ON
MARGARET DRABBLE’S THE MILLSTONE
David
Hackbridge Johnson
The front cover of my tatty Penguin
edition of Margaret Drabble’s novel The
Millstone features a photograph by Chris Yates. A green-tinged woman, her eyes focussed
intently on a baby in slightly psychedelic surrounds, swaddled, enveloped by
lace, and as if seen through the bottom of a glass. This captures in visionary terms the moment
when Drabble’s character Rosamund Stacey pulls back from the contemplation of an
abortion by means of a bottle of gin.
Or, as in the novel proper, her intentions are interrupted by the
arrival of friends, after which she decides she must keep her baby, since her
pals have drunk most of the gin. Yates’
cover paints a more poignant scene than the hardback first edition where
Quentin Blake’s quirky design leads the reader to expect the comedic. The
Millstone is funny but perhaps in the half a dozen years between Blake
and Yates, the book had bedded down into a deeper understanding of its
merits. There was an earlier Penguin
cover in 1968 by Caroline Smith, Astrop/Hill – the latter pairing most famous
for their pop-art classic, The Booze
Book. The Smith/Astrop/Hill
collective is closer to Blake than Yates.
The softer-hued alternative, with its Renaissance lady contemplating the
miracle of birth, presents us with an iconography of motherhood, as opposed to the
whimsy of Carry On movies. She is a shy
Mona Lisa for the sixties.
I am reading The Millstone by Margaret Drabble because Doris Lessing tells me to
in the first volume of her autobiography, Under
My Skin. Dealing as it does with a
young woman who wishes to bring up a child without a husband and without even
telling the man she knows is the father, The
Millstone might not excite much comment today, but I suspect it was mildly
subversive in 1965 when it was first published.
I immediately thought that perhaps this was a rerun of The L-Shaped Room by Lynn Reid
Banks. The cogs don't quite mesh
together however; Banks’ protagonist leaves a middle-class home and attempts to
make her life as a single mother in a grimy boarding house in Fulham. Rosamund Stacey, the young woman in Drabble’s
novel needs no such wrenching from her environment, since she is safely ensconced
in her parents’ flat whilst they pursue work in Africa and later India. Given that Jane Graham in Banks’ novel is by
some perceived as nothing better than a prostitute, I wonder if Drabble’s book
is a sly parody of the gritty realism of Jane's misery and social
exclusion. Although Rosamund has a few
episodes of staged weeping, she seems to drift through the entire experience of
pregnancy and birth in a kind of cosy cocoon.
There is no expulsion from Eden in Rosamond’s life, which is set up at
the start of the novel as one of easily enjoyed middle class advantages, with
dashings of high culture sprinkled into conversations like chocolate dust on a
cappuccino. The fans of grimier proceedings
might be easily irritated by the conversations between Rosamund and her friends,
in which they chat about their various novels, both finished and unfinished,
the doings of Oxbridge chums, Thomas Hardy, Wordsworth, and the progress
Rosamund is making on her thesis about Elizabethan sonneteers. Before it be judged that the book is Love Actually 40 years early, it is
worth trying to tease out what Drabble is doing in the book, since beneath its
easy-going surface, there are a few semi-depths worth exploring.
We read the story as a first person
narrative. Rosamund is both confident
and naïve, both straightforward and academic in the way that she confides to
the pages. Given that she has two casual
boyfriends with whom she does not sleep with at the same time as having sex
with a third man who is a gay friend and who makes her pregnant, she admits to
a certain difficulty with love. The
reader can guess in advance that it is the birth of the child that will finally
ignite this powerful emotion. The two
casual boyfriends are easily dispensed with, but George, with whom she has sex
in the gentlest, almost invisible manner, is a man she might even love if only
she knew what that meant. She clearly
has some barriers as to the function of close relationships and the responsibilities
they might entail. She expresses it in
this way: ‘I did not realise the dreadful facts of life. I did not know that a pattern forms before we
are aware of it, and that what we think we make becomes a rigid prison making
us.'[1] Her self-assurance is dented by a kind of
groping around the facts of both sex and love and the connection between the
two. Even in her meditation about George
immediately after they make love, she has to interpose the visual medium in
order to describe the confusion of her feelings: ‘I was so happy for that hour
that we lay there because truly I seemed to see him through the eyes of love,
so irrationally valuable did he seem.'[2]
Running alongside the inner-musings
of Rosamund, are a sequence of set pieces which allow her to present, with acute
observational humour, little asides on societal and class differences. Most of these involve the waiting rooms of GP
surgeries and hospitals. Drabble knows
that we will latch on to Rosamund’s naivety when she realizes that in the GP
waiting room she will discover people of a vastly different background than her
smart set: ‘but here, gathered in this room, were representatives of a
population whose existence I had hardly noticed'.[3] She goes on to describe foreigners, ‘respectably
shabby' old people, a ‘grossly fat' woman, and frivolous girls who giggle into
magazine articles. The invitation here is
to raise eyebrows not at the fat and silly, but at Rosamond herself, who is
being watched by the reader as she watches.
I am quite sure that this subtlety of interlocking views, some
described, some implied, is a quite deliberate ploy on behalf of the author. One of the miserable pregnant girls in the GP
surgery waiting room could well be Jane Graham out of The L-shaped Room, the sort of girl whose life struggle Rosamund
could barely imagine. She remains
somewhat on the outside, comfortable with her own observations when she goes to
the hospital clinic for the first time.
She learns from the young women whose backs ache and who feels sick all
the time, that she too can expect their condition as her pregnancy
progresses. She has nothing in common
with these women and dislikes the look of them.
She, ‘felt a stranger and a foreigner there, and yet I was one of them,
I was like that too, I was trapped in a human limit for the first time in my
life, and I was going to have to learn how to live inside it.'[4] In this way Rosamund the outsider must become
the insider. Eventually like all the
other women she must take her iron pills and vitamin pills. She can mark a certain amused superiority by
finding that these regimes leave her, ‘unillumined by even the most fitful
gleams of comfort'.[5] Drabble’s portrayal of Rosamund, or rather Rosamond’s
portrayal of herself, remains pitch perfect throughout – we are never quite
irritated by her and remain on her side, only passingly concerned with
tragedies happening offstage to less privileged girls. Together with Rosamund we can see the funny
side of her efforts to buy the right kind of underwear in Marks and
Spencer. As she views these outsized
garments she has to remind herself that she really is pregnant. She does begin to realize that the life of her
child is more important than ‘rearranging the underwear in a department store.'[6]
In a way Rosamund is a supermum in
the making. She doesn't seem to get a
great deal of backache or early morning vomiting, and rather improbably she
continues with her thesis on the Elizabethan sonneteers throughout the
pregnancy. I think Drabble wants us to
see her as almost too good to be true. It
is hard to know who she is satirising, the grimy realism of Banks, or the polar
opposite behaviour of her privileged heroine.
It needn't be either or. A little
later when she describes herself as a single girl, ‘idle, refined, educated',
we sense her own self-parody. It is with
such nested parodies that Drabble makes the lightness of her comedy and the
more serious but unlaboured points she wishes to hint at. Perhaps the sharpest
arrow is aimed at the complacency of her novelist friend, Lydia, who can say
disarmingly that, ‘I agree that ordinary babies aren't much of a status symbol,
but illegitimate ones are just about the last word'.[7] Jane Graham, please note.
Rosamond is not quite as carefree as
she makes out – not only does she not tell George – not once are the rights of
the father mentioned – neither does she wish to worry her parents with the news
of her pregnancy. She writes to her
sister and receives a rather censorious response – Beatrice is the mouthpiece
of conventional nostrums. Rosamund side-steps
these with the same nonchalance with which she deals with most of her
problems. In a sense she is on her own
by the dispensing of her social circle.
Only Lydia, who halfway through the pregnancy moves in with her to help
out, remains loyal to her daring project.
She meets her brother’s wife by accident, a woman she clearly dislikes,
and their encounter brings to the fore some telling internal conflicts within
Rosamund. In a rather petty way she
describes both her mother and her sister as far prettier and more intelligent
than Clare, her brother's wife. And yet
she wishes to roll back from her dislike: ‘whose fault is that, whose fault,
whose virtue, and my dislike ebbed away in a dry withdrawing scraping tide of
equity, leaving me as ever on the hard damp shore of sociological pity'.[8] It is here that a genuine understanding
breaks through Rosamund's seeming glibness.
Is it a betrayal by Lydia to feed her
own sociological pity by secretly writing a novel about Rosamund's
predicament? Rosamond discovers the
unfinished manuscript by accident and is at first indignant, but she has
insufficient fuel for prolonged anger.
Lydia the novelist wants to make a ‘case' of her friend, the single
mother. It is poetic justice when eventually
the child, certainly in the grip of Freud's oral phase, decides to rip up and
indeed eat several pages of Lydia's manuscript.
Then it is Lydia's turn not to be terribly angry. Rosamond remains aware of the special
privilege educated status affords her – the ambulance men give her a certain
little deference, and she feels she benefits from being collected ‘from a good
address, and not from a bed sitter in Tottenham or from a basement in ever
weeping Paddington.'[9] She is no doubt happy to be beyond the pages
of a dozen disastrous stories of unwanted pregnancies, replete with the bottles
of gin required to bring about their abortion, something she half-heartedly
considers at the start of the novel. The
baby gets born and there are no complications.
What does Rosamund feel?: ‘love, I suppose one might call it, and the
first of my life.'[10]
– not the most heartfelt expression of the emotion she is groping towards. She stays in hospital for over a week, and
this gives Rosamund further opportunities to view the behaviour of the lower
orders. She is not exactly scathing but
she can't help observing the conversation between three other women in her ward
with experience of previous pregnancies, which ends with the highly amusing ‘do
yours eat spinach?'[11]
– a phrase that Alan Bennett may have paid attention to. As to the naming of the child, Rosamond first
thinks she might call it Sandra, after one of the poorer girls she met in a
waiting room. In the end she plumps for
the sort of name thought suitable to those of her class, Octavia. There are a couple of Latin jokes at this
point which remind us of her excellent education. There is brief mention of feeding regimes for
babies, and I strongly suspect that this is an episode that immediately
attracted Doris Lessing, since even by the time Rosamund is having her baby, a
generation after Lessing’s first, the same strictness about feeding intervals
seems to be still in place. Both it
appears were reared on the nutritional theories of Truby King: ‘Authority, the
war, Truby King. I was reared to believe
that the endurance of privation is a virtue, and the result is that I believe
it to this day.’[12] The only difference here is that Rosamund is
smiling more that Doris Lessing.
Although she avoids George for the
duration of her pregnancy and only meets him more or less by chance of the end
of the novel, Rosamond can't quite forget the possibility that there might be
love between them. They spend a pleasant
evening together but George's personal life remains a closed book to Rosamund
and she muses on the fading possibility: ‘there seemed to be some deadlock
between us that could never be broken, for neither of us was given to breaking
such things, so we might well sit there, forever estranged, forever connected.’[13] This is where the true depth of the novel
resonates – the idea that behind the sketches of women from different classes,
the casual boyfriends, the name dropping of poets, there lies something of
greater import – the ability or otherwise for people to make any kind of genuine
connection with the other. These
thoughts only occupy the briefest of pauses before the novel must
conclude. As the reader is hoping
throughout the novel, the one person she does connect with is Octavia. Rosamund has, ‘lost the taste for half
knowledge'[14] as typified by her
relationship with George.
The
Millstone is a quick read and
highly pleasurable – the prose rolls out like honey off a spoon. That it isn't necessarily an easy read is a
tribute to the subtle complexity that lies just beneath its surface. I note that the artificial fabric Lurex gets
a mention on page 152. The last time I
saw this word was as the title of a fine volume of poems by Denise Riley, and
it was the word itself that threw me into the pleasure of reviewing that
volume.
I have a much more recent reprint of
Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone. It is a 2016 repackaging of the novel for a
readership that the publisher hopes will be hooked by giving the novel a
slightly different cultural location. The
swinging sixties don't get a mention in the original book and neither was this
a particular line plugged by the publishers at the time, mainly because the
standard swinging sixties tropes are absent – there is nothing about pop music
and only occasional references to fashion – far from being ‘in’ with the current
trends in popular culture, Rosamond and her friends are highly cultured and
associate with those organs productive of plays, poetry and novels. In the intervening decades no doubt the novel
has had a trajectory outside its pages, thus the blurb on the back cover of the
2016 edition breathlessly reels off a series of clichés that have come to be
seen as essential to any discussion of the decade: ‘The sixties are beginning
to swing and it is a time of sexual liberation.
Concealing her ignorance beneath the show of careless independence,
young and inexperienced Rosamund Stacy dips her toes in this exciting new
world.' It is not necessary to continue
in a vein that might make the author of The
Millstone squirm. The graphic design
of the new edition returns to the quirky aesthetic of Quentin Blake and
Caroline Smith, but with additional lipstick colorations that position the
novel as a precursor of chick lit, despite the fact that Rosamund is hardly a
ditzy shopaholic. The best thing about
the new cover is the Victorian lamp-post and a series of architectural
short-hands that position the novel accurately in a world where post-war values
still hold true. This leads to one
conclusion that The Millstone is a
period piece – no one would surely be shocked by it now – but just as a drama
like the 1961 film Victim about
homosexual blackmail can only have its emotional being within the legal framework
current at the time, so The Millstone
survives as a remarkable achievement in a world where women were both half-free
and half-imprisoned by the subtle societal transformations through which they
lived. No wonder Doris Lessing liked it
so much.
©David
Hackbridge Johnson 2026
All images
from the author’s collection.
[1]
Margaret Drabble, The Millstone,
Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1965, p. 7.
[2]
Ibid. p. 29.
[3]
Ibid. p. 37.
[4]
Ibid. p. 58.
[5]
Ibid. p. 60.
[6]
Ibid. p. 68.
[7]
Ibid. p. 75.
[8]
Ibid. p. 83.
[9]
Ibid. p. 111.
[10]
Ibid. p. 102.
[11]
Ibid. p. 108.
[12]
Ibid. p. 111.
[13]
Ibid. p. 168.
[14]
Ibid. p. 172.