This Much Is True

Dossie, as everyone called her, had been Margaret Thatcher’s tutor at Somerville College. Like me, Dossie didn’t seem to care about the clothes she wore or her appearance; her focus was science. She would hum softly under her breath all the time, but in addition to being a wife and mother of three children, she discovered the structure of insulin and vitamin B12 and so cured pernicious anaemia. She was gentle and hospitable, and I had no idea till much later that she was a genius. I just liked her enormously.

The Hodgkins were relaxed and liberal-minded parents; theirs was an open house and I fell in love with the whole family, as only children often do. One grandmother lived near Stratford-upon-Avon so the Hodgkin family went to see Shakespeare quite often. One time they invited me along, too. When I said, ‘Oh, thank you so much for inviting me,’ Liz’s father, Thomas, laughed and said, ‘It’s always nice to have a free seat in the front row.’ That’s what it was like having me around, he said: you didn’t need to go to the theatre, with me you already had a front row seat.

It was at the Hodgkins’ house that I first listened to music in a room with other people. At home, we never listened to classical music and I found the idea of doing so alarming. After supper, the family would gather around the gramophone and play records. One evening, I was told we were to hear Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony, the ‘Pathétique’. After supper I joined the circle of listeners. No one spoke. That was the first frightening thing: not a word was uttered — the idea of being in a room with people and NOT SPEAKING had never even crossed my mind. No one spoke for the entire length of the piece. I was amazed and discomfited. I didn’t know what to do, where to look. Eventually, I tried to forget the absence of conversation and concentrated on the music. It was lovely, and I did enjoy it, but that initial embarrassment remains a powerful memory.

But what most drew me to the Hodgkins and has held me to Liz ever since was politics. Liz and her family taught me that through politics you could change things. They joked that I came into their household as a far-right Conservative candidate, who believed in hanging and capital punishment (like my parents) and eventually, by the sixth form, they had transformed my way of thinking. They educated me about Palestine, for example. And that was a difficult one. It still is hard.

To Mummy, the Hodgkins exemplified ‘the best people’, and yet they were Communists. When they met, my parents liked them very much, but because Mummy and Daddy were aspiring middle class, they were suspicious of anyone or anything with even a whiff of left-leaning sympathies.

Mummy’s sister, Auntie Gusta, died young in April 1950, at just fifty. She had married an absolute shit of a man, a timber merchant called Ben Tosh, originally Benjamin Toshinski. They had settled in Dulwich and had three children. My cousins were all quite a bit older than me: Doris Tosh who was born in 1926, Jack (Jacob) Tosh was born in 1923, and the aforementioned cousin, Buffy, was born in 1928. Subsequently, after they buried Gusta, Grandma Walters, who had been living with Gusta and Ben, came to live in Oxford with us. It was a sad time for Mummy, because she had lost her only surving sibling and by this time Grandma had advanced bowel cancer and was very frail. My mother looked after her and nursed her until her death in January 1953, aged eighty-eight.

In her will, my grandmother left everything to my mother — she inherited about £18,000, which was rather a lot back then. Uncle Ben and his children, my first cousins, accused my mother of forcing my grandmother’s hand in making her will and filed a civil claim of ‘undue influence’ against her.

From that point on, the case cast a shadow over my childhood. While this nastiness was unfolding, Mummy and Daddy continually went to London to consult lawyers; and my mother became stressed and upset. She would come home quite broken after these days with the solicitors, and it was awful to see. It aged her terribly, because of course she was fighting a lie. Mummy didn’t use undue influence in order to secure her mother’s estate. Mummy adored Grandma and Grandma loved Mummy and when Gusta died, understandably she wanted to live with us; just as it was natural to want to leave her money to her only surviving child.

One of the accusations levelled at my mother was that she prevented my cousins from visiting their grandmother. A lie! They came once to see her and she refused to see them. She disliked them because they made fun of her slowness, and mocked her. In court they alleged that I was the gatekeeper, shoving them away at the front door and that I was twenty-one years old. I was actually eleven.