Jeremy Gavron: ‘My mother was a woman who looked for solutions. Suicide was a solution’

Why did Hannah Gavron, a brilliant writer and lecturer, take her own life aged 29? Why did her husband refuse to discuss her death with their two boys? Her son, Jeremy Gavron, talks about unravelling these mysteries in a cathartic book

• Read an extract from Jeremy Gavron’s book here

On the afternoon of 14 December 1965, a 29-year-old woman dropped the younger of her two sons at a Christmas party at his nursery school and drove to the flat of a friend in Primrose Hill, north London. Inside, she sealed the kitchen doors and windows and turned on the oven. Some time later, Herbert Popjoy, a gas board fitter, climbed into the building’s back garden, from where he could see a body lying on the floor. He did his best to save the woman, but it was too late. As the coroner would note, she had carried out her plan with utmost efficiency. She could not be resuscitated.

This woman’s name was Hannah Gavron and outwardly she had everything to live for. Certainly, her marriage was in trouble. Her husband no longer shared their modern, light-filled house in Highgate; she had a key to her friend’s flat because she had been meeting her lover there. But the idea that she had wanted to kill herself was, to those who knew her, inconceivable. She was not – so far as anyone was aware – a depressive. Clever and beautiful, she was one of those golden people, an object of admiration and, perhaps, some envy. Her family was loving, her young neighbours like-minded; her husband, in spite of their estrangement, still doted on her. And she was materially lucky, too: foreign holidays, a car, her own home. There was even enough money to pay for a nanny to take care of her boys while she was teaching sociology, a job she loved and to which she was increasingly committed. At the time of her death, she had just finished her first book, The Captive Wife, a study of young mothers in Kentish Town. When it was published a few months later – and serialised in the Observer – it caused the sort of stir she would have relished. She was theatrical, bold. She had wanted to make her mark. As a friend put it: “She brought an extra jolt to life.”

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