Discussion re: Daddy’s Gone A’Hunting

BBC Radio 4 A Good Read
17th June 2008

Sue Macgregor hosts, with political satirist Alistair Beaton and writer and journalist Valerie Grove.

VG: The book I have a chosen is Daddy’s Gone A’Hunting, a novel by Penelope Mortimer.

Most people have heard of PM’s The Pumpkin Eater, her most famous novel, partly because it was made into a film, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter, starring Ann Bancroft and Peter Finch. And she was rather annoyed, actually, that it was the one novel that obliterated all the others in her canon. Anyway, all her books are out of print and The Pumpkin Eater is not even available on DVD, but its fame persists, so I’m very glad, myself, that Persephone Books has decided to reissue Daddy’s Gone A’Hunting, which was the novel that came out before The Pumpkin Eater in 1958. And like The Pumpkin Eater it is about a marriage. The heroine Ruth has one undergraduate daughter and two sons at boarding school and a prosperous existence in an enclave known as the Common – wealthy professional families somewhere in commuter land. Her husband is a successful dentist somewhere like Harley Street and what the novel reflects, a good ten years before the Women’s Liberation Movement took hold of women’s literature, is the chafing emptiness of her life.

She’s a woman who feels she has very little existence outside her husband and her children. Ruth’s actually a bit depressed (that’s an overused word): the marriage is somewhat moribund – they lie in bed, but apart, her husband is obviously becoming unfaithful. And at the core of the story there is the daughter’s pregnancy. She’s 18, she’s just gone to Oxford and she wants to have an abortion. And, remember this is ten years before the abortion law reform of 1967. It was written fifty years ago, but it’s timeless. It’s so sharply written, so observant. It’s beautifully pared down, and I think PM was a brilliant novelist and it’s time she was revived.

SM: Alastair, did you enjoy it as much as Valerie does?

AB: Almost. First of all I think that every Pro-Life campaigner should be made to read this book. I object, actually, to the term Pro-Life because we’re all Pro-Life - just because we favour abortion sometimes doesn’t mean we’re Anti-Life. However, I think they should be made to read this book because it’s extraordinarily revealing about what life was like for a pregnant woman who didn’t want to have her child, before the abortion law (largely thanks to David Steele) came into being. And I think that is the prime importance of the book. I think it’s beautifully written. I think it’s a very spare kind of style. I hugely admire the writing. I don’t agree that it’s timeless. It talks about women in their terribly boxed-in and restricted lives at a certain period in our history and it does seem very far away and, actually, that makes it quite cheering because it makes one realise that we’ve come a long way and to some extent we’re all feminists now. It’s a lovely piece of writing, but I think it’s a period piece.

SM: I agree with that, but I don’t think that that is something that is to its discredit. I mean, I didn’t live in Britain in the 1950s but it rang very true for me. It’s not that long after the end of the war. Life is quite tough in some ways. I mean, their houses are cold, there’s lino on the floor, shopping is difficult – it’s before the era of supermarkets. Shopping involves queues for the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, it takes all day, and although the heroine of this is an intelligent woman, she doesn’t work and you feel now, and I don’t know that PM meant us to feel this quite so much, you feel now, what a terrible waste. And she is depressed – and I want to ask Valerie how autobiographical this is because you’ve written a long and very insightful biography of John and I just wonder whether we’re reading about what happened to Penelope and to her daughter.

VG: It is true, it was an episode in their lives but I don’t think her depression (she was depressed) came from not having enough to do; she had altogether too much to do, plenty of opportunities to work outside the home. But her daughter did become pregnant while at Cambridge and this was something that she had to confront. And, so she had to write a novel about it because, as the daughter said, her mother’s way of dealing with everything was to write about it in a novel, and she does it so well. When I said it was timeless I mean that the emotions are timeless and she deals with them in a way that’s applicable anywhere, to women anywhere really – the mother-daughter relationship is timeless. The mother-daughter relationship is beautifully done, because she feels that her daughter doesn’t understand her. Angela, the daughter, thinks that her mother is a chintzy little woman, with everything neatly sewn up in her life and Ruth says, ‘Oh God she doesn’t know me and she’s never going to know me, it’s my fault’. She thinks of the child inside Angela as a real child, she carries it in her imagination. For Angela it’s just a useless growth, already dead.

SM: I just wonder whether Rex is John Mortimer and the daughter is her real daughter and what they must have felt reading about themselves.

VG: Well, John Mortimer always says, yes, he’s all the ghastly husbands that PM wrote about, but he was never quite as frightful as Rex, who knows nothing of what’s going on, and he gets a cold and thinks he’s going to die.

AB: It’s odd isn’t it, because I never quite believed in the profession of the dreadful husband who’s a dentist and I never quite believe he’s a dentist. I think he’s a playwright.

VG: She used dentists all the time as the husband’s profession.

SM: Alistair, were you moved by the plight of the daughter and, indeed, very much of the mother in this?

AB: I was moved to an extent. I wonder if this is one of these books where one’s reaction depends very much on whether one’s a man or a woman. There were times when I wanted to just shout at this woman Ruth, the mother, and say, ‘oh, for God’s sake, you don’t have to send your children to a ghastly public school and stop feeling sorry for yourself and do something about it’. Now, I presume that’s rather insensitive on my part, but occasionally she did drive me mad and I did want to say ‘oh, just change things for God’s sake’.

SM: We’ve been talking about Valerie’s choice Daddy’s Gone A’Hunting by Penelope Mortimer, and that is from Persephone Books at £10 and the best way to get hold of Persephone Books, I think, is to go on to their website.

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