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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
From the tragic massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, to signing the Treaty of Rome when Britain entered the Common Market, Barbara Hosking was there. This is the story of a Cornish scholarship girl with no contacts who ended up in the corridors of power. It is also the very personal story of her struggle with her sexuality as a bewildered teenager, and as a young woman in the 1950s, a time when being gay could mean social ostracism. Born during the General Strike in 1926, Barbara Hosking worked her way through London's typing pools in the 1950s to executive posts in the Labour Party, then to No. 10 as a press officer to Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. Between working on a copper mine in the African bush, pioneering British breakfast television and negotiating the complexities of government, hers has been a life of breadth and bravery. Looking back at the age of ninety-one, this is Barbara Hosking's unheard-of account of the innermost workings of politics and the media amid the turbulence of twentieth-century Britain.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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“Barbara writes with warmth and enthusiasm about politics and women, and her book is full of her mischievous Cornish personality.”baroness boothroyd om
“Barbara Hosking wields a vivid pen sharpened by her keen eye for character, mood and episode. This is a memoir of true warmth and insight.”peter hennessy
“If ever a girl picked herself up, dusted herself down and started all over again, it is Barbara Hosking. This book fulfils an ambition at the age of ninety-one. What a girl! It is a frank, fascinating and sometimes moving tale of her progress from nether Cornwall to serving two Prime Ministers, becoming a ministerial private secretary and then working to raise the standing of women in public life.”sir bernard ingham
“A warm, funny and illuminating book that guides readers through one woman’s journey down the corridors of Whitehall and through a slowly changing society. She did so at a time when being a woman and, in Barbara’s case, a gay woman meant the path was strewn with obstacles. It is a tribute to her guts, her resilience and her charm that she has emerged triumphant.”sue cameron, total politics
“The former Downing Street aide’s sexuality is possibly the least interesting part of Exceeding My Brief – among confronting spitting cobras while working at a copper mine in Tanzania, defying Ted Heath over a sherry in No. 10, and hosting a party at the Munich Olympics while negotiating a hostage situation. Her recollections zigzag through her dizzying career of local reporting, the novelty of London working life, three years mining in Africa, Labour HQ, Whitehall, Downing Street, and the cut-throat world of television. This background makes her already remarkable career even more so.”new statesman
“A remarkable life in the corridors of power.”bbc news
“A rollicking career and storied life.”the observer
“Exceeding My Brief is a cracking good read.”gay’s the word
“A hit memoir. She is quite literally the trailblazer you’ve (probably) never heard of.”daily mail
“What a woman. No glass ceiling too thick.”emma barnett, bbc radio 5 live
“A remarkable woman.”civil service world
“Now here is a role model I can get behind. My latest gay icon.”ruth hunt, ceo of stonewall
“A remarkable tale, well told and often insightful. There don’t seem to be many Barbara Hoskings around anymore.”the national
“Fascinating insights on government from the 1950s to now.”margot james mp
For Margaret, who has kept me on course for more than twenty years – so far.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
When their day’s work underground was done and they made the long ascent to the surface, Cornish miners used the phrase ‘coming up to grass’. I came up to grass when I was seventy-five years old and my years of work had finally finished. Or so I thought…
I write this memoir as I look back on an unplanned career which took me light years away from the sea and the Cornish cliffs and moors of my childhood. My ambition always was to write, and to have writers as my friends. I never imagined that cinema advertising, parliamentary press releases or speeches would flow from my pen. My ambition was to be a ‘real’ writer, like the authors I met when I invited them to speak at our school or interviewed in the Isles of Scilly, or whose manuscripts I typed up at Miss Wesley’s secretarial college. Now, I have many authors xamong my friends, and I know first-hand how hard it is to face a blank page and write every day.
I had never expected to be professionally involved in politics, or to be a Cornish Liberal working for – indeed, becoming a supporter of – the Labour Party. I didn’t foresee that I would be offered a marginal parliamentary seat, or come to admire and like many Conservatives, both within and beyond government. And I certainly never expected to receive an honour, yet I ended up with two, first an OBE and later a CBE. In ordinary social life, there is never an opportunity to wear honours, and I envy the French who wear little ribbons in their buttonholes to show that they have been awarded the Légion d’Honneur. I think this is why the French have such good eyesight – they are trying to see what rank the recipient holds!
I had always assumed that, like the rest of my family, I would die young. Yet there I was in the early autumn of 2016 planning my ninetieth birthday party in November. For my seventy-fifth birthday, I commissioned a piece of music from Judith Bingham. It was played by the Ambache Orchestra – of which I was a board member – the only orchestra at the time run by a woman, at a party at the Reform Club. Edward Heath came along and made a speech: ‘I always did what Barbara told me – and see where it got me!’
I did not embark on this memoir with publication in ximind, but because I wanted to set down my experiences of a world that has changed beyond recognition over my lifetime; in particular the world of British politics and government of which I enjoyed a worm’s-eye view. Perhaps, too, I was drawn to a nostalgic revisiting of my life, and to saluting the many extraordinary people who have populated both my working and my personal life. It is difficult to become a published writer today; the financial risks are high in an age of electronic reading, and I’m neither a celebrated cook nor a top footballer, or even famous for being famous. However, I have achieved my ambition: I have written a book and, one way or another, I will see it in print. It may not have quite the impact of the Atlantic breakers on Cornish cliffs, but I hope it will amuse my friends, and perhaps others who would like to ascend the greasy pole of the political world.
My story is, I believe, proof that life is a lottery. Health, success and love are all a matter of chance, and I grabbed the many unexpected chances which came my way. But, above all, I have been blessed with so many true friends, the sort of friends who not only enrich one’s life with their company, but give support and withhold judgement.
My life is fuller than it has ever been. In retirement, I anticipated a life filled with friends, travel, and the arts, but a life lived essentially alone. Once again I was wrong. I had known Margaret from my membership of the 300 Group, xiithe 1980s movement founded to encourage more women to become Members of Parliament, and we were also both on the Council of the Royal Society of Arts. We became friends, but the possibility of a closer relationship had never occurred to me. Not only had she been married, but she was twenty years younger than me.
Happily, I was wrong about that, too, and in the words of the old music hall ballad:
When I thought that I was past love
It was then I met my last love
And I loved her as I’d never loved before.
I am, indeed, a fortunate woman.
PART I
STORMING IN2
CHAPTER ONE
The Penlee lifeboat disaster occurred in 1981, a week before Christmas. Two vessels were lost with all hands. A Danish ship on her maiden voyage and a lifeboat with an eight-man crew from the village of Mousehole in the far west of Cornwall.
A rescue helicopter had been dispatched from Culdrose naval base, but the storm was so violent that it was impossible to help. The pilot said later that, despite the huge seas, the lifeboat actually managed to get alongside the ship, and, speaking of the lifeboat men, he added, ‘I have never seen such heroism. It was truly heroic.’ The lifeboat signalled that it had the captain’s wife and children safely aboard. That was the last message.
I was working at the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) at the time, where I was responsible for 4public relations, explaining the regulation of commercial television and radio to the media and public. I was born in Penzance, and knew very well how this tragedy would affect the nearby village of Mousehole. In Cornwall, lifeboats are an important fixture in people’s lives. From the Lizard around Land’s End to St Ives, local men are proud to volunteer and there is rarely a shortage of crews. I also knew the impact of these deaths on a small community whose members are all related. The news of the Penlee tragedy brought back vivid memories of many nights spent waiting with flasks of tea and whisky for the Sennen lifeboat to return, and I recalled watching the Isles of Scilly lifeboat going out into a storm.
I knew money would be needed and I wanted to help. First, I contacted the Mousehole Male Voice Choir. Would they give a concert in London to raise funds? They would. Next on the list was the head of public relations at Barclays Bank, who offered to lend me accommodation in West London, normally used for trainee bankers (Barclays incorporated the Cornish Bolitho Bank and so had strong links with Cornwall). I asked Thames Television if I could borrow their theatre. Yes, I could. With all this in place, I would organise a concert to raise money for the families left behind.
But I had completely forgotten one vital point: the media. This was a huge Christmas news story, and money immediately started rolling in. By Christmas Eve some 5two million pounds had been raised. My concert in the little Thames theatre would be a drop in the ocean. I then received a telephone call from Brenda Wootton, a great Cornish singer.
‘Barbara,’ she began, her voice sounding, like most Cornish voices, as if she were shouting into the teeth of an Atlantic gale. ‘Could you take delivery of 1,000 pasties at Paddington Station for the concert?’
What?! We might possibly sell 100 Cornish pasties at the concert if we were lucky, but what would I do with the other 900? Very reluctantly, I decided to abandon the idea of a concert and leave the fundraising to more experienced hands. Next day, the fund totalled over three million pounds. Wonderful pictures of the headlands I used to walk over and the village I knew so well, where there are cannonballs from ships of the Spanish Armada in the churchyard, were shown on television. The storm had subsided and, as so often in Cornwall, Christmas Day was as mild as spring.
I felt very homesick and overcome by memories of childhood.
I was born to candlelight and to water. I had been told that there was a storm blowing the night I was born, with the sound of crashing waves. As darkness fell, all the lights went out. This was 4 November 1926, and the General Strike had reached the far west. 6
To complete this inauspicious arrival, my right arm was hanging in a strange way, but those Cornish nurses at the nursing home in the 1920s knew what to do with a sickly baby. As soon as the doctor had gone and my mother was asleep, they wrapped me up warmly and took me for an early morning walk along the promenade ‘to get some good sea air into her little lungs’. If babies imprint like birds, then I was imprinted with a huge love of rough seas and a strong wind. But that could be Celtic. All Celts from Galicia to the Hebrides feel the same pull.
My mother returned with her baby daughter to the family dairy, where we lived over the shop. She was apologetic. My parents already had one daughter, my sister Peggy, and my father longed for a son. He had been a soldier – a very good soldier – during the Great War eight years before. He loved discipline, order and the company of men. Now, he had another girl, and one with a broken arm. Two years later, however, his wish was granted when my brother, Geoffrey, was born; and then, in 1930, my mother produced yet another daughter, whom they named Sheila. That was my family: my parents, William and Ada, two sisters and a brother.
For me, it was an unsatisfactory sequence because I lacked proper definition. I wasn’t the eldest, or the youngest, or the only boy. Perhaps that is why I have never known my place. My right arm was a case of Erb’s palsy, a very 7rare condition indeed, but shared with the German Kaiser. Historians read a great deal into its effect on his character; mine just made me fiercely independent.
Our dairy was in Causewayhead, roughly at right angles to Market Jew Street, the two main shopping streets in Penzance. They were separated by the Green Market where, after the cattle sales on market day, heavy-set farmers in their best breeches and jackets, gold watch chains straining across their stomachs, would sit smoking their strong cigarettes and watching the great world go by.
Our friends were not only other shopkeepers, but also included doctors, architects, hotel owners. My mother sang with them in the Operatic Society and my father met them at Masonic evenings. There were also artists in Newlyn, Lamorna and St Ives whom we knew, although it was difficult to place them. They spoke with upper-class accents but dressed scruffily, and were often drunk.
Our house in Causewayhead had no electricity. We had gas mantles in every room, which were very fragile and had to be carefully lit. If, by accident, a match knocked into the mantle, it disintegrated, and they were expensive to replace. Gas heated all the water for the bathroom and the kitchen. I must have been seven years old before I was allowed to stand on a chair, turn on the gas, strike a match, hold my breath and swiftly light the gas.
My mother loved the gas company. They held lectures 8and cookery demonstrations that were hugely popular with the ladies of Penzance, the wives of professional men. They not only learnt new ways of cooking, but also enjoyed meeting a wider range of local people. The demonstrators, mostly from among the few women graduates of the time, later developed new careers as journalists or consumer advisers. It was here, as a demonstrator for the gas company, that Marguerite Patten began her career, before writing her very successful cookery books.
The gas cooker was also a convenient way out for those women who could no longer bear their often brutal lives. The sterling qualities of early twentieth-century man in isolated rural parts of the country had a real downside in battered wives and beaten children.
As long as we obeyed our father, family life above the dairy was happy for all of us, including our mother. Daddy was not really happy with a wife who loved the arts. The women in his childhood had worked ALL the time, milking, cooking, cleaning, and he often showed impatience with Mummy’s failure to be house-proud. If he noticed dust on the sideboard or a leaf on the carpet, he would tut loudly.
I will not marry thee
A farmer’s wife to be
To do thy drudgery.
9 Life on Cornish farms was hard and there was no escape. Cows had to be milked every day, including Christmas, and there were always young children demanding attention in the kitchen, the warm heart of the farmhouse.
Boisterous laughter made Daddy uneasy. ‘All this laughter will lead to tears,’ he would say, a self-fulfilling prophecy as he cuffed one of us about the ears. He had another saying, which was most often delivered to me: ‘There is a right way and a wrong way of doing everything. Why do you always choose the wrong way?’ Mummy often began sentences with ‘Shush! Shush! Your father is writing a cheque … Shush! Your father is listening to the six o’clock news…’
On days when we were well behaved, Daddy would take one of us, usually me, with him when he went to collect the milk. The others weren’t too keen on rising before six, but I loved it. We would drive off in the big van and go from farm to farm around St Just, Cape Cornwall and Zennor, the sky turning blue and the sea and cliffs appearing as we went. We passed grey, dilapidated farm buildings clinging on to the steep hillsides, surrounded by ‘hedges’ of granite rock gouged out of the moors, laced with blackthorn, fuchsia and tamarisk, and golden with gorse.
There was much joking and gossip with the farmers, and sometimes a bun with clotted cream for me while the men loaded heavy churns of milk into the van. Daddy would tell 10me stories about the farms and their families and how we were related to them, and about the little granite churches. He showed me the medieval wooden carving of a mermaid in the church near the squint, and told me the story of the mermaid who fell in love with a choirboy and swam up the river at Zennor to take him back to sea.
He also told me about life in the army in India, about the dangers of the Khyber Pass, about how difficult it was to wrap puttees around one’s calves in wet weather, about how good the Indian soldiers were and how he trusted them. And always about ‘our Empire on which the sun never sets’. His dark eyes shone. ‘I will make chapattis tonight,’ he would promise, and he did.
My mother was keen to preserve Cornish traditions. ‘You are entirely Cornish,’ she told us. ‘Your grandparents, great-grandparents, all the way back.’ While I was still a baby, she took me to the Mên-an-Tol, a pair of prehistoric granite pillars, where I was pushed through the hole in the round, central stone. She performed the same ritual with my siblings. When I was older I asked her why. ‘A bit of superstition, I suppose,’ she replied. ‘It does no harm to remember the old traditions.’ Both my parents were superstitious. Crossed knives, shoes on the table, fishing on Sunday and many more bringers of bad luck had to be avoided.
On 1 May, all four of us children would be hauled out of 11bed in the dark, given a quick breakfast and sent off to the woods with our May horns. These strange objects, which I have never seen outside Cornwall, were like megaphones. About three feet long with a mouthpiece, they were made of tin, and when you blew into them the noise was very loud indeed.
Our May Day task was to gather branches of leaves in the woods and wake the town up with our May horns as we came back. We were not the only children parading our green leaves, and the noise was deafening.
My parents’ marriage was not happy. They had married for the wrong reasons. My mother had been unhappy at home in Newquay after her father had gone out to post a letter and dropped down dead when he was only thirty-four. He was an ex-miner who had gone out to Alaska in the Gold Rush of 1879 and had a little gold nugget on his watch chain. A year after his death, her mother married again, a widower with a son the same age as my mother. She favoured the boy over her own daughter, so when William Hosking came along, Ada saw him as a wonderful escape. And no wonder.
My father was good-looking, confident, a successful soldier back from the war. He had been the regimental sergeant major of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. His family were small farmers with a bit of land above St Ives which they had farmed for ever. He was the brightest 12of the children. When he met Ada, an educated young woman with a certificate for Voice from the Royal Academy of Music, a pretty face and a lovely nature, William saw her as a possible bride. And she was the only child of a mother, my grandmother, who was financially well off. It would be a good match. But my grandmother, who was a tough, practical woman, worried about her dreamy daughter’s suitability as a wife for William. ‘Always had her head in a book, or playing the piano,’ she told me many years later, but at the time she kept her misgivings to herself.
The first few years in Penzance were probably the happiest time of Mummy’s life. They lived over their brand new dairy, a wedding present from her mother. She had a young woman to help with the house full time, and a grumbling old woman for the rough work such as turning the mangle for the laundry on Monday mornings. Now that his mother-in-law had set him up in business, Daddy hired two men and bought a van for work and a car for us, one of the first cars in Penzance. When my elder sister Peggy was born, a second young girl was taken on as a nanny to help with her, and on her birth certificate my father was described as ‘Master Dairyman’.
Our parents’ social life was busy. They joined the local Operatic Society, where my mother was always given a good contralto role, while occasionally my father’s sweet baritone was welcomed into the men’s chorus. When I 13was old enough, I sometimes played the piano while my mother rehearsed; which is why I can still sing almost the whole of ‘Samson and Delilah’ in French!
There was a tiny cloud over the birth of my sister Peggy. The doctor, who was very popular in the town, made a forceps delivery, which involved clamping the baby’s head on both sides of its forehead and pulling. The baby emerged unscathed, except for small scars like new moons by each eye, and a badly bruised right arm. Two years later, when she became pregnant again, my mother wanted to go to another doctor, but this was impossible because – so she explained to me later – we owed our doctor money. Perhaps that was why I was born with a broken right arm. Geoffrey and Sheila had a different doctor and they were fine.
When I was old enough, I started wearing an iron splint. It wrapped around my body and kept my arm above my head all day. That is how I acquired my nickname, Bobbie, because my father said I looked like a policeman directing traffic. As I grew, I was encased in a bigger splint: this was the medical solution to my problem in 1929. When I started going to school, I abandoned the splint in the evenings, and while this immobilisation slightly limited the length of my arm, I was still able to use it pretty well. It was then that Mummy had decided piano lessons would help.
Thursdays in Penzance were special. It was market day, 14which was when all the farmers from around West Penwith came to town to sell their cows. By late morning, after the sales, they gathered in the Green Market. ‘’Ere, me ’andsome. ’Ow are ’ee?’ they called, as they recognised an urban cousin, or ‘Fine great girl she is!’ as they compared notes on the local women and laughed coarsely.
‘’Ow’s it going then, William Henry?’ they asked Daddy, as he joined them for a beer and pasty and discussed the price they had made for their cows. ‘’Tis less every month,’ they complained, but my father envied them their hard life and loved their banter. He returned home late on market days, his face flushed and his eyes shining.
For a while he had been a man among men.
CHAPTER TWO
As the country entered the 1930s, the economic recession grew, unemployment increased and in Penzance more men were on the dole. Many of our customers cut their orders for milk and cream. Finally, we said farewell to our last milkman and my father delivered the milk himself. By 1936 when I was ten, I was aware not only of the need to economise, but also of the need not to exacerbate the tense family atmosphere.
My mother had a miserable time with me. Every year or two I had to be fitted with a new splint, and every week she had to take me to the orthopaedic clinic where the adhesions in my elbow were broken. This was achieved by three nurses pulling on my wrist and shoulder. I learnt not to cry because my mother suffered so. The upside was that I now have a very high pain threshold. 16
I still remember my pride when, without help, I tied my shoelaces into bows for the first time. I was often ill with asthma too. Sometimes I was in bed for seven or eight weeks at a time. On one occasion, I overheard the doctor (still the same one) saying to my mother, ‘You must prepare for the worst.’ But when I had recovered, he recommended the occasional herbal cigarette and taught me how to inhale!
I was given a Saturday penny every week by our cousins-in-law, the butchers across the road. They were forever sharpening their great knives as they gossiped all day long. My penny was riches. I went up to Merrifield’s, the sweet shop at the top of the town, and bought a halfpenny’s worth of bull’s eyes, a farthing’s worth of liquorice allsorts and a sherbet. My young ‘uncles’ were chapel, unlike us, and in the living room behind the shop hung a huge print of an eye with the legend, Lord Thou Seest Me. Despite this warning, they had a reputation in Penzance for chasing girls.
One of our great treats every week was the cinema, which I was first taken to at four years old, when most films were still silent. Concentrating on the subtitles helped me to learn to read. Penzance was the last cinema in Cornwall to show the latest feature film because the reels were taken from town to town until they reached us. Later, when sound cinema had replaced the silent movies, 17we had the news first, and then the feature film, and the evening ended with the national anthem, for which we all stood to attention, quivering with patriotism.
The Gaumont News was presented by a man with a commanding voice who barked the commentary; but at the end of the war, even he moderated his tone when pictures of the liberation of Belsen came on screen. If I close my eyes I can go straight back to that shabby picture house and recall those horrifying images: the corpses, the shock in the eyes of our soldiers, and the scarecrow survivors will always be with me. This is why I will never let an anti-Semitic remark go unchallenged.
When I was four years old, I started going to the local primary school, which was about a mile from the centre of Penzance. My elder sister, Peggy, had to walk with me for the whole of the first term, much to her annoyance. I loved her deeply and I admired her school friends too, but this feeling was not returned. They urged me to make my own friends instead of tagging along after them.
On my first day I met Miss Paul, a grey presence: grey hair, grey suit with a long skirt, a kind voice and, as I soon discovered, a loving heart. My sister explained to Miss Paul why my right arm, always above my head, was raised, not because I needed the lavatory or to ask a question.
We sat at little desks and were each given a coloured pencil and sheets of paper. Miss Paul wrote out the 18alphabet on the blackboard. This was old stuff to me – I had been taught to read by Peggy. I even knew one long word: expectorate. It was on an official notice in the public gardens: ‘Gentlemen are forbidden to expectorate’.
I was preparing to demonstrate my knowledge when the little girl next to me said, ‘My name’s Elsie. What’s yours?’
‘Barbara,’ I whispered. ‘But I’m called Bobbie.’
‘Well, Bobbie, you’ve got a red crayon and I’ve only got a blue one.’
‘Yes.’
‘I want your crayon.’
‘But you’ve got your own, I want mine.’
‘My da’s a policeman.’
I didn’t really understand, but I recognised a threat and gave her my crayon.
Miss Paul shushed us into silence and I turned my attention to the blackboard. Miss Paul never raised her voice, but within a year she turned a ragbag of undisciplined four-to-six-year-olds into attentive little girls – apart from me, that is. I was quite unable to keep quiet and my behaviour was wild. I fought and shouted and laughed noisily. I think I was a happy child, but I worried my parents and the school. At the end of the first year, my report was pretty bad and my mother went to see Miss Paul, who assured her that I would eventually learn self-discipline.
‘She’s going to do really well,’ predicted Miss Paul. This 19surprised my mother. She knew that Peggy was clever – very clever – but not I.
For the first time, I found my splint useful. If I was bored at school, I undid the leather strap which held my wrist up so that my arm hung at an apparently painful angle. I would tell my teacher, who would send me home. On one splendid occasion, I intervened when a bigger boy was bullying my brother. I swung my iron-clad right arm and broke his nose. Mummy worried about my behaviour and she worried about my asthma and eczema. When I wasn’t boisterous, I was ill in bed. The family doctor prescribed rest and distraction. This led to a succession of neighbours calling with books and toys, and even a garrulous parrot. Nothing really worked. I would become suddenly ill for no apparent reason and recover quickly and just as mysteriously. Curiously, I recovered for ever when I left home…
I was six years old when I fell in love for the first time. Her name was Melvina Sowden. She lived with her mother, near the cattle market, in very poor circumstances. She was a quiet child with long, fair hair and blue eyes, which was very unusual in Penzance. We walked together to school and home again. I talked, and she laughed and looked mysterious. My parents were worried, partly because of the excessive nature of my love, and partly because they thought I would pick up Melvina’s dreadful Cornish 20accent. It was many years before I realised that they had Cornish accents themselves.
My love affair ended, like so many of them when I was young, in heartbreak. Melvina’s mother introduced her to little boys and I was no competition. My mother was relieved, as I then devoted more of my time to the piano and to singing lessons.
Looking back, my childhood seems to have been a succession of sunny days, on the cliffs or on the beach, in the sea or in the countryside, picking blackberries or watercress or taking home fish given to me by the friendly Newlyn fishermen. I went for walks with Geoffrey, my brother, when he was recovering from an operation for mastoiditis. Despite my poor health, my elementary school taught me well, and I had a good command of the three Rs, Reading, Writing and ’Rithmetic, plus some grasp of geography and history.
When we went to visit our grandmother in Newquay, my father found a new way to keep me quiet during the train journey: counting rabbits from the window – there were hundreds of them! I also played with friends on the promenade and watched the ladies playing bowls. One day, we saw posters for a competition at the local theatre. It was for children and they were asked to recite or sing. We went inside to find a packed theatre, and joined the queue for the stage. My friends decided to leave, but I decided to stay 21and recite a poem. I went forward on my own, whereupon one of the staff stopped me. ‘You don’t want to go on, do you?’ He was looking at my arm. ‘Yes please, I have a lovely little poem. Mummy likes it,’ I replied, not understanding his objection. ‘OK then, what’s your name?’ My name, Bobbie Hosking, was announced to the audience and I went to the middle of the stage, turned and faced them:
I had a penny, a bright new penny,
I took my penny to the market square.
I wanted a rabbit, a little furry rabbit
But they didn’t have a rabbit anywhere there.
I was about six years old, going on seven, and I recited with emotion. The audience clapped. I was a success and I took home a prize, a small teddy bear. ‘Bill,’ my mother said, ‘she stood alone on that stage. She didn’t mind.’ Apparently, my parents were amazed and moved, although I did not understand why.
In common with much of the town, we led a full religious life. We knelt by our beds morning and night to say our prayers, and went to church three times on Sunday at the parish church, St Mary’s near the harbour. Geoffrey was a ‘boat boy’, which meant that, aged six, he wore a beautiful lace surplice and carried the silver vessel that held incense. I was in the choir. For some reason, Peggy 22seemed not to have been involved in any of our church activities and Sheila just tagged along.
I had a very comprehensive preparation for confirmation which involved staying for a week with the Sisters of the Epiphany in a large convent in Truro. The hardest thing for me was the rule of silence. At mealtimes one of the sisters read stories of the saints while we ate. The easiest part was the examination of our conscience. I was born with only a small amount of guilt and can usually forgive myself fairly easily for the general run of mortal sins.
The difficulty came some three years later when I started questioning some of the Creed. On Sundays, when we repeated it during Mass, I found that I could not accept ‘the resurrection of the body’. For some months I just left this line out, but gradually other lines became difficult for me as well. I am now quite sure that all religion is man-made and I happily contemplate death as the end, full stop. But I still love the great psalms and singing hymns and I love the words of the prayer book: ‘When the busy world is hushed and the fever of life is over.’
CHAPTER THREE
In 1936, when I was ten, it was time for the scholarship exam. If you passed you were eligible for the boys’ or girls’ grammar school, but poor children left school at fourteen whether they passed or failed. They found jobs on the land or at sea, went into service, or worked as shop assistants and errand boys. Families who could afford it kept their children at school longer and sent them to the grammar schools. But there were also two other girls’ schools in Penzance, both boarding establishments. One was St Clare’s, a Church of England school, the other West Cornwall, a Methodist school for the daughters of missionaries and other expats. This school offered two scholarships a year for local girls. When Peggy took the entrance exam, she did so well that headmistresses from several of the top schools in the south and west of England wrote to my mother offering my 24sister full boarding education. But my father refused to let her go. ‘She has a perfectly good home here,’ he argued. My mother was very disappointed and so was Peggy. She went to West Cornwall.
