Biscuits. Oh good!

Letters

Vol. 21 No. 12 · 10 June 1999

From Amanda Hopkinson

Anna Vaux, in her review of Jane Dunn's biography of Antonia White (LRB, 27 May), says of White: 'We are not to forget that she was mentally ill, impoverished and a single mother at a time when children were not considered "smart" and unmarried motherhood was desperately unconventional as well as difficult.' Perhaps the time has come to extend a similarly generous attitude to her third husband (my father), Tom Hopkinson. In Vaux's review he again receives a bad press for Antonia's plight. Given that she was already mentally ill, suffering from writer's block and a single mother before they met, the 'blaming game' cannot find him culpable for the situation which he, as a 25-year-old provincial looking to make his way in the capital, strove to find solutions to.

Perhaps the most 'unconventional' solution he came up with was that Susan (her elder daughter) be immediately brought home from the orphanage where she had been placed and that Lyndall (born during their relationship, also not his child) be raised as his own. From the start Antonia's own needs were overwhelming. The only way Tom could begin to hope to meet them was by prioritising them night and day. At night, Antonia was insomniac, frequently maniacal, and given either to mounting the windowsill or the Embankment with threats to hurl herself down, or to wild nightmares which, she believed, required instant Freudian analysis, for which Tom's assistance was essential. (He eventually developed a form of 'sleeptalking' that seemed to do the trick quite nicely.) By day, Tom took on long shifts at a thankless job in an advertising agency to support a wife, one of whose less endearing manias was to spend uncontrollably. After their separation, he continued to support her and educate her children, who spent their holidays from boarding school with him. That he was the origin of a technique which others later practised of providing her with regular 'reading deadlines' is disparaged as 'wringing' the words out of her. But it was also the only way Antonia ever succeeded in completing anything. Whatever the miseries involved in sitting down at the twin desks they'd bought to celebrate their wedding and their commitment to becoming 'real writers', they were hardly greater than those, also described, of latterly taking three weeks over not completing a book review for the Tablet.

With such efforts on his part it seems a little churlish to conclude, with Vaux, that Tom 'got off relatively lightly in the blaming game, though he contributed quite thoroughly to the mess'. If blame is what's wanted, she need look no further than Tom's own autobiography (Of This Our Time) in which self-blame is very much the name of the game.

For what it's worth, my own feeling about 'Aunt Tony', as I was taught to call her, was that she really didn't know one end of a child from the other. The ferocities of her Edwardian upbringing conspired with her naturally bohemian tendencies in rendering her an unpredictable mixture of the authoritarian and the anarchic. It took me a while to forgive her for using her favoured greeting – 'Hail, Peachbottom!' – quite so loudly across all the tables at Lyons' Corner House, where we met for tea and walnut cake. But once past my 12th birthday I had apparently reached the age of reason: sherry was substituted for tea at 5.30 p.m. and she'd trade ancient bedhopping gossip about the 'Bloomsberries' for the latest tame doings in the dorms after dark. And the sense of being at once consulted and confided in by a 'fellow adult', introducing alcohol, scandal – and even Catholicism – into the equation, was an eye-widening delight.

Amanda Hopkinson
London N4