Margaret Spufford loved truth, loved people, loved to laugh – despite it all

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2014/mar/20/margaret-spufford-social-historian-saint

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Margaret Spufford, who has died aged 79, may have been someone quite like a saint. To say so in print seems an extraordinary violation of what she actually was: an immensely strong personality who seemed always to act on what she saw as her duty to love truth and to love people. She saw the world with a luminous and pitiless compassion, and in her company other people could do so too.

I never understood how someone so scholarly and careful of the truth could accept the miracle stories of Christianity, but I learned from her that it can be done.

I don't know that she believed in an afterlife in any well-defined sense: but she believed this world was interfused with another, perhaps with an eternity, and that this might at any moment break through into ours. This faith enabled her to face, without flinching, cruelties that make ordinary people writhe and hide.

She was more ill, more often, than anyone I have known. As a young woman her studies at both Oxford and Cambridge had been interrupted by breakdowns. In her 30s she was crippled by early onset osteoporosis, followed by cancer and heart disease; finally the indignities and inadequacies consequent from a series of strokes brought her slowly to a place where she was immobile and almost speechless, unable even to swallow, though she still could laugh.

For someone who had talked as much and as wonderfully as she did, this was terrible. What made it more terrible was the knowledge that it was love that kept her alive, and so love that made all that suffering possible. It was the love of her family and of her friends – she would have said the love of God through them – that gave her the reasons for living, and so for suffering.

I met her first in 1992, a little after the publication of her book about her daughter, Bridget, who was born with cystinosis, a metabolic disease caused by the conjunction of two recessive genes.

When only a toddler, Bridget was admitted as an emergency to Great Ormond Street: she was expected to die within a week. In the event she spent a year in hospital and at the end of that time death did not seem the most terrible thing to her mother, who wrote, years later: "What was intolerable was watching her learn fear: her fluid and chemical balance changed so fast it was adjusted on the basis of six-hourly blood tests. Sometimes these were intravenous, but most often a laboratory technician dug a triangle of razor blades into her fingers. She had very small fingers, and sometimes, not having enough blood, he needed to cut her again. She learned fast. I am never going to be able to forget the sound of her screams."

At that time little was known about Bridget's condition except that it was fatal. Her parents were told that she would certainly die before she was 14. With the help of two kidney transplants, one from her father, she defied this prophecy. But even after she returned from her year at Great Ormond Street, she could for some months only be kept alive with intravenous drips, checked hourly day and night.

Despite all this, Bridget grew up, and was admitted to university. She died at the age of 22; Margaret was by then the founder of a hostel for disabled students in Cambridge. She also wrote a short book about her daughter's life and suffering, called Celebration.

That was how I met her: it crossed my desk on the Independent, and I read it on the Tube home one night, quite overwhelmed by the honesty. So I rang her up, meaning to write a feature. "Don't be embarrassed," she said, "but my daughter died on Sunday." There was an angry and determined pride behind her consideration: "It is a tragedy," she said, "but it is not pathetic."

That would not be a bad epitaph for her own life, seen from the outside, but I think she would have entirely repudiated the idea that it had been a tragedy.

What she was proud of was her own professional success. As a social historian she attained real distinction, a professorship and fellowship of British Academy. She worked all through her own illnesses and Bridget's. She published three highly influential works of social history: Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries; Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England; and The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and their Wares in the Seventeenth Century. Her focus was always on the ordinary lives of unremarkable people, though she would deny that anyone, however ordinary, could possibly be unremarkable.

She was a Benedictine oblate, attached to the convent at West Malling in Kent, where she once sent me for a weekend. She used to tease me about conversion; I know she prayed for me but the last time we talked she was almost immobile, silent for minutes at a time and her expression was full of sluggish anguish. I held her hand and spouted some sententious nonsense about love. Then I said that if I could be this pious as an atheist, I'd be completely unendurable as a Christian and at this from somewhere deep inside she laughed.

Through her own illnesses, and her daughter's, she was a profoundly loving wife to Peter, her husband and another historian of great distinction, and to her son, the writer Francis. I am glad to have loved them all.