Just across Banbury Road from us was the Cutteslowe Estate. A ‘class wall’ was built between the bottom of Carlton Road and the beginning of the estate, because it was not thought appropriate that North Oxford should have to deal with ‘hoi polloi’ living in what they considered to be vile council housing. That’s what Oxford was like when I was growing up — and it hasn’t changed much. Oxford is a place that pushes people away, which has divisions — divisions of class, divisions of intelligence. It’s a place of harsh judgements and little compassion. The wall was finally pulled down in 1959, but snobbery is harder to demolish.
I know that my parents keenly felt discriminated against in many situations, and yet I don’t think they ever considered moving away, chiefly because I was at Oxford High School. They always put my well-being before theirs and made many sacrifices for me.
When I started to become the person that the High School created, it was a complicated situation for my parents. My mother had come from a lower middle-class background, but by becoming a doctor my father was now middle class, and so my mother had remade herself. She did a lot of charity work, and gave parties for the synagogue. And they always voted Tory. They wouldn’t, or couldn’t, consider anything else.
Once I was at Oxford High School, however, I would confront them about their voting Tory. Through school, I had formed strong friendships with people like Anna Truelove, Catherine Pasternak Slater and Liz Hodgkin, that have lasted all my life. The Hodgkins, in particular, were an intellectual family: Hog’s grandfather (she was called Hog at school) had been Provost of Queen’s College, and spending so much time in the company of Liz’s large and vociferously opinionated household led me to question aspects of my upbringing.
I have been friends with Liz since we were eleven. After school, we both went to Newnham College, Cambridge (Old Hall), and have remained close ever since.
Liz lived with her parents, her two brothers, and her aunt and five cousins, in one of those vast, Victorian houses close to the school in Woodstock Road. Liz’s father was Thomas Hodgkin, the Marxist historian of Africa at Oxford, while her mother was the Nobel Prize winner Dorothy Hodgkin. There were only three female Nobel Prize winners for chemistry: one was Marie Curie, one was Irène-Joliot Curie, and the other was Dorothy Hodgkin.
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.
It was reported in the Oxford Mail, and Mummy was badly advised by a solicitor who persuaded her to make a settlement, telling her: ‘If you go ahead with this case and you lose it, you’ll lose everything. If you make a settlement, at least you’ll keep something.’ As I said, it was about £18,000, so it was a considerable sum, but not an utter fortune. Anyway, Mummy listened to this solicitor and so the case never actually went to trial. The whole matter was eventually settled but the judge told my mother that she had not been well served by her solicitor. He actually said that in court.
It was a dark time; and afterwards I didn’t have much of a relationship with any of my Tosh cousins. For over fifty years we didn’t speak. I never forgave my uncle for accusing my mother; he knew very well she had been a loving daughter and there was no foundation for the charge. He didn’t like my mother because she thought he had been a bad husband to her sister.