Jenni Murray - Memoirs of a Not So Dutiful Daughter

About the Book

The only child of an electrical engineer and a mother who resented the fact that shed never been to university, the broadcaster Jenni Murray grew up in a traditional household in the 1950s. But instead of becoming the housewife her mother expected her to be, Jenni opted to forge her own path in her career and her personal life.

The resulting tensions have lasted as long as she can remember. How, she has often wondered, could two women be so full of love for each other, and at the same time so full of hate that they broke each others hearts?

And so Jenni began this remarkable memoir and continued to write throughout 2006 as her mother lay dying, and Jenni struggled to care for her and her beloved father while herself being treated for breast cancer.

Filled with love and laughter, frustration and heartbreak, and with the courage to keep on keeping on even in the darkest days, it will speak to every mother and daughter, dutiful or not.

Contents

Memoirs of a Not So
Dutiful Daughter

Jenni Murray

In loving memory of Alvin and Win Bailey

My thanks to David, the best life support system a woman could wish for, and to my sons, Ed and Charlie, who accept with gracious resignation that, as the American writer Nora Ephron said, Life is copy. Im especially grateful to my editor, Selina Walker, whose loyalty, patience and judgement have been invaluable through very difficult times.

PHOTOGRAPHS

. Dad in the army

. Mum with my grandfather Walter, 1934

. My christening, June 1950

. Blackpool, 1951

. At the seaside

. Action girl

. School reunion, 2001

. With Grandma

. With my grandparents

. In Poland

. Muhtar

. The white dress and veil

. The newsroom, Radio Bristol

. Edwina Currie, me, my parents and Clare Short, all celebrating Womans Hours fiftieth birthday

. Mother and daughter

. Mum and Dad, 1979

. Girl reporter

. Eds birth

. At last, my boy!

. On their wedding day

. Dads favourite picture of Mum

. Dad with Ed

. The family in Clapham

. David in the kitchen

. My coronation frock

. Pigtails

. Mother and daughter in the same outfit

. Dad and the surly teenager

. With Dad, entirely relaxed

INTRODUCTION

I feel I am beginning a love letter. Im saying things I could not have expressed even a year ago, because there was a barrier between us thats existed for as long as I can remember. It collapses today in hospital when I hold her hand and stroke her hair, and she says, Do you love me? Ive often wondered.

The words come, barely audible, through the haze of the wicked disease that has taken away the difficult, argumentative, demanding woman who has haunted my life from the moment I was born, driven so much of what I have striven to achieve and yet has so frequently evaporated my courage.

In the past five years, as the illness took its relentless hold on my mother, there have been hints of vulnerability and uncertainty and a willingness to talk about what has in the past been utterly taboo, but we have continued to dance around each other. I know Im not the only woman to have had a difficult relationship with her mother, but our family history and the times in which we live seem to have militated against any possibility of reconciliation. We were two women forever joined by an invisible umbilical cord but torn apart by circumstance, education and a sexual revolution that opened opportunities for me that for her had been unimaginable.

Some of the things I did to offend or upset her were, even as an adult, carried out in childlike defiance. Others were political acts, rooted in my convictions but at odds with her own, as I rushed with wild enthusiasm through the new gender landscape that stretched before me. Some were designed to please her but never seemed quite to hit the mark; at other times I was paralysed, unable to say or do the things I wanted to do because she sat on my shoulder, critical and displeased, oozing disappointment and disgust.

Now my mother lies dishevelled and desperate, needing me as she has never appeared to need me before, and I feel a rush of love for her that I have never been able to acknowledge. I tell her I do love her. That I always have, but have often been too angry or too sad to express it. I ask her to forgive me if I have made her feel uncared-for.

I have a photograph of her aged six, her dark, straight, shiny hair cut into a pudding-basin style. She had the same dead straight, sleek locks I had as a child and a young woman, before either of us discovered the delights of the permanent wave or the highlight. There are other strong physical similarities shape of face, height, colour of eyes except that I inherited my fathers build, big-boned and powerful, while she, as she has never ceased to remind me, is delicately boned, almost skinny. I cant count the number of times she has sighed and, in what frequently felt like a crowing tone, bemoaned my deficiencies in the feminine delicacy department.

In the photo, even at that young age, shes wearing black-rimmed, bottle-bottomed spectacles. Now, her poor sight further clouded by cataracts, she asks me to wipe away the sticky gum that accumulates on her left eye and causes her so many problems that she can no longer summon up the energy to read our one shared pastime.

I look into a mirror image of my own best feature, hers now fuzzy with age. She fights hard to focus and to articulate. I love you too, she says, more than anything and Im sorry too that I havent always shown it.

As I leave the lonely little room shes occupying shes generally alone on the many occasions she has to be admitted as she can be disruptive if there are other patients around her she looks over to the flowers I brought her.

Theyre beautiful. Thank you, she whispers and makes a supreme effort to smile. And youre beautiful too.

It is the first time she has ever paid me an unconditional compliment. I am fifty-six years old. I weep all the way home.

It was this entry in my diary in the summer of 2006 that made me think seriously of writing this book. How, I wondered often, could two women be so close, so full of love for each other and at the same time so full of hate that they broke each others heart?

My mothers slow deterioration as Parkinsons disease did its worst and my frequent visits to her and my father far more than I had ever made in the years since I left home at the age of eighteen drew me back to a book I had read when I was still at school. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter was my introduction to the work of the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. She wrote of the conventional, bourgeois childhood she had escaped through a determination to educate herself and break away from the constraints of her mothers plan that her daughter would become, like her, a loyal wife and mother.

Instead, Simone became one of the great intellectuals of twentieth-century France and wrote one of the most influential of all feminist texts, The Second Sex. But it was the Memoirs, the first volume of her autobiography, that had stayed most clearly in my mind. Like her, I had no brothers. She had a younger sister while I was an only child, but we were both accorded many of the privileges generally only open to boys. Like me, she adored the father who described her as having a mans brain. Like me, she had a mother who saw her job as conditioning her daughter to become a woman who knew her place which would be secondary to a man. But she never sought to blame her mother, acknowledging in a later book, A Very Easy Death, how Maman de Beauvoir lived against herself. She had appetites in plenty; she spent all her strength in repressing them and she underwent this denial in anger she had been taught to pull the laces hard and tight herself.