Tastes of Honey by Selina Todd

Author:Selina Todd
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473545090
Publisher: Random House

9

Happy Ever After

On 4 March 1964 Shelagh gave birth to Charlotte Jo Delaney in a private nursing home. Journalists were waiting when she returned to the fourth-floor flat she shared with Una in Judd Street Mansions. ‘Yes, it’s true, I’ve just had a baby,’ she told them. ‘I don’t want to discuss it anymore.’1 The Daily Mirror carried the news on its front page, informing readers that ‘[s]he stayed silent about the identity of Charlotte’s father’ and refused to say whether she had married.2 The journalists, said her friend Kevin Palmer, a stage manager and actor at Theatre Workshop, were ‘camped outside the door, and outside the flats. She couldn’t go out. They wanted to see Charlotte, they wanted to know if Shelagh was married, and who the father was … and they thought because she wasn’t married, that she was public property.’ She had no rights; had given them up in deciding to flout convention and present her sin to the world. Harold Riley visited her and found ‘she was very distressed by the press’.3 Kevin and Harold were horrified to hear that some journalists were so desperate to get a photo of Shelagh with her baby that they ‘set off a fire alarm in the corridor in her block of flats so that everyone ran out in their pyjamas’.4

Unmarried motherhood, Shelagh wrote, ‘hung like the Sword of Damocles over women’s heads’ when she was growing up.5 This had not changed by 1964, but A Taste of Honey had broken the taboo on discussing it in the arts. And in the years since 1958, the number of illegitimate births had risen, from eleven births among every thousand unmarried women in the mid-1950s to nineteen by 1964.6 By then, a handful of young women were making their name as novelists by writing about the choices and dilemmas that confronted their generation. Lynne Reid Banks’s debut novel, The L-Shaped Room, appeared in 1960; Maureen Duffy’s That’s How It Was in 1962; Margaret Drabble’s A Summer Bird-Cage in 1963; Margaret Forster’s Dames’ Delight in 1964. These novels focused on the new opportunities available to young women for sexual, emotional and financial independence – not least university and professional work. The protagonists believed marriage would curtail their freedom, but single women who wanted a sex life feared the stigma of illegitimate pregnancy and the burden of childcare. It is no accident that both Jane in The L-Shaped Room and Rosamund in Drabble’s 1966 bestseller The Millstone have wealthy and helpful relatives to rely on. Nevertheless, each of these novels ends shortly after they give birth – their writers found the single mother’s future hard to envisage. How to lead a satisfying adult life was a question they had to leave unanswered. Duffy’s That’s How It Was, which centres on Paddy, a teenage schoolgirl who is desperate to escape the hardships endured by her working-class single mother, is constructed ‘towards its very last line, the question “And what the hell do I do now?”’.

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