A Notable Woman Read online

  And that brings me to the mundane fact of a dancing partner. I must have one for the 21st (Old Girls), but who in the world do I know who can dance? Only one, and he’s lying ill in Uruguay.

  Sunday, 4 December

  So I suppose I must ask Jack Phipps.

  Tuesday, 6 December

  I wrote to Jack Phipps last night and I have prayed. He will get it today, and I do hope he’ll understand and be able to come. I live in suspense waiting for his answer.

  Tuesday, 27 December

  I had Eric Yewlett for the Old Girls dance. He’s learning to be a parson and makes feeble jokes. I can’t bear him.

  Wednesday, 14 March 1928

  Tonight I am going over to Harrow with the Jolliffes to a Conservative dance.

  Yesterday morning Joyce phoned through: ‘What I rang up to say was,’ she said after the usual banalities, ‘that I have got you a partner for tomorrow night.’ (For a moment my heart sank – I immediately thought of Dennis Rollin.) ‘And he,’ she went on, ‘is so thrilled with the idea that he is ready to put himself and car at your disposal. He has evidently been wanting to make your acquaintance for a long while.’

  ‘But how topping of him,’ I said. ‘Who is he incidentally?’

  ‘Mr Harold Dagley,’ said Joyce.

  ‘I seem to know the name.’ And so I do, but for the life of me I can’t remember anything more about him. ‘What a howl. But I say, Joyce, I’m sure he’s thinking of Margaret, not me.’

  Anyway he is coming to fetch me from Wembley between six and half-past. I’m nervous, excited, it all seems so absurd. I’m sure it will be like so many of those dreams of mine – will crumble away to nothing. And tomorrow I shall still be in the same place, a looker on. He is sure to be disappointed – they all are. I have got to the stage when depression falls upon me like a blanket. I am going all to pieces so I must think no more about it.

  Later:

  Didn’t I say it would all come to nothing? I have just had another phone message from Joyce to say that H.D. is down with ’flu. So what does it matter what I wear or what the weather is? Damn damn damn. I am fated. Oh God mayn’t I ever get to know anybody? Mayn’t I have any fun at all? Mayn’t I ever meet a few of the people I imagine are in love with me? Or is it to save me from more bitterness, more heartache? But to quote someone else, ‘To give up possible joys for the fear of possible pain is to give up everything.’ I would willingly suffer a little if I could have lovers – lots of them and a good time.

  Tuesday, 27 March

  1.40 a.m. Another little Hell – paved with good intentions and roofed with lost opportunities. Oh God, what a fool I was. And the only way to ease the ache is to write and write, even at half-past-one in the morning.

  We have just come back from another Ladies’ Night – the Borough of Acton – and Geoffrey Roberts was there. I caught his eye in the entrance hall before we went up for the reception. He came over and was introduced as ‘Mr Roberts’. He stared hard and said, ‘Am very pleased to meet you.’ I just smiled faintly and turned away, thinking, ‘Oh, Geoffrey Roberts … he can wait.’ And it was there I made the first mistake, I know now.

  Then I let slip another opportunity. After dinner, while we were waiting for the dancing to begin, Ethel and I and one or two others went up the stairs to look at the awful flash-light photos of ourselves. Having thoroughly studied and reviled same, they stood back against the wall and I leant over the bannisters looking down onto the hall below, wondering idly why I had been so cold to G.R. He was standing with the crowd. He is tall and dark, and again his eye caught mine, and almost at once he came upstairs to look at the photos beside me. Should I have spoken or given some sort of encouragement? All the torment begins again when I think of it.

  I try to comfort myself with the thought that Ethel and Mrs Halter were just behind so it would have been impossible, but it wouldn’t have been. We had been introduced, and it was my place to speak. I had hoped he would have asked for a dance, but having behaved so abominably beforehand I hardly blame him for not risking getting snubbed again.

  There is no sleep for me until 2, and even now I shall lie awake a long, long time. Am I really in love, or is it another one of those dreams which are always dreams?

  Later: All day long my nerves have been keyed to a pitch I can hardly describe. All the time my mind has throbbed with a single thought – a suffocating desire to meet and speak with him who has haunted my thoughts since we last looked into one another’s eyes.

  Sunday, 1 April

  I have slipped back into the old ways of looking at life, merely as a bystander. No man turns from the stream to wait upon me, they do not come in numbers as they seem to come for Margaret. I am just amused, cynical, hating myself – dreading the thought of tomorrow and the disillusionment it may bring. ‘At 18 we are so innocently vain’ – I am quoting from Isobel. As she says, we want everyone to love us. And why not? I shall never be 18 again. And I have never been kissed. Oh damn it, and I know I ought to have been. Other people think I have.

  Sunday, 15 April

  The days slip by so quickly. It is nearly a year since I left PHC, and of what value has that year been to me? I know now I should have stayed on. I could have helped PHC, could have made myself useful in the library, could have got Matric and learnt more of things I was just beginning to enjoy. I have gained nothing by stealing this year from my school life.

  Wednesday, 25 April

  No further news of Harold Dagley.

  Thursday, 3 May

  I had a long, long letter from Leslie this morning. It seems so wonderful after all this time. And he writes all the news to me, treating me no longer as a baby sister, and sends all the snaps to me.

  Sunday, 6 May

  I mustn’t fall in love with someone at the Tennis Club. It will be so awkward, yet I can’t help thinking of him. On no account will I be made to look a fool. Oh, he wears such wonderfully creased flannels. I am going to the club tomorrow evening. I went yesterday too.

  Temple Silvester has just passed, and I can’t imagine who it was with him. One of the girls in an awful red frock with the Alsatian.

  Sunday, 20 May

  Ethel has not meant to, but she has stolen away all possible intimacy between me and Daddy. I only see him now as a man growing old – a little eccentric, a little vulgar, irritating – the difference between our ages forming an almost unsurpassable gulf. Yet I know that I love him.

  Daddy I want to win you back some day. There is work I must do for you, for myself, for our name. And perhaps I am lazy and weak-minded. Perhaps I do find the position of junior typist a very comfortable and easy one, and perhaps I am not doing as much and learning as much as I should.

  I hate myself for being a coward and a cad. I eat with them, I smile and talk with them, I take all my father has to offer, and then write these sort of beastly things about them without them knowing.

  Wednesday, 6 June

  ‘I don’t think I could take a boy of my own age seriously enough to marry him,’ I told Miss Walker some 15 minutes back as she stood by the window watching the traffic at work. At present I am not worrying myself particularly about it at all. I would like to go to the pictures with Geoffrey Roberts. Or have coffee with Barrett at Lyons. Or meet Harold Dagley. Or go for a walk with Jack Honour. Any of these to amuse me, laugh with me, tease and be teased. Except Jack: I would want him to make love to me.

  ‘Very small, very shy.’ Jean prepares for the battles ahead.

  4.

  Two Girls Who Whispered Once

  Tuesday, 25 September 1928 (aged eighteen)

  This ‘year’ is nearly over. I have come through fairly all right. I took Miss Walker’s place and stood the test. It was work I rather enjoyed in spite of the few long letters that got me down. It was hard work, doing the work of two at a busy time. But it gave me a sense of well-being and I gained in self-confidence.12

  Tomorrow I start lessons in architecture at the Ealing Institute.
Wednesday and Friday mornings at 10 to 12.30. Shall I be the only girl? And if so, shall I be an awful mug? Shall I be able to do anything?

  Wednesday, 26 September

  She came in some 10 or 15 minutes after the class had started. Tall, thin, dark-eyed, smiling impudently.

  ‘Come, come,’ said Mr Patrick, pulling out his watch. ‘First day of the term – this is dreadful.’ But there was a corresponding twinkle in his eye that I noticed afterwards always came when he spoke to her. Lazy, amusing, vibrant in every fibre of her … one of those people who go through life in a don’t-care-a-damn-for-anyone-life-is-fun mood. Aggravating to live with but lovable in spite of her faults. Character and personality – or what Elinor Glyn has termed ‘It’ – counts more than brains or beauty.13

  A piquant face not altogether unattractive, teeth a trifle prominent, skin almost sallow, lanky shingle, but lovely eyes. A button off the cuff of the short tweed coat she wore, darned woolly stockings, large flat-heeled old brown strap shoes, a wispy skirt of a thin dark blue artificial silk. And yet the most impelling personality in the room – at least I thought so.

  She came and inspected my instruments. ‘Aren’t they nice?’ she said. And, ‘Where do you get your set-squares from? I’ve tried all over the place in Ealing and can’t get them with the rounded edges like that.’ Making herself charmingly agreeable in case she might want to borrow something. After she had gone I scratched my name on the set-squares.

  After all, it was quite simple. There are 7 of us starting Architecture – 3 boys and 4 girls. The rest are doing their 2nd and 3rd years. One helped oneself to a drawing board, bought a sheet of paper in the next room, took a T-square and chose a place in the front row. And it was all fairly easy to begin with.

  I wonder why these personalities dominate me so. Immediately I come into contact with anyone I take a fancy to I want to be like them.

  Sunday, 11 November

  For two minutes today we paused and dreamed. There was heartache and pain and awe in the silence, and the cry of a frightened child, and a man who coughed, and two girls who whispered once. And there was promise and peace and a vast universal stillness.

  I am so very proud and glad I was there in Whitehall with all those thousands. Within a few yards of the King and his family. And to see the people who came: coarse, loud-voiced women. Slim supple girls. Old men and young. A cockney and his vacant-eyed wife – one of the bloody Tommies perhaps who came through. All of them bound together for one indefinable space of time by a relationship stronger than blood or spoken word. And the service at Albert Hall tonight, when songs and hymns were sung so familiar and so clear, grander than the men who first thought of them.14

  Saturday, 15 December

  Against the dictates of all reason, and minimising the chances of my eyesight ever becoming better, I must write. Today I watched a bride and bridegroom sent away by their relations and friends smothered in confetti. Confetti was thrust down their necks, bags of it emptied over them, their car lurid with it. Horrible, gaudy stuff that brings no happiness. And so my resolve is strengthened more fiercely than before: If I ever get married, mine shall be the quietest of weddings. I don’t want a lot of people for whom I care nothing get tight on Daddy’s champagne and ogle me at church and whisper to one another.

  I have dreamed it all so often. One morning, Sunday perhaps, very early I and He, Leslie, Ethel and Daddy and his most intimate and necessary relations in a little church, and then to shy away. No fuss, no ribaldry, no hateful insincerity.

  Sunday, 12 January 1929

  Last night I met Harold Dagley. Margaret and I went together to join in the celebrations of P.’s 21st (next year I shall be 21!). And he came late. They had partnered me off with him, but as it happened, Martin was partnerless so I went round with him. H.D. was distinctly disappointing even at first sight – slight, thin, dark and weak-chinned. He is one of those boys who cannot be friends with a girl without wanting to flirt with her. And it is no use getting away from the fact that I am not a flirt in the same way Margaret is. I don’t think there’s anything frightfully admirable in that. Perhaps I said that because I am a bit jealous. I know that if anybody wanted to kiss me I wouldn’t refuse him – and yet damn it all I’ve just remembered that Percy did on Boxing Day under the mistletoe and I smacked his face.

  Oh I don’t know – it’s all wrong. How often have I wondered: to give up everything for an ideal, or lose sight of it in the murk of an everyday existence? Is it made up of little things – washing up, typewriters and shoulder straps – or must one climb the hills to reach the stars alone?

  Wednesday, 17 April

  Daddy has hurt me so. I came in from the tennis club meeting full of the fun I had gleaned from it, and I told Daddy that Valerie had been elected to the Ladies Committee. ‘Oh, you are hopeless – if Valerie can, why can’t you?’ And it hurt, hurt, hurt. Why can’t parents help you by thinking a bit for themselves, instead of bringing up the same old platitudes? I am too damn proud ever to talk of these things with other people.

  Monday, 23 December

  ‘The War has ruined us for everything.’ He is right. ‘We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces.’ (From All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, translated by A.W. Wheen.)

  I have not the time to say all I would about this book, nor to copy all the paragraphs I should like to. I think all my generation and all later generations should read it. We never knew the true ghastliness of war, its utter futility, its horror, the pitiless suffering of men. We should pray every night and every morning for no more war.

  This book brings it home to you more than anything I have ever known. The details are harrowing – it spares you nothing, it makes you feel physically sick. Yet how much better for us to learn like this rather than ever enact it all again.

  Monday, 6 January 1930

  And so I pray. My one big belief is prayer. I pray that if all other faiths fail, this one may not. But the question that weighs heaviest on my mind at the moment is this one: Shall I leave the Tennis Club or not?

  The idea came to me just before Xmas. At first it seemed the one thing left for me to do to establish my happiness. I want to write it all down so that I can get the pros and cons in a cold systematic review.

  Pros: I shall be free every day to do exactly as I like. No one at the club cares whether I go or not. It is too large for me – I fit in nowhere. I cannot somehow play tennis well enough to arrest the attentions or kindly regard of the upper sects. The bright young people boss me. I am not able to drift with them: self-consciousness overcomes me. My eyesight, nerves and weakness generally are against me. I love tennis. If only there were someone who wouldn’t mind practising with me. No more mental agony, that lounging about in the summer hoping someone will ask you to make up a decent four, but no one does because there is always someone else. Then eventually to hide one’s shame and get one’s money’s worth, make up a four myself with a lot of old women.

  The cons: Perhaps I didn’t try very hard last summer. I missed the tournaments quite by mistake – that always gives a bad impression. Many people are kind: no one is ever rude to me or obviously shuns me like they do Mrs Warner. There is always a chance that I may sometime convince them I can help, organise, could be of value to the club, can be light and amusing and attractive.

  But I think the biggest and most important Con is Valerie. It is so hard not to be jealous. She is young and has won a gallant place among them. I don’t want to lose her, she is one of the best friends I have. If it wasn’t for her I shouldn’t think twice about leaving. Oh God, I don’t know what to do.

  Sunday, 12 January

  There is a dream: an exquisite little house set down on the borders of Cornwall and Devon near the sea. That may never come true – those counties are already overcrowded during the
summer, what will they be like in some years’ time? Maybe a husband, maybe a husband at sea, maybe a husband who is difficult, divorce, perhaps death. I should like 2 children, a boy and a girl with 2 years’ difference in their ages. Most of the time they are at boarding school.

  Monday, 17 March

  As far as I can gather, I come into an annual income of about £300 in October. I could devote one-sixth of the amount to the improvements in the office I so much desire. It has also occurred to me whether I couldn’t invest that amount in something solid and remunerative, such as flats or gilt-edged securities. The flats appeal to me, buying up old property, altering and redecorating and then renting them.

  The alterations in the office will cost money. There will be one very, very unalterable condition if I do this though, and that is that G.P.P.15 must get rid of W.S.B. and engage some more reliable draughtsmen. If I had my way I would turn out W.S.B., E.H.S. and I am afraid J.G.P. I do not think I shall really speak of this until I am 21. I am then within my legal rights and should be capable of voicing an opinion. I am very serious about all this. In the meantime, a little patience and much thought.

  Wednesday, 9 April

  A success such as I have never known! How I have worked and prayed and dreamed, and now it is all over, their congratulations still ringing in my ears. And Mr Worrall, Mr Worrall himself came to me – asked for me – and told me he considered I was the best in the whole show. I’m just overwhelmed.16

  And what a weapon I have in my short-sightedness. Without it I feel convinced I should not have done nearly so well. I could see nothing beyond the footlights, a faint blur that conveyed nothing to me, only sounds that came from that darkness. I didn’t feel nervous because I couldn’t see their faces or note their expressions.