A Woman on the Edge of Time by Jeremy Gavron

Author:Jeremy Gavron
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781615193394
Publisher: The Experiment

Hannah was also now working. In August 1963, my grandfather noted, ‘H gains position as lecturer in sociology at Hornsey College. £1600 a year!’

The only people I know about from Hannah’s Hornsey days are the man with whom she had her affair, whose name I have learned is John Hayes, and David Page, who wrote the letter I so liked. I have come a long way since I last wrote to David Page, and I try him again, and this time he invites me to visit him in his Norfolk farmhouse. He meets me at his local train station, and on the drive he explains that Hannah taught not sociology at Hornsey but general studies, on a course he partly ran. He talks about the Coldstream Report of 1960, which established that art colleges had to give their students a liberal arts as well as a fine arts education: he and Hannah were both employed under this new policy.

While he makes tea, he lets me look at his appointments diary from Hannah’s first year at Hornsey. Leafing through, I see records of classes she gave on Freud and psychology, the American civil war, the sociology/psychology of violence.

Like other art colleges, he tells me, when he comes back, Hornsey was expanding rapidly in the 1960s. The building where he and Hannah taught was shared with a primary school—during classes, children would fling pellets through the windows from the playground. The new Hornsey was a mix of the conservative and the more radical. One teacher, an Austrian-Jewish refugee, was famous for shouting at anyone who espoused left-wing views, ‘If zat is what you sink, go and live in Moscow.’ But there were also younger, more progressive, teachers—among them, Jonathan Miller, Michael Kidron, and Tom Nairn.

I ask about John Hayes, but David didn’t know him well. He prefers to talk about Hannah, how popular with her students she was—with him, too. She was ‘very much the new woman. In your face, a lot of cursing, smoking her cheroots. Anything a man could do she could, too.’

‘To me, she was the epitome of a certain kind of life force,’ he says. ‘She lit the lamps when she walked in.’ He shakes his head. ‘I can’t see how you can suppress that enough to do what she did.’ He had felt angry with her afterwards, he says. He was her friend. Why hadn’t she come and talked to him?

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