one of my kids showed Jean a conker she’d found. Jean said “Wow”, and they discussed the conker for ages. I was pleased, but also secretly annoyed. There’s never time to look at every leaf and beetle and chewed-in-half tennis ball that the kids poke in my face, demanding “Look! Look!” I want to, I really do, but somehow I always shout: “No, put it down, NOW!”

  Despite the conker incident we hit it off and end up emailing each other. One day of deepest exasperation, I send a few ragged lines wondering how she managed motherhood and writing. Her reply:

  “You ask how mothers manage to write, and frankly I still don’t know. Even now it’s hard, and writing with a houseful of little ones seems nearly impossible in retrospect, and yet at the time it was just so necessary. I felt I could be a good mother, wife, etc. if I could only get my little crumbs of writing time every day. Writing fed that part of my soul I needed to keep alive to feed everyone else… But I still believe it’s worth all the work. I even think it’s good for our kids, to see their mothers committed to work they love.”

  These dear words arrived on a day when I least felt that things were possible. Jean stuck me to it. And now here we are, California-bound. Other recipients of the email pass my message on or get back with further questions and suggestions; onwards and upwards. Until I hit a spiky roadblock – worse than no reply – a person who says:

  “Oh, that. The whole working-mother debate is a crock of shit. Women of colour have been doing it for generations.”

  What? This sends me into a tailspin. Into a crock, even. I’ve been planning to trace the Wollstonecraft legacy forwards in time, rolling my sleeves up to face down the hairy male oppressors and training my indignant sights on the 1970s. I wasn’t prepared for the fracturing of the movement that’s happened since then. From out of nowhere a low sliding tackle from other women. But then, what if it’s true? What if it is just a crock? I slump in my chair and sulk.

  It’s the elephant again. The one who came and sat in the middle of the room in Norway, when Mayor Knut talked about the life of Wollstonecraft’s maid, Marguerite. I didn’t acknowledge its presence once while we were in Paris. Hello again, Elephant of Privilege. You shall henceforth be known as the Crock. For a couple of days there’s a gentle hissing noise as my motivation sinks like an aged balloon.

  Wollstonecraft says: “I plead for my sex, not for myself.” Can I truthfully say the same? Who is feminism for? It goes back to the showgirls’ dressing room. Those dancers were shoved around, self-starved and mistreated. But not only did they not like feminism, they were actively hostile to the very idea. So who is it for? Is the debate just the worthiness playground of the privileged? And if so, what can validate it?

  Luckily I’ve got someone to ask who will indulge me in such questions. She’s used to it. She’s my oldest friend, and we went to the same hellhole of a primary school together. I call her up.

  “Lucy, can you be too poor to care about feminism?”

  She laughs at me.

  “Come and trail me for a day, Bee. Just come and have a look for yourself.”

  OK then. I buy a return train ticket to Leeds.

  Lucy does a job most people don’t know exists, in a place where few people ever go. She’s an outreach worker for a charity that connects excluded families with government services that they might need but do not know about. Lucy goes out and finds them: walking the streets, alleys and housing blocks, literally cold-calling, in one of Britain’s most deprived communities. And I’ve hopped on a train to come up and join her, to tag along for the day.

  If Britain’s broken anywhere, it’s right here in Holbeck, a notorious Leeds neighbourho
od lined with red-brick back-to-backs. Despite my boasted Yorkshire roots, these days I’m basically a poncey Londoner. Scuttling through back alleys around the smashed houses it’s embarrassing how foreign it all feels. The Leeds city skyline is glittering there: we’re only a six-minute drive from downtown Harvey-Nicks glamour. But the contrast here is stunning. Derelict houses, broken windows, random dogs, no cars.

  Most of the doors and lower-ground windows have heavy steel bars in front. Holbeck doesn’t have a distinguished history. Even back in 1834 it was crowned “the most crowded, most filthy and unhealthy village in the country”. Former residents of note include Hasib Hussain, the youngest of the 2005 London suicide bombers, the one who blew up the bus in Tavistock Square. And this is where Lucy does her beat.

  She reaches through the steel bars to knock on a door, saying in a perky Avon-lady voice: “Hi! I’m Lucy from City and Holbeck Children’s Centre. We’re supporting families with children under five – does this apply to anyone in your household?” It’s clearly a line she’s repeated a thousand times. We keep knocking. Dogs bark at us. Some houses are empty, some obviously not, but no one answers. A sleepy man looks out, hears Lucy’s pitch, says: “No, no ta, you’re all right” and shuffles back inside.

  “Sometimes they get suspicious and think we’re social workers,” she tells me, “and we say: ‘No! No, we’re not social workers.’ Our job is to read the signs and refer people on: we connect them to the right agencies.”

  Our next knock is more productive: a cheery Muslim bloke with a long beard opens the door. He has two young girls, he says, and takes some of our leaflets about playgroups. Lucy gives him details of the bus route and opening times. But walking away, she warns: “Don’t get excited. Most of the time no one answers. You could spend a whole morning doing this and only make one connection.”