Rachel Cooke 

Jeremy Gavron: ‘My mother was a woman who looked for solutions. Suicide was a solution’

Why did Hannah Gavron, a brilliant writer and lecturer, take her own life aged 29? Her son, Jeremy, talks about trying to unravel these mysteries
  
  

Author Jeremy Gavron beside a portrait of his mother Hannah, who took her own life in 1965.
Author Jeremy Gavron beside a portrait of his mother Hannah, who took her own life in 1965. Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Observer Photograph: Sophia Evans/Observer

On the afternoon of 14 December 1965, a 29-year-old woman dropped the younger of her two sons at a Christmas party at his nursery school and drove to the flat of a friend in Primrose Hill, north London. Inside, she sealed the kitchen doors and windows and turned on the oven. Some time later, Herbert Popjoy, a gas board fitter, climbed into the building’s back garden, from where he could see a body lying on the floor. He did his best to save the woman, but it was too late. As the coroner would note, she had carried out her plan with utmost efficiency. She could not be resuscitated.

This woman’s name was Hannah Gavron and outwardly she had everything to live for. Certainly, her marriage was in trouble. Her husband no longer shared their modern, light-filled house in Highgate; she had a key to her friend’s flat because she had been meeting her lover there. But the idea that she had wanted to kill herself was, to those who knew her, inconceivable. She was not – so far as anyone was aware – a depressive. Clever and beautiful, she was one of those golden people, an object of admiration and, perhaps, some envy. Her family was loving, her young neighbours like-minded; her husband, in spite of their estrangement, still doted on her. And she was materially lucky, too: foreign holidays, a car, her own home. There was even enough money to pay for a nanny to take care of her boys while she was teaching sociology, a job she loved and to which she was increasingly committed. At the time of her death, she had just finished her first book, The Captive Wife, a study of young mothers in Kentish Town. When it was published a few months later – and serialised in the Observer – it caused the sort of stir she would have relished. She was theatrical, bold. She had wanted to make her mark. As a friend put it: “She brought an extra jolt to life.”

So why did she decide to kill herself? What, besides hypoxia, destroyed Hannah Gavron? And why, in the months and years after her death, were people so unwilling to talk about what she had done – or to talk about her at all? These are the questions at the heart of a mesmerising new memoir by her son Jeremy Gavron, the little boy she dropped off that day (he was then four years old). Meticulous, even-handed and quietly revelatory, it may be read both as a kind of detective story, the reader’s stomach fluttering wildly each time he tracks down another witness, and as a work of social history, a sly skewering of the limitations, whether spoken or unspoken, which were then placed on women. Either way, one truth is inescapable. He wrote this book, metaphorically speaking, in the brace position, jaw clenched, hands clamped over his eyes. No wonder he ended up using lines by the Israeli writer Amos Oz for an epigraph: “Have I betrayed them all again by telling the story? Or is it the other way round: would I have betrayed them if I had not told it?”

Sitting at his kitchen table in Hampstead, Jeremy Gavron smiles, though it’s the kind of grin that could almost be a wince. “Yes, it did feel like I was breaking a taboo,” he says. “And it still does, even now. I was thinking about this the other day. While I was working on the book, I met about 70 people who knew Hannah. But there were many others I didn’t go and see and the reason for that was that I had to steel myself each time. The taboo was mainly inside my family, and inside me, but there was a sense that other people had bought into it. They would say, ‘I can’t talk about that.’ I had to persuade them to go on. ‘I want to know everything,’ I’d say. Even in middle age, I was still buying into this evasive family narrative.”

In the months after Hannah’s death, Jeremy’s father – Bob Gavron, the Labour peer, publishing magnate and chair of the Guardian Media Group from 1997 to 2000, who died last February at the age of 84 – didn’t only decide not to tell his sons how she had died, he seems to have made up his mind not to mention her ever again. In 1967, he remarried (his new wife was Nicky Coates, later London’s deputy mayor under Ken Livingstone): two half-sisters were born – Jessica, a lawyer, and Sarah, the director of the film Suffragette and the family moved to the home where Jeremy would live until he was 18. In that house, he cannot recall Hannah’s name ever being spoken. Copies of The Captive Wife could be glimpsed on a high shelf where “other parents might have kept books by Henry Miller”, but there were no photographs of Hannah on display, nor any other sign of her. He was 16 when he discovered that she had killed herself. His father told him while they were in the car. His father had never stopped loving her, but she had fallen for a colleague at Hornsey College of Art, a gay man. When this man rejected her, she felt she’d “messed things up” and so she took her own life.

This bitter newsflash stirred Jeremy’s interest in her. Somehow, he found some photographs of her, as well as the silver cups she’d won in showjumping competitions as a girl, familial contraband he stowed in his room. But still she was not to be discussed. The years ticked by. He went to university and then to work as a journalist abroad. When he was 29, his grandfather, Hannah’s father, died and his grandmother had to move into sheltered accommodation – and it was while helping his aunt clear out the house that he found his mother’s suicide note. No one had ever told him she had written such a thing, but he “understood immediately” that this was what it was. In it, she first apologised to Anne Wicks, the owner of the flat. And then, after a PTO: “Please tell the boys I did love them terribly!” What still amazes him about this is that, though he took it home, he never shared her message with his brother. “Simon had always doubted that she could have loved us and yet I never showed it to him,” he says. “It never even occurred to me. All I felt was shame and embarrassment and so I hid it.” Save for a few tense words exchanged with his father, the long silence continued.

Then something happened. In 2005, Simon died. Jeremy’s relationship with his brother had been complicated, but now he was pitched into grief. One of the effects of this grief was that it dislodged another sorrow. Suddenly, he was ambushed by a more ancient loss. “I’m not good at dramatising my life,” he says. “I retreat from melodrama, so it’s hard for me to admit this. But yes, it felt like an earthquake. It threw me.” Immediately after Simon’s death, he could not write at all. He put aside the novel he was working on. Six months later, however, he stumbled on an article about the suicide of Nicholas Hughes, the son of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Reading it, he felt a chill. Plath had killed herself two years before Hannah, in a flat just streets away, using the same means. Like Bob Gavron, Ted Hughes had tried to protect his children from these facts – and now, it seemed, Nicholas had killed himself because he was unable to cope with a second loss, that of his father. It was at this point that Jeremy knew he would write about his mother, though he had no idea then how long it would take him (six years, in the end), nor the degree to which he would become obsessed with the details, sometimes uncanny and sometimes prosaic, of the too few years she spent on this Earth.

To say that a book “brings a character to life” is so cliched as to mean almost nothing. But as I read A Woman on the Edge of Time, I began to feel Hannah was someone I knew; I thought of her as a friend with whom I’d fallen out. My feelings about her – sometimes fond, sometimes exasperated – were so reflexively intimate. How was this possible? It’s an achievement that seems all the greater when you consider that by the time Jeremy began his research, some of the most important characters in her story – her friend Anne Wicks, who cooked a pheasant for friends on the night she died; her father, a journalist and friend of George Orwell called TR Fyvel, who kept a shocked, sorrowful but somewhat gnomic diary in the weeks after her death – were long dead. But he was dogged, indefatigable. His book is the work of a reporter and all the better for it: “I’d been told half-truths for so long. I decided I needed to be as objective as I could. I had to apply the same level of scepticism to everything.” Determined not to turn Hannah into a saint, on the page she is not always likable: brave and sparky, she is also capricious, spoilt. “Yes, she was difficult,” he says. “But everyone in my family is described as difficult. There’s a Norman Mailer quote I like about Tolstoy’s approach to writing, that you have to be both very compassionate with your characters and very severe. That’s what I tried to do with Hannah. I wanted to find out who she was.”

Slowly, he traces her life: a tentative outline at first, shading as he finds out more. She was born in Palestine, where her parents were then working, her father at the Jewish Federation of Labour, her mother at a school run by a disciple of Freud. When the family returned to Britain, she, ebullient and extremely precocious, elected to attend Frensham Heights, the progressive boarding school in Surrey. You will get some idea of the kind of girl she was if I tell you that, having decided that she and her friends were too fat, she made them exercise in a locker room in the morning while she chanted Shakespeare: “Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt.”

But while she loved Frensham, and seemed to excel there, it had a darker side in the form of its headmaster, a man Jeremy refers to in his book only as K. Hannah had what she describes in a cache of youthful letters as an “affaire” with this man, and though this seems at first to the reader to be youthful fantasy, it soon becomes clear that she really did creep down the corridor to his study late at night. K had form on this, and he was arrogant, too, unbothered by gossip and pursed lips. Among Jeremy’s more extraordinary discoveries – each page seems to bring another – was the fact that K had once led a group of boys at another school up a German mountain to their deaths. The weather changed, they were exhausted, help was too long in coming. But the suggestion is there: perhaps his pride had been a factor, too.

After school, Hannah won at place at Rada, though she never graduated. Instead, at the age of 18, she married Jeremy’s father. But she would not remain a housewife long. Soon, she began a sociology degree at Bedford College. She got a first and, when her sons were born, continued with her studies, embarking on the PhD thesis that would eventually become The Captive Wife (a title, it is both important and unhappy to note, which she chose). She began reviewing books for the newspapers, appearing as a pundit on radio and television, and landed herself a plum job, lecturing at Hornsey College of Art, one of the institutions at the centre of the swinging 60s, all black polo necks and Mary Quant hairdos and Cream playing in the bar – and it is at this point that the reader feels the past and future start to rub up against each other. Hannah is caught in the friction, about to get burnt. Second-wave feminism had not yet been born. The conventions of the 50s, beyond places such as Hornsey, were still in the ascendant. Hannah chafes. She wants more. She is “ahead of the pack”. Something must give. That something is first her marriage and then, perhaps, her sanity. She falls in love with her colleague, John Hayes, who lives with another man. Her father records in his diary that she is “fighting for her identity as an individual”, that she cannot put up with a husband who is determined “to dominate”. He urges her to see a psychiatrist. The reader is struck by this advice, which comes out of the blue. A woman wants to end her marriage and the response is… that she is mad?

Little by little, Jeremy builds a dossier, fat with facts that may, or may not, have affected her state of mind, though there are, perhaps, omissions, too. “I was haunted by K,” he says. “I became obsessed with him. I would look at the census, see where he had lived; I tried to contact a member of the family of one of the boys who’d been killed, and his wife, who told me not to grave-dig. What he did to Hannah may have made her vulnerable at 29. All the psychologists will tell you that. But in the end, I cut all that back. I didn’t want him to be too big a character. It was Hannah’s name I wanted to stand out.” It is for a similar reason, he insists, that he never names his father in the book. “I was working on the proofs after he died, so I had a chance to say: he’s not going to read this. But there was nothing I felt I needed to change. He was a very forceful character, but I don’t think I’ve protected him. I don’t believe he was the main force in Hannah’s death.” Did his father wish he hadn’t begun the book? “Yes, he said so and he dealt with it by turning away.”

It is clear to Jeremy that Hannah intended to kill herself that winter afternoon: “She drank and took drugs; no one was expected. But I think if she’d made it through to the next day, she wouldn’t have done it – and that’s the final mystery, that moment. I think she got into a fugue state. It [suicide] was a solution and Hannah was the kind of person who looked for solutions. Why did she kill herself? She shouldn’t have. Her book was about to open everything up for her. She could have had whatever life she wanted.” Nevertheless, he has called his book A Woman on the Edge of Time for a reason. “It is clear to me that this particular moment in history was in some ways toxic for this particular person.” His mother, to pinch from Stevie Smith, was much too far out. “Hannah was a woman who needed to fulfil herself the way men fulfil themselves. I think the trouble she got into was that she was too far ahead. She left other women behind. Her friend Anne [another career woman] was the same and perhaps that’s why, instead of recognising that Hannah was in trouble, she deepened it [by tacitly encouraging, through the loan of her flat, an affair that could never work out].”

But whatever remains foggy now, half a century later it’s the living who matter. Does he feel – together, we grab at a word – better? “Yes, and in the most simple, cathartic way. There was this big gap in my sense of myself and my family. I knew so little about who Hannah was. It was important for me to be heard. As children, we weren’t. She disappeared from one day to the next. That was the way people did things then. But even today, suicide is different because how do you remember someone who rejected everything?” As he says this, I’m startled to find myself picturing his mother on holiday, in clam diggers and a sleeveless shirt, as if – that feeling again – I’d known her. I don’t know how to answer his question, save for to tell him that, somehow, he has managed to paste her photograph in the album of my mind.

A Woman on the Edge of Time by Jeremy Gavron (Scribe, £16.99). To order a copy for £13.59, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

Jeremy Gavron is speaking at the Bristol Festival of Ideas on Wednesday 25 November. Click here for details

In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 08457 90 90 90. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14.

 

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