Events | 2010.01.15
'How could he maim me, mutilate me?'
A feminist since she was \'absolutely tiny\', the veteran Woman\'s Hour host Jenni Murray has never shied away from awkward questions. Now, three years after her mastectomy, she has one for her surgeon
It\'s been an emotional morning in the offices of Woman\'s Hour. Christina Schmid has been talking about life after losing her husband, a bomb-disposal expert in Afghanistan, and has brought the assistant who shows me up to the fifth floor of Broadcasting House near to tears. When Jenni Murray, who conducted the interview, arrives back in her office, she looks drained. "Talking to somebody for 25 minutes who\'s on the edge of absolutely palpable grief is just very hard, because the last thing you want them to do is for them to break down. You\'ve got to keep the balance between asking them the sort of questions the audience wants to hear the answers to, and protecting them from going too far into their grief."
Murray\'s voice dips and slows. It has been described as "the most beautiful voice on radio, ever", and it is a remarkable instrument – husky, supple, full of layers, though her inevitable awareness of timbre and pitch causes, in conversation, a slight hamminess. It is quiet, too, and intimate (an effect exacerbated, this morning, by her tiny, messy office, where the blinds are drawn, the door is closed, and the light is off because it gives her headaches). But woe betide anyone who assumes that she is therefore a pushover, or unable to ask the awkward question. As an interviewee she is generous, but impatient with anything other than clearly structured, direct – ie radio-friendly – questions. "Keep it simple," she says, not unkindly, at one point. "What\'s the question?" more impatiently, at another.
It\'s not a surprise, then, that when Murray read the Irish journalist Lia Mills\'s account of having part of her face reconstructed, what really stuck her was how the surgeon was "ruthless, but brilliant"; that after her own mastectomy, three years ago, "the first thought I had when I looked in the mirror, when I looked at my scar, was \'how did he do it? How did he pick up that scalpel and just —\'" She makes a harsh cutting sound. " How did he maim me, and mutilate me in this manner?"; no surprise, then, that she has just made a documentary which tries to answer that question.
"I\'m being very frank with you," she says, at one point – and she is, though not really much more frank than she has been before, on her programmes, in her newspaper columns and in her memoir. Nevertheless, she seems to feel the need to point it out, because the difference between the surgeons and her is that while they depersonalise in order to heal – she watches another woman, Sue, being given a mastectomy by the same surgeon who did hers, and is struck that absolutely everything other than the breast is covered, even the face – Murray\'s frankness, her version of "ruthlessness", has always been about making things as specific and as personal as possible.
"My mother would never have said the words \'breast cancer\'," she says. "She\'d have called it \'the C sword\' and she would never have said \'breast\', in polite company." In 1956, when Woman\'s Hour mentioned cancer, the presenter made sure to warn listeners first, so they could switch the radio off if they chose to. And "if you conceal these things, you don\'t deal with them. You don\'t go and get your mammograms, you don\'t press for better treatments."
But there\'s frankness, and then there\'s frankness, and she has also been very clear about the ways in which she wishes female cancers were not talked about: brave battles, innocent heroines (she wrote some particularly incensed editorials about how Jade Goody was described, when she was dying of cervical cancer), positive thinking – the flip side of which, presumably, is that negative thinking must have caused the scourge in the first place. Cancer thus joins the long list of things that could have been avoided, if you were just a slightly better person. She is very funny about Barbara Ehrenreich\'s excoriation of the trend in Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, which she has just reviewed.
"Thinking positively about how you\'re going to live your life day by day – rather than being depressed at home thinking you\'re going to die is not a bad thing – but to actually follow a philosophy that says that the way you think, the way that you operate, is what can make you better, is just such a cheat and a lie. And when Ehrenreich did it I thought" – and slaps her desk in emphasis – "I should have written that book!"
While it is interesting that, standing in the operating theatre, watching Professor Nigel Bundred cut into Sue, Murray is much less upset than she expected, she is curiously inarticulate about what it is she does feel. "It\'s most peculiar," she says, a little helplessly. It is "strange", "bizarre". I yearned for something more precise. Perhaps she needed time to think about it, to be away from the microphone and the breathless David Attenborough-esque in-situ reportage, because what she says now is far more interesting.
"What struck me most is that what he takes out is this really ugly lump of pink and yellow fat. And you look at this thing, and you think, \'God. Is this what we make all this bloomin\' fuss about? Is this what we want reduced or made bigger, or does he like my breasts, doesn\'t he like my breasts? Do I like my breasts? Do I not like my breasts? This is what I\'m going to feed my babies with, or not feed my babies with because I\'m worried about them getting saggy?\' Blah-de-blah-de-blah – on we go. And that\'s all it is, underneath there. It\'s so ugly . And I sort of felt after that that I didn\'t miss mine quite so much."
Of course, this only goes so far. She was not tempted when Bundred offered to reduce the other breast, so that they matched (breast augmentations and reductions often cause loss of feeling in the nipple and she was not prepared to give that up), and "it\'s always there, you know. Every time you undress, have a bath, have a shower …" She laughs, and adds, defensively, quickly, "I don\'t look at myself naked in the mirror very often because it\'s not a particularly pretty sight and hasn\'t been for long time – but you know, every time you look at yourself there is that reminder that you are not a complete woman any more." She does think that, in the very unlucky event that cancer returned to the other breast, she would agonise less about losing it – but it would be difficult, and really extremely unlucky – to replicate the agonies of the first time round.
Murray (the surname is her first husband\'s) was told she had to have a mastectomy five days before Christmas in 2006; the day her mother died of starvation owing to Parkinson\'s disease. The operation proved insufficient, so was followed by chemotherapy – the side-effects of which would eventually require both her hips to be replaced. Six months later her father died from lung cancer. Memoirs of a Not so Dutiful Daughter is honest, sometimes uncomfortably so, about how differently she, an only daughter, felt about her parents – the lifelong, bitter battles with a bright, controlling, stay-at-home mother; the adoration of a father with movie-star looks and 6ft frame (Murray has a bit of a thing about height and is obviously tickled pink that she has produced a 6ft2 rugby-playing younger son).
"It was Jung who would call an all-too-common girlhood obsession with the most important man in her life \'the Electra complex\'," she writes, in a characteristically blunt observation. "I had it in spades." He supported her, and she basked in his praise; it is both revealing and painful that the last words her mother spoke to her came when Murray was telling her father about her latest exploits, while helping her mother drink lemonade from a safety cup. Inattention meant her mother started choking, and then said, furiously, "For God\'s sake, Jennifer … can\'t you concentrate for one second? It\'s always been the same – all you can ever think about is yourself and showing off about the bloody BBC."
But it was her mother who made her a feminist – in that Murray wanted to be everything her mother wasn\'t. "I never really enjoyed all the things that she did, and I wasn\'t really interested in cleaning the house, and I absolutely wasn\'t interested in spending all afternoon baking cakes. It just seemed much more interesting to get up in the morning and go out and meet people and do stuff and then come home at the end of the day and enjoy being at home with the people you were close to. And I remember feeling that from being absolutely tiny – that being a man seemed to be so much more interesting than being what was expected of a woman."
University – Hull, where she studied French and drama, and, she notes in a no-nonsense paragraph, was once raped – began to consolidate this feeling, as did her first, brief marriage, during which she attempted to apply for benefits to tide them over for a few weeks. "And this woman said, \'You can\'t have benefits because you\'re married , and you have a husband , and he\'s legally bound to keep you ." She almost spits the words out. "And the idea of being a kept woman just cut me to the quick! You know?"
"But the absolute light bulb didn\'t really switch on," until after her divorce. "I tried to get a mortgage, and you know – you go along, you\'ve got a job, you\'ve saved up a deposit, and they say, \'No, no no, we can\'t give you a mortgage unless you have a signature from your husband or father.\'" She threatened legal action, under the Sex Discrimination Act, and got her mortgage, but it put the seal on her antipathy to the institution of marriage – an antipathy made spectacularly public when, in the 90s she wrote an article that quoted, approvingly, Mary Wollstonecraft\'s dictum that marriage is "legalised prostitution". She was door-stepped by the tabloids, an MP tabled a motion that she should be removed from her job at Woman\'s Hour, and she seriously upset her mother, who had been so ashamed that her daughter was "living in sin" that she had let her friends assume Murray was married.
She married again, five years ago – because of inheritance tax, she insists, and so that her two sons can keep the family home, though she does admit that saying so annoys her partner of 30 years, David Forgham, who believed there was something more to it. There is something inevitable in the fact that everything went swimmingly until the signing of the register, when she noticed that while there were spaces for the names and occupations of their respective fathers, there was no mention whatsoever of mothers.
She must be disappointed, surely, in feminism these days – what with all the women who reject the label, or those who interpret it as an excuse to learn pole-dancing, or emulate Katie Price as Jordan, or lose themselves in planning the most ornate of weddings? Apparently not. "I\'m very encouraged by what I think is a new wave of feminism. Groups like the Fawcett Society are burgeoning. On the internet there are lots of groups. And you know – what we forget is actually how young this movement is, and how much has been achieved. You know, a backlash, and response to that, is inevitable. What I\'m really interested in now is the number of guys who are coming round. Richard Reeves at Demos, different fatherhood groups – men who are actually likely to influence policy – beginning to embrace the idea that we will not have equal relationships or any kind of equal society until we begin to perceive the care of children as something that parents do, and not just as women\'s work. I might be one of the only people in the world who\'s really impressed by Nick Clegg, but he\'s the only male politician who\'s quite openly come out and said, \'This is what we\'ve got to do. We have to start looking at leave that enables both parents to take time off, and find ways of allowing both parents to carry on with a career while the children are small.\'"
That wasn\'t possible for her family – Forgham, who was a weapons officer on nuclear submarines, eventually decided to go into childcare full-time, a role he enjoyed. But it was also very isolating for him, and difficult to return to work, and that will have only strengthened her belief that children should not be raised to expect strict gender delineation. "As a parent it\'s your duty to foster whatever your child is inclined towards. People assume that if you\'re a boy you\'ve got to love football." Her voice rises. "You may well love football. But you might also be the most inept kicker of a ball and go through absolute miseries in a sporty school because you detest everything you\'re expected to do and would much rather be curled up with a book. I just say, \'Look at your kids, find out what they\'d really like to do. It doesn\'t matter whether they\'re extremely masculine or feminine. Who cares? Let them do whatever they want to do, and then you will raise balanced children.\' Sorry," she says, bashfully. "That was my little lecture. I feel really strongly about this."
"I\'ve got two sons, and they\'re in their 20s now, and it\'s absolutely fundamental to my life and their lives that they will make partnerships with women they respect, and with whom they can share equality. I\'m sure eventually they will have children – though not yet perhaps; I\'m not quite ready to be a grandmother, I don\'t think – but you know, they will want women who are equally qualified to them, who are doing equally interesting jobs. We have to put things in place so that it\'s easier for them to do it than it was for me."
Ruthless and Brilliant is on BBC Radio 4 tomorrow at 1.30pm
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2010/jan/16/womens-hour-jenni-murray
