Around the time I met Anton in the Lower Sixth, it was time for college entrance. We had an excellent Latin mistress, Miss Frisby. Her particular sartorial peculiarity were pockets outside her skirts. She would put her hands in those pockets and flap them up and down. She called people ‘deary’ when she was cross. I liked her but she thought I was a frightful show-off. I wanted attention, just like a child. I confess I have never lost that pathetic need to be the centre of attention.
Everybody knew that my Latin wasn’t strong enough and that it might be a stumbling block in my university ambitions, so Miss Frisby advised my parents that I should get extra coaching. They made some enquiries and arranged extra tuition with C. E. Stevens, the professor of Latin and Greek at Magdalen College, who was affectionately known as ‘Tom Brown’.
Tom Brown was a charming and interesting man who had got married late in life to a fierce Russian lady. He had a set of rooms in Magdalen College where I used to go every week. He was big and burly, smoked a pipe and wore the sort of clothes that a country gentleman would wear, including a good tweed jacket with leather-patched elbows. He would stand in front of the fire, puffing his pipe, and talk about the Greeks and Romans as if they lived around the corner.
One day, some months after I had begun my tutorials, we were sitting in his study, me tussling with my Latin exercises, and he said he wanted to tell me something.
Naturally I thought that he was going to say that he’d fallen in love with me, because that’s what you think when you’re a seventeen-year-old girl. Instead, he said, ‘I want to be a woman.’ I was flabbergasted. I had seen no sign of this and I couldn’t quite believe it. He then said, ‘May I go on?’ Of course I said yes. He said, ‘Do you know what I’m wearing under my trousers?’ He pulled up his trouser leg — he was wearing stockings. I showed my surprise, and he said, ‘Have you noticed how smooth my skin is?’ I said, ‘Well, no, not really.’ Though he did have a very good complexion.
He asked me to follow him. He took me to his bedroom, and showed me his dressing table, ‘Look at all my creams, that’s why I have such smooth skin, because I use all these lotions.’ His dressing table was like the vanity table of an actress. It was covered with emollients and perfumes and various unguents for the body, for the face, for the eyes, anti-wrinkle preparations, and every possible beauty formulation you could think of. I was astonished. Then he said, ‘Haven’t you seen how small my feet are?’ And he showed me his feet.
I didn’t quite know how I should respond to the sight of these perfectly normal-sized feet, so I said, ‘Well, honestly, Tom, I’ve never really thought about it.’ I wasn’t disgusted. I was fascinated and rather surprised — very surprised, in fact.
He replied, ‘I want to be a woman. I’ve always wanted to be a woman since I was a little boy. I used to go into my mother’s cupboard and take out her dresses and wear them and look at myself in the mirror. I know that I’m meant to be a woman. I shouldn’t be a man, it’s all wrong.’ He was practically crying. ‘I have this pole, which makes me a man, and I don’t want it. I want to cut it off. I don’t want it.’
‘May I tell you my real name?’ He told me his true name was Agatha.
At that point, it was really hard not to laugh because Agatha isn’t exactly the most glorious female name, but he said, ‘May I write to you as Agatha, Miriam?’ Naturally I said, ‘Of course.’ He wrote me letters as Agatha and we were friends until he died.
Eventually, I told my parents about what Tom Brown had told me and they were amazingly non-censorious. They accepted it; they did ask if he had touched me inappropriately, though it wasn’t called that back then. Obviously, the college authorities didn’t know, but I think his wife did and she didn’t mind. She accepted it too. She loved him, and he was a respected don and he made her a home.
I’m a repository of many confidences. People often tell me private things about themselves or about things that have happened to them that they haven’t told anybody else, because they trust me, and this was one of those times.
Many women come to lesbianism later in life, after marriage and children. I have been the confidante of a surprising number of ‘straight’ women, who fall in love with a person not a sex — and now it’s easier for them to follow their emotions and find happiness. It delights me.
Like Anton, Tom was someone whose soul interested me. I believe he liked me very much and he wanted me to know the real Tom Brown. I have always felt it an honour to be allowed to see into another’s soul. I cherished my friendship with Tom until he died; it is the vulnerabilities in people, rather more than their strengths, which allow us to love them.
Dinner with Isaiah Berlin
When the time came to apply to university, a form was required from school, and I had to find a sponsor — somebody who would support my application and vouch for my academic promise and moral repute. Very often it was the headmistress who fulfilled this role. As Miss Vera Stack was perhaps not my biggest fan, Mummy came up with an alternative solution to secure my sponsorship.
One evening, she said to Daddy: ‘Isn’t one of your patients Isaiah Berlin?’
Daddy replied, ‘Yes.’
When Isaiah Berlin came to Oxford, he brought his parents with him, and while his father, the erstwhile head of the Riga Association of Timber Merchants, was fluent not only in Yiddish, Russian and German, but also French and English, his Russian-speaking mother, Marie, was fluent in only Yiddish and Latvian. And because Daddy was quite probably the only doctor in Oxford who spoke Yiddish, he had become the Berlins’ family doctor.
She said: ‘Joe, I want you to invite Isaiah Berlin for supper and I want him to sponsor Miriam for her college entrance.’ She couldn’t have known that he was a Fellow of All Souls and Oxford’s most important intellectual figure. Yet, with remarkable instinct, my mother had fixed upon the perfect sponsor for her daughter.
Daddy said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, I’m not asking him to dinner. I’m a professional person. I can’t ask a patient to do that!’
But Mummy insisted: ‘You will, and I will cook a wonderful Jewish meal’ — which she did. She was a good, plain cook. And so, Sir Isaiah Berlin[7] did come to supper, and I was there at the table with Mummy and Daddy. It was just the four of us — and he was utterly charming. I think he was amused to be invited, although I don’t think Daddy had been able to bring himself to explain the real reason for this impromptu dinner invitation. ‘Would you come to supper? And by the way…’ That was simply against his nature: Daddy was a moral person. Mummy was an opportunist.
We sat down to eat, and we soon found that Isaiah Berlin, though friendly, was completely unintelligible. He was a brilliant man, but so thick was his accent that you did not understand anything he said — you simply couldn’t grasp a single word, not a word! Conversation was difficult therefore (an understatement), but nonetheless he was charming. So, there we were, all smiling and convivial, me pretending to follow whatever in God’s name he was talking about — and Mummy rose to the occasion. She just came straight out with it. ‘This is our daughter, Miriam. She’s leaving school, and obviously we’re putting her in for college entrance. It would be wonderful if you could be her sponsor.’