Eric Hobsbawm by Evans Richard J.;

Author:Evans, Richard J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

III

While Eric was away touring Latin America in 1962–3, Marlene had moved into Eric’s flat in Gordon Mansions in Huntley Street, around the corner from Birkbeck. On his return, their married life began properly. She began to establish a domestic routine. ‘If it was pasta for dinner I would put the water on, phone him and it would be ready when he arrived home.’59 Within a couple of years they had two children, Andy (born on 12 June 1963) and Julia (born on 15 August 1964). Eric and Marlene were out with Eric’s cousin Denis Preston and his wife at Bertorelli’s restaurant in Charlotte Street, not far from Birkbeck, when Marlene unexpectedly went into labour with Andy; Denis had to drive them all to hospital.60 It was not customary for fathers to attend the birth of their children in the mid-sixties, and so, when the baby was born, Marlene asked the nurse in the delivery room to tell Eric the good news. She would recognise him, Marlene advised her, if she went ‘out into the corridor and find the one not pacing up and down but the one reading’.61 The arrival of Andy and Julia put a final stop to the late-night expeditions of Francis Newton, and his contributions to the New Statesman. Fatherhood also slowed down Eric’s writing and research. As he told Jack Plumb in August 1964: ‘I am now married and with two tiny children (14 months and a few weeks), and the degree to which this diminishes productivity is quite astonishing. I dream of solid Victorian comforts when husbands didn’t have to take turns with wives in feeding infants in the middle of the night etc.’62 As this suggests, Eric did indeed play his part in looking after the children’s infant needs.

In December 1965 Eric and Marlene moved from the flat at 37 Gordon Mansions, WC1, to 97 Larkhall Rise, in Clapham, SW4, a mid-nineteenth-century villa of two storeys and basement, a frontage of three windows, with generously proportioned rooms, nine steps up to the front door of the raised ground floor from the street, and a lower ground floor below, visible from the street through the front window.63 They shared the property with the Nottingham-born playwright Alan Sillitoe (best known for his novels Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, both turned into successful films) and his wife and child, co-existing by getting an exiled Austrian architect, Max Neuburger, to partition it into two flats. The Sillitoes had part of the raised ground floor and first floor, the Hobsbawms the lower ground floor and the rest of the raised ground floor and first floor, and the two families shared the large garden. At the time, Clapham had still not been gentrified and the neighbours found Alan Sillitoe’s lifestyle difficult to understand. ‘They couldn’t make him out at all because he didn’t go out to work. What does he do? He doesn’t go out to work . . . They’d never come across somebody who was living there as a writer.

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